I warned you this was going to happen, when I wrote that
A disproportionate number of incels are extremely intelligent, because a majority of women tend to be suspicious of intelligence in men and associate it with creepiness/nerdiness/unfuckability. So what do you get when you have a vast community of permanent incels with high IQs and plenty of time on their hands?
Turns out you get seven dead people and 13 injured ones. Maybe. If you believe that Eliot Rodger was just an incel with time on his hands. And you get a couple million people who want to prop up their agendas with those bodies.
Like Ted Kaczynski, Eliot Rodger had a manifesto. I’ve read it — the whole thing. Okay, I skimmed parts of it, like the mind-numbing recitations of childhood interactions in Joyce-esque detail, but I did cover it front to back. But I read it well enough to understand the central fucking point of the whole fucking thing, which is this: Eliot Rodger was insane. If I wrote a novel just like it, everybody who read it would think, “Wow, Jack did a good solid job of showing you just how broken the main character’s interpretation of actual events was.” Rodger narrates his own life in a way that makes it plain that he fundamentally misunderstands everything around him. It’s pretty much “The Black Swan”, only with a geek in a Bimmer instead of Natalie in a tutu. The TOTALLY FUCKING CRAZY PART OF IT is that the media has chosen to take him as a reliable narrator.
Consider this: How many times have you heard that Rodger was a “failure with women” or “rejected by women”? Plenty of times, right? Read his narrative. He says that he was rejected by women, but he wasn’t. He didn’t ask anybody out. He didn’t do what normal men do, which is actually walk up to women and ask them for a date. Instead, he sat in Stepmommy’s Bimmer and waited for the pussy to throw itself through the window. He wasn’t rejected by women; he never approached them. He imagined that they would reject him — but when you read his story it turns out that a lot of people were nice to him in school and might have gone out with him, had he managed to ask them.
Did you read that he was constantly bullied? No he wasn’t. He relates three incidents of actual bullying over the course of 22 years of life. I saw the “bullies” in my Catholic school get bullied by other bullies a lot more than that, and the rest of us got it even worse. If you can arrange to have a life where you have three unpleasant interactions with your classmates in sixteen years of schooling, you’re doing great, trust me.
Did you read that he was obsessed with men’s rights sites and the MRA movement and the PUA movement? That’s not true either. He was a member of a site called “PUAHate” which is devoted to the idea that the pick-up artist scene is a scam and that only handsome, wealthy men really succeed with women. He never had anything to do with MRA, which is a bunch of single dads griping about visitation rights and dressing up like Spiderman to prove that fathers can be heroes to their estranged children. But he was already furious with women and the men who succeeded with them well before he joined PUAHate.
Did you read that he was a misogynist who hated women? That’s only true in the sense that he hated everyone who was having a successful dating life. His early “attacks”, which consisted of giving angry looks to happy couples, were directed more at the men than the women. He didn’t hate women. He hated attractive women who refused to just run up and throw themselves at his feet, and he hated the men who were sleeping with them.
Here’s the weirdest one of all? Did you read that he was white? That’s being repeated everywhere — that Eliot Rodger was a disaffected white man. Well, let’s look at his mother and sister:
Holy shit, that’s a Malaysian woman of Chinese background. In other words — and pay attention here, I’m serious — if Eliot Rodger was white, so is Barack Obama. Isn’t it amazing how having one white parent means two different things, depending on what the media wants to put forward? Obama’s black, this guy’s white, George Zimmerman is white, Elizabeth Warren is a Native American. In Eliot’s manifesto, he specifically complains that “full Asian” guys are getting white girls when he, a “half-Asian” guy, can’t get them — but remember, again, that he never asked.
The assembled news media are treating Rodger’s manifesto as plain fact, as if it was written by Woodward and Bernstein instead of by someone so mentally ill that he needed to kill random victims to fix a problem that only existed in his own mind. One wonders if they watched “The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty” and thought “OMFG, that guy is a fighter pilot and a race car driver in addition to being a copier repairman or whatever his day job is!” If this guy had written that he was secretly a vampire at night, NBC would run a headline entitled VAMPIRES ARE REAL AND THEY’RE KILLING WOMEN.
Which leads me to #YesAllWomen, the idiotic hashtag created in the wake of the killings. Let me give you a brief bit of history: There exists in this country a class of “men” who have internalized the teachings of modern feminism so thoroughly that they feel compelled to offer excuses for their entire sex. These excuses typically take the form of a weak response to some feminist talking point they’ve long since accepted as gospel:
“Yes, there are a lot of male rapists, but #NotAllMen are rapists.”
“Yes, women are continually harassed and attacked, but #NotAllMen are like that.”
“Amy Schumer might have been fingered by an elderly cab driver, but #NotAllMen would let her stuff their fingers in there.”
The proper response to “men” like this is contempt, and that’s exactly what they get from the feminists they so admire. These women can intrinsically sense that the kind of man who would sit around trying to earn their approval by claiming that he is #notallmen is a stalker, creeper, weirdo, or all of the above. They’re remarkably similar to the white people who go to Jamaica to apologize for slavery:
When you see the expressions on the black faces around them, they are always contemptuous, bemused, or just plain confused, but it’s easy to tell what they are thinking: Why are people like you apologizing for slavery? If people like you had tried to enslave us, it would have failed, you fucking milquetoast pansies. If you want an effective apology for slavery, take the fifty most highly compensated brokers on Wall Street and let them kneel on the ground in Jamaica or Botswana. Good luck getting that to happen. That might impress the Jamaicans, but sending a bunch of associate professors with cuckold complexes to kneel in front of them won’t get you anywhere. The Jamaicans haven’t had the benefit of a modern American public-school “education” so they aren’t stupid enough to think that behavior like that is indicative of anything other than personal weakness and possibly mental illness.
Similarly, women aren’t impressed by the #NotAllMen crowd. They consider them to be a bunch of weirdos and wannabe rapists who would pull an Eliot Rodger on them if they had the courage to touch a knife or pistol. They can sense that “men” like this are only good for trampling further. Thus, the #YesAllWomen hashtag, which is all about how creepy men are, particularly the #NotAllMen crowd.
As far as I can tell, the purpose of #YesAllWomen is to complain about how all women are molested, groped, raped, harassed, denied equal pay, disrespected, and everything else. You can search Twitter for it, there are millions of examples by now. I’m hearing a lot about how #YesAllWomen represents a powerful taking-back of female power or something like that. Of course, that’s a lie.
Remember what our friend The Last Psychiatrist always says: “If you’re reading it, it’s for you.” So. Who’s reading the #YesAllWomen tweets? I’ll wait while you figure it out.
That’s right! The only people who are actually bothering to read “#YesAllWomen” are the fucking “male ally” creepers and weirdos who normally post #NotAllMen! I guarantee you that Kobe Bryant, a man whose ability to rape has been the subject of two court cases and an out-of-court settlement, isn’t at home reading this shit. I guarantee you that the guys from Beta Theta Pi who loaded up their favorite sorority girls with Four Loko or the equivalent and then forcibly held them down in their dorm rooms afterwards aren’t reading it. I guarantee you that the average rapist, who statistically is, shall we say, not likely to be reading feminist Tweets, is not reading these #YesAllWomen tweets either.
Since the audience for #YesAllWomen isn’t the group of people who are being complained about — namely, rapists and sexual assailants — why bother? You’ll notice that I never use this blog to attempt to communicate with aliens. That’s because I assume that the aliens aren’t reading this blog. If I wanted to communicate with aliens, if I had something to say that they needed to say, I’d hire a big dish and beam it towards Andromeda. If you ever read this blog and see me saying something like, “These God-damned aliens are responsible for my failure to rise to the occasion three times in a night” then you can assume that I’m actually sending a message of some sort to a woman I know who is reading this blog, and it’s this: aliens control my dick, and I apologize for what happened the other evening. If women really wanted to confront rapists, they wouldn’t Tweet to their followers about it. They’d put on sandwich boards and go stand in the ghetto, or the fraternity houses, or in whatever bars or nursing homes their uncles are currently inhabiting.
The media wants to use the Eliot Rodger thing to beat up on the manosphere, because they despise the manosphere. Female Twitter users want to use the Eliot Rodger thing to let their friendzone beta orbiter male friends know, in no uncertain terms, that they consider them to be borderline rapists. Nobody’s tagging George Clooney or Channing Tatum in these posts, because most of these woman would welcome whatever attention George Clooney or Channing Tatum threw at them, for the same reason that I wouldn’t be offended by anything Kate Winslet said to me in person, as long as it was Kate Winslet talking to me in person.
Kate: You’re easily the least attractive man I’ve ever met.
Jack: Couldn’t agree more. Why don’t we have dinner and you can tell me what exactly about me is so repulsive. I can’t wait to hear all about it.
Look at the “M&M graphic” at the top of this post. That is, without a doubt, some woman telling some creeper male “friend” of hers that she considers him a rapist. When she made that graphic, she wasn’t imagining some faceless minority hiding in the subway station. She’s been conditioned to believe that poor people and minorities never rape anybody. She’s thinking about the guy in her Comparative Literature class who tried to give her a Moleskine for Christmas. What a creeper.
If you read deeper into the #YesAllWomen thing, you’ll find a bunch of indignation that women are taught to avoid rape but men aren’t taught not to rape. What a crock of shit. My father made it absolutely plain to me that “no meant no” and so did the fathers of the men I grew up with. The entire civilized middle class of this country was taught this lesson. I think I took it a bit too much to heart, if conversations I’ve had in adulthood with the women I knew when I was younger can be taken as a guide. Some time ago, I had a woman say to me on a date “You aren’t even going to try to kiss me, are you?” My first thought was “OMG SHE THINKS YOU’RE TRYING TO RAPE HER, APOLOGIZE AND RUN.” Then I realized that she wanted me to kiss her. I’m a slow learner, but I do learn. So I dragged her up the stairs and…
Just kidding about that last part. But I did kiss her. She wanted me to kiss her. She wasn’t worried about me being a 10% rapist or anything like that. She liked me and she was interested in whatever I had to offer, and the feeling was mutual. I had, and have never had, any interest in doing something that a woman didn’t want me to do. Nor have I ever had to say anything to a woman to reassure her that I wasn’t a rapist. Never occurred to me to do so. The minute you find yourself saying, “I’m not a rapist,” what the woman hears is “I’m a rapist, just not a very strong-willed one.”
We’ll end this with a Choose Your Own Adventure.
The media is saying that Eliot Rodger was a white pickup artist who was pretty much like all the others except he had the guts to actually kill someone.
The #YesAllWomen crowd is saying that they are really creeped out by the men they know whom they consider not worth fucking, and they’d like those men to stop looking at them or thinking about them or invading their space in any way, so they can get about the business of getting those digits from that charming-looking Beta Theta Pi who just refused to buy them a drink.
The facts of the Eliot Rodger case say that a mentally ill young man didn’t get the help he needed and because he saw the world as being radically different from the way it really was, he took actions that no sane person, man or woman, would take in the same situation. He was mentally ill enough to describe being the child of a millionaire with a new BMW as “my hellish existence”. His actions reflect on him alone, because he alone carried them out.
Choose your own adventure, but choose carefully.
“Not all men” is used in opposition to a feminist arguments, not put forth by feminist allies. It’s used to undermine or derail a particular discussion, and to minimize feminist concerns that are put forth on one issue or another. At this point the symbolism of the statement means as much as the underlying argument, so YMMV in terms of finding it’s routine application in comment threads or twitter.
As for the graphic, my interpretation of it is that even a small bunch of bad actors can poison the overall culture. The whole point of #Yesallwomen is that they each feel harassed, threatened, etc. by someone at some time, and so to a degree it doesn’t matter that NotAllMen do those things.
Take this all with a grain of salt since it’s from a “man” who has internalized the teachings of modern feminism.
I’d suggest that the minute you type “#notallmen” you’ve agreed to whatever is being fed you. It implicitly agrees that whatever characteristic is up for discussion at the time is, in fact, endemic to men.
If I said to you, “Not all street racers have underground raves before they head out,” that would imply that enough street racers have underground raves for it for be characteristic of the breed.
It’s true, for example, that #NotAllMen can bench-press 500 pounds, but you never see anybody say that because it’s understood that men who can bench-press 500 pounds make up an insignificant portion of men.
#NotAllMen fly planes into the WTC.
#NotAllMen bought LaFerraris this year.
And so on.
I understand what you’re saying, but that’s not what’s going on in the discussions with it. It’s “not all men rape/pillage/whatever, so let’s discount what you’re talking about here and/or recenter your feminist discussion to the issues men face.” Here’s a link that talks about it.
I read that when it came out… but to some degree you, the article, and I are all agreeing with each other. Here’s TIME:
““Not all men” also differs from “what about the men?” and other classic derails because it acknowledges that rape, sexism, and misogyny are real issues — just not, you know, real issues that the speaker is involved with in any way. The “not all men” man, at least in some cases, agrees with you and is perfectly willing to talk about how terrible those other guys are, just as soon as we get done establishing that he himself would never be such a cad. It’s infuriating and unhelpful, but in a way it represents a weird kind of progress.”
The difference between the “not all men” guy and actual men is that actual men have no interest in tossing the male half of humanity under the bus in order to toady to whatever feminist they’ve chosen as their target for abject attempts at mild ingratiation. The “weird kind of progess” of which the writer speaks is exactly that: the “not all men” guy accepts as read the tenets of radical feminism and is willing to kneel to them. He just doesn’t want you to think that HE is that kind of creeper/rapist/whatever. The irony is that HE is the guy being called out and marginalized as a rapist/creeper/whatever.
The minute you open your mouth to say “not all men”, you’ve agreed to the promise that rape, sexism, violence, et al are primarily male activities and that they are common enough to men to be taken as a baseline. Which is “progress” from the feminist perspective, because from their perspective it just means you’re negotiating the terms of your surrender.
There are times when I think (some of) your writing deserves a much larger audience. This is one of those times.
+1 on that. Very refreshing and well done.
Yep ;
You’re right on target here Jack .
I feel sorry for him but he was nuttier than a bag of almond cookies .
-Nate
Jack, you’re an auto journo, you’ve got to look at this from that perspective.
Which design decisions made in Munich were most to blame for this terrible event?
“The facts of the Eliot Rodger case say that a mentally ill young man didn’t get the help he needed and because he saw the world as being radically different from the way it really was, he took actions that no sane person, man or woman, would take in the same situation. He was mentally ill enough to describe being the child of a millionaire with a new BMW as “my hellish existence”. His actions reflect on him alone, because he alone carried them out.”
This. he was a narcissistic sociopath who couldn’t cope with the reality that the world didn’t think him as awesome as he thought himself, and he had the coldness to take it out on the people he most wanted to think him awesome.
Shades of Columbine, really. The narrative after that mess was that Harris and Klebold were “bullied outcasts,” but when the truth came out it showed that Eric Harris was just a psycho/sociopath who truly believed other people were beneath him and he was entitled to decide if they deserved to keep living.
oh, and as one of the “incels” in your previous post, I’m pretty irritated about the accepted narrative on Rodger. yeah, I’ve had about as much “luck” with women as he had, because I’ve tried as little as he had (which is to say I haven’t bothered since junior year of high school.) I know I’m a serious introvert, I know I have severe social anxiety, I know that puts a hard limit on my “chances,” so I live my life as well as I can within my comfort zone. The important thing is I sure as hell don’t blame anyone else for that.
Jack, this is an awesome effort and product. Great writing, I have shared this with as many people as possible and they all have had positive comments. You are a bit older than I am. However, this speaks to the giant middle of America, as well as me, a white middle class guy who is tired of hearing how much shit he has to apologize for in our society.
Facebook is replete with the weak of which you write; articles discussing how misogynistic or violent blah blah blah society is.
Sometimes a cigar is a cigar and Elliot Rodgers was a sick guy who didn’t get the help he needed.
“The whole point of #Yesallwomen is that they each feel harassed, threatened, etc. by someone at some time, and so to a degree it doesn’t matter that NotAllMen do those things.”
Actually the whole point of #YesAllWomen is that Feminists are inherently anti-science and are incapable of understanding the difference between statistics and anecdotal evidence. They have an entirely self-centered view of the world, and believe that if something happened to them (even once) it means that it happens to everybody, all the time.
Most Feminists actually have the SAME EXACT WORLDVIEW as Elliot Rodgers, only with the genders flipped. And if they became as sexually frustrated as Rodgers, they would lash out with the same level of violence. But Feminists dont become sexually frustrated this way, because they are rarely, if ever, turned down for sex or romantic and emotional intimacy, due to their massive amounts of Female Social Privilege. And even when they DO lash out and kill people, it is always either blamed on Men or and invented falsehood called “Post Partum Psychosis”. You see when MEN are crazy, it means that their entire gender is inherently dangerous. When WOMEN are crazy, it means that whatever violence they commit is not their fault or responsibility.
Female Privilege is so strong that, even when a misogynist psychopath intent on the complete eradication of the female gender goes on a killing spree, he STILL ends up killing TWICE as many men as he does women. And their deaths go completely ignored. Violence against women is violence against women. And violence against men is, somehow, still violence against women.
Ok, upon seeing that photo of his mom and sister, i have a new theory: Elliot Rodgers desperately wanted to bang his own sister, and couldnt
In the manifesto, he writes about his anger at hearing his sister having sex. As fate would have it, one of my best BMX pals had a real mattress of a younger sister. It wasn’t uncommon for us to be sitting in the living room on a Saturday or Sunday morning prepping our bikes for a race and to have her sexual activity in her basement bedroom be basically a soundtrack for said preparation. His reaction was always, “Ugh, I wish she’d shut up,” but since he didn’t want to sleep with her (and neither did any other sane person), there was no weird suppressed frustration behind it.
I have mixed feelings on the subject. On the one hand, I feel like Yesallwomen and Notallmen bring important topics into focus and promote dialog that occasionally is healthy. On the other hand, they’re alienating and polarizing and they’re stupid blanket generalizations, as many people have commented above. Men who’ve never hurt women feel unfairly criticized and vaguely threatened.
Anyway, I had never heard of PUA movement until Elliot Rodger, and now I’m kind of fascinated and repulsed by it. It seems a strange and foreign concept, that there are these man-eating, rapacious women out there that trick men into buying them drinks…and then don’t pay them back with sex. I’m a forty seven year old white woman whose lived and worked and studied in a lot of big cities in my life, and met a lot of people, and I have NEVER met a female that even remotely fits the description of what PUA people think women are. I would venture to say to any of you who do know women like that - you are hanging out in the wrong circles. So sad, this chasm of misunderstanding between the sexes.
Elliot Rodger was a nutbar with delusions of grandiosity that surely were only his desperate attempt to ignore and deny his own unconscious self loathing (did you see how bigoted this “half-Asian” kid is about people of color?) I wonder how his therapist is feeling right now. Probably pretty bad. They never covered this topic in therapy? That social skills, empathy and kindness are the means to intimacy and worthwhile relationships - not luxury brand automobiles and $300 sunglasses?
Which brings me to my next point: Elliot Rodger was not “wealthy.” His parents were struggling financially. The press keeps getting that wrong (except CNN) apparently because they can’t see past the luxury car selfies.
Lastly - by focusing so much debate and scrutiny on this kid (I am guilty of this too) we are giving him exactly what he hoped to attain on his “day of retribution” - fame, attention, and from some people even sympathy. We all now know who Elliot Rodger is. But do any of us know the names of any of his victims without looking them up?
The media isn’t interested in the victims, I’d suggest. Look how the media portrayed Fred Goldman — basically, as a repulsive moron who was somehow stalking OJ just because, you know, his son had his throat cut back to the spine.
Oh yeah, and let me add one more thing regarding “Pua” guys who hope to get sex by buying women drinks at bars - that’s what hookers are for. If you think of sex as some kind of transactional thing that money buys - why not just see a professional?
I’m reading Jack’s blog so I guess it’s for me, and I suppose I chose adventure #2:
To me #NotAllMen always struck me as rather silly. Not because I think that it is a form of acquiescence (though it is an interesting angle), but because #NotAllMen simply goes without saying. It also stinks of a certain lack of confidence.
That said, I personally don’t feel that the #YesAllWomen tags are a personal indictment against me, my actions, my worldview, nor are they a threat to my masculinity. Then again, I can also read a Jezebel article without feeling either guilt, righteous indignation, or any pressure to apologize for being a white male American. I’m one of the lucky ones I guess.
“He says that he was rejected by women, but he wasn’t. He didn’t ask anybody out. He didn’t do what normal men do, which is actually walk up to women and ask them for a date… He imagined that they would reject him —”
This is fairly close to the comment I made back on your original “incel” post. Even the King of the Neckbeards dressed in sweatpants and a wrinkled “My Little Pony” shirt will get a date if he just asks enough people. Some (BUT NOT ALL!) men somehow develop this relationship failure complex without ever even being rejected and they seem to always be quite bitter about it.
As far as the rest of the post goes, it all seems like something that only exists on the internet and in freshman college courses.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never left the house with a wrinkled My Little Pony shirt.
The Ironic Idiocy behind #YesAllWomen
http://neckbearlord.tumblr.com/post/87320211320/the-ironic-idiocy-behind-yesallwomen
The kid had a messed up life and past.
Anyone else get the bit where his parents and therapist actually created a fake girlfriend for him and then he caught this girlfriend of his sleeping with his therapist?
Jeez…