There are a lot of hair-raisingly reactionary dudes on The Spearhead, but perhaps none quite so hair-raising as the prolific commenter who calls himself Darryl X. Here are some of his pearls of wisdom, taken from a recent Spearhead thread. (Many of his comments in the thread were devoted to a sort of mini-vendetta against another Spearhead commenter, Andie, who had committed the crime of commenting while female; I’ve cut out most of that to focus on Darryl’s more timeless thoughts.) Fair warning: This is extreme stuff, even by Spearhead standards.
Since the solution for the past forty-four years was to kill and impoverish and exile and imprison men and steal their kids, I’d say sending women to live in a cave is a generous trade.
Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati upheld the conviction of a divorced Tennessee dad with the unlikely name of Franklin Delano Jeffries II who, in the midst of a custody battle, decided to post a YouTube video of himself singing a song with the sweet title “Daughter’s Love.”
The problem was that only a small portion of the song was actually about daughters and love; the rest was about Mr. Jeffries’ apparent desire to kill the judge overseeing the custody hearings, and possibly others.
As the appeals court judge put it:
The song contains sweet passages about relationships between fathers and daughters and the importance of spending time together. The rest boils into an assortment of the banal (complaints about his ex-wife), the ranting (gripes about lawyers and the legal system) and the menacing (threats to kill the judge if he doesn’t “do the right thing” at an upcoming custody hearing). Jeffries set the words to music and created a video of himself performing the song on a guitar painted with an American flag on it. The style is part country, part rap, sometimes on key, and surely therapeutic.
Here’s a bit of advice for Men’s Rights redditors and MRAs in general: if you don’t want people to associate the Men’s Rights movement with hatred, you should probably not associate yourselves with hate groups.
Yesterday, a fellow called heiligenschein posted a link in the Men’s Rights subreddit to a relatively new subreddit called simply SPLC, a subreddit set up by enemies of the Southern Poverty Law Center and devoted to, as heiligenschein put it, “compiling the numerous criticisms of the [SPLC].” As he explained in a comment:
Pissed off cats: Much more entertaining than pissed-off dudes on the Internet
So yesterday, I appeared (albeit very briefly) on TheStream on Al Jazeera English along with Helen Lewis of the New Statesman, social media researcher Alice Marwick, Skepchick blogger Rebecca Watson, and others. The topic: online misogyny and harassment of women. No sooner had the show ended than I ran across two perfect examples of precisely the sort of misogynistic harassment we’d just been talking about, courtesy of Reddit and Roosh.
First, Reddit. On Monday, Forbes columnist Kashmir Hill – female, beep boop! – wrote a piece mocking the notion (apparently widespread in some circles) that in these hyper-connected days people without Facebook accounts are a bit suspect. But part way along towards making her point she committed the terrible error of making the following not-to-be-taken-literally remark:
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, some of the fellas are discussing a recent post from Arthur Goldwag on the Southern Poverty Law Center Hatewatch blog. Goldwag looks at some of the hero-bashing comments from MRAs in the wake of the Aurora shootings, which we’ve discussed here and here.
This somehow inspires the prolix Men’s Right Redditor Demonspawn to set forth some of his opinions about (most) women and how shitty they are. The whole discussion is worth reading, as a sort of case study in MRA hypocrisy: all this woman-hatred comes in a thread in which Reddit MRAs wax indignant once again that anyone might possibly label them hateful. (Also, how dare women suggest that there’s anything untoward about a dude hanging onto nude pics of an ex, when clearly not deleting them is a sign of “respect.”)
Looks like Demonspawn won himself a convert! Congrats. you beautiful douchebag.
Over on The Spearhead, the discussion of, er, “altruism” (and why the men who sacrificed their lives to save their girlfriends in the Aurora theater shootings were “suckers”) continues. All of the comments I mentioned in my previous post now have dozens of upvotes; one has more than a hundred. (All except for the comment praising the dead men as “heroic” which remains underwater, votewise.)
Words cannot convey my sense of dispair, isolation, and acceptance that women are at best amoral beings and at worst imoral. I no longer look at a women and hope they may be the one who vaules a decent, kind, moral man. Instead I see a feral creature who wants to be thugf#$cked and used. They are addicted to a drug called emotion. They want the highs of being thugf#cked and the coming lows of being used and dumped. Then rinse and repeat.
[citation needed]
The stable decent man is too “boring” or “nice”. The lush sociatal enviroment we have created for them is taken for granted. It exists as does the air they breath, simply out of nothing in thier minds. They simply cannot grasp the truth of it takes good men to build, invent and maintain their “posh” world. … My eyes are sadly opened to what women are now.
ck also makes comments that suggest to me that he is suffering from depression, possibly quite severe. He gets upvotes for his misogyny, but no one there offers any comfort or help, except for one commenter who urges him, unhelpfully, to “[t]ry to get as far from feminist women as possible,” possibly by moving to another country.
Evidently the last thing MRAs ever want to do is to provide actual tangible help to fellow men who are suffering.
Meanwhile, Darryl X offers some thoughts on you, my dear readers and commenters:
I hope the posts on Futrelle’s site and others illustrates for you the cold-blooded and parasitic nature of those kinds of people and that they do not represent civilization and that as more and more honest hard-working and innocent men are killed off by them, they will be living in a cave because they have neither the intelligence nor the initiative to do anything but defraud others and they are running out of victims. Eventually they will start cannibalizing themselves. Actually they already have started.
Evidently, according to Spearhead logic, “civilization” is much more effectively maintained by demonizing half of it.
In his latest post on A Voice for Men, Mr. Elam laments the evil way one Australian news site took AVFM’s rallying cry – “Fuck Their Shit Up” — and made it seem kind of mean. Also, they added an “ing” to “fuck.” Elam writes:
[Journalist Tory] Shepherd (or her editors) gave a subheading to her piece which read:
Hate site’s motto is ‘F***king their s**t up
Misuse of the transitive verb aside, and ignoring the fact that even when properly quoted it is not the sites motto (which is “Take the Red Pill”), the use of that phrase in the sub-header was calculated to make AVfM appear to be a hate site.
How unfair to tag a website with the slogan it uses constantly! And, really, how could anyone see “fuck their shit up” as anything but a spirited call for peacefulness, understanding, and love?
