Well, here’s a new twist on the whole “women love assholes” thing. According to the blogger known as Vox Day – a sort of right-wing/PUA hybrid – the best way for a fella to capture the attention of a comely lass is to rape and murder another comely lass. Yep. He seems to have confused “Game” — that is, pick-up artist trickery — with The Most Dangerous Game. Oh, Vox stops short of recommending that his readers actually go out and murder women, but he argues this women-love-killers argument in all seriousness:
I don’t believe I could recommend this as a strategy for most men, but it is surely educational to learn that raping and killing a woman is demonstrably more attractive to women than behaving like a gentleman. And women, before all the inevitable snowflaking commences, please note that there is absolutely nothing to argue about here. It is an established empirical fact.
His empirical “proof” of this assertion? The fact that some Japanese women have set up online fan clubs for Tatsuya Ichihashi, an accused murderer.
From this one data point, Vox seems to have made a somewhat hasty generalization based on the notion that all women are the same person – that is, if one woman thinks or does something, all women think or do that same thing.
Yes, there are women — and men — who find themselves attracted to vile human beings. Some women idolize murderers. Some men think Ann Coulter is hot. That doesn’t mean that all women idolize murderers or that all men want to get it on with Ms. Coulter. It just means that some people have really, really, really appalling taste.
But let’s just assume for a moment that Vox’s basic premise is true: all women love violent psycopaths,. If you’ want to get with the ladies, but aren’t so hard up for a date that you’re actually willing to resort to homicide, is there some other way you convey what a violent psychopath you are to the ladies of the world? Yep, says Vox:
[I]f you are being introduced to a woman you find attractive, she will be more attracted to you if you slap her in the face without warning and walk away without explanation than if you smile and tell her that you are very pleased to meet her. Now this, being a mere hypothesis, can be argued. And tested, if you’re feeling especially scientific this weekend.
I really hope none of his readers take him up on this.
Is Vox being altogether serious about this? Yes and no. About the idea that women love killers? Absolutely serious. About actually assaulting women? He’s a bit more cagey. On his blog Alpha Game, Vox elaborates:
Women find it sexier for you to rape and kill a woman than putting them on pedestals and being a nice guy. I’m not saying that you should rape and kill anyone, but I would recommend, at the very least, dropping the nice guy routine and pushing over the pedestals.
Women have plenty of positive attributes. But they’re not angels, and when it comes to what sexually attracts them, even the nice, well-bred ones are more insanely twisted, from the male perspective, than the average serial killer.
So apparently the only truly happy couples in the world are those in which both partners think like serial killers.
What a romantic!
This is 100% true if you are trying to attract my fist to your face.
VoIP: In the discussions at Whatever and Making Light, it was pointed out to Beale over and over again that
– there are and have been many well-known, highly respected and successful female authors of hard SF
– rather a lot of authors writing hard SF are not PhD-holding gearheads; they make shit up, and turn to actual non-fiction-writer scientists for the technical knowledge
– Beale himself is not a three-PhD gearhead yet himself has written hard SF
– he was, in fact, making his dumb arguments to women who were successful writers of hard SF.
Didn’t matter. He just stuffed his fingers in his ears and went back to a bad imitation of Christopher Hitchens going “nah nah nah, I can’t heaaaaarrrr yoooooou”. (He did backpedal amusingly when called out on his anti-Semitism; apparently he forgot that you can chalk misogyny up to being daring and un-PC, but bashing Jews, not so much.)
hooray! i sent this in to david, i am glad he wrote about it, because this guy is seriously pretty gross on a whole number of fronts. i am pretty sure vox has enough material for the next few months if david really wanted to dig around. susan walsh has also apparently posted a few times on vox’s “alpha game” site. the site is actually extremely strange because vox is trying to post about “christian game” which is both… totally incoherent (sex fiends vs. anti-sex puritanism) and somehow perfectly consistent (because at least he’s upfront about where he wants women to be and why).
under his real name, theodore beale, vox is also a blogger for world net daily (the totally loonadoodle christian fundie/ rightwing conspiracy website, mostly known these days for promoting birther nonsense). he’s also one of the select group of fantasy/sci-fi writers (along with orson scott card off the top of my head) who are batshit insane when it comes to their politics. it apparently runs in the family because vox’s dad is currently in jail for tax evasion after going full-on tax crackpot/sovereign citizen.
vox is also the type of person who constantly mentions he is in mensa. he is a chronic bloviator and believes that he is on a mission to save western society from corruption i.e. feminism, atheism, the gays, liberals, etc. you can even participate in his “voxiversity” and do book studies with him! (barf-o.)
can somebody point vox towards manboobz (if he hasn’t found it already), it is pretty lulzy when he tries to defend himself. he pretty much explodes when people dismiss his Intellectual Theories and Big Huge Mensa Brain.
“I’d date a murderer. I’d also date a convicted rapist.”
And stay out late and wear a leather jacket and ride a motorcycle and get a tattoo and play my music real loud and–!
Do these people receive no sensory input from the outside world whatsoever?
I can understand that they have no friends, but they must have colleagues, or neighbours, or relatives, or people of SOME sort whom they can observe behaving as humans do: meeting, usually loving and/or fucking one another and happy to do so, often forming couples, sometimes marrying and all with nary a serial killer in sight?
Yeah, I’m sure Lindsay Hawker thought Ichihashi was just soooo cooool while he was strangling her to death because she dared to scream for help after he kidnapped and raped her. Kakkoii deshou? *eyeroll*
That whole situation was sort of, er, near and dear to me because literally a day or two after I arrived in Japan to teach English was when her body was found in that bathtub full o’ sand. (She was an English teacher with a different company, and he was her student.) Then he went on the run for a bajillion million years (after running out of the window with no shoes on when the police came), and was only barely caught. As a woman I had to teach my share of creeps who just came for the foreign chixxx, and let me tell you, the idea that any of them might have a bathtub full of sand on their balcony was NOT HOT.
The reason, as I understand it, that a lot of the girls thought Ichihashi was so awesome was because he got all that plastic surgery and looked like some sort of manga character to them. Not the fact that he raped and murdered someone. Although I’m sure there is someone somewhere who got turned on by that, but we’re talking about a country where women in pornos have to squeal like hamsters and make sounds like they’re in lots of pain as a general rule. And let’s not get into the whole, “I like watching cartoon women get raped and killed by monsters” thing, which is not an uncommon genre of porn.
Anyway, I’ve said my piece. Using Ichihashi and his few devotees as a rule for all women would be just as dumb as saying that all men like watching monsters rape and kill women just because a good number of Japanese dudes do.
And obviously we all speak Portuguese, since everyone in Portugal does. Must be true …
Now some women (myself included) may find the idea of being slapped in the face pretty hot in a consensual, pre-negotiated, situation. However any stranger who was to try that sort of stunt would quickly find themselves in jail on assault charges.
Some women (and men) let their fantasies run amok, they think because they have these dark fantasies about dangerous people or situations that they should actually seek them out. Finding Dexter really sexy and actually wanting a relationship with a serial killer are two very different things. one healthy and the other decidedly less so. Generalizing from these women to all women is pretty stupid, however since I’m familiar with Vox Day’s ramblings thanks to the mocking he’s gotten on the Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog I’m unsurprised that he makes that leap.
Wow… using a culture in which there are so many issues with sexuality, dominance, violence in the society to somehow try and mansplain that all women are basically the same woman with the same desrires diregards the social and cultural differencies is simply… well… stupid.
Also, MENSA is turning to be a club of douchebags, like the Dilbert creator who also loves to blow his own horn how smart he is.
The thing is, neither of them are particularly good in using logic or following arguments and with some huge gaps in their education accoring the topics they engage in and the ideas they are advocating.
So… NOT IMPRESSED about the whole MENSA thing.
The idea of IQ testing was originally french and it was in order to help lacking students and children not to create and maintain an upper crust of ‘smart people’. Also, MENSA is not a uniquely created for each individual test but it is quite crude, which means it can be abused and manipulated which makes it deeply flawed. Having MENSA does not excuse but makes eggregiously stupid and ilogical claims even the more laughable still.
And on the note for women writers… Louis McMaster Budjold would happily proceed her life having so many awards for both Nebula AND Hugo for her science fiction books without even hearing about this dude and his MENSA awards.
Oh, the old trope about how women love murderers again.
Hey, you know who else loves murderers? Men.
Some men, anyway. Male death row prisoners are frequently contacted by men on the outside who send money to their bank accounts in exchange for phone calls and a “relationship.”
All of which means nothing as regards how men are, actually. But if you’re gonna make the special point that some women seem to like killers, might as well tell the whole story.
@Bee:
Exactly. Proving, once again, that PEOPLE can be stupid and PEOPLE can have bad taste.
So far, I remain totally unconvinced about any sweeping generalizations the MRAs like to make about women. They only work if you ignore a huge swath of facts and context.
@magdelyn:
“I’d date a murderer. I’d also date a convicted rapist. But, that’s just me. To the person in the last thread that assumed I have a uterus. I don’t.”
Date whomever your heart desires. And you’ve said yourself “that’s just me.” Which is cool. There’s no need to say all men/women do one thing or another in order to assert one’s personal preference, which is my sticking point with Vox Day; not that there aren’t people who are attracted to or could be attracted to a murderer or convicted rapist.
It’s kinda like the old school yard myth: if he slaps you in the face, that means he likes you.
People who feel a need to say they belong in MENSA are usually douchenozzles. MENSA itself would usually be fine except for the fact that it attracts people that seek it as a status symbol like moths to a flame. Like, I know I likely am able to qualify (wouldn’t say I know for sure, since I’m not a conceited ass) but since I don’t give a crap I never sought to apply. So by definition you get a whole lot of highly intelligent people that all cared A LOT about knowing that they are highly intelligent and/or have a club that selects only people as intelligent as they are.
I remember the good old days when there was a crosspost flamewar on Usenet between alt.atheism and the theistic contingent of soc.mensa, whose most common pro-God argument was “I know more than you, I’m in MENSA”… Good times.
I think if you’re as smart as all that, you ought to be smart enough to question the notion of intelligence as a single, fixed, measurable attribute of a person.
“I must be smarter because I take math and logic tests better” is a pretty darn dumb thing to think.
You know how to get a woman to date you? Kill her!
…Wait, maybe we didn’t quite think this through.
This is mind-boggling, really.
When I see people defending this kind of violence my brain just reels and tries to find alternate explanations to why they’re saying this, because I just find it so HARD to believe they’re serious.
My latest explanation is that maybe it’s all reverse psychology? You see, they’re so bad at getting into relationships, that the only way they can think of to do it is to try and convince other men to act even worse than themselves.
Regarding Mensa, I think it gets an unfairly bad rap because – as with almost any group of people – the minority of total douchebags in the group tend to be a lot louder than the majority of reasonable people. I know a lot of Mensa members and Mensa alums, and my experience is that roughly 97% of them joined Mensa because they like hanging out with a bunch of geeks talking about books and doing logic puzzles, and roughly 3% of them joined because they want to brag to everyone about how they got into Mensa and that makes them OMG SO SMART rather than, you know, just a person who’s good at the particular sort of tests on the Mensa exam. The other 97% not infrequently try to find excuses not to invite those guys to Mensa events, because they’re annoying as heck.
In other words, it’s totally cool to figure that the people who brag about being in Mensa in unrelated conversations are asses, because they are – but Mensa itself is still mostly normal people who don’t think they’re particularly better than anyone else just because they’re good at logic puzzles; you’re just less likely to notice them since they’re not going around shouting, “HEY LOOK AT ME I’M SOOOOOOO SMART ‘CAUSE I’M IN MENSA.” :-p
can somebody point vox towards manboobz (if he hasn’t found it already)
Christ, no. He’s not even an entertaining troll. His posts sound like he shoved a dictionary up his ass just before walking into a cocktail party, because everybody knows broads drop their panties the first time you use a word with four syllables.
He tends to google himself, so he will show up, or not; no need to invite tedium by summoning him.
NWO is more entertaining, Meller is about as coherent.
Pretty sure Vox Day is like Bloody Mary or Candyman. Just repeat his name three times and he shows up in a thread.
@Polliwog: plus, you’d think that even people who joined Mensa because they’re so darn smart would figure out that if you have to tell people you are in Mensa, clearly your brilliance is not all that obvious.
Oh, now you have to link for us. I’ll go make popcorn.
You do have to wonder about somebody who says ‘hey, try this technique, chicks dig it’ without giving examples of, you know, actually having tried it. Even PUAs will say that they know such-and-such works because *they* do it.
Hey now! :p
cynical: I didn’t figure that applied to me, because I don’t have a tattoo. XD
You should get a tattoo that says you’re in MENSA. All the panties would drop.
@mythago Indeed! “I’m in Mensa” is a perfectly good support for “so I know Bob, who is also a member of my local Mensa branch” or “so I’m busy tonight, because it’s our branch’s monthly spaghetti dinner,” not so much for “so I’m amazingly brilliant, neener neener, and now I don’t need to ACT brilliant or anything to prove it.”