When Harry Styles agreed to model a series of dresses and skirts for a Vogue cover shoot, he knew it would stir up controversy. He probably didn’t think he was going to be blamed for undermining civilization itself. But that’s what some right-wing opinion-havers would have you believe.
“Blexit” leader Candace Owens started the brouhaha with this melodramatic tweet:
She followed up with a swipe at feminism:
It wasn’t long until fast-talking dunderhead Ben Shapiro decided to chime in.
But Ben wasn’t content to simply share a couple of tweets on the issue, and so he took it to his podcast today, delivering a nearly half-hour rant on the subject, interrupted only by Shapiro reading out ads for luxury bedsheets and his publication the Daily Wire.
He began by not-so-subtly suggesting that men wearing dresses might deserve a punch in the mouth, and followed with a rambling, repetitive rant taking on what he, likes Owens, sees as a dire threat to western civilization: men in “floofy” frocks.
This excerpt will give you some of the flavor of the thing:
But Shapiro wasn’t just annoyed; he presented himself as a noble guardian of civilization fighting off the cross-dressing barbarians.
“This stuff matters,” he declared.
It matters. Because these are fundamental ideas for the preservation of civilization. Boys and girls are different. Boys and girls are different. And it’s important to inculcate in your children that boys and girls are different. And any parents who fail to inculcate in a boy that manliness is a good thing, and that responsible manliness helped build civilizations … any parent that does not teach their girls that femininity, meaning the protection of hearth and home in a different way than masculinity, is a good thing. Any parent that doesn’t teach their girls that is not doing their kid any favors. They’re undermining the civilizational compact that men and women [have], based on biology and in every human culture.
Dude, it’s just a man in a dress. Cis male musicians have been donning dresses for decades — from David Bowie to Kurt Cobain — and somehow civilization hasn’t come tumbling down.
But Shapiro thinks this is a Very Important Topic.
We shouldn’t be shy about discussing these issuesl the left certainly isn’t shy about discussing these issues. They’ll put these [ideas] in public schools, they’ll tell your kindergartener that real men wear dresses. And then you’ll be explaining to a five year old that real men don’t wear dresses. And I don’t feel that’s an acceptable ramification of our cultural discussion.
I really don’t think there’s much discussion of cross-dressing in kindergarten.
Shapiro throws in a weird racial aside:
Harry Styles is a free man, living in a western country, in a west by the way that is defended by white masculine men, as a general rule.
Shapiro insists he has nothing against Harry Styles. It’s just that when Styles puts on a dress he is TEARING APART THE VERY FABRIC OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
I’m not saying don’t pick up his CDs; I’m not saying don’t listen to his music; I’m not saying don’t watch the movies he’s in. All I’m saying is that when you put out an argument that men ought to act like women and that this is a good thing you’re doing something that tears at the fabric of not only civilization but family and the fabric of childrearing and everybody with half a brain knows this.
Again, Ben, it’s just a man in a dress, a playful tweak of conventional notions of masculinity. How fragile is masculinity — how fragile is civilization itself — if it can be brought to its knees by a handful of pictures of a man in a dress?
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Basically I had called, i got a voice mail that said the name of the woman I was pretty sure was the right one. I left a message saying I was calling about her son Eric if this is the right lady, If you don’t have a son eric, Feel free not to bother calling me back, that i could have the wrong person. A bit later she called me back and asked me what it was about and I said i found her because of her son’s internet activity. She asked me if She could call me back at another time because she was busy at the moment and wanted her husband to be there. I said alright. She called back and I told her that her son somehow found himself on a blog that I like to read and the reason I was able to find them was because he was putting all of their personal information out to people, including giving his phone number to grown men, saying what school he goes to, their home address, putting pictures of their family house there, and writing under his full name. She asked me what her son was doing on a feminist blog, and that she was pretty sure he wasn’t even sure what feminism is. I said he was claiming to be a MGTOW, and then i clumsily explained what that was, and basically I was just calling tell her I was concerned about her son’s internet activity putting him and their family in unnecessary danger. She thanked me and said she would talk to him about it at some point after getting upset at some of things I told her he had been posting about.
@Lainy
I just found the smoking gun. In the post where he says he wants to sue you (archive link in case he password protects or deletes), he says that his mom is a lawyer. All evidence points to you finding the right person and him being full of shit.
@Naglfar
I figured it was the right woman, it would be quite a coincidences if it a was a woman of the same name, in the same city, with the son of the same age and same name. Hopefully if any thing his dad will be able to figure out how to get the websites taken down and put on protection. I think he was some kind of software engineer or something. or a technical engineer. Something like that, some sort of engineer that isn’t the architectural engineer.
@Lainy
Maybe her office phone is set up to forward calls home on weekends. He was definitely in a panic about getting caught, which means he knows what he’s doing is wrong. It never goes well for MGTOWs when their beliefs get exposed to sunlight.
I also saw on his blog that he’s planning to organize a MGTOW day at his middle school in January. That doesn’t seem like an event that a school should sanction. What’s next, a Klan rally?
@buttercup
Yeah i agree the mgtow is bad but really what made me do it was the child putting his safety and his family safety in danger because he decided to put it all over the internet that he could and the idea of this child giving his phone number to adult men who have already shown themselves to want to use women and children, that made me feel sick. I think even if he had posted his mgtow spewl I would just roll my eyes and say a pray for the 12 year old, but he really needed an adult to step in and tell his parents that he is putting himself in danger by giving people his home, school and phone number to anyone who wants it!
@Lainy
That also checks out with what he said in his “suing Lainy” post, where Eric describes his dad as an engineer.
@Buttercup
That’s possible. Also possible she has forwarding on or changed the number because she’s working from home during the pandemic.
Just checked his other blog and found that. I didn’t realize he had another blog, so thank you for pointing that out. Yeah, the school should probably know about that.
David got back to me. He says he’ll be more careful who he lets in for the next couple days. I don’t think we had anything to fear, but at least that should save us some minor annoyances from Eric’s little middle school MGTOW brigade.
@Naglfar
Oh right, I didn’t think of that! She probably is working from home.
@Lainy
Yes, he definitely needs to be more closely watched by the adults in his life. Besides the grooming, it’s concerning that he’s reading the Eliott Rodger manifesto and already nursing deep hatred for women. You may have saved future lives by alerting his parents.
It’s ironic that his attempts at grown-up behavior may result in closer supervision.
@naglfar
Honestly, the kid can try and post whatever he wants, he can descend onto the blog I’m only here half the time at best. I feel like I did my part. His parents are now at least aware of his irresponsible internet activity. If the kid wants to stamp his foot and lerking obsess about me because I got him in trouble, I really don’t care. In like a week I will probably forget the kid existed in the first place.
@Lainy
You certainly did, and once again we thank you for doing it. Like Buttercup said, you may well have saved lives.
@naglfar
yeah, I’m just a little sad I had to use an Obituary of a dead grandmother to confirm it. That felt a little skeevy, but she would have died when he was like 4 so maybe not so bad
Bingo!
This whole thread is making me wonder if I am sufficiently monitoring my similarly-aged son’s online activity.
Small update: Eric keeps added to the blog post claiming that his parents must have known he was an MGTOW because he sent them a link to his streaming site on October 9th. Evidently he doesn’t realize that 1) that doesn’t mean his parents knew what MGTOW was then, they might have thought it was just a video hosting site and 2) his parents might not tell him about such a phone call right away because they might be thinking about a course of action. This also reveals he must be lurking because he keeps posting what he thinks are rebuttals to things here. He keeps trying to show his innocence but instead is producing more evidence against himself.
Eric, since I know you’re reading this, who is “Dr Frank”?
Wasn’t he already banned here?
@Lumipuna
Yeah but apparently according to others here who care more then I do, the kid has wrote like 6 blog post about me on his little blog from declaring that I’m a lair and how he’s so not in trouble and how his parents are cool that he’s putting all this personal information online (their not), and how he is somehow going to sue me. Little boy has a obsession I think.
@Lainy
Yeah, he’s just putting up what he thinks is evidence defending himself but really isn’t helping his case. He is really bad at this.
@naglfar
Well he’s a child, once he shows me evidence that his mother knew he was putting up all of his personal information like phone number, address, photos of his house, where he goes to school, to random men and everyone else on the internet then he’ll have some proof.
It looks like on his other blog he deleted the post about doing a MGTOW day at his school.
I also figured out why he kept trying to @ igormgtow (whoever that is). On his blog it’s set up so it alerts his friend when he tags them like that, and he must have assumed it’s the same here, rather than just a thing to let someone know you’re responding to them.
@Naglfar
Judging by his “friend’s” Twitter feed, he won’t be of much help. Ugh.
Why has Igor been called upon to write a guest blog post defending Eric? Some random online dude knows better than Eric what’s happening in his own household? So weird.
I’m glad he took down the MGTOW event. If his school has a code of ethics, that would have been a serious violation, one that might result in detention or even suspension. Girls are not only not allowed in MGTOW, they’re explicitly scapegoats and targets. It’s a hate group. Schools these days have a zero tolerance policy for those. At least, decent schools do.
Also, I could be wrong, but I don’t think there would be many takers for a “Girls Are Icky!” rally. Not many twelve year olds want to sit and listen to someone ranting about their personal grievances through a bullhorn. A chess club or D&D group would be way cooler.
@buttercup
Like we had days that were bored game days and I remember spending hours playing scrabble and having a great time.
@Buttercup
Just checked that post. It mostly seems to serve to show that Eric and Igor are either very naïve or just inept. Very little of it is information we didn’t know, and a lot of it makes me more suspicious, not less.
Maybe Eric is locked out of the blog by his parents?
Definitely a thing a very real person would say.
I could do a full takedown of the post if people want, but I’m not sure how much it would be useful.
@Lainy
Board games are a great way to make new friends. It’s a structured activity, which helps with social anxiety. We had a D&D club at our middle school. I was terrible at it and always got killed immediately, but it was fun to just hang out at lunchtime.
@Naglfar
There were quite a few weird things in that post. I’d be interested to hear your take.
I watched a few seconds of one of Igor’s videos. His voice is higher pitched than Eric’s, but good lord, he has the worst fake Russian accent. I work with Russians and Ukrainians at my job, so I’m familiar with the accent. There are a lot of subtle tells in Igor’s speech, such as using articles (native Russian speakers drop them). He’s probably some American kid LARPing for attention.
edit: or British (he spells summarised with an “s”)
I used to love playing scrabble with my friends. I was very good at that game but haven’t played in a long time, maybe after the pandemic I’ll start playing again.
@Buttercup
I can do a takedown, just a moment while I get my laptop (I’m on my phone right now).
Edit: he’s got more posts, I’ll cover those too