Category Archives: creepy
Don’t call her “baby.” No, seriously, don’t.
Unless you’re Kojak. Kojak gets a free pass with the word “baby.”
So I read a lot of creepy shit doing research for this blog. But the manosphere blog Random Xpat Rantings — slogan: “Contemplative dominance for the modern man” — seems to be trying to take creepiness to a whole other level.
In a recent post, blogger xsplat attempts to explain “How to make an attractive woman fall for you on the first or second date.” One of his hints: “If you are way into the girl, it will be way easier for her to fall for you.”
But what if you’re dead inside and can’t feel love? Well, have no fear, because xsplat has an answer for you: Pretend that the women you’re dating are your children!
If you don’t know how to feel love, here is a trick that will work for some, if you let it. Men naturally feel paternal love. Women are neotenous. Evolution is accidental, however the coincidence is meaningful. Women are neotenous because that arouses men’s paternal love. Use that to your advantage. Consider her as YOUR child. This will open up a flood of love for her. It’s ok – it’s not real incest – don’t be an idiot. It’s a trick you are performing in order to commune more fully. To love her more. To enjoy for yourself the great rush of love.
Also, I have a long history of doing this, again and again. It’s not just an accident in my distant past. It’s what I do. It’s what I did today. It’s a formula. It’s a formula that might very well work for you.
If you’re giving out dating advice and you have to specify “it’s ok — it’s not real incest” you should probably start trying to figure out just how your life has gone so terribly, terribly wrong.
Pickup artist: Women are crazy, so it’s in your best interest to treat them badly
She’s not interested? Obviously she’s nuts!
Leave it to the guys at Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog to find a bright side, of sorts, to a study reporting that one in five Americans suffered from some sort of mental illness in 2010, with more women (23%) amongst those affected than men (16.8%).
Since “at least a quarter of the women you run into at any given time are not going to be alright upstairs,” RoK contributor Athlone McGinn argues, and the percentage is likely to be much higher amongst younger women, you might as well use this fact to your advantage.
But first you need to accept the disadvantages. For one thing, you need to realize your powerful man-logic won’t work on these gals:
If you’re 18-25, you will in many cases be dealing with someone who is fundamentally incapable of being reliably rational.
Never mind that most mental illnesses don’t affect the ability to think rationally about most things. Someone with an intense phobia of Donald Trump’s hair, for example, is able to think rationally about everything except Donald Trump’s hair.
Maybe that’s a bad example. I’m not sure it’s entirely irrational to be afraid of Donald Trump’s hair.
And, like their sane counterparts, the crazy ladies may sometimes turn you down. But at least this time you don’t have to feel so bad about yourself.
You may think you’re a loser because you get shot down by these girls more than you’d like, but this isn’t always the case: you’re often dealing with not-entirely-alright girls with illogical criteria.
Oh, but McGinn assures us that “[t]his isn’t an excuse, mind you.” You still need to make sure your “game” is tight. Just don’t be too hard on yourself, because women (like the prices at Crazy Eddie’s electronics emporiums) are literally insane.
So what’s the great advantage of dating a woman who’s mentally ill? McGinn is a bit vague, probably deliberately, but essentially he suggests that men can keep “dysfunctional” women in line by treating them like shit:
Dysfunctional treatment is often welcomed by dysfunctional people, and many of those with mental issues fit that bill. Since we’ve already established that a very large number of young women fit into that category, you should not be surprised to see so many of them respond positively to dysfunctional behavior.
It is not uncommon for young men to adopt some of these dysfunctional behaviors, find increased sexual/romantic success with their female peers as a result, and then feel guilty about it all. Such guilt is understandable (they don’t like the fact that morally degraded versions of themselves are more appealing to girls in general than the men they actually prefer to be), but ultimately unnecessary—there is nothing a man can do about the female proclivity to welcome such behavior except adapt to it. It is the result of factors much bigger than him.
Poor pickup artists! They don’t want to be abusive, manipulative, exploitative assholes and terrible people generally. They’re driven to this awful behavior by forces beyond their control — like the fact that women are statistically somewhat more likely to suffer from mental illness than men.
The No-Friend Zone
Ladies! Here, fresh from the MensRants subreddit is A Man With Whom You Do Not Want To Be Friends. Or acquaintances. Or anything, really. To be honest, you probably don’t even want this guy to spot you at a distance from the window of a speeding train. Much T.M.I. in this quote:
Dude, I would seriously suggest you start masturbating. A lot. Preferably not in public.
And try not to bother any actual women for a while, at least until you can start conceptualizing of them as something more than objects (like candy or books) that have been set out for you to use as you please.
Also, your “mad and furious master?” “Mad and furious master?” Did you really just write that? I think you mean your boner. If you want to get fancy, your libido. What are you, Heartiste? Can none of you idiots write about sex without getting all purple prosey on us?
The “Don’t Be That Girl” Poster Controversy in Edmonton, and A Voice for Men’s History of Rape Apologia
Two of the Don’t Be that Girl posters
I‘ve been traveling, so I’m a bit late getting to the whole “Don’t Be That Girl” poster controversy in Edmonton. For those of you who don’t already know all about it: A group called Men’s Rights Edmonton, closely associated with our favorite Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men, has been putting up some pretty obnoxious posters parodying an anti-rape poster campaign called “Don’t Be That Guy,” turning the anti-date rape message into one that targets alleged false accusers of rape.
Sexist cartoons get dada
Today, a guest post from Etelka, the blogger behind the hilarious Wretched Refuse blog, which you all should read every day.
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Thanks for letting me sit in, David! As I was telling you, I recently did some rooting around in a unique cranny of pre-manosphere media: sexist vintage cartoons. In the late ’40s and ’50s there were a lot of them published in books like this. (Some of the book covers that follow have been borrowed from the Vintage Sleaze blog here.)
More #Fidelbogenisms from @Fidelbogen, brave Counter-Feminist Tortoise-Fighting Ant Warrior of Truth
This is actually the picture of himself he uses for his YouTube vidoes.
I know I just wrote about it, but our Counter-Feminist pal Fidelbogen’s Twitter feed is turning into the funniest thing on Twitter next to 80sDonDraper.
John The Other debates John The Other on MRA misogyny, loses
John Hembling: Open mouth, insert foot.
So the other day someone asked the Men’s Rights subreddit “Why do people think you guys hate women?”
There were a lot of ridiculous answers to that question, but one of the most ridiculous (and one of the most highly upvoted) responses came from our old friend John Hembling, the blabby Canadian videoblogger and A Voice for Men “Editor in Chief” also known for some dopey reason as John The Other. He explained:
Heartiste: Men need to be able to hit their mates in order to “retain” them
A better way to retain your mate: Be a sharp-dressed man.
You may know Heartiste as a reactionary, misogynistic, proudly racist dispenser of manipulative, sometimes abusive dating advice to would-be “alpha males.”
Did you also know that he was an open advocate of domestic violence against women?
Well, I didn’t, until a friend pointed out a strange little exchange on his Twitter account the other day.
Last Tuesday morning, apropos of nothing in particular, Heartiste made the following pronouncement:
When someone asked what sort of threats he meant, he elaborated:
The latter three items on the list (“Abandonment. Shame. Ostracism”) are standard techniques in Heartiste’s dating strategy, but the open advocacy of violence is, I think, new.
In addition to being repugnant, Heartiste’s argument here doesn’t even particularly make sense. Essentially, he seems to be saying that men need to be able to hit women to keep them in line so that they won’t have to … hit women to keep them in line.
Also, the phrase “mate retention strategy,” apparently popular with Evo Psych types, gives me the creeps. I’m pretty sure the best “mate retention strategy” is to be the sort of person your “mate” wants to be in a relationship with.
I did a quick search for the phrase, and found numerous references to two academic studies. One suggested that some women fake orgasms as a “mate retention strategy.” Another possibly more revealing one claimed that men of “low mate value” often insult their mates to lower their self-esteem so they won’t feel confident enough to leave. That seems more or less in line with what Heartiste’s general approach. And certainly, by any reasonable definition of the term, Heartiste and his followers are some pretty “low value” people, both as “mates” and as decent human beings generally.
I also found this reference to research by Evo Psych big daddy David Buss suggesting that violence — surprise! — isn’t actually a particularly effective “mate retention strategy.”
Also, beating up your mate is, you know, just generally a pretty shitty thing to do.
If Heartiste takes his tweets down, I’ve got screenshots.
EDITED TO ADD: Heartiste has really been going wild with the Twitter lately.
Here he claims to have invented the term “hivemind.”
After I pointed out that this belief was delusional, he suggested that I kill myself. Very alpha!
He’s also been on a bit of a racist rampage, posting lots of stuff like this:
See also here, here, here, here, and here.
Phrasing your racism in pseudoscientific terms doesn’t make it right, dude. It just makes you a pretentious racist.
A Sexual Assault How-To by a sleazeball Redditor? Thanks, Kickstarter! [UPDATED: Kickstarter: "We were wrong."]
So you may have heard about that Kickstarter that raised $16,000 for a loathsome Reddit PUA’s “handbook on how to bully women who don’t like you into sex, while preserving your claims to believe you had consent should you need to tell the police,” as Amanda Marcotte aptly described it in her post on it yesterday. Slate’s Alyssa Rosenberg also has some thoughts on it.
I don’t really have anything to add.
There’s a petition up demanding that Kickstarter simply refuse to fund what is essentially a how-to guide to sexual assault. Last I checked, it had gotten nearly 60,000 signatures.
EDITED TO ADD: Casey Malone, who wrote the blog post that brought this awful project to the attention of people outside of the sleazier corners of Reddit, wrote Kickstarter about it and got a response suggesting that Kickstarter, while planning to go ahead and fund the project, will be reexamining its policies as a result of the controversy. Malone posted some further thoughts.
EDITED AGAIN: Kickstarter has offered an apology. You can find it here. But I’m just going to repost the whole thing:
Dear everybody,
On Wednesday morning Kickstarter was sent a blog post quoting disturbing material found on Reddit. The offensive material was part of a draft for a “seduction guide” that someone was using Kickstarter to publish. The posts offended a lot of people — us included — and many asked us to cancel the creator’s project. We didn’t.
We were wrong.
Why didn’t we cancel the project when this material was brought to our attention? Two things influenced our decision:
- The decision had to be made immediately. We had only two hours from when we found out about the material to when the project was ending. We’ve never acted to remove a project that quickly.
- Our processes, and everyday thinking, bias heavily toward creators. This is deeply ingrained. We feel a duty to our community — and our creators especially — to approach these investigations methodically as there is no margin for error in canceling a project. This thinking made us miss the forest for the trees.
These factors don’t excuse our decision but we hope they add clarity to how we arrived at it.
Let us be 100% clear: Content promoting or glorifying violence against women or anyone else has always been prohibited from Kickstarter. If a project page contains hateful or abusive material we don’t approve it in the first place. If we had seen this material when the project was submitted to Kickstarter (we didn’t), it never would have been approved. Kickstarter is committed to a culture of respect.
Where does this leave us?
First, there is no taking back money from the project or canceling funding after the fact. When the project was funded the backers’ money went directly from them to the creator. We missed the window.
Second, the project page has been removed from Kickstarter. The project has no place on our site. For transparency’s sake, a record of the page is cached here.
Third, we are prohibiting “seduction guides,” or anything similar, effective immediately. This material encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works. These things do not belong on Kickstarter.
Fourth, today Kickstarter will donate $25,000 to an anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN. It’s an excellent organization that combats exactly the sort of problems our inaction may have encouraged.
We take our role as Kickstarter’s stewards very seriously. Kickstarter is one of the friendliest, most supportive places on the web and we’re committed to keeping it that way. We’re sorry for getting this so wrong.
That is an apology. Some people could learn a thing or two from this.
Let’s talk about sex! (With the icky, icky dudes of The Spearhead)
Those sneaky, sexy ladies, always up to something!
So over on The Spearhead, the fellas are discussing journalist Daniel Bergner’s sexy new sex book What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire. It’s a book that challenges many conventional wisdoms, both scientific and popular, about sexuality and, as Salon puts it, portrays female sexuality as essentially “base, animalistic and ravenous.”
