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.
Somewhat related: I was checking out the new blogs recently added at Patheos, and I found this one:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/searchingfortomsawyer/
It’s the blog of an Evangelical Lutheran pastor who is way fixated on… boys. Well, not in a sexual sense, I hope, but he is one of those people who think that there is some kind of “boy crisis”.
Sample:
In short, a gold mine of gender essentialism.
I wonder if he knows that even Mark Twain thought Tom Sawyer to be insufferable…
“Are you thinking just when they’re little and you can’t talk to them about why it’s dangerous?”
Yeah, I was, once they’re old enough to understand that this is a Bad Thing I’m all for reasoning with them on their level. And I meant what SittieKitty said — a swat as soon as possible so they associate the dangerous behavior with, well, pain. Cuz “ow that smarts” is better than getting hit by a car or eating bleach, etc.
And, of course, not for things they’ve ever been allowed to do, or they may not get that no, you never ever do this.
FTR, my experience with kids is limited to other people’s offspring, so my grown up voice and logic, at their level, has always worked (but the worst I’ve had to deal with is no, you cannot take that free kitten)
Re: bullies — yeah, just hit back harder really isn’t the best advice. Though I am still downright proud of my one and only suspension as a kid — tried all the proper channels, repeatedly, told the kid to stop, repeatedly, told him if he didn’t I was going to kick him, he didn’t, so I did. Apparently it did work for that one, but he was a lone jerk, wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere against half the football team in HS (not letting the cheerleaders cheat off you goes over poorly)
That one, really, requires fixing the whole damned system. Seriously, I got suspended for one kick in self-defense — didn’t attempt to lie about it or anything either — beating without mercy will get the kid in serious trouble.
Communication: You can’t actually create your own Ender Wiggin that way, you know.
My younger son was neglected (birth mother) and abused (foster mother). We adopted him at age five. He’s now twelve, and has been in therapy as long as he’s been with us. He recently (within the last year) stopped hitting me. He now uses please and thank you to get what he wants. If I’d followed the ‘speak roughly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes ‘ approach, he’d be halfway to Tom Riddle by now. I tremble to think what would have happened had he stayed in the abusive foster home, or been adopted by less flexible parents. Oh, the foster mother lost her fostering license over how she treated him, so yay for CPS for that.
The very young don’t usually associate the swat with the specific behavior. They associate the swat with you. That is usually the point at which they take a swing at you because they just learned that that is one of the many things peeps do.
Blurgh, I forgot how much I hate home-hunting. I dealt with possibly the skeeziest broker ever today, but at least I might have an exciting housing opportunity that wouldn’t involve being closeted, literally OR figuratively!
All the stuff about child abuse just reminds me of Random Creeper I got this week who sent me a PM on LJ saying, “I’m most sorry you feel like you have to cut your family off and have negative feelings towards so many people that at least maybe “tried” to love you” THANK YOU CREEPY STRANGER!
RE: Communication ASAP
but the kid needs to fight people he can beat, people his own size…That’s why, if I had kids, and they’d get bullied, I’d encourage them to beat those bullies with no mercy. After all, the school system doesn’t defend our kids – it defends the bullies.
You realize this sounds like you’re actually encouraging your kids to BE bullies, right?
So MRAs often argue that women are bad because they commit a lot of child abuse, but also argue that men should commit child abuse?
Can someone just go all Lisbeth Salander on him already?
but the kid needs to fight people he can beat, people his own size…
In a word, no.
See, if he can beat them, and not lose, it’s sport; and cruel sport.
If it’s an evenly matched contest what the kid learns is going to be outside the control of the parents.
and if the kid can’t win (say the other kid has been taking judo for the past three years), then it’s going to teach them they can’t win.
Furthermore, none of that has bupkis to do with bullies. So the conflation of those two isn’t useful.
Given that most bullies have support networks (both in the world of kids, and in the world of adults) the odds of being able to, “beat them without mercy” is slim. For one, the bully is (contra the stereotype) often more used to violence. Secondly, most bullies don’t start with the blows, they start with little indignities; boundary testing.
They they move to emotional indignities. By the time they move to physical abuses the victim has lost a lot of the sense they can win.
So this is a bad way to model the situation.
“They they move to emotional indignities. By the time they move to physical abuses the victim has lost a lot of the sense they can win.”
And that is why I remain proud of my suspension. Too many abusive ex’s and assholes since then, it’s a reminder of days when I could, and did, win. Because jerkwad was still on emotional indignities and learned with a swift kick that I wadn’t having it.
And I repeat… One. Kick. That I owned up to.
Beat without mercy isn’t self-defense, full stop. Teach your kid that in school and enjoy bailing them out after a fight as an adult, cuz that’s assault, not self-defense.
(Pecunium, nawh, I can’t kick as high as you, but catch it in the back of the thigh while wiggling your ass at me and you are going down)
So our “teach them to beat the bullies without mercy” friend doesn’t have kids and has never spent much time around kids as an adult, right? And has memory problems which have led hir to forget what happens to kids who beat the shit out of other kids at school and get caught?
My Dad actually did teach me to hit people who bullied me back. I only had to do it once, and yep, it worked. Thing is, the way it played out was kid was harassing me, I tried to walk away, he followed me and yanked on my hair, and I turned around and punched him, on the playground in full view of both kids and teachers. So a. everyone could see that he’d started it and b. I only hit him once, and then as soon as he backed off so did I. If I’d followed that one punch up with beating the shit out of him I’d have been in far more trouble than he would.
Teaching your kids to stand up for themselves is great, but please don’t teach them to be stupid and to replicate the behavior that you claim to be against.
So basically, some guy plagiarized Maddox? A lot of the quotes seem very similar to something Maddox wrote in 2002. Except the original clearly was satire.
I don’t know if I’m allowed to post a link, but google “maddox beat kid” or something like that and you’ll see it.
Joseph, thanks. I checked it out and updated the post. Not only is the basic idea unoriginal, but there are several similar passages — and ROK stole the idea and wording for a particularly offensive graphic/caption combo.
Speaking of anarcha-feminists (quote in OP)… Emma Goldman wrote about being abused in childhood, right? What a success, with a submissive woman like her. 😉
And ugh. These beliefs do seem awfully common even outside the manosphere.
Where I live, the l only consistent difference between what’s considered child physical abuse and “discipline” seems to be that the latter lands the victim in the hospital; it seems pretty accepted. My classmates of all ages would talk about being whipped, and a few about how they would do the same to their kids to keep them from turning gay (!)… So I also got beaten, didn’t turn out okay either, but at least I don’t carry those monstrous attitudes! In my experience, corporal punishment and outright abuse weren’t fundamentally different at all, perhaps because of the lax attitude toward abuse (and conflation with corporal punishment). YMMV though.
How exactly does one shave a vagina? Does he realize that pubes don’t generally grow in the “vag” ? Do feminists unshavenness generally make them so goddamn hairy, that it grows out from the orifices too?
“HUGE HUGZ to everyone”
“this is not satire omg!!! dictionary definition time !!!!!!”
“Trigger warning watch out!!!”
Can you all send me a picture of yourselves and the most attractive partner you have been with?
Better still can you convince me that this retarded circlejerk of cries of misogyny and childish shit is not in any way dysfunctional?
David I hope you read this, where are you going in life reposting manosphere articles to a biased audience?
On, of all things, a poultry forum, we had a discussion of corporal punishment, a few years ago.
Interesting thing we noticed: people who had been smacked as children fell into two camps: the camp that said they were fine with it and the camp that said they would never do it themselves. People who had not been smacked as children ALL said they were against corporal punishment and would never smack their own children.
Oh skater, aren’t you just precious. No way in hell am I sending you, or any of our trolls, pics of me, or any of my partners.
Titianblue — guess I’m an outlier? Cuz I’m okay enough with a swat in response to potentially fatal behavior, which I see as completely different from being hit for whatever pissed my father off this time. But I see the former as a matter of conditioning and I’ve got trained fish, so idk, I may be biased with regards to the power of casual conditioning.
Skater, and who exactly do you fucking think you are to make such requests out of anyone? Lol, sit the fuck down, idiot. Or better, you go ahead and show some photos of yourselves and your partners to US, how about that hmm? David’s website of mocking and exposing misogyny has 3,682 followers and counting, so we’re really not quite a minority here.
Show this piece of shit “article” to any sane-minded person and they will express the same disgust about it just like we did.
Yo, lurker who’s checking in–
Skater sounds like a nauseating piece of human trash, but I think there’s a point to be made here. I’ve only discovered this site recently, but…I’m not sure how to say this, but the comments section of this site is always chock-full of “ironic” childishness, cute animal videos, and so on. I know the reason for it — it’s a way of coping with all the soul-destroyingly horrible shit we read on manosphere blogs — but It is really, really hard to take seriously, and it brings any rational take-down of manosphere nonsense to a screeching halt.
But then, I’m only one person, and if the current state of the comments section is what helps you guys survive knowing about this repulsive underworld of the internet, then it shouldn’t matter what I think. Just chiming in.
What would sending pictures to some random troll demonstrate? And since when was attractiveness an objective scale, that could be shown with a single picture and no knowledge of the person depicted?
Oh, yeah, ablism, baby, that’s how we’ll show the world that feminism is totally unnecessary!
Also, ‘cries of misogyny’? So it’s your claim that the stuff that goes on the MRM is … not?
Justify, plz.
@Skater:
… What’s the point? I’m awesome. I can win at the metrics you want me to win at. I’m blessed to know models and stuff. I can bench press, like, a lot. Tell me why any of that actively matters in relation to someone pointing out that you should beat your kids to teach them to be “A man” and cloaking it behind satire?
Secondly, no I can’t. But if this is dysfunctional, somehow, it’s the nicest possibly dysfunctional place I’ve found.
But then, I’m having this conversation with someone who links to articles that think that feminism causes depression and that Dutch women are happy because they don’t work as much.
(The Dutch position, by the by, in the World Happiness Index, is 4. There are other countries, ranked higher, wherein people (That is, everyone, also women) work more than the Dutch ones, and score higher on happiness. But hey? What’s the point – tell me how that relates to someone telling you that the ideal way of raising a child is beatings. We can both bring up irrelevant things about the other).
@Wildeyes:
I don’t entirely agree. I find that cute pictures of cats and so on goes perfectly well with rational or irrational take downs of vile shit. I happen to like cute fuzzy things. There’s a cat on my lap literally right now as I am writing this.
In my opinion, if you start treating statements like: “Pretend to kill someone’s cat” with anything but ironic childishness, cries of idiocy and bad poetry, then you’ve already lost. These things don’t have a rational platform that deserves, in any way, a rational takedown. It’s not a debate, is what I’m saying, where the other side somehow has a different opinion and you can reach a mutually accepted compromise between two positions, or a logica derivation of their tenets that allow you to move on from here. Someone out there, right now, thinks that women are mindless lizards who go for nebolous status and that “American Girls” is somehow an insult akin to ********, because some Americans might be fat.
In light of that, responding with anything but pictures of cats is just… Why would you? q:
The lack of serious attitude is an indictment of their position, not a statement against our own “Inability to be serious, cool adults”, to paraphrase.
@wildeyes
Really? Really really? Sorry we don’t live up to your standards of rational debate. No, wait, not sorry at all. *blows raspberry*