Attention-seeking manosphere guru Roosh V posts article on “Why You Should Beat Your Kids” [UPDATE: Was it plagiarized?]

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.