On Return of Kings, the internet’s premier lady-hating garbage site, one of the regular contributors is trying his hand at philosophy again. It’s not going very well.
Max Roscoe, who describes himself as “an aspiring philosopher king,” has decided to take on what he sees as the evils of “modern liberal democracy.”
As he sees it, “the western culture today destroys everything it touches,” creating
weak men, shrill, out of shape, and damaged women, a decrepit culture, and declining values.
His number one complaint? That “western culture” has destroyed Asians. Not through cultural imperialism or anything like that. Roscoe thinks that Asians in Asia are fine. But the Asians he encounters in the west are something else entirely.
Asians are naturally thin, petite, and healthy—IN ASIA. … However, when Asians move to the west and adopt our culture, diet, and lifestyle, they become overweight, slutty, and often mutilate their bodies and experiment with gender fluidity.
That’s right. Western culture is evil because it makes hot Asian babes into genderqueer fatties.
It angers me every time I see a fat Asian, because I know how difficult it is for Asians to work against their biology to become fat.
ROSCOE ANGRY! ROSCOE SMASH!
Don’t worry, western women! Roscoe hates you gals too.
Roscoe makes his case against American women by contrasting a photo of sorority girls from the early 1970s, in which “all are smiling, thin, with long hair, in skirts or dresses with heels,” with a photo of an extremely obese woman wearing a stars-and-stripes bikini, which Roscoe seems to have taken from a YouTube video with the slightly awkward title “BEST FAT People Fail Compilation – Obese People Falling Down Fails.”
To aspiring philosopher-king Roscoe, this is all the evidence he needs to prove “that the quality of women offered today in the West is abysmal.”
Indeed, in Roscoe’s eyes, domestically produced women are made so badly that American men should probably seek out foreign imports.
If you haven’t been abroad within the last year, plan a trip now, if for no other reason than to see what is possible. We do not have to accept the low quality females we are being offered here.
Roscoe does not limit his critique of Western liberal democracy to the Fat Chick Problem. He is also critical of non-fat women who do things to their bodies (and minds) that Roscoe does not approve of.
[I]t angers me when I see a thin, kind, young woman who has pierced and mutilated her body with graffiti and shrapnel, and has taken up the cause for feminism. Without a strong, patriarchal system to guide her, she becomes an enemy of civilization itself.
Apparently Roosh requires all Return of Kings writers to refer to piercings as “shrapnel.”
But there is more wrong with modern Western culture than its tendency to produce fat chicks and tattooed feminists. Roscoe is also angry that:
- Westerners dance like Miley Cyrus and/or “Elaine Benice” [sic] from Seinfeld.
- “American Millennial men” have become “shallow, silly, weak, vapid, directionless, and boring.”
- The “the profit-at-all-costs fascist system” of modern capitalism makes most jobs pretty sucky.
- Young couples no longer litter or make out in public because they’re all “play[ing] on their smartphones.”
Ok, I admit I don’t quite get that last point. So let’s back up and try it again.
Complaining that smartphones have led to a world bereft of “physical and emotional intimacy, save for the actual moment of banging your partner,” Roscoe posts two pictures to show what has apparently gone wrong.
In the first, from 1967, young people make out on park benches in New York’s Tompkins Square Park, surrounded by litter.
In the second photo, meant to represent a “Millennial couple on a typical date, 2016,” a couple sitting on a patch of grass check their phones. No litter is visible. Smartphones bad, litter good!
CHECKMATE FEMINISTS!
I guess it’s kind of hard to work up a powerful critique of Western Liberal Democracy if the cornerstone of your philosophy is NO FAT CHICKS.
Yeah, I think people get genuine enjoyment out of the silliness of bad movies but they feel guilty about it. So they pretend it’s irony when it’s really not.
For sure, I think %100 irony is pretty rare. I can’t imagine watching an entire bad movie on it’s own just for the sake of irony. I’d have to be getting some real enjoyment out of it at some level. For me it’s also it’s a social thing, since I’ve watched all kinds of bad movies and had a great time if friends were there and we made fun of it together.
I should tell the story about the guy who slept on the couch in the nude all the time, and peed in the fridge crisper drawer while on E. And I couldn’t move or leave or anything cause it was company-owned apartments!
I basically stayed locked in my bedroom the whole time outside of work, and only came out when he wasn’t around.
Ugh. Ugh.
I briefly liked his videos. Then Elevatorgate happened and I realized that he wasn’t reasonable – he was just a predator whose “rationalism” is just force-of-insult. If there’s anything I learned from him, it’s that rationality has to be inwards first, before you can hope to critique anyone else.
I know! It breaks my heart to see how much of a lightning rod she is for these people. She’s just a well-meaning woman who has tried to bring some needed perspective on the video games industry, which is ironically exactly what video game geeks have wanted for years – to be taken seriously!
(Though as has been said before, they don’t want to be taken seriously – they want to be praised)
http://38.media.tumblr.com/8e48b5738c64f22e97fc68f7c2958cd2/tumblr_nkyvmbA7xz1s2wio8o1_250.gif
@calmdown
I have always been frustrated by YouTube. TF has around 500k subscribers, TheAmazingAtheist has around 800k. Lesser antifeminists like ArmouredSkeptic, Aurini, and Sargon have around 20k. Karen Straughen has, like what, 200k. I still cannot fully understand why antifeminism is so popular on YouTube and Reddit and why those particular websites attract so many douchebags.
We know what the facts are, and on the whole scientific literature (from both “hard” and “soft” sciences) really doesn’t support antifeminism. Of course there are nuances in the information, that men’s issues are indeed valid, and there are feminists who are recalcitrant or disingenuous ideologues. That is the nature of politics in all ages and regions of the world.
But what shocks me is how all the antifeminists on YouTube and Reddit seem almost impervious to facts. They can swallow a Thunderf00t video whole and completely endorse it, ignoring TF’s blatant fallacies and pandering, but they throw temper tantrums a feminist like Kristi Winters or Laci Green makes a video with sources to back up their statements. Even Anita Sarkeesian, whose reputation has been poisoned so badly, did well-researched videos. She delivered what she promised. I remember YouTubers like HannibaltheVictor who actually studied archeology and anthropology and he would cite a lot of literature for his videos. Not just articles and stats. Actual literature!
Point is, many of the antifeminists just did not consider the facts at all. They just keep aggressively pushing the same talking points over again. Some are a little smarter and try to use studies and stats though. But from what I’ve seen, antifeminists seem to be abandoning this practice more and more. They seem to almost to be superstitious in some way.
It’s almost like they didn’t drop the central beliefs that support the fundamentalism they claim to be against/backed out from.
@dreemr
Exactly. Anita is not a big feminist icon or pioneering scholar like Judith Butler or Kimberle Crenshaw. All she really does is popularize feminist forms of critical theory by applying it to popular culture. But the rabid antifeminists have made her into some sort of head of the Feminist Illuminati where evil Cultural Marxists hold council in Pandaemonium to plot to send all good gamerbros to Feminist Death Camps.
I think that people who successfully produce 101 level stuff are actually the most threatening to reactionaries. The right wing freaks out about Michael Moore a lot too. He’s good at telling a compelling story, but his documentaries and books are very 101 level progressivism.
It’s the stuff that’s not really detailed and academic, but told well and simply that’s the most likely to snag the fence sitters. So that’s what’s the scariest to these people.
I know, I just cannot get the whole atheism/science = anti-feminist thing! I am not a scientist, but I assume most atheists believe in evolution, (which I guess is maybe where some of the evo-psych BS comes from?) But, according to anti-feminism, most females are evolved to make babies(which are mostly a burden), and to be a burden to men. Under the most general principles of evolution (again, I am not an expert) how could a species(modern humans) realistically survive for so long if %50 of their population was as fucking useless as most MRAs seem to believe? Wouldn’t we have died out eons ago?
@wwth
Their biggest worry is becoming irrelevant like the bigots of yesteryear.
@Three Snakes:
The way many of them yell “ANDREA DWORKIN!” as some kind of “gotcha!” against feminists – as well as treating some rando on a comment section as far more important than they actually are – their knowledge on feminism is absolutely abysmal.
They don’t care to become better informed, because they’d rather have a convenient strawman conceived from their imagination. It’d certainly explain why they do such a poor job actually debating real people who happen to be feminists, whose arguments are far more nuanced than the one-dimensional punching bags they could beat their fists against and then pat themselves on the back for knocking around.
J.J. Abrams?
Damon Lindeloff?
I also agree that there’s no such thing as liking/doing something ironically. A lot of people can’t seem to understand that there’s a difference between liking something and something being good, so I think “I watch it ironically” fills the void of “I get legitimate enjoyment out of this while nevertheless acknowledging its lack of objective quality.”
“Guilty pleasure” is one term to use, but I don’t think that’s accurate – you don’t necessarily feel guilty for liking it – and prefer “frivolous fun,” myself.
It’s really, really obvious that MRAs who call themselves philosophers have never actually studied philosophy. Writing about what you personally think is not philosophy; it’s an essay or a blog posting.
http://i1064.photobucket.com/albums/u375/erica_cross2/12fb9c0f13af4ba5110f41ff5a14369f_zpssnafven3.jpg
(Not true of myself…yet)
@IP @PoM – Sorry for the late reply.
It was a true drive-by posting.
(We were replumbing yesterday o_o )
re: sleepy kitty: She’s a funny cat. We have three and she’s been the generally least friendly (though is a great mouser), with the exception that she’s preternaturally patient with small children.
Until recently, she could take or leave adults. If she came over to you, it was like, “Ohmygawd! [Name] came over to me!…Oh…oh…she wants me to shake the food because it’s not situated correctly in the bowl…”
She’s pushing 12, though, and for the past year or so she’s been a lap slut.
“Oh…you’re sitting? And warm? Yes, that will help my aches nicely.”
If you see me posting a bunch, about half the time it’s because she’s claimed my lap and I don’t want to disturb her by getting up.
Sorry, I drive-by posted a bit myself there!
You guys are right that describing my roommate as a really nice guy at this juncture may be … a stretch.
To be clear though, he doesn’t really bring this stuff up ever, it’s just that sometimes I want to talk about something I read that day or something that got posted here with my man-thing and if my roommate is home, I either don’t feel comfortable bringing it up at all, whether I’m talking to him or not, or he’ll jump in and say something.
I really can’t agree to disagree on the topic of women meaning it when they say no (which was the catalyst to the women always dress sexy for men conversation) but I also don’t feel like hating one of the people I live with so I’ve just kinda shut up about it.
He also isn’t home THAT often, he’s there maybe 3 nights a week on a busy week, pays half the rent and sleeps at his girlfriend’s place so all in all it’s a pretty good deal, he’s just really obnoxious sometimes.
I just have a really hard time accepting that he believes some of these terrible things because we’ve been friends for a decade and I just really expected better from him. The decade of friendship and the fact that we still have a lot of fun gaming together and talking about other things is why I am still calling him a nice guy, whether he deserves it or not.
Inappropriate joke guy… He honestly isn’t a jerk, he’s just a gamer dude in his 30s and probably needs to have someone point out when his comments are inappropriate just because he’s used to people around him not thinking it’s inappropriate. I didn’t feel up to pointing it out yesterday but I do often jump in and ask people not to say things like that, and for the most part, if they give the faintest crap about me, they listen.
@Calmdown:
See? If The Hiddle says it – it must be true! 😀
@ThatBear
Heck, I remember from the original Buck Rogers book (Armageddon: 2419, published in 1928/1929), in their first meeting Buck attempts to be his dashing chivalric self to Wilma Deering, and gets told off by her as she points out that she is a decorated commander in the armed forces and he just put them both in danger with his attempts at ‘helping’.
(Of course, the rather blatant ‘Yellow Peril’ aspects of the book were more than a little problematic.)
@A Space Alpaca,
I really understand that. There is a difference between someone who’s falling down the MRA-hole out of ignorance and a touch of selfishness, and someone who’s steeped in that toxicity, and it’s really hard to condemn someone you know and like and have fun with for it. Nor is it your responsibility to rescue him – we all have a certain amount of effort we can put out into the world, and perhaps he’s at that limit. He gets to be responsible for himself, after all.
I hope that he gets out of the path he’s on, or at the least that he doesn’t go in too deep. Appeal to your shared friendship, if you can; I find that often snaps people out of their mode-two thinking and into mode-one.
I think he’s been spending way too much time with his other friends (which include my ex boyfriend who turned into an egomaniac shortly before we ended things) and he’s been friends with those guys just as long as he’s been friends with me. One of them was a virgin until a couple months ago and I think he was pretty angry about it so that can’t have helped. There’s more of them and he’s more inclined to agree with them, so I don’t think appealing to our history as friends is really going to help.
Fortunately, he’s a long-term relationship sort of guy who’s in what is, as far as I know, a happy relationship with a woman who has a child who is not his. I think all of his nastiness is contained to chats with his ‘bros’ and his thoughts. And to be clear, he’s not an MGTOW type that just hates women, but he does think that PUAs are right, that ‘game’ works and is something that women actively participate in as well (which may be true in some cases). Most of what he thinks is just disparaging to one type of woman, rather than hating all women in general. It’s definitely still problematic, but I don’t for a second think that he mistreats his girlfriend.
I think the biggest problem with PUA is they have *just* enough of a grasp of something true to sucker in people who should really know better, and then some stuff starts to work a bit (Because it turns out that just actually trying to talk to women is a good way of actually starting to meet women) but then when the rest doesn’t work they get told they’re just not doing it hard enough.
Take peacocking for example.
The idea is you take some absurd, utterly ridiculous piece of apparel that you’d really like to wear anyway. And you wear it. And you be confident and happy and glad you’re wearing this thing. (let’s say ridiculous cowboy hat, and I am in no way describing something I like to wear that some of my friends think is silly 😛 )
Then it gets people’s attention. It’s hard to not notice the guy in the giant stupid cowboy hat. But then if he’s still happy and confident and enjoying himself YOU NOTICE THAT, TOO. And you think, “Hey, he’s totally not self-conscious wearing that thing that I’d die of shame to try on in a store.” And that counts for something, because it turns out most people have things they’d like to do and wear but are afraid of getting judged over.
But, no, these dipshits think it means just shoving a giant fuzzy top hat on your head to get attention and then sulking in a corner.
I’m just glad that when that stuff hit the scene I was in a relationship with a woman who wanted to explore like, an open relationship, and the fact that it all utterly fell apart in seconds when there was a woman NOT being exploited, even though these shmucks constantly talked about how a MFF threesome was some kind of holy grail, yet they couldn’t begin to conceive of a scene where one of the women actually WANTED to be there, well, that really helped me see just how much of it was utter bullshit.
P.S., I’m intensely amused by the fact that “dipshits” has been repeatedly autocorrected to “dispirits”. Thanks, iPhone.
Is “guilty pleasure” watching the same as “watching ironically,” though? If you’re watching something because you enjoy it (guiltily or otherwise), that’s not being ironic, that’s just enjoying something. To watch something ironically, wouldn’t you have to actually hate it and get no enjoyment out of it, but watch it anyway?
@katz
Guilty pleasure: “Snooki & JWoww”
Ironic watching: “Libertarian Primary Debate”
One is the best fucking show ever. One is grown people behaving like children.