And it fucking terrifies some people. White supremacists may have always existed, but they’re mobilising again to reclaim a more visible place in mainstream society. Ironically, the newly invigorated white supremacist movement itself embodies everything its practitioners claim to reject in the ‘freedom-hating, liberal elites’. Despite being quite emphatically racist, they lash out at being described as such. Despite being enthusiastically misogynistic, they will not stand for being called sexist. Despite insisting that others toughen up and take brutal language on the chin, they become vitriolic and defensive at being called names, decrying what they see as the penchant for ‘ad hominem’ in the ‘weak, predictable Looney Left’. We are at a point in history (again) when Nazis are not only proudly congregating in public spaces, but having their horrendous bile defended as ‘freedom of speech’. For almost a century, the United States of America has cultivated a grand reputation of hunting Nazis in literature, movies, television shows, comics and basically any form of pop culture you can think of, so it shows a remarkable level of cognitive dissonance to still hold on to the image of oneself as a hero fighting on the side of good while defending the rights of white nationalists to light up tiki torches and march towards the town square.
Where does Yiannopoulos fit into this, and what does it have to do with the central concern that boys are being bred in a culture of toxic masculinity, entitlement and dangerous rage?
As I said earlier, Yiannopoulos isn’t so much an ideas man as he is a conduit for a particular kind of white male entitlement and hostility. Once upon a time, men were allowed to be men and this meant men were allowed to be in charge. White men in particular were given authority over certain groups of people, which I’m sure made the simultaneous inequalities they may also have experienced a little easier to stomach. The vast majority of Yiannopoulos’s fans are so young that this cultural memory is little more than idealised nostalgia, but my goodness does the nostalgia taste ideal.
When Yiannopoulos sneers that ‘feminism is cancer’, what he’s really offering to men is an easy and flippant rejoinder to anything that remotely threatens the stability of their position in society. Feminism is cancer, because boys should be allowed to be boys without fear of censure or discipline from the horrendous schoolmarms trying to spoil their fun. Why should they have to engage with the concept of rape culture and its documented harm on women in particular, but also men? Why should they be required to investigate the social advantage that being men gives them in the workplace, the public sphere, the private sphere . . . basically, the entire fucking world? Why should they have to apologise for being men, as if there’s something shameful about this? Feminism is the thing trying to make them do this! Feminism makes them feel bad, annoyed, angry—it’s a cancer destroying the very fabric of their world.
The sense they’re being asked to personally apologise is interesting, because it not only assumes a generic and universal state of masculinity that is somehow being subjected to widespread cultural shaming right now (which is not true, even if certain aspects of male entitlement are being scrutinised and critiqued) but also that this supposed universal state of manhood is so beneficial to boys that the removal of it will cause untold damage.
Let’s be clear about what is and isn’t harmful to boys. Having faith in oneself is an important part of self-esteem. Having faith that one is never wrong and indeed that one’s masculine status gives them licence to test that theory every day leads to harm being done to others and a failure of the self to progress beyond a crude ego. There’s a pretty big fucking difference, and it’s doing no one any good to let it continue unchecked.
Of course, this devotion to the unparalleled excellence of the self is not shared by all boys, but it’s held in some way by the ones who eagerly embrace the teachings of a man like Yiannopoulos. It may spawn from unbridled arrogance (think here of the private school boys whose parents pay top dollar for their school fees so that their teachers are never allowed to discipline them or even say that they’re wrong; the same boys who participate in online communities that exploit and criminally abuse their female peers because it’s ‘funny’, who are backed up sometimes by parents claiming the girls ‘asked for it’, and who view it as a good way to solidify the relationships they share with their figurative brothers). Or perhaps it stems from the opposite—a false bravado born out of a crushing sense of inadequacy and a desire to right this clear wrong (feminism has gone too far, men are the oppressed ones now, this is why men are killing themselves etc.) Whatever its motivation, the end result is the same: a collective sense of invincibility that has a recognisable thread of cherished masculinity woven through it.
But what these boys and men also share is a desire for blood. Not literally, of course, but blood in the sense of destruction. It’s obvious in their language and online dynamics that they want to watch someone they consider an enemy be torn to pieces and ‘destroyed’, as they put it, not only for their amusement but also because they think that witnessing this annihilation is somehow owed to them. This is why one of the most common challenges demanded by the average internet edgelord is that you (and anyone else whose political position threatens them) agree to ‘debate’ either them or whichever infamous troll they happen to be fapping over that week.
Over the last year or so, I’ve had to field numerous demands from men—most of them adolescent boys, from the looks of their profiles—that I ‘debate Milo’ in particular. My refusal is regarded as proof that I know he’ll ‘destroy’ me (there’s that word again). Sometimes the two ideas are joined together, I guess in the spirit of playing an open hand.
‘Debate Milo,’ they shriek, ‘because I want to watch him destroy you!’
Sounds fun!
It’s easy to dismiss Yiannopoulos as a sort of poor man’s Puck, but he represents a much broader problem with how some young men are being socialised to act in online spaces. The British journalist Laurie Penny once wrote of Yiannopoulos: ‘I have seen the death of political discourse reflected in his designer sunglasses.’ It is perhaps one of the most accurate things ever to have been written about the man who calls Donald Trump ‘Daddy’, and in doing so encourages in his followers a feverish loyalty and devotion to the self-proclaimed ‘pussy grabber’. It’s a level of engagement that appeals especially to the boys being bred to have complete and unwavering faith in their own supremacy, providing them with an easy means of discounting anything that remotely challenges them and one that conveniently requires no experience, knowledge or intellectual rigour to uphold. (Mitchell Ivers, the editor working on Yiannopoulos’s book before Simon & Schuster cancelled the contract, even suggested in his copy-edits: ‘Careful that the egotistical boasting that your young audience finds humorous doesn’t make you seem juvenile to other readers.’)
Who needs facts and conversational convention when you can just scream ‘fake news’ at anything you don’t like and claim the speaker is angry, ugly, afraid and mentally unwell? How liberating for the young men drawn to this level of discourse, and empowered further by the mirthful hollers of the braying crowd?
Like me, Penny has also been frequently instructed by the internet’s enthusiastic bloodletters to go head to head with Yiannopoulos, but has responded with characteristic insight and vulnerability. ‘I have never understood this game,’ she wrote in 2016. ‘That’s why I’ve always refused to debate Milo in public. Not because I’m frightened I’ll lose, but because I know I’ll lose, because I care and he doesn’t—and that means he’s already won. Help and forgive me, but I actually believe human beings can be better than this.’
Human beings can indeed be better than this, but that doesn’t mean they will be. And this is what one comes to understand about engaging in this kind of battle online, where the rules and conventions of formal debate were long ago lost and any vestige of them has been disdainfully thrown away: the only way to ‘win’ is to understand that winning at any cost is all that matters. Qualifications, knowledge and expertise ar
e irrelevant—if you can shout the loudest, you can box in the ring. Because it isn’t just Yiannopoulos who feels entitled to a public showdown with the people with whom he disagrees—it’s everyone, from the administrator of the local men’s rights chapter’s Facebook page to the anonymous teenage shitlord whose primary experience of the world comes from hanging around on 4chan or Reddit (if he’s feeling sophisticated that day).
Your opponent may have no better argument than to dismiss an entire political movement as ‘cancer’, to mock its practitioners as fat, feral and sexless, or to recite obnoxious and easily disproven statements such as ‘the wage gap doesn’t exist’ and ‘rape culture isn’t real’, but the use of sound bites and sneers as a means of dialogue will sadly be more than satisfactory to an audience of his supportive peers and fellow ideologues. This is what makes dealing with this kind of repetitive arrogance so infuriating—not that the request for a debate is unreasonable, but that it is repeatedly made in bad faith. Why would anyone feel inclined to offer themselves up to a room of angry, spoilt and entitled men to be verbally torn apart—and not by eviscerating intelligence but by the crudest and most basic of insults?
Call me crazy (and so many people have), but I consider finding ten different ways to tell someone they have a floppy, diseased vagina to be slightly more than a difference in opinion. And yet when women choose not to engage with this kind of repulsive and wholly unproductive dialogue it isn’t because we recognise that it’s beneath us. No, it’s because we’re hypocrites who can’t defend our ideas. We’re snowflakes who crumble under the weight of gentle critique. We’re scared of facts and logic, babies who need to be agreed with otherwise we’ll be #triggered. Also, we’re fat and ugly and that’s why we hate men.
There’s a question in here with which all of society should be concerning itself, and it goes beyond the more philosophical query of what happened to actual debate. It’s the question of how the language of misogyny most hateful became incorporated into the standard vocabularies of boys and men all over the world—boys and men who would, like today’s modern white nationalists, become visibly irate at the suggestion they held anything other than exemplary views towards the group of people they routinely denigrate and dehumanise.
Let me share some examples of the reasoned ‘critique’ I received after a men’s rights website wrote a blog post comparing me to Hitler and very kindly directed their enthusiastic readership to my page.
‘You’re obviously mentally retarded, being a “feminist” and all.’
‘I swear, all this chick needs is a good solid rogering in her arse, by like 5. No. 6 dudes from across the world (no discrimination here) and she’d be happy again.’
‘If your [sic] feeling hurt because someone calls you and [sic] ugly fat discusting [sic] snowflake fucking layde [sic] boy then get over it.’
‘There is not one “woman” on this page that men would want to have sex with.’
‘Hitler does not deserve to have feminist [sic] called feminazis. Poor Adolf. He could have prevented this.’
‘I think women deserve equal rights, and lefts!’
‘You’re just craving some cock and don’t know how to say it.’
‘You shit-thick thundercunt.’
‘Shut up retard.’
‘Go sit on a butcher knife swine.’
‘A real man keeps his woman batered [sic].’
‘Good job you slimey [sic] fat cunt, I really do hope you are the next one raped.’
What can you say to that? To engage is to willingly open oneself up to a discussion devoid of facts or any real arguments, and in which points are awarded by the audience based on how many ‘sick burns’ can be made about owning cats (remembering, of course, that these insults are only allowed if they go one way—if you were to respond in kind, you’d be guilty of ‘ad hominem’ and ‘typical feminazi behaviour, resorting to insults instead of facts’). To ignore them is to admit defeat and acknowledge your inferior abilities and intellectual vacuity.
The impossibility of it reminds me of the arguments I used to have with my brother and sister when we were small enough to be forgiven for being intolerable little shits. Anyone with a sibling will be familiar with the game Wave Your Finger Around Your Brother Or Sister’s Face Until They Scream For Parental Intervention, At Which Point You Gleefully Repeat Over And Over, ‘I’m Not Touching You! I’m Not Touching You!’
The internet’s Angry Young Men, stuck as they are in a state of arrested development, operate in much the same way. It isn’t their fault if you choose to get personally offended or upset by their behaviour. They’re not even touching you! If you can’t handle a bit of gentle antagonism when they’re not even touching you, then you’re the one with the problem.
Being expected to tolerate such mindless, brain-numbing verbal diarrhoea with good grace is a burden frequently placed on women, and this is what Yiannopoulos represents to the men who eagerly herald him as their messiah (and yes, he does have female fans who are no doubt attracted to his racism, his transphobia and his hatred of the left but who also have enough internalised misogyny to think that if they can just be the best Official Woman ever, these men will somehow treat them as an exception): his deliberately offensive bombast provides cover for those who think they should be absolved from ever having to face up to the consequences of their actions. They scream for a debate while at the same time lashing out at any of the women who dare to fight back against them. They don’t want women to stand up for themselves or to be given the opportunity to defend their ideas and arguments in an adult environment. They want us to sit there like good little girls, absorbing their hatred and anger and reassuring them of their supreme importance to this world. This is what a debate looks like in their minds. It’s a thousand men forcing a woman to silently endure their animosity, insecurity and unbridled rage while they collectively jerk off before ejaculating all over her face.
It’s all too easy for people to think this behaviour is confined to the worst and most immature of teenage boys, but the reality is frighteningly different. It’s becoming more commonplace online and more normalised in the mainstream media we create and consume. Yiannopoulos slowly clawed his way from being an obnoxious troll at the fringes of the far right (the new wave of which is known as the ‘alt-right’, a term that seems obscenely sanitised to me) and onto airwaves beamed directly into people’s homes across America and the world beyond. He regurgitates basic, outrageous bigotry as a way of exploiting the short attention span of modern-day consumers so he can cultivate the appearance of being an expert, and it’s effective in both recycling and reinforcing views that would otherwise be subjected to intellectual testing. But a readership that forms its opinions on the basis of headlines rather than news content responds very well to ostentatious sound bites, which makes someone like Yiannopoulos a sinister choice for establishment industries to propel into the mainstream.
Which brings us back to that function centre in Adelaide. After losing a series of employment and speaker opportunities following his guest slot on a podcast in which he appeared to condone sexual relationships between adult men and adolescent boys, Yiannopoulos needed somewhere to regroup (and refuel his ego). Where else for him to head but the welcoming bosom of his vast Australian fan base? We are a country girt by rednecks, racists and misogynists, after all. More pertinently, we slobber over any North American or British import, no matter what their philosophy or actual talent. The American media had spurned Yiannopoulos when he revealed that condoning even paedophilia was a depth to which he was willing to sink, but the Australian media wasted no time in rolling out the red carpet for him. His five-city tour was sponsored by Penthouse Australia magazine (I was shocked to discover they hated women—shocked, I tell you!) and promoted by ‘celebrity agent’ Max Markson. It also featured hosts Andrew Bolt (a newspaper columnist, radio and television presenter, and convicted racist—so maybe not that much of a surprise, really), Mark Latham (an unhinged collection of used aeroplan
e vomit bags that have been sculpted into the approximate shape of a human male, and also a former prime ministerial candidate) and Ross Cameron (a knob). David Leyonhjelm, the Libertarian senator and universally recognised Awful Human, also invited Yiannopoulos to speak at Parliament House in Canberra, with members of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (of Dickheads) racing to occupy the front row.
God, we’re a country of embarrassing eejits.
My own personal feelings about Yiannopoulos aside, I find it deeply concerning that a man who espouses such relentlessly hateful views has found such a substantial audience here. As Laurie Penny so eloquently wrote, he represents the death of political discourse. How can we possibly hope to have productive conversations around gender inequality when the rules of engagement are so decidedly nasty and lawless?
As far as fighting goes, it’s seductive. Who hasn’t experienced a spike in adrenaline when they’ve gone head to head with someone in the comments section of an ABC News post? Even when the tide of public opinion (full of shit and debris as it is) turns against you, it’s still impossible not to keep checking on those notifications.
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