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
But you guyssssss, we only call men manginas for being feminists, not for being women. It’s totes different… Which is why we compare men we don’t like, men who are feminists to genitalia frequently associated with women and expect this to discredit and dismiss them. Because it’s implying feminist men are equatable to women and that that is a bad thing.
What could possibly be misogynistic about that? It’s not like we use it against feminine men… We just call those ones f**s. Totes different.
@WWTH,
It’s that sort of mental housekeeping that is needed in order to come to truth, i think! We all have terrible ideas, and usually we’ve got to be slapped in the face with their consequences to change. This sort of “everyone is terrible!” realization is powerful disinfectant.
What do you think, OTD? Up to the challenge?
okay dhag talked about two videos, the first one I agree he was an asshole and I hadn’t seen that video before. I don’t agree it was rape apologia, his point was that being stopped from ever seeing your children is worse than being raped and that anybody would choose being raped over not seeing their kids again. I think he made some bad analogies but nothing that came close to saying rape being justified because of child support. He talked about the idea of never seeing your kids again but still being forced to pay child support that and the prospect of being locked up if you cant pay. Skeptorr is a happily married, wealthy man with several daughters from what he has said but he used anecdotal experience from his friends and also talked about a particular law in Spain concerning allegations of domestic violence.
There was no murder advocacy, the second video was a response to some statements by Swedish politicians. In the past few months in Israel there have been a number of incidents of terrorists running into crowds of people in broad daylight and stabbing a bunch of random people until they are shot by the police. These people WANTED to be shot dead by the police which is why they always did this in front of police officers, their intention to stab as many people as they could before getting shot dead by the cops and becoming “martyred”.
In some of these cases the police managed to arrest the stabbers without shooting them but most of the time the cops shot them dead, which makes perfect sense. If you are a cop and you see someone running around a crowd stabbing random people then it makes sense to shoot them dead. If that was America then none of them would have been arrested and all of em would have been shot. Just look at all the cases of un armed black men being shot dead for bullshit reasons.
Some Swedish politicians had said the cops were wrong to shoot these stabbers dead and called it “extra judicial executions” so Skeptorr talked about how they did what anybody should do if you got a gun and you witness that. These clips that dhag mention were ALL from these recent stab attacks not random clips unrelated to this. He described what you should do if you have a gun and you witness one of these incidents, dhag made it sound bloodthirsty but he was talking about how the cops were justified.
He made a flippant comment about Syrians living in Sweden coming back from fighting for ISIS and attacking people back in Sweden but on the screen he showed what he was talking about from news articles. The Swedish government is aware of Syrians and other muslims living in Sweden, going to Syria to fight for ISIS and then allowing these people back into the country and proposing that these people should be given priority for public jobs to deradicalise and integrate them which is a dangerous idea. Anybody who goes to join ISIS which we all know is an evil cult of mass murder and mass rape should never be allowed back into a county, even if they are natural born citzens
Sorry i didn’t mean to say its use is ever acceptable, I don’t use the term, I just meant that it is not used by MRAs as a term for feminine men, which I sometimes see feminists say, that is why I used the example of the feminist UFC fighter who got called a mangina on MRA websites
If OTD comes back, I’d like to know what he thinks about feminism. Because for all the talk he’s done here, he’s made everything exclusively about MRAs. Who is or isn’t one. Who’s associated with who. I don’t believe he’s actually told us what his own ideology is. We know he opposes circumcision. That’s it.
So’s the manosphere.
I’m just going to make this really easy for everyone and paste in Dhag’s post from the other thread.
OTD’s excuse for this is that it’s okay for Australian men to call women misogynistic slurs for some reason.
I don’t know why, but I’m not terribly optimistic about those other people he cited in this thread as non-misogynist MRAs.
This is what OTD dismissed as a bad analogy. He can’t tell the difference between a bad but well meaning analogy and overt misogyny. Anyone who thinks being required to pay a few hundred dollars a month to keep your child alive is worse than being repeatedly raped is a misogynist and a rape apologist.
I’ve always been puzzled as to how he has any followers? I can’t think of any sensible person I know who would be impressed by him. The manosphere should be called the losersphere!
OTD also seems to take it as read that this is what all custody removal is like, when in fact I can’t actually think of any divorce-based custody removal where “police barge into (anyone’s) house” “for no reason”. Additionally, those divorce custody removals in which the parent (yeah, not always the dad) would “go to prison” if they ever tried to contact them are never “for no reason”, they are because THAT IS WHAT THE COURT DECIDED WAS IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE CHILDREN. In other words, the parent losing custody and contact was proven in court to be so harmful to the welfare and well-being of their child that all contact must be cutoff.
I still don’t care to watch any of these guys’ videos but I did take a peek at Felfop Returns’ twitter. He likes a bunch of videos with titles like “the Young Turks are dishonest cunts” and “post-feminist parasitic women seek rich men to pay for them” and “do bimbos even have brains?” He also retweeted something that appeared to be from an anti-choice account because it used the term “unborn baby” to describe a fetus. So that guy isn’t terribly promising. https://twitter.com/felfop
https://twitter.com/therynmeyer
Theryn Meyer appears to be a trans woman who thinks other trans women should be okay with transphobia. She retweeted someone who retweeted our old friend Milo bragging about being offensive. She said she has no problems with TERFS. So, yeah. Internalized misogyny and internalized transphobia all wrapped up in one!
I’ve about had my fill of researching MRAs now. If others want to take on the other ones he listed, cool. If not. I understand. Life is too short to watch MRAs on YouTube!
no I didn’t take it as read. I admit I don’t know much about situations like these. I admit that was a shit video. He was talking about the law in Spain though and I did not bother looking into what law he was talking about. I only found that video because of it being linked to me from here but it is still going far too far to call it pro rape or advocating rape, that is just outrageous, he didn’t say anything close to that.
I’ve been having a bad time of it lately and was refraining from responding because of it, but you know what, fuck that.
Being forced to choose between being raped and never seeing your children again isn’t some god damned hypothetical for women. It happens far too often.
So fuck you and your “bad analogy” OTD.
no, bane666au is the australian guy, he made the posters with the c word. i wasn’t aware of those posters before they were linked to me on the other thread. I said that Australians don’t use the c word in the same way, i thought it was more of a light hearted insult over there. Some Australians replied and told me I was talking crap and i’m not going to argue with that because i’ve never been there. But regardless of that, these posters were from 2 years ago, I only starting watching him when he started the “propaganda of toxic feminism” series in summer 2014. I’ve never seen seen him talk in a sexist way and he has talked to feminists a lot recently and has always been polite and friendly.
The video by Spinosauruskin is an old one that I wasn’t aware of before it was linked. Spino has only recently turned 18 so I think in that old video he was immature and he doesn’t talk in that manner since I have been following him. It was also a light hearted video anyway not an angry one. Jenny’s video was “10 reasons why feminists should have sex with MRAs” but obviously a comedy video mocking MRAs, his reply “10 reasons jenny is a cunt” was also a comedy video mocking her in response. Jenny also uses the C word at MRAs and for feminists who she doesn’t like btw.
He was talking about never seeing your kids again, the bit about also paying child support was just an add on but the main thing was never seeing your kids again being worse than being raped.
OTD, there is a difference between calling something pro-rape and calling someone a rape apologist. Skeptorr was saying that losing your children in a divorce because of your own bad actions is *worse* than being raped, that being raped is *preferable* to your own actions meaning you can’t see your children again. That is rape apologia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologia it’s number 3 on the list there under Benoit’s Postures.
where has she said she has no problem with TERFS?
He didn’t say about your own bad actions though. He said that the law in Spain allows that to happen based on an accusation alone.
So the excuse for him spouting rape apologist bullshit is that he made assumptions based in his misogyny and did no research about the actual laws in Spain before posting his rant about it? Not a great excuse, OTD.
Family courts do not just decide on a whim to never let fathers see their children again. Even parents who have lost primary custody still get visitation. There are cases when a woman was impregnated by rape and the rapist father still gets some parental rights! If the court makes that decision, it’s usually because the father has been extremely abusive. Even abusive fathers sometimes get supervised visits BTW. To compare this to someone just breaking into a random woman’s house and giving her the option of losing her kids and being raped repeatedly is absolutely fucking ridiculous. It shows just how little regard he has for the trauma of rape and for rape victims. It’s disgusting and defending it even tacitly by nit picking about the term “rape apologia” is fucking disgusting too.
Is there some reason you’re incapable of clinking on the link to her twitter an scrolling down? Haven’t we done enough looking up stuff for you?
weirwoodtreehugger-
But guyyyyyyys, doing work is hard and beneath manly men. If women don’t want to be hated, they should do all the infinite hard work of researching and debunking bullshit claims so that I as the man can just dismiss it with some weak ass shit that lets me believe what I currently believe and not have to change in any way whatsoever.
But seriously, given our pet sealion’s current main argument is “well, things made a year or two ago must be completely unrelated to the new stuff, so I’m gonna still love the new stuff and assume it’s non-misogynistic, even if it’s coming from the same anti-feminist space as all the other misogynist shit they’ve made in the recent past”, I think we can be safely assured that work or actual thought are not really things he is at all prepared to do.
OTD: So, you recommend videoes from people that you say are good examples of MRAs but you don’t vet them? If I’m recommending to someone to read up on Gloria Steinem, I make sure they understand that in the 70s and 80s she said some horrible things about Trans people. I make sure I know the history of people I’m recommending that people read (or watch).
Here’s the bigger problem: a lot of your responses contain phrases like ‘I didn’t know’ or ‘they aren’t like that anymore’. You come across as amazingly naive or a cherry picking troll at worst.
We aren’t here to educate you on feminism and on why the people you like are harmful to men and women alike. That is your job should you want to do it. Go find a beginner’s website or book and learn yourself.
It’s also not our job to vet your sources. You need to do that so you can find out why people see them as awful examples of human beings.
You seem to have this need for compartmentalization (see arguments about who’s an MRA and who belongs to which faction of AVfM) and that’s fine if you choose to believe that there is no overlap in anything at anytime. That’s even fine in internet arguing. But it’s not fine in real life when so many things are in shades of grey. Please try to see how arguing in pedantics and semantics isn’t trying to come to an agreement about anything other than definitions of things.
I might as well check out the last two guys on his list (without actually watching any of their videos, because fuck no).
Billy Clement: #GamerGater and ThunderD00fus fan who’s been taking part in the harassment against LaughingWitch.
Tyler Preston: #GamerGater, Islamophobe and Dawkins/Hitchens fan who approvingly retweets “White genocide” stuff despite being black. Looks like we have some internalised racism to go with the internalised misogyny and internalised transphobia.
Is anybody surprised? Aside from at there being a black #Gater who isn’t just a sockpuppet, I mean?
But for said whinemonger:
https://twitter.com/TherynMeyer/status/676209967641178112
“I have no problem w/ TERFs. By all means, count me out of ur viciously toxic ideology ”
Oh, and in case you thought this was a sarcastic response to a TERF, the “toxic ideology” she is responding to here is modern feminist efforts to correct transphobia.
The tweet she is responding to:
https://twitter.com/creepygrrl/status/676190375409766400
“I think for the most part young feminists are trying to undo the TERFism of our predecessors ha”
Which I’ll also note wasn’t even talking to Theryn in the first place, but was an unfortunate soul who made the “mistake” of having a conversation with a trans game developer who the Gators have decided is triple Satan because she’s a trans woman who dares be in “their” gaming industry.
Oh, did I mention she was a Gator, you know that misogynist hate mob who has been harassing women in gaming for over a year now in response to an abuser asking them to in order to keep hurting an ex of his? Cause that seems relevant right about now.
Oh, and since our lovely lion of the sea is currently trying out a “all that problematic stuff was from their past and I’m sure they are all better now” tactic, I also want to note that this particular tweet is from December 13, literally 11 days ago.
I think you need to watch more than just one or two videos of someone’s before you say you like them. Maybe even just browse through their videos and read the titles. Or actually go to their YouTube pages.
Just suggestions.
I follow her on twitter and watch her videos. I haven’t seen any pro TERF stuff. I think she is awesome. The woman who retweeted Milo is also a trans woman. Some trans women like Milo.
Theryn has done lots of hard work for the cause of mens issues, setting up the mens issues group at her university and organizing all kinds of interesting and important events about things like male suicide and missing and murdered aboriginal men.