With the exception of that last charge, which is so despicably offensive that it’s almost impossible to believe it came out of an actual person’s brain, all these examples of ‘female privilege’ seem less indicative of a rising gynarchy poised to crush whimpering men with a gigantic, comfortably shod foot than they are things some men either want or don’t want women to be able to do (say no to sex; pursue sex; have an abortion; have a baby; report sexual assault; get a divorce). It is not ‘female privilege’ for a woman to have the final say over whether or not she grows a foetus inside her for nine months before birthing it and then raising it. Having done all those things (the third is an ongoing project), I can assure you it’s not a fucking frolic in the park. While we’re at it, can we all agree that it’s a curious bit of cognitive dissonance to argue against paying to support children you don’t want in one breath while ranting about how the legal system helps women steal them from you in the other? And by the way, the belief that women can just walk out of their house and fall on a dick of their choosing is patently false. For example, I have never fallen onto Oscar Isaacs’ dick and it’s not like I haven’t tried.
The argument that the fight for gender equality has swung ‘too far’ to the other side is simply ludicrous. One woman is still killed by her partner or ex-partner every week in Australia. The World Health Organization estimates that 30 percent of women worldwide who have been in a sexual relationship have experienced some form of violence within that partnership. The two issues most integral to women’s equality—reproductive autonomy and financial independence—are still not considered legally sacrosanct for the overwhelming majority of women in the world today.
And we’ve got men (and some women) not just complaining that feminism is subjugating men, but claiming that it’s gripped them in a vice so tight they need to stage their own movement?
I’ll let you in on a little secret. The feminist mafia in Australia is trying to erode men’s rights, and we’ve had some success over the years. Like the right for a man to rape his wife. Destroyed that. Or the right of men alone to determine who rises to political leadership. We nailed that one too. Or how about the right of husbands to consider their wives as their physical property, and for a husband to have the right to commit his wife to a mental asylum (as many did) as a means of securing a divorce, leaving him free to marry another (often, younger) woman? Yep, got rid of that. So referring to ‘female privilege’ (particularly in a world where, in some places, it’s still considered a privilege when girl babies are even allowed to live) as some kind of nefarious threat to the psychic wellbeing of men isn’t just offensive, it’s also dangerous. It provides a focal point of blame for the frustrations of men who feel they’ve somehow been denied all that was promised to them, and it can have terrifying and often violent ramifications for the women in their lives.
You’ll notice that a good deal of the angst and fury of Angry Internet Men is wrapped up in sex: specifically, women who will not have it with them. More criminal than their rejection, though, is the fact that these women are obviously having sex with everyone else, because they are trashy sluts who have had a parade of cocks in them, so who do they think they are to be so fucking discerning?
It’s a stance eagerly embraced by Return of Kings, established in 2012 as ‘a blog for heterosexual, masculine men’ with the aim to ‘usher the return of the masculine man in a world where masculinity is being increasingly punished and shamed in favour of creating an androgynous and politically correct society that allows women to assert superiority and control over men’. Articles published on RoK boast such titles as: ‘Women should not be allowed to vote’, ‘Young girls are better than older women’, ‘The Intellectual inferiority of women’ and ‘27 attractive girls who became ugly freaks because of feminism’.
As the founder and face of Return of Kings, Daryush ‘Roosh’ Valizadeh has become something of a hero to the insecure, occasionally deranged men who make up his fan base. He claims to have coined the term ‘neomasculinity’, a wackadoo ideology that basically states women are only valuable if they’re young and fertile, and that men prove their value by fucking them. Roosh started his career as a pick-up artist (or PUA), teaching men how to hook up with women by asserting their ‘alpha’ status and borderline raping them.
That may sound like a hyperbolic accusation, but you need only look to his own work to see how close it is to the truth. For a long time, Roosh’s primary source of income came from his Bang! series, a collection of travel guides aimed at men who wanted to screw their way around Europe and South America. I say ‘screw’, but they’ve been widely condemned not just for encouraging rape but for recounting Roosh’s own numerous experiences as a rapist.
In Bang Iceland, Roosh writes:
While walking to my place, I realised how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated. I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do.
As David Futrelle, author of the anti-MRA website, We Hunted the Mammoth, wrote in 2015, ‘Sex with women too drunk to consent is considered rape in Iceland as well as in the US.’
In Bang Ukraine, Roosh brags about the time he turns an initially consensual sexual encounter into rape. (Warning: the following excerpt contains a graphic description of sexual assault.)
I was fucking her from behind, getting to the end in the way I normally did, when all of a sudden she said, ‘Wait stop, I want to go back on top.’ I refused and we argued . . . She tried to squirm away while I was laying down my strokes so I had to use some muscle to prevent her from escaping. I was able to finish, but my orgasm was weak. Afterwards I told her she was selfish and that she couldn’t call an audible so late in the game.
So, to recap, his sexual partner told him to stop and he not only refused, he also ‘had to use some muscle’ to hold her down and ‘prevent her from escaping’. And after he finished raping her, he called her selfish.
Neomasculinity, hey?
Roosh is not an outlier in the MRA world, even though he publicly distances himself from the movement. The belief that men have been stripped of their natural roles as ‘leaders’ (and the rewards that come with it, which always, always include access to nubile young women’s bodies) is fundamental to the MRA philosophy, as is the conviction that they must work towards restoring this balance. That’s why they embrace philosophies like that of the Red Pill movement (MRA dork code for ‘taking the Red Pill’ à la The Matrix, and ‘seeing’ the true reality of the femofascist dictatorship under which we labour), pick-up artistry and ‘returning’ to those glorious days of yore in which they were ‘kings’. It’s why they’re drawn to the work of Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones from InfoWars and even (perhaps especially) Donald ‘The President’ Trump, all of whom give them licence to say what they want to whomever they want and ignore any and all consequences. Feminism is cancer! Women are whores who think everyone should pay for their birth control! Grab ’em by the pussy—they’ll let you do it!
Those who are drawn to this kind of rhetoric ignore the fact that patriarchy has generally never favoured men of their calibre. It may soothe them somewhat to fantasise about (or even act on) taking what they want from women through violence or force, but their real gripe should be laid at the feet of patriarchy itself. Unfortunately, this would require actual work and introspection. It would require challenging other men. Far easier (and less intimidating) to pretend that uppity women are the problem.
The lack of wholesome, positive communities for men in a society that so often denies raw sensitivity to them can’t be underestimated. Opportunities for bonding are limited, and too many of the ones available require the degradation of somebody else. Men who frequent MRA websites (or PUA ones, or basic shitlord communities whose only goal is to out-edge each other) derive an enormous amount of satisfaction from trolling the people they believe are
somehow denying them power. They argue that women manufacture rape claims, and so express their anger over this by coordinating with each other to threaten to rape them. They are pathologically afraid of women encroaching on the spaces and communities they feel belong to them. Women who transgress these rigidly enforced boundaries can be doxxed (internet slang for documents being deliberately leaked), their home addresses, phone numbers and private details published online to make the world just that much more terrifying for them.
When game developer Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest received positive reviews in 2013, she began to receive hate mail almost immediately. But the harassment escalated when Eron Gjoni, Quinn’s bitter ex-boyfriend, published an online rant alleging she had slept with a journalist in exchange for a positive review. As it turns out, the journalist in question had never written the review—but Quinn may have slept with him, and in a community that pulses with image-based exploitation (more commonly known as ‘revenge porn’), slut-shaming and aggressively entitled masculine dominance, that appears to be the more unforgivable crime.
The unwarranted backlash spawned #Gamergate, a thinly constructed Twitter ‘movement’ that pretended to be about ‘ethics in gaming journalism’ but, as prominent feminist games and media critic Anita Sarkeesian observed, very quickly revealed itself to be a ‘sexist temper tantrum’ more concerned with silencing critics of misogyny in gaming culture and keeping women out completely. Sarkeesian had already inspired the wrath of gamers all over the world when she used a Kickstarter campaign to create her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games YouTube series, and gamergaters wasted no time in ramping up the abuse. Video game developer Brianna Wu was likewise targeted after she posted a series of tweets about gamergaters, quipping that they were ‘fighting an apocalyptic future where women are 8 percent of programmers and not 3 percent’. Quinn, Sarkeesian and Wu were all doxxed by furious gamergaters, each receiving dozens of death threats and/or rape threats. In September 2014, an anonymous message was posted to 4chan, that community of juvenile ‘edgelords’ feverishly committed to their campaign of abuse and silencing.
‘Next time [Quinn] shows up at a conference we . . . give her a crippling injury that’s never going to fully heal . . . a good solid injury to the knees. I’d say a brain damage, but we don’t want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear us.’
A month later, a Twitter user named ‘Death To Brianna’ (@chatterwhiteman) tweeted at Wu, ‘I’ve got a K-Bar and I’m coming to your house so I can shove it up your ugly feminist cunt.’ It was part of a series of tweets that included threats like, ‘Your mutilated corpse will be on the front page of Jezebel tomorrow and there isn’t jack shit you can do about it,’ and, ‘If you have any kids, they’re going to die too. I don’t give a shit. They’ll grow up to be feminists anyway.’
But remember, it’s about ethics in gaming journalism.
Roosh may have been peripheral to this, but the festering community of rage-wankers he comes from shares a lot of similarities with #Gamergate. Chief among them is the unbridled hatred of women who not only refuse to know their place but seem oblivious to or disregard the place to which men are entitled as a birthright. Shortly after @chatterwhiteman publicly threatened to rape and murder Wu, Roosh published a post on Return of Kings pledging support to the #Gamergate movement and its efforts to destroy what he saw as a common enemy (people with a moral conscience, I guess). He wrote:
Gamergate is an exciting development for our sphere because an external group is going up against our enemy. While gamergate is not our movement, I have chosen to aid them as much as possible. I won’t take any credit for their victories, but I sure will enjoy the satisfaction of having my enemy defeated.
The idea that women (and the men who support them, and collectively fight for a better, more equitable world) are perceived as The Enemy is fundamental to understanding the mindset of the men who move through the manosphere, whether as out and proud MRAs, Red Pillers, 4channers, territorial gamers or lonely pick-up artists. They have been successfully conditioned by the patriarchal lie that says ‘real men’ are defined by their ability to dominate others and, in turn, command their respect. For some of them, their inability to embody these so-called ‘masculine’ values is felt as a source of deep shame. Others will exhibit naturally bullying traits, comfortable with the abuse of others and confident in their rule as Supreme Alpha Male.
The risk of the manosphere is in the way toxic behaviour and rage become weaponised against the people perceived to be standing between men and their ‘biologically gifted power’. Roosh dehumanises women to an audience of thousands, encouraging the belief that we exist only as vessels for men to plunge their dicks into and only then if we happen to be young and fertile enough to ‘deserve’ them. To developmentally arrested men desperate to assert themselves as strong and virile, it’s a pretty intoxicating message. Gamergaters nerd out over the integrity of the gaming space while secretly enjoying the fact their pretensions to some kind of larger moral goal allow them to get away with (and get off on) treating real-life women the way they treat the background character sex workers in Grand Theft Auto.
The vast majority of these men will swear blind that they don’t hate women at all; that your accusations of misogyny or entitlement are ad hominem attacks; that they love women (the good, nice ones); and that death/rape threats posted on the internet are always just a joke. Is it their fault if women can’t take a joke?
Easy things to say but if you really want to see toxic masculinity in action, you only have to look at how these same men excuse and sometimes even make martyrs of the men who actually do commit these acts of violence in real life.
After all, it’s obvious, isn’t it? If women would just be nicer to men, then men wouldn’t be forced to hurt us.
It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls have never been attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men, instead of me, the supreme gentleman. I will punish you all for it.
These words were spoken as part of a video titled Retribution, filmed and uploaded onto YouTube on the night of 23 May 2014. The creator of the video was a twenty-two-year-old man named Elliot Rodger. Retribution was just one of many videos in which Rodger raged against what he saw as the ‘injustice’ of his virginity and lack of sexual prowess with women, but it was the one that outlined most clearly his violent plan for revenge.
On the day of retribution, I will enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB, and I will slaughter every single spoiled stuck-up blonde slut I see inside there. All those girls that I’ve desired so much, they would have all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them. While they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes, I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true Alpha Male.
Shortly after posting ‘Retribution’, Rodger embarked on a massacre that saw him take six lives and seriously injure thirteen others. After fatally stabbing his three male housemates, he drove his black BMW through the Californian college community of Isla Vista and began shooting random members of the public. A stand-off with local law enforcement ended with Rodger shooting himself in the head.
Investigations after the massacre found that Rodger followed several men’s rights channels on YouTube and was an active member in one online MRA community. In addition to Retribution, he also uploaded a 137-page manifesto titled My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger. The manifesto is an exhaustive recount of Rodger’s life, each grievance and outrage described in meticulous detail. As numerous others have said, the clinical language is reminiscent of that used in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, a novel about a similarly privileged young psychopath with a homicidal hatred of women. The fictional Patrick Bateman may not have had R
odger’s sexual ineptitude, but he was likewise obsessed with measuring his worth as a man against the achievements and possessions of other men in his social sphere. And like Bateman, Rodger had a very clear idea of what he thought it meant to be a successful ‘alpha’ male. This dangerous belief system was fostered and indulged by the MRA and hyper-masculine communities he immersed himself in online. Despite growing up with money, Rodger was obsessed with winning the lottery. ‘I mused that once I became wealthy, I would finally be worthy enough to all the beautiful girls.’
Being considered ‘worthy’ by ‘beautiful girls’ is a repetitive motif in Rodger’s manifesto. At one point he writes, ‘It’s all girls’ fault for not having any sexual attraction towards me.’ Shortly after, speaking about his friend Dale, he laments bitterly, ‘Women were never cruel to him. They gave him sex and love his whole life.’ Chillingly, he observes towards the end of his tirade that: ‘Women’s rejection of me is a declaration of war, and if it’s war they want, then war they shall have.’
Rodger’s online footprint included frequent visits to the website PUAHate, a community of men committed to exposing ‘the scams, deception, and misleading marketing techniques used by dating gurus and the seduction community to deceive men and profit from them’.
On paper, pushing back against the creepy and misogynistic fug of pick-up artistry sounds like a community service. In practice, PUAHate was a kvetching place for men who had poured thousands of dollars into learning how to bed beautiful women only to wallow in the same swamp of rejection. They’d paid their money and applied the techniques, so where were the women they were promised? Fucking hot guys, apparently. What a bunch of shallow, superficial cunts.
Boys Will Be Boys Page 18