Category Archives: feminism
Hey, It’s Some Men Against Assholes and Misogyny!
Jen Kirkman (Men Against Assholes and Misogyny Not Pictured)
With all the assholery that I’ve been writing about lately, I wanted to highlight something that wasn’t assholish. That is, in fact, anti-assholish. And that’s comedian Jen Kirkman’s new tumblr blog: “MA’AM” - MEN AGAINST ASSHOLES & MISOGYNY, which she describes as “a place for men - not afraid to call themselves feminists - to write from their heart to help educate men who may still hold some sexist attitudes towards women.”
Kirkman started it a bit over a week ago after going on a sort of Twitter strike, frustrated by all the misogynistic assholes that kept popping up on her timeline.
Here’s how she explains it:
Sometimes I would get sad when I was batting away dozens of hate-filled things while in my timeline my male comedian friends were just joking along having fun - as we all should be. And I felt like I was alone on the playground and I wanted them to speak up for me. Not “beat up” the specific people attacking me … but I wanted my male comedian friends to write, in public, about things they have expressed to me in private about how much they feel for the women in their life who are still spoken to this way.
So far she’s gotten a lot of followers — she picked up a thousand in the first 48 hours — and a ton of submissions, some from fellow comedians (Greg Proops, Michael Ian Black), some from regular dudes, one from her dad.
The submissions are, I suppose I should say, a mixed bag. Some of the essays are great. Some are a bit mansplainy, or White Knighty, or otherwise a bit problematic.
But that’s kind of inherent to the project. Jen is challenging guys who don’t spend all day every day thinking about feminism, but whose hearts are basically in the right place, to stand up against the asshole misogynists of the world. And a lot of guys are responding to her challenge.
Oh, BTW, while we’re on the topic: Jen is also pretty fucking hilarious.
Here’s some of her standup:
And here she is narrating some Drunk History. (She really was drunk.)
Comics Break: All girls are good for is knittin’ an’ neckin’ and SATAN
I‘m feeling a bit poorly today, so in lieu of an actual post, here’s an old comic I found on a blog called Grottu. I’m pretty sure this is what our old friend NWOslave sees when he looks at the world.
Slightly more on topic, here’s a frame from an old romance comic; you can find a discussion of the somewhat, er, problematic story it’s from on Sequential Crush.
Is Reddit’s Feminism subreddit run by MRAs?
Oh, Reddit, where the demographics are so skewed that virtually every discussion amongst and/or about women ultimately gets taken over by dudes doing the old “what about the dudes” routine. It’s no secret that the TwoXChromosomes subreddit has long been overrun with MRAs and FeMRAs. And now it’s become pretty clear that the Feminism subreddit has gone MRA as well.
If you want all the details of the drama, here’s a thread in the subreddit in which the feminists who’ve stuck with the subreddit take on the MRAs and MRA-symps amongst the mods.
Check out the Feminisms and SRSWomen subreddits if you want to discuss feministy stuff on Reddit without having to deal with endless derailing from MRAs and other shitlords.
EDITED TO ADD: More links:
SRS takes on the whole mess (lots of useful links).
SRS links to r/feminism mods defending MRAs
An r/feminism thread about the recent Captain Awkward posts about creeps that is, naturally, full of endless hang-wringing about the evils of “creep-shaming.”
(Thanks, Cliff, for the links.)
Spearheader: Feminist men are “nerds, socially awkward, sissy-gay, annoying or just plain weird.”
So WF Price and the rest of the fellas over on The Spearhead are doing a little bit of armchair psychoanalysis of the dreaded “male feminist” in general, and me in particular. It is fairly amusing stuff.
Price sets forth his highly original thesis:
If you observe genuinely feminist men, there’s something a bit off about them, and it’s tempting to chalk their feminism up to a result of some flaw or aberration in their character. Normal men (aside from those whose paycheck depends on it such as politicians and men who work for feminist-dominated institutions) simply don’t go in for feminism unless it gets them sexual gratification, but those days are pretty much over, so the remnants tend to be an assortment of freaks and guys who have a chip on their shoulder.
“But those days are pretty much over?” Evidently, Price thinks there was a time during which women were obligated to reward feminist men with “sexual gratification,” but that this is no longer the case. So “normal men” have stopped being feminists, or at least stopped pretending to be feminists.
So what are these freakish feminist men of today really getting out of it?
Friday links: What About the Men: The Book, and more harassment of Anita Sarkeesian
Longtime Friend of Man Boobz Ozy Frantz, cofounder of the No Seriously What About teh Menz blog, is writing a book with fellow NSWATMer Noah Brand about men and feminism titled, naturally, What About the Men. The first chapter, written by Ozy, is up on the Good Men Project web site, NSWATM’s (sort of) new home. It’s even got footnotes, and illustrations by Barry Deutsch!
Ozy explains the book’s central aim:
We live in a sexist society, one where gender programming starts at birth (though the advent of the sonogram has allowed parents to get a head start by painting the nursery pink or blue and stocking up in advance on gendered toys and clothes) and is so pervasive as to be inescapable. Feminism has done an excellent job analyzing and challenging the ways that these assigned and enforced gender roles damage and deform the lives of women. The same tools of analysis can be applied to the damage and deformation that men suffer. And that damage, sad to say, is severe.
Yes, that says “CLICK TO HIT HER!”
Meanwhile, over on The New Statesman, Helen Lewis looks at the continuing harassment of Anita Sarkeesian, the women who dared to ask people to donate money for a video series on sexism in video games and thereby unleashed a misogynistic shitstorm.
One of the most disturbing examples of harassment: an online game in which players are invited to “beat up Anita Sarkeesian.” Lewis censors some of the images, but not others, so let me just put a TRIGGER WARNING for depictions of violence against women, including a grotesquely photoshopped “beaten up” Sarkeesian. Anyone who thinks Sarkeesian and her supporters were making too big a deal of the harassment needs to go look at these images in Lewis’ article here. (The game itself, posted on Newgrounds.com, has now been removed.)
Again, this is all because Sarkeesian asked people to donate for a video project. If they felt like it was worthwhile. That’s all she did. And this is what she got in return: someone so angry that Sarkeesian was pointing out sexism in video games that he literally sat down and made a game inviting angry internetters to “beat this bitch up.” Irony doesn’t even begin to cover it.
On Think Progress, Alyssa Rosenberg underlines why we need to take this kind of harassment seriously:
[A]nyone who thinks that feminists who push back hard against online harassment are being oversensitive needs to understand that we’re all trying to keep ourselves from becoming Anita Sarkeesians. No matter how strong you are, and no matter how much support you have, this kind of concentrated campaign of harassment affects the targets of it. And the goal of these campaigns is to terrorize people into silence. It’s not disagreement. It’s not creative trolling. It’s deployment of a weapon.
But it’s just as important to point out that Sarkeesian wasn’t silenced; in addition to helping her raise much more money than she had originally asked for, those who attacked her simply reinforced (and helped to further publicize) the argument she was making — in the case of the “beat up Anita Sarkeesian” game, quite directly indeed. The cowards and assholes who try to shut down feminists online with this sort of harassment are not only losers — they’re losing.
JohnTheOther channels Hugo Schwyzer in this disquisition on pseudo-mystical spooge
Sorry to return so quickly to the fetid mind of MRA blabologist JohnTheOther, but, well, you’ll see why I have.
Here is Mr. TheOther in AskReddit, responding to the question “Women of Reddit, how do you feel about cumshots?” (No, he is not strictly speaking a “woman of Reddit,” not like that’s going to stop him.) Enjoy the irony of the A Voice for Men second banana rehashing, apparently with utter sincerity, an argument once set forth, rather infamously, by a feminist fellow named Hugo Schwyzer. And enjoy the also-very-special response from fellow MRA SuicideBanana, whom we met earlier in the week.
I know Mr. TheOther is concerned about people “quote mining” comments, and presenting them out of context, but in this case, there is no further context. His comment, which I have presented unedited in screenshot form, isn’t in response to any other comment; it’s simply an answer to the question I alluded to above. Mr. TheOther does respond to SuicideBanana’s remarks about him being an advocate and facilitator of violence, as you can see if you clicky click here, but sheds no more light on the issue of porno cumshots as a “pseudo-mystical representation of the sexuality of the viewer.”
MRAs would rather complain about “male disposability” than work to enable women to serve in combat
Men’s Rights Activists regularly complain that it is mostly men who serve in the armed forces, and that it is mostly male soldiers who are killed and injured in service to their country in wartime. MRAs also complain that, in the United States, only men have to sign up for the draft – though this is more of a formality than anything else, as the draft has been dead for decades and there is virtually no chance of it being resurrected any time soon.
MRAs love to cite the dominance of men in the armed forces as a prime example of what they call “male disposability,” and somehow manage to blame feminists for it all.
But it’s not feminists who are trying to keep women from becoming soldiers, or serving in combat. While some MRAs support the idea of women serving in the army, and having to register for the draft the same as men do, many others scoff at the very notion of women as soldiers, mocking their alleged female “weakness” and in some cases denigrating the service of women now in the armed forces as being equivalent to attending “day care camp.” (Not exactly.) These MRAs may complain that men bear the brunt of the costs of war. But they don’t actually want women to serve.
Not that it makes much of a difference, because the MRAs who do supposedly want women to share the same responsibilities as men aren’t doing shit about it. You know who is? Feminists. The National Organization for Women, while opposing the draft, has long argued that if registration is required of men, it should also be required of women. NOW has also opposed the ban on female soliders serving in combat. (Not that it’s easy to draw a clear line between combat and non-combat positions on the contemporary battlefields.)
Meanwhile, a group called the Molly Pitcher Project, made up of University of Virginia law students and headed by feminist law professor Anne Coughlin, is assisting two female soldiers who are now suing the Pentagon in an attempt to lift the combat ban.
Do you want to know who is opposing them – aside from the Pentagon’s lawyers? Take a look at some of the comments posted in response to a Los Angeles Times article on the lawsuit. Note: The quotes below are pretty egregious; some deal with military rape in a really offensive way. (Thanks to Pecunium for pointing me to them.)
These aren’t “cherry-picked” from hundreds of comments; these are the bulk of the comments that were left on the article.
Are any of these commenters MRAs? Maybe, maybe not, but certainly their misogynistic “logic” is virtually identical to that I’ve seen from misogynist MRAs opposed to women serving in combat. One thing they are clearly not is feminist.
If MRAs, or at least some of them, truly want a world in which men and women share equally in the responsibilities of military service (and both have equal opportunties for military leadership), they need to challenge the misogynists — within their movement and without — who argue that women simply aren’t fit for the battlefield. And they need to support the feminists who are actually trying to make a difference — instead of standing on the sidelines crying foul.
I don’t hold out much hope that this will ever happen. MRAs are much too enamored with their fantasies of male martyrhood.
I’m giving a talk at Northwestern University on Monday. Topic: How to hate women and have terrible sex
Hot sex talk
Just a little heads up for any of you in the Chicago area: I’ll be speaking at Northwestern University on Monday, as part of its annual “Sex Week.”
My topic? “How to hate women and have terrible sex: Misogynistic sex myths, and how they ruin sex for everyone.” Nice Guys, Friend Zones, and the Alpha Asshole Cock Carousel will all make appearances.
The talk will be at 8 PM in Room G02 of Annenberg Hall on the Northwestern Campus in Evanston.
(Here’s a map.)
There will be free condoms and lube. (Apparently.)
For more about sex week, see the official website, or take a look at this piece in the Daily Northwestern.
Sex week is sponsored by the College Feminists; I’m talking at the invitation of Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault.
I’ll be writing the lecture over the weekend, so please feel free to offer suggestions as to which misogynistic sex myths I should talk about.
EDITED TO ADD: The Spearhead has discovered that I’m doing this talk. W. F. Price writes about it with his usual objectivity, by which I mean that his piece is filled with lies and weird projection.
International Women’s Day has gotten SO commercialized
I mean, seriously?
I’m not even sure if I’ll be putting up a tree next year.
That said, Martha Marcy May Marlene is an awesome movie. You should rent it and eat cupcakes.
In the meantime, let’s celebrate International Women’s Day the right way. With a gif of Maude Lebowski saying “vagina.”
EDITED TO ADD: In case anyone is wondering, I have no idea who did that graphic; it’s floating around on tumblr. I found it courtesy of unknowable woman.
Man Boobz on Tumblr! It’s now a thing!
Reddit, in a nutshell. An example of the sort of hilarity you will find on the brand-new Man Boobz on Tumblr!
The Man Boobz Empire is expanding into new territory. Namely, Tumblr, with the grand opening of Man Boobz on Tumblr! I will be using the new platform to plug posts here, to blog and reblog about interesting stuff beyond what I write about here, and of course to post more pics. Like the one here, which is a fairly accurate summary of way too many discussions on Reddit and elsewhere on the internets. Will there also be pics of kitties? Yes, yes there will.
There’s a big social justice/feminist contingent on Tumblr, and this will help to reach them, and also to relay some of what they’re talking about to you all. It’ll also allow me to respond to stuff that’s going on a lot more quickly.
And kitties.
Also, while we’re talking about Tumblr: Alexander Ryking, that misogynist Tumblr dude we were talking about the other day? He’s been removed as a politics editor on Tumblr. Ta da!
