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What Matt Forney’s “Case Against Female Self-Esteem” Reveals About His Own Deep Insecurities

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Matt Forney is desperate for attention; it’s as glaringly obvious as the giant MATT FORNEY that adorns the top of his blog, creatively named MATT FORNEY. And like some caricature of an emo teen “acting out,” the misogynistic manosphere blogger has decided that any attention — even bad attention — is better than no attention.

And so, perhaps at least dimly aware that his ideas are and his prose are both too lackluster to command much attention on their own, he seems to be trying to rile up as much of the internet as possible with posts that are deliberately designed to offend liberals and feminists and pretty much anyone who is not a woman-hating douchebag. He had a minor hit a this spring with a post entitled Why Fat Girls Don’t Deserve to Be Loved, which did in fact live up — that is, down — to its title.

Now he’s got an even bigger hit in a post titled The Case Against Female Self-Esteem.

Originally posted in mid-September — people have been sending me notes for weeks asking when I would be writing about it — the post has blown up in recent days, inspiring countless angry Tumblr posts and Tweets from feminists pissed off at its, er, argument. It’s even inspired some threats of violence from Feminists, which Forney seems to regard with glee, reposting them on Twitter alongside boasts about how much traffic his post has generated thus far — last count, 90,0000 views.

So what is there to say about the post itself? It’s already been ably dissected, line by line, by Stephanie Zvan at Almost Diamonds. Some of its more absurd assertions — 60, to be exact — have been highlighted in this post by Clara on That Girl Magazine. There’s nothing original about most of Forney’s argument; it’s merely a collection of misogynistic manosphere tropes arranged into an “argument” against female self-esteem that Forney clearly intends as a provocation.

But ironically this paean to female insecurity offers interesting insights into Forney’s own insecurities about women, and more broadly into the insecurities that seem to drive so much of the manosphere’s misogynistic rage. That makes it worth examining in some detail.

Forney starts out with the sort of confession that most men would save for their therapists, announcing his love of insecure women, and declaring:

Whenever a girl I’m talking to brags about how she’s “confident” and “strong,” I can feel my dick deflating like a punctured tire.

Yep, he said it: confident women render him impotent.

“I’d still bang her, of course,” he quickly adds, somewhat unconvincingly. With what? While there are plenty of ways to have amazing sex that don’t involve an erect penis at all, somehow I don’t think Forney is much interested in that kind of thing.

Eventually Forney gets to the thesis of his piece:

In order for America to right itself, there needs to be a massive and concerted war on female self-esteem.

He rehashes tiresome antifeminist arguments suggesting that women are pumped up from birth by too much praise, and grow up into stuck-up princesses who won’t give the Matt Forneys of the world the time of day.

Sorry, that last bit is just subtext. He doesn’t actually say that out loud.

Then he goes on to rehash more tired manosphere arguments about how women are worthless nothings compared to hard-working manly men.

Most girls have done nothing to deserve self-esteem.

In the world of men, respect—and by extension self-esteem—is based on actually achieving something of worth or having some kind of skill or talent.

Says a man whose only real accomplishment in life has been offending people on the internet.

Most girls’ so-called achievements, the ones they take pride in, are complete jokes. Wow, you have a master’s degree in puppetry?

Huh. Not sure where that’s offered. Meanwhile, Forney is involved in studying a far more serious subject: how to con women into bed using the science of “game” developed by eminent scientists on the internet with names like Heartiste and Badger Hut and The Captain Power.

Then it’s on to the similarly tired notion that women don’t work “real” jobs:

The vast majority of girls work useless fluff jobs … If every girl was fired from her job tomorrow, elementary schools would have to shut down for a couple days, but otherwise life would go on as usual.

If every man lost his job tomorrow, the country would collapse.

Yeah, I’m sure the world would tremble if Matt Forney stopped writing his blog posts.

Forney returns to the topic of insecurity, and the embarrassing personal revelations begin to flow once again:

[T]he girls I’ve loved the most were the ones who were the most insecure, the most emotionally vulnerable.

Somehow I don’t find this hard to believe.

So what group of men is sort of famous for being attracted to vulnerable women?

(Hint: It starts with “abus” and ends with “ers.”)

Forney tries to justify his own skeeziness with some good old-fashioned misogynistic nonsense — complete with societal collapse and a side order of rape.

Insecurity is the natural state of woman. How could it be anything else? Given their lack of physical strength, a woman on her own should be frightened as hell without men to protect her. If society were to collapse, all the Strong, Independent Women™ who read Jezebel and xoJane would last about five minutes before they either found a man to cling onto or got raped and killed.

Now, I don’t actually believe, as Susan Brownmiller once famously wrote, that rape is “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”

But “arguments” like Forney’s above certainly give one pause. Essentially he’s saying the same thing as Brownmiller — except that he thinks this is good for men, good for women (and perhaps most importantly) good for his boner.

And, yeah, he actually spells that last bit out as explicitly as he can:

Confidence doesn’t give men erections; vulnerability does.

After saying that the fear caused by the threat of rape is good for women, Forney has the gall to suggest that feminism is causing mental illness among young women. Of course, like many backwards-thinking wannabe social critics, Forney thinks that psychiatric drugs — which can be quite effective in alleviating these illnesses — are just as bad as the illnesses themselves, because they remove the insecurities that make “girls” so sexy:

Ordinarily a depressed or insecure girl would seek solace in the loving embrace of a man, but daily hits from her good friend Saint Xanax short-circuit her feminine instincts.

Forney even throws a bit of evo psych paleobabble into the mix:

In squelching her inborn insecurity with you-go-grrlisms and drugs, the modern woman has become an emotional cripple. Like a fat slob eating Big Macs instead of a juicy steak from the supermarket, she substitutes having a dominant and confident man in her life with lotsa cocka and dating where she considers herself an “equal.”

The horror!

She views men as a life support system for a penis, an accoutrement, no different than her Manolo Blahniks or snazzy new iPhone. When she gets bored of her boy-toy, she tosses him in the trash and moves on to a newer, shinier model, and if she can get cash and prizes for trading in her old clunker, that’s just the icing on the cake.

Essentially, “confident” women are incapable of viewing men as human beings.

Gender-swap this little tirade (minus the MRA-lite bit about “cash and prizes,” code words for child support and alimony) and you have a capsule description of pretty much every “game”-obsessed dude in the manosphere

When manboobs and feminists say you should be happy that women today are “independent,” this is what they’re arguing for; a world in which romantic relationships are impossible.

Uh, most “manboobs and feminists” I know are actually in romantic relationships. Some of them with more than one partner.

Where men are nothing more than fashion items to help women show how cool or sophisticated they are. Sorry, but homie don’t play that game.

Sorry, homie, but I don’t think anyone is inviting you to that particular game. I’m trying to imagine a world in which the seething, petulant, hateful, overgrown emo kid that is Matt Forney is considered a “fashion item” to anyone, and my brain is seizing up.

And we’re on to more self-revelations:

So-called confident women are as threatening as a pile of dog turds. Sure, you can scrape them off your boots when you get home, but it’s better to not step in dog shit to begin with.

And more convoluted justifications. Now Forney wants to convince us that women don’t even really want self-esteem in the first place. No, they’d rather be spanked.

[I]n their bones, girls know that their toxic, feminist you-go-grrl ideology is a lie.  …

They want nothing more than for a man to throw them over his knee, shatter the Berlin Wall around their hearts, and expose the lovestruck, bashful little girl within.

Now, there are plenty of women (and plenty of non-women) who like a bit of spanking now and again as part of a consensually kinky sex life. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what Forney is talking about here. He seems to be suggesting that women want to be physically abused.

Game, at least as it was conceived by the seduction community, was all about this. All the hysterical nitwits blubbering about how “negging” and the like was designed to hurt girls’ self-esteem were precisely right, but that’s the thing; women are crying out for a man who will wound their self-esteem.

So I guess in Forneyland women love verbal abuse too.

“Confident” women are still women, and they still lust after men who dominate them, even if they can’t admit it to themselves. Because their self-esteem has been artificially boosted by society, today’s girls need extra-concentrated doses of dominance—i.e. game—in order to feel womanly, like a junkie chasing the dragon.

So women want to be treated badly, “even if they can’t admit it to themselves.” So if they say “no,” or “stop,” or “why are you doing this to me,” I presume Forney thinks that’s just their false consciousness speaking?

This is how abusers think.

And then Forney moves on to another favorite MRA trope: the idea that feminists fight rape because it secretly turns them on.

Girls will all but die without masculine attention. Hell, I’m even starting to think that the feminist agita about “rape culture” is part of this as well. Pushing lies like the claim that one in three women will be raped during her lifetime and their constantly expanding the definition of rape are ways for feminists to indulge their desire for vulnerability in a way that doesn’t conflict with their view of themselves as “strong” and “empowered.”

Forney winds up the post with a concentrated dose of abuser-think:

At the end of the day, there are no Strong, Independent Women™. There are only shrews pleading for a taming.

That’s how abusers think.

All the posturing, the pill-popping, the whining and demands for “equality”; they’re a cry for help.

That’s how abusers think.

Girls don’t want the six-figure cubicle job, the shiny Brooklyn 2BR, the master’s degree, the sexual liberation, none of it. They want to be collectively led back to the kitchen, told to make a nice big tuna sandwich with extra mayo and lettuce, then swatted on the ass as we walk out the door.

That’s how abusers think.

I say we give them what they want.

That’s how abusers think.

And that’s how Matt Forney thinks — though how he thinks he’s going to be able to support a non-empowered, kitchen-dwelling woman off of his paltry e-book sales I have no idea.

So what have we learned here?

Matt Forney, who literally admits that his penis wilts when he’s faced with a confident woman, needs insecure women to bolster his ego and his erection. And if he can’t find them, he wants to make them, to undercut the confidence of women with insults and fearmongering, “warnings” of rape and threats of violence and verbal abuse.

And that’s the real problem. Forney may write posts like this for attention. But he seems to believe this bullshit sincerely. And so do many of his readers. And that’s why his posts are worth paying attention to, even thought that’s exactly what he wants us to do. Because he reveals a lot more about himself than he thinks in his writings. And the better we understand these guys, the better we can fight them.

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Howard Bannister
11 years ago

50 Shades of Bok Choy sounds perfect right about now.

50 Shades of Gorgonzola!

Binjabreel
11 years ago

I’m just going to leave this here:

Gilbert Gottfried reads 50 Shades

Dvärghundspossen
11 years ago

Regarding Xanax: It’s not solely prescribed against anxiety. I have a mix of schizophrenia and (hypo)mania symptoms. Haldol helps against both, mostly, but occasionally my thoughts will speed up despite the Haldol, and then I add Xanax. I know I’m not unique in being prescribed some kind of benzo essentially as a help to the neuroleptics.

I’ve been taking both Haldol and Xanax for the most part of sixteen years now. Xanax I take when I need to, which isn’t that often, so I take about one hundred Xanax pills a year. Could be two pills a day during one period of time and then several weeks where I take none, it varies. I’m yet to experience any urge to take these pills or any kind of withdrawal symptoms. I don’t know if that’s just me, or if they’re normally less addictive when you take them for the reason I do compared to when you take them to ease anxiety.

Athywren
Athywren
11 years ago

But you can use SQL to generate Mandelbrot! SQL is amazing.

Hey, I didn’t say it wasn’t awesome, just that it’s pure evil. I build a database for any story I come up with to keep track of my ideas and the relationships between characters and the groups they form, which makes SQL one of the tools that has brought me the most happiness in all the world… it’s just that the first weekend of any database’s life is absolute hell.

Only four queries to merge data? I was once working with data that was so broken I had to do 20 merges to rebuild usable data, while sifting it for the cases I wanted.

I have seen hell, my friends.

URK! I’ll get the priests… just… just hold on!

katz
11 years ago

Hey, I didn’t say it wasn’t awesome, just that it’s pure evil. I build a database for any story I come up with to keep track of my ideas and the relationships between characters and the groups they form

Wow. There’s nerdy and then there’s that.

Ally S
11 years ago

SQL is a fucking demon from the pits of hell! Have you ever tried merging multiple pieces interrelated data into a single query? Ugh. Four queries. FOUR! SQL requires some arcane bullshit to work. I’d argue that mastery of SQL is the only thing in all of history that deserves true praise.
Either that, or I just need to actually rtfm for that one… but isn’t that the same deal, really?

I’ve been working on a Ruby on Rails app with PostGreSQL, an advanced SQL database, and I share your hatred for SQL. Among other things, I have to deal with multi-tenant private schemas for this app. T_T This app was partly made by my dad before I picked up the project and started working on it, and for some reason he thought that private schemas were a smart idea. I see pretty much no need for them.

Also I just want to say that I’m fucking sick of search paths. >_>

Ally S
11 years ago

Hey, I didn’t say it wasn’t awesome, just that it’s pure evil. I build a database for any story I come up with to keep track of my ideas and the relationships between characters and the groups they form

Wow. There’s nerdy and then there’s that.

I think the words you’re looking for are “totally awesome.”

grumpycatisagirl
11 years ago

Matt Forney’s site is 503 Service Unavailable. May it remain so.

katz
11 years ago

Obvs, do whatever works for you, but I would find human relationships too subtle to model with SQL relationships. It would feel like a major oversimplification.

I also tend to think that too many characters to keep track of in your head = too many characters, period, since the reader is certainly not going to use a database to keep track of them.

melody
11 years ago

I’m just gonna say this because that comment made me twitch…..I went to the Evergreen State College and no you can’t get a degree in puppetry there. If you want a masters there you better be interested in working for change: Teacher, Public Administration, and Environmental Studies are what you can get a masters degree in there. Anyhow…just saying.

As far as women in the work place:

“largest percentage of employed women (40.6 percent) worked in management, professional, and related occupations; 32.0 percent worked in sales and office occupations; 21.3 percent in service occupations; 5.2 percent in production, transportation, and material moving occupations; and 0.9 percent in natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations” according to the US department of labor.

As far as the types of jobs women dominate in:

“Registered nurses………………………………………………………91.1 %
Elementary and middle school teachers………………………81.8
Medical and health services managers…………………………72.5
Psychologists……………………………………………………………66.7
Tax examiners, collectors, and revenue agents……………66.1
Education administrators……………………………………………63.0
Advertising and promotions managers……………………… 61.1
Accountants and auditors……………………………………… 60.1”

So, I guess MRAs don’t think we need nurses, teachers, managers, mental health providers ect.

I’m sure they’d consider my job a fluff job. I mean I just take care of teenage boys. And I’m sure they would be shocked to find out that *gasp* my job has risks. These kids can be dangerous. I care about them, but I can’t forget that most of them have put people in the hospital. One took a basball bat to my supervisors car. But they need someone who understands their issues and works with them so that they can become productive members of society. I want to see them succeed in life is all.

Dvärghundspossen
11 years ago

Haha, I’m a philosopher, I can totally see someone argue that I have a fluff job. Although philosophy is heavily male-dominated…

Argenti Aertheri
Argenti Aertheri
11 years ago

Katz — I did similar with a VtM story, the relationships where either their titles (where the relationship between them is known by that shorthand), or simple things like “friends”, “hates but respects”, “loathes”, etc.

Athywren — oh but I know enough PHP to have written my own WP theme from the bare bones hacked together from multiple themes, with shiny jQuery to top it off (subtle things, like making menus slide down instead of just appear, I’m big on things degrading beautifully if the user end doesn’t support that function)

And after doing the survey data in excel, I sorta wish I knew SQL.

Re: Xanax — I take 0.5 mg of ativan for breakfast (lamictal and zoloft are also breakfast), but when I was buying street xanax I made a point of always having one or two around just in case. Because the last thing you want to be doing while having a cascade of panic attacks is hunting it down. And I never, fucking ever, felt any desire to take it except when it knocking me out cold was preferable to sitting around in an endless series of panic attacks.

The daily ativan, idk on tolerance, besides to say I haven’t tried to kill my father yet so it must still be keeping me from turning into an anxious mess the moment he starts his shit. And a second definitely makes NYC sorta bearable.

Relatedly, pecunium, I showed my mother your place on maps and holy shit that plant really was taking over! I commend your plant taming skillz.

katz
11 years ago

You ought to learn SQL for surveys and things; a simple little flat-file database would have handily kept track of the MBZ survey. And you wouldn’t have had to make a binding decision about what to model or not model, because if anyone had an additional question, you could look it up with one quick query.

Xen
Xen
11 years ago

Who knew MRAs were such delicate little flowers?

kittehserf
11 years ago

Xen – everyone? 😉

grumpycatisagirl
11 years ago

LOL @kittehserf.

Dvärghundspossen
11 years ago

It would be interesting to know, though, exactly what he thinks of when he talks about “fluff jobs”. I imagine he doesn’t really go out in the real world much, but get a lot of his world view from TV. On TV, people often have vaguely defined jobs that mean they have to be in an office everyday, and where sassy clothes and heels if they’re women, but have loads of time to gossip and scheme at the work place. It’s probably something along those lines that he has in mind.

Dvärghundspossen
11 years ago

WEAR sassy clothes and heels. Sorry.

Athywren
Athywren
11 years ago

Wow. There’s nerdy and then there’s that.

I think the words you’re looking for are “totally awesome.”

Those aren’t synonymous?

Obvs, do whatever works for you, but I would find human relationships too subtle to model with SQL relationships. It would feel like a major oversimplification.

I also tend to think that too many characters to keep track of in your head = too many characters, period, since the reader is certainly not going to use a database to keep track of them.

I basically just use it as a notepad – my handwriting is monstrous and my brain is scattery.
It’s complicated enough that I could model our fine Mr Futrelle’s relationship with this site and its readership to an acceptable resolution, taking into account the fact that he is the “boss” of the page, as well as a commenter, and also a double agent for the Kitten-Ferret Mafia. It wouldn’t necessarily give his underlying motivations for selling us out to the Kitten-Ferret Mafia, and plotting our gruesome deaths at their hands, but there’s also an “additional information” memo input which allows for such miscellany and irrelevancies.
I also don’t really have that many characters. I have two ideas that I’m working on at the moment, one only really has three characters, one of whom is mostly just alluded to at the moment, and the others are just incidentals… it’s a cheesy super-hero thing, so most of the characters are POWfodder with the occasional “end of level boss” type person. The other’s more serious, including Commentary and everything but even that only has a handful of main characters.
It’s really just a matter of building a skeleton around them so that I don’t forget something important two months from now and write something that contradicts their motivations. Plus, if I find myself suffering from writer’s block, I can fiddle with the database and keep myself at least being productive in the right area.

Athywren — oh but I know enough PHP to have written my own WP theme from the bare bones hacked together from multiple themes, with shiny jQuery to top it off (subtle things, like making menus slide down instead of just appear, I’m big on things degrading beautifully if the user end doesn’t support that function)

And after doing the survey data in excel, I sorta wish I knew SQL.

PHP and SQuirreL are fairly similar (or, at least, I associate them closely in my mind) so I think you’d probably be able to figure SQL out relatively easily, and it really is good for taking in raw data like that. I actually find SQL easier to use than excel to be honest with you because, if you need SQL to do something for you, you can just write a few lines and it’ll do it… just don’t forget that comma or you’ll have a quest on your hands.

grumpycatisagirl
11 years ago

Matt F. referred to his “legal situation” on Twitter. Does anyone know what his legal situation is?

kittehserf
11 years ago

Dvarg – fluff job: grooming furry critters!

emilygoddess
11 years ago

Whenever a girl I’m talking to brags about how she’s “confident” and “strong,” I can feel my dick deflating like a punctured tire.

Aside from the telling revelation here, where are all these women who, according to MRAs, talk like they just escaped from a Destiny’s Child song?

Most girls have done nothing to deserve self-esteem.

In the world of men, respect—and by extension self-esteem—is based on actually achieving something of worth or having some kind of skill or talent.

You’re only allowed to not hate yourself if you’ve done something objectively worthwhile. Basic self-respect is only for the worthy, and respect for others based solely on shared humanity is unmanly. Does that make Jesus the world’s biggest mangina?

Also, dude, your use of “girls” is really telling. And really fucking annoying.

If every girl was fired from her job tomorrow, elementary schools would have to shut down for a couple days, but otherwise life would go on as usual.

A couple of days? Does he think the majority of substitute teachers are men? Or that men will quit their totally non-fluffy jobs to teach? And how would life go on as usual if half the workforce was suddenly removed from it?

If every man lost his job tomorrow, the country would collapse.

Inasmuch as this is true, could it be due to the systematic exclusion of women from education, certain segments of the workforce, and politics? Nah, must be because females be useless or some shit.

Given their lack of physical strength, a woman on her own should be frightened as hell without men to protect her. If society were to collapse, all the Strong, Independent Women™ who read Jezebel and xoJane would last about five minutes before they either found a man to cling onto or got raped and killed.

So…rape culture does exist, and women have good reason to be afraid of men? I thought that was misandry.

Girls don’t want the six-figure cubicle job, the shiny Brooklyn 2BR, the master’s degree, the sexual liberation, none of it.

Even if we accept that the more recent generations of women have been led astray by the availability of these things, you still have to explain why the women who had the kitchen and the ass-swatting fought their asses off for access to the master’s degree and the liberation.

hellkell
hellkell
11 years ago

Melody: I kid, I kid, about Evergreen.

emilygoddess
11 years ago

I forgot about Forney and his various other identities. Maybe he’s all het up about a woman having a degree in puppetry because being next to a professional makes his sockpuppetry look even more pathetic?

Women are overwhelmingly nurses, aides, and CNAs–healthcare runs on the back of our girlie sparkly labor.

Especially since, while doctors may diagnose and prescribe, the nurses etc do the vast majority of the actual patient care. Better hope you don’t need to be hospitalized after all the women get fired…

I’m not sure how many elementary school teachers can afford to rock Manolos (which, seriously, there are way better high-end shoes out there. MBs are straight-up marketing, like Patron tequila). Has Forney ever met a woman, like, for real?

You mean Sex & The City wasn’t a documentary?

Tax examiners, collectors, and revenue agents……………66.1

Is that in the US? OMG, the lolbertarian MRAs will love that one. “See? The feminists really are stealing our money!”

Also, my favorite 50 Shades reading:

kittehserf
11 years ago

emilygoddess:

“You’re only allowed to not hate yourself if you’ve done something objectively deemed by Forney to be worthwhile.”

FTFY

Forney’s claim: “Girls don’t want the six-figure cubicle job,”

Well, when I was a girl (ie. over thirty years ago) I’d never heard of cubicle jobs, for a start. Plus, if I was on a six-figure salary I’d be demanding a workspace a damn sight better than a feckin’ cubicle. Come to that, unless I loved the work, I’d be saving all the money and quitting the minute I had a retirement fund – which on that salary, wouldn’t take long at all.