So earlier this month the feminist writer and serial-misogynist-annoyer Lindy West announced that she was leaving her job at Jezebel “to work on personal projects. (I am also available for freelance. Hire me!)”
I took this to mean that she was leaving her job at Jezebel to work on personal projects and do freelance work, because this is something that writers, especially talented writers with a lot of options, sometimes do.
Over in the Manosphere, though, the fellas had a rather different interpretation, which went something like this HA HA THE FAT SLUT GOT FIRED HER CAREER IS OVER WE WON YIPPEEEEEEEEE!!!
Heartiste – real name James Wiedmann – is a proudly racist, woman-hating “pickup artist” guru known for advocating manipulative and often quite abusive “game” techniques to give men the upper hand in relationships and in the dating market. These run the gamut from emotional abuse – what he calls “dread game,” an elaborate portfolio of gaslighting ploys to keep women feeling insecure and off-balance – to straightforward physical abuse – slapping women “when necessary” to assert “alpha male” dominance.
Now he’s suggesting that wannabe lotharios borrow some tips on how to “game” women from the Duluth Power and Control Wheel, a widely used violence intervention tool designed to fight abuse, not provide a blueprint for it.
The Duluth Wheel highlights some of the most prevalent kinds of abusive behavior. Heartiste mines its descriptions of abuse for dating tips, claiming to find in it “a few curious nuggets of anti-feminist truth about relationships and how to keep them going.”
In his recent post, Heartiste goes through some of the descriptions of abusive behavior on the Duluth Wheel – and recasts them as handy tools for would-be “alpha males.”
Step 1) Post an 800-word rant on the Red Pill subreddit starting with the sentence “Women are shit.”
Step 2) There is no step 2.
TRUE STORY.
I’ve seen the rant, and now you can see it too. If you’re not masochistic enough to click on that link, I’m not going to subject you to the whole thing. It contains so much pure misogyny per square inch that reading it wore me out. So I’m just going to post some giant chunks of it, make a few jokes, and then take the rest of the day off.
So what do you do when a fondly held fantasy crumbles? That’s a question that both Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen have had to ask themselves this past week, when something they both desperately hoped was true – that Anita Sarkeesian had lied about contacting the police about death threats she’d gotten on Twitter – was shown convincingly to be false.
[NOTE: The original video on Davis Aurini’s YouTube channel was taken down shortly after the post went up. So I’ve embedded the version that is, as of this moment, up on the director’s YouTube channel. I”d recommend that you download this for your permanent collection.]
Ok, so I’ve been working on a post about the latest ridiculous doings of our friends Davis Aurini and JordanOwen42 — the not-so-dynamic duo who’ve been desperately begging for money to make their Totally Serious documentary about how evil Anita Sarkeesian is. But then I watched this, and it’s too good not to post on its own.
This is Lust in the Time of Heartache, a short “philosophical” film written and produced, and just posted on teh Interwebs, by Mr. Aurini. I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to be a comedy, but I was laughing at it from beginning to end.
There’s nothing about this film that’s not terrible and ridiculous, from the choice of fonts in the title sequence to the names of the characters as revealed in the closing credits.
Where even to start in criticizing this mess? The, er, “acting?” The pretentious, pseudo-philosophical voiceover, delivered by Mr. Aurini himself? The shrill, frantic — yet somehow also meandering — music that plays almost continuously from beginning to end? The ludicrously unconvincing fight choreography? The ill-fitting suits? The evo psych? The dawning recognition that this whole thing is meant to depict how Aurini sees himself in our “fallen” world?
The fact that this ten minute film credits a “parkour consultant?”
I’m going to borrow a couple of lines from Pauline Kael’s famous review of the legendarily stinky 1970 film Song of Norway because they offer a pretty fair assessment of this one as well:
The movie is of an unbelievable badness. … You can’t get angry at something this stupefying; it seems to have been made by trolls.
She means “under the bridge”-style trolls, not the modern kind.
Oh, and the sound is awful, too. NOTE: Dialogue is supposed to be louder than the background noises.
Anyway, just watch it. It’s only ten minutes long. And definitely stay for the final credits. You’ll see why.
But hey, don’t take my word for it. Read this glowing review, from some dude on YouTube:
Excellent writing that encompasses the transitions from one cinematic style to the next. At first I was concentrating on the technical problems and lackluster performances, however, after about 5 mins in, the pacing kicked up a notch. Well done, sir.
Feminists made me a misogynist: from Masculinist India
Congratulations, A Voice for Men. You are having an impact upon the world.
Or at least upon one organization in India, a truly reprehensible group called Masculinist India, which has adopted the histrionic rhetorical style, and even some of the specific arguments, advanced by AVFM and other North American Men’s Rights groups for a series of graphically challenged “masculinist” memes posted on Facebook and on the group’s web page. Masculinist India has even adopted AVFM’s preferred nomenclature, describing its members as “Men’s Human Rights Activists.” They are of course the complete opposite of “human rights” activists, campaigning instead against basic rights for women.
The influence of AVFM and other Western Men’s Rightsers can been seen again and again in Masculinist India’s posts and memes, which have all the sophistication and subtlety of Chick Tracts.
The “feminists made me a misogynist” logic of the meme above, for example, echoes the argument made in “Hate Bounces,” an influential MRA screed by MRA/MGTOW elder “Zed,” and by countless other MRAs including former AVFM Number Two John Hembling.
Other memes borrow not only the arguments of Western MRAs but recycle the same tired stock photos, like the angry woman in this meme, a favorite amongst Western MRAs.
Where no man has gone before — and no girls allowed.
The man behind The Black Pill blog – formerly known as Omega Virgin Revolt – would like to go his own way, he really would. But he’s been feeling a bit stymied on that front, because no matter where on earth he might go, it doesn’t seem far enough away for him.
In a recent post, he looked at some of the solutions that have been suggested for discerning Men Going Their Own Way like himself, and found them all a bit wanting.
So here’s a new perspective on the whole “should we allow women to take over the tech industry or any other industry” question, courtesy of the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog. Yes, women, if you want to run a business or an industry you apparently have to check with the dudes at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog first.
In a post titled “Why We Don’t Want Women Taking Over Tech Or Any Other Industry,” the ironically named “Reality forever” explains that women shouldn’t be allowed to run anything because, well, women are terrible and apparently love making everyone go to meetings:
The long wait is over! #GamerGate Bingo is here! Well, here, actually. Go there for your very own randomly generated bingo card, and get playing!
Also, I can edit the list of phrases that’s being used to make the cards, so if you have ideas for new phrases, or you want to improve the wording of one that’s already there, or you think one of them should be removed for being redundant or too obscure or too obvious or whatever, let me know in the comments!
