“Zed,” also known as “The Zen Priest,” was one of the originators of the Men Going Their Own Way “philosophy” and is treated as a wise elder by many longtime MRAs.
WF Price of The Spearhead described a compilation of Zed’s writings as “really quite profound as well as a great read” and used to give it out as a bonus for everyone who signed up for his email newsletter. Paul Elam of A Voice for Men laid it on a bit thicker, saying of the man he described as both a mentor and a friend:
[H]is writings have taken him to iconic status in the minds of many men who have been at this for a while, this writer included. This has happened despite the fact that he has eschewed the path of self promotion and opted to speak from behind the persona of an archetype, maybe because of it. Either way, he has wielded a sharp sword from his underworld den, and worn the uniform of a warrior in the battle for sanity between men and women … .
So what kind of fellow is this Zed?
Well, as I learned from a recent thread over on MGTOWforums.com, where he is officially an “elite member,” he’s the sort of person who thinks you should’t bother to save a four-year-old girl from drowning, because then she’ll grow up into a woman, and most of them are just terrible.
The regulars on the forums there were discussing the case of Michael Patterson, a Georgia man who was paralyzed after diving into a creek to rescue a four-year-old girl from drowning, and who has now died after several weeks in the hospital.
While a few suggested that Patterson was a hero, others made clear they wouldn’t have done the same thing themselves. 0kool put it like this:
i know i would never save an adult CUNT….and i know that as sure as i breathe air. however, i would be hard pressed to save a female child knowing what she might have the potential to do in the future. My hat’s off to the guy. Let’s hope his death isn’t in vain and the child doesn’t become a CUNT piece of shit!
Zed, that grand underground warrior for gender sanity, that icon of the Men’s Rights movement, argued the same thing in slightly more restrained prose. In one comment, he warned of the dire possibility that the seemingly innocent little girl you save could grow up to be
another Amanda Marcunt, or Jessica Valenti, or Betty Friedan? Do we think it is worth a man giving his own life to save the life of a woman who will spend it being totally destructive?
In another, he raised the specter of an even more hated figure, at least amongst MGTOWers and MRAs:
Given the evidence around me, it does appear far more likely that a girl will grow up to be another Sharon Osborne – who thinks it is “fantastic” when a woman cuts off the penis of her husband, or the audience of women who cheered that statement – than a woman who contributes much, even to her own family.
I really can’t think of any woman in the public light who the world would be much worse off without.
When a female is in trouble, if I don’t know her, I don’t see her.
This is the kind of timeless wisdom that makes you an icon in the Men’s Rights movement, I guess.
NOTE: Thanks to @taylerlp on Twitter for the tip.
EDITED TO ADD: When I wrote this post, there were 13 or so comments in the MGTOWforums thread; there are considerably more now, including a number from MGTOWers who say they WOULD try to save a little girl. But Zed only doubles down on his position.
Vlad and Elisabeta
(Yes I know that wasn’t really her name, but this was an illustration for a piece I wrote at the height of OMG GARY OLDMAN in the ’90s.)
Death of a Janissary
WARNING: black and white gore
Mircea Avenged
WARNING: ditto!
(I also know Vlad probably didn’t wear Western European full plate armour, but when I drew these I could not for the life of me find any visual references to what armour the Wallachian nobility did wear. Since the pics were for a Goth magazine, I went for the full-on Gothic style of armour, thehellwithit.)
🙂
wow, those are amazing kitteh… and what are you talking about, those lines are super clean
Seconding what SittieKitty said, also, that even looks like him! Way better than I can do!
Looks nothing like how imagined Vlad the Impala would look, Kittehs!
(Those are excellent. Love the feeling of motion in the hair/manes/capes.
lowquacks, you are EVIL! 😀
Now if it were Vlad the Impala vs a Great White Huner type, then yay impalas for the win!
Also, thanks, everyone! I had fun drawing those, back in the day. Twenty years ago, cripes.
*Hunter. I have no idea what a Great White Huner is.
Aren’t most boy band members, like, twenty? You know, I don’t think drooling over a twenty-year-old celebrity is creepy regardless of your own age. Might be weird (but not always) to actually date someone who’s twenty if you’re forty, but it’s not like there’s something wrong with a forty-year-old merely finding twenty-year-olds attractive.
The worst part is, I’m not even the most well known Orion Anderson in contemporary America. For the record:
I DON’T work for the Library of Social Science; I DID playtest and edit After Sundown, the horror movie monster RPG
I DON’T spam academic and literary discussion listhosts with ads for “Idealogies of War, Genocide and Terror,” nor do I edit that publication; I DO sometimes plug Darkest Night, the co-op fantasy boardgame I playtest
I am NOT the founder of MECHAPOWER, an NYC-based IT company; I AM the designer of Identity Crisis, a forthcoming retro-feudal asian cyberpunk wuxia crime fantasy RPG.
I am also NOT a software engineer in the Seattle area; I am an intellectual dilettante in the Chicago area.
This public service announcement brought to you by the National Council for the Promotion of Misandry
Yeah apparently kitteh’s complaint wasn’t even that what I said was creepy. I blame lack of proper sleep and So. Much. Data. (With luck, the disability section will be done before the hour’s up [which means before 6 am here, fuck])
Done — location, urban/not, age, education, class, employment status, all the gender questions, the sexuality one, relationship status, and I just finished on the disability questions.
To do — ethnicity, politics, religion, SMART ASSES!!
This update brought to you by the number i (because this shit is irrational) and the letter w (as in “wow, I’m actually making headway!”)
The religion one is going to kill me, there’s just so much there.
Oh and to the two trolls who need hugs *flips them both off* hugs are for people who don’t intentionally fuck with my data.
Can someone explain how one can be both not disabled, and have a mental or physical disability? Idk if I’m missing something, or this handful of people where confused, or what. None of it looks like troll data, and a couple people checked combinations that included both employed and unemployed…
More importantly, can anyone please explain how one can be both a captialist and a member of the pirate party? I’m assuming these dozen people didn’t just think the pirate party goes argh matey and has pet parrots…
Argenti, one could be in favour of some kind of laissez-faire-capitalism where nobody can copyright anything and information just flows free. I’d say this isn’t a very uncommon combination…
Regarding employed and unemployed, that’s weird. Maybe someone who’s freelance, or has some on-and-off work that isn’t enough to support oneself?
Regarding no disability but mental disability – maybe these people associate the word “disability”, unless specifically accompanied by the word “mental”, with physical disabilities?
Obviously all this is speculation on my part…
Most pirate parties don’t advocate elimination of private property (outside of intellectual property) – they’re usually civilly-libertarian social democrats of some sort.
The pirate party people I know afk aren’t even social democrats, they’re pretty right-wing. And they’re not confused in any way. You can regard copyright laws as a hindrance of the free market forces.
And this is what I get for dealing largely in things that could make me money = art XD
Thanks guys!
Dvärghundspossen — there’s only a handful of each, and I’d be questioning disabled, retired, employed if I didn’t know that it’s pecunium and how that makes utter sense. So I assume the rest of the sorta weird stuff does too, just not to me! The pirate party one was the one that was bugging me, because apparently my brain things of everything as being under copyright!
At least there are only 20-something political options, religion is going to kill me.
Did I mention that I let my mother take it since she wanted to see and probably knows more about the regulars here than the lurkers who don’t read the comment? Had to explain what cis means 3 times (in the “yes, I get that it’s not-trans* but what does it mean?” sense) and then she got to politics! And just looked at me all confused — “other US conservative is at the bottom” “thank you”. This after she said she could handle it, complete with “oh he of little faith”…good thing I stuck around!
She then spent an hour arguing with me over whether parody religions are funny or stupid, and how anyone can have more than one religion (she wasn’t even having any of the indigenous traditions and any of the ones spread by missionaries, a combo that has to be fairly common worldwide).
Pecunium — how can you be Catholic and anything else?! HOW??? (What, I certainly wasn’t going to try explaining that she calls me chaos and confusion for good reason, it’s a religion even! [my religious views are one of those things we just don’t discuss because we both know we’ll end up angry])
And the handful of pirate party people I know are various strains of anarchists. This explains my confusion I think!
And sorry, that got long.
Dvärghundspossen’s closer to most of the Pirate parties than I and looks to be right. I was getting mixed up with Australia’s Sex Party, which has quite a few similar ideas or was going to or something like that. I don’t really follow the Sex Party.
Argenti, I likely would have put mental disability with no disability if you hadn’t clarified affecting your life… that’s just a personal and self-deprecating tick of mine though, I don’t feel “disabled enough” (noticing a theme with me yet?) because it’s an invisible disability for the most part… And I’m really curious if I put single in a monogamous relationship or not (I can’t remember), so I’m pretty interested in seeing the breakdown.
*shakes fist* I did the relationship section without doing the combinations, just a total count.
Single, not looking and monogamous relationship? I have one and all else I can see with the data split like this is that whomever it is is bi/pan/omnisexual. Idk who it is, but I’d guess you know if it’s you 🙂
And the mental disability thing…yeah, took awhile to come to terms with my being too nuts to be functional (part of why I’m going non-stop with the data is everytime I stop to think about it the sheer amount of it, and that 1,600+ people took it and thus well over a thousand people are waiting on my results gets all “MAOR ATIVAN, NOW”)
…and then my latest psych is all “well you haven’t tried every job” (like, huh?)
I’ll look into splitting the relationship data into uh…look into grouping it into combinations that is. And/or splitting up the chunks so that each data point is a unique survey (person), currently each data point is a box checked. (For comparison, I did the non-cis gender options the same way since there are…uh, at least 300? Possible combinations. There are about 100 for the seven relationship options, but much like the disability ones it looks like they cluster, so it might be reasonable)
Employed and unemployed possibility…teachers! I know a couple and oh boy are they just thrilled to be currently unemployed (summer break started here last week-ish)
@Argenti, could the single/not-looking/monogamous person be someone in an unusual situation like Kittehs or LBT?
IDK? Since it’s in my clipboard already, here’s that data —
Single, looking 96
Single, not looking 175
Single, open to the possibility 323
In a monogamous relationship 488
In a non-monogamous relationship 55
In an open relationship 36
Other 12
In a non-monogamous relationship; In an open relationship 16
In a non-monogamous relationship; Other 2
Single, open to the possibility; Single, looking 19
Single, open to the possibility; Single, not looking 9
Single, not looking; In a monogamous relationship 1
Single, not looking; Other 1
In a monogamous relationship; In an open relationship; Other 1
Single, open to the possibility; Single, looking; Other 1
Single, open to the possibility; Single, looking; Single, not looking 3
No Response 402
SittieKitty — I changed it so it’s now using the combinations that was surprisingly easy. And now my sleeping plll is kicking in so I’m off to bed. G’night!