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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.
Nooooooooooo! Though, to be fair, I am probably already facing that for not donating living space, food, and unending attentions and affections to Our Great Overlords, Their Fuzzinesses, The Furrinati. For the most-furred one in my apartment is… the husbutt!
I just came back to catch up on this thread and Sheety . . . well, wasn’t boring to me, I’ll give him that . . . that was a Non-Sequitur Spectacular.
And you have all made me laugh very hard. Harder than ever before. Please say you’ll never make me laugh that hard again.
Grumpycatisagirl:
We will never make you laugh that hard again.
Polar bears are one of three extant marine mammals in the order Carnivora.
One of those statements was true.
Excluding Pinnipedia, for kicks.
That would have worked better if I was awake. Brain is in hibernate.
That’s okay, I’m not awake either, so hahahahaha.
He’s a were-cat! 😯
wow wow wow such entitlement
I see it in the real world too. It’s depressing 🙁
@Racnad
Pop culture in general is pretty messed up in how it portrays sexuality in general. Boys/men should be pursuing sex in all (heterosexual) forms with as many women as possible and if they aren’t getting laid, there’s something wrong with them; girls/women should, of course, be doing the opposite and if they don’t, they’re sluts. Non-het sex isn’t even on the radar, of course.
I’d like to see any sort of sexuality-shaming go the way of the dodo.
On a related note, I had to introduce a client of mine to the MGTOW/MRA etc world yesterday. Long story short, we run live events and one of our videographers had taken extra footage (ie: cutting room floor stuff) of a woman speaking, posted it on YT, and linked to it from a MGTOW forum as an example of something. The woman on the video was alerted to this by someone she didn’t know, who was able to find her in about 5 minutes of googling after seeing the video (which had 10K+ hits and really, really awful comments).
My client asked my opinion of whether we should continue to use this videographer – I said no based on the legal/ethical violation in general (he seriously violated the terms of our agreement with him as per use of material), and then explained to him what MGTOW was and what sort of people this guy exposed this woman to by posting her stuff there. This site was helpful – thanks David 🙂
Dear gods, your client had to ask?
So, just to be clear, you’ve been trying to splain this stuff to us and tell us what our responses to it should be ever since you first showed up here, and it’s only now that you’re actually bothering to check out the source material yourself? Wow, misogynists are so lazy.
titianblue
Oh yes, it can take some time for it to filter through the brain, even of someone who is not explicitly misogynistic, that this is Not Cool. I have always felt that it’s worth the effort to engage in explanation at least once, even if it’s pretty obviously a Hail Mary Pass, since sometimes it works.
I do think we need to get out of the shame trap altogether; it’s immensely destructive and I have never seen anyone benefit from it. When MRAs claim we are creep shaming they are lying; we communicate about guys who deliberately endanger us because they endanger us, and none of us are under the illusion that a guy who endangers women is going to stop doing it because a woman successfully made him ashamed of himself. That sort of fairy tale is fine in fairy tales but in the real world it is incredibly dangerous.
It’s also an example of the false equivalences which the MRAs try to push, and I decline absolutely to sign up to any of those false equivalences…
So I read some of what the troll posted. Apparently, if a woman says “no” she’s violating the “basic human rights” of a man and that man’s “right’s” are more important than her right bodily autonomy.
This type of thinking comes from the notion that sex is a basic need (which it isn’t) A lot of boys/men seem to think like that, unfortunately. Some think they would die without sex. Some think it’s as important as eating,drinking, pooping and peeing (which are actually basic human needs). Hell, even those needs don’t trump another human being’s right to bodily autonomy.
Male entitlement is fucking annoying. And also DEADLY. Get it in your heads, trolls.
Thankfully, it seems like more and more men are becoming aware of how messed up this type of thinking and behavior is. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.
@titianblue Yeah, he had to ask. He’s very non-confrontational, but jeez – this was a no-brainer. For me the ethical violation was enough, and was compounded by the context in which he posted this woman’s video. Client was willing to give him another shot, for chrissakes, until I explained why the context made this extra special bad (I had to resort to “If he had posted video of you in the Stormfront forum as an example of why Jewish people suck and a bunch of neo-nazi folk then used you as a point of discussion, would you be so willing to keep him on?” to make him see that this was also motivated by bigotry/prejudice)
I’ve never really, really grokked how often misogyny/sexism gets a pass, or is completely overlooked (as in not even seen/noticed) until all this ER shit, and then with my client yesterday. How some people don’t WANT to see, because it’s uncomfortable. Even how some women don’t see it, because it’s always been there as noise in the background. And it makes me wonder what I don’t see, or refuse to see.
But hey, everyone is entitled to sex, with one catch.
Guess what that can be!
Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahaha!
It’s the “fish don’t have a word for water” thing. Misogyny is everywhere, our culture is steeped in it, and it’s particularly easy for those who never experience it, and indeed benefit, even unwittingly, from it, to be utterly unaware of it.
If you’re white then I’m guessing the thing you sometimes don’t see is racism. My parents lived in Texas for a while when I was a teenager, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to a. notice how weirdly polite some black men were to me, and how much they went out of their way to be super respectful even when they were old enough to be in the can-tell-me-to-shut-up-and-go-do-my-homework category from my perspective, and b. figure out why they might have been socialized to react to me that way, especially when there were a bunch of white men around.
I like this guy’s sign. It says:
“Violence against women begins with a belief and ends with an action. It’s time to address the former and not just the latter”
Which is spot on IMO.
@Cassandrakitty
Or, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams:
I remember telling a friend years ago that the reason why “it’s a white thing, you wouldn’t understand” isn’t a valid concept is that, in the US, not understanding ‘the white thing’ is potentially lethal (for a PoC). White privilege is the freedom not to realize that.
Yep. It tends to be easier to explain this concept to people who’re lacking privilege on at least one axis, and from there to get them to see how it applies to all kinds of different situations. How you explain it to straight middle class white dudes, who can get through life just fine without seeing anyone else’s perspective if they choose to…well, we’re probably farther ahead on curing cancer than we are on that particular project.
Which of course is that it not extends to sex with others.
I think there’s an argument to be made that sex is a basic human urge (for a majority of humans) and that the freedom to pursue sex and other forms of companionship shouldn’t be restricted (by, say, the sending of children into celibate church life or the criminalization of extramarital sex, etc). But as Kittehs and others have pointed out, when you frame sex as a basic right, you run into the issue of who is going to provide it, and risk putting Person B on the chopping block to meet person A’s “right” to sex.
There’s also the fact that wehn we point it out, we are often told we’re overreacting or reading too much into things. Women are basically gaslit en masse into thinking misogyny doesn’t exists.
Yup. Once I got my brain around homophobia and misogyny (being bi and female), it wasn’t a huge leap to understand what (for example) PoC and trans people were saying about their own experiences. It’s part of why I’m so frustrated with white feminists expressing other oppressive *isms: how do you not see the same patterns at work?