The Manosphere: Reboot

What goes around, comes around

Hello! Welcome to Lover/Fighter (formerly known as Dear Clementine), where you’ll find unflinching feminist polemic and political analysis AND writing about the silly little things that make us all human. Like hope against all odds, love that yearns in spite of itself, and the tendency we all have to wait too long for avocados to ripen. While most of my work is free to read, this Substack is supported entirely by my paid subscribers. If you enjoy my writing and find it educational, I would deeply appreciate you becoming one of them! You can do so through this lil button here, and I will reward you by including little treats and bonus extras. I appreciate you x

Inspired by Soraya Chemaly’s recent piece on men’s cultivated ignorance (and the fact women have been writing about the violence of ‘the manosphere’ for years without receiving the same cultural attention given to male-helmed documentaries), I’m sharing a complete chapter (fittingly titled ‘The Manosphere’) from my 2018 book, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship.

Buy it here!

A couple of notes, for readers under the age of thirtyish:

Before ‘woke’ was co-opted from Black vernacular and used to deride anyone with a shred of moral fibre, human-haters used the term ‘SJW’ or ‘social justice warrior’. That its usage has essentially disappeared is a good reminder that language (and propaganda) is constantly shifting, and that empathy and respect for collective care has always stoked the ire of people invested in maintaining systems of oppression.

Most of the men referred to here have disappeared from public discourse. This tells us a couple of things:

Firstly, that the rhetorical lifespan of misogyny’s most prominent figureheads is limited. Before Andrew Tate, there was Milo Yiannopoulos. Before Milo, there was Gavin McInnes (the racist, transphobic, deeply misogynistic co-founder of VICE magazine who went on to found the Proud Boys). Somewhere in the midst of their reign, Jordan Peterson slithered his way into the zeitgeist and briefly hypnotised dum-dums with the most ludicrously illogical nonsense you can imagine.

Misogyny’s line of snakeoil salesmen stretches back through histroy for thousands of years, and it will probably stretch on just as far into the future. Even using Tate as an example of contemporary villain feels dated. While his name hasn’t passed into obscurity just yet, his successors are already beginning to claim chunks of an audience share he once briefly commanded outright.

Secondly, we are focusing on the wrong problem. Misogyny is the ideology that upholds patriarchy. Without men to breathe life into it, the system collapses. Patriarchy relies entirely on men’s willingness to submit themselves to a hierarchy of power - but it obfuscates the existence of this hierarchy by establishing an ‘inferior’ set of people over whom the male class can collectively rule. Some men take to this unearned authority like a pig to shit, and have no problem admitting how much they enjoy exerting such sadism over women.

But as Marilyn Frye argues, most men prefer to flatter themselves as being more generous than that. Theirs is a benevolent form of leadership, a moral obligation made necessary due to women’s infantile nature and general incapacity. If anything, their willingness to act as women’s caretakers both makes and proves their heroic nature. That women insist on contradicting this supposedly innate biological call to subservience is somewhat inconvenient for the garden variety misogynist, but easily passed off as yet more evidence of our functional incompetency. This attempted annihilation (as Frye calls it) of female subjectivity is essential to the success of patriarchy, because the artificial reality that patriarchy asserts as being immutable to the human condition cannot withstand women’s scrutiny. To put that in less floral language, women are biologically wired to submit to male authority and we would all understand that if we just shut the fuck up and did what we were told.

The poison spread by the goblins living in the manosphere might feel scary, but it’s just patriarchy’s most audacious claims expressed in shocking ways. Men (starting from childhood, sadly) are conditioned by patriarchy to join forces against women as a diversionary tactic from the real threat to their well-being: patriarchy itself, and the myriad, deeply insidious ways it exerts itself against us all. Bombastic misogynists who gesticulate wildly with the soft hands of those who’ve never built a road in their life are not inventing a new kind of misogyny for the masses.

In fact, it’s the exact same brand of misogyny once expressed by Aristotle, who claimed women were deformed men created as a by product of defective sperm. The only difference between them is that Aristotle continues to be revered throughout the world and is widely referred to as the inventor of formal logic.

The point is, misogyny is a very well established virus always in search of a host and a pathway to transmission. The methods through which that virus is transferred change in accordance with social trends, but the disease itself is easily identifiable. And feminists HAVE been effective in working to destroy it, and we should acknowledge the extensive success we’ve had in regards to that longstanding battle. Is the war over? Not even close. But contrary to popular opinion, I actually don’t believe the problem is “getting worse”. I think it’s become more visible (and certainly more unashamedly gross), but there’s always going to be an explosion of pus when you’re lancing a boil. Rather than sink into despair over the feverish enthusiasm today’s men still have for joining the homoerotic clubhouse of misogynist circle jerking, we should feel encouraged by the fact more and more people find their antics a mixture of repugnant, pitiful and plain old confusing.

---

Hey there! Keep scrolling down to read the chapter I’ve shared from Boys Will Be Boys. I wrote this in 2018, and I think it provides a fascinating little time capsule into the repetition of these issues. Paid subscriptions are what assists me to keep most of my writing accessible to everyone, and I deeply appreciate your support.

If you can’t afford a monthly subscription but would like to leave me a tip, you can get my paypal here!

---

‘The Manosphere’, from Boys Will Be Boys

A few months after the release of my first book, I was invited by the University of Melbourne to deliver a lunchtime lecture on the subject of rape culture. When I arrived at the library, I was surprised to learn that the organisers had arranged for a security guard to be present. Apparently they had received a complaint from a men’s rights activist who was upset that a man-hating feminazi terrorist (I’m paraphrasing) had been considered an appropriate speaker. He was concerned for his safety, he told them. He had reason to believe that I might try to hurt him, because of my known vendetta against straight white men. (His fears were not ill-founded. It’s a well-known fact that I am amassing a collection of straight white men in the crawl space beneath my house, and when I have properly trained them they will be released back into society with a terrifying new skill set that includes knowing when their bedsheets need washing and being able to appreciate a gentle joke at their expense.)

My contacts at the university reassured the worried fellow that he would be perfectly safe. However, if he was concerned, then they recommended he consider staying far, far away from the venue where I would be speaking.

It probably goes without saying that the security guard was for my benefit.

Having just had a baby and hence being in a slightly more vulnerable state of mind than I would normally be, I was grateful for the organisers’ consideration. Unfortunately, I can’t say I was surprised that they deemed it necessary. It’s not uncommon for me to turn up to events and hear straight away about the various people who took issue with me being there and the things they’ve done or said to make their anger about it known. Men who don’t even live in the same state (and frequently not even in the same country) flock to Facebook event pages to leave abusive comments to organisers, links to defamatory blog posts about me and images of satirical tweets I’ve written that are presented as evidence of my violent hatred of the world’s male population. Despite their fury over what they see as feminist and SJW attempts to ‘censor’ the voices of MRAs (men’s rights activists), they sure do pull out all the stops when it comes to trying to fuck with your shit.

Before it was cancelled, I was due to speak at the 2018 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne. The post announcing me as a speaker was inundated by thousands of angry men, all eager to share their incandescent rage that I might have anything to do with a movement that rejects the concept of deities. There’s a stark irony in the fact that so many men who count themselves as atheists are also furious about women who refuse to bow down and worship them. I was told that a number of rape threats had had to be deleted from the post’s comments section, because of course the best way for men to disprove a feminist’s central world view that ‘world is fukt’ is to gather together and threaten her with sexual violence.

The threats made against feminists are not always explicitly violent in nature. Sometimes, they amount to a concerted effort to destroy your financial opportunities. In 2017, I published a Facebook post announcing I had just signed a contract to write this book. That post was shared by Avid Reader, a bookstore in Brisbane with a wonderful reputation for supporting writers, artists and the tenets of basic human decency. Almost immediately, Avid Reader’s Facebook page was bombed by one-star ratings accompanied by reviews blasting them for being ‘anti-men’. The source of the backlash was quickly traced to an online group named Anti-Feminism Australia, a noxious community of MRAs whose leader seems to be particularly fixated with me. In addition to trolling businesses that support my work, the group has circulated a petition calling for my book contract to be cancelled, trawled through my Instagram archives to find photographs to publish under the headline who is the father of clementine ford’s baby? and suggested I should be investigated by authorities for abusing my son. After Avid Reader shared my post, AFA posted a link to the store’s business page with the caption: ‘Avid Reader Bookshop and Cafe in Brisbane are promoting Clementine Ford’s man hating book. Be sure to leave them a one star review for promoting the hatred of men.’

AFA have had success with this approach before. A Dymocks bookstore on the North Coast of New South Wales closed down their Facebook page after being flooded with one-star reviews by AFA members also complaining about their ‘promotion’ of me. Afterwards, AFA wrote a celebratory post declaring: ‘A big thank you to everyone who helped expose Dymocks Charlestown bookstore for promoting Clementine Ford’s book. As a result of many 1 star reviews and comments they have removed their page! That’s what we call a success!’

The post went on to outline their motivation more clearly: ‘We need to keep exposing and shaming any business or organization that promotes Clementine Ford or gives a platform [sic] to preach her hateful ideology. If she is rejected by enough businesses she will have no where [sic] to go and will eventually fade away. Remember this misandrist makes a living out of hating men.’

Well, now. I would hardly call it a living. A stipend, perhaps. A bit of pocket money at the most. But not a living. If only it paid that well!

AFA’s attempts to troll Avid Reader backfired spectacularly. Not only did the bookstore’s social media manager respond by thoroughly ridiculing them, prominent members of Australia’s literary scene (some of whom were actually Avid Reader staff alum) rallied others to leave their own glowing five-star reviews. By the end of the day, Avid Reader’s page likes had increased by a few thousand and their rating hovered at roughly 4.8. As an added bonus, Dymocks Charlestown reinstated their Facebook business page and very quickly re-established a four-star rating too.

It’s childish behaviour from men who feel angry because they aren’t taken seriously, but tantrums such as this in response to my work are so common that it seems almost normal now. I once missed a phone call from the (now former) editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. The voicemail he left sounded so grave and serious that I was convinced I was about to lose my job. I phoned him back in a panic, preparing myself for annihilation, when he said there was something he needed to discuss with me.

‘We’ve received some quite concerning correspondence in relation to you,’ he began.

‘Oh really?’ I replied, scanning my memory to see if I’d done anything illegal recently—like how you drive past a police car and suddenly freak out that you might have stolen the vehicle you’re in and somehow forgotten it.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s a photocopied picture of you with some pretty nasty things written on it. Look, I don’t really feel comfortable reading them out loud to you, but I wanted you to know that we’re taking this very seriously and we’ve forwarded it on to police.’

Adrenaline suddenly flooded through my body and I burst out laughing.

‘Is that all?!’ I exclaimed. ‘For a minute I was worried something really bad had happened!’

It’s an odd feeling to find yourself explaining to one of your most senior employers that a handwritten letter calling you a whore is actually on the tamer end of the scale when it comes to your daily fan mail. It’s an expression of aggressive misogyny, sure, but it’s also nice to see that there are some people who still know how to use a pen. The vast majority of the abuse I receive is meted out in the same default fonts favoured by social media platforms and email accounts, and it gets a bit samey. You want to see the flourishes of someone’s personal calligraphy as they call for you to be throat-raped or fucked by a donkey, and I naturally offer humble admiration to anyone who continues to persevere with the Australian postal service.

I think some people are surprised by how easily I deal with the torrent of abuse sent my way but, honestly, it’s because it’s difficult to imagine a more pathetic group of people than the men who, for various reasons, have decided to spend their lives telling women on Twitter that a good hard cocking would cure them of their bitterness. And they could get one, too, if they weren’t so fucking fat!

Imagine the world’s most unappealing assortment of choco­lates, with flavours like ‘urinal cake’, ‘unwashed dick’ and ‘silent fart in an elevator’ all crammed into a plastic tray that’s covered in the slick grease of an unwashed barnet. Men’s rights activists, internet shitlords, teenage boys who spend too much time on conspiracy websites, Mark Latham—they might each have their own specific grievances and concerns, but if you threw them in a cauldron (you probably have a few floating around) and boiled them all down together you’d find that their flavours were fairly indistinguishable.

At least, this is the impression gleaned after spending even the barest amount of time surveying the internet’s ‘manosphere’. Drawing together users from 4chan, 8chan, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, independently run blogs and the sewerage pipes that connect the lot of them, the vast toilet system that makes up this manosphere can be accurately summarised by three words: angry, paranoid and entitled.

In his book Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, David Neiwert refers to MRA websites in particular as being ‘like wildlife refuges for misogynist ideas’. As he notes, ‘They call feminists “a social cancer,” and assert, “Feminism is a hate movement designed to disenfranchise and dehumanize men.”’ To illustrate his point, Neiwert references a blog written by an MRA with the moniker Alcuin. Alcuin argues, ‘Just as the Nazis had to create a Jewish conspiracy as a way to justify mass slaughter, so feminists have to create patriarchy as a way to justify mass slaughter of innocent unborn, and the destruction of men and masculinity. Rape is now a political crime, not a crime of sex or violence.’

Alcuin appears to have made his blog private now, but I managed to track down a post in which he rails against the characterisation of MRAs as ‘angry’ and ‘hate-filled’. MRAs are kind creatures, he argues, but the ‘feminist-run media’ has painted them in a bad light. Instead, he says, ‘A lot of articles and comments simply offer observations based on experience. A guy finds out that western women prefer alphas, sleep around easily, turn their love into hatred at a moment’s notice, use shaming language, are sweet only when they want something, fuck their boyfriend’s best friend, walk out on their family or, more common, kick the husband out. Why shouldn’t he warn others about this behaviour? It’s a public service, actually.’

It’s misogyny, actually.

Despite their solid standing in the world’s legion of Angry Men, MRAs are a slightly more worrisome breed of creep because they use some of the genuine issues men face as a sort of Trojan Horse via which they can sneak a far more insidious agenda into the public discourse. MRAs are capable of recognising the harm that patriarchy does to men—the increased risk of suicide, the shunting of their emotional selves, the substantial impact that violence has on men’s lives—but instead of working with feminists to dismantle this system of structural oppression, they’ve identified women as its source. The curious logic of the average MRA holds that feminism and the fight for women’s liberation is not only unnecessary (because women obviously have more power and privilege than men because we can have sex whenever we want—yes, really, this is an argument that some of them earnestly expound), but that every harm identified by feminism can be countered by an equal and opposite harm being enacted by women against men. Misogyny and misandry are treated by MRAs as interchangeable, with the latter being widely viewed as ‘just as bad, if not worse’. According to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So it is that MRAs view the battleground of sexism. Every time a bell rings, a she-witch somewhere commits a radical misandry against an unsuspecting man.

Yes, Ben Folds said it best when he observed that, ‘Y’all don’t know what it’s like / Being male, middle class and white.’

Central to the MRA argument is their insistence that women experience some kind of disproportionate ‘female privilege’ that actually provides them with more advantages than men. In the MRA handbook, female privilege includes the following: being able to speak to men without being considered preda­tory; being able to have sex ‘whenever you want’; being able to decide whether or not to continue with a pregnancy (as opposed to ‘having a child forced on you so that a scheming bitch can rob you blind for the next eighteen years’); being able to have sex with a man and then later change your mind while accusing him of rape; having the right to leave a marriage because the courts will automatically favour you in a custody dispute, despite this not having been the case for over twenty years; not having to pay for dinner or drinks. Female privilege is also receiving, as the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist George F. Will put it in the Washington Post, the ‘coveted status’ of being a rape survivor on a college campus and all the advantages that come with that (‘Colleges become the victims of progressivism’, 6 June 2014).

With the exception of that last charge, which is so despicably offensive that it’s almost impossible to believe it came out of an actual person’s brain, all these examples of ‘female privilege’ seem less indicative of a rising gynarchy poised to crush whimpering men with a gigantic, comfortably shod foot than they are things some men either want or don’t want women to be able to do (say no to sex; pursue sex; have an abortion; have a baby; report sexual assault; get a divorce). It is not ‘female privilege’ for a woman to have the final say over whether or not she grows a foetus inside her for nine months before birthing it and then raising it. Having done all those things (the third is an ongoing project), I can assure you it’s not a fucking frolic in the park. While we’re at it, can we all agree that it’s a curious bit of cognitive dissonance to argue against paying to support children you don’t want in one breath while ranting about how the legal system helps women steal them from you in the other? And by the way, the belief that women can just walk out of their house and fall on a dick of their choosing is patently false. For example, I have never fallen onto Oscar Isaacs’ dick and it’s not like I haven’t tried.

The argument that the fight for gender equality has swung ‘too far’ to the other side is simply ludicrous. One woman is still killed by her partner or ex-partner every week in Australia. The World Health Organization estimates that 30 percent of women worldwide who have been in a sexual relationship have experienced some form of violence within that partnership. The two issues most integral to women’s equality—reproductive autonomy and financial independence—are still not considered legally sacrosanct for the overwhelming majority of women in the world today.

And we’ve got men (and some women) not just complaining that feminism is subjugating men, but claiming that it’s gripped them in a vice so tight they need to stage their own movement?

I’ll let you in on a little secret. The feminist mafia in Australia is trying to erode men’s rights, and we’ve had some success over the years. Like the right for a man to rape his wife. Destroyed that. Or the right of men alone to determine who rises to political leadership. We nailed that one too. Or how about the right of husbands to consider their wives as their physical property, and for a husband to have the right to commit his wife to a mental asylum (as many did) as a means of securing a divorce, leaving him free to marry another (often, younger) woman? Yep, got rid of that. So referring to ‘female privilege’ (particularly in a world where, in some places, it’s still considered a privilege when girl babies are even allowed to live) as some kind of nefarious threat to the psychic wellbeing of men isn’t just offensive, it’s also dangerous. It provides a focal point of blame for the frustrations of men who feel they’ve somehow been denied all that was promised to them, and it can have terrifying and often violent ramifications for the women in their lives.

****

You’ll notice that a good deal of the angst and fury of Angry Internet Men is wrapped up in sex: specifically, women who will not have it with them. More criminal than their rejection, though, is the fact that these women are obviously having sex with everyone else, because they are trashy sluts who have had a parade of cocks in them, so who do they think they are to be so fucking discerning?

It’s a stance eagerly embraced by Return of Kings, established in 2012 as ‘a blog for heterosexual, masculine men’ with the aim to ‘usher the return of the masculine man in a world where masculinity is being increasingly punished and shamed in favour of creating an androgynous and politically correct society that allows women to assert superiority and control over men’. Articles published on RoK boast such titles as: ‘Women should not be allowed to vote’, ‘Young girls are better than older women’, ‘The Intellectual inferiority of women’ and ‘27 attractive girls who became ugly freaks because of feminism’.

As the founder and face of Return of Kings, Daryush ‘Roosh’ Valizadeh* has become something of a hero to the insecure, occasionally deranged men who make up his fan base. He claims to have coined the term ‘neomasculinity’, a wackadoo ideology that basically states women are only valuable if they’re young and fertile, and that men prove their value by fucking them. Roosh started his career as a pick-up artist (or PUA), teaching men how to hook up with women by asserting their ‘alpha’ status and borderline raping them.

*2026 update: in news that will surprise very few people, Roosh has since pivoted from PUA world to become a reformed Man of God. He is one of a growing number of misogynists seeking community - and presumably an audience - via baptism into the ultra Orthodox Russian church. More at We Hunted The Mammoth here.

That may sound like a hyperbolic accusation, but you need only look to his own work to see how close it is to the truth. For a long time, Roosh’s primary source of income came from his Bang! series, a collection of travel guides aimed at men who wanted to screw their way around Europe and South America. I say ‘screw’, but they’ve been widely condemned not just for encouraging rape but for recounting Roosh’s own numerous experiences as a rapist.

In Bang Iceland, Roosh writes:

While walking to my place, I realised how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated. I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do.

As David Futrelle, author of the anti-MRA website, We Hunted the Mammoth, wrote in 2015, ‘Sex with women too drunk to consent is considered rape in Iceland as well as in the US.’

In Bang Ukraine, Roosh brags about the time he turns an initially consensual sexual encounter into rape. (Warning: the following excerpt contains a graphic description of sexual assault.)

I was fucking her from behind, getting to the end in the way I normally did, when all of a sudden she said, ‘Wait stop, I want to go back on top.’ I refused and we argued . . . She tried to squirm away while I was laying down my strokes so I had to use some muscle to prevent her from escaping. I was able to finish, but my orgasm was weak. Afterwards I told her she was selfish and that she couldn’t call an audible so late in the game.

So, to recap, his sexual partner told him to stop and he not only refused, he also ‘had to use some muscle’ to hold her down and ‘prevent her from escaping’. And after he finished raping her, he called her selfish.

Neomasculinity, hey?

Roosh is not an outlier in the MRA world, even though he publicly distances himself from the movement. The belief that men have been stripped of their natural roles as ‘leaders’ (and the rewards that come with it, which always, always include access to nubile young women’s bodies) is fundamental to the MRA philosophy, as is the conviction that they must work towards restoring this balance. That’s why they embrace philosophies like that of the Red Pill movement (MRA dork code for ‘taking the Red Pill’ à la The Matrix, and ‘seeing’ the true reality of the femofascist dictatorship under which we labour), pick-up artistry and ‘returning’ to those glorious days of yore in which they were ‘kings’. It’s why they’re drawn to the work of Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones from InfoWars and even (perhaps especially) Donald ‘The President’ Trump, all of whom give them licence to say what they want to whomever they want and ignore any and all consequences. Feminism is cancer! Women are whores who think everyone should pay for their birth control! Grab ’em by the pussy—they’ll let you do it!

Those who are drawn to this kind of rhetoric ignore the fact that patriarchy has generally never favoured men of their calibre. It may soothe them somewhat to fantasise about (or even act on) taking what they want from women through violence or force, but their real gripe should be laid at the feet of patriarchy itself. Unfortunately, this would require actual work and introspection. It would require challenging other men. Far easier (and less intimi­dating) to pretend that uppity women are the problem.

The lack of wholesome, positive communities for men in a society that so often denies raw sensitivity to them can’t be underestimated. Opportunities for bonding are limited, and too many of the ones available require the degradation of somebody else. Men who frequent MRA websites (or PUA ones, or basic shitlord communities whose only goal is to out-edge each other) derive an enormous amount of satisfaction from trolling the people they believe are somehow denying them power. They argue that women manufacture rape claims, and so express their anger over this by coordinating with each other to threaten to rape them. They are pathologically afraid of women encroaching on the spaces and communities they feel belong to them. Women who transgress these rigidly enforced boundaries can be doxxed (internet slang for documents being deliberately leaked), their home addresses, phone numbers and private details published online to make the world just that much more terrifying for them.

When game developer Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest received positive reviews in 2013, she began to receive hate mail almost immediately. But the harassment escalated when Eron Gjoni, Quinn’s bitter ex-boyfriend, published an online rant alleging she had slept with a journalist in exchange for a positive review. As it turns out, the journalist in question had never written the review—but Quinn may have slept with him, and in a community that pulses with image-based exploitation (more commonly known as ‘revenge porn’), slut-shaming and aggressively entitled masculine dominance, that appears to be the more unforgivable crime.

The unwarranted backlash spawned #Gamergate, a thinly constructed Twitter ‘movement’ that pretended to be about ‘ethics in gaming journalism’ but, as prominent feminist games and media critic Anita Sarkeesian observed, very quickly revealed itself to be a ‘sexist temper tantrum’ more concerned with silencing critics of misogyny in gaming culture and keeping women out completely. Sarkeesian had already inspired the wrath of gamers all over the world when she used a Kickstarter campaign to create her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games YouTube series, and gamergaters wasted no time in ramping up the abuse. Video game developer Brianna Wu was likewise targeted after she posted a series of tweets about gamergaters, quipping that they were ‘fighting an apocalyptic future where women are 8 percent of programmers and not 3 percent’. Quinn, Sarkeesian and Wu were all doxxed by furious gamergaters, each receiving dozens of death threats and/or rape threats. In September 2014, an anonymous message was posted to 4chan, that community of juvenile ‘edgelords’ feverishly committed to their campaign of abuse and silencing.

‘Next time [Quinn] shows up at a conference we . . . give her a crippling injury that’s never going to fully heal . . . a good solid injury to the knees. I’d say a brain damage, but we don’t want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear us.’

A month later, a Twitter user named ‘Death To Brianna’ (@chatterwhiteman) tweeted at Wu, ‘I’ve got a K-Bar and I’m coming to your house so I can shove it up your ugly feminist cunt.’ It was part of a series of tweets that included threats like, ‘Your mutilated corpse will be on the front page of Jezebel tomorrow and there isn’t jack shit you can do about it,’ and, ‘If you have any kids, they’re going to die too. I don’t give a shit. They’ll grow up to be feminists anyway.’

But remember, it’s about ethics in gaming journalism.

Roosh may have been peripheral to this, but the festering community of rage-wankers he comes from shares a lot of similarities with #Gamergate. Chief among them is the unbridled hatred of women who not only refuse to know their place but seem oblivious to or disregard the place to which men are entitled as a birthright. Shortly after @chatterwhiteman publicly threatened to rape and murder Wu, Roosh published a post on Return of Kings pledging support to the #Gamergate movement and its efforts to destroy what he saw as a common enemy (people with a moral conscience, I guess). He wrote:

Gamergate is an exciting development for our sphere because an external group is going up against our enemy. While gamergate is not our movement, I have chosen to aid them as much as possible. I won’t take any credit for their victories, but I sure will enjoy the satisfaction of having my enemy defeated.

The idea that women (and the men who support them, and collectively fight for a better, more equitable world) are perceived as The Enemy is fundamental to understanding the mindset of the men who move through the manosphere, whether as out and proud MRAs, Red Pillers, 4channers, territorial gamers or lonely pick-up artists. They have been successfully conditioned by the patriarchal lie that says ‘real men’ are defined by their ability to dominate others and, in turn, command their respect. For some of them, their inability to embody these so-called ‘masculine’ values is felt as a source of deep shame. Others will exhibit naturally bullying traits, comfortable with the abuse of others and confident in their rule as Supreme Alpha Male.

The risk of the manosphere is in the way toxic behaviour and rage become weaponised against the people perceived to be standing between men and their ‘biologically gifted power’. Roosh dehumanises women to an audience of thousands, encouraging the belief that we exist only as vessels for men to plunge their dicks into and only then if we happen to be young and fertile enough to ‘deserve’ them. To developmentally arrested men desperate to assert themselves as strong and virile, it’s a pretty intoxicating message. Gamergaters nerd out over the integrity of the gaming space while secretly enjoying the fact their pretensions to some kind of larger moral goal allow them to get away with (and get off on) treating real-life women the way they treat the background character sex workers in Grand Theft Auto.

The vast majority of these men will swear blind that they don’t hate women at all; that your accusations of misogyny or entitlement are ad hominem attacks; that they love women (the good, nice ones); and that death/rape threats posted on the internet are always just a joke. Is it their fault if women can’t take a joke?

Easy things to say but if you really want to see toxic masculinity in action, you only have to look at how these same men excuse and sometimes even make martyrs of the men who actually do commit these acts of violence in real life.

After all, it’s obvious, isn’t it? If women would just be nicer to men, then men wouldn’t be forced to hurt us.

---

It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls have never been attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me. I’m the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men, instead of me, the supreme gentleman. I will punish you all for it.

These words were spoken as part of a video titled Retribution, filmed and uploaded onto YouTube on the night of 23 May 2014. The creator of the video was a twenty-two-year-old man named Elliot Rodger. Retribution was just one of many videos in which Rodger raged against what he saw as the ‘injustice’ of his virginity and lack of sexual prowess with women, but it was the one that outlined most clearly his violent plan for revenge.

On the day of retribution, I will enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB, and I will slaughter every single spoiled stuck-up blonde slut I see inside there. All those girls that I’ve desired so much, they would have all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them. While they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes, I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true Alpha Male.

Shortly after posting ‘Retribution’, Rodger embarked on a massacre that saw him take six lives and seriously injure thirteen others. After fatally stabbing his three male housemates, he drove his black BMW through the Californian college community of Isla Vista and began shooting random members of the public. A stand-off with local law enforcement ended with Rodger shooting himself in the head.

Investigations after the massacre found that Rodger followed several men’s rights channels on YouTube and was an active member in one online MRA community. In addition to Retribution, he also uploaded a 137-page manifesto titled My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger. The manifesto is an exhaustive recount of Rodger’s life, each grievance and outrage described in meticulous detail. As numerous others have said, the clinical language is reminiscent of that used in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, a novel about a similarly privileged young psychopath with a homicidal hatred of women. The fictional Patrick Bateman may not have had Rodger’s sexual ineptitude, but he was likewise obsessed with measuring his worth as a man against the achievements and possessions of other men in his social sphere. And like Bateman, Rodger had a very clear idea of what he thought it meant to be a successful ‘alpha’ male. This dangerous belief system was fostered and indulged by the MRA and hyper-masculine communities he immersed himself in online. Despite growing up with money, Rodger was obsessed with winning the lottery. ‘I mused that once I became wealthy, I would finally be worthy enough to all the beautiful girls.’

Being considered ‘worthy’ by ‘beautiful girls’ is a repetitive motif in Rodger’s manifesto. At one point he writes, ‘It’s all girls’ fault for not having any sexual attraction towards me.’ Shortly after, speaking about his friend Dale, he laments bitterly, ‘Women were never cruel to him. They gave him sex and love his whole life.’ Chillingly, he observes towards the end of his tirade that: ‘Women’s rejection of me is a declaration of war, and if it’s war they want, then war they shall have.’

Rodger’s online footprint included frequent visits to the website PUAHate, a community of men committed to exposing ‘the scams, deception, and misleading marketing techniques used by dating gurus and the seduction community to deceive men and profit from them’.

On paper, pushing back against the creepy and misogynistic fug of pick-up artistry sounds like a community service. In practice, PUAHate was a kvetching place for men who had poured thousands of dollars into learning how to bed beautiful women only to wallow in the same swamp of rejection. They’d paid their money and applied the techniques, so where were the women they were promised? Fucking hot guys, apparently. What a bunch of shallow, superficial cunts.

At least, this is how the members of PUAHate saw it, seemingly unaware of the double standard. As Katie J.M. Baker wrote for Jezebel in 2012, ‘Isn’t it a tad hypocritical for PUAHate posters, who seemingly think they deserve a bevy of beautiful ladies ready to have sex with them on command at all times, to criticize women who date attractive guys?’

PUAHate no longer exists (the site was closed down shortly after the massacre in Isla Vista) but at its heart it represented what’s known as the ‘incel’ community. Short for ‘involuntarily celibate’, incels are predominantly straight, cis men who feel they are being forced into celibacy against their will because women refuse to have sex with them.

Yes, really.

So gripped by this idea of no-sex-as-oppression are incels that misogyny abounds. In their world view, women are not fully formed humans with rights to autonomy of their bodies and desires. Instead, they are cruel banshees who exploit a supposedly unfair hierarchy of attraction and need to purposefully humiliate and exclude the ‘average’ and ‘below average’ men who fail to live up to its superficial standards. Although it’s not unique to them, there’s a curious narcissism to incels that reflects the simultaneous strength of their self-hatred and self-obsession. Instead of just being ignorant of their existence or vaguely turned off by them, women are instead thought to be keenly aware of incel desperation. Denying sex to incels is perceived as more than basic rejection—it’s an act of humiliation, deliberately waged and cruelly enjoyed by women who devote a lot of time to thinking about how much better they are than these men. To put it bluntly, incels behave as if they’re the biggest piece of worthless shit floating right smack bang in the centre of the universe.

Basically, we’re looking at a turducken of toxic masculinity, entitlement, self-obsession and rank misogyny.

Don’t be tempted into feeling pity for incels. While some of them may be genuinely clueless chaps unable to figure out a way to overcome loneliness and social awkwardness, most are furious at women for (as Rodger lamented) refusing to ‘give’ them love and sex. Instead, they go for ‘Chads’, the jocks and d-bags (of course) who get laid whenever they want despite being arseholes because women are FICKLE BITCHES. Incidentally, and to literally nobody’s surprise, a number of the posts on Anti-Feminism Australia are rooted in incel ideology. In February 2018, a post appeared with the title ‘Why Aussie men face dating inequality’. The author defends men who get angry or lash out following rejection, writing:

‘Can you really blame those men? They probably just got rejected for the 100th time because they weren’t in the top 10% of men that women go after. That is, men who are muscular, tall and rich.’

Yanno, ‘Chads’.

In an unchecked community, this furious male entitlement to sex (and the subsequent rage felt at being denied it) feeds off itself. It isn’t uncommon to discover incel threads of men discussing the ethics of having sex with dead bodies or the imperative a just society has to make rape legal. (In his manifesto, Rodger also wrote, ‘Women should not have the right to choose who to mate with. That choice should be made for them by civilized men of intelligence.’) In the incel world, shared fantasies of revenge homicide are not the exception; they’re the norm. When news of Rodger’s massacre hit incel communities, he was widely heralded as a hero. Even today, fan pages exist praising his actions—and no, not all of them are run by morality-free edgelords trying to get some 8chan cred. Some are genuinely agitating to follow in his footsteps.

Others would argue that venting about revenge doesn’t necessarily mean a person will act on it. This is undoubtedly true. The vast majority of people who unleash angry tirades online are probably not going to go on a homicidal rampage. But enough of the people who have perpetrated massacres began by building an online portfolio of rage, indignation and pointed commentary outlining if not their exact plans, then something that arguably formed the basis of them.

In April 2018, a young man named Alek Minassian commandeered a white van in Toronto and drove it into a group of pedestrians. He was arrested and charged with ten counts of murder, and multiple further counts of attempted murder. Facebook later confirmed that a profile linked to Minassian had published a post shortly before the attack. It read:

Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!

Not too long after Minassian staged a mass murder in Toronto, a young man named Dimitrios Pagourtzis took a pistol and a shotgun into his Texas high school and opened fire, murdering eight students and two teachers. It later emerged that his first victim, Shana Fisher, had spent the previous four months rejecting Pagourtzis’ ‘aggressive’ advances. Her mother told the Los Angeles Times that, ‘a week later he opens fire on everyone he didn’t like, Shana being the first one’.

A month before Rodger slaughtered six people in Isla Vista, a sixteen-year-old Connecticut teen named Christopher Plaskon fatally stabbed his classmate Maren Sanchez, also sixteen. When police officers arrived, he announced, ‘I did it. Just arrest me.’ It soon emerged that on the morning of the murder, Plaskon had asked Sanchez to be his date for the upcoming junior prom. Sanchez and Plaskon were friends, but she had recently started dating another boy at the school. When she declined his invi­tation, Plaskon pulled out a knife and plunged it into her chest. Afterwards, he threw her down the stairwell. Apparently, Sanchez had tried to alert the school’s administration to Plaskon’s violent tendencies but they had failed to act.

This is the terrible bind in which women find themselves within a toxic cultural mindset that prioritises men’s ‘need’ for sex and affection over women’s right to determine what feels unsafe or undesirable for us. When we listen to our instincts and complain about male behaviour, we’re accused of seeing things that just aren’t there. Stop making men feel bad! They’re allowed to ask you out! How will the human race survive if men can’t ask you out anymore? Stop doing that wishy-washy girl thing and just say no! What’s the worst that could happen?!

As we know, there is a lot of ‘worst’ that could happen. We know it because we know what misogyny and male entitlement writ large looks like. The denial of its existence is what allows violence against women to flourish, from incessant street harassment to sexual assault to murder. This violence is the shadow under which we live and the threat we fear. It’s what allows a young man to believe so fervently that he is ‘owed’ female attention and adoration. And it’s what makes him decide to punish those who deny it to him. This isn’t theoretical. It’s proven time and time again by the actions of men who choose to enact violence against women they believe have emasculated them.

Shortly after Isla Vista, a Tumblr site appeared called When Women Refuse. The project was established as a direct response to the massacre, particularly the subsequent claims that violence of its kind was ‘an isolated incident’. When Women Refuse documents in blistering, brutal, devastating detail the violent retaliation that is often inflicted on women when they reject men’s sexual advances. From image-based exploitation to beatings and, in all too many cases, even murder, the sheer number of men who seem unable to handle being denied access to women of their choosing is staggering.

There’s Christopher O’Krowley, who shot and killed his co-worker, Caroline Nosal, because she didn’t want to pursue a romantic relationship with him. There’s Raelynn Vincent, whose decision to ignore a man catcalling her from a car one night resulted in the stranger stopping his vehicle to pursue her and punch her in the face hard enough to break her jaw. There’s no shortage of irony in the fact that women are also told to ‘just ignore street harassment’ or even respond positively to it because ‘it’s a compliment, if anything’. Tell that to Janese Talton-Jackson, who turned down Charles McKinney at a Pittsburgh bar. As she left for home later that night, McKinney followed her and fatally shot her in the chest. And what about Yan Chi ‘Anthony’ Cheung, an Australian pharmacist who pled guilty to one count of poisoning to injure or cause distress or pain after his victim and colleague, Pamela Leung, observed CCTV footage of him drugging her water and coffee at least twenty-three times over the course of a year. Leung had previously confronted Cheung over his sexual advances, which included ‘[brushing] past her breasts, buttocks and hands’. Cheung retaliated by drugging her with medications like Phenergan, doxylamine, Endep, Seroquel and Deptran.

A few months before he killed six people in Isla Vista, Rodger posted on PUAHate:

‘If we can’t solve our problems we must DESTROY our problems. One day incels will realise their true strength and numbers, and will overthrow this oppressive feminist system. Start envisioning a world where WOMEN FEAR YOU.’

Newsflash. Women already fear men, with good reason. It isn’t just because some of them, like Rodger, believe their masculinity is anointed by putting their dick in a vagina. It’s because beyond the terrifying incel community, there are people whose pity outstrips their rationality when it comes to socially awkward men who are ‘shackled’ by their virginity or fumbling attempts to connect with women. And here’s where we come to the most frightening aspect of incel ideology and misogynist retribution against women viewed as the root of men’s problems: it’s that altogether too many people are able to recognise the abhorrent nature of Rodger’s actions while also expressing sympathy for what must have driven him to them.

He did a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing—but if women had just given him a chance then he wouldn’t have been so angry. Rejection is hard! Humiliation is harder! Sexual frustration is the hardest! I’m not saying it’s women’s fault necessarily when men take all these things out on the world, but maybe if women weren’t so picky about who they bone then he wouldn’t have had to. You know?

On Return of Kings, Roosh condemned the massacre but still found a way to blame it on American women, who, according to him, ‘have been encouraged to pursue exciting and fun casual sex in their prime with sexy and hot men as a way of “experimentation”.’ As ripper as that actually sounds, it’s apparently bad because ‘until you allow and encourage all men to get sex by some means, these massacres will be more commonplace as America’s cultural decline continues’.

Roosh is a particularly awful person, but the view of women as sexual gatekeepers extends well beyond his PUA rape corner of the internet. Men ‘need’ sex in a way that women don’t, and not being able to access it makes them go cuckoo. It’s our job, therefore, to release their pressure valves once in a while . . . or on our heads be it.

Not every boy will turn out like Elliot Rodger, Christopher Plaskon, Alek Minassian, Dimitrios Pagourtzis or even Roosh, but these men are also not outliers in an otherwise unproblematic system. They are frightening end points on a spectrum of behaviours that, even at the less homicidal end, still conditions boys and men to feel entitled to women’s attention and bodies as a means of establishing their masculine power. The concept of ‘alpha masculinity’ is almost entirely destructive to both the boys who are raised to measure themselves against it and the girls who are expected to succumb to it. We do a disservice to young men (even the pitiful ones) when we make excuses for them or trivialise their participation in these subcultures. We need to disrupt the messages that are filtered through every aspect of culture: messages that tell young men their masculinity is defined by how well they command the people around them, particularly the women; messages that frame women as rewards for men who compare favourably to other men, that have for generations shown fictional male heroes ‘winning’ women at the end of their quests.

In his brilliant article ‘Your princess is in another castle: Misogyny, entitlement, and nerds’, writer and self-proclaimed nerd Arthur Chu reflects on the lessons boys are taught from pop culture about what they ‘deserve’. He writes:

. . . the overall problem is one of a culture where instead of seeing women as, you know, people, protagonists of their own stories just like we are of ours, men are taught that women are things to ‘earn,’ to ‘win.’ That if we try hard enough and persist long enough, we’ll get the girl in the end. Like life is a video game and women, like money and status, are just part of the reward we get for doing well.

Again, not every spurned man will respond to his own unexamined rage by grabbing a gun or a knife or even just a well-organised online harassment squad and slaying whichever woman has pissed him off that day. But enough of them do for us to know that it’s a problem. We don’t stop it by isolating them from each other and passing their deeds off as the result of mental illness or depression. We understand it by recognising it as part of a culture of learned entitlement in which the logical endpoint for falling short is violence and retribution.

We change it by going back to the beginning, and starting again.

---

One last invitation to become a paid subscriber, then you can be on your merry way!

If you can’t afford a monthly subscription but would like to leave me a tip, you can get my paypal here!