Hi there everyone, after the recent conversation about an MRA site, I thought maybe I'd contribute something that I consider to meet the definition of a lolcow from the other side of the Great War of the Sexes.
Bear in mind I’m calling these people “Anti MRAs” even though they almost always call themselves feminists, because I think it’d be fair for someone calling themselves a feminist to disavow these people for various reasons. That’s just a little hat tip to people who can express an opinion without being idiots and an attempt to make it clear I am attacking lolcows and not a philosophy.
I don’t know how many of these I’ll do, but I thought I’d start with these two.
I've been reading a lot of MRA sites the last year or so, fascinated by it all, and this has actually directed me to a lot of people who say ridiculous and hateful things about men and who are just ridiculous overall. I thought some of them might make for some good lolcow discussion. I will warn you these people are more sad than funny, this is no Hypno Ponies thread unfortunately.
As a point of clarification, because future examples of lolcows I can think of some sometimes actually propose doing violence toward real people (anti MRA people are surprisingly often violent), and there’s some real scum that you have to look at here to get the whole picture, I am going to withhold sources at times (you can find them yourself easily I assure you but please don’t for your own health) but I’ll try to note when and why.
And like with the MRA sites, I would not encourage anyone to be too harsh to the users of these sites, these could just be people who are going through some bad times who don't need mocking. Those are people I feel bad for because they’re being manipulated. Yes there are outrageous things in the comments/forums but I’m going to try to stick to articles written by people with a long history of spouting hate and/or nonsense and overreacting to trivial, stupid shit.
So the usual lolcow criteria of outrageous behavior applies, plus the caveat that there is evidence to support my judgment that these people are so far gone emotionally nothing I can say here would affect them negatively in any way.
Let's start with Rage Against the Man-chine.
rageagainstthemanchine.com
This site is nearly all text (lol understatement of the year), it’s pretty safe to visit.
This blog is more terrible than funny, honestly. And it's been going for years now. And Nine Deuce is a ridiculous person whose reactions to things like men wearing suits and talking on phones and popular video games is outrageously absurd.
When I first found this I couldn't parse if it was a woman or a self-loathing man because of both the tone, and the lack of bylines or an online moniker tagged to each post. The best you get is she puts the name "Nine Deuce" in some of her article titles and the About page. You can see her in the comments too, but the lack of bylines in a blog, especially if it ever had guest posts, is a little pet peeve of mine.
And this is the kindest thing I can say about this site.
The first thing I noted is that the name of the blog is about on the humor level of a seven year old, as are some of the article titles. “A Dick-tion”. Ha ha. So funny.
The second thing I noticed is that like many blogger lolcows, she can type walls of text and say absoutely nothing. Seriously, the sheer volume of inane prattle here isn't the worst I've ever seen but it's still impressive for someone who can't be arsed to update her blog more than four times in some years. So much text to rail about matters of no importance!
The length of her content and the use of incredibly long sentences just makes her writing seem even more insane. She will write hundreds of words about so much crap that doesn't matter, like some guys on a TV show eating sushi off nude models or something equally trivial. She's also great at calling things that aren't misogynist by any reasonable standard misogynist.
I didn't even realize she had updated again until I started making this thread that her latest post, of her typical unnecessary length, is the single most whacked out interpretation of that asshole's (I refuse to name him) manifesto.
I doubt she actually even read all 141 pages of it to be honest. But it doesn't matter, you don't need 187 pages of her nonsense diatribe to say he was a very privileged kid who had some deep seated personal issues.
I love how she adds "Pokemon" to her list of misogynist media in this post. Yes Pokemon sure is some evil woman hating. I need that Picard face palm .gif here.
And we haven't even begun to explore her nonsense. The absolutely brilliant conclusion to her latest bit of digital insanity is:
"A man who is capable of relating to women - who does not suffer from the mental illness known as masculinity - is incapable of abusing them, either in person or by proxy."
The lack of logic in that statement... it burns! It burns so badly! Much like the famous quip "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", this is yet more proof that just because you can say words doesn't mean you make any damn sense.
From what I can gather from reading her archive, she considers "good" men to be three or four random guys she says nothing about and about ten men she calls "fags". Oh, and she has a hate on for transgender and homosexual people too, claiming they can’t suffer misogyny like True and Honest women at some point if I remember correctly.
Or it at least it looks like it she’s got a grudge against them, she's so incoherent and waffles on it so much it's hard to tell. It’s like she says something that’s anti-homosexual, then she gets called on it and tries to make it out like she didn’t really say that. That wouldn’t be remarkable except for her PAGES and PAGES of rants about how she doesn’t think gender is a real thing. You’d think a person who believes that would be very pro gay and pro trans but apparently not. Again I’m not judging the right and wrong here it’s the hypocrisy and the wishy washy ways.
But back on topic, seriously according to her there's only like those 14 guys (most of whom she calls fags) who aren't mentally ill rapists and murderers. I'm left to assume she means to imply only homosexual men can't harm women or something equally nonsensical, I don't know I can't piece together what I THINK she COULD mean from her gigantic text dumps that are somehow repetitive without actually making a point.
I would rather think the men she hates so damn much are the same biological species as her and they relate to the members of her gender who aren't batshit crazy more often than not. If they didn't, human beings would not still exist.
Why the hell am I trying to actually form a coherent counter argument… It must be my mansplaining.
But as stupid as this one sentence was on its own, if you trawl through her archive a little bit, you can see she can't really define "masculinity" in her WALLS AND WALLS of text. By my dirty crapped briefs, if you're going to rail against something for YEARS and keep making these posts, at least coherently and clearly identify what it is you're so against. Even those MRAs she hates so much manage to do that.
Her greatest sin as an advocate for… man hating (I guess? It’s hard to tell what she is about sometimes) is not unnecessary length or terrible logic, rather it is confirmation bias. Even when she obviously goes out and researches a topic, she never looks for a counter example or contrary evidence and only cherry picks her examples. She is exactly like the MRA sites that rail about gynocracy, except gender inverted. Pages upon pages of her strange beliefs indicate a faith in the existence of an all-encompassing male conspiracy of violence and rape and guns and capitalism, with naughty little penises hiding in every dark corner out to fling anti woman propaganda at her.
One of my "favorite" posts of hers, that shows her pure insanity and poor writing and logic skills and confirmation bias all in one glorious mountain of pure fail, is her post that starts off about how no one would read books about serial killers if their victims weren't women and it just loses focus from there. She goes on to say things like this means that serial killers kill woman to get "revenge" against women because misogyny what the fuck did I just type.
So people reading books = serial killers targeting women… or something. I don’t know she goes off tangent pretty quick.
If she has a point in there I can't find it, but it shows her confirmation bias in her research perfectly. Male victims of serial killers are many and there's no shortage of serial killers who preyed exclusively on men and boys. I'm not even mentioning the ones who kill entire families of people and don't follow a pattern with regard to gender.
Jeffrey Dahmer, have you ever heard of him Nine Deuce!?
In the second place, the initial premise makes no sense, there's tons of people who would read about serial killers regardless of who the victims were because it's their JOB to figure out how to stop those people. And a lot of those people whose job it is Ms. Deuce to stop those woman slaying killers, the people who actually physically go out and try to stop these evil people, happen to be men… Oh my God I am doing it again I am actually trying to make a reasonable counter argument, bad Rooster!
And of course, going back to her latest post about the asshole I refuse to name as an example, she's all too happy to quote the work of male researchers and experts when it serves her purpose.
I confess though I still can't get completely through that serial killer post, it's so badly written and so poorly reasoned I keep giving up; I’ve only managed to sort of read it by looking at the first half and the second half at different times. And I've read Atlas Shrugged, the most poorly written and overly reptitive book ever penned. Twice.
Oh, but that must be a lie, men never read books written by women because misogygny. I guess I imagined all those Margaret Weiss novels too.
I will note that for someone who purports to hate men, her meticulous observation of the details of male behavior is quite thorough; she recants some way too detailed accounts of men doing mind bogglingly mundane things. It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.
It's similar to a blowhard who constantly makes fun of gay men but keeps talking about them and how awful they are and what a threat they are to society constantly, until you realize it is probable he is actually obsessed with being gay himself. I am convinced she is obsessed with masculine men for some reason at this point.
Reading her blog makes me want to go to the hardware store and buy the materials to make a Viking chair, then take it fishing and scratch my balls. I would make a fart joke in the lumberyard. All while carrying a gun, I think I'd take my 1911; most of my handguns actually aren't terribly phallic but that should do. Maybe afterward I could go get a Nintendo and play some Pokemon games. And the whole time I would be doing a little dance and in a sing song voice I'd chant over and over again "I haaaave a peeeee-nis!" Oh and at some point I’d talk loudly into an Iphone. While wearing a suit. Which I have several of, because it's the tool of female oppression.
And I'd love her to witness all this and just seethe and write 197 paragraphs about how I was some kind of rapist. I'd threaten to go some porn too, but she would have an aneurysm at that point and I can't have that on my conscience (that I don't have, being male). Her rants against porn are just incredible, FYI.
We Hunted the Mammoth, formerly Man Boobz, written by David Futrelle.
wehuntedthemammoth.com/
First I have to explain about WHTM and why it proves Futrelle is not a complete idiot. I am trying to be fair here and not just rail against these people, if they do something not stupid I'm going to point it out.
Futrelle’s site is a little different from a lot of these man hating sites in that Futrelle is actually competent with respect to knowing how to market himself and court his audience. I will compliment him openly on how shrewd he is from a business perspective, the popularity of his blog is pretty good and he is great at producing drama from MRAs to keep his site growing as a business.
I will give you what I think is the best example of his business acumen. One of the long standing rules on his site is MRAs are not allowed to comment, yet his content is exclusively designed to bait MRAs under the guise of feminist crusading.
Fucking genius.
He purports to “mock misogyny” for a feminist audience, but think about that site rule about no MRAs, and let that sink in a moment.
Futrelle has found a way to not only troll the MRA, but make a living off of doing so, but I warn you if he sounds cool now, he won't be once you find out some unsavory things about him. I am going to start weak and finish strong on this one.
Back on topic, the very people he purports to battle are what drive his traffic and popularity. It’s very clever; the trouble is it makes him absolutely no better of a human being than the people he is trolling and making a living from. It’s absolutely fantastic, he gets money from MRAs, and he cultivates a following of sycophants and parrots from his popularity and keeps his site a “safe zone” for himself via judicious censorship.
He is very, very good at troll baiting as a revenue source. I’m not saying I admire that in a person but I acknowledge skill when I see it. His own material is rather bland, he couldn’t be a professional internet personality on his own merit without creating drama.
But why is he lolcow?
Well there’s the long answer about why what he does is lolcow behavior. Then there's a short answer that's better. I am going to start with the weakest argument and end with the strongest one.
The first prong of this is that the crap he spews is ridiculous and he cannot logically debate MRAs on point with any coherency whatsoever. Debating MRAs should be shooting fish in a barrel and he loses at it consistently.
I am pretty sure Futrelle is TRUE and HONEST in his feminist beliefs. He’s too consistent to just be an MRA contrarian. He even writes well, using complete sentences.
But he cannot argue on point without insulting, mocking and berating his opponent with very juvenile tactics that obfuscate any actual point he might have had initially. It is a common theme in his work. Probably the most glorious example of this when he engaged Paul Elam, the founder of MRA site A Voice for Men, in a debate over domestic violence.
www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/.../a-debate-on-domestic-violence/
Now I will say, AVFM is one of the classier MRA sites overall, because some of the core content producers are actually reasonable people and I have some respect for certain members there. They publish a lot of crap though and they facilitate a lot of hateful comments and forum posts (but those are the members doing that shit usually). But I know some people won’t click on MRA links out of principal so I will summarize it for you:
Futrelle starts off okay citing some actual research at first, but he mixes in in some ad hominem jabs.
Elam fires back and rebuts his opening argument with the point that the research Futrelle cites to support his argument is driven by political ideologues (in a later response Elam proves his allegation).
Futrelle further responses show his shit begins to unravel as he resorts to calling Elam stupid and goes off point. He then basically resorts to grade school level mockery of his opponent. Futrelle further responds with SOME WORDS IN ALL CAPS like CWC rage posting and hilarity has ensued. I do all caps words too, but I do it in informal communications as self-effacing humor, Futrelle is supposed to be a serious advocate and expert on misogyny.
It’s pretty striking to see the contrast between what actually a respectable start he had and how he winds up there at the end. Even if you don’t think Elam cited the right sources, any counter argument Futrelle might have had is pretty much gone because of a lack of any class.
But this is how it goes with this guy, he picks easy targets for his blog and writes predictable snarky essays about them where he’s safely cocooned by sycophants, then he doesn’t allow people on his site to criticize his work (if they do they get called MRAs or trolls and are banned).
I used to give him credit for having the balls to actually go debate MRAs, but the thing is when he does actually engage in debates it’s always the same: first he throws out some sources that sound reasonable (which is good!) but right after the first time someone rebuts the validity of his initial argument or points out he’s off topic in any reasonable way, he’s like a big man baby who can do nothing but call his opponent names and use schoolboy debate tactics.
Even Judgy Bitch (whose debate skills are about on par with his insofar as she basically has nothing but snark and name calling as half the argument) has pwned him with second grade math. If you are getting pwned by Judgy Bitch, you suck. That’d be like challenging CWC to an art competition and losing, it’s possible but you’d really have to be terrible.
Okay so he’s bad at debating, so what. I used to think well at least he has the courage to debate, that’s something.
The problem is, he really doesn’t. Here's his reaction to his debate with Paul Elam as an example:
http://manboobz.blogspot.com/p/not-so-great-debate-on-domestic.html
Notice what he does here: he doesn't let the text of the debate speak for itself. Rather, he surrounds it with a smear campaign against his opponent to make himself look like an hero and insults Elam again and again.
The kicker is at the bottom where he claims Elam deleted his comment, his "proof" is a link to the AVFM article and it's on a page that MRAs aren't allowed to comment on.
He also ignores that the debate had rules, there was a time limit to respond, and the "last word" Futrelle put out was posted October 28, after the time period was over. The thing is, even if Elam did delete the comment, he was right to do so under the rules of the debate contest.
Notice what he's done here: he's taken the contest into his own safe space where Elam can't touch him.
This is embarassing manbaby behavior, trying to cover up how bad he looked while tard raging against a calm opponent. He could have just said "I'll do better next time" but he didn't. Also, he deliberately drove traffic to an MRA site and purports to loathe MRAs. Just think about that and his overall business strategy.
If you notice his general pattern, he never actually persists in debating when his opponent actually makes a point of any kind. He basically shows up and throws a dirty poo filled diaper at an MRA site and then runs away giggling like he accomplished something; mostly now he seems to do this on Twitter. I’ll give him credit, he’s managed to monetize it.
He goes back to his little safe spot and brags about it, and his little cult and they make it all better. The fact is this is a business for him so he doesn’t have to get the fast food job he’s qualified for; he needs to carefully provoke the MRA occasionally to keep his traffic up, but he can’t dare doing anything that would show he really can’t support his positions.
I admit there’s a certain appeal to making a living writing snarky stuff on the internet, but it’s dishonest to present yourself as a serious advocate and crusader when what you really are is an internet clown. I’ll admit he at least does some research work to come up with his opening positions, but this isn’t a lifestyle that actually produces anything useful because his research isn’t original. Even on his own site, where he can control the message and therefore always “win”, at the end of the day, like the MRAs he debates, he accomplishes absolutely nothing.
Okay I’ve gone on at length about why he’s not a good blogger/content producer, but why is he a lolcow? What’s the short answer as to why he’s a lolcow? At this point I can see why someone might not think he's too lolcowish because, as I said, he does write well and initially he looks like he's an informed person.
Well, as I continued to read stuff from this guy, I got the feeling that there was something not quite right about him. While I don’t think the proof is 100%, I think it’s more likely than not I was correct.
See, one of the dangers of making a living picking on people who do NOTHING all day but look for research on the internet is anything you’ve ever done online WILL be found. This guy’s life is basically trolling the internet for losers to argue with, and these are losers with good research skills and lots of time. They may not always be good people, but they can find good information.
And one day, one of the MRAs he picks on so much got sick of his shit and really looked into the guy and this is what he found:
I am going to have to withhold the link for this I am afraid; it would seem to possibly be at odds with the forum rules and I’m new here and don’t want to take the gamble. Just trust me, this list here is the only content on the site I am comfortable sharing, and I’ve seen the citations that show evidence these things are either true or likely true. I’ve taken the hit for you, do not let my sacrifice be in vain.
David Futrelle was a statutory rape apologist in his early writing career.
Futrelle once suggested adults who rape and impregnate children shouldn’t go to prison.
Futrelle is a denier of sexual assaults toward children being widespread.
Once called an act of pederasty “tender” and “erotic”.
Stated there was no sexual difference between a 5 year old and a 17 year old.
Offered to teach teenagers good ex while handing out condoms to them.
Organizes regular meet ups with his female readers, some of whom are allegedly underage children.
Admitted to fantasizing about a porn star dressed up as a small child.
Claimed that raising the age of consent from 12 to 16 was merely prudish.
Fuck. Him.
You will know a man by the company he keeps my dear reader. If the MRA are a bunch of scummy sites that don’t quite sit right in many ways, who in their right mind would find a way to make a living as an attention parasite off that same family of sites?
If nothing else, the only thing sadder than being a lulzy MRA guy is being a lulzy guy crusading as a feminist who is really a professional attention whore who cannot debate MRAs at their own level of discourse, and a sleazeball who supports pedos IRL.
Bear in mind I’m calling these people “Anti MRAs” even though they almost always call themselves feminists, because I think it’d be fair for someone calling themselves a feminist to disavow these people for various reasons. That’s just a little hat tip to people who can express an opinion without being idiots and an attempt to make it clear I am attacking lolcows and not a philosophy.
I don’t know how many of these I’ll do, but I thought I’d start with these two.
I've been reading a lot of MRA sites the last year or so, fascinated by it all, and this has actually directed me to a lot of people who say ridiculous and hateful things about men and who are just ridiculous overall. I thought some of them might make for some good lolcow discussion. I will warn you these people are more sad than funny, this is no Hypno Ponies thread unfortunately.
As a point of clarification, because future examples of lolcows I can think of some sometimes actually propose doing violence toward real people (anti MRA people are surprisingly often violent), and there’s some real scum that you have to look at here to get the whole picture, I am going to withhold sources at times (you can find them yourself easily I assure you but please don’t for your own health) but I’ll try to note when and why.
And like with the MRA sites, I would not encourage anyone to be too harsh to the users of these sites, these could just be people who are going through some bad times who don't need mocking. Those are people I feel bad for because they’re being manipulated. Yes there are outrageous things in the comments/forums but I’m going to try to stick to articles written by people with a long history of spouting hate and/or nonsense and overreacting to trivial, stupid shit.
So the usual lolcow criteria of outrageous behavior applies, plus the caveat that there is evidence to support my judgment that these people are so far gone emotionally nothing I can say here would affect them negatively in any way.
Let's start with Rage Against the Man-chine.
rageagainstthemanchine.com
This site is nearly all text (lol understatement of the year), it’s pretty safe to visit.
This blog is more terrible than funny, honestly. And it's been going for years now. And Nine Deuce is a ridiculous person whose reactions to things like men wearing suits and talking on phones and popular video games is outrageously absurd.
When I first found this I couldn't parse if it was a woman or a self-loathing man because of both the tone, and the lack of bylines or an online moniker tagged to each post. The best you get is she puts the name "Nine Deuce" in some of her article titles and the About page. You can see her in the comments too, but the lack of bylines in a blog, especially if it ever had guest posts, is a little pet peeve of mine.
And this is the kindest thing I can say about this site.
The first thing I noted is that the name of the blog is about on the humor level of a seven year old, as are some of the article titles. “A Dick-tion”. Ha ha. So funny.
The second thing I noticed is that like many blogger lolcows, she can type walls of text and say absoutely nothing. Seriously, the sheer volume of inane prattle here isn't the worst I've ever seen but it's still impressive for someone who can't be arsed to update her blog more than four times in some years. So much text to rail about matters of no importance!
The length of her content and the use of incredibly long sentences just makes her writing seem even more insane. She will write hundreds of words about so much crap that doesn't matter, like some guys on a TV show eating sushi off nude models or something equally trivial. She's also great at calling things that aren't misogynist by any reasonable standard misogynist.
I didn't even realize she had updated again until I started making this thread that her latest post, of her typical unnecessary length, is the single most whacked out interpretation of that asshole's (I refuse to name him) manifesto.
I doubt she actually even read all 141 pages of it to be honest. But it doesn't matter, you don't need 187 pages of her nonsense diatribe to say he was a very privileged kid who had some deep seated personal issues.
I love how she adds "Pokemon" to her list of misogynist media in this post. Yes Pokemon sure is some evil woman hating. I need that Picard face palm .gif here.
And we haven't even begun to explore her nonsense. The absolutely brilliant conclusion to her latest bit of digital insanity is:
"A man who is capable of relating to women - who does not suffer from the mental illness known as masculinity - is incapable of abusing them, either in person or by proxy."
The lack of logic in that statement... it burns! It burns so badly! Much like the famous quip "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", this is yet more proof that just because you can say words doesn't mean you make any damn sense.
From what I can gather from reading her archive, she considers "good" men to be three or four random guys she says nothing about and about ten men she calls "fags". Oh, and she has a hate on for transgender and homosexual people too, claiming they can’t suffer misogyny like True and Honest women at some point if I remember correctly.
Or it at least it looks like it she’s got a grudge against them, she's so incoherent and waffles on it so much it's hard to tell. It’s like she says something that’s anti-homosexual, then she gets called on it and tries to make it out like she didn’t really say that. That wouldn’t be remarkable except for her PAGES and PAGES of rants about how she doesn’t think gender is a real thing. You’d think a person who believes that would be very pro gay and pro trans but apparently not. Again I’m not judging the right and wrong here it’s the hypocrisy and the wishy washy ways.
But back on topic, seriously according to her there's only like those 14 guys (most of whom she calls fags) who aren't mentally ill rapists and murderers. I'm left to assume she means to imply only homosexual men can't harm women or something equally nonsensical, I don't know I can't piece together what I THINK she COULD mean from her gigantic text dumps that are somehow repetitive without actually making a point.
I would rather think the men she hates so damn much are the same biological species as her and they relate to the members of her gender who aren't batshit crazy more often than not. If they didn't, human beings would not still exist.
Why the hell am I trying to actually form a coherent counter argument… It must be my mansplaining.
But as stupid as this one sentence was on its own, if you trawl through her archive a little bit, you can see she can't really define "masculinity" in her WALLS AND WALLS of text. By my dirty crapped briefs, if you're going to rail against something for YEARS and keep making these posts, at least coherently and clearly identify what it is you're so against. Even those MRAs she hates so much manage to do that.
Her greatest sin as an advocate for… man hating (I guess? It’s hard to tell what she is about sometimes) is not unnecessary length or terrible logic, rather it is confirmation bias. Even when she obviously goes out and researches a topic, she never looks for a counter example or contrary evidence and only cherry picks her examples. She is exactly like the MRA sites that rail about gynocracy, except gender inverted. Pages upon pages of her strange beliefs indicate a faith in the existence of an all-encompassing male conspiracy of violence and rape and guns and capitalism, with naughty little penises hiding in every dark corner out to fling anti woman propaganda at her.
One of my "favorite" posts of hers, that shows her pure insanity and poor writing and logic skills and confirmation bias all in one glorious mountain of pure fail, is her post that starts off about how no one would read books about serial killers if their victims weren't women and it just loses focus from there. She goes on to say things like this means that serial killers kill woman to get "revenge" against women because misogyny what the fuck did I just type.
So people reading books = serial killers targeting women… or something. I don’t know she goes off tangent pretty quick.
If she has a point in there I can't find it, but it shows her confirmation bias in her research perfectly. Male victims of serial killers are many and there's no shortage of serial killers who preyed exclusively on men and boys. I'm not even mentioning the ones who kill entire families of people and don't follow a pattern with regard to gender.
Jeffrey Dahmer, have you ever heard of him Nine Deuce!?
In the second place, the initial premise makes no sense, there's tons of people who would read about serial killers regardless of who the victims were because it's their JOB to figure out how to stop those people. And a lot of those people whose job it is Ms. Deuce to stop those woman slaying killers, the people who actually physically go out and try to stop these evil people, happen to be men… Oh my God I am doing it again I am actually trying to make a reasonable counter argument, bad Rooster!
And of course, going back to her latest post about the asshole I refuse to name as an example, she's all too happy to quote the work of male researchers and experts when it serves her purpose.
I confess though I still can't get completely through that serial killer post, it's so badly written and so poorly reasoned I keep giving up; I’ve only managed to sort of read it by looking at the first half and the second half at different times. And I've read Atlas Shrugged, the most poorly written and overly reptitive book ever penned. Twice.
Oh, but that must be a lie, men never read books written by women because misogygny. I guess I imagined all those Margaret Weiss novels too.
I will note that for someone who purports to hate men, her meticulous observation of the details of male behavior is quite thorough; she recants some way too detailed accounts of men doing mind bogglingly mundane things. It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.
It's similar to a blowhard who constantly makes fun of gay men but keeps talking about them and how awful they are and what a threat they are to society constantly, until you realize it is probable he is actually obsessed with being gay himself. I am convinced she is obsessed with masculine men for some reason at this point.
Reading her blog makes me want to go to the hardware store and buy the materials to make a Viking chair, then take it fishing and scratch my balls. I would make a fart joke in the lumberyard. All while carrying a gun, I think I'd take my 1911; most of my handguns actually aren't terribly phallic but that should do. Maybe afterward I could go get a Nintendo and play some Pokemon games. And the whole time I would be doing a little dance and in a sing song voice I'd chant over and over again "I haaaave a peeeee-nis!" Oh and at some point I’d talk loudly into an Iphone. While wearing a suit. Which I have several of, because it's the tool of female oppression.
And I'd love her to witness all this and just seethe and write 197 paragraphs about how I was some kind of rapist. I'd threaten to go some porn too, but she would have an aneurysm at that point and I can't have that on my conscience (that I don't have, being male). Her rants against porn are just incredible, FYI.
We Hunted the Mammoth, formerly Man Boobz, written by David Futrelle.
wehuntedthemammoth.com/
First I have to explain about WHTM and why it proves Futrelle is not a complete idiot. I am trying to be fair here and not just rail against these people, if they do something not stupid I'm going to point it out.
Futrelle’s site is a little different from a lot of these man hating sites in that Futrelle is actually competent with respect to knowing how to market himself and court his audience. I will compliment him openly on how shrewd he is from a business perspective, the popularity of his blog is pretty good and he is great at producing drama from MRAs to keep his site growing as a business.
I will give you what I think is the best example of his business acumen. One of the long standing rules on his site is MRAs are not allowed to comment, yet his content is exclusively designed to bait MRAs under the guise of feminist crusading.
Fucking genius.
He purports to “mock misogyny” for a feminist audience, but think about that site rule about no MRAs, and let that sink in a moment.
Futrelle has found a way to not only troll the MRA, but make a living off of doing so, but I warn you if he sounds cool now, he won't be once you find out some unsavory things about him. I am going to start weak and finish strong on this one.
Back on topic, the very people he purports to battle are what drive his traffic and popularity. It’s very clever; the trouble is it makes him absolutely no better of a human being than the people he is trolling and making a living from. It’s absolutely fantastic, he gets money from MRAs, and he cultivates a following of sycophants and parrots from his popularity and keeps his site a “safe zone” for himself via judicious censorship.
He is very, very good at troll baiting as a revenue source. I’m not saying I admire that in a person but I acknowledge skill when I see it. His own material is rather bland, he couldn’t be a professional internet personality on his own merit without creating drama.
But why is he lolcow?
Well there’s the long answer about why what he does is lolcow behavior. Then there's a short answer that's better. I am going to start with the weakest argument and end with the strongest one.
The first prong of this is that the crap he spews is ridiculous and he cannot logically debate MRAs on point with any coherency whatsoever. Debating MRAs should be shooting fish in a barrel and he loses at it consistently.
I am pretty sure Futrelle is TRUE and HONEST in his feminist beliefs. He’s too consistent to just be an MRA contrarian. He even writes well, using complete sentences.
But he cannot argue on point without insulting, mocking and berating his opponent with very juvenile tactics that obfuscate any actual point he might have had initially. It is a common theme in his work. Probably the most glorious example of this when he engaged Paul Elam, the founder of MRA site A Voice for Men, in a debate over domestic violence.
www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/.../a-debate-on-domestic-violence/
Now I will say, AVFM is one of the classier MRA sites overall, because some of the core content producers are actually reasonable people and I have some respect for certain members there. They publish a lot of crap though and they facilitate a lot of hateful comments and forum posts (but those are the members doing that shit usually). But I know some people won’t click on MRA links out of principal so I will summarize it for you:
Futrelle starts off okay citing some actual research at first, but he mixes in in some ad hominem jabs.
Elam fires back and rebuts his opening argument with the point that the research Futrelle cites to support his argument is driven by political ideologues (in a later response Elam proves his allegation).
Futrelle further responses show his shit begins to unravel as he resorts to calling Elam stupid and goes off point. He then basically resorts to grade school level mockery of his opponent. Futrelle further responds with SOME WORDS IN ALL CAPS like CWC rage posting and hilarity has ensued. I do all caps words too, but I do it in informal communications as self-effacing humor, Futrelle is supposed to be a serious advocate and expert on misogyny.
It’s pretty striking to see the contrast between what actually a respectable start he had and how he winds up there at the end. Even if you don’t think Elam cited the right sources, any counter argument Futrelle might have had is pretty much gone because of a lack of any class.
But this is how it goes with this guy, he picks easy targets for his blog and writes predictable snarky essays about them where he’s safely cocooned by sycophants, then he doesn’t allow people on his site to criticize his work (if they do they get called MRAs or trolls and are banned).
I used to give him credit for having the balls to actually go debate MRAs, but the thing is when he does actually engage in debates it’s always the same: first he throws out some sources that sound reasonable (which is good!) but right after the first time someone rebuts the validity of his initial argument or points out he’s off topic in any reasonable way, he’s like a big man baby who can do nothing but call his opponent names and use schoolboy debate tactics.
Even Judgy Bitch (whose debate skills are about on par with his insofar as she basically has nothing but snark and name calling as half the argument) has pwned him with second grade math. If you are getting pwned by Judgy Bitch, you suck. That’d be like challenging CWC to an art competition and losing, it’s possible but you’d really have to be terrible.
Okay so he’s bad at debating, so what. I used to think well at least he has the courage to debate, that’s something.
The problem is, he really doesn’t. Here's his reaction to his debate with Paul Elam as an example:
http://manboobz.blogspot.com/p/not-so-great-debate-on-domestic.html
Notice what he does here: he doesn't let the text of the debate speak for itself. Rather, he surrounds it with a smear campaign against his opponent to make himself look like an hero and insults Elam again and again.
The kicker is at the bottom where he claims Elam deleted his comment, his "proof" is a link to the AVFM article and it's on a page that MRAs aren't allowed to comment on.
He also ignores that the debate had rules, there was a time limit to respond, and the "last word" Futrelle put out was posted October 28, after the time period was over. The thing is, even if Elam did delete the comment, he was right to do so under the rules of the debate contest.
Notice what he's done here: he's taken the contest into his own safe space where Elam can't touch him.
This is embarassing manbaby behavior, trying to cover up how bad he looked while tard raging against a calm opponent. He could have just said "I'll do better next time" but he didn't. Also, he deliberately drove traffic to an MRA site and purports to loathe MRAs. Just think about that and his overall business strategy.
If you notice his general pattern, he never actually persists in debating when his opponent actually makes a point of any kind. He basically shows up and throws a dirty poo filled diaper at an MRA site and then runs away giggling like he accomplished something; mostly now he seems to do this on Twitter. I’ll give him credit, he’s managed to monetize it.
He goes back to his little safe spot and brags about it, and his little cult and they make it all better. The fact is this is a business for him so he doesn’t have to get the fast food job he’s qualified for; he needs to carefully provoke the MRA occasionally to keep his traffic up, but he can’t dare doing anything that would show he really can’t support his positions.
I admit there’s a certain appeal to making a living writing snarky stuff on the internet, but it’s dishonest to present yourself as a serious advocate and crusader when what you really are is an internet clown. I’ll admit he at least does some research work to come up with his opening positions, but this isn’t a lifestyle that actually produces anything useful because his research isn’t original. Even on his own site, where he can control the message and therefore always “win”, at the end of the day, like the MRAs he debates, he accomplishes absolutely nothing.
Okay I’ve gone on at length about why he’s not a good blogger/content producer, but why is he a lolcow? What’s the short answer as to why he’s a lolcow? At this point I can see why someone might not think he's too lolcowish because, as I said, he does write well and initially he looks like he's an informed person.
Well, as I continued to read stuff from this guy, I got the feeling that there was something not quite right about him. While I don’t think the proof is 100%, I think it’s more likely than not I was correct.
See, one of the dangers of making a living picking on people who do NOTHING all day but look for research on the internet is anything you’ve ever done online WILL be found. This guy’s life is basically trolling the internet for losers to argue with, and these are losers with good research skills and lots of time. They may not always be good people, but they can find good information.
And one day, one of the MRAs he picks on so much got sick of his shit and really looked into the guy and this is what he found:
I am going to have to withhold the link for this I am afraid; it would seem to possibly be at odds with the forum rules and I’m new here and don’t want to take the gamble. Just trust me, this list here is the only content on the site I am comfortable sharing, and I’ve seen the citations that show evidence these things are either true or likely true. I’ve taken the hit for you, do not let my sacrifice be in vain.
David Futrelle was a statutory rape apologist in his early writing career.
Futrelle once suggested adults who rape and impregnate children shouldn’t go to prison.
Futrelle is a denier of sexual assaults toward children being widespread.
Once called an act of pederasty “tender” and “erotic”.
Stated there was no sexual difference between a 5 year old and a 17 year old.
Offered to teach teenagers good ex while handing out condoms to them.
Organizes regular meet ups with his female readers, some of whom are allegedly underage children.
Admitted to fantasizing about a porn star dressed up as a small child.
Claimed that raising the age of consent from 12 to 16 was merely prudish.
Fuck. Him.
You will know a man by the company he keeps my dear reader. If the MRA are a bunch of scummy sites that don’t quite sit right in many ways, who in their right mind would find a way to make a living as an attention parasite off that same family of sites?
If nothing else, the only thing sadder than being a lulzy MRA guy is being a lulzy guy crusading as a feminist who is really a professional attention whore who cannot debate MRAs at their own level of discourse, and a sleazeball who supports pedos IRL.
