[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.
Ha ha ha. That story makes my Internet day.
Viewaskew:
Believe it or not, I (at least kinda) know that feel too. I was way preoccupied with sex from puberty until perimenopause. I felt like a freaky bag of walking raging hormones and wasted a lot of time wondering if other girls felt this way since they didn’t seem to. But as a girl/woman, (in the 70’s and 80’s, anyway) it was *never* okay for me to be open about it. Trying to even just confide it made me a social pariah; other women side eye you so hard it hurts and guys just turn into slavering beasts. I never even had anyone to commiserate with.
That was the inner life of one of the many girls no one looked at twice in middle or high school. I got through it by practicing the fine art of self-love back before (and just at the beginning of) the time when masturbation became okay. So, yeah. Piling on the “citation needed” bandwagon for that statement up there.
WatermelonSugar:
I think you’re quite right about that; there are some things I feel I missed out on. I was enough of a brainiac to be able to pretty much sail through classes in spite of my sexual preoccupation but I feel now that I could have gotten much more out of it and my life in general.
Not to jump on you, but I know there are commenters here who have been or have family members who have been in mental institutions, so maybe that’s not a good shorthand for attempted murderers.
>high-five<
Ain't Karma grand? It doesn't always work out like that…but when it does, it's awesome.
And even if you don’t get awesome-sauce Karma, you still get to survive, improve, find your own way, and say “At least I’m not one of those schleps who peaked in high school!” So that, too, is a win.
And look, incels — NO ONE GOT KILLED. Not a drop of blood was shed. Not even so much as a slap to the face was dealt. And we STILL got satisfaction!
>pointing< See, incels, THIS is how you do it. It's not so hard. Try it and see. (And welcome, dhag85!)
@dhag85: 😀 That’s sort of how relationships are, too. You pick an eclair from the lazy susan, and hope you didn’t get the poisoned one.
Eclairs, by the way, are delish. I can’t recommend them enough.
It’s interesting how early on, some people learn to internalize rejection (“something’s wrong with me”) and others externalize it (“something’s wrong with her”). It’s like, okay, I put myself put there and got rebuffed, and now there’s this big bad-tasting ball of awkwardness that needs to be dealt with. Someone has to own it. Is it gonna be me, or the other person? It seems more noble to absorb the awkwardness yourself, even if you know on some level it’s not anything you did wrong.
Eventually most people grow out of that phase and are able to let the big bad-tasting ball of awkwardness just sit there. It doesn’t have to have an owner, or an explanation.
This is entirely irrelevant, but when I was in high school we all had code names for the boys we liked so we could talk about them, and mine was eclair.
Catching up on all these comments. Sorry if this thought seems random, but it’s related to something someone said a few hundred comments back.
Sometimes (often) on the interwebs I use screen names that don’t indicate my gender. I also very rarely state my gender when posting comments, for example. This, despite not actually being a woman, has brought me to the point where I feel like I’ve had more than a lifetime supply of misogynist slurs, creepy stalker behavior, random stranger dudes saying they love me out of the blue, sudden bursts of intense anger, etc.
I feel like it might be a learning experience for most guys to just go use the internet posing as a woman for a few days. Just being mistaken for a woman has sure opened my eyes, and of course I realize actually being a woman 24/7 is a completely different situation altogether.
@Bina
Thanks! I’ve been around for a while as a reader, and even made a few comments here and there. But the welcome still applies. 🙂
I’d like to know where I said that these guys should be given attention or coddled for bad behavior, as I have repeatedly said that their behavior and beliefs (but not their feelings) should be judged. But actually your example about the toddler throwing a fit is a perfect example.
After your toddler throws a fit over something silly, as toddler’s do, do you explain how they could behave better, or how they could use their anger to solve their problems, or how their unrealistic expectations cause their issues, or do you tell them that their feelings are silly and irrational? (remember the implication of this statement is always YOU’RE silly and irrational). Because if you do tell your kids that their wrong to feel the way they do, that’s gaslighting.
And a fit is a behavior, not an feeling.
I keep on hearing you guys speak of “reasonable” anger. Which is all well and good, except for the million dollar question; who exactly gets to decide what’s “reasonable”?
How is what your saying any different from men who tell women that they’re “paranoid” when women express feelings that they don’t understand or agree with?
They don’t deserve to be invalidated either. It’s nobody’s place to judge whether or not someone else’s feelings are valid or not. For example, people with OCD sometimes have a sexual obsession concerning children, they realize it’s wrong and feel horrified, nut should they be judged just for having these sexual thoughts? “Sneering condescension” sounds like a behavior, but ignoring that, pretty much everyone picks up some racism or sexism from our culture. Should people be judged for being products of their culture, or should they be judged by how they behave?
If anyone has any tips on how to get along in this place, I’m all ears.
@mrex
Wait.. these guys aren’t actually toddlers, right? And feminist women aren’t actually their mommies, right? Just checking.
I REALLY want this man to be diagnosed with some sort of mental illness because if he is not considered to be subject to some kind of disorder or illness this behaviour will be seen as falling into the realm of normal by the kind of males who follow the various sites mentioned in these comments.
Even if he is there will probably be some apologia for him, but at least it will be there in black and white that there was more to it than the fact he couldn’t have sex with the kind of woman he wanted.
What a cute little tortoise!
I laughed, to my shame, while watching the giant tortoises try. It was the squeak of the male’s foot against the female’s shell that did it.
‘If you don’t look like [insert supermodel name here], you’re shit out of luck.’
And even [insert supermodel name here] doesn’t look like [supermodel].
I don’t know, mrex, you seem to be rather hung up on this whole point about emotions.
One might even say that you’re…hooked on a feeling.
dhag85 – I guess currently people might look at your kitties and see the ‘hag’ in your username. Reclaiming the word hag was popular with many women in the 70s.
mrex – it would not be gaslighting to tell your child that their feelings are wrong – gaslighting is the deliberate attempt to make another person believe something that is not actually happening in order to have them question their sanity. It would simply be a poor choice of how to try and reinforce desirable behaviours, as you would reinforce in the child a sense of being bad and wrong (not insane) when they did not produce the desirable behaviours.
I don’t talk to them about it at all, yet. They don’t have the attention span, for one. I distract them, redirect them, or carry on with childcare if they get mad that I picked them up.
But the people throwing fits because they think the Universe should just shower them in pussy wouldn’t react well to a nice, calm talk like that. People have tried. Best thing to do is ignore ’em, and hope maybe they’ll learn better eventually.
And, like dhag85 said, they aren’t toddlers and I’m not their daddy.
@katz
Us too. It made banal interactions much more thrilling and espionage-like. Mine was Fish (his last name sounded vaguely like Haddock). Was eclair based on anything, or just random?
My husband once told me that the single most appealing thing about me when he was getting to know me was that I seemed to be entirely comfortable with my life as I was living it. My enthusiastic and persistent pursuit of him was clearly not an attempt to ‘fix’ my life, but to share it with him.
When I read things like Viewaskew and Tom Trollerson, it makes me marvel at just how tough it is being a straight man in modern America. Guess I really lucked out there. /sarc
@Ellesar
Haha, these are just my initials – the “hag” in there is accidental. However, I never use this name online. (I guess I’m signed in through wordpress, and this is my wordpress user name? I don’t computer very well, but I think I’ll change this user name eventually.)
I often use a screen name ending with the letter “i”, which I think leads some people to assume I’m a woman. (Some have even stated this as a reason, and then politely changed their insults from “c*nt” to “mangina”.)
Sometimes one momentarily forgets.
Yeah, Ellesar, let’s not go there. It will not go over well and that’s not an argument I particularly want to get into today. Can we just not? Like not even discuss mental illness in that context?
If someone doesn’t bring it up themselves, as in “this is a thing I deal with,” then we don’t go there at all.
@katz
I lol’d.
There are a few words we don’t use here. “Crazy” is one that comes up a lot. Don’t use it here. We don’t care if you use it in your personal life or on other sites, just please don’t use it here. You might try “Reality disagrees.”
Don’t wish harm or death on anyone. You might try “May they step on a Lego.”
Don’t tell folks what it’s like to be a woman, a person of color, a trans person, anything like that unless you are one.
If someone tells you you’ve stepped on their toes here in the comments, don’t double down. Apologize. It doesn’t have to be florid and abasing, just simple. Then listen to people explain why what you said hurt them.
Flounces are scored out of 10. Every comment you make after you announce a flounce carries a -2 penalty. I think the record holder had something like -20/10.
Ha, it cracks me up that other people did this too! He was eclair because all the boys on the basketball team had donut-related names because of Dunkin’ Donuts, and now it all seems overly complicated.
Fair enough. It would be psychological abuse, either way.
It’s debatable whether these guys have matured past toddlerhood, but feminists/women are definitely not their mommies. Regardless, we still are responsible for how we treat others.
I’m not suggesting that we actually parent these guys.
Ok, I really laughed at that.
And yeah, I’m a woman, with mental illnesses, who has rage and many violent emotions that I “shouldn’t”. I can relate to being judged for feeling them. I thought I was a bad person for quite some time until I figured out that it is the behavior that matters, not the emotion or the intensity of the emotion.
@falcolner, thanks for the tips, am I stepping on toes?
How old are your kids? 🙂