Karen Straughan, the soporific, pseudoscientific YouTube antifeminist, doesn’t seem on the surface much like a “Red Pill Woman.” She’s a single mother with short hair, well past “the wall,” who makes a point of not wearing makeup in her videos.
But she’s got one quality that apparently makes up for all of her other defects as a Red Pill gal: she tells the Red Pill guys exactly what they want to hear, defending their noxious views, feeding their sense of victimhood, and hand-waving away their blatant misogyny.
So it’s hardly a surprise that she got a warm welcome when she showed up yesterday in the Red Pill subreddit to do an “ask me anything.” Today, I girded my loins and popped a caffeine pill and read through her answers. Well, skimmed them, anyway; I’m no masochist.
I learned a lot. Unfortunately, most of what I learned was not true.
So let me present the Top Ten Completely Untrue Things I Learned from GirlWritesWhat’s Red Pill AMA, and One Thing That Might Possibly Be True.
All quotes are straight from Straughan’s AMA. I’ve bolded some of the most-untrue bits.
1) Roosh V isn’t a bad person for wanting to legalize rape
“One commenter expressed a wish that I’d learn to speak more wisely and circumspectly on topics like RooshV’s suggestion to make rape legal on private property (all I said was that however stupid or unfeasible or offensive his idea was, his stated intention was to prevent rape, so I wasn’t going to call him a bad person for it).”
2) Red Pill dudes only say terrible things about women because they love them so much
“It’s not misogynistic. Some of the rhetoric here is very angry, and very generalized. A lot of that is from a sense of betrayal–I was taught women are wonderful and believed it, and then the shit hit the fan. There’s a point, though, if the journey isn’t suppressed through punishment and shaming, where these men tend to realize it’s the false paradigm they’re angry with, not women. … If these men didn’t love women in the first place, they wouldn’t be able to be hurt by their failure to live up to the unrealistic expectations society has encouraged them to have.”
3) When men rape women, it’s probably some woman’s fault, if you think about it
“A rapist is a very damaged man (usually damaged by women) or a man who really really really wants sex but can’t convince a woman to willingly lie down with him.”
4) Women might look cute, but GWW can see the total-not-cuteness of their souls
“Neoteny. It’s important. The cuter someone is, the nicer we assume they are. For women, that cuteness is also associated with attractiveness to the opposite sex. So everyone thinks cute women are automatically nice, and men also find them sexually appealing.”
5) I’m a fatty who might possibly be wearing a fedora. No, really, for some reason my weight and possible hat choices came up
“Have you guys seen David Futrelle? Or “Angry Aussie”? Or any number of other hipster douchebag male feminists who are fat, have neckbeards, wear fedoras, have difficulty getting laid, etc?
A lot of the men I’ve met in my travels through the MRM are awkward or otherwise don’t remind women of Matthew McConaughey. But a lot of them are quite presentable. Confident, attractive, fit, and definitely not virgins.”
NOTE: I have doublechecked and I am definitely not wearing a fedora.
6) “Most feminists” probably have Borderline Personality Disorder or something similar
7) Red Pillers are the Malcolm X to the Men’s Rights Movement’s Martin Luther King
“If you rebelled without disseminating a message, you’d be a hindrance. But doing what you’re doing, you’re helping, even if you’re just presenting a Malcolm X for MRAs to juxtapose against MLK.“
8) Black activists only protested the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown in order to get white people mad and make money for themselves, probably
“When you try to cast blame over all whites for perpetuating a racist culture in a Martin or Brown case, whites don’t like that. They get pissed. It gets the animosity stirred up on both sides of the racial divide much more effectively than if the shooting was 100% unjustifiable. And it stirs up white resentment of blacks.
It’s like these particular people (activist leaders) are invested in racism, and they (maybe subconsciously) go out of their way to perpetuate the conditions that keep them in paychecks and justify their existence.
If racism ended, they’d be out of a job. The last three generations are the least racist, sexist, homophobic in history. Where’s the money and status in that, for your average Sharpton?”
9) There’s no epidemic of rape in India because half of all rape cases there are total bullshit
“[T]here’s significant evidence that about half of rape reports in India derive from consensual sex between unmarried persons, but which fall under statutory definitions of rape that are being questioned within the system as to their moral basis in a changing social landscape.”
10) Women are less stable than men because science?
“A woman has to be more emotionally stable than 85% of women to be as emotionally stable as the average man. A man has to be more sensitive than 85% of men to be as sensitive as the average woman.”
11) Chimp dudes don’t have wingmen. (Wing-chimps?)
“Human males are more cooperative with each other than males of almost any other species, really. The phenomenon of guys trying to get other guys laid just isn’t a thing in chimpanzee society.“
That last one might be true, I guess. What the hell do I know about chimps?
EDIT: I have been informed that chimp dudes sort of do have wingmen, but in a horrible way.
Wow, what a horrible person.
You can see her almost coming to a place of thought and reflection.
If you just … took out the parenthetical … and examined why a man who really wants sex but can’t get it consensually might use non-consensual tactics …
So close, GWW. But so far away.
I think her ideas are summarized thusly, “I want others to be in as much pain as I am, though I would never admit to being in pain.” She has a lot of shit she needs to sort out about what she truly values in herself and in other people before she hands out advice.
Handy primate sex guide:
Chimpanzees- Male Chimp packs divide female chimps amongst themselves along the pack chain of command. So yes as a matter of fact there are chimp wingmen, but the reality is much more horrifyingly close to sex-trafficking than dating
Bonobos- Matriarchal led packs that have lots and lots of casual and promiscuous sex used more as a social bonding exercise than reproduction
Gorillas- Patriarchal led pack that’s sorta like lion prides (One male, several females depending on the male’s ability to provide) only everyone is much smarter
Orangutans- Live mostly alone, females find a male when they are ready, then raise the offspring alone
So now you know, when someone uses ape behavior to say “This is how humans (And especially women) are supposed to act” ask them which species. When they mention a specific one remind them that we humans have a lot of close genetic relatives with completely different sexual proclivities. Appeals to nature are dumb
This post has left me shaking with rage.
I’m going to go snuggle my cats.
mrkfoster, I knew someone here would know! I’ve updated the post accordingly.
Was there supposed to be a quote under #6, the “most feminists are probably bipolar” one? ‘Cause it didn’t load in for me.
She was on TVO not too long ago. I listened to the podcast the other day, but I didn’t recognize her voice. It was a show about privilege, and she was clearly the contrarian on the panel, but she didn’t say alot and she wasn’t particularly insulting.
I was listening to it without video, so I didn’t realize who it was at first. She then mentioned being thrown out of that comic book convention in Calgary, and being spoken to by a cop while hanging out in the park, and it clicked. She seemed to think this was equivalent to the police harassment of black males, which I did not exactly agree with.
Video and audio here, it was a good podcast:
http://theagenda.tvo.org/episode/212741/the-question-of-privilege
I am glad #5 is there because I’ve been wondering about this for a while now: why are fedoras so often mentioned either for MRAs or their opponents? What are they suppose to symbolise?
Oh, and David, if you haven’t heard yet, there’s a tedious troll over on the stumbling block post, name of Mark, wants us to agree with him that other people have to take care not to call his attention to them because he doesn’t want to get to know them and if he sees them anyway, it’s irritating. And he’s framing it as “there should be a limit to decency, right?”
@Ælfscýne:
There’s a certain kind of jerky white guy who wears a trilby and lets the world know he’s small-minded, hate-filled, and jerky. For some reason everyone calls the trilby that guy wears, a fedora.
https://www.google.com/search?q=trilby&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=00BqVdKWJpanyASS9oKIAg&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1024&bih=657#tbm=isch&q=fedora+vs+trilby&revid=419023683
Worth noting (in reference to mrkfoster’s handy guide) that we humans are far, far more closely related to both chimps and bonobos (which we are equally related to) than the rest. Appeals to nature can hold some water, if the trait in question is shared by both chimps and bonobos, though it’s far from conclusive.
It does, of course, lead one to the idea that perhaps appealing to nature against the MRAs could be fun: “See, the bonobos have a true matriarchy, and their societies are practically just constant orgies!”
Will these delicate man babies like their looks defended as attractive? Aren’t they supposed to be above the “standards” women “have to” meet to exist? (I often wonder if the glamor of attractiveness is thrown over them when their dicks are wetted in the ideal trophy conquest. It is hard when everything about them makes me want to air quote sarcastically.)
I’m new to posting but read here and it helps a lot (been having a very hard time dealing with sexual harassment at work and the slut rep I earned just for having breasts and being there. It makes me feel less the whole world is like that to read the good people.)
Orangutans are pretty rapey.
Thanks Falconer. I guess that explains an expression I’ve also heard before: “Your fedora is a trilby.” 😀
Dear asshole,
Fuck you for insinuating that sensitivity is somehow equated with emotional instability
Fuck you for preaching the bullshit stereotype that men are ‘naturally’ emotionally stable (tell that to my uncle who frequently ‘snaps’)
Fuck you for preaching the bullshit stereotype that women are ‘naturally’ sensitive
Fuck you because those toxic gender roles will marginalize anyone who doesn’t fit the norm.
This is merely one of the MANY reasons why you are a terrible human being who is actively making the world a worse place.
Patriarchy is what teaches men to put women on pedestals. Feminists don’t say women are wonderful. We say women are human, with flaws and good qualities both. So why are they so angry at feminists. I know. Misogyny. It just makes zero sense.
I’d say the damage done by rape is quite a bit worse than the damage done by a woman dumping a man or a mother making her son take diarrhea meds.
Also, the myth that men rape because they can’t get laid needs to die in a fire. Do you think Jameis Winston or that Max Factor had problems getting laid? Please. Plenty of rapists have wives or girlfriends.
Gotta love when MRAs compare themselves to civil rights leaders.
Especially because they’re racist as hell.
Oh really?
May I direct your attention back to quote 1?
More emotionally stable, huh? Cool story.
Appeals to nature are typically bullshit regardless of whether the trait in question is shared by close relatives of hominids. That’s because there is nothing “natural” about human beings. We have instincts and urges, but we also have culture in which we are steeped since we are infants. Culture tells us to do some things, and tells us not to do other things, and this becomes so innate it starts to feel like instinct.
By the time we are verbal, it is virtually impossible to separate what is instinct from what is cultural, and by the time we are adults, it is actually impossible. One can really only tease “nature” out of babies, and extrapolating from babies to adult behavior is … problematic.
In short, it can’t be said what humans would be like without any culture (which is what “nature” means in this context) because you’ll never find a human without culture.
My friend Julia once said that evopsych boils down to “Humans and chimps are inherently the same, men and women are inherently different.”
Applies here.
Even apes aren’t perfectly natural, they learn and sometimes their culture changes. Making an appeal to nature when you could actually be looking at learned ape behaviour isn’t going to be very useful in making assumptions about human behaviour. I remember hearing about a group of apes (forget which kind) where most of the males died off, and once the females outnumbered them the males became less violent towards the females. And they taught new male apes that joined them later on to be less violent.
“Don’t listen to what those nasty people say. You’ll always be mamma’s biggest, bestest, most handsomest boys!”
^^^
Sums up her rhetoric.
Shorter Karen Straughan: LOOK AT ALL MY FACTS THAT I HAVE HERE FOR YOU.
(Why is my hand full of poo?)
A lot boils down to how many data points are available and taken into account. Behavior that reliably shows up in varied populations of both chimps and bonobos, as well as being evidenced in a variety of human cultures (particularly if widely evidenced in isolated cultures that don’t directly interact with one another)? Likely to be some natural basis there, even if it is influenced by culture. Behavior endemic to the present-day US that kinda matches something some chimp populations do? Not so much. Note that I’ve never seen any of the evopsych crowd hold to anywhere near such an exacting standard (they tend to stick to the second example, since it let’s them make up whatever crap fits their preexisting ideology), and everything about patriarchal gender relationships in modern western culture fails the test in multiple different ways.
Um, neoteny isn’t about making things “cute” – it’s about retaining aspects of youth, which in turn leads to a longer life-span and a greater capacity for learning. Other animals have a very short period between infancy to adulthood – not to mention, for certain animals (sea turtles for example), tend to lack parental care at birth and even guidance after that.
Neoteny was beneficial to humanity because it allowed a younger generation to learn from an older generation for a longer period of time, also allowing them to retain more information, as well as have the guidance in order to survive and develop further. It’s also probably because of that, that we were able to actually develop a society, as it effected our sapience.
I really despise how these people purposefully misunderstand and misuse scientific concepts like this, for their ideological bullshit prattling.
Oh, blow it out your ass…
I think maybe she meant the halo effect? But that’s gender neutral, so it doesn’t fit the “women hit the wall at 25” narrative.