Masculinities of the far right

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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Mon May 14, 2018 1:40 pm

Angry young white men, the “incel rebellion” and an age of worldwide reaction

White supremacists, online misogynists and the rise of the far right: How to fight a rising tide of resentment

CONOR LYNCH

Incels are just one tiny facet of the much larger reactionary trend in America and around the world. Young men are becoming radicalized by reactionary ideologies at an alarming rate, and the success of Trump and right-wing populists in Europe suggests that we are living in an age of reaction. As the most extreme reactionaries begin to use violence and other dangerous tactics to advance their political agenda, it is important to understand what has driven this reactionary trend.

Though the obvious answer is that “aggrieved entitlement” has been the main factor, the truth is more complex. Ultimately the same thing that has driven left-wing populism has driven this politics of reaction: a legitimate feeling of discontent with the status quo. There are plenty of valid reasons to be disillusioned with the modern world, of course, but this dissatisfaction can lead one to embrace either a reactionary politics that fetishizes the past, or a progressive politics that aims to create a better future.

Obviously those who feel this kind of malaise are liable to embrace reactionary politics if they become convinced that they would have been better off in the past, while those who do not suffer from golden-age syndrome are more likely to embrace the left. One way to challenge the reactionary mentality is to debunk the romantic depiction of the past and offer a more accurate and cogent critique of the modern world (which, among other things, means offering a critique of capitalism). When challenging the reactionary’s way of thinking it is also important to make clear that, realistically, he wouldn’t have been much better off in the “good old days.”

As Kimmel notes in his book, reactionary ideas “reflect a somewhat nostalgic longing for that past world, when men believed they could simply take their places among the nation’s elite, simply by working hard and applying themselves. Alas, such a world never existed; economic elites have always managed to reproduce themselves despite the ideals of a meritocracy.”

“The anger of the middle-class white Americans is real,” he continues, but its aim “is misdirected not towards those who are the cause of their misery but against those who are just below them on the economic ladder.”

To counteract the reactionary mindset, it will be necessary not only to expose and discredit reactionary myths about the past, but also to acknowledge that reactionaries have legitimate reason to feel disenchanted with the modern world — and, finally, to offer a genuine progressive alternative to the status quo.


https://www.salon.com/2018/05/12/angry- ... -reaction/
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Tue May 15, 2018 9:00 am

National Review op-ed says treat trans people with basic dignity, right-wing loses it

Social conservatives battle it out to see who can reject trans people the most.


ZACK FORD
MAY 10, 2018

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CONSERVATIVE OUTLET DEBATES INTERNALLY OVER WHETHER TO 'COMPROMISE' ON TRANSGENDER PEOPLE. (CREDIT: ERIK MCGREGOR/PACIFIC PRESS/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES)

The conservative National Review on Wednesday published a piece by J.J. McCullough, suggesting it was “time for a compromise on transgenderism.” What followed was a desperate attempt by other National Review columnists to out-do one another in rejecting transgender people instead.

The premise of McCullough’s so-called “compromise” is not compelling, of course. He argues that conservatives should admit “the reality that transgender men and women exist, and are entitled to basic human dignity, just like everyone else.” He even suggests that maybe conservatives should abandon the practice of “ostentatiously calling people by pronouns they don’t want.” It’s not a matter of “want,” however; misgendering transgender people in such a way is so stigmatizing it can measurably impact their health.

That’s about all McCullough offers. He adds that progressives would have to accept that many will still condemn transgender people for religious reasons, that trans kids’ genders will still be policed, and that laws won’t be used to “impose accommodation of transgenderism in a fashion far more totalitarian than is rationally justified.” He reinforces “the broad two-gender social order our civilization is based around,” so the compromise offers no room for respecting gender non-binary people either.

Given how conservatives don’t even think laws should require bakers to sell same-sex couples the same cakes they sell to other couples, that doesn’t suggest much promise for nondiscrimination protections on behalf of gender identity.

Nevertheless, by acknowledging that trans people exist, McCullough might as well have suggested that Jesus wasn’t God’s son, given how swiftly all of the other white, Christian men working in the world of conservative media launched their counterattacks. The National Review itself published two additional articles responding to McCullough’s “compromise.”

First up was Michael Brendan Dougherty, who answered McCullough’s suggestion that conservatives must compromise with a blunt, “No we don’t.” Acknowledging trans people’s existence, he warns, is a “slippery bit of a double-talk” that will inhibit conservatives’ ability “to tell the truth.”

David French then picked up Dougherty’s argument about “truth” and intentionally doubled down. “I won’t call Chelsea Manning ‘she’ for a very simple reason. He’s [sic] a man [sic],” French insisted. “If a person legally changes his [sic] name, I’ll use his [sic] legal name. But I will not use my words to endorse a falsehood. I simply won’t.”

French followed up with warnings about bathrooms and the usual baseless fear-mongering.

Over at the American Conservative, Rod Dreher — who believes that Christians should shut themselves off from society to avoid having to respect LGBTQ people — tossed his hat in the ring, calling McCullough’s compromise “badly wrong.” To his credit, he correctly pointed out that there is no form of discrimination against trans people that “the Left” will accept, but he did so while defending the premise of practicing such discrimination.

Dreher also promoted a group of trans-exclusive radical feminists dedicated to rejecting transgender kids, warning that “transgenders” [sic] have been “viciously attacking” them. “This is madness, true madness, and you cannot compromise with it,” he wrote, a not so subtle dogwhistle referring to conservatives’ belief that transgender people are inherently mentally ill. (They’re not.)

Not to be left out of the transphobic pissing contest, the Federalist’s David Marcus joined the fray Thursday, claiming that what McCullough had actually suggested was not a compromise, but “a surrender that is not justified.” It’s a “fantasy,” he insisted, that transgenderism is “a persistent aspect of humanity.” He then worried, unnecessarily, about how trans women “will absolutely dominate women’s sports,” awkwardly offering, “They can even be sexier.”


Continues: https://thinkprogress.org/conservative- ... e0ac39af3/
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Thu May 24, 2018 9:03 am

An Anarchist Response to Far-Right Professor Jordan Peterson

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Peterson claims to be tapping into and addressing the alienation expressed by thousands of young men with his self-help philosophy. He blames third wave feminism, the dissolution of the quintessential male archetype and a lack encouragement for signs of a disaffected population of young men who are experiencing increasing university dropout and suicide rates relative to women. Indeed, one only has to mention the term “young men” for Peterson to dissolve into tears during interviews, bemoaning the “postmodern neo-Marxists” who’s claim that Western Civilization is a patriarchal hierarchy allegedly undermines the fragile archetypical male. Here, Peterson references a far-Right conspiracy theory commonly associated with fascism, but for now, let’s focus on the question of personal responsibility.

What does Peterson mean when he says we should take responsibility for our own lives? In an interview on ABC news Australia where Peterson lays out his philosophy, the interviewer pushes back, pointing out that some people face difficult circumstances in life, which makes it harder to take responsibility. Peterson agrees, responding with: “Life is very difficult and we all die… well, what’s the alternative, you take responsibility for that and try to struggle uphill because the alternative makes everything worse.”

With this, Peterson cuts down to an existential truth; in the face of suffering, an individual can either choose to accept suffering and fight to reduce it by seeking-out meaning, or remain complacent. He cites existential reasons for why we ought to seek responsibility, arguing that we are defined by our burdens and that we should, “Carry the biggest rock we can find.” Here, I agree with Peterson’s logic and have personally encountered similar sentiments in a critique of Bartelbyism and hopelessness published in the anarchist blog, Research & Destroy:

Most of the theoretical expressions that emerge from this confused condition share a fundamental misidentification of effects as causes. Identifying the source of their unhappiness in their own naïve optimism and commitment, their investment in some political project or process, they reason that, in order to spare themselves future suffering, they must cease to hope, to commit, to desire, they must treat each new event as dead from the start. They conclude not only that disaffection and pessimism will cause us to suffer less in the face of the failure of struggles, but that optimism, earnest commitment, investment, are the source of these failures. In other words, they reason that the reason we lose is because we keep trying, despite the fact that it is obviously the other way around.


To seek out responsibility and meaning in the face of suffering and to fight against the forces that perpetuate one’s suffering is both empowering and perhaps a more rational course of action given one’s own beliefs of what the world should look like.

However, Peterson draws an arbitrary line between individuals who pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps within the confines of the status quo and activists who seek to alter or dismantle it altogether, revealing a deep-seated political bias that belies a consistent application of his own message. Peterson focuses on the erosion of the male archetype as a model of meaning for all men (a doubtful prospect) while ignoring the structural conditions that cause many individuals, including men, to suffer from an utter lack of agency and self-determination.

He justifies his disdain for activism with the empty platitude, “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world,” completely missing the fact that human experiences are shaped by external conditions and that addressing these conditions is not only an exercise of personal responsibility but also a way of expanding the sphere of individual autonomy and responsibility. In order for people to actively take responsibility for their own lives (rather than passively accepting it), they must feel empowered to contribute to their own personal development, friendships, families and communities. Both the State and capitalism, institutions lauded by Peterson, obfuscate individual responsibility and prevent individuals from finding meaning in their day-to-day activities.

Peterson himself admits that, “Our culture has oppressive elements to it, it’s not completely fair” (emphasis on the word “culture”), while disparaging activists who actually take responsibility for their own lives by fighting back against socioeconomic and structural forms of oppression that limit their sphere of action such as as racism, patriarchy, transphobia and the State.

For many trans activists, the search for meaning manifests itself as a fight to validate their own existence; trans people are murdered and sexually assaulted at a far higher rate than the rest of the population and are vilified in almost all walks of like. For Peterson (although he might not admit it or phrase it this way), the only oppressed group worthy of recognition is “young men,” who are, according to him, being silenced by campus “social justice warriors” with accusations of racism and bigotry — an utterly absurd claim. It is ironic that one of the far-Right’s favorite insults to hurl at leftists is “snowflake.”

Drawing an arbitrary line in the sand at activism reveals Peterson for what he is, not a herald of the new far-Right “counterculture,” but a hypocritical representative of the neo-liberal status quo who’s rebranding of traditionalism, use of fascist dog-whistles and glorification of toxic masculinity has earned him a major following amongst the Alt-Right. Peterson paradoxically finds himself in direct opposition to those who would seek to truly foster an environment of personal responsibility by expanding individual autonomy and delegating greater responsibility to the individual by dismantling illegitimate, authoritarian modes of governance.

At this point it is important to further clarify the concept of “personal responsibility.” Responsibility is derived from our capacity for action. Every individual with agency is responsible for their actions regardless of their circumstances. For example, a murderer is typically held responsible for their actions even after we take into account the underlying conditions that compelled them to commit the crime. Similarly, each of us is responsible for our own decisions. That said, underlying socioeconomic conditions, authoritarian modes of organization and centralized power structures can take away responsibility from people or prevent them from feeling a sense of responsibility by shrinking their sphere of influence until it is virtually non-existent. As people begin to doubt the efficacy and meaning behind their actions, they begin to feel alienated and lose their sense of personal responsibility.

Structuralist philosophers such as Marx sought to identify underlying socioeconomic constructs that explain and predict the behavior and sentiments of the average individual. Structures such as such as racism, transphobia, statism and capitalism serve to negate the impact people of certain groups can make in the world. Peterson accuses leftists of focusing on groups while ignoring the individual, conveniently forgetting that groups are made of individuals and that in these cases, group autonomy translates to individual autonomy.

So, let us return to the original question, under the status quo, can we individually choose most of our actions and shape our own circumstances? The answer is no. We live inside a framework of institutionalized rule via classes, bosses, owners and the State.

Authoritarian modes of governance, from representative democracy to autocracy, force the individual to abdicate responsibility by passing it up or down the chain of command. Individual action is contingent on permission from the institutions and people that control our society and workplaces. From traveling across an imaginary line in the sand, to starting a new project at work, getting an education and in some cases, using the bathroom, our actions are dictated by faceless, impersonal institutions and socioeconomic conditions that fall outside our control.

In these cases, an individual is only responsible for choosing between blindly follow orders or putting themselves in opposition to systemic domination, which is exactly what we see from activists, many of whom are not making appeals to authority by carrying signs and placards but actively engaging in direct action in order to oppose the centralization of power; physically confronting fascists, destroying fossil fuel infrastructure, hacking, squatting and farming. These aren’t people seeking out “victim status” or special privileges but social equity and personal autonomy. Examples of what I mean span from mobilizing at Standing Rock and physically confronting neo-Nazis at their rallies, to forming temporary autonomous zones like Exarchia and ZAD inside the cracks of State hegemony.

Moreover, even when it isn’t entirely abdicated, responsibility is obfuscated by complex bureaucracy, geographically limited by borders, eroded by forced labor and diluted within centralized power structures. Underlying circumstances such as being from a low-income background (data shows that the most important drivers of one’s living standard are determined at birth), lead to individuals being faced with binary choices with only one viable option.

While an individual can always choose to act; taking on student debt and accepting tedious, repetitive jobs for low wages will always be seen as better alternatives to homelessness, social exclusion and even starvation, so it’s easy to get the impression that you’re being dragged through life by the proverbial “invisible hand.” The same applies when an individual is unable to cross a national border in search of a better life or immobilized by legal fees due to a court hearing for drug possession. It is no wonder that young men and other more acutely marginalized groups feel disenfranchised and powerless inside the status quo.


https://itsgoingdown.org/an-anarchist-r ... -peterson/
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Fri May 25, 2018 7:26 am

A Thing for Men in Uniforms

James Kirchick

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Benito Mussolini, undated (circa 1930s)

This belief that homosexuality belongs to an elite caste, whose select adherents are members of an exclusive fraternity existing above the heterosexual masses and destined for greatness, is a theme recognizable in several prominent homosexual writers and figures throughout history and across cultures. The gay American architect and early Nazi enthusiast Philip Johnson, displayed, according to the author Marc Wortman, “a personal snobbery toward mass democratic society.” (Upon the German invasion of Poland, Johnson wrote that “The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy,” albeit using “gay” in the earlier, non-homosexual sense of the word.) D.H. Lawrence expressed a hatred for democracy (“Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” he wrote, was a “three-fanged serpent”) and posited a Nietzschean understanding of same-sex relations, contending that “nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not.” Bemoaning the demise of dandyism, a way of life hardly exclusive to homosexuals but one disproportionately adopted by them, Baudelaire had blamed, “the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level,” which “is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride.”

The idea of a homosexual elite allied with an authoritarian politics was initially advanced in the form of the Männerbund (men’s associations) of late Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. In his cultural history of that era, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, the historian Robert Beachy details the surprising political diversity of early homosexual activists, many of whom were far right nationalists. The aftermath of World War I “helped to catalyze strains of masculinist ideology,” he writes, as “demoralized German troops” returned home “to explore the homosocial friendship and same-sex eroticism they had discovered in the trenches.” While the most renowned figure from that period remains the sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld, a cosmopolitan, Jewish Social Democrat (whose 150th birthday will be celebrated May 14 at a symposium in Berlin), he existed alongside a coterie of hyper-masculine, authoritarian-minded writers and thinkers who “helped to assimilate homoeroticism to a nationalist, anti-democratic politics.”

Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was far ahead of its time in positing homosexuality as a fixed identity, and his Institute for the Science of Sexuality, of which the Committee was part, was promptly destroyed by the Nazis after their seizure of power in 1933. Whereas Hirschfeld was interested in exploring the whole diverse array of sexual and gender expression—a panoply including lesbianism, “transvestism” (a term he invented), and effeminacy among gay men—the architects of the Männerbund prized masculinity, of which no purer form could be found than in the Frontgemeinschaft (front-line comradeship) of the World War I trenches. One of the intellectual leaders of the movement, Benedict Friedländer, contended that homosexuals constituted a class of Übermenschen, driven to greatness by the revolutionary nature of their forbidden desire:

Any repression of deep-seated physiological or physical tendencies harms the body and spirit… Consequently, we can understand why the great men of post-classical and recent times have so often sinned against both custom and the law on this particular point [homosexuality]: had they accommodated themselves on law and custom and sinned against their own nature, they might not have accomplished the achievements that have made their names immortal.

One organization promoting such theories, its sense of superiority elucidated by its very name, was the Community of the Special. Founded by the writer Adolf Brand, who had also started the world’s first regular gay publication, Der Eigene (“The Unique”), in 1896, the Community of the Special aimed to create “an elite vanguard of superior German men,” according to Beachy, “who would lead [a] renewal” of German nationalism. “Implicit was a strong suspicion of Weimar democracy and Reichstag debate, as well as latent and often explicit anti-Semitism,” as non-traditionally masculine homosexuals were conflated with lesbians, Jews, Communists, and Social Democrats as enemies of the German volk. In 1923, when campaigners were advocating the repeal of Paragraph 175 (the Wilhelmine-era law proscribing homosexual conduct, which the Nazis would later use to persecute gay men), the Community of the Special abstained—on the grounds that it did not want to divide conservative nationalist forces on this issue of sexuality as France began its postwar occupation of the Ruhr valley.

Another prominent Männerbund figure, Hans Blüher, wrote a three-volume study celebrating the homoeroticism of the Wandervögel, a German proto-boy scouts. When conservatives attacked him, Blüher overcompensated by adopting an extravagant German nationalism, eventually becoming one of the most notorious anti-Semites of the Weimar era. (According to historian Claudia Bruns, Blüher was one of the first figures to use the term Konservative Revolution to describe the array of reactionary forces that eventually toppled the Weimar Republic.) Figures like Friedländer, Blüher, and Brand were not a mere curiosity among politically active homosexuals in Germany at the time. Beachy cites a 1926 survey of 38,000 members of the League for Human Rights, one of Weimar’s leading homosexual organizations, which found that 12,000—roughly one-third—belonged to volkisch right-wing parties.

The most infamous figure to emerge from the milieu of the German Männerbund was Ernst Röhm, a barrel-chested, scar-faced veteran of World War I and co-founder of the SA, the gang of Nazi thugs colloquially known as “Brownshirts.” Surrounding himself with young, virile men looking for a fight, Röhm didn’t hide his homosexuality and, initially, his close friend Adolf Hitler was willing to tolerate it. (Part of the reason the Nazis incinerated the archives of the Institute for the Science of Sexuality so quickly after assuming power, Hirschfeld later surmised, was to destroy the records he had amassed from homosexual members of the SA who had volunteered for his studies.) But eventually Hitler began to see the SA leadership as a threat to his absolute power. In 1934, he ordered “The Night of the Long Knives,” in which Röhm and dozens of his SA comrades (some allegedly found in bed with one another) were executed.

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SA leader Ernst Röhm, with his mother

Though the Nazi leadership carried out the Night of the Long Knives to eliminate a rival power base, it later claimed a desire to stamp out homosexual debauchery as an ex post facto justification for the purge. “A sect that was at the heart of a conspiracy not only against the normal conceptions of a healthy people, but also against state security” was how Hitler described Röhm and his circle. The image of the SA as a den of homosexual iniquity has lived on in popular culture; in his 1969 film The Damned, Luchino Visconti depicted the Night of the Long Knives as a gay bacchanal culminating in a gangland-style slaughter. It has also served more slanderous purposes: while the myth of a homosexual inclination to fascism may have originated with socialists and Communists, it has today been revived by some ultra-conservative polemicists intent on branding Nazism an outgrowth of progressive social and sexual values. Scott Lively, a pastor who has called for the criminalization of public advocacy of homosexuality,” has also co-authored a revisionist tract claiming that Nazism was a homosexual conspiracy. Dinesh D’Souza, who had the temerity to tweet last year that “Hitler was NOT anti-gay,” contends that the “Nazi atmosphere” of the early 1930s “far more closely resembles that of the Village Voice or the Democratic National Convention than it does the National Review or the Trump White House.”

The gay flirtation with Weimar-era rightist movements would end tragically, of course, not just for those homosexuals who joined Nazi ranks in the mistaken belief that Hitler would create a New Order in which they would be protected, but also for the thousands of gay men imprisoned and killed under the Nazi regime. “The many homosexual men who embraced the Nazi cause misapprehended the centrality of Nazi racialist doctrine and how homosexuality appeared to threaten it,” Beachy observes. “Viewing Nazis as the literal embodiment of the homoerotic Männerbund, many were blinded by the homoeroticism of the masculinist ideologies.”


http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/05/14 ... -uniforms/
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Fri May 25, 2018 9:32 pm

Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes calls female journalists "colostomy bags for various strangers' semen"
McInnes defends Jordan Peterson's suggestion that "enforced monogamy" is the solution to incels' violent hatred of women

From the May 21 edition of CRTV's Get Off My Lawn:


GAVIN MCINNES (HOST): That's why we have to have enforced monogamy, because men are liars and, guess what, ladies? We lie to ourselves. When we say, "we love you" and "we changed our minds" and "we want to be with you again, can you come over? I know it's 4 in the morning, but I need you right now." We're lying to ourselves. And the next morning when we go, "God I wish she'd get out of here," that's us being honest with ourselves again. And we find out that we duped ourselves. So don't listen to us because we can't trust ourselves. And the irony of all of this, of course, with feminism, is that we've convinced you that this horrible situation where we use you and then wait til' your ovaries dry up and then toss you in the trash and go for a younger model? We've convinced you that that's empowering. And all of these writers, like Amanda Marcotte and all of these, Nellie Bowles, and the woman [Taylor Lorenz] who exposed Pamela Geller's kids, all these spinsters, they think they're living this too cool, empowered Watergate-journalist life. But you're not. You're just a colostomy bag for various strangers' semen.


https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018 ... men/220280
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby liminalOyster » Sun May 27, 2018 3:48 pm

Wow - without a caption, David Hogg reads as 100% alt-right.

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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Sun May 27, 2018 4:06 pm

"We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles".

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Society of the spectacle - Guy Debord
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 01, 2018 5:57 am

Trigger Warning


Congressional Candidate In Virginia Admits He’s A Pedophile

Nathan Larson also ran online forums for pedophiles and misogynists.

By Jesselyn Cook Andy Campbell

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Nathan Larson is running for Congress as an independent in Virginia.
In an interview with HuffPost, he was open about his pedophilia.


Nathan Larson, a 37-year-old accountant from Charlottesville, Virginia, is running for Congress as an independent candidate in his native state. He is also a pedophile, as he admitted to HuffPost on Thursday, who has bragged in website posts about raping his late ex-wife.

In a phone call, Larson confirmed that he created the now-defunct websites suiped.org and incelocalypse.today ― chat rooms that served as gathering places for pedophiles and violence-minded misogynists like himself. HuffPost contacted Larson after confirming that his campaign website shared an IP address with these forums, among others. His sites were terminated by their domain host on Tuesday.

On the phone, he was open about his pedophilia and seemingly unfazed about his long odds of attaining government office.

“A lot of people are tired of political correctness and being constrained by it,” he said. “People prefer when there’s an outsider who doesn’t have anything to lose and is willing to say what’s on a lot of people’s minds.”

When asked whether he’s a pedophile or just writes about pedophilia, he said, “It’s a mix of both. When people go over the top there’s a grain of truth to what they say.”

Asked whether there was a “grain of truth” in his essay about father-daughter incest and another about raping his ex-wife repeatedly, he said yes, offering that plenty of women have rape fantasies.

According to Larson’s campaign manifesto, his platform as a “quasi-neoreactionary libertarian” candidate includes protecting gun ownership rights, establishing free trade and protecting “benevolent white supremacy,” as well as legalizing incestuous marriage and child pornography.

In the manifesto, Larson called Nazi leader Adolf Hitler a “white supremacist hero.” He urged Congress to repeal the Violence Against Women Act, adding, “We need to switch to a system that classifies women as property, initially of their fathers and later of their husbands.” He also showed sympathy for men who identify as involuntary celibates, or incels, suggesting it is unfair that they “are forced to pay taxes for schools, welfare, and other support for other men’s children.”


Continues: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ ... ccounter=2
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 01, 2018 11:58 am

There is a better way:

http://www.anarkismo.net/article/13970

Strengthening Anarchism's Gender Analysis
August 13, 2009 16:28 by J. Rogue - Common Action, Workers Solidarity Alliance

Lessons From The Transfeminist Movement


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Transfeminism developed out of a critique of the mainstream and radical feminist movements. The feminist movement has a history of internal hierarchies. There are many examples of women of color, working class women, lesbians and others speaking out against the tendency of the white, affluent- dominated women’s movement to silence them and overlook their needs. Instead of honoring these marginalized voices, the mainstream feminist movement has prioritized struggling for rights primarily in the interests of white affluent women. While the feminist movement as a whole has not resolved these hierarchal tendencies, various groups have continued to speak up regarding their own marginalization – in particular, transgendered women. The process of developing a broader understanding of systems of oppression and how they interact has advanced feminism and is key to building on the theory of anarchist feminism.

Transfeminism builds on the work that came out of the multiracial feminist movement, and in particular, the work of Black feminists. Frequently, when confronted with allegations of racism, classism, or homophobia, the women’s movement dismisses these issues as divisive. The more prominent voices promote the idea of a homogenous “universal female experience,” which, as it is based on commonality between women, theoretically promotes a sense of sisterhood. In reality, it means pruning the definition of “woman” and trying to fit all women into a mold reflecting the dominant demographic of the women’s movement: white, affluent, heterosexual, and non-disabled. This “policing” of identity, whether conscious or not, reinforces systems of oppression and exploitation. When women who do not fit this mold have challenged it, they have frequently been accused of being divisive and disloyal to the sisterhood. The hierarchy of womanhood created by the women’s movement reflects, in many ways, the dominant culture of racism, capitalism and heteronormativity.

Mainstream feminist organizing frequently tries to find the common ground shared by women, and therefore focuses on what the most vocal members decide are “women’s issues” – as if the female experience existed in vacuum outside of other forms of oppression and exploitation. However, using an intersectional approach to analyzing and organizing around oppression, as advocated by multiracial feminism and transfeminism, we can discuss these differences rather than dismiss them. The multiracial feminist movement developed this approach, which argues that one cannot address the position of women without also addressing their class, race, sexuality, ability, and all other aspects of their identity and experiences. Forms of oppression and exploitation do not exist separately. They are intimately related and reinforce each other, and so trying to address them singly (i.e. “sexism” divorced from racism, capitalism, etc) does not lead to a clear understanding of the patriarchal system. This is in accordance with the anarchist view that we must fight all forms of hierarchy, oppression, and exploitation simultaneously; abolishing capitalism and the state does not ensure that white supremacy and patriarchy will be somehow magically dismantled.

Tied to this assumption of a “universal female experience” is the idea that that if a woman surrounds herself with those that embody that “universal” woman, then she is safe from patriarchy and oppression. The concept of “women’s safe spaces” (being women-only) date back to the early lesbian feminist movement, which was largely comprised of white, middle-class women who prioritized addressing sexism over other forms of oppression. This notion that an all-women space is inherently safe not only discounts the intimate violence that can occur between women, but also ignores or de-prioritizes the other types of violence that women can experience; racism, poverty, incarceration and other forms of state, economic and social brutality.

The Transfeminist Manifesto states: “Transfeminism believes that we construct our own gender identities based on what feels genuine, comfortable and sincere to us as we live and relate to others within given social and cultural constraint. (1)” The notion that gender is a social construct is a key concept in transfeminism, and are also essential (no pun intended) to an anarchist approach to feminism. Transfeminism also criticizes the idea of a “universal female experience” and argues against the biologically essentialist view that one’s gender is defined by one’s genitalia. Other feminisms have embraced the essentialist argument, seeing the idea of “women’s unity” as being built off a sameness, some kind of core “woman-ness.” This definition of woman is generally reliant on what is between a person’s legs. Yet what specifically about the definition of woman is intrinsic to two X chromosomes? If it is defined as being in possession of a womb, does that mean women who have had hysterectomies are somehow less of a woman? Perhaps, if we reduce the definition of “woman” to the role of child-bearer. That seems rather antithetical to feminism. Gender roles have long been under scrutiny in radical communities. The idea that women are born to be mothers, are more sensitive and peaceful, are predisposed to wearing the color pink and all the other stereotypes out there are socially constructed, not biological. If the (repressive) gender role does not define what a woman is, and if the organs one is born with do not define gender either, the next logical step is to recognize that gender can only be defined by the individual, for themselves. While this concept may cause some to panic, that does not make it any less legitimate with regards to a person’s identity.

It is important to note that not all transgender people chose to physically transition, and that each person’s decision to do so or not is their own. The decision is highly personal and generally irrelevant to theoretical conceptions of gender. There are many reasons to physically change one’s body, from getting a haircut to taking hormones. Some reasons might be to feel more at ease in a world with strict definitions of male and female. Another is to look in the mirror and see on the outside (the popular understanding of) the gender one feels on the inside. Surely, for some, it is the belief that gender is defined by the physical construction of one’s genitalia. But rather than draw from speculation as to the motivations for the personal decisions of trans people (as if they where not vast and varied), it is more productive to note the challenge to the idea that biology is destiny.

Thus far, gender and feminist theory that includes trans experiences exists almost solely in academia. There are very few working class intellectuals in the field, and the academic language used is not particularly accessible to the average person. This is unfortunate, since the issues that transfeminism addresses affect all people. Capitalism, racism, the state, patriarchy and the medical field mediate the way everyone experiences gender. There is a significant amount of coercion employed by these institutions to police human experiences, which applies to everyone, trans and non-trans alike. Capitalism and the state play a very direct role in the experiences of trans people. Access to hormones and surgery, if desired, costs a significant amount of money, and people are often forced to jump through bureaucratic hoops in order to acquire them. Trans people are disproportionately likely to be members of the working and under classes. However, within the radical queer and transfeminist communities, while there may be discussions of class, they are generally framed around identity – arguing for “anti-classist” politics, but not necessarily anti-capitalist.

The concepts espoused by transfeminism help us understand gender, but there is a need for the theory to break out of academia and to develop praxis amongst the working class and social movements. This is not to say that there are no examples of transfeminist organizing, but rather that there needs to be an incorporation of transfeminist principles into broad based movements. Even gay and lesbian movements have a history of leaving trans people behind. For example, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act does not protect gender identity. Again we see a hierarchy of importance; the gay and lesbian movement compromises (throwing trans folks under the bus), rather than employing an inclusive strategy for liberation. There is frequently a sense of a “scarcity of liberation” within reformist social movements, the feeling that the possibilities for freedom are so limited that we must fight against other marginalized groups for a piece of the pie. This is in direct opposition to the concept of intersectionality, since it often requires people to betray one aspect of their identity in order to politically prioritize another. How can a person be expected to engage in a fight against gender oppression if it ignores or worsens their racial oppression? Where does one aspect of their identity and experiences end and another begin? Anarchism offers a possible society in which liberation is anything but scarce. It provides a theoretical framework that calls for an end to all hierarchies, and, as stated by Martha Ackelsberg, “It offers a perspective on the nature and process of social revolutionary transformation (e.g. the insistence that means must be consistent with ends, and that economic issues are critical, but not the only source of hierarchal power relations) that can be extremely valuable to/ for women’s emancipation. (2)”

Anarchists need to be developing working class theory that includes an awareness of the diversity of the working class. The anarchist movement can benefit from the development of a working class, anarchist approach to gender issues that incorporates the lessons of transfeminism and intersectionality. It is not so much a matter of asking anarchists to become active in the transfeminist movement as it is a need for anarchists to take a page from the Mujeres Libres and integrate the principles of (trans)feminism into our organizing within the working class and social movements. Continuing to develop contemporary anarchist theory of gender rooted in the working class requires a real and integrated understanding of transfeminism.

This article neglects to address another important concept: the idea that biological sex is somewhat socially constructed as well. Given the high prevalence of intersex folks, it is worth re-evaluating whether or not there are only two supposed biological sexes. This is a whole additional discussion, and one that would require a bit more research. Recommended sites for more information are http://www.isna.org and http://www.eminism.org.


Notes

1. The Transfeminist Manifesto by Emi Koyama (2000)

2. Lessons from the Free Women of Spain an interview with Martha Ackelsberg
by Geert Dhont (2004)

This article appears in the latest issue of the Northeastern Anarchist
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 04, 2018 8:13 am

Anti-Transgender Activist Walt Heyer Discusses ‘Sex Change Regret’ With Christopher Cantwell

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Cantwell frequently attacks transgender people on his Radical Agenda podcast, routinely and falsely calling them “mentally ill.” In one episode from September 2016 he said transgender people were “lucky” that “we haven’t fuckin’ rounded you up and put you into [concentration] camps.” During that same episode a caller told Cantwell he has “trouble looking at a … tranny and not wanting to just break their neck right there.”

On the May 28, 2018 episode of his show, titled “Jump,” Cantwell mocked Manning’s suicidal tweet and interviewed anti-transgender activist Walt Heyer about so-called “sex change regret.” Heyer himself transitioned from male to female and back again, having been misdiagnosed as suffering from gender dysphoria. Today the 77-year-old runs the website Sex Change Regret and authors transphobic screeds for websites like The Federalist and the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal.

Heyer’s career centers around promoting the discredited idea that most transgender people who transition experience regret after the fact. While detransitioning does occur, it’s a more complicated matter than Heyer makes it out to be. Another unsupported claim made by Heyer is that no one is really transgender, but rather such individuals suffer from several untreated mental illnesses.

Heyer told Cantwell that “the real truth is people who identify and say they’re transgender are suffering from some form of mental illness, either it’s emotional, psychological, or sexual.” He added that for 50 years “they’ve been trying to prove that there’s a transgender gene and there isn’t one” — and therefore there is no such thing as being transgender.

“So we’re experimenting with peoples’ emotions where the reason why somebody like [Chelsea] Manning and other transgenders [sic] wanna attempt suicide is because we’re affirming them, and not providing effective psychotherapy for the vast number of mental disorders that most of them suffer from,” he continued.

“And those disorders are body dysmorphic disorder, dissociative disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and many other emotional and psychological disorders that never get treated because alls we’re doin’ is affirming these poor saps, and as a result of that they have no treatment for the actual disorder that’s causing them to behave in these bizarre ways.”

And, according to Heyer, the medical issues faced by transgender people are actually a “political tool” used by politicians to “fund raise” and “aggravate our school systems” — presumably by allowing children to use the restrooms that match their gender identity.

“And so we’re destroying kids’ lives, I mean adults who identify as a transgender person ages 25 and above attempt suicide at a rate above 40%,” he said. “The young children that are bein’ encouraged in our schools to change genders and not even tell their parents, attempt suicide at a rate of 50%.” It’s unclear how Heyer thinks children “change genders” in school without their parents’ knowledge, or where he gets his statistics from.


https://angrywhitemen.org/2018/06/03/an ... -cantwell/
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 06, 2018 8:31 pm

The Pacific Northwest Proud Boys - White Nationalist Social Club

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Left: Auburn WA Proudboy Ethan Nordean chokes a counter-protester on the ground, Center: Russell Schultz attacks a community member standing up for reproductive rights and healthcare in front of a Planned Parenthood in Olympia WA, Right: Tusitala “Tiny” Toese punches a counter-protester at Joey Gibson’s anti-immigrant hate rally in downtown Portland.


“Western Chauvinism” equals “White Pride”

The Proud Boys form a central pillar of the current alt-right movement in large part because their patented dogwhistle, “Western Chauvinism,” functions as an effective, but less explicit, articulation of white supremacist ideology. Their homophobic, transphobic, anti-immigrant, anti-semitic, and anti-Islamic beliefs are justified by their “pride” in “the west” having “founded civilization–” ignoring the obvious fact that all of the people they despise have been part of civilizations since long before anyone identified such a thing as “Western culture.” Their vision of a “west” without queer and trans people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and people of color, reveals their notion of “western pride” for what it really is: the same politic Nazi groups call “White Identitarianism,” or “White Pride.” The Proud Boys’ views are identical to those of openly fascist groups such as Identity Europa and Patriot Front. Belief in this ideology of Western Chauvinism is a requirement for membership in the Proud Boys. Like other fascist groups, the Proud Boys organize around the perception that this fantastical, preeminent “West” is losing its natural position of dominance. Openly white supremacist groups label this same myth of losing ground “white genocide.” Regardless of what they call these ideas, both groups agree that this allegedly lost power must be re-claimed and defended through violence, directed at whomever they deem to be enemies or usurpers of their culture.

Misogyny

Violence is the fuel in the ideological engine of a far-right group like the Proud Boys. Like many white nationalist groups, their public exhibitions of power, expressed in violence and the threat of violence, draws in other power-seeking men. It becomes a way to reinforce their understanding of social order, at the same time as they attack their enemies, and instill fear in the general public.

This driving force of violence can be found in many of their members’ political speech. Violence towards women, in both action and speech, becomes a bonding activity for a chauvinist member of the group. Founder McInnes’s own misogyny is well documented throughout his tenure at Vice Magazine. More recently McInnes, in grotesque terms, expressed agreement with alt-right pop psychologist Jordan Peterson’s proposed programs of “enforced monogamy” to exert control over women’s autonomy. The Proud Boys oppose access to abortion and women’s health resources. Like many fascists, they use myths of “traditional” sexual orientation and gender roles to impose control over women, and as a rationale in targeting feminist activists for violence. They substitute the sanitized phrase “venerating the housewife” to mask their intent to eliminate women’s civil rights and bodily autonomy. In the Northwest, Proud Boys are frequent participants in anti-choice demonstrations, and have attacked activists who oppose their intimidation tactics outside of reproductive healthcare providers such as Planned Parenthood. A number of the NW Proud Boys have been charged with domestic violence and assault, as our forthcoming articles will soon show. And threaded through the physical violence, their rallying cry, “Proud of Your Boy,” makes it clear that what drives their actions is their belief in a society in which men hold power over women, and enforce that hierarchy through assaults and slander.

Homophobia and Transphobia

Women are only one of the Proud Boys’ many targets. From African-Americans, to vegetarians, to trans and queer people, to activists working on any number of causes, Proud Boys find all these at-risk communities to be a simultaneous excuse and outlet for their violence in defense of “Western civilization.”

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Proud Boys Pacific Northwest’s obsession with urine grows to paranoid levels.

Homophobia and transphobia are two of the most concerning categories of bigotry that the Proud Boys express. They have consistently singled out people they believe are gay or trans at protests as targets for assault and subsequent online harassment. One of the Proud Boys, in a speech to fellow Proud Boys at Joey Gibson’s June 3, 2018 rally, exhorted the crowd to “show these f—–s what we’re made of,” before rushing into the crowd to attack anti-fascist activists. Their predilection toward such hateful slurs evokes an ugly history of persecution for many LGBTQ people today, these words having only recently become socially unacceptable in mainstream culture. Homophobia and transphobia are not just “political opinions.” The bigoted and dehumanizing statements are intimately linked to real-world acts of violence, including the Proud Boys’ own long record of assaults. The cycle of hatred and violence creates a vicious feedback loop.


https://rosecityantifa.org/articles/pb-intro/
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 07, 2018 6:39 pm

NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch: Some women “wouldn’t know what masculinity was if it hit them in the face"

From the June 6 edition of NRATV’s Relentless:

DANA LOESCH (HOST): I am so tired of this matriarchal witch hunt on young men. There is nothing toxic about masculinity, but there are plenty of toxic things about third-wave feminism and the matriarchy that’s attempting to assert authority and also be the ombudsman over all characteristics and definitions of that which are either masculine or feminine. As a boy mom, kind of had enough of this. Especially like women who just need to stay in your lane and don’t be telling men how their masculinity is toxic. No, the problem that we’re having with society is that there’s an attack on masculinity where toxic masculinity isn’t an issue in all of the homes where there are absent fathers. That’s a lack of, not toxic. See, we have an issue right now where men are underappreciated, dads are ridiculed either as the dumb dad on television, that awful stereotype that still persists, or they are told that, what, they’re oppressive, they are suppressive simply because they are males and in the United States of America. I’m so tired, as a woman, as a mother of boys, having to combat this garbage from women -- many of which, many of whom don’t even have children, -- and others who wouldn’t be able -- they wouldn’t know what masculinity was if it hit them in the face. No. Honestly, stop it.


https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018 ... ace/220390
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 08, 2018 10:51 am

The Deadly Incel Movement’s Absurd Pop Culture Roots

The idea of a harassment campaign crossed over into the mainstream when the term “incels” did, in 2014. It was only a few months after Rodger’s spree that women on Twitter started experiencing mobs of enraged men demanding “ethics in gaming journalism,” the rallying cry of Gamergate.

The campaign initially stuck to standard anti-feminist grievances. The worst threats centered on feminist-identified media figures like Anita Sarkeesian, who had been intensely harassed for years. Gamergate caught the media’s attention by targeting the advertisers of outlets, like Gawker Media’s Kotaku, it deemed unfriendly. The subsequent scrutiny familiarized the public with threats like doxxing or SWATing (calling an armed SWAT team to invade the target’s house by using a fake bomb threat) that feminists had long experienced.

Gamergate also signaled an ideological shift in the manosphere, personified through its then-rising star Milo Yiannopolous. Though he initially presented his grievances in the language red-pillers were familiar with — one of Yiannopolous’ more famous posts was entitled “Feminism Is Cancer” — he maintained ongoing coordination with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, ushering his readers from misogyny into alignment with far-right militancy. Watching how Yiannopolous built a platform for genocidal ideologies under the veil of campy “outrageousness,” distracting critics with an ever more ridiculous series of outfits and haircuts — it was clear that he’d learned the right lessons from Mystery.

The alliance between masculinists and white supremacists was a natural one, suggests Charlottesville-based activist Emily Gorcenski. She’s recently been using her social media accounts to draw attention to leaked Discord chats between members of the alt-right, where, she says, individuals use incel lingo about “Chads” and “Stacys.” Gorcenski says both groups have a tendency to transmute their own anxieties into a “a complex scaffold of a belief system.”

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“They start from [white supremacy], and then they have to answer questions,” Gorcenski says, “like, are Jewish people white? Or what if someone is 2 percent white? It’s all junk statistics and junk science, but they have this whole framework built up. Incels have that about women.”

The ideological link between the misogynist rage of Gamergate and today’s alt-right isn’t subtle. Plenty of contemporary alt-right figures, like Mike Cernovich and Yiannopolous, initially made their names within Gamergate. Video game developer Zoe Quinn, the movement’s first and primary target, had been talking about the fascism within the movement since the beginning. As early as October 2014, Quinn Tweeted that she was “fightin more nazis than some issues of captain america these days for fuck’s sake.” In 2017, as Trump was about to be inaugurated on the back of substantial alt-right support, Quinn wrote that “[it] just dawned on me that I had a breakup go so badly he got mad and helped usher in a new era of American fascism over it.”

But the manosphere’s turn to fascism was not necessarily a case of embracing a new ideology so much as it was unearthing the subtext that had been there all along.

“There is, and always has been, a racialized dimension to all of this,” says digital sociologist Katherine Cross, whose work on Gamergate made her the target of a campaign to cancel her 2015 SXSW panel on harassment. “Anti-feminism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, it all hangs together. Scratch one and find the other.”

Cross points to one of the most famous passages of Elliott Rodger’s manifesto: “How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me?” he wrote. “I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more.”


I wondered if any of this would have played out differently in 2018; whether any of those male journalists or network executives were ashamed of their involvement in mainstreaming the manosphere, or if they felt responsible for the rise of Rodger and Minassian. Strauss, at least, has renounced the PUAs and written a memoir about surviving “sex addiction.” I reached out to several men who had covered these communities in the late ’00s — including Strauss, and even Mystery himself — but none were willing to talk. One let me send him a few questions; when I mentioned the incels, he abruptly told me he would “not be able to participate.”

Nor is the world more inclined to listen to women. When I spoke to writer Alana Massey, who was targeted by Roissy, an influential PUA blogger, following a 2015 article she published about Tinder, the conversation turned — as it often does, among women in my line of work — to which harassers we had in common. She told me that she’d been asked in late 2017 to comment on the recurring harassment allegations surrounding the nominally “leftist” podcast Chapo Trap House.

The podcast’s hosts, to say nothing of their rabid online fanbase, perceived themselves as enemies of the far-right manosphere. Nevertheless, their tactics — and targets — were often disturbingly similar. I’d been a regular punching bag for Chapo throughout 2016 and early 2017, culminating in a graphic death threat being sent to me by a man who was seemingly on friendly terms with Chapo host Felix Biederman. Massey caught Chapo’s attention in November 2016, when she referred to it as a “C+ podcast” in a subtweet. She forwarded me the email she’d sent to the reporter about the resulting deluge; the links and screencaps include men describing Massey as a “geriatric bipolar stripper” and posting her photo and calling it a “meth before and after pic.” Yet, when the reporter ran her quotes back by her, she believed that he planned to blow off the allegations.

“He didn’t quote a single thing that I was sent,” Massey said, “and he had like three sentences about ‘these irksome something-or-others.’ I was like, no, just take it out.”

In 2011, the thought of terrorism organized by a group of sexist men online was laughable.


In the weeks after the Minassian attack, the media published yet another wave of explainers about “incels,” economists mused about “redistributing sex,” and Times columnist Ross Douthat suggested that dateless men might be availed the use of sex workers or robots. (That he considered the two interchangeable is its own issue.) Like the PUAs, the incels were taken at face value, with their formerly unthinkable ideas — “redistributed sex,” despite the euphemism, is a call for legalized sex slavery — absorbed and broadcast uncritically by the mainstream. Between the first draft of this article and the second, a boy in Santa Fe, Texas, went on a shooting spree, after a girl he’d been harassing for months refused to date him and publicly told him to leave her alone.

Once again, women were stuck yelling warnings to a crowd that neither heard nor cared. The cycle that has dominated coverage of the manosphere for 10 years — horror and forgetfulness, mass outrage and instant erasure — continues to this day.


A combined 20 people have died in the Sodini, Rodger, and Minassian attacks. None of it was hard to see coming. The radical misogynist ideology behind the incel attacks was not remotely obscure. “Is it unpredictable that someone who buys into this kind of thinking — about how women owe men sex, about how women are worthless except for their ability to provide sex, about how force and cruelty can get you sex because women are ‘depraved’…actually just killed people?” I wrote in a 2009 blog post responding to the Sodini shooting. “No. No, it’s not.”

This is to say nothing of the role that toxic masculinity plays in mass violence generally — the history of domestic violence that is common among mass shooters, or the countless shootings that begin as crimes of domestic violence. If we’ve failed to take incels’ violence seriously, that is in part because we’ve failed to recognize this broader connection between misogyny and mass killing.

In Rebecca Solnit’s 2014 essay “Cassandra Among the Creeps,” she points out that the mythic Greek prophet Cassandra — who was always right and never believed — met her fate for reasons that would be applauded on any incel board. “[The] disbelief with which her prophecies were met was the result of a curse placed on her by Apollo when she refused to have sex with the god,” Solnit writes. “The idea that loss of credibility is tied to asserting rights over your own body was there all along.”

Reporting this story, multiple women told me they’d told some man the truth, about violence they’d suffered or violence they’d heard men planning, only to be dismissed because they didn’t fit into the story those men had decided to tell. Harassment is downgraded to merely irksome; a story about a brewing terrorist movement is killed because it’s not a fluffy piece about nerds trying to get laid. Misogyny, to quote Mystery, “doesn’t fit into” this reality.

Men own the narrative. Unless that changes, nothing will change. The #MeToo movement has made it a bit trendier to give women an empathetic hearing, but gains like these are easily erased. Even still, women often have to come out in massive numbers to bring down even one predator. If a man has to be accused of more than 50 sexual assaults before we see him as a threat, we are still operating under Cassandra rules.

In addition to the footage of the PUA seminar, LA Fitness shooter George Sodini left behind a YouTube channel and a blog, in which he obsessively fixated on his failure to find a girlfriend. Instead of distancing themselves from Sodini after the 2009 shooting, the manosphere embraced him as the beginning of something new. “Celibacy is walking death and anything is justified in avoiding that miserable fate,” Roissy wrote, in evident commiseration. He predicted that “we are going to see a growing eunuchracy of involuntarily celibate betas and the marginalized men in their ranks decide that exiting in a blaze of hot lead beats living in loveless obscurity.”

I’d like to say it was a pathetic fantasy. But, well, here we are.


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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 10, 2018 8:10 am

The Housewives of White Supremacy

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The digital far right, frequently called the alt-right, is largely regarded as a men-only space. The photographs from the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., were striking for the lack of female faces in a sea of button-down-wearing snarls. The movement shares DNA with so-called incels, a network of men who feel women have unfairly denied them sexual relationships. And it is defined in part by its misogyny and its anti-feminist, anti-woman language.

But some members of the alt-right have been weighing whether the absence of women from their movement is a problem. In 2016, the Swedish nationalist Marcus Follin, who calls himself The Golden One on YouTube, made a video titled “The Women Question.” In it, he urged his followers to dial down the open misogyny and consider new strategies to win over more women to the white nationalist cause. Mr. Follin was responding to statistics from the Austrian presidential election that year, in which female voters helped swing the election away from the candidate of the far-right Freedom Party. “You might not like that women have the right to vote, you might not like that anyone has the right to vote,” Mr. Follin conceded, “but it’s about winning a long-term political victory.”

Enter the tradwives.

Over the past few years, dozens of YouTube and social media accounts have sprung up showcasing soft-spoken young white women who extol the virtues of staying at home, submitting to male leadership and bearing lots of children — being “traditional wives.” These accounts pepper their messages with scrapbook-style collections of 1950s advertising images showing glamorous mothers in lipstick and heels with happy families and beautiful, opulent homes. They give their videos titles like “Female Nature and Advice for Young Ladies,” “How I Homeschool” and “You Might be a Millennial Housewife If….”

But running alongside what could be mistaken for a peculiar style of mommy-vlogging is a virulent strain of white nationalism. One such advocate who calls herself “Wife With a Purpose” made international headlines last year when she issued something she titled “the white baby challenge.” Citing falling white birthrates in the West, she urged her followers to procreate. “I’ve made six!” she wrote. “Match or beat me!” Wife With a Purpose might be the most prominent and certainly most openly white supremacist of the women who call themselves tradwives, but she is not an anomaly: These accounts veer dizzyingly from Cosmo-style tips on pleasing your husband to racist musings about “ghetto music” to, on some occasions, calls to reassert their vision of the white race. The seemingly anachronistic way they dress is no accident. The deliberately hyperfeminine aesthetics are constructed precisely to mask the authoritarianism of their ideology.

There is nothing particularly new about this message within the far right. And tradwives still constitute a niche digital subculture. There’s a clear market for their message — the biggest tradwife accounts usually surge to about 10,000 YouTube subscribers in just a year of posting — but their male alt-right counterparts have 10 times the number of followers.

Still, tradwives remain worth contemplating because they help illuminate some of the forces that drive the alt-right and where the movement might be going. The alt-right is abhorrent; it is racist and hate-filled. But it is, like any other mass movement, also driven by a sense of dissatisfaction with modern life. Tradwives help us understand the sources of that dissatisfaction by revealing points of overlap between red-lipsticked mothers of six and the men who complain of being “kissless virgins.”

A frustrated yearning for a mythic past of material abundance, at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult for young people to build careers and achieve financial security, is not gender-specific. Young people face ever more obstacles, higher demands and continually dwindling returns in the form of work benefits, job security and pay. We shouldn’t underestimate how some young white women, when faced with this bleak economic landscape and then presented with a rosy image of 1950s domestic bliss, may look back to 1960s Friedan-era feminism as having cheated them out of a family and a luxurious lifestyle, all supported by a single income. The men on the alt-right might point to diversity initiatives and mass immigration as having dismantled their career prospects; the women are furious that they have to consider career prospects at all.

Tradwives also point to the ways that the half-finished work of the sexual revolution has brought about not just male but also female discontents. The likes of pickup artists and incels claim that the sexual revolution has brought about a consequence-free life of pleasure for young women, while socially awkward or unattractive men are left behind. But the existence of tradwives points to a more nuanced reality. Female fears of objectification and sexual violence remain as potent as ever; the tradwife subculture exploits them by blaming modernity for such phenomena, and then offers chastity, marriage and motherhood as an escape. As one such YouTube commentator, a teenager, told her audience, traditionalism does “what feminism is supposed to do” in preventing women from being made into “sexual objects” and treated “like a whore.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/opin ... right.html
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 10, 2018 10:51 am

The Rage of the Incels

Incels aren’t really looking for sex. They’re looking for absolute male supremacy.

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In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy. They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads. The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with women does not appear to have occurred to them.

The incel ideology has already inspired the murders of at least sixteen people. Elliot Rodger, in 2014, in Isla Vista, California, killed six and injured fourteen in an attempt to instigate a “War on Women” for “depriving me of sex.” (He then killed himself.) Alek Minassian killed ten people and injured sixteen, in Toronto, last month; prior to doing so, he wrote, on Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” You might also include Christopher Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people, in 2015, and left behind a manifesto that praised Rodger and lamented his own virginity.

The label that Minassian and others have adopted has entered the mainstream, and it is now being widely misinterpreted. Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate,” but there are many people who would like to have sex and do not. (The term was coined by a queer Canadian woman, in the nineties.) Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.

If what incels wanted was sex, they might, for instance, value sex workers and wish to legalize sex work. But incels, being violent misogynists, often express extreme disgust at the idea of “whores.” Incels tend to direct hatred at things they think they desire; they are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of fraud. Incel culture advises men to “looksmaxx” or “statusmaxx”—to improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more respectfully are “white-knighting,” putting on a mockable façade of chivalry.) When these tactics fail, as they are bound to do, the rage intensifies. Incels dream of beheading the sluts who wear short shorts but don’t want to be groped by strangers; they draw up elaborate scenarios in which women are auctioned off at age eighteen to the highest bidder; they call Elliot Rodger their Lord and Savior and feminists the female K.K.K. “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering,” one poster on incels.me wrote recently. “They are the ones who have UNJUSTLY made our lives a living hell… We need to focus more on our hatred of women. Hatred is power.”

On a recent ninety-degree day in New York City, I went for a walk and thought about how my life would look through incel eyes. I’m twenty-nine, so I’m a little old and used up: incels fetishize teen-agers and virgins (they use the abbreviation “JBs,” for jailbait), and they describe women who have sought pleasure in their sex lives as “whores” riding a “cock carousel.” I’m a feminist, which is disgusting to them. (“It is obvious that women are inferior, that is why men have always been in control of women.”) I was wearing a crop top and shorts, the sort of outfit that they believe causes men to rape women. (“Now watch as the level of rapes mysteriously rise up.”) In the elaborate incel taxonomy of participants in the sexual marketplace, I am a Becky, devoting my attentions to a Chad. I’m probably a “roastie,” too—another term they use for women with sexual experience, denoting labia that have turned into roast beef from overuse.


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