TRIGGER WARNING: Many of the links below lead to articles commenting on and quoting some pretty extreme misogyny.
So hey, Feministes. Jill has generously invited me to guest blog here, and I thought I’d introduce myself.
I’m a longtime journalist, writing about everything from gender and sexuality to money. (It’s the latter kind of writing that actually pays the bills.) You can see an assortment of my articles and book reviews here.
For the past seven months or so I’ve been writing about misogyny on my blog Man Boobz. It’s been a highly educational experience, to say the least. I started the blog initially intending it to offer a critique of the Men’s Rights movement, but the more I delved into the MR movement the more misogyny I found, and the more I became convinced that for a considerable number of Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) it was misogyny, not a deep concern for men’s issues, that drove their online activism. (I suppose I should put “activism” in quotes here; as I have pointed out before, MRAs are some of the least activist activists I’ve ever run across, and mostly spend their time kvetching about feminism and/or women in general online.)
Now I focus mostly on tracking down and critiquing – or, in many cases, simply mocking — misogyny online, much of it found on MRA and related sites. I devote a lot of time to one sort-of bastard child of the MR movement that refers to itself by the ungraceful acronym MGTOW, which stands for Men Going Their Own Way. What this little formulation means for individual MGTOWers varies – not all of them are literally male separatists who try to avoid women altogether – but for most of them, it seems to involve posting a shit-ton of misogynistic crap on the Internet.
Some of what I write about is truly vile and disturbing, and tough to read, but much of it is so over-the-top that it’s impossible to do anything but point and laugh at its absurdities. Given that the people I’m writing about tend to be mostly inconsequential idiots, I try to keep the tone as light as possible, given the subject matter. But a word of warning: much of what I write about – and quote from extensively – on my blog is fairly vile, and my posts should probably come with an assortment of trigger warnings. Also, the comments section of my blog is pretty much overrun with angry and often misogynistic guys, and many of their comments are pretty obnoxious. It’s a pretty lively place, but not a “safe space.”
So there’s my somewhat long-winded intro. This week I will be posting reworked versions of some posts on my site that I think will be especially interesting to the Feministe crowd, as well as some new pieces. We’ll be discussing everything from the geeky misogyny of Dilbert creator Scott Adams to the notion, strongly held by some MRAs and MGTOWers, that sexbots will destroy feminism and put women “in their place.”
One post that might be useful for newcomers to my blog is this one, explaining some of the weird terminology that crops up.
And here is a general overview of misogyny in the Men’s Rights movement that I wrote for the Good Men Project Magazine.