Boys Will Be Boys

by Clementine Ford

  At least, this is how the members of PUAHate saw it, seemingly unaware of the double standard. As Katie J.M. Baker wrote for Jezebel in 2012, ‘Isn’t it a tad hypocritical for PUAHate posters, who seemingly think they deserve a bevy of beautiful ladies ready to have sex with them on command at all times, to criticize women who date attractive guys?’

  PUAHate no longer exists (the site was closed down shortly after the massacre in Isla Vista) but at its heart it represented what’s known as the ‘incel’ community. Short for ‘involuntarily celibate’, incels are predominantly straight, cis men who feel they are being forced into celibacy against their will because women refuse to have sex with them.

  Yes, really.

  So gripped by this idea of no-sex-as-oppression are incels that misogyny abounds. In their world view, women are not fully formed humans with rights to autonomy of their bodies and desires. Instead, they are cruel banshees who exploit a supposedly unfair hierarchy of attraction and need to purposefully humiliate and exclude the ‘average’ and ‘below average’ men who fail to live up to its superficial standards. Although it’s not unique to them, there’s a curious narcissism to incels that reflects the simultaneous strength of their self-hatred and self-obsession. Instead of just being ignorant of their existence or vaguely turned off by them, women are instead thought to be keenly aware of incel desperation. Denying sex to incels is perceived as more than basic rejection—it’s an act of humiliation, deliberately waged and cruelly enjoyed by women who devote a lot of time to thinking about how much better they are than these men. To put it bluntly, incels behave as if they’re the biggest piece of worthless shit floating right smack bang in the centre of the universe.

  Basically, we’re looking at a turducken of toxic masculinity, entitlement, self-obsession and rank misogyny.

  Don’t be tempted into feeling pity for incels. While some of them may be genuinely clueless chaps unable to figure out a way to overcome loneliness and social awkwardness, most are furious at women for (as Rodger lamented) refusing to ‘give’ them love and sex. Instead, they go for ‘Chads’, the jocks and d-bags (of course) who get laid whenever they want despite being arseholes because women are FICKLE BITCHES. (Incidentally, and to literally nobody’s surprise, a number of the posts on Anti-Feminism Australia are rooted in incel ideology. In February 2018, a post appeared with the title ‘Why Aussie men face dating inequality’. The author defends men who get angry or lash out following rejection, writing, ‘Can you really blame those men? They probably just got rejected for the 100th time because they weren’t in the top 10% of men that women go after. That is, men who are muscular, tall and rich.’ Yanno, ‘Chads’.)

  In an unchecked community, this furious male entitlement to sex (and the subsequent rage felt at being denied it) feeds off itself. It isn’t uncommon to discover incel threads of men discussing the ethics of having sex with dead bodies or the imperative a just society has to make rape legal. (In his manifesto, Rodger also wrote, ‘Women should not have the right to choose who to mate with. That choice should be made for them by civilized men of intelligence.’) In the incel world, shared fantasies of revenge homicide are not the exception; they’re the norm. When news of Rodger’s massacre hit incel communities, he was widely heralded as a hero. Even today, fan pages exist praising his actions—and no, not all of them are run by morality-free edgelords trying to get some 8chan cred. Some are genuinely agitating to follow in his footsteps.

  Others would argue that venting about revenge doesn’t necessarily mean a person will act on it. This is undoubtedly true. The vast majority of people who unleash angry tirades online are probably not going to go on a homicidal rampage. But enough of the people who have perpetrated massacres began by building an online portfolio of rage, indignation and pointed commentary outlining if not their exact plans, then something that arguably formed the basis of them.

  In April 2018, a young man named Alek Minassian commandeered a white van in Toronto and drove it into a group of pedestrians. He was arrested and charged with ten counts of murder, and multiple further counts of attempted murder. Facebook later confirmed that a profile linked to Minassian had published a post shortly before the attack. It read: ‘Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!’

  Not too long after Minassian staged a mass murder in Toronto, a young man named Dimitrios Pagourtzis took a pistol and a shotgun into his Texas high school and opened fire, murdering eight students and two teachers. It later emerged that his first victim, Shana Fisher, had spent the previous four months rejecting Pagourtzis’ ‘aggressive’ advances. Her mother told the Los Angeles Times that ‘a week later he opens fire on everyone he didn’t like, Shana being the first one’.

  A month before Rodger slaughtered six people in Isla Vista, a sixteen-year-old Connecticut teen named Christopher Plaskon fatally stabbed his classmate Maren Sanchez, also sixteen. When police officers arrived, he announced, ‘I did it. Just arrest me.’ It soon emerged that on the morning of the murder, Plaskon had asked Sanchez to be his date for the upcoming junior prom. Sanchez and Plaskon were friends, but she had recently started dating another boy at the school. When she declined his invitation, Plaskon pulled out a knife and plunged it into her chest. Afterwards, he threw her down the stairwell. Apparently, Sanchez had tried to alert the school’s administration to Plaskon’s violent tendencies but they had failed to act.

  This is the terrible bind in which women find themselves within a toxic cultural mindset that prioritises men’s ‘need’ for sex and affection over women’s right to determine what feels unsafe or undesirable for us. When we listen to our instincts and complain about male behaviour, we’re accused of seeing things that just aren’t there. Stop making men feel bad! They’re allowed to ask you out! How will the human race survive if men can’t ask you out anymore? Stop doing that wishy-washy girl thing and just say no! What’s the worst that could happen?!

  As we know, there is a lot of ‘worst’ that could happen. We know it because we know what misogyny and male entitlement writ large looks like. The denial of its existence is what allows violence against women to flourish, from incessant street harassment to sexual assault to murder. This violence is the shadow under which we live and the threat we fear. It’s what allows a young man to believe so fervently that he is ‘owed’ female attention and adoration. And it’s what makes him decide to punish those who deny it to him. This isn’t theoretical. It’s proven time and time again by the actions of men who choose to enact violence against women they believe have emasculated them.

  Shortly after Isla Vista, a Tumblr site appeared called When Women Refuse. The project was established as a direct response to the massacre, particularly the subsequent claims that violence of its kind was ‘an isolated incident’. When Women Refuse documents in blistering, brutal, devastating detail the violent retaliation that is often inflicted on women when they reject men’s sexual advances. From image-based exploitation to beatings and, in all too many cases, even murder, the sheer number of men who seem unable to handle being denied access to women of their choosing is staggering.

  There’s Christopher O’Krowley, who shot and killed his co-worker, Caroline Nosal, because she didn’t want to pursue a romantic relationship with him. There’s Raelynn Vincent, whose decision to ignore a man catcalling her from a car one night resulted in the stranger stopping his vehicle to pursue her and punch her in the face hard enough to break her jaw. There’s no shortage of irony in the fact that women are also told to ‘just ignore street harassment’ or even respond positively to it because ‘it’s a compliment, if anything’. Tell that to Janese Talton-Jackson, who turned down Charles McKinney at a Pittsburgh bar. As she left for home later that night, McKinney followed her and fatally shot her in the chest. And what about Yan Chi ‘Anthony’ Cheung, an Australian pharmacist who pled guil
ty to one count of poisoning to injure or cause distress or pain after his victim and colleague, Pamela Leung, observed CCTV footage of him drugging her water and coffee at least twenty-three times over the course of a year. Leung had previously confronted Cheung over his sexual advances, which included ‘[brushing] past her breasts, buttocks and hands’. Cheung retaliated by drugging her with medications like Phenergan, doxylamine, Endep, Seroquel and Deptran.

  A few months before he killed six people in Isla Vista, Rodger posted on PUAHate, ‘If we can’t solve our problems we must DESTROY our problems. One day incels will realise their true strength and numbers, and will overthrow this oppressive feminist system. Start envisioning a world where WOMEN FEAR YOU.’

  Newsflash. Women already fear men, with good reason. It isn’t just because some of them, like Rodger, believe their masculinity is anointed by putting their dick in a vagina. It’s because beyond the terrifying incel community, there are people whose pity outstrips their rationality when it comes to socially awkward men who are ‘shackled’ by their virginity or fumbling attempts to connect with women. And here’s where we come to the most frightening aspect of incel ideology and misogynist retribution against women viewed as the root of men’s problems: it’s that altogether too many people are able to recognise the abhorrent nature of Rodger’s actions while also expressing sympathy for what must have driven him to them.

  He did a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing—but if women had just given him a chance then he wouldn’t have been so angry. Rejection is hard! Humiliation is harder! Sexual frustration is the hardest! I’m not saying it’s women’s fault necessarily when men take all these things out on the world, but maybe if women weren’t so picky about who they bone then he wouldn’t have had to. You know?

  On Return of Kings, Roosh condemned the massacre but still found a way to blame it on American women, who, according to him, ‘have been encouraged to pursue exciting and fun casual sex in their prime with sexy and hot men as a way of “experimentation”.’ As ripper as that actually sounds, it’s apparently bad because ‘until you allow and encourage all men to get sex by some means, these massacres will be more commonplace as America’s cultural decline continues’.

  Roosh is a particularly awful person, but the view of women as sexual gatekeepers extends well beyond his PUA rape corner of the internet. Men ‘need’ sex in a way that women don’t, and not being able to access it makes them go cuckoo. It’s our job, therefore, to release their pressure valves once in a while . . . or on our heads be it.

  Not every boy will turn out like Elliot Rodger, Christopher Plaskon, Alek Minassian, Dimitrios Pagourtzis or even Roosh, but these men are also not outliers in an otherwise unproblematic system. They are frightening end points on a spectrum of behaviours that, even at the less homicidal end, still conditions boys and men to feel entitled to women’s attention and bodies as a means of establishing their masculine power. The concept of ‘alpha masculinity’ is almost entirely destructive to both the boys who are raised to measure themselves against it and the girls who are expected to succumb to it. We do a disservice to young men (even the pitiful ones) when we make excuses for them or trivialise their participation in these subcultures. We need to disrupt the messages that are filtered through every aspect of culture: messages that tell young men their masculinity is defined by how well they command the people around them, particularly the women; messages that frame women as rewards for men who compare favourably to other men, that have for generations shown fictional male heroes ‘winning’ women at the end of their quests.

  In his brilliant article ‘Your princess is in another castle: Misogyny, entitlement, and nerds’, writer and self-proclaimed nerd Arthur Chu reflects on the lessons boys are taught from pop culture about what they ‘deserve’. He writes:

  . . . the overall problem is one of a culture where instead of seeing women as, you know, people, protagonists of their own stories just like we are of ours, men are taught that women are things to ‘earn,’ to ‘win.’ That if we try hard enough and persist long enough, we’ll get the girl in the end. Like life is a video game and women, like money and status, are just part of the reward we get for doing well.

  Again, not every spurned man will respond to his own unexamined rage by grabbing a gun or a knife or even just a well-organised online harassment squad and slaying whichever woman has pissed him off that day. But enough of them do for us to know that it’s a problem. We don’t stop it by isolating them from each other and passing their deeds off as the result of mental illness or depression. We understand it by recognising it as part of a culture of learned entitlement in which the logical endpoint for falling short is violence and retribution.

  We change it by going back to the beginning, and starting again.

  8

  YOUR HONOUR, I OBJECT

  I have ideas about women who spend evenings in bars hustling men for drinks, playing on their sexual desires . . . And the women who drink and make out, doing everything short of sex with men all evening, and then go to his apartment at 2:00 a.m. Sometimes both of these women end up being the ‘victims’ of rape.

  But are these women asking to get raped?

  In the most severe and emphatic terms possible the answer is NO, THEY ARE NOT ASKING TO GET RAPED.

  They are freaking begging for it.

  Damn near demanding it.

  And all the outraged PC demands to get huffy and point out how nothing justifies or excuses rape won’t change the fact that there are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk through life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH—PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.

  So wrote Paul Elam in November 2010, in an online post titled ‘Challenging the Etiology of Rape’. Perhaps the world’s most famous MRA, in 2008 Elam founded A Voice for Men, a for-profit men’s rights website with an annual revenue estimated at around US$120,000 as of 2014, and with only one paid employee: Elam. Revenue is sourced mostly from online donations and advertising, but on the Red Pill shop (named for the Red Pill movement), AVFM’s CafePress online shop, you can buy t-shirts that say things like ‘My Wallet, My Choice’ and ‘It hurts when you are in love with a heartless bitch’.

  (Sidenote: In 2016, an American filmmaker called Cassie Jaye made a documentary about the men’s rights movement called The Red Pill. The film was heavily financed by MRAs, including Paul Elam and members of the AVFM community, and was subsequently criticised for being little more than an advertorial. Of particular concern was Jaye’s failure to press Elam on his more violent declarations, including his aforementioned views on rape victims and their apparent culpability. A planned Australian premiere was cancelled by Melbourne’s Palace Kino cinema after a petition was circulated characterising the movie as ‘misogynistic propaganda’. MRAs, both those who had financially supported the film and those who were simply counting on it to enlist more people to the movement, were up in arms. When they coordinate to sabotage feminist events it’s acceptable political activism—but when feminists protest content and behaviours that quantifiably promote harm to women, it’s censorship. Funny, isn’t it? In the ensuing fallout, I was repeatedly accused of having either created the petition myself or of fiercely promoting it, when the truth is I did neither. As I said at the time, I support a general release for The Red Pill if only because I think we can all use a little more absurdist comedy in our lives.)

  The sentiments expressed in Elam’s 2010 post sit nicely alongside some of the articles you can read on AVFM a full eight years later, which include ‘Feminism and “gender narcissism”’, ‘The rush to paint men as sexual abusers’, ‘Pathetic stupidity of cucks described in medieval Latin literature’ and—my personal favourite—‘Should we execute women who delayed their #MeToo accusations?’ In a January 2018 post titled ‘How to get your man to punch you in the face’, Elam argues that women are the primary cause of in
timate partner violence. Our ‘relational aggression’ is what pushes men to hurt us, and thus men shouldn’t be blamed when they do. In fact, Elam writes, ‘. . . if [relational aggression] one day results in that man punching her in the face, the only criticism I would have is that he should have left before making himself legally vulnerable to even more of her [abuse].’

  In his tenure as AVFM founder and publisher, Elam has openly stated that if he ever sits on a jury in a rape trial, he would vote to acquit on principle even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges were true. This is because he believes America is overrun by a swathe of false rape accusations and that the legal system is ‘patently untrustworthy when it comes to the offense of rape’. I mean, he’s not wrong. The system is ‘patently untrustworthy when it comes to the offense of rape’, primarily because the system itself was built by men to service a patriarchal society that continues to interpret the law based on masculine ideals. Only 3 percent of those accused of rape will ever be convicted, while the survivors of rape face a lifetime economic burden of over US$100,000, not to mention all the victim-blaming that goes along with it (‘Lifetime economic burden of rape among US adults’, C. Peterson, S. DeGue, C. Florence, C.N. Lokey, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2017).

  But wait, that’s not what he means! No—Elam thinks the legal system is untrustworthy because ‘in this, the age of misandry, not one aspect of a rape case can be trusted . . . the accuser cannot be trusted.’ And of course, as he argued back in 2010, ‘stupid, conniving bitches’ are just asking for it. Despite the fact that criminal studies consistently show roughly 2 to 8 percent of rape allegations are false (incidentally, the same rate as false reports for other crimes), MRAs doggedly pursue their belief that false reports actually account for around half of all sexual assault accusations. But while Elam and his global acolytes dismiss rigorous, peer-reviewed studies and accurate criminal statistical data on rape as the product of a sinister feminist conspiracy, their own sources are lacking, to say the least.