It's the Stupid, Stupid

I have been reprimanded more than once over at manboobz for using "ablist" language by referring to some of the manosphere writers as "lunatics" or wishing that they would climb out of their basements and get "real jobs."  And today I note, with some chagrin, that someone on the bluepill reddit was offended that I dismissed the redpill boys as "morons" instead of more kindly conceding that they are "misled."  Well, in fact, I think they are both.  Morons are, after all, easily misled.

When I am in another forum, such as manboobz, I try to conform to the rules of that culture.  As a visitor, I show respect to the community over there by parsing my thoughts in ways that do not offend other members.  In my blog, I write exactly as I please, and I try to express myself as truthfully as I can.  Similarly, when I was in the middle east, I wore "hijab" out of respect to the mores of the culture that was hosting me, and did not consider myself a hypocrite in doing so.  In my own home, I am not obligated to avoid offense; I am obligated to live and speak my truth.  And I wear whatever I damn well please.  (Which today means a t-shirt covered in bird poop and riddled with cigarette burns, so there!)

Granted, my "truth" is based on my own life experience, on what I have been exposed to through reading, observing, reflecting, and just plain hanging out (as a white, bisexual middle-class woman) on this planet for nearly sixty years.  

And truthfully, I do believe that many of the New Misogynists suffer from personality disorders.  And I truthfully believe -- based on reading many, many, many comments -- that their followers are not only poorly educated, but suffer from real intellectual deficits.  

And, yes, I am somewhat contemptuous of people who do not try to better themselves.  Ignorance is not a sin, but willful ignorance is the greatest sin in my book.  If someone tells me I am wrong, and explains why, I try to exercise enough humility to consider that he/she might be right, even if that means I must (gasp!) be wrong.  Because experience tells me that when I am feeling most defensive is when I am most likely to be encountering an important learning opportunity. 

People who cling to ideas that are not only wrong, but also harmful to others, in the face of all evidence to the contrary (whether this is creationism, misogyny, denial of privilege, denial of climate change, or transphobia) are ignorant.  And that ignorance is either stemming from (1) some willfulness on their part, (2) pathological delusion, or else (3) plain old garden-variety stupidity.  

People who are not stupid, but who take advantage of others' stupidity in an attempt to gain power or prestige, are, on the other hand, bad. (Think Karl Rove / Dick Cheney and Bush Jr.)  One of the things I find most despicable about "Roosh" is that he appears to have started out in life with the requisite number of brain cells and support to have done something useful (he has a B.S. in microbiology), but he squandered his gifts because his need to be perceived as a "leader of men" (an alpha among betas) trumped his willingness to achieve success through hard work and self-discipline.  He's a very bad person who chooses to treat women badly and who encourages stupid men to follow their worst (most base) impulses.

There is so much cognitive dissonance in the manosphere, it makes my head hurt.  Sometimes I wonder if these leaders (i.e., Paul Elam) really started out believing the crap they now spew, or if they simply, over time, have acquiesced to their own lies.  Of course, in the hot house environments of manosphere blogs, where no received wisdom is challenged or examined, everyone's mind becomes duller, even the most critical (hostile) reader's. 

Look, I'm no brainiac either.  The worst thing about aging is that every day, I feel myself slipping, cognitively.  I struggle to keep abreast of the information and skills I need just to do my job, for example, and joke (?) that as soon as I retire, I will refuse to adapt to one more technological change.  Every day I am aware that I have less control over my future, so no wonder I find myself looking backwards.  I need to exercise more, both physically and mentally, just to maintain basic function.

If there's one reason I will quit following the manosphere, it is because I cannot afford to expose my already-deteriorating faculties to so much Stupid.  Ditto watching television.  In the same vein, if there's one reason I hate teaching remedial English, it is because exposing myself to so much bad writing is eroding my own writing skills.  Sometimes I find myself embroiled in some internal argument with, say, Bill Price's wife, or recoiling from some new horror from Matt Forney or JudgyBitch, and I wonder what the hell I am doing.  I should be taking a physics class or learning to crochet instead.

That's just how this tired old lady sees it on a cold, cloudy Friday morning. 
 

Time For a New Wardrobe?

A former student flagged me down as I was crossing campus.  As is often the case, I apologized because I couldn't remember her name.  "That's OK," she said.  "It was fifteen years ago, after all."  "But still, you remembered me," I said.  "I recognized your dress," she said.

Modern Day Chastity Belts

So this has been making the rounds, both in manosphere and feminist places:  rape-repellant sportswear.

It's been amply pointed out that whoever engineered this getup is absolutely clueless about rape prevention, since he/she thinks that it is merely a matter of preventing a penis from entering a vagina.  In the case of stranger rape, what are the chances of this saving your life at the point of a gun?  

Still, it made me chuckle a bit as I recalled how I devised my own "anti-rape" outfit while I was traveling solo from Kabul to Istanbul when I was 22 years old.  I basically wore a lot of tight layers:  underpants, layered with a pair of stout tights, and on top of that a rubber girdle.  Over this I wore a slip, a blouse, a sweater, a jumper dress, and a coat.  

Boy, it was hot in there.  Also, going to the toilet (overflowing squat toilets, mind you, on moving trains) took me about twenty minutes and gave me quite a workout.

However, I did encounter one incident in which my home-made rape prevention outfit was called into action.  Going through eastern Turkey, the conductor fetched me out of a "family" compartment where I was happily hanging out with a troupe of friendly Kurdish folks, and forced me into the back of the train, where an empty car had just been added.  He then proceeded to (attempt to) rape me.

He didn't have much luck.  He was a relatively slight man (probably about 150 pounds) and I was a stout woman (probably about 175 pounds), and I immediately employed a kind of passive-resistance technique, curling up into a ball on the seat, like a very large hedgehog might.  He couldn't even cop a good feel;  with all my layers of snug, thick clothing, groping my breasts and buttocks was probably as exciting as patting down a well-upholstered couch.  Frustrated, he began smacking me on the shoulders (fortunately not in the head, which was the only exposed part of my body), and then finally stomped out of the car, whereupon I immediately made a beeline back to the safety of my Kurdish family.

When I complained to one of the male members of the family, he asked me wearily what I had expected, traveling alone?  At least he couldn't blame me for the immodesty of my attire.  

There were a few such scary moments to come, however careful I was to avoid being isolated or surrounded exclusively by males.  The aggressors and would-be rapists were almost always men in positions of slight authority, i.e., hotel keepers, ticket agents, museum guards.  Women, if they were in the vicinity, were usually quick to come to my defense.

I considered trying to pass as a man, but my body type (in those days, distinctly pear-shaped) and childishly round face made that difficult to achieve in western dress.  And, as a Turkish friend later pointed out, would hardly have made less of a target of rape in those parts of the world. 

Fan Mail From A Squirrel

"Ella the Squirrel" asks me, "What future do you predict for the manosphere?"

Well, Ella, first let me say I am incredibly flattered (and bemused) that you would think I have any idea.  If you have read much of this blog, you'll realize that I --- like most old fogies  Baby Boomers --- am much more engaged in reminiscing about the past (specifically, my own past) than speculating about a future, especially a hypothetical future that I am, every day, less and less likely to be around for.

However, thanks for your question.  Let me haul out my reading glasses crystal ball, and give your query an honest crack.

Hmm...  I'm not seeing much here, Ella. The future looks cloudy, with a strong possibility of rain -- whoops, that's the local weather forecast!  Never mind... 

I'm still not seeing a damn thing, Ella.  Perhaps that means that the MRM (Male Rights Movement) doesn't have a future.  Maybe because it doesn't have a present?  By that I mean it doesn't exist as a movement at all, but rather as a symptom -- a symptom of severe post-Reaganomics social / economic distress.

As you no doubt know, the "manosphere" is a loose confederation of PUAs (pick up artists and gamers), MGTOW (men going their own way), and MRAs (male rights activists, or, as Paul Elam of "A Voice for Men" would have it, MHRAs).  Feminists and other intelligent, thoughtful-type people (who may not identify themselves as feminists, but, frankly, who are) clump them together, recognizing that they are linked by a common thread of misogyny (= fear and loathing of women) w/ a big round dollop of racism.

What also unites the followers of the "manosphere" blogs is that they are really, really unhappy (frustrated) + really, really stupid.   What unites the leaders of the "manosphere" (i.e., the writers of the blogs) is they are, for the most part, utter and abject social failures w/ outsized senses of entitlement, whose only experience of (or hope for) recognition is in being followed by... well, by a bunch of desperate morons.  (And these days recognition (for whatever reason) = success, hence the phenomena of reality television "stars" and the fact that news media have become little more than celebrity gossip mills.)

The leaders of these manosphere blogs (Roosh, Roissy, Price, Elam, Forney, et al.) eke out slender livings by pandering to an audience of losers.  And I call them "losers" not in anger, but in pity:  young (or developmentally delayed) white guys who are being cast out by a global economy that no longer values them, or rather, that is no longer willing to accord them privilege simply by virtue of being white + male.  

They perceive themselves as being "overtaken" by women and by brown people.  The reality is that they are, for the first time in thousands of years, simply being forced to compete with those "minorities" on an increasingly level playing field.  (Still, it has to be pretty scary. "Who stole my cheese?"  I mean, I can only imagine...)

I am not without sympathy.  But then, I've always been kind of a softy.

I was reprimanded over at manboobz for calling these guys "dinosaurs" who were heading for extinction (because I was being too hard on the dinosaurs, as I recall).   But I will resurrect that poor analogy, nonetheless.  The "manosphere" may survive, but the so-called "movements" it purports to be incubating will not.  Oh, I'm sure there will always be a place for lonely guys to give each other dating advice, just as (for some inexplicable reason) girls keep buying Cosmopolitan magazine.  Just cuz when we're young, we're horny and clueless...

The Men's Rights Movement in its present incarnation will go the way of the KKK and the John Birch Society, increasingly marginalized and irrelevant.  The legitimate grievances of the MRM (fathers' rights, acknowledgement of sexual and domestic abuse of men) will be subsumed under the broader liberal agenda (and I predict feminists doing a lot of the legwork in those regards).  Men Going Their Own Way?  There have always been a portion of involuntary celibates (of both genders) and "hermits" (of both genders), and nothing necessarily "wrong" with that: some people just aren't suited to "coupling", yet still enjoy rich and rewarding, albeit eccentric and somewhat lonesome, lives.

Of course, to a great extent, the "manosphere" is a phenomenon of the internet.  People are (I certainly am!) still thrilled to be able to "connect" to others with similarly "esoteric" interests.  The internet has made it possible for people with relatively uncommon conditions or identities to find one another, to connect, to share, and to build on that.  

I'm not trans, but my Best Beloved is.  How we envy the trans kids today, who have so much more information (and power) at their fingertips!  How different would my SO's life have been, had she known she was so far-from-alone in the world?  The internet has in this way fueled social justice movements, by bringing people together.

Of course, the dark side to this is that the internet also brings together people who are marginalized (or feel themselves to be unfairly disadvantaged) in a very different way, and provides them with a refuge, an answer.  In the case of the "manosphere" boys, that "answer" is scapegoating women (and minorities) for their troubles.  Paradoxically, the internet also isolates, and draws already-isolated people into cults. And ultimately does them great disservice.

But the "manosphere" is ultimately likely to remain primarily an internet phenomenon because it cannot stand up to public scrutiny.  In the court of public discourse, the New Misogynists will lose.  That explains why they are so ambivalent about straying outside of the "intertubes" into the "real world."  And why, aside from their kamikaze-style leaders, most members scrupulously avoid having their real identities known:  most people are not willing to commit social suicide.  

To publicly identify oneself with this stuff (as Roosh has, in essence, admitted on more than one occasion) = to burn one's bridges forever.  Elam and Price are old farts, so who cares?  On the other hand, Roosh and Forney are relatively young -- yet they have tattooed their bigotries and hatred onto their identities more permanently and damnably than any white supremacist ever tattooed his face.  There is as yet no laser surgery powerful enough to erase the evidence they have strewn upon servers across the world that they are, simply, terrible people... 

Returning to the "patriarchy" is a lost cause.  The followers of the manosphere, however much they may enjoy indulging in false nostalgia, know that the tide of the world is irrevocably turning against them, and the few of them willing to be swept out to sea for such a lost cause will be remembered with the approximate admixture of pity and contempt as we now accord the long-dead soldiers of the Confederacy: the poor, stupid, deluded bastards!

Does this answer your question?




 

Danielle Messia

I'm a cemetery freak, and any trip to Europe will have to include visits to Highgate in London and Pere Lachaise in Paris.  

Today I was watching the documentary "Forever," about people who visit Pere Lachaise, and was introduced to one of its residents, a singer I had never heard:  Danielle Messia.  Of course I immediately bought one of her CDs and have been listening to it all afternoon.  Although my French is pretty bad, I do love me a good chanson, and this one is damn fine: sad and brave and heart-breakingly defiant.

Why Is It Always a White Guy?

Salon featured an excerpt of Angry White Men by Michael Kimmel.  I hope it will help give me insight into the phenomena of MRAs, MGTOWs, and PUAs.

Seattle's First Singing MRA

May I introduce Uncle Fran?  He was a fixture on a popular local comedy show Almost Live, and quite possibly the first MRA folk singer.