In this edition of Misogyny Theater, we hear from pickup guru Roosh V, who has some thoughts about the female Men’s Rights Activists – FeMRAs – that we’ve seen so much of in the media of late.
He doesn’t much like them. Not because they’re hateful nitwits like their male comrades in the Men’s Rights movement. But because, you know, they’re women, representatives of what Roosh so memorably calls “a gender who has no loyalty to men.”
He accuses them of pandering to men for attention, and accuses male MRAs, in turn, of being too easily ensnared by their feminine wiles. It’s a mirror image of the accusations that MRAs like to throw at male feminists, and likely to infuriate more than a few MRAs, both male and female.
All of Roosh’s bits in this video come from his recent video “The Men’s Rights Movement Is Making A Huge Mistake.” I’ve indicated all my edits with beeps.
We may be seeing more from Roosh in Misogyny Theater in the future. For the dating-guru-cum-reactionary philosopher, from his secret lair located somewhere in Siberia – no, really, he has literally exiled himself to Siberia — has announced in another video his plans to take over YouTube over the course of the next year or so.
Will he be able to do it? On the one hand, he’s a reactionary woman-hating piece of shit, which means that he should be able to appeal to YouTube’s vast reactionary woman-hating piece of shit demographic. And he has managed to build up his Return of Kings blog into a must-read site for terrible people; a quick check with web traffic monitor Alexa shows that, trafficwise, ROK is trouncing the most popular Men’s Rights site, A Voice for Men.
On the other, as you may have gathered from this video, he has about as much charisma as a sack of potatoes. Stay tuned.
I think a lot of mythologies have some version of “one set of gods replaces another” (eg, the Greek gods supplanting the Titans). What I learned was that this happens when one human culture replaces another and then tries to syncretize the two mythologies.
*knows nothing of tabletop RPGs.* Except for Munchkin! I like Munchkin.
I like how Roosh is all ‘having women in the movement will attract men desperate for attention from women’.
Isn’t that pretty much everybody in his audience at this point? I mean, all the MRAs who don’t actually do any activism seem to be whining about how women aren’t talking to them/having sex with them/making them sandwiches.
They did seem to appropriate all sorts of characters from all sorts of places.
I loved that in the original printing of Dieties & Demigods, they included both Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and Elric of Melniboné. My little teenage fantasy-loving heart was touched by that. Especially since they gave Mouser some levels as a Magic-User.
I find it oddly depressing how none of my younger friends have even heard of Fafhrd and the Mouser….
@Katz:
True. But Irish mythology really goes over the top with it: seven waves of colonizers.
That’s a lot of oppressing the locals for one set of myths.
I echo the sentiment of runsinbackground. From what I have heard about Roosh and observed over time he has no tolerance for anyone person or group that does not think or agree with him. He deletes comments that he does not like on his blog. His blog has over time been known for the many anti gay sentiments his followers post on it. It is a shame he even has gullible followers to his blog.
Infighting is funny.
Wow, I didn’t know that!
Well, seven or five or four, depending on which of the many available texts you want to reference (a fairly common problem when studying Irish mythology; there’s a lot of sources, and they rarely agree on many of the details).
But no matter which one you go with, it’s a lot of colonizing by outsiders.
They also had the Cthulhu Mythos, which was, at the time, my first introduction to H.P. Lovecraft anything. I seriously had no idea what these things were supposed to be (wait, is this a real religion somewhere in the world?) and it wasn’t until years later I ran into the Mythos again and realized, “Oh, that’s what that was.”
@Gaebolga: I only got into the hobby after 1995. Anything from 1st Edition or earlier is like a treasure for me. I would like to get my hands on one of those Deities books with all the copyright theft in it.
It’s interesting to compare the source mythology with what the game makes of it.
On the other hand, I have threatened to make a dungeon with all the dorky D&D monsters in it, starting with the flail snail and going from there.
Will there be a flumph?
Oh man, the Mythos is all over real early D&D. Anything penned by Gary Gygax has a good chance of having some hidden, weird altar that has a chance of driving your character mad or granting a boon. There’s LOST TEMPLE OF THARIZDUN, of course, but there’s also a weird chapel in STEADING OF THE HILL GIANT CHIEF.
(All-capsing the names of modules is the way to go, donchaknow.)
You bet yer sweet Polikarpov.
For some reason, Lovecraft didn’t do it for me until I was in college. I mean, I read some of his short stories as a kid, but they didn’t seem particularly scary to me (this was after I had been utterly terrified by the first horror movie I ever saw – Alien – when I was ten; I guess existential eldritch horror is a bit less horrifying after seeing a xenomorph bust out of a guys chest at the dinner table…).
I fixed the alexa link. Well, replaced it with two that (reportedly) work. It is pretty appalling how much traffic ROK gets. Even Roosh’s blog, which he updates only irregularly, does nearly as well trafficwise as AVFM. Clearly he is better at trolling with completely obnoxious articles than AVFM is.
Kitties!
… wait, was Roosh in that video as well?
Never mind.
I’d vote for a passing comet.
I know these guys are hard to listen to, oh lord do I know. I try to keep these videos as short as possible. And I think I’ll keep adding kitties to them as well.
Another massive Gygax-D&D borrowing from Lovecraft was in THE SHRINE OF THE KUO-TOA (Falconer, I will abide by the capitalization concept), where the titular Kuo-Toa were just Deep Ones from “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” But the Kuo-Toa worship a lobster-headed goddess with the delightful name of Blibdoolpoolp.
CONFIDENTIAL TO WOODY: You know you have to pass a troll challenge before you can comment here again, right? It’s actually a really really easy challenge. But you are failing it magnificently so far.
On the other hand, I have threatened to make a dungeon with all the dorky D&D monsters in it, starting with the flail snail and going from there.
Heh.
I recall when I was younger getting sick of our groups hack’n’sack ways, and deciding to take ov er DMing intelligently in an earlier AD&D game. So I found some sort of a beasty I can’t recall the name of right now – a illusion slinging not very powerful mage type who looked like and hung around with goblins, and had a couple of them with a goblin tribe causing havoc in the local region. Viola – instant opposition.
The players figured I was being tricky (“Goblins? Too easy”) and scouted around, finding the back door out. However, it just had a raised dais with a very mild magical glow and a rockfall blocking any way further in. They couldn’t figure out anything to do there – there wasn’t anything – so they went in the front door.
After running into a few encounters which demonstrated just how nasty goblins could be on their home turf with a LITTLE bit of magical backup (the secret door right where the magic-users of the party would congregate as the party attacked a prepared barrier was greatly disconcerting), they finally had the payoff with the goblins pulling back and me saying that “in front of you the corridor opens into a large room. There’s a figure looking like a goblin wearing a robe waving its hands around and chanting in the middle of the room.
Cue the firing off of lightening bolts and fireballs. Remember what I said about slinging illusions? Have you ever seen a party get decimated by their OWN spells as they go off in a confined corridor that just looks like a huge room? I fudged it a little and had the mage-types miscalculate and also get caught in the blast, killing one and leaving the other grabbing a sack and running for the exit, closely pursued by the two remaining fighters of the party, who are smoking around the edges. They manage to see it run onto a dais on a dead end next to a corridor closed off by a rockfall – and dimension door (short distance teleport as an innate skill) through to the dais at the exit – which, of course, they had practiced between those two spots before closing the back exit. The party hadn’t thought to leave anything on that other dais.
So the party finds pretty much crap left behind – all the valuable transportable stuff got away. The remaining goblins are evacuating, and running away from them. And after they got back from getting everyone healed, the place was deserted with nothing to show for it.
And that was because I played a couple of dorky 16 INT monsters the way they should be played.
Adding more kitties to anything is a pretty safe bet, and it seems to piss off the manospherians.
>Ah yes, Siberia, known for it’s overabundance of sexy, young, single ladies.
Well it’s at least know for its attractive women. Though that could just as well be the result of its remoteness making it a cavans for people to project such fantasies on the region.
Surprisingly not too much! That one was a statistical fluke (Every character rolled 1, 3, 4, or 5 on their saves). I feel somewhat bad about it even today. It was all compounded by our shared agreement to play until everyone died for this one shot adventure beer and pretzels adventure. An adventure that ended with everyone disemboweled by a monster.
Haven’t ever actually killed any player characters beyond that. Sort of go out of my way to avoid it. I guess I’m a bit odd like that, since essentially my thinking is that if everyone dies, it rather stops the game – and I enjoy playing, so killing all the characters is an exercise in exactly the wrong kind of escalation compared to the sort of game I like to run.
In most typical D&D campaigns, there’s so many other interesting fail states than “You ran out of hitpoints” so I do tend to include a surprising and varied amount of ways in which anyone can suffer tremendous, terrible things without ever being outright killed. Like the custom 200 table of mutations or the randomly generated curses table (it’s actually just an old wild magic chart with some extras). Ultimately, I guess I enjoy the “fail in interesting ways” school of thought, because it keeps the game itself going while changing the circumstances of the situation as it is.
But then I play with people who are fine with that, and I don’t think we’ve ever actually done a hack and slash burn burn kill maim campaign. The total humanoid body count for our last 3.5 campaign was… like, 8 guys? Over 9 levels? Hell, at one point, they tried saving some of the pirates who had only minutes before been attacking their vessel from an unspeakable crime against nature. Nice chaps, those heroes.
Oh wait, no. No. We decided to end it since people were moving away and stuff, bu the final confrontation with a dwarf who had siphoned of eldritch power from an avatar of a god did end with 3 out of 4 party members unconscious and dying, a warehouse on fire and a xenophobic cannibal lizardman slitting the throat of various unconscious hostile type dwarves. Given that he didn’t have first aid, I assume that actually means I’ve killed 3 players. But they were stabilizng, so I don’t know if it counts.
… incidentally, what my players don’t yet know is that the new campaign is in the same world some decades later and they’re all about to have a rude re-introduction to the Schaefer and Sons Entrepreneurial Enterprises.
I play a lot of roguelikes, so I get my enjoyment of permanent death and restarts when dungeon dwelling there. I think a shared cooperative game between everyone is less interesting if you turn it into a game of Ongoing Combat Tactics. Doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy playing in those games (I rather do!) but then it’s the sort where I need to be a player character myself, rather than behind the machinations of the world.
You should always have an unspeakable alter to your local Monstrous Being From Beyond The Veil of Reality(tm) behind a random wall in your dungeon. Those seeping tendrils of pure chaos is what keeps the rats away!
Hah. Sounds like a round of Tucker’s Kobolds. Goblins can be terrifying. Kobolds too.
I do like the “This is actually a corridor” illusion. Figures it’d be the exact kind of thing an illusionist would actually use.
As long as he feels better after pounding angrily on his keyboard, that’s what matters. 🙂
Thanks for fixing the links, David.
This video was bearable only because Roosh wasn’t talking about his favourite topic.
I believe that Vox Day also warned AVFM about those treacherous ladypeople. His prediction was that the feMRAs would take over and turn AVFM into a feminist organization, or at least make it much less manly, if I recall correctly, which is one of his standard things – let women into any organization and they ruin it.