[CONTENT WARNING: Misogynistic violence, rape apologia]
His complaint was a familiar one:
I think every girl is a type of slut, they are fussy with men nowadays, they do not give boys like us a chance.
You can find nearly identical laments in the profiles of self-described “nice guys” on OkCupid, on Men’s Rights blogs, and on forums for self-described “Incels” comisserating about their “involuntary celibacy” and what they see as the shallowness of young women.
But these words actually come from a video filmed by Ben Moynihan, a British teenager who was convicted of attempted murder earlier this week after stabbing three women in an attempt to take a sort of revenge upon the “weaker” gender he felt had made his life miserable by denying him sex. Another young man trying to punish women with violence for the “crime” of not dating him.
“I am still a virgin,” he wrote in one note. “Everyone is losing it before me, that’s why you are my chosen target.” In another note, he declared that “all women needs to die and hopefully next time I can gauge [sic] their eyes out.”
Moynihan’s twisted logic is of course eerily similar to that of Elliot Rodger, who went on a shooting spree in Isla Vista last spring in an attempt to “punish” women for their lack of interest in dating him, which he declared to be “a crime that can never be forgiven.”
Thankfully, Moynihan, unlike Rodger, was captured by police before he actually succeeded in killing anyone.
Not so thankfully, both of these men have their fans, including some amongst the usual suspects I write about on this blog. On the incel hangout slutHATE – the successor to PUAhate, on which Elliot Rodger was an occasional commenter – both Rodger and Moynihan have become heroes of a sort to some of the more bitter commenters. Or at least the source of much amusement.
In response to news about Moynihan’s trial, one slutHATEr posted a thread asking “Okay, which one of you did this?” “A new supreme gentleman rises,” wrote another in a different thread devoted to the would-be killer.
A third commenter, going by the name Homesick Alien, asked the question “Are Females days numbered?” listing an assortment of incels who’d killed “females” in an act of twisted “revenge” for their lackluster or nonexistent dating lives. In the comments, Homesick Alien chillingly wrote that
I’m sure someone somehow is rightfully very rageful currently planning the next shooting spree . We can only hope it’ll be more elaborate. Female entitlement is off the charts now, they are out of control,. It’s about time they are put in their fucking place.
Another posted a link to Rodger’s 150-page manifesto, suggesting that “it has the potential to motivate incels to damage the females.”
In a thread from several months ago, a slutHATEr calling himselt NewGenious119 went after fellow incels for not supporting shooting sprees enthusiastically enough.
Seriously, is there something mentally wrong with you? Thinking that a school full of sluts and frat stars getting slain by an incel is a bad thing is characteristic of a normalfag mindset. Our ONLY hope for ever getting to fuck multiple hot sluts is if there are enough incels in the western world who snap and cause bloodshed. It’s the only way that sluts and alphas will realize and accept that there are serious consequences for allowing so many males to live their lives in misery.
Emphasis mine.
As it turned out, there was no need for him to worry that other incels didn’t support spree killngs aimed at “sluts,” as assorted commenters soon let him know.
The rogue MRA and American-Women-Boycotter who calls himself John Rambo seconded his sentiment, writing
I wouldn’t do one myself. But I wouldn’t prevent one from happening if I knew it would as long as I wouldn’t die or a girl that willing to fuck me would. …
Honestly, I truly have very little sympathy for the victims.
A commenter calling himself Worthless Trash only had one complaint: that the death tolls weren’t higher.
I just wish these guys would make better plans and kill their targets and more of them, but sadly most of them have a weakened will-power after all the years of rejections and maybe bullying.
Also i don’t care if it will solve the problem or not, i just feel better hearing this, it’s like divine justice, they feel so superior but in the end they die like worms, just like they treat other guys, like worms, so in the end we are all equal.
Still others offered their assent:
I personally rejoice whenever I hear news of a school shooting.
The higher the death count, the better
i like their kill count high, because it’s always satisfying seeing someone arrogant going from rich to poor, beautiful too ugly from popular to dead
While a few commenters spoke out against the idea of mass murder as a reasonable response to a lack of dates, they were in the distinct minority.
And then there was this guy:
i support ERism [Elliot Rodgerism], but I would never do it myself, my brother is a doctor and his career would be ruined if our family name ever got tarnished
It would be a little easier to dismiss all this as merely internet dumbassery, were it not for the fact that Rodger went out and killed 6 people after posting similar comments on the message board that later became slutHATE.
While commenters like these are a distinct minority even in the sordid world of the manosphere, the sad and scary fact is that there are a frightening number of young and not-so-young men who have embraced one of the central assumptions of the murder-spree-supporting incels of slutHATE – the notion that women who put “nice guys” in the “friend zone” are committing some kind of crime against them, and deserve to be punished for it, individually or collectively.
You can see variations on this in assorted memes attacking women – much as Moynihan and Rodgers did – for supposedly preferring “bad boys” and assholes over the “nice guys” of the world.
Other “friend zone” memes are a bit darker.
And darker still:
And somehow even darker than that:
And we’re just begun to scratch the surface here.
In a followup post, I will look at the ways in which the rampant “slutbashing” of Men’s Rights Activists and other manosphere denizens helps to feed the toxic culture of aggrieved sexual entitlement that has contributed to violence against women.
So…Why the hell are these guys and the groups who support them being listed with the “authorities” as hate groups and terrorist groups? Could it be because it is only women who are the targets? Am I sounding paranoid?
ARGH!!!!!!
(smacking head with keyboard) Why are these guys NOT being…?
Words. Where are my words?
I think I’ve lost them.
Slut does not mean “females who won’t fuck me.” Maybe if he wasn’t so busy torturing the english language, he could have gotten a date or two.
It’s at times like this I think, wouldn’t it be a fucking hoot if men were actually scared of women, even just for a little while?
The sheer irony of these same men advocating/threatening to kill women who refuse to have sex with them, juxtaposed against the idea that these are the exact same assholes that want to police how PoC respond to actual injustices.
Nope, nope. I not only can’t even…I won’t even!
You wrote exactly what I was going to, samantha.
Everything about this is just monstrous. I feel like I can only sort of nudge at the edges of it because to try to process the whole thing would just be too much.
Edge 1: Surely it’s ridiculous to call women who’ve turned you down “sluts”–setting aside the fact that it’s just a pointless word in any case, obviously they’re more choosy than you’re giving them credit for
Edge 2: I am endlessly unsurprised by the crossover between incel talk and the endless MRA revulsion for women who aren’t supermodels. It seems to cross none of their minds that if they had early on included average-sized, average-looking women in the group they call “women,” they might not have reached the bitter desperation that makes them undateable for absolutely everyone who values her pulse.
Plenty of awkward, lonely guys find awkward, lonely girls and are happy–but rare is the awkward, lonely person of any gender who ends up with an underwear model, and that’s the only kind of woman they’re considering. (Hell, rare is the outgoing, sociable person who winds up with an underwear model–they’re pretty thin on the ground.)
How can people think they are heroes. How. Elliot Rodger tore apart my college community and caused so much pain and suffering. The fact that people think he’s a hero adds insult to injury. Every time I think I’ve healed and moved on from it something like this will bring me straight back to that terrible night and the following weekend. I want to get better but how can I when people think he’s a hero and I’m in fear of it happening again.
How can people think they are heroes. How. Elliot Rodger tore apart my college community and caused so much pain and suffering. The fact that people think he’s a hero adds insult to injury. Every time I think I’ve healed and moved on from it something like this will bring me straight back to that terrible night and the following weekend. I want to get better but how can I when people think he’s a hero and I’m in fear of it happening again.
I… UH…?
“Female entitlement is off the charts now”
*angrily points to the “When Women Refuse” tumblr*
That’s all I can say. I’m at a loss for words right now.
I hate how stupid they think women are for being able to see that they obviously hate women despite how many kindness coins they put in. Above sense of humor, most women have “thinks women are people” as a based assumption that the person they would want to spend their time/life with agrees in the whole personhood thing.
Men who hate women absolutely hate people being able to put words onto things. Like the song says, mansplainer may be a buzzword, but it doesn’t mean a man explaining things. It’s a man explaining things, talking down to the person they’re explaining it too while also assuming that he knows more about the topic than the woman does, regardless of the woman’s credentials. They get furious that women are able to see the invitation of going back “for coffee” while turning around and demanding to know what the person attacked expected, going back up to a hotel room alone.
I got into a youtube argument, trying to explain why “rape victim” aren’t used when talking about sexual assault survivors, and when he lost, terribly, he came back with how did I feel about the ERA not being able to pass. I pointed out I was Canadian and then asked him how it felt to be part of the first generation where the privilege of being a white-straight-male will never mean as little as it did in the history of white-straight-maleness? He didn’t get back to me.
So… women who won’t fuck men literally deserve to die, and it’s WOMEN who are the entitled ones?
I feel so sick. This is the kind of shit that makes me never want to leave the house, because the thought of coming across someone who thinks like this is sickening and terrifying,
“Plenty of awkward, lonely guys find awkward, lonely girls and are happy”
And there are plenty of awkward, lonely guys who are sad that they’re lonely but recognise that they can’t control women, they can only control their own selves. It’s comforting to remember that the vast majority of guys would never ever blame all women everywhere for their lack of a girlfriend.
‘*angrily points to the “When Women Refuse” tumblr*’
I feel lucky that the only thing remotely bad that happened when I refused a guy’s number was that he plastered on this self-deprecating smile and said “oh it’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” (No, asshole, it’s because you’re a total stranger who came up to me on the street. I managed to negotiate him down to him giving me *his* number instead. Which I promptly lost. OOPS.)
For such “nice guys” these fellas sure do like rape and murder.
http://i1302.photobucket.com/albums/ag137/nelsonmonty/nope_zpsbcc14df0.gif
I really would like to know why being a virgin, having women say they do not want to have sex with you, or feeling that you are not very attractive have become reasons for murderous rage. Being a teen/ young person is usually a time of uncertainty, insecurity, believing that everyone else is out there having a better time than you – this is REALLY COMMON for boys and girls. Where the hell did this group of boys/ men learn their view of life?!
I have 2 teen sons, obviously as they have a feminist mother they have a different perspective than many, but SURELY MOST families bring up their kids to have realistic expectations, and not burst into rages if they do not get what they want? I dealt with all that before my kids were FIVE. I know that this isn’t just parental failure, but the poisonous attitudes out there do not appeal to people who have been parented with consistent love, acceptance and respect for others.
But toxic masculinity isn’t a thing.
From what I understand, hate and terrorism against women isn’t tracked by anyone because it’s too big of a job. No, really, that’s the story I’ve heard: tracking hatred against women would be such a big job that nobody wants to start trying.
I find it weird that these guys, for all their hatred directed at women, never take into account that men do plenty of shitty things to other men – and quite frequently, at that. Of course even if the majority of horrible people they came across were men, dislike towards them is never gendered as it is with women. Guys are just “assholes” or “shitheads” – they’re never “whores”, “sluts”, “cunts”, “bitches”, etc. Maybe it’s just me but for every woman I just don’t get along with, there’s three guys who I like even less. Mostly because the people who have made my life miserable to some degree or another have generally been men, including people I was stupid enough to consider “friends” at one point and treat me like shit ’cause, hey, that’s a “guy thing.”
It’d be one thing if they had relationship troubles and frustrated about that (I know I can be), that’d be understandable, but their blaming women for all the trouble in their lives is an absurd conclusion to come to. But I suppose this sort of thing comes about with privileged people who are, in comparison with less developed parts of the world, pretty well-off when they lack the sort of troubles whose importance would overshadow the supposed need to get laid or not having to hear people discuss feminism on the internet. Alternatively, they’re lives are just so empty that they focus on their most base desire and see any obstacle to fulfill it as an attack on their person.
A guy can get sexually frustrated, but nonetheless deal with it in a constructive and healthy manner. The reaction of “let’s kill random women ’cause a few refused to sleep with me on command!” is obviously neither and really can’t be excused as “fantasizing” at this point. They obviously obsess over it and then take out that anger on people who never actually wronged them in any tangible way.
Gah! “Their”, not “they’re” – not sure how I keep making that mistake…
I think one of the main things linking all these guys, and at least partly the cause of their problems, is an inability to tell fiction from reality. When you find it extremely difficult to connect with the world and others you find it easier to see the world through fiction, which explains everything for you and actively tries to connect with you (think GamerGate’s farcically over-the-top MMO/war rhetoric).
When I read a transcript of Elliot Roger’s video, the part that stood out to me was his insistence that university is a massive fuckfest he wasn’t invited to. As a student I can see this isn’t true, and it’s only portrayed like that to that extent by the American media. Roger had an existential crisis at least in part because he couldn’t deal with real life not being what the TV told him.
Think about it, when you look at American romance stories and subplots what do you see? Universally attractive women falling over themselves for unattractive men, often for no reason at all. Movies like Knocked Up practically state that chubby manchildren deserve to have a supermodel walk into their life and fuck them into maturity, and a fair number of its audience members walk out thinking just that. No effort required on their part, they just need to be nice and she’ll swoon right into their arms.
There’s also the utter obsession with sex that comes with any sexually-repressed culture, presenting losing one’s virginity as some grand step in maturing, and not having done it by a certain age being worthy of mockery. These kids have no connection to reality outside of the media they consume, and their inability to live up to its ridiculous standards causes them to collapse in on themselves into black holes of misanthropy.
This is disgusting. A bunch of selfish, whiny, evil brats don’t get laid and so that means they must kill all women? What scum. They think they just deserve sex because they’re men? It’s absolutely terrifying how many of these sick f*cks are out in the world.
“Think about it, when you look at American romance stories and subplots what do you see? Universally attractive women falling over themselves for unattractive men, often for no reason at all. Movies like Knocked Up practically state that chubby manchildren deserve to have a supermodel walk into their life and fuck them into maturity, and a fair number of its audience members walk out thinking just that.”
I would love to see a movie where the schlubby, Former Highschool Nerd learns that part of being a grown-up is learning to deal with the baggage you pick up during adolescence, including getting over Becky-Sue going to the Prom with that asshole Rusty the quarterback, all because he had the nerve to ask her instead of secretly pining for her and hoping she’d read his mind.
Or a movie where the male lead, after being dumped by his girlfriend because he doesn’t have his shit together (meaning, steady employment, paying bills, other grown-up stuff), hooks up with a woman who pulls the same crap he did (losing her job after a week, sits on the couch all day in a nest of junk food, expects him to fund and support her unfeasible dream careers) and finds out how un-fun it is to be the only responsible adult in a relationship.
– Policy of Madness
Sorry, but these ****stains infuriate me past the point of functioning human empathy.
DAVID – please delete that last part of my post (or the whole thing, and i’ll repost minus the wishing horrible fate upon these ******** part).
Cyberwulf, have you ever considered becoming a screenwriter?
@filmrunner – more and more, lol. I do write a lot of fanfiction.