Dear Matt,
This post is in response to your recent attempts to write humorously about a topic we can all agree is loaded. Yeah, I mean both of your rape "satires", not just the one you quickly took down and "apologized" for.
I can see you're struggling with the genre, so I thought I'd helpfully link you up to a writer you'll recognize, Lindy West, who wrote a brilliant piece about How To Tell A Rape Joke.
Oops, my bad! I know how much you dislike feedback from women females on any subject whatsoever (especially if the subject is women females themselves), so let me link you instead to a male masculine comic you might relate too. Like you, Louis CK is bald, pale, pudgy, and has built a stellar career on charting his trouble with girls.
Louis CK has done several bits concerning rape but this one is my personal favorite. (In case you don't "get it," the "butt" of the joke here is the girl and / or rape culture itself -- yet women find it as funny as men do.)
Enjoy!
La Strega
The prevalence of false rape accusations is one of the central obsessions of the MRM. In response, fervent Roosh fan Matt Forney recently posted "tongue in cheek" advice to would-be rapists. Yeah, it's obviously meant to be read as Swiftian "satire," a la American Psycho (which I didn't think was funny either). He admits he has gotten his ideas from watching movies, and there is nothing very interesting here beyond a rehash of morbid cinematic fantasies.
For the record, I don't find jokes or ruminations about humiliating or castrating men amusing either. Neutering my dogs is more traumatic for me than for them!
Rape is the ultimate act of domination, whether male over female or male over other male. (I acknowledge women also occasionally rape men, particularly in cases
of statutory rape, and these acts are just as reprehensible.) Nobody is going to argue that rape is worse than murder or mutilation, but it violates an individual's sovereignty in a way that few crimes do. And it strikes me as an act of terrorism, because the fear it engenders affects all women all the time.
Although the legal definition of rape has broadened, the rate of rape appears to have declined in the U.S. This is good news, albeit a trend no one has been able to explain. People do seem to be more sensitive and knowledgeable about what rape is / is not, possibly thanks to the fact that it has been a feminist concern for a generation.
We don't know why humans are sexually aroused by the imagery, suggestion or reality of violence. There are almost certainly biochemical mechanisms at work here: somehow, the wires for aggressive and sexual impulses get crossed in the limbic system. Furthermore, we are awash in imagery that promotes violent sexual fantasy and horror. The disappearance, violation and murder of attractive white women is such a pervasive theme in entertainment and popular media that it is hardly shocking anymore.
What stuns me is that young men like Matt Forney are putting their fantasies out there on the Internet with their legal names attached. What compels people to burn their social and professional bridges in this reckless way? I don't buy that it's "ballsy" to commit social suicide. It's tragic.
Perhaps he is so young that he cannot envisage a day when he wishes more than anything that he hadn't done so. Perhaps the ego stroke of Internet "celebrity" is as addictive and self-destructive as crack? Or do these men feel so hopeless and despairing about their futures that they really have nothing to lose?
Update: Forney has removed the piece from his blog and (sort of) apologized for it. I've also ascertained Mr. Forney is forty years old, not as young as I had assumed. (In other words, old enough to know better.)
