Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

is the mens rights movement the marks

yes, no

the mens rights movement is apparently what happens after being burned by the pua pyramid scheme

so I guess yes and yes, actually nvm

he had a video of him cruising in his bmw head bobbing to 80s music up on youtube

― iatee, Sunday, May 25, 2014 4:38 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

the emotionless drone of his voice, his inflections, his syntax....

there are a lot of zombie people out there normal people instinctively ignore how damaged they are and they can tell theyre being ignored

don't think i'll be able to watch this guy's vids.

find myself depressed by the repetitive nature of these things: as soon as i saw a few mentions on twitter of a shooting where the guy expressed his loathing of women i knew exactly what all available discourse would be

not that stating the basic facts of things (#yesallwomen) isn't vital

it's getting to the point where "misogynist shooting" is its own subcategory of event in life

this one seems different, maybe because we have such a clear window into the mind that made it happen. people seem to be genuinely unsettled in a way that is significant. maybe i am projecting my own feelings though

this one seems different...

― building a desert (art), Sunday, May 25, 2014

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Collier_Township_shooting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_massacre

also reminded of that trite phrase "put yourself out there"--that being the precise thing certain young men (usually men!) are not willing to do, resorting instead to a kind of ego-security autoimmune operation that can only annihilate everything in its path.

^this from ryan rings very true, manifests itself in lots of ways

The bit about violent entitlement up thread reminded me of something I listened to not too long ago.

Cracked did a podcast ep about this very thing a coupla months back. Jason Pargin makes the point that part of the rage-inducing aspect is that "you deserve and are going to win the pretty girl" is soaked thru pop-culture, among other things. Not that this is a causal relationship, but pretty correlative

An apt Margaret Atwood quote via Digby today:

‘”Why do men feel threatened by women?” I asked a male friend of mine. So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. “I mean,” I said, “men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power.” “They’re afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their world view.”

Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, “Why do women feel threatened by men?” “They’re afraid of being killed,” they said.’

Fox News has a theory

http://gawker.com/fox-news-wonders-about-ucsb-shooter-s-homosexual-impul-1581412307

was just going to post that

also fwiw DRUDGE led with the headline "LESS THAN ZERO" yesterday for a while.

ha, Fox News is drawing their talking points directly from PUA/MRA forum reactions to this dude

breaking an ilx sabbatical to say that in the context of this being a horrible, horrifying story, this thread's been a really interesting read. and, from what i could find cached or preserved today (site's been taken-down by its operators, apparently) this puahate message board where rodger was a contributing member is a scary place, see, e.g., this twitter feed that posted actual comments from the site.

i want to apologize to jaymc and others for judging their reading of the 'manifesto' in this thread. it's natural to try and understand a horrible thing after it happens. i was still feeling lots of hatred over this whole thing (which is a bit ironic given my reasons for judging others' actions), but it's cooled down now.

(and this is not to imply that anyone would stew over anonymous online judgement from someone named 'sufjan grafton' anyway. i just regret it now.)

I went through a phase a few months ago where I read quite a bit of the PUA Hate forums. It was an astonishing place, hilarious in its many bonehead idiosyncrasies (they had a seemingly endless supply of "incel" subcategories, including such gems as "wristcel", or involuntarily celibate due to insufficiently girthy wrists) but also deeply gross and unsettling.

The last thread I can remember reading on there was swiftly-deleted one in which a poster announced his intention to commit suicide. It was, sorry to say, pretty convincing. He said he was certain he'd be a miserable virgin forever, and claimed that the tipping point was a recent conversation with a female acquaintance who (in his telling) confirmed that all the main tenets of "red pill" thinking about women's attitudes toward sex and dating were accurate. Responses from other posters were polarized. Some momentarily dropped their personas and implored him not to do it, even expressing the opinion, seldom-voiced in those parts, that there was more to life than casual sex. But at least one or two strongly encouraged him, saying that they'd kill themselves too, and for the same reasons, if only they had the guts to go through with it.

Thankfully, that was enough to snap me out of my short-lived fascination with PUA Hate.

I mean really, the all-consuming poisonous misogyny of the place should have put me off way sooner than that.

there are people out there who actually think they are condemned to celibacy forever because their wrists are too small?

There are at least people who will express that sentiment on a message board. I get the sense that most of these guys thought their bodies were insufficiently masculine in many ways, but sometimes particular features would come under special scrutiny. Posting of wrist measurements, to brag or bemoan, was not all that uncommon.

You'd think being celibate would help someone bulk up those wrist muscles p easily

lol

re: Crabbits way upthread: I think I do want answers to these questions actually, in particular the last one, just didn't want anyone to feel pressured to GIVE ME ANSWERS RIGHT NOW, because man...this is a dense, ugly, thorny issue. I want to actively push back against the misogynist thinking that drives the pua-mra crowd, but I don't even know where to start...I don't find myself encountering this kind of thing IRL, which frankly, I'm thankful for, but waiting around waiting for BS to crop up in my life so I can call it out doesn't feel like an effective strategy. Nor does trying to engage these people on their internet-turf.

I wish I could have grabbed this guy the shoulders and shook him, told him, "look, dude, calm down, sex isn't actually that important, all those embittered hate-spewers are blind fools, women are just people, like you and me, and they don't owe you anything, you owe yourself some care and respect." Would that have done anything? Would he have just laughed at me? Why am I different from him? Sometimes I wonder at how I even came to have the worldview that I have. I didn't have a lot of great experiences with women growing up (not many negative ones either), and even now, at 27, I frequently feel awkward just talking with women (because I am a man, and men are, let's face it, not trustworthy) and don't have a whole lot of female friends. Yet it is still just self-evident to me, as I said, that women are just people...for fuck's sake, that seems so *obvious* that I feel like a fool even typing it out.

I guess tied up in this is the pervasive sense of sexuality as a one-sided transaction, which bestows status on men and steals it from women...and it is frighteningly widespread and ingrained, it's not just extreme misogynists who see it that way. I suppose better sex education would help. Maybe a better pop culture would help, too.

Just got an email from the chancellor. 3 roommate victims were also ucsb students. 2 engineering majors :-(. Third anonymous at parents' request.

Guess I'll contribute to:

As someone who grew up on the internet, I remember discovering, reading, and believing in this thing called 'Ladder Theory' (which I just googled and is still around) in middle school which is sort of like PUA-lite, or ur-PUA

Also remember reading Tucker Max posts as a freshman

Guess just sort of ruminating that even though my only access to American culture was through school, TV and movies, and the internet, and there this thing was, Ladder Theory, clickable on the internet, accessible to all

from what i read elsewhere, posts like this are what led to the operators taking down the site:

-Elliot Rodger is a hero
-Shot people
-Is now dead
-A puahate member
Keep in mind incels, this forum is a place to “funnel” dangerous people, and is being tracked. Keep your posts mundane and your fucking terrorist attacks to yourself.

this post is apparently "from an unnamed user that went up on the site 2:48 a.m., after news of Rodger’s killing spree broke, but before the site came down." like i said, a scary place.

Famous spree shooters were casually referenced all the time on PUA Hate. IIRC there was a frequent poster there with the screen name LanzaIsMyHero (or something like that). PUA Haters generally identified all those guys, not just the self-diagnosed like George Sodini, as fellow incels.

so the media released the name of the third student, whose parents requested anonymity.

which is a bummer

The PUAHate thing is really weird to me. So they got disillusioned by normal PUA sites, but wanted to retain the misogyny?

the big hats pissed them off

people that fail out of pua end up hating both the "movement" and women generally. the "movement" for failing them and women for continuing their "involuntary celibacy"

at least that's what the southern poverty law center led me to believe

These people need to all be slapped really hard across the face. Maybe it will be like zen koans and they'll be startled into recognizing that self pity and resentment don't lead anywhere good.

Guess I'll contribute to:

As someone who grew up on the internet, I remember discovering, reading, and believing in this thing called 'Ladder Theory' (which I just googled and is still around) in middle school which is sort of like PUA-lite, or ur-PUA

Also remember reading Tucker Max posts as a freshman

― 龜, Sunday, May 25, 2014 8:45 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i remember the ladder theory bullshit!! and i remember being a college freshman virgin believing that bullshit!! p sure that's the origin of the friend zone? or the "friend ladder" or whatever? anytime one of my students talks about the friend zone, im always like mock horror "oh no i have to enjoy the company and friendship of somebody i like boo hoooooo"

Yeah the 'friend ladder' and trying to jump between the friend ladder and the other ladder and falling or something

Trying to remember more, I think I probably picked it up from the GameFAQS forum or something

In conclusion: Ban all video games

i suppose there's no hope for anyone say going on reddit's #mensrights forum and changing some minds. they are probably just digging their heels in.

pretty much digging in if the stuff i've seen on red pill and men's rights reddit / everywhere on 4chan is any indication

i will echo some of the posters' experiences itt. i dont know how much progressive discourse i was exposed to on gender issues from my ostensibly liberal parents (to give you an idea, my dad is 15 years older than my mom and they married when she was 22 and he is basically a textbook creep shithole). so i had the self-pitying "why dont girls wanna go out with me"/never approach anyone for fear of rejection steez going since like 8th grade til about age 20. part of it was feeling unattractive because i was fatter than i thought was socially acceptable. but when ive looked back at things i wrote for creative writing or "humorous" shit or whatever, there's this palpable undercurrent of misogyny and i think it's this idea on a small scale of "i should be attracting more female attention than i am right now and women are wrong to reject me in favor of guy x, y or z". so like when i read women who are saying that men need to unlearn patriarchy, it hit me right between my eyes today. i think i've been sexist my whole fucking life and am just now reckoning with the extent to which ive hurt others. much of what angers me about rodgers is that ive thought i was above the fray of sexism bc i never engaged in MRA or overt anti-feminist rhetoric but the same feeling of entitlement was something that was in me for all of my adolescence and much of my young adult life. and it's such a normal part of male socialization that i feel at once utterly ashamed to have engaged in it myself and somewhat powerless to stop it. i'm a teacher and i'm constantly on my male students about their persistently sexist (and homophobic) behaviors and i can only hope that i can set an example of adult maleness that isn't defined by its opposition to women and femininity.

really good post

yes

respect for the honesty itt

yeah, great posts. if it's not too off topic i want to recant some arguments i made about a year ago concerning the nice guys of okcupid tumblr. i said that the guys featured on the blog seemed socially maladjusted and probably didn't know better and should be either ignored or criticized privately rather than publicly shamed. i even said that it seemed like bullying because the guys featured were largely socially undesirable and the type of people who seem to get bullied a lot irl. in saying this i was both blind to my own privilege of being able to ignore them (they don't harass me bc i am a man) and also probably underestimated how hateful the resentful nice guy mindset was, even in its milder manifestations. so...yeah. it wasn't my place to criticize the tactics of that blog and, as is the case more often than i like to admit, i didn't know what i was talking about. sorry ilx.

...i had the self-pitying "why dont girls wanna go out with me"/never approach anyone for fear of rejection steez going since like 8th grade til about age 20. ... but when ive looked back at things i wrote for creative writing or "humorous" shit or whatever, there's this palpable undercurrent of misogyny and i think it's this idea on a small scale of "i should be attracting more female attention than i am right now and women are wrong to reject me in favor of guy x, y or z".

So, I've been thinking about this one a lot, partly because I've spent a lot of time in Isla Vista. Me, and most of my friends (men and women, older and younger), generally have a version of this story: "I was a bit of an outcast, had some friends, but was probably bullied. I discovered punk rock/riot grrrl/food not bombs/DIY culture and then I found my people." Is this just a twisted and terrible version of that story? I don't think I would have succumbed to the MRA stuff, since my mom was a very pioneering feminist and taught me about that early. I don't know, it's all just terrible.

I was just explaining "ladder theory" to my girlfriend, who had (of course) never heard of it before, and reacted with a mixture of pity, amusement, disbelief & horror

we talked about a bunch of other stuff, too, trying to get at the roots of this sort of discourse and exorcise some of its frustrating sticking power... this

much of what angers me about rodgers is that ive thought i was above the fray of sexism bc i never engaged in MRA or overt anti-feminist rhetoric but the same feeling of entitlement was something that was in me for all of my adolescence and much of my young adult life