>A New Low in Victim-Blaming, Part 2: In Mala Fide on Lara Logan
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| From In Mala Fide |
The reaction of the “manosphere” to Lara Logan’s reported sexual assault in Cairo has been highly revealing, to put it mildly. And what it reveals about the assorted Men’s Rightsers, Men Going Their Own Way, pickup artists, and others who make up the manosphere is pretty ugly.
Take, for example, Ferdinand Bardamu’s posts on the subject. On Tuesday, Bardamu, whose antifeminist blog In Mala Fide is widely linked to in the manosphere, spat forth a snide, sarcastic rant that attacked Logan for having the temerity to even set foot in Egypt. He started out dismissive:
Apparently, a CBS lady reporter got raped while covering the revolution in Egypt. For some reason, we’re expected to feel sorry for her.
Then turned up the sarcasm:
Oh, what a symbol of courage Miss Logan is! What a beacon of determination and grit and…no, seriously. I can’t go on.
Fuck Lara Logan. Fuck her and the shit-for-brains idiot who thought it was a good idea to send a WOMAN to report from a war zone. …
Of course, Bardamu ignores the simple fact that is is dangerous to send ANY reporter, male or female, into the midst of a revolution — indeed, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented more than 140 attacks on journalists in the Egyptian unrest so far; one journalist was shot and killed. Despite this fact, it is an undeniably good thing that some reporters (male and female both) are willing to risk their lives to cover wars and revolutions and other dramatic, dangerous, and important events. No one has suggested that the attacks on male journalists mean that men should not be covering these events. No one is mocking the male journalists who were attacked. (Well, almost no one. Bardamu refers in passing to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, also famously attacked while covering the events of Egypt, as a “twinkle-toed pansy [who] couldn’t handle the heat on the streets of Cairo.”)
For Bardamu, though, Logan’s story is one of a woman foolishly trying to make her way in a man’s world:
You send a chick into a situation like the one in Egypt, you might as well hang a sign around her neck that says “FREE FUCKTOY”. I don’t care how many disaster areas she’s reported from, how many awards she’s won, it was going to happen eventually. …
Sucks that Lara got raped, but she had it coming. [Emphasis in original]
To Bardamu, this case is evidence not only that women journalists should not be sent to cover the Egyptian revolution but that they should not be allowed to leave their home country at all:
[O]f COURSE Lara shouldn’t be sent on another foreign assignment again! She, nor any other women should be allowed to be a foreign correspondent for their own safety.
And then, after arguing that Logan “had it coming,”and that any western woman who has the temerity to leave her hotel room and step out into the streets of Cairo should expect herself to get raped sooner or later, Bardamu then suggests that Logan may be making it all up:
There’s a non-zero chance that she didn’t get raped at all, and that she made the whole thing up to garner attention and sympathy from the weepy, chivalrous masses. …
I have no evidence that she’s not telling the truth, only a tiny feeling in the pit of my stomach that’s been growing year by year, with every venal vixen who falsely accuses a man of rape because she wants fame, or she feels like a slut after sleeping with the guy, or she’s mad that he slept with her best friend the day after, or whatever else.
Naturally, in the comments, many of Bardamu’s fans agreed that women women who trespass into male spaces deserve whatever happens to them. According to “John”:
Women do not belong in men’s locker rooms, Mike Tysons apartment at 2:00 a.m., drunk in a bar bathroom with the Steelers quarterback, and they sure as hell don’t belong “reporting” in the middle of a revolution. Women should not go to Frat Parties dressed like sluts and get drunk with the expectation that “nothing will happen.” …
This woman, Laura Logan, is not just an idiot – she is an adulterous whore. She shares this unfortunate circumstance with tens of millions of others of her sex, and deserves no pity whatsoever.
For some, the case was not just another excuse for “slut shaming” but evidence that the very notion of equality between the sexes is wrong. As Brett Stevens put it:
American women are rape targets worldwide. They are known to be clueless, friendly, and most of all, sexually easy. If a woman chucks her sexual favors out the door at the drop out of a hat, why not just go the extra mile and apply pressure? … We take these girls from comfy suburbs and send them into war zones and riots and wonder why they get gang raped. Amazing cluelessness, arising from our insane idea of “equality.”
There were other comments even worse than these — e.g., this one — but I don’t have the heart to post them here.
But Bardamu’s retrograde notions were also challenged in the comments — mostly from those who saw his noxious post linked to on feminist sites and on Twitter, but also in a few cases from actual fans of his blog.
This reaction inspired Bardamu to post a second piece on the Logan story, one even more narcissistic and self-righteous than the first. After taking on some of his critics (most notably Molly of Progressive Blogic, whom he labeled a “premenstrual whiner”), and casually referring to Logan as “an unwilling cum dumpster,” Bardamu tried to pretend that it was him, and not the feminists, who had the best interests of women at heart.
Lara Logan had no business being in Cairo, or anywhere in that part of the world for that matter. All of you leftie feminist tossers screeching about “rape culture” have her blood on your hands. How many more have to suffer before your lies are discredited?
Sorry, but a guy who refers to any women, much less a woman who has been raped, as a “cum dumpster” pretty much forfeits any right to be taken seriously on the subject of what is best for women.
About a week ago, Bardamu reported that he’d taken a Psychopathy Test on OkCupid, and had scored an impressive 31 points, which put him in the ranks of the “True Psychopaths.” His posts on Logan — full of narcissistic rage and utterly lacking in basic human empathy — seem to bear out this diagnoses all too well.
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Posted on February 19, 2011, in hypocrisy, MRA, reactionary bullshit, violence against men/women, western women suck. Bookmark the permalink. 82 Comments.
>@DarkSideCat, TriplanetaryJust because you hated existentialism and didn't understand it does not invalidate it. Indeed, it instead proves that you are not in a position to pass judgement about it.Still, let's run with your implied charge of obscurantism. Putting it simply, no fluff. Security is the finished product - a safe home, kids, etc. Security is the mother's priority, and for simplification, let's assume that it is also the father's. In the traditional (pre-feminist) model, the father does not have the luxury of enjoying this security at face value, unlike the mother. The father needs to "earn" it, and he does this through supporting his family, through his involvement in the outside sphere, namely, employment. The mother also needs to earn her security, and in the traditional model, she does this through housework. There is nothing to be compensated for, because security and happy, healthy kids are the prize. If she does not accept her responsibilities with respect to housework, then she is, for all intents and purposes, a retiree. If a mother does not regard security and healthy, happy kids as her priority, then she does not know what love is, and we should not want society to raise her delinquents, taking up valuable jail space. A mother that expects "compensation" for loving her children is by definition incapable of love and should never be a mother.Sure, many women seek opportunities beyond security. But the laws of supply and demand put a price on external opportunities that have resulted in the pre-feminist traditional roles always being more attractive for women. Not because of patriarchal oppression but because security places fewer demands, and because only women were permitted to be stay-at-homes. Only women had this escape-hatch. Men never enjoyed the permission to be stay-at-homes. Men never had an escape-hatch.The only reason that anyone works is because entities outside of the family are prepared to pay for services rendered outside of the family. No-one is going to pay anyone for raising their own children in the family's own interests, and nor should they, no matter how difficult that might be for some of us to accept.Defining "purpose" is an existential question (no tp, I'm not trying to be "Deep"). If you think that your purpose is defined by how you are compensated financially, then you do indeed fail to understand what "purpose" is all about, and it is no surprise that you hated existentialism.Or is all this still too obscure for you? Perhaps you should have taken your classes in existentialism a little more seriously.lol
>Only women had this escape-hatch. Men never enjoyed the permission to be stay-at-homes. Men never had an escape-hatch.And now they do, thanks to … feminism.
>Man this is rich. Let me see if I can put this in a way that won't go completely over your head, Chuckee: I was not accusing you of being obscure. You were the one claiming you were calling on some obscure ideas. I was mocking you because you didn't say anything that's beyond the average high schooler. Existentialism is every wannabe-philosopher's favorite philosophy. You're seriously overreaching yourself here.The rest of your pseudointellectual bullshit can be dismissed without being so wordy, since it's all the same trite historical revisionism (not to mention middle/upper-class tunnel vision) that MRAs regularly engage in, just dressed up (very shabbily) in teleological language and the word "existentialist" thrown in every couple of paragraphs in an attempt to make you sound like you know what the fuck you're talking about.
>Chucky, dude, sorry but nothing you said was deep. The weird thing about this entire line of conversation is that it has such a limited relationship to any aspect of life as I know it. At last count, I know one stay at home mom (who lost her full time job last month and is currently looking for another) and two stay at home dads, who've been unemployed (on and off) for the past decade while their MIT educated wives work in the tech industry. As for "deep"-I dunno. You mean that you suspect the idea that different people have different needs and priorities is gonna BLOW OUR MINDS?I don't really even know what to say to that, really. It's sad.
>Bee and triplanetary, you are projecting your anti-intellectualism (apologies for the big words, I haven't time to explain). Either you know what you are talking about and can debate with me on theoretical terms, or you cannot. I can respect it if you don't wish to go down that route. But given that you dismiss this manner of discussion as "pseudointellectual bullshit", it is clear that you haven't a clue what you are talking about. It is a given that anti-intellectual phillistines will be fundamentally incapable of debating on terms more sophisticated than grunting out unsubstantiated opinions. Ipso facto, you will be doing yourselves a favor to stick within the confines of the thread in the terms that you do purport to understand. It doesn't pay you to diss well-established theory that universities regard important enough to include in their curricula. And it will still be easy to make mince-meet of you, but at least you won't look so ridiculous. I promise I won't use big words any more, just to make it a bit easier for you.
>Somewhere there's a barroom full of people who are sick of listening to this asshole.I would like to see how someone who can't even spell "mincemeat" is planning to trump us intellectually, but whatevs.
>And the comedy ratchets up another notch! Incidentally, I'm not arguing that universities shouldn't teach existentialism. No era of philosophical history should be ignored, because they all contribute to the overall conversation. Plato, for example, was wrong about very nearly everything he said, but he had an enormous impact of Western civilization that it would be silly not to teach his philosophy. Existentialism is also historically influential. I never said it shouldn't be taught. In fact, I never said I had anything against it. All I said was that citing it doesn't make you look as smart as you think it does.But I'll make you a deal. If you use any "big words" that I don't understand, I'll let you know instead of just furtively looking it up. It hasn't happened yet, but if it does I'll be sure to inform you.
>hahaha!kan't taike mee on on mi arguments, so rezorting too attakcing me on on a typping erorr… now how lame iz that?And I don't care a flying toss how smart anyone thinks I look. You are projecting yet again. Just because you angst about how you look to others does not mean that everyone else does. If you spent more time thinking about the task at hand and not how you looked to others, you might progress further in constructing your arguments.
>This is seriously fucking amazing. SERIOUSLY. It's a classic textbook case of projection, of all things.Chucky, having entered into an argument he fears he will lose, attempts to distract his opponents by (1) telling them that they are "projecting" (having just learned that word from his therapist, I assume) and (2) telling them that he's very smart, and what he's talking about is too deep for their comprehension. When that backfires, he tells his opponents to stop derailing the actual conversation, that he doesn't care what they think of his intellectual capacity, and (again) that they are projecting. I call BS. You're too perfectly imitating the hilarity of shallow depth for any of this to be real. A-plus, my good sir. You are awesome.For what it's worth, I never (or, almost never) resort to making fun of typos when I want to tear someone apart in an internet debate. In most cases, it's pointless and amateurish. But in your case-where the mistake clearly wasn't a typo and where the entire intent of the post was for the poster to prove how damn smart he is and how stupid he thinks everyone else is-I thought it was appropriate. Come on; you only added the dash after typing in "mincemeet" and seeing the red line underneath.
>What does it take for dumb meat to know when it's been minced well and truly?
>"What does it take for dumb meat to know when it's been minced well and truly?
"You need to ask *yourself* that question.
>All I can say is: Wow. To this thread's comments, too.