Feminism

[TychoCelchuuu]

Thanks for the link about the Connecticut interview story. I sent it to my students and told them to read it because it matches up pretty well with what they are reading for class right now.

[Twig]

The real gem is nabbing permission to say "politically correct". I can't even tell you how many people I had to [redacted] to get this. 

[Merus]

So in case you aren't aware, a men's rights activist went on a shooting rampage because he couldn't stand to see women make their own dating decisions instead of dating him (charmingly, particularly if they weren't white).

 

A transcript of his last video, where he made the threat (and also an excuse to link We Hunted The Mammoth). The YouTube comments are, obviously, appalling.

 

There are many people trying to work out whether mental illness is the problem, or MRAs, or trivial access to guns. It would be nice if the argument didn't assume we had to choose. Also if people didn't automatically assume that mental illness makes you shoot up a university when you get angry.

 

Lowlights: he'd been murdering people in his apartment before the shooting, and apparently his family worked out he was a danger to others and reported it to the police, who interviewed him and found him a nice young man. Rape culture!

[Roderick]

It's very upsetting, ugh.

[Treasure Goblin]

I heard about this story, but I decided against watching the video or reading the youtube comments because I knew what i'd find would probably gross me out more than I need to be right now.  My heart goes out to the victims and their families though. 

I also found out one of my supervisors at work is an MRA, which is pretty weird and i've never encountered a MRA in person before (to my knowledge).  

[Gormongous]

I also found out one of my supervisors at work is an MRA, which is pretty weird and i've never encountered a MRA in person before (to my knowledge).  

 

I only encounter them on occasion among my students, so I'm usually lulled into thinking they're all just confused young men who'll grow out of it. An incident like this tells me that, even if they are just confused, I should probably be more worried about the kind of answers that MRA culture and literature is giving them. What an awful thing to happen, I cannot even say enough.

[Twig]

I honestly don't know how I'd deal with it if I found out someone I know identifies as a Men's Right Activist. I mean, I thought it was a joke for the longest time, but then realized it was, you know, real people actually believing that shit. That'd be really awkward for me and probably really really awkward for them because I can't keep my mouth shut when I discover something insane about a human being I'm talking to.

[Problem Machine]

You would be the F2P man finding out Jake bought keys.

 

This is a garbage situation. I can only hope some good comes from the ensuing conversation, though considering the way most large outlets want to steer it towards crazy-shaming and loneliness as convenient explanations makes me skeptical.

[Twig]

Hah! That's not too far off, probably.

Mmmh the mainstream media is pretty good at making stuff like this into something it shouldn't be. I'm not very optimistic.

[Nachimir]

The Daily Mail here has already branded him "The Hunger Games Killer", which does nothing except lead away from any pertinent issues and fuck massively with his family.

 

It's saddening me that, even though he posted a video detailing exactly why he was about to murder people, there are still people claiming it's not an MRA-related thing. Much will be made of his Aspergers, which doesn't make anyone a threat, but people with Aspergers will suffer for that

[Thrik]

I found that story pretty disturbing when I saw it last night, although I don't recall any links to MRA? Is that something in the video (can't really tolerate watching it)?

I've come across guys a bit like this before, who are really bad at interacting with girls and end up hating them as a result. Instead of accepting responsibility for themselves not being very attractive or good at talking to them and figuring out why, they see themselves as just fine and blame girls for not seeing how great they are.

These same guys, just like the killer, then spend copious amounts of time on pick-up artist programmes and such, which invariably have an emphasis on 'gaming' women and basically manipulating them into finding them attractive. It's a subtle difference, but whereas a lot of guys want to be more attractive to girls, many of these PUA types want to make girls be attracted to them.

Of course, ultimately these guys still have the same problems and no amount of chat-up tricks will help them. At that point some of them, again like the killer, seemingly end up in anti-PUA/women communities where they hate both the women who reject them and the guys who can successfully attract them.

It's all incredibly toxic, and stems from social issues possibly complemented and/or caused by disorder. I'd say that that's what's led to this rather than anything to do with gun access or men's rights activism. He stabbed half the victims, so while I do believe easy access to guns can dramatically inflate death counts during such incidents, it doesn't seem to have been a factor here.

[Gormongous]

I found that story pretty disturbing when I saw it last night, although I don't recall any links to MRA? Is that something in the video (can't really tolerate watching it)?

I've come across guys a bit like this before, who are really bad at interacting with girls and end up hating them as a result. Instead of accepting responsibility for themselves not being very attractive or good at talking to them and figuring out why, they see themselves as just fine and blame girls for not seeing how great they are.

These same guys, just like the killer, then spend copious amounts of time on pick-up artist programmes and such, which invariably have an emphasis on 'gaming' women and basically manipulating them into finding him attractive. It's a subtle difference, but whereas a lot of guys want to be more attractive to girls, many of these PUA types want to make girls be attracted to them.

Of course, ultimately these guys still have the same problems and no amount of chat-up tricks will help them. At that point some of them, again like the killer, seemingly end up in anti-PUA/women communities where they hate both the women who reject them and the guys who can successfully attract them.

It's all incredibly toxic, and stems from social issues possibly complemented and/or caused by disorder. I'd say that that's what's led to this rather than anything to do with gun access or men's rights activism. He stabbed half the victims, so while I do believe easy access to guns can dramatically inflate death counts during such incidents, it doesn't seem to have been a factor here.

 

As I understand it from the several articles, he was an active poster on PUAHate, a supposedly anti-PUA website that is actually just another PUA website full of anti-feminist hate. The video, of which I only read the transcript because life is too short and ugly already, is full of explicit PUA and MRA language about gynocracy and the need to punish people and assert himself as "alpha" thereby. It's really all distressing, not least because these websites gave him the tools to articulate his own entitlement as the failing of society, not him, and to conceptualize violence as the only solution, at the age of twenty-fucking-two. It's even more distressing to know that access to guns, MRA culture, and mental illness, along with a dozen other factors, certainly all played a role in this, but instead we have to wait and see which one the mainstream media narrative will choose as the thing that caused it all.

[Nachimir]

The video was laced with the kind of rhetoric, and terms, that come from MRA communities. At one point he describes himself as "the ultimate gentleman" and "the true alpha male" before going on to talk about how he'll take vengeance on everyone (but especially women, which he describes by their physical characteristics or with the word "sluts"). But, this will be blamed on mental illness and access to guns. Not the deeply poisonous ideology he'd been steeping himself in for years, nuh-uh. Nor cultures that let men feel entitled to women's bodies in such a way that small manifestations of that entitlement pass unchecked every day.

[James]

The YouTube comments are, obviously, appalling

God dammit, what the fuck is wrong with us? How can people be this wilfully stupid?

[Nachimir]

Apparently, PUA communities were hurriedly removing all of Elliott's posts from their boards last night.

 

the forums that Rodger seems to have participated in quickly attempted to distance themselves from him by scrubbing his contributions. PUAHate.com shut down its forums “for maintenance” and 

. BodyBuilding.com, another site where Rodger allegedlyposted, also deleted 

 from its boards.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I've come across guys a bit like this before, who are really bad at interacting with girls and end up hating them as a result. Instead of accepting responsibility for themselves not being very attractive or good at talking to them and figuring out why, they see themselves as just fine and blame girls for not seeing how great they are.

 

Not hard to see why when so many pieces of media end with winning the female lead as a prize. It's such a literal sense of entitlement, it's disheartening. :/

 

[Empty]

i've read quite a lot of his manifesto but i'm not really convinced he's an mra. don't get me wrong, it's probably the most misogynist thing i've ever read, the guy hates women so profoundly and viciously it's incredibly uncomfortable and blames them for all his problems. but while mra's and misogyny are fundamentally linked, not all misogynists are mra's. normally you can tell in under a minute if someone lives in the mra world because with their rhetoric it's all about feminism as the enemy, it's very political, instant barricades, ranging from 'not all men' to vicious attacks on people expressing feminist viewpoints. a place where men's rights are defined solely along us vs them sports team politics. yet in 140 pages he barely mentions feminism and seems fairly apolitical, all his problems with women are deeply personal in nature and related to his narcissism and personality disorders, he hates them because they don't smile at him, or show him attention or do anything to him that isn't just worshiping at the altar (the culture informs the personal of course and you can see that in the document, but that's patriarchal assumptions about masculinity and the way men should act and look at women instead of mra's specifically).

 

i don't think he's a pick up artist either. he believes he is entitled to women just by being a man (and rich) - whereas pick up artists believe that interacting with women should be like playing dark souls and that everyone that is failing is a weak person who just needs to master their awful rules. this might sound like a lot of words to split pointless hairs about different flavours of what are all awful mens groups, but i think there's value in distinguishing the different manifestations of how men hate women.

[Merus]

Yeah, technically he's an incel, not an MRA or a PUA, but honestly I don't know if there's value in splitting hairs. For instance, there are "Men Going Their Own Way" who supposedly swear off women but still manage to spend most of their time hating them. What they identify as is a facade; scratch a little away and you find someone furious that whatever hierarchy there is, they're not up high and women aren't below them.

 

So! I don't think I've told the story about my PUA roommate. I had one! His name was Justin. This was back before I understood feminism or had heard about PUAs. He was very charming except he was also pretty racist and pretty shitty towards women, and he had set a goal to sleep with 50 women in a year. I mentioned once that I was heading out to go to my friend Belinda's place, and he literally could not comprehend that I could be friends with a woman and that we could have shared interests and do cool things. It was bizarre. My other housemate and I eventually decided that his view on women was shaped by the women he spent time with - his techniques basically only worked on the kind of women that conformed to his stereotype. I suspect now that this probably isn't true, that they probably had more to offer, and he wouldn't have seen it.

[Nachimir]

Yeah, technically he's an incel, not an MRA or a PUA

 

You and Empty are right in making the distinction, but they all blend into one for me: misogynist assholes. I was in a very similar position to Elliot when I was twenty-two, but I recognised the common factor in many situations I didn't like was me, and decided to start work on that insead of getting angry. I'd flirted with PUA stuff but it never really made sense or harmonised with my character, and went on to learn that "talking to girls" is just "talking to people", but it doesn't work for anyone involved if you still have a bunch of assumptions and entitlements packed into your head.

His connection to MRA/PUA/Incel stuff is being ignored or denied by a lot of people right now. There are MRAs claiming that if he'd just worked harder at Game or bought their product, that might have saved lives. There are a bunch of factors that contributed to this, including easy access to guns, but his connection to deeply misogynist bits of culture, borne out by the video in which he explicitly states his motive, is a really important one.

[Merus]

There are MRAs claiming that if he'd just worked harder at Game or bought their product, that might have saved lives. There are a bunch of factors that contributed to this, including easy access to guns, but his connection to deeply misogynist bits of culture, borne out by the video in which he explicitly states his motive, is a really important one.

 

Another excuse to link to We Hunted The Mammoth, who talked about this very thing? It's like Easter! In that it's borne out of a really shitty event and that the story'll trail off after about four days without any closure

 

My heart goes out to the families involved; the victims, who didn't deserve this, and the killer's, who saw it coming and tried to stop it.

[Bjorn]

I just listened to one of his early youtube videos.  This almost seems like fiction, like if you were making a movie about a lonely, sad misogynist MRA going on a shooting spree, this is the kind of filler content you would film to have in between other scenes.  Fucking creepy.  And sinister, though hard to say if it would have felt like that watching it before all this happened.

 

I rather hope that the MRA and PUA sites that have deleted his posts/accounts are charged with interfering with a criminal investigation and destroying evidence, assuming they are owned by US citizens.  Anything YouTube pulled down they kept, but I'm willing to bet some of the geniuses on the PUA/MRA sites just deleted whatever they could find. 

 

I was going to write something else, but this thing is so tragic and has sooooo many different moving parts around it that I don't even know where to start to do anything justice.

[Twig]

Last night I was thinking that it's good nothing's come up about this that connects it to video games because maybe that would slow people to focus on the real problem. Reading the posts in here since then has just made new really sad.

[syntheticgerbil]

His Youtube account shows he was in to Pokemon for a while, so the media can't have much fun with that.

 

Yeah I don't know, I've already wasted like 3-4 hours reading parts of his internet paper trail and I feel really gross right now. The guy has such a strange sense of entitlement and his constant use of "magnificent gentleman" should be something one would say in a joking manner. I have an even harder time filling the gaps of what this dude was even like around his family or friends because it seems like all he did was spend all of his waking hours of the day obsessing over not getting a girl. Did he just spout his nonsense and everyone just constantly changed the topic or did no one even want to talk to him in the first place?

 

The answers on why he was lonely or why he couldn't get girls is completely obvious to me and hopefully most everyone else is that he was creepy, narcissistic, placed self worth on all the wrong things (his BMW and clothes), and had a strange racist streak. His forum posts are all at places where people mostly welcomed this talk or at least were too busy whining about themselves to address the amount of crazy he chimed in.

[Jason Bakker]

You and Empty are right in making the distinction, but they all blend into one for me: misogynist assholes. I was in a very similar position to Elliot when I was twenty-two, but I recognised the common factor in many situations I didn't like was me, and decided to start work on that insead of getting angry. I'd flirted with PUA stuff but it never really made sense or harmonised with my character, and went on to learn that "talking to girls" is just "talking to people", but it doesn't work for anyone involved if you still have a bunch of assumptions and entitlements packed into your head.

 

I think this is perhaps one of the most important points to be borne out of this incident - that many, many males go through a period in their lives where they are horrifyingly close to the position that Elliot was in. For me it was all through my teen years, and it was focused around an "othering" of girls and women, to the point where I literally could barely speak to a woman or girl outside my family. And significantly for me, the only thing that brought me out of that situation was luck - meeting a girl my age who managed to push through that bullshit and actually make a connection with me.

 

It points to systemic problems in the way boys are raised and how they are taught (both explicitly and through action) to see women; and then after that, there being no systems in place to handle that situation or even diagnose it as a problem. Society views it as acceptable, and it just perpetuates indefinitely unless luck or some sort of self-awareness kicks in. The fact that Elliot's situation was both incredibly sad (for his views of women and race, not his lack of "success") and shouldn't be a part of so many men's lives is a perfect example of how feminism positively affects men as well as women, by trying to create awareness, and break down these barriers and negative cycles and behaviors.

[syntheticgerbil]

Well to chime in on that, I do truly believe that most if not all teen boys go through that phase of misogyny, where they see all of the opposite sex as devious, deceitful, superficial, hurtful, or unfaithful, they don't really turn it in to what their life is about like this fringe group where it in turn defines their adulthood. I'll admit I went through that phase for more than enough years myself and did not want to even talk to a girl unless she met my high standards of what someone's personality should be, but none of that was actually broken through getting a girlfriend and was really something I got through by just learning about people and being decent and less selfish (not to mention far away from perfect).

I feel like until a male works through that phase themselves, they should not unload that baggage on a female after starting a relationship. It's also unfair to think there needs to be some woman out there that must absorb this hate in order to cure a male of this type from their misogynist line of thought. People like this Elliott guy *should* remain separate from all women until this mindset dissipates even if it is a few levels under murder mode. They are creating an unfair situation all on their own.

The thing with Elliott Rodgers is he seemed to not have once picked up a fucking hobby or interest and instead made his life about achieving alpha male status. As if having sex is a live or die situation. He measured his self worth in terms of his "superior" European descent, the type of car he drove, where he traveled, and what his clothes cost. It seems there was no point in which he wasn't a wretched human being. His Google Plus profile is a disturbing read without even knowing him as a mass murderer.

I don't know, I refuse to offer any understanding to the MRA and PUA types, because they refuse to see there is more to life. I have been around nerds and ingrates all my life who are not relationship material, but for whatever reason, I don't think I've ever been friends with (or really known) anyone with this toxic misogynist attitude that permeates every waking hour of their life. Most people seem to find something to do, play video games, learn about something, read books, do something creative,or like get in to obsessing about the gym. Hell, they could all turn to drugs and it might still even be more productive than be someone who is a bottled up entity of seething hate.