So it seems that some Men’s Rightsers and manospherians, reveling in the negative attention they’ve managed to get from the mainstream for some of their more reprehensible postings, have decided to up the ante a bit, posting stuff that’s so deliberately over the top in its despicableness that even some of their readers have been taken aback.
A case in point: A paean to child abuse recently posted on Roosh’s Return of Kings blog. (Let me put a big TRIGGER WARNING on all the quotes from it that follow.)
But alas, the feminists, for the most part, stayed home. And the ones who showed up were mostly dudes, from the LBGT activist group BashBack. Making things even worse, they didn’t block any doors or try to crash AVFM’s rally. What they did, mostly, was chant things the MRAs didn’t like.
So, it finally happened. The men’s rights lecture and rally in Toronto that A Voice for Men have been breathlessly promoting for weeks — in no less than 17 separate posts — have both come to pass. Men’s Rights celebrities flew in from across the continent to attend the exciting events. Paul Elam was there! So was Karen Straughan! Even Dan Perrins made an appearance! (Oh, wait, I think he lives around there.)
In a post-rally post, AVFM’s Robert O’Hara declared the “Historic MHRA rally in Toronto” to have been a “huge success.”
Well, you can be the judge of that. Go here to watch some actual footage of the event. (Sorry, I can’t get it to embed here.) So far I’ve only watched the final 8-minute video at the top of the page, but it’s pretty revealing in and of itself. The event organizers almost outnumber the sparse crowd. And one of the speakers calls for MRAs to take up arms against their “communist” opponents. No, really, just watch.
In case the video gets pulled, or censored, I’ve taken the liberty of transcribing his remarks: :
There’s an organization out there called communism, and the communist manifesto says that the first thing they have to do is take over power. And they’ll never get elected. And they know that they’ll never get elected. So what they do is they say “we have to take power by violent methods,” right, so if you want to crack back against these people, I hate to say it, but you’ve gotta be prepared to pick up a gun and put down the books.
Emphasis mine.
Someone in the audience responds to this with a hearty “yep!” There’s a smattering of applause, mixed with boos. AVFM’s Dean Esmay hurridly ushers the speaker away from the microphone.
The speaker who follows Esmay — I didn’t catch his name — describes the counterprotesters (who held their own rally nearby) as being of “the hammer and sickle” and denigrates them as “queers.”
This isn’t so much history being made as history repeating itself. I suspect the rhetoric was similar at a lot of White Citizen Council rallies in the sixties.
Oh, and the HISTORIC LECTURE that so many MRAs were hoping and dreaming that feminists would disrupt? Feminists ignored it. Apparently, according to one MRA on Reddit who claimed to have been there, a little more than a hundred people showed up.
Congratulations, A Voice for Men, on your FLAWLESS VICTORY!
I’ll watch as much of the rest of the rally as I can force myself to sit through, and add anything else worth adding.
EDITED TO ADD: I watched the video that covered the rest of the rally. It was pretty uneventful: a low energy, sparsely attended rally with a bunch of half-assed speeches. Apparently no one at A Voice for Men or CAFE, the co-host of the rally, bothered to prepare anything to say — perhaps because they were all expecting some sort of feminist riot? The “pick up a gun” speaker wasn’t one of the scheduled speakers, just someone they gave the microphone to when he raised his hand after the scheduled speakers were done.
One moment that did stand out: a trans man — apparently a member of CAFE — briefly took the mic, taking offense at the chants from the counterprotestors calling MRA’s “anti-gay.” I would suggest he take a look at AVFM’s not-so-proud history of homophobia and transphobia.
EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: Here’s a picture of the event from Civilian Media. You can almost taste the excitement! From left, Nick Reading of Men’s Rights Edmonton, Dean Esmay of AVFM, the legendary Paul Elam (looking a little bewildered), and two other dudes. Paul evidently HEARTS Fucking Their Shit Up. Oh, Paul, we HEART U!
So I want to move on from the whole Pax Dickinson thing, but I feel I would be remiss to do so without first mentioning a remarkable post on Roosh’s Return of King blog with the seemingly innocuous title Pax Dickinson And The Culture Of Tolerance. Written by a Roosh forum regular who goes by the name scorpion (nice), the post is ostensibly a critique of alleged “cultural Marxists” whom, he charges, “claim to be tolerant of everything [yet] are … intolerant of traditional masculine behavior … .”
But his post is in fact a plea for intolerance so over the top that, save for some manosphere-specific jargon, and its focus on “feminists, white knights, manginas, fat acceptance activists and homosexuals” rather than, you know, Jews, it might as well have come straight from the pages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
No, I think Roosh V has you beat in that category.
The Pax Dickinson Crisis seems to have abated somewhat, with postings on the #standwithpax hashtag on Twitter slowing to a trickle and the production of manosphere rants on the subject more or less grinding to a halt, at least for the moment.
But there is one manosphere ideologue who hasn’t given up the fight for injustice, and that’s the despicable “game” guru Roosh Valizadeh, who seems to have embarked on a crusade to ruin the life and career of the Valleywag/Gawker writer who first brought Dickinson’s terrible tweets to the attention of the wider world.
He explained his strategy, which he suggests will work on all liberal writers who might criticize men for racism or misogyny:
Unless she’s applying for a position at Jezebel, no respectable company will touch a toxic individual who has been linked to racism. They don’t want anyone who may cause controversy for them, and behind rape, nothing says controversy like race. …
It’s a slow-burn attack that will effectively punish these writers and scare their co-workers , whose income is low enough that they need to depend on corporate employment indefinitely, unless one day they get an original thought and can stay away from their iPhone long enough to write a book. It won’t work on the big liberal writers like Jessica Valenti or Naomi Wolf, since any attention they get just helps them sell more books, but it does work on the young girl out of college trying to win feminist brownie points by denouncing a man for being “creepy” based on a bad joke.
And then he compared it with something he seems to have a certain amount of experience with:
Having your name destroyed on Google is the internet version of getting raped.
Lovely.
There are more than a few practical problems with Roosh’s little plan, the most notable being that if some hypothetical hiring manager comes across Roosh’s attack on Tiku — or on any writer he’s tried to tar — all this manager will have to do is spend a minute skimming Roosh’s post to see that the charge is bullshit and that Roosh is himself a raving bigot.
And Roosh, if you’re trying to smear someone, it’s generally not good form to announce this plan publicly in a post that at times reads like the monologue of some cartoon supervillain.
In his piece, Roosh notes that “[n]ot long ago, Buzzfeed insinuated I was a rapist.” Well, it did more than that: It quoted Roosh admitting quite frankly that he’d had sex with a woman who was too intoxicated to consent.
I thought, in the interests of openness, it would be worth quoting that passage from Roosh — it’s in his e-book Bang Iceland — once again. Heck, I’ll even give the bit Buzzfeed quoted a little more context. I’ll let you decide if Roosh is a rapist or not.
I hooked her arm and off we went. The best thing that possibly could have happened was a “failed” afterparty. There had to be a moment when she realized that all her friends are gone and the only reasonable option left was to go home with a strange man she had just met.
While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated.
I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do. If a girl is willing to walk home with me, she’s going to get the dick no matter how much she has drunk. I’ll protect myself by using a condom (most of the time), but I know that when it comes to sex, one ounce of hesitation or a feeling of morality will get me nothing.
Emphasis mine.
At this point even Pax Dickinson may want to distance himself from this creep.
Yes, this is really Pax Dickinson, and that’s really his name.
Roosh V and the other human skidmarks who make up the reactionary “game”-centric wing of the manosphere have finally found something to rally around beyond their shared hatred of women and gays and trans* folks and fatties and people with skin colors different from theirs: they’re taking up the cause of a dude who recently got forced out from a high-profile position at news site Business Insider for loudly expressing his own hatred of … woman and gays and trans* folk and people with a different skin color than him.
Really, about the only manosphere prejudice that former Business Insider CTO Pax Dickinson doesn’t seem to share — and enjoy sharing with the world on Twitter — is a hatred of fatties.
Dickenson found himself the center of a Twitter tempest earlier this week after Valleywag’s Nitasha Tiku wrote a brief piece calling Dickinson a “Tech Bro Nightmare” and quoting some of his more noxious tweets. Among them:
Michelle Obama is not impressed with your argument.
Christian J., the blogger behind What Men Are Saying About Women and the inventor of the infamous MRA two-dot ellipsis, has always been an open racist as well as a misogynist, letting drop horrific comments from time to time on why he thinks black women are the worst kind of women in the world.
Christian lays out his thesis statement in his first sentence:
I have made no effort to hide my disgust about black females as they do really deserve every criticism they get.
What follows is a largely incoherent stream-of consciousness rant unencumbered by logic or the correct use of language.
Christian starts off by attacking “black “Lesbian” females” and “Oprah “Find the Victim” Winfrey,” whom he describes as a
selfish, self-serving, anti-male bigot and organiser of female only schools in Africa. A true racist bigot in every sense of the word.
Yes, the author of “Why Black Women are More Repulsive than any Other..” did just call Oprah a racist bigot.
Apparently immune to irony, Christian J continues:
The facts about black women is even more horrendous than one could even assume. They developed themselves as being so arrogant and self-serving, that even black men avoid them like the plague. …
The fact that they have constantly hit out against black men as being either gays or hoods or in jail, leaving them pregnant (that’s a favourite with women, always blame someone else for one’s own stupidity) and refusing to man up when required. They vilified black men at every opportunity. …
The black man’s response was huge. They enjoyed handing their oversized asses back to them in popular songs like rap and other genres.
You will no doubt have noticed by now that Christian J. does not seem to understand what words mean or how language works, exactly.
They reduced the black female down to the levels they could understand and they also stated in no uncertain terms, what black females could do with themselves while they went off and picked females from other races to replace those high and mighty, self-elevated edifices and phoenixes.
Edifices? Phoenixes? Is he just pulling random words out of the dictionary now?
Poetic justice and it was the appropriate feedback they required to put them back in the box where they originally came from and hopefully teach them some level of humility.
The … box … they came from? What the fuck is he even talking about here?
That did not work of course as their ego now had grown even bigger that they themselves could no longer control. …
Dan Perrins has launched an international boycott of Jamaica. Mighty white of you, Dan!
So the other day, Canadian Men’s Rights activist and all-around crank Dan Perrins apparently noticed for the first time that gay men face massive bigotry in Jamaica. He reported his findings in a post on A Voice for Men:
Right now in Jamaica lesbian sex is legal while male homosexual sex acts can get you up to 10 years in prison at hard labor.
In other words, homosexual women are accepted as a normal part of society. Homosexual men are criminals, for just existing.
So just move into your underground bunkers already, angry white dudes.
Over on Chateau Heartiste, the Heartiste formerly known as Roissy is in full-blown white supremacist mode today.
Apparently what got dear old Mr. H in an especially racist mood was a comment from a reader called Libertardian who suggested that, while in the good old days, civilization used to rein in the alleged worst tendencies of women, “in the West we had to abolish civilization because it was hurting people’s feelings.”
You keep using that word. I’m not even going to bother with the rest of this quote.
If you ever need proof that Men’s Rights Activists live in a world of their own, check out this, er, argument, found in a posting on A Voice for Men UK, the official British franchise of the American hate site we know so well :
All women are homophobic.
Whether the men being prejudiced against are gay or not is kind of beside the point – after all, ‘homo’ = man, ‘phobia’ = fear, therefore: ‘homophobia’ = Fear of Man – but, if you want to quibble over Greek & Latin etymology, perhaps we can at least agree on this: all women, to a greater or lesser extent, display the ‘symptoms’ we attribute to said condition: overt caution, fear &/or disdain of men.
Yep, that’s right. In order to find an excuse to call women “homophobic,” they’ve invented an entirely new definition for the word not based in any way on the actual etymology of the word “homophobia” (which is of course derived from “homosexual”) but on something they’ve just made up.
The author of the post then uses this weird logic to make excuses for actual homophobia among straight men:
Female ‘homophobia’ is so normalized in our society that treating every man you meet like ‘Schrödinger’s Rapist’ is considered an ordinary, common sense fact of life – just so long as you are a woman. But if a man feels at all uncomfortable around another man sexually, he is presently branded an evil bigot for behaving the way all women do at all times.
A Voice for Men: they reject your reality, and substitute nonsensical unreality that allows them to say bad things about women.
