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.
These comments from the site stood out:
Here someone explains the social problem that Rebel Yell is “satirizing”.
See, he was making fun of how our feminist culture has emasculated today’s youth. That’s what makes it funny satire. (Except for the part where he discusses his big dick, how many testicles he has and WOMEN he’s had sex with, his “combat sports” training and gun collection, which is purely informational and in no way satirizing male insecurity.)
Yes there is a lot of beta talk nonsense and people defending corporal punishment, but some of the posters seem genuinely outraged and discuss how destructive child abuse is. The following post is a bit sad.
Another poster poses an excellent question:
Answer: Yes.
Random – when and why did people on the internet decide to start writing “self-entitled” when they mean either “entitled” or possibly “selfish”? It grates almost as badly as when they call someone a “looser”.
Athywren, here you go.
What does having large genitalia and lots of sex have to do with being a good parent? I mean, he makes a point of saying this in an essay that is ostensibly about parenting.
And it’s not really “parenting” when your whole philosophy is basically beat your child(ren) into terrified submission. That falls more under the category of evil rather than “parenting.”
Have these guys been really extreme of late, or am I just reaching my threshold for bullshit? I mean, this guy; the guy yesterday so said shooting a little girl in the head was “scientifically rational,” Colon-Nolan harassing that young woman and being downright happy at the thought of her commuting suicide; I mean, if this is representative sample of the “manosphere,” how can anyone take them seriously?
Brain bleach? Yes, please. This is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SGleaTJoy1U&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DSGleaTJoy1U
“Satire”, yeah. As Sam Raimi pointed out, satire requires you to be smarter than your characters… though there’s nobody being satirized at all in this story, it’s just one asshole baring their inner mind.
@Athywren. You are referencing “Not the 9 O’clock News” on BBC, circa 1980. The business man (Mel Smith) sadly passed away recently.
As for these MRA idiots, any man who would boast of the size and “use” of his tackle is undoubtedly hung like a mouse.
Right up there with the “Old School ADD Medicine” caption under a picture of a leather belt.
Internet hugs to anyone who was upset by this article.
TW: Child abuse
This part made me really sad (as opposed to angry, which was my reaction to the rest of it). Because yeah, some abused kids do grow up believing that vulnerability = death, and that violence is an acceptable way – if not the only way – to assert themselves, and that others who they perceive as “weak” should be hated and attacked.
It’s not a sign of good parenting. It’s a goddamn tragedy.
Dedicated a week to anti-fat bullying? That would explain why I’ve been called fat about 10 times this week on the internet by MRAs when it’s an insult they had never before used on me. Interesting coincidence.
Cassandrasays — I’m a looser. I spend all day running around untying knots for the hell of it.
So YOU’RE the reason Doad lost his balloon! *shakes fist*
@ Jefrir & Warren, thanks! I knew it was Not The Nine O’Clock News, but apparently my memory got in the way of my googling. He didn’t say anything at all! Which does explain why the voice I remembered sounded more like John Cleese than Mel Smith. RIP, Mel.
Well, it’s all about being a good role model, isn’t it? Walking around with enormous genitals makes your kids think it’s a good thing to have them, so they will. Likewise with having lots of sex. The more sex you have, particularly if it’s with women other than their mother, the more impressed your six month old will be with you. Very young children have a deep and comprehensive understanding of their parent’s sexual experience, and if they see you have a lot of sex, they’ll realise that you’re just brilliant, and that’s why it’s ok for you to beat them.
I quite like how they’re just accusing anyone who disagrees with them of being fat and ugly at the moment. It really shows how committed they are to curing obesity, and how noble their intentions truly are.
I wonder if they ever realize that the response to their attempts at fat shaming is mostly bafflement.
Feminist : You shouldn’t hit your kids.
MRA : I bet you’re really fat
Feminist : Huh? What does that have to do with whether or not it’s OK for people to hit their kids?
It’s silly enough when there’s some sort of context (you will never find a man because you’re fat!), but when it’s a complete non-sequitur it turns into a Monty Python sketch about angry assholes who’re screaming at people for no apparent reason.
Well, except Monty Python is waaaay more fun and funnier.
@sparky – these guys equate having large genitalia and lots of sex with women as being a superior person, let alone parent. Which is even more sad.
Also they seem to think that it’s good for boys to see Dad interacting with women in a sexually demeaning way. Remember the dude who was going on about being a regular at the strip club and passing that “status” on to his son? It’s about teaching boys how these dudes think they’re supposed to relate to women, so if the kid sees Dad fucking around with lots of women he’ll grow up to be a player himself.
@Sparky
Egads! Blockquote Fail!
I once commented at RoK and was immediately offered several paragraphs of advice on how to improve my chances with women. This was their way of being nice.
I would have told a normal rude person “Thanks, I’m good, I have multiple partners and am happy with my sex life” but there is no way in hell that would fit their worldview; I’d just be another lying mangina.
@ inurashii
I guess in a way that’s an acknowledgement of the fact that they know that a guy who is capable of managing his sex life in a satisfactory way would have no reason to be reading RoK.
Weirdly enough, that’s pretty much exactly what I said in my comment that they replied to — that PUA is based on insecurity, the belief that you are so undesirable that you have to trick somebody into having sex with you.
They of course told me that RoK isn’t PUAs, just “regular guys”, which made my head turn upside-down.
So having two testicles and a penis under my left arm is wrong?
No wonder I’m so beta.
Regular guys are all kings! Yeah, that’s not delusional at all.
Haha, they removed the “: “*For all the effeminate males and troll feminists commenting on this post: rot in Hell. I stand by what I said. Kids need beatings from time to time.” disclaimer.
Yeah, now I can suddenly see the satire of this piece, the way it neatly manages to surmise an outrageous position and make it clear that the alternative is much better no wait no it’s still wrong, but at least they’re covering their own ass now.
The thing is, if they’re using what they call “satire” (but what is probably better described as parody) to highlight what they think is the extremity of feminist theory…well they’re basically using the same tactics Solanas did when writing SCUM Manifesto.
Not that I think that’s even what they’re doing. I think that the authors of this shit actually believe it, and only claim they don’t to try to “get out of jail free.” But it’s interesting they’re claiming to use the same rhetorical device as an extreme feminist figure…