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.
First, hugs to anyone who wants one.
Second, “If you want to think about PTSD as paint on the walls of a person’s life”, I’m borrowing that, thank you (borrowing, not stealing, since it’ll aid a stuck analogy between pecunium and I and he’ll likely see it here anyways…and probably figured out what I’m going to use it for the moment he saw this, I hate you sometimes pecunium 😛 )
Standing up to them didn’t always do much either. My bullying problems only stopped when one got held back and the other got sent to military school. Okay, someone in authority was doing their job, I guess.
I don’t generally admit this, but I bullied a kid (and other people, in-system) when I was young. I feel awful about it now; it was a shitty thing to do. When I try and think why I did it, it was because I felt that this was the norm, what I was SUPPOSED to be doing. Nobody ever batted an eye when other people treated us like shit, so maybe the only reason we felt bad about it was because we were weak, and other kids were tough and didn’t actually care. (Obviously, this was complete bullshit, but at the time, it seemed true.)
Also, if abuse was completely emotionally meaningless, then it became merely an exercise in power: either you were that kid getting smacked who nobody gave a shit about, or you were the person with the power to smack someone. It seemed obvious who you’d want to be — the person with the power, the person who the adults would defer to. The person people CARED about.
What actually stopped me was our younger brother — which is interesting, since he wasn’t always the nicest person himself. But one day, I was hurting this kid, smaller and younger than me, and our brother just looked at me aghast, and went, “What is your PROBLEM?”
I stopped. I let the kid go, and I never bothered him again. And I was ashamed, and confused, because that was the first time anyone had ever actually intervened that I’d seen, regardless of who was doing what. And suddenly, with that outside intervention, that “What is your PROBLEM,” it became overwhelmingly obvious just how cruel and fucked up it was.
THAT is why I don’t believe in the “ignore it and go away” school of thought. If our brother hadn’t intervened, hadn’t given me that look like I was a bullying asshole… I might’ve kept doing it, sure that it was meaningless and not hurting anyone. But he did, and he made things different for me. I’m glad.
Argenti, you are welcome to it!
Everyone can feel free to steal/borrow the “easy to be copacetic when you know you’ll never have a cross burning on *your* lawn” thing too, if’n you want. Seeing as how I did too.
/rests on my laurels
@cloudiah – Fuck the bullies, indeed.
Normal person’s response to bullying: become a deeper, more aware, more empathetic person, with a keen sense of social justice.
MRA response to bullying: emulate your tormentors. In the most cartoonish way possible.
@LBT
I picked on my little sister. Not often (most of the time we were each other’s best friends), and not maliciously, but there was definitely a power play going on, and some of it was me letting the shit that landed on me at school roll downhill to her. I feel rotten about it now.
Yeah. I feel shitty about doing it, but at least I learned from it. And now I know, however horribly, that I CAN write a bullying, violent person, because for however short a period, I knew what it felt like. I didn’t like the person I was when I did that, and so I’m grateful to our brother for refusing to let our shit slide. He helped me become a better person, not just another chain of people doing terrible things to those smaller and weaker than themselves.
I also didn’t like the version of me who was mean to my sister…but at that time I didn’t like myself anyway (self-esteem shot to hell for numerous reasons…including the bullies! Yay for vicious cycles!), so I couldn’t tell the difference. In retrospect it’s obvious.
Atdevel’s faux indignation is hilarious. This woman didn’t doc drop.
One would think the manosphere with its history of doc dropping and harassment would know the difference.
Between having three older brothers and being the foreign girl in high school, I learned how to take a punch pretty early on. Because there were and still are a lot of them.
I did fight back in school, eventually, because nobody else woud do anything but blame me for it. I saw it coming, braced myself, but ended up turning around and unleashing some violence instead. I’m not proud of it, but it stopped the bullying. In fact, most potential bullies didn’t even come near me after that. I don’t think it was because I hurt him, but… I had the element of surprise, knocked him down and the whole school knew that uberjock got his ass kicked by a skinny little girl.
Bullies who don’t ever figure out that its wrong to hurt others dont stop being bullies once high school is over. They continue finding people to bully well into their adult lives. I know this all too well.
And Diz… you suck. You massively fucking suck.
@ashley
Which would be salient if that was their goal. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they’d love to humiliate her for having the gall of being a fat uggo who DARES to not worship at their feet and slobber all over their cocks, and having the temerity for turning around and hitting one of the sleazebags when she gets sick of him being a complete creep.
But that’s icing. The goal is to harangue and threaten until she feels too intimidated to remain online. They want to chase her off, and punish and hurt her, for refusing one of them even though they think she has no business refusing anyone for being a fat uggo even though they’d never ever touch her because she’s a beached whale.
THAT is somewhat more worrisome: that their harrassment will cause her to clam up and hide.
Ha, ha, I like this reply to atdevel:
“Pro tip: you can dramatically lower your chances of being publicly embarrassed if you don’t send unwanted obscene messages to strangers. This is effective for several reasons: first, if you don’t harass people, they are far less likely to feel hostility towards you. Second, it is much more difficult for someone to embarrass you if you haven’t sent them embarrassing material. This works for both men and women.”
And that’s real
This is horrible and shameful, but when I was a teenager I would emotionally abuse animals. If you don’t think it’s impossible to emotionally abuse animals, you’ve not been around animals a lot (and pretty much everyone here has).
It felt horrible and I would cry for shame. About a year after I left home, by which point I understood more about the “shit rolling downhill” thing, I apologized to every single animal I was still around. Nobody was holding any grudges, so I took that as a chance to move on and haven’t done it since.
That’s the thing about growing up: you’re supposed to gain maturity, self-awareness, and empathy, and stop replicating the abusive cycles that made you (and others) miserable when you were younger. MRAs do not pass go, do not collect emotional maturity. May I present to the court: this example, the one about the gamer dudes who were sooo abused by hot chixx in high school that they abuse women at cons today, the shit about “an eye for an eye” that these guys bring up in domestic violence/custody/alimony cases, the nugget they tried to defecate about all rapists having been raped by their moms, the bit about feminists being “combatants” that deserve retaliation, and more.
(TW for frank mention of violent acts
And by “domestic violence cases” I mean, “the ones where the dude says ‘gee yerroner, she tripped me during a petty fight or something, so I beat her bloody and/or shot her and posted pictures of her body on Facebook'” cases.
Never, of course, the ones where the woman says “your honor, my husband beat and raped me and possibly my children for decades while my complaints were not taken seriously by police, so I finally shot him [or merely fired the gun into the ceiling without hurting anyone] as a way to ensure it wasn’t going to happen again.”
Never those latter cases. You have to stop and wonder why.*
* hint: misogyny]
I never got bullied myself.
Years after high school, one of the friends I had who had left suddenly in 8th grade without any explanation — she contacted me on Facebook, and that is when I found out that she’d been horribly bullied, until her parents finally decided to send her to a different school.
It was kind of devastating to find out this had been going on and (a) I was completely oblivious, and (b) she had so internalized the idea that she was to blame for her own mistreatment that she didn’t even feel safe telling people she considered friends.
And yeah, like guffaw-ferrets says, everyone has hurt someone at some point. The difference about MRAs is that they fully commit to increasing the amount of pain in the world, every day. More women should die on the job vs. hey, maybe we should do something to lower the numbers of men who die at work!
Long week. Good night, all!
G’night cloudiah!
I was a bully in primary school. I feel pretty shitty about it now, but I know I didn’t do it out of malice,or cruelty.
… I just liked fighting. I was this tiny little kid, with untreated ADHD, and I liked to fight. It took energy, enough that I could focus for a bit afterwards, and it was such a simple reaction. Someone does something you don’t like, hit them. They either fight back and you get a good scrap, or they don’t, and they stop doing that thing you don’t like.
I stopped about 13, when I realised that there are serious serious consequences to fighting when you get older. I started doing martial arts, which got rid of the aggression I held and encouraged me to protect those who can’t protect themselves.
I didn’t really get bullied physically as a kid… I was pushed down into the snow once, but I didn’t do anything about it. I was the smart kid who had few friends, and didn’t really get onto anybody’s radar, and I was the tall kid. My only problem was that I was friends with a couple kids that everyone else made fun of, so I got made fun of as a result.
I dunno… it was weird. I can’t really remember what it was like very clearly, but it probably didn’t help me practice getting to know people and making circles of friends later in life. I learned to just be alone, maybe with one or two other people I interacted with regularly. The bullies kinda disappeared for me starting in 7th grade.
Its called an analogy. I thought feminists were supposed to be critical thinkers?
The point is this; do you resolve the situation peacefully, or do you relatiate? I was always led to believe that feminists were all about resolving issues “properly” which is why I brought up domestic violence. I see a lot of the Jezebel crowd (and I see some familiar screen names here) crowing about how a guy deserved getting hit for something, or getting personal stuff shown online or whatever.
That same crowd seems pretty quick to turn around and talk about how that isn’t appropriate when, say, a guy takes a shot in anger at a wife who was hitting him. They’ll be the first to say that you should NEVER do something like that, because it isn’t proper.
So where do we draw the line? It seems pretty far down given the double standards here. If this girl had been creeping this guy and sent him nude pics, you guys would shit a brick house if he posted them online. You don’t exactly make it too hard to see how much resentment you have for men.
Actually, the situation is gender neutral. If some random chick kept messaging a guy about how bad she wanted to peg him and/or squirt all over his face, she would be a creepy asshole, and I would not be feel much sympathy for her if he sent those messages to her family to shut her down.
Diz, the only reason you find this confusing is because, like the domestic violence study you guys are so fond of referencing, you treat any and all types of violence as the same thing. Slapping? Punching? Beating? Raping? As an aggressor? As self defence? All the same to you. Doxxing? Revealing someone who was stalking you? Encouragement of harassment? You literally cannot differentiate.
No wonder feminists are so mysterious to you… You have no capacity to see the line that feminists are drawing, and so you conclude that there is no line, or the line (if it exists) must be completely arbitrary or in women’s favor.
You seem pretty content making up positions to argue against–rather than making any kind of point or responding to anything anyone actually said–so I won’t disturb you.
On the subject of bullying:
I don’t know if you’ve heard of this story outside of Ireland, but there are pictures going around on social media of a 17-year-old girl giving oral sex to several men at a concert in Slane. Cue the slut-shaming, of course (by the way 17 is the legal age of consent, though I think this would still considered child pornography?). Cue people feeling sorry for the men who might end up on the sex offender’s registry because they assumed the girl was 18 at an over 18s concert (they won’t, as I said the age of consent is 17). Cue the idiots making excuses for the dudes taking and distributing the picture, because if you’re stupid and get drunk at an over 18 concert, they have the right to a) assume you are 18 without asking, and b) assume you’re ok with distributing their picture on social media for the sole purpose of slut-shaming. Cue nobody slut-shaming the men, who are standing in triumphant poses (I’ve heard, a friend saw the pictures).
All this from my friends, who by their own admission would never have taken the pictures themselves, and would have put a drunk 17-year-old in a taxi and send her home.
But you know what? The slut-shaming is ok according to them. Because that’s just how society is, and she shouldn’t have put herself in that situation. Because she’ll get over it (tell that to Amanda Todd). Because it ends at some point, while being on the sex offender’s registry is forever (again, bullshit).
To me, this is disturbingly close to someone telling me that being raped is ok because I was drunk and put myself in that situation. To me is sounds dangerously close to being told that my rapist has it worse, because he might end up as a sex offender for life, and I’ll just get over it. Is this a false equivalency? Am I overreacting?
Tell me manboobzers, do I need to make new friends?
“To me, this is disturbingly close to someone telling me that being raped is ok because I was drunk and put myself in that situation. To me is sounds dangerously close to being told that my rapist has it worse, because he might end up as a sex offender for life, and I’ll just get over it. Is this a false equivalency? Am I overreacting?
Tell me manboobzers, do I need to make new friends?”
Ack, I’m sorry. Both that that happened to you, and for the, being so insensitive (that’d the ack part). For the questions…no, no, idk.
DiZ — seriously, type that into google, with that caps. You’re an insult.
1) you’re analogy had exactly 0 points of comparison
2) this isn’t Jezebel, stop arguing with the straw feminists