By David Futrelle
I know I write a lot about incels on this blog. It’s not just because they’re such hateful and self-destructive shits; it’s also because they’re so perversely fascinating.
By David Futrelle
I know I write a lot about incels on this blog. It’s not just because they’re such hateful and self-destructive shits; it’s also because they’re so perversely fascinating.
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Fat feminist ladies! If you’re walking down the street one day, and some bitter douchebag gives you a dirty look, he may be more than just a bitter douchebag giving you a dirty look while you walk down the street.
"we're inclusive and accepting!" says #gamergate, before drawing racist caricatures of women they dislike. pic.twitter.com/zbFnWBOmdn
— Sarah Nyberg (@srhbutts) November 1, 2014
The other day, I posted a screenshot of an 8chan comment featuring the drawing above, a crude caricature of Anita Sarkeesian that’s a not-very-subtle variation on a racist and anti-Semitic cartoon that originally ran in a neo-Nazi newspaper.
Here’s the original, in all its crapitude:
Never doubt the ingenuity of the internet’s misogynists in coming up with new reasons to hate a woman they’re already inclined to hate.
Actress and geek icon Emma Watson has been near the top of the new Misogyny hate list all this week, in the wake of the speech she gave at the UN gently praising feminism and suggesting that traditional gender roles aren’t always such a good thing for dudes either. She’s made this point before, declaring in a Tweet last month that
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.
Love is in the air at the Chateau Heartiste, the online home of the racist, woman-hating pickup artiste with an “he” at the start of his made up name. In a recent post, Heartiste responds to a reader with the plaintive question: Can sluts fall in love?
Heartiste takes the opportunity to drop some (pseudo)science on the questioner. By which I mean he plucks this nugget of not-quite-scientific nonsense from his posterior:
Absolutely. But they can also fall out of love. And they do both more easily than non-sluts.
Sluts are a strange amalgam of genetic, environmental, and “gray area” influences. Hormones are a good example of a gray area somewhere between the environment and genes which shapes character. While I’ve no hard evidence, I’d bet that sluts release less oxytocin than normal women do during lovemaking, which means the hard slut is less likely to emotionally bond when she’s spermally bonded.
Ah love, sweet ineffable love!
It’s not quite clear how Heartiste became an expert on love, since he seems to thoroughly hate the women he spends so much of his life obsessing about.
Elsewhere in the same “reader mailbag” post, for example, he urges another question-writer to gaslight a former girlfriend who is still showing interest in him in order to score some easy sex. I’ve bolded some of the more repugnant bits for those who’d rather skim than read Mr. H.
She wants the lines of communication open, because she still has hope you’ll give her what she needs. Reply, but only a fraction of the time she texts. Initially, keep it friendly and frivolous, but don’t allow yourself to get boxed into a “friends forever?” interrogation. If she starts down that road, first, know she doesn’t really mean it, and second, amputate that rotten limb of conversation promptly. “You’re so funny” is a reply that will light a fire under her hamster’s ass. Anytime she sends you one of those “just thinking about you” texts, reply “aw that’s sweet.” If she texts, “just got our hair done”, reply, “thanks! i needed to know this.”
The idea is that you are reinforcing your relative higher value by repeatedly and (some would say) sadistically mocking her eagerness to keep you in her life.
Allow for a few weeks of this empty banter, then maneuver her into your fornication zone with a disarming suggestion: “If you need to talk, you can swing by tomorrow (tonight’s no good)”. Through the expert deployment of ambiguous promises, you want her to believe you are warming to the idea of a committed, conventional long-term relationship. The goal is increasing perceptions of your “commitment attainability”, and that will require some feints to the beta side. Convinced of your good intentions, you can extract sexual goodies in this manner for another six months or so, before the process begins anew.
What a charmer!
Heartiste is fond of spinning out these sorts of sadistic fantasies, and his fans lap them up. It’s not clear if any of them have spoken to an actual human woman in years.
Apparently hoping to gin up another flood of hate-traffic to his blog, the attention-seeking human stain whose name rhymes with Batt Gorney has posted what is essentially a how-to guide for would-be abusive boyfriends under the charming title “How to Crush a Girl’s Self-Esteem.”
“Gorney” has conveniently arranged his suggestions into a numbered list, so let’s proceed through them one by one. (If you’re triggered by explicit discussions of psychological and physical abuse, please stop reading now.)
So someone went to the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day to ask the assembled Men’s Rights Activists a simple question: what sort of activism do you folks do? Specifically, the visitor asked, “Do MRAs have marches or campaigns or fundraisers?”
The post didn’t get much attention, but the answers that “Chickenjuggle” got were pretty, well, instructive.
The He-Man Manosphere Cat Fight Continues! The long-awaited 20/20 story on the Manosphere did not, alas, run as scheduled last night — it’s been postponed until who knows when — but the Men’s Rightsy infighting it inspired continues!
Yesterday, you may recall, the Spearhead’s WF Price called out A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam for his alleged naiveté in going on the show in the first place, and for generally being a shitty backstabbing narcissistic asshole — all fair enough criticisms.
Well now Elam and his AVFM attack squad have responded to Price’s attack in the comments on the Spearhead– as various Spearhead readers have stepped forward to offer their own thoughts on Elam, many of them even less flattering than Price’s screed.
So over on A Voice for Men, the regulars are all congratulating one another for their grand victory in Toronto. In AVFM’s official post on Saturday’s tiny “rally,” incongruously titled “Historic MHRA rally in Toronto huge success,” Elam — who in photographs of the events looked rather befuddled by it all — declared that the day had been magical for him:
“This was one of the greatest things I have ever done in my life,” said Elam. “Meeting all of these people and talking to a crowd that was five times bigger than the opposition was a remarkable event.”
Given that most of the opposition made a clear decision to ignore the AVFM/CAFE rally and lecture — much to the obvious disappointment of many MRAs who were there in Toronto or watching on the sidelines on the Internet — this was not much of an accomplishment.