I have been vaguely aware that Scott Adams was a Men’s Rights Advocate (MRA). It doesn’t come as a complete surprise. The female characters in Dilbert are typical of the thinking of teenage boys, which is pretty typical of MRAs. But I did find his recent article amusing, The Humiliation of the American Male in 2016. Here’s the first line, “Perhaps the biggest unreported story of this presidential election is the humiliation of the American male.” There’s nothing quite so wonderful as the combination of self-pity and conspiracy theories coming from a super rich and famous guy.
His concern is the following commercial for Cascade Complete. You can check his own video of his television, if you like. It’s really hard to make out what’s going on in it, but you can see that Scott Adams sticks to the script by being a Fox News viewer. You can see the video below. But basically, it’s a guy that went to the store and bought an off-brand detergent for half the price. His wife tells him that they will now have to use twice as much detergent. So he has to go back to the store.
Update of Typical 1950s TV Commercial
It’s interesting just how clueless Scott Adams is. I mean, it’s the woman doing the dishes. What’s being presented here is something that is straight out of the 1950s. It’s the man that picks things up from the store when he’s around. It’s the woman who is managing the house. To me, it seems like a pretty boring commercial. The woman does seem kind of harsh and the guy does seem kind of like an idiot. But you really have to be a total wimp to look at this commercial and feel threatened. And to see it as indicative of “the humiliation of the American male” makes you even more pathetic than the character in the commercial.
The rest of Scott Adams’ blog post doesn’t make much sense. He seems to have something against the v-neck sweater. Now personally, I don’t like v-neck anything and I don’t like sweaters of any kind. So I’m with him on that. But he thinks that v-neck sweaters are “the uniform of a man who is owned by a woman.” So I guess the Cascade Complete commercial was a perfect MRA storm.
Humiliated Men Will Elect Trump!
Scott Adams then goes on to hint that Trump just might become president because of the “coming tsunami” of men who feel humiliated by women. Men don’t talk about it because, well, it’s humiliating, “But in the privacy of the polling booth, the men who don’t talk are free to act.” This is the language of the abused. But it is the language of the actually abused — not of whiny little man-boys like Scott Adams.
The problem with people like Scott Adams is that they have surrounded themselves with other man-boys who think exactly the same way. And far from being silent about their humiliations, they do little but jabber on about it. So they assume the rest of us men are quietly steaming about all this humiliation. But we don’t feel it. We get along just fine with women. We aren’t so insecure that we need them to constantly tell us how awesome we are.
Scott Adams is pathetic. I realizes that he just lets his id go and writes things that make no sense. But he’s been on the MRA subject long enough that I think we all know that regardless of the size of his penis, he’s ashamed of it. He ought to be ashamed — just not about that.
I wonder if Adams hasn’t just decided that, since nothing is predictable about Trump, and few things make sense about his continued existence in the election, then this year he can write any old nonsense, make sure ‘Trump’ is in the article a lot, and he’ll get plenty of traffic (and Dilbert sales, he hopes), either from pro-Trump fools, or people trying to work out what the hell Adams actually believes.
Yes, but this didn’t start with Trump. It might have started after his wife left him several years back.
@ Barney: Scott Adams is pretty vile. He has said that, to paraphrase, since sexual consent is at least nominally upheld by the law, we live in a matriarchy where men are oppressed.
If I could paint, I would paint for Scott Adams a desert landscape with v necked sweaters draped over branches and flowing over cliffs, and Hillary Clinton’s face is the Sun. Title: The Persistence Of Humiliation.
Seriously, I try to tell myself that being an MRA is it’s own punishment. And then they start talking and my reaction is, “That guy needs to take a beating.”
Nice image and very fitting of your Magritte reference.
Well so much for these v-neck sweaters I was going to give you to assert my control over every aspect of your life! *throws them away*
I associate them more with t-shirts actually. They offend my sense of geometry. No woman will ever get between me and math.
How would that even be possible to do?
Most men have stronger sex drives than math drives.
I actually do need women to tell me how awesome I am. Not how better than women I am. Just that I’m not a horrible person. I really don’t trust the judgment of most men, so if a female friend says “yes, you’re flawed, but you’re not worse than Hitler” it’s better than when a man says it.
If it weren’t for women, we would all be living in the mud. Yes, we need women far more than they need us. Luckily, most of them like having us around. Not that they are perfect or anything. Although the geometry of the v-neck on women does make more sense to me. Maybe that’s what Adams was on about. Maybe it’s just geometry. And a small penis.
> they have surrounded themselves with other man-boys who think exactly the same way.
Nowadays it’s easy to surround yourself w/ others who feel the same as you. At least, online. So easy that you can fail to understand how other people even CAN think differently.
I know this can be a problem for me, at least.
Unfortunately, the GOP has become so shrill and paranoid that open discussion is difficult at best.
Oh, and cartoonists-cranks are a long tradition. See Johnny Hart, Al Capp, Chester Gould, Harold Gray…
Yes, I worry about it myself. But that’s what’s good about being a liberal: you question yourself, but you pay by being indecisive. Conservatives tend to be the opposite.
I do seem to remember something about Al Capp.