Watch out: He has a Ph.D!

The Man Boobz Pledge Drive continues. See here for more details, or click below to donate.

And now back to our regularly scheduled post:

Warren Farrell, whose 1993 book The Myth of Male Power essentially set the agenda for the Men’s Rights movement we know (and don’t love) today, did an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit yesterday.

Most of the questions he chose to answer were pretty much softballs, and his answers largely reiterated things he’s said before many times. But he was also asked some pointed questions about his views on incest which he chose to answer. Well, sort of. Instead of clearing up the issue, he dug his hole a little deeper.

[TRIGGER WARNING for incest/child abuse apologia.]

Some backstory: As longtime readers of this blog know, Farrell spent several years in the 1970s researching a book about incest, which ultimately never appeared. In 1977, Farrell gave an interview to, of all things, Penthouse magazine, in which he tried to explain his “findings” and his views on the topic generally. The interview revealed that Farrell at the time had some exceedingly creepy views on incest and child sexual abuse.

If you haven’t read my post on the subject, going through the interview in detail, I suggest you take a few moments to read it now. (Here’s a transcript of the entire Penthouse article; in my post you can find links to high-quality scans of the original magazine pages – in case anyone still doubts he said what he indeed said.)

In short, Farrell believed there were “positive” aspects to incest that weren’t being talked about because society deemed the topic “taboo.” Indeed, the working title of Farrell’s book was The Last Taboo: The Three Faces of Incest.

In the past, Farrell has been, to say the least, a bit evasive when it comes to clarifying what he meant by some of the most troubling comments in the Penthouse interview, and would seem to prefer that all evidence of his interest in the issue of incest vanish down Orwell’s famous memory hole.

On Reddit, Farrell was presented with a perfect opportunity to set the record straight, both on his views on incest and child sexual abuse generally as well as on a number of specific quotes. (Note: as you’ll see, most of the first quote listed is the Penthouse author’s paraphrase, but the rest are all directly from Farrell.)

In his response, Farrell addresses none of the quotes directly, and his comments raise more questions than they answer.

“Excellent questions,” he says, before going on to answer none of them. Let’s break down his non-answer.

bottom-line, i did this research when my research skills as a new Ph.D. were in the foreground and my raising two daughters was in the future. had i and my wife helped raise two daughters first, the intellectual interest would have evaporated. life teaches; children teach you more.

He starts off by mentioning his Ph.D., though he doesn’t mention that it was in political science and not psychology. Moreover, his discussions of his research in the Penthouse interview suggest that his methodology was anything but scientific.

His reference to his daughters seems to suggest that if he had had children he would have realized that there really was no “positive” aspect to incest. One might have assumed he would have picked up on this when the overwhelming majority of the women he interviewed “admitted to having negative attitudes toward their incest,” as the Penthouse article delicately puts it.

Farrell ends this paragraph with a smiley, as if the years he spent trying to find examples of “positive” incest were all just a harmless misunderstanding.

now, for some depth. i haven’t published anything on this research because i saw from the article from which you are quoting how easy it was to have the things i said about the way the people i interviewed felt be confused with what i felt.

This is completely disingenuous. It’s not uncommon to find sexual abusers who’ve convinced themselves that the abuse they inflicted upon children was a good thing for their victims, and most people who write about the subject have no problem distinguishing their views from the abusers and abuse apologists they report on.

No, the really disturbing things about Farrell’s interview are the statements in which he expresses his own opinions on the subject. For example, this quote (referenced in the questions on Reddit), in which he describes some of what he evidently sees as the negative aspects of the incest “taboo.”

[M]illions of people … are now refraining from touching, holding, and genitally caressing their children, when that is really a part of a caring, loving expression, are repressing the sexuality of a lot of children and themselves. Maybe this needs repressing, and maybe it doesn’t. My book should at least begin the exploration.

You can see that whole quote in context in the original article here. Farrell now claims that he didn’t say “genitally” but “generally,” though if you replace that one word in that quote it’s scarcely any better.

The Penthouse article also contains this astounding quote from him:

“When I get my most glowing positive cases, 6 out of 200,” says Farrell, “the incest is part of the family’s open, sensual style of life, wherein sex is an outgrowth of warmth and affection. It is more likely that the father has good sex with his wife, and his wife is likely to know and approve — and in one or two cases to join in.”

And this:

“Incest is like a magnifying glass,” he summarizes. “In some circumstances it magnifies the beauty of a relationship, and in others it magnifies the trauma.”

In some circumstances it magnifies the beauty. Farrell gives absolutely no indication here that he is explaining someone else’s views; it seems to be what he himself believes. And until and unless he specifically addresses this quote it is hard to read it any other way.

Let’s go back to Farrell’s “answer.”

i have always been opposed to incest, and still am … .

That’s true, at least to an extent. In the Penthouse article, even though he seems to agree with many of the abusers’ rationalizations for their abuse, he does state specifically that he’s

not recommending incest between parent and child, and especially not between father and daughter.

But then he goes on to say this:

The great majority of fathers can grasp the dynamics of positive incest ‘intellectually’. But in a society that encourages looking at women in almost purely sexual terms, I don’t believe they can translate this understanding into practice.

As far as I can figure it, he’s saying that he’s opposed to father-daughter incest because in today’s sexist society it’s … hard for fathers to do incest properly?  If that can be seen as being “opposed to incest” I guess he is opposed. I would love some clarification from Farrell on this point.

Back to Farrell’s answers on Reddit. After sort of, kind of, suggesting maybe his research was a bad idea (in that part above about his daughters) he returns to defending it:

but i was trying to be a good researcher and ask people about their experience without the bias of assuming it was negative or positive.

Really? Seeing abuse as abuse is “bias?” Would you consider it reasonable to study, say, murder, or violent assault, or even someone falling to their death off a mountain “without the bias of assuming it was negative or positive?” Or is it just sexual abuse of young girls and boys that merits such “objectivity?”

And yes, though Farrell now portrays himself as an advocate for both men and boys, he told the Penthouse interviewer that “boys don’t seem to suffer” from sexual abuse — sorry, incest. (That quote is a paraphrase of Farrell’s views from the Penthouse author.)

And then comes this amazing bit, in which he suggests that his interest in challenging the “taboo” of incest was in some ways inspired by the gay liberation movement of the 1970s – because on some level the sexual abuse of children is roughly similar to gay sex between consenting adults?

i had learned this from the misinformation we had gotten about gay people by working from the starting assumption of its dysfunction.

Amazing, just amazing.

You might think that Reddit’s Men’s Rightsers would be appalled by Farrell’s creepy non-answer. Nope. Most of them seem to think he addressed all possible concerns with the issue, with one poster getting dozens of upvotes for suggesting that MRAs bookmark “Dr Farrell’s response to the incest (mis)quote …  for easy reference!”

It wasn’t a misquote, and his “response” was worse than no response at all.

The apologies for Farrell’s non-answer aren’t surprising. Other MRAs who are familiar with the interview have also gone to great lengths to explain it away; indeed,  one of Farrell’s fans went as far as suggesting that “Penthouse was not always “pornographic” and to characterise it as that is just to demonise and imply that the article as being far more overtly sexual that it was.”

I will repeat what I said last time I wrote about Farrell: if he disagrees with any of my conclusions here, or feels he wishes to clarify or explicitly repudiate anything or everything in the Penthouse article, I’m offering him a chance to explain himself here in a post on this blog — in his own words, unedited.

I find the Oscars tedious, and only watched a few minutes last night — I bailed shortly after Captain Kirk made his appearance — but apparently I should have stuck around, if only to watch the insufferable Seth MacFarlane’s award-winning performance as Unfunny Misogynist Asshole Host.

What, you say, he didn’t actually win an award for that? Well, yes he did: Having read a number of accounts of the whole sorry spectacle, I’m awarding MacFarlane the non-coveted Man Boobz Boob of the Day Award (Oscar Edition). In the wake of MacFarlane’s performance at the Oscars, in which he devoted a whole song to actresses’ breasts, I should note that I am using the word “boob” to mean “nincompoop.” Which, to be honest, is an undeservedly mild epithet for a guy who punctuated his comments with repeated jokes about rape.

A few of the highlights of MacFarlane’s night:

That song-and-dance number about how great it is to see so many boobs in films  – including, specifically, in The Accused, and Monster, and Boys Don’t Cry. You know, during the rape scenes in those quie serious films.

MacFarlane’s animatronic teddy bear (from his movie Ted) joking about attending an orgy at Jack Nicholson’s house – you know, the place where Roman Polanski raped a 13-year old girl.

Oh, and then there was MacFarlane joking about how 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis would be too old to date George Clooney in about 16 years. (What, is Heartiste writing MacFarlane’s jokes?) And his bizarre domestic violence joke about Chris Brown and Rihanna. And on and on. (See here for many more examples.)

Getting into the spirit of the evening, whoever was doing The Onion’s twitter account decided it would be hilarious to refer to the aforementioned 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis as a “cunt.” The Onion later deleted the tweet and offered an apology for it.

Somehow I doubt we’re going to get an apology from MacFarlane.

Here are a couple more takes on the whole unfortunate evening.

Why Seth MacFarlane’s Misogyny Matters (Vulture)

Seth MacFarlane and the Oscars’ Hostile, Ugly, Sexist Night (The New Yorker)

Oscar Watch: Was That Awful or What? (NY Post)

EDITED TO ADD: Oh, joy! The Men’s Rights subreddit weighs in on the issue, in a thread sort-of-responding to that New Yorker piece.

EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: Actually, r/mensrights has two threads on the subject; here’s the other one.

Over on PUAhate.com, a fellow named Virgil challenges the widely held manosphere notion that women start losing their appeal once they hit their early 20s. According to him, the real turning point comes at the ripe old age of 25 or so. Why? Let’s let him explain — and in the process demonstrate how to use the word “c*ntathlon” in a sentence.

Behaviour has to count for something.

Any between ages 18-21 is in her Looks/reproductive Prime but The behaviour in these ages stinks.

Its like a competition to see who can out-cunt the other.

From simple things like skipping lines, to humiliating people in public, to ostracising people.

Its a damn cuntathlon.

We have to have some quality control here okes.

I fully agree that age 24-25 is the tip of the iceberg here folk.

Walk with me.

-she still looks attractive

-She’s starting work and therefore is in a controlled environment where validation is far less.Thus cooling the cunty behaviour

-she’s at the perfect equilibriu$ of grown up behaviour and youthful Looks.

Virgil gets some challenges from the regulars.

JackOfJokers argues that 25-year-olds are still as badly behaved  as 18-21-year-olds, and not as good-looking:

Sounds nice in theory Virgil, but the truth is they still get validated fuckloads by desperate office guys, they’re super stuck up, and they definitely look much worse; fat, cellulite, wrinkles, shitty diet, etc.

Mechanical Animals agrees:

If you think girls act much different from 18-21 to 24-25 you are fucking deluded.

Life after high school is exactly that, a continuation after high school.

What does this mean is exactly that, the good looking people keeps living in a bubble of validation way past their academical period.

Life of the sub 8 is a dead end, a merciless damnation. Think about all these beautiful, fucking females. You will never touch them.

The “sub-8” bit is a reference to the notion, seemingly held by 90% of the denizens of PUAhate, that only “male models” ever get to have sex with women.

Genetically Inferior, meanwhile, makes the case for “jailbait.”

15-18 is prime for a female but nobody will admit it

This arouses much ire from the regulars, not so much because Genetically Inferior is being a crepy pedo, but because “at 15 most chicks barely even have any tits developed,” as the similarly named Genetics puts it. “Wake up to reality incel,” Genetics continues in a second comment,

stop comparing tumblr feeds and “jailbait” associated websites of the top percent of teens to the average titless whore. At fifteen you’re merely in grade 10, most chicks have little tits and ass to show for.

Doesn’t start getting good untill 17-18 then peak at 21

I gave up reading the thread at this point as it seemed to have degenerated into little more than a collection of “jailbait” pictures.

Some guys get all the chicks

The regulars at PUAhate.com – we’ve met them before – are a strange and bitter bunch. Most seem to be self-loathing so-called “incels” who blame their lack of romantic and sexual success on their average or below-average looks. Rejecting the basic premise of the pickup artist crowd – that average guys can transform themselves into suave lotharios by mastering manipulative pickup formulas – the PUAhate regulars tend to be true believers in what they somewhat pretentiously call “looks theory,” the odd and obviously untrue notion that women only date men with “male model” looks.

As one PUAhater put it recently:

PUA makes you think that all your problems are because of your personality/behaviour – i.e. things you can control. So when you keep failing, it means that YOU are fucking up and doing things wrong

the reality is that many of us just lost the genetic lottery. we are ugly, the wrong race, the wrong height etc, and that fucked us up. there is NOTHING we can do about it

So, naturally, the PUAhaters spend a lot of their time jealous of tall, good-looking men for their supposed monopoly on the women of the world — whom they also hate.

But the strange thing is that the PUAhaters pretty much hate everyone else as well. They get angry when guys they consider ugly score “hot chicks.” They get angry when guys who are good-looking but not male models get attention from “really hot girls.” And so on, and so on, and so on.

Indeed, many of the regulars seem to walk around in a perpetual state of rage, angry at each and every man who’s managed to pair up with a woman, not to mention the women as well.

One regular recently described his “day from hell” to his comrades:

To start the day I saw a couple where it was an average White guy with an OBESE Asian girl. They were walking around acting like they were trying to prove shit. LMAO. I wanted to kick the guy in the fucking nuts for dating that landwhale. If you’re going to use the racial advantage, at least date a girl who is under 300lbs. Later I go to the gym and see the same tall guys I usually do. Even if I had a good face, how the fuck do you compete with guys who are fucking 6’4”?

Then at the gym there’s this good looking White guy there talking to this Asian dude about how Asian girls are easy and how they approach him. To make things worse after that these fucking frat douchebags come in with their girlfriends to show off . Then to cap off the day a girl I used to know from freshman year walks right past me without even saying anything. I used to fucking live next door to this bitch and now she doesn’t even say anything and acts like a pretentious cunt. She’s an Indian girl dating a White dude lmao. Days like today make you wonder why you even still try in the first place.

Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, most of those posting on PUAhate don’t actually seem to be ugly by anyone’s standards but their own, at least judging from the pictures of themselves they sometimes post to the site, which reveal them to be mostly average-looking guys, with some of the regulars even quite conventionally handsome.

But evidently they would rather believe that they have “lost the genetic lottery” rather than face a more obvious explanation for why the girls don’t like them: because they’re shallow, self-obsessed assholes who hate themselves and hate women and radiate their bitterness from every pore. (And some are even creepier than this, like this pedophile – sorry, ephebophile – who’s angry at me personally because unlike him I don’t chase after 15-year-olds. Link NSFW.)

The PUAhaters often talk about getting surgeries to “correct” their supposed genetic flaws. They would do far better to spend that money on therapy.

Jimmy Savile: The real victim? (Uh, no.)

British barrister Barbara Hewson caused a bit of a stir last week when she called for the age of consent in Britain to be lowered to 13 so as to end the alleged “persecution of old men” like those arrested in the wake of the recent Jimmy Savile scandal, which revealed a widespread culture of sexual exploitation of underage girls (and some boys) at the BBC in the 1970s.

Now one female Men’s Rights Activist connected to hate site A Voice for Men has done Hewson one better, arguing that the real culprits in these scandals weren’t the predatory adult men but the girls they victimized.

Janet Bloomfield, a fairly regular contributor to terrorist-manifesto-posting AVFM who is better known as JudgyBitch, writes on her blog that:

[B]asically, the girls were groupies. They wanted all the benefits of hanging out with a big star and they understood it came with a price and they paid it, perhaps reluctantly, but with full knowledge that the trips to London and the fags and the sweet weren’t free. …

And now they are claiming the MEN abused THEM? Looks to me like it was the other way around.

Yes, Bloomfield apparently feels that these poor little rich men were robbed of cigarettes and candy and trips to London by predatory teenage girls. She continues:

It’s a story as old as bloody time. Young women with nothing to offer but their youth and sexuality chase after powerful men in exchange for favors. If we are going to arrest every powerful man who has ever availed himself of willing women, we are gonna need to build a whole lot of jails.

Uh, Judgy, in case you missed the point of the whole debate here, we’re not talking about women. We’re talking about girls. In the case of  BBC broadcaster Stuart Hall, one of the victims that he has admitted to assaulting was nine years old at the time. Nine. Savile’s youngest alleged victim was an eight-year-old boy, and dozens of his alleged assaults were upon children in hospitals.

In the end, Bloomfield kind of, sort of, admits that the men may have behaved badly in these cases. But she still wants them to face zero legal repercussions.

Powerful men always have and always will delight in young women hunting them. Young women always have and always will hunt for powerful men. Both sides are equally culpable. Both sides are engaging in abuse. Both sides are behaving shamefully. Both side are being idiots.

But only one side is being held criminally responsible? Bullshit. If the girls are not going to be strung up on charges of solicitation and prostitution, and I absolutely do NOT think they should be, then fairness and equality under the law dictates the men get a pass, too.

Again, you may notice, Bloomfield cannot seem to decide whether or not these girls are in fact girls or “young women,” and in the two consecutive paragraphs right above you’ll notice she slides effortlessly between the two. Perhaps her desire to tag these girls “women” is an admission that, at least on some unconscious level, she knows what she’s arguing is beyond the moral pale.

Elsewhere in her post, she puts up pictures of underage girls whom she seems to think would be impossible to distinguish from adults. Here’s one, of a twelve-year-old model. (She also includes a creepily sexualized picture of the same model at age ten.)

Anyone unable to tell that this is a picture of a child, not an adult, shouldn’t be having sex with anyone.

And anyone as morally deficient as JudgyBitch shouldn’t be judging anyone.

Unless you’re Kojak. Kojak gets a free pass with the word “baby.”

So I read a lot of creepy shit doing research for this blog. But the manosphere blog Random Xpat Rantings — slogan: “Contemplative dominance for the modern man” — seems to be trying to take creepiness to a whole other level.

In a recent post, blogger xsplat attempts to explain “How to make an attractive woman fall for you on the first or second date.” One of his hints: “If you are way into the girl, it will be way easier for her to fall for you.”

But what if you’re dead inside and can’t feel love? Well, have no fear, because xsplat has an answer for you: Pretend that the women you’re dating are your children!

If you don’t know how to feel love, here is a trick that will work for some, if you let it. Men naturally feel paternal love. Women are neotenous. Evolution is accidental, however the coincidence is meaningful. Women are neotenous because that arouses men’s paternal love. Use that to your advantage. Consider her as YOUR child. This will open up a flood of love for her. It’s ok – it’s not real incest – don’t be an idiot. It’s a trick you are performing in order to commune more fully. To love her more. To enjoy for yourself the great rush of love.

Also, I have a long history of doing this, again and again. It’s not just an accident in my distant past. It’s what I do. It’s what I did today. It’s a formula. It’s a formula that might very well work for you.

If you’re giving out dating advice and you have to specify “it’s ok — it’s not real incest” you should probably start trying to figure out just how your life has gone so terribly, terribly wrong.

Paul Elam: If he hears any more about rape culture, he might possibly lose it.

You might not think that student orientation events would be an appropriate venue for chants celebrating the rape of underage girls. But such chants have apparently been something of a tradition at not one but two Canadian schools — and possibly more? Last week, a scandal erupted at the University of British Columbia after word got out that an orientation event at its Saunder School of Business had included a chant on this particular theme, led by orientation leaders from the Commerce Undergraduate Society.

According to one woman who disgustedly live-tweeted the event, it went something like this:

Y-O-U-N-G at UBC, we like ‘em young, Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for go to jail.

Meanwhile, in Halifax, someone made a video — and posted it to YouTube — of student orientation leaders at Saint Mary’s University chanting a nearly identical chant.

Naturally, noted, er, human rights activist Paul Elam of A Voice for Men felt compelled to weigh in on the issue. He started off by expressing his deep disgust … with having to hear anything about the issue at all:

I swear if I read one more outraged “report” — aka feverish, paranoid rant — that twists something stupid into “evidence” of a “rape culture,” I am going to just lose it.

Yes, how outrageous that a chant joking about raping underage girls at an official school orientation event could possibly be construed as contributing in any way to rape culture! So sorry that your delicate sensitivities were offended, Paul.

After some more predictable histrionics on this “hyper-hipster-hysteria” from Mr. Elam, he got to his main point: blaming feminists for the rape chants.

No, really.

I am an older guy. I find it interesting, given that I came from a more “patriarchal” generation, that something like this when I was 18 would have been unthinkable. Why? Because other men, especially older ones, would have pulled those young people aside and said, “Hey, we don’t do that around here.” That would have been that, as they say, if it had even happened in the first place.

We can thank feminists for this. Through policy and governance they have eroded positive male role models, and male authority, right out of the culture. After feminist undermining of the family, removing fathers from the lives of children and demonizing male heroes, we have a population of young people, especially young men, growing more socially feral with each new generation.

And now what do we see? Feminists running around everywhere telling men they need to tell each other, “Don’t rape. Don’t abuse women. Don’t this. Don’t that.” …

You can’t assault the identity of half the human race, marginalize and disempower them, which is exactly what feminism has done, and expect anything in return but what you are getting.

In other words: You gals asked for it.

Paul Elam, you are rape culture.

A real Mens Rights poster from deviantART

Pity the poor Men’s Rights activists. The real civil rights movements that MRAs like to compare their, er, “struggle” to may have faced many obstacles that MRAs haven’t — from legal prohibitions on voting to fire bombings and assassinations  — but at least they haven’t had a hard time explaining just what it was, and is, that they’re seeking redress for.

When Martin Luther King so famously dreamt of a world in which “my four little children will … not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” he was not only speaking eloquently; he was expressing an idea that was, well, pretty easy to understand.

And that’s where the trouble comes for the MRAs. It’s a bit harder to explain your alleged anti-oppression movement to the general public when the people on whose behalf you’re fighting aren’t actually, you know, oppressed. So is it any wonder that MRAs have such a hard time explaining themselves to the public?

I mean, all the Suffragettes had to put on their posters was “Votes for Women.” MRAs are stuck. Men already have votes. They already have civil rights. Heck, men already run most companies and hold most political offices and control most of the world’s wealth.

And so MRA propaganda tends to be muddled, a weird mixture of misogyny and special pleading and stuff that just doesn’t make any sort of sense no matter how you slice it. In earlier posts we’ve looked at baffling and/or offensive posters from A Voice for Men and associated sites, as well as at some of the awful graphics that sometimes make their appearance on Reddit.

Today, a quick stroll through the MRA underground on deviantART.

The graphic at the top of the post is from someone calling himself awesomeninja; for his propaganda work, he specializes in somewhat baffling text-based graphics in basic colors.  Apparently he has convinced himself that “feminazis use child-bearing all the time to defend their sexist views,” and feels it is necessary to respond to this in giant letters in several colors with a black background.

He is also responsible for this similarly befuddling contribution to political art:

Wait, is this a trick question?

Dude, have you actually met any Men’s Rights Activists?

Oh, wait, you are one. Oops.

But wait, there’s more:

Of course, awesomeninja isn’t the only one spreading the MRA message of love on deviantART. Here are a few other graphics I found by searching for “men’s rights” and related tags on the site.

This lovely “stamp” from loqutor, who has convinced himself he is “debunking an ages-old feminist myth” with it.

A meme from Userbruiser, who apparently thinks that if a woman has alcohol in her system, it’s ok to rape her:

This bizarre castration fantasy from the same lovely fellow:

This rant posted by themodsquad, who also enjoys jokes about pedophilia and bestiality.

There’s some question about whether or not themodsquad came up with that all by himself, but this uglier and worse-written sequel seems pretty authentic to me:

Is he a “real” MRA or just a troll? I don’t know, but he does seem to be an authentic misogynistic asshole attention-seeker, and I’ve seen virtually every “argument” in the first graphic rehashed many times on assorted MRA sites; it’s pretty much standard-issue “we hunted the mammoth to feed you.”

Let’s close with several graphics from an aspiring Man Going His Own Way. millenia89 is proud of his own reproductive organs:

But he doesn’t seem to think too highly of most of his fellow male-identified penis-havers. Indeed, he believes most of his fellow men are like lemmings marching off a cliff — except for a tiny percentage of MGTOW like the two tiny fellows at the bottom right of the graphic below.

I know it seems confusing, but trust me, the MGTOW in this picture aren’t the ones going over the cliff, really. They’re the ones facing the other direction, underneath that little MGTOW sign.  No, not under the big MGTOW sign, under the little one. Just trust me on this one.

millenia89 is especially unimpressed with men who step in to “save a hoe,” like this fellow, whom he sees as a handy “personification” of the sort of  “manipulated tool” who, I guess, apparently likes women enough to help them out.  I’m not quite sure I get it. Apparently this picture is inherently hilarious because it’s a picture of a black guy with an odd smile in a weirdly inaccurate superman costume. Heck, even the font is wacky.

Millenia89 may not think much of most of his fellow men, but at least he doesn’t want to render them obsolete. Women, well, that’s another issue entirely, as this utopian paean to the glories of artificial wombs suggests:

So awesomeninja thinks that “pregnancy is no excuse for misandry.” Millenia89 evidently hopes that in the future there will be no excuse for pregnancy itself.

This is how the Men’s Rights movement tries to explain itself to the world.

And MRAs wonder why their little movement has the reputation it does.

–

I was inspired to check out deviantART’s MRA community by some of the commenters here. Check out the comments in the “Feminist anti-obedience school” thread starting here to see some homegrown parodies of awesomeninja’s graphic works.

LaidNYC is back!

It’s been a while since we checked in with LaidNYC, the alleged pickup artist whose sperm is LIQUID GOLD and whose wisdom about women, and life in general, is liquid, well, something else. Let’s see what  we can learn from him.

In one recent post, Mr. LaidNYC brings his unique perspective to the question of raising boys, a topic I’m pretty sure he has no actual experience with. Well, after reading his advice, I can only hope that he has no actual experience with it, and that he never gets any. Some of his insights:

Marry a HAWT chick:

Choose his mother carefully.  You are only half responsible for the genetic outcome of your child.  You want a thin, young, healthy wife to help assure a healthy child.  The mother should embrace the idea of wifely submission and a captain-first mate relationship in which she is not the captain.  This will be your son’s first relationship model and it should embed natural gender roles in his mind forever.

Make sure your son knows he’s cockblocking you by even existing, and that you’re making a giant sacrifice by sticking around with mommy, even though she’s no longer the hottie she was when you married her, and you could TOTALLY be dating hotter chicks if she weren’t around.

Make him aware of your sacrifice.  As a guy with game, you will likely be passing up lots of pussy and fun times if you choose to have kids.  Make him aware of this.  He should realize his existence is a gift from you.  This will make him respect you more, and a child who respects his father has higher self-worth because he instinctively understands that his father is his genes.

Pay him money to approach HAWT chicks at Farmers’ Markets before he even reaches puberty. Because that’s not weird or creepy at all.

Have him approach girls.  When he’s cute and pre-pubescent, take him to a park or farmers market and have him approach smoking hot babes.  Give him cute stuff to say, he’ll have a 0% blowout rate.  Make it fun for him, not “daddy is making me talk to girls again”.  Use monetary incentives if necessary.

Get him a dog, because bitches are bitches amirite high five bro! No, really, that’s his argument:

Get a dog. A dog teaches kids how to love and how to be in charge of something they love.  The parallels between dog training and game are staggering.

Also, be a drunk and a letch, because somehow this will benefit him.

Set up some dominoes for him to topple.  This is fun.  Buy a small piece of bar so he can easily be a bartender when he’s 18.  Befriend families in the neighborhood who have hot daughters so he can have an in to fuck them.  … Be a regular at a bar or strip club and pass the status on to him.

What kind of status points to you accumulate, exactly, by being a creepy old dude hanging out in a strip club all the time?

Speaking of creepy old dudes, let’s take a look at another post from LaidNYC with the seemingly inoffensive title The Walls of Facebook, in which our hero villain explains some  research he’s conducted by creeping through the Facebook pictures of teen girls.

Back when I still had Facebook, I was routinely shocked at HOW MUCH hotter girls, even in their early to mid twenties, used to be just a few years earlier.

In fact, Facebook shows that when women peak is even younger than anyone blogging under their real name would care to admit.  Common red pill dogma states that women are their hottest between 18-24.

I say this is bullshit.  Try 15-19.

Even that is generous for modern girls in prosperous countries.  If she’s going to college to binge drink on weekends and swipe her mealplan card at the buffet line, her peak likely ceases her first semester at around age 18.

True female peak, on average, is probably around 16-18.

High schoolers.

Yep, this is the same guy who was just giving advice on how to be a good parent.

He continues:

Now, we in the red pill community try to stretch that peak to 23 or 24 because most guys don’t have the chance to bang high school girls.  There’s the law, different social circles, cock-blocking parents, etc. So we lie to ourselves a bit and claim the 22, 23 year old girls we date are still at peak.  Close enough for government work.

Yes, that’s right. He just complained about COCK-BLOCKING PARENTS.

I was going to keep going and go through a couple more posts of his today, but, honestly, HE JUST COMPLAINED ABOUT COCK-BLOCKING PARENTS. I’ve had enough of this creepy bullshit for one day.

The real Matt Forney. Is he also LaidNYC?

So, I’ve written about the terrible “game” blogger LaidNYC several times already because the fellow is such a reliable purveyor of terrible what-the-fuckery — what with his weird fixation on the alleged value of his sperm, his creepy obsession with underage girls, and his overall awfulness as a human being. I have wondered, from time to time, if the fellow isn’t simply a troll, but I’ve kept on writing about him largely because his readers — and other manosphere bloggers — seem to take him utterly seriously.

Today, though, I just noticed a post from Matt Forney — a Manosphere blogger who is himself a deeply terrible person with a history of trollery and sockpuppeting — who seems to be dropping big hints that LaidNYC may not be who he seems. In a post reviewing an”ebook” by LaidNYC — insofar as a 13 page collection of platitudes obviously banged out in a few hours can be considered a book of any kind — Forney writes:

There are bloggers who take weeks, months, years to get into a groove, honing their talents to the point where their posts become must-reads. And then there are guys like LaidNYC who come exploding out of the gate, writing stuff so good you swear they’ve done this before. LaidNYC is on my top tier of bloggers because his writing is not only brutal and honest, brimming with verisimilitude, but his prose style is hilarious as well.

The fact that he so effortlessly sends feminists into shrieking hysterics is proof that he’s doing things right.

Emphasis mine.

He ends the “review” urging his readers to send LaidNYC some real money for his ridiculous “book.”

So is Forney — with that bit about “stuff so good you swear they’ve done it before” — basically admitting that he is LaidNYC? If so, this wouldn’t be the first time he’s written an enthusiastic review of one of his own, er, books under a different name.

I suppose we’ll find out.

In any case, I’m not sure if it matters much if LaidNYC is a genuine “game” blogger with deeply misogynistic views who writes horrendous shit because he believes every word of it, or a troll with deeply misogynistic views who writes horrendous shit because he wants to piss off women and feminists and maybe con a few gullible followers into sending him money while he’s at it.

And whether or not LaidNYC’s noxious “advice” is meant seriously, manosphere dudes are lapping it up regardless.

Matt Forney and LaidNYC — who may or may not be the same person — have learned that you can get attention by saying terrible things. Congratulations. What an amazing accomplishment.

EDITED TO ADD: Well, on Twitter, for what it’s worth, Forney denies it all.

I did manage to find an audio interview with LaidNYC here. You can compare it to Forney’s voice on his podcast here. At first I was thinking that while the voices are similar, it wasn’t a match: LaidNYC was a faster talker with a higher voice, etc.  (It’s hard to tell, in part because LaidNYC’s voice in the interview is poor quality, over the phone.) But then I skipped ahead to about ten minutes into Forney’s podcast and now I’m not sure. The voices are awfully similar (and frankly, not terribly alpha-sounding). Any thoughts?

So I’ve been poking around the CreepyPM’s subreddit again — it’s a place where people, mostly women, post screenshots of the creepy private messages they’ve gotten from anonymous weirdos — and I ran across this doozy from Omegle, an online chat program that links up random strangers.

This bit of passive-aggressive, cut-and-paste pervery was one anonymous fellow’s opening conversational salvo. (Click on the pic to see a larger, more readable version.)

Now, I’m no psychiatrist, but as someone who’s suffered from depression, I’m pretty sure that guilt-tripping random women on the internet into sending you pictures of their BOOBZ isn’t going to actually help to cure this depression.

But the fact is, this guy isn’t actually suicidal. He’s just made that bit up in order to con women — and evidently some underage girls — into showing him their tits.

How do I know? Because. as a couple of the regulars in the CreepyPMs subreddit have pointed out, he’s done this before, apparently many times, with the same sob story about “having a really crap week (my grandma died).” So either he’s lost several dozen grandmothers in the past couple of years or he’s lying. I’m going to go with the latter explanation. Occam’s razor and all.

So congratulations, dude, you’ve managed to define a new low in shitty online pervery. From now on, people will forever measured by your yardstick. As in, “well, that’s guy’s pretty pervy, but he’s not quit as pervy as the guy who pretended to be suicidal on Omegle to get girls to show him their tits.”

How comments are moderated at Man Boobz.

So I had to re-ban a couple of long-banned trolls today, who had returned with new names and slightly different IP addresses but who gave themselves away with their behavior. And that got me thinking about the people — well, the MRAs and PUAs and other such charming folks — who regularly denounce me as an evil censor of FREE SPEECH.

In fact, when I ban people, I do so for good reasons: one of the two trolls I banned today was a longtime MRAish commenter here who eventually creeped everyone out by boasting about having sex with underage prostitutes; the other was a man of many sockpuppets known for angry, abusive meltdowns full of slurs.

Anyway, so I thought I’d give you all a glimpse into my “trash” folder. Here’s a sampling of comments from would-be first time commenters at Man Boobz that I felt would not add anything to the discourse here. But in the interests of FREE SPEECH I thought I’d give these “ideas” an airing today.

TRIGGER WARNING for violent and offensive language. (Sorry about the quality of the last two; you can click on them to see larger versions.)

Not all of the comments I trash are quite this awful. Some are only mildly violent or abusive. I tend to be a bit picky with people’s first comments, assuming that if someone posts a shitty first comment it’s not likely to get any better after that. There are a few banned commenters who stop by and try to post anyway, including one fellow who leaves endless comments trying to prove, as far as I can tell, that teenage girls are objectively hotter than women in their twenties and older.

And, of course, there are comments targeting individual women, whether these are giant cut-and-pasted rants about Anita Sarkeesian, vaguely threatening remarks aimed at other well-known internet feminists, or bizarre sexual comments about female MRAs from fans of theirs.

Once in a while I will get a comment from a feminist that resorts to violent language; I don’t let those comments through either.

And then there are the pictures people try to post in the comments. Below, one of the ones I actually let through, depicting me in a dress with some extremely tall dude. A quick Google image search reveals that it was originally posted online by regular A Voice for Men contributor Janet Bloomfield, in a blog post of hers from last year on Disney princesses. Stay classy, Men’s “Human Rights” Movement!

I don’t actually own a dress like this.

Anyway, the pictures I don’t let through are worse.

Ask him anything!

Warren Farrell, the intellectual grandfather of the Men’s Rights movement, is doing an AMA on Reddit today at 1 PM Eastern time. UPDATE: It’s started, and it’s here.

AMA, in Reddit-speak, stands for Ask Me Anything. So I would encourage you to ask Mr. Farrell questions about anything he has said or written in the past that you find troubling, or even just confusing.

Here are some suggestions. Seriously, ask him any of these, as I’m not sure I’ll be able to be online when the whole thing goes down.

1) Mr Farrell, in your book The Myth of Male Power, you wrote that:

It is important that a woman’s “noes” be respected and that her “yeses” be respected. And it is also important when nonverbal “yeses” (tongues still touching) conflict with those verbal “noes” that the man not be put in jail for choosing the “yes” over the “no.” He might just be trying to become her fantasy.

Are you suggesting that if a woman clearly says no to sex, but does not stop kissing a man, that he is entitled to have sex with her anyway because she has given him a non-verbal “yes?” If not, what specifically do you mean? What sort of non-verbal “yes” would outweigh a clear verbal “no?” Why doesn’t her verbal no mean no?

Source: Myth of Male Power, page 315.

Screencap here: http://i.imgur.com/cwSoc.png

2) Mr. Farrell, regarding your research on incest in the 1970s, you told Penthouse magazine that:

“When I get my most glowing positive cases, 6 out of 200,” says Farrell, “the incest is part of the family’s open, sensual style of life, wherein sex is an outgrowth of warmth and affection. It is more likely that the father has good sex with his wife, and his wife is likely to know and approve — and in one or two cases to join in.”

Were you actually suggesting that there are “glowing, positive cases” of parent-child incest – that is, child sexual abuse?  How can child sexual abuse be “glowing” or “positive” for the child?

If this is not what you meant, what did you mean?

Penthouse also quotes you as saying that you were doing your research

“because millions of people who are now refraining from touching, holding, and genitally caressing their children, when that is really a part of a caring, loving expression, are repressing the sexuality of a lot of children and themselves. Maybe this needs repressing, and maybe it doesn’t.”

As I understand it, you’ve said you were misquoted and that you did not say “genitally,” and that what you actually said was “generally” or “gently.” But even with the word replaced, you are suggesting that parents are repressing their sexuality and their children’s sexuality if they don’t “caress” their children. What did you mean by this?

Sources:
Transcript of Penthouse article: http://nafcj.net/taboo1977farrell.htm

Scanned pages of original article from Penthouse: http://www.thelizlibrary.org/site-index/site-index-frame.html#soulhttp://www.thelizlibrary.org/fathers/farrell2.htm

3) Mr. Farrell, why did you choose a photograph of a nude woman’s ass for the cover of the new edition of The Myth of Male Power? Do you really think that male power is somehow negated by female sexuality?

4) Mr. Farrell, why have you chosen to associate yourself with the website A Voice for Men, a site that frequently refers to women as “cunts,” “bitches,” and “whores?” If you are not aware of this, would you disassociate yourself from the site if given clear proof of the site’s frequent misogynistic attacks on women?

If you’re looking for more ideas on questions to ask him, check out my posts on him in the archives.

These might be good to start with:

The Myth of Warren Farrell: Farrell on Rape, Part One

Warren Farrell’s notorious comments on date rape: Not any more defensible in context than out of it

What Men’s Rights guru Warren Farrell actually said about the allegedly positive aspects of incest.

MRA founding father Warren Farrell responds to questions about his incest research with evasive non-answers. And a smiley. (About his last AMA appearance.

Warren Farrell on Unemployment, Salesmanship, and Other Things That Are Like Rape, Supposedly

Also check out the excellent Farrell’s Follies series on Reddit.

And Fibinachi has a series on Farrell as well.

I couldn’t come up with a good graphic for this post, so here’s a giant chicken kidnapping a young boy.

Jakeface — not his real name — is a “Game” blogger, pushing 40, and living in Vietnam. Or visiting there? I haven’t read enough of his blog to be able to figure that out. Given that the name of his blog is “cedonulli,” which seems to be a pretentious reference to the Latin phrase “cedo nulli” ( “I yield to none”), I probably won’t be reading all that much more.

But I do know he likes Vietnam, because he’s the sort of guy who enjoys joking about having sex with “girls … so barely legal … it’s not even funny,” and in Vietnam, he says, he’s not the only one who thinks that 24-year old women are “old as fuck.”

Did I mention he’s pushing 40 himself?

Anyway, not long ago, Jakeface offered readers of his blog his deep thoughts on the subject of age, and why women over the age of 19 are already starting to look elderly to him. [Link is mildly NSFW]

He starts off by noting sadly that even in Vietnam, he still runs into Western women in their 30s who for some strange reason think they aren’t old hags.

even nice western girls are under the influence of western default cultural context.  so many ridiculously illogical retarded things leave their mouths, that you can’t help but praise the heavens that you found a cultural base that still has a concept of sustainable biological imperatives.

“i’m 35 now, i’ve got my education and my career, i’m ready to settle down and have babies.  why can’t i find a good man?”

it’s so hard to be jake, sometimes.

Jake apparently hasn’t found the shift key on his keyboard yet.

But he can’t blame these Western gals, he says, for being “indoctrinated by western culture,” and “so it would be unfair, short sighted, dumb to make fun of miss-35 for waiting till after the closing bell to place her bid.”

Well, just so long as Miss 35 doesn’t try to get her wrinkled claws into him:

when the same miss-35 makes some eyeballs your way though, and says “i think you’re attractive”, then things get a bit creepier.

Dude, if you’re going to write fiction, at least try to make the dialogue sound vaguely realistic.

Anyway, Jake informs us that this eyeball-making elderly lady of 35 with the world’s least creative pickup line is

like the homeless man wandering into the bentley dealer, making moves to go sit in the new continental gt. a clear case of a completely non-reality based self image.  a delusion, painful to those who may have to be part of a conflicting reality.  i totally get how 19 year old girls must feel, when the 65 year old liver-spotted shaking hands of the australian tourist reach for her thigh.

Yes, that’s right: when a 35-year-old woman hits on a man her age or even slightly older, she is like a 65-year-old man pawing the thighs of a 19-year-old girl.

That’s PUA math for you.

Actually, that’s the math that PUAs try to sell to their readers, and to themselves.

In reality the math that really counts for Western expats like Jakeface has to do with exploiting their relative wealth in countries where a sufficient number of women are poor enough that putting up with a PUA and his bullshit isn’t the worst option they have. In Vietnam, per capita income is a little over $1,100 (American). Per capita income in the US? About $43,000. That’s the real expat PUA math.

Anyway, Jakeface continues with his rant:

24 is super crazy, crazy old.  for a girl.

17. 19. past that, if we’re going to get all about babies, is pretty sketchy.

Yeah, he really said that. Does he even believe it? Who knows? The average age for first births in the United States is 26; in the UK, it’s 30. The risks of pregnancy and giving birth over the age of 35 have been greatly exaggerated, and the vast majority of babies born to women later in life are perfectly healthy. Even if he doesn’t know any women his age who’ve had children,you might think he would have noticed the small army of female celebrities in their forties who’ve been popping out babies without either them or the babies exploding.

But Jakeface isn’t basing his conclusions here on a close reading of the medical literature, or even People magazine. Nope, as he makes clear, his opinions are coming straight from his dick and his “barely legal” obsessed brain.

who cares about what which culture says about it.  that’s what my brain, freed from all the media propaganda, is finding attractive.  at 24, you can already start to imagine what she’ll look like in 10 years.  the outlines are set.  the fantasy of youth eternal is already shattered.

24 is old-holy-fuck-you’re-countess-dracula, tell me about how life was in the 16th century.

Again, Jakeface by his own admission is almost 40.

in vietnam, that sort of age awareness seems to be the consensus, still.  which makes vietnam ok in my book.  it makes me think about applying for vietnamese citizenship.  i want to be part of a culture that shares my innate values.  a 35 year old vietnamese woman wouldn’t go “heeeey, soooo, how about some babies?”  it’d be considered unfathomably rude, suggesting that my value wouldn’t allow me the choice of a 19 year old instead, that my fridge is only good for milk a solid week and a half past its expiration date.

Dude, you only have this “value” in countries where a good portion of the women don’t have good options. And you know it. That’s why you’re in a country with a per capita income that is literally 1/38^th that of the United States.

and this isn’t personal, as in if you read this and you’re a 35 year old woman, i’m not making fun.  i’m only talking about biological reality, and my own mating preferences.  which also, mating preferences of any man with the option, and in his right mind.

Really? George Clooney, formerly the world’s most eligible bachelor, just got engaged to a 36-year-old.

it could still happen.  jake might have some asian babies with a few 24 year old girls.  there are two current contenders, which i’m hoping to replace with some 17 year olds, before some heat-of-the-moment questionable decisions.

it’s hard to take a step back, when you’re in the pet shop, surrounded by puppies.

For the sake of all that is good in this world, dude, do not breed. Do not saddle some poor Vietnamese teenager with your spawn.

Somehow, we doubt that MRAs would appreciate this kind of “protection” for themselves and their fellow men.

One classic bad argument against feminism is the disingenuous claim that “we don’t need it any more.” In the bad old days, proponents of this argument would concede, women may have faced some pesky little obstacles, but now that they can vote, and own property, and briefly work as the executive editor of The New York Times, there’s just no need for feminism any more. Problem solved!

But these days the great minds of the Men’s Rights movement have moved beyond this bad argument to a worse one: feminism was never really necessary in the first place, because women have never been oppressed.

The other day a Redditor by the name of cefarix earned himself a couple of dozen upvotes by posting a version of this argument to the Men’s Rights Subreddit.

I often see feminists make the claim that women have been oppressed for thousands of years. What evidence is there to back up this claim?

Personally, I don’t think this could be the case. Men and women are both integral parts of human society, and the social bonds between close relatives of either gender are stronger than bonds with members of the same gender but unrelated. So it seems to me the idea that men would oppress their own close female relatives and women would just roll over and accept this oppression from their fathers, uncles, brothers, sons, etc, for thousands of years across all/most cultures across all of humanity – and not have that society disintegrate over the course of a couple generations – is ridiculous.

This is so packed with such sheer and obvious wrongness that it’s tempting to just point and laugh and move on. But I’ve seen variations on this argument presented seriously by assorted MRAs again and again so I think it’s worth dealing with in some detail.

Before we even get to the facts of the case, let’s deal with the form of his argument: He’s arguing that history cannot have happened the way feminists say it happened because he doesn’t think that could be the case.

Trouble is, you can’t simply decide what did or did not happen in history based on what makes sense to you. History is history. It’s not a thread on Reddit. You can’t downvote historical facts out of existence the way, say, Men’s Rights Redditors downvote those pointing out facts they don’t like.

Cefarix follows this with an assertion that’s become rather common amongst MRAs: men can’t have oppressed women because no man is going to oppress his wife or his daughter or his mother, and besides, they wouldn’t have put up with it and it wouldn’t have worked anyway.

It seems to me that if the core of your argument is the notion that men would never harm members of their own family then you’ve pretty much lost the argument before it’s even begun. Husbands batter wives, fathers abuse children, boyfriends rape their girlfriends, and so on and so on; all this is not only possible, but it happens quite regularly. And only quite recently, historically speaking, has any of this been regarded as a serious social problem worthy of public discussion.

And so the idea that men might “oppress their own close female relatives” is hardly beyond the pale.

Of course. history isn’t about what could have happened; it’s about what did happen. But the evidence that the oppression of women did happen — and is still happening — is everywhere. Indeed, it takes a certain willful blindness not to see it.

History, of course, is a complicated thing, and the ways in which women have been oppressed have been many and varied over the years. Nor, of course, has the oppression of women been the only form of oppression in history, which is not only, as Marx would have it, a story of “class warfare” but also of ethnic warfare, racial oppression, and many other forms of oppression, some of which are only now beginning to be fully understood.

So if cefarix is genuinely interested in evidence, let me make some suggestions for places to start.

For a history of patriarchy that looks in detail at how it developed, whose interests it served, and the various complicated ways it was intertwined with class and other oppressions, a good place to start would be Gerda Lerner’s classic The Creation of Patriarchy, and her followup volume The Creation of Feminist Consciousness. Here’s an interview in which she goes over some of the points she makes in these books.

To understand some of the hatred of women that has been baked into Western culture from the beginning, I’d suggest taking a look at Jack Holland’s highly readable Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice. Meanwhile, David D. Gilmore’s Misogyny: The Male Malady offers an anthropological take on the same subject.

Alas, after going through his commenting history, I’m not sure that cefarix will be open to changing his mind on any of this, given how wedded he seems to be to a number of other rather appalling opinions — like his contention that homosexuality is a “disease” and his belief that “the whole age of consent thing is a modern Western aberration from what is considered normal for our species.”

Of course, if you look at the discussion inspired by cefarix’ post on Reddit, you’ll see that most of the Men’s Rights Redditors posting there don’t seem much interested in looking at facts that challenge their beliefs either. Most of those dissenters who pointed out the various ways women have been oppressed throughout history found their comments downvoted and dismissed.

Consider this amazing exchange — and notice which of the two comments is the one with net downvotes.

That last bit, about men being “forced” into having power, is quite something. But I’m still stuck on the whole cat thing. I mean, I like cats and all, but cats are not people, and it really wouldn’t be appropriate for me to lock a woman in my apartment, feed her on the floor out of a can, and make her poop in a box, even though my cats seem quite content with this arrangement for themselves.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of the comments that won upvotes.

Someone named goodfoobar suggesting that men have always been the slaves of women, because women live longer:

And our old friend TyphonBlue. who turns not only history but logic itself on its head by arguing that men are “disenfranchised” by … having power over women.

Yep. The most badly oppressed creatures in history are the ones wearing crowns on their heads.

I’m really not quite sure how Typhon manages to avoid injuring herself with all of her twists of logic.

The alleged theamazingatheist’s allegedly false confession

You may have run across an image macro going around the internet recently featuring a picture of YouTube ranter and sometime Men’s Rights ally The Amazing Atheist – aka Terroja or TJ Kinkaid – and an appalling quote, supposedly from him, arguing that MRAs should campaign to lower the age of consent, because “[n]ature already has an age of consent. That age is approximately 12-13, otherwise known as the onset of puberty.”

I didn’t post about the quote, appalling as it is, because I couldn’t find any proof that Mr. Kincaid actually wrote or said it; I even searched several of Mr. Kincaid’s books and a document entitled “The Somewhat Complete Ravings of TJ Kincaid” to no avail. Apparently no one else has been able to find the quote either.

If this quote was fabricated, I’m a little puzzled as to why, because Kincaid has actually said very similar things before. Given the confusion about the quote, I thought it might be worth noting what we know he has said on the topic.

In a 2006 posting on a Marilyn Manson fan site, linked to in RationalWiki’s profile of him, a self-identified “atheist libertarian” calling himself Terroja argued that

Having pedophilic attractions doesn’t mean you automatically go out and start molesting kids. From the time I was 14 to the time I was about 19, I used to have extreme pedophilic fantasies, and I somehow managed to never even come close to acting on them. I think with my brain, not my penis.

I do think, however, the pedophilia is unfairly persecuted in today’s society.

I think the difference in punishment between child rapists and child molestors should be more significant, with molestors perhaps simply attending mandatory therapy for their first offense. I also think that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 12 or 13.

My stance is not designed to be controversial or to offend anyone. I only want human beings to understand that the law must work within the parameters of human nature, not in defiance of it.

In a recent posting on his blog, Kincaid admits that this indeed is something he once believed:

The age of consent thing is based on a post I made on an internet forum when I was like 20. And it was actually a pretty popular sentiment on the boards at that time. Hell, it was a popular sentiment on the internet in general at that time. It was also, I’m sad to say, an opinion that my father held.

After experiencing another decade on planet earth, I realize how horribly misguided that opinion was and is. I think that maybe it’s not so horrible for kids that age to begin sexual exploration with one another, but it’s definitely wrong for an adult to engage is sex with someone that young and inexperienced. 

The “everyone else was a pedophile in 2006” argument is not exactly a convincing one, and it’s worth noting that Kincaid “confessed” his attraction towards underage girls in his self-published 2007 book “Scumbag: Musings of a Subhuman” as well, writing that

I think 14-year-old girls are hot. (Yeah, so does everyone else, but I actually admit it)

That’s what pedophiles would like to believe, but it’s not actually true.

Also, in “The Somewhat Complete Ravings of TJ Kincaid,” which seems to be a compilation of writings from several of his books, we find the following passage:

Teenage girls are annoying because they go out into public dressed like sluts and then if you look at their massive titties there is a segment of our society that will happily declare you a pedophile for “oggling those poor children.” Children, my ass. Children don’t have D cups. Children don’t have big, luscious round asses crammed into designer jeans.

For what it’s worth, the word is “ogling,” not “oggling.”

Even more troubling than these quotes is the fact that Kincaid also claimed at one point that he “dated” a 14-year-old when he was 23.

In his recent posting, he insists that he was only joking:

As for this nonsense about me dating a 14-year-old when I was 23, I was actually mocking a friend of mine who was over 30 and was macking on some 16-year-old girl. The sad fact is that when I was 23, I was single and pussyless. And I was too timid and frightened to even approach a girl sexually, let alone one who could wind me up in prison.

I have no trouble believing that he was lying about having an underage girlfriend, but his explanation doesn’t seem to jibe with what he – or someone claiming to be him – said in the very strange (and not altogether safe for work) video that seems to be the source for what Kincaid calls this “rumor” about him.

Roughly 30 minutes into the video, which shows a live BlogTV session between YouTube personality thefakesagan and some guests in  an internet chatroom, we see someone identified as theamazingatheist declare flatly in the chat session that “as a 23-year-old I dated a 14-year-old briefly.”

When the expletive-spewing thefakesagan asks him what it was that led him to stop “dating” the 14-year-old so quickly, theamazingatheist replies “fear of her dad murdering me,” adding in a followup comment that “he was a Marine, actually.”

When the host, burping and fiddling with a bass guitar, asks theamazingatheist if he actually felt “an emotional bond with this 14-year-old bitch,” themazingatheist replies “I felt an emotional bond with her pussy.”

“Sorry,” he types a few moments later, “I’m a sociopath, useless in the ways of love.”

The host then spends a few moments fumbling with his instrument, trying ineptly to work out the bassline to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” “You better run, you better do what you’re told,” he sings, “TJ’s in the back room fucking a 14-year-old.”

The conversation moves on, and I think I will too.

But now that I’ve gotten hold of some of TJ’s masterworks, I think I’ll have to see what else is hiding within them. I suspect I’ll be posting about that shortly.

A young Richard Dawkins contemplates the beauty of the universe.

Apparently Richard Dawkins was worried that people might have forgotten what an asshat he is. So, helpful fellow that he is, he decided to give us all a demonstration of why he’s one of the atheist movement’s biggest liabilities, a “humanist” who has trouble remembering to act human.

Earlier today Dawkins decided, for some reason, that he needed to remind the people of the world of a fairly basic point of logic, and so he took to Twitter and thumbed out this little thought:

However petulantly phrased this is, the basic logic is sound: If I say that Hitler was worse than Stalin, I’m not endorsing either Hitler or Stalin. Unless I add “and Stalin was totally awesome and I endorse him” at the end.

The trouble is that Dawkins didn’t stop with this one tweet. He decided to illustrate his point with some examples. Some really terrible examples.

Yep, that’s right. He decided to do what comedians call a “callback” to some terrible comments he made last year about what he perversely described as “mild pedophilia.” And then he added asshattery to asshattery by suggesting a similar distinction between “date rape” and “stranger rape.”

Anyone seeing these comments as insensitive twaddle designed to minimize both “mild” pedophilia and date rape has good reason to do so. As you may recall, in the earlier controversy about so-called “mild” pedophilia, Dawkins told an interviewer for the Times magazine that

I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.

He went on to tell the interviewer that when he was a child one of his school masters had “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.” But, he added, he didn’t think that this sort of “mild touching up” had done him, or any of the classmates also victimized by the teacher, any “lasting harm.”

Huh. If Dawkins says that a teacher groping him was no big deal, I guess this kind of “mild” abuse shouldn’t be a big deal for anyone else, either, huh?

I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of logical fallacy here.

Given his history of minimizing these “mild” sexual crimes, it’s not a surprise that his crass tweets today inspired a bit of a twitterstorm.

Dawkins has responded with his typical petulance, and has stubbornly defended his comments as an exercise in pure logic that his critics are too irrational to understand.

What I have learned today is that there are people on Twitter who think in absolutist terms, to an extent I wouldn't have believed possible.—
Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 29, 2014

.@mikester8821 Yes, it is so obvious it is painful. But they aren't debating, they are emoting.—
Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 29, 2014

If you take a few moments to go through his timeline you’ll find many more tweets and retweets reiterating this “argument.” Dawkins is not the sort of person to admit to mistakes. Indeed, he so regularly puts his foot in his mouth it’s hard not to conclude that he must like the taste of shoe leather.

But these recurring controversies can’t be doing much for his reputation. Indeed, they seem to cause more and more people to wonder why anyone takes Dawkins seriously on any subject other than biology. Even his critics on Twitter are growing a bit weary.

/reset counter.

This site has operated for [0] days without Richard Dawkins saying something witless.—
Mike Booth (@somegreybloke) July 29, 2014

I love how whenever Richard Dawkins puts his foot in his mouth, he tries to get it out by inserting the other one.—
Mark Leggett (@markleggett) July 29, 2014

Dick Dawkins should provide a table for women on how bad to feel after rape. You knew him? 1 point. Stranger? 2 points. Would be so helpful.—
ròsachd (@endorathewitch) July 29, 2014

Good lord. Look at Dawkins feed. Like every third tweet (or sequence) is something deplorable.—
Natalie Reed (@nataliereed84) July 29, 2014

It seems that no matter what point Richard Dawkins tries to make, he only ever ends up proving that Richard Dawkins is a tosspot.—
Steph Dickinson (@EccentricSteph) July 29, 2014

Seems like it. I’m beginning to wonder why any atheists — at least those who are not also asshats — continue to think of Dawkins as an ally of any kind.

Click my kitty to see the smash hit new blog!

So much bullshit.

Janet Bloomfield’s antifeminist smear campaign continues apace. Yesterday I wrote about her disgraceful attack on feminist writer Jessica Valenti, in which Bloomfield made up offensive statements and attributed them to Valenti in a malicious attempt to malign her reputation. Bloomfield, the “social media director” for A Voice for Men, then went on to boast about this on her blog.

Now she has decided to libel me as well, declaring on Twitter

So @davidfutrelle thinks 12 yr olds can choose prostitution? Interesting… unz.org/Pub/InTheseTim…—
JanetBloomfield (@JudgyBitch1) August 04, 2014

She followed this up with a post on her blog full of outright lies and weird insinuations.  Her allies at A Voice for Men jumped on board the defamation train, with Paul Elam devoting at least part of one of his “radio” shows to the topic “Is David Futrelle a Perv Apologist?”

This morning, the AVFM Twitter crew was out in force peddling this bullshit, with “operations manager” Dean Esmay leading the charge in his typically addled way.

Ironically, the AVFM crowd is cribbing their attacks on me from a REAL pedophile apologist who blogs under the name theantifeminist. Indeed, Elam, Bloomfield and AVFM ally Angry Harry all linked to theantifeminist on Twitter this morning to back up their assorted smears.

The supposed case against me is based on two articles I wrote nearly twenty years ago for the magazine In These Times.

The attack on me is absurd on its face, but I think it’s worth addressing if only to show the depths of their dishonesty, and just how desperate they are to smear me.

The first article, which I wrote with my sister in August of 1994, was a brief and mostly descriptive report on a censorship controversy in Cincinnati involving Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial but celebrated film Salo.

My sister and I noted that the film, “a loose, allegorical adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s novel 120 Days of Sodom,” contained “explicit scenes of sexual torture and mutilation.” We also pointed out that it was regarded by many critics as a great work of art, and noted that many First Amendment experts thought that this would make the case difficult for prosecutors to win.

As it turns out, they were right about this: the prosecutors lost. Today, the film is available in a Criterion Collection edition; you can rent it from Netflix, if you so desire.

My sister and I focused only on the controversy in our piece, offering no opinion on the film itself; indeed, I’ve never even seen it.

And that was it.

Apparently, in the eyes of Elam and his pal theantifeminist, the fact that I even wrote about the controversy renders me, as Elam insinuates, a “perv apologist” if not some sort of “perv” myself.

Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, complete fucking bullshit, as Elam, at least, well knows. Elam once talked about his fondness for the film Air Force One, which involves the hijacking of, well, Air Force One, and the killing of at least one hostage that I can remember. President Harrison Ford also gets shot at a lotm and punched, and nearly thrown out of the plane. Should we conclude that Elam is an apologist for airline hijackings, attempted presidential assassinations, and murder?

The second “argument” against me is based on a tendentious misrepresentation of a review essay I wrote in 1995 dealing with two books on Victorian sexuality, which theantifeminist has tried to portray as a defense of child prostitution, even though I made absolutely no mention of that topic in the review. Not one word.

The supposed proof of this bizarre accusation? The fact that the word “girl” appears twice in my review.

The first instance comes in a quote from a Victorian anti-prostitution campaigner who was upset that “one of the girls” she had attempted to rescue from a life of prostitution told her that she planned to return to that life.

But it’s clear that this “girl” is an adult woman, not a child; as I made clear earlier in that very paragraph, the “purity” campaigns I was talking about were aimed at “working-class women” who had turned to prostitution.

The second use of the word “girl” comes in a sentence in which I refer to the tendency of reformers to fall “back on coercive strategies to control the sexual behavior of young girls.”

Why anyone would interpret this as a reference to child prostitution, much less an apologia for it, I can’t say. In fact, I was making reference to the desire of reformers to control the sexuality of so-called “incorrigible” working-class girls, presumably mostly teenagers.

If for some reason you don’t believe this, I suggest you turn to page 115 of the hardback edition of Banishing the Beast, by Lucy Bland, the book I was reviewing. Bland makes a clear distinction between these “incorrigible” girls and prostitutes, quoting fellow historian Judith Walkowitz, who noted that the reformers approached “incorrigible” girls with the same patronizing mindset they had brought into their work with “unrepentant prostitutes,” and that in the case of the “incorrigible” girls the reformers were often less interested in protecting them than in “control[ling] their voluntary sexual impulses.”

You could say the same of the proponents of abstinence-only sex ed today.

To Bloomfield and Elam, I say, if you want to go after a real apologist for child prostitution, go after Tom Martin, who is probably the most famous MRA in the UK, and who also happens to be the guy who’s been peddling the antifeminist’s shit around on Twitter.

I know you’ve seen his Tweets, because that’s where you got all this bullshit from.

Here are some recent highlights from his Twitter stream. I’m pretty sure Bloomfield has seen these Tweets, as she’s referenced in every single one of them. But if you haven’t, this should be a treat for you all.

@Jacqueline0267 @tiredriotdude @JudgyBitch1 @DavidFutrelle @JessicaValent A 10 year old whore targeting the pedo tourist strip is no victim.—
Tom Martin (@Sexismbusters) August 05, 2014

@Snullvit @JudgyBitch1 When you were 10, did you know how to consent? I did, some don't, but child whores are precocious hustlers, so do.—
Tom Martin (@Sexismbusters) August 05, 2014

@tiredriotdude @JudgyBitch1 @DavidFutrelle @JessicaValenti 10 is age of criminal responsibility in UK, hence 10 year old hooker responsible.—
Tom Martin (@Sexismbusters) August 04, 2014

@tiredriotdude @JudgyBitch1 @DavidFutrelle @JessicaValenti further, lots of child prostitutes say that they are the victimisers.—
Tom Martin (@Sexismbusters) August 04, 2014

@tiredriotdude @Jacqueline0267 @JudgyBitch1 @DavidFutrelle @jessicavalent from what I've read, children do enter prostitution voluntarily.—
Tom Martin (@Sexismbusters) August 05, 2014

Bloomfield and Elam should be renouncing, and denouncing, this guy. Instead, they’re using him as their source.

Of course, Bloomfield and Martin have a good deal more in common than she would perhaps like to admit: In the midst of the Jimmy Savile pedophilia scandal in the UK last year, she wrote a blog post blaming … the underage girls who’d been molested by Savile and others.

[B]asically, the girls were groupies. They wanted all the benefits of hanging out with a big star and they understood it came with a price and they paid it, perhaps reluctantly, but with full knowledge that the trips to London and the fags and the sweet weren’t free.

Why should they be? …

And now they are claiming the MEN abused THEM? Looks to me like it was the other way around.

Sounds a lot like Tom Martin, doesn’t it? Janet Bloomfield, eat your own words.

Scumbag Reddit strikes again.

If you’re a straight guy looking for “fapping” material, the internet is your friend. It’s awash in freely available pictures of naked women of every size, shape, color, age, or hairstyle you prefer. And if you want more than pictures, the internet is happy to oblige, offering up videos featuring women of every description engaging in every sex act you can imagine, and then some.

You might think this would be enough.

But for some straight dudes, it evidently isn’t. They don’t just want to look at the mind-bogglingly enormous selection of women out there who have agreed to pose naked, or even perform explicit sex acts, on camera.

No, they also want to look at women who haven’t agreed to have their nude photos put on the internet. Hence the popularity of “ex-girlfriend” or “revenge porn” sites, filled with pictures that are (or at least purport to be) of ex-girlfriends who never wanted the pictures they shared with their then-boyfriends posted for the world to see.

Hence the popularity of “leaked” celebrity nudes.

The latest celebrity nudes scandal revolves around a gigantic collection of personal pictures stolen from the supposedly secure online accounts of an assortment of female celebs (and a couple of guys).

The most famous of the celebs in this current batch are Jennifer Lawrence – Jlaw – and Kate Upton; there are many others, including alleged pics of comedian Aubrey Plaza and gymnast McKayla Maroney, which internet “detectives” are scurrying to prove are real. Maroney is only 18; if the alleged pics of her are real, and weren’t taken very recently, they’re arguably child porn.

The pics were first released by an anon on internet cesspool 4chan, and they have found a welcome home on the slightly more respectable internet cesspool Reddit, where they have been posted and reposted, sometimes retouched and color-corrected, and celebrated with enthusiasm by hundreds of thousands of Redditors.

Indeed, the leaks have inspired a new subreddit, TheFappening, which has managed to gain 100,000 subscribers in a day. Evidently Reddit’s admins have no problem with a subreddit distributing stolen celebrity pics, including some that may well be child porn.

Naturally, Reddit being Reddit, some of new members of TheFappening are trying to distract from their odiousness by suggesting that those downloading Jlaw’s stolen pics also … donate to a charity fighting prostate cancer. Either that or start up their own prostate cancer fund – to make sure they get credit for their donations.

Sorry, guys, that doesn’t make what you’ve done ok. And if you’re truly concerned about prostate cancer, why on earth did you wait until you needed some good PR to launch a fundraising effort?

Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, meanwhile, one concerned fellow attempts to stand up for the hidden victims in the scandal: men. No, really.

Even some of the commenters feel obliged to point out that, er, the hacker almost certainly is a dude —  not just because the leak originated at 4chan, or because the overwhelming majority of the pics are of women, but also because, you know, women can’t STEM.

The strangest reaction to the scandal from an MRA that I’ve run across so far comes from the new Twitter account of A Voice for Men’s PR gal Janet Bloomfied (the one she created, in violation of Twitter’s rules, to get around her recent ban). After mocking celebs for taking private selfies or posing for their partners, Bloomfield posted a topless, headless picture of, presumably, herself, commenting “Is this me? Maybe. I text nothing I don’t want shared. #DontBeDumb.”

Apparently Bloomfield doesn’t quite understand the difference between posting nude photos of yourself and posting pictures of other people that have been obtained and posted without their consent. This isn’t particularly surprising, as MRAs in general seem to have trouble understanding the finer points (and the blindingly obvious points) of consent.

The enthusiasm with which so many male Redditors – and skeezy dudes in general – have greeted this latest leak of celebrity pics makes one wonder if it is not the celebrity of the women in question that is the draw but the lack of consent. After all, there are plenty of other celebrity nudes out there that the celebrities in question consented to have taken and published.

For a lot of those downloading and/or posting the pics of JLaw and Kate Upton and the rest, I suspect the real thrill comes not from seeing the nude bodies of these particular celebs – which, after all, are pretty similar to the nude bodies of porn actresses that can be found everywhere online – but from the violation of privacy that these pictures represent.

There is a real sadism here, driven in part, I suspect, by resentment that many female celebrities don’t agree to appear nude in their movies or to pose nude or topless for magazines. Sharing these stolen nudes is a way to punish JLaw and other female celebs who have so far refused to share every inch of their bodies with their male, er, fans.

It’s a toxic stew of entitlement, resentment, and misogyny. And no amount of donations to prostate cancer research will make up for it.

The Sam Pepper situation just gets uglier and uglier. As YouTube sex educator Laci Green explains in the video above, Pepper, under fire for “prank” videos on YouTube that appear to show him sexually harassing numerous young women, is now facing serious accusations of sexual misconduct from numerous women – including, in one case, violent rape.

For those who haven’t been following the story as it’s developed over the past week: Sam Pepper is a former Big Brother UK cast member and YouTube personality best known for a series of unfunny “prank” videos which have often featured him sexually harassing women in various creepy ways.

Earlier this week, Pepper posted a video titled “Fake Hand Ass Pinch Prank,” that featured him grabbing the asses of various women he encountered on the street with his real hand – the fake hand (arm, actually) was a bit of a misdirect to make it look as though it wasn’t really him doing the pinching.

This apparently was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. After a groundswell of complaints about the blatant sexual harassment in the video, YouTube took it down.

Pepper responded with a second video, in which a woman went around pinching men’s asses, and then a third, in which he claimed, bizarrely, that the whole thing had been staged with actors in an attempt to bring public attention to the issue of … sexual harassment against men.

This claim reeks of bullshit. Over the course of his less-than-illustrious career Pepper has put forth numerous videos that feature similar sexual harassment of women — oh, sorry, “pranks.” If you go through his YouTube uploads, you’ll find videos in which he literally handcuffs himself to unsuspecting and clearly uncomfortable women, promising to release them if they kiss him. In other videos he forces kisses on other unsuspecting women; in yet another he and an accomplice literally lasso women and claim them for their own.

Are all these videos fake, too? Are they all part of his grand plan to bring light to sexual harassment against … men?

Or are they what they appear to be, videos in which Pepper harasses women and calls it pranking?

And is his big “reveal” video a sincere attempt to bring attention to sexual harassment of men?

Or is it a desperate attempt to spin his way out of a scandal of his own making and rescue his sleazy but extremely lucrative YouTube career, which is now in danger of imploding?

The answers to these questions seem pretty obvious to me.

And now, as Laci Green points out in the video above, women are coming forward to tell of their own (alleged) encounters with Pepper. Their stories paint a picture of Pepper as an overentitled sexual predator who uses his internet fame – he’s got 2.4 million YouTube followers – as a tool to exploit and abuse young women – and teenage girls.

Below, I’ve posted a video from the woman who says Pepper raped her. It’s harrowing to watch — and a big TRIGGER WARNING for graphic description of the alleged rape. She has also provided a written account here, including screenshots of texts she allegedly exchanged with Pepper.

I say “alleged” because the case has not been proven in court. But I believe her.

You can find another video from an accuser here. Laci Green’s Open Letter to Pepper — written before the latest round of accusations — is here. Green has been getting threatening emails that seem to be coming from Pepper himself; Pepper, on Twitter, claims that his email address is being “spoofed” and that the threats aren’t coming from him.  Buzzfeed, meanwhile, reports that Pepper is also being accused of soliciting nude photos from an underage girl. Another girl claims that Pepper sexually assaulted her when she was 15.

Follow Green on Twitter for updates as this develops. I suspect this is going to get even uglier still.