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
Thought this would be an appropriate place to put those:
http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/articles/2015-12/21/mens-rights-activists-meninism-mra-feminism
GQ actually calls this mess for what it is. Naturally, the comment section has been thoroughly infested with MRAs mad at being called names, so avoid it if you can.
I have the impression of seeing several professional boxers beating up a kitten.
But since the kitten is an abhorrent, logicless shitstain, I don’t feel guilty of liking the boxers do.
The only question I have at that point is if there is a way to make him understand that (s)he could be a lot happier is (s)he stopped reading or listening to balls of hatred and started to make his opinion by himself.
Wow. OTD, as a personal favor to me, I would love it you took some time to really think about what you said here, because this post isamazing. Once you understand the terrible mistake you’ve made here, I think you might come to understand why we (or at least I) can’t take you seriously, and why despite your superficially polite behavior, I have to think of you as, in gaming terms, “a hostile.”
What you are saying is that you do not know and have not bothered to learn anything about this man except that he claims feminists are lying about him, but you like him anyway. That is an absurd and shockingly incurious position.
If you don’t know who Bane666au is or what he does, then you can’t know whether things feminists say about him are true. He may tell that he can disprove feminist claims with “facts and evidence,” but you don’t investigate him for yourself, then you can’t be sure his “facts and evidence” are real. This problem is emblematic of your entire approach to the MRM. You decided you liked the Honey Badgers but didn’t know where they came from, and still seem unaware that they directly participated in some of the worst things AVFM has done. You like MRAs when they talk about how great they are, but you don’t bother to find out what’s true.
If you’ll humor me, I really would like you to go away for a couple days or at least several to think this over. While you’re away, you might want to go to one of the MRA Youtubers you think highly of and watch a few videos at random from outside the series you normally would watch. I would also encourage you to use brows the WHTM archives by tag. Specifically, I would strongly suggest using the Honey Badgers tag to look at the rest of David’s coverage. He’s been following them for years, and because he covers their tweets, essays, and comments more than their videos, you might learn a lot about them that you would otherwise miss.
Seriously, please go do that. Then come back and read the rest of this post.
—————————————————————————————————————
Welcome back. I imagine that you are feeling rather foolish; you have my sympathy. Chagrin can be a very uncomfortable emotion. However, chagrin is not bad for you; it’s very good. I would encourage you to practice sitting with chagrin until it becomes more comfortable. The more willingly you learn to accept chagrin, the better your life will be overall.
I imagine that you probably also feel a bit defensive. Sure, you made some mistakes, but does that really justify our chilliness? Doesn’t everyone sometimes get caught in circular reasoning, fail to check a claim out before passing it on, or trust somebody they shouldn’t? Yes, of course they do. If your only failings were a touch of laziness and a touch of credulity, they would be easily forgiven. You seem willing to change you mind when presented with new facts, and that goes a long way.
Here’s the problem: When you take sides in a dispute you know little about, you consistently side with men, MRAs, and the “falsely accused” and against women, feminists, and survivors. It’s a sexist and damaging pattern which feminists have to cope with every single day. You may not think of yourself as sexist; you may honestly try not to be, but it seems that in your subconscious, you trust men and don’t trust women.
That’s unacceptable, and you will never be welcome here unless you find a way to change. We’ve shown you that some of your favorite MRAs are not who you thought they were, but we can’t and won’t make time to show you the dark side of every last one of them. You’re going to have to stop trusting them and start digging for yourself.
Apparently OTD is really sold on this “Propaganda of Toxic Feminism” video series thing. I’m almost prone to turn on an incognito window just so I can see what sort of paper-bag logical arguments they’re making.
It is sort of expected that OTD isn’t really engaging this discussion honestly, though. They watch a bunch of videos on how feminists are gullible tools suckered in by propaganda, and then comes to a feminist site to argue for MRAs? Yeah, I don’t expect they’re too open to change on this point.
Merry Saturnalia to everyone!
@Orange Tango Drinker:
I understand that you like those MRAs. However, as we’ve shown you, you aren’t very good at spotting the prejudice and misogyny that your favourite MRAs have supported.
Can you see the general pattern here?
1) You claim that a particular MRA is not a misogynist.
2) We tell you that they are misogynists.
3) You demand evidence.
4) We provide evidence.
5) You (hopefully) concede the point.
Given that this is the pattern, you need to understand something: we can skip directly from step 1 to step 5. If the women here tell you that a particular person is a misogynist, save everyone their breath. This site has some people who are far better at spotting it than you are.
“Holy balls,” you might say, “All my favourite entertainers are misogynists.”
This is a discovery we all come to at some point. It’s part of someone’s awakening as a feminist. Soon you’ll learn to spot the misogyny yourself, and you’ll wonder how you ever managed to not see it.
“Do I have to stop enjoying this stuff?” you might reasonably ask.
No, of course not. Most of us enjoy a lot of content despite the terrible views of the people who make it. We even have a word for this: problematic. We say that a work is problematic when we believe it has some messages that are hateful or that some people may find offensive, but we believe that the overall value of the work is still high enough to make it worth enjoying despite this. For example, I really enjoy west coast G-Funk rap despite it being deeply problematic. I’m not going to defend it, but I’m also not going to stop enjoying it.
However, a big question does need to be asked: do you, personally, want to be a misogynist? If not, then we can help you, but the main thing you need to do is listen and stop protesting that everything is fine when it isn’t. We can be friends, but it requires you to be willing to learn.
If you do want to be a misogynist then I can’t stop you, but I would like to ask you to leave this website, stop responding to people and find some misogynists to associate with.
However, please do not respond by claiming that you’re not a misogynist or that you don’t think you’re a misogynist. That would insult my intelligence and make me angry, and I think we both understand each other better than to want that.
Ninja Twins!
Twinjas!
Orion, are you and I actually the same person? That would be awkward, given the accruing evidence that ej and I are the same person.
We are all Katie.
Orion, are you and I actually the same person? That would be awkward, given the accruing evidence that ej and I are the same person.
EDIT: David, what happened there? Did my post just appear from Dave?
No, I’m Spartacus!
http://i.imgflip.com/7x2x6.gif
Also, it’s almost as though they expect other people to solve men’s issues for them! While they sit and whine about it not happening.
I hope Yates had access to industrial-strength brain bleach after he’d finished filming.
sunnysombrera –
Doing work is misandry.
Well, that’s a joke, but at the same time, they do feel entitled to the work of others, especially of women, for free to get what they want. I mean, we’re talking about reactionaries that miss TV images of wives taking care of homes for free and raising the kids and so on. Creating the home they want to enjoy.
So of course those pining for this or a version of this where they’re existing wives or girlfriends have even less of a personality like some sex-dispensing chore-bot, feel dismayed at having to do work like a real rights movement.
At having to genuinely build structures and systems and organizations to help things become better. To them, it should be women’s work to do all that for them.
And it’s why all their activism just devolves to screaming at women and other marginalized folk. Because at the end of the day, they know they have a sweet deal, and they don’t have that gaping need genuinely marginalized and hated communities have for creating support and actual activism. They just want a fictional past back again when they could be 100% ignorant of sexism and where they could get a “Leave it to Beaver” fantasy of suburban comfort.
And now for something completely stupid:
http://i.imgur.com/L737fBH.jpg
I shouldn’t watch MST3K while sleep deprived. Anyway. Back to the troll.
Ugh. I tried, honest. The first of this “Propaganda of Toxic Feminism” series is fourty minutes. Not just that, but it’s fourty minutes of a digitized voice moderately sync’d up to the mouth movements of an otherwise static floating skull in a Kool-aid jar. It started off by deconstructing how Elliott Rodger was not an MRA, because he was on the PUAHate forum, and PUAs aren’t MRAs. I – no, I have better things to do with my time.
@OTD,
At one point in the bit I was able to watch, Mr. Kool-Aid Head claimed that there were two options that could explain this – either the author o the article was a deceptive liar, or so incompetent as to be incapable of doing her job. I assume you know this point, OTD? Cause there’s a third option (and even more, likely – this is an example of a false binary!).
MRAs, PUAs, FeMRAs, MGTOWs; all of these groups all look the same to everyone outside of them. Because there’s always a common theme – the universal refrain of “women are bitches, women are stupid, women are evil, women are destroying western civilization.” You don’t have to scratch that deep into any of these groups to find the hate.
There are men’s rights worth fighting for. The MRM isn’t fighting for them. Google “anti circumcision activism” and you won’t see any of the MRM around anywhere. First hit is Intact America, leading to the Intact Network. You want to support people who fight for men’s rights without hating women? Go talk to them.
Unless you want the misogyny, of course.
Scildfreja-
Ah, now we see where OTD got his “if I call technicality on terminology, then I totally win” argument style from.
I suppose it’s just an old retread of the “dictionary argument” with some “no true scotsman” thrown in for good measure.
eeeeeeeeeeeeee MST3K
http://i.imgur.com/WWSxZMS.gif
Are you as excited as I am for the new season coming up?
I haven’t participated in dealing with OTD, but I’m personally getting tired of their shtick. They show up to nitpick about a tiny technical detail they spot in someone’s post, then eventually reveal they hold their favorite MRAs to no such standards.
It’s soooo important that no one connects the MRM with Roosh, a man who wails about the evils of women and feminism like MRAs, is a disgusting rape apologist like MRAs generally are, and uses the exact same lingo as MRAs, but MRAs who constantly feed their audiences misinformation about feminism apparently have some good points and are therefore probably not that bad.
I mean, I wouldn’t mind that much if OTD actually went to the comment section of their favorite MRA’s videos and started nitpicking on every misconception they have about feminism. That would be funny and actually kind of cool. But somehow I doubt that’s happening, mainly because 1) they would have told us as much already, and 2) ain’t nobody got time for that. You could write a multi-part encyclopedia on all the things MRAs get wrong about feminism.
@sunnysombrera
Not only that, but I bet any actual activists making progress in solving said issues would see these keyboard warriors claiming credit (like #GGrs claiming credit for every positive change in the video game industry). Because they think that’s how activism works: Whine until someone else does things for you, then claim you participated.
This is roughly how they think feminism works, but as with everything else with them, it’s all projection.
These people (including Doosh himself) have something to say about Reggie.
http://youtu.be/PnA9YYhRPtg
http://youtu.be/-Q9F_CPb99g
https://j4mb.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/reggie-yatess-extreme-uk-men-at-war/
@Scildfreja: David actually wrote an article about this.
Essentially, since they all look the same and perform basically the same functions (read: hating women and teaching other men to hate women), to an outside observer, they all look the same and do the same things, because they do.
The only real difference is how they do it. MRAs hate women through blaming women and feminists for all their problems, PUAs hate women by viewing them as only moist holes to put penii in, #GamerGaters hate women by harassing and chasing women out of gaming, MGTOWs hate women by blaming them for not getting laid ect.
The only people who would actually give a damn about the distinctions are those already involved in or aware of the inner workings of the manosphere: see OTD (involved in) or David (aware of).
To those of us who are being targeted, it the distinctions don’t really matter. Because they’re all the same to us. They’re attackers.
To a PoC it wouldn’t matter if they were being attacked by the KKK or a neo-nazi, they’re being attacked by a racist. To a LGBTQA+ person it wouldn’t matter if they were being attacked by the WBC or some random dude who isn’t Christian, they’re being attacked by homophobes.
In short, manospherians are Kleenex and the only people who give a damn about the specific brand of tissues are tissue connoisseurs that are involved with other tissue connoisseurs.
@scildfreya
Okay!
I’m Kate Harding*, myself.
*For those who may fondly remember Shapely Prose and the marathon comment thread where a couple of trolls accused Kate of sock-puppeting her own comments. Hundreds of them! That’s talent, right there.
Oh, well said there Paradoxical Intention
@Paradoxy:
wouldn’t it be more like manospherians are facial tissue and MRAs are Kleenex, Red Pillers are Puffs, PUAs are Kirkland and MGTOWs are that weird brand you find in cheap motels?
Edit to add: It all falls apart when you realize that tissues are actually good for something.
On point as usual, Paradoxy. Misogynists are misogynists in any colour. The finer details are irrelevant – the point is thy don’t see women as people and treat us as such.
The manosphere in a nutshell:
“We are not misogynists, that’s just more of their woman lies. Now on to important business: what should we call ourselves?”