Less than 24 hours after an apparent white supremacist murdered nine black churchgoers in cold blood during a prayer meeting in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, one prominent MRA is trying to put the blame on feminism, because of a remark the killer reportedly made about rape.
One of the survivors of the church killings reported that, before he began shooting, the killer told those in the prayer group that “you rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
Dylann Storm Roof, the accused killer, wore his racism on his sleeve, almost literally: a former classmate tells the press that Roof “made a lot of racist jokes”; his license plate featured the Confederate flag; his Facebook profile picture shows him in a jacket with patches representing the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa.
But Dean Esmay, the second-in-command at A Voice for Men, probably the most influential Men’s Rights site, thinks that Roof’s killing spree may be the result of too much feminism. Earlier today, he posted a link to an article on the shooting to the Men’s Rights subreddit with this headline:
To their credit, the Men’s Rights subreddit regulars voted his comment down; one told him “[n]ot everything is about us, man. This is distasteful.”
Two hours later, apparently undaunted by the criticism and oblivious to irony, Esmay returned to the Men’s Rights subreddit to make another accusation:
No one has declared the shooter to be an MRA. The little we know about Roof right now suggests that he was a garden-variety old-school racist. The paranoid notion of black men raping “our” white women is one of the oldest racist tropes out there; as Jessica Valenti noted on Twitter, Roof’s language is “the language of white supremacist patriarchy.”
The alleged threat to “our women” was used for generations as an excuse to lynch black men and terrorize the black community as a whole. In the case of Roof’s shootings, it’s an even more transparent ruse. As Rebecca Carroll notes in The Guardian, it’s hard to argue that these killings had anything to do with real fears or even paranoid fantasies about the rape of white women when most of the victims were not black men — the symbolic “rapists” in the equation — but black women:
There is something inconsistent with the Charleston shooter’s alleged evocation of the historical myth of black man as beast and rapist of white women, and the fact that he killed mostly black women. Did he only shoot black women because there were no more black men to kill? Because black women birth, care for and love black men? Or because he didn’t see black women as women at all …
The idea that white women’s bodies represent that which is inviolable while black women’s are disposable hasn’t changed enough since it was first articulated by white men; but again, aimed at black men on Wednesday night, it was predominately black women who suffered by their invocation.
We will find out more about Root’s twisted beliefs in days to come. But it is clear already that they had nothing whatsoever to do with feminism.
H/T — r/againstmensrights
EDIT: I’m making this a NO TROLL, no-derailing-with-idiotic-MRA-or-incel-talking-points thread.
Now feminists are responsible for the murder of Emmett Till? Oh, fuck no. Fuck that.
By the way, asking men of all races to please not catcall is not the same as saying lynch black men who catcall. No feminists are calling for that.
FUCK YOU.
Is it possible you use claims of “debate” to get around the fact that you’re willfully derailing a thread about a tragedy to make it about male tears and how men need to get laid more and it’s all us wimmens’ fault?
We were tired of your shit when you walked in here, you factually unreasonable shitlord.
Also, nice ableist dog whistle with the mention of “hugbox”.
Stick the flounce this time, huh?
-5/10
Dude, I thought I sucked at ducking out of threads. You said at the end of the first one that you weren’t going to stick around, and then you stuck around.
Please stop making my gender look bad. Just stop. Turn around. Scram. Vamoose.
The fact that most of the victims of the shooting were women seems lost on Divided.
I have to ask this; what’s a ‘hugbox’?
So they’re insulting us because… we’re not constantly at one another’s throats?
Was he not here for this very thread where we were calling one another Stalin?
@Paradoxical
What a fucking asshole.
Pretty much, any forum or discussion place where people gather to talk about something where they can’t or don’t want to be confronted.
Though, I have no idea where Divided Brain got the idea that this wasn’t a place where we aren’t confronted on a regular basis. It’s not our fault the ideas he’s “confronting” us with are factually wrong and willfully ignorant.
Ta Paradoxical
That puts matey boy’s comment in context.
@Alan
Temple Grandin, who has autism, is able to better focus and not suffer so much when she has close physical contact, so she invented a device to give herself that. Colloquially, it’s called a “hugbox,” and Internet assholes like applying the term to any forum they are trolling.
It’s also not our fault that he’s “confronting” us about a topic that the thread isn’t talking about. Combine that with him being willfully ignorant and refusing to hear anything we have to say on the subject of him blaming feminism for his boner sads…
He can go sulk elsewhere.
But for the fact you’ve explained why it has an unpleasant connotation it would have been the perfect word to describe the MRA mindset based on what I’ve been following in the posts about those video chaps.
@ POM
What a brilliant idea; I want one!
@Alan
Yah, it’s basically saying that everyone on the trolled forum is psychologically abnormal and in need of constant hugs, with undertones of anti-autism ableism. It’s not surprising that a troll like Divided Line would use it, because it is only used by trolls.
Temple Grandin is pretty brilliant, and an awesome example of why autistic people should be taken seriously and not treated like children.
I always find it amusing when people take something that’s actually quite positive and use it as an insult.
“Yeah, go back to taking care of people why don’t you!” etc.
@ madness,
First sorry about the gun laws comment, would reasonable work? Knew I was going to have trouble re-framing that when I read the policy. Was really embarrassed with myself when I re-read my first post here.
And, I understand now, I was conflating the disagreement about the use of “different” with disagreement about the rest of my idea.
Honestly had not been able to figure that one out in my lurking. That’s why I apologized for my first post and just said I didn’t understand with my second.
Got to go out now, would like to continue this conversation later, if possible.
Did you ever stop to think that the number of women-seeking-men is more or less equal to the number of men-seeking-women? (Until you get into the higher age brackets, where women start outnumbering men.) So, both sides have an equally hard time, just in different ways.
Men have to run the risk of setting up online profiles and getting no responses. But women have to run the risk of setting up online profiles and getting messages from people who are just spamming everyone on the site in hopes of getting a reply. So they have to filter through all that noise and find the people who actually might be compatible. Getting a lot of messages might seem flattering at first, but you can see how reading them could turn into a boring chore after a while.
So: What can unattached people do differently in order to improve their chances of getting into a relationship?
I used a few different on-line dating sites back in the day, and what worked for me was a site where you had to pay a nominal fee (I think it was 25 cents) to contact someone, and where the profiles had a lot of long essay questions to answer. The nominal fee scared off most of the spammers, and the essay questions made it easier to figure out if there was a basic level of compatibility. I could get a pretty good response rate just by making a few comments about the other persons’ profile. (“I see you like Author X. I’ve been meaning to read him; which book do you think I should start with?”)
If that doesn’t work for you, remember that on-line dating didn’t exist for most of human history. What people used to do back before the Internet was to go out and make a lot of friends, and then see if any of their friends could set them up with someone compatible. This has the nice advantage that there’s no risk of direct rejection until after the first date; all the initial negotiation happens behind the scenes.
That doesn’t count as much as you’d think. There are lots of men who are in bad shape financially, professionally, and socially, but are still able to have successful romantic relationships. I mean, Charles Manson got married not long ago, despite the fact that he’s unemployed, serving a life sentence in prison with no real possibility of parole, and is just a horrible human being in general. The next time you’re feeling down about your chances of a relationship, just remind yourself that you’re not as bad as Charles Manson, and that means there’s hope for you.
Anyway, good luck, and let us know how things work out!
Dear Pseudonymous Digital Entity:
We regret to inform you that what you are doing is most emphatically not debating. We understand that, given the tone and tenor of your posting, the denizens of the internet with which you most frequently associate may have lead you to believe you are debating. Sadly they have lead you astray.
In a debate, especially one taking place in a venue where resources can be readily obtained, proper form dictates that the debater provide citations and support for their arguments. While we see an abundance of assertions in your posts, we notice very little in the way of support for those assertions.
Further, and perhaps more important to the situation at hand, debates take place in proper spaces, namely those sites set up for debate or in places directly related to the topic of debate. They also generally take place by mutual consent. Jumping into a thread discussing a multiple murder to debate about the proper assignment of blame for your lack of intimacy hardly meets those criteria (And before you protest,we are aware that someone else brought up your history. This does not excuse your behaviour).
Regardless of your intentions (and we have serious doubts with regards to their sincerity), your actions were not those of one attempting to engage in a debate. They do, in fact, have many of the earmarks of persistent trolling. Might we suggest that if you are truly interested in debate that you spend less time on internet forums and more time in communications classes.
Thank you and good day.
Oh my gosh, that’s the first time the blockquote mammoth got me! I’m really one of you now!
Divided Line is one of those garden variety of idiots who sees the problems of toxic masculinity but, instead of actually considering where they come from, just decide to blame feminism because why question things that movies have clearly told me are true?
Pop Quiz: Who’s going around telling men to ‘stop being a little bitch’ and ‘man up’?
Hint: It’s OTHER MEN (or women who want to be ‘one of the guys’)
No, that’s TOXIC masculinity. The fact that you consider this to be “masulinity” is exactly why this is such a problem in our society. Have you not noticed how often ‘masculinity’ in the media is equated with violence and sexual conquest? Ask yourself, why is that? Why should a man be defined by his ability to fight and the number of women he’s fucked?
Do you not realize that the idea that masculinity can be taken from you is fucking bullshit and needs to go away?
Words mean things. We call misogynists misogynists. We call rape apologists rape apologists. I forget the last time I’ve seen anyone here call someone a loser (citation please) and I’ve only ever seen the word “neckbeard” on 4chan, not around here.
Actually, I see a lot of MEN using the term ‘loser’ and ‘neckbeard’. HUH, I wonder why that is. Could it be that you’re once again blaming feminism for the actions of other men?
Yup. And you are the bad guy because you are scapegoating your problems onto feminism instead of actually thinking of the root causes. Fortunately people change and maybe by reading some of these responses, you might as well.
Are you fucking dense? Elliot Rodger is a shining example of how bad toxic masculinity really is. He literally felt like society OWED him a woman. He felt like he was some ‘supreme gentlemen’. He was an entitled, misogynistic hate-fueled despicable human being. NOBODY except himself considers him a ‘nice guy’.
NO. Life is not an action movie staring Bruce Willis. Life is not a fucking movie with heroes and villains. Not to mention, you actually think women want to be ‘rescued’. Ugh. Do you not see how painfully obvious it is, that your entire ‘understanding’ of gender roles is based on what movies, TV and video games have told you?
Do us all a favor and get rid of your completely insincere need to ‘save’ women. Women are perfectly capable of saving themselves.
I ♡ how many trolls come here and say something to the effect of, “I’m here to drop a TRUTH BOMB on you! It’s SO TOTALLY UNLIKE ANYTHING that’s EVER CONFRONTED you, so your disagreement is PROOF of my RIGHTEOUSNESS!”
And then all proceed to say the exact same fucking thing.
I will give this one points for grammatical and spelling system consistency, though.
That doesn’t always happen.
It’s not merely a boring chore. A significant fraction of the messages from guys that come in to women on dating sites come from men who become incredibly ragey when they don’t get a totally positive response. If the woman sends no response at all, these guys start sending threatening insults, and even the most polite no also results in insults and sometimes threats of violence.
Putting up a profile with a female name and picture is very emotionally dangerous, because literally any incoming message can be from one of these guys and there is no way to predict ahead of time what kind of reaction a particular guy is going to have to rejection. “It’s just words, brush it off” is advice that always comes from people who don’t actually have to be subjected to constant verbal abuse from strangers.
Hit me up sometime. I’m usually in the mood for this kind of conversation.