It’s rare that they come out and say it this explicitly, but here’s Heartiste, arguing that unless society treats women badly they won’t give him a boner. In a brief post about “Dread Game” — his term for manipulatively gaslighting women to prey on their insecurities — he offers up this bit of shitbag philosophy:
Dread game on a societal scale keeps women in line, always working hard to please men lest they be cast to the icy wastelands with the rest of the anti-feminine rejects. The opposite of Dread Game — Coddle Game — relaxes selective pressures on women to stay feminine and thin and agreeable. And so what you see now in the decadent, coddling West is what we get: Ballbusting fat feminist cunts and careerist androgynes.
Sometimes it seems like the internet, or at least huge portions of it, is essentially a giant harassment machine, directed primarily at women.
This week, the target of the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine is game developer Zoe Quinn. Quinn, best known as the creator of the text-based Depression Quest, faced down two previous waves of harassment from gamer dudes who were angry about her game, for some gamer-dude reasons I can’t claim to understand, and who grew even angrier after Quinn spoke publicly about being harassed.
Her harassers claimed that she was lying about being harassed previously, and apparently figured there was no better way to prove that she hadn’t been harassed in the first place than by harassing her about her claims of harassment. I’m sorry if that’s confusing, but the “logic” of internet assholes tends to be a bit circular.
The latest wave of harassment is on a whole new level of viciousness. Because this time her haters have what they see as proof that she is indeed the evil [insert favorite anti-woman slur] that they’ve always claimed her to be. Their alleged smoking gun consists of a series of excruciatingly detailed blog posts by a vengeful ex-boyfriend describing how she allegedly cheated on him and lied about it; at roughly 10,000 words in all, not counting all the screenshots of online conversations presented as proof of his claims, his story is nearly the length of a novella.
You might ask: why is any of this any of our business? It’s fucking not. Some have tried to claim this is about “ethics,” accusing Quinn of trading sexual favors for a positive game review. But the journalist she allegedly slept with never actually wrote a review of her game.
Of course this has nothing to do with any real ethical concerns on the part of her attackers. As Quinn has pointed out herself, the people who are gleefully sharing her personal information, posting nude pictures of her, sending her threats, and otherwise trying to destroy her life don’t have any fucking ethics.
No, this is just another excuse to go after an outspoken woman on the internet, and a chance for misogynistic gamer dudes to score a symbolic victory against any and all women who are trying to enter what these guys want to see as a clubhouse where girls aren’t allowed. Anita Sarkeesian has been dealing with the same sort of shit ever since she first set out to examine sexism in the gaming world.
I honestly don’t have the psychic energy to collect together examples of the horrible shit people are saying about her; just type her name into Google along with your favorite anti-woman slur and you’ll have more proof than you need. Or go to Reddit and make your way to any of the numerous subreddits devoted to gaming and/or misogyny, where many people will be thrilled to tell you all about how “the video game industry is being fucked over because of these women.” (Actual quote.)
I am not going to link to, or address anything having to do with the validity of the specific claims made by an angry ex-boyfriend with an axe to grind and a desire to use 4chan as his own personal army. This is not a “she-said” to his “he-said”. The idea that I am required to debunk a manifesto of my sexual past written by an openly malicious ex-boyfriend in order to continue participating in this industry is horrifying, and I won’t do it. It’s a personal matter that never should have been made public, and I don’t want to delve into personal shit, mine or anyone else’s, while saying that people’s love and sex lives are no one’s business. I’m not going to talk about it. I will never talk about it. It is not your goddamned business.
What I *am* going to say is that the proliferation of nude pictures of me, death threats, vandalization, doxxing of my trans friends for having the audacity to converse with me publicly, harassment of friends and family and my friends’ family in addition to TOTALLY UNRELATED PEOPLE, sending my home address around, rape threats, memes about me being a whore, pressures to kill myself, slurs of every variety, fucking debates over what my genitals smell like, vultures trying to make money off of youtube videos about it, all of these things are inexcusable and will continue to happen to women until this culture changes. I’m certainly not the first. I wish I could be the last.
Because I’ve had a small degree of success in a specific subculture, every aspect of my life is suddenly a matter of public concern. Suddenly it’s acceptable to share pictures of my breasts on social media to threaten and punish me. Suddenly I don’t have any right to privacy or basic dignity. Suddenly I don’t get to live out normal parts of life, like going through a bad and ugly breakup in private. I have forfeited this by being a blip in a small community, while those who delight in assailing me hide behind their keyboards and a culture that permits it, beyond reproach.
My life and my body are not public property. No one’s life and body are public property.
Sexuality is one of the most personal, hurtful, and easy things to demonize a woman over, and also has nothing to do with my games. Yet large swaths of the gaming community are either unable or unwilling to separate the two. I’m convinced that my ex chose 4chan as the staging ground for his campaign of harassment and character assassination because he knew this; he knew that someone claiming to be “from the Internet” has shown up at my house once already, and he is counting on the most reviled hubs of our community to live up to their sordid reputations. This is another example of gendered violence, whereby my personal life becomes a means to punish my professional credentials and to try to shame me into giving up my work. I’m still committed to doing my small part to create a world where no woman is at risk of experiencing this.
I don’t have anything to add.
This is a NO TROLLS, NO MRAS thread. Anyone posting any doxxing shit in the comments below, or adding to the harassment against her in any way, will be banned.
Goodnight, Paul! You can buy your own Misogyny Bunch pillow for only $19.19 at A Voice for Men’s Red Pill store.
Let me take a moment to ignore my regular readers and speak directly to the Men’s Rights Activists who might be reading this blog. I suspect there are a few.
What I would like to talk to you about it ironic humor. Because, here’s the thing, sometimes people say things they don’t actually believe in order to make a little fun at the way other people see them.
I‘ve been trying to avoid reading, much less writing about, the human stain and pickup guru who calls himself Roosh V. But I couldn’t keep myself away from his most recent post, an appalling little exercise called The Most Reliable Way To Tell If A Girl Is A Slut,which turns out to be even more appalling than its title.
Roosh, you see, has figured out a simple one-question test to determine the sluttiness of any woman. Let’s let him explain:
Many girls go to great lengths to hide their slutty past, knowing deep down the low value it conveys for being a suitable long-term partner, but there is one easy indicator that should tell you beyond a reasonable doubt whether she is a slut or not.
Has she lived on her own?
I believe my response to this is best illustrated by the following video of Don Draper saying “what?”
Let me just add:
HAS SHE LIVED ON HER OWN?
Are you exclusively dating high school girls?
If she’s an adult, or at least an adult somewhere in the vicinity of your own age, OF COURSE SHE’S LIVED ON HER OWN.
Yes, yes, I know, given this economy it’s true that some young people – mostly young men – are living at home a little longer these days than in the past, but the overwhelming majority have moved out by their mid-twenties. You’re 35 years old, dude.
Roosh continues:
If she has lived away from her parents for more than a year, she has—at the minimum—slept with many men whose last names she did not know, including one-night stands that did not involve condoms.
Dude, do you even know the first names of the women you sleep with? And haven’t you bragged endlessly about how you “raw dog it” with women? Weren’t you “raw dogging it” even when you were afraid you had AIDS? (Those are rhetorical questions; I already know that the answers are yes, and yes.)
An “independent” girl, removed from the constraints of a nuclear family home and its rules, curfew, and the concern of good parents, will allow the slutty dick gobbler within her to be released.
Women engaging in consensual sex that they enjoy … with someone else? THE END OF THE WORLD. Raping women who are too drunk to consent? According to Roosh himself, it’s “what I do.”
In other words, a natural-born slut who lives on her own will have far more sexual partners than if she lives with parents of average skill who require their daughter to be home by midnight.
Amazing deduction, Sherlock. And if she’s a nun, she’ll probably be having even less sex. The question is: why are you, as 35 year old man, regularly pursuing women young enough to live with their parents?
Give a man leeway in living life and he does great things, but give a woman this same freedom and she fully embraces the whore lifestyle, unable to stop from getting her fill of cock.
Really? Here are some young men who have recently started living on their own; I’m not sure that what they are doing could really be described as a “great thing.” (Content Warning: Drunk dudes hitting each other in the head with boards.)
If you want to estimate a girl’s notch count, simply multiple the number of years she has lived on her own by the number 3. If she has lived on campus in college for four years and then moved to a large city for two more, you can rest assured she’s had over 15 cocks in her vagina, and god knows how many more in her mouth.
Not that anyone’s worth is determined by how many penises they’ve had in their vagina, or anywhere else, but I feel I should note that these figures, clearly pulled from the Journal of Roosh’s Own Ass, are completely wrong.
According to people who’ve actually studied human sexuality, his number is just a teensy bit high. And by “teensy” I mean they’re off by an order of magnitude. According to one 2005 study, women in their 30s and early 40s report that they’ve had only 4 male sexual partners, on average, not the 36 to 78 that Roosh’s formula would predict for women who move out on their own at the age of 18 to go to college.
There are definite exceptions for girls who are relationship minded and had boyfriends of more than one year in length, but unless she mentions this, you’re interacting with a slut and should proceed accordingly by escorting her home and asking if you can use her bathroom. Then you must fornicate with her like so many other men.
Yeah, that’s really … creepy. You lie to get into her home, then proceed as if, as a slut, she’s already consented to sex?
You may be thinking the following: “Many Western girls live alone, at least 50%. Does that mean that over 50% of American girls are sluts?” That’s exactly what it means. Independence in women drives them to disempowering sexual behaviors that oppose motherly or wife behaviors. You must be skeptical of girls who have lived alone if you want a serious relationship.
At least if you want a relationship with a creepy, judgmental asshole who thinks like Roosh.
[T]here is absolutely no need for a girl to be independent by living alone without a husband unless you want her holes to be used as a real-life enactment of 50 Shades Of Grey by many strange men.
Well, that is, if you assume that 1) all women can magically find men, whether their father or a husband, who will pay all their bills and 2) Roosh’s opinions about any given woman’s sexual life matter more than the opinions of the woman herself.
If you end up having a daughter of your own, I highly recommend you limit her financial independence before she finds a husband. Refrain from giving her Think & Grow Rich advice that would be better suited for your son. Otherwise, she’ll become a slut who gives it up to any man who dances a good clown jig.
So: prepare your daughter to be dependent for her very existence on dudes who think like Roosh.
That may be the worst parenting advice I’ve ever heard. Then again, it’s from Roosh.
Today, a look at an appalling apologia for domestic violence and abuse from everyone’s least favorite creepy expat, the anonymous “game” blogger behind Random Xpat Rantings. Oh, and he also offers a handy rationalization for child abuse as well.
Xsplat, is, by his own description, an expat in his late 40s living in Indonesia and “dating” a teenager considerably less than half his age. Well, not just dating: apparently he feels that he “owns” her.
He starts off his post by arguing that parents have the right to spank their children because the children are, in essence, their property:
I have a confession to make: I don’t always read the comments on posts by Men’s Rights Activists.
I realize this might come as a shock to some of you. I mean, one of the main, er, critiques I get from MRAs is that I “cherry pick” comments from MRAs to make them look bad — never mind that it is the comments that make them look bad, not me. But the embarrassing fact is that I often don’t read the comments at all.
In my defense, I have a hard enough time making it through the posts themselves. Life is short, and MRAs are long-winded. And by the time I get to the end of a lot of MRA posts, I’ve pretty much lost my patience with their nonsense. The last thing I want to do at that moment is to read the fawning word-vomit of a bunch of irritating fucks whose comments are likely to be as bad or possibly even worse than the original post.
So today I decided to do a sort of penance for my sins — and to actually read through a week’s worth of comments on A Voice for Men to see what I could learn about the world, and (perhaps more to the point) about the sort of people who actually enjoy reading posts on that terrible site.
I tried my best to do this little experiment as scientifically as possible. But I cheated a little. I didn’t read the comments to every post. And I didn’t read every comment on the posts that I did look at. I mean, what the hell. There’s a limit to my masochism. Seriously, you try reading a week’s worth of this shit in one sitting.
Anyway, here are the Top 7 Insights I’ve learned from a week’s worth of comments at AVFM. In choosing the following, I stuck with comments that were either upvoted or unchallenged by the site’s regulars, or both.
Mr. Vinczer followed up this perplexing tweet with a bunch more insinuating that I’m a “hack,” a “pathological liar,” a “criminal,” and so on — as well as some links to what he apparently sees as “dirt” about me. (More on the latter in a moment.)
Apparently Vinczer — the “Activia Director” for men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men and the son of the genius who designed that AVFM commemorative coin — was stung by my gentle criticism of his father’s coin-designing skills.
So he has decided to dox me, apparently going as far as hiring a private detective to look into my allegedly sordid life.
PI will confirm, every living and non living fact about you. Enjoy your soon to be elevated infamous public status.
So far his doxing of me is not going very well, in that the “dirt” he has dug up about me is either wildly inaccurate, not particularly “infamous”– or not information about me, specifically, at all.
Hello, m’lady, I trust you have brought your birth certificate?
UPDATE: D’oh! It looks like this Craigslist ad is a fake. A very similar “gentleman” posted a very similar Craigslist Personal a little less than a year ago, as this Huffington Post story at the time reported. That gentleman claimed to be living in California, not Canada. So unless the fellow who wrote this ad just moved to Edmonton, it looks like a big ol FAKE.
But it’s still pretty funny.
Hey ladies! Are you a “worthy” woman between the ages of 18-27? Do you like men who think most women, including possibly you, are terrible? Are you looking for a long-winded, judgmental jackass who is definitely older than you but who won’t specify his age, what kind of music he likes, or whether or not he likes dogs until after you’ve met? Do you enjoy reading giant walls of text on the internet that randomly erupt in ALL CAPS and inappropriate “quotation” marks?
Oh, and do you live in Alberta, Canada?
Well, then, you’re in luck, because I have found the man for you! Correction: the GENTLEman for you. Nestled away in the men seeking women section of Craigslist, Edmonton, there’s a self-described
very nice, mature , “gentleman.” with a higher college degree and education. I have my own house (not apartment), car, motorcycle, income, etc. I am of European descent (Spanish/Austrian). A professional man with a GOOD BACKGROUND. Better than 99% of what you will find, GUARANTEE #1.
And all you have to do to in order to meet this fine fellow is to read through his 3500 word, 28-question FAQ to make sure you don’t disagree with him about anything, from the playing of video games (bad) to the proper age difference between men and women in relationships (“Generally speaking the MAN should be OLDER than the woman because females mature or age faster than males (both physically and mentally). This is a scientific fact.”)
Today, we bring to life (sort of) some audio excerpts from a video by Sandman, a prolific videoblogger and self-described Man Going His Own Way. He addresses such topics as the friendzone, Mr. Big from Sex and the City, and the shelf life of the human vergina. Well, that’s how he pronounces it, anyway.
The audio is taken from his video “Friendzone Revenge,” starting about 3:50 in. I edited his remarks for length and to remove repetition.
As someone who watched a bit of Sex and the City back in the day, I feel that I should note that Sandman’s “analysis” of Mr. Big is pretty much total bullshit. I would also like to note that the show would have been ten times better if Patrick Warburton had played Mr. Big. And possibly painted his face once in a while.
The sound clip of birds tweeting came from freeSFX.co.uk.
Roy Den Hollander: Are we lawyer or are we dancer?
The other day I suggested that perhaps it was unfair to the Men’s Rights movement to allow them to handle their own public relations, given how terrible they are at it. Today I wonder if the same principle might also apply to MRAs trying to handle their own lawyering.
A case in point: the lawsuit that antifeminist lawyer, “Ladies Night” hater and hip-hop dance enthusiat Roy Den Hollander has just brought against Australian journalist Tory Shepherd, who wrote about the involvement of Den Hollander and others with links to “men’s rights extremists” in a proposed set of “male studies” courses at the University of South Australia.
It’s still not clear to me if these courses had ever been formally approved – the university says they weren’t – but Den Hollander thinks that Shepherd and another Australian reporter got them cancelled by writing about them. And so he figures that they should compensate him for losing him his teaching gig.
You may vaguely remember all of this. A Voice for Men, heavily involved in the courses, famously denounced Shepherd as a “whore” shortly after AVFM’s Paul Elam indignantly called her a liar for suggesting that A Voice for Men regularly calls women whores. (Which of course it does; Elam himself used the word “whore” 28 times in a single post about Skepchick’s Rebecca Watson.)
Anyhoo, so Den Hollander, acting as his own lawyer, has served Shepherd with the lawsuit. And it’s a doozy of a document, at least going by the excerpts Shepherd posted in a column Wednesday.
Somehow we doubt that this lawsuit is going to enhance Den Hollander’s reputation as a fair-minded analyst of gender relations.
Here are some of the best bits, as presented by Shepherd in her column as “some lessons from Mr Den Hollander, who will not be paid to give lessons at UniSA.”
Lesson 1: How to censor a journalist by accusing them of censorship.
“Two modern-day, book-burning, Bacchae reporters from down-under authored and published false and misleading information concerning Plaintiff (Den Hollander) with the intent and result of harming his economic interests and interfering with a prospective economic advantage by causing the University of SA to incinerate the section of a proposed male studies course that Plaintiff would have taught,” he writes. But wait.
Lesson 2: How to personally attack a journalist by accusing them of personal attacks.
“The two reporters, Tory Shepherd, AKA “Tory the Torch” for The Advertiser and Amy McNeilage, AKA “Amy McNeuter” for The Sydney Morning Herald, used their power as reporters to do what weak-minded ideologues have done throughout history — employ personal attacks to prevent the spread of knowledge and ideas that they disagreed with.”
Lesson 3: How to prove you are not an extremist by sounding like an extremist.
“If these two feminist book-burners had not jumped on their broomsticks and scared the bejesus out of the administrators of the University of SA, students there would have had an opportunity to acquire information and consider views not available anywhere else in higher education.”
Yeah, I’m sure that sort of thing is going to go over great in court.
Elsewhere in his lawsuit, Den Hollander denounces “yellow, female-dog-in-heat reporting,” takes a swipe at “girlie-guys,” and offers this intriguing take on Australian military history:
Thank goodness for Australians that Tory was not around for Australia’s battle against the Japanese. Her anti-gun advocacy for men might have even resulted in her and Amy ending up as Japanese “comfort girls.”
The case does at least promise to be highly entertaining, so I guess we have to give Den Hollander credit for that.
