So our old friend Roosh Valizadeh seems to have fully embraced the Matt Forney school of misogynist internet celebrity, posting over-the-top offensive posts in a transparent attempt to gin up controversy and blog traffic. And it’s working: he’s brought an avalanche of well-deserved hate down upon himself. But don’t worry: he’s still got some supporters — not only on his own blog but in the Men’s Rights subreddit.
The post that’s been keeping the servers hosting Roosh’s Return of Kings blog busy lately is a guest post by Tuthmosis with the title “5 Reasons To Date A Girl With An Eating Disorder.”
It’s pretty much as awful as you’d imagine. Reason 1: “Her obsession over her body will improve her overall looks.” Number 2: “She costs less money” because she’ll only order salads at dinner. Hilarious. It’s all so predictably “provocative” it’s not worth quoting in any more detail.
Roosh has responded to the controversy with an, er, “Publisher Response” that was clearly designed to further stir the shit. In it, he claimed that the original post
contains value for men who want to date thin women in America, a country that is currently facing a devastating obesity epidemic, which we recently highlighted with Fat Shaming Week.
He followed this by claiming that Return of Kings wasn’t promoting eating disorders, merely trying to help women struggling with eating disorders find happiness in love:
We are educating our masculine readers not to pass on eating disorder victims just because they have an illness, yet instead of receiving thanks, we’re receiving hate instead. If we all had cancer, and someone wrote an article titled “5 Reasons To Fornicate With A Man Who Has Cancer,” we would spread it far and wide to make fornicating with us a better proposition for women. We would not send death threats or calls for censorship like is happening to us now. I think a bit more graciousness is in order for our unorthodox method of outreach.
As a much less obnoxious internet celebrity once put it:
Despite setting out to offend as many people as possible, Roosh reacted with indignation when he discovered that someone on the Men’s Rights subreddit had dared to suggest that perhaps he had stepped over the line a bit.
https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/403290871854280704
What’s doubly ironic about this tweet is that he actually has a lot of defenders in that thread — and that the thread itself has gotten twice as many downvotes as upvotes. Only a few found the Return of Kings post offensive; the others dismissed it as clickbait — or agreed with it.
One commenter, posting under the name of a famous turn-of-the-twentieth centuryantifeminist and opponent of women’s suffrage, apparently sees Roosh as some sort of heroic defender of anorexic women:
Meanwhile, the ironically named LogicalDebater beamed us this message from his home planet:
And our old friend Demonspawn, quoting from a commenter on Return of Kings, blamed the outrage on fat, ugly feminists jealous because men would rather date thin women.
![Demonspawn [-1] 1 point 21 hours ago (8|7) This comment on the followup article nailed it to the wall: The anger was only thinly veiled by the eating disorder arguments. Ultimately the original article was about accepting women albeit with the benefit that she's thin and won't cost as much, but I think that is the rub. The feminist hate speech directed in the comments and emails to this site was latent anger at a man's desire to date thin women. Since feminism encourages the destruction of female beauty and femininity most feminists have a hatred toward anything that encourages or accepts women for these traits. The hate directed at this site under the guise of "eating disorders" is just that, the article hit a rough nerve with feminists who hate beauty and acceptance when it is defined by men.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/demon.png?resize=525%2C242&ssl=1)
Men’s Rights Activists often complain about being lumped together with pickup artists; here, many of them have chosen to associate themselves with Roosh at his worst.
The greatest human rights movement of the 21st century, folks!
EDIT: Belated thanks to Snork Maiden for pointing me to Roosh’s tweet and the Reddit thread!
Amen!
Ha – I was “amen”ing Noadi’s comment, but it fits yours too, Alice. 😀
” Btw, did you want us to use ze/zir to refer to you, or were just expressing a disliking of the singular they?”
The latter, that gets me confused. I’m equally fine with he or zie.
@Noadi Not sure who you’re responding to but that’s a pretty standard definition for as long as I’ve been aware of the word. For example urban dictionary has that definition from way back in 2002: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=troll
Um, that’s a bit too general. You can be mentally ill and still not completely locked up in your own little world. I’ve had stretches of time where I was pretty unbalanced (like, occasionally traveled all around the city in an attempt to shake off imaginary stalkers, did magical rituals at night to stave off demons from my apartment and stuff like that), was on quite a lot of meds, and still went out to party and had casual sex time to time. Everyone’s different.
What Roosh and his followers are after seems to be girls who aren’t that ill, like they still function, still go to their job/school and stuff like that, but they feel really bad about themselves and are therefore easy to abuse. Sadly, I don’t think that category of girls is non-existent.
^^ I agree with the above. During the darkest years of my youth I jumped into a lot of the wrong beds, having such lousy self esteem I used getting laid as a means of (short lived) validation, ROK and its ilk would have dismissed me as a slut while taking full advantage.
That’s what I hate about that article. While I can clearly see it’s intended to be tongue in cheek, and I don’t believe it’ll actually encourage any girls into developing eating disorders, it may encourage some of its male readership to go out looking for vulnerable women who they can exploit, possibly inflicting more damage, and without a shred of the compassion Roosh’s rebuttal disingenuously, and hypocritically claims to be full of.
Dvarg has it right. What Roosh is advocating is that predators look for vulnerabilities that they can exploit, one of which is low self-esteem. It’s an ethically appalling position to take, and clearly flags someone as a predator, but we already knew that about him.
Hmmm.
Well, one small comforting thing about mental illness: Even an absolutely repugnant asswipe like Roosh doesn’t have the power to induce it. The most he can do is try to use it as an “in”. But since he’s physically repulsive, I doubt he’d have much luck there. And even a total validation seeker wouldn’t want it from HIM. Frankly, I think everything he writes is one big unconvincing pose.
Cutting boards: a million years ago (give or take) I read an article that said that wooden boards are actually better at preventing salmonella contamination than plastic, provided that you clean them properly. Something about the wood sucking all the liquid out of the salmonella cells, killing them, which the plastic boards don’t do.
Bina — depends what mental illness you mean — this is a man who’s confessed to “what would be rape in other countries”…so he’s a rapist, which puts inducing PTSD on the table. And emotional abuse can certainly harm someone already vulnerable to, f’ex, depression or an ED.
The ones that are more genetic than environment, no, he can’t, but the one’s that can be environmentally triggered? Yeah, he’s dangerous. And not just because his chicken prep is laughable.
“People are mad, but the article is clearly true. Girls with eating disorders are cheap dates because they don’t want to eat, and because of their low self esteem will work harder to please you. ”
The article is only true if you’re looking for someone vulnerable to abuse and manipulate. Why would I want to let my girlfriend starve to death and debase herself? That’s just sad.
It looks like Roosh is enjoying success beyond his wildest dreams. One of my FB from the UK just reposted one of his stupid rants from ROK on my news feed with the predictable outrage. Just what the Hairy One wants. Unless you’re getting your information
through MB or another blog dedicated to exposing misogyny, it’s best to just ignore ROK, or at least not post angry or critical comments. You’re just flattering the haters and accomplishing nothing.
“Feminist food-safety fanatics for-the-win!”
Food safety and basic hygiene are misandry!
I guess Moma Sita is Ruby’s replacement, then? Not that we needed or wanted one.
@Cloudiah, good luck on the job interview! 😀
No doubt. Also, I feel like outrage is like crawling – it’s a stage you need to go through before you can learn to mock.
Haven’t we had the whole “just because someone has been here for x years doesn’t mean they have any authority” thing with a previous troll?
I thought everyone understood the shorthand of newbie/regular. As in “newbies” will say that’s what they are as a way of saying “I know you guys don’t know me but I’m trying to post in good faith”. And we say someone is a regular as shorthand for “we know and trust this person so they get a lot more leeway/benefit of the doubt than relative strangers”.
It’s not like that isn’t the case in social situations IRL, too, surely?
Sorry to be splainy but it’s been bugging me.
Not splainy at all, titianblue, I thought anyone who’s posted on boards or blogs or forums would know that shorthand too – it’s sort of self-explanatory, isn’t it? The “we know and trust this person” is the particularly important bit with “regulars”. Though it’s apparent zie wasn’t posting in good faith, and that trollish nonsense and flailing looks like someone with a grudge. The “you all have mental illnesses” is beloved of trolls in general, but wasn’t it one of Pell’s faves?
Maybe Moma Sita’s a nurse at Dr Famous Pell’s Famous Mental Asylum.
“A confusion of trolls” sounds like a good collective noun for ’em. 😀
Yeah, I’d say they have asshole friends or no friends, and really no idea how to get friends, going on their behaviour. That, or they’re gormless wonders who act like this on the internet because they’re anonymous.
I just wish more of them would learn to flamin’ well spell and punctuate.
Wasn’t there another recent troll with basically the same schtick as Moma Sita? I was trying to remember the name but drawing a blank.
Was it Du(m)b? Same scattershot approach and oh-so-superior “you must debate me” attitude, but different style (pomposity rather than frothy incoherence, at least at first).
A bit before him, maybe? I feel like it was specifically a troll identifying themselves as female and pissing and moaning about how unfair it was that people here weren’t buying the version of feminism they were selling.
::scratches head:: Yeah, that sounds familiar. There was a big blow-up with Feminist Bees, but she wasn’t a troll, just had a meltdown over whatever the disagreement was – something about intersectionality, iirc. There was someone else who fits the bill but I can’t recall the name either.
I guess I’m just wondering if it’s the same person socking, since this iteration did feel so familiar.
Karin’s a familiar name but I can’t remember the M.O. Trollspludge, they do blur. This latest one had more staying power (aka failing to stick the flounce) than most, lately. I’m guessing this is a sock of some sort.
Karin was the one who arrived pre-frothed, yelled about how she was talking to David and not to any of those, and then declared victory in the debate that she was having with the straw-commenters she’d created. So it was all “so, you admit that X”, “dude, what?”, “hah! I triumph!”.
Gawd, that does sound similar to MS’s “I’m writing to David! I am! I’m writing to David and he won’t be amused and he’ll ban you all!!!eleventy!1!!!”
That bit made me think either zie wasn’t a sock, because that was so witless, or else it was all a stupid act trying to wind people up, because none of Ye Olde Trolls of Yore would seriously think David’s gonna ban regulars.