Programmer with a linguistics background, dad, trekkie. He/him Mastodon: @bgainor@mstdn.party
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In 1851 French Bishop Latour and his friend Father Valliant are dispatched to New Mexico to reawaken its slumbering Catholicism. …
When social media companies have been brave enough to take these steps, the impact has been significant: Milo Yiannopoulos saw his influence and platform greatly reduced after his ban from Twitter, with reports of his finances plummeting and tours being canceled. “If you look at [far-right conspiracy theorist] Alex Jones, for example,” Davey pointed out, “when he got de-platformed, he lost a zero off his regular viewing figures.”
— Men Who Hate Women : From Incels to Pickup Artists by Laura Bates (Page 361 - 362)
Deplatforming works!
Alex has a markedly different perspective from his friends. Growing up, his mom had already talked to him about feminism and inequality from a young age. So when he encountered the same online propaganda, it didn’t have the impact on him that it did on his friends.
— Men Who Hate Women : From Incels to Pickup Artists by Laura Bates (Page 295)
As a parent, this is the most important passage in the book for me. We have a responsibility to talk to our kids about these things before they get exposed to right-wing disinformation.
By encouraging more and more men in the ultimately doomed attempt to live up to toxic ideals of performative masculinity, men’s rights idols are driving forward the vicious circle, ushering another wave of disaffected, broken, ashamed men straight into nets of misogyny, blame, and bitterness.
— Men Who Hate Women : From Incels to Pickup Artists by Laura Bates (Page 221)
For a creative, a writer, an artist, a maker, among hundreds of other sectors, access to social media can literally mean the life or death of a career, so important a role does it play in professional promotion and visibility.
So when we tell women to simply switch off, spend less time online, or stop visiting certain websites, what we are really saying is that they, not their harassers, should suffer the negative consequences of trolling. They, not the trolls, should be excluded from hostile spaces.
— Men Who Hate Women : From Incels to Pickup Artists by Laura Bates (Page 173)
The rhetorical trick of presenting a campaign as nobly battling exactly the interests it itself personifies would go on to become central to future campaigns of the alt-right and the manosphere. Gamergate’s proponents harassed, abused, and deliberately obfuscated their real aims, all the while claiming to be acting in the name of ethics, transparency, and purity. In the same way, the manosphere calls for gender equality while indulging in extreme misogyny, demands transparency of statistics while spreading false facts, and portrays itself as the champion of downtrodden victims while espousing the creation of greater gains and protections for the group already most privileged in our society. Similarly, the alt-right claims to have the noble cause of opening people’s eyes to injustice and inequality, all the while attempting to revive some of the most deeply damaging hate campaigns of recent history.
— Men Who Hate Women : From Incels to Pickup Artists by Laura Bates (Page 161)
Perhaps to a greater degree than any other manosphere community, MRAs have identified a set of very real problems and grievances, from job safety for manual laborers to substandard mental health provision and parental rights. But when it comes to assigning blame, they have taken aim at precisely the wrong target. It is not women, or even feminists, who have limited, frustrated, diminished, hurt, and damaged men but masculinity itself or, rather, our society’s constricting, toxic, self-defeating version of what it means to perform being a man. Yet every time anybody tries to make progress in tackling this particular version of masculinity, the MRM rises up as a united voice to condemn and undermine the attempt.
— Men Who Hate Women : From Incels to Pickup Artists by Laura Bates (Page 148 - 149)
MRAs are about as focused on men’s rights as defense contractors are invested in maintaining peace.
— Men Who Hate Women : From Incels to Pickup Artists by Laura Bates (Page 119)
According to a study carried out by researchers at the University of Houston in 2019, 27 percent of men avoid one-on-one meetings with female colleagues, and 21 percent are reluctant to hire women for jobs involving close interpersonal interactions with men (such as jobs involving travel). As writer and feminist activist Soraya Chemaly highlighted, this means that over a quarter of American men are committing workplace discrimination and violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bars differential treatment of people in the workplace on the basis, in this case, of sex.
— Men Who Hate Women : From Incels to Pickup Artists by Laura Bates (Page 117)
But what MGTOW has in common with the majority of the other groups that make up the manosphere, perhaps best exemplified by MGTOW itself, is the special quality of being a group supposedly exclusively devoted to men whose near-total focus is women.
— Men Who Hate Women : From Incels to Pickup Artists by Laura Bates (Page 110)
It is ironic that the exact techniques these snake-oil salesmen use to recruit hapless wannabe Romeos are the same as those they train their disciples to use on women: pretend to be possessed of some magical, transformative secret so as to con and manipulate your target into doing exactly what you want.
— Men Who Hate Women : From Incels to Pickup Artists by Laura Bates (Page 95)
I no longer believe depriving these groups of the oxygen of publicity is the best course of action, because we are kidding ourselves if we believe they aren’t superb propagandists, already spreading their message like wildfire. And the spread of that message benefits from our careful silence, our choice to look away. So I don’t think they should be ignored. Not because those who spread hatred and sow division deserve a “fair hearing”; not to legitimize the rhetoric of extreme prejudice by suggesting it is one side of a valid debate. But because we cannot confront the real threat these groups pose unless we are prepared to look it directly in the eye. Because right now, these groups have dug their claws deep into teenage boys across the country, and parents can’t fight for their sons if they don’t even know the problem exists. Because allowing the manosphere to remain shrouded in shadows lends a different kind of legitimacy—that of the scrappy, underdog outsider. It allows these groups to claim the mantle of righteous grievance, posing as alienated victims, when exposure to the bright light of day proves their ringleaders to be anything but.
— Men Who Hate Women : From Incels to Pickup Artists by Laura Bates (Page 23)
Parable of the Talents is a science fiction novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler, …
Content warning No specifics, but does reference the book's ending
There were a jarring number of similarities between American politics of the 2030s as described in Parable of the Talents, and America's actual politics of today. Of course, there is the literal use of "Make America Great Again", which others have pointed out, but Jarret's rise echoes Trump's in other ways as well, and he is ultimately just as hollow.
From a literary perspective, the fact that this book shows us multiple characters' perspectives, rather than just Olamina's as in Parable of the Sower, makes it much more complex and thornier to read. I'm left wondering how much we are actually meant to identify with her religious movement, although obviously it's still more sympathetic than Christian America.
If anything, I would say that my main complaint is that the story seems to wrap up too quickly and conveniently. It's unfortunate that Butler never got around to writing a third Earthseed book, because I feel like there was a lot more to explore there.