As many of you no doubt know, the BBC’s Reggie Yates recently did an hour-long documentary about the “manosphere,” paying particular attention to the rapey, repellent pickup guru Roosh Valizadeh. I’ve pasted the video below.
I have, well, lots of thoughts about it. It’s really pretty compelling, particularly the segments involving Roosh, which essentially offer him a nice sturdy — albeit figurative — rope with which to hang himself. Which he of course does. More on that, and Roosh’s response, below.
The non-Roosh segments are a mixed bag. Yates’ not terribly enlightening discussions with proudly reactionary GamerGate panderer and ostensible journalist Milo Yiannopoulos are pretty skippable.
More compelling is Yates’ interview with an infamous online bully who actually served a brief stint in jail for the threats he’d Tweeted to two prominent women, one of them a Member of Parliament. Their crime, in his eyes? They wanted to put Jane Austen’s face on the ten pound note. There’s something a bit chilling in the blase way the troll, a shaven-headed sad sack by the name of John Nimmo, recounts his vicious harassment campaign.
But most chilling of all were the segments with Roosh, which take up a hefty chunk of the program. Yates attended one of the little speeches Roosh gave on his “word tour” last summer, interviewing him afterwards; several months later he traveled to Poland for a followup.
Yates memorably introduces Roosh with a snippet from one of his videos in which he complains about how much effort it can take “to access [women’s] warm, moist cavity holes.”
Such a romantic!
We then get to see some snippets of Roosh’s mysterious speech, ostensibly on “The State of Man” in the world today. Nothing he says will be particularly surprising to anyone who’s familiar with his odious writings.
Still, seeing him present his ridiculous “philosophy” live highlights not just how noxious his ideas but also how incredibly, well, dumb they are. Roosh clearly wants to upgrade his status from that of a burned-out, rape-apologizing pickup artist to that of a great thinker. The only problem is that thinking isn’t something he does particularly well.
But it’s Yates’ interview with Roosh in Poland that really stands out.
In his hotel room before the interview, Yates reads out some of the more repellent and rapey things that Roosh has written.
“This isn’t about confidence,” he says, holding aloft one of Roosh’s slender volumes of dubious pickup wisdom. “30 Bangs isn’t about making young men feel as though they have value. This is about making young women feel as though they have none.”
Later, in Roosh’s apartment, Roosh waxes indignant about the public reaction to his infamous proposal to fight rape by making it legal. Roosh insists it was satire, but, as Yates tells him, it’s “quite hard to find the satirical angle to it.” (A point I and many others made at the time.)
And then, just moments after telling Yates that “I advocate for consensual sex,” he presents his own version of “no means no” in which no actually means pause for a moment before returning to doing whatever she said no to.
Yates asks him about a story in one of his books in which Roosh writes about penetrating a woman who is half asleep.
“Haven’t you done that?” he asks Yates. “When a girl is half asleep, when you’ve already had sex with her?”
Yates tells him that no, of course, he hasn’t. Roosh keeps digging his hole deeper, seeming genuinely puzzled that Yates isn’t nodding in agreement.
“So if you want to examine every instance, every thrust, maybe you can find something,” Roosh tells him. “But this can happen to every man.”
By “something,” Roosh seems to mean “an instance in which you put your penis in a woman without permission.”
In Roosh’s mind, evidently, rape (that’s really not rape), is something that happens to the rapist, not the woman he rapes; it’s the rapist who’s sort of the real victim.
On his blog, Roosh has denounced the documentary as a “hit piece,” suggesting that Yates — whom he describes as a “BBC host of questionable sexuality” — simply wasn’t man enough to really understand him or his comrades in the manosphere. (Yates isn’t actually gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
By “hir[ing] a non-masculine man to report on masculinity,” Roosh argues, the BBC is doing the equivalent of
hir[ing] a carpenter to review an Italian opera. Besides a handful of exaggerated facial expressions made for the camera, the carpenter will not be able to analyze the opera on a level above that of even a grade-school trumpet player.
That’s a new one, I guess.
Roosh then goes on to declare that this “hit piece on the manosphere” is actually a giant victory for him, because
it gets my ideas across to those who have yet to see it. Even if 0.1% of people who watched the BBC documentary become readers of mine, it’s still a huge win, since doing it only cost me a couple hours of time. …
The BBC program tried to paint me as a criminal, but instead I gained more fans and sold more books. As long as my name exits the mouth of my enemies, I win, and I will continue to win.
Didn’t Charlie Sheen once say something similar?
I hate to have to tell you this, Roosh, but no, you’re really not winning at all. Repulsing the general public with your repugnant ideas is not a victory. Every thought of yours that you put on the internet makes ever clearer what a huge loser you are.
Here’s the documentary. For anyone who doesn’t have time to watch the whole thing, I’ve attached a second video below that features nothing but the segments featuring Roosh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8RxL9kuBs4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsUh-Qisg2Q
MRAs on youtube I like; Alison Tieman, Billy Clement, Theadviseshowtv, Theryn Meyer, Tyler Preston, Felfop returns, skeptorr, Bane666au
“The MRAs I like don’t go on misogynistic hate-rants or harass women! *lists various MRAs known for their misogynistic hate-rants and harassment of women*”
i wanted to call social services when I heard the advice to that ‘father’. who talks of their own daughter like this……enslave her by marriage to a domestic abuser and give her children…scary.
her big error..having a job.
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2015/12/23/scientists-discover-genderfluid-lioness-who-looks-acts-and-roars-like-a-male/?
That’s seriously the coolest news of the week.
It also show that even for lions, who have a far greater sexual dimorphism than humans, things aren’t anywhere near as clear cut as some may believe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zpw4cvwVV0
skeptorr and alison had a discussion with two radical feminists here. It was awesome
She wasn’t referring to Roosh specifically you knee-jerking used tissue.
For fuck’s sake. Why are you even here if you want to defend the MRM so badly? I’m glad you backed off of it because EJ is right, but goddamn, does no one read the banner anymore, or do you think it just doesn’t apply to you?
By your standards then, no one is an MRA, because no one who IDs as an MRA does any activism on behalf of men, and no one who does activism on behalf of men identifies as an MRA because they want to avoid the shitty reputation.
I, and several other feminists, do publicly endorse (and I imagine some of us actually do) activism on behalf of men. We support people who are anti-circumcision, we want to see more men’s domestic violence shelters, we want to see more support for men’s mental health.
Does this make us MRA supporters then because we advocate for these things, and some of us also help to make them happen?
By that logic, there are decent neo-nazis out there.
Look, I get that no one’s 100% evil all of the time. It’s just not possible. Rabid racists can like puppies, whatever.
But every time you’ve tried to show us “decent” MRAs, they’ve always been really, really, not-decent.
Not even a little.
I get that you might not see that because you’re looking at them from a male perspective, but saying “hey, these guys are alright! You’re not just giving them a fair shake!” to women who have seen their sexism and harassment first hand is really, really, disturbing.
So you approve of men mocking other men for being ‘feminine’ for not going along with their He-Man Woman Haters Club? You approve of men tearing other men down for not fitting into a tiny masculinity box if they question the box? You approve of mocking a man for standing up for women and questioning the manosphere’s status quo?
Once again, the biggest men-haters are never the feminists, but rather the anti-feminists.
Yes they do.
Except the Honey Badger Brigade is still involved with them, and they supported them doing this. They still support AVfM and they still are involved with them.
So, they’re supporting the doxxing and harassment.
Even if they didn’t support doing that, Tiemann and the rest of the Honey Badgers have done their fair share of harassment.
Hell, just look at their little “lawsuit”. They got mad they were thrown out of a convention for harassing a panel they didn’t like.
Also, nice job posting a list of MRAs you like, but some of them have been featured here before for their gross misogyny. So, you keep believing they’re “decent” while they’re calling people “c*nts” and harassing people.
Also, no, we’re not going to fucking watch any Honey Badger shows. Stop linking them here.
Alison can talk to two radical feminists until she’s blue in the face, and I wouldn’t care because it doesn’t change the fact that she’s a terrible person with a fuckton of internalized misogyny.
The A for Activism fits because as the MRA define their activism it IS spewing hate on the internet, crashing comment forums with hateful MRM non sequiturs, doxing, harassing, producing long, unfollowable and unwatchable videos etc. etc. So I don’t think that someone has to do what I personally would call activism to be MRA. They just have to do activism as they see it.
Also I think people who lump all manospherians into MRA have a point and I think those who try to make the distinction with tight taxonomy have a point, but I think Roosh is now MRA with his neo-masculinity nonsense and his switching of emphasis away from PUA. He didn’t used to be MRA, but now I think he is. But I recognise the line may be fine for some.
OTD – you sound a lot like my ex. Defending this BS and trying to stay above the cess pit by saying that some of these MRA are not so bad. He was/is a big fan of Alison and Karen, too. Yuck. I almost hate the Honey Badgers more than the men, because these women are the equivalent of saying that “Uncle Tom told me he doesn’t mind riding in the back of the bus.*”
____
Hey, maybe Uncle Tom genuinely prefers the back, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong for him not have a choice of seating and wrong for him to defend others having that choice taken away.
No i dont agree with that. I meant I don’t mind MRAs making fun of people who are anti MRA just like anti MRAs can make fun of MRAs. I actually like this website and I also like Kevin Logans video series mocking the manosphere.
That is not a honey badger show it is on skeptorrs youtube channel
Come on, OTD, you said this …
Take just one of these, Bane666au, immortalised by David here … https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/02/20/a-voice-for-men-takes-on-feminist-rhymes-with-bunts-with-new-poster-campaign/
Read the portion of David’s post where he goes through several of Bane666au’s ‘posters’ and shows the nastiness and the dishonesty in all of them. Do you really expect that anyone here would find his work honest or informative or acceptable in any way?
He looks to me like a fair average quality bundle of prejudice and misogyny spiced up with an overdose of snide and nasty smart aleckry. I have no intention of looking at any of the others you mention. One of the reasons I come here is that David, patient, long-suffering hero that he is, does that for us so that we don’t have to.
OTD: so I hope you have never used the terms ‘mangina’ ‘cuckservative’ or any terms related to them which most if not all of the manosphere uses in an attempt to emasculate (not really a thing btw) men who do not move in lockstep with whatever contradictory standard they expect that day.
By the way, for anybody who missed the last time Kool-Aid Drinker mentioned Skeptorr, Dhag took the time to check out his videos. Let’s just say I see a WHTM post of his own in the near future. You know, because of all the rape apologia, murder advocacy (!!!) and violent racism.
I don’t support those posters and I didn’t know about those posters until it was linked to me on the other thread I was posting on. I only know his youtube stuff, mostly his video series “propaganda of toxic feminism” where he debunks false information about the MRM. There is no insults or sexist language in these videos, just a nice debunking. Showing feminists making claims about the MRM and then showing they are false using facts and evidence.
Those posters were from 2 years ago which is before he started that video series.
Recently, the last few months he has been talking with feminists both in video responses and live chats and he is always very friendly and polite. He seems like a nice bloke. In his live hangout on monday with two radical feminists he said he is not anti feminist anymore
The comments on the Youtube video for the full version are all about how this documentary deliberately picked people who make MRA’s look bad. I’m really curious to hear who these people think make the MRA’s look good. Paul Elam? Janet Bloomfield? Scott Adams? The Men’s Rights subreddit? Gamergate? Who?
So you didn’t know about the actual tone and content of MRA comments, but you really like some videos that ‘debunk’ the lie that the MRM is mean?
@OTD
http://i.imgur.com/Ufbr5ej.gif
Something tells me you’re being disingenuous here, and perhaps loose with the truth regarding this guy’s videos. Call it instinct, call it your reputation for being a sealion that obfuscates things and contradicts themselves.
I don’t use those terms, I think they are silly and “cuckservative” is also racist. I don’t agree that most or all of the manosphere use those terms and I don’t agree they are used in that manner. Cuckervative seems to have caught on a bit recently among american right wingers but in a watered down way, but I first started seeing this term years ago used by popular racist youtubers like ramzpaul to describe white conservatives who were non racist/anti racist or pro Israel. So it is basically a new way of saying “race traitor”. The only manosphere people I see using the term are the ones who are openly racist. Matt Forney and Davis Aurini who are fans of ramzpaul, for example.
I’ve seen all kinds of different men called manginas for being feminists, not for acting feminine just for being feminist. I don’t remember the name of the fighter but I remember a few years ago there was a UFC fighter that got called a mangina on MRA websites because he said he was a feminist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTtNAM2fabo
here is the hangout I was talking about from monday with two self identified radical feminists and it was a nice friendly convo, obviously they strongly disagreed on some things but they agreed on a lot and bane did say he is no longer anti feminist
@EJ, GardenGallivant,
Aw, I was beaten to the punch on Orion’s Arm! If you like sci-fi worldbuilding, they are doing some amazing stuff there! Be warned, though, the place reeks of Dark Enlightenment. I’m not sure what smell that is, but I’m guessing it’s a combination of dirty laundry and collected stacks of old pizza boxes and chinese take-out.
@Orange Tang Drinker
Just curious about something here, so pardon my intrusion. You remind me a lot of those GamerGaters who are actually in it for the game journalism ethics – i.e. the people suckered into being a cover for a platform to abuse and harass. Just, you’re doing it for the MRA.
I’m glad you don’t identify with awful groups like the Rooshes and AVFM and etcetera. But, just like GamerGate, you don’t get to define what MRA or the MRM means – there’s no gatekeeper for the term. When you carry the banner for the MRM, or for MRAs, you carry it for Elam and Roosh, too. If you don’t want to do that, then you need to start speaking out against the misogyny, because as long as you use the label, *not* speaking out makes you complicit.
It’s just like “Feminist” with our TERFs and anti-male Feminists and whatnot. As a Feminist, if I don’t want our platform to be associated with the exclusion of trans persons, or with racists, or whatnot, I have to speak up about it with other feminists when it comes up.
That “infighting” that progressives are often accused of (though conservatives do it just as much) ? That’s important. I don’t want to be on the same side as evil ideas, no matter what they are. Speaking up and raising awareness is the only way to make that happen.
So, if you want to sanitize the word “MRA”, and not get mocked or ridiculed when you identify with them? Start cleaning house. They say light is good disinfectant, and David here has a great big spotlight.
(Am I right or did I screw that up horribly? D:)
That you can just shrug off someone’s history with gross misogyny and say “he seems like a nice bloke” really shows how little you understand about misogyny.
Since you like links so much.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs239/en/
http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures
A third of women worldwide have experienced domestic violence or non-partner rape and 20% of girls have experienced child sexual abuse.
When men (or even women) say or do misogynistic things, even if it’s just casual misogyny, it perpetuates these terrible statistics. Objectifying women, calling women you dislike or disagree with c*nts and bitches, disbelieving women who report their rapes, dismissing street harassment as a compliment, implying that if a woman wears a short skirt, isn’t a virgin or drinks she should have expected to be assaulted, etc. It all contributes.
So excuse me if I don’t give one single tiny fuck if the MRAs you like phrase their misogyny in polite and friendly tones.
I love this idea that a carpenter can’t also be an opera fan. It’s this exact sort of limitation that is created by toxic masculinity that hurts men. If anyone wants to be a men’s rights advocate they should be out there protesting any definition of what it means to be a man.
You’re right in theory. But I think we all know that if OTD legit cleaned the misogynistic MRAs out of the MRM house, he’d find himself in an empty house.
Although I do suppose he gets a modicum of credit for at least trying to play the find a non-misogynist MRA game. Of course, he’s failing because he doesn’t see someone as a misogynist if they don’t come right out and say “I hate women” but most trolls just ignore the question altogether.
Sascha-
Yeah given the usual reaponse of the Manosphere, I really fear for Yates’s fiancee. And it’s cause everytime they’ve gone after a guy who’s criticized them, they’ve done so by going against the nearest woman to them (see them targeting the one woman who tagged along with Shartlet).
It’s almost like the whole Manosphere is defined by their hatred and terrorization of women or something…
OTD, can you please clarify, first you said the word ‘mangina’ is silly but then you justified it because it was being used against men who identified as feminist, with a strong implication that identifying as feminist made them traitors to their sex. It is a misogynist slur, and you seem to be saying its use is acceptable in some cases, unless I’m misunderstanding.
Thanks for the replies! Now I have a few followup questions:
Ok, well I’ve seen a lot of MRAs use very… um… different definitions for the words ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’, so I’d like a specific citation on this one.
So how do you feel about that? Do you consider it appropriate for the term “mangina” to be applied to a man who identifies as a feminist (or ally)? If so, why?
I’ll save my opinion for most of those until I actually do some research, but let’s discuss Alison Tieman, since I know you’re a big fan of the Honey Badger Brigade.
Here’s a WHTM article about Alison:
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/10/03/a-voice-for-mens-alison-tieman-winning-women-the-right-to-vote-was-feminisms-first-act-of-female-supremacy/
So, what are your thoughts? do you agree that “winning the right to vote for women was the first act of female supremacy”? If so, why? if not, why the hell do you support Alison Tieman?
Like seriously? Your example of MRAs who are ‘decent people’ includes a woman who made a hateful tirade about women gaining the right to vote?
I find OTD’s recycling of this point rather interesting. Because it reveals a lot about OTD’s assumptions that he perhaps is not aware of. First up, this strange idea that when people engage others, this somehow excuses bigotry. This also mixes with a notion that engaging someone you disagree with negates hatred and violence and means you can’t be all bad.
And this is patently ridiculous. But it’s familiar. Reggie Yates did another documentary called Extreme Russia and for the first part, he interviewed a bunch of Russian Nationalists and Neo-Nazis. And in this bit, the leader of the Neo-nazi movement approaches him and makes a big show of his ability to be in the same room and not murder the black man, putting videos online about how “look, I’m being so civil, clearly they are all wrong about us being haters”.
And Yates basically goes through the episode, digs up convincing evidence that this guy is personally training his fellow neo-nazis to stab migrants and that his movement is every bit as hateful as it looks from the outside.
And yet even though the guy knew it was complete shit, he still hard-sold this “i sat down with a black guy” moment as if it was some get out of jail free card.
And it’s really only hate movements that do this. That point to that one time they sat down with their targeted population and didn’t stab them as if this proves that they are good and civil and not really haters. That think it exonerates them.
Cause see, the rest of the world doesn’t really work that way. People talking to people who disagree with them is not special or unique. And it should not be amazing if someone can resist being a complete fuck for a half-hour.
But OTD thinks it is. He thinks it is remarkable that his hate group spoke to feminists this one time. He thinks this is the equivalent of a slam-down argument, which is why he’s linked it 2-3 times this forum chain alone.
He cites this one moment of almost civility in the exact same way as any hate movement and thinks this does not make him a willing participant in a hate movement. He makes the same arguments every other willing pawn of a hate movement makes when speaking to a general audience (the KKK doesn’t hate black people, no, they’re just worried about white culture, now please watch this video where a Klansman met a black person once). He may not realize that this is what he is doing or that it is stereotypical.
It is nonetheless his actions.