Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

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

I know it sounds like the ultimate in silly cliches, but I really do think that a lot of these guys just need an older male role model, or mentor, or whatever, to tell them "Hey, it gets better ... but not until you stop thinking this way"

Reading his manifesto (which is a memoir not a manifesto, other than the last page), it looks like his parents worked to introduce him to mentors.

I also went to meet with my father’s friend Dale Launer on that weekend. Dale Laun3r is a successful Hollywood screenwriter and producer who owns a nice house in the Pacific Palisades. Dale and my father have been friends for many years. When I was a child, father sometimes took me to dinner parties at his house. I hadn’t seen Dale since I was a child, but within the last few months I began to have email conversations with him after he found out I was having trouble with girls. He wanted to help me overcome my troubles because he is a so-called expert with women. He even showed me pictures of all of the gorgeous women he has dated in his life, and there were a lot of them. This man truly lived.

A few men who are successful with women have offered me help and advice about this in the past, but nothing ever came of it. I suppose they want to help because it would be a boost to their already big egos, and also because they feel sorry for me. People should feel sorry for me. My life is so pathetic, and I hate the world for forcing me to suffer it. I feel sorry for myself. In truth, there is nothing men like Dale can really do to help me attract girls and lose my virginity.

They can’t mind-control girls to be attracted to me. It’s all girls’ fault for not having any sexual attraction towards me. My brief friendship with Dale would, however, spark a few more interesting email conversations where I confide to him about how cruel I think women are by nature. He would only be amused by this. Of course he would be amused. Women were never cruel to him. They gave him sex and love all his life.

lets hope puahate stays down for good now. a far more sinister and potentially damaging place than any of the pua/mra places ive come across. appalling levels of misogyny, homophobia, and racism, a very fascist obsession with pseudo-scientific theories about "weak genes" and how they manifest as certain facial features, closer in content to a site like stormfront than yr average reddit thread

Yeah I googled "puahate jezebel" and came across, among other things, a very unhappy and uninformative WordPress post about how feminists and the 'seduction community' were in cahoots.

There but for punk rock and a feminist mother go I. That, and the fact that I never had an echo chamber telling me that my self-pity and nascent egotism were virtues. Oh yeah, and easy access to guns.

...also one of the things that I like about this thread is that I think people hear are acknowledging that this is a complex case AND are still willing to speak truths like "misogyny is deadly", "social isolation is fucked up", and "easy access to guns for all is STUPID STUPID STUPID".

i should feel blessed that most of the things raised in this thread recently are completely foreign to me, but i'm still curious--w/o being curious enough to google and end up down some rabbit hole of crazy discourse. what is PUA? what is ladder theory? what _is_ all this stuff?

PUA = "pick-up artist", a weird subculture dedicated to teaching nerdy, alienated guys how to seduce women by the application of game strategies. obsessed with "alpha" and "beta male" divisions, pseudoscientific evolutionary biology, the supposedly manipulative and manipulable nature of women. often misogynist, anti-feminist, creepy as hell. bleeds over into "men's rights activism", virulent misogyny as ideology, worse and worse and worse.

"ladder theory" comes from a website that went viral in the early-mid 2000s (before the "PUA" culture had gained much traction), which was basically just an elaborate extension of the "friend zone" concept: all (straight) people are constantly ranking members of the opposite sex on 'ladders'; women have two 'ladders', one for male friends and another for potential romantic partners; men just have the one ladder, because they will fuck any female acquaintance of theirs under the right circumstances; problems arise when you try to jump from the 'friend' ladder to the 'romance' ladder and fall into the gaping abyss between them

Someone asked what men can do to try to stop shit like this happening, IMO you can start by questioning the pervasive sexist and misogynist attitudes you come across in everyday life. If someone tells a sexist joke, don't laugh at it, even if everyone else around you does. If you hear people say shit like "all women are like this", or "all men are like this", don't be silent but ask what they mean by that, why do they think that way? Obviously that's not gonna magically stop extreme sexists and misogynists from thinking they are entitled to see the world that way, but a part of that entitlement comes from sexism being a quietly accepted part of everyday life, so it's important not to quietly accept it.

There are a lot of problems with R.W. Connell's theory of hegemonic masculinity, but I think one part he got it right is that few (if any men) actually reach the top of the hegemony, the ideal stereotypic masculinity, but the majority of men are still complicit in the hegemony, i.e. they propagate or approve this ideal even they themselves can never reach it. The "alpha male" dream is a powerful image to be sold (by media, entertainment industry, internet communities, etc), and sadly a lot of people who could (and should) never live up to still buy into it, instead of coming up with alternative masculinities, ways of being men that aren't based on differentiation and objectification of 50% of humanity.

this isn't about overt sexism of hegemonic masulinity, it's about inadequate treatment of mental illness.

If by "this" you mean the shooting, sure, mental illnesses need proper treatment. But mental illnesses also don't exist in a vacuum, social attitudes often have an influence on the forms they manifest in and the ways they are expressed. And (like I tried to explain in my post above, though maybe it wasn't clear) I certainly wasn't trying to imply that extreme cases like this shooting will just suddenly disappear if people begin to address sexism more, but addressing it is necessary to battle many forms of psychological and physical violence not caused by mental disorder, and maybe it'll also help to change things so that those disorders won't manifest in such destructive ways (at least not as often).

So apparently there was a race aspect to this too http://aaldef.org/blog/elliot-rodgers-manifesto-shows-self-hate-fueled-anti-asian-violence-that-kicked-off-isla-vista-rampa.html

I can't think of how many male coworkers I had in my late teens/early 20s who told me some or another story about being rejected by a woman, but their "pick up approach" was to basically sound like a spam email subject line. Like how many times I stood over a deep fat fryer at work telling a coworker, "women don't like when you talk to them like that," and they were always surprised. "Oh!" Like I am sure their moms or whatever told them but their moms aren't really women, or people? I don't know.

When there's war on the ground in a country, it will, sooner or later, end up being fought on the bodies of women. When there's not state-level, overt war on the ground in a country, men fight their personal battles on the bodies of women. PUA/MRA stuff is exactly that: it's warfare, it's violence. To not act PURPOSEFULLY against that in your personal and political lives is to sanction it, even if you never post on a msg board or shoot a bunch of ppl.

To not act PURPOSEFULLY against that in your personal and political lives is to sanction it, even if you never post on a msg board or shoot a bunch of ppl.

how does one act purposefully against these movements? legit question, since ive only been confronted with one actual practitioner and he abandoned course, after a short period and lots of talks about misguided notuons, in favor of being a human instead

notions*

The violence isn't ONLY resident in men's rights movement or w/e, as I think the talk around the USCB shooting has brought to the forefront. Like other kinds of hatred that are already in the air we breathe, misogyny is a force that will fill any available vessel (tm someone's tweet last night, sorry to steal it here).

Call out woman-blaming or -hating or -policing speech wherever you find it, instead of just disapproving silently and changing the subject. Don't street harass and don't enable men who do. Consider misogyny important enough to demote or exclude people in your life who express it. Support Planned Parenthood (or a DV shelter or other reproductive/aid/justice group of your choice). Explore other ways to define your personal gender identify and sense of "masculinity" that don't depend on being the opposite of women, or more powerful than women, that aren't about the "other" at all. Teach your kids what you learn, to give them a headstart.

Be vocal about only supporting public figures and policies that don't have a net negative effect on teenage girls, single moms, non-white women, undocumented women--all the places in society where the least powerful of us live. Don't make jokes about ogling women in their summer clothes, about how much you love shorts weather: consider whether you're comfortable with the way you THINK about women at times, consider your complicity in the male gaze, in eyeballs on bodies.

...those things seem like a good start, don't you think?

FIGHTING PATRIARCHY ON MY BIRTHDAY YO

^5

male gaze made me do it

and bruce

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8PB1a1c9zA&feature=kp

great jokes, shithead

龜, I noticed that as well after reading some stuff he had posted on the puahate cesspool

man, it's like that character from Shock Corridor
http://aaldef.org/blog/elliot-rodgers-manifesto-shows-self-hate-fueled-anti-asian-violence-that-kicked-off-isla-vista-rampa.html

龜, I noticed that as well after reading some stuff he had posted on the puahate cesspool

― the glimmer man (Sufjan Grafton), Monday, May 26, 2014

not just rodger. racism, misogyny, and implied and open threats of violence run through everything i saw yesterday on the cached pages of this site. apparently there are more of these online communities? so weird. the people who post there have exactly the same attitudes -- even worse, actually -- as the "alpha males" they hate for being "not nice-guys."

that's an interesting idea. "alpha male" represents the apex of their own personal ideals, and "betas" are those who fail at fulfilling them. the "nice guy" thing could be a submissive posture in line with their dominantation-oriented/abusive worldview when they see themselves as failing to fulfill their ideals, yet gives them a sense of power and superiority out of feeling hopeless to become their "alpha" ideal. and it does nothing to change or modify their fundamental belief system because it's just a part of it.

this seems like some sorta bizarre, masochistic, self-hating, woman-hating, sex-obsessed, narcissistic cult. no surprise a mass shooter comes out of this worldview, what an absolutely god awful way to think about life (at least how my amateur psychology chin scratching puts it).

it's also this weird fucked up worldview where the only place he can find happiness is in the world of this fantasy place of "hot sorority girls" and winning the approval of alpha males.

not sure if "winning the approval of alpha males" is an express goal, but they do seem in awe of "alpha males," and there sure is a lot of sexual subtext in the posts on that board.

the whole thing plays into topics covered on another ilx thread ("marketing of masculinity," iirc). these attitudes about "alpha males" and basic-traits of masculinity get peddled by the mainstream media, too. this thread made me remember an old article by peggy noonan, just after 09.11.01, celebrating the return of manly men. they might have to drag peggy noonan away from the golf club martini bar to write her columns, but she does shape attitudes from her media platform.

Like other kinds of hatred that are already in the air we breathe, misogyny is a force that will fill any available vessel

this ^^^^
i feel like undercurrents of misogyny run through nearly all communities online and offline. i used to like internet forums better than communicating in real life because my experience professionally & personally is that outside of safe spaces like classrooms with feminist professors, there are almost always dudes who talk over me and don't listen to a word i'm saying, always. it wears me down and it becomes easier to just not talk much because of men who interrupt me, contradict me, play devil's advocate, start talking over me, or ignore what i said completely.

i feel like the first thing one can do to be against this misogyny is to talk to women with respect, listen to what women have to say, consider their point of view, take it seriously, don't jump in to talk over it, and don't immediately jump to tell them that it's invalid or argue the opposite just to argue. it's just subconscious and comes from the culture, i certainly notice it a lot even from men who are generally mature, decent, honest people and yet just can't help but respond to women as if they don't matter as much as men, except of course for the way they look. the mra/pua stuff i am hardly aware of & do not encounter in real life but what's very real is the subtle, constant dismissing and undermining that i experience in a misogynist culture. and the constant reminders everywhere that the #1 most important thing about women is how they look and whether men think they look attractive enough or not.

otmfm

well said, daria

thx

i was hanging out with several different groups of friends over the weekend & it was like.. wow everyone is nice and can hold a conversation and talks to me like i'm a person and no one is making crass comments about any women at all. why can't it be like this everywhere

totally

it's kinda fucked up that you are just supposed to 'deal with' all the rest of the shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W8jVEfvemk

this made me cry. but i guess nothing will come of it; nothing changes anything, unfortunately.

someone should make sure obama sees it

Nope, in fact we can all predict exactly what the NRA stooges will say. If only one of the victims had been armed blah blah blah.