Paul Elam has so far refrained from responding to the halfway-on-the-mark, halfway-completely-ridiculous criticism of the Men’s Rights movement leveled by rapey PUA douchenozzle Roosh that we discussed yesterday. Not even that bit comparing the very serious dudes reading A Voice for Men to silly ladies reading Cosmo was enough to provoke the oh-so-easily provoked Elam. Either he’s gotten very Zen about criticism from PUAs, or he’s spent the last several days punching pillows and muttering under his breath about evil “pussy beggars.”
But some of Elam’s acolytes took it upon themselves to respond for him. My favorite comment is this bait-and-switcher from MrStodern, which starts off with a vaguely reasonable observation before descending into misogynist nonsense.
Apparently feminists love pickup artists, and the only legitimate reason for dudes to have sex with women is to teach them a lesson. Who knew?
I didn’t know the details of that case, but I did not want to rely on just what the MRA’s say about it. They don’t have much of a track record for accuracy and honesty. What’s bad is that they will use this one case of wrongful prosecution to try to say that all cases of rape and domestic violence are cases of the state abusing their authority over falsely accused men.
I know some bored guy is gone by now, but I figure he’ll come back to get bored some more. I wanted to tell him not to use SAVE as a reliable source for anything. They are just as misogynistic and extreme as AVfM or The Spearhead but they try to pretend to be a legitimate lobbying group, kind of like how The False Rape Society does. Anyway, SAVE’s treasurer runs a mail order bride business and her main goal is to reduce legal protections offered to immigrants who are victims of abuse.
from Right Wing Watch
Yeah, I refuse to go read details about it on MRA sites. Most of the links I come up with are from them. So I only go by the local news articles about it. And those indicate that she’s being disciplined for this one case in particular, and that she’s being disciplined for comments that she made about the defendant, and for withholding evidence from the defense. Actually, she hasn’t even been disciplined yet, because that hearing hasn’t happened. MRAs want to point to this one case as proof that ALL COURTS are feminist run and oppressive to men. That’s ridiculous.
OT. Wayyyy OT:
I just found out that a collection of kittens is known as an intrigue.
Boring Troll is boring.
Conway Troll is rapey.
C’mon, let’s up the quality of trolling around here!
Anything to do with kitties is never OT here.
And that is awesome.
Speaking as a submissive woman, seconded. Jimmy’s posts make my skin crawl.
Also, funny thing – my partner is a dominant man, and he’s had a very large number of sexual partners over the years, a significant percentage of whom were submissive women. And yet, somehow, he’s never yet met even one of these frequently-cited women who say “no, stop” and then get mad at guys for stopping. It’s weird, seeing as every single rape apologist we get here has met positively loads of women who really, really want dudes to ignore them when they say “no” to prove how dominant they are, that someone who actually specifically sought out women who are really into being dominated would somehow magically have missed out on this oh-so-ubiquitous experience. It’s almost like it’s a giant load of rape-apologist bullshit or something!
Roosh the doosh is a lot like the guy in this song:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeMeDihwyrg]
And if he’s more than just hot air he’ll suffer a similar fate. LOLz
Prison rape. Hilarious. (Not actually hilarious.)
Not cool, dude.
Hey, Ooompa, we’ve already got unfunny trolls who run around harping on prison rape. THE JOB’S TAKEN, ASSHOLE.
Pollywoog: I suspect your husband is good at communication and seeking out people who are in touch with themselves enough to know how to communicate about sex and sub play. It’s possible the MRAs at issue just made stuff up out of whole cloth – but it’s likelier they encountered a woman like that once or twice, who behaved that way because they were so out of touch with their sexuality – or had f’d up prior experiences – that they really did get mad in that situation.
Of course, that doesn’t change anything – if somebody says “no” you stop and if they get mad, you can communicate openly and figure out a safe word if that’s what you want to do.
Broadly i think this is what’s going on with MRAs in general, where they have an experience that is genuinely negative – being mistreated by a woman, being manhandled by the criminal justice system or the family law system, whatever, and then draw an unhealthy and unproductive lesson from it that leads them to a very strange neovictorian ideology.
@Drew: Agree. We know there ARE women who doesn’t want to talk about sex but seriously expects the man to magically know everything they want via telepathy. There are probably women with sub desires like that too. But it’s really nobody’s duty to try to please people with completely unrealistic expectations about telepathy.
Yes, I think that’s very true, though it’s exacerbated by their galloping narcissism – for instance, they weren’t “mistreated” because they badly misread a social situation and the woman understandably wanted to get out of it, they were mistreated because she was an ALPHA FUCK BITCH.
@ Wetherby
I wonder if this is part of why conversations about social skills with those guys go so poorly. When we say a person has good social skills we mean that they’re good at reading situations and correctly interpreting other people’s signals, whereas PUA types seem to see “good social skills” when applied to a man as meaning “knows how to make women fuck him”. Since they refuse to accept the idea that part of having good social skills is knowing when someone else isn’t interested in you sexually and how to back off gracefully in a way that minimizes discomfort for everyone involved, you get these conversations where people are talking past each other.
Of course the reason why they refuse to accept that part of having good social skills is knowing when and how to back off is that they’re incredibly sexist and kind of rapey, but I do think that a different understanding of what it means for a man to have good social skills is part of what’s causing so many frustrating conversations.
Yes, I think that’s very true. And I sort of sympathize to a limited extent because I’m sure my own social skills were dreadful in my teens – as you say, teenage males do tend to fixate on how to make women fuck them without caring about anything else, and peer pressure makes things even more toxic.
That’s why I was so sympathetic towards Mister Al a year or so ago, because although I wasn’t a raving misogynist at nineteen (or indeed at any other time), I certainly recognised many of his delusions as ones that I myself possessed, and within five years I was a completely different person.
But it took concentrated effort and one hell of a lot of lacerating self-criticism on my part – and if you’ve bought into a culture that regards any form of self-criticism as being “unmanly”, “weak” or “pussy-begging”, it’s going to be that much harder.
And the advent of the Web doesn’t help at all, as I just know I’d have made an complete ass of myself throughout my teens, probably under my real name because I was so convinced I was right. Fortunately, I didn’t get online till I was nearly thirty, which was a blessing for everyone – and even then there’s stuff I wrote in the 1990s that I devoutly hope has been long forgotten.
I have flashes of sympathy too, because they’re just so mixed up about how relationships work and most of us had some stupid ideas about that when we were young. But then I realize that part of the underlying problem is their refusal to accept the idea that sometimes women won’t want to fuck them and that’s just how life is. With the idea of social skills, for example, they’d be a lot less confused if they’d let go of the delusion that all women come with a cheat code and if they can just figure out what it is then sex will result.
It’s the refusal to admit that women are people that’s the problem, is what I’m saying. It’s just sort of disturbing that it’s able to warp people’s perceptions to the point where they’re literally unable to understand what is being said to them no matter how clearly it’s explained.
I’ll always remember admiring a very old friend of mine (she wasn’t quite the girl next door, but near enough) who elegantly but unmistakably made it clear when we hit our late teens that there was not even the remotest chance in hell of us being anything other than friends.
I can’t remember precisely how she did it, but it was something along the lines of a completely casual comment at a party to the effect that she couldn’t imagine herself getting romantically involved with anyone she’d known since she was in single figures. Since we’d been going out socially quite a bit as friends, I assumed that this was aimed largely at me – how could it not have been, since apart from her brother I was the only person in the room who fitted that description? – and was happy to take the hint.
A quarter century later, we’re still friends.
“I have flashes of sympathy too, because they’re just so mixed up about how relationships work and most of us had some stupid ideas about that when we were young.”
Thanks. I’m new to the manosphere, and I was wondering if there was something wrong with me because I’ve had a few “there be for the grace of god go I” moments. I had a few toxic romantic relationships in my late teens/early twenties. Combined with the stoic-man attitude that my dad relied upon, this led me to embrace the idea that men didn’t really have feelings. I didn’t want to demonize men, and I didn’t hate guys, but I didn’t really view us all as one big happy humanity, either. It took me breaking a few hearts on my own, and then really examining my own way of blundering through the world, to realize that I was wrong, wrong, wrong. A blinding lack of communication and some really poor self esteem had doomed my earliest romances, not bad, hard-hearted dudes in general. If I hadn’t been able stop my own navel gazing for a few minutes, I could easily see how a few more bad romances could have led me to turn into a bitter man-hater. It’s easy to blame your bad luck on someone else. It’s a lot harder to change your behavior. It’s even harder to change the way you see your little corner of the world and how it might affect the people around you.
PUA is the most focused application of social skills there is, for men who are tired of repeating the same 15-minute anodyne “greet and meet” conversation and having no romantic lives at all. Since all feminist “advice” is really geared towards enabling quiet, shy, unattractive men to elicit the normal, everyday “No” from women that poisons their lives, anything else is an improvement.
Eurosabra, just shut up.
@Eurosabra
a)It is not feminism’s job to help you get laid.
b)If feminism does give advice in that vein, it is very likely to be of the “treat women like people and not sex dispensers” variety.
c)You don’t treat women like they’re people. You may claim you do, but it’s obvious from your many posts that your interactions with women are solely centered on getting sex and that you have no problem with treating them like objects and lying to them if you think it will get you sex.
d)You can’t complain about feminist’s advice because you don’t follow it. At best you tried to act like you thought that women are people because you thought that would get you laid, that’s not following the advice.
All anyone ever cares about is that male desire not be too onerous for women. Since I am forced to be my sole advocate, I choose my methods. No complaints registered . :-).
So being called a slimeball repeatedly doesn’t register as a complaint?
Mind you, I daresay it happens to you so routinely that it’s easy enough to tune out.
Yes, how terribly selfish of women to expect that you not treat them as walking sex dispenser units. Truly, men who are forced to not have sex with everyone they want are society’s greatest victims.
Fuck off and take your rape apologia with you.
You are creepy as fuck Eurosabra.