In this, the inaugural episode of an occasional series I’m calling Just Another Day on Twitter, we will meet a very concerned Twitterer who showed up in my mentions today.
Jemoi1, you see, is unhappy that I suggested the other day that Richard Dawkins’ recent tweets about Chanty Binx, the red-haired Canadian feminist who’s become a favorite target of MRAs and others of their ilk, would almost certainly worsen the harassment that she’s been facing on a daily basis for nearly three years.
“[B]y accusing people you disagree with of harrasing you are pissing on the experience of real harrasment victims,” Jemoi1 tweeted at me, claiming to be a harassment victim himself. In a followup tweet, he accused me of chasing page views “while ignoring victims of harrassment.”
As I pondered whether or not to bother to respond, I clicked over to Jemoi1’s Twitter feed. And this is what I saw.
As you no doubt noted, I blanked out the names of those he was targeting as well as some of the more obscene language.
There are literally hundreds of tweets like these — angry, obscene, scatological, abusive.
Jemoi1 is a little bit obsessed with horses.
And with other people’s mothers.
Oh, in case you’re wondering, when Jemoi1 refers to “racism,” he (naturally) means racism against white people. This is the main theme of perhaps a third of his tweets.
Despite his obsession with racism (against white people), he is happy to drop the n-word into his own Tweets. Here’s one lovely example:
While most of his tweets target feminists and those he deems anti-white racists, Jemoi1 also has some strong feelings about e-sports, spamming a number of professional e-sporters with the same vicious, vaguely threatening message:
In a couple of cases, he moved past mere threatening language and simply sent his targets death threats.
It seems to me that if Jemoi1 were truly concerned about the victims of harassment, he would have long ago DELETED HIS ACCOUNT.
@falconer :
“What’s your understanding of the Bechdel test? Because I thought it was about stories. Yes, it concerns women characters but it doesn’t measure them.”
The point I want to make is, all the points of the aforementioned “foil” test to the bechdel test can be failed by describing accurately existing men. You don’t need. While you can’t fail the Bechdel test by describing accurately existing women.
I see the Bechdel test as a very basic reality check. If it fail, your story have a major consistent problem, or is way outside the scope the test was imaged in*. That “foil” test ? Not so much. Bubbling and incompetent dads exists, people who fall in love with someone because of his or her status exist, honest hard working men being screwed or asshole exist, people being uncreative and/or violent exist. And all in sadly high amount.
While a woman (or man) who have exactly one conversation topic, who is the opposite sex, isn’t something that happen.
Another way to state it is, the premise of the bechdel test is that movies often don’t show women as functioning human, the premise of that “foil” test is that movies often don’t show as not being asshole. The difference being that almost all women are functioning humans, while a decent fraction of men (and women) actually are assholes.
* by that, I mean that saying that, say, Interstellar, Waiting for Godot or Robin Crusoe fail the bechdel test isn’t informative, because there is a reasonable explanation.
The Borat movie has been on HBO a bunch lately, and I decided that Roosh is ideologically indistinguishable. Then I googled their names together and saw that this is, of course, a thing.
I mean, I’d love it if this is what they meant, but I just don’t see it in the rule as written. There’s nothing here about female agency. The woman doesn’t have the option to not be with the man. According to this rule, women aren’t trophies to be won — they’re entitlements you have by right.
Maybe I’m just too cynical? The violence rule is definitely good. But overall, knowing who made it, this could also be interpreted as MRA wish fulfillment wanting to be entitled to everything. I’m a nice guy, so I deserve to be a high-powered executive and get female attention and be regarded as a good dad even if my wife does all the actual work.
Lime-Doosh is coming to Australia?!?! Eewww!
@Alan Robertshaw
Do you live in Cornwall or just have a Cornish mechanic ? 🙂
With the way that Australia’s revoking PUAs’ visas forcing them to leave left, right, and center, I don’t think Roosh will last long if Australia’s made aware of it.
@ matchstick
Oh, I live here. The funny thing is, he’s not the mechanic; just some bloke who hangs around in the garage. Weird. 😉
@Alan Robertshaw
Heh 🙂
Spent vast majority of my childhood round St Austell & Par and both my parents and parents in law still live down there so the description of the garage sounds strangely familiar 🙂
@dhag
I have to disagree. I would say anyone who takes action that is counter to feminist goals is anti-feminist. Dawkins is currently being very anti-feminist on Twitter even though he’s a self-declared feminist.
@ matchstick
Yeah, they should call it “Dreckly Servicing”!
One of my favourite Cornish experiences (and you’ll appreciate this because you can imagine the accent) was when a bloke in the pub suddenly asked:
” ‘Ere, what’s that word where you’re racist against gays?”
@Alan Robertshaw:
Oo arr, mah lovarr. 😀
I have a huge amount of love for the West Country region and the accent in particular.
@kupo
That was my snarky way of saying there’s no difference between an anti-feminist and Dawkins, despite the fact that he’s a self-declared feminist.
@ monzach
Right on; proper job! 🙂
Honestly, David, I don’t know how you tolerate this nonsense as much as you do. That said, I’m also thankful for it – because I couldn’t without losing my mind. Even dealing with assholes occasionally on Facebook stresses me out…
I also noticed that the one and only Sargon of Akkad proclaimed you were “defending” Dawah Man despite the fact, prior to and after the correction, you simply stated that it came off as a racist stereotype with a “funny” accent. Most of the people who accuse you of supposedly lying quite obviously don’t read your posts, as much as hear about it from someone else and then presumptuously demonize you regardless of what you actually wrote.
The weird part being that, oftentimes, you are simply quoting what someone else said and linking said statement – which is more than I see from most other Manosphereans. They’ll just pull any random quote (usually from someone I don’t know at all) out of their ass and become indignant when you don’t just accept it, right then and there.
@ katz
Are Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Coulombe rabid MRAs or antifeminists? A brief googling comes up with an article on the McGyver test by Coulombe on AVFM (which I admittedly did not read more than 3 paragraphs of), but knowing AVFM, it may just be a repost of her text somewhere else, which she may (or may not) have given a permission to do without knowing what kind of site AVFM is.
I’m asking because some of the meninists do seem to have a sincere desire to find a more “positive masculinity”, and reject a feminist framework mainly because it’s too extreme and because of poor relations between the right and the left. Of course they won’t be any less sexist if they succeed, but if they can do something about the culture of violence and the assumption that women should be primary caregivers among lower ses men*, a goal which this test would seemingly support, that would be a positive development for feminism and everyone.
Those guys are never ever ever ever going to listen to feminists anyway. They’re permanently and forever lost to us and will only ever be influenced by feminism when it’s so indirect they can’t tell it’s feminism, and this isn’t going to go away with generations either. If the test is something separate from incitement to violence, aggrieved entitlement, rape culture, and other aspects of toxic masculinity, rather than an attempt to whitewash all that, then maybe it isn’t so bad even if it exists in the same space those things do? That’s precisely where it’s needed. Over time it may lead to incremental change toward where we want stuff to be.
* NOT a racist dogwhistle. I can’t come up with terms that would be entirely unpolluted by that shit. Suggestions?
Oh, are they not MRA types? My bad.
@ katz
I honestly don’t know, I’m just being hopeful. If you don’t, either, I guess it remains to be seen.
@katz @dust bunny
They aren’t open MRAs afaik, but the book seems to fall into the studies of masculinity that blame “lack of male mentors” (especially fatherlessness) for the “crisis of masculinity” they make out. The “crisis of masculinity” narrative, although certainly not totally unfounded, is at least open to laying the blame at the feet of women and all too often doesn’t problematize the way masculinity is presented in a patriarchal society. Most of their points (education, lack of male mentors etc.) are popular talking points of MRAs, and they don’t seem to critically reflect the data supporting this diagnosis.
I’ve just perused through the book on Google Books, but there are some weird chapters about women’s expectations of what men should achieve being shaped through “many women’s version of porn – romantic comedies and erotic novels” (that’s a quote, GB doesn’t show page numbers), or how women should teach “shy men” how to date while meeting through OKCupid or similar.
Edit: they did a reddit AMA, in which they mention their basic premises and arguments:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/35b1ye/i_am_psychology_professor_philip_zimbardo_here/
“The other part is fatherlessness. By far, this stands out across all nations as a cause of why young men are failing academically, wiping out socially, and flaming out sexually with women.” This seems highly problematic for me, at least for the fact that they don’t seem to have checked for social status, and seem to think that single mother households are no problem for girls.
Looking a bit over the AMA, it looks like they are definitely close to MRA discourse. In the AMA you get responses like this from Zimbardo (on why he is interested in masculinity):
Which is just confusing: the first sentence is totally ok with me. But then feminism and the success of young women is a problem? But you “celebrate” the rise of “gals”?
Or, in the same thread, Nikita Coulombe quoting Warren Farrell:
link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/35b1ye/i_am_psychology_professor_philip_zimbardo_here/cr2qtb7
Farherlessness is typically blamed on women, so I usually side eye anyone who says it’s the root of all problems.
Since there is a class component involved, they’re also essentially arguing that the patriarchy is the fault of lower income people. As if middle and upper class men aren’t ever misogynistic.
The Stanford
torture pornprison experiment guy is an MRA? … I don’t think I’ve ever been less surprised in my life.@wwth
That’s a big red flag for me, too. Especially when “fatherlessness” is employed without a subject, as if fathers just mysteriously disappeared or as if it were always the decision of single mothers to raise a kid on their own.
@dhag
My apologies. Sometimes snark goes over my head. 🙂
Ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ewewewewewewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
@kupo
No worries. 🙂
If these supposedly “shy” men are meeting up with women from OKCupid, evidence suggests that they already know how to date.
@ Bernardo Soares
Okay, that’s pretty definitive. I expected they would be gross, you have to be or you’re not communicating to MRAs and MRA-adjacent groups in language they understand. But these guys are clearly feeding the resentment, not engaging in any sort of constructive effort. I regret my insufficient cynicism.
Thank you for your research efforts.
It really is disappointing to know Zimbardo is an MRA, or at least an MRA-lite. You’d think with something like the Stanford Prison Experiment – he’d be more aware of how actual power structures work and their negative effects, especially patriarchy.
Then again, as Richard Dawkins or Ben Carson prove, being knowledgeable or skilled in one field or another doesn’t make one enlightened.
Goddamn, that last sentence just drips of insincerity…
It’s like how, in South Park, they’ll spend an entire episode dismissing the usefulness of hybrid cars (because…some people are smug about it…?) and then end by doing a convenient 180-degree turn around to act otherwise – while still attaching the insipid advice of “just don’t be smug about it!”
Um, yeah, that doesn’t take away from the fact you just spent mocking the existence of hybrids purely because some drivers are smug about it. Which, as far as complaints go, is really petty and completely besides the point.
Oh boy, that ‘ol chestnut!
So, yeah, put the onus on single mothers who do their damnedest to raise a kid by themselves – oftentimes without the child support payments expected by the father of their child – and act like it’s all their fault…’cause it isn’t like things such as social class or race ever come into it.
Or, y’know, the fact the person who sired the child doesn’t want to contribute to raising them. You’d think that’d be the obvious culprit of fatherlessness, not the women who had their child and spends most of the time fucking raising them.
Bernardo Soares:
And if she’d done any research on this, she’d know the answer! It’s not “reverse sexism” it’s sexism against women. And thanks to feminists, they’re already talking this week about when women will be added to selective service registration! So congrats MRAs! Feminists will soon have solved one of your problems!
Seems like feminists do more for men’s rights than MRAs.
This chaps my hide as well. In addition to what others have already said (class, poverty, available support networks etc), it’s also spoken about as if only male children are in single-mother households, or as if having no father in your life only affects male children somehow. As if young men can’t learn how to become good people unless they have an older man in their life? My husband , and many other men I know, contradict this.
I’m not particularly fond of applying the Bechdel test on a work-by-work basis. There’s a variety of entirely valid reasons for a given work to fail it, because it’s specifically measuring whether there are two named female characters who have an onscreen conversation not about a man. Obviously, any work that only has one speaking character fails. Likewise, any work strictly locked onto a single male character’s viewpoint is fairly likely to fail. And I watched The Martian recently, and I think it fails (possibly depending on how you count group conversations) because there is one man stranded on Mars and virtually all the dialogue in the entire movie is about that fact.
The factor of actual interest is the count of works that fail the Bechdel test vs. the count that fail the reverse Bechdel test: There are at least two named male characters who have a conversation about something other than a woman. And yes, there are things that fail that one and not by the trivial exercise of not having more than three gendered characters and failing one of the two by default. Not very many, but they exist.
Correction
I have to correct what I said way back on p. 2. Bang did not sell 985 copies on Amazon. It had 985 reviews, which is a very respectable number of reviews. And as of today, the book has 993 reviews.
That said, I still don’t think Roosh makes a living from his books and lectures. His talks are poorly attended (35 or so guys at his Canadian talks this summer). And I don’t know how many books he sells from Amazon, his own website, and any other venues, but I do know is that it’s extremely difficult for any author to make a living from books:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/15/income-for-us-authors-falls-below-federal-poverty-line-survey
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/17/writers-earn-less-than-600-a-year (That’s 600 pounds, which is $874.95 in US dollars.)
Back to the reviews of Bang: Of the 993 reviews (that’s a gratifying number for an author), 35 percent are 1-star reviews (that’s an unsettling number for an author).
Here’s an excerpt from a 1-star review by P.G. (January 15, 2016):
But, Tessa! Us widdle feeemales aren’t fit for combat because we’re naturally weaker than men! And we’re distracting because boobs! So this is a problem of us mean ol’ femicommunists trying to make us women more powerful than we really are and trying to distract the MAYUNLY MENFOLK while they’re off doing MAYNLY MENFOLK THINGS like fighting in wars to impress us feeemales!
[/HEAVY sarcasm]