Blog Archives
Don’t Be That Rape Apologist: Arthur Koestler, Judgy Bitch, and why MRAs hate rape awareness campaigns
Arthur Koestler: Brilliant writer, serial rapist?
Today I’m going to talk about Janet Bloomfield — AKA JudgyBitch — and her bizarre attack on the original Don’t Be That Guy anti-rape posters in Edmonton. But I’m going to take a bit of a detour first, so bear with me.
I recently picked up a copy of Arthur Koestler’s The Case of the Midwife Toad, a nonfiction account of a scientific feud that provided me with some diverting travel reading and put me in the mood to read more of Koestler’s nonfiction.
But doing some rudimentary Googling I made a rather horrifying discovery about Koestler, whom I’d admired since reading his bracing account of breaking with Communism in the classic The God That Failed anthology: according to a recent biographer, Koestler was a serial rapist and abuser of women.
Matt Forney, still trying hard to offend, publishes post suggesting that whenever women drink they cheat on their boyfriends [CORRECTED]
Women preparing to cheat.
Matt Forrney, the asshole behind the now-defunct In Mala Fide blog, is apparently as desperate for attention as ever. So today I’m going to indulge him by posting this deliberately obnoxious comment of his about women and drinking. [CORRECTION: The post was actually written by someone calling himself "The Captain Power," who is evidently a whole other different person than Matt Forney, who merely published this post on his blog called Matt Forney.]
If your girlfriend goes out and drinks alcohol, you are most likely getting cheated on.
Women by nature are predetermined in their D.N.A to get pregnant and reproduce, and until they reach menopause they need a constant supply of penis to provide fertility. Your girlfriend might prefer your penis, but once the alcohol kicks in and she is inebriated, your penis is useless. Out of site, out of mind (but full of semen).
In my entire life I have never met a women who was out drinking and didn’t cheat on her boyfriend. …
The few drinking exceptions for women include weddings, work parties, birthday parties with male friends, and suicide attempts.
The reference to suicide attempts at the end is a nice touch.
Vox Day on Charles Saatchi: Divorcing your wife after she’s already left you is a totally ALPHA move
I guess I’ll never quite understand this whole alpha thing.
Over on his Alpha Game blog, the reliably awful Vox Day is defending the ALPHA DOG honor of British art collector Charles Saatchi – you know, the guy recently in the news for choking his wife, TV chef Nigella Lawson, in a very public argument – sorry, a “playful tiff”– at a restaurant. Read the rest of this entry
Why manly men and ladylike ladies must love dogs, hate cats
The rare super-alpha cat -lover/tamer, the exception to the rule
When I bring up the subject of cats on this blog, as I so often do, it’s party because, well, I’m a bit of a fan. But it’s also because I know it confuses and irritates the misogynists who read this blog, inveterate cat-haters all (or almost all). I’ve never quite understood the depth of the animosity the guys in the manosphere seem to have towards cats.
But now one of these cat haters has provided us with a theoretical explanation for his catphobia. In a post with the suggestive title “Limp-Wristed Cat Lovers, Beautiful Dog Lovers,” the guy behind the PUA blog LaidInNYC explains why real men — and real women — hate cats and love dogs instead.
Are Women Worthless Strumpets Because They Don’t Wear Men’s Suits to Work?
Why do the ladies get to stand in front? Misandry!
When you look at the above picture — a group portrait of the Congressional freshman class of 2013 — what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Maybe something along the lines of “there sure are a lot of white dudes in that picture!”
Not if you’re “Emmanuel Goldstein” over at Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog. No, he looked at that same picture and thought: American women sure are a bunch of worthless attention whores!
Why? Because some of the women in the picture have the temerity to wear … bright colors!
Up from misogyny?
A couple of interesting reads:
Check out Escaping the Friendzone: The story of a former right-wing MRA on Jezebel Groupthink, a confessional mini-memoir by a dude who traces his “transition from misogynist, homophobic, right-wing MRA to raging intersectional feminist atheist leftist.”
Meanwhile, that guy who just got that rapey pickup manual funded by Kickstarter, Ken Hoinsky? Well, he’s apparently been quite upset by the criticism and is now pledging to make the manual entirely non-rapey. No, really. He met with the guy who started the petition about his book, and released an apology of sorts saying, among other things:
The concept that someone could interpret what I was writing to be a rape guide shocked me at first. But I took a long look in the mirror and absorbed all the great feedback coming in from across the Internet…
Here is what I realized: In the most offensive and controversial parts, I chose my words poorly. Very, very poorly. I meant one thing and people were reading another. THIS IS A MAJOR PROBLEM. I needed to seriously evaluate every last word of my writing to make sure I wasn’t encouraging sexual assault in any way, shape, or form.
Ben Kassoy of DoSomething.Org … graciously offered to meet with me to provide alternate opinions and insights to help remove all of the potentially harmful advice. I am proud to say that his was the first of many meetings I will be having with anti-rape and anti-abuse organizations and experts to make sure that the advice I am offering is free of any tinge of sexual assault or rape vibes. I will be rewriting Above The Game under their guidance and insight.
Right here, on abovethegame.info, I will be starting an international dialogue on how we remove the negative stigma and shame that drives men to seek out seduction advice in the first place. My name may have been martyred in the press, but I will be using this opportunity for good.
The answer isn’t censoring all dialogue surrounding the issue ala Kickstarter’s statement on banning all men’s dating guide projects. Women’s rights and “male seduction guides” can and should coexist …
P.S. To my loyal followers from reddit, you should already be aware my writings are not intended to encourage rape. So rest assured the final book will be in the same style you are used to. I’m just taking us to the next level.
Frankly, it doesn’t sound like he’s really learned much of anything from the experience yet, but if he actually follows through with his promised meetings with anti-rape activists he might. We’ll just have to see how that goes.
Heartiste: Men need to be able to hit their mates in order to “retain” them
A better way to retain your mate: Be a sharp-dressed man.
You may know Heartiste as a reactionary, misogynistic, proudly racist dispenser of manipulative, sometimes abusive dating advice to would-be “alpha males.”
Did you also know that he was an open advocate of domestic violence against women?
Well, I didn’t, until a friend pointed out a strange little exchange on his Twitter account the other day.
Last Tuesday morning, apropos of nothing in particular, Heartiste made the following pronouncement:
Depriving men of the means to make credible mate retention threats will assure that women need more retaining. #evolutionaryarmsrace—
(@heartiste) June 18, 2013
When someone asked what sort of threats he meant, he elaborated:
@ChrisCaroll1 Violence. Abandonment. Shame. Ostracism. etc. RT: What are "credible mate retention threats"? That's a new one on me.—
(@heartiste) June 18, 2013
The latter three items on the list (“Abandonment. Shame. Ostracism”) are standard techniques in Heartiste’s dating strategy, but the open advocacy of violence is, I think, new.
In addition to being repugnant, Heartiste’s argument here doesn’t even particularly make sense. Essentially, he seems to be saying that men need to be able to hit women to keep them in line so that they won’t have to … hit women to keep them in line.
Also, the phrase “mate retention strategy,” apparently popular with Evo Psych types, gives me the creeps. I’m pretty sure the best “mate retention strategy” is to be the sort of person your “mate” wants to be in a relationship with.
I did a quick search for the phrase, and found numerous references to two academic studies. One suggested that some women fake orgasms as a “mate retention strategy.” Another possibly more revealing one claimed that men of “low mate value” often insult their mates to lower their self-esteem so they won’t feel confident enough to leave. That seems more or less in line with what Heartiste’s general approach. And certainly, by any reasonable definition of the term, Heartiste and his followers are some pretty “low value” people, both as “mates” and as decent human beings generally.
I also found this reference to research by Evo Psych big daddy David Buss suggesting that violence — surprise! — isn’t actually a particularly effective “mate retention strategy.”
Also, beating up your mate is, you know, just generally a pretty shitty thing to do.
If Heartiste takes his tweets down, I’ve got screenshots.
EDITED TO ADD: Heartiste has really been going wild with the Twitter lately.
Here he claims to have invented the term “hivemind.”
Interesting that this pants-wetting manboob stole the Chateau Heartiste coinage "hivemind." A reader is outed! guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/…—
(@heartiste) June 24, 2013
After I pointed out that this belief was delusional, he suggested that I kill myself. Very alpha!
He’s also been on a bit of a racist rampage, posting lots of stuff like this:
What leftoids see as "white privilege" is just organically emergent consequences of biological realities. They know this, so they lie.—
(@heartiste) June 25, 2013
See also here, here, here, here, and here.
Phrasing your racism in pseudoscientific terms doesn’t make it right, dude. It just makes you a pretentious racist.
From the mouths of trolls: Rape is unneccessary if you’ve got “game.”
So my Mighty White of You post — about the demographics of the Men’s Rights subreddit — drew the attention of Obsidian, a longtime Manosphere blogger who has been described by some of his comrades as “the Blackest Man of the Manosphere” (not that this is much of an accomplishment in that lily-white world). He stuck around for some not-terribly productive discussions of race and feminism, pickup artistry, and I can’t remember the rest because I just sort of stopped caring after a while.
But there was one thing he said — a passing remark in a long comment — that stood out to some of the commenters here, and which I thought was revealing enough to warrant highlighting in a post:
I don’t support rape for a very simple reason – because it’s not necessary. A Man with Game doesn’t need to rape anyone.
That … is not a good reason to “not support” rape.
Really, that’s probably the worst reason to “not support” rape besides “I don’t have enough time in my busy schedule to rape anyone today” or “I might muss up my new suit raping someone.”
Do you really need to search for reasons to “not support” rape beyond, you know, the idea that violating other people for your own selfish pleasure is wrong?
PUAs: Even the ones who aren’t directly advocating sexual assault have some pretty fucked up ideas about rape.
A Sexual Assault How-To by a sleazeball Redditor? Thanks, Kickstarter! [UPDATED: Kickstarter: "We were wrong."]
So you may have heard about that Kickstarter that raised $16,000 for a loathsome Reddit PUA’s “handbook on how to bully women who don’t like you into sex, while preserving your claims to believe you had consent should you need to tell the police,” as Amanda Marcotte aptly described it in her post on it yesterday. Slate’s Alyssa Rosenberg also has some thoughts on it.
I don’t really have anything to add.
There’s a petition up demanding that Kickstarter simply refuse to fund what is essentially a how-to guide to sexual assault. Last I checked, it had gotten nearly 60,000 signatures.
EDITED TO ADD: Casey Malone, who wrote the blog post that brought this awful project to the attention of people outside of the sleazier corners of Reddit, wrote Kickstarter about it and got a response suggesting that Kickstarter, while planning to go ahead and fund the project, will be reexamining its policies as a result of the controversy. Malone posted some further thoughts.
EDITED AGAIN: Kickstarter has offered an apology. You can find it here. But I’m just going to repost the whole thing:
Dear everybody,
On Wednesday morning Kickstarter was sent a blog post quoting disturbing material found on Reddit. The offensive material was part of a draft for a “seduction guide” that someone was using Kickstarter to publish. The posts offended a lot of people — us included — and many asked us to cancel the creator’s project. We didn’t.
We were wrong.
Why didn’t we cancel the project when this material was brought to our attention? Two things influenced our decision:
- The decision had to be made immediately. We had only two hours from when we found out about the material to when the project was ending. We’ve never acted to remove a project that quickly.
- Our processes, and everyday thinking, bias heavily toward creators. This is deeply ingrained. We feel a duty to our community — and our creators especially — to approach these investigations methodically as there is no margin for error in canceling a project. This thinking made us miss the forest for the trees.
These factors don’t excuse our decision but we hope they add clarity to how we arrived at it.
Let us be 100% clear: Content promoting or glorifying violence against women or anyone else has always been prohibited from Kickstarter. If a project page contains hateful or abusive material we don’t approve it in the first place. If we had seen this material when the project was submitted to Kickstarter (we didn’t), it never would have been approved. Kickstarter is committed to a culture of respect.
Where does this leave us?
First, there is no taking back money from the project or canceling funding after the fact. When the project was funded the backers’ money went directly from them to the creator. We missed the window.
Second, the project page has been removed from Kickstarter. The project has no place on our site. For transparency’s sake, a record of the page is cached here.
Third, we are prohibiting “seduction guides,” or anything similar, effective immediately. This material encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works. These things do not belong on Kickstarter.
Fourth, today Kickstarter will donate $25,000 to an anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN. It’s an excellent organization that combats exactly the sort of problems our inaction may have encouraged.
We take our role as Kickstarter’s stewards very seriously. Kickstarter is one of the friendliest, most supportive places on the web and we’re committed to keeping it that way. We’re sorry for getting this so wrong.
That is an apology. Some people could learn a thing or two from this.
Bride of the Monster: The Red Pill Subreddit creates Red Pill Women
He’s kino escalating, but she’s not giving him any Indicators of Interest.
So you all remember The Red Pill subreddit, that wretched hive of scum and misogyny I wrote about the other day, and the other other day, and the other other other day before that. Well, now something even more horrible has sprouted up on Reddit, like genital warts after a night “raw dogging it” with a PUA douchebag.
It’s a new subreddit from the Red Pill masterminds called Red Pill Women.
