Yesterday on Manboobz, a new commenter was called out for dismissing MRAs as "crazy." Her feelings got hurt, and she flounced off the board, which was a shame, because it could have been a great learning moment for her. It certainly was for me.
For one reason, it reminded me of how pejorative the word "crazy" is, and I should know. I recently "unfriended" an acquaintance who had commented on Facebook (and I paraphrase here) that I needed to get my head examined before I lost my medical insurance. Yeah, it hurt my feelings. And also, was that ever a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Suffice to say, I am hardly a paragon of mental health myself. I struggle with chronic depression and anxiety, and sometimes my girlfriend warns me that I am "going off the deep end." I have more than a touch of OCD, and have been medicated for panic attacks on occasion. Overall, however, given the genetic hand I was dealt, the circumstances I grew up in, and some of the god-awful choices I have made, I have managed pretty well so far. But I digress...
My point here is that I know firsthand that to disparage people who suffer from mental disorders is cruel and unfair. I know that the vast majority of people with psychiatric diagnoses do not commit crimes and do not intentionally hurt other people. I know that psychiatry cannot fully address the nature of "evil," nor is psychiatric treatment in itself a solution.
The kerfuffle at Manbooz yesterday, as well as a brief exchange with Zosimus the Heathen (see comments), also made me reflect on how the language we use not only expresses, but shapes, our thoughts. It was one of my favorite discussion topics in graduate school. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, anyone?
Spiritually, I would have to describe myself as a skeptic. While I enjoy attending church, and often derive sustenance from it, I am not a Believer. I sometimes envy others their faith even as I soundly reject their attempts to instill it in me. I don't have a personal conflict with this. When it comes to religion, I have zero interest in converting anyone else to my point of view. Indeed, I deeply love and respect a number of people (including My Most Beloved) who happen to find comfort and guidance in what I personally consider a lot of hooey.
However, my lack of belief in supernatural causality does run me aground when it comes to the concept of "evil." I have found myself labeling much of what I read in the manosphere as "evil." And I think I need to look at this habit, which is a kind of intellectual "shortcut," a lot more carefully. What do I mean when I call Roosh or JudgyBitch or Paul Elam "evil" people?
James Knoll, a psychiatrist, recently posted in Medscape:
What most of us label as evil is, in the final analysis, extreme selfishness. When we lack a clear understanding of
something that frightens us, we call it "evil," which temporarily allays
our anxiety. Our nerves settled, we believe we have become clear about
the nature of the problem, and then we may go about defending ourselves
against the "other" we have just created. But this defensive posture may
all too easily transition into a preemptive strike -- the result of
projecting onto the "other" the aspects of our own psyches that we hate
or fear the most. That a killer considers his self-centered
interests more important than your life is not due to some supernatural
evil force; it is simply supremely egoistic... [italics mine]
If anything keeps me kicking, it's the way life continues to remind me that I have so much yet to learn.
Almost every manospherean writer claims that just because he/she is anti-feminist, that does not mean he/she is a misogynist. Of course, the writer will then proceed to demonstrate his/her fear and hatred of women in the most fulsome manner.
A few months ago, right wing conspiracy theorist Pete Santilli, on behalf of American women, demanded an apology from Alex Jones for his "disgusting remarks" promoting rape. But better not assume from this gallant gesture that Mr. Santilli himself is not a vicious misogynist.
I read today that he has announced on the air that he wants to shoot Hillary Clinton in the "vagina." One might think that her "head" or "heart" would be more lethal targets. If it is agony, not immediate death, he wishes to inflict, why not her "stomach" or her "knees?" He wants to shoot Bill Clinton and Barack Obama too, but does not specify that it is their "testicles" that should be blown off.
He chooses Clinton's vagina because this is the organ that represents the very essence of misogynistic loathing and longing. Like Phil Spector, he wants to penetrate her with his phallic gun before he sends her into oblivion. It's so fucking telling. And it's so fucking chilling. And I'm so fucking sick of reading and hearing about this kind of shit. And now I've used up my entire f-word allowance for the day, damn it.
One of my best friends is a former boyfriend I'll call "Max," if by "best" you mean the kind of friendship that doesn't require much maintenance. In other words, Max and I will go for months without contact; then he'll suddenly swing through the front door unannounced, with a parcel of DVDs and CDs in his hand, demanding a drink and the next six hours of my time.
We're close enough friends that I served as the officiant at his wedding.
Anyway, Max was a terrible boyfriend: a lazy, lying, mooching pothead (and I would say that to his face, and I often do). He hasn't changed much, but somehow those qualities are more tolerable now that we are not romantically involved.
Not that Max and I ever had a great romance, mind you, except insofar as I briefly wished it to be. What Max and I shared was a common taste in music, and a mutual passion for one artist in particular.
Shortly after Max and I broke up, he learned I had played some songs by the same artist for another lover, and he was devastated by what he took to be the worst form of infidelity. How could I squander something so intimate and significant on a roll in the hay? Years later, he still brings it up: the betrayal of it.
You have to understand: When Max turns you on to a singer or a band, to a movie or a book, he is giving you the very best part of himself.
I'm not as territorial as Max is, but I have the same tendency to guard what is precious aesthetically and emotionally. That's why when Roosh twittered a reference to David Foster Wallace the other day, my hackles went up. No! No! No! You of all people cannot have my DFW!
@rooshv
It was with some relief, then, that I noticed that Matt Forney had posted a link to a review by Vox Day of Wallace's Infinite Jest, in which he suggests Wallace killed himself because he realized he (Wallace, that is, not Vox Day) was a terrible writer.
Much has been written about why Wallace hanged himself. He had valiantly struggled with severe depression throughout his life. The sudden epiphany he was a "terrible" writer was almost certainly not one of the reasons. As always with the manosphere, I suspect that there is a certain amount of projection going on here.
I'll concede that Wallace is not an easy read, and certainly not everyone's cuppa, and Infinite Jest is a bit intimidating, partly because of its length, but also because Wallace is not afraid to make demands of the reader. You have to give Wallace the wheel, so to speak, and then just hang on to your seat. I don't know if I would have been willing to put in the effort if he hadn't already won me over with his hilarious anthologies of essays and short stories. I recommend starting with "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (especially if you have ever been on a cruise).
Yes, Matt Forney et al., Wallace does use a lot of "big words." Thank goodness for the dictionary in my nook. Oddly enough, some of us wordsmiths actually relish the opportunity to expand our vocabularies.
It's so reassuring to see Matt Forney hates Jonathan Franzen too.
Roosh has repeated categorically that he will not have children with an American woman, while in the next breath he glorifies "raw dogging" as many women as possible, including women he frankly detests. A few months ago, I felt compelled to remind his impressionable young male readers that unprotected sex was likely to lead to unplanned
fatherhood. I figured Roosh would delete the comment; in fact, that comment may have led to his blocking my IPO.
Back when I worked at an abortion clinic, I would sometimes ask young girls (15-16 year olds, typically) why they hadn't used contraception, and the answer was usually to the effect, "I didn't want a baby, so I didn't think I could get pregnant." This kind of magical thinking is a part of the adolescent's natural egocentrism, of course, which often leads to lamentable consequences. Some adolescents are exceedingly responsible about their behavior, but we can't expect that most will be, and it's not their "fault" when they're not.
By the time a person is in his early twenties, the prefrontal cortex has had a chance to develop and get connected with the rest of the brain. That's why "21" is a reasonable age at which to grant legal adulthood. Unfortunately, our pesky sexual impulses continue to override common sense for a long time to come. It may take years of experience to understand that "something that feels so good" may not, in fact, "be so right."
The Misogynists talk a lot about "sperm jacking," whereby devious women trick
unwitting men into impregnating them, thereby guaranteeing the mother
the right to suck her victim dry of child support for the following
eighteen years. Unlike most of the manosphere fodder, it's not a baseless fear. It does happen.
Late last night, as I was leaving the athletic club I've recently joined, I was waylaid by a young fellow working the front desk. (Part of becoming a fat old lady is that everyone under 30 now perceives me as a maternal figure, which is kind of touching but also kind of annoying.)
While I was trying to browse the pool schedule, the kid launched into a story about his personal travails with his "baby mama." In the span of twenty minutes I learned all this: He had once been a happy chap with a promising career as a Red Bull sales representative. Apparently Red Bull has aphrodisiac qualities I was hitherto unaware of: Every day, flocks of pretty girls laid siege to his cart, demanding free samples. To his surprise (and mine), there are Red Bull groupies. As a result, the poor guy had more pussy than he knew what to do with. And all of this went to his head (and nether regions).
One lass came back for more than the Red Bull. She told him she was a 22 year old university student on the pill; as it turned out, she was an 18 year old high school dropout who had decided to have a baby. Six weeks later, he learned he was going to be a father. And that's when the nightmare began. Because allowing for hyperbole, even if only half of what he related to me was true, she (and her parents) sounded like absolutely terrible people.
The kid didn't want this pregnancy and he wasn't consulted, but he was willing to "man up" and take responsibility. Over the past two years, his efforts to establish a relationship with the child have been thwarted, yet he has grown emotionally attached to the child, and would like to be a good parent. He and his parents have already poured $18,000 into the legal system in an effort to gain more access.
He was practically in tears last night because he had just learned his son had been taken to the ER with a dislocated elbow. My eyebrows shot up: How did that happen? Well, the child had been trying to play with his mom's laptop, so mom had picked him up by one arm and swung him away from it. "Poor little guy!" the young man fretted. "I hope you're documenting everything," I said.
I also said, "I hope things get better. Don't give up. Your son needs you in his life." I was trying to say all the right things, but what I really wanted was to quit listening to this saga. It was harshing my post-workout mellow. I also resented hearing this kind of story right now; when I am so furious with the MRM, the last thing I want to entertain is the notion that men do have some legitimate grievances, and Father's Rights are definitely an area where changes are called for.
Obviously, forcing anyone into parenthood is unethical, to say the least. As a woman, I know that being pregnant against one's will is like being pushed on to a train you can't get off of. Desperate women will risk death to jump off that train. Knowing this as I do, how can I not feel some measure of sympathy for guys secretly giving their pregnant girlfriends abortifacients? It is unfair.
Biology is unfair in general. The legal system is sometimes unfair to men. It sucks, but that's the way it is. Meanwhile, as Annie Sprinkle says, "Learn to love latex!"
I was idly browsing the comments in Roosh V today. It was the familiar topic of how poorly the charms of American women compare to those of Eastern European women. Ho-hum. Roosh is doing a lot of recycling these days. The fans themselves seemed a bit weary of the subject, like they were just going through the motions.
However, one young man (I assume) did write something that stuck in my head all afternoon, to the effect (and I paraphrase here) that he really wished American women would get with the program, figure out how much they were hated, and start making themselves more pleasing "before civil war breaks out."
Now it's not uncommon for these guys to propose, uhm, forceful means to resolve their frustration, i.e., a Spearhead post not long ago calling for the sexual enslavement of single mothers, or gathering up all the fat girls into forced labor camps to work off those unsightly extra pounds, or that poor Incel guy who wants "the government" to require pay women to go out with him. I suppose forcefully imposing their collective will on more than half the population doesn't seem that far out to them (as long as they don't factor in all those beta and omega men who would surely balk at seeing their female relatives, friends and colleagues carted off).
Roosh himself has hinted rather darkly that "things" were reaching some sort of tipping point; that "things" were going to get "uglier" in the near future.
Actually, I've run across a lot of similarly ominous warnings from the online misogynists. The following is plucked from The Spearhead in January 2010: "May your words provoke a reaction. I grow impatient for the coming war."
And then I was introduced by No More Mr. Nice Guy to Eivind Berge's blog, wherein he declares "Feminism versus MRA is an irreconcilable difference that can only be resolved by violence."
Berge was recently charged with inciting violence by Norwegian authorities, but the charges have been dropped. In the process, however, his sanity was brought into question by nearly everyone he knew, an understandably harrowing experience that he describes in Kafkaesque detail -- but which leaves this reader pretty much convinced he is indeed one crazy barrel of lutefisk possibly brilliant but definitely disturbed individual.
This ordeal, and the resulting sense of betrayal from Berge's point of view, led him to "repudiate" his own family, a familiar theme with other MRAs. Sooner or later, their misogyny drives everyone away, and destroys all intimacy... they get increasingly isolated... their mental disorders get worse and more entrenched...
I'm not sure whether to laugh, cry, or buy myself a shotgun. Where are these gathering storm clouds but in their own fevered imaginations? And what would this final showdown look like? I mean, where would the battle lines be drawn and what would their tactics be? And what would the final outcome be? It sounds like the premise of a really awful sci-fi movie. Or a video game perhaps?
Although I'd like to dismiss all this as adolescent bluster and blowing off steam, I'll admit this kind of talk makes me uneasy, and I hope that the SPLC continues to monitor these websites carefully.
Update: I read today that radio host Pete Santilli announced on the air, "I want to shoot Hilary Clinton in the vagina."
If anything characterizes The Way We Live Now, it is the cult of celebrity. It seems like almost everyone wants to be famous. We crave recognition so badly that many of us don't care what it takes: better notoriety than anonymity. And because we live in a day of unparallelled opportunities to self-publish and self-promote, people often have to scream to be heard above the din of competing sources of input. One way to stand out above the fray is to be Outrageous.
One recent commenter on Manboobz alluded to this as a way of explaining the "manosphere." For the most part, it's an internet phenomenon, which has linked various and numerous unhappy and disenfranchised white men. Unable to form a coherent platform, they have united behind a common enemy, which they call "feminism" but which really is femininity in general (including, as we have recently seen, female children and transsexual women). Much has already been written about this elsewhere, and much more eloquently than I could.
Members of the manosphere post, for the most part, anonymously. They have to, because to openly espouse the views they claim to hold would be to commit social and professional suicide.
A handful of leaders do identify themselves (Roosh V aka Daryush Valizadeh, Paul Elam, Matt Forney aka Ferdinand Bardemu), and a few have had their true identities made known against their will (Roissy "Heartiste" and the guy who went by "violentacrez"). Of course, any semblance of a "normal" life is over for them: they are now officially and irrevocably married to their online personae. In some ways, they have paid the ultimate price for their narcissism (or "martyrdom" as their acolytes might frame it).
Yet in order to maintain readership, they must keep producing more of what their readers want, which is ever more outrageous material. The "outrage" comes from the overtly hateful nature of their ideas, the hateful expression of these ideas, and sometimes from a potent and disturbing stew of fantasy, entitlement, resentment, and violent retribution. In other words: hate porn.
Then there are people like JudgyBitch, who is torn between the demands of her compulsive exhibitionism and the need to protect her personal life. From what I have seen, exhibitionism usually trumps prudence in these cases. Hence, she uses pseudonyms, but "vlogs" on YouTube; being recognized and outed is but a matter of months. And that is not a threat, since I have neither the means nor the interest in doxing her. It is simply a prediction and perhaps a warning. We may enjoy the anonymity of the internet, but we are foolish indeed if we think that it is guaranteed.
Personally, I'm not sure the threat of exposure is an entirely bad thing. Perhaps it's a reflection of my age, but I don't hold anonymity to be sacrosanct. The internet is not the confessional. A blog is is not your analyst's couch. Writing about, or for, other people affects them. Words can be as influential and powerful as actions, and they should be treated as such. People should be held accountable for what they say. Free speech is not free of consequences.
Right now the Internet is The Wild West and anything goes, so naturally it is a fertile ground for the worst of people and the worst kinds of people, but in time I am confident we will develop some respect for its power; we will demand and adopt standards of behavior and responsibility. Meanwhile, we are left with vigilante groups like Anonymous, which is perhaps better -- or perhaps worse -- than no moral order whatsoever.
At the same time -- and getting back to the title of this post -- I do understand the merciless thirst for recognition, and how blogging plays to that. That's because I understand The Quest for Immortality and The Denial of Death. What's more human and existentially poignant than to counter the inevitability of death by howling in protest? Of course, ranting and raging avails us little -- often makes everything worse in fact -- but it makes us feel powerful, and distracts us from the unbearable knowledge that all of this -- and all of us -- will be dust in a hundred years.
As one hostile commenter unkindly and needlessly pointed out, I have a very "obscure" blog. Indeed, I'm thrilled if five people look at it a day. I'm pleasantly puzzled by the number of visitors I do get. I'm not trying to make a name for myself here, much less a profit. I'm just practicing my writing skills, and I find it more motivating to write for an audience (even if it's only an imaginary, potential audience).
Like Hansel and Gretl, I've littered my blog with so many crumbs that it would be fairly easy to figure out who I am, if anyone cared (and I am very, very sure that no one does). And not that it matters because it really, really doesn't, in part because I am not only old, but also (like my heroine Jane Eyre) plain and poor and obscure and have no family or reputation to protect. Also, when I write critically about the New Misogynists, I only write what I would say to their faces, given the opportunity. I would be happy to meet with Roosh V or Janet Bloomfield in person and tell them what I think. Hell, I'd buy the first round!
However, a few years ago, I had a very different blog. It was a kind of confessional, recounting with humor and some salacious detail a year spent pursuing casual encounters on craigslist. (Frankly, I was more than a little inspired by A Round Heeled Woman by Jane Juska.) Well, as you know, Sex Sells, even sexual escapades as weird and pathetic as I was often describing in my crazy little blog.
As my readership took off, I found that more and more I was living my life in service to my blog. Consequently, I was engaging in behaviors that were increasingly humiliating and risky (both to my physical and emotional well being) just to have something to regale "my readers" with over their morning coffee. It got a little out of hand. Sometimes I said and did things I didn't really believe in or feel good about, just for the "copy." Inevitably, I got more than a little burned out. And, as fun as it was to shock and delight a lot of random strangers in cyberspace, I had to let it go. (Also, I happened to meet someone I loved, thereby putting the final kabosh on pursuing or reporting what I might call "My Slutty, SluttyYear.")
This experience gives me a little personal insight into -- and real sympathy for -- why and how a phenomenon like JudgyBitch is born. I imagine she's been bored and flailing about for something beyond family responsibilities to give her life meaning and purpose. Maybe she's always been the kind of gal with plenty of outrageous opinions, the kinds of opinions that are offered more for shock value than real insight ("the life of the party" so to speak), and now she's found a way to get a lot more attention for them. The validation comes from making people gasp (Oh no she didn't!) rather than making them reflect or engage in honest debate. She's found a forum where she is made to feel exceptional ("A woman in a man's world") and is accorded special recognition and privilege as such. As she is egged on, she goes farther and farther out on the limb, she exposes more and more, her position becomes more and more tenuous, she seems more and more deluded... But that attention! That masculine attention! It is as addictive as crack, and she just can't stop.
In response to my comment that the only way I can cope with the MRA/PUA crowd is to remind myself that they are merely dinosaurs bellowing piteously as they lurch into oblivion, a clever blogger who also comments on Manboobz posted a link to the "Extinction" scene in Disney's "Fantasia."
As I watched it, I realized that I'd seen this before, and that the visual image I was describing had been formed and implanted in my brain while watching "Fantasia" as a child fifty years ago.
I find myself muttering "Dinosaurs!" a lot these days, and usually in reference to people more or less my own age -- which is not so very old, mind you -- who can't or won't grasp that the greater social environment has changed, and however much they moan and roar, it's not ever going back to accommodate them. I cannot remember the exact quote, but something like "shuffling backwards into the future" comes to mind.
And I ought to know. Every day, I'm painfully aware of my increasing obsolescence. It hasn't been a smooth, gradual decline either: within the last decade, I went from being at the top of my game (whatever game you can think of) to playing bingo with a hearing aid in the back of a church basement (figuratively).
The bitch of it is, I know how tiresome I am being whenever I launch into a story about the ways things were -- I can see it in my students' and younger colleagues' eyes -- yet I cannot stop myself. I want them to know. I have something important to share here: the ways things are compared to the way things were. I was there! I know!
It doesn't matter what the topic is: abortion, feminism, Islam, neighborhoods, technology. Whatever, I must dive in and insert my historical perspective. Because that is all I have to offer now. And I cannot bear to be completely silenced, not yet.
Ann Coulter, watch out: there's a new anti-feminist female provocateur emerging, and she's just as blonde, skinny, and outrageously mean-spirited as you are! PLUS she's younger and -- dare I say it? -- even prettier. Yes, Mirror, mirror on the wall: it's JudgyBitch (catchy moniker!) AKA "Janet Bloomfield." She's a self-described stay at home mom, reported to be from Canada, with an undergraduate degree in film theory. She is affectionately referred to as "Drunky" on another anti-MRA blog because she is rumored to enjoy her booze. Allegedly. And God knows I'd be the last person in the world to condemn her for that! However, if alcohol is behind this brand of vitriol, she might want to reconsider blogging-while-drinking, cuz this lady is one mean drunk.
I will admit that one of my guiltiest pleasures is indulging my morbid fascination with really evil women. Male serial killers, architects of doom, and genocidal maniacs are a dime a dozen, but when a woman is truly horrible, she gets my attention. Hence my addiction to Deadly Women, or any stories about the likes of Myra Hindley, Elisabeth Bathory, and, most recently, Jodi Arias. Make of this predilection what you will -- I cannot defend it -- but clearly I'm not alone.
Of course, women don't have to be practicing Black Widows to fascinate me. They only have to think like sociopaths.
I just spent an hour on one of Janet Bloomfield's blogs and I was impressed. There aren't many women out there with the balls to claim prepubescent girls "ask" to be molested in exchange for candy, cigarettes, or limo rides. In fact, Bloomfield has a lot to say about so-called rape and the women who invent it, but it boils down to her conviction that rape is a "fantasy" concocted by women too fat and unattractive to get real men to fuck them. Nice, huh? Bloomfield writes for A Voice For Men (presumably, in between mothering her three children, proudly crafting her husband sandwiches, and pouring herself just a little more chardonnay malbec).
To get the full flavor of Janet "JudgyBitch" Bloomfield, you have to watch her Youtube channel; every narcissist has one these days. The smug expression, the professionally cut and streaked blonde bob, the odd vocal affectations all scream a carefully crafted facade of upper middle class white privilege, and so enhance the appeal of her misogynistic rants immeasurably.
OK, it's easy for me to understand why someone can "judge" members of a perceived inferior class -- morally reprehensible, but it follows a kind of self-serving logic -- but to turn on one's own class is a very curious phenomenon to me. What does a woman gain by allying herself with her oppressor? Does she believe, on some level, that by disavowing her own vulnerability as a female (and the mother of females) and taking on the perpetrators' point of view, she wins special entitlements and protection? Is this some variation of Stockholm Syndrome? Armchair psychiatrists want to know!
And how does the adolescent daughter of such a woman react when the kids at school mention they watched her mom on the internet? How do the other mothers feel about JudgyBitch as a mother and potential role model for their own daughters?
Now I don't know if Janet Bloomfield is a pseudonym as she claims it is, but when a person posts videos on YouTube, doing everything she can to garner a sliver of attention from the boys, she is bound to be recognized by someone, sooner than later. And although she claims no fear of reprisals (from her husband's employer, from the college where maybe she will get a Ph.D. some day), I can predict with grim certainty that the wildly irresponsible claims and downright evil ideas she has posted about rape and pedophilia will not be easy to sweep away.
Oh, that's right: JudgyBitch doesn't give a shit what other people think of her (unless it's Paul Elam, perhaps). She's like the Courtney Love of the manosphere! Now where'd I put that corkscrew?
Last night around midnight I was getting ready to turn in when I heard some of my neighbors yelling. At first I figured they were just having a loud party, but it soon became apparent at least one woman was angry. When I heard her say, "It isn't even loaded, you chicken shit," I knew someone had a gun over there, and I grew concerned.
My neighbors are South Pacific Islanders, and very friendly folks. My only real beef with them is that they don't get waste service. Instead, they pile their garbage into the bed of an open pickup until it's full, then haul it to the dump. Winds prevailing as they are, a lot of candy wrappers and snack packaging get blown onto my lawn. Although it's mildly annoying, I have never said anything: I just pick it up and mutter to myself. Their eldest daughter is a stocky, athletic kid who spends hours every day shooting into the neighbor's basketball hoop or cycling in endless circles around the cul de sac. She's a sweet kid who seems lonely. It was the knowledge that she was in the house with these raging idiots that made me wonder if I should call the cops.
On the other hand, I didn't want to overreact, or get people in trouble unnecessarily. Although several adults were yelling at this point, no one seemed to be in pain or extreme fear. While I dithered thusly in my darkened living room, the cops arrived anyway, and with considerable drama ("Come out with your hands up!"), they arrested both a woman and a man.
This Mother's Day morning all looked serene across the way, and I ventured out for a pack of smokes. I have a favorite convenience store I always buy cigarettes from that is run by a Korean couple. They are rather surly, but the front counter is plastered with pictures of their beagle in various adorable poses. I've been popping into their store twice a week for ten years, yet they never seem to recognize me. They never remember the brand I smoke either. It's a little weird: Do they really not recognize me? Do all of us white people look alike? Or are they just respecting my space? Either way, I don't mind. I'm a native of a city that is renowned for both its rain and its social chill, and I kind of like it that way.
As I was leaving the store, I noticed a rack of t-shirts on display near the door. One on top caught my eye. It showed a cartoon man brandishing an unfurled belt above a small terrified face with the caption, "This hurts me worse than it hurts you." It was so crudely drawn that I wasn't sure if the victim was meant to be a child or a woman. I had never seen a t-shirt like that before, and I could hardly believe that someone would think of making it, much less selling it. Was it meant to celebrate or condemn domestic violence? I almost wanted to buy it so that people would believe it was real. I thought about taking a picture, or asking the owner what it meant to him, but his forbidding expression and lack of English daunted me.
As I drove away, I thought, "It's time to find a new place to buy cigarettes."
This week I showed one of my classes "Seeking Asian Female," a documentary from Independent Lens (PBS) that tells the story of an "Asiaphile," a sixty year old parking lot attendant named Steven, and his efforts to win the affections of his younger Chinese wife, Sandy. The film is available to watch online through the month, and I recommend it.
My class is composed almost exclusively of Asian international students, about half of whom are Chinese. I was a little apprehensive about their reactions: Would they be offended? Would they be embarrassed? In fact, they seem to have found it pretty hilarious, especially the scenes in which Sandy upbraids a befuddled Steven in Mandarin.
In the short class discussion that followed, one of the students, a comely young Chinese girl, asked me, "What's wrong with being attractive to white guys?" As I delicately waded into language of "fetish" and "objectification," I realized they were already familiar with these concepts via mass exposure to advertising and internet porn.
The students were asked to write a contrastive paragraph about the expectations that Sandy and Steven had before they married, and how these expectations were challenged by reality. It dovetailed neatly with a unit we had finished on discrimination, racism, and cultural stereotypes. (I've yet to read their efforts, but will do so this afternoon.)
What I didn't share with them is my own family history with yellow fever. My uncle married twice, first to a Japanese gal named Yoriko when I was about ten. She was the wayward daughter of a Shinto priest, and turned out to be -- to my uncle's dismay -- quite a pistol. When they visited, Yoriko used my underwear drawer to stash her snacks, and my panties reeked of dried squid for a full decade. Sadly, this was the only reminder of her once vibrant presence, as she soon ran off with her golf instructor and was lost to our family forever.
My uncle's second marriage came much later, and was a marriage in name only. His second wife was a Korean bar girl who had suffered a near-fatal aneurysm in my uncle's Seoul apartment while he was at work. She was grievously brain damaged as a result, unable to speak (although she could be distressingly vocal) and had an unsteady, lumbering gait. She required constant supervision and around the clock assistance, so her aging mom and dad were part of the package. My uncle married her -- or so he claimed -- so that he could get her on his medical insurance plan. He set her and her folks up in LA for several years, but they hated living in the US, never learned more than a few words in English, and soon were back in Korea, where he continued to support them (and still does, after his death). I sometimes wonder if my uncle took Jae Nam on, not so much out of compassion, but because he knew she was the one woman who could never leave him.
My uncle was only attracted to women who were extremely young, extremely petite, and otherwise "extremely feminine" in the worst sense of the Asian female cultural stereotype. His addiction to Asian girls took him on various sex tourism holidays. One trip to a Thai brothel resulted in his developing both oral gonorrhea and genital herpes simultaneously, the inconvenient details of which he shared freely. (I learned to carefully sequester my personal linens and towels whenever he dropped in.) My uncle's "yellow fever" persisted throughout his life even though it was based on a fantasy that his own experiences repeatedly disproved.
For a guy with utter contempt for females, Roosh spends a lot of time fantasizing what it is like to be a girl. This week on his blog he offers up a short story called "Patricia and Her Smartphone." Except it's not so short, after all; it is 3500 words long, as he lays out in thudding detail how a young woman's day revolves around the demands of social media. It is meant, I expect, to be a stinging indictment of how consumerism has destroyed the capacity of women to form relationships with others.
Roosh often blames feminism for all the ills that plague male/female relationships today, but he seems to conflate feminism with consumerism. This lack of understanding of what these terms actually mean confounds and annoys me more than just about anything else Roosh does.
Roosh's literary effort seems to be derived from Bret Easton Ellis yuppie satire, American Psycho. I heartily disliked both the book and subsequent movie. but in their day they got favorable reviews. Of course, there are no smartphones in American Psycho, which was published in 1991, but otherwise it's much of a muchness, as my mother used to say..
As someone who spends several hours a day trying to capture the fleeting attention of "emerging adults," I am all too familiar with how the new technology hinders face-to-face communication and shortens attention spans. I don't find the addiction to texting and twittering a particularly gendered behavior, however: my male students are equally in thrall to their devices. It also strikes me as a bit hypocritical that Roosh takes young ladies to task for living online, when he and his followers are doing much the same. Meh, this is hardly breaking news, and many artists and writers have been addressing it.
I did smile at the passage in which Patricia and her friend Madison photograph their lunches before consuming them: "The food arrived, presented beautifully on large plates with squigglies of unknown sauce going outward like heat rays a child would leave on a drawing of the sun. Both phones were out now, taking pictures from different angles... From the beginning of their lunch date until the end, a total of 52
photos were taken. Sixteen of those photos would be uploaded to various
sites to garner a total of 48 likes, comments, and retweets, including a
comment from the restaurant, apologizing for the menu typo." I (once) shared a meal in Las Vegas with a colleague who actually did this: by the time she was ready to take an actual bite, I was ready for the dessert menu.
Patricia, as Roosh's fictional feminized self, is a very, very Mean Girl who dismisses the men who approach her throughout the day because they aren't handsome or hip enough to meet her standards. She later meets a fellow for drinks who tries to impress her by "talking about his recent experience in the Peruvian mountains where he took ayahuasca and achieved spiritual enlightenment [and] accumulated a vocabulary of 1,000 words in Quechua to learn important Andean wisdom from wise elders..." Now, if that bit of esoterica wouldn't impress a girl, what would? (Me? I'd be thinking, What a pretentious twit!)
Patricia won't have anything to do with poor Cody, either, because he doesn't believe that access to birth control is a woman's right. (And rightly so; that attitude should be a complete deal breaker in any woman's playbook.)
The story goes on and on and on. Roosh took the next day off from blogging, citing exhaustion, and no wonder: If it was as exhausting to write as it is to read, he must be knackered.
Roosh writes competently; I'd be thrilled if my students could string that many grammatical sentences together. Functional literacy does not, alas, good writing make. Unfortunately, like pretty much everyone in the manosphere, he is incapable of nuance, subtlety or levity. Despite his efforts to be witty and satirical, the resulting prose is heavy, turgid and excruciating, and about as much fun as watching someone stack bricks.
I don't think this is the sort of thing his fan base wants to read, either.
Watch this link of Russian dashboards... just people Being Good.
Roosh is exhausted. Anyone who reads his blog between the lines can sense he nearing the the end. He is trying to prepare his fan base for the inevitable End of Roosh:
"When I first got to Eastern Europe, my standards were lower than what the market provided. I bought all the product available, a binge that coincided with doctor visits and antibiotic treatments. But each new notch increased my standards by just a tiny amount, until one day, standing in a plentiful, fully-stocked market, I did not make a purchase. The reason is that my standards overshot the local markets I found myself in."
In other words, he found himself, in a veritable "poosy paradise," to be impotent.
"I tried to drug myself with alcohol to make the market more appealing. It used to work in the past, but no longer. Even after many drinks, my brain knows true beauty. Only when my boner supplants my brain, when I walk around the market with a priapismatic [sic] erection that is not stimulated by the external, can I proceed with a transaction."
Let's reword this, shall we? "Especially after many drinks, I am unaroused despite the abundance of attractive young women in my view."
"Please tell me how to go back to when my standards were lower, when I was not a machine for detecting aesthetic flaws in women, of spotting misshapen thighs, an extra dollop of adipose tissue over the stomach, eyebrows that weren’t properly groomed or even a voice one half octave too deep."
Gosh, I wish I could help here. Perhaps you need to entertain the notion that while sex without emotional connection can be fun, as a daily diet it is lacking essential nutrients. You have dedicated your entire identity, your life's very purpose, to detecting and exposing the flaws in women. This is the End of Your Game: no one real can now meet your standards, and the sexual act has become about as meaningful as gorging on a bag of potato chips.
When I look in the mirror, I see a physically flawed specimen, so why have I come to seek perfection? My brain demands it, and it is defeating my boner, putting me on the path of one day seeing sex as a biological nuisance instead of a pleasurable necessity.
Ah, my love! You are beginning to see the light: Sex is BOTH "a biological nuisance' AND "a pleasurable necessity." Is Little Roosh beginning to grow up?
Almost all women I’ve had sex with in the past I would have sex with today, but only on one condition: I wouldn’t have to put in a stroke of work. They would have come to me, touch me, disrobe, and then let me play with their bodies as I see fit. I would not put 10% of the original effort that allowed me to have sex with them in the first place. This must be the end of the player, when the development of his brain defeats the evolutionary demands of his penis, or is it the natural order of man, with the hyper-sexed player and his demands of never ending variety being the anomaly, the freak of nature?
Let's not get carried away here. You write as though you have actually had sex with a huge number of women, but we all know, don't we, that this is not exactly the case. You also write as though "the penis" makes "evolutionary demands" as part of the "natural order of man." In other words, your entire life philosophy needs a major overhaul. And I don't know whether that will sit very well with your readers.
The club is horrible and I want to leave. I pick the most beautiful girl in the venue, one who my brain liked, but she rejects me, not so softly. I can’t leave after having done just one approach—I can leave after two. I go through the motions on the girl next to me, cute but not extraordinary, just slightly above the mean of what I’ve had in the past. She likes me. She’s touching me, complimenting me. She is ready to do the work that I don’t want to do and so my brain allows me to proceed and I will have sex with her three days from now. Unless it’s easy or unless the girl in the top 0.01% of women I’ve seen in 25 countries and counting, I can’t seem to be bothered.
OK, OK -- you've convinced me! Sex addiction is a Real Thing.
Roosh is trying to tell his readership that he has had enough. Little Roosh Wants To Come Home. Don't make him keep trying to fuck strange women in strange countries! It's starting to tear at his very soul.
But what else can Roosh do? Sans the porno, does anyone care what Roosh does or says or writes? It looks like he will soon find out.
Over at ROK there is a review ("How to Build a Beta Male") of a short 2007 Danish film called "Dennis" (link to the film here). It depicts an evening in the life of a stolid, hypertrophied body builder who lives with his clingy, emotionally incestuous single mother. He asks a girl from his fitness club out for pizza. The evening doesn't end well, as the girl's friends make fun of him and he runs back to his mama's bed (literally). A little disturbing, a little sad, but I like to think that this was only Dennis' first attempts to strike out on his own. (In fact, the director Mads Mathiesen took Dennis on an extended and more upbeat adventure to Thailand in a feature length 2012 film called "Teddy Bear").
The character Dennis, and his enmeshed relationship with his tiny terrifying mother, seems to have struck a chord even with Roosh, and the discussion on ROK focuses on "beta/omega" males and how women create them. The whole concept of alpha vs. beta men is rubbish, of course, which is why the manosphere spends huge amounts of time just trying to define what these distinctions are. However, that there are a lot of lonely single men out there with undeveloped social skills is self-evident by the very existence of a PUA/game industry.
I hate to admit I recognize the Evil Mother in this film, but sadly I do. I know a few mothers, both married and single, who have turned their sons into their proxy "boyfriends," and it ain't pretty. Very close to home is my partner's ex, who has been undergoing a kind of emotional meltdown as their son (now nineteen) begins to flex his wings. The youth, whom I'll call Kirk, is still living at home, still cooking and cleaning for mom, still accompanying her on holidays, still tucking her in to bed when she's polished off the nightly bottle of wine.
I see hope on the horizon though. Unlike "Dennis," Kirk has great social skills. As a result, he has a lot of close friends, both male and female. In fact, he has recently acquired a girlfriend whom he texts constantly, much to his mom's dismay. He has a part time customer service job that he is good at and he goes to school part time.
Kirk and his dad (my partner) spend regular time together, sailing, attending musicals, cooking, building stuff, flirting outrageously with everyone they meet. Both are the gregarious sort for whom the expression "He never met a stranger" was coined. Kirk also seems to have inherited his dad's sunny resilience and unflappable self-confidence. From his father (a M2F transsexual), he has developed a spirit of tolerance and all-embracing compassion. It seems a bit ironic that it is his transgender parent's qualities that already make Kirk his own man.
I'm not really worried about Kirk even though I am sympathetic with the prolonged and often painful separation process he is undergoing. I stay on the sidelines, of course. We encourage his growing autonomy, but never disparage the attachment with his mom. He's going to be fine (and eventually, I hope his mother will be too).
A few months ago, I decided to have my tattoo removed. It is on my forearm, so it's quite visible during the warmer months, and I was tired of dealing with other people's reactions to it. When I had it done, almost thirty years ago, it seemed a beautiful and daring form of self-expression, and I enjoyed the attention it got. Now I am older, in many ways a different person: a person who no longer wants to wear her heart, literally, on her sleeve.
I underwent three laser sessions at a total cost of nearly $1000. Laser treatment is so excruciating that I cracked a molar gritting my teeth. The only mercy is that it doesn't take long. Unfortunately, although the outline faded a bit, the image didn't budge. The doctor told me I was wasting my money to continue. Because the ink had probably been adulterated with silicone, it was impervious to the laser. I was disappointed, but not surprised. In truth, I was relieved that I didn't have to undergo the pain or expense anymore. So me and my tattoo: we're pretty much stuck with each other, at least until the technology advances.
That's partly why "Erasing Hate," which depicts a former skinhead's odyssey back into Society, moved me on a visceral level. When Bryan Widner is offered a chance to have his racist facial, neck and hand tattoos removed courtesy of the SPLC, he undergoes eighteen months of literal torture. (Although he is under general anesthesia for each session, it is still an extremely painful process.)
The transformation is jaw-dropping, as Widner goes from menacing freak to an ordinarily handsome man.
What the documentary fails to explain is exactly why Widner, once known as "The Pitbull" of the Vinlanders Social Club, decided to let go of his racist identity. He credits his new responsibilities and joys as a husband and father. His wife, a former white nationalist herself, suggests the couple became disillusioned by the violent misogyny of the white supremacist subculture. The family is shown attending a Baptist church, but there doesn't seem to have been any one great spiritual epiphany.
I am left with the impression that the Widners just got tired of pretending that they believed in something they no longer believed in. Like many of us, they got smarter as they got older, and were hungry to live with greater integrity, and in greater harmony with the rest of their species.
Hate takes a lot out of a person without much return.
It's understandable that estranged adolescents will be attracted to hate groups, cults, and radical political activism, which seem to offer all the answers and solutions to Why Life Sucks. What I would like to know more about is how former members like the Widners manage to walk away. That question is not really explored in any satisfying depth in "Erasing Hate," but the story of one family's "redemption" makes this the ultimate "feel good" movie.
