The Brief Reign of the Feminist Troll Queen

Who died and made you Queen of the trolls?

So the MRA who calls himself Troll King – but who is not actually a troll – recently decided he would create some lulz by trolling Reddit’s Mens Rights subreddit as a pretend feminist calling “herself” feministtrollqueen. What followed was perhaps the worst impersonation of a feminist the world has seen since, well, Sarah Palin called herself one. But the whole embarrassing spectacle is worth looking at, as it reveals a great deal, not about feminism, but about some of the strange things rattling around in the heads of some of feminism’s most ardent and addled critics.

During her brief reign, feministtrollqueen posted a series of long rambling comments filled with what “she” evidently thought was a highly witty parody of feminist-speak, but which bears about as much relationship to feminism as what’s inside Glenn Beck’s head does to reality. Here's a chunk of her first post::

WHY can't us feminsits and mens misogynists get along? ...

I LOVE men so much that I want to help you "nice guys" and I want you to become real men so that women, like me, will want to have crazy and hot and slutty sex with you. Don't be losers and creeps….

Us feminists, we don't want to hurt you...we probably want to suck your dick, 'cause we LOVE men and their dicks...Just because you have unjust privilege doesn't mean you are evil or bad...it just means you need to lose your patriarchal privilege and become feminist men....then you will be good men. Then you won't be virginal losers, once you except and deny your privilege you will get SEX and be valuable

Naturally, some of the locals assumed that this was a real feminist talking – all but one of those who commented on this post seemed to think it was real -- and set out to school her on a thing or two. One wrote a lengthy point-by-point "rebuttal," ending it with:

[S]ince you are female (presumably), don't presume to tell men what a "real man" is. …  [W]hile you claim to "love men", you're posting shows you are actually closer to a misandrist who thinks the only good man is the one beneath her feet.

Feministtrollqueen then  began posting even more obviously loopy comments. Far from being the sex-negative Dworkin-ite  stereotype of yesteryear, she seemed, if anything, rather obsessed with sex and how much she loved it:

OMG!!! You guys are such misogynists. You need to realize that I am a feminist and I know what feminism is cause I am a feminist. HOW dare you talk about such a movement in such a bad way, you are evil penis wearing misogynists! Those evil penises of yours cause RAAAAPPPEEEEE and that is all men's fault.

Those testicles of yours create woman hating, aka misogynistic, thoughts. NOW, understand that I LOOOVE men.... I just think you misogynists need to understand that you can be better, real men. Until you step up and be real men, you will always be manchildren.

Now, I love men. I really do. I have sexes with many, many men. I luvs casual sexes with men. I do it all the time. I just don't like it when you men make me feel bad by exercising your own sexual rights and opinions and call me fat. I am not fat, I AM BIG AND BEAUTIFUL!....

Warming to her subject, she continued: 

You pathetic virgins in the MRM are just bitter and lonely and can't get any pussy cause you live in yo mommas basement. How pathetic.

I read all of your posts and I still won't have nasty and sexy butts sexts with you. I am simply too sexy for you and even if you wanted it you couldn't get it. I am that much bettar than you but unlike you I actually believe in equality.

You little boys need to grow up and become real men and learn about feminism and how us women will actually help you and solve your problems for you. I am for equality! I want men to be free and feminine like me, you little boys just want to whine and moan and need to call a waahhbulance

Even at this point there were some who thought it was still possible that this was a real feminist. Presumably, even these gullible souls realized something was afoot when feministtrollqueen started going on about how much she liked “casual sexes with da manchilds!! I like their pee pees” while also claiming that men “want to rape you and kill you and eat your dead pussy.”

The brief and insignificant reign of the feministtrollqueen is in many ways instructive. 

Given the obsessive discussion of sex, and feminsittrollqueen’s endless nattering about how she doesn’t want to have sex with non-feminist non-real-men, Troll King seems to conflate “feminists” with “women who don’t want to have sex with him.” While I can’t imagine that many feminists do want to have sex with him, I can’t believe they are the only ones. (A Venn diagram of the two groups would consist of two concentric circles, with the “feminist” circle entirely within the larger group of “women who don’t want to have sex with Troll King.)

Like many MRAs and MGTOWers. Troll King seems to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about, and getting angry about, women having sex, particularly those having sex with people other than him. As we’ve seen again and again, manosphere men seem to take it personally when women fuck anyone but them. When attractive women have sex with confident, attractive men, they’re denounced as hypergamous, gold-digging and/or thug-loving sluts. But manosphere dudes’  hatred of women having sex goes well beyond sour grapes, as they also tend to be furious when women they consider unattractive have sex. If any woman out there is having sex with anyone who is not them, it is somehow a personal affront to all men who aren’t having sex at that very moment.

If that woman is also a feminist, well, their heads nearly explode. Forget the old stereotype of feminists as dour, hairy-legged, man-hating, cat-owning lesbian bluestockings. Troll King is obsessed with what seems to be the new stereotype: the sex-positive feminist as wanton slut. And he’s not the only one. Manosphere dudes regularly attack prominent feminist bloggers as “sluts” and “whores” and worse. Sometimes their minds become so addled by it all that they get the old and new stereotypes mixed up into one weird misogynist soufflé --- like the commenter on Antimisandry.com who denounced one famous feminist blogger as both a “super slut” and a “worthless, dried up, spinster whore.”

One commenter on Hooking Up Smart set forth what seems to be the general manosphere “theory” about feminist sluthood:

they want to suppress male “patriarchal” mating preferences

they want to have their cake and eat it too, i.e. want the option to be as slutty as they want but also want the respect and social status that was never given to such women

they want to neuter men because they only want the biggest alpha assholes to initiate sex, since these are the only type of men they are attracted to

 

As you may have noticed, this theory makes no fucking sense at all: feminists criticize asshole guys because they only want to have sex with the most assholish of men? Yet I’ve seen variants of this "argument" all over the mansophere. 

Troll King also seems to conflate feminists with all women who ever criticize men for any reason. His faux feminist creation continually refers to men as “manchildren,” an obvious reference to the arguments set forth recently by cultural critic Kay Hymowitz, who has denounced young men today as perpetual adolescents obsessed with video games and pop culture, while celebrating the supposedly more masculine men of yore. Trouble is, as I've pointed out before, Hymowitz isn’t a feminist at all; she’s an anti-feminist, and some of the most pointed critiques of her retrograde ideas have come from feminists. (Here’s one recent example.)

There’s really no way around it: the obsessions of the Troll King’s faux feminist identity seem to be driven mainly by masculine insecurity and sexual jealousy – and rage at women displaying autonomy or in any way challenging male prerogatives: How dare women refuse to have sex with us! How dare they call our masculinity into question! It’s no wonder his feminist parody reveals so much more about himself than it does about feminism.  

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Quiz: Jezebel ... or Andrea Dworkin?

Here's one easy way to tell if someone is from another planet. Specifically, Planet I'm-So-Crazed-by-My-Hatred-of-Feminism-That-My-Brain-Has-Imploded. They post comments on Reddit containing this sentence:

Hmm. I'm not what you'd call a big fan of Andrea Dworkin, but I have read her work, and unless my memory is faulty, I don't recall her writing much about Ryan Gosling, lip stain, or baby giraffes.

So here's a little quiz to see if you can tell the difference between Jezebel and Andrea Dworkin. Some of the quotes below come from recent Jezebel articles; some come from Dworkin. I also threw in a quote from Ryan Gosling as well, just for the hell of it. So who said what? (Answers below.)

a) Intercourse in reality is a use and an abuse simultaneously, experienced and described as such, the act parlayed into the illuminated heights of religious duty and the dark recesses of morbid and dirty brutality.

b) I freely admit that I watch some shitty, shitty television, and if it weren't for my sense of shame, I'd probably watch a lot more of it. I can't get enough of The Bachelor, which combines the most terrible aspects of dating, the weirdest aspects of arranged marriages, and sociopaths.

c) The sexual colonialization of women's bodies is a material reality: men control the sexual and reproductive uses of women's bodies. In this system of male power, rape is the paradigmatic sexual act.

d) Women's bodies are possessed by men. Women are forced into involuntary childbearing because men, not women, control women's reproductive functions. Women are an enslaved population--the crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses.

e) Pie is just fine as a partner for the weak coffee of church basements, for Thanksgiving, for dessert at a roadside cafe in Harmony, Minneosta, but for high falutin' snacking, you cannot beat the elegant convenience of the cupcake.

f) If I eat a huge meal and I can get the girl to rub my belly, I think that's about as romantic as I can think of.

ANSWER KEY: What, are you a fucking idiot? Oh, ok, the last one is the Ryan Gosling quote. I really, really, really hope you can figure out the rest on your own.

Hello, Men's Rights Redditors!

I just noticed that someone posted a link to this blog on the Men's Rights subreddit under the title "Male extremist feminists can be even more deluded than female ones..."  I would happily respond to this bit of idiocy in the Men's Rights subreddit itself, but, alas, the moderator there has banned me because I have the subreddit listed in my "Enemies List." The ban seems a bit silly. I discuss things with people in my "Enemies List" all the time, and they're free to post here the same as anyone else.

But I have a question for you Men's Rights Redditors. Since I can't ask it there, I'll ask it here, and you can respond here: What have I ever said on this blog (or elsewhere) that is in any way an example of feminist "extremism?" I challenge you to find a single "extremist" statement here, or a single example of misandry. (Note: Saying "oh, the whole blog is extremist" or "it's obvious you're an extremist" something along those lines is not an answer; it's a way of begging the question.)

If I really am some sort of extremist, it should be quite easy to find specific examples of this extremism.

Rapists are apparently being oppressed by the term "rapist."

Well, here's a new one. Apparently rapists are being oppressed by the evil misandrist term ... rapist. Or so says a poster calling himself ReluctantNihilist in the upstart MENSRIGHTSMOVEMENT subreddit on Reddit, a tiny little discussion forum (with 12 subscribers) for those who think the regular Men's Rights subreddit has become a hotbed of radical feminism. Here's his argument:

The prefix "-ist" means "one who believes in". ...  It is a belief system. A misandrist demonstrates a pattern of behaviors that exemplify misandry.

Does a person who commits a rape necessarily believe and engage in a pattern of behavior of rape?

No.

There are a couple of problems with this analysis, starting with the fact that "ist" is, uh, not actually a prefix but a suffix. And that it can simply mean "one that performs a specified action." Believing may not have anything to do with it: a "typist," for example, types; he or she doesn't believe in an ideology of typing. Nor does an "ist" have to do something repeatedly: an "arsonist" is someone who burns shit up, whether that's once or a hundred times. Our ReluctantlNihilist is evidently not much of a linguist. But let's set aside these little qualms and continue with his post:

The proper term for someone who commits a rape, or even several, is a raper. "-er" means "one who takes part in". Determination of whether that person would qualify as a rapist is another matter.

The use of the word "rapist" rather than "raper" is misandrist doublespeak, because even though women rape, too, we know that the term "rapist" is only applied to males. 

Uh, I think the term is used for female rapists also. There just aren't that many of them.

This misandrist doublespeak is subtle but effective. Calling someone a rapist insinuates they have committed multiple rapes and, if set free, they'll do it again and again. This only fuels rape hysteria.

The more accurate and less emotionally-charged term is:

Raper.

Actually, it's a fair bet that someone who rapes once will rape again; one study of "undetected rapists" -- that is, rapists who hadn't been caught, which is to say the overwhelming majority of rapists -- found that they admitted to having assaulted, on average, roughly 6 victims each.

But let's set this aside and ask the big question: why exactly should we give a fuck about hurting the feelings of people who rape other people? If "ist" is good enough for Stalinists, philanthropists, proctologists, and, yes, even nihilists, it's certainly good enough for rapists.

ReluctantNihilist, I am demoting you to a ReluctantNihiler.

MRAs on Julian Assange: No consent, no problem!

Apparently some Men's Right Activists have no trouble believing the rape accusations against Julian Assange. They just have trouble giving a shit about rape.

Over on the Men's Rights subreddit on Reddit, the regular crowd was discussing an article about Assange. One of the allegations against Assange is that he raped one of his accusers in her sleep, without wearing a condom. (EDITED TO ADD: According to her account, she had told him explicitly the night before that she would not have sex with him without a condom, and had in fact refused unprotected sex with him when he'd tried it that evening.) As the article recounts the (alleged) incident:

She says they had consensual sex but she woke up the next morning to find him having intercourse with her to which she had not consented.

When she asked him if he was wearing anything, he had allegedly said: "I am wearing you."

This response got high-fives from some of the Men's Rights redditors. One quoted Assange's (alleged) remark, then added "Nailed it." Eight upvotes for that comment, no downvotes. Another quoted the same remark, and added "LIKE A BOSS." That got upvotes as well.

So apparently, to some MRAs at least, raping a woman in her sleep is A-OK, just so long as you've got a witty one-liner at the ready when she wakes up.

Air conditioning for women: A terrible injustice

Fuck those bitches. They didn't invent air conditioning!

How to win friends and garner dozens of upvotes in the Men's Rights subreddit on Reddit: Bash out a barely coherent stream-of-consciousness rant suggesting that women are ungrateful bitches because they don't mine coal, and didn't invent air conditioning or hunt mammoths. Of course, no one posting in the Men's Rights subreddit has done any of those things either, but apparently everyone with a penis gets automatic credit for them.

Here's the post, from some dude called TheGrendler:

We men built a nice safe world for you all the the coal-mines of death, roads, railroads, bridges and tall office buildings. Its $1,000,000 spent per death of a man on a large dangerous project on average now you can just 9-5 it and call it a day in air-conditioned and heated safety. Forget about the wars we died in and the sacrifices made just ignore history or is it now hersorty? You are accruing the benefits without ever having to pay the price you still don't have to sign up for the draft and who will protect you? The Sex and the City girls will fight off the North Koreans with their Manolo Blahniks?

Men gave you this modern world now you take it for granted we hunted the mammoth to feed you we died in burning buildings and were gassed in the trenches but that was just for fun right?

How quick and conveniently you forget who made this possible.

We gave you Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy not to mention countless others, Jonas Salk saved half the world from death and you just piss on it all.

Shame on you,

You hedonistic, narcissistic, sociopath metastasizing cancer.

Whatever happened to live together die alone?

Damn you ungrateful sluts for enjoying air conditioning, despite the fact that it was invented by a dude! (Probably. I didn't check.) Only dudes should enjoy things invented by other dudes! Jonas Salk was a dude! Only dudes should get the polio vaccine! How do you like your polio, you fancy-shoe wearing bitches!!!?? You should have thought of that before you went and didn't invent the motherfucking polio vaccine!!!

And you can just forget about reading any motherfucking Dostoevsky! Only dudes can read Dostoevsky! You filthy whores stick to Jane Austen!

Sorry, I got carried away.

How to blame feminism for everything: Extreme Homemaker Edition

Evil feminists oppressing a fake waterfall

Follow this simple four-step plan!

1) Find a story in The Daily Mail, that bastion of journalistic excellence, about a dumb, irritating woman saying or doing something dumb and/or irritating.

Oh, here's one, with the promising title "Why I'd rather my daughter marry a rich man than have a brilliant career."

Representative dumb and irritating quote:

Younger women have realised that instead of spending the day listening to some bore drone on about sales figures, it might be more fun to go swimming with the children while the cleaner sorts out the house.

2) Decide that this dumb, irritating woman is somehow a "feminist," even though she actually mocks feminists at one point and, oh yeah, her whole life plan for her daughter is pretty much the exact polar opposite of feminism.

3) Post the article to Men's Rights on Reddit under the title "Marry a rich man: The new wave of feminism."

4) Collect upvotes.

False (rape) assumptions

If you want to get downvoted on the Men's Rights subreddit on Reddit, just post something about how you were actually raped in a discussion of "The Campus Rape Myth." You'll get a batch of instant downvotes, and a bunch of Men's Rightsers questioning whether or not you're telling the truth, and demanding that you answer all of their questions.

Contrast this to what happens when a guy posts something on that subreddit about being falsely accused of rape or child abduction. No scrutiny, no downvotes. It's simply assumed to be true.

This is the internet, and it's pretty hard to know who is and who isn't telling the truth. But this is a pretty clear double standard, on the part of people who claim to hate double standards.

Flash Mob

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Straight talk on homophobia ... on the Men's Rights subreddit??

Oh Reddit. Sometimes you make me so sad. Case in point: the 5,415 upvotes Redditors gave to this old dog of a story, a blatantly misogynist, and blatantly made-up, revenge-vasectomy tale from the "Best of Craigslist." Mitigating factors: the fact that some commenters correctly labeled the story a hateful fake; the 4,582 downvotes the story got (resulting in "only" 833 net upvotes).

But sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised. Even as I was contemplating the idiotic reaction to this idiotic vasectomy story, I ran across another headline: "Does homophobia affect straight males too?" Good question. Weirdly, the post was from the Men's Rights subreddit. Hoping for the best but fearing the worst, I took a look. Lo and behold, the post had actually inspired a real, honest discussion of the issues.

The OP set the stage with a few specific questions:

Have you ever hesitated to become close to another male for fear that it might be misinterpreted by someone else? Was there ever a time you resisted getting close to another male emotionally because you were afraid it might be seen as sexual? Does the fear of being called gay or a faggot ever change the way you behave in front of other males?

Among the answers there were of course a few jokes, including one that was actually sort of funny:

dontputsaltinyoureye 9 points

it has had a tremendous effect on my life. i am unable to wear my avril lavigne [shirt] in public due to the fear. WHY CAN I NOT WEAR MY AVRIL LAVIGNE SHIRT?!

And there was the requisite reference to Glee:

AGenericGoon 44 points

I am heterosexual, and watch/enjoy glee.

I will take this secret to the grave.

But there were also a number of bracingly honest comments, comments that would not be out of place on a feminist or LGBT message board. Some commenters talked about being gay-bashed -- even though they aren't gay. Others talked about how hetero-normative gender roles force men to keep quiet about their feelings:

TheBananaKing 27 points

Absolutely. all -normative behaviours box people in.

Straight guy here. ... there's an awful lot of restriction and anxiety in inter-male behaviour. You can't ever be sad or hurt - only angry. You can't extend comfort or affection towards another guy, except via humorous taunting / rivalry / aggression (eg play-fighting), unless you're very, very drunk. You have to do this kind of... reverse double-entendre the entire time, translating everything into John Wayne before you speak or act it, and back again to understand others. It's a pain in the ass.

Others offered more personal takes on what it's like to be a straight guy who's frequently taken to be gay:

ecartes 9 points

I talk with a lisp and dress really well. I'm also heterosexual.

Almost everyone I initially meet believes, nay, KNOWS, that I'm, ACTUALLY homosexual. It's weird, living with the thought that everyone I meet thinks I'm gay. Although I will never know fully the oppression that some gay people face, I feel like I've felt a lot of it just from being perceived as gay. ...

And perhaps the most unexpected of all:

soylentcoleslaw 33 points

If I acted on my normal impulses, I'd be extremely effeminate. I love cute things and cute clothes, I have subconscious feminine mannerisms, and I'd love a strong partner who makes me feel safe and who would take charge. I've never had a gay fantasy in my life. The thought of being with another man just doesn't do it for me, but given what I want and who I naturally am, I'm said on numerous occasions how much easier my love life would be if it did. As it is, if I want to attract someone new, I have to tamp all that down and put on my reasonably masculine face, and maybe if I'm lucky, I can reveal some of that side of myself gradually. But I can't be totally myself. Never. ... So I go on pretending to be manly sometimes and hopefully don't screw up.

Oh, sure, there were some answers that were bluntly homophobic -- redwood9 states plainly that "I just hate fags ... I hate all cocksuckers and those who bend over and take it in the ass" -- but they made up a tiny minority of the comments, and were generally downvoted.

So what's going on here? Has the Men's Rights Subreddit suddenly become a beacon of open-mindedness? Not exactly. Most of those commenting in the topic don't appear to be Men's Rights regulars, but Redditors who were drawn to the topic when it appeared on Reddit's main page. Here's what someone who is a MR regular had to say:

aetheralloy 0 points

"Bro's" and "bromance" is the term often used to shame men ... Women (feminists) in particular love to use it. ...

The really interesting question here isn't if it affects males, but why women are both extremely homophobic towards gay males while also willing to use them as emotional buddies.

Yeah, damn those feminist women and their hatred of gay men!

So, no group hug just yet. But it's good to see an outburst of good sense in a discussion forum that's often pretty backwards.

It's just a pity that the moderator of Men's Rights remains convinced "that there is an international, feminist, antimale conspiracy," as he puts it in the sidebar, and that the subreddit's slogan remains "Earning scorn from feminists since March 19, 2008."

Because, you know what? If you're a guy feeling boxed in by normative gender roles, some of the best people in the world to talk to about it are, you know, feminists.

Men's Rights Activists: "Don't tell me to 'man up,' you mangina!"

If you're ever looking for a pretty much sure-fire way to get a Men's Rights Activist to blow his top -- not that this is a particularly difficult feat -- just tell him to "man up." Indeed, the phrase is so infuriating to some MRAs that it causes them to spew typos like a mad man. "Few phrases in the world make an MRAs [sic] want to rip our [sic] their spines and beat people to a bloody pulp with them," writes TheZetaMale on his Zeta blog. "'Man Up' has to be one of them." Meanwhile, on the Men's Rights subreddit on Reddit, a fellow calling himself olythoreau seconds this emotion:

I noticed that people using the phrase "man up" or "be a man" really fucking pisses me off. A trigger of sorts. Fuck everyone who has any expectation that I or any other man perform masculinity to their liking. Yes, I'm a man, but I'm a fucking individual... and I'll perform masculinity any way I fucking please!

Thing is, I completely agree with this sentiment: telling a guy to "man up" is an obnoxious thing to do. Oh, sure, I sometimes agree with the message people are trying to send by using this phrase: stop whining about trivial shit and get on with your life.

Indeed, no group of people I've ever run across is so expert in turning molehills into Mt. Everest than the MRA crowd; they put the whiniest of "victim feminists" to shame. Do you really need to boycott half the companies in the Fortune 500* because they ran "misandrist" ads featuring doofus husbands failing in their doofusy attempts to cook dinner? Does the fact that some random hot chick finds you repellent really mean that evil women rule the world? Does the fact that some anti-MRA blogger calls a dumb old sexist cartoon a dumb old sexist cartoon really mean that "feminists and manginas .. would love to enforce a world where the very thought that men experience problems with women in relationships is taboo[?]"

So I can certainly understand the exasperation so many people feel towards the MRM, as the very existence of this blog attests. But the phrase "man up" is absolutely the wrong way to make these points, for precisely the reasons olythoreau outlines. And I'd add: the phrase is sexist as hell, suggesting implicitly that non-men and non-manly men are a bunch of, well, pussies. (It's telling that the most common alternate way to tell someone to "man up" is to tell him to "stop being a pussy.")

I'm hardly the only feminist-ish person to dislike the phrase "man up": Jezebel ran a story called "Stop Telling Men to 'Man Up'" the other day, noting the sudden ubiquity of the phrase in the political world, and making the point that the phrase implies "that the worst thing to be is not-a-man — weak, lacking in courage." (Of course, there are some MRAs who have no problem with the phrase "man up" for exactly this reason.)

But there is an irony to MRAs' distaste with the phrase. No, scratch that, a HUMONGOUS GIGANTIC FUCKING IRONY. While they complain about the phrase "man up" being applied to them, they are the first to question the masculinity of anyone who disagrees with them or who displays their masculinity in any other way than they do -- hence their almost ritualistic use of the gender-bending term "mangina" (NSFW link) to indicate anyone not-them. (For ample proof of this, just scroll down to the comments on virtually any post on this blog.) As cat points out in a comment on this very subject on this very blog:

The thing about MRA patriarchy foot soldiers is that they can't seem to get the old slogan of "the patriarchy hurts men too". First, they complain about not being able to express emotions and variety, then they turn around the first chance they get to bash the guys that do. You know, if you stopped doing all this gay-bashing gender shaming, you would be able to express your emotions verbally, dress in different colors, admit you enjoy musicals and baking, etc. You're slitting your own damned throats and blaming it on everyone but yourselves.

I'd only add one little caveat to this: the people attacking "manginas" aren't always the exact same people in the MRM who are complaining about being told to "man up." Indeed, TheZetaMale -- the first guy I quoted above -- actually took his fellow MRAs to task in an earlier post for using "shaming language like 'Faggot' and 'Emasculated Mangina.'" Unfortunately, his attitude is rarer than rare in the MRM.

So here's a challenge for any MRM who hates being told to "man up": take a stand against the term "mangina" and all the other obnoxious gender-questioning slurs that litter every message board or comment section populated by MRAs. Post a denunciation of this shit right here, in the comments to this post. Just human up, and do it.

NOTE TO EXTREMELY LITERAL READERS: *I realize that they're not literally advocating boycotting half the companies in the Fortune 500. Sometimes I keed.

EDIT: Amanda Marcotte posted an excellent piece on how "man up" fucks stuff up for everybody. Check it out.

Quote of the Day: Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Easily Impressed Hot Chicks

A ringing endorsement of immigration from "mean0dean0" in the Men's Rights subreddit on Reddit:

Date immigrants--especially girls from countries with really repressive regimes or abject poverty. Just the fact that you have possessions like a car or a video game system is enough to secure you a happy girlfriend.

Fuck American girls--like the rest of this cuntry (spelling intentional), they're way overprivileged, overfed, and overhyped. For every Katy Perry, there are a thousand fat cows waiting to put their insecurities on you when you get home.

Scary Man-sters and Super Creeps

Pablo Picasso had a way with the ladies.

"Well some people try to pick up girls, and get called assholes," the song goes. "This never happened to Pablo Picasso. He could walk down your street, and girls could not resist his stare. ... Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole." This is more or less true, even though, by almost every account, Picasso was pretty much a complete douchebag.

Life is unfair. Famous men can behave like utter boors and predators towards the opposite sex and get away with it, even win reputations as charming ladykillers. The rest of us, well, we make awkward passes and often get rejected; sometimes we even get called creeps. This makes some men bitter; a few even become Men's Rights Activists.

In a recent article on AlterNet, feminist sex blogger Clarisse Thorn offers a defense, of sorts, of men unfairly labelled "creeps." "Why Do We Demonize Men Who Are Honest About Their Sexual Needs?" the article's title asks, and it's not a bad question. Women are naturally, and quite justifiably, wary of the attention of strange men, who could easily turn out to be predators. "So it's completely understandable that we're all on high alert for predatory expressions of male sexuality," she writes. What this means is that perfectly decent guys are sometimes seen as creeps until proven innocent.

The pressure put on men to be initiators, yet avoid seeming creepy or aggressive leads to an unpleasant double bind. After all, the same gross cultural pressures that make women into objects force men into instigators. ... So how can a man express his sexual needs without being tarred as a creep?

Her solution? We need to "accept male desire" as natural and legitimate -- not something "toxic," or some kind of macho accomplishment:

Like everyone, men deserve to feel as though their sexuality is hot, awesome, delicious, valuable, and can be pleasurable for all parties in a consensual situation. Just as women shouldn't have to feel exploited when they have consensual sex, men shouldn't have to feel like they're exploiting someone when they have consensual sex.

It's hard to disagree with that. I worry, though, that many of the guys in Thorn's intended audience will only notice the bit about male sexuality being "hot, awesome, delicious and valuable," and miss her careful caveats about consent -- which she repeats three times in two sentences in an attempt to drive home the point. Unfortunately, as Amanda Marcotte puts it in a response to Thorn's piece: 

[O]ne thing creepy dudes all have in common is they only hear what they want to hear. So even though Clarisse actually writes, "It’s also incumbent upon us to honor each others’ boundaries," creepy dudes are going to hear, "See, this lady agrees with me that it’s perfectly fine for me to use 'pick-up artist' techniques to put women that are 15 years younger than me and who don’t want to talk to me in situations where they have trouble finding a polite way to escape conversation with me. And I’m entitled to be such a miserable fuckhead, because men are so oppressed because they don’t get to have sex with whoever they want whenever they want."

Looking through the comments Thorn's article got on AlterNet, Marcotte finds ample evidence of this kind of creepiness -- men with both a sense of entitlement and a massive amount of self-pity. That toxic attitude shows up as well in a comment from the perhaps aptly named "jackwripper" in a discussion of Thorn's piece in the Men's Rights subreddit on Reddit:

[W]hen the vast majority of men have to ask hundreds or thousands of women on dates, for sex, for a dance, to talk, just to get one positive response, then, as a man, you either go through life alone, or you proposition thousands of women.

Women as a group could fix this with one of two behavior changes. Women could initiate these encounters when they see a man they are attracted to... not REALLY hot, but attractive enough. ... The other behavior change women could adopt, would be to stop rejecting out of hand every man and every approach that is not an absolute perfect match. Men learn not to be very picky, maybe women need to learn not to be picky too. This statement also includes the women who men have to be less picky about. It is very strange how a female "3" can reject the advances of a male "7" because she is convinced she is a "9" and expects a male "10".

It's a bizarre and insidious sort of argument: Women need to start having sex with men they don't want to have sex with, because otherwise some men will have to go through life alone -- or, I guess, with "2s" who aren't too stuck up to go out with them. Why exactly is it women's job to "fix this?" Sorry, it doesn't work that way.

Jackwripper's argument eerily echoes the logic of George Sodini, the bitter, dateless antifeminist asshole who shot 12 women in a health club last year because he felt young women had unfairly rejected him. And so it's perhaps not surprising that Sodini had his defenders in the MRA/pickup artist crowd. As one fan of Sodini put it in a comment at the time on a PUA blog popular with MRAs: 

I think every man DOES deserve to get laid. ... The problem is, our feminized society has given every woman the power to hold out for higher quality men than they deserve. This creates an imbalance that leads to tragedies like the one in PA. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. (Newton’s 3rd Law) If empowered women keep applying pressure, they will create an explosion.

So, women, the message is clear: Date some losers, or someone is going to get shot.

No one "deserves" to get laid. If you're a creepy asshole who doesn't understand that any woman is allowed to turn you down for sex, for whatever reason she wants, however stupid it might seem to you, then you don't deserve shit.

How to take the high road in the false rape accusation debate

... suggest that false accusers should be raped. (Here's the comment in context in the Men's Rights subreddit on Reddit.)

Help, Help I'm being oppressed! Manicures and Matriarchy Edition

Ok, I take back everything I've said on this blog. Men truly are oppressed. Take a look at the second and third hottest posts on the Men's Rights subreddit at the moment:

Drama on teh Internets: Men's Rights Reddit edition

Oh, the drama!

Like many online forums, the Men's Rights subreddit on Reddit.com is a mixture of the good, the bad, and the very, very annoying. The good: A fairly large number of decent people there, ranging from moderate, non-misogynistic men's rightsers to a few brave souls willing to stand up to the fanatics. The bad: The aforementioned fanatics, posting douchey rants, and quick to dismiss all opinions coming from women ("cunts," "bitches") and/or supporters of women ("manginas"). The annoying: The moderators of the subreddit, a touchy, ban-happy fellow who calls himself Kloo2yoo, and his ineffectual sidekick, Ignatiusloyola.

It's Kloo who started up the subreddit, and Kloo who wrote the confrontational message that greets every visitor:

The men's rights movement is just a collection of people who are tired of being taken advantage of, taken for granted, and lied to. Millions of people who have independently come to the same conclusions, usually the hard way. ... This is not a feminist subreddit. It was created in opposition to feminism.

We are a million armies of 1.

In case you didn't get the message, he adds:

kloo2yoo believes that there is an international, feminist, antimale conspiracy, and encourages peaceful, but direct, action against it.

Message received: Feminists are the enemy. You are not welcome here. And indeed, visitors to the subreddit who display an excess of feminism have a tendency to get banned. (In some cases, after much protest from the decent folks in the subreddit, Kloo has relented and let them post again.) Quite a few people on Reddit now refuse to post in his subreddit because they don't feel like wasting their time in a forum from which they can be arbitrarily banned at any point. (Ignatiusloyola doesn't seem altogether happy with all of Kloo's behavior, but will not stand up to him.)

It's because of Kloo that I've put the Men's Right's subreddit in my "enemies list." Now, I have nothing against him stating his own personal opinion, however stridently he wants. What I do have a problem with is his purporting to speak for everyone in the subreddit, many of whom think his talk of an anti-male "conspiracy" is more than a little loopy. And the banning. I hate the banning.

Yes, as you may have guessed, he's banned me from the subreddit already; I had made only a handful of posts, most of which were straightforward and relatively nonconfrontational and, indeed, well-received by others in the subreddit. But Kloo saw his subreddit on my enemies list, and saw red. Never mind that he had already put feminists like myself on *his* enemies list.

Weirdly, after banning me, Kloo decided he wanted to debate some of the things I said in my Men Behaving Worse post, which had referred to his strange defense of the Women Behaving Badly posts that litter his subreddit. Only he wanted to debate me in private messages. I'm not playing that game.

So here's my message to you, Kloo-dee: If you want to debate me, debate me publicly, in a forum where I have the right to respond. Debate me here, in comments; I will not ban you no matter what you say. Or unban me from the Men's Rights subreddit, and debate me there.

Confidential message to Kloo: You just posted something in Men's Rights about your troubles tracking down a particular blog post from a particular feminist from a year ago that you had lost the link to. Heh. I know exactly what post you're talking about (and boy are you misremembering what it said). I'll happily post the link for you in the Men's Rights subreddit, but, in order for me to do that, you'll have to unban me first.

This is one of the reasons it makes sense to keep talking to your "enemies." They often know shit that you don't.

EDIT: Some tinkering, added a link.