On The Spearhead, demanding child support is a "provocation," and beating a woman's face in is "justice."

A little over a week ago, a Florida man in the midst of a divorce hearing, apparently upset that he would have to pay child support, reportedly snapped and brutally attacked his wife, leaving her, as one account of the incident notes, “with two black eyes, broken facial bones and split lips.” (You can see the extent of her injuries here.) He’s now being held on felony battery charges. The woman had previously tried to get a restraining order against her husband, but apparently couldn’t convince the court he was dangerous enough to warrant it.

On The Spearhead, sadly but unsurprisingly, it’s the alleged attacker, Paul Gonzalez, who is getting the sympathy. W.F. Price, the site’s head honcho, weighed in on the subject yesterday. In his mind, apparently, the demand that Gonzalez actually provide some financial support for his two children was a provocation of sorts, which led him, as a Marine veteran, to “react ... as warriors sometimes do in response to provocation — violently.”

At this point, we know very few details about the case. But that didn’t stop Price from opining confidently on what he imagines are injustices perpetrated against the poor alleged attacker:

What likely happened in that courtroom is that Gonzalez, representing himself, got the shaft. … We don’t know what the child support order was, but it was probably pretty hefty (as usual), and the visitation quite meager. Add to that the fact that his wife was already living with another man, despite having so recently given birth to Mr. Gonzalez’s daughter, and the situation must have seemed absolutely upside-down to the former marine. It was upside down. His wife is obviously a little tramp who has no problem swinging from one dick to another even while raising two babies, and there she was about to get rewarded with an upgrade in lifestyle while the chump father loses his kids and wallet. That’s why Mr. Gonzalez lost it. 

Price does acknowledge, in a cursory way, that “beating your wife is always a bad idea” -- though he seems less bothered by the beating than by the fact that in this case the divorcing wife “gets to go on camera making herself out to be a poor, innocent little victim. I highly doubt this woman is innocent.”

The commenters to Price’s article rallied around the alleged attacker. In a comment that got three times as many upvotes as downvotes from Spearhead readers, Greyghost celebrated Gonzalez as something of a hero:

I need to send that guy a prison christmas package. He was getting screwed and struck out. To bad he never heard of the spearhead. If about 10 to 15 percent of crapped on fathers did this kind of thing with some murders mixed in there the talk about fathers would sound a lot like the talk when the subject is islam.

 Piercedhead offered this take:

Gonzalez may well have been overwhelmed by the realization that being innocent of all his wife’s false accusations made little difference to this fate – he still got treated as if he was worthless. In that case, might as well match the penalty with the appropriate deed… 

If the courts won’t dispense justice, someone else will – it’s a law of nature.

That’s right: bashing a woman’s face in is a kind of “justice.” Naturally enough, this being The Spearhead, this comment garnered (at last count) 56 upvotes from readers, and only 2 downvotes. 

Mananon, meanwhile, suggested that the alleged attack had:

something to do with a warrior’s instinct for dignified self-reliance. … Strip a man of his dignity and what else is there left?

DCM, even more bluntly, described Gonzalez as:

a brave man and a hero. 

There will be more and more of these incidents and it will be a long time before women are seen as responsible for them — which they are. …

It will be men who can’t take it any more who will ignite change.

Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c) -- yes, that's how he writes his name -- took it a step further, saying that: 

the only bit I feel sorry about is that he did not arrange to have someone else kill her such that his chances of being caught were minimal. By doing this in the middle of the court he will be put in a cage for a long, long time. And he does not deserve to be there. HE is the VICTIM.

Every one of these quotes, with the exception of Nolan’s, garnered at least a dozen upvotes from Spearhead readers. (Nolan's comment so far has gotten no upvotes or downvotes.)

What sort of comment on this case will get you downvoted by the Spearheaders? One like this:

Wow! Nothing justifies violence. I wonder who will care for the baby while the mother recovers. Or doesn’t that matter? 

What a coward. Mad at the judge, goes after a woman. 

Actually advocating murder, no sweat. Suggesting that violence is wrong and worrying about the welfare of the children, outrageous!

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The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys

I'm walkin' here!

Pierce Harlan of the False Rape Society has broken past the limits of mere logic, arguing that the fact that a small number of guys at a couple of events have put on women's clothing to raise money for women's causes means that rape culture doesn't exist. That seems to be the main message of a post of his today with the baffling title "Boys in bras, boys in heels, boys in pink -- all to raise money for women's causes: Is this the 'rape culture' we hear so much about?"

Harlan, posting as "Archivist," complains about several recent campus events, in which college guys have literally put on heels (to raise money and awareness about sexual assault) and bras (to raise money for breast cancer research). Harlan isn't thrilled about the causes themselves: he has sneeringly derided sexual assault awareness as "a supposedly good cause" and, while acknowledging that breast cancer research is theoretically a good thing, he's evidently tired of hearing about it.

But he seems even more hot and bothered about the cross-dressing by guys he calls "chivalrous clowns," describing the bra-wearing as "creepy" and deriding the guys "prancing around in high heels." Apparently, as Harlan sees it, these fellows are just doing it to impress the chicks:

young men will do pretty much anything to help, to curry favor with, and to be admired by young women.

It is heinous to suggest that attitudes of sexual aggression and dominance over women are normalized, rationalized, and excused by the alleged beneficiaries of "patriarchy" in our culture. In point of fact, the foolish young buffoons in heels and bras are far more representative of young masculinity in our culture than is the young rapist. 

There's not a lot of logic in this, er, argument, but in an earlier posting Harlan elaborates on the distaste he feels towards the "Walk A Mile In Her Shoes" event, which was held at the University of Montana (clearly a hotbed of radical feminism). 

It would be downright shocking if this or similar events ever prevented a single sexual assault from occurring because: (1) prancing around in high heels and similar useless stunts has nothing to do with preventing sexual assault; and (2) the vast majority of young men who strutted their stuff and who participate in such events are highly unlikely to ever rape a woman.  ...

If we want to curb sexual assault, we need to teach our young people the truth, but the truth doesn't jibe with the current rape meta-narrative that holds only one gender responsible for stopping it. ...

Young people generally do not understand that women experience much greater after-the-fact regret than men do. Sometimes feelings of regret are translated into feelings of "being used," and sometimes feelings of "being used" are misinterpreted or purposefully misconstrued as "rape."

Asking the police, a judge, or a jury to sort out what happened in an alcohol-fueled tryst based on a "he said/she said" account puts an impossible burden on our law enforcement and judicial apparatuses. ...

There is no "rape culture"; there is no "rape continuum."  Rape is committed by social deviants, not the nice boy next door. It is almost a certainty that none of the charming young buffoons who strutted around in women's heels yesterday will ever rape a woman. ...

The sad, politically incorrect fact of the matter is that young women have far more power to stop rape than innocent young men by not putting themselves in situations where rape is more likely to occur. 

There's a lot of bullshit condensed into these short paragraphs. There's victim-blaming, of course: do we regularly attack murder victims for "putting themselves in situations where murder is likely to occur?" There's his weird complaint that actually investigating and prosecuting date rape puts an "impossible burden" on police and the judicial system: should we simply stop enforcing laws against all crimes that are hard to investigate or prosecute? And there's his unwillingness to accept the simple fact that rapists all too often do look exactly like the "nice boy next door." As for his complaint that these events target the wrong people, see here for an argument as to why it makes sense to raise awareness specifically amongst those men who are NOT likely to rape women. 

In the past a few MRAs have asked me why I put the False Rape Society blog in my "boob roll" -- and formerly in my "enemies list." This is why. Spreading blatant misinformation and blaming victims: these are not exactly good ways to actually reduce the number of men falsely accused of rape.

And here's another thought for the MRAs reading this, Harlan included: if you are truly as concerned about testicular or prostate cancer -- or any other male malady -- as you so often and so loudly claim to be, take a few moments away from your constant complaining about feminism and/or women, and actually hold a fund raiser yourselves. In a comment on his latest post, Harlan writes: "My problem is this: how about an event to raise funds for male suicide, etc. once in a while?" You know how events like these happen? PEOPLE ORGANIZE THEM. There is nothing stopping MRAs from organizing such an event on their own. How about it, guys? 

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Earthquakes and Ideologues

A scene in Haiti, after its earthquake.

Sometimes The Spearhead, probably the internet's leading angry-man site, seems like a giant interactive game of "pin the blame on the feminists." When uprisings broke out in Tunisia and then Egypt , you may recall, W. F. Price -- head honcho at The Spearhead -- suggested that the unrest in both countries was a male reaction to the excesses of feminism and female power.

Now he's returned with an even stranger article, comparing  the current disaster in Japan with the very different outcome of last year's earthquake in Haiti-- and blaming women in general and feminists in particular for the far more lethal outcome in Haiti.

You might think that the staggering death toll in Haiti -- estimates range from 92,000 to more than 300,000 --  might have something  to do with the fact that it's the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with a weak and corrupt government and almost nothing in the way of intrastructure.  And that Japan's relative resiliance in the face of an even more powerful earthquake might have something to do with the fact that it's a wealthy nation -- the world's third most powerful economy, with a GDP per capita about 30 times greater than Haiti's -- with a great deal of experience in handling earthquakes.

But Price has a rather different, and highly peculiar, explanation: Haiti suffered more because it's a  "matriachal" country, unlike properly "patriarchal" Japan. Comparing  "matriarchal Haiti’s and patriarchal Japan’s respective responses to natural disaster," Price writes that

in Haiti the women are still living in open encampments well over a year after the quake, [while] Japanese women are already sheltered, which is necessary, because it is still cold in northern Japan this time of year. ...

Price goes on to argue that Japan is doing better by its men as well. While in Haiti in the aftermath of the quake, the UN and some relief organizations targeted aid towards women -- who tend to literally get pushed aside in the mad scramble for food supplies otherwise -- Price argues that

Japanese men ... have it far better than their Haitian counterparts as well. There are no foreign troops pointing guns at them and denying them food, they are taken care of and respected if old, and given jobs and a place in society if young. Perhaps most importantly, They are given the opportunity to do what men often do best — they are allowed to take care of their families and communities.

Let's set aside for a moment that it is a tad early to be declaring, er, "mission accomplished" in the Japan crisis, especially with the specter of a nuclear reactor meltdown looming. Price is a man with an agenda, and he moves fairly quickly to his grand conclusion: The two disasters, he argues,

give us an opportunity to ask ourselves what kind of a society we want to live in. Do we want, as the feminists would have it, to be helpless, disease infested, homeless and starving if we face hardship, or do we want to have the ability to come together and pull ourselves up from the rubble? For the sane people of the world, the choice is clear.

Yes, that's right. Feminism is the party of helplessness, disease, homelessness and starvation. Anyone who's just made the argument he made really shouldn't be offering any opinions on the sanity of others.

Before we get into a critique of Price's argument, such as it is, let's pause for a moment to ask how his novel thesis was received by the Spearhead regulars. While a few commenters did take him to task for ignoring economics, others took his absurd argument and ran with it. (This is The Spearhead, after all.) Alucin declared,

Feminism is a crime against humanity. What happened in Haiti regarding food distribution will be repeated again and again as long as feminism prevails. Fighting feminism is something good people do on behalf of humanity. The men and women of Japan will get their lives back together again far more quickly than the matriarchal people of Haiti.

The future is patriarchal. It’s just a matter of which form it will take and when the West will re-masculate.

Epoetker took it a step further, adding a bit of racism to the misogynistic mix:

Haiti is a land of men who look like men but think like women. Japan is a land of men who look like women but think like men.

Rebel, meanwhile, found a grim humor in it all:

The Haitian case is proof positive that feminism is exactly like AIDS.
No matter how many die, feminism will be the last thing to die.
It was planned that way.

Whichever way you look at it, the answer is always the same: feminism is a religion of death.
Feminists are death worshippers.

That leaves very little hope for the future.
Life is so short and we worry too much. And it’s so futile.
One day we will all be Haitians. LOL!!

A note: These aren't a couple of weird comments I've "cherry picked" to give a distorted picture of the discussion. In fact, these comments got anywhere from 20 to nearly 70 upvotes from Spearhead readers, and almost no downvotes. There were many other comments, also heavily upvoted, agreeing with these general premises. If you don't believe me, go take a look yourself.

Numerous other commenters, I should also note, offered frankly racist interpretations of "the tale of two earthquakes," blaming the greater scope of the disaster in Haiti on what one commenter called its "largely negro, largely indolent society." While some objected to the racism, many clearly racist comments got numerous upvotes from the Spearhead crowd.  (The comment I just quoted got 60 upvotes and 20 downvotes.)

Getting back to Price's argument, let's try to unpack the various layers of bullshit here. First of all, Haiti is no matriarchy. Yes, women often head up households there. But they don't run the country, by any measure.

Life in Haiti is no picnic for men, but women have it even worse; as one human rights group noted in a recent report, "Haitian women experience additional barriers to the full enjoyment of their basic rights due to predominant social beliefs that they are inferior to men and a historical pattern of discrimination and violence against them based on their sex. Discrimination against women is a structural feature in Haitian society and culture that has subsisted throughout its history, both in times of peace and unrest."

Rape is a constant threat, and, as a recent article in the Los Angeles Times notes, it "wasn't even considered a serious criminal offense in Haiti until five years ago. ... Before 2005, rape was considered an offense against honor, or "crime of passion," meaning it was a minor infraction in which the perpetrator would go free if he agreed to marry his victim."

The earthquake only made the situation worse for women. Rapes are especially widespread in the camps that sprung up in the wake of last year's earthquake. Instead of "tak[ing] care of their families and communities," as Price would put it, many Haitian men have instead preyed on women and girls, sexually assaultng them and stealing their food and other supplies. This is not, to put it mildly, a country suffering from an excess of feminism or female authority.

No, Haiti is in dire straits mostly because of its extreme poverty. Anyone looking at the history of natural disasters can plainly see that they tend to cause far more chaos and misery and death in poor countries than they do in rich ones: In highly patriarchal, and poverty-stricken Pakistan, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake killed an estimated 75,000, though the quake there was an order of magnitude weaker than Japan's.

I'm not sure why I feel the need to remind readers of these basic points; the absurdity of Price's arguments should be immediately obvious to anyone not blinded by misogyny. Sometimes I wonder if Price even believes all of the shit he shovels. Stupidity would be easier to forgive than that level of cynicism.

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If you don't agree with me, angry dudes will kick your ass

Anyone who's seen Taxi Driver will remember Travis Bickle's late night soliloquy on the "whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, [and] junkies" he saw every night driving his cab. "Someday," he told himself, "a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."

Of course -- SPOILER ALERT! -- what he really meant by "a real rain" coming was that he, Travis Bickle, would lose his shit and start shooting people.

Bickle wasn't the only one to mix his predictions with a heaping helping of threat. Those who predict the end of the world at the hand of gods or men or some vague terrible cataclysm are all too often rooting (secretly or openly) for the civilization-destroyers they are ostensibly warning against. We saw this the other day amongst those MGTOWers who are now talking giddily about how complete economic collapse will serve to put foolish women and their "mangina" pals in their proper place.

And we see it again and again in the Men's Rights movement, when MRAs sternly warn their detractors that if people don't start listening to them, and pronto, the men of the world will rise up and, well,  kick the shit out of everyone who opposes them. This is a warning only in the sense that a mafioso telling someone that, if he doesn't pay what he owes, his legs just might possibly get broken, is a warning; by all reasonable definitions, it is a threat. As opposed to the leg-breaking, the threats of these MRAS aren't very specific threats, but they're threats of violence nonetheless.

I ran across one recent example of this sort of "warning" in the comments to Paul Elam's piece on misandry -- or at least what he labels misandry -- in the Good Men Project's package on the Men's Rights movement. (My own contribution to the debate is here.) Here's "Factory," responding to another commenter who pointed out that some of his wording in an earlier comment had been awfully violent:

Who said I was interested in proving I wasn’t violent?

In point of fact, I continually warn people that if these issues are not MEANINGFULLY addressed, and soon, there will be a LOT of violence (see: Middle East) that we MRAs won’t be able to stop.

And frankly, if it comes to that, society (and all the women in it along with the men) flat out DESERVES whatever is coming.

Your hubris as a movement is causing a lot of men to be angry. You all vastly underestimate both the anger, and the ubiquitous nature of this anger.

We MRAs do nothing except act as weather vane and map. That’s why we have no central authority, or funding, or organization of any kind. We are average guys mad enough to stand up like we do. There are a LOT more guys that are just as mad, but content to let others lead.

And there are a growing number of men that take Feminist (and ‘official’) dismissal of mens issues as indication that ONLY violent revolution will lead to change.

And speaking for myself, if it ever comes to violence, I will stand aside, and feel bad while all manner of nasty things are done…but I won’t lift a FINGER to stop it.

Just like people like you are doing right now.

Notice the not-so-subtle, and rather thoroughly bungled, rhetorical sleight of hand here. Factory paints the violence as something he won't indulge in (but won't stop) -- forgetting that in the very first sentence he admitted that he was himself violent. He refers to MRAs as little more than a "weather vane" for male emotion -- but somehow later in the paragraph they are leading things. He claims that he will "feel bad while all manner of nasty things are done," but this is only after stating in no uncertain terms that he thinks "society ... flat out DESERVES whatever is coming."

So, yeah, this is as much a "warning" as the hypothetical mafioso's reference to broken legs.

Naturally, Elam himself stepped up to second Factory's emotion, declaring that "[m]en, when disenfranchised and pushed to the edge, have frequently become violent."

On his own site, Elam has been much more frankly threatening. Recently, telling off one commenter who had the temerity to actually question the gospel according to Elam, he finished off a long rant about male anger with this:

I would not suggest that treating half the population, the stronger half at that, with too much continuing disregard is a very good idea.

Thinking they will never come out swinging is a stupid, stupid way to go.

This kind of logic might best be called the Appeal to an Ass-kicking. The structure of this argument could be broken down as follows:

1) Source A says that p is true
2) If you don't agree that p is true, Source A (or perhaps some other dudes) will do you bodily harm.
3) Therefore, you'd better fucking agree that p is true.

This is probably the oldest and crudest form of logic there is, and one that is popular amongst many animals as well. (My cat is a master of it, at least when p = "you will give me treats now.")

Perhaps the best way to respond to it is the way that the commenter calling herself fannie responded to Factory on the Good Men Project:

You’re arguing that men are going to be so angry they’re not going to be able to control their rage and are therefore going to start inflicting mass amounts of violence upon others.

I’m not sure a feminist could be more defamatory of men than you are being.

MRAs sure are misandrist.

I, and feminists like me, think men are better than that.

Me too.


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Heil Hitlary!

Hillary Clinton: A legless Nazi?

Some very, er, interesting observations on world politics from SingleDad on the angry-man internet hub known as The Spearhead. 

I think things will get much worse in ways we cannot imagine today. Why do you think our secretary of state has done nothing except meet with women all over the world non-stop.

I mean, we’re in two wars, North Africa is coming undone and where is Hitlary.

I’ll tell you. She is meeting with and creating a world feminist Cabal to be a non-elected shadow government.

What can we expect, more men in prison, less boys graduating high school, less and more dangerous jobs for men, more wars (to reduce the male population, a win/win for Hitlary), and world wide demonization and extermination of heterosexuality.

They hate men, women that like men, children and families.

Use your imagination ... they are doing all this in secret as they know what they have in mind is unethical and could not tolerate the light of day.

Note: When he refers to "Hitlary," SingleDad is, I believe, trying to draw a humorous parallel between our Secretary of State and the lead character in the 1980 Pakistani film Hitlar, in which the aforementioned Hitlar, son of Hitler, terrorizes a Punjabi village. In case you missed this film when it was in theaters, here's a bit more on it from IMDb:

The movie starts with the premise that Hitler never died at the end of WWII, but that he escaped and started a family somewhere in the Punjabi heartland. The movie shows Hitlar, the son the world never knew about, sending his goons out to ravage the local villagers and terrify them into submission. Sultan Rahi witnesses the brutal murder of an innocent villager and vows to take revenge. and his quest for vengeance pits him against Hitlar, son of Hitler!

That might seem like sort of an obscure reference for SingleDad to make, but apparently The Spearheaders are huge fans of Pakistanti cinema. (I'm more of a Bollywood man myself.)

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Godwin's Law, upside-down and backwards

Meet Stu. Stu hates feminsts. But he hates manginas even more. You might even say that Stu hates manginas the way Hitler hated Jews. No, I'm not comparing Stu to Hitler. He happily compares himself to Hitler in this comment on A Voice For Men.

Phew, I’m glad you [Paul Elam] said feminist hating is an honorable and viable political act because I certainly hate them. ... The real object of my hatred are those that enable these people. The ones that are actively engaged in creating the environment of misandry that we live in now.

For those people, career feminists and manginas, my hatred would be on par to Adolf Hitlers hatred of a super rich gay jew who was raping his arse. Out of these, I hate career manginas the most. There would be no mercy for these arseholes if I could be dictator for a day, they would soon be living what is left of their lives in extreme misery.

Emphasis added. This comment, Hitler and all, got more than three times as many upvotes as downvotes from the assembled mob site's readers. Of course, Stu's comment is in response to a post titled "The Scourge of Rape. Yeah, whatever," which means that these upvoters are people who enjoyed a post titled  "The Scourge of Rape. Yeah, whatever" so much that they stuck around afterwards to compliment the author, so, you know.

This, by contrast, is the sort of comment that gets downvoted on A Voice For Men, and which inspires the post's author, Paul Elam, to tell the commenter "fuck that, and fuck you. Let me say that again. Fuck you."

EDITED TO ADD: When I posted this piece last night, that second comment had virtually no upvotes; you had to click a link to even see it. I hope at least a few of the upvotes it now has were from the regulars on that site.

Another heartening sign: the critical response Elam's "Rape ... whatever" screed got on the Men's Rights subreddit on Reddit. His response to the criticism is rather telling. I'm generally not a fan of the Men's Rights subreddit, as you might imagine, but there are some decent people who comment there and it is much less hateful than almost all of the other MRA/MGTOW/etc sites I regularly read.

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

Do Men Going Their Own Way Dream of Misogynistic Sheep?

Let's just flush superbad into space.

Some manosphere dudes dream of a future filled with robogirl sex slaves eager to fulfill their every twisted wish. Over on Happy Bachelors, superbad dreams bigger. And weirder. Here's his vision of a futuristic misogynistic sex utopia, a sort of sexed-up sci-fi version of that old creepy fairy tale about Bluebeard, mixed with a bit of Moonraker for good measure:

in an ideal world i would live alone on a huge spaceship with a large queue of sexy virgin's in cryofreeze. when i got the urge i would select one to be thawed on a non-Windows OS computer. after having my way with them, if they asked anything too personal, like my name, i'd hit a big red panic button and have them flushed into space. then i'd eat some souvlaki and log on to a feminist forum and tell them how deeply i cared about their cause. "you're right Sarah! i think twats should rule the world... YAAY TWATS!" then till the wee hours i would work on my mangina annihilation ray. when perfected i'd pull up to earth, get on a 100 million watt transmitter, and announce, while sipping ouzo, "you all got 24 hours to get the f*ck out".

Yeah. Good luck with that.

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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.

A New Low in Victim-Blaming, Part 2: In Mala Fide on Lara Logan

From In Mala Fide

The reaction of the "manosphere" to Lara Logan's reported sexual assault in Cairo has been highly revealing, to put it mildly. And what it reveals about the assorted Men's Rightsers, Men Going Their Own Way, pickup artists, and others who make up the manosphere is pretty ugly.

Take, for example, Ferdinand Bardamu's posts on the subject. On Tuesday, Bardamu, whose antifeminist blog In Mala Fide is widely linked to in the manosphere, spat forth a snide, sarcastic rant that attacked Logan for having the temerity to even set foot in Egypt. He started out dismissive:

Apparently, a CBS lady reporter got raped while covering the revolution in Egypt. For some reason, we’re expected to feel sorry for her.

Then turned up the sarcasm:

Oh, what a symbol of courage Miss Logan is! What a beacon of determination and grit and…no, seriously. I can’t go on.

Fuck Lara Logan. Fuck her and the shit-for-brains idiot who thought it was a good idea to send a WOMAN to report from a war zone. ...

Of course, Bardamu ignores the simple  fact that is is dangerous to send ANY reporter, male or female, into the midst of a revolution -- indeed, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented more than 140 attacks on journalists in the Egyptian unrest so far; one journalist was shot and killed. Despite this fact, it is an undeniably good thing that some reporters (male and female both) are willing to risk their lives to cover wars and revolutions and other dramatic, dangerous, and important events. No one has suggested that the attacks on male journalists mean that men should not be covering these events. No one is mocking the male journalists who were attacked. (Well, almost no one. Bardamu refers in passing to CNN's Anderson Cooper, also famously attacked while covering the events of Egypt, as a "twinkle-toed pansy [who] couldn’t handle the heat on the streets of Cairo.")

For Bardamu, though, Logan's story is one of a woman foolishly trying to make her way in a man's world:

You send a chick into a situation like the one in Egypt, you might as well hang a sign around her neck that says “FREE FUCKTOY”. I don’t care how many disaster areas she’s reported from, how many awards she’s won, it was going to happen eventually. ...

Sucks that Lara got raped, but she had it coming. [Emphasis in original]

To Bardamu, this case is evidence not only that women journalists should not be sent to cover the Egyptian revolution but that they should not be allowed to leave their home country at all:

[O]f COURSE Lara shouldn’t be sent on another foreign assignment again! She, nor any other women should be allowed to be a foreign correspondent for their own safety.

And then, after arguing that Logan "had it coming,"and that any western woman who has the temerity to leave her hotel room and step out into the streets of Cairo should expect herself to get raped sooner or later, Bardamu then suggests that Logan may be making it all up:

There’s a non-zero chance that she didn’t get raped at all, and that she made the whole thing up to garner attention and sympathy from the weepy, chivalrous masses. ...

I have no evidence that she’s not telling the truth, only a tiny feeling in the pit of my stomach that’s been growing year by year, with every venal vixen who falsely accuses a man of rape because she wants fame, or she feels like a slut after sleeping with the guy, or she’s mad that he slept with her best friend the day after, or whatever else.

Naturally, in the comments, many of Bardamu's fans agreed that women women who trespass into male spaces deserve whatever happens to them. According to "John":

Women do not belong in men’s locker rooms, Mike Tysons apartment at 2:00 a.m., drunk in a bar bathroom with the Steelers quarterback, and they sure as hell don’t belong “reporting” in the middle of a revolution. Women should not go to Frat Parties dressed like sluts and get drunk with the expectation that “nothing will happen.” ...

This woman, Laura Logan, is not just an idiot – she is an adulterous whore. She shares this unfortunate circumstance with tens of millions of others of her sex, and deserves no pity whatsoever.

For some, the case was not just another excuse for "slut shaming" but evidence that the very notion of equality between the sexes is wrong. As Brett Stevens put it:

American women are rape targets worldwide. They are known to be clueless, friendly, and most of all, sexually easy. If a woman chucks her sexual favors out the door at the drop out of a hat, why not just go the extra mile and apply pressure? ... We take these girls from comfy suburbs and send them into war zones and riots and wonder why they get gang raped. Amazing cluelessness, arising from our insane idea of “equality.”

There were other comments even worse than these -- e.g., this one -- but I don't have the heart to post them here.

But Bardamu's retrograde notions were also challenged in the comments -- mostly from those who saw his noxious post linked to on feminist sites and on Twitter, but also in a few cases from actual fans of his blog.

This reaction inspired Bardamu to post a second piece on the Logan story, one even more narcissistic and self-righteous than the first. After taking on some of his critics (most notably Molly of Progressive Blogic, whom he labeled a "premenstrual whiner"), and casually referring to Logan as "an unwilling cum dumpster," Bardamu tried to pretend that it was him, and not the feminists, who had the best interests of women at heart.

Lara Logan had no business being in Cairo, or anywhere in that part of the world for that matter. All of you leftie feminist tossers screeching about “rape culture” have her blood on your hands. How many more have to suffer before your lies are discredited?

Sorry, but a guy who refers to any women, much less a woman who has been raped, as a "cum dumpster" pretty much forfeits any right to be taken seriously on the subject of what is best for women.

About a week ago, Bardamu reported that he'd taken a Psychopathy Test on OkCupid, and had scored an impressive 31 points, which put him in the ranks of the "True Psychopaths."  His posts on Logan -- full of narcissistic rage and utterly lacking in basic human empathy -- seem to bear out this diagnoses all too well.

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Taking victim-blaming to new lows: The Spearhead on Lara Logan

Lara Logan, shortly before the attack

There has been an astounding amount of vile shit posted on the internet about the reported sexual assault and beating of CBS reporter Lara Logan in Cairo's Tahir Square. I spent a depressing hour or so the other night looking through hundreds of comments on the Yahoo news message boards; it was a virtual festival of misogyny, racism, victim-blaming and simple nastiness. A sample (each quote is from a different comment):

don't put some nice white pu55y near crazy @#$% arabs. it's like goddamn king kong

Kinda' like sending a woman reporter into a locker room? Don't ask me to feel any kind of remorse for her. Equal rights demands equal responsibility

it started as a revolution and turned in a black spring break! mwaa ha ha

She loved every minute of it.

I could multiply examples ad infinitum; the last I checked there were more than 1500 comments on the one Yahoo news story I looked at, and most were of this sort. The only slightly encouraging sign? Most of these vile comments have more downvotes from readers than upvotes.

You expect this kind of behavior from the Yahoo message board crowd, which has never been very big on civility, or even basic human decency. Typical anonymous internet assholery.

Leave it to the readers of The Spearhead, though, to take commentary on this sad case to an even lower low. Yesterday, Spearhead head honcho W.F. Price published his own, predictably victim-blaming, take on the subject -- essentially blaming feminists for encouraging women to report the news in the same dangerous places that male reporters go. (When Anderson Cooper was attacked, you didn't hear anyone suggesting that men shouldn't be covering the events in Cairo.)

I think that's a supremely tasteless way to use this tragedy to push an antifeminist agenda. But the comments to his article, roughly 270 of them at last count, are far worse -- rarely bothering with even a pro-forma expression of basic human sympathy, some blaming and even mocking the victim, and most using the case to crudely push an assortment of their own misogynist agendas.  Here are some of the worst; I present them without comment, as they pretty much speak for themselves. I have edited some for space reasons; you can follow the links to read them in their entirety.

Alucin explained about how rape allegedly benefits its victims:

When I studied in university a woman claimed to have been gang-raped. After telling the story, she acquired a certain authority. She was at the top of the feminist hierarchy .... Her word was gold because of her rape.

It was never even verified if she had in fact been raped.

It’s a harsh thing to say, but the woman at university gained immensely from the rape, or her rape story-telling, with this increased stature. She probably wouldn’t have gotten into that very small degree program without the rape story to tell to the admissions committee.

At school, no one, especially a man, could ever challenge her about any subject, however remotely related to rape. ...

Rape against men or women is a tragedy, but I also find it sickening how “survivors” or their “friends and supporters” often use their status for personal gain. ... It’s the same thing when feminists politicize breast cancer. 

Opus added:

I agree with Alcuin: In my experience women wear RAPE like a badge of honour or military medal (as I presume Ms Logan will now do). I, of course, never believe word of it, and I notice most guys these days are equally sceptical. There may be an increasing Rape epidemic but no one I know is a Rapist. Funny.

Confused declared that he didn't give a shit:

No group on earth is more privileged that American/western women.
I won’t waste my time any more worrying about their safety, or lack thereof, due to their choices.

intp took it a step further:

Don’t believe her. Don’t care. I hope the Arab guys didn’t catch anything from her.

That is what the non-stop lie called feminism has done to me. Vive la nihilism.

Rebel offered this highly original take on rape:

I don’t see the point here..

According to feminist orthodoxy, humpteen gazillion women are raped every day. This one is the humpteen gazillionth plus one for that day.

Women are raped if you have sex with them, women are raped if you don’t have sex with them, women are raped even if there are no men around. ...

Every time two animals are copulating, a woman feels raped. There are more rapes on earth than there are hydrogen molecules in the universe.

To women of today, rape seems to be the highest achievement, the Royal Road to Success.

I’m laughing so much I might get a hernia, my belly is aching from the laughter.

Papa Smurf suggested the reported rape was a great career move, and ended his comment with a smiley:

she’ll be a CBS news anchor in no time. great way to get promoted.

I dont know if she genuinely didnt want what just happend or maybe feminism has affectivly blinded her and rendered her stupid. Blonde western women in the arab world are like all you can eat restraunts to fat people. Just help yourselves ;)

Troll King posted a long rambling diatribe against "western women" in the Middle East, of which these remarks are only a small portion:

*yawn*

Typical feminist/western woman(as if there is a difference) acts like her typical bitchy self in a place that won’t tolerate it. ....

The fact is that women, western cunts, think they can go into a culture and act how they want and treat the poorest of the poor not just like “help” or a but like a slave that should be lashed for simply flirting. I bet these rapists look who do this probably thought she would act towards them the same way white women act towards brown and black men on western tv. Like he was a stud....

But, umm, like yeah dude. That is so hurrible I might go and cry a river.

The Contrarian Expatriate took victim-blaming to a new low:

Sounds like she got what she set herself up for. You can yell, “I am woman, hear me roar!” all you want in the Anglosphere, but step into the 3rd world behaving that way and they will pound you (no pun intended) back into your place.

Again, as is generally the case with the comments from The Spearhead that I quote here on my blog, these are not weird outliers in the discussion there. Unlike the comments from Yahoo I quoted above, all of the comments I quoted from The Spearhead got multiple upvotes from readers there, in most cases several dozen; none had more than a handful of downvotes. Alucin's comment about the benefits of rape -- a comment surprisingly similar in spirit to an infamous quote on false rape accusations from Catherine Comins, an assistant dean at Vassar, that still raises hackles from antifeminists two decades after it was uttered to a Time magazine writer --  got more than 80 upvotes. There is more than a little irony here.

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Lady Killers

Feminist Training Camp

There's only really one rule to follow if you want to get upvoted on The Spearhead: make sure you say something hateful about women! If you follow this rule, you can say almost anything you want, no matter how completely batshit insane it is, and still get a couple of dozen upvotes. Works every time!

Consider, for example, this peculiar wisdom from one fellow calling himself Anonymous age 68, taken from a long, rambling comment that, the last time I checked, had 35 upvotes and only 11 downvotes. Take it away, you lovable old kook:

For 45 years, the man-haters who run this country have been saying privately they want to kill most men. I read MS. in the 80?s, and it was there. In recent years, they have shushed the stupids who have been saying it publicly, but you can be sure they are privately saying, “NOT YET, STUPID!” ...

Killing large numbers of men is the only one of the original feminist goals which has not yet been achieved. And, all the other things they have done to men were directly or indirectly in the original lists.

I subscribed to MS magazine in the 70?s and 80?s, until my stomach would not take it any more. They told right out in there, their original goals. The world cannot be safe until most men are terminated.

I tried to tell other men, who treated me like s**t. “Why do you worry about things like that? This is the USA, and nothing like that will ever happen. ...” 

Exactly what the Jew leaders told worried Jews in the 20th Century.That worked out real well.

Just in case you didn't subscribe to Ms. in the 70s and 80s, and you're wondering what the other original feminist goals were, here's the whole list:

1) Buy comfortable shoes
2) Create Lilith Fair
3) Kill men.
4) ???
5) Profit!


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Rapist babies and internet threats

How the hell did I get mixed up in all this?

The manosphere is in an uproar about a public service TV ad from an anti-violence group that portrays a baby boy as a future rapist. Some MRAs are attempting to refute the ad's implication that improperly socialized men are prone to violence by posting and upvoting ... violent comments and veiled threats online. And apparently some non-veiled death threats as well.

A few days ago, you see, W.F. Price, head honcho at The Spearhead, wrote a critical piece about the endeavors of one Josh Jasper to draw attention to sexism in Super Bowl commercials; Price also pointed out that Jasper, CEO of the Riverview Center, a nonprofit serving domestic violence and sexual assault victims in Illinois and Iowa, had put out an earlier commercial that, in Price's words, "impl[ied] that baby boys are all potential rapists."

Despite the source, that's actually a more or less accurate description of the ad, which depicts a happy little baby boy as a future rapist. I'm just not quite sure why that's so objectionable; after all, every baby, male or female, is a bundle of possibilities, some good, some bad. (Hitler was once a happy, gurgling baby.) The point of the ad is that parents can have an effect on how their kids turn out; if you raise your son to be a violent, misogynist asshole, he may well end up a rapist.

As much as I agree with this basic sentiment, I'm not going to defend the ad. It's terrible. Generally, I'm not a fan of using babies to make political points -- it's trite and manipulative, to begin with. And in this case, it's worse than that: portraying a baby as a future rapist seems rather hamfisted, given that babies are often victims of abuse themselves. 

Judge for yourself; here's the ad.




All this said, the flaws of the "rapist baby" ad in no way excuse the response it's gotten from some of the more hotheaded in the Men's Rights Movement and the manosphere in general. On his website, Peter Nolan declares that the ad "promote[s] hatred of male babies"; on The Spearhead,  Poester99 goes even further, accusing Riverview Center of "promoting violence against baby boys." Which is, of course, completely absurd. (Even besides that, as Jasper has pointed out on his blog, the Riverview Center serves male victims as well as female ones.) It's hard to know if the people spouting this nonsense honestly believe it, or if they are using the baby in the ad even more cynically and opportunistically than Jasper is.

Unfortunately, the MRA reaction has gone well beyond simple rhetorical overkill. A number of comments on The Spearhead, many of them with dozens of upvotes, are essentially threats -- some vague, some not-so-vague -- against Jasper himself. duke writes that:

Mangina creeps like Josh Jasper should suffer the same fate as Nazi sympathizers after WWII-taken out and shot after a five minute trial.

Avenger adds:

If men really were as violent as he claims they would have shut him up long ago. One good beating and this mangina would never open his mouth again.

Firepower, meanwhile, goes after Jasper's ... first name:

So long as males tolerate sissified males named “Josh” – pissing even on our SuperBowl – these gender traitors will only feel encouraged to increase their anti-male slurs.

Over on A Voice For Men, meanwhile, MRA elder Paul Elam insinuates that Jasper, far from being a sissy,  is a violent "alpha puke" -- and calls on his fans to dig up dirt on him:

This man deserves consequences for his actions.

Some history on Josh is known. We know he was a marine and we also know that he was a Los Angeles police officer. Two areas for sure where the capacity for violence is a plus. Add to that the fact that he was on a Domestic Violence task force and this bad apple starts to stink a little more. ...

Anyone want to take any bets on whether this alpha puke ever busted heads as a cop, simply because he could? It leaves one to wonder - especially given the intellectual violence he is so obviously willing to inflict on male children - just what sort of skeletons are in this douche bag's closet.

If they are there, I would love to get my hands on them and rattle them together for the world to hear.

And on Men-Factor, antifeminist blogger ScareCrow (who used to regularly post comments here) posts the email addresses of The Riverview Center's mostly female board of directors, urging readers to "vent your anger" on this "bitch-hive," adding "I aim to destroy it."

I don't have the patience or the stomach to sort through the comments on the YouTube page for the ad to see what other vile shit has been posted there.

I can only hope that most of this violent language is just standard internet tough guy  talk, and won't result in real violence in the real world. Even if you believe that Jasper's ad commits a sort of rhetorical violence against male babies -- which I think is a ridiculous reading of the admittedly idiotic ad --  it does not justify actual violence against anybody.

EDIT: I should have let this one sit a little before putting it up. I've made various changes to strengthen and clarify my argument.
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"I don't hate women. I just want them all to die bitter and alone."

Non-haters also gonna hate.

The "Rant you very much" section of NiceGuy's MGTOW [Men Going Their Own Way] forum is the place for commenters to post stuff that they think might be too crazy and "out there" for the forum's other sections. Given what else is posted over on NiceGuy's -- the stomping ground of a fellow named Nightstorm and his wild fantasies of moustrap vaginas and leech women --  this is a tall order indeed.

NiceGuy richbansha tried his best to live up to these high expectations with a recent rant titled "Why not hate?" Why bother to pretend that we don't hate women, rich asks his fellow NiceGuys, when this won't actually do us any good? As for him, he admits his hatred up front. (I've taken the liberty of bolding some expecially ranty bits in the quote below, and adding a paragraph break.)

Do I "hate women"? You bet your ass!  ...

[T]he most common reason why one of us will deny the possibility that we hate them  is not not look bad. Is there any doubt that they don't hate YOU or that those listening in wouldn't just as soon see you violated? ... No matter what you do, you can still expect the most inconscionable treatment at the hands of AW [American Women]. If the response to both kindness and cruelty are identical, what is the reason for such a lopsided favoritism for appeasement?

When saying that you want to rape and cut up a woman with a band saw is met with the exact same reaction as saying you want to want to buy them a drink, what ... is the incentive to not be hateful and violent? We have seen for ourselves that refraining only makes you are more likely target for hatred and violence. ... So when a stinking cavern gets out of hand why not pulp her? You know you want to. Does anyone really think that stopping yourself or saying you would stop yourself will make it any easier on you?

In a followup post, he blames it all on the alleged tendency of women to adore "bad boys" and treat kind, considerate nice guys -- richbansha apparently thinks he is, or at least was, one of them -- like dirt:

My fate was decided in 7th grade when that girl said I had cooties. ...  If you ever got a "P" in the box on your report card that says "Respects the rights of others" then you are a marked man. ...

I have suffered far more for the things that I had nothing to do with than any active and intentional infraction that I ever committed. ... Who do skanks even call the cops on? Violent meth dealer Bf who routinely beats her and impregnates her or the honest, hardworking auditor who pays for the meth dealer's offspring? Is it any wonder that I think dudes should get on the good side of that equation?

The "good side," of course, being the side of of the girlfriend-beating "bad-boy" meth dealer.

So, yeah, that's what a rant on NiceGuy's looks like.

More interesting to me than the actual rant, though, are the responses of others in the forum. TheDude suggested he tone it down a bit: 

So you think that violence may be the answer when there are thousands of cops who would love to beat your ass because you "disrespected a lady?" I think talking about it on this board just makes us a target and it is bad advice.

In other words, the voice of reason in this discussion frames his advice in entirely self-interested terms: Don't attack women because then cops will beat your ass. Don't talk like this on the forum, because it makes MGTOW look bad.

And then there are those who chime in to say they didn't hate women ... but. There is always a "but." A couple of the "buts" are fairly mild and inoffensive. the american, echoing the famous Dr. Freud, notes

I don't hate women. I just don't understand their thought processes.

Our friend Yohan goes a little further (bold in original):

I am not hateful or violent, but I am highly MISTRUSTING against all and everything a Western female will ever tell me.

It's not only about my past, it's about the present legal situation in feminist countries, which encourages females of any age to consider men of any age, even young boys and old people, even your own father as nothing but trash except for quick money supply.

About hate, it should be said, hate is really bad for your health cousing heart problems, stomach problems etc..

And then there are ... these. Richard Cranium blames those evil Sufragettes (and the manginas who loved them) for it all:

It's not a matter of hating women per se, it's hating what they've become, or more specifically what manginas have let them become. As has been stated here & elsewhere, the day we let them out of the kitchen and let them vote was the day it all went to hell.

Big R takes his non-hatred to a whole other level:

I dont hate them either. I want them to live to see how lonely and suicidal they,ll become when they find out all the men have dumped them forever in the feminized world. I want them to live and suffer without men or the attention they receive from us. ...

I have turned out just a little vengeful towards women for the treatment I have received from them throughout my life. Just seeing an AW maybe lying on the sidewalk after a drunken suicidal depressive drinking binge after being dumped and cheated on would brighten up my day.

Our friend Yohan obliged this last wish by posting a photo of a drunk woman lying on the floor in what appears to be a pool of her own urine, with a friendly little note advising Big R to "have a nice day."

So very considerate, these Men Going Their Own Way.

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The uprising in Egypt: Not all about the menz

Leon Trotsky -- you know, THE Trotsky -- once said disdainfully of writer Dwight Macdonald, who'd had the temerity to actually question him about something-or-other, "everyone has the right to be stupid, but comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege."

Now, Trotsky was sort of a shit, and probably would have been a worse dictator than Stalin, and Dwight Macdonald was awesome, but I've always loved this little put-down, and I'd like to update it for the internet age.  So here goes:

Everyone has the right to pontificate about shit they know nothing about on the internet, but our comrades at The Spearhead abuse the privilege.

The latest example: A short piece about the Egyptian protests from Spearhead head cheese W.F. Price. Noting that footage of the protests show a lot of angry men out on the streets, Price opines:

Governments that consistently neglect or antagonize their male populations never last too long.

Yep, no matter what happens anywhere in the world at any time, on The Spearhead it's always all about the menz. Indeed, not only has the Egyptian government been insufficiently accommodating to men, Price suggests; it's also started flirting with feminism, having "recently taken the lead in the Arab world in empowering women." But such a transparent ploy to win over the wimmenz will invariably backfire, he argues (or, rather, asserts), further angering the angry men in the streets:

Female support matters little; women shift allegiance at the drop of a hat, so any government that counts on them to prop them up is making a mistake.

Those fickle, fickle women!

In the comments, someone called Antz took this absurdity a step or two further, asking his fellow Spearheaders to

note the alpha males in battle gear, ready at the drop of a hat to open fire on their freedom loving brothers with machine guns.

Alpha males have always been the wielders of the burning blade of feminist anti-male hatred.

Yes, that's right. The Egyptian security police have suddenly gone feminist on us.

This isn't the first time Price has attempted to cast an uprising in the Arab world as a manly reaction to the doings of evil women. He titled a recent piece on the Tunisian uprising "Arrogant Woman Slaps Young Man, Brings Down Her Regime." The "arrogant woman" in question was a corrupt local official who slapped and thereby humiliated a young Tunisian street vendor named Mohammad Bouazizi; his very public suicide -- he lit himself on fire in front of a government building as a form of protest --was what set off the Tunisian uprising. (I have no idea what Price means by referring to "her regime," as the woman in question was  merely a local functionary and the regime in question was of course headed by a man.) Price wrote:

Authoritarian regimes in Muslim-majority states tend to favor women’s empowerment, seeing women as natural allies in keeping fundamentalist Islam at bay and willing participants in corrupt patronage systems. However, favoring women can only go so far, as men need a certain degree of appeasement as well, and it seems that young Tunisian men have had enough of being – quite literally in this case – slapped around.

Never mind that Tunisia's historic adoption of women's rights legislation -- abolishing polygamy, and, horror of feminist horrors, requiring men to actually get consent from women before marrying them  -- happened more than half a century ago. Never mind that the repressive Ben Ali government was actually moving backwards on women's rights. A woman slapped a man, so the uprising was therefore all about the symbolic slapping of men by an evil regime that Price has bizarrely described as a "her."

Back to Egypt, which is even less of a feminist paradise than Tunisia. Indeed, a 2010 report from the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights concluded that the country was getting worse, not better, when it came to its already dismal record on women's rights. As thedailynewsegypt.com reports (link is to Google's cached copy of the story):

The report, which is based on the findings of international human rights organizations, stated that Egypt was ranked 125th out of 134 countries regarding women’s rights, and was ranked 13th among countries in the Middle East/North Africa region. ...

The state council’s refusal to appoint female judges in February was considered by the ECWR as a major setback to women’s rights in 2010. ...  Women still suffer from inequality in the workplace ... there’s been a rise in violence against women. ...  71.4 percent of violent crimes in 2010 were against women. ...

The ECWR also highlighted the increased use of two new alarming police practices against women: the practice of holding women hostage in order to force fugitives to surrender themselves to the police, as well as the sexual violation of women by police officers.

But that's not the only thing that Price has gotten very, very wrong: As many observers far more knowledgeable than Price have pointed out -- including, amazingly, one commenter on The Spearhead -- the footage of male-dominated protests we see on TV is in many ways wildly misleading: Egyptian women have been involved in the current protests in unprecedented numbers.

As Jenna Krajeski noted on Slate's XXFactor blog,

An unprecedented number of Egyptian women participated in Tuesday’s anti-government protests. Ghada Shahbandar, an activist with the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, estimated the crowd downtown to be 20 percent female. Other estimates were as high as 50 percent. In past protests, the female presence would rarely rise to 10 percent. Protests have a reputation for being dangerous for Egyptian women, whose common struggle as objects of sexual harassment is exacerbated in the congested, male-dominated crowd.

Max Strasser, a former associate editor at Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition in Cairo, explains the dynamic:

It is no secret that Egypt is a conservative country when it comes to gender relations. Men and women generally, though not exclusively, adhere to traditional gender roles where women stay at home. As a result, many public spaces are heavily male dominated. Moreover, sexual harassment is frustratingly common ... Big crowds, like soccer rallies, are usually the least hospitable for women.

Since this uprising began, the typical gender dynamic in Egypt’s public space seems to have been thrown out with the regime. Some have said that as many as half of the protesters are women. Moreover, as I have watched Al Jazeera it seems clear that women of all walks of life, from young girls in jeans to older women wearing niqab, are taking part.  All are chanting, pumping their fists and, at times, battling with the riot police.

As feminist human rights activist Nawal El Saadawi told Democracy Now!, "women and girls are beside boys in the streets."

Do I have any idea what's next in Egypt? Of course not. The crowds I've seen in the news coverage on CNN and elsewhere have been mostly men, and a lot of these men are fundamentalist fanatics. But I think the presence of women alongside the men in the protests is heartening, and gives us some reason for optimism.

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