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.
@lkeke35
It’s not even as honest as projection. It’s just straight-up lying. White men have never, as a group, been gripped by fear that “their” women are in danger of rape from black men. That’s the excuse they offer when they go out to commit violence against blacks, but you’ll notice that black women are just as much in danger of that violence as black men. “Fear of rape” is just a face-saving excuse offered in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable. It plays better in the newspapers than “black people aren’t sufficiently subservient to suit me,” which is the actual, honest motive.
Fuck off. Yes, you can. Murder is not prima facie evidence of insanity and everyone knows it. Including you. If it were, all murderers would go into mental health treatment and prisons would house none of them.
@berdache, no plenty of sane people go on killing sprees (or do you think you know more about mental illness than the medical professionals that determine who is fit to stand trial?)
@WWTH
That’s my impression, too. I’m not sure if his Mad Max rant was enough to tip the scales but his paranoia has been bad lately.
@brooked
I’m not sure. There is AVFM Operations and AVFM Education. When I googled the latter, I got tons of search results with the phrase “AVFM Education, LLC is opening a publishing house” so maybe that’s their e-book enterprise?
*looks at avatar that might as well be Trollface*
Yeah, fuck off, troll. We’re not in the mood to humour your bad-faith bullshit today.
Does that include soldiers or militias defending their country from invaders like ISIS?
“Esmay is digging himself a hole here. This is obviously a racist tragedy. Esmay must think all his followers are self absorbed fools. Keep digging, dude. They’ll figure you out.”
Well, if the shoe fits….
“[n]ot everything is about us, man. This is distasteful.”
Some of the guys who are in the manosphere are in it for the long term and/or the long con. IOW, they’re committed, they’re lifers; they may even (à la Roosh) find it hard to get out when they want to get out. Others are only there for a year or two: they’re there because they got dumped or got fired or are between jobs or are having difficulty cobbling together another, less shaky, identity. The thing is, they’re not there as a steady, permanent thing. Sooner or later they’re going to be moving on. They’re in the midst of working out some of their issues and it would not be unjust to them to say they’re going through a phase.
The dude who dropped the comment above is one of the second kind. No, I don’t know it for a fact, but I’m about as certain as I can be that it’s true. He retains more than a glimmer of lucidity and his glimmer of lucidity is powerful enough that it lets him know when one of his chosen ringleaders is being absurd. Not only that, it lends him enough assurance to say so (quite clearly).
Bravo. This isn’t a fellow who’s going to be posting to the MRA sites indefinitely. Sooner or later he’s going to be moving along; it’s just that right now, he’s encountered some reverses and he’s going through a phase — but the phase isn’t going to last forever. I predict.
Yes, sane/mentally healthy people commit murder. They do it for all kinds of selfish or stupid motives, like money, hatred, or revenge. Good grief.
Esmay has been demoted. He seems to have had a breakdown. He had lost all perspective. He raves. He looks for bogey feminists under every violent male rock.
But all he finds are violent young men. That’s all there are, with these mass killers of innocent people. Some from happy whole families, some from broken families, some abused, some indulged, some with warning signs, some with none, some frankly angry about lack of sexual access, some sexually numb.
But all nursing an idea that they have been unjustly treated. Someone has done them wrong. They can’t see who it is at first. Then they read some news article, some MRA posting, some Stormfront concept, whatever, and everything finally swings into focus. Now they know why they feel so bad. It’s not the male elite that runs capitalism and offers them nothing but servitude. It’s not even the girls who withhold sexual access. It’s the Black people. What did they do? They acted like humans. They married regardless of race. They tried to get ahead and stopped acting as employment garbage. They began to surpass the white boys who were so troubled and introverted they could only cope with minimum wage jobs.
The young men are welcomed on certain online sites. Their precarious egos are fed with video games. They find sympathy somewhere. They are told their suffering is caused by their single mother, abandoned by the father, or the uppitiness of girls nowadays, or the uppitiness of Black people. It is never the male elite collecting the surplus. Now they understand none of this is their fault, it is an external circumstance, they are innocent, victims themselves, not culpable for anything they must do to right the unjust situation. They have had their spirits killed – let others experience this death too. They have lost their birthright, to be better than women and Black people. The insult is intolerable. They must reclaim their manhood.
@berdache
Only if you define “insane” as “kills people.” Sane people kill.
Being a fanatic for one’s prejudice only makes one a dangerous fanatic, not mentally ill.
Now, tell me — what’s your motive for bringing this here? You cannot seriously think that this will help bring some ephemeral “help” that concern trolls seem so concerned about, so what? If you’re not trying to paint this as done by the Other — which you are.
*grumbles* Neurotypicals…
It is satisfying in a way I cannot quite put into words how Elam gets told to shut his yap by the very people he’s trying to preach to.
Seriously- for all their flaws (and boy are their flaws) the Milgram experiments did a pretty good job of showing that anywhere from two out of five to four out of five people will commit murder just because a guy with a clipboard told them they had to.
Hi Crip Dyke!
So good to see you.
berdache from a previous life,
If that were true how do you explain war, slavery, genocide and the murder of minorities as a systematic tactic of oppression throughout human history? Perfectly sane people do evil things everyday. ISIS is not comprised of mentally ill people. US American torturers and all of the people who gave them their orders are not mentally ill. Drone bombers who bomb weddings and the people who instruct them to do so are not mentally ill. Israeli bombers who bomb playgrounds full of children, the people who give them orders and the American politicians and pundits who support them are not mentally ill. Right now you are in denial. you’re confused, willfully ignorant and self deluding. You are not doing so because you are mentally ill. You’re just fucking wrong and wrong because you are motivated to other, just like people who kill other their victims until they feel no guilt for murdering them. It’s a coping mechanism. We all do it. All we can do is be aware of our tendency to do it and try not to fool ourselves.
Hi Lea. I remember you as berdache.
I was wondering about:
If what were true?
I was calling attention to the fact that pseudo-commandos are NOT motivated or compelled by mentally illness.
Did I accidentally say the opposite somewhere?
It was Dean Esmay, actually, but the feeling’s still the same.
Damn those E names. ANd my dyslexia.
One could claim that gender racism and ethnic racism are based on the same basic
way of thinking….
*Glare*
David, you have a strep throat. Go to bed. Stop writing about racist murderers and MRA conspiracists. They’ll still be here when you get back.
Ikeke,
You nailed that. I’ve been noticing more and more how misogynists hatred of women seems to come from their own projected self loathing.
POM is also right. White dudes aren’t THAT clueless. I doubt half the bobble heads on Faux News believe the lies they peddle.
I wonder how much alike the drive behind bigotry and the drive behind addiction are?
Feel pain (Shame in this case)
Take pain away by method X
Pain returns, this time with added guilt
This time you need more X to keep pain away
Pain returns
cycle, cycle, cycle
It’s very dangerous to lie to yourself. That’s how people go from bad to worse, I think. Tell yourself something is OK because reasons and it gets easier to do. Blame it on someone or something else, wash, rinse, repeat.
White guilt is a a helluva thing. I can understand not wanting to come to terms with it, especially for people so privileged that they expect to be better than everyone else without ever trying. They’re weak because they can be. After all, they think not feeling like a rightful master of the universe is the worst thing ever. That expectation can only lead to disappointment and of course they blame that disappointment on the people they want to feel superior too. We’re ruining their image of themselves by not being happily submissive.
So, they lie to themselves. They lie to us and every time reality get’s past their defenses, they have to amp up the lies.
Nope, Crip Dyke. That wasn’t me. I was referring to what Beardache wrote about only mentally ill people being capable of atrocities.
I was asking Bearache to explain xir position. I get yours and it’s spot on.
You also know me as as Jackie elsewhere.
NothingClever,
You should see what comes out of my keyboard prior to spellchecking. It sometimes looks like I put letters in my mouth, swish them around and then spit them at the screen.
:'( That’s sadly true.
@Lea
D’oh!
It was Berdache’s “previous life” thing that made me think that you were telling me you had formerly used berdache, and thus I didn’t get that you were switching the person to whom you were addressing your comment.
Oy.
Sorry about the confusion – it’s all mine.
@Lea
We are…the same person?!
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/hlysht.gif
Pandapool/Jackie Cakes,
It is time you knew the truth.
http://2jaug735w09q3iqc322yl87sli.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/orphan.black_.clones.jpg