So my Mighty White of You post — about the demographics of the Men’s Rights subreddit — drew the attention of Obsidian, a longtime Manosphere blogger who has been described by some of his comrades as “the Blackest Man of the Manosphere” (not that this is much of an accomplishment in that lily-white world). He stuck around for some not-terribly productive discussions of race and feminism, pickup artistry, and I can’t remember the rest because I just sort of stopped caring after a while.
But there was one thing he said — a passing remark in a long comment — that stood out to some of the commenters here, and which I thought was revealing enough to warrant highlighting in a post:
I don’t support rape for a very simple reason – because it’s not necessary. A Man with Game doesn’t need to rape anyone.
That … is not a good reason to “not support” rape.
Really, that’s probably the worst reason to “not support” rape besides “I don’t have enough time in my busy schedule to rape anyone today” or “I might muss up my new suit raping someone.”
Do you really need to search for reasons to “not support” rape beyond, you know, the idea that violating other people for your own selfish pleasure is wrong?
PUAs: Even the ones who aren’t directly advocating sexual assault have some pretty fucked up ideas about rape.
So you may have heard about that Kickstarter that raised $16,000 for a loathsome Reddit PUA’s “handbook on how to bully women who don’t like you into sex, while preserving your claims to believe you had consent should you need to tell the police,” as Amanda Marcotte aptly described it in her post on it yesterday. Slate’s Alyssa Rosenberg also has some thoughts on it.
I don’t really have anything to add.
There’s a petition up demanding that Kickstarter simply refuse to fund what is essentially a how-to guide to sexual assault. Last I checked, it had gotten nearly 60,000 signatures.
EDITED TO ADD: Casey Malone, who wrote the blog post that brought this awful project to the attention of people outside of the sleazier corners of Reddit, wrote Kickstarter about it and got a response suggesting that Kickstarter, while planning to go ahead and fund the project, will be reexamining its policies as a result of the controversy. Malone posted some further thoughts.
EDITED AGAIN: Kickstarter has offered an apology. You can find it here. But I’m just going to repost the whole thing:
Dear everybody,
On Wednesday morning Kickstarter was sent a blog post quoting disturbing material found on Reddit. The offensive material was part of a draft for a “seduction guide” that someone was using Kickstarter to publish. The posts offended a lot of people — us included — and many asked us to cancel the creator’s project. We didn’t.
We were wrong.
Why didn’t we cancel the project when this material was brought to our attention? Two things influenced our decision:
The decision had to be made immediately. We had only two hours from when we found out about the material to when the project was ending. We’ve never acted to remove a project that quickly.
Our processes, and everyday thinking, bias heavily toward creators. This is deeply ingrained. We feel a duty to our community — and our creators especially — to approach these investigations methodically as there is no margin for error in canceling a project. This thinking made us miss the forest for the trees.
These factors don’t excuse our decision but we hope they add clarity to how we arrived at it.
Let us be 100% clear: Content promoting or glorifying violence against women or anyone else has always been prohibited from Kickstarter. If a project page contains hateful or abusive material we don’t approve it in the first place. If we had seen this material when the project was submitted to Kickstarter (we didn’t), it never would have been approved. Kickstarter is committed to a culture of respect.
Where does this leave us?
First, there is no taking back money from the project or canceling funding after the fact. When the project was funded the backers’ money went directly from them to the creator. We missed the window.
Second, the project page has been removed from Kickstarter. The project has no place on our site. For transparency’s sake, a record of the page is cached here.
Third, we are prohibiting “seduction guides,” or anything similar, effective immediately. This material encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works. These things do not belong on Kickstarter.
Fourth, today Kickstarter will donate $25,000 to an anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN. It’s an excellent organization that combats exactly the sort of problems our inaction may have encouraged.
We take our role as Kickstarter’s stewards very seriously. Kickstarter is one of the friendliest, most supportive places on the web and we’re committed to keeping it that way. We’re sorry for getting this so wrong.
That is an apology. Some people could learn a thing or two from this.
What do women want? Dudes. In groups. Especially dudes who hate them.
That, in any case, seems to be the conclusion drawn by a blogger who calls himself Hipster Racist, and who seems to be a white supremacist of some kind. Anyway, he’s written a little post about the rise of Reddit’s Red and Blue Pill Subreddits and how they illustrate the Mannerbund Effect, a theory that helps to explain just why it is that the ladies allegedly like getting up in men’s business so much.
While we’re talking about this whole Facebook thing (see here and here if you don’t know what I’m referring to), I figured some of you might be wondering: What does the eminent Man-O-Philosopher and self-described “Counter-Feminist Agent of Change” Fidelbogen think of all this?
So if you’ve ever wondered what sort of activism that Men’s Rights, er, Activists do when they do do activism, take a look at this little ACTION ALERT from A Voice for Men.
You may recall Paul Elam getting all worked up the other day because Facebook, responding to a campaign launched by a coalition of feminist activists and groups, announced it was going to try to do a better job removing “gender-based” hate speech from its site. You know, like this [TRIGGER WARNING] sort of thing.
Naturally, Elam and other MRAs interpreted Facebook’s announcement as the first step in the End of Male Speech on the Internet, or something.
Anyway, now the MRAs are ACTIVATING! AVFM has announced that it’s going after the groups that signed onto the feminist Facebook protest. Because, well, I’m not sure I get why exactly.
Here’s their explanation:
It’s time for action. The AVFM community has scrambled to look beyond the fine print of WAM!’s ultimatum to Facebook and into the signatories. We are finding that some of them are tax-exempt, and even government funded. We now know that government funded institutions have endorsed a harmful double standard that results in the censorship of men.
But, if we discover that even one cent of government money touched WAM!’s campaign, we will be exposing a whole new dimension of hypocrisy.
Uh, ok. I’m just really having a hard time finding the hypocrisy here. If you look at the names of the groups that signed onto the open letter, you’ll find a number of general feminist groups, groups concerned with the representation of women/gender in the media, and groups organized against sexual assault and other forms of violence.
They didn’t sign a petition demanding that all men posting on the internet be banned or, I dunno, kicked in the balls. They signed onto an open letter demanding that Facebook remove
groups, pages and images that explicitly condone or encourage rape or domestic violence or suggest that they are something to laugh or boast about.
That doesn’t seem hypocritical to me. It seems rather in line with what these groups promote.
And the only men who will be censored will be men posting this sort of hateful shit. If women post this sort of shit, they’ll be banned too.
Apparently, AVFM and its “activist” fans are so divorced from reality that they think they’re going to be able to publicly embarrass rape survivor support groups … for standing up against crude, hateful rape jokes on Facebook featuring images of brutalized victims.
Dudes: If your wife isn’t horny for you, she’s probably into misandry and witchcraft and possibly even Pinterest.
In a post ostensibly about the imminent arrival of female Viagra, our dear friend JudgyBitch weighs in on yet another subject about which she knows shit: the reasons that women who are not her might not want to have sex with their husbands:
Loss of libido in women, excepting rare medical conditions, in my opinion, is a direct result of not seeing men as emotionally complex beings. If you’re married, at some point, your husband probably stood in front of you and promised to love you forever. Rejecting him physically is a very wounding thing to do. It hurts. Sex is one of the most important, intimate ways married couples show that they love one another. Refusing to have sex with your husband is telling him, in a very painful way, that you don’t love him. That you don’t care for him or about him.
Huh. If I hadn’t seen her on video, thus confirming her status as an adult human female, I would have a hard time believing that it was an actual woman saying this and not some horny, creepy teenage boy in the process of trying to manipulate his girlfriend into “going all the way.”
Oh, but she’s got more:
I guess the only way to justify that is to think of men as emotionless. It doesn’t hurt men to be rejected because they don’t feel anything to begin with.
Really? The only way to justify saying “no” to your husband when you don’t want to have sex with him is if you convince yourself he’s emotionless? But women should just force themselves to say “yes” to sex when they don’t want to and simply endure what follows?
That’s the ugly little reality behind female viagara. Will it actually boost women’s libido? Who knows. What difference will it make, though, if women are going to continue to see men as less than completely human? That’s the real problem.
Does anyone know where to get irony meters at a reasonable price? Mine just leapt off the table, ran around the room screaming, and exploded.
Evil feminist removing male ideas from the Internet
Men’s Rights, er, activists are waving their arms frantically in the air over what they see as a dire new threat to men and manhood: Facebook’s recent annoucement that it was going to try to do a better job of taking down violent images mocking victims of rape and domestic violence, and other kinds of misogynistic hate speech.
Tom Martin would be right at home in Second Life, apparently.
I realize that I may be the only one who’s really all that interested in sectarian infighting amongst the MRAs, but an old friend of ours has weighed in on the recent battles over the A Voice for Men satellite group MRA London, and I’ve learned some interesting things as a result.
So “dating” guru Roosh has a post up on his Return of Kings blog by another self-professed dating guru, Alex Matlock, who rates various types of “bad sex” according to the type of female partner who’s involved in them, including such charmingly named types as “The one that tries too much (aka The Disaster)” and “The one that doesn’t move (aka The Starfish or The Doll).”
I expected a good deal of standard-issue manosphere misogyny in Matlock’s list, but I honestly couldn’t make it past his description of what he regards as the second-worst type of female sex partner: “The one that’s scared (aka The Virgin).” Because what he’s describing doesn’t sound so much like “bad sex” as “date rape.”
