For a certain subset of horrible men, there are few things more infuriating than the fact that women they find undesirable can turn down men for sex. For this upsets their primitive sense of justice: such women should be so grateful for any male attention, these men think, that turning down even the most boorish of men shouldn’t even be an option for them.
Consider the reactions of some of the regulars on date-rapey pickup guru Roosh V’s forum to the story of Josh and Mary on the dating site Plenty of Fish. One fine December evening, you see, Josh decided to try a little “direct game” on Mary.
That’s what the fellas on Roosh’s forum call it, anyway. The rest of us would call it sexual harassment.
Josh started off by asking Mary if she “wanted to be fuck buddies.” She said “nope,” and the conversation went downhill from there, with Josh sending a series of increasingly explicit comments to Mary, despite getting nothing but negative replies from her.
After eight messages from Josh, with the last one suggesting he would pay her $50 to “come over right now and swallow my load,” Mary turned the tables, noting that she’d been able to deduce his real identity from his PoF profile, and asking him if he wanted her to send screenshots of the chat to his mother and grandmother. He begged her not to.
As you may have already figured out, from the fact that we’re talking about this story in public, Mary did indeed pass along the screenshots, and posted them online.
Poetic justice? Not to the fellas on Roosh’s forum. Because, you see, Mary is … a fat chick.
While dismissing Josh as a “chode” with “atrocious game,” Scorpion saved most of his anger for the harassed woman:
Look how much she relishes not only shooting him down, but damaging his reputation with his own family. She’s positively intoxicated with her power. Simply spitting bad direct game is enough to unleash her vindictive fury.
“Bad direct game.” I’m pretty sure even Clarence Thomas would consider what Josh did sexual harassment.
At any point, she could have pressed a single button and blocked the man from communicating with her, but she didn’t. She didn’t because she enjoys the feeling of power she gets from receiving attention from guys like this and then brutally shooting them down. It makes her feel much hotter and more desirable than she actually is in real life. She’s not there to meet men; she’s there to virtually castrate them for her own amusement.
I’m guessing here, but I’m pretty sure that nowhere in Mary’s profile did she encourage the men of PoF to send her explicit sexual propositions out of the blue. And I’m pretty sure she didn’t hold a gun to Josh’s head and force him to send a half-dozen sexually explicit harassing messages to a woman he didn’t know.
Athlone McGinnis also relies heavily on euphemism when describing Josh’s appalling behavior:
I don’t think its primarily the revenge she’s after, its the validation. She is enjoying the power she has over this guy and wielding it brutally because it shows she can maintain standards despite her weight and the doubtless numerous confidence issues that stem from it. In blowing up this guy for being too direct in his evaluation of her sexuality, she affirms the value of her own sexuality.
Oh, so he was just being “direct in his evaluation of her sexuality.”
In short: “I am wanted, but I have standards and can choose. I have so much agency despite my weight that I can go as far as to punish those who approach me in a way I do not like rather than simply blocking them. I’m teaching them a lesson, because I’m valuable enough to provide such lessons.
So apparently in Mr. McGinnis’ world women who are fat aren’t supposed to have agency? They’re not supposed to be able to choose? They’re supposed to drop their panties to any guy who offers to be their fuck buddy or tells them to “suck my dick?”
Also, I’m a victim bravely standing up against online bullying/harassment-look at me!”
Yeah, actually, she is. Get used to it, guys, because you’re going to see a lot more of this in the future.
This isn’t just a laughing matter for her. She needs to be able to do this in order to feel worthwhile. She has to be able to show that even she is able to maintain standards and doesn’t have to settle for just any old guy asking for any old sexual favor simply because she resembles a beached manatee.
And it’s not a laughing matter for you either, is it? You’re actually angry that a woman said no to a sexual harasser — because you don’t find her attractive. And because Josh — from his picture, a conventionally attractive, non-fat fellow — did.
Mr. McGinnis, may a fat person sit on your dreams, and crush them.
The assumption is that bullying is 100% about your reaction, so if you provide no reaction, they’ll leave you alone.
But a) that’s assuming that it’s possible to be so absolutely neutral that they don’t think there’s any reaction (because they never go “you should have seen the look on her face!” or mock you for just walking away) and b) it’s simply not true. They’re getting joy out of hurting something helpless, and even if you don’t react, they know they’re hurting you. Kids who love to stomp on bugs or pull up flowers aren’t doing it because the bugs and flowers are reacting.
Oh, yeah, the problem is her, not the asshole who was really fucking rude and kept going. Fuck the Roosh crew sideways, and shame on them if they dox her.
RE: katz
The assumption is that bullying is 100% about your reaction, so if you provide no reaction, they’ll leave you alone.
Exactly. Which isn’t true. I mean, believe me, we became a dissociative pretty early on, and part of the effect was that it took us a while to react to anything. It didn’t keep us from being bullied or mistreated; it just made us more docile and passive and made it even harder to actually DO anything about it, because it’d take a day to even understand what happened.
Bullying is one of those things where I look back at my time in school and go “Seriously? That was really how it went down?”
The weird thing about them wanting to troll her on facebook is that it only makes them look bad, not her. The whole point of her contacting the dude’s relatives was because he’d acted badly and publicizing it to his family would humiliate him. They’re not humiliating her in any way by posting on her facebook, since she never did anything to be humiliated about. They’re actually going to embarrass themselves publicly in front of all her facebook friends. As a revenge plot, it really contains all the intelligence I’d expect from the manosphere… which is none.
I agree that the “just block him” mentality is ridiculous, especially since so many people seem to think that blocking or deleting someone on social networks is a huge referendum on their character and literally the most offensive thing you could do to anyone ever. Recently, a friend was being harassed by a dude she had been briefly dating (she had unequivocally ended things, he still kept popping up on her chat insisting that they “needed to talk” and then turning aggressive when she kept refusing to meet up with him) so she blocked him out of desperation. Their mutual friends acted like that was a super-extreme move and really harsh on the poor dude.
Seriously. All the harassment she had to deal with up to that point was unfortunate, but no big deal. But blocking him? Wow, no need to be such a bitch!
If she had been a supermodel the story would have ended with the guy “getting the bang.” Because 90% of the bangs reported on the RooshV forum are made up.
There is truth to Alice’s words.
@tinyorc
Ugh 🙁
I admit, sometimes I’m tempted to create a troll account on one of those dating services, using old photos of us back when we were still presenting female, PURELY to give takedowns to assholes who send anon cock pics and such.
I’ve often fantasized about having some of Roosh’s choicest bits translated into Farsi and sending them to his mom and dad (whose addresses are readily available online). He has often insinuated they have little idea what he does, partly because their English is limited. Of course I wouldn’t do it. It’s just a fantasy.
La Strega:
When I was in high school, there were quite a few Persian students in my classes (it gave me a bit of a skewed idea about how large a minority group it was). Anyway, one of them spoke up in calculus to try to get us to stop saying “cos” as a short form of cosine because evidently that is basically the c-word in Farsi. It didn’t really work too well.
He also corrected your pronunciation of Iran, but when one teacher accidentally mispronounced Iraq, he said he didn’t care.
I thought that the feminist position was not to retaliate in such a damaging way? Or does that only apply when a man pops his wife in the eye after she beats on him?
Re: bullies, I got the whole “They’re just doing it to get a reaction, so ignore them and they’ll stop” lecture. It was horseshit from start to finish. Even to the extent that they were doing it to get a reaction, ignoring them never made them stop…it made them escalate. Like, they’d start with annoying but harmless jibes, then move up to more hurtful insults, then get physical–stealing my books and throwing them in the trash can, for instance. And then calling me “trash picker” when I rummaged to retrieve them.
Thanks a lot, adults.
It’s entirely clear that the Rooshites aren’t upset about the idea of people being “creative” with the internet, just the fact that people who aren’t them can do it.
RE: diz
I thought that the feminist position was not to retaliate in such a damaging way?
Oh please. She just posted what he’d said. The only damage that guy took was to his ego.
Or does that only apply when a man pops his wife in the eye after she beats on him?
Uh huh, a physical beating is TOTALLY comparable to what’s going on here. You aren’t just pulling purple rhetoric out of your ass. Gotcha.
@diz
Really? Are you honestly equating what she did to domestic abuse?
ninja’d by LBT
Yay! My first ninja!
Katz:
It’s a very insipid notion – that’s for certain.
The idea ignoring bullies will make them leave you alone is one of those lies I was told while in high school, which obviously didn’t work and eventually lead to my own father assuming I must have been provoking them (nevermind I avoided them as much as possible). Even when standing up to one of them – I was suspended for several days.
What’s weird is that whenever I reported being harassed or picked on, the faculty did little to nothing about it. The only time they did anything when I was in Freshmen football (I hated every minute of it) and some guy constantly kept coming up from behind me and touch my testicles, though everyone on the team was mad at me for it because it was “just a joke.” It felt like, no matter what those kids did, you were being punished by simply not liking it and doing something about it.
It’s hard not to look at American culture and think we celebrate bullies. We downplay the effects of bullying, as if it’s just the antics of youth, and generally go victim-blaming the moment said victim bothers to stand their ground. We think that, when abused, we should just shut up and take it – as if they “deserve” to be tormented by an obvious sociopath. It certainly explains all those horrendous “she was just a slut” defenses in rape cases or why a workforce can be forced to jump through flaming hoops by their employer (who never suffers any consequences for it).
@diz
Because showing someone’s (mother + grandmother?) what they said is exactly like domestic violence. Fool.
Like everyone has said, social repercussions != physical violence, and feminists are generally all for social repercussions for domestic abusers, whatever their gender.
You have no real expectation of confidentiality when flirting with someone (or while performing some puerile form of sexual harassment expected to perform the same role).
Once you get more involved than “one party sexually harasses, other party firmly refuses” some could certainly be negotiated or be expected as part of the respect between two (or more) interested people, and you’d probably get some as a matter of course because saying anything about certain things might be embarassing for either party – dirty talk that’s reciprocated probably won’t be shared except with close friends or anonymously by most people, for example, but expecting people to keep quiet about who has been coming onto them, pleasantly or not, is a bit much.
Diz, please. I’m sure you can do better than that sad little attempt at whatever that was.
@wordsp1nner:
“Anyway, one of them spoke up in calculus to try to get us to stop saying “cos” as a short form of cosine because evidently that is basically the c-word in Farsi.”
Actually, it’s pronounced more like “cooz,” if memory serves. Whenever I would walk down the street, I would hear a chorus of that word: cooz, cooz, cooz, cooz… So it is pretty much engraved on my aural memory.