We Hunted The Mammoth
The Washington Post recently ran a piece by Michele Goldberg about feminist women who’ve basically been run off the internet by rape threats and death threats and endless harassment.
Reactionary fantasy author and racist shithead Vox Day (a.k.a Theadore Beale) couldn’t be more pleased. After posting several quotes from the WaPo article on his Vox Popoli blog, he did a little victory lap:
Oh dear. Fantasy author and garbage person Vox Day is having one of those (vox) days, and has decided to take it out on, you guessed it, feminism, pounding out an overwrought little rant on his Alpha Game blog.
Never give feminists an inch. Don’t agree with them, don’t tolerate them, show them no mercy whatsoever. Feminism is a Satanic, anti-Christian, anti-reason, anti-science ideology that destroys literally everything it touches and everyone who embraces it.
Wow. He’s so mad he’s practically plagiarizing Pat Robertson’s famous quote about feminism being “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” I’m not sure how Vox managed to forget the lesbian witchcraft angle.
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I thought I’d seen every variety of rape apologism known to humankind. But this is a new one for me: Fantasy author and garbage human Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale) has decided that all claims of rape directed at white guys are suspect because … white guys don’t rape.
No, really. That’s his actual argument:
In the world of fantasy writer and all-around hateful shithead Vox Day, women who are raped when they’re too drunk to consent should just suck it up, because reporting their rapes would be akin to someone calling police when they can’t remember where they’ve parked their car.
In a blog post today, Vox approvingly quotes a retiring British judge under fire for telling a newspaper that “the rape conviction statistics will not improve until women stop getting so drunk.” (This is the same judge who recently gave a teacher convicted of possessing a massive library of child porn a suspended sentence, saying that she couldn’t “criticise you for being a teacher who’s attracted to children.”)
Vox offers his take:
You know how they say “smile and the world smiles with you?” Apparently, that’s all wrong, at least according to our dear old friend Vox Day (Theodore Beale). The fantasy author and human shitstain says this old saw needs a rewrite: smile, and the world’s true Alphas laugh at you. As Mr. Day-Beale explains:
Women say they resent it when men tell them to smile. And well they should. An instinctive smile, when one is not expressing pleasure or recognition, is a submissive gesture. This is why attractive women tend to smirk in response to the big goofy submissive smiles sent their way by lower status men.
And then, presumably, those sexy ladies will quickly excuse themselves and make a beeline for the nearest ALPHA fantasy author standing grimly in the corner, quietly judging everyone and thinking unkind thoughts about John Scalzi.
But what if you’re one of those big goofy smiling submissive dudes? How do you capture some of that broody Alpha magic for yourself? It’s simple: Don’t turn that frown upside down.
One easy way to increase your perceived level of alpha is to simply not smile at strangers. Instead, just reply with a nod or a pleasant word. One can be perfectly civil without grinning at everyone like an idiot, and it’s always interesting to see the difference it makes in people’s perceptions.
Just don’t overdo it, lest the ladies think you’re, for example, some sort of weirdo misogynist so filled with fear and loathing for everything female that you’ve actually set up an entire blog devoted to telling the world what an awesome alpha you are.
I’m not talking about walking around glowering; self-conscious anger is much worse than indiscriminate smiling. But women have always been drawn to brooding men, so rather than turning them away with a gesture of preemptive submission, give them something to which they can be drawn.
To be perfectly fair, though, this does work with most Bronte sisters.
Apparently worried that the world might forget what a thoroughly reprehensible human being he is, fantasy author and freelance bigot Vox Day (Theodore Beale) has decided to bring up the issue of marital rape again – in order to assert, as he has many times in the past, that marital rape doesn’t actually exist.
In a post yesterday on his blog Vox Populi, Beale notes with obvious pleasure that an Indian judge recently ruled that marital sex, “even if forcible, is not rape,” thus upholding a section of the Indian Penal Code that refuses to acknowledge marital rape as rape.
Beale crows:
Some of my dimmer critics have attempted to make a meal out of my factual statement: a man cannot rape his wife. But that is not only a fact, it is the explicit law in the greater part of the world, just as it is part of the English Common Law. …
The fact that some of the lawless governments in the decadent, demographically dying West presently call some forms of sex between a husband and wife “rape” does not transform marital sex into rape any more than a law that declared all vaginal intercourse to be rape would make it so.
Unfortunately for Beale, simply declaring that the world is on his side on this one does not make it so. It not simply a handful of “ lawless governments in the decadent, demographically dying West” that see marital rape for what it is. The United Nations has recognized marital rape as a human rights violation for more than two decades. And the world is coming around to this point of view.
While (as of 2011) only 52 countries had laws specifically criminalizing marital rape, many others don’t have a “marital rape” exemption to their rape laws, meaning that in more than 100 countries marital rape can be prosecuted. And that number will inevitably grow.
Here’s a map from Wikipedia showing the countries (in red) in which marital rape is illegal. The countries in black allow marital rape. In the other countries, it’s a bit more complicated. (See here for the details.)
But for now, at least, Beale is happy for another chance to explain the toxic “logic” behind his assertion that “marital rape” is impossible.
Anyone with a basic grasp of logic who thinks about the subject of “marital rape” for more than ten seconds will quickly realize that marriage grants consent on an ongoing basis. This has to be the case, otherwise every time one partner wakes the other up in an intimate manner or has sex with an inebriated spouse, rape has been committed.
Now, by Beale’s logic, a husband is entitled to force his wife to have sex over her screaming objections. Since “consent is ongoing,” in Beale’s version of marriage, a woman could say no or even fight back against her husband’s advances, but none of this would count as non-consent because once a woman is married there is no such thing.
But of course Beale doesn’t want to have to defend what is obviously – at least to anyone with any humanity – violent rape. So he tries instead to restrict the debate to the seemingly innocuous practice of “wake-up sex.” After all, what guy doesn’t want to be woken up with a blow job?
But even this example isn’t as persuasive as he thinks it is. Some people like to be woken up in an “intimate manner,” at least some of the time; some don’t, and you don’t get to override their desire not to be sexually manhandled in their sleep just because you’re married to them. And while drunk sex is not necessarily rape, marriage doesn’t give you the right to force sex on a partner who is intoxicated to the point of incapacity.
And for those who wish to argue that consent can be withdrawn, there is a word for withdrawing consent in a marriage. That word is “divorce”.
No, that word is “no.” There is no such thing as ongoing consent to sex. The fact that you are married to someone doesn’t give you the right to have sex with them whenever and wherever you want, whether they want to or not, any more than the fact that someone is a professional boxer gives you the right to punch them in the head any time you feel like it.
The concept of marital rape is not merely an oxymoron, it is an attack on the institution of marriage, on the concept of objective law, and indeed, on the core foundation of human civilization itself.
No, Mr. Beale, you having the right to do whatever you want to with your dick is not the basis of civilization itself. Civilization, in fact, is built in part on the repression of some of our darkest desires. Part of growing up is reconciling ourselves to the sad fact that we can’t just do whatever the hell we want to all the time; Freud described this as putting behind the “pleasure principle” of infancy and early childhood for the “reality principle” that governs the more mature mind.
Beale seems to be driven not only by a desire for instant sexual gratification, whenever and wherever he wants, but also by a certain degree of sexual insecurity. In a previous post on the subject, he wrote:
If a woman believes in the concept of marital rape, absolutely do not marry her! It would make no sense whatsoever to marry a woman who believes that being married to her grants her husband no more sexual privilege than the next unemployed musician who happens to catch her eye.
Beale seems to think that if married women are allowed to say no to their husbands, they’ll desert these poor beta schlubs en masse in favor of scruffy alphas with guitars. At the root of all his arguments against the idea of marital rape is an obvious terror of unrestricted female choice.
In a way Beale’s petulant, self-serving defenses of marital rape serve a positive function, in that they help to remind us how abhorrent the practice is and how nonsensical the “arguments” in favor of allowing it really are.
Every time he opens his mouth on the subject, he helps to strengthen the growing consensus against marital rape.
Happy Mothers’ Day! In honor of this special day let me share the sweet sentiments of the mother-loving Vox Day, who took time out of his busy schedule of woman-hating to write a post urging his readers to “Honor the Mothers” of the world. Or at least the non-feminist mothers of the “Western sub-species” of the human race.
Vox starts out his paean to motherhood by noting that women are mostly shitty and need to be constantly reminded of their shittiness by right-thinking fellows like him:
We are, quite rightly, very often hard on women here at Alpha Game. We need to be, because they spend most of their lives having smoke blown up their pretty little asses by people of both sexes and all ages who want to curry favor with them.
Oh, but even though women are terrible, don’t give in to the temptation of misogyny!
But never be tempted into misogyny by the bad behavior of one, one hundred, one thousand, or even one million women. They are the fate of the human race. They are the fate of the Western sub-species. They matter.
Take the day to honor the mothers of our sub-species. Well, some of them.
So, honor those who reject the nihilistic hedonism of feminism despite being literally inundated with its dogma from their earliest years and fulfill their primary destiny, that of motherhood. Whether she fulfills it gracefully and well or grudgingly and incompetently, she has done her duty. Respect that she has played her part in the miracle of life, honor her for doing her part in turning back the dark void of universal entropy.
It’s not nothing. It’s not a minor thing. Without women, there is no Man.
So even if you hate women, you need to remember that they serve a useful role as incubators of future men!
Happy Mother’s Day.
And a happy mother’s day to you too, you racist, misogynistic piece of poop.
So our old friend Vox Day – the proudly bigoted science fiction/fantasy writer and self-professed expert on all things “Alpha” – is in the news again. This time, it’s not for declaring most date rape imaginary or writing a racist diatribe against a fellow author. Nope! It’s because another of his literary efforts, a novelette entitled Opera Vita Aeterna, just got nominated for a Hugo award.
In other news, apparently it’s not that hard to get nominated for a Hugo if you have a coterie of hard-core fans who are perhaps still pissed that you got kicked out of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and you suggest on your blog beforehand that it would be cool if they voted to nominate you.
Anyway, there’s already plenty of discussion of the news amongst the science-fiction set, most of them understandably displeased that a racist, misogynistic, homophobic asshole got a nomination. Here’s a bit more about the racist attack on black fantasy writer NK Jemisin (and misuse of the SFWA Twitter account) that got him tossed from the organization. If you’ve never seen what he wrote about Jemisin, I’ll just quote some of the more memorable passages again here, because, wow. I’ve bolded the best — that is, worst — bits:
So our old friend Vox Day is working on a video game. And he’s decided to make a bold and unprecedented choice in his design of the game: he’s not going to have any ladies in it.
But it turns out this choice has nothing to do with anything so pedestrian as misogyny. In fact, it was the only rational choice he could make. Let’s let him explain. He has such a way with words. (He’s apparently some sort of writer.)
I am a game designer. I am designing and producing a game that does not, and will not, have a single female character in it. This is not because I am misogynistic. This is not because I do not women to play the game. This is because putting women in the game makes no sense, violates the principle of the suspension of disbelief, and will not make the game any better as a game.
Well, that makes sense. I mean, the game is probably some game that has to have only male characters to be believable. You know, like Dance Party with the American Presidents or the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association Board of Directors Simulator 3000 or something like that.
I am the lead designer of First Sword, a combat management game. The game has orcs and men, elves and dwarves. It has goblins and trolls. But it has no women.
Uh, wait. It’s a combat game filled with orcs, goblins and trolls, but putting women in it would “violate … the principle of the suspension of disbelief.”
Because the game is a gladiator game. Women cannot credibly fight as gladiators. We don’t put women in the game for the same reason we don’t put bunny rabbits or children in the game.
Well, why not? You put fucking orcs in it. Why not make a combat game with bunny rabbits?
Actually, someone already did that. It’s called Overgrowth. And it’s supposed to be pretty good.
Putting women in the game would be an act of brutal sadism, an act of barbarism even by pagan Roman standards. While the Romans did occasionally put female gladiators in the arena, they were there as a comedic act.
Really? This is a VIDEO GAME. You can do whatever you want with it. It is really harder to imagine a woman being able to fight a man than it is to imagine entire races of imaginary humanoid creatures?
We could, of course, throw out historical verisimilitude. But we’re not going to. Because we value that verisimilitude far more than we value the opinion of a few whiny women who don’t play the sort of games we make anyhow.
Historical verisimilitude? Historical verisimilitude?!
YOU’RE MAKING A GAME ABOUT ORCS AND TROLLS.
ORCS AND TROLLS DO NOT EXIST.
THEY HAVE NEVER EXISTED.
THERE IS NO HISTORY THAT INCLUDES ORCS AND TROLLS.
Some married men like to jokingly refer to their wife as “the boss,” generally in a patronizing manner that suggests she’s nominally in charge of the boring everyday stuff in the household that he doesn’t really care about anyway.
But our old nemesis Vox Day isn’t having any of it. To refer to your wife as the boss, even as a joke, is to threaten to loose the forces of anarchy and chaos and feminism upon your family. Also, women are dogs. On his Alpha Game blog, he writes,
If you let a dog think he’s the boss, he will cease to defer to you and begin objecting, violently, when you interfere with what he now believes are his prerogatives. Women are no different.
That’s right. Give in an inch to your wife, and the next thing you know she’ll be sitting on the furniture and insisting on eating “people food” at the table.
It’s a tad ironic that Vox here has decided to degrade women by comparing them to dogs, when his whole “alpha” schtick is based on misguided notions about the behavior of “alpha dogs” and wolves.
It’s one thing to turn over your social calendar to your wife due to a lack of interest in the various social obligations of the family. But checking in to see if there is scheduling conflict, or simply being courteous enough to see if your wife minds if you go to the football game does not make you an employee or a child. Therefore, it does not make her the boss. And what might have been an ironic jest in the days of Mad Men is often taken quite literally now.
Marriage: an endless power struggle in which the wife must always lose.
What a lovely vision of the world!
I should also add that you should never ever, even jokingly, refer to Bruce Springsteen as “the boss” either, because if you do he’s going to be hounding you to hand in your TPS reports and forcing you to work on Saturdays. You don’t want that.
EDITED TO ADD: In the comments on Alpha Game, cailcorishev expands a bit on the whole “women-as-dogs” thing in what he evidently thinks is a humorous way:
Since you mentioned dogs: virtually everything about disciplining a dog and being the pack leader applies to leading a woman (or children). I’m convinced that, if you took a woman on a 45-minute walk every day, as Cesar Millan recommended for dogs, it would eliminate a lot of her problems. Just make sure you lead her, having her take your arm and follow you where you want to go — or use a leash if she’s into that kind of thing.
I can only hope his wife — if there is an unfortunate woman holding this position — pees on the rug and chews up all his important paperwork.
