So internet garbage person Matt Forney has written another one of his deliberately awful Return of Kings posts designed to create outrage and deliver page views. This latest one, like his previous attempts in this genre, is a clickbaity list of “5 Reasons Why Girls With Mental Disorders Should Be Shunned” as “unworthy of your love.”
It would be easy enough to point out the irony of the thoroughly grotesque Forney declaring women with mental disorders to be “gross” fatties with stinky butts. (This is item 4 on his list. No, really.) Especially since he’s doing it on a website run by a dude who seems to resent the fact that he has to wipe his own ass.
But I’m more interested in the post’s “featured comment,” a miniature manifesto singled out by Return of Kings’ reluctant-ass-wiper-in-chief Roosh V as the best response to Forney’s post (and sporting more than 80 upvotes from the site’s terrible readers).
GamerGate provides a rare example of rats climbing aboard a sinking ship.
As the “movement” stews in its own conspiratorial rage, a small army of reactionary misogynists, sensing opportunity, have joined the cause. Sure, right-wingers like Adam Baldwin and Milo Yiannopoulos have long been Gaters, but it’s only in recent days that they’ve been joined by some of the better-known manospherians, from angry lawyer and juice seller Mike Cernovich to the charming Roosh V.
The latest manosphere douchebag to take up the GamerGate cause is the lovely and talented Matt Forney, who has promptly claimed for himself the mantle of GamerGate leader and hero.
Not the model for a happy and successful relationship
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.)
For more proof that bigotries flock together, let’s take a look at some tweets the always despicable Matt Forney made today after learning of the death of Nelson Mandela:
His “statistical evidence” of an alleged “white genocide” in South Africa? A page that links to a curious document full of unsourced claims and hysterical language, and which refers to South Africa’s former apartheid system as “so-called apartheid.” (It’s a pdf; TRIGGER WARNING for gruesome pictures of murder victims.)
Matt Forney is desperate for attention; it’s as glaringly obvious as the giant MATT FORNEY that adorns the top of his blog, creatively named MATT FORNEY. And like some caricature of an emo teen “acting out,” the misogynistic manosphere blogger has decided that any attention — even bad attention — is better than no attention.
And so, perhaps at least dimly aware that his ideas are and his prose are both too lackluster to command much attention on their own, he seems to be trying to rile up as much of the internet as possible with posts that are deliberately designed to offend liberals and feminists and pretty much anyone who is not a woman-hating douchebag. He had a minor hit a this spring with a post entitled Why Fat Girls Don’t Deserve to Be Loved, which did in fact live up — that is, down — to its title.
So, I’ve written about the terrible “game” blogger LaidNYC several times already because the fellow is such a reliable purveyor of terrible what-the-fuckery — what with his weird fixation on the alleged value of his sperm, his creepy obsession with underage girls, and his overall awfulness as a human being. I have wondered, from time to time, if the fellow isn’t simply a troll, but I’ve kept on writing about him largely because his readers — and other manosphere bloggers — seem to take him utterly seriously.
Today, though, I just noticed a post from Matt Forney — a Manosphere blogger who is himself a deeply terrible person with a history of trollery and sockpuppeting — who seems to be dropping big hints that LaidNYC may not be who he seems. In a post reviewing an”ebook” by LaidNYC — insofar as a 13 page collection of platitudes obviously banged out in a few hours can be considered a book of any kind — Forney writes:
There are bloggers who take weeks, months, years to get into a groove, honing their talents to the point where their posts become must-reads. And then there are guys like LaidNYC who come exploding out of the gate, writing stuff so good you swear they’ve done this before. LaidNYC is on my top tier of bloggers because his writing is not only brutal and honest, brimming with verisimilitude, but his prose style is hilarious as well.
The fact that he so effortlessly sends feminists into shrieking hysterics is proof that he’s doing things right.
Emphasis mine.
He ends the “review” urging his readers to send LaidNYC some real money for his ridiculous “book.”
In any case, I’m not sure if it matters much if LaidNYC is a genuine “game” blogger with deeply misogynistic views who writes horrendous shit because he believes every word of it, or a troll with deeply misogynistic views who writes horrendous shit because he wants to piss off women and feminists and maybe con a few gullible followers into sending him money while he’s at it.
And whether or not LaidNYC’s noxious “advice” is meant seriously, manosphere dudes are lapping it up regardless.
Matt Forney and LaidNYC — who may or may not be the same person — have learned that you can get attention by saying terrible things. Congratulations. What an amazing accomplishment.
EDITED TO ADD: Well, on Twitter, for what it’s worth, Forney denies it all.
I did manage to find an audio interview with LaidNYC here. You can compare it to Forney’s voice on his podcast here. At first I was thinking that while the voices are similar, it wasn’t a match: LaidNYC was a faster talker with a higher voice, etc. (It’s hard to tell, in part because LaidNYC’s voice in the interview is poor quality, over the phone.) But then I skipped ahead to about ten minutes into Forney’s podcast and now I’m not sure. The voices are awfully similar (and frankly, not terribly alpha-sounding). Any thoughts?
This spring, the pseudonymous “Ferdinand Bardamu” of the defunct manosphere blog In Mala Fide self-published a book/ebook collecting together his, er, best posts from that terrible, terrible blog. I actually bought a copy of the ebook — for research — and it is awful. Somehow putting Bardamu’s posts in book form makes even more clear how puerile — and how badly written — they really are.
But there are evidently some people out there who disagree. Indeed, I recently ran across a review of the book that could not have been more glowing had it been written by the author himself:
Three Years of Hate is an invaluable, priceless book not merely because it’s well-written, entertaining and thought-provoking. It’s worth reading because it’s a piece of history. It’s a record of one of the most influential and important thinkers of our times. Decades from now, when the current dystopia is naught but a bad memory, Ferdinand Bardamu will be remembered as one of the architects of its fall.
If you’re relying on glowing reviews to sell your book, and your book is a piece of crap, you might as well write the glowing reviews yourself, huh?
I suppose Forney’s explanation would be that it was all a big joke, and that by then “everyone knew” that Forney and Bardamu were one and the same, but that’s not true, and he didn’t confirm that fact for more than another month in any case.
I can’t remember exactly where I ran across a reference to theis ingenious little bit of self-boosterism, but I think it was while reading back through some old posts on the always interesting blog Roosh & Me: An Old Feminist Looks at the New Misogynist, by Cinzia La Strega. who is an occasional commenter over here on Man Boobz.
