Roosh V, trolling for page views with deliberately offensive posts, finds some supporters in the Men’s Rights subreddit
The glamorous life of an internet king
So our old friend Roosh Valizadeh seems to have fully embraced the Matt Forney school of misogynist internet celebrity, posting over-the-top offensive posts in a transparent attempt to gin up controversy and blog traffic. And it’s working: he’s brought an avalanche of well-deserved hate down upon himself. But don’t worry: he’s still got some supporters — not only on his own blog but in the Men’s Rights subreddit.
The post that’s been keeping the servers hosting Roosh’s Return of Kings blog busy lately is a guest post by Tuthmosis with the title “5 Reasons To Date A Girl With An Eating Disorder.”
It’s pretty much as awful as you’d imagine. Reason 1: “Her obsession over her body will improve her overall looks.” Number 2: “She costs less money” because she’ll only order salads at dinner. Hilarious. It’s all so predictably “provocative” it’s not worth quoting in any more detail.
Roosh has responded to the controversy with an, er, “Publisher Response” that was clearly designed to further stir the shit. In it, he claimed that the original post
contains value for men who want to date thin women in America, a country that is currently facing a devastating obesity epidemic, which we recently highlighted with Fat Shaming Week.
He followed this by claiming that Return of Kings wasn’t promoting eating disorders, merely trying to help women struggling with eating disorders find happiness in love:
We are educating our masculine readers not to pass on eating disorder victims just because they have an illness, yet instead of receiving thanks, we’re receiving hate instead. If we all had cancer, and someone wrote an article titled “5 Reasons To Fornicate With A Man Who Has Cancer,” we would spread it far and wide to make fornicating with us a better proposition for women. We would not send death threats or calls for censorship like is happening to us now. I think a bit more graciousness is in order for our unorthodox method of outreach.
As a much less obnoxious internet celebrity once put it:
Despite setting out to offend as many people as possible, Roosh reacted with indignation when he discovered that someone on the Men’s Rights subreddit had dared to suggest that perhaps he had stepped over the line a bit.
If you don't despise sniveling MRAs then you will now: they want to throw ROK under the bus to protect their image ow.ly/r1OWG—
Roosh (@rooshv) November 20, 2013
What’s doubly ironic about this tweet is that he actually has a lot of defenders in that thread — and that the thread itself has gotten twice as many downvotes as upvotes. Only a few found the Return of Kings post offensive; the others dismissed it as clickbait — or agreed with it.
One commenter, posting under the name of a famous turn-of-the-twentieth centuryantifeminist and opponent of women’s suffrage, apparently sees Roosh as some sort of heroic defender of anorexic women:
Meanwhile, the ironically named LogicalDebater beamed us this message from his home planet:
And our old friend Demonspawn, quoting from a commenter on Return of Kings, blamed the outrage on fat, ugly feminists jealous because men would rather date thin women.
![Demonspawn [-1] 1 point 21 hours ago (8|7) This comment on the followup article nailed it to the wall: The anger was only thinly veiled by the eating disorder arguments. Ultimately the original article was about accepting women albeit with the benefit that she's thin and won't cost as much, but I think that is the rub. The feminist hate speech directed in the comments and emails to this site was latent anger at a man's desire to date thin women. Since feminism encourages the destruction of female beauty and femininity most feminists have a hatred toward anything that encourages or accepts women for these traits. The hate directed at this site under the guise of "eating disorders" is just that, the article hit a rough nerve with feminists who hate beauty and acceptance when it is defined by men.](../../../../2013/11/demon_w-604.png)
Men’s Rights Activists often complain about being lumped together with pickup artists; here, many of them have chosen to associate themselves with Roosh at his worst.
The greatest human rights movement of the 21st century, folks!
EDIT: Belated thanks to Snork Maiden for pointing me to Roosh’s tweet and the Reddit thread!
Posted on November 21, 2013, in antifeminism, are these guys 12 years old?, attention seeking, demonspawn, doubling down, empathy deficit, evil fat fatties, mansplaining, men who should not ever be with women ever, misogyny, MRA, oppressed men, playing the victim, PUA, reddit, rhymes with roosh and tagged anti-feminism, antifeminism, eating disorders, men's rights, misogyny, MRA, PUA, reddit. Bookmark the permalink. 383 Comments.
I want to be charitable and say that they’re adding prison rape (highly underreported) for the men’s side, but not to the woman’s side.
And by “Esmay says he got proven wrong,” I mean the guy Elam’s debating, not Esmay himself.
RE: Moma Sita
those who are deemed fat suffer and receive more discrimination than any other group, ie race, creed, or gender
Really? However did they manage to separate and tally all that up, I wonder? Citation please. Fatphobia is a thing, but I HIGHLY doubt it’s the thing to end all things, especially considering the intersectional nature of it.
Many men want a woman with an appetite and someone who isn’t broken.
Fuck you. People with eating disorders aren’t broken.
Where did my post show anything “ableist?”
Why don’t you scroll up and read that part you said about how people with EDs are broken? THAT’s why you’re ableist, houseplant. I have an eating disorder. I have a mental illness. I am not fucking broken. Implying that I AM broken because I have a mental illness is ableist.
How is this difficult for you?
RE: Mike
Girls with eating disorders are cheap dates because they don’t want to eat, and because of their low self esteem will work harder to please you.
Stupid child. What makes you think men don’t get eating disorders? Go fuck a cactus.
“what do I need to do to get in and out with the least amount of money, time and energy spent.”
Wow. You must be SUCH a good lover, with an attitude like that. Folks must be lining up round the block for a piece of you!
Yea, I have no idea Alice, but I feel like it may be a bit of both. Again, it’s not a huge deal to me, I currently don’t believe it and I don’t think men getting hurt like that is less important, so I’m not going to be upset or anything if they’re right. I just honestly don’t believe them since they are shit at statistics and lie so often.
I feel like they only bring it up to get women to shut the fuck up about their own problems with rape though, so it bugs me in that way.
@ LBT
When your weight passes a certain pre-determined point you stop being black, or gay, or belonging to a religious minority.
But he can’t, cacti don’t get eating disorders! How can he fuck someone or something if he doesn’t think they/it are vulnerable?
“I’ve been trolling so I know it when I see it.”
And I, for one, appreciate your conversion to friendly commenter. Btw, did you want us to use ze/zir to refer to you, or were just expressing a disliking of the singular they?
“Also, AVFM cannot do site design, at all. On my screen, the logo’s half hidden.”
Thank you for reminding me that I need to convert from px to em.
“Those negatives are not really our problem. Women with eating disorders are easy targets for sex just like other types of crazy women. You may not like it, but it’s clearly true.”
I, for one, hate sleeping with men (in general) because my body is always disgusting and gross. I don’t want anyone to see me naked. I’m also usually too tired and cold to want to have sex on top of feeling hideous.
And for the record, when I go out on dates - especially first dates, I don’t want people to know about my ed so I usually order pretty hardy and just push food around.
All of dudebros comments can basically be summarized as “I am a shameless predator”. Thanks for sharing, I guess?
The idea of women as individual human beings, rather than vagina life support systems, seems to have passed him by.
“he’s trolling for page views so let me go ahead and give him some page views talking about it…damn it…he’s good…”
“The victory that Tuthmosis and Roosh are celebrating at Return of Kings is unquestionably the greatest victory against feminism I have ever witnessed.”
That’s a quote from The Spearhead — they must really set a low bar for ‘victory’. No wonder they’ll never accomplish anything — even if they could figure out exactly what they are trying to accomplish.
KitKat - To be fair, if they ever figured out what they were trying to accomplish, we’d be screwed by now.
Um, a STARVING woman doesn’t have the energy to please you, and in any case, she will look and smell unsexy as hell. If she’s bulimic, she’ll also have rotten teeth from all the stomach acids coming up and washing over them. Don’t bother telling her she’s prettier when she smiles, she won’t fucking believe you. Even if she has the energy, which she won’t.
Oh, bullshit. You won’t get sex out of a mentally ill woman, because she’s preoccupied with her own problems and can’t even SEE you. When I was in my last major depression, 20 years ago, I had zero desire, and zero desire to please my boyfriend. I was most definitely NOT an “easy target” for any of your PUA shit. I was dead from the waist down, lost in my own fog, and didn’t want to do ANYTHING.
You may not want to hear it, but THAT’s the truth.
Victory? What victory? He wrote an obnoxious blog post and didn’t, I don’t know, get arrested?
katz - What’s the worst thing that happened? Some people called Roosh out on it, Roosh doesn’t give a fuck, his followers circlejerk and proclaim Roosh’s awesome, and that’s it?
Circle jerking is pretty much all the MRM does. That’s how they seem to define success.
I’ve been trying to figure out why I can’t figure out how it could benefit men, and then realized I am operating on the idea that targeting, using, and/or preying upon someone diminishes the person doing it.
Does anybody think its odd that the author of that article assumes women with eating disorders have “daddy issues”?
Sounds like this isn’t really about targetting someone because she’s “crazy” (uninhibited?) or cheap or anything else - if they’re really suggesting pushing themselves onto women with mental illnesses of whatever sort, they’re looking for victims they think will be less able to enforce boundaries. In other words, easier rape and general abuse targets.
On a minor note, I doubt any of these men has the least idea of what “good in bed” means.
That’s what I get for going off to rewatch series 7 of Doctor Who, some troll picks up my anti-troll post and thinks we have the same definition of troll. Sorry, we don’t. My definition is someone who shows up just to stir up trouble, rather than honest debate, regardless of whether the troll actually believes what they are spewing or not. Moma Sita fits that to a fucking T.
Damn it, I need to find time for Doctor Who. >:(
Amen!
Ha - I was “amen”ing Noadi’s comment, but it fits yours too, Alice.
” Btw, did you want us to use ze/zir to refer to you, or were just expressing a disliking of the singular they?”
The latter, that gets me confused. I’m equally fine with he or zie.
@Noadi Not sure who you’re responding to but that’s a pretty standard definition for as long as I’ve been aware of the word. For example urban dictionary has that definition from way back in 2002: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=troll
Um, that’s a bit too general. You can be mentally ill and still not completely locked up in your own little world. I’ve had stretches of time where I was pretty unbalanced (like, occasionally traveled all around the city in an attempt to shake off imaginary stalkers, did magical rituals at night to stave off demons from my apartment and stuff like that), was on quite a lot of meds, and still went out to party and had casual sex time to time. Everyone’s different.
What Roosh and his followers are after seems to be girls who aren’t that ill, like they still function, still go to their job/school and stuff like that, but they feel really bad about themselves and are therefore easy to abuse. Sadly, I don’t think that category of girls is non-existent.
^^ I agree with the above. During the darkest years of my youth I jumped into a lot of the wrong beds, having such lousy self esteem I used getting laid as a means of (short lived) validation, ROK and its ilk would have dismissed me as a slut while taking full advantage.
That’s what I hate about that article. While I can clearly see it’s intended to be tongue in cheek, and I don’t believe it’ll actually encourage any girls into developing eating disorders, it may encourage some of its male readership to go out looking for vulnerable women who they can exploit, possibly inflicting more damage, and without a shred of the compassion Roosh’s rebuttal disingenuously, and hypocritically claims to be full of.
Dvarg has it right. What Roosh is advocating is that predators look for vulnerabilities that they can exploit, one of which is low self-esteem. It’s an ethically appalling position to take, and clearly flags someone as a predator, but we already knew that about him.
Hmmm.
Well, one small comforting thing about mental illness: Even an absolutely repugnant asswipe like Roosh doesn’t have the power to induce it. The most he can do is try to use it as an “in”. But since he’s physically repulsive, I doubt he’d have much luck there. And even a total validation seeker wouldn’t want it from HIM. Frankly, I think everything he writes is one big unconvincing pose.
Cutting boards: a million years ago (give or take) I read an article that said that wooden boards are actually better at preventing salmonella contamination than plastic, provided that you clean them properly. Something about the wood sucking all the liquid out of the salmonella cells, killing them, which the plastic boards don’t do.
Bina — depends what mental illness you mean — this is a man who’s confessed to “what would be rape in other countries”…so he’s a rapist, which puts inducing PTSD on the table. And emotional abuse can certainly harm someone already vulnerable to, f’ex, depression or an ED.
The ones that are more genetic than environment, no, he can’t, but the one’s that can be environmentally triggered? Yeah, he’s dangerous. And not just because his chicken prep is laughable.
“People are mad, but the article is clearly true. Girls with eating disorders are cheap dates because they don’t want to eat, and because of their low self esteem will work harder to please you. ”
The article is only true if you’re looking for someone vulnerable to abuse and manipulate. Why would I want to let my girlfriend starve to death and debase herself? That’s just sad.