Another blog rec: man boobz

I’m sure this picture makes sense in context. Somehow.

Another blog recommendation: man boobz, by the irrepressible and inimitable David Futrelle. I discovered man boobz sometime last year, devoured the archives, and now look forward to its updates in my Google Reader every day.

This recommendation comes with a major content warning. Man boobz is dedicated to exposing, critiquing, and mocking the Men’s Rights movement and misogyny in general. Futrelle does an excellent job of quoting and citing the people he’s calling out, letting their words speak for themselves — but that means that very often he is discussing topics like rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment, and his blog often contains extremely misogynistic language. If those are likely to be triggering or upsetting to you, you may want to steer clear. That said, Futrelle does a pretty good job of putting in his own trigger and content warnings when he’s discussing particularly vile stuff.

(It also sometimes contains kittens to clear the palate.)

While I read Slacktivist to remind me that there’s hope and love and hippies out there, I read man boobz to remind myself that there’s still a lot to be angry about, a lot to fight for. The people Futrelle quotes are often cartoonishly horrible, but they’re still real. They are real actual people who think insanely terrible things about me because I’m a woman and a feminist. They are actually for real out there. (I have lived a fairly charmed life in terms of knowing good men who consider me a person — or at least polite men who treated me that way — so sometimes it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that these retrograde excuses for humans exist in the real world.)

But people like Futrelle are also out there, calling those cartoonishly awful people out and doing it with humor and wit. So that does give me some hope.