So over in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, the regulars are talking about sexbots, as it seems every single person in the broader manosphere has been doing this week.
And one of the regulars came up with a creepy new spin on the issue that took even me by surprise.
So the fellas were discussing the possibility of making sexbots look like anyone you want them to … and this happened.
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So the Sigma Nu house at Old Dominion University in Virginia apparently decided last weekend to reinforce the not-exactly-unjustified popular perception that fraternities are basically giant petri dishes for growing rape culture by hanging these lovely banners out for all incoming students to see.
People have already come out of the woodwork to defend the banners as “politically incorrect” humor, as Amanda Marcotte points out on Pandagon, and suggesting that they can’t possibly be referring to rape. She quotes one Washington Post commenter, who claims that while
A lot of Men’s Rights Activists, would-be pickup artists, and other so-called “Red Pillers” like to complain that feminists have so muddied up the issue of sexual consent that men today can never really be sure if the sex they’re having is actual consensual sex or some newfangled variety of rape.
But in fact the ones doing most of the muddying are them — in some cases because they would like to roll back the progress we’ve made on the issue of consent over the last several decades and return to a world in which pressuring and manipulating and even directly coercing a woman into saying “yes” to sex they don’t want was considered an appropriate “technique” in a man’s dating playbook.
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Congratulations, A Voice for Men! You’ve caused me to feel an actual twinge of sympathy for a woman who once declared, on AVFM no less, that “[w]omen are facing a very real and grave problem in our culture: They are obnoxious [plural form of vagina-related slur redacted.]”
The c-word-slinging woman in question is former AVFM contributor and YouTube micro-celebrity Diana Davison, a friend to and frequent collaborator with another former AVFMer, the infamous “JohnTheOther” Hembling. The two have been sniping at AVFM in videos for months, and getting sniped back at in return, and have both become entangled in the wider war between AVFM and what seems to be virtually the entirety of the Men Going Their Own Way movement.
As Davison’s video above makes clear, this war is getting pretty ugly, with some AVFMers apparently circulating nude photos of Davison in an attempt to shut her up with some good old-fashioned slut-shaming.
Was Marysville school shooter Jaylen Fryberg trying to exact revenge on a girl who had rejected him? Various news accounts suggest that Fryberg was reeling from a recent breakup; a number of angry, anguished, and frustratingly enigmatic recent comments on Fryberg’s Twitter account seem to back this up.
So it may be that the shootings on Friday were yet another reworking of an old story.
It’s no secret that many men, for an assortment of reasons, react badly and often violently to romantic and sexual rejection. This can range from self-described “nice guys” of OkCupid sending vicious messages to women who say no all the way to angry men who stalk and harass and sometimes kill ex-wives and girlfriends. Women who leave abusive relationships often suffer greater violence at the hands of exes unwilling to let them go.
I’ve written before of the striking ways that Men’s Rights Activism recapitulates the logic of domestic abuse; it’s no coincidence that so much MRA “activism” consists of harassment of individual women. So the question naturally follows: does the rage that drives so many MRAs come from the same dark place in the psyche as the rage that so many romantically and sexually rejected feel towards their exes?
Is Anita Sarkeesian secretly trying to hypnotize us all with her videos? Like, literally hypnotize us, in the “now you’re a chicken” sense?
That’s the central insinuation of an inadvertently hilarious video by YouTube blabber Jordan Owen, one of the guys behind that Sarkeesian Effect “documentary” that’s allegedly in the process of being made.
Owen’s video isn’t a particularly new one – he put it out in January – but it’s been recently resurrected by the good folks at A Voice for Men, who reposted it earlier this week, saying that it offered “very thoughtful, erudite” criticism of Sarkeesian that’s “particularly enlightening and full of information a lot of people don’t know.”
So that’s a good enough excuse for me to talk about it. Also, did I mention that the video is hilarious?
That powerful and obnoxious odor of bullshit you may have noticed in the air? That’s just Camille Paglia, evidently aiming for a bit of a comeback.
One of the first-generation of antifeminist feminists who came to public attention in the 1990s, Paglia is less a scholar than an intellectual entertainer, astonishingly adept at generating controversy by packaging rather conventionally reactionary ideas as bold contrarianism. And then getting everyone to talk about her rather than the issues at hand.
If you’re a straight guy looking for “fapping” material, the internet is your friend. It’s awash in freely available pictures of naked women of every size, shape, color, age, or hairstyle you prefer. And if you want more than pictures, the internet is happy to oblige, offering up videos featuring women of every description engaging in every sex act you can imagine, and then some.
You might think this would be enough.
But for some straight dudes, it evidently isn’t. They don’t just want to look at the mind-bogglingly enormous selection of women out there who have agreed to pose naked, or even perform explicit sex acts, on camera.
No, they also want to look at women who haven’t agreed to have their nude photos put on the internet. Hence the popularity of “ex-girlfriend” or “revenge porn” sites, filled with pictures that are (or at least purport to be) of ex-girlfriends who never wanted the pictures they shared with their then-boyfriends posted for the world to see.