When I saw the headline on Return of Kings, PUA scuzzball Roosh V’s garbage site, I braced for the worst.
Men Benefit From Acting Potentially Violent And Explosive Around Women
Because the not-so-secret truth about domestic abuse is that abusive men do benefit in various ways from being abusive, just as bullies benefit from stealing other kids’ lunch money.
Happily, in this instance at least, Return of Kings refrains from explicitly endorsing domestic abuse.
It turns out that this post. by regular RoK contributor David Garrett, is mostly about running into people on sidewalks.
On purpose. To show what a total alpha badass you are. Or at least what a total alpha badass you are pretending to be.
As Garrett sees it, women go weak in the knees around “bad boys” because they think these “bad boys would be willing to use or have used physical force in expressing their badness.”
Trouble is, dudes who go around punching people tend to get punched back. So the real trick, Garret writes, is
to be seen as potentially violent and explosive, without the regular drawbacks of spending time in prison, getting badly beaten up by five other guys, or some other event you don’t particularly want to experience.
The key word is “potentially.” And in case you missed his point, Garrett repeats it, with the word “potentially” in bold:
There’s a distinction here, as you can see, between being violent and acting potentially violent around women and others.
So how do you convince the Hot Babes you’re potentially a big tough guy … without ever having to get into an actual fight to prove it?
Well, here’s where the whole “running into people on sidewalks” thing comes in.
If you want to be seen as a big tough guy who never apologizes for taking up space in the world, what better way to show this (in a reasonably safe way) than by running into people on sidewalks? Or at least by running into people you’re pretty sure won’t punch you for it.
When you walk in large cities, you might notice the propensity of people, especially young women, not to move around you when you’re walking towards one another. Sometimes they will deliberately try and cut you off, expecting you’ll concede space. Don’t. Aside from those with infirmities, the elderly or parents with young children, plough through.
Last month, one middle-aged woman … refused to make way … Oh well, my bag ran into her. And it hurt. Too bad for her.
TOTAL ALPHA MOVE.
Oh, and for maximum benefit, do this in front of the Hot Babes you’re trying to impress. I mean, duh.
When you’re with your girl, a female target or just female friends, try things like this out. There’s a time and place for etiquette and politeness but at least 90% of the time, barring those with mobility issues, it isn’t on the streets you walk.
You can also try getting mad at people who blow cigarette smoke in your general direction.
I also (calmly) confront those who blow tobacco smoke in my face accidentally, half- or full-daring them to try again (depending on whether I’m being sarcastic or plain condescending).
After explicitly telling his readers to do all this in front of “your girl, a female target or just female friends” in order to convince them in a low-risk way how potentially violent they are, Garrett assures us that he totally acts this way even when there are no HB8’s in sight.
If an alpha male falls in the forest, and there’s no HB8 to hear him, does he make a sound? Garrett says YES and pumps his fists.
Rather than being a staged action, it’s who I am, someone utterly repulsed by cigarette fumes. I would do the same thing alone or with a girl. … The context is more like becoming who you really are, rather than what society has demanded you be: the timid, ball-less gentleman.
Oh, but don’t do any of this with, you know, black dudes, or anyone else who might actually punch you.
I am going to suggest to you that making retaliatory or wisecracking comments to abrasive males in the projects of Detroit or the Bronx, or the non-tourist suburbs of Moscow, is maybe not worth the effort (or the dental bill).
I mean, BECOME WHO YOU ARE but only with people smaller than you, and who probably don’t have friends in the vicinity who might punch you. Seriously, you may want to stick to middle-aged women you can “accidentally” hit with your bag.
Because nothing turns the hot babes on more than a dude who “accidentally” hits middle-aged women with his bag.
@katz:
Now I want to play Katamari Damacy again. I can already hear the music in my head.
@Argenti:
While I’m sure you’d be welcome to re-swear loyalty to Her Majesty, there’s still the small matter of the back taxes on that tea.
@Orion:
To me, the phrase “bad boy” is problematic because it defines someone in terms of other people’s response to them rather than their own achievements. It creates a masculinity in which we are dependent upon others’ acknowledgement of us rather than our acknowledgement of ourselves, which is a crucial element in toxicity.
@dumbassapostrophe:
You didn’t say anything objectionable (at least to me); I think Fruitloopsie is commenting more to your syntax. Your writing style is comma-heavy and informal which can be hard upon the poor Americans.
@alaisvex – Too late! (Trigger warnings, also CW for massive stupidity and bad anatomy)
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/01/16/become-a-total-alpha-male-sex-god-by-spitting-in-womens-mouths/
@dumbassapostrophe
i feel sorry for poor old Wapping, it was a bloody nasty place during the printers strikes, Mudchute down the road, nearest team is Millwall and how unnecessarily fucked up is Tower Hamlets. That sparkly, canyoned mostly ghosttown of Canary Warfe. Billingsgate and Poplar… oh man I miss em! I’ve had a lot of fun in those villes. its so sad whats hapoened to the docks take a walk around docklands museum snd get a sense of the changes in the kadt 70 years. it’ll never be the same a transient community and transient economy. The All Bar One dead as a door nail at half 8 in the evening. The locals excluded by the near city boys.
General advisement for those prone to teal-deer angst, you may want to skip this….
@Autosoma
Gahan because the exceptions to cheating in my relationship requires both time travel and the outside party involved, a celebrity, Brit accents are my 3rd favorite, and it’s a bit embarrassing to go into exactly who I’d qualify from the 1st and 2nd accent faves (let’s just say they’d have to be talking a whole lot of sexytimes talk and my eyes would be closed like I’d super-glued them shut. There’s just something about the accents, too bad I’m not a dragon nor do dragons exist 😛 )
@Freemage
I used to watch the news, but then I used to be allowed to roam freely around with friends as a kid, we’d all ride our bikes around and nary an adult focused on nothing but our supervision in sight. The earliest years of life (when I was too young to really remember) there were more child abductions in the general vicinity and so forth, but law enforcement responses/laws not to mention news media took a while for adapting and evolving to handle such problems – Rodney Alcala (sp) had committed offenses in California and NY state, had an appearance on a television dating show in the late 70’s despite being a convicted rapist and registered sex offender – by 1980 he was tried and convicted for the murder of a 12 year old girl from Huntington Beach (a city whose border is only a 10 minute drive from where I live today), a death sentence was given though verdict was overturned on grounds of the jury being improperly told about Alcala’s prior sex crime convictions, a second trial in 1986 again convicted him and sentence was death but overturned by 9th circuit appeals court in part because a witness was not allowed to support Alcala’s contention that the park ranger who found the 12 year old’s body had been “hypnotized by police investigators. But prosecutors refused to give up (thank goodness!) and in 2003 charged Alcala with not just the 12 year old’s murder but also 4 victims whose deaths were connected to Alcala because a recent change in the laws allowed LE to take his dna to enter into a national database – the California Supreme court ruled in favor of prosecutors in 2006 because these 4 victims were linked to Alcala through dna not eye-witness accounts – but the trial on 5 counts of murder (12 year old girl from Huntington Beach + 4 cases with dna) didn’t begin until 2010. Third round ended up with conviction on all 5 counts and the death sentence.
Alcala has been incarcerated since his 1979 arrest in the Huntington Beach case, but the media still managed to confuse people with reports regarding the trials in 2003 and onward so that more than a few believed that this guy was free and out in the community to find more victims in between his trials. Not only did his victims’ families suffer more with every conviction overturned, after being in court every day and having to hear what happened to their loved one(s), but the evolution of our media into its modern incarnation couldn’t have made things easier on them on top of it all. Of course during the same general time period in California there was the Jaycee Dugard being found after her abduction 18 years before, alive and with 2 daughters fathered by the man who abducted her; additionally John Albert Gardner III who abducted/raped/killed a 14 y/o in 2009 and a 17 y/o in 2010, he also admitted to an unsuccessful attempt to attack an adult female jogger in the same area in exchange for the plea deal that took the death penalty off the table. Media outlets and politics have come together in a vaguely unsettling way. Are the laws that have resulted from horrific crimes a good thing – yes, but the media isn’t what it used to be nor what it began as and the tabloid-esque behavior going on nowadays is concerning.
@EJ
Thanks for clearing that up! I try my very best not to sound like an asshole (to varying degrees of success, admittedly) and was a bit hurt, TBH. Glad it was just a misunderstanding. As a fellow American, I can definitely see your point about the overabundance of commas now that you mention it. It was early in the morning and I was basically writing how I talk when I get up, ie in half-formed sentences.
@autosoma
Now it’s time for me to ask what the hell it was I just read! Printers strikes? All Bar One? Just when I think I’m getting a hang of things, I find more shit to google. Btw is kadt the real spelling or a typo?
On Richard Ashcroft (who sung Bittersweet Symphony):
There are 2 things that could have led to his aggression being used in the video like that – the first being that he was extremely annoyed (understatement) about losing all the royalties to the Rolling Stones.
The second is that his mother died of cancer. That was what The Drugs Don’t Work was about. His reaction to losing her was to become a very angry young man.
We all sound like assholes from time to time, but I don’t think that was one of them. Welcome to the Mammoth. Pull up a misandric hard chair and help yourself to a gift basket.
I think “kadt” is a phone-keyboard-ism of “last”. That’s how I read it anyway.
All Bar One is a popular chain of bars, nowadays infested with financiers to the lamentation of everyone who isn’t a financier.
The Printer’s Strike can be read about here. A lot of East London people still feel sore about it, especially the police methods used.
Now I have to retract the last statement – I remember an interview where he talks about the song and his mother dying of cancer, but I can’t find any mention of it online, so I must be thinking about someone else – which is weird as the song is extremely specific.
Ah yes, “kadt” as “last” makes total sense. Thanks for the info. I really was going to google them myself, but I’m always happy when someone does the work for me. The printers strike is a lamentable gap in my knowledge considering I walk by the old News International HQ quite often. But hey, I’m not actually the one who lives there, so maybe I should cut myself some slack. Besides, if anyone should mention it to me, I’ll do what my people do best and play well-meaningly dumb. It can get you out of a lot of sticky situations.
@dumbassapostrophe
firstky kadt no idea what I was typing there. The stock android keypad hates my stumpy fingers abd Google auto corrected a sebtence for me in an email – where I’m trying to pitch my first journalistic endeavour and totally changed the tone of what i was saying.
like the miners strikes in the earky eighties. the Wapping Printers Strike was a brutal bitter affaire in the recent history if trade unionism, it was about bringing technology into printworks abd welk heres the wiki https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute. All Bar One is a boozer directly opposite Canary Warfe Tube station I used to have a “tumble down the sink” or just a plain tumble (rhyming slang for drink) after work its a totally meh!-tastic chain wine bar.
Have you recently moved to the ‘Stend or Dockland? if do nip up to Billingsgate early doors abd try to have a gas with the costers and porters… it’ll give you some interesting insights into what Wapping, Limehouse and Poplar ysed ti be like (be prepared for lits of continuous moaning and griping)
auto correct can’t live with it, can’t live without it… mind you the change to Dicklands rather than Docklands was apt, except that the original generations of locals who still live there don’t deserve that.
@ej Ta for stepping in and sorting my stumpy fingered keying
No worries. I use an Android phone too, I know what it’s like trying to sausage-finger stuff into that little virtual keyboard.
RE: fingers
Anyone ever do this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLZeq2kedFw
Also, I think Dicklands sounds like an interesting place…like what the owner of a gay bar in Hamburg might name his establishment. I say Hamburg because Germans are, in my fairly extensive experience, even less subtle than Americans. Plus it’s the big port city, so duh.
Anyway, thanks a whole bunch, autosoma! I’m not actually the one who lives in Wapping, that’s my partner. However, we spend a lot of time commuting between his place and mine (in Paris) so that neither of us has gotten to know our own hometowns properly. Maybe I can persuade the boyfriend to head up to Billingsgate to talk to the ur-eastenders like you suggested. On the other hand, he’s all English and weird about being newly middle class (unlike America where we ALL claim to be middle class or, at most, upper middle class), so it might be too much to ask of him.
Same here. And UGH. There is NOTHING cute about a big tall middle-aged man (Paul Fucking Elam, hello) drunkenly bawling “Hey Amanda Marcotte, your pussy stinks! Your pussy stinks, Amanda Marcotte!” No, guys, we do NOT get the (pseudo)maternal impulse to pick you up and wipe away your drool and change your diapers and give you a nice bubbly bath before tucking you into bed. We actually feel more like calling the cops and getting your ass hauled off to the drunk tank. But what with all the policing cutbacks going on, of course, guess who has to pick up the slack, whether she wants to or not?
Can you believe I didn’t even hear the full song OR see the video till someone posted it here yesterday, so all of that just blew right by me? (I know, how did I manage that? By basically finding Top 40 radio so sucky that I never turned it on for years and so missed all the fun of that particular earworm, that’s how.)
Anyhow: Yes, it sure does look that way. It doesn’t help, either, that he’s got that unhealthy emo-kid look, like he’s been doing all his moping in a bar at ungodly hours. And that his steamrolling the sidewalk (and every poor soul who gets in his way) is just the natural outcome of all that. And if THAT constitutes “self-improvement” and ascension to Alpha Male status, it’s little wonder that these guys repeatedly fail. They’re predestined, all right…predestined to make asses of themselves over something they read and promptly misread.
Supposedly the video is a joke response to the Massive Attack video showing what would really happen if you walked through the streets of a busy city like in that video (i.e you would just bump into everybody and piss them off)
There was a bold fisherman
Who sailed out of Billingsgate
To hunt the wild mackerel
And bold Conger Eel.
that’s an old porters drinking song, from the market, I think its 17th 18th century. I wouldn’t say is an easy place to buy from, but well worth a visit for shits and giggles and to get a feel of what working in London was like before it dies out completely.
I’ve always interpreted the video (in combinatation with the lyrics) as a metaphor for drug addiction or some other type of self-destructive behaviour, i.e., charging full steam ahead down the road to ruin, heedless of how your actions are affecting the people around you. I don’t think we’re meant to view Mr. Ashcroft’s impersonation of a steamroller as admirable.
The thing about targeting middle-aged women for abuse on the street is that we’ve been around the block a few times and tend not to conduct ourselves as shrinking violets. Any one of us would easily flatten a hipster stick figure or a wobbly hairball with an ego problem. This, of course, is why MRA wimps have a problem with strong women in the first place:) Beyond which, demonstrating in public to the sweet young things that one is a colossal douche is bound to keep them hiding out in mom’s basement in their Batman Underoos… perpetually undateable. Then again, nobody ever witnessed these types collapsing from brain strain.
P.S. A lesson to us all: Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Libertarians:
How: Hatred of women is baked into the Libertarian pie:
Cato Unbound: “The Education of a Libertarian”
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian
Why: “Libertarians get medieval on women”
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/201244104251611609.html
How mommy’s sweet boy ended up in the slammer: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/10/03/everything-we-know-about-ross-ulbricht-the-outdoorsy-libertarian-behind-silk-road/
The answer to all these questions: Ludwig von Mises Institute/Ron Paul/Tea Party
One of my proudest moments was when I broke through a group of dudes three abreast that were heading toward me on the sidewalk while I was running. If they had been looking ahead of themselves and listening to me yelling “excuse me!” starting from 50 yards away, they would have had plenty of time to let me past them. Instead, two of them got my elbows in their ribs. I ran away flashing double middle fingers. No regrets.
One time I was walking to the grocery store and these dudebros wearing University of Wisconsin shirts (relevant detail only if you’re a fellow Minnesotan) were taking up the entire sidewalk to play bean bag toss even though their house had a yard they could have been using. I stared them down, never wavering from my path but they didn’t move. So once I got a few feet away I said “excuse me” in a cold, intimidating voice that would have made Lucille Bluth and Cersei Lannister proud. One of them finally moved and called after me “you could have just gone around us.” He was clearly trying to salvage the tattered shreds of his machohood. So I turned around and shouted “no, this is a public sidewalk, not your fucking yard” and strutted away.
On the way back from the store, different dude bros were now playing the bean bag toss and they moved right out of the way for me.
Ha!
http://campusriot.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Lucille-Bluth-Arrested-Development-GIF.gif
Not to sound as over dramatic at the red pillers, but it was a pretty funny moment. You just know these jackasses thought that because I was a woman, I’d be all accommodating and scurry off of the sidewalk because there was a very important man activities taking place there.
http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr01/2013/5/2/14/anigif_enhanced-buzz-20569-1367521176-1.gif
This reminded me of something Andrew Sullivan wrote after he moved back to D.C. from his brief stint in NYC. One of the things about life in Manhattan he could not adjust to, he said, was how people don’t get out of your way on the sidewalk. The point being, of course, that HE was Andrew Sullivan! and yet, he had to get out of other people’s ways. Not like in Washington, so back to Washington he went.
He did receive some mocking for this, thank goodness.
Poor, coddled, giant conservative manbaby. So used to being An Opinion Shaper. And so reduced to being an Unperson. Waaaa.
You might be right about Andrew Sullivan.
But I must say that I feel the same way about NYC. I arrived in NYC for the first time as a 19-year-old. It was noon. And suddenly! The sidewalks were filled with people — presumably workers headed out to lunch — and they all seemed to be headed in the same direction. They filled the sidewalk. There was no room for anyone headed in the opposite direction. In the face of the onslaught of hungry New Yorkers, my companion and I did the only sensible thing. We retreated. And we lived to tell the tale.
To be fair to NYC, Greenwich Village at the time was a lovely bohemian experience. I went the Other End, where all the bohos went, and listened to folk music. I felt very sophisticated. I understand that the Village is now extremely expensive and stuffed with stockbrockers & such.
I