Women: If you wear skirts here, some MRAs think you should be punished for it
So we, as a society, have “peeping tom” laws to protect people who might unknowingly expose themselves to the creepy peepers of, well, creepy peepers who get their thrills from seeing and sometimes photographing strangers revealing more than they meant to.
It would seem reasonable enough to consider surreptitiously taken “upskirt” photographs as violations of peeping tom laws. But not in Massachusetts: On Wednesday, the Supreme Judicial Court in that state ruled that upskirt photographs are legally ok, as the laws there are written to apply only to protect victims who are “partially nude,” not those who are merely wearing short skirts.
In the wake of the ruling, legislators and women’s rights advocates are saying that the laws — written before cell phone camera were ubiquitous — need an update.
Naturally, this has some of the dedicated Human Rights activists in the Men’s Rights subreddit in an uproar. How dare anyone challenge their sacred right to take pictures of women’s panties on public transportation without their consent!
“Wearing a skirt has consequences!” What a perfect slogan for a “movement” that is about little more than tearing down half of humanity in the name of, what, a man’s right to be a peeping tom? Put it on a t-shirt, Demonspawn, and show the world the kind of creep you are.
So Twitter is a bit depressing today. One of the trending hashtags at the moment is #LiesToldByFemales and, yes, it’s the misogynistic cesspool that you might expect, a vast assortment of not-very-original stereotypes about women — sorry, females — and their allegedly lying ways. The female-bashing tweeters — some of them female themselves — aren’t even terribly original in their complaints, and most of the tweets seem to be reworkings on a few very basic themes.
We have the good-old fashioned trope of the female-as-narcissist, forever obsessed with how she looks — and given to lying about how much work she puts into her appearance.
Sometimes I scour the internet for hours in search of material for this blog. Other times it just plops right in my lap. Today, it plopped, in the form of a new visitor to this blog by the name of J.S., a 52-year-old married farmer (he said) who brought with him some very old-fashioned ideas about love and romance and how men can best access the “secret gardens” of the pretty ladies of the world.
the ‘secret language’( sub and non-verbal communication), the dating game, or how very attractive women go about choosing which men they let into their secret garden and which ones they don’t.
The primary lesson he tried to impart: that the “secret garden” is a little bit like Fight Club: The first rule of Secret Garden is that dudes can never ask to enter Secret Garden.
The pickup artist scene is a haven for manipulative assholes — and manipulative asshole wannabes — so it was hardly a surprise to see a post on Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog last week defending some of the internet’s most ubiquitous manipulative assholes: trolls.
Embracing rather than challenging a recent study that found internet trolling “correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism,” RoK’s runsonmagic suggested that such “dark triad” traits can serve leaders well and that trolling, handled expertly, can be a form of “provocative art.”
“Trolling can actually contribute to our culture by revealing our societal triggers and emotional weaknesses,” he wrote.
Emotionally secure people are not harmed by others perspectives, genuine or trolling. … If you feel like you are being trolled or become angry at something you read online, see if there is a way you can learn from the experience and be grateful for it.
Well, Roosh’s fans have just undergone quite a learning experience, but they’re not feeling very grateful.
Roosh, either in custody in Poland or posing in a jail cell for some publicity stunt. Photo from Roosh V Forum
UPDATE: Increasingly implausibleposts from Tuthmosis, the source of all the “information” about Roosh’s alleged arrest, make it pretty clear this was a hoax.
Tuthmosis and I conspired to prank the internet that I was in jail. The picture used is from the German DDR museum. …
I expect many of you to be annoyed, and I hope Tuth and I didn’t betray your trust with the prank, but the security and viability of the forum was never compromised and the picture was just too good not to use. Credit goes to Tuth for his “new rules” (http://www.rooshvforum.com/thread-33639-…#pid667804 ), which—if you were in on the joke—was quite amusing. I also did not expect the story to be as believed as it was, since there are many flaws in the picture that suggest it’s not a real jail cell, but on the other hand, the prospect of me going to jail is not unexpected. If you are pissed off, I recommend you read Tuth’s bulletins to see the humor in the prank (the “bill me later” option was my favorite).
I do sincerely appreciate the thoughts of concern of my Polish imprisonment. Now of course I really will be jailed and no one will believe it because of this false jailing accusation. In case of a real “involuntary absence” from the forum, I trust Tuth to continue moderation efforts. For many years he has selflessly helped me maintain the community we have and not actually gone mad with power.
On a positive note, we managed to troll the tub of estrogen Manboobz and his readers.
Interesting that the people who fell the hardest for his hoax were his own fans. Also, I’m not sure that me posting something that essentially said “here’s something that looks a bit fishy that’s being reported by someone who may well be lying” really counts as “being trolled.”
ORIGINAL POST:
Before I go into any details here I want to say that all of this is coming from Roosh’s forum and hasn’t been confirmed in any way. So treat it with however much skepticism you deem appropriate. For all I know this could be some bizarre publicity stunt to promote Roosh’s blog and his reprehensible Return of Kings website.
But according to Roosh’s pal “Tuthmosis,” who says he is getting his info from a friend of Roosh in Poland, Roosh has been arrested after some sort of violent “confrontation.” Here’s his description of what allegedly happened:
Roosh had a violent “confrontation” in Poland
He was apprehended by Polish authorities
He’s being (or already has been) charged with some sort of crime and being held in jail
In a followup comment he offered additional details about the alleged incident:
Confrontation was with Paul/Andre, his gypsy stalker
Didn’t start violent, but escalated quickly
Witnesses pointed to Roosh
There were “serious injuries”
Roosh is definitely being charged with something
In response to some skeptics who suggested this might all be a hoax, he wrote:
I too was hopeful this was some sort of joke–even if it meant me having egg on my face–but I just got a message from a second source. This is a guy who does back-end work for ROK and I’ve personally met, so I have no reason to doubt him.
Roosh is definitely being charged with a (serious) crime. The gypsy apparently took a nasty beating. What’s more, witnesses (who may be acquaintances of the gypsy) claim that Roosh was speaking epithets at him and may have used an object to strike him. I don’t know what the Polish laws are, but these circumstances apparently add to the severity of the crime. I got a couple of calls out to see what his legal prospects are, but the language barriers and time difference are making information hard to come by.
Naturally, Roosh’s fans being a bunch of racist assholes, the alleged ethnicity of Roosh’s alleged stalker led to some lovely generalizations about “gypsies” and this comment, from “Walter White,” who suggested that anti-“gypsy” bigotry might just get Roosh off the hook:
Scary stuff. I’ve travelled extensively in the region, and gypsies aren’t well thought of in Eastern Europe. Sounds terrible, but that’s the way it is. I guess an analogy for Americans would be like if a white dude got into a fight with a black guy in the 1940’s in the South. As wrong as it may be, the white guy would be given the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Roosh will get the benefit of that with regard to a fight with a gypsy. Then again, he’s not a Pole – so he’s not gonna get much “home team” advantage.
I guess we’ll see, huh?
That is, assuming this isn’t all a publicity stunt.
Odd that Roosh appears to have emerged apparently unscathed from such an allegedly violent confrontation. His hair isn’t even mussed up.