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.
Diz is just so precious. Run along now, dear, the adults are talking.
atdevel has taken his crusade to reddit, again: http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1kz37p/holy_fuck_david_futrelle_thinks_its_okay_for_a/
@saintnick86
I’m sorry that you went through that. Whenever I watch an American movie featuring bullies I think to myself that it has to be an exaggeration… it turns out it’s not, and it’s so sad.
I didn’t have any social skills as a kid (I’ve improved since then, although I’m still socially awkward), but I never encountered such violence. I was just invisible to most people, and was treated like a weirdo a few times, but the bullies were never that vicious.
I hope this situation in the USA changes soon. I just don’t get it.
Jesus, Karalora too. (I haven’t read all the comments)…
I really don’t get it.
And…I better go to sleep now since it’s past 4 am here…goodnight everyone
“That woman should be taken to court” (for her “very mean” behavior, presumably). These guys are such babies!
What would the charge even be? It’s not blackmail, because she has as much of a right to distribute that conversation as he does and she wasn’t making demands in exchange for not distributing it. It’s not libel, because it’s true that he sent those things to her.
Having one of these chucklefucks seeing a lawyer to discuss their options to deal with this misandry would be almost Pierre-worthy. . .
I feel a little better now. I usually just lurk because so many people usually say what I wanted to say anyway, but I hafta say, this is so much better compared to the one I read this morning.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/gender-stereotyping-unhelpful-counter-productive
It made me sick to my stomach. And here’s something incase you actually went there:
http://youtu.be/QBjKntYuUIk
Jedi fist-bump to saintnick86.
I got abused quite a bit back in Jr. High, and the solutions simply were not there. Amongst my friends, we all agreed that the only solution to bullies was madman theory: overreact suddenly, violently and viciously. Make them fucking fear ever touching us again. It would be worth the suspension. For at least three of us, that belief was based on successful past experience.
Needless to say, this is not an appropriate solution, and had serious effects later in life. I still can’t deal with horseplay. Someone hurting me by surprise, even a friend, even if it’s “in jest”, sends me into a blind rage. Last time it happened, I was wound up for a haymaker before I could stop myself, and this was a co-worker I actually liked.
Part of me worries that this “solution” might be part of the reason the geek fandom has so many ragaholics.
Wow, just wow. Not only is forwarding a conversation to parties you don’t want to see it comparable to domestic violence, but a more graphic than needed description thereof.
Pardon me if I think diz just wanted to say “a man pops his wife in the eye” (diz you’re an insult to DiZ, get lost)
We know a person or two with true horror stories regarding bullying. We got off comparatively easy.
Go figure, the guy I know who was bullied worth isn’t violent or raging at all.
I see atdevel is the next Orion.
My brother was bullied frequently, too, up until high school. When I piece together anecdotes given by people I know about their harassment / bullying, it seems that the most reliable way they got people off their back was to retaliate in kind. People in authority rarely helped.
atdevel’s levels of butthurt are precious. He’s taking his banning well.
I wish that once in my life I could read a criticism of David Futrelle that doesn’t involve making a crack at his weight. The unoriginality is suffocating.
SETTING: A LAWYER’S OFFICE. PIERRE, a LAWYER, is meeting with his CLIENT, an ANGRY-LOOKING-MAN. He wears his signature hat with a sharp business suit (or possibly with a barrister’s robes, and the hat has little wig-pigtails poking out? Whichever’s funnier). PIERRE’S CAT, POUTINE, is in the room.
ANGRY-LOOKING-MAN: I need you help. Have you ever heard of Direct Game?
PIERRE: I don’t believe that I have, unless that’sthe shop downtown that sells books about dragons and boxes of little plastic army men.
ALM: Ugh, betas.
PIERRE: I’m confused, sir. Are you saying you know something about a beating you’d like me to deal with?
ALM: Direct game is when you’re trying to pick up and you’re direct about it. You might say “hey, you wanna come over and suck my dick” to someone you’ve never met, for example. If you get rejected, you get more and more direct.
PIERRE: That sounds awful. If someone’s been trying this on you, you might have grounds for litigation, and they may be breaking the law. Have you asked this person to stop?
ALM: What? No. Anyway, I was running direct game on this chick on Plentyoffish. (POUTINE’S ears perk up) She wasn’t into my offer of coming over and cumming in her ass, so I offered her $50 to blow me.
PIERRE: Uhuh. This sounds like it could be quite a tricky defence to make.
ALM: Fuckin’ A it will be! I’m glad you see where this is going. How much do you think we can get out of her? She told my Mum, which is misandry, so there just has to be a juicy gender discrimination case for us.
PIERRE: . . .
PIERRE: Have you considered telling this story to police? I’m sure they can handle the problem here better than I can.
ALM: It’s that easy?! I’ve got screenshots of everything, I’ll print them all out and head up to the station immediately.
PIERRE: I’m sure they’ll be outraged.
There was a kid at my school who bullied everyone, even teachers. But his parents worked for the school district so no one wanted to do anything about it. The only ones he left alone were the kids who retaliated with physical violence. Obviously the teachers would never do that, so they became some of his worst victims. It was horrible.
I don’t know anything at all about legal practice or scripts beyond what I’ve seen in movies, so that might be a bit shit. . .
“Two Solicitors” as a title?
Yeah, I really don’t want to oversell my case here. I’m otherwise pretty zen about life, and it takes a fair bit to get me riled up, except for surprise pain.
Yeah, my experience with just about every form of mistreatment when young was that adults just didn’t care. They never did anything. Our parents were actually the worst; apparently they suspected we were getting raped under their own roof, but didn’t do anything, for fear of “making things worse.” It was only until a few months ago that I even realized that was fucked up, because we were just so USED to adults standing by and watching.
School was miserable for me from the time I got there until the time I graduated. If you want to think about PTSD as paint on the walls of a person’s life, I actually got a fresh layer of PTSD from *attending school.*
And, as LBT says, I was already so used to adults standing by and doing nothing that by the end of it, I was a shell of a human being. Rape culture was “normal” and seemed natural to me by the time I was eight or nine years old and the rest was just a matter of enduring it.
Purposefully socially isolating myself and engaging rigorously with feminism has been the best cure, and has perhaps oddly given me great social skills — but it really is that bad out there and for many of us it *doesn’t* get better. It just gets different. It just moves from the classroom or schoolyard or childhood home to the workplace or the message board or the other online forum — whether it be a comment section, a blog post, or a dating website.
The message is always: Cave in. Don’t react. Let them win, or they will make sure you lose *even harder.*
Adults doing nothing was always the baffling part. Kids being assholes, yeah, but of course kids will be assholes if adults never do anything about it. The adults at my school always had the attitude of “I told him to stop and he didn’t; what else can I possibly do?” OH I DON’T KNOW YOU ONLY RUN THE SCHOOL.
@katz: Seriously. I actually had a principal tell me and my mother that my bullying would stop “when Jesus comes”. Plus some arglebargle about how middle school was supposed to be a microcosm of society, and that if I didn’t handle it now, I’d be in for a rough life. Now that I’m an adult, I’m far angrier at the adults who saw what was going on and did nothing (and blamed me for it) than the 12-year-old girls that basically jumped me after every PE class.
RE: HuggaWugga
Same here. I mean, my bullies were dicks, but at least they were children. Kids do stupid shit sometimes. But I’m waaaaay less forgiving of adults who just stood by and watched. Their brains are fully developed, and they’re supposed to be the authorities. What’s their excuse?
Yeah, I got the “ignore bullies and they’ll leave you alone” advice too. Also “oh, he must have a crush on you, boys this age are always mean to girls they like”. Not to mention “he’s probably deeply unhappy inside, try to see his point of view”. All of which were useless and irritating.
Most bullies are lazy and take the path of least resistance when selecting their victims – it’s how they maintain the illusion of power. If you make it even slightly inconvenient for them to bully you, no matter how hard it is to speak up sometimes, it often checks their momentum. Not because they respect you for fighting back, but because they’re lazy shits who don’t like to think too much or put out a lot of effort. It confuses them when a victim departs from the script. They’d prefer to go for the easy target. To borrow Katz’s analogy, kids who pull up flowers for the fun of it will find something else to do if the flower stings them or emits a disagreeable odor or turns their hand green. They may try to stomp on the flower out of revenge, but it takes the fun out of bullying if they can’t be 100% in control.
So when a (supposedly) undesirable woman stands up and calls MRAs out on their shit, it upends their notion of The Way Things Should Be. The only response they can think of is to double down on the bullying and fat-shaming. They’re bottom-feeders.
As the Irish say, may the Legos rise to meet their feet.
That’s a good one. Fuck the bullies. May they one day develop the self-awareness to realize what shits they were.