Professor Douchecanoe manosphere-splains feminism to coeds

One of the strange superpowers of the modern Manosphere intellectual is the ability to pontificate endlessly, and with utmost confidence, on a subject — feminism — that they know absolutely nothing about. You could even say they know less than nothing about it, in that the few things they do think they know about it are completely and utterly wrong.

Today, the reliably terrible Return of Kings posted a prime example of what we might call the manosphere-splaining of feminism in the form of a post (archived here) by Beau Albrecht with the patronizing title “An Open Letter To Women Who Still Believe In Feminism.”

In other words, a guy who doesn’t know crap about feminism has decided to explain feminism to women who do actually know something about it. To paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s famous dis of Lillian Hellman, pretty much every word of Albrecht’s post is wrong, including “and” and “the.”

The post goes completely off the rails by the second paragraph:

I’m here to discuss radical feminism, which is the only variety that gets much attention and media access.

Like most antifeminists, Albrecht doesn’t actually know what radical feminism is, or what sets it apart from non-radical feminism, simply using it as a synonym for “all the feminists I don’t like,” a group that pretty much includes, well, all feminists except for mythologized first-wave feminists who were all polite and stuff, and possibly anti-feminist “feminists” like Christina Hoff Sommers.

Since the Second Wave arose—beginning in the mid-1950s, and kicking into high gear in the mid-1960s—feminism has been telling you that we live under a patriarchy, men are responsible for all your problems (“the personal is political”), we’re a bunch of evildoers, and so forth.

Here’s my Open Letter to dudes trying to explain feminism to feminists:

Dear dudes trying to explain feminism to feminists, 

It helps if you get the basic facts about feminism straight. 

Love, David

PS: Second wave feminism didn’t start in the 1950s; it started, very tentatively, in the early 1960s and only really took off on the late 1960s.

PPS: What difference does it make if you’re off by five or ten years in your dates, you ask? Because history involving women matters as much as history involving men. If you were writing an essay about Ronald Reagan and you said he had been elected to the presidency in 1972 or 1976, everyone reading your essay would know that you don’t know crap about crap.

PPPS: I mean, this is all stuff you could look up in two seconds on Wikipedia, or with a single Google search. 

Albrecht continues on in this fashion, piling nonsense upon nonsense; his attempts to rebut statistics showing that a significant number of female college students are raped every year are undercut not only by his disingenuous use of stats but also by the fact that he keeps referring to said female college students as “coeds,” which conjures up images like the one at the start of this post.

The rest of Albrecht’s post is a collection of manosphere clichés we’ve all seen dozens of times. He suggests that the root case of misogyny is women being mean — and that some men are so disgusted by snarky women that they literally turn themselves gay, “finding it to be better than nothing.” He mentions sexbots, and Japanese “herbivores,” and “cultural Marxism.” He declares that antifeminists like him “care about you more than the feminists.”

There is the obligatory reference to Sex and the City, which Albrecht naturally refers to as Sex in the City.

If you spend your 20s partying and “finding yourself” as you’ve been encouraged to do, don’t expect Mr. Big to be waiting around patiently to sweep you off your feet after you’ve aged and decided it’s time to settle down. Actually, many Mr. Bigs used to be those nerds you wouldn’t have given a second look to back in college. 

Sex and the City is such a completely fresh and original cultural reference that it’s likely many of Albrecht’s manosphere readers are going to spend much of the night tonight creepily hitting on women born after the show first went on the air in 1998.

There’s even a genuine “we hunted the mammoth” moment as Albrecht tries to convince women of the many fine benefits of patriarchy:

It was all on us to provide for you and the kids; be it by working on an assembly line all day, in a coal mine, digging ditches, or under the hot sun tilling the fields. … We got drafted in wars to protect you. We let you have first place on lifeboats. Meanwhile, women were tending the children and doing housework. All told, it wasn’t quite such a bad trade-off for women.

Look at this picture of men gallantly farming away for their pampered stay-at-home wives.

I don’t know why they’re all dressed as women. Probably just some gleaner thing.

Perhaps the most telling moment in the post comes during Albrecht’s attempt to prove that rape culture isn’t real.

Think about it a minute. We’re bigger and stronger than you. If we really were savages, we would be doing whatever we wanted to you, especially if that truly was approved by our culture. The reason you don’t have to pepper spray someone every day is that the vast majority of us are actually decent, civilized people. There are a few exceptions; they end up going to prison, and rightly so, where they’re despised even by the other criminals.

There’s just a teensy bit of an irony in the fact that Albrecht is posting this on a site run by everybody’s favorite repugnant “pickup artist” Roosh Valizadeh, an allegedly “ironic” proponent of rape legalization who has himself been accused of rape.

Yeah, the rest of this post isn’t going to be terribly funny.

In his book Bang Iceland, Roosh offered this account of one of his “dates,” if they can be called that:

While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated.

I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do.

In a book called 30 Bangs, Roosh wrote about his inability to take no for an answer:

It took four hours of foreplay and at least thirty repetitions of “No, Roosh, no” until she allowed my penis to enter her vagina. No means no—until it means yes.

Roosh went on to note that:

The sex was painful for her … She whimpered like a wounded puppy dog the entire time, but I really wanted to have an orgasm, so I was “almost there” for about ten minutes. After sex she sobbed for a good while … .

In Bang Ukraine, Roosh wrote this about a woman he got into an argument with during sex:

She tried to squirm away while I was laying down my strokes so I had to use some muscle to prevent her from escaping.

Apparently some men really are savages, at least by Albrecht’s definition of the term.