So it seems that some Men’s Rightsers and manospherians, reveling in the negative attention they’ve managed to get from the mainstream for some of their more reprehensible postings, have decided to up the ante a bit, posting stuff that’s so deliberately over the top in its despicableness that even some of their readers have been taken aback.
A case in point: A paean to child abuse recently posted on Roosh’s Return of Kings blog. (Let me put a big TRIGGER WARNING on all the quotes from it that follow.)
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In Why You Should Beat Your Kids, guest poster Rebel Yell argues — well, asserts — that
Beating builds character, and in my estimation, is the solution for today’s flabby, emasculated, and gynocentric culture.
The piece is filled with such wisdom as:
If you don’t beat your kids your son will end up banging some dude and your daughter will become an anarcha-feminist with an unshorn vag.
Yep. For you see, the beatings being advocated here are intended to enforce the patriarchal, homophobic, antifeminist, and even the fatphobic views favored by Roosh and his readers:
[T]oday’s kids … should be beat constantly until they realize that they can’t get away and have to fight back to survive. Beat until they lose their narcissistic attitude and accept that weakness is never an option. Beat until she loses weight and he stops playing with Barbie dolls.
Rebel Yell devotes much of the post to an obviously fictional tale of his own upbringing — which naturally involved a lot of beatings at the hands of his dad — before concluding with an exceedingly vicious attack on some favorite manosphere villains. Who happen to be real people.
Do us all a favor: beat your kids from time to time. If this simple rule was followed Miley Cyrus would shut the fuck up because Billy Ray laid a black eye on his slut daughter, Perez Hilton would be shamed to suicide, and Lindy West would die an ignoble death somewhere in the hinterlands of Hell. After all, Satan is male, right?
This is just straight up harassment.
Like some Men’s Rights activists who revel in saying vile things but try to wriggle out of taking moral responsibility for what they say, Roosh has declared that Rebel Yell’s post was “meant to be satire.”
Clearly Roosh has no idea what satire is. So here is a brief refresher. Satire is
the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
In other words, you need to actually disagree with the views you are satirizing. As I’ve pointed out before, when Jonathan Swift wrote his famous Modest Proposal, he didn’t actually believe that eating babies was a good idea. If he had, it wouldn’t have been satire, just a really fucked up essay by a really fucked up weirdo.
The only way Rebel Yell’s post would be satire would be if it were intended as a takedown of misogynist assholes who believe that beatings and bullying are an appropriate response to such supposed social ills as feminism, homosexuality, sluttiness, and obesity, and who hate Jezebel writer Lindy West so much they like to imagine her dead.
But that’s not a description of the sort of people who Roosh and his readers are against; that’s a description of who they are. Indeed, Roosh and his pals in the manosphere just devoted a week to a celebration of anti-fat bullying.
These guys are in many ways beyond satire. It’s hard to imagine anyone more exaggeratedly awful than they already are.
EDIT: And it turns out that this allegedly “humorous” post — as a number of people have pointed out — seems to have been plagiarized in part from a post by misogynistic “humorist” Maddox. Some similar passages:
MADDOX: If you don’t beat your kids when they fall out of line, the next thing you know your son will go off and bang some dude in the ass just out of spite.
REBEL YELL: If you don’t beat your kids your son will end up banging some dude and your daughter will become an anarcha-feminist with an unshorn vag.
MADDOX: The problem is that kids today think their opinions matter. By not beating your kids, they get a skewed perspective of reality … .
REBEL YELL: Beat until they realize that their opinions don’t matter.
And then there’s this. [TRIGGER WARNING for graphics even worse than the quotes so far.]
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Maddox illustrated his post with this graphic, now available as a t-shirt:
Return of Kings illustrated its post with this picture and a nearly identical caption.
So Return of Kings is not even original in its offensiveness.
Though if enjoying life was defined as “living somewhere cheap because it’s all you can afford from your self-published book sales, looking for drunk women to rape, and complaining about women who’re confident enough to give you the brush-off” then I think I’d give enjoyment of life a pass anyway.
“if you weren’t ashamed of yourselves or your ability to attract members of the opposite sex then posting an image wouldn’t be a problem.”
Because obviously it only applies one way, and one way only. 🙄
Careful, Alice, we’ll end up with skater posting pics of his Uncle Monty.
kittehs – It took me about five seconds before my mind took a gander on what you meant.
Wouldn’t that mean that he’d be banned faster? 😉
Oddly I was slightly offended that Skater accused this board of abusing the exclamation point, but then I imagined a very excited Richard Simmons saying “dictionary definition time !!!!!!” and couldn’t stay mad at hir.
Good point, Alice! 😀
For a moment there I thought he was misspelling his own nym, and that it should be slater. Except slaters are quite beneficial, which is more than can be said for trolls.
It always amuses me when they see commenters being friendly and affectionate to each other as a bad thing.
I’m sorry that your life is miserable and nobody wants to hug you, dude, but I have to point out that your current behavior is unlikely to improve that situation.
kittehs – Trolls are quite boring, yea?
I mean, I guess they’re vital to the “living under bridge” real estate market? But oh my gods, they are so boring and unoriginal.
I’m not sure trolls are vital to anything except themselves. They’re certainly boring nowadays; the Great Trolls of Yore have gone extinct, apparently.
Trolling is, however, essential to their ability to maintain their belief system. Yeah, dude, the fact that some random women weren’t interested in providing you with free wank pictures means that they’re insecure. Keep telling yourself that, and do try not to cry on the keyboard.
Troll has some funny definitions (as they all seem to). I’d have thought “hastening to get approval of my looks from rude invisible loutish dude on the internet” was a pretty good definition of insecurity, but apparently the real definition is “not giving a shit what stranger dude wants and not doing something because he tells me to.”
The only situation in which I’m interested in whether or not someone finds me attractive is if I want to fuck them. If they’re an MRA or a PUA, I don’t want to fuck them, so…
MRA or PUA = Immediate disqualification.
I only care if Mr Serf finds me attractive. Every other dude? All the better if they don’t, because I don’t want their sexual attention. (I don’t want women’s sexual attention either, but it wouldn’t squick me out the way men’s has.)
what if previous partners were same sex? srsly, troll isn’t even clever when they’re trying…
and hugs to everyone except skater.
Soooo… either I show my picture to everyone who asks, or I’m ashamed of myself? Why don’t you walk us through the logic of that? I don’t really measure my self worth by how I look, so I’m not sure how one relates to the other.
*scratches head* hey, um, uh…what’s the opposite sex? My genderqueer lover with, uh, the other standard set of anatomy?
Cuz ze isn’t my most conventionally attractive ex, but makes the top two for if a friend was interested — the other being the ex-FWB, because they are both seriously awesome people…my conventionally attractive ex’s? Nearly 100% overlap with my rapist ex’s (nearly cuz one’s a libertarian, but fairly cool otherwise)
high fives for GQ ^.^
This Maddox guy and the one who copied and pasted need to be investigated by proper authority. These are MRA? Don’t they throw rallies for the equality of men and beg to see their children and fair child support wages? Then they pull a stunt like this? They should disband immediately. Any mother who sees this violence will not ever let the father see his kids. Believe me I know only too well about fathers who like to use their 2 month old sons as punching bags. MRA wants to help boys? Then satire or not this should never be on any of their members site/blog/whatever. Stupid morons.
I don’t even where to start with this one. Rape jokes and the usual tasteless misogyny are both bad enough. Going after little kids though? Contemptible is much too kind a word for this. I’m not sure if it gets lower than making light of, much less promoting child abuse.
I’ve had the good fortune of growing up with two loving parents, who never did anything like what those two idiots suggest. A couple friends of mine, including a significant other were not so lucky. Even now, close to ten years after being rescued from their freak parents, they are still completely messed up and can’t discuss it directly without going to pieces.
There isn’t anything remotely funny or praiseworthy about child abuse. People who advocate child abuse should be locked up, or at the very least banned from having children.
I never thought that I would find a group of people more despicable than the Westboro Baptist Church. But it seems that such a day has come and I have been proven wrong.
The oh-so-helpful psychotherapist with experience in childhood sexual abuse / physical abuse / religious abuse victims from cult backgrounds was mightily pissed when I refused her $300 an hour offer of regressive hypnotherapy to fill in the nice huge blanks in my memory when I was 24.
“You’ll have a complete psychotic break by age 30” she predicted, furiously. (Her words, not mine; psychosis is a terrible thing, psychotics are just people.)
Yeah, nope, but it DID take me about that long to be able to talk about the crap I and my 8 younger sibs went thorough without losing it. I’m 40 now, and still getting lovely flashbacks in the form of all too real nightmares that aren’t actually dreams.
Special hell, folks. Special hell. And I don’t even believe in REGULAR hell.