Pity the poor MRAs who travelled hundreds — if not thousands — of miles to AVFM’s big weekend in Toronto hoping for a confrontation with the evil feminazis that never happened. They wanted footage of angry women they could watch again and again on YouTube. They wanted new names and faces to put up on Register-Her. In short, they wanted new women to hate.

But alas, the feminists, for the most part, stayed home. And the ones who showed up were mostly dudes, from the LBGT activist group BashBack. Making things even worse, they didn’t block any doors or try to crash AVFM’s rally. What they did, mostly, was chant things the MRAs didn’t like.


No, it was the MRAs who ignored the explicit instructions of the police to stay away from their opponents. Evidently hoping to provoke the confrontation that had been denied them thus far, a sizeable proportion of the AVFMers and Mens Rights Edmontoners in Toronto that day leave the spot designated for their rally to face off against the BashBack counter-protest.

How do we know this? Because Men’s Rights Edmonton filmed them doing it and put it on YouTube. And AVFM posted it on their site as well.

It’s kind of remarkable that they did. For one thing, it provides even more proof of how tiny the rally itself was. And it shows pretty clearly what an immature misogynistic buffoon Nick Reading of Men’s Rights Edmonton really is.

http://manboobz.com/2013/10/02/deprived-of-new-women-to-hate-in-toronto-a-voice-for-menners-resort-to-rape-jokes-gay-bashing/

Leila is one of hundreds of women who have been accused of going on a “Sex Jihad” in Syria. Last month, her parents appeared on a local Tunisian television network to speak about their “lost daughter.” Her mother stands silently as her father tearfully recounts how his daughter was led astray to “prostitute herself to Syrian dogs.”

The video was one of many quoted by Tunisia’s interior minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou when he promised to stem the phenomenon of Tunisian women traveling to Syria to wage “sex jihad” where they were having sex with “20, 30, [or] 100” militants, before returning pregnant to Tunisia. Sex jihad, or Jihad al-nikah, permits extramarital sexual relations with multiple partners, and is considered by some hardline Sunni Muslim Salafists as a legitimate form of holy war.
“After the sexual liaisons they have there in the name of Jihad al-nikah they come home pregnant,” said Ben Jeddou, though he declined to name any specific cases.

Leila, who asked that her real name and details of her identity remain private, says that the entire story is a lie. The only part that is true is that two years ago she left her small village in Tunisia to volunteer as a nurse among the Syrian rebels fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
It was there that she met her husband.

Remember Beatriz? Remember Savita? Or rather, remember #RememberSavita?

Media has a funny way of making one story sound like the most important thing in the world, and then dropping that story like a hot potato a week later.

Savita was the woman who died in an Irish hospital after having been denied a life-saving abortion. Since then, Ireland passed its first abortion bill, making the procedure legal in a few limited circumstances, including when there is a threat to the mother’s life. Just last month, the country’s first legal abortion was carried out, saving a woman’s life.

Beatriz lives in El Salvador, and for months was denied a life-saving abortion by her government, which bans the procedure under any circumstances. Eventually, after widespread media coverage, El Salvador granted her a cesarean section (what was essentially a late term abortion), and she lived. Kathy Bougher notes over at RH Reality Check that “Beatriz’s fight to save her own life provided the citizens of El Salvador a real-time view of the actual meaning and costs of a law about which a large share of the population previously had little awareness.”

But what kind of life is she living now?

http://feministing.com/2013/10/01/beatriz-survived-her-pregnancy-but-at-what-cost/

Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pick-up Artist in Denmark


Thirty-three-year-old Daryush Valizadeh, known to his predominantly heterosexual male fan base as Roosh, is a well-known pick-up artist within the worldwide “Seduction Community,” which relies on pop evolutionary psychology to teach the art of getting laid. Its origins date back to dubious neuro-linguistic programming “speed seduction” theories in the early 1990s, but the Community rose to prominence with investigative reporter Neil Strauss’s 2005 bestseller exposé The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, which spawned a VH1 reality show and drew aspiring “PUAs” to online forums and self-proclaimed gurus promising foolproof seduction strategies.

Pick-up artists believe that all women are the same: submissive, choosier than men when picking sexual partners, entranced by shiny objects. In the Community, players are self-made; most renowned pick-up artists claim they were socially awkward losers until they learned the tricks of the trade. If a pick-up artist hones his “inner game” (confidence) as well as his “outer game” (appearance), he can control his sexual future. When women come with cheat codes, rejection is not an option; if a play fails, the player tweaks his strategy instead of conceding defeat.

Roosh enjoys middling success as the author of the “Bang” series of travel guides, which trains readers to seduce women based on derogatory ethnic stereotypes. In Bang Brazil, Roosh warns his followers that “poor favela chicks are very easy, but quality is a serious problem.” He vows never to return to the Polish city of Katowice unless forced to “maintain the pussy flow.” Roosh’s predations haven’t gone without recognition. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, included Roosh’s personal blog in a March 2012 report on American hate groups; it quotes an Icelandic feminist group that described Bang Iceland as a “rape guide.”

But Roosh’s Denmark directory diverges from his usual frat-boy Casanova fantasies liberally seasoned with rape jokes. Don’t Bang Denmark—note the dramatic title change—is a cranky volume that (spoiler alert!) probably won’t help any Roosh acolytes score. Roosh calls it the “most angry book” he’s ever written. “This book is a warning of how bad things can get for a single man looking for beautiful, feminine, sexy women.”

What’s blocking the pussy flow in Denmark? The country’s excellent social welfare services. Really.

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cockblocked-by-redistribution

(Credit: Christian Bertrand / Shutterstock.com)
Lauren Mayberry, the lead vocalist of Scottish electro-pop band Chvrches, has written a poignant Op-Ed in the Guardian that’s all too relatable for women: the misogyny of the Internet. The band’s Facebook page has more than 100,000 “likes” on Facebook, and Mayberry, out of a sense of loyalty to her fans, personally reads every single message. For a long time, she ignored the sexist ones — until last week, when she posted this on Facebook, asking fans to “Seriously. Stop.”

While she received many comments of support, Mayberry’s post also resulted in … you guessed it … further misogyny:

“This isn’t rape culture. You’ll know rape culture when I’m raping you, bitch”

“I have your address and I will come round to your house and give u anal and you will love it you twat lol”

“Act like a slut, getting treated like a sluy [sic]”

“It’s just one of those things you’ll need to learn to deal with. If you’re easily offended, then maybe the music industry isn’t for you”

“But why should women ‘deal’ with this”? asks the singer, who has decided that it is not “all right for people to make comments ranging from ‘a bit sexist but generally harmless’ to openly sexually aggressive.” In other words, rape jokes aren’t “just jokes.”

“That it is something that ‘just happens,’ she explains. “Is the casual objectification of women so commonplace that we should all just suck it up, roll over and accept defeat? I hope not. Objectification, whatever its form, is not something anyone should have to ‘just deal with.’”

Cyberbullying, even in the form of anonymous comments on the Internet, has a real impact on real people and these messages undermine the hard work that Mayberry has prided herself on — messages that, by and large, her male peers don’t have to deal with. She writes: