#Just see the way these ‘manosphere’ guys talk about women. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kithj · 8 months

Text

i need to complain at length about bit(2019) so im sorry for this

this movie flopped hard. i really wanted to like it because of the premise, it calling itself a "queer intersecional feminist movie" & the fact that it got a lot of hard backlash initially online from the "manosphere" for supposedly being "misandrist" (it's not at all) but unfortunately it's executed horribly. i also think i'm extremely critical on it because there are some similar themes in this movie that i'm exploring with blood choke and seeing someone else tackle them and fail so massively makes me want to rip my hair out lmfao. overall the current reviews for this movie that i found were actually very positive, which makes me feel more insane for all of this. sorry

a group of queer(the leader is the only one who specifies and calls herself a "full blown dyke" so we know she's a lesbian and this will be relevant later) feminist vampires have one rule, which is No Men Allowed. the leader, duke, claims that all men are corrupted by power, and turning them into vampires will always end with them using their vampire powers to lord over and abuse women and others. she is basically the stereotypical man hating lesbian of the movie.

a lot of places online when reviewing this movie claim that the female vampires "only" hunt men and this is why it's misandrist however it's explained in the movie that in general they try to only hunt "bad" people (including predatory men) and one of the examples is a qanon guy that harasses women and others online and is a hateful bigot. it also shows duke killing some frat bro types later in the movie as well. but they do hunt and kill women and other people throughout the movie so i'm not entirely sure where this idea that they only hunt men comes from ? they don't really have any kind of "morality" because they are Vampires. i point this out because this is one of the big criticisms about it (again that it's "misandrist") which i don't agree with (im critical of it for very different reasons lol). they were going to kill and eat the main character at first before duke randomly changes her mind because she thinks she's hot and the main character is *gasp* a woman.

in fact she's a trans woman which is emphasized in a lot of the marketing and the actress is also trans, but in the movie it's barely even touched on so that felt particularly misleading to me since they made it seem like it was going to be significant (also part of why a lot of manosphere types hated it lol). like the word trans is not even spoken once in the entire movie, the audience is just supposed to Know what everyone is talking about. and duke, who otherwise spouts bioessentialist nonsense for a lot of the movie, has no issue with the mc in their very brief exchange that only vaguely touches on it. which is nice, i guess.

duke again makes the comment that you can't give men power, and the mc asks "what about me?" duke says "never even crossed my mind." and that's it. that's like the extent of the mc's transness in the movie. it felt like a cop-out to avoid having to actually challenge duke's ideas in any meaningful way. it would have been more interesting if the mc could have pushed her harder and made her realize that she was wrong. this is what i thought the movie was going to do, with its loudly declared trans mc. we could have talked about the patriarchy at a systemic level rather than an individual level, about how it effects trans women, about how this misogynistic behavior in men (and other women!) is typically rewarded but is not inherent, especially since duke does seem to understand this despite what she says; she's not a terf, nor is she an exclusionist in general, since it's implied some of the other women are bi, so why do we treat her like one? but none of it matters, and duke is just flat out punished in a horrible way later in the movie anyways.

we find out then that duke was hypnotized by a man after he saw her kissing women in a bar. he hypnotizes her, a lesbian, and enslaves her for years and years and forces her to be his wife. duke was abused in a variety of ways during this time until she was able to break his mind control and overpower him, sealing his heart in a lockbox that she's slowly been consuming to absorb his powers, since his heart wouldnt burn.

with this backstory reveal i did feel more sympathetic towards duke and i didn't like the direction the narrative was taking and i knew it was going to go downhill from here lmfao.

the mc, laurel, does get turned into a vampire. she is caught up in her new life and ends up ignoring her boy bestfriend and her brother who both get increasingly annoyed with her (understandably so). however, her boy bestfriend, after being ignored by her for a bit, decides to try and take his own life. it's heavily implied by the movie that this is all laurel's fault. her brother blames her for it and tells her that everything is her fault, he complains that he was always such an Ally and Supportive of her, but she's just a selfish bitch. and this is like... meant to be accepted by the audience, we are meant to be on the brother's side. i found this all very distasteful, especially since laurel's transness is only ever this vague concept that people either "didnt even think about" or just are "supportive" of and it was really gross to rub that in her face on top of blaming her friend's attempted suicide on her all for... having a life outside of him? i'm not saying that it's fine to ignore your friends, but the fact that neither of them also realized something traumatic was going on with her and just assuming she was intentionally ignoring them was also kind of shitty on their end, too.

at this point it was clear that the movie was going to "subvert" expectations and pull a Not All Men in the most inelegant and awful way possible. duke has now become The Enemy and it's revealed she's been using subtle mind control powers on the other vampires to keep them away from men, a power she's been gaining from eating the old man's heart. everyone is mad at her which is fair. however the movie treats this as if it is just as bad as what her husband did for some reason, who was enslaving and raping women for hundreds of years..... it's interesting that they chose this route considering it was already obvious that the women in this group were together out of necessity rather than any real comradery. the opening scene is all of them turning on one of the other women because she bit a man; this fragile alliance is built out of fear and survival, because they know society will never accept them. there's already a lack of agency; society has stripped them of that because of their identity as queer women. laurel's introduction could have changed this, but instead they decide to go the mind control route and just throw all that other commentary out the window. it's all duke's fault now.

a fight breaks out because laurel accidentally bites her brother and she refuses to let duke kill him. she ends up releasing the old vampire who reforms and immediately starts berating duke and the other women. duke understandably freaks out and has her heart ripped out, but the other girls manage to burn the vampire again and lock up his heart. duke, after being forced to face her abuser and rapist and have her heart literally ripped out, is then cast out and locked away as punishment for being mean to men. this is done by laurel literally Kicking her bleeding heart across the floor and down into a cell, which duke has to crawl after and fall down into in the most demeaning way possible.

truly the worst ending i could think of. punishing a woman for rightly being angry about her abuse and comparing her directly to her abuser.... i don't think duke was right at all but i wish they would have approached her character with more sympathy and done something more interesting than just "ACTUALLY... women are just as bad as men sometimes." even though she literally does nothing comparable to what he did lol and the things she was doing were a direct result of what he did to her to begin with. obviously not saying that as an excuse, but that this is what should have been explored in the movie, either by laurel's prompting or by duke having a come to jesus moment with herself after befriending laurel.

and touting that laurel was trans in all the promotional material only for it to never be relevant to the plot aside from her brother and friend whining to her about being such good allies was really gross. being a good ally is not something you do in the hopes of people reciprocating, you do it because it's the right thing to do. you should never make your allyship conditional or something that you use to hold over a person's head.

i do understand that it's important to depict trans characters who are more than just "trans." i know there are people of the opinion that laurel was a good trans character because it was so casual and "wasn't a big deal." i agree, to an extent. because obviously it WAS a big deal, for her brother to have so much resentment towards her about it. and the way it's handwaved off throughout the movie otherwise felt more like they were afraid of fully acknowledging it rather than just being "casual" about it. i suppose that's up to personal interpretation, though, but compared to the rest of the movie, the refusal to even say the word trans just left a bad taste in my mouth. i also understand that this whole post may come off as a "it's not that deep bro" moment and maybe you're right maybe i should just be happy i got a fun vampire movie but personally just accepting shit because it calls itself feminist and has gay people in it is not something i plan to get in the habit of doing.

i recently watched bottoms (which was excellent) and it made me think about this movie again. bit felt like originally they wanted to make something for an ingroup, but then chickened out half-way through and decided to try to appease a wider audience by turning duke into a villain. versus bottoms, which felt like they had a target audience and that's who it was for & they didn't care about how people outside of that group would perceive it.

bit ended up being careless and clumsy in my opinion because they got too concerned about optics rather than just focusing on the story, and the people being represented within that story. it sucks that they took such a shitty approach to duke's character and wrote off all of her concerns as her just being an Evil Bitch Lesbian. obviously there was a lot she was wrong about, but treating all of her concerns about misogyny as equally bad as a man brainwashing and raping women is not the way to send that message.

laurel's brother turns into a vampire in the end, and he asks her if duke was right, if he'll end up being a bad person, and laurel responds by basically just saying "no you'll be fine just don't be an asshole" which is true! it frustrates me that it took this fucking long for someone to say it. this was literally one of the last lines in the movie. why did duke have to brainwash anyone and why did she have to be punished so horribly for us to get here. why is the lesbian, who was abused for years and years by a man who was correctively raping her, given so little sympathy in this "feminist queer movie"?

duke absolutely still could have ended up being a villain. it's just the way they went about it was so heavy-handed; having her use the same power as her abuser, having her heart ripped out like him to imply they're the same, while completely ignoring her trauma and the things he did to her. i understand that they were going for a "power can corrupt ANYONE" message but to me it just simply did not hit. she wasn't "corrupted"-- we know why duke hates men, and it was because she was enslaved and abused by one for years. the movie all but refuses to acknowledge the things she went through and how horrible they were outside of the initial lore-dump flashback. why even bring it up if you're just going to treat her the same regardless? she is given no sympathy or nuance for this backstory.

i think it especially bothered me because i couldn't help but compare duke to valentina. while valentina doesn't have the same hatred for all men, she does hate the council and she hates standard. even the mc worries sometimes that valentina may hate her because she fears that her butchness makes valentina afraid of her and see her as a man.

valentina is absolutely not a good person, and she can be nasty and do bad things. she can be considered a villain. but because of her backstory, because of the things that were done to her, i can't imagine not still depicting her with some sympathy; she's a tragic figure. it's not just black and white. and especially with the current societal climate, the extreme & often violent misogyny being normalized online, the lesbophobia and transphobia, it feels like we should be taking special care with these stories, particularly when we ARE marketing them to a wider audience. (this would be a different conversation for stories written by and for an ingroup, but again, bit clearly chickened out of doing that)

when i watched this movie, all i could think about is the people that would walk away from this with the idea that duke-- the only woman who actually calls herself a dyke-- and other lesbians irl are the real problem. it does not take a lot for a lesbian to be called "man-hating." this is often the default when people are talking about us, whether it's true or not. and lesbians are often blamed for "infighting" in queer spaces, for pointing out lesbophobia and misogyny (alongside people of color pointing out racism). duke is exactly how they imagine all lesbians to be. and of course duke was wrong, but how many people are really understanding why she was wrong, when the movie refused to actually talk about it? why wasn't laurel even allowed to mention that she was trans, why wasn't she allowed to point out the flaws in duke's thinking for the audience to see?

there's not a lot of actually like... Good lesbian vampire movies; they're either fetishistic or "problematic" (i use that word only half-seriously) but there's a reason why lesbians do get depicted as vampires so often, and it's because people think they are evil and predatory. so it's disappointing to see one that's supposed to be on our side reiterate the same old song and dance again for the hundredth time. and again i just felt that duke's punishment at the end was so fucking cruel for no reason.... i really wanted this movie to be the supposed "queer intersectional feminist movie" it claimed to be but it just wasn't.

1 out of 5 stars for the reasons above but also because duke's outfits were really ugly and that pissed me off, too. watch bottoms instead.

#only open this if you want to see me be really annoying #anyways. was duke problematic? should we cancel duke? lmfao #personal #ummm i should tag this probably #lesbophobia #rape ment #my reviews

11 notes · View notes

pompadourpink · 1 year

Note

Hi ! You give great advice that has helped me before , so here i am at your door again. I’m 19 , female, never had a date. And i feel really lonely so i wanted to try this dating app . And an actor that i love uses it too. However, admission rates are low and they demand instagram. I could use that app to make friends too. I just feel really lonely. Do you think having an instagram would help? What advice would u give me?

Hello,

Welcome to my latest novel!

*insert here a reminder that English is not my first language

While craving connection and love is very natural and loneliness is understandably distressing, I'm going to officially declare that this is not the way.

The type of men you can find on Raya are older, experienced, famous, wealthy. The world is their oyster. You do not know them, what they are like, what they want, how they react where they don't get their way. You do not know what fame has done to them, their ego, trust, character. And in the era of the manosphere douchebags who actively look for women like you to trap, you need to proceed with caution.

It would be hazardous for you to learn how to swim by jumping into the ocean in the middle of a tsunami. You have not gone on a date, probably have not slept or done anything saucy with anyone, and maybe have not even kissed someone. Trying to get with a millionaire celebrity who gets hundreds of nudes in their DMs daily and can get anyone they want is very ambitious. Doing so when you have no experience, game, or skill in bed, will have to be guided every step of the way and are deeply insecure, is a scenario that ends well only in fanfiction written by a teenage girl who has never had a real conversation with a man.

Real-life men will either not look at you at all because they have lazier options, manipulate you because you have no way of telling the difference, or awkwardly reject you because dating someone who has no idea what she wants would be off-putting and make them feel like groomers.

Take it from a late bloomer: there is no deadline for a first relationship. It means nothing about your value as a person. And that is why pursuing people before you find yourself is dangerous: if you don't know what you are after, have no boundaries, and cannot make your own choices, people will make those decisions for you. If you wallow in self-pity in every conversation you have, they will either walk away because they are not therapists and have to protect themselves or take advantage of your weaknesses because you are begging for a crumb of attention and will be giving way more than they will ever give back, while thinking that this is how you will get treated the way you want. The truth is that if there is a hierarchy in the relationship, it will turn into Stockholm syndrome and you will be miserable.

I have talked about this before: when you don't know someone but you get a crush on them, your brain will see them as an unfinished puzzle and start filling up the blanks with your personal preferences. By doing so, you will create a person that does not exist, and when you eventually talk to the guy you have been dreaming of for six months, he will disappoint you, because the puzzle man has never and will never be. And it's worse if you are crushing on a celebrity: their PR team's whole job is to give them an excellent reputation and their work (characters, songs, etc.) is making them look attractive and fun. For all you know, your actor guy abuses his dog, uses slurs because he thinks it's funny and would ask about your underwear within the first minutes of the conversation if you matched with him.

Being in an adult relationship requires a number of things.

One, you need to be interesting, have things to say, passions you can ramble about, and answers to any question your match might have. If you are not there, it is time for self-discovery, trying new things, and discovering what is important to you and what you don't care about. Your partner cannot make you happy if you cannot show him how to do it and will not want to do it if talking to you feels like staring at a washing machine during a cycle.

Two, you need to be secure. You need to love yourself so you don't need others to feel confident, you need friends so you don't suffocate your partner and can stay your own person, you need a job, money, and drive so you can be independent, you need to address your trauma so no one can use your despair to treat you like garbage and get away with it (students get discounts, use them!).

Three, you need to be comfortable with adult activities (obviously people can be ace but most are not and especially not Raya people). Let's illustrate: you got a date with mister guy who invites you over, takes off his shirt and asks you to sit on him, does it feel arousing or excruciating? Would you sit and grind, or run outside and vomit? If you would look away, you're not ready for a relationship and I would rather you find out now than in front of a horny half-naked stranger who might not be good with rejection. Explore your body to figure out what you like so you can get the message across when the time comes.

And you know what? It's okay. People have different lives. You have things to recover from and he doesn't. He has access to opportunities that make him bolder and that is not your case. You might like different things and not be made to be together. No one was made for you. The first one will probably not be the one that makes you feel like you could love him forever, and it's fine, but no one will ever be exactly what you want, just like you have quirks that others will find peculiar or annoying. What makes a good relationship is good intentions and commitment.

Because of that, my advice (finally, we're there) is that you focus on yourself, on healing, first, and that you find a couple of good friends, that will treat you with love and respect, and that you will not treat as a parent or a box of tissues. Find them on social media, on Bumble BFF, or at an event somewhere in your city. Go out there, and try. Talk to people. Get comfortable with starting conversations with strangers. Learn small talk, try to make them laugh and feel appreciated, and fake being unapologetically yourself until you stop feeling like a waste of space.

So yes, you can get an IG, but make it a public diary, a way to express yourself and share what makes you happy, not a way to get into a pretentious dating app. Do things for yourself, so you can one day look back and be happy with the way you spent the very little time you got on Earth. Love will come.

Love,

Mum

#ask #malks

10 notes · View notes

staenless · 1 month

Text

I'm gonna be vulnerable with you guys for a sec and express what I'm certain is about to be an unpopular opinion; I fucking loath how Tumblr talks about TikTok, and specifically women and girls on TikTok. Don't like, don't read, I just honestly have to get this off my chest cause I'm mad

Like I see SO many posts about how popular TikTok trends, which are almost always mainly popular with women and girls, are self infantalising, promoting unhealthy behavior and societal views and literally killing feminism. I am not joking. I see so many of these posts. And like the craziest shit is the people posting this are SO certain of themselves and these buck-ass-wild opinions that they cannot even see the fucking hypocrisy of claiming these women are "self infantalising". Like you don't see how you taking one look at a TikTok trend, not knowing shit about it, and then deciding in your infinite wisdom you just HAVE to educate these imbicilic girls is fucking infantalising.

You're literally saying "these silly little girls with their "Girl Math" are portraying themselves as srupid and idiotic, and I am now going to call them srupid and idiotic for making a video where they rationalise purchasing certain luxuries to make themselves happy, because women like this are the reason we don't have gender inequality!" like it's sooo fucking patronising, bad faith and very clearly comes from someone who saw like, two videos and an essay ass post from one of their fellow fear-mongering online friends and decided to condemn these silly fucking idiots for their blatant internalised mysogyny. I, the supreme poster with wisdom beyond their platform however, am impervious to internalised mysogyny.

And it becomes even more obvious when you look through this person's posting history and they only ever talk about female-dominated trends (and when I say "female dominated I definitely include trans women here because I've seen posts complaining about how trans-women will call themselves girls and it's totally contributing to the societal infantalisation of women. These posts reak of terf-yness and seem to forget that men also refer to themselves as boys. "one of the boys" "me and the boys" it's almost as if using the child-centric gendered term denotes a level of carelessness and whimsical fun. "women's night" or "mens night" sounds severe and responsible. "girls night" or "boys night" sounds lighthearted and carefree. But God forbid we consider other influences on the language we use, it's clearly a way of infantalising women and stripping them of their agency, especially when it's women using these terms, reclamation and terms of indearment are for men only.). Mewling, a trend mainly popular with men and boys, originates from the looksmaxxing community, which is a branch of the wider manosphere/incel community. Where are your hand wringing posts about a trend popular with young men and boys that can be traced back to the incel community, a community that has produced actual fucking terrorists and murderers. A community where men advocate for women having their rights stripped away from them. But these wise bloggers seem fucking blind to mewling, or maybe in THIS instance they're able to understand that looksmaxxing was appropriated from the incel community in a effort to mock them, and mewling is an ironic continuation of this mockery. Well just ignore that videos about how to get that mewling jawline, which could lead down a rabbit hole to genuine looksmaxxing posts, to actual incel community. That's not important, but you know what is? Some earing disorder centered accounts made "girl dinner" posts showing how very little they ate, so girl dinner is a super harmful trend that promotes eating disorders.

The difference between Mewling leading to Inceldom, and Girl Dinner leading to an Eat Disorder is that women are fucking srupid and easy to manipulate, while boys are either too smart for this or cannot be held accountable for being radicalised or any of their actions really, so why even bother.

Do you understand my frustration here?

Okay sure, maybe some of these people genuinly DO care about TikTok promoting unhealthy beauty standards, or unhealthy traditional gender roles or just general unhealthy and dangerous ideas to be promoted to young women. So why don't they? Where are posts discussing trad wife influences who encourage their followers to give themselves fully to their husbands control, usually leading to white supremacist ideas. Where are the posts about "witches" (in commas because I do not think these people are genuine practicing witches, not because i don't respect or recognise wicca as a religion) who convince their followers to go off psychiatric medications because their mental illness is actually a divine gift, or that their womb is a sacred female blessing where all their power lies, and that this energy is submissive and caring like a hearth (that women without wombs aren't women at all, they lack this natural inclination to submission and motherhood that a divine goddess bestowed us, the real women, who need men to balance our divine energies). Where are call outs of influences who promote skin care and makeup products they don't use, making young girls buy and buy and buy in hopes of looking like their idols. Hell, where are the call outs for influences who encourage their users to stop using fucking sunblock, either because it's anti-aging and part of the toxic beauty culture, or that scientists are lieing to you and it actually causes sunscreen (I've even seen posts on Tumblr promoting ditching your sunscreen because of the whole "anti aging" angle. I think some Northern Hemisphere people are genuinly so fucking dillusional they very preventable cancer isnt a problem. Hi, I'm from the Southern Hemisphere, wear fucking sunscreen every time you go outside, skin cancer is real, the sun causes it, having melanoma lazered off is expensive.) For Christ's sake what about the MLMs???

These people who loooove talking about how their shitting on popular TikTok trends is actually feminism never discuss ACTUALLY harmful content on the app. They just look at whatever is popular with women and girls, think up a bad faith argument, and then send off posts complaining about it. Girl Dinner is going to cause eating disorders, girl math discourages women to study in stem and encourages them to act stupid, everything showers are upholding unfair beauty standards, these women are destroying society as we know it! Like you reek of mysogyny, and you probably won't read this post because your too busy getting sucked into a community of reactionaries who can't stop crying about how younger generations aren't media literate and don't know how to use Microsoft Word and use TikTok as google and all these other big bad scary headlines you never bothered reading the actual article for. You'll reblog screenshot of women saying "university is so hard, I wish I could just drop out and be a house wife" where Malala left a frown emoji comment and go "looks at these insolent hussies, I bet Malala is so sad they're wasting a gift she fought for!" as if women haven't been making the same joke for years and years, with no intent to follow through, because university is fucking hard and an idealized housewife life seems easy on some days. Malala got the fucking joke, she left a silly emoji to express 1) some women don't have this opportunity and 2) I'm sad not all women have this opportunity but 3) I can recognise how difficult studying is, and that sometimes an idealized version of life is easier to imagine, I get that you're just venting your frustrations but I'll leave this funny little emoji to remind you to keep working hard. She gets the joke. The girls posting, get the joke. I got the joke. But you choose to lament.

So yeah, I'm super annoyed by the way people on Tumblr act like women on TikTok are stupid, incapable or critical thinking, and stripping away women's rights. Instead of actually talking about ways women's rights are taken from them, or harmful communities that sell radicalisation and mysogyny to young girls, you chose Girl Dinner, I bet they're really proud of that choice too.

#Not checking spelling cause nobody is gonna read this #But it's so fucking annoying to see thinly veiled hate painted as feminism or whatever #Okay bestie I'm sure you've got great intentions tell me again how these women are stupid and clueless to their actions haha

0 notes

nox-artemis · 2 years

Text

Let me start by saying that I can't believe it's already been a year.

I'm not going to say the cliché, "time flies," because sure I petered out the second half of last year... okay. I mean, a lot of shit happened last year, some joyous, but a lot of it... not. Honestly, in retrospect, Miura's death was the second worst thing to have happened to my psyche last year (I'm still not in a mental state to explain the first, which indeed happened during the later half of the year). But you know, life goes on despite the tragedies and the heartache. It has to. And so it did.

I really didn't know what I could add to the overwhelming amount of remembrances I've seen all over Twitter for the anniversary of Miura's passing. Maybe I didn't really need to say anything at all.

... But then this guy named K.S. died.

Okay, sooooo this is going to be weird and unorthodox, and if you're not black and particularly Black American, you most likely have no idea who I'm talking about (and I envy you for that). In fact, I'm not even going to say his full name, but again, if you're in the grapevine, you'll know whom I'm referring to.

In a nutshell, K.S. was a podcaster whose name to fame was essentially being derogatory toward women, particularly black women; he was basically part of the manosphere and dished out advice to men and women who for some reason called into his show to be publicly degraded by him in an effort to "improve themselves." Naturally I deviate away from listening to those type of podcasts (and for the record, I don't really listen to the female equivalent either if such a thing exists; I'm honestly just another stereotypical true crime/paranormal listening chick), but every snippet I've ever come across... left a lot to be desired.

And now he too is part of the aether.

Of course I'm not going to go so far as to say that I'm glad the guy is dead, but I'm not going to say I'm upset either. I think that's the humblest approach. Rather than focus on my personal feelings of it all - being part of the demographic that was the target of K.S.'s ire - I think I'm just going to make the observation of this guy dying close to the same date as our beloved Miura-sensei and focus on legacy.

K.S. spent a portion of his 57 years - three years more than what was given to Miura - being a most unsavory and toxic human being and encouraged his listeners to be as unsavory and toxic as he was. As far as we know, up to his last day in this mortal coil he spent it exuding some deep-seated resentment he had toward BW - he literally built his livelihood on that energy, and ironically he died the way he claimed BW would if they didn't shape up: alone.

It's weird because both he and Miura were around the same age bracket and died the same way (heart attack) and there's a lot of speculation on either side ("what could have caused Miura's heart attack?" "K.S.'s heart was full of hate and that's why his heart gave out."). They each impacted the lives of many and each have a dedicated following.

But I think you can see where we begin making some distinctions.

The thing about podcasters like K.S. - "men with mics" as it's now dubbed - is just what actually makes them happy in life? What TRULY brings value to them? I could ask the usual what's their ambition or ultimate dream in life, but I think instead I ask, what are their daily whims? I think daily whims are important because they're those little moments and adventures that can take you and your headspace to a different level. I do a lot of those and they really helped me after Miura's passing.

It is unfortunately true to many people that all publicity is good publicity, even when that publicity is rooted in being awful, and people can make careers out of having an awful personality in a media-idol world. It's just weird that people choose to go down that path instead of doing something that makes them whole, whether it brings them into the spotlight or they revel in a shady area. I know that fame and power makes people forget about their own mortality, but alas, a lot of people get close calls and still go down that path.

Though I haven't really talked about it on here, I will hint that the biggest hardship I had endure last year was relationship-based. It's hard because I in fact had a close call - brace yourself - on the same day Miura died.

Yeah. Really, REALLY made shit so much shittier for my part.

But I remember saying in that moment, that I really wanted to see them face-to-face if I made it through.

And I made it so.

But I'm here now without them, so I guess it was not to be.

I'm still healing, and as with most events like these, a part of me will always remain wounded.

But in two days, I'll be going to Ecuador to continue my work in archaeology, and I'm going to make the most of my time while I'm there, thinking of ways to excel my own career ambitions and research. And the funny thing is that part of the reason I want to go down there so badly is so that I can come back and continue doing those little things I love that aren't career related: creating art, writing stories, spending time at my favorite haunts and with my friends, conversing with nature in my biome.

Sure, I could spend my time dishing out dating and relationship advice (based on many podcasts, it doesn't seem like being in a steady relationship is a prerequisite to start one) in order to soothe my wounded heart and ego, but I could also spend that energy making a podcast about my career topics and talk to awesome like-minded people. OR I could also just start yet another true-crime/haunted history podcast. Those things bring much more value to me, just like my daily whims.

I wonder if Miura did things like that, if he allowed himself to. His life was spent creating a masterpiece, but we've already implicated to the problematic nature of the industry he was in. But I think it's easy to say that despite the dark nature of his work and the various opinions people have on it - and the arguments we've gotten over -Miura managed not only to bring people together but to put forth a positive light in the world through the message of Berserk and the life he led to bring his story into being.

Despite the comparative nature of the two men and the presence of an expansive audience belonging to each - one being more of a positive force than the other IMHO - the matter of legacy applies to us all because we'll all leave one whether we become famous or not. We've probably all said at some point that we wouldn't care how people remembered us when we die, but I don't think it's true - not entirely at least.

I think it's one of those things we have to continue pondering, one year later.

#kentaro miura #RIP Kentaro Miura #berserk stuff

10 notes · View notes

fierceawakening · 3 years

Note

Yeah, I've also noticed that a lot of complaints about white women can veer into misogyny. That video you reblogged about white women weaponizing their oppression, along with earlier discourse about white women's tears, sounds a bit like when sexist men (like a lot of guys in the manosphere, for example) talk about "feminine wiles"—though I've mainly seen "white women" discourse bring up playing the victim as an example of such wiles, while more blatant misogynists seem at least as likely to bring up sexual wiles (a trope that "white women" discourse has thankfully seemed unwilling to touch so far, at least in my experience).

Oh heck yeah. It totally sounds to me like “womanly wiles” for the woke crowd.

Like we white AFABs are somehow so bewitching that we can make white men do whatever we want them to do. And like, as much as I hate people who act like ALL men do this, I just... I read those posts and am like “so does this shit work on white women with white husbands who beat them?”

I know what those posts are TRYING TO SAY is that often, white men who are ADJUDICATING SOME KIND OF DISPUTE between a white woman and a brown one, or even between a white woman and a brown man, will see the white woman as more convincing because they see her as “their kind.”

And I definitely think this is a problem, and I even think there are some white women who know this and use it.

But it seems to me that very few people explain that this is what they mean, and so it comes off as “white women put off weird pheromones that lead white men to not notice when they are airheads, which is often.” And yeah, if it comes off like that to you? Sounds sexist.

And a lot of the sort of white women who are trying to be woke, at least, aren’t likely to see themselves as wilesing the white man into doing what they want. Because they don’t see themselves as laying themselves upon the mercy of the patriarchy, they think of that as something they’d never do, as Feminists.

So it seems like... explaining it by “you just made southern belle eyes at that white man and he hurt a bunch of POC” is... not likely to get uptake, except among the sort of white woman who is ALREADY poring guiltily over every page of White Fragility.

Odds are, if Fran is in a dispute with Shaquan, then EVEN IF SHAQUAN IS OBVIOUSLY CORRECT, Fran isn’t going to understand when you go “you just weaponized your oppression.” As far as she’s concerned she’s just in an argument and the other person is wrong.

So... I dunno. It IS a thing and it’s important to know about, but the way it’s phrased sounds an awful lot like, “consider that if you’re in an argument with someone and you’re miffed at them and think they’re wrong, you might be CONTRIBUTING TO THEIR OPPRESSION by saying you’re miffed and arguing.”

Which is either going to send people into scrupulosity spirals that you THEN write off as “unhelpful white guilt,” or is just going to make people who might otherwise agree with you snort derisively and go “disagreement is oppression now? sod off.”

#cardi-brouch-junior

22 notes · View notes

longformautie · 4 years

Text

Addressing sexism of autistic men

CW: gender-based violence, including murder and rape

I. Introduction

This post has been coming for a long time. And I mean a LONG time. My thoughts on this topic have been evolving constantly. They will probably evolve even after I post this. I am still learning and welcome feedback.

I was prompted to write this post during the pre-coronavirus Before Times, when I saw that the popular Facebook page Humans Of New York had profiled an autistic man who had become a pickup artist. For context, pickup artists are a group of straight men who will cynically do whatever it takes to get them laid, which of course means blatantly ignoring the needs of the women they interact with, and who share strategies with one another. The autistic man in the photo post talked about how before he was a pickup artist he was hopeless with women, and now he was getting girls - getting laid, even. He said he knew it was manipulative, but that it was only fair - after all, it’s not like anyone had ever sympathized with him for his social difficulties. I was curious about what people had to say in the comments section; turns out, I wasn’t satisfied by any of the takes I found.

The takes I didn’t like can be broken down into two categories. Category number one were formulations like “poor him, he just wants to be accepted.” I’m not even a little bit sympathetic to this take and will only be spending a moment on it. Suffice it to say, it’s hard to take these people at their word that they care about the autism struggle when they don’t show up in droves to the banners of the neurodiversity movement with this level of enthusiasm. Rather, we are part of a culture that likes to sympathize with toxic men. If the man wasn’t autistic, they’d find some other excuse, but since he is, in defending him they can also activate the ableist notion that autistic people are incapable of respecting boundaries. I choose the word “incapable” because if your position is that autistic people sometimes don’t know better than to violate a boundary, the logical conclusion is simply that someone should teach them. To sincerely and enthusiastically take up this kind of “poor autistic guy doesn’t know any better” rhetoric, you have to presume complete incompetence of autistic people and that we’ll never learn, so that when a straight autistic man does a violating thing to a woman, they can shrug their shoulders and say, “well, I guess nothing can be done about this.” This attitude is sexism and ableism couched in a delusion of sympathy.

Category number two of takes, I like lots better but still am not quite satisfied with, and can be roughly summarized: “This isn’t caused by autism, it’s caused by being an asshole.” While I agree that being an asshole is the main ingredient in this cocktail, I don’t think the autism should be dismissed as an irrelevant detail. I think there is a sexism problem specific to autistic men that needs to be separately talked about and addressed. I intend to do so in this post, without assigning blame either to the autism or to the women being abused.

I want to note in advance that this post will be cishet-centric, not because I think straight experiences are universal, partly because the behavior of cishet men is what’s at task here, but mostly because I have no idea how these issues affect LGBTQIA communities. If anyone is able and willing offer insight or resources on that topic, I’d love to hear from you.

I. Autistic men

Having experienced it firsthand, I can say for sure that autistic loneliness is a vicious cycle. By loneliness, I mean a lack of any social connection, not just a lack of romantic or sexual partners. Autism makes social interaction more difficult, which makes it harder to find friends, but, crucially, not having friends also makes social interaction more difficult. More people to interact with means more practice with social interaction; it also means more assistance from comparatively clued-in people who care about us. This vicious cycle can also manifest with respect to a subset of people. For example, an autistic child who only socially interacts with adults may have trouble forming connections with peers. For the purpose of this discussion, I want to focus on the problems this presents for autistic boys who want to interact with girls in their age group.

The scarcity of cross-gender social interaction during childhood need not be framed as a uniquely autistic experience. Societal forces sort us by gender from an incredibly early age, so the vast majority of our social connections in childhood are with people of the same gender. Furthermore, especially during and after adolescence, boys and men are discouraged from being emotionally close with one another. Thus, the norms of masculinity isolate us almost totally from peers of all genders. Our social connections with men must be superficial; our social connections with women must be non-platonic. For those of us who crave the emotional intimacy that our same-gender friendships lack, a romantic relationship is the only socially acceptable opportunity to forming a deep, loving bond with someone close to our own age.

Enter autism (again). Dating, when we hit adolescence, is wholly new to us, and we have been given no opportunity to adjust ourselves to its social norms. Autism makes this a particular challenge, as do gender roles in dating. Since men are supposed to initiate and women are supposed to merely give subtle hints (if not be straight-out “hard to get”), straight autistic men face both the pressure of leaping into an arena that intimidates us, and the bewilderment of not knowing whether it’s working. If I had a crush on you in high school, I probably kept it a secret; if you had a crush on me, I probably didn’t notice.

Worth noting here that none of the things I’ve listed are evidence against autistic men’s actual attractiveness or appeal to women. We are facing access barriers that accumulate over the course of our lives until we finally figure out how to start ripping them down, and when we do, we quite often do get to have romantic and sexual relationships. But the prevailing narrative about autism and other disabilities is that they’re unsexy, and a lot of autistic men buy into that. I myself thought I was one of those autistic men who’d never date or have sex until experience taught me otherwise.

Knowing all this, we can see why a lot of autistic men might feel both that they need a relationship to be happy, and that they cannot possibly have one. This makes us prime targets for recruitment, because the sense of personal injury at being deprived of sexual experiences for reasons beyond one’s control is as indispensable an ingredient in the various movements of the “manosphere” as the sexism itself. It’s not that autistic men are any more or any less sexist than regular men, but that the sexists among us already feel exactly the way these communities require them to feel: deeply aggrieved, and deeply desperate. Pickup artistry both validates this sense of personal injury, and sells itself as the solution: a set of simple, logical rules that, when followed, will grant success. But it misses the uncomfortable truth that while everyone deserves to receive love, no particular person is obliged to give it. This is a deeply frustrating contradiction with no easy solution, but the solution certainly is not to cynically manipulate women into doing the thing you want.

III. Allistic women

I never was a pickup artist, but that doesn’t mean I never harbored a grievance against women for my loneliness. After all, I thought, wouldn’t my perpetual singleness end if women were more direct and assertive? As such, I worry that other people who read this may end up pinning the responsibility for autistic loneliness onto individual women too. The previous section hints at why that’s wrong, but I also want to take the time to explain why it’s deeply unfair.

My autism and masculinity were first brought into conjunction (or was it conflict?) in my mind in my freshman year of college. One of my new Facebook friends shared a Tumblr blog called “Straight White Boys Texting” which was a collection of screenshots of unwanted straight white boy texts, running the gamut from simple inability to take a hint to bona fide “what color is your thong” garbage. I felt pretty attacked, partly because I wasn’t yet used to seeing myself as part of a “straight white boys” collective that people didn’t like, and partly because what I saw was a bunch of guys missing social cues and taking things literally, just as a younger me would have done. I felt like I needed to say something - and boy, was that a bad decision. I said something about how the women in the screenshots needed to be more direct, and got instant (and deserved) backlash both for focusing on the least important problem in the interactions and for placing responsibility for a male behavior problem squarely back onto women.

At the time, I didn’t have a coherent framework for understanding sexism. Since then, I’ve learned that giving a direct no can occasionally get women killed, and most often at least gets them yelled at and insulted. Giving a yes also comes with its own risks - the risk of rape, in (unfortunately-not-actually-so-)extreme cases where that inch of “yes” results in guys taking a mile, but also the more pervasive risk of being socially stigmatized as slutty or promiscuous. It’s often the most women can get away with to be subtle (rather than completely silent) about all of their wants and needs, so that a discerning man who actually cares will know what those wants and needs are and respect them.

This puts those of us who have trouble with reading subtle signals in a difficult position if we inadvertently cross a boundary, but that’s not a problem women can reasonably be expected to solve. If a man crosses a woman’s boundaries because he simply doesn’t respect them, he wants to make it look like it’s an accident so that he will be forgiven. “But Aaron,” you might say, “didn’t you just say that the right thing to do in those situations is to teach people the right behavior, not ignore it?” Yes, that’s true. But that assumes the continuation of a conversation that a woman might feel safer just skipping; if a man is making her feel uncomfortable, she’s probably not inclined to continue to converse with him in order to establish whether his intentions were good or bad. When we impose the burden of freeing males from loneliness onto women, we are asking them to continue to interact with frightening men at their own peril.

Ironically enough, some of these frightening men are the autistic pickup artists from part 1. This means that pickup artists, far from “solving” the problems with dating they feel aggrieved by, are actually making it more difficult for everyone except themselves by giving women one more reason to be scared and cynical, and men who slip up one more type of monster to be mistaken for.

IV. Autistic women

At first glance, it seems like there’s a choice to be made here, between supporting autistic men who want to be valued as potential romantic and sexual partners and supporting allistic women who just want to be safe. But what I’m realizing more and more is that when there seems to be a conflict between the needs of two marginalized groups, the right choice is generally to avoid picking a side and instead find ways to support both groups. This works well, not only because both groups get what they want, but because if a side must be chosen, the people at the intersection of the two groups will lose both ways.

Autistic women bear the brunt of every part of this mess, as described in detail by Kassiane Asasumasu on her blog, Radical Neurodivergence Speaking (see the links later in this paragraph). Because autistic men fear ableism from neurotypical women, we tend to believe that autistic women are the only partners who will accept us for who we are. As a result, autistic women report being swarmed at autism meetup groups by men looking for a girlfriend, and those men who struggle with independent living are more than willing to escape that by leaning on the patriarchal expectation that the woman does all the chores, even when she is an autistic woman who struggles with the exact same tasks. This means autistic women actually interact with sexist autistic men the most, and not only are they subject to the same toxic shit that allistic women have to deal with, but they’re also expected to “understand” these men and thus endlessly tolerate their (supposedly inevitable) shitty behavior.

V. Solutions

Fortunately, the choice between female safety and autistic desirability is not a choice we have to make, but the solutions are not as simple as members of one or the other group simply choosing to behave differently. Rather, they require the collective participation of all kinds of people.

Addressing autistic male sexism necessarily means addressing sexism. It means respecting when women say no, rather than making it an unpleasant experience they might fear to repeat. It means teaching consent in special education classrooms, so that no one can claim in good faith that an autistic boy who crosses a boundary simply doesn’t know better. It means teaching girls, as they grow into women, that they are under no obligation to tolerate sexist behavior out of sympathy for the sexist man.

But addressing sexism also means supporting boys and men as they escape the confines of conventional masculinity. It means enabling and encouraging them to have close friends of all genders. It means reminding them that they don’t need a woman, any more than a woman needs a man.

In addition to addressing sexism, we need to address the ableism that prevents autistic people from accessing not just dating but emotional closeness of all kinds. We need to stimulate autistic people’s peer relationships at all stages of life. We cannot do this if special ed teachers continue to view us as broken allistic people rather than whole autistic people, nor can we do it if they view us as incomplete adults rather than entire children. If an autistic boy is unable to learn about condoms because it offends the sensibilities of the teacher, or if he is unable to learn how to talk like a teenager because his parents would like him to learn to speak like an adult, then that autistic boy is being deprived both of autonomy and of the opportunity to learn.

Furthermore, we need to teach allistic children how to interact with their autistic peers. Autistic people need no additional incentive to learn how to interact with the societal majority who control their access to jobs, housing, healthcare, education, political representation, and much more. Allistic people can, however, choose not to bother learning how to support and include us and face almost no social consequences beyond not getting to see my cool maps. Rather than alleviating this unequal distribution of incentives, adults generally exacerbate it by focusing only on the social development of autistic children with respect to interactions with allistic people, but not on the social development of allistic children towards being able to interact with autistic people. This is because the prevailing view regarding autism is still that our modes of moving through the world are incorrect and defective, whereas allistic modes of social interaction are viewed as normal and valid even when they exclude others.

The problem of autistic male sexism is hairy and complicated, but if we take the above steps, we can solve it without further stigmatizing autism, and without victim-blaming women. We don’t have to leave anyone behind in this conversation. Rather, by fighting both for autism acceptance and consent culture, we can produce a more just world where everyone gets the love and respect that they deserve.

3 notes · View notes

aridara · 5 years

Text

I’ve seen that this list of bad-stuff-that-feminists-SUPPOSEDLY-did-to-harm-men is going around again recently.

So, I’ve decided to simply copy-and-paste my rebuttal here, with slight modifications. Now with added quotes!

Okay, I’m going to number each single link Takashi0 provides. If it’s something that I’ve already talked about, I’ll be very brief about them, because there are 138 (if I didn’t miscount) links, and I can’t repeat myself every fucking time.

Feminists threaten to kill woman for saying men need abuse shelters.

1 No proof that it was feminists who threatened, in any way, Pizzey.

Feminists prevent a meeting about male suicide.

2 The meeting did happen. It wasn’t prevented from happening, nor did the protesters tried to via violent means.

Feminists stage mock murders to scare men.

3 No mainstream feminists defended them.

Feminist attacks male cartoonist and is hailed a hero of feminism.

4 Solanas wasn’t “hailed a hero of feminism”, neither back then, nor now.

Feminists shut down forum for battered husbands.

5 No proof that it was feminists; the forum continued.

Propaganda campaign against male fathers wanting custody.

6 Unsourced claim.

Feminists wish to slander accused names before convicted.

7 Feminists pointed out that protecting the names of those accused of rape while denying the same to those accused of crimes like murder or terrorism is patently unjust. This from Takashi0’s own source.

Try to shut down female prisons.

8 Becuse they don’t work - reconvictions and suicides were unusually high. Moreover, the release only involved convicts with light sentences that weren’t threats to society.

Create rape laws that exclude female rapists.

9 Suspicious source (see here); also, no word about whether those laws passed or not. Not to mention that, given the massive epidemic of rape on women in India, they really neded to sort out their priorities. (See also this thread.)

Make it impossible to charge women with rape.

10 Due to how Israel’s trials go, a man’s testimony trumps over a woman; if that law was in place and a woman can’t prove she has been raped (which is hard to prove), then the rapist could use this “non-conviction” as “proof” that she raped him and score a conviction. Also, the law only applies to a woman forcing the victim to penetrate her; if a woman penetrates a victim with a body part or object, even without this particular law she’d still be charged with rape.

Feminists against equal custody.

11 They’re against using 50/50 custody as the default; this is because it has repeatedly demonstrated that the most beneficial thing for the kid is to be able to stay with the parent that took care of them the most.

Female felons should serve home sentences.

12 Should read “Female felons should serve home sentences if they aren’t violent, but have parental duties, since we can’t just throw children in foster care”.

Told judges to be lenient on women.

13 Because they’re more likely to have parental duties or mental illnesses. It’s still a case-by-case procedure.

Feminists cover up female domestic violence.

14 Murray-Straus cites only ONE case where a publication was blocked, and offers no proof that it was feminists, nor the details of the case. The rest of his argument is basically “Feminists don’t talk about male victims of DV, this means that they are preventing everyone from helping them”. Sure. So is the World Wildlife Found. </sarcasm>

Feminists don’t want the gov to help unemployed men.

15 Feminists pointed out that there were various female-dominated jobfields in difficulty, too. And they didn’t ask for men to not be helped - they asked for women to be helped too.

Feminists launch campaigns to help girls only while boys are doing worse in every facet of education.

16 There still is a wage gap, a pay gap, a hiring gap, and a promoting gap. That’s the reason for those pro-girls campaigns.

Males who were raped as a child still have to pay child support.

17 The most recent case is from 1996, all of those cases haven’t been picked by any newsource whatsoever, and male rapists can get child custody for the children born from those rapes in these days.

Women should have the right to put a child up for adoption before the father gets custody.

18 The father in question didn’t have custody in the first place.

Feminists against beyond reasonable doubt when it’s male rapists.

19 Penal cases are based on “innocent unless proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt”. Civil cases - what the article was about - are based around “preponderance of evidence” which, as the article’s author puts it, means “the relevant body looks at all the evidence and rules for the party it thinks has the stronger case”. So, basically, slagartehfox wants civil cases of rape - and only rape - to have the same restrictions to evidence as penal cases.

5 rights feminism ignores for men.

20 This is actually a 5-in-1 bullshit list. (Also: JudgyBitch? Really?)

Men already have the right to decide whether to keep or terminate their own pregnancies. Oh, wait, JB wants men to be able to decide for others’ pregnancies. What next, does she wants to stay at home on sick leave when a colleague has a broken leg but she’s perfectly fine?

Feminists ARE the ones taking male rape seriously. MRAs… not so much. (See point 4 of this post of mine.)

Feminists aren’t the ones shaming men for talking about their feelings or admitting that they have mental problems - misoginysts are the ones shaming other men for being “weak”, or rather, “feminine”. (See here and here.)

Again: feminists aren’t against 50/50 shared custody being the default because they assume that women are “naturally” better caregivers - they’re against it because favoring the kids’ “primary caregiver” is more beneficial for those kids.

Feminists HAVE spoken against forced circumcision, and they aren’t preventing anyone from trying and solve this issue. MRAs? Only speak about it in discussions about FGM, in order to paint feminists as penis-cutting monsters. THAT’S IT.

Feminists blame males for their abuse.

21 Tries to demonstrate that women commit the majority of DV act by referencing the study that uses the Conflict Tactics Scale, which, among other things, doesn’t differentiate single incidents from repeated behaviours, doesn’t differentiate acts in self-defense from acts of abuse, and doesn’t consider at all sexual assaults and rapes.

The primary aggressor clause where only men get charged with abuse.

22 Unsourced claim. Also: no proof to disprove that the vast majority of DV offenders are men.

Shame men into going to war.

23 The White Feather Movement was created in the first place by far-right nationalists.

Feminists dismiss female child rapists.

24 The Honey Badge Brigade did, in fact, lie. The HBB stated “95% of abused boys in juvenile facilities reported being attacked/coerced by female staff“. This “statistic” doesn’t appear anywhere in the cited source; what is written is “Among the estimated 1,390 adjudicated youth who reported victimization, 89.1% were males reporting sexual activity with female staff only, and 3.0% were males reporting sexual activity with both female and male staff” (p.23). How is “sexual victimization” defined in the survey? “Sexual victimization—any forced sexual activity with another youth (nonconsensual sexual acts and other sexual contacts) and all sexual activity with facility staff“ (p.7). “All sexual activity with facility staff”, even if consensual and legal.

Feminists say men can’t talk about domestic abuse.

25 Question: where did Costello said “Men can’t talk about domestic abuse”? Answer: Nowhere - Takashi0 made that up!

Feminists mock a man who has his dick cut off.

26 Pretty much no feminist has defended that one. And before you say “No Ture Scotsman!”: we’re at 26 links so far - 30, if you consider the JudgyBitch one as 5 different points. Up until now, Takashi0 managed to drag up only 3 istances of feminists doing something awful - and ZERO istances of those people being defended by the vast majority of feminists.

Strawmanning MRA members.

27 That’s because MRAs are misogynists. Hell, have you forgot the existance of Pick-Up Artists (”I hate women but I want to have sex, here’s some ways to coerce them into sex”) or Men Going Their Own Way (”I hate women, so I don’t want to think about them, let me talk over and over on the Net about how women are awful”)? People can’t discern sides of the manosphere because they’re pretty much all characterized by misogyny.

feminists attack church.

28 The video depicts a (probably feminist) protest in front of a church. Not an “attack”. [EDIT 19/01/2016: Apparently it was a protest against Argentina’s massively fucked-up laws on abortion, which severely limit them. They’re the reason why 80.000 women per year end up in the hospital due to complications caused by illegal, non-sanitary abortions… and are arrested for having an abortion if they survive afterwards. And only 1 in 8 abortions (out of 450-600.000 per year) in Argentina are performed legally.]

Feminists transphobia

29 Congratulations: you finally found a sizable group of feminists that are legitimately awful (Trans-Exclusionari Radical Feminists, or TERFs). Too bad you’re way too late for the “Feminists should care about trans* people too, not being transphobic!“ by about a quarter of century.

Feminists slander the MRM

30 Repeated link - see 27.

Again,

31 Nope, the article is accurate. There is no systemic oppression of white cishet men (Systemic oppression isn’t just “I am discriminated against”, you also need a social system that upholds said discrimination to a systemic level - and there is no vast majority of women/POCs/lgbt+ people oppressing white cishet men); MRAs really did try to slander the Don’t Be That Guy campaign with their “False rape accusations are an epidemic, stop encouraging them!” bullshit (which has been repeatedly proven to be false); pretty much none of the issues MRAs worry about are caused by - or prevented from being solved by - feminists; and, in fact, the MRM has done nothing at all to solve those issues, preferring instead to attack feminists.

And again,

32 Elliott Rodger was literally dripping with his own misogyny. He regularly frequented first PUA sites, and then the PUAHate subreddit. His violent misogyny was pretty much the final consequence of the general manosphere’s misogynistic rethoric. Also, feminists didn’t claim that Rodger was a MRA, the Daily Kos did. And no, despite what the Honey Badgers can say, Futrelle wasn’t involved.

Call them terrorists.

33 While peole do think that calling the MRM “terrorist” is quite excessive, there’s no denial of the massive amount of hate present in it. Here and here manospherians justify Lepine; here’s proof that the Tom Ball manifesto stayed on AVfM’s front page for way too much time; and here, here and here are the manospherians’ opinions on Rodger. They aren’t terrorists - they’re cheerleaders for terrorists.

Feminists say Men can’t be raped.

34 Broken and probably repeated link - see 9.

Feminists defend female raping minor.

35 ………Barbara Ellen is a prominent feminist? Oh, right, I forgot - she’s a woman, and she’s saying something you don’t like, therefore of course she’s a feminist. (Meanwhile: MRAs believe that a minor boy “having sex with” an adult woman is something enviable: 1, 2, 3.)

Feminist defends why fucking an 8 year old boy isn’t rape.

36 Zero proof that kermitismywaifu is a feminist. In fact, it seems he’s NOT.

Feminists primary aggressor clause discriminates against males.

37 WAVA is already gender-neutral. Plus: if the MRM wants male shelters, then why didn’t they do like feminists did and fund them?! Hell, with WAVA you’d easily get financial aid from the government!

Feminists cover up female domestic abuse stats.

38 Broken link, but probably a repeat of 14.

Woman smashing bottle in mans face in public. Nobody gives a fuck.

39 Oh, right, I remember when they’ve tried this before. How many times have they done the play? And how many times they’ve shown the one istance where nobody helped?

Jezebel mocks men who are abused.

40 Jezebel critiqued the faulty CTS study. Bad taste? Sure. Plenty of feminists admit that. We’re still waiting for MRAs to stop bringing up that massively flawed study.

Feminists make sure the gov doesn’t spend money on male shelters or male research.

41 Same argument as 37. Why don’t MRAs fund male shelters? Oh, right, because they don’t give a shit about male victims.

Female on male abuse in public is at best ignored, and at worst celebrated.

42 Where’s the unedited footage? Where are the bystanders’ reactions? (See point 39)

Public stops a man from abusing a woman in public, same crowd laughs when the roles are reversed.

43 Oh hey, it’s the #ViolenceIsViolence fraudolent video! See here for details!

No funding for male shelter.

44 Again: WAVA IS GENDER-NEUTRAL. There’s this guy who’s asking for help to build this shelter, but have any of you ever heard MRAs raising their asses and doing something to help building those shelters? Nooooooo! (Also: good job spreading that “there are no resources for men” narrative. Apparently MRA’s prefer to tell male victims that they cannot receive any help, than to direct them towards actually existing resources like this or this or this…)

Founder of Canadas only male shelter for abuse forced to close due to lack of funding before committing suicide.

45 Did feminists cut off his fundings? No. Did they prevent anyone from supporting him? No. Did MRAs raised money to help this guy? No.

Feminists threaten to kill woman for saying men need abuse shelters.

Feminists prevent a meeting about male suicide.

Feminists stage mock murders to scare men.

Feminist attacks male cartoonist and is hailed a hero of feminism.

Feminists skewed the Definition of Domestic Abuse, resulting in only male abusers being arrested and female abusers not.

46-50 Repeated points - see 1, 2, 3, 4 and 22.

Feminists’s DV training hurts Police training

51 Misleading title. What happend was: a husband attacks a man. He claims that it was self-defense because, he says, said man attempted to attack and rape his wife. The wife had previously given a taped statement to the police, stating that the man wasn’t armed. She then refused to testify in person by invoking marital privilege. Not “feminists’s DV training”.

Feminist Mary Koss denies malerape victims.

52 Koss doesn’t “deny male rape victims”. She simply states that for the purpose of researching the subject “forced to penetrate” should be a separate category.

53 Broken link to a page named “Sommers”. Possibly, it portrayed these debunked statements of her.

54 Link that shows that Koss, in her survey, attained herself to the local (Ohio) legal definition of rape because otherwise her critics would’ve dismissed her survey “because she broadened the definition of rape beyond the reasonable”. They still tried to discredit her that way, though.

Feminists violently protesting against Warren Farrell at U of Toronto

55 Repeated point - see 2. Also: no acts of violence were made.

A mob of feminists at a recent protest attacking and sexually molesting a group of Rosary-praying Catholic men who were peacefully protecting the cathedral in the city of San Juan from threats of vandalism.

56 Repeated point - see 28. And there was no “attack” or “sexual molesties”.

Feminists disrupt a forum for battered men

57 Repeated point - see 5.

Feminists fought a law for equal custody to be the default if both parents want custody and neither parent is unfit.

58 Broken link to Glenn Sacks. Also: probably repeated point (11).

Multiple times.

Feminists started a campaign against Father’s rights groups

Feminists fought against laws granting men anonymity until charged with the crime of rape—not convicted, just charged.

Feminists fought against a law to end to the justice system favoring women simply because they are women, and giving men harsher sentences simply because they are men.

Feminist fought against men want equal treatment when victims of domestic violence, and to not be arrested for the crime of “being male” under primary aggressor policies.

Feminists in India and Israel fought against femalerapists being arrested, charged and convicted of rape.

Feminists fought against a economic stimulus for male-dominated job such as construction, etc.

59-66 All repeated points - see 11, 6, 7, 8, 21, 9, 10 and 15.

Feminist fought a law against Paternity Fraud.

67 The link only states what the “Revocation of Paternity Act” is. Not that feminists fought it. In fact, a search for “feminism revocation of paternity act” pretty much only brings up anti-feminists sites linking to the same webpage.

Feminist Harriet Harman has publicly requested employers to hire women in preference to White men if both job candidates are equally

68 It was basically affirmative action, it was for women and ethnic minorities (and yes, there IS discrimination against them), and most importantly it was NOT a law proposal and thus there was no obligation for those firms to follow.

Equality Minister,feminist Patricia Hewitt, was found guilty of breaching the Sex Discrimination Act by “overlooking a strong male candidate for a job in favour of a weaker female applicant”.

69 Congratulations: you found a woman doing a Bad Thing. And? Are you claiming that feminism as a whole is bad because of one woman, but that one of the biggest MRM websites putting up a libelous “criminal registry” is the action of an extremist fringe? Or that widespread hiring biases against women don’t exist because of this one woman being biased?

Elected in 2009, the lesbian feminist prime minister Johanna Sigurdardottir has vowed to “end of the Age of Testosterone

70 Do you know what the “Age of Testosterone” refers to? The 2008-11 Iceland financial crisis, caused by aggressive economic policies opposed by, among other groups, feminist groups.

Feminists want to peeing while standing illegal

71 False description - that left party is pushing to exchange stand-only toilets in male restrooms with sitting ones. Newsflash: you can pee on a sitting toilet while standing up.

Erin Pizzey had to flee the UK because she and her family received death threats and her dog murdered all because feminists didn’t like that she discovered women were equally as violent as men.

72 Repeated point - see 1.

Also Suzanne Steinmetz and her children received death threats and bomb threats she discovered that the rate at which men were victimized by domestic violence was similar to the rate for women.

73 No proof that it was feminists.

Richard Gelles and Murray Straus have all received death threats from feminists, simply for publishing their findings (that female-to-male family violence was equal to the rate of male-to-female violence).

74 No proof that it was feminists.

75 Yep, it’s the CTS study. Debunked.

Feminists say Men can’t be raped.

Feminists defend female raping minor.

Feminist defends why fucking an 8 year old boy isn’t rape.

76-78 Repeated points - see 9, 35 and 36.

Most feminists backed studies are bullshit.

79 This doesn’t prove that “most feminist backed studies are bulshit”. All this proves is that people have forgot to actually check the BOJ statistics.

Beyond reasonable doubt doesn’t apply to rape.For men only

80 A college hearing is considered akin to a civil lawsuit, and thus it isn’t bound by the same restrictions as a penal trial. Plus, even in the rare cases where the school does take disciplinary action against a student accused of sexual assault, 75-90% of the time it’s a token punishment - if the school decides to give any punishment in the first place.

Feminist changes mind on rape culture when her son is falsely accused.

81 False rape accusations are awful. The fact that they exist doesn’t change the fact that rape culture exists, or that way more often is the accuser that gets disbelieved (including by the police), or that false rape accusations are no more common than false anything accusations.

Feminists primary aggressor clause discriminates against males.

Feminists cover up female domestic abuse stats.

Jezebel mocks men who are abused.

Feminists make sure the gov doesn’t spend money on male shelters or male research.

82-85 Repeated points - see 37, 38, 40 and 37 (again).

Feminists prevent a meeting about male suicide.

Feminists stage mock murders to scare men.

Feminist attacks male cartoonist and is hailed a hero of feminism.

Feminists shut down forum for battered husbands.

Propaganda campaign against male fathers wanting custody.

Feminists wish to slander accused names before convicted.

Try to shut down female prisons.

Create rape laws that exclude female rapists.

Make it impossible to charge women with rape.

Feminists against equal custody.

Female felons should serve home sentences.

Told judges to be lenient on women.

Feminists cover up female domestic violence.

Feminists don’t want the gov to help unemployed men.

Feminists launch campaigns to help girls only while boys are doing worse in every facet of education.

Males who were raped as a child still have to pay child support.

Women should have the right to put a child up for adoption before the father gets custody. Feminists against beyond reasonable doubt when it’s male rapists.

5 rights feminism ignores for men.

Feminists blame males for their abuse.

The primary aggressor clause where only men get charged with abuse.

Shame men into going to war.

Feminists dismiss female child rapists.

Feminists say men can’t talk about domestic abuse.

Feminists mock a man who has his dick cut off.

86-110 All these points are a repeat of links 2 through 26.

feminists attack church.

111 Repeated point - see 28.

Feminists shut down a festival about gender equality for including men.

112 That’s not what happened. What happened was that the sponsors realized that CAFE had nothing to do with equality and everything to do with MRAs and misogyny, and ran away from them.

Feminists hope MRA’s die.

113 Correction: ONE person who defines themselves as “feminist” and who doesn’t have any relevant spot in feminism whatsoever hopes that MRAs die.

Feminists against fathers day.

114 #EndFathersDay is a troll tag created by 4channers.

Feminist makes up fake assault stories.

115 Again: only 2% at best of rape accusations are false. There is no epidemic of “false rape accusations” or “made-up stories of assault”.

Female reporter bullied by feminists at the National Young Feminist Leadership Conference

116 Yes, because telling someone “Your conservative magazine isn’t welcome here” is totally bullying on par with what feminists face. </sarcasm>

The Wage Gap is a myth.

117-121 Besides the fact that the wage gap has been always correctly labeled by feminists as “How much female workers collectively make/how much male workers collectively make“, there’s some small factoids such as: women are penalized if they get pregnant more than if they take a pause from their jobs from any other reason; women are penalized if they try to negotiate their salary; there’s hiring and promoting biases; and even if we consider a man and a woman doing the exact same job/efficiency/hours worked, there’s still a 7% difference.

Women Now a Majority in American Workplaces

Labor force participation rate for men has never been lower.

122-124 How is this a problem? Feminists aren’t “stealing jobs” or “preventing men from taking jobs”.

Women in some cases make more than men.

And their husbands dont have a problem with it either.

125-134 Still doesn’t negate the existance of the gender wage gap.

Women CHOOSE to stay away from STEM field

135-138 Still doesn’t negate the existance of biases against women in STEM. (Here’s two examples.)

Did I mention that at least 50 of these links are repeats? Good fucking job, Takashi. Good fucking job.

#debunking antifeminism

2 notes · View notes

spaztique · 3 years

Text

Pill Overdosed - An Essay On the Devolution of the Incel Community, From a Recovered “Love Shy.”

This was inspired by plunging down the rabbitholes of the incel community, the manosphere, and everywhere in-between.

Not long before writing this, there was a mass shooting incident in Plymouth, Devon. The shooter was a self-identified involuntary celibate, or incel for short: somebody who struggles with social skills to the point where they suffer depression from the fact they cannot develop a relationship to the point of romance. You’d think that merely not having the skills to attain a romance wouldn’t be much of an excuse to go postal, or maybe think he was an isolated case, but sadly, this isn’t: there was yet another mass murder not long prior at a sorority at UC Santa Barbara. Same motivation, same background. What gives?

I think I have a little authortiy to speak on the subject because, as I’ve said in my prior self-help writings, I also grew up without social skills. The only difference, of course, is I trained like crazy to fix that. Prior to 2010, I was a self-identified “love shy”: the pro-incel, back when the community was all about self-improvement and learning social skills to escape. After tons of hard work, I eventually got my first girlfriend in college, albeit we weren’t a very good match, seperated after it was clear we couldn’t work out, became a serial dater, and quietly graduated from the “love shy” label in 2011. I only bring this up now because, as I’ve noticed, things have changed a LOT in ten years.

Without diving deep into the histories of these concepts, there are three basic ideologies the modern incel falls into. Shorthand, they are known as the bluepill philosophy, the redpill philosophy, and the blackpill philosophy. They exist on a continuum, and the further you go down the spectrum, the more insane and nihilistic it becomes, eventually descending into despair, rage, misogyny, conspiracy thinking, and finding homicide and self-destruction.

The Bluepill Incel - The “Nice Guy”

Ah, the “nice guy.” The classic dogged friend-to-everyone who believes if they’re simply nice enough, he’ll eventually find love (and of course, sex). He’s too shy to voice his intentions, too pure to even hint at anything sexual (unless he’s in private with pornographic materials), and his primary love language is favors and gifts. This is your vanilla garden-variety incel, and he’ll need a couple heartbreaks and losing his crushes to more direct, forward men (known infamously as being “friend-zoned”) before he either wakes up to reality, or descend deeper down the spiral.

The basic nice guy merely has trouble with boundaries, self-disclosure, and empathy: the basic skills of building and deepening relationships. Favors and kind acts are the only way he knows to gain peoples favor: especially with women. He’s terrified of rejection and fears the maintenance part of relationships: getting into disagreements and making up, because he thinks he won’t get a second chance. Low self-esteem plagues the nice guy, and his biggest belief is that a relationship, especially a physical relationship, will solve his problems.

Hoo boy, he cannot be any more wrong.

Bhuddist teacher and psychologist Tara Brach coined this obsession “the trance of unworthiness”: where we believe our lack of something (in this case, a relationship) means we are unworthy, worthless, flawed, different from others. Incels use their single status to beat themselves up daily, not realizing this is the “trance of unworthiness” in action. Not having a relationship is a catalyst for this trance: they see the relationship and physical touch as the ultimate sign of acceptance, of being worthy, of being part of the human race and not “rejected.” Perhaps this is another reason they fear rejection: it reinforces the trance of unworthiness they wish to escape through physical contact.

It’s a misnomer to believe the nice guy is “entitled” to sex. This isn’t true: they simply believe they did everything they could to deepen the relationship, and it should’ve happened as naturally as if they had, say, flirted, voiced their intent, escalate the relationship, deepen their emotional intimacy, and so on. From their perspective, they’re not thinking, “I did all this stuff for you, so I DEMAND you sleep with me!,” but rather, “I did all these things for you and showered you in gifts and attention, so why don’t you love me as much as I love you?! What else am I supposed to do?!” But everything the nice guy does is surface-level, transactional, unemotional from a relationship standpoint. Sure, it can build friendships (albeit shallow friendships which resemble partnerships more than best buds), but not romance. Maybe we shouldn’t call it the “friend zone” and more the “you-didn’t-even-bother-building-the-relationship-correctly zone.”

Besides, it’s not the sex that incels want: it’s the validation. As I said before, physical intimacy is the ultimate form of acceptance, of escaping the trance of unworthiness, and the more physical, the more loving, the more closer, the more “points” it earns. If a hug is worth 10 points, and a kiss is worth 100, and a cuddle is 500, then sex is like 10,000+. But why not just pay an escort or “go solo”? To them, that’s cheating. To an incel, having to pay somebody to like you isn’t unconditional: that’s maybe worth 5 points, or maybe even negative points. Of course, sex is a cooperative activity, not a validation sink. Nothing will wake you up from this reality faster than that awkward conversation after your first few times of, “So, um… How was it?”

Where does this come from? Some blame romance movies and their grand romantic gestures, others blame love songs, and others blame just society’s sentimental view of romance. I’m sure if I mention flowers (especially roses), chocolate, plush bears, bubble baths, candlelit dinners, or slow dancing, you think romance. The images and ideas are burred into our collective unconscious. We’re bombarded with all of these images telling us three things: this is what love looks like, love is the ultimate cure for loneliness and sadness, and if you don’t want this, there’s something wrong with you. But the thing about the artistic representation of love is that it only depicts the end product, or at least the fantasy of somebody wanting us and loving us unconditionally. Perhaps the popularity of the Japanese archetypes of the tsundere come from the struggles of building a relationship, while the yandere shows us how creepy it is when somebody wants us way, waaay more than we want them back.

Either way, it paints an unrealistic portrait of how romance works.

Just as you can’t learn driving from action movie chase scenes, or sex from hardcore pornography, or how to become an Olympic-level runner playing Sonic, the simplified artistic portrayals of love and romance do not provide adequate education for how to interact with people. Actual relationships run on a model of probing (first contact, asking surface-level questions), deepening (asking and revealing more personal things mutually), and maintenence (handling misunderstandings, rebuilding familiarity, or even breaking off the relationship if there can be no reconciliation). Another popular modern concept is breaking down communications into different “love languages”: gifts and favors are only two, but there are also words of affirmation and reassurance, touch, and time together. This is the boring work of building everyone relationship from a friendship to a romance, but it is the basic skill incels ignore until they receive enough pain when they normal methods fail.

And with that, they begin searching for answers…

The Redpill Incel - The Modern Incel, Between Two Choices…

In The Matrix, Neo is given the choice between taking a blue pill to stay in his safe little world as an office drone, or take the red pill, disconnect from The Matrix, and realize the horrifying truth: the world is enslaved by machines, and he’s going to join a resistance to save humanity.

In the early 2010s, the idea of the red pill vs. blue pill was to describe the choice between the idealized romantic world I described above for the nice guy incel, and the cold hard facts about dating: that dating is a skill, and you need confidence, influence, leadership skills, a decent wardrobe, and good self-maintenance skills to increase your odds of success. Even in the mid 2000s, this spawned the pickup artist community, which are really just social skills gurus who market common-sense advice to single men.

However, something changed in the mid 2010s…

Eventually, the redpill ideology morphed into this idea that women, despite having their own corner of dating advice and entire magazines for how to attract men, secretly control not just dating, but society as a whole, and feminism has utterly wrecked dating. This corner has other bizarre, frankly misogynist ideas about how women operate, and some go even further as to saying all dating is rigged towards women and men should just avoid it all together. They also posit that women, by their nature, cannot be involuntary celibates, even though it was a woman who coined the original term. (And I also find it kinda funny how supposed “men’s rights” activists unironically use the term “red pill,” despite being coined by two writers who later came out as trans women.)

Obviously, this creates a problem for the modern incel: in their moment of pain, they’re desperately searching for answers, and they’ll latch onto the first source of hope they can find. Now, I got lucky: we didn’t have “men’s rights” folks in power back when I was searching for answers. We didn’t have those weird-ass theories, and those who did were laughed out of the community. (Neil Strauss even documents this in his book The Game, where he talks about some of the more questionable gurus trying and failing to get a foothold.) But these days? Imagine an incel in a moment of weakness, and they suddenly come across a post saying, “It’s not you! It’s feminism! Feminism is the reason you can’t find love! And love means validation, so therefore, feminism is the reason you can’t find validation!” Suddenly, there’s hope: the incel thinks if he can “game the system,” he’ll get that coveted physical contact, and with it, the validation he yearns for. But all this does is add another catalyst for his trance of unworthiness: lack of love AND feminism make him feel like his life is nothing but pain.

Now, let me put on my own Morpheus glasses and leather trenchcoat and ask you: what if I were to tell you there were three pills? A blue pill, a red pill, and a black pill? You take the blue pill, your journey to discover how relationships work ends: you wake up in your bed and you can believe whatever you want to believe about romance. You take the red pill, and you’ll see how far the rabbit hole goes…

… but if you take the black pill, you’ll wake up somewhere far worse.

A world of infinite loneliness, where what you want is forever out of your reach, in a world that sees you as a mistake. Where arbitrary rules apply to you that apply to nobody else. Where there is no hope for those who enter.

Why would anybody choose this pill?

I offer you one blue pill, and two red pills. One is the true red pill, and the other is the black pill.

Back in my day, there was only one red pill. Now, there are two, and one is poisoned.

Now, just as Morpheus showed Neo the desolate Desert of the Real, let me show the Desert of the Loveless…

The Black Pill - The Radical Extremist Incels

First, the incel starts as a “nice guy”: naive, but still relatively hopeful.

Then, after realizing their ways don’t work, they are given two choices:

One path leads to a life of self-improvement, hard study of social skills, practice, and eventually escape…

… but the other leads here. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.

The black pill ideology has given up on self-improvement, with the motto “it’s over,” any any notion of hope is considered “blue pill propaganda.” After years of being told, “Just go to the gym!,” “Just groom better!,” “Just get a good job and better education,” and so on, but NOT being told the most basic social skills, they’ve decided all of that just doesn’t work and it must be something else.

According to black pill incels…

Women are only interested in “Chads”: men who are a 8-10 out of 10 on the looks scale and blessed with perfect genetics and no personality. Any evidence to the contrary will be explained away. (Is the guy ugly? Then he must have money. No money? Then he must have status. No status? Then she must be cheating. Not cheating? Well, this example must be made up because it’s probably not true.)

Genes determine everything: if you were born any shorter than 6”0, you’re screwed. Women apparently only prefer white men (despite, y’know, other cultures and countries existing), and if you were born anything other than white, you’re screwed. (And if you somehow “ascend” inceldome? Then you are a fakecel: you were never truly an incel in the first place, because true incels are permanent.)

Feminism has destroyed modern dating and only a return traditional values like some kinda Handmaid’s Tale-esque patriarchal dystopia will solve everything. Because they see sex as the ultimate fuel for validation, sex needs to be considered a human right equal to food and water. Expect plenty of talk of sex slaves, lowering the age of consent, and sex robots.

Despite accusing everyone else who disagrees with them of “coping from cold, hard facts,” their misogyny and bizarre ideas are the ultimate coping mechanism: they’ve effectively shut themselves off from anyone who disagrees with them, and they stew in their anger with fellow blackpill incels in an echo chamber of despair and self-loathing, celebrating when women (or as they derisively call them, femoids) face hardships or when there’s a mass killing of any kind. If this seems like an exaggeration, I’d welcome you to look for yourself, if I wasn’t scared some normal incel would fall prey to their toxic influence.

These are the incels that give the poor unfortunate socially awkward incels a bad name. It’s why people fear “nice guys” may turn out to be future serial killers. If you wanna know why people want to label incels as a whole as a “hate group,” despite being a subset of only the most extreme ones, it’s because of these folks right here.

So, what now?

What’s an involuntary celibate to do? None of the options are good: continue being a “nice guy,” or look for advice elsewhere, even though there’s a 50/50 chance you could get suckered in to the extremists?

To put on my Morpheus glasses again, what if I were to tell you there’s a fourth choice? To take none of the pills?

Being a “nice guy” who does everything for others in hopes of earning friendship or romance doesn’t work.

Relying solely on hard science may be informative, but when you rely on that alone with no heart, still only shooting for validation, that doesn’t work either.

And obviously, giving up and isolating yourself with other angry virgins doesn’t work, either.

What if the solution was simpler? Waaay simpler?

It all boils down to such basic things:

Self-validation: learning to not rely on external things like love or physical connection as your own means to escape the “trance of unworthiness.” Everyone who’s walked this path says that once you realize that sex isn’t everything, you’ve truly escaped inceldome: then it simply becomes something that’s nice to have, like going to an amusement park or eating a deluxe sundae.

Basic communication and relationship skills: You can learn a lot more from looking up social penetration theory and the stages of a relationship than reading about facial ratios and social darwinism. Read the most basic guides on empathy and how to start conversations, then work into books on how intimacy works (you’ll notice an overlap with social penetration theory.)

Learn to network. Just as friends can get you jobs, they can also hook you up with fellow singles. Join groups, talk to co-workers (and no, you don’t have to date co-workers, I mean they can find people outside of work), get a hobby. Once you learn the above two skills, get out there and build connections until you find someone who can find someone.

Notice how I didn’t say “go to the gym” or “just be confident” or “take a shower.” I’ve seen plenty of incels do all three and have no luck, and I’ve seen guys without confidence get equally unconfident girlfriends, as well as guys who are unhealthy and never bathe. These are non-factors: self-validation, social skills, and networking is all you need.

Of course, there are still lessons from both the blue pill and red pill (which some folks call the purple pill philosophy): you need the romantic creativity and heart of the blue pill, but the hard skills and pragmatism of the red pill. And you need everything to overcome the dark side that is the black pill, the shadow we avoid where infinite horrors lurk within.

Coming back to the incident that sparked this post, there have been some modern incels who were jarred by the recent killings. Some are starting to question what happened to the incel community, just as I have. How did it devolve from folks wondering how to escape their loneliness, into the hellhole of conspiracy theories and hatred it has become now? Perhaps this may be the beginning of the incel community returning to its roots, where the romantically impaired seeked advice that actually worked, rather than wallow in self-pity and cheer on mankind’s destruction. As an old recovered “love shy,” I pray others find the same path I and many others like me had walked, and avoid the one that leads to self-destruction others have stumbled upon.

With this post, I’m making my vow to do my part to make sure more people avoid this terrible fate and find happiness, whether they pursue love or not.

0 notes

hotelconcierge · 7 years

Text

HYPOCRISY IS BAD, BUT YOU’RE WORSE

“I like the Walrus best," said Alice, "because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.” “He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee. “You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn't count how many he took: contrariwise.” “That was mean!” Alice said indignantly. “Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn't eat so many as the Walrus.” “But he ate as many as he could get,” said Tweedledum. This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, “Well! They were both very unpleasant characters—” (Through the Looking-Glass)

This is a moviepost—extensive spoilers follow for Death Proof, Jackie Brown, and Inglourious Basterds—and I wrote it mostly because I wanted to talk about some movies. But first, a topical tie-in:

There is always an outside that a person considers unworthy of life...The individual progressive or racist may never say that the outside is unworthy of rights, but they feel it. This is what is meant by that line from Inglorious Bastards when the character of Lt. Aldo Raine says; the "Nazi ain't got no humanity. They're the foot soldiers of a jew-hating, mass-murdering maniac and they need to be de-stroyed!"

Here we have a thirst to destroy the perceived inferior, except instead of a racist seeking the end of Jews it is the progressive liberal seeking the genocide of racists. That's irony.

And understand what is happening here. Aldo Raine is really a proxy for Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino is the one speaking, not Brad Pitt. The man is very left-wing and he wrote the script. That move is essentially an exposition of the directors [sic] politics.

The above quote is taken from The Anti-Puritan. Exactly what it sounds like: dude read three Moldbug posts and now thinks he can write. The specifics of this guy’s bad opinions are not that interesting—would you believe that even the videogame industry has been corrupted by cultural Marxism?—but perhaps something can be learned from the framing:

A climate scientist drives to an important summit on global warming. On the way there, he fills up his tank with gas. The only reason oil companies are in business and climate change is occurring is because of people like him who fill up their tanks with gas. Their payments make climate change possible. The payments are the reason Exxon, Shell and BP exist.

A feminist complains about the cis het patriarchy. Her boyfriend, whom she spreads her legs for, is tall, strong, confident, manly, and "dominant" in every way. Fucking dominant men is the reason they exist, the reason they will continue to exist, and the cultural incentive to become dominant...She and billions of other women perpetuate "the patriarchy" with their sexual choices. Patriarchy exists because of them.

A college professor complains about McDonald's. She has eaten fast food from a burger restaurant recently. She, and millions [of] others, are the reason McDonald's exists. (Source)

Let’s accept that there’s a lot to unpack here and move on. Focus instead on the form of the argument: tu quoque, again and again. The feebler the discourse the more accusations of hypocrisy (Bush Lied, Barack Hussein’d) because hypocrisy doesn’t require knowledge of anything but pre-algebra logic. Even a child can identify a contradiction: “But mom! You said—!”

This is precisely the skull malformation that has constricted discussion of the protestors who identify as “Antifascist Action” and are derided as the “alt-left.” Antifa has already become a perennial non-issue where all opinions are based on anecdote and there are plenty of anecdotes to go around; no one has skin in the game, anyone can upvote, and measurable achievements are dwarfed by spikes of indignation like hypertensive hemorrhages into America’s brain. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t been watching the stock prices of PP, NRA, PETA, and BLM.

Antifa now faces the two attacks that were long ago formulated against other activist groups. One: antifa is composed of violent morons who carry upon them body and pubic lice species yet to be classified by science. Two: antifa is counterproductive to their stated goal, e.g. getting to whack-a-mole pamphleteers is actually a powerful incentive to suffer for fashion.

I suspect both criticisms are true, but whatever—does the first imply the second? Is violence bad even when it is effective? Because if it isn’t, then claiming that “antifa are thugs too!” is worse than useless. Your opponent can simply reply, “So what? Nazi ain't got no humanity.” And now that you’ve cried wolf, that guy won’t listen when you claim that, in this instance, violence might not work. So you better be damn sure about your answer: what price should be paid for the sin of hypocrisy?

There is always an outside that a person considers unworthy of life...

Quentin Tarantino has dedicated his career to answering this question.

QT has seen too many movies for it to be any other way. If you consume enough art across epoch and genre, you can’t help arrive at the Susan Sontag #redpill that content doesn’t matter all that much. All art is genre fiction no matter the pretensions and our lizard brain judges accordingly. Sure, thematic analysis is fun to play with after the fact, but if a movie has the right tropes in the right places—femme fatales, tough muchachos, pretty pictures, happy ending—well, you can convince yourself of just about anything.

Take, for example, Death Proof. Genre: exploitation/slasher. Synopsis: hot babes go for a night out, ex-stuntman stalks and runs ‘em down in a death-proof car; stuntman rinses and repeats with another girl gang except they turn the tables and Mortal Kombat his thoracic spine. Rating: extremely badass, you should check it out, anyone who tells you different is a pleb.

Namely: some people complain that the movie has too many scenes of girls talking and that their QT-isms are an unrealistic depiction of an actual group chat. The characters bicker lewdly, if that’s a thing, alternating between weirdly masculine sex-as-status teasing and pledges of undying affection, the verbal equivalent of a catfight, which is maybe how a creepy foot fetishist would imagine female dialogue, but...

Nope, still pleb. Tarantino wasn’t the first guy to invoke this trope, it’s part of the DNA of the slasher genre, as old as Jamie Lee Curtis getting razzed for her virginity in Halloween. Misogyny, maybe, but also content is a spook. Slasher movies have to fill 70 minutes before the eponymous slashing, and they also have to make you care about the outcome of said slashing without humanizing the characters so much that you get all Marley and Me when they die.

What’s the secret? Status games, the less nuance the better. Boys would watch paint dry if you said it was a grudge match. Catfighting is no different than the elaboration of powers in a shonen manga or the suspicious glares exchanged between heist movie protagonists: it creates tension. Different value systems have been described, there can only be one, now you’re rooting for process of elimination to reveal the truth. No—you identify with that process. Hail Gnon. You could make a movie with men playing status games and being killed off by women and men would still find it hot; I know this because of female horrorcore rappers but also because this movie is called Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and it’s 10/10. Incidentally:

This is referenced again in the final scene of the film, in which the viewer cheers on our group of heroines as they beat to death a pleading, injured man.

Here’s the hot take: tote bag feminists are wrong to think that drawing boobs on Powergirl is a male attempt to diminish her power. On the contrary, the more vampire slaying the better. Sexualization is an attempt to gain access to female power: if she wants The Phallus badly enough, she might just lend her power to you. Obverse: men are idiots for thinking that the existence of rape fantasies means that women secretly want to be raped. There’s an image floating around the manosphere about that terrorist with a heart of gold, Ted Kaczynski, who was gauche with ladies in the free world but deluged in love letters upon his incarceration. Before you can say medium = message, someone tragically rendered celibate by their 23andMe results will point to this as proof that women “only want serial killers.” Newsflash: Kaczynski is serving eight life sentences without possibility of parole. Do you think the fangirls didn’t know that? Rape fantasies (theoretically “hot”) are qualitatively different than being raped (“unimaginably horrific”) because you construct the former, can turn it off at any time. The fantasy victim is assaulted by a terrible power, but the person who selects and controls that power is...

Of course it is, cough, problematic, that slasher movie girls display power through HPV vaccinations while male zombie apocalypse survivors soliloquize on whether suicide is inevitable in the absence of God. But once you sexistly set up that women should be valued by their sin, the wages = death equation is not in and of itself misogynistic. No, it’s just inevitable: sex-as-status tension can only be relieved in two ways and one of them is frowned upon in theaters. Film crit cliché and Kraftwerk song, I know, but: watching a movie renders you impotent—you can’t interact with the sexy image on the screen—except through what the camera will allow.

That’s why you are complicit in the murders that occur in the first half of Death Proof. The ex-stuntman—old, a teetotaler, star of TV shows long forgotten (and played by once-famous Kurt Russell)—is as impotent as you are, capable of getting a deleted scene lap dance but zero penetration, and when he gets in his car to commit vehicular homicide x4, he looks at the camera and smiles. Because you’re right there with him, waiting for the money shot. It would be nice to fuck, but you’ll settle for a murder. Except when it actually happens, played four times for your amusement, it’s horrible—a face melted off by a tire, a wet leg flapping in the street. Throw in a Wilhelm scream. Wasn’t that what you wanted? Are you not entertained?

It’s all perspective, my man. For all the short shorts and naughty words, the girls plan and backup plan ways to prevent unwanted sexual advances; two of them have boyfriends and one is texting a crush trying to seal the deal; they discuss and decide against inviting the opposite sex to their lakeside vacation. But that’s not what you see from the outside. That’s not where your attention is drawn, wandering the club and editing your .jpg of grievances. For you, dancefloor means sex, choker necklace means slut, and being a slut means she would never sleep with you. That’s a personal insult. And that means that nothing else matters.

Which is insane. This isn’t an argument for or against promiscuity, the point is you don’t even know promiscuity looks like. You know symbols, and for that matter, why those symbols, where did you learn those? Brazzers? If you’re gonna be mad at a thing you should at least be mad at the thing itself, not at whatever fucked up fetish you’ve imposed on reality.

There’s a scene midway through the movie where QT tips his hand. The second girl gang is lounging in a car, one of them dangling her feet out the window. The ex-stuntman approaches, you assume his perspective, and maybe because it’s an old grindhouse film...

...but the color goes out, and everything is black and white.

Which, speaking of:

Jackie Brown is first and foremost a movie about being extremely cool all the time (you should watch it). The plot is an excuse: briefly, Pam Grier (airline stewardess), Robert Forster (bail bondsman), Samuel L Jackson (arms dealer), Robert De Niro (ex-convict), Bridget Fonda (stoner surfer chick) and a couple Feds each try to nab a briefcase holding $500K.

Jackie Brown is secondarily a movie about how race shapes each and every human interaction, but that description makes it sound like a Very Special Episode, and that couldn’t be more wrong. The movie is gleefully amoral, in fact lapses from pure MacGuffinism are treated as intolerable weakness, e.g. Jackson to De Niro:

ORDELL: You know what your problem is, Louis?

Louis doesn't say anything, he just puts his hands in his pockets.

ORDELL: You think you're a good guy. When you go into a deal you don't go in prepared to take that motherfucker all the way. You go in looking for a way out. And it ain't cause you're scared neither. It's cause you think you're a good guy, and you think there's certain things a good guy won't do. That's where we're different, me and you. Cause me, once I decide I want something, ain’t a goddam motherfuckin' thing gonna stop me from gittin' it. I gotta use a gun get what I want, I'm gonna use a gun. Nigga gets in my way, nigga gonna get removed. Understand what I'm saying?

Apparently not, because De Niro later makes this mistake and gets popped.

For these characters, race is just another weapon. When Jackson meets Forster for the first time, he lights a cigarette, puts his feet up on the desk, and taps out the ash in a partly full coffee cup. Then he points out a photo of Forster with a black employee. “Y’all tight?” “Yeah.” “But you his boss though, right?” “Yeah.” “Bet it was your idea to take that picture too, wasn’t it...?” In their second encounter, Jackson, trying to get bail for Grier, pulls the same trick:

ORDELL: Man, you know I'm good for it. Thousand bucks ain't shit.

MAX: If I don't see it in front of me, you're right. It ain't shit.

ORDELL: Man, you need to look at this with a little compassion. Jackie ain't no criminal. She ain't used to this kinda treatment. I mean, gangsters don't give a fuck - but for the average citizen, coupla nights in County fuck with your mind.

MAX: Ordell, this isn't a bar, an you don't have a tab.

ORDELL: Just listen for a second. We got a forty-year-old, gainfully employed black woman, falsely accused -

MAX: Falsely accused? She didn't come back from Mexico with cocaine on her?

ORDELL: Falsely accused of Intent. If she had that shit - and mind you, I said "if" - it was just her shit to get high with.

MAX: Is white guilt supposed to make me forget I'm running a business?

But Forster—male lead, the “good guy”—plays his version of the race card and flips the script.

Example 2: Bridget Fonda, surfer gal, plots to betray Jackson, who “moves his lips when he reads,” "let's say he's streetwise, I'll give him that.” But Jackson knows that she sees him that way, it makes her predictable, which is why he can keep her around: “You can’t trust Melanie, but you can always trust Melanie to be Melanie.”

That’s not the half of it. Jackson talks a soon-dead man into getting in the trunk of an Oldsmobile, houses a homeless addict in Compton and tells her it’s Hollywood; he lies effortlessly, and when drafting your fantasy friend group you should be aware that people who lie effortlessly do it because it’s fun. Threatening someone gets you an automaton who will system 2 your demands and nothing more. Deceiving someone gives you control over that person’s soul. So Fonda’s stoned delusions of manipulating him—which in fact make her easier to manipulate—are part of her appeal. Translated: “She ain't as pretty as she used to be, and she bitch a whole lot more than she used to...But she white.”

Except Fonda is manipulating him. She’s spent her adulthood as the side piece for Dubai businessmen and Japanese industrialists who—though she doesn’t even speak the language—get off on the fact that she’s a haughty blonde who thinks she’s better than them, thinks she can manipulate them. But since they’re paying for rent and weed, doesn’t that mean...?

Example 3: Pam Grier as Jackie Brown.

youtube

From more Sam Jackson than Sam Jackson to mumblecore for Medicare, Jackie outsmarts everyone and it’s not even close. The Feds lean into their uniforms but she doesn’t miss a beat: urbane dinner guest in one scene, “panicked, defensive, unreasonable black woman” in another. Of course the movie ends the way it does, of course. Jackson steps into a dark room. Jackie screams “he’s got a gun!” And a cop pulls the trigger. You can’t always beat the system, but if you try sometimes, it just might beat who you need.

Why does Jackie win? The canon explanation is that she’s an airline stewardess: her job is to tell people of all origins what they want to hear. The meta explanation is she’s played by blaxploitation star Pam Grier. The gimmick of Grier movies like Coffy and Foxy Brown is their exaggeration of the audience’s favored tropes re: sex and race—say, hypersexuality and fashionable/wearable blackness. But the punchline of these films is that on-screen, Pam Grier with an afro is disguising herself as an high-class escort to fool the baddies: “The gentlemen you’ll be meeting this evening have a preference for…your type.” And then she kills them.

So it’s true that these films let you "exploit” a caricature, but the flip side is that anyone who can turn that caricature on and off gets to exploit you. And that seems to be Jackie Brown’s realist take: not that racism is the Original Sin for which Thou Must Atone—because everyone sees race and is selfish besides—but rather that it makes you a sucker. And the flip side: by capitalism or by meme magic, the world will always conspire to show you what you want to see. Choose wisely.

If Jackie Brown accepts that racism is inevitable, Inglourious Basterds sets out to prove that it’s also kind of fun.

youtube

It’s telling that Inglourious Basterds posters are push-pinned on the walls of fraternity houses right next to Scarface and The Wolf of Wall Street. Three movies, three sets of protagonists who happen to be amoral, masculine, and white. Sounds like a diss, but who are creatine-chugging white boys supposed to look up to? Chris Pratt? You can just tell that guy was grown in a test tube. There’s a reason Tarantino movies are popular and there’s a reason I’m talking about them instead of Buñuel or Tarkovsky and it has something to do with “making intensive use of a major language” and the twenty-somethings desperate to identify with a character named “Bear Jew.” And the above scene is indeed, “sick af.” Goes off without a hitch except when the Nazi says that he got his medals for bravery, and then there’s a split-second of—what, annoyance? Like, stick to the script, asshole. You’re sure as hell gonna get it now.

But I’m sure you’re aware that’s the joke, that once you got Ennio Morricone in the background you can justify anything. The Basterds “ain’t in the prisoner taking business”; they scalp the dead and maim the witnesses they leave alive. There’s no panorama of concentration camp horrors, no humanizing backstory, no evidence of any softness save boyish joy in the art of cruelty. Halfway through the film a young man celebrating the birth of his son is shot dead after surrendering in a Mexican standoff; the Basterds shrug and move on. At the climax of the film, a movie theatre full of Germans is exploded, shot, and burned to death. The modern viewer can’t help but cheer.

youtube

The opening chapter, Colonel Hans Landa vs. the outgroup under the floorboards, sways your sympathies in the opposite direction. No, it doesn’t make you hate the French or the Jews. But the tension—the silence and the ticking and the mounting requests and insinuations—is so unbearable that you can’t help but wish for someone to pull the Band-Aid. And the camera can’t do that. Only characters can. Only the character driving the action, and Landa drives the action in his every appearance. Something has to happen—and like the man onscreen, you cave.

Hans Landa alone seems to understand that he’s in a movie, which is perhaps why he’s so polite, so witty, so manically overacted. Perhaps this is how he sees through the Allies’ tricks and disguises: he assumes everyone else is an actor as well. And perhaps this is the apologia for his crimes: he’s just playing a role. The Basterds loathe the Nazis, but Landa bears no animosity towards the Jews, can empathize with them quite easily—it’s just, he likes to play detective and the Nazis were hiring. Is that really worse? Didn’t both the Walrus and the Carpenter eat as many as they could get?

And so, near the end of the film, when Landa cuts a deal to exchange his Hugo Boss for Levi Strauss, he asks of his prisoners the one question that would matter to a character in a period piece: “What shall the history books read?”

Landa’s argument, of course, is a load of shit.

In Inglourious Basterds, every disguise fails. The British film critic-turned-agent is unable to play the Nazi he’s seen on-screen. The German actress is revealed to be an Allied spy. The vengeful Shosanna is revealed as a sweet Jewish girl; the baby-faced Nazi lusting after her is shown to be a monster. The propaganda film burns. Only Lieutenant Aldo Raine and one Basterd make it out alive, and that’s because they’re American, i.e. monolingual.

Perception is a slave to narrative, but narrative has zip zero zilch nada to do with reality. The author is dead. Was Triumph of the Will a “good movie,” technically proficient and even emotionally moving? Absolutely. Could the director’s intentions have been “good,” apolitical, an attempt at beauty but nothing more? Unlikely in this case, but possible. But was Triumph of the Will “good”?

This is the obvious yet unswallowable truth: sometimes good people do bad things. “Nazi ain't got no humanity”? How many films have Nazis with wives, mistresses, children, pub games, medals for bravery? And yet Lieutenant Raine’s opening polemic is correct: the foot soldiers of the Third Reich worked for a Jew-hating, mass-murdering maniac: they needed to be destroyed. Reality isn’t Disney, where internal beauty works its way external. Reality isn’t even so kind as to match intentions with consequences. The American (Union) soldiers fighting against the Nazis (Confederacy) may have been motivated by every bit as much hatred and bloodlust, and yet they were necessary, they were the good guys. FYI—that’s irony.

“So you’re saying we should punch the alt-right?” Are you an idiot? The Nazis weren’t bad because they were Nazis, they were bad because of the things they did. If you actually think that punching a teenage Kekistani is going to bring down the New World Order, go ahead, but stop pushing the pillow of identity over the mouth of reality.

The goal of the System, the sum of vectors going both left and right, is to keep people arguing about abstractions of violence so they won’t deign to consider the ugliness of pragmatism. The radical left will asseverate that violence is justified, refusing to question whether their particular brand of protest is effective; the alt-right will keep rallying against cropped image lunatics, the finest examples of white genocide the media has to offer, never seriously considering that sometimes people lie on the internet; and “““centrists””” will deduce that since violence is never okay, since everyone is so irrational, nothing can be done. But that’s still a perspective: it’s the perspective of the camera.

Fuck that. This essay is a condemnation of anyone who thinks that the hypocrisy of the outgroup disproves their complaint, of anyone who thinks that good intentions are enough to absolve you from sin:

You don’t get to forget what you are.

47 notes · View notes

lastsonlost · 7 years

Link

Feminist male-bashing has come to sound like a cliche — a misogynist caricature. Feminism, its loudest proponents vow, is about fighting for equality. The man-hating label is either a smear or a misunderstanding.

Yet a lot of feminist rhetoric today does cross the line from attacks on sexism into attacks on men, with a strong focus on personal behavior: the way they talk, the way they approach relationships, even the way they sit on public transit. Male faults are stated as sweeping condemnations; objecting to such generalizations is taken as a sign of complicity. Meanwhile, similar indictments of women would be considered grossly misogynistic.

This gender antagonism does nothing to advance the unfinished business of equality. If anything, the fixation on men behaving badly is a distraction from more fundamental issues, such as changes in the workplace to promote work-life balance. What’s more, male-bashing not only sours many men — and quite a few women — on feminism. It often drives them into Internet subcultures where critiques of feminism mix with hostility toward women.

* * *

To some extent, the challenge to men and male power has always been inherent in feminism, from the time the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments catalogued the grievances of “woman” against “man.” However, these grievances were directed more at institutions than at individuals. In “The Feminine Mystique,” which sparked the great feminist revival of the 1960s, Betty Friedan saw men not as villains but as fellow victims burdened by societal pressures and by the expectations of their wives, who depended on them for both livelihood and identity.

That began to change in the 1970s with the rise of radical feminism. This movement, with its slogan, “The personal is political,” brought a wave of female anger at men’s collective and individual transgressions. Authors like Andrea Dworkin and Marilyn French depicted ordinary men as patriarchy’s brutal foot soldiers.

This tendency has reached a troubling new peak, as radical feminist theories that view modern Western civilization as a patriarchy have migrated from academic and activist fringes into mainstream conversation. One reason for this trend is social media, with its instant amplification of personal narratives and its addiction to outrage. We live in a time when jerky male attempts at cyber-flirting can be collected on a blog called Straight White Boys Texting (which carries a disclaimer that prejudice against white males is not racist or sexist, since it is not directed at the oppressed) and then deplored in an article titled “Dear Men: This Is Why Women Have Every Right To Be Disgusted With Us.”

Whatever the reasons for the current cycle of misandry — yes, that’s a word, derided but also adopted for ironic use by many feminists — its existence is quite real. Consider, for example, the number of neologisms that use “man” as a derogatory prefix and that have entered everyday media language: “mansplaining,” “manspreading” and “manterrupting.” Are these primarily male behaviors that justify the gender-specific terms? Not necessarily: The study that is cited as evidence of excessive male interruption of women actually found that the most frequent interrupting is female-on-female (“femterrupting”?).

Sitting with legs apart may be a guy thing, but there is plenty of visualdocumentation of women hogging extra space on public transit with purses, shopping bags and feet on seats. As for “mansplaining,” these days it seems to mean little more than a man making an argument a woman dislikes. Slate correspondent Dahlia Lithwick has admitted using the term to “dismiss anything said by men” in debates about Hillary Clinton. And the day after Clinton claimed the Democratic presidential nomination, political analyst David Axelrod was slammed as a “mansplainer” on Twitter for his observation that it’s a measure of our country’s “great progress” that “many younger women find the nomination of a woman unremarkable.”

Men who gripe about their ex-girlfriends and advise other men to avoid relationships with women are generally relegated to the seedy underbelly of the Internet — various forums and websites in the “manosphere,” recently chronicled by Stephen Marche in the Guardian. Yet a leading voice of the new feminist generation, British writer Laurie Penny, can use her column in the New Statesman to decry ex-boyfriends who “turned mean or walked away” and to urge straight young women to stay single instead of “wasting years in succession on lacklustre, unappreciative, boring child-men.”

Feminist commentary routinely puts the nastiest possible spin on male behavior and motives. Consider the backlash against the concept of the “friend zone,” or being relegated to “friends-only” status when seeking a romantic relationship — usually, though not exclusively, in reference to men being “friend zoned” by women. Since the term has a clear negative connotation, feminist critics say it reflects the assumption that a man is owed sex as a reward for treating a woman well. Yet it’s at least as likely that, as feminist writer Rachel Hills argued in a rare dissent in the Atlantic, the lament of the “friend zoned” is about “loneliness and romantic frustration,” not sexual entitlement.

Things have gotten to a point where casual low-level male-bashing is a constant white noise in the hip progressive online media. Take a recent pieceon Broadly, the women’s section of Vice, titled, “Men Are Creepy, New Study Confirms” — promoted with a Vice Facebook post that said: “Are you a man? You’re probably a creep.” The actual study found something very different: that both men and women overwhelmingly think someone described as “creepy” is more likely to be male. If a study had found that a negative trait was widely associated with women (or gays or Muslims), surely this would have been reported as deplorable stereotyping, not confirmation of reality.

Meanwhile, men can get raked over the (virtual) coals for voicing even the mildest unpopular opinion on something feminism-related. Just recently, YouTube film reviewer James Rolfe, who goes by “Angry Video Game Nerd,” was roundly vilified as a misogynistic “man-baby” in social media and the online press after announcing that he would not watch the female-led “Ghostbusters” remake because of what he felt was its failure to acknowledge the original franchise.

* * *

This matters, and not just because it can make men less sympathetic to the problems women face. At a time when we constantly hear that womanpower is triumphant and “the end of men” — or at least of traditional manhood — is nigh, men face some real problems of their own. Women are now earning about 60 percent of college degrees; male college enrollment after high school has stalled at 61 percent since 1994, even as female enrollment has risen from 63 percent to 71 percent. Predominantly male blue-collar jobs are on the decline, and the rise of single motherhood has left many men disconnected from family life. The old model of marriage and fatherhood has been declared obsolete, but new ideals remain elusive.

Perhaps mocking and berating men is not the way to show that the feminist revolution is about equality and that they have a stake in the new game. The message that feminism can help men, too — by placing equal value on their role as parents or by encouraging better mental health care and reducing male suicide —

is undercut by gender warriors like Australian pundit Clementine Ford, whose “ironic misandry”

often seems entirely non-ironic and who has angrily insisted that feminism stands only for women. Gibes about “male tears” — for instance, on a T-shirt sported by writer Jessica Valenti in a phototaunting her detractors — seem particularly unfortunate if feminists are serious about challenging the stereotype of the stoic, pain-suppressing male. Dismissing concerns about wrongful accusations of rape with a snarky “What about the menz” is not a great way to show that women’s liberation does not infringe on men’s civil rights. And telling men that their proper role in the movement for gender equality is to listen to women and patiently endure anti-male slams is not the best way to win support.

Valenti and others argue that man-hating cannot do any real damage because men have the power and privilege. Few would deny the historical reality of male dominance. But today, when men can lose their jobs because of sexist missteps and be expelled from college over allegations of sexual misconduct, that’s a blinkered view, particularly since the war on male sins can often target individuals’ trivial transgressions. Take the media shaming of former “Harry Potter” podcaster Benjamin Schoen, pilloried for some mildly obnoxious tweets (and then an insufficiently gracious email apology) to a woman who had blocked him on Facebook after an attempt at flirting. While sexist verbal abuse toward women online is widely deplored, there is little sympathy for men who are attacked as misogynists, mocked as “man-babies” or “angry virgins,” or even smeared as sexual predators in Internet disputes.

We are headed into an election with what is likely to be a nearly unprecedented gender gap among voters. To some extent, these numbers reflect policy differences. Yet it is not too far-fetched to see the pro-Donald Trump sentiment as fueled, at least in part, by a backlash against feminism. And while some of this backlash may be of the old-fashioned “put women in their place” variety, there is little doubt that for the younger generation, the perception of feminism as extremist and anti-male plays a role, too.

This theme emerged in Conor Friedersdorf’s recent interview in the Atlanticwith a Trump supporter, a college-educated, 22-year-old resident of San Francisco who considers himself a feminist and expects his career to take a back seat to that of his higher-earning fiancee — but who also complains about being “shamed” as a white man and voices concern about false accusations of rape.

As this campaign shows, our fractured culture is badly in need of healing — from the gender wars as well as other divisions. To be a part of this healing, feminism must include men, not just as supportive allies but as partners, with an equal voice and equal humanity.

Cathy Young is the author of two books, and a frequent contributor to Reason, Newsday, and RealClearPolitics.com. Follow @cathyyoung63

#feminism

451 notes · View notes

randomshoes · 7 years

Note

Did you have to hang out on a lot of Manosphere sites to write your MRA guide?

No, actually. Ireally had no intention of becoming this knowledgable about MRAs andanti-feminists. The thing is, they have this tendency to appear theminute anyone uses the word feminist in a positive context on theinternet and dump reams of text “proving” that feminists are evilbitches out to brainwash everyone and that men are the ones beingoppressed by feminists and that we must save the mensss! I haveliterally never sought out an MRA or anti-feminist, they have alwayscome to me, my friends, or people I read/watch on the internet inorder to “argue” with the idea that women are oppressed or thatwomen are equal to men. They then act as if feminists are attackingthem, when they came tobother us. Basically,they feel that the existenceof people like Anita Sarkeesian or Zoe Quinn is an attack on thempersonally. And believing something like that is a direct line toviolence. A similar thing can be seen in the way bigots sometimesreact to trans people, or the way racists react towards any blackperson in a position of authority.

Which is incidentally alsohow I know that the people who claim the movement is just abouthelping men with men’s problems are full of shit, because they arenot doing that. They are just searching out feminists (and women ingeneral) on the internet and arguing with literally everything theysay (and that’s the nicer ones, the nastier ones harass, threaten,and dox them). I have not, for example, seen an MRA group try to opena domestic violence shelter for men. But boy do they love citingstatistics about no one funding those things. It’s a movementdesigned to discredit feminism by making it into one “extreme” ofsome sort of gender war instead of an ideology aimed at understandingand improving the lives of half of the world.If they succeed at convincing the general public that feminism isjust one extreme on a spectrum, then the “reasonable” position isto do nothing at all, which is really what they want. See, for likethe forth time this week, the Golden Mean Fallacy.

Itis probably useful to clarify that I am mostly addressing thearguments they make in public, as it were. In other words, the thingsthey say on more “neutral” ground (mainstream websites likefacebook, youtube, etc) or on more liberal-oriented websites. Thethings they say on their own websites, from what I’ve seen, seemmuch, much worse and way further out there. This reminds me of theperson who asked me, “How is feminism not a religion?” After I finished laughing, all Icould think was, dude, that argument might work on people who’vealready bought really far into your red pill shit (and hatereligion), but it requires like, sixty leaps of logic for those of uswho live in the real world and know what words mean. If I was givingthem advice on their PR campaign I wouldn’t recommend using thatargument in public….but I’m not, so please continue MRAs!

I’vealso, unfortunately, met several MRAs in real life, primarily of thelevel 3 variety. I’ll post of description of level 3 tomorrow, but itbasically boils down to “My life sucks and/or women were mean to meone time therefore I’m the one being oppressed.” Talking to theseguys in person gave me some experience arguing with them and someinsight into their psychology, since one of these people was activelydating one of my best friends and I had to deal with him. A lot.

#askrandomshoes #MRAs #anti-feminists #manosphere #feminism #field guide to MRAs #golden mean fallacy #anita sarkeesian #zoe quinn #gamergate #religion #but not really

20 notes · View notes

evilelitest2 · 7 years

Text

100 Days of Trump Day 59: Fight Club...kinda

Welcome back to 100 Days of Trump where I try to explain WTF happened in 2016 through 100 works and today we are going to talk about a failed movie. I have to be honest with you folks, I had a lot of fucking trouble deciding whether I should include this one or not, because one one hand it is talking about the exact same Alt Right/Gamergate/MRA bullshit that was so pivital to getting Trump elected, and on the other hand it is a movie that utterly fails at delivering its ostensible point. Since I’m assuming fucking everybody has seen this movie, you are all familiar with all of those people who unironically love this movie and want to be like Tyler Durden and people are like “omg those people totally miss the point of the movie” and yes they do.

That is entirely the fault of the movie, because despite what the movies intention is, the reality is that the movie makes the thing it is criticizing seem more appealing than than it means too, beacuse David Fincher has a major problem with restraints and loves overindlugence, and when you are criticizing overindulging while indulging in it, you get to weird sentences and also a failed movie. Fight Club does not succeed at what Fight Club is attempting to make, and ultimately comes out equally in favor of its subject as against it, because failed film-making choices. Because the movie only really works as the director intended (and I am assuming he did intend to mean this movie as a critic of toxic masculinity because that is what he said) if you go into the movie knowing exactly what the director intended, and that is really a failed movie. Again this is a movie that is like “bah consumer culture’ and filled with Pepsi ads. But I am recommending it anyways because if you do come into the film knowing its intentions, then it is extremely enlightening to the entire bullshit culture of Toxic Masculinity, though it ironically falls into the same traps it critiques.

Ok so if you have been on the internet for any degree of time you have encountered the whole manosphere and if you aren’t emotionally maladjusted, you see these pepole running around talking about manleness and man things and BEING A MAN and if you pay the slightest bit of attention you notice how like...contradictory it all is? And I don’t mean in a politician “I say one thing but do another” sense of contradictory, I mean in a “Wait, really?” poser desperately trying to hang out with the cool kids contradiction. For example, go unto Reddit, 4chan, 8chan and the various pro Trump sites and you will see all this stuff about how Trump is a real man who understands the masculine virtues unlike those girly sensitive easily offended liberals who care about feelings and are all wimps. And if you are a fucking idiot, your response should be “Wait, isn’t Trump like the most easily offended obviously insecure man in the world who throws a giant hissy fit over the slightest provocation, never severed in the military (while mocking those who do) and is constantly showing his emotions at all times. How the fuck is that masculine?

Or if you pay attention to Gamergate who are like “OMG , women/betas are so weak and overreact to everything” And then you have a video game with a female protagonist and they go absolutely apeshit and whine like nobody has ever whined before? Or you have people like Sargon of Akkad who are like “ZOMG free speech” and then they call for universities to have classes they don’t like purged without a shred of irony.

Or the Golden One who says that the leftist Betas do nothing but whine about shit and then when somebody makes a video like this he tries to sue him for defamation. LIke have you noticed (and will notice in the responses to this post) that the so called alpha masculine folks are also the biggest fucking badies in the world? From Roosh V’s pathetic whining about feminists being mean to him for saying women don’t have brains, so Thunderf00t buying into long debunked pseudo science, to Davis Arueni saying how people try to pull down millionaires to then immediately critique millions who he doesn’t like (he has accomplished nothing himself of course), to the talk of “Neomasculinity going back to ancient Greece” which ignores the fact that their was a lot of sodomy going on back then, to the fact that the fucking Red Pill is from a movie made by two transwomen about systemic inequality. The entire culture of masculinity is a giant contradictory of terms. And I keep posting this, but its true, the people who stand for the working class are always getting behind rich assholes who just say a few phrases?

youtube

Or how the religious right is always getting behind rich pricks who only care obtaining money and never seem to actually do anything christian.

youtube

Or if any of you have had the misfortune of meeting Wall Street folks, they are all into macho culture, extreme sports and act like they are some sort of alpha males when they are all these fucking accountants who spend all day calling people trying to trick them out of their money. Or the fact that you have libertarians like Adam Baldwin coming out to support Putin because he is a real man. And that is really what I want to talk about with Fight Club, the fact that for all of its macho aspirations, they really don’t live up to any of the standards they set except for rhetoric, its a fucking cargo cult. In a way, Fight Club feels like a commentary on 300, a big dumb hyper macho ultra violent stupid fucking movie that is also like....really gay. And have you noticed that Fight Club is one of the most gay movies like...ever. even if we ignore the way Tyler dresses, the entire relationship of the movie is about shirtless men holding each other and the core relationship in the film is between two men who not only love holding their hands, but are....ok they are basically dating, I mean this is hardly subtext. They literally go “We should do this again some time” while smoking I mean come on. Its really impossible to find any of these defenders of masculinity who don’t come off as a mix of pathetic and psychotic.

And then you have the fact that the whole macho idea is being an individual and standing up conformist culture that makes you into a homogenized drone of the system....and then they start doing EXACTLY THAT. They literally give up their names and start taking little pamphlets with basically nondisclosure agreements. The whole point of the movie is how Fight Club is a fucking cult based on contradictions, like the fact that you aren’t suppose to speak of it, but you are expected to spread it. Or the fact that the group comes into existence with men who have testicular cancer, or the fact that the only time actual happiness is found is when one stops buying into this macho bullshit. I mean look at this video here contrasting self proclaimed masculine god among men “The Golden One” (no really he actually fucking said that) and a man whose goal in life seems to be as silly and unmasculine as possible.

youtube

Beyond the fact that this video is hilarious and Hbomberguy is one of the best people for just undermining the entire macho subculture of the Alt Right, here is the thing...notice how Hbomberugy comes off as more traditionally masculine than the Golden One? Like he just seems more confident and fucking relaxed. But beyond that, notice how much this guy spends talking about feelings and emotions and all types of things traditionally described as girly. Or here is a great example, the Golden One is all into fantasy as where he draws his traditional values, but the Granddaddy of fantasy, LOTRS, not only features LOTs of scenes of men crying, it also is centered upon you know...these guys

Two extremely non-masculine men who not only cry frequently, but have this very close sensitive relationship where they talk about their feelings (and that is even before you get into the gay thing). But you have these Alt Right folks taking the token most shallow levels stuff from the source material of both masculine mainstream culture and alternative culture and trying to internalize meaning out of them....they are fucking posers is what I’m getting at, oh dear its looped back around again

And the core of entire response is...people feeling lonely. This isn’t just the film, go unto these fucking boards and you see people talking about white Genocide and the Red Pill in one sentence, and then crying openly about how they feel so lonely, unfulfilled and suicidal, I mean, I’m on tumblr, and I see people posting about depression, anxiety, not wanting to get up in the morning, not being able to go outside, not being able to work, living constantly on the edge as people who feel put upon by the world and let me tell you, there is nobody I’ve encountered on tumblr as utterly hopeless as the people I see on 4chan. I”m not saying 4chan folks have worse problems, in fact I can assure you, they really really don’t, but they feel like they do, its a whole giant mess of feelings going on at all those sites. Our protagonist has spent his whole life going “if I buy enough useless commercial junk, I stop being so lonely”. And then “Hey if you due enough violence then guess what you belong”. But this is the great bit (and by the way this is the bit the movie does not do enough to explore). The system they are fighting against, the corporate neoliberal clintonian milktoast capitalist system that dehumanizes them? They are right about how awful it is, but what they aren’t right about is who is responsible. They blame women. But who runs the credit card companies and corporate materialism and the Wall Street Banks...guess what? They aren’t being run by feminists or muslims or black people or any other group who are supposedly being whiny for not wanting to get persecuted. They are run by people like this

or this

Yeah, real leftist infiltration there fellows

Also, going back to my theme of “The Right co-opts the left” that I have been talking about so much, notice how these MRAs, White Nationalists, Klansmen etc all kinda use SJW rhetoric? Like the they use similar memes, rhetorical style, and even the whole identity politics support group style. I mean if you spend too much time in the Alt Right interwebs, you find yourself seeing discussions privilege and triggering caused by black people and women, and these people really believe that despite congress being utterly white and male, they are the ones who are persecuted. And its a cargo cult, its all about trappings and surface level appearance, not actual context, the Alt Right has the trappings of the progressive movement. And the reason for this is that the progressives and the Alt Right actually hate the same target, project Mayhem’s attack on the credit card companies well...a lot of touchy feely, died hair, gender fluid, mixed race, Muslim, lesbian, pagan, liberal environmentalist who cries easily and talks about fan shipping on tumblr, they aren’t exactly weeping tears for the Credit Card Industry, they want it to die a slow death.

Like...this guy

They are doing more to reject the system than Tyler Durden ever did, because the instinctive response to have of those things is contempt or revulsion, while mainstream society doesn’t really lack so called Alpha Males fighting with other men to take down society with violence. Also I really want to reiterate that the whole Alpha/Beta wolf model is how the behave in captivity, which as Hbomberguy said, kinda sums up the entire Alt Right movement in a nutshell. As always, they lash out at centrists and call it leftists

youtube

Gee, does that remind you of anything? These people are losers who want to believe in the Right Wing ideological principles, but don’t know what to do when it doesn’t bear out in reality, so rather than admit that they believed in a lie, they hope if they can double down, they can somehow make it real again. Because if they admit that the entire premise itself was at fault, that is a lot scarier than what ever giant conspiracy theory they dream up, better to pretend to believe that Jews run the world than admit that you’ve put faith in a lie.

Because these aren’t macho people fighting against the feminine, those people exist and they are also really awful, but the absolute worse comes from the people who feel like they don’t quite fit. And that is what is going on in project mayhem, these desperate sad people are getting screwed over by those who run society, but rather than addressing you know...the actual problem, they just kind of incoherently lash out at people who suffer more then them, and surprise surprise, nothing actually gets done. The movie kinda fails this, I honestly could make a whole series of post on both why Fight Club is brilliant and why it completely fails at what it sets out to do. BUt it does get at how self defeating this all is, and how people who love the masculine virtues don’t even seem to understand them, never exhibit any but the trappings of them, and always seem to behave not as leftists do, but as they accuse leftists of doing. So I suppose it is only fitting that the ultimate crybaby macho man wound up becoming president by appealing to exactly these people I suppose. People are surprised that Trump is contradictory and are confused why people would support him, except...that’s the point, the whole point is that he is contradictory, that the people who cry out for individualism seem desperate to submerge their will to that of a strong man.

If you want a nice concise summery of what I am talking about, check out this video by Folding Ideas, its very dry and kind of pretentious, but his actual point is really useful and informative.

youtube

49 notes · View notes

nothingman · 7 years

Link

For years, Reddit’s r/TheRedPill forum has been one of the worst corners of the internet. It’s the home of the pickup artist movement, it gave Milo Yiannapolis a fawning fanbase, and it’s the hub of the perceived “manosphere”–a community built around the “men’s rights” philosophy that feminism is a sham built to oppress men.

Reddit is deliberately designed to protect anonymity. But that doesn’t mean users don’t also have to work to protect themselves–something that someone probably should have told Robert Fisher of New Hampshire, who has just been outed by The Daily Beast, via a trail of usernames and custom URLs with ties to Fisher’s email address, as the creator of the misogynistic forum.

Fisher, by the way, also happens to be a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, not that the connection is very surprising. If I had to name the two communities most vocal in their loathing of women, I’d probably go with Red Pill dudes and the GOP.

In addition to Red Pill, Fisher’s reported aliases had also written and published a pickup artist site, a blog attempting to “Explain God,” and one site titled “Existential Vortex.” He also was or maybe still is a singer-songwriter and kazooist in an “indieelectronic” band. Basically, he sounds like exactly the sort of bro-ish college kid, straight off a few frat party rejections and his first philosophy class, whom you would expect to found a misogynistic Reddit forum with a name referencing The Matrix. (Except Fisher had, at the time of Red Pill’s creation, aged out of the follies of youth excuse. He’s 31 now.)

Fisher’s reported “Pk_atheist” alias started the subreddit in October 2012, just before he lost his first election—one he ran as a Democrat. He won his seat in November of 2014, by which time the subreddit had grown to 83,000 members. He had already stepped down as a moderator in early 2013, but continued to be active in the community.

The Daily Beast writes that “within hours of contacting Rep. Fisher, and after delivering by email a summary of his apparent connections to The Red Pill kingpin, his two primary Reddit usernames had been wiped, and four blogs connected to him were deleted or made private.”

[Update: His own colleagues, on both sides of the aisle, are already calling for his resignation. Fisher responded with a statement asserting he is “not disappearing,” adding, “I will continue to stand strong for men’s rights and the rights of all.”]

But the internet doesn’t let you hide from your awfulness that easily. Through archived posts and comment threads, we have way too clear a window into this man’s mind and his motivations for starting this giant sexism feeding ground. Here are just a few direct quotes.

Content warning for, well, for everything Red Pill is about. (Misogyny and rape denial abound.)

–If you want the short version of his views on women: “I find women’s personalities in general to be lackluster and boring, serving little purpose in my day to day life. So I usually only compare body types.”

–“Because when I told myself I thought they were smart, I really had the footnote in the back of my head … smart … for a woman.”

–“I don’t hate women. I just understand what use they are to me. Stimulating conversation is not one of them.”

–“Understand that in the old days, women were not brought up the way they are today. Before feminism, there was less freedom, and therefore it was not necessary to teach women consequence. Consequence was strictly a man’s game.”

–“Women are not oppressed- they’re literally free from a lot of the responsibilities men are- to the extent where women have no need for the functioning every-day knowledge that most men have by the age of 18 … If you took the conversation skills, the sub-par intelligence, the lack of curiosity and put it in a man’s body- would you hang out with that guy? No! Would he be successful? Hell no! Those things are useless without a woman’s body attached.”

–In a post with “seduction” advice, he proposes “There’s a good girl voice inside each woman telling her that she needs to make sure to be proper and avoid being a slut.” He follows up with a lot of tips on how to invade the “good girl’s” personal space and trick her into letting out the “slut.”

–In response to a question about the Free the Nipple movement: “Hot women are a cartel, and they will continue to keep prices as high as possible. Anybody “freeing” their nipples will either be low-quality, or they will have a smear campaign against them to make them seem low-quality, despite the equality implications supposedly working for the cartel.”

–He defended being sexually attracted to teenage girls. “15 year old girls have boobs. Puberty doesnt strike at 18 overnight. Secondly, not creepy- 15 year old girls and guys are commonly sexually active. Its just illegal.”

–In one of his many comments alleging women frequently falsely accuse men of rape, he says he has a video camera in his room, presumably to record his exploits for proof of innocence.

It’s bad enough that someone could hold all of these beliefs, let alone feel confident to enough to put them out in public (even if anonymously so). Add to that the fact that there are, as of now, nearly 200,000 subscribers to the subreddit.

But nothing is scarier than knowing that this is what at least some (and some is too many) of the men who make our country’s laws think about women. And if you think Fisher’s purported Reddit persona is all talk, it’s not. It’s clear that his misogyny infects his platform.

Taking a quick look at Fisher’s terrible, stock-photo-filled campaign website, you can see the threads. In the site’s “Family” section (complete with a stock picture of what I assume is a random family of strangers, so you know he really cares), he says he wants to “strengthen the family.” But all that seems to mean to him is something about the family court legal system. He writes, “It is long over-due to bring oversight and accountability to our family courts. Every parent deserves justice in our courts regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or orientation.”

This obsession with family courts looks to date back to 2012, when his colleague and fellow men’s rights activist Joshua Youssef began publicly decrying the “feminist judicial tyranny” over a custody battle with his ex-wife. A reddit username the Daily Beast attributes to Youssef posted a lengthy rant about the “corruption, deception, greed, lawlessness, and feminist entitlement-mindedness, of the family court” to /theredpill, with Fisher in the comments defending him.

Remember that comment about “low quality” women exposing their nipples? Another one of New Hampshire’s Reps, Al Baldasaro, insulted the physical appearance of a female legislator who was fighting a bill, written by an all-male team, which would have outlawed breastfeeding in public.

Just four days after the 2014 election that put him in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, with only 100 subscribers, Pk_atheist wrote a manifesto of sorts, explaining the point of the, as of then, two-week-old forum.

“Our culture has become a feminist culture,” he wrote. “A president cannot be elected today without succumbing to the feminist narrative and paying them tribute. How many times has Obama given credit for his manhood to his wife? How many times has the debate hinged on women’s pay gap – which is a myth that gets lip service because if you don’t you’re a misogynist!”

Yet he maintained, “It’s too easy to blame feminism for our troubles.” He’s all for equal rights, he says, although he takes care to specify, “Equal rights are something I strongly am in support of. For men and women.” As opposed to unequal equality, I suppose.

His big message is that feminism has led not to equal rights, but to female domination. Women, as he puts it, control the conversation. “I am here to say, for better or for worse, the frame around public discourse is a feminist frame, and we’ve lost our identity because of it.”

Therefore men, he proclaims, need to take back this role of central dominance from women. The Red Pill is “men’s sexual strategy,” designed to counter feminism, which is, apparently, nothing more than a sexual strategy itself.

This, through the Daily Beast’s sleuthing, appears to be Robert Fisher’s worldview. This is a man who gave a space to hundreds of thousands of others looking to blame and conquer women, while simultaneously being elected into public office, where he has the ability to affect real policy.

Here’s the kicker, and keep this in mind the next time you think your vote doesn’t matter: In Fisher’s small New Hampshire district, he won his re-election by only 700 votes. He won his first election in 2014 by 276 votes. Squashing the internet’s rampant misogyny is a challenge too big for any one of us, but if you’re eligible to vote, you can do your part to keep immature, idiotic monsters like this one out of office.

(via Daily Beast, image: Shutterstock)

Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!

—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

via The Mary Sue

#IFTTT #Feedly #Nothingman uses feedly

4 notes · View notes