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.
3) the only photos are head shots, well, his includes his (covered) torso. Exactly the sort of photos one would see on any site, even kids friendly ones. Absolutely nothing sexual, or that you wouldn’t see in public.
Gonna guess his mother and grandmother have seen him in a shirt before. So your second comment is still attempting to make analogies that jus that’d no points of comparison at all.
@Mongoose: I live in Ireland, I know about it – hopefully the men and women who shared the photo and commented shit about the girl (everyone ignored/praised the boy, for the most part) have some nice, long conversations with google-savvy future employers ahead of them.
HEY EVERYBODY: this is by far the funniest thing i have EVER SEEN on the manosphere. Maybe even including the best things David has written about here. It is just…beyond parody. http://www.rooshv.com/an-afternoon-with-stig-greybeard
I am the most oblivious person on earth. I didn’t know that I was bullied in High School until a decade later when my best friend (who left school in 10th grade to do a home school type program because of bullying) asked me how I had been able to stay in school with all of the shit people gave me. I come from a fairly toxic family so I’d never recognized what was happening me to bullying. I was just used to it at home.
I remember at one point someone coming up to me and asking how I could even show my face at school since I was so ugly I shouldn’t be allowed to leave the house. “Ugly people have to leave the house too,” I said. I don’t know. I didn’t think I was ugly. It was more that I didn’t understand why being ugly would mean I stayed at home.
What I don’t understand in this situation is why it is on the woman to have to block the conversation. It’s like saying that if a woman in real life really didn’t like the insults a guy was yelling on her then she really needs to go an get a restraining order.
What am I talking about. That is exactly what these people would think.
I found a solution to most of the problems I had with my peers. I always did my homework. And I didn’t care if people copied from my work. However, if you were a jerk you didn’t get to copy my homework. And sometimes EVERYONE would be cut off from copying if someone was rude. Sure it wasn’t really the right thing to do, but it worked.
Frankly, be an atheist at a very christian and conservative school was rough sometimes, but I got by. Most of the “bullying” I got was from my brother. But thats why my parents kicked him out of the house.
And being drunk does not put the blame on you if someone rapes you. Thats ridiculous. And if someones life is “ruined” because they raped someone they deserve their life to be ruined.
With all these bullying stories… I was bullied too. From kindergarten all through elementary school, occasionally even in high school but there I was no fun anymore. And I really just was the introverted shy child with the book (or drawing), who wanted to be left alone.
I tried to stand up for myself but teachers tended to catch/punish me not them and my bullies never really choose fights where they didn’t outnumber me at least 3 to 1 or was any other way unwinnable. So I ended up with trust issues, generally cynical opinion on people, the habit to guard my back and not giving in one inch, basically becoming the unmovable wall. Also to be unpredictable with violence or no.
Oh, fuck off with that bullshit. You have never seen anyone here claiming that someone “deserved to get hit.” Let me guess, your next example is going to be Sharon Osborne, right? Let me just skip ahead of that bullshit and remind you that no one here thought that case was funny, either.
And where do we draw the line? We draw the fucking line after she said “no” the first time. This guy didn’t stop after several “no’s.” He was so angry that she rejected him that he went nasty to put her in her place. At that point, his motive was not to get her in bed, but to hurt her because she’d already rejected him and he knew it.
[TW: descriptions of bullying]
I was bullied. Every day. Consistently. From physical stuff (one time the main bully in my class came up to me and said he was sorry and wanted to shake my hand, and he had one of those spiked conker shells in his palm, and…I have a teeny-tiny scar still) to weird-ass psychological stuff. Like, I came back from holiday once with a multi-coloured pencil that I really really liked, and someone stole it and crushed it and left the pieces in the playground where I would find them. (Which strikes my twenty-three-year-old self as kind of comical. I mean, what were they trying to do, some kind of Mafia film reconstruction?)
The advice I got was to rise above it, but honestly I tried everything. I tried talking back. I tried ignoring it. The one teacher I had who actually seemed to want to help once had me look the people who bullied me the most in the eyes and tell them how it made me feel. That was well-intentioned, I’m sure, but it really only made things worse.
The problem was that I had nothing to hold up against it. I could say whatever I wanted or I could say nothing at all, but there was nothing I could do that would either a) make them feel like they had to stop or there’d be repercussions (because there wouldn’t be, at worst they’d miss fifteen minutes of break) or b) make them go “wait a minute! I’m being a complete jerk! Maybe I should stop doing that”.
I would have preferred option b), but it was never going to happen, because they didn’t care about being a jerk or how I was feeling. I don’t really know what, exactly, they were getting out of the bullying (a feeling of superiority? Power? Government payoffs?) but it probably wasn’t really about me specifically, so how I specifically felt wasn’t going to factor into it. So I’d have settled for option a).
So yeah, you know. If there was anything that lady could have said to make the guy realise that maybe what he calls “direct game” is what most people call “sexual harassment” – which there wasn’t, because when she says “do you really think this is an okay way to talk to women” he just goes “I just wanted to chat!”, which is sort of like breaking someone’s arm and saying you just wanted to shake their hand – then she’d probably have done it. But there wasn’t. So she settled for option a).
Big hugs to everyone who got bullied in school. I was bullied too, and I had to raise hell before anybody noticed (even though all the teachers were fond of me).
At the university where I work, there’s research being done on the effects of bullying. The principal investigator gave a TED talk earlier this year on the subject. If anybody is interested, here it is:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSKWXVmOIPA&w=560&h=315]
I’d love to know what you think of it!
Ugh, so sorry for everyone who was bullied at school – I was also bullied myself, but I have almost no faculty for episodic memory, or at least an extremely poor one in any case (it’s a family trait, I think) which although sucky in others, at least means the bullying doesn’t really bother my thoughts much now that I’m an adult.
@ Rei: Aaaw bless, I felt so sad when I read that about your coloured pencil! Poor primary-school-aged Rei. At least you are now (/will soon be?) an adult and could probably roll around on a bed of coloured pencils if you wanted, whereas the kid who bullied you is also now an adult and has to live forever with the fact ‘I once smashed up a kid’s coloured pencil cause I knew they liked it, and I deliberately arranged the pieces where I knew that kid would see them, cause that was the kind of kid I was’…that’s gotta be worse. Internet hugs for you if you want them, as you guys say here. 🙂
@Guffaw ferrets
Oh wow 🙁 Internet hugs, if you want them. And hugs for everyone else who’s been bullied, if they want them.
@mongoose
Probably, assuming you can find some/ are comfortable ditching them. But they don’t sound very nice from what you’ve said, and you deserve better. ::offers internet hugs::
@doubledogdarrow
And if she did get a restraining order they’d probably think she was overreacting… :/
“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.”
Then why do you have to make totally untrue shit up the girl and about us to see that? IF, WOULD, sheesh, go away.
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.
Ah, I see the problem. You assume that anyone who isn’t a bully is a wimp who will never fight back. No, that’s not true. Hope this helps.
I also want to give hugs to everyone who was bullied in school.
I remember now complaining to my guidance counselor about a guy who bullied me in junior high and after that he stopped. I guess I’m really lucky that an adult listened in my case. Maybe I should find out where that counselor is today and send him a thank you note.
I was picked on too as a kid, and was given the “Just ignore them and they’ll get bored and leave you alone” crap. Even as a child, that sounded like crap to me. My reaction was, “So I’m just supposed to take it?” From elementary to middle school, I was given, “Oh those boys pick on you because they like you.” That never sounded right to me either. My retort was, “Well, they better not expect me to like them back.”
In 7th grade, someone behind me snapped my bra strap. I turned back and told the girl behind me to cut that out. She denied it, and everyone else defended her, saying she didn’t do it. I snapped, “Well, somebody did!” (with the teacher in the room) and made it clear that playing tricks on me would not be convenient. It never happened again.
If I ever have kids, I will tell them that there are people who don’t realize that what they do it hurtful, and there are cruel people who enjoy hurting others. So you react. Be reasonable, but at least do something. The ones who don’t know that what they’re doing is wrong, will learn it. The ones who purposely want to hurt you…may try harder to get you down, or they may at least learn that you are not easy prey.
This: http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1kz37p/holy_fuck_david_futrelle_thinks_its_okay_for_a/
comments indicate that not all support douchedude. made me smile.
My Dad told me that if people were mean to me I should hit them back, and then showed me how to do it. There are lots of cool things that I’m grateful to my parents for, but I have to say, “if someone tries to bully you then fight back” is up there in the top 5.
I actually got a few apologies in adulthood from people who bullied me when we were kids. That was nice, though I’d never held any grudges against them. Though, I certainly carry a lot of that baggage with me to this day. I guess because I lived in abusive household and my brother and I were pretty nasty to our younger sister. I could see how kids could get to be that way, but adults had no excuse.
The “just ignore it and it will go away” and “that’s what boys do when they like you” advice sounded like bullshit to me as a kid, and it still does now. I will not be passing that advice onto any child I may have or interact with.
I put up with a lot of shit in middle school. I was stabbed once, in the foot. Even when adults in authority intervened, the punishments were inconsequential (stay an hour after school ohnoe!). But, often adults would spout some form of the “boys will be boys, it’s just horseplay” bullshit to excuse it. This made the official policy of “don’t do anything, leave and tell a teacher” otiose.
In shop class, once, I was standing on a table trying to retrieve a ball or something that had landed on top of a light. Someone pulled my pants down, in front of the whole class. The teacher, instead of trying to find and punish the responsible party, sent me to the office for ‘flashing’ the class. Cause, you know, that kid doesn’t like sports so he’s probably a weird little homo pervert or something.
I got quite violent in response to any antagonism whatsoever, and it stopped. I choked a few kids unconscious. A friend and I ambushed a kid in the hall and broke a couple of his ribs with sections of copper pipe. Other boys seemed to think that this was cool and badass. I didn’t have any problems in high school.
This was not an ideal solution. I still react extremely badly to any sort of perceived provocation, verbal or physical. My heart rate goes way up, tunnel vision, loss of hearing, insensitivity to pain, weird emotionality. This is not usually an appropriate or helpful response.
What I learned from this: if your reaction is in any way to “put up with it”, all that does is make your antagonist say “Hey, this person will put up with my shit. I will give them more shit.” And, we, as a society, like to blame the victim.
So, yeah, far from somehow being morally culpable for exposing poor Josh instead of just blocking him, Mary is a fucking hero for standing up to this d-bag and putting a stop to his behavior. Do you really think she was the first person he pulled this shit with, or that, if she hadn’t done something, she would have been the last?
off topic (sorry) i recently read your post about what’s going on with WBB and myself, and to be honest, when you say i’m somehow down with avfm, you’ve definitely got me pegged wrong. take a close look, i’ve never written an article for them–though jto asked several times, i’ve always been against the libertarian uh…*people* that support them, and i’ve never been against women or women’s rights (or men’s rights), and by men, you guys tend to think of white middle class males. i don’t. i’m not white, and i clawed my way out of the ghetto to be middle class, so for me, men’s rights is about inequalities of sentencing for minorities and so forth. i’d be more than happy to set the record straight.
i am against making false accusations, but i’m not stupid. we don’t really know how often that happens. if you want to peg me as hating women b/c reasons, so be it, but then you’d be committing the same fallacies as your ideological enemies.
as for my more than colorful language, well, i won’t apologize for it, but let’s be clear about that, too: i’ll use whatever words will advance my cause. i always have, and always will. that’s not gonna change. and don’t take that as saying I’ll lie. cuz i avoid that as much as i can–but full disclosure, my youngest still believes in santa claus, and i’m not going to disabuse her of that notion just yet. when WBB and I both decide, together, that the little one is ready, we’ll tell her the truth.
so. ball’s in your court. you can contact me, or not, for my skype, and we can set the record straight.
again, sorry for the off topic comment, but i didn’t bother to check for a private email, and there’s no harm from my pov in putting this invitation out in public.
Wow, you guys all make my time in school look weak sauce. People, like, threw erasers at me and that was about the worst of it.
@SredniVashtar
Oh wow, it’s like “A Christmas Carol” for PUAs, a PUCarol if you will. Here’s a short recap:
The protagonist, Daniel, is an unlikeable douche who is planning to propose to his girlfriend Andrea. He’s planning to do it in public specifically so she would have a hard time refusing in front of a massive crowd. However, on his way to propose, he gets visited by the titular Stig Greybeard, who is an emissary from “the powers that be”, who apparently think Daniel is super important for some unspecified reason.
Stig was sent to save Daniel from the horrible fate of marrying his girlfriend, and does so by showing him glimpses from the past, present and future. Stig’s message seems to be (I’m not sure, it’s very poorly written):
-Everything was much better when women didn’t work and just stayed home taking care of their families all day;
-Andrea thinks Daniel is boring;
-Daniel will end up divorced, masturbating to tentacle porn and paying 80% of his money as alimony.
The story ends with Daniel proposing anyway and Andrea accepting, and that’s it.
I’s an utterly pointless story, Daniel has zero character development, Andrea is made out to be this horrible person but is never shown doing anything worse than thinking Daniel is boring, the Stig Greybeard character is completely bland despite his ridiculous name, and it’s never clear why exactly it’s so important for him to help Daniel, he himself doesn’t seem to care.
@tina
Just across this comment there:
“All I can say is that MRAs should not be exposing personal details as people like manboobz are connecting details and watching for personal details like hawks.
Both the roosh-v forums and manboobz are awful.”
LOL whut
Stig Greybeard bless us, everyone.
*hugs* for all the ManBoobzers who were bullied. I was too in 5th and 6th grade, a bit. I mostly got it to stop by mocking my bullies, loudly, in front of their friends. It seemed to work. Unfortunately, the mocking usually hinged on the fact that they thought I was a gross freak (for example, yelling loudly at a boy who was mocking me that if he liked me so much, he should just ask me out already, or forcing a boy who asked me to dance as a joke to actually dance with me, and then turning and walking away halfway through the song).
I think the only way to get a bully to stop is to make the social consequences of bullying worse than the jolt that they get out of the bullying. So beating them up, or mocking them, or getting other people that they admire to tell them that they’re being douchebags (whether that’s other kids or teachers they trust). If they feel shame for their actions as a bully, they’re much more likely to knock it off.
Oh man that Greybeard story was almost as earnestly bad as the original Dickens, but with NONE of the social commentary actually based in reality.