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."
First off, is there anything more mind-numbingly boring than listening to women excoriate themselves for their "sinful" and "addictive" behavior around food?
Second,
I can't count the number of times I have been "the fat girl" in the group listening to the (relatively) "thin" girls compete for who has the most disordered eating. I used to believe that these women were merely being insensitive when they nattered on
about their shameful food-related confessions. As I get older, I
recognize that this is, in fact, how "mean girls" (of any age) put each other down.
Twenty years ago, the massage school where I had been newly hired to teach sponsored a buffet brunch at one of Seattle's nicer seafood restaurants. I loaded up my plate with a little of everything that looked good (and trust me, it all looked good). I happily plopped myself down at a table with two other young women, both of whom had been my instructors, and for whom I still felt a certain measure of awe. I was thrilled to be acknowledged as their peer. Neither gave me more than a cursory acknowledgment. In fact, one immediately turned to the other and said, "Do you want to split a muffin with me?" I looked down at my plate, heaped with crab, smoked salmon, cheese, eggs. A giant muffin, too large to perch on the plate, sat conspicuously off to the side with a pat of butter. Taking advantage of the school's singular act of largesse, I hadn't thought I should offer to "share" my booty with anyone. Not that the two ladies were inviting me to. "This food is positively sinful," one of the instructors declared, picking at her salad.
"I know," the other commiserated. "It's terrible." Terrible? It was delicious! Plus it was free! What's not to like here?
It suddenly occurred to me that I probably weighed about as much as the two of them together. And suddenly I had lost my appetite. The two instructors clucked on in this vein for the next thirty minutes, studiously avoiding eye contact with me. I hadn't been snubbed like that since I had tried to crash the popular kids' lunch table in high school. I tentatively tried to enter the conversation a couple of times, but they weren't having it. It slowly dawned on me that they weren't "overlooking" me; they were engaged in a subtle conspiracy to humiliate me. Why? Simply because they could. Not surprising I lasted only two quarters as a massage school instructor, which was a shame in a way, because I was probably the most knowledgeable (certainly the most academically qualified) teacher there, and was well-liked enough by some students that I was invited to speak at their graduation ceremony.
Now I'm a mouthy old broad who would call these ladies on their shit (in the nicest possible way, of course).
I'm so sick of women who use food and weight as an opportunity to put other women down.
Maybe if enough women see this Amy Schumer sketch, they will learn not to act like this. Can women ever stop using food intake and weight as an arena in which to compete with one another?
When I'm not tearing my hair out, my students' papers sometimes make me laugh. Last week I showed my class the "Blackfish" documentary, which examines the case of Tillikum, a captive orca known to have killed three people so far. I also gave my students a couple of articles to read, and then asked them to "take a stand" on the question of whether orcas should be held in captivity. One student, perhaps conflating "Blackfish" with "Moby Dick," concluded, "If we don't start taking whales seriously, they will kill us."
This film marked Bo Derek's debut, BTW, but what the heck were Richard Harris and Charlotte Rampling doing in this ludicrous farce (besides looking fabulous)? Another student, carried away by SeaWorld's PR, declared, "Orcas should be kept in captivity, where they are served restaurant-quality meals and much mental stimulation." Come to think of it, why can't I live at SeaWorld?
And yet another student, also a hardcore SeaWorld fan, mused tenderly that "People and orcas need to be together... because of love."
