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.
@ytsuken: Hm, we seem to be mis-communicating here. Apologies – that’s clearly my fault.
I’m saying that when you *opt* to apply it to her like that, you are saying that she is mentally defecient and ugly. I’m sorry, what else does 3 / 10 femdora with a potential cluster b personality disorder mean? You’re clearly stating that the argument she uses applies to herself, which means that it applies to herself because she is and has the traits she’s accusing others of having (and adding a few more, just because)
I get it, I just disagree with the utility, and I find it a little dickish I guess. She’s accusing her opponents of being fat and stupid, but she’s actually fat and stupid herself, so… eh. Something? Ha ha, fat stupid people’s arguments are worthless? Also the way she’s acting is an indicator of personality disorder! Hah! Her argument is wrong, but if you use it to insult her, you’re indirectly cropping up the validity of the argument itself. That’s my issue, I guess.
My problem with Straughn’s words isn’t really that she’s not pretty enough while making them, my problem is that her words relies on insulting primatologists and chimpanzee’s everywhere.
@Fibinachi
I was just trying to emulate the way her political side speaks to highlight the irony. ._. I don’t think these things are bad or matter at all, lol.
Speaking of rape in India being total bullshit, hey… look what I found. Uh-oh, it’s actually wildly underreported and far more horrifying than what people already think of the situation there:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Over-53-children-face-sexual-abuse-Survey/articleshow/1881344.cms
This sentence only makes sense if one agrees with the premises that: women who are not conventionally attractive can’t get laid; said women are desperate to get laid, and will do whatever it takes to get the attention that is a prerequisite to getting laid; and, the process of getting attention constitutes a personality disorder.
If it were to turn out that GWW gets all the sex she wants with no problem, the entire speculative fantasy about her “projection” breaks down because reality isn’t adhering to the fantasy. However, it’s even worse than that, because if any of those three premises turns out to not be true, the basis for the fantasy dissolves entirely.
When you are making an argument that insults GWW on the basis of misogynist presumptions, you are making a misogynist argument. All of the “wait, but” in the world doesn’t change that.
Happens. The internet! Words are hard to read intent behind and all that.
What I do love about the specific “Haha, David (/male feminists) are fat” argument is that that’s a bad wrong evil bad thing! Yet, GWW being an amalgamation of all the things the MRM professes to think is terrible is… seldom touched upon, I guess?
It’s okay to be a single mother over 30 who wears no make-up and thinks they’re somehow allowed to have opinions so long as you hate women while doing it. Maybe The Wall that all women slam into at 25 is easily defied with the proper application of hate and evo-psych talking points?
(Hey, wait, does that mean reading a biology textbook is a preservative?)
…How can consensual sex between unmarried persons be considered rape in India if ACTUAL RAPE between unmarried (and especially married) persons is often not considered rape?.Does she have evidence of that… legal phenomenon she referenced actually working this way?
My brain is full of fuck.
The fedora bunny has to rescue his guffawing little brother from the overall-wearing weasel. Then he has just enough time for another couple bars of his fedora song before the credits roll.
Excuse me while I dash off to the shops to buy a fedora. Or is that only for “male feminists”?
GWW doesn’t seem to much care about appearing conventionally feminine, and she’s not trying to appeal to the red pillers in that way. Her comments about “fat neckbeard male feminists” are intended to flatter and reassure the dudes she’s talking to, in a motherly sort of way, as suggested by Philip Rose and makingfitzcarraldo. Indeed, in this AMA she really laid on the mother talk. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her talk so much about her kids.
Does she comment about the looks of feminist women? I don’t remember ever seeing her do that.
There’s a different sort of dynamic going on with someone like JB, who seems perpetually trapped in high school. JB talks about the looks of feminist women constantly.
http://judgybitch.com/2013/04/06/the-president-compliments-a-pretty-woman-and-all-the-ugly-bitches-scream/
As for the rape in India, I don’t have statistics or anything, however I’ve read multiple times that 10 rapes per day happen there. One MRA freak from my country said that isn’t such a huge number because India is a big country. If 10 false rape allegations happened per day, he would use this to prove that India is a misandrist country and false rape allegations are epidemic. The hypocrisy of some of them, it burns.
I was taught that women were wonderful* too. However when the shit hit the fan for me was I found out about all the things attached to that asterisk.
*As long as they’re submissive, keep their hair long, shave their legs, dress in a way that’s appealing to men, dress in a way that’s modest, fuck men on their command, don’t fuck any men at all, don’t speak up and offer your opinion at all, you should have babies, you should take care of babies, be smart but not too smart, be beautiful, but not too beautiful, you can’t be fat, you can’t be funny, you can’t drive, you can’t do anything men say you can’t do, no matter which men say it, and if they contradict one another, you still have to do both at the same time.
And here we have a dash of some bitter racism, just to keep things tasting like a traditional MRA shit-stew.
“Don’t say white people treat black people badly because that makes white people angry!”
Fuck off. I’m white and I know people of my race treat black people badly. Black people deserve better.
And fuck off again because both the Trayvon Martin case and the Michael Brown case were completely 100% unjustified. As were the cases of so many other black people over the course of history.
White cops have a history of shooting first and asking questions later when it comes to black “suspects”.
Hell, what about this seven year old girl who was shot in the head while she was sleeping on the couch in her own home and the police barged into her house on a no-knock raid on the wrong house?
Is that just “black people trying to stir shit up to piss off us decent white folks”, GWW?
Fuck right the fuck off.
Well, it’s a trilby for one, and two, I’m very happy that we feminists are going to take back that hat. It’s been abused for far too long.
Ah, this reminds me of Chobitcoin, another reactionaries’ pet token minority and a gamergater. She constantly pounds the panic button of “LOL FEMINISTS ARE UGLY AND MALE FEMINISTS ARE JUST WHORING FOR ATTENTION AND BEING SUPER SUBMISSIVE BECAUSE THEY CAN’T GET LAID IN ANY OTHER WAY” when she is… a submissive self-deprecating panderer who puts more value into a bunch of transphobic misogynists liking her than anything, and her interactions with other women have a distinctly “catty” quality. She constantly talks about feminists’ looks whilst being really far from conventionally attractive, makes jokes about them being “autistic” when she is likely on the AS spectrum too, and I think I’ve seen her post nudes for approval as well. Not to mention that episode in which she threatened to shoot trans people just to amuse and appease her fanbase.
What a sad clusterfuck.
@AnAndrejaPejicBlog (@Lindsay_Irene)
Oh, Karen, those boys only paid you a dollar to climb the tree so they could see your panties.
This is not okay!
The correct response to an antifeminist saying feminists are ugly is to point out that a woman’s looks do not have any impact on her worth as a human being, and that beauty is both subjective and culturally informed, with no objective beauty standards existing. It’s not to say, “Well, you’re ugly too, you hypocrite.”
The correct response to someone making ableist jokes is to tell them that ableism is not okay. It’s not to start armchair-diagnosing the culprit with mental disorders.
What the hell is wrong with you?
Do you know, there is just SO much angst on the interwebs about trilbies being called fedoras. I was quite taken aback. I’m a grammar pedant myself, but I think (given some of the memes I saw) hat pedants could possibly outstrip me! Not that I mind being corrected, of course – I admire and appreciate pedantry wherever it arises. Pedants unite!
Anyhoo…I would happily have either hat if it made some MRAs rage 😀
And JB and this woman have kids, God help us.
Ytsuken
Just stop. Stop calling people ugly and stop with the ableist language. Again stop.
Insulting people based on their appearance is gross, no matter who is doing it. So is describing mentally ill people as assholes and using them as an insult for people one doesn’t like. “They did it first” is a pathetic defense.
If one can’t manage to defend women without being sexist and ableist, then we’re not any better off – we’re just perpetuating the sexism and ableism while pretending were better than other sexist people.
IIRC Chobitcoin actually described being on the spectrum herself in one of her posts about her childhood, and she’s trans. Regardless, she thinks “queershit” and “autism” are somehow brilliant insults at the same time.
But no problem, topic closed.
I’m confused; isn’t wearing short hair and not wearing makeup particularly feminist? I’ve seen her camp argue that both of these are a sign of disrespect and hidden lesbianism. And don’t MRAs argue that women announcing their gender in their usernames are “attention whores”?
Also, since I know nothing about her, where is the father of her children and why aren’t MRAs upset that he doesn’t have full custody, isn’t that the “ethics in journalism” of the modern day men’s rights movement? Or where is her boyfriend — shouldn’t her kids have a stable man in their lives so they’re raised properly? Where is his YouTube channel? Where is their TLC reality show on “raising kids the right way”?
But whatever, I suppose. We’ll ignore some of our most persistent and prominent talking points just to hear a woman tell us we’re right.
Y’know, even if we accepted that your stuff about her appearance is supposed to be a badly-worded comment on MRA hypocrisy (which I don’t buy, because there’s just too much of a difference between David’s “She doesn’t seem on the surface much like a RP woman” and your “She looks like a lesbian baby-eating buzzcut Feminazi,” but hey, let’s be generous)… You are being grossly ableist. Fuck you.
Sincerely, an autistic lesbian Feminazi.
Anyway, what I was going to post before I got distracted by the asswipe:
I’ve never participated in an AMA, but aren’t they supposed to be about small personal things? Like “What’s your favourite movie” or “Do you have pets”? Not “Please repeat the same tripe you’ve told us a thousand times already! MRA BEDDY-BYES STORYTIME!”?
People’s terrible beliefs and actions should be judged according to their actual words and actions. Claiming that they are ugly, or autistic, or any other insult that has nothing to do with their actions is pretty and does not address what is truly wrong with them (i.e. that they espouse toxic, bigoted, and dumbass ideas)
*petty, not pretty. Damn autocorrect