[UPDATE 2: Pogo now says his misogynistic posts were an “experiment.” For my take on this, see here.]

[UPDATE: Pogo has taken down several of the blog posts mentioned in this post. I have replaced the links to the vanished posts with links to archived versions.]

So you know that dude Pogo, who makes all those amazingly perky-yet-somehow-also-ethereal music/video mashups using snippets of old Disney movies and the like?

Turns out he’s a bit of a misogynistic dickbag.

Yep. On his Pogomix blog, Nick Bertke (his real name) has been posting a bunch of tiresome and achingly unoriginal rants about feminism and the alleged privileges of women that might as well have been cut and pasted from the Men’s Rights subreddit or A Voice for Men.

In “Why We Should Envy Women” he argues that “[d]espite what all these feminists talk about, women actually have things pretty damn good. Better than men, I would say.”

He presents a little list of ways he thinks women have it better than men; it’s an assortment of MRA clichés, a sort of mashup (yep) of Warren Farrell and Girl Writes What, as filtered through a million crappy blogs.

– You are naturally endowed with a more valuable, sought after and artistically favorable body.

– At the bat of an eye, you can be excused from accountability regardless of the magnitude of your actions.

– At 18, you lose the protective status of the child but retain the protective status of the female. …

– Society excuses you from needing to work and says all you need is a hard working and generous man. …

– You are granted the rights of a democracy without the burdens of military service.

The creepiest item on the list is undoubtedly this one:

– You can give the opposite sex a thrashing when the person deserves it.

That’s right: the guy who created the gorgeous “Alice” and the charmingly catchy “Upular” envies women’s alleged ability to beat up their boyfriends without consequence, apparently wishing he could do the same to women when they “deserve it.”

Seemingly channeling the “red pill wisdom” of the internet’s self-proclaimed masters of “Game,” Bertke goes on to explain that women are basically overgrown children needing the “discipline” of a firm father figure.

I’ve always found that the more I treat a woman like a child, the stronger the relationship, the better the sex and the more often it happens. Discipline, reprimand and complete indifference. I think the feminine woman craves the attributes of a firm father in the man she enters a relationship with. The more I realize it, the more I see modern feminism in a different light – it could well be little more than the collective feminine cry for drama and childlike retaliation.

Sigh. He seems to have turned this rant, or portions of it, into a video. (I could only make it through about 30 seconds before my annoyance got the better of me and I turned it off.) [UPDATE: He’s deleted the video.]

In “5 Things I’ve Learned About The Real World,” Bertke urges his readers to, yep, “take the red pill for a minute,” and offers more, er, insights into women’s alleged desire for “fatherly order.”

A lot of women you meet, feminists in particular, will preach that you are the source of their failures and womanly strife. This won’t stop them from playing powerless, and they’ll insist that you roll up your sleeves and rescue them from their mysterious bonds. The collective female cry for fatherly order requires that you as a man are expected to make the world spin.

As you may have noticed, Bertke’s prose is not quite as elegant as his songs. He can’t even keep his metaphors straight.

In “Where Feminism Goes Wrong,” he informs us that “inequality is a door that swings both ways but feminism by definition and in practice treats it as a one way street.” (Here’s an archived copy of the post in case he takes it down too.)



Yep. Inequality is somehow both a door and a street.

He goes on to declare that:

Feminism is taken prisoner by too many women and re-branded as a self entitling social status posing as a humanitarian ideology. There’s really only two possible explanations for why feminism has become a bait and switch: 1. Feminism is revealing its self to be a camouflaged push for gender supremacy, or 2. Feminists just aren’t doing a very good job of communicating their true cause.

There’s actually a third explanation, more convincing than the first two, which is that Nick Bertke has no fucking clue what he’s talking about.

Misogynistic outbursts are apparently not a new thing for Bertke. Last spring, after erratic behavior on his part led some of his fans to worry that he might be undergoing some sort of breakdown, one Redditor reported that “some fans and friends close to Nick that have stated that he’s done something similar in the past, going on a rude, sometimes misogynistic rant and basically acting like a 12 year old … .”

It’s always disappointing to find out that someone whose work you enjoy and admire is a shitty person. Alas, he’s far from the first talented musician to turn out to be a woman-hating asshole.

Bertke, dude, stick to sampling other people’s words. Your own words are terrible.

H/T — @ Metz77 on Twitter, who alerted me to Pogo’s asshattery.

EDIT: Reworded a couple of things.

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