[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.
“Women who won’t sleep with me deserve to die.”
And these guys have the nerve to say that women are entitled?! I agree with Jenny. They think that a woman’s ability to choose her own sexual partners is a privilege, not a right, and that we don’t deserve to say no. It’s disgusting.
I also need quite a bit of brain bleach after that post, so here is David Tennant narrating hamsters running on a wheel.
I wish I could understand the psychology behind these guys, like how in the world did they get to the stage where they honestly believe that murder is a justified response to rejection? That women shouldn’t be allowed to turn them down? How the hell did they get that way?!
Exactly, and thus why I find people who get worked up about it laughable. They’re treating fiction as if it were historical documents – that altering them would be an unforgivable sin. Even though that shit is made-up and having one version appear won’t make another version disappear.
It’s completely pointless in comparison to (say) how horror can be used to deal with issues related to race and gender.
It’s like people who only want to discuss videogames on a completely mechanical (i.e. graphics, controls, gameplay) level, but have massive hissy-fits whenever anyone else wants to discuss them as narratives. Why they can’t just be happy that they can enjoy it in one way while someone else does so differently is puzzling to me, ’cause I don’t spend time caring how each individual enjoys or doesn’t something.
“And then people like me have to step in and remind them that the “zombies” in that film aren’t actually zombies. They’re not dead, just infected.”
That’s an entirely arbitrary distinction. Zombie is just a term for a set of vague, constantly fluctuating characteristics that categorise a common type of fictional threat. No-one would deny that Let The Right One In is a vampire film, despite the vampire not being dead.
@ej
that was amazingly high quality brain bleach
Yis.
I don’t have anything, really, to add because there are no words.
I did just want to say thank you, David, for this post. I love a good mocking, but I always appreciate when you give issues like this serious attention, too.
To echo a few: There are a lot of good men out there. It’s just they’re quietly going about their lives being thoughtful and self-reflective while these asshats are yelling in their echo chambers – sometimes so loudly that the din spills out.
Off topic, but you know how MRA groups have a habit of viciously turning on their female supporters if they ever disagree with them? It seems that the GOP do the exact same thing.
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/23/when_wingnut_cavemen_attack_the_right_turns_on_renee_ellmers_with_stunning_misogyny/
Also, I just read the actual report linked in the main post and holy shit, this happened in the city where I lived only four months ago. O_O
Good heavens, akemp0013! And you have lived with this for two years? I know that this is an absurd question, but have you spoken with the police about this?
I cannot help but wonder how many other women are living with this kind of thing hanging over their heads…and how many of them do not even know it.
It happened in the same area of the same city where I was living when it all happened! I remember my friend telling me to be careful walking home because there was a guy who was following people and then stabbing them in non fatal places. THAT MUST HAVE BEEN THIS BEN DUDE.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard of any “But those aren’t real zombies!” drama surrounding 28 Days Later. At least that hilarious tidbit makes me feel a little better – I was feeling a little nauseated reading this post.
wrt: where do they get this entitlement
Anyone remember myredpillmemoirs, the baby PUA who visited here a couple months ago? I check his blog periodically, and as luck would have it, he made a post a few days ago that basically sums this up in a tidy nutshell.
There is no murdering on his blog, but you can see the root of the entitlement coursing through this post.
The remainder of the post details a couple of strategies for how to pick up women in everyday encounters, like at a grocery store or a gas station.
There is zero cognizance in his post that women are human beings who have a right to visit a gas station without being forced into an unwanted encounter with a strange man with sexual intentions. The entire post is made from the perspective that women exist for the benefit of men, so it’s fine to pester them on the street, and that they are furthermore some kind of alien creature who can be trapped if one has an appropriately “crafty” response prepared in the event of an honest question. It has a lot in common with advice that people give to one another on the best ways to catch fish.
There’s also the reference to “quality” women, which again is based in the presumption that women exist for men, and that men are therefore justified in judging and labeling them. If “quality” women exist, then that means worthless women also exist, and since these judgments are being made about women the guy has never met these categorizations are being made solely on the basis of physical attributes.
He wraps up his post with:
Yes, I’m sure his self-assessment is 100% reliable and not even slightly biased, and that these random women he forces into sexualized encounters are genuinely interested in him and not engaging in self-defense politeness.
Again, there is no hint of violence on his blog, but this post contains all of the foundational assumptions that lead to some dudes thinking that violence is justified when women won’t sleep with them. It all starts there.
Awwwww…Thanks for that, ej. It made me smile. :):):)
I feel like these guys project so hard that we should be able to tie them up in the back of a movie theater and let them project the most terrifying horror flick ever onto the screen. Did someone say something about zombies?
The tweerdle on the shit cake would be if the movie was named “Feminism Has Turned Females Away From Men”.
Yeah, it’d be like trying to argue whether Ghostbusters is either a horror-comedy or a comedy-horror. We can all agree it is both, so why split hairs on such a small detail?
LouLou, how do you know it’s him? (I mean, I have no trouble believing it’s him but I don’t want that sort of thing up in comments here unless there’s some sort of evidence.0
I instantly felt sick to my stomach while reading this. It’s terrifying to know I share a planet with these kinds of people, let alone a species.
Why do some men feel the need to pull this kind of shit? Is it because of the inherent anonymity coupled with the self-pity echo chamber of the internet that they feel comfortable saying things like this?
How am I “entitled” when I face the very real fear of being murdered for simply saying “no thank you” to someone? Why are their dicks more important than MY LIFE?
paradoxicalintent –
Sorry if I’m answering rhetorical questions, but in my opinion, yes. Also, the broader culture that teaches straight cis men that: 1) Having sex – particularly with conventionally attractive women – is vital to their identities as men, their health, possibly their very survival, 2) Women were created to be sex dispensers, and 3) They are being unfairly deprived of something if they don’t get to have sex with whoever they want.
I still don’t understand how a large community of “incels” can exist. Can’t they just arrange meetups where they have sex with each other?
My husband regularly suggests this solution for MRAs in general. Somehow they never think of it.
Quick, everybody in the pile!
it is quite clear to all what is going on – these men are modern robin hoods, taking from the greedy and giving to the needy. aS we all know, all women everywhere all get asked on 35 dates a day while poor men are forced to fight like dogs over the little scraps of love they can get, and so the solution is to kill women and keep treating sex as a competition at least if youre a man
So…I had a long conversation with my husband about these guys, their colonies around the world and their “psychology.” He got scared. After all, we have granddaughters who may grow up in this toxic environment.
When we got to the part of the conversation about women protecting ourselves we both agreed that we need to be able to defend ourselves. It seems obvious that, unless there is a body, the police rarely do anything. Thing is, though, that a woman using lethal force to defend her life is as likely to get herself imprisoned as not. So, we started to look at non-lethal things that women can use if their lives are threatened, such as heavy-duty tasers, maximum potency mace/pepper spray, martial arts training and such. Personally, I think that they are good choices. We even talked about trank guns – non-lethal and will stop a person cold.
I hate that people even need to THINK this way, but we may have to. One thing that he pointed out was that what drives these babymen seems a lot like what drives all despotic, violent movements, from the Inquisition on. Whether their sense of entitlement is religious, economic and/or sexual, it seems to stem from the same source. And it would seem that it may be a part of the predominantly male population – hopefully, a minority. I want to believe a very tiny minority.
We need to stay awake, pay attention, and never forget that life is worth every effort to make it joyful and loving, and as safe as we can make it.
@Samantha
I almost agree with you but I would say it’s not a male or female thing, it a majority thing.it just happen that it historical worked out to be men. I take a much less kind view of humanity as a whole.