There's a certain irony that Taki's Magazine has elected Matt Forney to write a piece castigating liberal media reactions to the Santa Barbara shooting. After all, this is a guy who feeds, literally and figuratively, on the outrage of normal decent people "liberals" and "feminists" by writing the same kind of vile, misogynistic and racist screeds that apparently helped warp Elliot Rodger's worldview. Forney predictably attempts to distance himself (and his manospherean cronies) from the site Rodger's is reported to have commented on: It isn't us, it's them! He even manages to insinuate that anti-misogynist sites such as David Futrelle's We Hunted the Mammoth and the Southern Poverty Law Center were somehow culpable for failing to warn the public of the real danger of PUAHate.
I mean, just look how spiteful and scurrilous the PUAHate boys were, trying to dox and intimidate Matt's pals (never mind that is precisely what Matt has been doing for the past few months). Of course, PUAHate may have been at odds with pickup artists, but they were very much part of the "manosphere" at large, that loose confederation of malcontents that are united in their shared hatred of women and minorities. The distinctions between these factions and these individuals are virtually insignificant to anyone outside their 'sphere. Whatever their purported aims, whether a return to patriarchy, or a pussy in every pot, the blame for the disappointing ways of the world is always to be placed squarely at one source: the autonomy of women. And they are willing to employ the most violent language and imagery to achieve dominance over those uppity western females (who really haven't understood their rightful place since either 1920 or 1420, depending on who's fantasizing talking). How dare the SPLC name Matt Forney and his friend Roosh's blogs as "hate groups." Didn't they see that PUAHate was just as bad? (Waah, waah, it's so unfair!) "Could it be that feminists ignored PUA Hate out of a fatuous “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic? If so, their negligence just cost at least six people their lives."
Not bloody likely. Even for a paranoid manipulator of facts like Forney, this is a bit of a stretch. If PUAHate was overlooked before the shootings, it is because it was a relatively unknown site that did little to grub for attention from the mainstream, unlike Forney himself -- an indefatigable and shameless self-promoter who basically lives and breathes on twitter, re-tweeting his admirers and his critics with equal relish -- or other, more organized or widely read hate sites like A Voice for Men,Vox Day, Heartiste, etc. ad nauseum. PUAHate was just one of literally hundreds of misogynistic blogs, with the sole distinction that it hated the "game gurus" who had failed to deliver them the promised sex-on-demand they'd paid good cash money for, almost as much as it did the women whose favors they furiously insisted they were entitled to.
Show me a comment left by Rodger on PUAHate that suggests he was ready to commit mass murder, and I can show you scores more on Return of Kings or The Spearhead that are even more ominous.
All of these sites are the same, and they're all horrible.
Even a dedicated follower of the manosphere like Futrelle cannot possibly monitor them all.(And it's hardly necessary to do so, since they are all croaking in unison in the same fetid bog.)
Typically, I rely on the manosphere's tweets to keep me abreast of what feminists are saying. Seriously, they do a phenomenal job of keeping track of the feminists, not only the big up-and-coming voices, but also the most obscure. Back before they doxed me, I don't think I'd ever had more than twenty readers at a time -- but one of them was Mattie, who apparently read everything.
Suffice to say, they take their enemies opponents verrry seriously, which is a measure of both their thirst for recognition and their paradoxical fear of being exposed. They're always "collecting names" and compiling dossiers in the form of accusatory tweets. But the upside of their paranoia is that they are always a good place to start whenever you want to know who's-new-in-the-zoo of young female media presences. I'd never even heard of Elizabeth Plank, for example, until Roosh twittered, "I would not have shed a single tear had misandrist & anti-white racist @feministabulous been one of Rodger's victims."
It's hard for me to imagine even lachrymose Roosh shedding a genuine tear for anyone except Roosh (in which case, I expect he can shed a bucket). But my imagination was piqued -- who was this radical feminist that had Roosh's blood up? -- so I moseyed over and took a look.
Nothing very inflammatory about her post, unless you think it is "misandry" or "racism" to point out -- and support statistically -- that mass murderers are overwhelmingly white males with huge reservoirs of entitlement. (In other words, the very same demographic group that composes the "manosphere.") And that we, as a society, need to start addressing misogyny as a systemic disorder.
It would appear that men
aren't entitled to sex; women aren't entitled to safety. One might be
led to believe that fact brought us together.
No one, regardless of gender, is "entitled" to sex however much we may desire it; yet all people have the right to safety. Now go back to nursing your whisky and mourning your childless, uncoupled state, sir... If one positive thing comes of the unfolding tragedy in Santa Barbara, it may be that the manosphere is subjected to more public scrutiny and widespread social condemnation. In the wake of the news that UCSB student Elliot Roger participated in the forum puahate, other New Misogynists have scurried to deflect negative attention onto that site. One blogger has even pondered if puahate and manboobz are somehow in cahoots with one another to bring the manosphere down. Or with the Southern Poverty Law Center. As if.
He talks of keeping the "haters" out, as if their network of angry blogs were some sort of gated community. In fact, while the accessibility and anonymity of the internet has allowed the "manosphere" to blossom, it also works against it, by effectively rendering the "movement" it claims to represent transparent and its "leaders" accountable for the ideas they promulgate. From my point of view, there is little difference between puahate and any number of other misogynistic watering holes. All of these sites are social cesspools that are brewing the same poison, whether it is Roosh ("Women are lubricated holes for my pleasure") and Return of Kings, Paul Elam ("I want to fuck their shit up" or "Bash A Bitch Week"), Bill Price or Vox Day ("Rape is our marital right"), or Matt Forney, who famously wrote that women needed to be beaten because "it's the only way to make them behave better than chimps," and who posted a piece about how men could get away with rape by murdering their victims and dismembering their bodies (oops, that was "satire," wasn't it?).
The manosphere is an aggregator of isolated, angry, socially maladjusted and mentally disturbed men -- and the (handful of) women who love them. It creates an echo chamber that allows these men to delude themselves into blaming women and minorities for their own inability to adapt to a changing world of greater diversity, social inclusion and economic competition. It breeds real, physical violence by promoting violent language and violent fantasies of retribution. Their impotent dreams of achieving dominance will inevitably end in the deaths of others; the blood will be on their hands. And the world will keep turning.
It seems like a parody: A good looking, articulate UCSB student sitting in his glossy black BMW, announcing plans to "slaughter" the popular blondes who have rejected him because they preferred to bestow their favors on the alpha "bad boy" losers instead of "a perfect guy... a supreme gentleman" like himself. Except, unfortunately, it is real. Anyone who follows almost any part of the manosphere (he was allegedly an active participant on sites such as bodybuilding.com and puahate.com) will recognize the cold rage and the overweening sense of entitlement Elliot Rodgers displays as he justifies the murders he is about to commit. Yes, he will be "a god" and they will die "like animals" through this act of "restorative retribution." Too bad he didn't think of starting his own blog instead of buying a gun. It would probably have been a big hit and then he could have had all the groupies he wanted.
Facebook has banned Matt Forney's fan page and is preventing posting to his personal account. It wasn't my doing, BTW. They must have gotten tired of dealing with the avalanche of complaints from young women still outraged about his "self-esteem" post months ago. And he's promising to leave the country (at least temporarily). Fortunately for those students with more money than brains, the Internet will allow him to plagiarize essays from anywhere in the world.
One of my favorite past times has become to identify the trolls on Return of Kings. The website is riddled with them, and the more blatant they are, the more fervent are the responses they elicit from the ROK's moronic simple-minded fan base. Return of Kings is basically the equivalent of the World Wrestling Federation. It doesn't matter if this stuff is real or not; it only has to deliver a predictable form of entertainment. In his (?) post, "The Moment I Saw Women For What They Really Are,"
"Fry Koskenin" retreads the ground so familiar to Roosh and the other
New Misogynists: the utter perfidy of the female sex. In this particular story, our hero
experiences his epiphany about the truly vile nature of women when a "fiery
fit" former girlfriend coerces him into having (anal!) sex with her
despite his suffering from a slipped disk: "My back, buttocks, and pelvis felt like they
were filled with loose razor blades during every tentative thrust."*
To top it off, this succubus proceeds to deride his unsatisfactory
performance before storming off into the dark night: "And then it occurred to me that I had brought a
stealth predator into my sanctuary, and when I was most vulnerable to
boot. She was not my ally and not my friend, and certainly not when my
needs diverged from her most frivolous whims."
Hey, when did the desire for sex become a "frivolous whim?" According to the "game" artists' version of evo-psych, we are all driven by the relentless messages emanating from our loins (because reproduction).
Fortunately, there were positive lessons to be learned: "Now I laugh about all of this unnecessary strife, and
take a certain sick joy in knowing that it’s unwise to ever fully relax
in a woman’s presence.. It has liberated me from so many burdensome concerns, and for that I am
grateful. You just can never fully trust what women are thinking or
might do... And a bit of unease is always
prudent when you know that a vampire is watching you sleep." I
would bet a significant amount of money (in my case, say, $100) that
not only is "Fry Koskenin" not "a regular guy," but is not a guy at all,
despite claims to be "a 41-year-old nuclear-engineer-turned-writer ... fond of intelligence, achievement, danger, and
beauty, and not much else... [who] loves his motorcycle and despises
communists." The only part of Fry's post that is probably true is that he/she does have "an exemplary education."
This is not Matt Forney-level trolling. This is far too
carefully crafted. And this particular troll has even gone to the
trouble of creating a fake website. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Is it possible that she was just trying to play Marilyn Monroe to his Jack Kennedy? MM was said to have mischievously remarked, "I think I made his back feel better" after one of their trysts in the early sixties.
Although we're only halfway through the quarter, one of my students has already failed another class because she plagiarized an essay, apparently in a very blatant and deliberate way. She sat in my class last week, tears rolling down her face. I felt sorry for her. I was also disappointed. I address plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty in every class, warning students of the consequences if they are caught. I tell them the story of the late Edward Kennedy, who was suspended from Harvard for convincing a classmate to take his Spanish exam for him. Of course, his father quickly bought his way back in, but for the rest of his life, despite a long and distinguished senatorial career, this incident remained a blemish on his character. In fact, in retrospect, it seems to have foreshadowed a personal and public life that was plagued with ethical lapses. If my non-native speaking students are particularly vulnerable to accusations of plagiarism, it's not because they are more "dishonest"; it's because they don't have enough control over English to "dumb down" the language of their plagiarized sources so that they can be plausibly passed off as their own efforts. And when they "google" their material, they somehow fail to consider that instructors can also "google" it. Which is how the hapless student (above) was busted. Part of the problem, from my angle, is that too many assignments practically "invite" students to plagiarize: the topics are too general, too over worked, and do not require students to do any more than synthesize other writers' ideas. The failure of instructors' imaginations in designing writing assignments is a big part of the problem. But here's an example of academic dishonesty that troubles me even more: There is a tenured writing instructor who habitually teaches 20 credits a quarter. That's a stunning load in terms of marking. How does he manage it? Easy! He farms out his students' papers to an outfit that, for a modest fee, reads and grades the papers for him. It's common knowledge that he does this. Perhaps his dean does not consider his behavior unethical. (His students complain it takes a long time to get their work back from him, but no wonder; he probably sends the stuff in batches to India.) I find it infuriating. I also wonder if I'm a bit of a chump. What is keeping me from recruiting my own cadre of "assistants?" Marking grammatical errors isn't difficult, nor does it require any qualifications beyond a command of English sentence structure; it's just tedious. Being relieved of reading and marking student papers would free me up to focus on the parts of teaching I do enjoy (e.g., story telling, pontificating), allow me to moonlight, and probably double my income. Furthermore, there are some (bored housewives looking to supplement the income from their monetized blogs, unemployed English majors) who might view this kind of piecework as "an incredible job opportunity."
