Germanwings employees at a makeshift memorial for those killed on Flight 9525
As the news broke this morning that the Germanwings plane crash may have been a deliberate murder/suicide caused by the flight’s co-pilot, readers of the leading Men’s Rights website A Voice for Men were greeted by a post from site founder Paul Elam titled “A little blood in the mix never hurt a revolution.”
The headline on Elam’s post, a muddled mess that’s mostly a response to recent infighting amongst MRAs, recalls a disturbing post of his from several years ago titled “How to Build a Man Bomb.” (Archived here.)
Ostensibly a warning about the cost of ignoring male rage, it read a lot more like a threat.
Roosh Valizadeh has long fantasized about ruining the professional lives of alleged “social justice warrior” journalists who criticize racist and misogynistic assholes like himself.
Now he’s fantasizing about murdering them.
Yesterday, the pickup guru and “Return of Kings” founder posted a short story on his personal blog about a twentysomething mailroom worker who loses his job after a feckless SJW reporter working for a Gawker-like blog called “The Denouncer” discovers an offensive Facebook post of his and writes a hit piece on him.
Unable to get a decent-paying job, the young man travels to New York and guns down the reporter who, in his mind, ruined his life.
If you have to guess which of the two characters Roosh sympathizes with, you clearly haven’t encountered him before.
The threats directed at Anita Sarkeesian are intended to silence women’s voices
Reading through the luridly threatening email that forced Anita Sarkeesian to cancel her talk at Utah State University, originally scheduled for today, I found myself wondering, a bit dumbfounded: just where does this kind of hate come from?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself again and again in recent days as I contemplate the ongoing fiasco that is GamerGate. How on earth have all these people gotten so angry, so worked up, so willing to dox and harass and threaten women (and some of their male allies) over video games?
How exactly does someone reach a point where it makes sense to them to threaten – and perhaps even to seriously plan – a “Montreal-style Massacre” because they don’t like a few videos pointing out sexism in video games?
Even after years spent tracking and trying to understand the misogynistic online culture that’s given birth to GamerGate, I don’t have an answer. And I’m not sure where to get one.
And so, as a kind of preliminary step towards finding an answer to this question, I thought I would ask a simpler and more empirical question: where does the language of hatred found in the threatening email sent to Utah State officials come from?
Utah State University has just announced that Anita Sarkeesian has canceled a talk she was scheduled to give at the school tomorrow after receiving a threat of a “Montreal Massacre-style attack” by someone promising ““the deadliest school shooting in American history” if the cultural critic was allowed to speak.
Anita Sarkeesian has canceled her scheduled speech for tomorrow following a discussion with Utah State University police regarding an email threat that was sent to Utah State University. During the discussion, Sarkeesian asked if weapons will be permitted at the speaking venue. Sarkeesian was informed that, in accordance with the State of Utah law regarding the carrying of firearms, if a person has a valid concealed firearm permit and is carrying a weapon, they are permitted to have it at the venue.
Emphasis added. That’s right: the school received threats from someone promising to shoot people at a public event, but because of Utah’s gun laws, authorities would not be able to prohibit audience members from BRINGING GUNS to the talk.
Collage of images from the PhilosophyOfRape subreddit
For a social media site with pretensions to respectability, Reddit shows an astounding tolerance for hate. As anyone who has ever explored the site’s dark underbelly knows well, the site hosts a vast array of subreddits devoted to celebrations of such things as “white pride” and violence against women.
The latest addition to this archipelago of awfulness is a 3-day-old subreddit with the pretentious and appalling name PhilosophyOfRape, set up by a user of the same name in order to promote and celebrate “corrective” rape of “sluts” and “harlots.”
In a manifesto announcing the subreddit to the world, the user known as PhilosophyOfRape set forth his basic thesis, which he insists is as “serious as a heart attack.”
A makeshift shrine on the lawn of the sorority targeted by Elliot Rodger
Most of those in the manosphere, whatever their real feelings, have been relatively circumspect about expressing sympathy with, or support for, Elliot Rodger. Sure, many manospherians – from MRAs to PUAs to MGTOWs – have long been half-warning, half-threatening those of us in the “blue pill” world that angry young men are going to rise up and take a sort of self-styled revenge upon their supposed female and feminist oppressors.
But when one man actually launches a “Day of Retribution” intended to punish the “blonde sluts” of the world (as well as any man who roused his ire or got in his way), most manospherians have tried to change the subject, denying any connection between his ideas and theirs, and in some cases even trying to pretend that the man who wanted to watch all women die in concentration camps wasn’t even a misogynist at all.
That’s not the case over at the CoAlpha Forum, a self-proclaimed “Reactionary Free Speech Forum” given over to a strange and scary patriarchal variant on manosphere ideology.
The main thing keeping the CoAlphas from celebrating Elliot Rodgers as an Incel Hero? He killed too many men – and didn’t “butcher” enough “sorority girls.”
On April 2, Army Specialist Ivan Lopez shot and killed three people on the Fort Hood military base in Texas, before turning his gun on himself; 16 others were injured. It’s not clear what caused Lopez’ killing spree, though the incident seems to have been triggered by the difficulties he encountered trying to get a 24-hour pass to attend his mother’s funeral.
But a writer for A Voice for Men, Michael Conzachi, has a novel explanation for the tragedy: the military’s excessive niceness towards lesbians and gays.
In a post entitled “What role has feminism played in the shooting at Fort Hood and its aftermath?” Conzachi sets forth his thesis:
Numerous directives from the Pentagon and the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS), of which some in the military refer to the group as the “Super-Feminists” or jokingly, the “Lesbo Circle of Doom,” allow for and promote an immediate leave period of five days for same sex military couples to marry. …
How is it that a large contingent of feminist dominated military and Pentagon leadership enacts policies that favor, prioritize, and give expanded benefits for same sex couples; yet Specialist Lopez apparently was only allowed two days to bury his mother?
If that was you, and you could only get two days to attend to your mother’s death, and you see same sex military couples being allowed five days immediate leave to marry; wouldn’t that bother you a little, regardless of what your opinions are of gay and same sex couples? Where is the equality?
Yep. An unhinged man murders his fellow soldiers in cold blood. Let’s blame it on same-sex marriage and the “Lesbo Circle of Doom.”
At least Conzachi admits that his theory is only a theory, and that “whether or not we will ever learn [the shooter’s] true motives is unknown.”
Coznachi spends the rest of his post tearing down the female officer who confronted Lopez and brought an end to his killing spree.
He ends with this question — a question that he seems to have already answered to his own satisfaction:
Are the military’s priorities of same sex couple, gay, and women in combat issues harmful to males in general?
A number of those who are associated with A Voice for Men — most notably “managing editor ” Dean Esmay and “contributing editor” Karen Straughan — profess to be great Friends of the Gays; indeed Straughan describes herself as a “genderqueer, bisexual … woman”).
I can only wonder why they would want to associate themselves with a site that publishes articles suggesting that supporting the rights of same sex couples in the military to marry is “harmful to males in general.”
Attention pretty high school girls! If a nerdy looking dude in your school shows up one day loaded with guns and Molotov cocktails and starts shooting up the place, it’s actually your fault, for not sleeping with him.
Some people dream of going back in a time machine and strangling baby Hitler in his crib, thus preventing World War II, the Holocaust, any number of stupid memes. Our dear friend Heartiste — the repellent right-wing pickup guru — dreams instead of delivering the incredibly wussy teenage Hitler his own Sixteen Commandments of Poon, thus saving young Adolph from the horrors of Betahood and perhaps also preventing World War II, etc.
Heartiste, who evidently gets his news from seven-year-old stories in the Daily Mail, has been reading about a not-so-new book that tells the story of teenage Hitler’s unrequited crush on a girl named Stefanie Isak. To hear the Daily Mail tell it, Hitler was quite the beta simp, watching from a distance in fury as alpha male army officers charmed (and won over) the young lass. Heartiste is driven to comment:
A couple of days ago, Rachel Swirsky — an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer who posts at Alas, A Blog and sometimes comments here on Man Boobz as well — sent along a link to a brilliant, brutal, and horrifying short story she’d recently published in Apex Magazine. Titled “Abomination Rises on Filthy Wings,” the story is essentially her attempt to get inside the mind of a violent misogynist.
As the editor’s note to her story explains:
Swirsky wrote this piece after talking to multiple editors who worked with horror stories, all of whom reported receiving many submissions about men murdering their wives or ex–wives. Despite the fictional veneer and supernatural justification [for the murder], many have the feel of personal revenge fantasies, and most characterize the women through disturbing, misogynist stereotypes. Swirsky wanted to see if it was possible to write a story that included all the markers of the trope but nevertheless subverted it.
In writing the story, Swirsky told me, “I drew heavily on Manboobz for mood and imagery, to try to get the sense of the narrator.”
So, enjoy. But first, I should warn you that the story is very violent, very disturbing, and could very well be triggering. So giant TRIGGER WARNING.
