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Prominent MRA tries to blame Charleston shooting on feminism and its alleged “lies about rape culture.”

Dylann Storm Roof's Facebook profile picture; the patches on his jackket depict the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa
Dylann Storm Roof’s Facebook profile picture; the patches on his jacket depict the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa

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:

South Carolina shooter spoke of rape--was he driven by lies about our

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:

The media will be claiming the South Carolina shooter is an MRA in 3...2...1..... (cnn.com)

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.

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sn0rkmaiden
9 years ago

Dammit, I just saw this article about the Charleston murderer:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/dylann-roof-pushed-over-the-edge-by-white-power-music-and-black-man-stealing-his-love-interest-cousin-says-10333088.html

Apparently this is yet another case of aggrieved false entitlement. Roof got upset when a girl he was interested in, not dating, just interested in, started dating a black guy. According to one source that’s what drove him into white supremacy.

You know it really isn’t the job of feminists to explain to young men that just because they think a girl is pretty, that doesn’t give them the right to expect anything from her, and it certainly doesn’t give them the right to feel aggrieved if she doesn’t like them back. That is the job of men’s rights activists, and they are failing miserably to address this. In fact ‘failure’ is too kind a word, what many sites are doing is encouraging this toxic sense of entitlement.

Xenophone
Xenophone
9 years ago

The awful is all over the internet. I spent time yelling at online atheists who were posting stuff like, “he may have been going through a psychotic episode,” “churches are intolerant and segregated,” “praying didn’t do them much good, did it,” and “this is clearly not terrorism.” Glad to see y’all holding down the fort here and pushing back on nonsense.

It clearly IS terrorism. But in this case it has nothing to do with religion. A lot of Christians have a persecution complex despite the horrific persecution they’ve inflicted on non-christians, including Jews(which I am one).

It is racial terrorism. I assume that the reason religion is coming into play is because it happened in a church.

Spindrift
Spindrift
9 years ago

@sn0rkmaiden

It’ll be interesting to see what MRAs do with that information.

Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
9 years ago

Nothing SFW, probably. This fractally-horrible glop of polluted pond scum is every MRA’s wet dream.

sunnysombrera
sunnysombrera
9 years ago

I’m not sure about AVFM but ROK for sure would go “well she should have given Roof a chance instead of jumping on black cock like whores always do” or some other awful sentiment. Followed by a slew of racism and misogyny that whines about how women don’t partner up with “Nice Guys” instead of why nasty guys like Roof commit mass murder because they didn’t get their boners pleased.

sunnysombrera
sunnysombrera
9 years ago

Whatever they do, we know they’ll just blame women for this like Dean already has. If anything I regret that Independent article because it just gives them MORE ammunition to say “see ladies? If you don’t do what men want they’ll go out and kill people!”

The Daily Mail did something similar with Rodgers. They published the FULL NAME AND CLEAR PHOTO of his high school sweetheart who apparently started his whole process of becoming a self-entitled mass murderer (coughbullshitcough). IDIOTS.

autosoma
9 years ago

I’ve spent since yesterday reading this whole thread and wow it’s gone in some interesting directions. Anyway, I still see this as;

A person enters a religious building and murders several people, later some context comes out and different, sometimes adversarial groups take sides on that context.

The white man walked into a Christian Church and murdered black people predominantly women.

The white man entered the church murdering black mostly female congregants whilst he (the white man) uttered racist statements as he acted.

I know I’ve repeated myself several times slightly modifying what happened with the facts as I understand them.

The core of this is that it is a monstrous crime and everyone needs to find a way to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

I’m more angry about the way this crime is bring spun over and over again and how the groups who appear to condone it aren’t being censured enough.

It makes me feel more depressed than usual.

weirwoodtreehugger
9 years ago

The cousin said he was normal until he started listening to white power music years. But his friends from high school said he was always telling racist jokes back then.

Than the cousin said “Dylann liked her. The black guy got her.” As if the young woman was a bone two dogs were fighting for rather than a person who just started dating someone she liked.

Sounds like he was in an environment full of normal racism and misogyny. So why again should people act surprised this happened? If you let any kind of racism be normal, somebody will inevitably take it this far.

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

Tells you what the cousin considers normal, doesn’t it?

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

No, the poet was not talking about wanting to kill women. He was talking about all the women who are killed. He named names and gave ages. He mentioned surviving family members. It was good.

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

Oh. Wait. The ‘he” on the terrace? Yeah. He thought that was a funny joke.

Vanir (@Vanir85)
9 years ago

Whatever they do, we know they’ll just blame women for this like Dean already has.

– sunnysombrera

Milo Yiannopoulos has already posted an article blaming feminism and drugs (more precicely, feminist teachers and feminist doctors drugging boys). Apparantly, men having to live in a society where women have presence and liberty, is so stressfull and damaging for men, that coupled with the feminazi horror of proper medical treatment for things like ADHD, they end up as spree killers.

Here’s the article, through donotlink (TRIGGER WARNING: extreme misogyny, ableism, and general douchebaggery):

t.co

AnAndrejaPejicBlog (@Lindsay_Irene)

I’ve encountered Divided Line on Pandagon before, He once flipped out on me and called me over-entitled and selfish because I said that I would never have sex with a man that I had just met at a bar. He demanded that I justify my no-one-night-stands-for-me-personally-but-hey-if-they-work-for-you-go-for-it stance. I replied that I didn’t think it was likely to result in sex that I would enjoy. He told me I sounded like a spoiled rich woman complaining about how hard it is to find good help these days. (Yeah, that made no sense to me, either.) When I further explained that I have to trust someone before I can be intimate with them, he said that by the time a woman knows a man well enough to trust him, he’s in her friendzone and she will then not have sex with him. And that is just teeny, tiny sample of the creepy bs he posted. Banning him was a good choice.

sunnysombrera
sunnysombrera
9 years ago

Milo makes the rookie error of conflating correlation with causation:

Roof is just the latest in a long line of young men who have committed appalling crimes after a lifetime on psychotropic drugs. If you don’t believe me, consider some of the most notorious young male shooters in American history.

Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza? Lexapro and Celexa. Red-headed Aurora killer James Holmes? Clonazepam and sertraline. Virginia Tech mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho? Prozac. Charles Whitman, the “Texas Tower Sniper”? Dexedrine. Columbine executioners Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? Zoloft and Luvox.

What about the shooters who WEREN’T on any drugs? Or, more importantly, the hundreds of thousands if not millions who were/are on pills but HAVEN’T KILLED ANYONE?

Also, is it me or does he try to handwave away problematic behaviour and paint it as “normal masculinity”?

The lived experience of such men is precisely the opposite of privilege: they are punished for being boys at school, branded “creeps” or, worse, rapists for showing sexual interest at college

Dumbass, most men are labelled creeps or rapists for doing creepy/rapist things. And although not necessarily problematic behaviour, boys are usually “punished for being boys” if they are disrupting the learning environment. That’s not trying to turn boys into girls, that’s trying to make it so that everyone can concentrate in class. Look, I don’t like that boys are drugged to the hilt too, but considering Milo’s history I’m starting to think he just wants men and boys to be able to do whatever they want without consequences, and is using a terrible tragedy to try and make his twisted point.

Dylann Roof’s actions are unlikely to have been primarily motivated by race, even though he may have identified as a white supremacist. For one thing, half his Facebook friends were black.

OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE MILO.

Aunt Edna
Aunt Edna
9 years ago

To state the obvious (because one must), a breakup does not turn a man (person) into a mass murderer. It may be a precipitating event, usually one of several, but it is not “the” reason why he decides to do his evil deed (even though he and/or others may want to use it as an excuse at some point).

While on topic, Roof was raised by a classic redpillian “alpha” father, who knew, the way natural “alphas” do, just how to “handle” his women (and kids):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3131858/Charleston-killer-Dylann-Roof-grew-fractured-home-violent-father-beat-stepmother-hired-private-detective-follow-split-claims-court-papers.html

Snuffy
Snuffy
9 years ago

For one thing, half his Facebook friends were black.

Actually it was only about 1/3 of his “friends” who were black, but of course Milo distorts the truth to make his “theory” sound better. Being “friends” on Facebook doesn’t necessarily mean he was friends with black people. People “hate follow” all the time whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, Disqus, or blogs they don’t like.

(Plus the whole “He can’t be racist, He has a black friend!” is a terrible argument and is pretty moot when the guy flat out states he’s racist.)

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

People “hate follow” all the time whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, Disqus, or blogs they don’t like.

You forgot Linkdin. *coughElamandEsmecough*

zennurse
zennurse
9 years ago

Dylann Roofs website and manifesto have been found, it is exactly what you’d expect, all this yammering from people who want to say his murders are about something else are going to have to STFU. Pictures of him at a confederate museum, holding the bars and stars pointing his gun, spitting on the US flag. He was motivated by racism. Not misogyny, not anti-christianity, nothing but blood curdling hate for black people. I won’t link because the zip auto downloads but if you want to see it, its last. Rhodesian. Dot. Com.

Esmay is an idiot.

History Nerd
History Nerd
9 years ago

Most racists are not consistent about who belongs to the group of people they hate. Many white supremacists will rationalize and make exceptions for people of color they happen to know personally (and even deny that they’re racist).

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

Holy shit. He blames Trayvon Martin and lionizes his killer.

Me and White friends would sometimes would watch things that would make us think that “blacks were the real racists” and other elementary thoughts like this, but there was no real understanding behind it.

The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?

What about the white menz? We’re the real victims of racism! He learned all about how put upon white men are on the internet. Of course he did.

It gets worse.

He does sound alot like the men David writes about here. ALOT. In fact, he sounds alot like every Fox viewer I’ve know when they’re in private. He’s not different. He’s not “crazy”. He’s just your average entitled racist with a gun.

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

I have noticed a great disdain for race mixing White women within the White nationalists community, bordering on insanity it. These women are victims, and they can be saved. Stop.

He believes in the inherent inferiority of black people. He feels society has not given him the respect he deserves and is in fact out to get him. His girlfriend left him for a black man. Yeah, this was a little bit about misogyny and a whole lot about racism.

Check out how familiar this sounds:

In a modern history class it is always emphasized that, when talking about “bad” things Whites have done in history, they were White. But when we lern about the numerous, almost countless wonderful things Whites have done, it is never pointed out that these people were White. Yet when we learn about anything important done by a black person in history, it is always pointed out repeatedly that they were black. For example when we learn about how George Washington carver was the first n*gger smart enough to open a peanut.

Switch the focus from race to gender and you’ve got the MRM.

Vanir (@Vanir85)
9 years ago

His girlfriend left him for a black man.

– Lea

Not sure even this is correct. From what I’ve seen, the woman in question was never the shooter’s actual girlfriend. He was interested in her… and then she entered a relationship with a black man.

Switch the focus from race to gender and you’ve got the MRM.

– Lea

Pretty much. The mindset of bigotry is much the same – be it sexism, racism, hatred of gays or jewish people or whatever. And you will often find A LOT of overlap; male supremacists are often racist, and white supremacists are often sexist, etc.

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

He says American History X is one of his favorite films.
How the fuck did he miss the message of that film?

Even if my life is worth less than a speck of dirt, I want to use it for the good of society.

That’s a line he calls one of his favorites. This is the film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1900893/ Right there we see that he is convinced he is doing a good thing. He’s not a mad dog killer. He’s a martyr in his estimation, just like the people who attended lynchings thought they were.

I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.

Once again:

…no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me

Think Reddit and Facebook will change their policies now? You think AVfM and ROK will have to shut down? Fox News? Conservapedia? Stormfront? You think the far right will even slow it’s roll a tiny bit? You think they don’t know they are inciting violence toward the people they hate?

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

He was interested in her… and then she entered a relationship with a black man.

Not even shocked at this point. She owed him, I’m sure. Because white boner.

Dividedline, alphabet soup and Venny,
I hope you are paying attention.

Pandapool -- The Species that Endangers YOU (aka Banana Jackie Cake, for those who still want to call me "Banana", "Jackie" or whatever)
Pandapool -- The Species that Endangers YOU (aka Banana Jackie Cake, for those who still want to call me "Banana", "Jackie" or whatever)
9 years ago

Think Reddit and Facebook will change their policies now? You think AVfM and ROK will have to shut down? Fox News? Conservapedia? Stormfront? You think the far right will even slow it’s roll a tiny bit? You think they don’t know they are inciting violence toward the people they hate?

Nope. They’ll likely blame his behavior on mental illness and go on inspiring more and more of his ilk.

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