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If anyone was hoping – against their better judgement – that Men’s Rights activists would be inspired by the tragedy in Isla Vista to reconsider any of their beliefs, or even to reflect for a moment on the many striking similarities between passages in Elliot Rodger’s book-length manifesto and comments posted every day by MRAs and others in the manosphere, well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you should not keep that hope alive.
It’s not that they’re not talking about the tragedy. A look through the top 100 posts in the Men’s Rights subreddit, the largest Men’s Rights forum online, reveals that roughly a third of them, including the top stickied post, relate in some way to Elliot Rodger’s rampage and the discussions that have come up online and in the media in its aftermath.
But the message of virtually all of these posts is: “Nothing to see here! Move along!” There are numerous posts expressing outrage that anyone would see any connection between Rodger’s toxic misogyny to the Men’s Rights movement; there are others mocking and attacking the #YesAllWomen hashtag; there’s even one suggesting that Rodger, who wrote about how he longed to watch all the women of the world starve to death in concentration camps, wasn’t actually a misogynist at all.
Take a look. One post, with more than 500 upvotes, complains:
Another post makes a strikingly similar complaint:
One angry MRA asks:
Another wonders:
Sorry to break it to you, fella, but that’s not how defamation suits work. If it were, all of us who call ourselves feminists would be collecting millions of dollars from the Men’s Rights subreddit for all the patently untrue things you guys say about us every day of every week.
Still others make sure that everyone knows that Rodger hated men too – not that this has actually gone unnoticed in the media or in discussions of the tragedy.
And then there’s this fellow, who seems to think that Rodger only hated men, and that his big problem with women was that he loved them too much:
There are, it’s true, two posts that raise the issue of what might be done to prevent tragedies like this from happening in the future. One of them takes on the issue of “virgin shaming.” (Sure, I’m against that, and against slut shaming too. Odd that roughly 100% of the virgin shaming I’ve ever heard in my life has come from MRAs and other non-fans of this blog, even though — sorry to break it to you fellows — I’ve not been a virgin since the early Reagan administration.)
Meanwhile, the other “positive” suggestion — the stickied top post, submitted by one of the forum’s moderators — is pretty transparently intended as a PR move – and an excuse to bash feminists.
Yep, “creep shaming.” That’s the problem! Way to cut through all the bullshit and get to the heart of the matter! The problem isn’t that some men — well, a lot of men — think and act in predatory and entitled ways towards women. The problem is that sometimes when they do, women call them “creeps.”
The problem isn’t that the world’s creepiest and most entitled man just killed 6 innocent people, the problem is “creep shaming.”
After killing his roommates and a friend of theirs, Rodger attempted to get inside a sorority so he could massacre the women inside it. But he couldn’t get anyone to let him in. Probably because, well, whoever was nearest the door thought he looked a bit, well, creepy.
“Creep-shaming” isn’t some insidious form of discrimination against awkward men. It’s a defense mechanism that women develop to protect them against predatory men. And in the case of the Isla Vista murders, I’m guessing that the willingness of women to go with their gut sense that Rodger was a creep literally saved lives.
But the mods of the Men’s Rights subreddit would rather moan about “creep shaming.” They would prefer that women lower their defenses against men like Elliot Rodger — because it hurts their feelings to sometimes get called a “creep.”
Guys, this is why people think Elliot Rodger was an MRA.
EDIT: I added more to the conclusion because I had more to say about creep shaming.
AA? Nope. Listening to him is like listening to a long, sustained dog fart. You don’t enjoy the sound. The being making it hasn’t got sense enough to be embarrassed or apologetic. It adds nothing of value* to the world and it makes you want to leave the room immediately.
*Aside from the relief it must cause it’s issuer
Judging from what all the other idiots are saying I’m sure it will be blah, blah, he was just crazy. Blah, blah, blah feminists evil, blah, blah, women only date assholes. Blah, blah, derp.
Well, what surprised me is my friend who posted it usually is very much pro-feminist, and has “liked” the anti-misogyny anti-entitlement-to-women articles I posted in the past few days.
Ugh, Amazing Atheist videos are unbearable. I tried to watch one in response to the Feminist Frequency videos, and just couldn’t. Knowing some very smart and feminist atheists makes the whole atheist, misogynist connection baffling to me because I know he’s not the only one out there,he might just be the loudest.
cassandrakitty
I’m sure that Erin is, indeed, dumb enough to come up with that sort of non sequitur; the fact that it’s misogynistic guys who endanger people is unlikely to register on that sort of brain.
Of course, there really are people stupid enough to try and grope a doctor in the ER; her worst example to date was when she removed a guy’s hand from her body and pointed out to him that it was inappropriate, whereupon he demanded to know ‘what good are you for then?’
It says a great deal about her commitment to her patients that she didn’t abandon him to a junior male doctor a great deal less capable of finding out what was actually making him ill.
I think that when it comes to spotting trolls it comes back to the fact that women have a shared experience of all the many and varied forms of crap that we encounter, and we spot it faster than people whose lives don’t expose them to said crap…
Ok, so I try really hard not to comment on anything on the internet as a rule – there’s far too much being said about anything at any given time already – but there are two things I feel the need to opine on, and then I’ll go back to lurking quietly at the back and not smoking:
1 – This site is great, thank you for it. The OPs and comments. The fact that you are willing to unban and give another chance to noxious trolls is classy as all heck. I dig it. Thanks again.
2 – Exene… Just. Wow. Sad about this. “Today you’re gonna be sick so sick” about covers it. Time to hug a gallon of Rossi, blast “Under The Big Black Sun” and spray paint “Kill Yr Idols” on a crumbling factory wall like it’s 1995 :/
I did not know that. What would be the point? To make them “confess the truth”?
Alex Jones calls pretty much everything a false flag these days. He did it with the Boston marathon bombing. Then it turned out Tamerlan Tsarnaev was an Alex Jones fan, and shit got awkward…
@grumpycatisagirl
I decided to take the bullet for the team and watched the TAA video. Plus side: he acknowledges that Elliot Rodgers was a misogynist and that misogyny was a huge reason behind his actions. Minus side: everything else
Don’t you need to have achieved something outside of X-Box Live to go Galt? I
thought that Randian fantasy was meant for douchebag industrialists, top scientists and such.
I have a coworker like this too! The HAARP thing gets her really going, some days.
@emilygoddess
I don’t know about all of them but, that’s certainly happened
And my post about the two pornstar suicides and the REAL character of patriarchy that we live in? David Frutell’s response: Sorry nothing to see here.
And his blog readers are worse.
The lonely guy mysoginy is engendered by something that resembles a barbaric quasi poligamy, so to be sure I’m not blaming women. I’m blaming male sexual privilege i.e. social status.
Neither you nor anyone else but me is arming young men and women today with the knowledge they need to raise the real issues and not sidestep them with pop psychology and smarmy self satisfied elitism.
You like to bash on this guy but like I said, it’s a probablistic unlikelihood that women wouldn’t be attracted to him. He wasn’t denied women, women were denied him! Meanwhile, two women do pornos and are bullied to suicide. Where is the real problem? It’s on your side, not mine buddy.
Psychopathy is better reflected by the news and the blogosphere and laughable impotence in dealing with the points I have been raising here and elsewhere for a long time.
In fact men and women are entitled to sex and attention because guess what, those are natural human needs.
The real critical point is with standards of beauty and attraction, but you will never approach a resolution to that point in the manner you are going about here. You are contributing to the problem with your two sided slimy rhetoric and you are only trying to humiliate and disempower victims both male and female alike. You are shameful to say the least.
And as for MRA’s. Misguided trolls dealing with these same issues.
Idk if I mentioned it here, but a few days ago someone showed up in one of the asexual groups i am part of on facebook and started talking about how they were going to become asexual “before something bad happened.” And talked about how there was going to be an incel 9/11.
These people are scary. But you know, I have no reason to fear men and the reason I’m considering getting pepper spray for the first time in my life is I’m just a paranoid woman who hates men.
Hey, thank you, Shadow! I’m still left wondering what the hell my friend thought was so insightful about the video then . . .
So, I’m not really super educated about asexuality, but isn’t that kind of not how it works?
@cupisnique
It’s well substantiated that there’s a ton like him out there, hence his fan base. Asshole atheists is one of the more depressing things I discovered on the internet, which is really saying something.
It isn’t lol. And I told him that and so did many people in the group, but he got very offended because we weren’t being supportive. I would have been supportive had he been not sounded entitled as hell, has brought it up somewhere OTHER than an asexuality group, and had realized asexuality simply means lack of sexual attraction, not death of libido.
He wanted to be chemically castrated, though as I understand that doesn’t work quite that well. Either way I did call him out initially because goddamn I am sick of people talking about “becoming asexual” or telling me how great and easy it must be for me (as a matter of fact, in a society where sex and romance are huge parts of our lives and media, being an asexual aromantic is NOT easy for me).
After I called him out initially a few other people chimed in, and he got angrier and angrier, insisting women all wanted bad boys.
All in all, not sure if he was legit, or a troll who was feeding off the Eliot Rodgers case. I was the day after it happened. Either way it was creepy and annoying.
In all seriousness, is there any internet space where these dudes won’t try to sell their tales of woe? They’ll be on Etsy any day now, whining about how the vendors will only sell to bad boy alphas.
The incel 9/11 comment was one of the last comments he made before we started ignoring him and talking about music taste (I brought up classic love songs as a way to clean your mind of his shit). He was removed from the group and the post removed when the mod woke up the next morning.
Yes, but they all think they’re in the ubermensch category. They’re aggrieved because the inferior people are taking and mooching but they don’t realize that they’ve benefited from big government too. In a Randian utopia they would probably not be at the top of the heap.
I’d love to see a movie where a guy like this is transported into an alternate universe where the we live in a society like this and he learns to be careful what you wish for.
This actually happens in the AVEN group every few weeks or months. Someone along the same vein as this guy will pop up whining about wanting to be asexual and women being evil. It’s rather annoying. And they always try to guilt us too.
Oh! One of my favorite parts from this guy was him insisting that women couldn’t understand the male libido. It’s apparently different for men (tell that to my crazy asexual libido – I have a higher libido than the majority of the people I know who aren’t asexual).
Katz: Gah, the false flags. How can it be a false flag if actual people are actually dead?
The fantasy is this is all a dramatic put-up. No one really died, it was all make-up and actors. By pretending to Rodger killed people a false idea that misogny is rampant can be created, and women/feminists will be able to further their agenda.
This is seriously a style of thinking which various reactionaries engage in. It’s the ENTIRE basis of “Newton Truthers”.
@ pecunium
I assume it’s similar to the whole “Nazi concentration camps never happened” conspiracy theories then?
Atheist/skeptical MRAs are such a contradiction. “I don’t believe in anything without evidence! Now let me tell you about hypergamy and how feminists control the government…”
@Black Linen Sheets, I find it really hard to understand what you’re even going on about, and your refusal to actually engage with people here doesn’t exactly make me want to try.
“False flag” doesn’t necessarily mean the thing didn’t happen. It means person A did the thing and then put person B’s flag on the scene (meaning they made it look like someone else did it). It’s like the standard Truther line that the U.S. did 9/11 and tried to blame it on Arab terrorists.
Yeah. that’s because you posted them in a “no trolls” topic where I had specifically banned anything excessively argumentative. Because people were upset by the murders and none of us wanted to read that sort of bullshit right then, right there. So yeah, if you post something in the one thread where it isn’t allowed, I won’t let it through, genius.