We Hunted The Mammoth
By David Futrelle
Eventually, it seems, every single far-right nitwit in the United States will be fighting with every other far-right nitwit. Last week, we looked at the miniature civil war that broke out between “crying Nazi” Christopher Cantwell and the boys at the Daily Stormer. Today, let’s take a look at another name from this blog’s past: Davis Aurini.
Last year, I wrote about a repellant little “community” on Reddit: the PhilosophyofRape subreddit, devoted to promoting what it called the corrective rape of “filthy, unmitigated, sluts … [t]hat badly need to be punished. Badly.”
Reddit being what it is, the subreddit remains up to this day. And now the folks behind it have taken their repugnant “philosophy” to the web. Earlier this week, one of the subreddit’s numerous moderators, a veritable cauldron of bigotries who calls himself European88, announced the grand opening of a new Philosophy of Rape website. He urged his fellow “philosophers” to “[s]ubscribe and submit your rape tips … !”
While Men’s Rights Activists are quick to label virtually any woman that they disagree with a feminist, they react with outrage when anyone who is not a self-admitted MRA is described as one.
The folks at A Voice for Men are still fuming about what they consider a “trust-shattering” media scandal: the fact that a bunch of news outlets wrote about a supposed Men’s Rights boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road, when in fact the virulently antifeminist Youtube blabber calling for the boycott wasn’t technically a Men’s Rights activist at all.
Meanwhile, there’s a dude cluttering up my Twitter mentions with demands I take some sort of action against a tiny handful of commenters on this blog who have referred to the woman-hating mass killer Elliot Rodger as an MRA, even though, as far as we know, he wasn’t one.
To which I can only say: Sorry, guys. You’re Kleenex. And you’d better get used to it.
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Sluthate’s “shitty advice” forum, devoted to discussing such high-minded topics as “Do fat women have dirtier vaginas?” and “why is rape bad,” is a haven for embittered “incels” — self-described “involuntary celibates” — who’ve convinced themselves that they are too objectively unattractive and un-alpha to attract attention from the cruel and superficial “sluts” of the world — a category that seems to include all the women they find attractive.
Back when the forum was known as PUAhate, it was a regular hangout of one especially embittered incel, a young man known as Elliot Rodger, who last year killed six in Isla Vista California, and then himself, in what he called his “Day of Retribution” against women. Many of Sluthate’s regulars, unsurprisingly, have embraced “ER” as a kind of incel martyr.
Now they’ve found a new and improved hero: Andreas Lubitz, the troubled co-pilot who, French officials say, deliberately flew Germanwings Flight 9525 into a mountain in the French Alps.
“Andy Bob” of A Voice for Men has decided that the recent threats against Anita Sarkeesian are fake because … they’re too melodramatic.
In a rather remarkable bit of logicking titled “Anonymous feminist provides Anita Sarkeesian with a potential new source of revenue,” Andy Bob quotes this line from the threat email:
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Well, the great minds of the manosphere have been going into overdrive trying to explain away the fact that a man who had a lot in common with them, ideology-wise, murdered six innocent people on Friday as part of a “Day of Retribution” that he had hoped would involve a lot more dead bodies, particularly of the blonde, female variety.
We had noted cultural commenter JudgyBitch (Janet Bloomfield) looking at Elliot Rodger, a man who wrote a 140-page manifesto detailing his hatred of women and girls, a manifesto that contained the following paragraph:
Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such.
.. and which ended with a fantasy of putting all the women in the world in concentration camps and starving them to death, while Rodger took a position in a giant tower built just for him “where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die,” and suggesting that Rodger wasn’t actually a misogynist, because he wasn’t able to get into the sorority and murder all the “blonde sluts” he had hoped to murder and so ended up killing more men than women.
When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime.
But when a man filled to overflowing with hatred of women acts upon this hatred and launches a killing spree targeting women, many people find it hard to accept that his violence has anything to do with his misogyny. They’re quick to blame it on practically anything else they can think of – guns, video games, mental illness – though none of these things in themselves would explain why a killer would target women.
In the case of Elliot Rodger, who set out on Friday night aiming, as he put it in a chilling video, to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut” in a popular sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, some Men’s Rights activists and other manospherians are doing their best to convince the world that misogyny had nothing to do with it.
Pickup artists, classy fellows that they are, are using Elliot Rodger’s killing rampage as a marketing ploy. In the comments to one of Rodger’s videos on YouTube, a company called Strategic Dating Coach offered their solution to prevent similar shootings in the future: send disturbed young men who can’t get dates to one of their coaching sessions!
While this response to Rodger’s mass killing is uniquely crass, the argument that “Game saves lives” is hardly new. To PUAs like Heartiste and Roosh Valizadeh it’s practically an article of faith.
Pickup artists, classy fellows that they are, are using Elliot Rodger’s killing rampage as a marketing ploy. In the comments to one of Rodger’s videos on YouTube, a company called Strategic Dating Coach offered their solution to prevent similar shootings in the future: send disturbed young men who can’t get dates to one of their coaching sessions!
While this response to Rodger’s mass killing is uniquely crass, the argument that “Game saves lives” is hardly new. To PUAs like Heartiste and Roosh Valizadeh it’s practically an article of faith.
I didn’t realize it, but as these panels from a Doll Man comic book make clear, women really don’t like short men. Or at least really, really, really short men.
I would like to apologize to Doll Man, and, indeed, all Doll Men, for being insensitive to their tiny little plight.
(Now back to reading the 900+ comments in that PUAhate thread.)
