White knighting a big mouth

It is amazing the lengths that some men will go to prevent a woman from being held accountable for her nonsensical words. First, we have Miss Rousey's characteristically silly assertion of her own martial capabilities:

UFC women’s bantamweight champion and all-around American badass Ronda Rousey said on ESPN’s Sportscenter Thursday that she believes she could beat “100 percent” of the UFC male fighters in her weight class.

“UFC announcer Joe Rogan has stated that he thinks you might be able to beat 50 percent of UFC male bantamweight fighters,” Sportscenter anchor Matt Barrie said. “So now this debate has started. Ronda, what do you think of about Rogan’s comment?”

"I never say that I'm incapable of beating anybody, because I don't believe in putting limits on myself," Rousey replied. "So I mean, I would have to say if you're just talking about what's in the realm of possibility of what's possible of who I could beat, well, I could beat 100 percent of them.

And then we have white knight Kevin Iole riding to her rescue lest anyone take the little woman's words at face value:

At one point before her fight with Zingano, UFC president Dana White joked he might have to make Rousey fight men if she beat Zingano easily. Again, White wasn't suggesting that was his plan. He was simply pointing out how dominant she'd been.

But that didn't stop UFC flyweight contender Ian McCall from speaking out about it. McCall took Rogan's comments completely seriously and said that Rousey wouldn't defeat a good male mixed martial arts fighter. He went on to say he'd throw Rousey, a bronze medalist in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

A good man will not lose to Ronda Rousey. I could put a judo gi on, [she's] an Olympian. You're not throwing me. It's not going to happen. I will throw you on your head. Pretty simple. And you weigh more than me. I can't compartmentalize it. It doesn't make sense to me. I know it's all talk. They compare her to [former heavyweight boxer Mike] Tyson. She's dangerous, she's good. I get it, but it's just silly. 

McCall completely missed the point and made himself look incredibly small in the process. Rousey is enormously popular and is growing the fan base. People like to witness greatness and what Rousey is doing is not only great for herself, but for all of her peers, male and female.

McCall's words are incredibly demeaning to one of the greatest female athletes in the world.

No, McCall's words are straightforward and correct, as Rousey's own mother would agree. The only one whose words are actually "incredibly demeaning" are Sir Iole's, since he made Ronda Rousey look not only small, but infantile. The good white knight is not willing to let the little lady speak for herself, or be spoken back to by others. Miss Rousey's mother, a former world judo champion, is considerably more lucid than either Joe Rogan or her daughter, as she pointed out.

"That's a stupid idea," De Mars said. "Seriously, that's a stupid idea. I'm as much a feminist as anyone but the fact is that biologically, there's a difference between men and women. Hello. Duh. A woman who is 135 pounds and a man who is 135 pounds are not physically equal."

Rousey is a good fighter. No question. She deserves respect for that. But she is a tiny little thing that any normal-sized man could beat as easily as she beats most of her competitors, and she shouldn't be encouraged to shoot her mouth of in this regard. I only go around 195 and I can CURL her weight five times. And there are much bigger and stronger men who do could do single-hand shoulder presses with her.

It's fine to exaggerate and engage in hyperbole, especially in a sport that thrives on that sort of marketing, but then don't turn around and throw hissy fits when someone deigns to take your claims seriously.

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Rage, rage against the dying of male interest

A formerly gorgeousish woman complains that men aren't interested in her belated, but no doubt fascinating personal developments:

“I bet you were gorgeous when you were young,” I was told recently, via message, like that was supposed to be a compliment. Yes, I was gorgeous, ish, for a while, and self-absorbed, and shallow, and inexperienced, and over-sensitive and dull. You’re right, mate, you’d have much preferred me then.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. What does it mean to us, as women, to be told that we’re worth less than we used to be? No man I know has ever been told that his powers, his allure, his charm have faded, and that he has to face up to that redundancy. Many women I know in their 50s talk about their invisibility in public places. I’m sure a case could be made for invisibility as a liberating force in a woman’s life, but I am not the woman to make it, not this week at least, when I’ve been dissed or else flatly ignored by all the men I’ve said hello to.

It’s making me a bit rebellious, I admit. It’s making me want to look 50, and talk about 50, and stand firm with a whole movement of women, rejecting the pressure to try to look 35 for ever, throwing away our foundation garments and hair dye. I get these impulses and then I buy another stupid snake-oil anti-ageing cream.

It’s true that men don’t see me any more. It’s sobering to walk down the street observing how the 50-year-old men behave, paying attention to what they’re looking at as they stroll along. They are not looking in shop windows. They are not looking at me. They are looking at women half their age.

I just think it's funny that she genuinely appears to believe she isn't still self-absorbed, and shallow, and over-sensitive, and dull. Basically, she's no longer attractive, but she is experienced. And she wonders why men don't look at her?

This is just another exhibit of Steve Sailer's Law of Female Journalism: "The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that the journalist herself be considered hotter."

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Off the deep end

Feminism continues to roll towards its inevitable end as farce. It's now actually too insane for NPR and The Nation:

Last year, I found myself listening to an episode of NPR’s “Tell Me More,” where an assembled group of activists and writers discussed whether the Internet was ruining feminism. The discussion was occasioned by an article in The Nation, “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars,” by Michelle Goldberg. Goldberg’s credentials as a left-leaning feminist weren’t previously in dispute, so the article’s thesis was genuinely shocking: With easy anonymity and the near instantaneous ability to whip up social media mobs, the Internet was pushing feminists to insufferable levels of stridency and infighting. When The Nation, a magazine that for most of its storied history has regarded Communism an unalloyed force for good, denigrates the current state of feminism as “Maoist hazing,” we are truly through the looking glass.

As a measure of how insane things have gotten, the NPR panel discussed one of the article’s more telling anecdotes. Actress Martha Plimpton, star of the Fox sitcom “Raising Hope,” fancies herself such a serious feminist, insofar as serious feminist means incorporating a performance of Lennon and Oko’s “Woman is the N–ger of the World” into her one-woman show at the Lincoln Center. Plimpton is also co-founder of an abortion-rights charity, “A Is For,” which had the misfortune of titling a recent fundraiser “A Night of a Thousand Vaginas.”
Forget for a moment the dumbfounding irony of casting aspersions on a ‘reproductive justice’ fundraiser because it’s ‘exclusionary and harmful’ to deny anyone the womanly joys of terminating the life of an unborn child.

For this thoughtcrime, Plimpton immediately came under attack online and boycotts were threatened because the event wasn’t inclusive enough because of “constant genital policing” that offends transsexual men.

This should serve as a warning to all equalitarians. Insist on believing that 2+2=5, and it won't be long before you start rolling your eyes and shrieking about how anyone who denies that the correct answer to 37 divided by 126 is purple and is guilty of microaggressive rape.

You may not see how it does anyone any harm to pretend that everyone is equal when you know they're not, but that's just the first step to madness. And sometimes, all it takes is a single step to go off the deep end and into the depths.

Bonus points: see if you can identify the socio-sexual rank of the author, on the basis of this quote:

"Look, maybe this is me waving my male privilege all over the place, but there’s only one word for a woman who can simultaneously defend feminine virtue, upset the patriarchy, and clean out the Augean stables of third-wave feminism with a single d–k joke: Hawt. (Don’t worry, Flanagan need not worry about my intentions. It turns out I’m already married to a very attractive female journalist with balls bigger than mine. I guess I have a type?)"

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Feminist programming

The juxtaposition of equalitarians trying to reprogram impressionable little minds while watching elite male athletes perform actions that are entirely beyond female capacities would be hilarious if it weren't for the poor gamma males who will soak it up.

This kid will probably be fine, because once he starts crushing his older, athletic sister due to his physical superiority, he'll break through the programming. The problem is the fat little couch potatoes, who will never engage in activity that would expose the lie for what it is.

I ran NCAA Division One track and field. I know the full extent of female athletic capability. I've stretched with them, run with them, lifted with them, and been on my hands and knees vomiting next to them. (Speed days were so brutal that we used to pick a color-of-the-day for lunch because we knew we'd be seeing it again that afternoon.) And while they are impressive, even elite women simply can't run, jump, or throw with the men. They simply can't. They're not designed for it.

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Nightmare at Central Perk

And the menace of Chandler Bing. It's no wonder the Social Justice Warriors are always so on edge. For them, the clock is always ticking on when their attitudes and actions will abruptly transform from heroic to villainesque:

Chandler, identified in Season 1 as having a “quality” of gayness about him, is endlessly paranoid about being perceived as insufficiently masculine. He’s freaked out by hugs, and by Joey having a pink pillow on his couch. (“If you let this go, you’re going to be sitting around with your fingers soaking in stuff!”)

In retrospect, the entire show’s treatment of LGBTQ issues is awful, a fault pointedly illustrated by the exhaustive clip-compilation “Homophobic Friends.” But Chandler’s treatment of his gay father, a Vegas drag queen played by Kathleen Turner, is especially appalling, and it’s not clear the show knows it. It’s one thing for Chandler to recall being embarrassed as a kid, but he is actively resentful and mocking of his loving, involved father right up until his own wedding (to which his father is initially not invited!). Even a line like “Hi, Dad” is delivered with vicious sarcasm. Monica eventually cajoles him into a grudging reconciliation, which the show treats as an acceptably warm conclusion. But his continuing discomfort now reads as jarringly out-of-place for a supposedly hip New York thirtysomething—let alone a supposedly good person, period.

When it comes to women, Chandler turns out to be just as retrograde as Joey, but his lust comes with an undercurrent of the kind of bitter desperation that I now recognize as not only gross, but potentially menacing.

Yes, I know that when I am in the mood for a scary horror movie, my first thought is to dial up an episode of Friends. It's somehow appropriate that Chandler Bing, of all people, should turn out to be the Freddy Krueger for the Millennial generation.

The best that one can say of these people is that they are differently sane.

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Banning breasts

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16, Pregnant, and Doomed

An observer shares an observation:

The other day some 16 and Pregnant show followup was on for about 15 minutes while I was finishing something in that room and it was two things: 1. Literally a case study in Game. Each girl had gotten pregnant by an Alpha, and then each one had a Gamma who was their friend and they really didn't like but it was the best they could do, but they didn't sleep with them. 2. A study in the future of America as the girl's "families" were all women helping them (mom's, aunts, etc.) No men around except Gammas, I didn't even see a single Delta.

Given the increase in single motherhood across all demographic lines, this is a much scarier trend than even FED fiscal policy to me. A country with strong families can bounce back from most anything, but a country run by single momss, checked-out deltas, and alphas having an easier time than in the last 200 years is a total disaster waiting to happen.

The bigger problem than the small number of individuals featured is the way that this is being marketed to an entire generation. The number of pregnant teenagers is actually on the decline; one can no more trust the media's portrayal of society in this regard than in the apparent fact that all American couples now consist of attractive, slender white women married to faithful, considerate black men with college degrees.

But if it is not a worrisome indication of what society is, it is a troubling indication of what the media wants society to become.

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PJ O'Rourke on the Dunham Horror

PJ watches Girls so you don't have to:

Ms. Dunham is 28. I was under the impression that “girls” is a demeaning term for adult women. The title must have something to do with this hipster “Irony” thing, which I confess I don’t understand. The root of the word irony is in the Greek eironeia, “liar.”

I had my 14-year-old daughter, Poppet, instruct me in how to watch an episode of Girls on my computer. (Turns out “content” is not completely “free.”)

Two seconds into the opening credits I was trying to get my daughter out of the room by any means possible. “Poppet! Look in the yard! The puppy’s on fire! Quick! Quick! Run outside and roll him in the snow!”

It turns out Girls is a serialized horror movie—more gruesome, frightening, grim, dark, and disturbing than anything that’s ever occurred to Stephen King.

I have two daughters, Poppet and her 17-year-old sister Muffin. “Girls” is about young people who are only a few years older than my daughters. These young people, portrayed as being representative of typical young people, reside in a dumpy, grubby, woeful part of New York called Brooklyn, where Ms. Dunham should put her clothes back on.

I lived in New York for fifteen years. No one had been to Brooklyn since the Dodgers left in 1957.

The young people in Girls are miserable, peevish, depressed, hate their bodies, themselves, their life, and each other. They occupy apartments with the size and charm of the janitor’s closet, shared by The Abominable Roommate. They dress in clothing from the flophouse lost-and-found and are groomed with a hacksaw and gravel rake. They are tattooed all over with things that don’t even look like things the way a anchor or a mermaid or a heart inscribed “Mom” does, and they’re only a few years older than my daughters.

The characters in Girls take drugs. They “hook up” in a manner that makes the casual sex of the 1960s seem like an arranged marriage in Oman. And they drink and they vomit and they drink and they vomit and they drink and they vomit.

It’s every parent’s nightmare.

Correction: it's the nightmare of every father who actually gives a damn about his daughter. The Dunham Horror's parents obviously couldn't have cared less about her.

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The fake rape factory

UVA appears to be ground zero for fake rape:

In an April 29, 2014 essay for the Huffington Post, Emily Renda writes that her story (of her own supposed rape during her freshman year) is “ordinary, normal, average, not unusual and practically commonplace” – all that in just the first paragraph; if Renda is to be believed then, getting raped at U.Va. (or perhaps at any institution of “higher learning”) is hardly different in occurrence or frequency than getting a morning cup of coffee.

Just about the entire rest of her post talks about the importance of fellow victims and their caregivers/advocates hugging it out, giving comfort and burning candles, except where she nonchalantly mentions how all this extraordinary support from others allowed her to feel safe again, “so that it didn’t matter that I saw my assailant on Grounds”.

Though Renda’s claims of the ubiquity of rape seem a bit exaggerated, her credibility doesn’t really begin to come into question until one considers her Huffington piece in its entirety, and then comes across some of her other claims, found elsewhere.

Let's face it, at this point it is obvious that claims of rape in college are nothing more than female attention-seeking. The majority of real college rapes are those that no college wants to admit, which is those involving black scholarship athletes.

And it's no wonder that there are so many of these fake rape stories:

“Do you ever kind of really want to expose a situation or topic and then kind of like shop around for a more concrete story that would be better for you to write?” a student asked.

“Yes, I absolutely do. I’m working on one right now where that’s the case,” Erdley replied. “That’s something I’ve done a lot when I’ve written for women’s magazines where I’ve written a lot about women’s health and women’s rights.”

It's not news or investigative reporting. It's pure fictional propaganda.

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The UVA rape hoax

People are beginning to question the narrative:

Journalists who contemplate such matters are now wondering whether the incredible Rolling Stone story about the gang rape of a University of Virginia student is just that: not credible.

Last week, I wrote that the breathtaking story was an indictment of the university's feeble attempts to address the so-called campus sexual assault crisis. For me, the lesson is clear: Rape is a serious crime, not an academic infraction. The police—and only the police—are equipped to deal with it. "The best way to confront campus rape is to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves and make violent crime the business of the normal criminal justice system," I wrote.

I didn't question the incident itself, because my point stands regardless. Making universities investigate and adjudicate rape—something that both federal and state governments are pushing—is the wrong approach, and what happened at UVA is just one example of why that's the case.

Unless, of course, it didn't happen. Then it would be an example of something else, entirely.

I can tell you right now that it is a hoax, it never happened, and no one is going to end up being charged with a crime over this unless it is the woman who falsely cried rape. One of the advantages of being an fiction editor is that you see a wide range of fiction, from the very good to the very bad. And most people write very bad fiction, the chief hallmark of which is that it is heavily reliant upon things they have seen on television or in the movies.

It's something you can usually recognize too, when they write people saying things in precisely the same way you see the dialogue on a TV show. It rings false, because no one actually talks like that. Even in the brief description provided in the excerpt from the Rolling Stone article, it is readily apparent that the dialogue being reported is fake, and not only fake, but incompetently faked.

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The systematic demolition of a feminist

In which Nero fact-rapes Anita Sarkeesian, then metaphorically eviscerates her, puts her intestines through a woodchopper, pours gasoline over her corpse, and sets it on fire:

Feminists say they want to help women, but it's always someone else—in the gaming world, usually a man—who gets their wallet out to do it.

In reality, it's not women that some gamers have a problem with: it's people like Sarkeesian and McIntosh. They have claimed hatred of them and people like them is tantamount to hatred of women. But it isn't. People don't hate Anita Sarkeesian because she's a woman: they hate her because they see her as a disingenuous, divisive, sociopathic opportunist.

Prominent feminists and feminist journalists have offered compelling critiques of Sarkeesian's work. Much of what is erroneously characterised as "abuse" is in fact merely robust criticism of Sarkeesian's ideas—ideas she refuses to debate. Sarkeesian, uniquely in the sphere of public intellectuals, refuses to subject her pontifications to critique. She censors comments not because they are insulting or distasteful but because they reveal structural weaknesses in her arguments. This is not the manner of an academic, aspirant or otherwise, worth listening to.

It is in this respect that her professorial aspirations, and those of her writer and producer, reach dizzying heights of absurdity, beyond even those of her laugh-a-minute Master's thesis. Universities are places of learning and debate, but Sarkeesian is a broadcaster, not an interlocutor. So radically anxious is she about the substance of her arguments and so vulnerable is she to accusations of sensational cherry-picking, she has not accepted a single invitation to debate her theories.

Note: Nero has not actually committed any violence against the woman, it's just that after reading the entire piece in its ruthless entirety, it rather feels like he has.

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Dr. Helen hits USA Today

With her rhetorical six-guns blazing:

Imagine that your 14-year-old daughter engaged in sex with the 20-year-old man down the street. Anger would hardly begin to describe your feelings, but then imagine how you and your daughter would feel if she became pregnant and the man who abused her got custody of the child and your daughter had to pay him child support for the next 18 years.

This would not only be unthinkable in our society but most people would say that it bordered on abuse or worse. Yet, as reported in a recent Arizona Republic news story, this is what happened to Nick Olivas, who happened to be 14 at the time he had sex with a 20-year-old woman. The difference, of course, is he's not a girl.

At the age of 21, Olivas found out he had a child and that he owed over $15,000 in back child support plus interest. He was rightfully upset, stating: "It was a shock. I was living my life and enjoying being young. To find out you have a 6-year-old? It's unexplainable. It freaked me out."

When a state government finds out a 14-year-old girl is a statutory rape victim of a 20-year-old man, the common reaction would be to file criminal charges to put the predator in jail. But for male victims, child support laws turn state governments into the allies of abusers instead of advocates for the victims.

Why the double standard when the victim is male?

Now that is a lovely rhetorical start designed to punch right through the female imperative before the reader realizes it, then adeptly making the twist to appeal to the legal equality that feminists supposedly stand for.

She's right, of course. The law holding male statutory rape victims responsible for their children is absurd. That being said, female rape victims who bear their rapist's children do assume responsibility for them, so the correct thing to do would be to give a male victim the right to claim paternal responsibility and/or custody without either being imposed upon him.

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Men are more abused

On Twitter, anyhow. The freaky little people upset about the Hugo awards aside, I actually take a good deal less stick on Twitter than I would have expected based on the amount of hate mail I used to get. But won't someone think of the poor men?

According to an analysis of more than 2million messages sent to celebrities, politicians and journalists - one in every 20 sent to prominent male figures was abusive compared to only one in 70 for females. 

This should have been obvious. After all, were the numbers were reversed, we'd be seeing prime time ads for STOPPING TWITTER ABUSE. And frankly, the abuse directed at Piers Morgan really shouldn't be counted. I mean, is it really abuse when it is eminently merited?

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How you know they're important

Both Roissy and I observed, years ago, that we would know Game and men's issues were entering the mainstream, not when the media began paying attention to the actual opinion leaders, but when they began appointing women as official spokeswomen for it. Apparently the same is true for the MRAs.

The Men's Rights Movement and the Women Who Love It. Who are these women men's rights activists? And why do they embrace a movement that some see as blatantly misogynistic? Below is a rundown of key players. A few of them, including Janet Bloomfield, who was the focus of a recent in Vice News article, have been in the spotlight recently. Others are virtually unknown to the mainstream, but within the movement they're seen as luminaries.Some of movement's fiercest activists aren't men.

Now, I very much encourage what these women are trying to do. It's not even remotely their fault that they find themselves being given a platform denied to the men they are trying to support. Dr. Helen, in particular, is always very good about rejecting the idea that she speaks for men or that she even can speak for men. She understands that we are perfectly capable of speaking for ourselves and points that out with regularity. But it is still a bit ironic, if entirely predictable (and it was, in fact, predicted), that the aspect deemed most newsworthy about the Mens' Rights movement is that there are women who support it. Real live women and everything!

It is great that Dr. Helen and other women are getting the word out there; exposing people to the ideas is far more important than establishing any cults of personality, and let's face it, some of our sites can be a bit much for the neophyte. But it is still amusing to see an article with pictures and glossy illustrations of Janey-come-latelies who have been addressing the subject since the early days of 2011.

If we were women, there would already be a Time Magazine cover with Roosh, Roissy, and me dressed in all black, arms folded, cast in dramatic lighting. Based on our respective numbers, I would estimate that a man's site requires about 20x more traffic to receive the same amount of media attention as a woman's. But it doesn't matter anyhow. Roosh is far too busy doing unspeakable things to the local women in Tanzania or wherever he is now and Roissy is even more reclusive than I am. We'd probably just send Rollo, Dalrock, and Yohami in our stead.

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How feminism is "ruining" A Game of Thrones

I wouldn't go quite so far as that myself. While there are a number of suboptimal decisions that have been made, such as the invention of a romance between Grey Worm and the child-in-the-book Missandrei, A GAME OF THRONES is still one of the best book-to-film adaptations I have ever seen, second only to THE GODFATHER. No one who has read and loved THE DARK IS RISING and knows what monstrosities were inflicted upon it in the process of adaptation could possibly view HBO's A GAME OF THRONES as ruined. But there is no question that the HBO series has modified a number of the female characters in a feminist manner, and that these decisions have tended to weaken an otherwise strong cinematic story:

It’s cliché to complain about how a movie or television show is ruining the source material by departing from the books.  There’s nothing new about bitching that HBO is sabotaging A Song of Ice and Fire, the literary source for its program Game of Thrones, but what’s not being pointed out is why they are doing it.

The answer is feminism.  Television needs to constantly reinforce the egalitarian narrative.  The point of feminism is to absolve women from all responsibility for their actions.  The show does this by creating simplistic explanations for the female characters’ actions and promoting  Mary Sue style “strong women.”

Women in the books have complicated rationalizations for their actions, often deriving from deep seated insecurities and fears.  Like real life women, they rationalize things to themselves based on deluded self-images, rather than reality.  The show does its best to strip these away, the easier to blame everything on men.

Cersei, in particular, has been sold short. As the writer notes: "In the book, Cercei Lannister is plagued by a mix of insecurity and self-delusion—Tyrion notes that his sister thinks she is “Tywin Lannister with teats.”  Indeed, she looks up to her father partially because it enhances her own self-image as his equal.  She also uses her sexuality as a weapon, betraying her brother (and lover) Jamie, who remains loyal. The show’s Cercei is portrayed as reacting to her oppressed status as a woman forced to marry men she doesn’t love."

It's not that the HBO Cersei is uninteresting; Lena Headey has presented an impressive character and been more than effective with the dialogue she's been given. But it's a little ironic that modifications made in order to make her character more palatable to feminists means that the HBO Cersei is neither as strong nor as ruthless as the book Cersei.

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Never satisfied

This article on the deficiencies of rom-coms, which are movies made expressly for women and which no man would give the time of day were it not for the money to be made in them, illustrates the total pointlessness of ever attempting to please feminists by giving them what they demand:

Rom-com women promote the myth that even the most successful and self-actualized among the female gender require sex in order to be bearable human beings. Before they get the guy, they’re self-involved, anxious, jealous, unfulfilled, and, at times, neurotic. After they get laid they morph into modern day Donna Stones, pleasant and perfectly confident in their ability to face the world.

It could be argued that the stereotypical rom-com woman is so popular because, out of the top 200 grossing comedies from the past decade, women have directed only nine of them. Then again, seven out of those nine female-directed films happened to have been rom-coms that fit the stereotypical bill, leaving audiences to question when, exactly, feminism will begin “leaning in” to the silver screen.

Give them X, they'll demand Y. Give them Y, they'll demand Z. It's considerably less trouble to refuse to give any ground in the first place. Such women are seldom satisfied until they have complete control and have completely driven out every last vestige of male influence and involvement. Don't give them the initial inch and thereby prevent the eventual mile.

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Ever the optimist

Glenn Reynolds attends the First International Conference on Men's Issues and comes away considerably more optimistic about the present state of intersexual relations than I am:

The thing that struck me most about the gathering was the palpable lack of gender tension. Men and women at this conference seemed to be on the same page, and the same team, in a way that seems almost surprising in these gender-divided times. Maybe that's because gender-talk, long a female domain, is also now about men. As another speaker at the conference, Warren Farrell, said, women can't hear what men don't say. So it's good that men are speaking up. As Farrell concluded in a Friday night dinner speech, the goal is "not a men's movement, not a women's movement, but a gender liberation movement."

With men and women both talking and listening, it gave me some hope that perhaps we'll see something new, and better, in the politics of gender. Will this spirit be able to overcome the politicized divisiveness that marks today's gender discussion? If enough men and women of good will come together, it just might.

The problem is that the sort of men and women who have combined to construct the current anti-male legal regime are exactly the sort of men and women who were not at the conference. And it remains to be seen how many of the women who publicly portray themselves as pro-male are genuinely pro-male as opposed to attempting to coopt any pro-male movement into the service of the Female Imperative.

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A portrait in professional responsibility

Roosh rightly takes Tuthmosis to task for his poorly conceived and insufficiently researched article concerning his assertion that short-haired women are damaged:

After prolonged and vigorous deep thought, I have come to the following conclusion: Tuthmosis has understated how utterly damaged short-haired women are. Run, run far away from them.

Don’t believe me? Look at the live Twitter response feed. Tuthmosis may have been too nice. To make yourself ugly, and then try to convince the world that you’re in fact beautiful, or that you don’t need a man to find you attractive at all, is so delusional that the ROK executive team is currently reaching out to the best mental health professionals in Moldova so that these women can get the help that they desperately need. (At the same time, I have since held a private meeting in the ROK office with Tuthmosis to encourage him to not write with such a polite filter that makes him hesitant to offend the female sex.)

I, for one, certainly hope that Tuthmosis will henceforth cease to affect such a shy and nonconfrontational style. The lad has promise, but he simply has to learn how to come right out and say what he truly thinks.

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Female sexism

Imagine if this ad was recreated, but the man was repeatedly disappointed because all the women he kept meeting had small breasts. Then, at the end, he sees a woman from behind who has a slim build and a small butt, and he sighs, but then she turns around to reveal a spectacular pair of DDs!

That would be considered sexist despite the fact that women have considerably more control over their breast size than men do over their height. But this VW ad is not, because Female Imperative.

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Hunting for anger

Rollo observes that the androsphere is keeping its collective cool:

If the “postponement” of the ABC 20/20 manosphere “exposé” has taught us anything it’s that the writers seeking to cast light on the manosphere are looking for crazy. They need crazy because it’s the only thing they know how, or have the patience, to confront in as minimal an effort as it takes to type a few paragraphs dismissing it as misogyny.

Writers (vichy male writers) like R. Tod Kelly are also lazy. They see an opportunity for outrage and that sells advertising. They wanted Stormfront and what they got was a global consortium of rational, well reasoned men with jobs, families and intelligence, men from all walks of life, all ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds expressing ideas that don’t fit into an acculturation of feminine primacy.

If you read Matt Forney’s 20/20 interview post you’ll see the desperation for crazy in their producer’s attempts to provoke him to become what they think he should be – a frothing, angry, hate-fueled misogynist. That would make it easy for them, they know how to sell crazy. The copy gets approved, the crazies get marginalized and we move on to the next Mabeline commercial.

He's absolutely correct. The media has neither the ability nor the time to engage in rational dialectic, so cheap appeals to rhetoric are all they can manage. And one of the easiest ways to disqualify an opponent in a rhetorical manner is to portray them as out-group.

This is why the writers and producers he mentions were trying to find some wild-eyed angry men they could hold up as examples of the androsphere's craziness, and if they couldn't find them, they were perfectly willing to try manufacturing them.

However, we're fortunate that from Roosh and Roissy down to the smallest blog, the androsphere consists of men who are much practiced in maintaining their frame. In fact, one could argue that there is not a worse group to attempt to rhetorically dismantle, because by definition, the Game bloggers are adept at dealing with the grand rhetorical arsenal wielded by women.

And it's not as if maintaining frame gets any harder when dealing with someone with whom you have absolutely no desire to have sex. All the same, be cautious whenever dealing with the media. They ALWAYS try to sound like your best friends during the phase they call "the get". And once you're on the hook and the recording devices are started, they switch into full prosecutorial mode.

It's not a problem so long as you are prepared for it. Just remember, no one, NO ONE, interesting in covering these subjects in the media is on your side. Be cool, be prepared, and above all, maintain frame.

This doesn't mean that a man's anger is not legitimate or justified. It only means that it is unwise and counterproductive to display it for the public, because it is a rhetorical weakness.

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