By David Futrelle

Incels have rather, er, romanticized ideas about sexual abuse. They’re so fixated on the idea that having sex will fix all of their problems that they sometimes fantasize publicly about how great it would have been if their mothers, or sisters, or cousins had molested them when they were young. And sometimes they even get angry that they weren’t abused.

Take, for example, this lovely Incels.co poster, who seems to think that the root of all of his problems is that his then-17-year-old cousin refused to have sex with him when he was a lad of 13. Which would not only have been a violation of the incest taboo, but rape.

This post was so appalling that it ended up getting reposted on the Incel Tears subreddit, a hangout for people to share the horrifying things they find on assorted incel forums.

Naturally, the regulars on Incels.co discovered that this post had made it to Incel Tears, and one of them complained that the people there “never show our reaction. They obviously love cherrypicking us to push a false narrative.”

So let me remedy that.

Yes, there were a number of Incels.co commenters who were repulsed by the idea of someone having sex with their cousin. Like, for example, this person:

But I would be remiss if I didn’t also post some of the other responses.

Wizardcel’s response to this: “I regret not having raped her.”

Oh, but there’s more:

And then there was this weird racist response:

I should point out that none of the commenters — whether pro or con on the incest question — seemed to have noticed, much less cared, that Mr. Wizardcel was also glorifying the sexual abuse of a 13-year-old.

For incels, it seems, sex is sex — and sexual abuse is also sex.

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By David Futrelle

Several years ago, a certain subset of pickup artists became obsessed with ovulation after reading (or hearing of) a study suggesting that women on the verge of ovulation tend to be especially attracted to the sort of hyper-masculine “alpha males” that PUAs spend so much energy pretending to be.

Indeed, some enterprising PUAs literally began tracking the menstrual cycles of various women they were attracted to, using spreadsheets or apps designed for actual menstruaters, so they could schedule their seduction attempts for when their targets would be at the height of their horny alpha-hunger.

This sort of talk has largely died down in PUA hangouts like the Red Pill subreddit after, one assumes, a lot of failures in the real world. (The “alpha male” part of the original study has basically been disproven, though it’s apparently true that cis women on average do get a bit hornier before they ovulate.)

But hope lingers on, at least in the heart of one lonely incel who posted a plaintive query in the Braincels subreddit earlier today (and then reposted it in the IncelsWithoutHate subreddit). His question? Well, you might as well read it for yourself.

Alas, poor NiceGuy897393 got no useful advice, only mockery, in the Braincels subreddit, the main Reddit hangout for incels. The regulas in the IncelsWithoutHate subreddit were a little more helpful.

“That’s just not how it works,” wrote a commenter called
Miranda_Bonard.

women are not just idk, looking for sex when they are ovulating. If you’re not their type, they won’t want you. + how the fuck did you get to know her schedule? And being sweaty doesn’t help most of time when you want to date someone.

A commenter called Cavedwelling offered an even more detailed answer:

People are a little more complicaited than that, People don’t really work like animals. Girls feel a plethora of things during their period, …

And humans aren’t attracted to the smell of sweat like animals. Sweat is a bad smell, girls would be alot more attracted to a touch of cologne than the smell of bacteria eating sweat in your armpits.

If she didn’t like you before, she still won’t want to fuck you then. It’s best to just talk to her and feel out the situation.

Woah. “Just talk to her?” Like she’s another human being? There’s a radical idea.

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By David Futrelle

Manosphere men are obsessed with the idea that women are naturally unfaithful, willing and eager to cheat on their husbands or boyfriends with any alpha male that happens to glance in their direction — a female proclivity these guys like to call “hypergamy,” a highfalutin word borrowed from anthropology and radically redefined to give their altogether unscientific, and thoroughly misogynistic, assumption the patina of SCIENCE.

For these guys, the worst-case scenario, hypergamy-wise, would be to discover that their partner not only cheated on them, but got pregnant in the process — and decided to pass off the resulting child as theirs. These guys see paternity fraud — which they assume is rampant — as not just a breach of trust, but as the ultimate form of cuckolding and a violation of what they see as their God-given right to pass their genes on to the next generation.

A post on Roosh V’s now-dormant Return of King’s site, summing up the view of many in the manosphere, claimed that “paternity fraud is worse than rape.”

But some go even further — with one commenter I recently ran across declaring paternity fraud to be a kind of murder.

“Paternity Fraud is Evolutionary Rape & Murder, Emotional Abuse and Financial Fraud,” wrote an angry Redditor calling himself MixedMartialArtsGuy in an open letter to Mr. Dr. Jordan Peterson urging him to stop advocating for marriage.

“[T]here is little to no recourse for men in the law,” MMAGuy continued.

This [is] why no man with any self respect or Red Pill knowledge gets married in 2019 onwards and any man with kids needs to get paternity tests – 1/3 kids tested have the wrong father.

The one-third claim gets pulled out pretty much any time manosphere men start talking about paternity fraud. But it turns out to be, well, utter garbage, like pretty much everything else these guys say. If these guys bother to give a source for this claim, they generally refer back to a New York Times piece on paternity testing. But the NYT piece itself offers no source for this number.

Several years back, sociologist Michael Gilding made an effort to track down the source of this “stubborn figure,” ultimately discovering that it came from “the published transcript of a symposium on the ethics of artificial insemination that was held nearly forty years ago, in 1972.” The numbers originated in a never-published study of patients in one English town. And we don’t even know how the study was conducted; as Gilding notes, neither the “precise tests [nor the] population sample were [ever] identified.”

So what’s the real number? Gilding, writing in 2011, looked at 2008 date from US and Australian paternity testing labs and found a “non-paternity rate” of roughly 25%.

“The problem with these figures is obvious,” he adds.

The participants are not a random sample of the population. On the contrary, they are a group of people who have doubts about the paternity of a child or children. The main thing we can say on the basis of these figures is that about three-quarters of people who have some reason to doubt paternity will find that their doubts are unfounded.

So what is the actual percentage? We don’t know. Gilding reports that recent — or recent-ish — published studies range from 0.78% — (from a 1994 Swiss study) to 11.8% (from a 1999 Mexican study). He notes that “the best North American study, published in 2009, proposes a rate between 1 and 3 per cent.”

But don’t expect to convince MMAGuy of this. When I poked around online trying to see if anyone else agreed with his “paternity fraud is murder” stance, I ran across an almost identically worded comment from someone with a suspiciously similar name under a video on “paternity fraud and the modern cuckold” by our old friend nemesis Paul Elam. (I think it’s safe to assume that MMAGuy and MMAFather are the same guy.)

In these even-less-hinged comments, the artist now calling himself MMAfather seemed to suggest that paternity fraud was not only equivalent to murder; it could also possibly justify murder.

You may wonder how exactly someone gets to the point at which they think the mass murder of divorced women and family court judges is somehow a sensible plan for political change.

In the case of MMAGuy/MMAFather, it’s clear that at least part of the reason is that he spends a great deal immersed in the manosphere — reading posts and comments, making posts and comments, watching videos, even reading the occasional book or two.

In fact, we know exactly which videos he’s watched and what books he’s read — because he has spelled this out explicitly not only by dropping comments on a Paul Elam video but by posting links to the works of other manosphere-associated ideologues he follows.

In one highly upvoted post on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, for example, he strongly urges his fellow MGTOWs to read books by reactionary dating guru Rollo Tomassi and antifeminist ideologue Helen Smith; to watch videos from self-described Men;s Rights Activist and alt-right YouTube “philosopher” Stefan Molyneux as well as MGTOWs Turd Flinging Monkey and Sandman; and even Jordan Peterson, though he doesn’t like JP’s take on marriage. Oh, and he also encourages them to watch Cassie Jaye’s Red Pill documentary, a sort of love note to the Men’s Right movement that was funded in part by the very people Jaye was “reporting” on.

It’s not surprising, though it is certainly distressing, that someone who regularly dumps this much poison into their brains ends up having some pretty poisonous views. What’s even more distressing is that MMAFather’s comments about murdering divorced women and judges were evidently so uncontroversial to the other commenters on Elam’s video that not a single one of them challenged him — or, indeed, said anything at all about his outrageous views.

That’s the kind of world that Elam, Molyneux, Tomassi and the rest have created with their terrible ideas and poisonous rhetoric over the course of the last decade.

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By David Futrelle

Today’s Deep Thought from the Incels.co forums. (Well, ok, technically it’s a Deep Thought from January but I just ran across it today.)

The rest of the thread is pretty bad but I’m too filled with existential dread to dig out the worst quotes for you all today.

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By David Futrelle

Jordan Peterson, the sulky alt-lite celebrity professor who likes to sue people who disagree with him, has announced the imminent arrival of his new Free Speech Social Media platform Thinkspot, which promises to be the freest free speech venue in human history except that you have to pay for it and if you say something that offends the Peterson fans and oft-banned alt-right weirdos who will likely populate the service, they can downvote your comments until they disappear.

Also, Peterson is saying that there might be a 50-word minimum to comments — designed to make sure that comments are “thoughtful” — so that Nazis who want to post the 14 words will be allowed to but they’ll always have to post them four times in a row.

Here’s how the right wing site Newsbusters described it, drawing the details from a recent discussion between Peterson and stoner podcaster Joe Rogan.

Peterson discussed Thinkspot with podcaster Joe Rogan on June 9, emphasizing a radically pro-free speech Terms of Service. He described that freedom as the “central” aspect saying, “once you’re on our platform we won’t take you down unless we’re ordered to by a US court of law.”

That will be a profound contrast to platforms that ban users for “misgendering” people who identify as trans, or for tweeting “learn to code” at fired journalists. 

Well, with the 50 word comment minimum, they’ll actually have to write:

Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to.

Clearly this will encourage only the most thoughtful of discussions.

As for the downvoting thing, Newsbusters explains that

All comments on the website will have a voting feature “and if your ratio of upvotes to downvotes falls below 50/50 then your comments will be hidden, people will still be able to see them, if they click, but you’ll disappear.” 

Obviously this whole thing is going to be a smashing success, as right-wing “free speechers” love it when algorithms hide their comments from view, and they don’t consider this censorship at all or yell about it endlessly or anything.

Peterson has apparently got a bunch of true a-list free speech warriors lined up to beta test the “anti-censorship platform,” including, well, himself; failed-comedian-turned-alt-right-booster Dave Rubin; celebrity “skeptic” and alleged rapist Michael Shermer; and YouTube blabber/rape joker Carl Benjamin, a.k.a. “Sargon of Akkad,” a.k.a. “Carl of Swindon,” recently in the news for his disastrous campaign for the European Parliament, which went so badly that it kind of took down the entire UKIP party with it.

So basically, the consummate control-freak Peterson is asking the prickliest assholes in the world of social media to pay him money to use a platform that allows their political enemies to downvote their comments until they vanish. I really can’t imagine anything going wrong here.

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By David Futrelle

One of my favorite would-be “gotcha” arguments I’ve heard again and again from Men’s Rights Activists over the years is this attempt to outwit history itself with powerful MAN LOGICK:

Women could NEVER have been oppressed the way feminists say that they were because men would NEVER oppress their OWN WIVES and DAUGHTERS like that!

I’m not sure which particular MRA brain genius first came up with this argument, but I ran across a particularly pure version of it in the Men’s Rights subreddit recently and thought I’d share it with you all:

The “argument” here is of course fallacious; it’s a textbook example of the “argument from incredulity” — that is, “I can’t imagine how it could be true, therefore it isn’t.” That’s just not how the world works. Plenty of things have happened over the course of human history that have been what historians call “really fucking weird,” but they can’t simply be dismissed, because the evidence is clear that they really happened. (Under this administration, almost literally unbeleivable things happen practically every day.)

And in the case of patriarchy, of course, there’s a huge fucking mountain of evidence that men have not only oppressed women as a class throughout history but still do so today. I mean, it’s not just a weird coincidence that every single US President and vice president has been a dude, or that men got the vote before women did, or that women couldn’t even get credit cards in their own name until the 1970s. There are big fat books about all of this shit, MRA dudes; maybe read one or two of them before spouting off like idiots?

But even if the argument from incredulity was a real and valid argument, and one’s feelings about the likelihood of something happening could trump the facts of history, it’s not actually hard to imagine men oppressing not only women in general but their own wives and daughters.

I mean, men throughout history have beaten and raped their wives; hell, marital rape wasn’t even illegal in all 50 US states until the early 1990s. Men have abused their daughters in countless ways. In the antebellum south, male slave owners raped their slaves and then enslaved the children who were born as a result of these rapes — their own flesh and blood. (Thomas Jefferson, I’m looking at you!)

But of course patriarchy wasn’t and isn’t all about cruelty. It’s also about the very “protection” that firstherr cites in his post. Since practically the beginnings of human history, men have restricted the activities of women in order to “protect” them from the real and alleged dangers of the wider world — a supposed benefit to women that, however they felt about this particular bargain, they could not opt out of.

Patriarchal oppression can be as unsubtle as a punch to the face, or as subtle and seemingly benevolent as Joe Biden telling the brothers of a 13-year-old girl he’s just met that they need to make sure to keep the boys away from her. That’s how it’s been able to last so long.

Again, none of this is news to anyone who has studied even the barest smattering of feminism. What’s still kind of amazing to me, though, is that virtually no Men’s Rights Activists — including the supposed intellectuals in the movement — seem to have bothered to learn even the most basic basics about the feminism that they rail against all day long. instead getting their information from YouTube videos and antifeminist ideologues and other MRAs as ignorant as they are.

That’s why laughable arguments like firstterr’s here get dozens of upvotes when posted to the Men’s Rights subreddit. That’s why these guys don’t seem to have learned a thing since I started following them nearly nine years ago. They’re ignorant, incurious, and happy to embrace logical fallacies so long as they can use them to score points against some imaginary feminist foes.

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a political movement less impressive than the Men’s Rights movement. Given how completely wrongheaded the basic premise of their movement is — that men, not women, are the true wretched of the earth — fallacious arguments based on utter ignorance seem to be the best that they can come up with.

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By David Futrelle

Sometimes I get the sense that Reddit’s most-devoted semen retainters — the guys who give up both masturbation and sex in order to protect the mystical power of their pent-up love goo — aren’t just embarking on a slightly odd form of supposed self-improvement.

No, it seems like at least some of these guys also might have some less than positive feelings about the biggest threat to their semen-retention streaks: sexy ladies who make them horny.

See if you can detect the subtle hints of misogyny in this long screed posted a couple of months ago to both the Semen Retention subreddit and the somewhat harder-core “PureRetention” subreddit.

In the former subreddit, the semen-filled Redditor called Lightpowerwithin titled the piece “Assert Power Over the Woman,” which is already a bit of a hint right there.

He began by preparing his readers for a wild ride.

Some might think, I am sounding a bit anti-woman. …

But for the sake of ones own progress in life, hear me out. …

I must unserstand that the clarity of all that is Good in consciousness comes from abstaining from the woman. …

For when we partake OF the woman, the seal of spiritual power is sliced, depending on the depth of indulgence.

THE SEAL OF SPIRITUAL POWER

Good, Bad, I’m the Guy with the Gun.

The “Gun” being – “The Power.” – the power is like a cup filled with everlasting life. It is pureed to the tilt.

PUREED TO THE TILT!!!!

One mis-step can lead a spill in the drop of life. The “Pretty” faces we see in our day to day life can easily cause us to “mis-step” with our cup of everlasting life.

DON’T MIS-STEP WITH THE CUP!! BECAUSE THINGS COULD GET MESSY!

Being overly emotional, or even slightly passionate in the beginning stages of the ‘path’ can cause a drop in the everlasting life. Mindfulness of our thoughts is paramount. Holding our ‘cup’ as we traverse forward, getting stronger each day.

JUST DON’T DRIP THE CUP!!!1

Some fools re-joice in the presence of the lady. Their hearts jump when she bats her eyelashes and throws her hair.

BEWARE THE EYELASH BATTERS!

These same fools who hold their cup of life would give their power away in the blink of an eye.

THE BLINK OF AN EYE!

The womans presence can often have a man question his lifes direction. WHAT is more important to you? Steadfastly focusing with white-lighted intent forever burning into the timeline of life with your purpose?

STEADFASTLY FOCUSING WITH WHITE-LIGHTED INTENT!!

Or using your power to be given away to a lovers fling?

BEWARE THE LOVERS AND THEIR DASTARDLY FLINGS!!!!!

Blessed and righteous..

Is he who holds his power and integrity for himself. You cannot fake ‘the power’ – it is only given and accumulated with time and purpose, mindfulness in the midst of the feminine presence and what not.

AND WHAT NOT!

Today, a righteousman is few and far between. Bombarded with imagery of concubines the the ‘other’ life that leads to dependency and misery.

BOMBARDED WITH IMAGERY!

Be the man with the gun. Righteous walk, righteous talk, and righteous intention.

RIGHTEOUS WALK

Rise above the woman.

RISE ABOVE!!

The true nature of man is to lead. Rise above the devils that have taken hold of our minds. Kick down the exhaulted image of woman. The false idol that has been put above us. Destroy that Golden-godess image and walk forward.

DESTROY THE GOLDEN GODDESS IMAGE!!1

Never give the temptress what they want.

NEVER GIVE THE TEMPTRESS!

They are the tools of the devil. Get them out of your way. Let the temptresses that feed off trickery and attention be trampled and bombarded by our boots of righteousness.

BOOTS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS!!

Even with the power, we develop the senses of discernment. We discern righteous women who loom youthful and fully of life. Be cautious. Assert domimance [sic] and put them to work. They have much to prove in this life.

ASSERT DOMIMANCE!

No, that’s Dom Deluise. We’re looking for DOMINANCE.

Ok, that’s better.

Walk the path of light. Do not fantasize about romantic notions and bullshit that will tie you down. If a woman cannot be chaste, cannot back your play, or get behind and support you, kick her out of your way. Cast her down to the weak and unrighteous.

CAST HER DOWN!

Walk your rignteous path of power and achievement. Be free. In the days of old, the women tended the gardens, prepared the food, maintained the household, weaved baskets, and other womanly duties. Such is her place.

The men fought. Killed. Hunted. Built structures and negotiated the deals. And lead the family. Nothing has changed from our primitive instincts other then technology softening the man.

NOTHING HAS CHANGED FROM OUR PRIMITIVE INSTINCTS!!

Kick the notion of woman down and become the strength. The blood. The power. The force. Through clear mind, clear will, a chaste heart. Assert domimance [sic] once again like the days of old.

ASSERT DOMIMANCE!!11

No, that’s Dom Deluise again.

No, that’s Dom Perignon.

Eh, I guess that’ll do.

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By David Futrelle

There’s a little bit of drama going on in the Am I the Asshole subreddit, where Redditors who suspect that they might just possibly have behaved a teensy bit improperly (but probably not) go to tell their stories and get a ruling on their asshole status from their peers.

Yesterday, a fellow calling himself TheCrocDude reported in with this leading question: “AITA [Am I The Asshole] for wearing “crocs” to work? (Serious, I may have just been denied a promotion)”

It was pretty clear from the outset that he expected Redditors to weigh in on his side.

Huh. That was a pretty quick jump from “I didn’t get the promotion because I dress like a slob” to “maybe I’m being oppressed as a man!”

First, as many people pointed out, Crocs — while tacky — may be perfectly appropriate office wear in a casual office, especially for someone who works out of sight of the public, or for some non-office jobs that require people to be on their feet all day. (In my exceedingly casual home office, where my only work colleagues are cats, I’m barefoot most of the time, and so are they.) But people in management at tech companies are generally expected to not wear giant cartoon rubber shoes.

And, no, CrocDude, the woman who got promoted over you would not have been able to get away with Crocs because she’s a woman. There’s no such thing as a “Croc Pass” that applies only to the ladies.

But the petulance of CrocDude’s post — I’m not going to call him by his real name, as he is an embarrassment to all Davids — and his belief that he was somehow discriminated against in his tech job for being a man suggest that the Crocs are really only the symptom of his unpromotability problem, not the cause.

And his other comments in the thread more than confirm this judgement. For, in the least surprising development since my cats starting to pester me for dinner an hour before it’s usually served, it turns out that CrocDude kind of a creepy misogynistic douchebag

When one Redditor asked him how exactly “wearing goofy footwear relate[s] to gender bias,” CrocDude offered this, er, observation:

Dude you can see she wears thong panties under her dresses, that’s unprofessional

Wait, what? Maybe she’s the one who should be going to HR, not you.

When another Redditor wondered why exactly he was monitoring his co-worker’s ass at work, he responded “Why are they looking at my feet?”

I dunno, dude, maybe because you’re wearing giant neon-colored clown shoes?

And then there was the whole George R. R Martin question. In response to a question from another Redditor that’s since been deleted — presumably for being offensive — Mr. Croc complained that his office rival is

the “quirky hot girl” who claims to love GoT but couldn’t identify GRRM in a police line up.

That’s right. He apparently thinks she shouldn’t get the promotion because he’s convinced himself that she’s a FAKE NERD in addition to being a thong-wearer.

Jeez, dude, you’re making Croc wearers look bad.

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By David Futrelle

With no plausible official explanation for the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 five years ago, and the failures of the assorted attempts to find what survives of the plane in the deep, dark waters of the southern Indian ocean, you may have assumed, as I did, that we would never know what happened to the mystery plane, or why.

In a must-read story in the latest Atlantic magazine, William Langewiesche argues that — despite the bungled investigation of the matter by the corrupt and inept Malaysian government, and the assorted roadblocks government officials have put in the way of other investigators — we actually have a very good idea not only of what transpired in the final hours of that doomed flight, but also why it may have happened.

It looks, in short, like a murder-suicide by an aggrieved middle-aged pilot, depressed and angry over the dissolution of his marriage and possibly also by his inability to attract the attention of several younger women he had become at least slightly obsessed with.

Usually, these sorts of murder-suicides — which are shockingly common — involve a man taking the life of a woman who has left him or otherwise threatened his sense of control over the relationship, and possibly a few other family members, before taking his own life. (Murder-suicides involving women as the murderers are rare.) In the case of MH370, it appears the alleged murderer took out 227 passengers and 12 crew in his act of “revenge” on the world.

Looking skeptically at the official Malaysian government report, and largely ignoring the vast array of spurious conspiracy theories that have sprung up around the plane’s disappearance, Langewiesche examines the sparse but revealing electronic and physical clues left behind by the plane as it veered sharply off its original flightplan and then, after a series of puzzling maneuvers, ultimately flew six more hours in the wrong direction until it ended up crashing violently into the ocean thousands of miles from its intended destination. He concludes, confidently, that the plane

did not catch on fire yet stay in the air for all that time. No, it did not become a “ghost flight” able to navigate and switch its systems off and then back on. No, it was not shot down after long consideration by nefarious national powers who lingered on its tail before pulling the trigger. And no, it is not somewhere in the South China Sea, nor is it sitting intact in some camouflaged hangar in Central Asia. The one thing all of these explanations have in common is that they contradict the authentic information investigators do possess.

What did happen? It appears the plane was deliberately taken down, almost certainly by one of the two men installed in the cockpit at the beginning of the flight — either the pilot, 53-year-old Captain Zaharie Ahmad or his co-pilot, 27-year-old Fariq Abdul Hamid. (There is zero evidence of a hijacking, and Langewiesche argues convincingly that it would have been exceedingly unlikely.)

“[I]t is difficult to see the co-pilot as the perpetrator.” Langewiesche writes.

He was young and optimistic, and reportedly planning to get married. He had no history of any sort of trouble, dissent, or doubts.

But Zaharie, the pilot,

was often lonely and sad. His wife had moved out … By his own admission to friends, he spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms waiting for the days between flights to go by. … He is known to have established a wistful relationship with a married woman and her three children … and to have obsessed over two young internet models … for whom he left Facebook comments that apparently did not elicit responses. … Zaharie seems to have become somewhat disconnected from his earlier, well-established life.

What happened that awful night? Langewiesche suggests that shortly before turning the plane around a hour into the flight, Zaharie either killed or incapacitated his co-pilot, then depressurized the cabin before sending the plane climbing to 40,000 feet in a deliberate attempt to kill the passengers and the rest of the crew.

Langewiesche paints quite a chilling scene of what likely happened:

An intentional depressurization would have been an obvious way—and probably the only way—to subdue a potentially unruly cabin in an airplane that was going to remain in flight for hours to come. In the cabin, the effect would have gone unnoticed but for the sudden appearance of the drop-down oxygen masks and perhaps the cabin crew’s use of the few portable units of similar design. None of those cabin masks was intended for more than about 15 minutes of use during emergency descents to altitudes below 13,000 feet; they would have been of no value at all cruising at 40,000 feet. The cabin occupants would have become incapacitated within a couple of minutes, lost consciousness, and gently died without any choking or gasping for air. The scene would have been dimly lit by the emergency lights, with the dead belted into their seats, their faces nestled in the worthless oxygen masks dangling on tubes from the ceiling.

Zaharie, or whoever was flying the plane, had access to much more effective oxygen masks with hours worth of supplies; after several hours, he could have re-pressurized the plane, confident that he was the only one left alive. Or he could have taken the mask off after putting the plane on its final course and turning on the autopilot, drifting into unconsciousness and ultimately death long before the plane hit the water.

As Langewiesche is well aware, it’s hard to believe that any pilot would do such a monstrous thing. But, as he points out, there have been several similar cases over the last 22 years, including one that seems to have been inspired by MH370.

In 2015, a year after the disappearance of MH370, a young co-pilot named Andreas Lubitz seems to have deliberately crashed Germanwings Flight 9525 into a mountain in the French Alps after locking the pilot out of the plane’s cabin. As I noted at the time, he was known for his explosive rage — and had just been dumped by his girlfriend, and though he was clearly not an incel, he was quickly adopted as a “legitimate SLAYER” and “incel hero” by the regulars on the incel-centric SlutHate forum (which has since morphed into Lookism). Now that Langewiesche has highlighted the romantic and sexual rejection that may have triggered Zaharie’s alleged murderous act, I wonder if the incels will embrace him as well. (If they don’t, it will likely be because of his age; incels like their “heroes” young.)

As I noted in my posts on Lubitz, men often react poorly to romantic rejection, sometimes lashing out with violence — sometimes as the rejecter herself, other times at the world at large. Roughly a third of all female murder victims in the United States are killed by their exes, and “murder/suicides” in which an aggrieved man kills his partner or an ex-partner are so common in the United States that they’re rarely reported as anything more than local news unless, say, an entire family is killed.

Or, in this case, an entire plane full of people.

Toxic masculinity kills.

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By David Futrelle

Hearing the news that Air Force personnel at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland were recently given a briefing on the threat posed by the incel movement — complete with slides featuring incel obsessions Becky and Stacy — some reacted with predictable jokes.

“You never know when the Air Force will need to bomb the Incel State,” author and ex-Daily Caller journalist Scott Greer joked on Twitter.

“These guys fly planes?” asked another Twitterer. “I’m concerned. You should only let smart people do that.”

So far, details on the briefing are a little skanty. According to Task & Purpose, a site reporting on military and veterans’ issues,

At least one Air Force base is on the lookout for a sinister new threat: angry men who can’t get laid.

Personnel at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland were recently treated to a threat brief regarding an “increase in nationwide activity” by self-described “incels,” members of an online subculture of “involuntary celibacy” who adopt an ideology of misogyny, mistrust of women, and violence in response to their failed attempts at romantic relationships.

The brief was first made public via a screenshot posted to the popular Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page on Tuesday. An Air Force spokesman confirmed the authenticity of the screenshot to Task & Purpose.

The screenshot in question showed a slide from the presentation featuring an interent-famous incel meme starring supposed female archetypes Becky and Stacey.

Obviously, the Air Force isn’t contemplating any air strikes on incel hideouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, or anywhere else.

The briefing seems to have been intended to warn about the possible dangers of incel rampages by Air Force personnel themselves, many of whom obviously have access to considerable firepower and the training necessary to know how to use these weapons in the deadliest manner.

“The intent of the brief was to educate the Joint Base Andrews commanders on the behaviors and activities attributed to the group to safeguard our Airmen/installation,” an Air Force spokesperson told Task & Purpose.

It’s a good thing that the Air Force is taking incels seriously. We can’t dismiss the real threat of incels because of the absurdity of their beliefs. Terrorists and mass killers are often motivated by beliefs that the rest of us would consider ridiculous.

Son of Sam believed his neighbor’s dog was telling him to kill. Charles Manson ordered the killings at the Tate and LaBianca homes in hope of setting off a race war that would ultimately put him in charge of the world — basing his peculiar eschatology in part on secret messages he thought were hidden in Beatles lyrics. Compared to these two — and to many other mass killers — incels seem almost rational.

As for the memes? They’re a central part both of incel and alt-right culture; they radicalize angry young men in the same way that YouTube videos and books like the neo-Nazi bible The Turner Diaries do. These days, mass killers don’t just pen manifestos; they also leave a trail of memes. The Christchurch killer included references to memes in his manifesto; the Toronto van killer, an incel, left behind a short statement on social media referencing several popular incel memes.

“Indeed,” Task & Purpose notes,

the screenshot [of the Air Force briefing] appeared the day after Brian Isaac Clyde, a former Army infantryman who frequently posted memes that referenced the incel movement alongside anti-government conspiracies to his Facebook page, was shot by federal officers after he opened fire outside a Dallas, Texas federal building.

It’s not clear if Clyde considered himself an incel; his social media was overstuffed with all sorts of memes popular amongst alt-rightists and manospherans and right-wing conspiracy theorists generally.

We learned a long time ago that 4chan’s racist and anti-Semitic memes weren’t just “ironic.” Nor are threats of violence any less serious if they take the form of a meme. Incels make a lot of memes. They’ve also killed a lot of people. Everyone needs to take them seriously.

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By David Futrelle

Today, just another example of the sort of toxic nonsense that gets upvotes in the Men’s Rights subreddit, despite the protestations from Reddit MRAs that they really aren’t about hate at all.

What I’ve got for you is a rather remarkable comment from longtime Men’s Rights Redditor DavidByron2 — a fellow with quite a history of reprehensible opinions — responding to an OP who had argued that “feminism is a shit test to weed out weak men” — that is, that women use feminism in order to figure out which guys are “manly enough” to disobey its rules, because these Chadly anti-feminist rule-breakers are the men that women (even some feminists) really want to get with.

Mr. Byron2 suggests that this applies as well to laws against rape.

Yep, that’s right: he’s convinced himself that “real” — or at least non-feminist women — prefer men who ignore their “noes,” because I guess he thinks these women prefer “manly” date-rapists to feminist men who are so wimpy they’ll only have sex with women who’ve consented to it.

I’m not quite sure I’m following his logic at the end, but apparently, for straight guys, only having sex with women who consent to it is equivalent to … having your head bitten off by a praying mantis?

Byron2 got a dozen upvotes for the bizarre rape apologia, because of course he did. I mean, honestly, his argument — awful as it is — isn’t that far off from the terrible anti-date-rape-law arguments of Warren Farrell, the intellectual grandpappy of the Men’s Rights movement, in his still-influential 1993 book The Myth of Male Power — opinions he’s still defending to this day.

But that’s a whole other post. Or maybe two.

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By David Futrelle

Trump’s fans have a new woman to hate. Yesterday, New York magazine published a lengthy story by author and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll detailing a lifetime of run-ins with what she called her “Hideous Men” — the most famous one on her list being our current president, whom Carroll says assaulted, then raped her, in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room some two decades ago.

Though Carroll tells her stories with many darkly funny asides — she’s a humor writer who once won an Emmy for her work on Saturday Night Live — her account of the alleged rape is harrowing and very believable. She ends the story with an astonishing confession: she has not had sex a single time since her alleged encounter with Trump.

Naturally, Trump has denied the allegations, falsely asserting that he’d never even met Carroll (there’s a photo of the two together in Carroll’s piece).

But Trump’s fans seem less outraged by Carroll’s supposedly false allegations than gleeful at the chance to go after another “nasty woman,” as Trump likes to call any prominent woman who isn’t a fan of his. As the indomitable Talia Lavin noted on Twitter yesterday, “there are people among the president’s supporters who revel in his rape and cruelty to women.” And for them, Carroll’s accusations are simply another excuse for an orgy of their own cruelty.

Some of them are going after Carroll directly, responding to old tweets of hers with all the viciousness they can muster, many of their, er, arguments based on the premise that Carroll, a winner of numerous beauty pageants in her younger years, is and was simply too hideous to rape.

Others made it plain that this new controversy is simply fodder for their larger goal of “owning the libs” and hopefully making them cry.

On Reddit’s ongoing Trump love-fest known as The Donald, the regulars have already launched (at last count) 30 separate threads on Carroll and her accusations, with several devoted entirely to the proposition that she’s too old and ugly to rape (she’s roughly the same age as Trump) and one to spreading a meme suggesting that Carroll is too tacky to shop at Bergdorf.

“Considering that Trump was dating hot ass Marla Maples at the time, this is bullshit,” one Donald-loving Redditor declared.

Did your see how absolutely fucking ugly the accuser is? Im pretty sure even bill Clinton wouldn’t of fucked her.

Others pushed the same, er, argument.

“Stormy Daniels I could maybe see him having an affair with,” one wrote. “This thing? He’s not blind and he doesn’t drink or do drugs.”

Still another added:

Funny how it’s always the pigs that like to bring this stuff up, and not the literal supermodels Trump spent years working with.

The cruelty shown towards Carroll is hardly surprising, coming from Trump fans, as this sort of bullying is basically the essence of Trump’s brand. As Atlantic writer Adam Serwer argued in a widely cited piece, for Trump and his fans, “the cruelty is the point.”

Or current president’s “only real, authentic pleasure,” Serwer noted,

is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear.

This cruelty comes out most obviously in Trump’s malevolent policies towards immigrants. But he’s just as much of a bully when it comes to mocking the women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault and sexual exploitation. “Believe me, she would not be my first choice,” he told his followers at one rally, referring to accuser Jessica Leeds. “When you looked at that horrible woman [on television] last night, you said, ‘I don’t think so.'” The crowd ate it up.

He later derided porn actress and producer Stormy Daniels, whom he had barely consensual sex with shortly after the birth of his youngest son, as “Horseface.” His fans quickly began pumping out the memes.

But the cruelty of Trump’s fans really went into overdrive after Christine Blasey Ford came forward to accuse not Trump but his supreme court nominee Bret Kavanaugh of attempted rape. After Trump, again at one of his rallies, mocked her less-than-perfect memory of an incident that happened nearly 40 years ago, his supporters cheered, and laughed, and began chanting “lock her up.”

As Serwer noted at the time,

Ford testified to the Senate … that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.

Social media was quickly filled with insulting memes and other smears from Trump’s acolytes:

Anyone nostalgic for this particular campaign of misogynistic bullying and hate can still buy Kavanaugh-themed “I like beer!” novelty t-shirts on Amazon.

For Carroll, the attacks have just begun. Given that she’s not suing Trump, and won’t be testifying before congress about her experience, it’s highly unlikely that the campaign against her will ever reach the size or the sheer nastiness of the campaign against Ford, who had to go into hiding for her own safety after her moment in the spotlight.

But, as even the memes about her I’ve seen remind us, the attacks on her are part of a larger pattern. (The woman on the right is Carroll.)

In the Daily Beast, Molly-Jong Fast notes that Carroll’s allegations will ultimately fade into the political background with all the other allegations against him, and most politicians will likely conclude “that the American people have forgotten and moved on.” But, she adds in a hopeful finale, “women remember,” and will have the chance to act upon these memories at the ballot box in 2020.

The trouble is that not all of these women will be voting against Trump. If you look at those participating in the Carroll-trashing today, you’ll notice that more than a few of them are women, some of them as eager as the men to attack Carroll as a “dog” who’d be lucky to get a second glance from Trump. And this has been the case in all the campaigns against Trump’s (and Kavenaugh’s) accusers. (You may recall the woman wearing the “Trump can grab my pussy” t-shirt at one of his rallies; Jong-Fast even cites her case herself.)

Like their male counterparts, these women positively enjoy going after Trump’s many alleged victims. For many of Trump’s fans, if not the vast majority of them, his bullying isn’t a bug but a feature — and an open invitation for them to join in. This is the essence of what draws them, regardless of gender, to Trump.

“If you don’t understand by now that the sexual assaults Trump has committed make his base like him even more, I’m not sure what to tell you,” writer and BitchMedia cofounder Andi Zeisler wrote on Twitter yesterday.

We can only hope, along with Jong-Fast, that our anger at this cruelty can overpower the cruelty itself at the ballot box. Because if it can’t, this country may be beyond redemption.

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By David Futrelle

Today, a brief visit to the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, where men who claim they’ve given up women — and don’t even think about them any more — spend all day every day talking about women. This time, they’re talking about female orgasm, which according to them doesn’t exist.

Annoyed by a post in the badly named women-centric TwoXChromosomes subreddit in which a young woman wondered if she might possibly have just had her first orgasm while taking a highly stressful physics test, a MGTOW Redditor called TVTestPattern declares flatly that the female orgasm is a “myth.”

Oh, dude. Dude.

I feel a little bad for him. And a lot bad for any woman who may have suffered the misfortune of having sex with him.

Also, dude, the fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally — which is what his final line links to — isn’t actually proof of anything, except perhaps that screenwriter Nora Ephron might just have endured some really shitty boyfriends and husbands in her day (we already knew she had one extra-shitty ex-husband, Carl Bernstein). But I digress.

The commenters in the MGTOW subreddit thought that Mr. TestPattern here was really onto something with his totally original female orgasm theory.

“I have always said this,” wrote YouLoseAgainDipshits.

As men, we know that orgasms don’t feel thatgood. When’s the last time you screamed and moaned while masturbating?

While women are drama queens, it’s clear they don’t even know what an orgasm is.

A guy called Avyctes managed to have an opinion that was somehow even worse than this.

“A female orgasm is irrelevant,” he wrote.

As long as the Man gets off. She’s nothing more, and a whole lot less, than a walking masturbation sleeve.

So weird that there are so many guys out there not only willing to admit that they’re terrible people, but also to make it absolutely clear that they are utter shit in bed. The internet is an amazing thing.

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By David Futrelle

Self-described “involuntary celibates” want the world to pity them as decent men who have been cruelly denied sex by too-picky women who reject them for the tiniest of physical flaws. This is absurd in itself, but it’s made even more absurd by the fact that incels themselves tend to be pickier about women than any mythical Chad-chasing Stacy.

Incels don’t just want sex with any woman; they feel that they’re owed sex with women “in their prime” — that is, young, conventionally attractive, relatively thin and, oh, did I mention young? That is, not women at all but teenage girls?

Incels — not all of them but a lot — exalt “teenage love” over all other forms of love and sex. And if they don’t get “teenage love” when they they themselves are teenagers, they think they deserve it as adults. The very thought that a man in, say, his thirties should be having sex with “old” women close to his own age fills them with rage.

In a recent posting on Incels.co, a prolific contributor to that site with a Dylann Roof avatar and more than 5000 comments to his name, asked angrily “How the fuck does society have the AUDACITY to tell oldcels to stick to older women[?]” In case you didn’t pick up on his bad mood, the poster, calling himself Turbocuckcel_7000, tagged his post with the popular Incels.co tag “RageFuel.”

Turbocuckcel made his case:

And by the way, when he demands some credit for not “ruining someone else’s future wife,” he means by having sex with her, because in the incel brain any woman who isn’t a virgin when she marries is basically a used-up harlot.

In any case, a commenter called Cuyen, with more than 30 thousand Incels.co comments to his, er, credit, quickly took Turbocuckcel’s argument to its logical conclusion, declaring:

If you are old and never had teenager love,then youre entitled to have a JB

Someone called Tempus Edax Rerum popped up with this bit of bad history:

The funny thing about this statement is that less than a hundred years ago this was actually how it worked.

Well, no, it wasn’t. In 1920, the median age of first marriage for women was 21.2, true, but the median from men was 24.6 — an age gap of less than 3 1/2 years. (Today, the median age is 27.8 for women, 29.8 for men, boosted slightly by the recent legalization of gay marriage, which meant a sudden rush of older couples marrying.) Looking this up literally took 30 seconds.

Turbocuckcel, naturally, agreed wholeheartedly with Cuyen’s rule, adding that the situation contemporary non-Chad men face is

a massive ripoff. like it’s not bad enough how you are likely to just be used for your money and divorce-raped as an oldcel loveless faggot anyway, you need to get the stinkeye from every sanctimonious fuckface in a 5km radius too if you have an age difference greater than 3-4 years in your favor. …

i’ll probably dream about dating and marrying a 20 year old girl even as they’re shovelling dirt over my coffin

Your dream is every twenty year old “girl’s” nightmare, dude.

Someone called Bernd worked himself into quite a lather:

I know, it’s always “ew grow up”, “immature”, “creepy” and “can’t handle an independent woman sweaty?”

It’s not like everyone can afford to live on 1000% of normal dopamine levels in their youths like females do. They live in some sort of hedonistic sinful version of the garden of Eden and fuck through waves and waves of Chads AND get stuff handed to them FOR FREE. This is somehow less big of a deal than men dating younger women.

It’s somehow “less big of a deal,” because the only place any of this happens is in your head, dude.

LMS-maxxed older guys [guys who’ve maxed-out their Looks, Money and Status –DF] fucking prime pussy deserve it. Because it is hard. Imagine through how much shit normies go to fuck 18-24 year olds that are below their looksmatch. Now picture it at 35+.

If you’ve worked your fucking ass off in life and got nothing to show for than a used up single mother wooing you with her requirement list, then it is not wrong to want even a tiny share of the enjoyment in life that foids get for free as a birthright.

Time to pull out this gif again:

Incels: Using their delusions to stoke their resentment and justify their predatory desires.

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By David Futrelle

Chuck Woolery is probably best known for two things: 1) being the host of the dating show Love Connection back in the 80s and early 90s and 2) his off-brand cartoon superhero head.

In the last several years, Woolery has staged a comeback of sorts, this time as a right-wing podcaster and Twitter provocateur with more than half a million followers. He’s especially fond of railing against the alleged evils of abortion.

Last night, he offered this deep thought on Twitter:

Why, yes, Chuck, it is. And that’s a good thing. It’s good that women can choose to have children, or not, on their own schedule and for their own reasons, rather than having such a major, life-changing decision left to the whims of nature and less-than-100-percent effective birth control. (Or some dude poking a hole in his condom to prove to himself that his boys can swim.)

The ironic thing about Chuck’s current stance on abortion and the sanctity of pregnancy is that, despite his recent comeback, his true claim to fame remains his former gig on a dating show whose original run ended a quarter of a century ago,

The Chuck Woolery incarnation of Love Connection — in which one shallow, attractive idiot chose another shallow, attractive idiot from a menu of three shallow, attractive idiots and went on a date with them — was basically all about enabling casual sex for cheap entertainment. Though they couldn’t talk about sex directly on the show — instead relying on salacious innuendo — so many of the contestants did have sex that the staff had a cutesy term for it: “boink dates.”

Which is fine, of course, but it seems a little out-of-whack with Woolery’s recent ravings.

In any case, with all that sex going on — the show ran through 11 seasons and more than 2000 episodes — it’s at least possible that some of the women who appeared on the show got pregnant as a result of their Love Connection dates.

If you”ve ever caught a rerun of the show, you know what a horrifying prospect that would be; these were lust connections, at best, and it’s hard to imagine that many of the, er, relationships that came out of the show lasted more than one or two more dates. This is exactly the reason why we need to protect reproductive rights in the first place: no one should be forced to raise a child spawned from a casual hookup — especially with someone from Love Connection.

Woolery has other, well, intriguing ideas about reproductive rights and politics in general, the most original probably being this take on the voting rights of babies.

I don’t know about that. But if we allowed babies to vote all of our politicians would probably be kitties. Or possibly big lovable monsters. I’m actually ok with that.

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By David Futrelle

When they’re not talking about women having sex with dogs, or celebrating their favorite mass killer, the regulars at Incels.co sometimes have normal internet discussions on normal internet discussion topics like, well, Garfield and Charlie Brown.

In a sort-of-recent thread, the regulars at the popular incel site discussed the burning question of whether or not Jon Arbuckle — the owner of the famously sarcastic orange cat — was an incel. The general consensus: Absolutely.

According to several commenters, the real pathos of Jon’s life was revealed by the cartoon art experiment called Garfield Without Garfield, which removed the cat from the strip and left Jon talking to himself in an empty apartment.

“Garfield without Garfield is basically pure incel despair,” the original poster agreed.

As it turns out, the incels are wrong about Jon: though his romantic failures were a long-running theme of the strip — he got turned down a lot and when he did go on dates they often ended up being disastrous — he did ultimately connect with Garfield’s vet, eventually even marrying her (in the Garfield Cinematic Universe, at least, if not in the strips) . As the Garfield wiki explains:

His biggest crush is Dr. Liz Wilson, Garfield and Odie‘s vet. Over the years, Jon had asked her out on dates numerous times. She usually turned him down but sometimes agreed, however those dates were usually disastrous, often due to Garfield insisting on accompanying them. In the live action films, Garfield: The Movie and Garfield’s A Tale of Two Kitties he became Dr. Liz Wilson’s boyfriend. This later became the case in the comic strip too, from July 2006 onwards. In Garfield’s A Tale of Two Kitties, Liz marries Jon, but this never has become possible in the strips.

One incel stepped in to correct his colleagues on the Liz Wilson question, then offered his own thoughts on another cartoon character often assumed to be something of an incel himself: Charlie Brown. (I mean, by incel logic, how could he not be? He’s a chinless bald child and sort of the ultimate beta.)

Turns out that in the final years of the strip, before creator Charles M. Schultz’ death in 2000, Charlie Brown finally found himself a little red-haired girlfriend (though she wasn’t the little red-haired oneitis of his dreams).

FrothySolutions began with a reference to Jon Arbuckle’s girlfriend before going on to praise Charlie Brown’s apparent pussy slaying prowess:

I have to admit, that last highlighted sentence is not one I ever expected to read in this lifetime, and I doubt you did either. But consider yourself Incel Wisdomized for today.

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By David Futrelle

Men Going Their Own Way remain a bit confused about lesbians. In particular, MGTOWs have a hard time understanding how lesbians pay their bills. After all, according to MGTOW ideology, women don’t actually work, at least not at “real” jobs, and most of them make their real money by sponging off of men — their long-suffering husbands and/or boyfriends.

But what about lesbians, who don’t have husbands or boyfriends? Women can’t sponge off each other; that would make MGTOW heads explode.

Luckily one anonymous MGTOW Redditor has it all figured out: they sponge off of Big Daddy government by winning magical Oppression Dollars for themselves.

Apparently I missed the news about the government programs to provide wads of cash to lesbians for being lesbians. I know some women who’d definitely like to sign up for that!

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By David Futrelle

So I’ve been a teensy weensy bit obsessed with the Semen Retention subreddit for months now — though, emulating the disciplined approach to life that subreddit advocates, I have tried my best not to post about it more than once a month or so. But some days I can’t help but relapse. Today is one of those days.

What fascinates ma about this particular subreddit — a harder-core brother to the NoFap subreddit that has basically taken General Jack D. Ripper’s soliloquy about “precious bodily fluids” from Dr. Strangelove and turned it into a way of life — isn’t just the quasi-magical powers many of these guys think they’ll gain if they can keep their hands off their wangs, but also the strong undercurrent of misogyny that runs through so many of the discussions.

Sometimes this undercurrent erupts in a geyser. Take, for example, the rant titled “Men are waking up.” posted to the subreddit several momths back by someone calling himself, quite aptly, Invisible_Weirdo. Despite living up to Mr. Weirdo’s handle, the post still managed to get 75 upvotes in the relatively small subreddit.

“Do you know how many men are dropping out of school more than women,” Mr. Weirdo begins.

Women are academically becoming much more successful in all fields than men once given the chance. Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and learning disabilities compared to girls. Does that mean women are superior to men? They are according to an author who uses the nickname Elise Sutton.
Of course, I didn’t believe her.

For what it’s worth, Sutton isn’t an expert on childhood education. She’s a FemDom — not that there’s anything wrong with that! — who’s written a couple of books about “male desire for Loving Female Authority,” as the subtitle of her first book puts it. From a quick skim of that book it appears we’re talking fetishes, not sociology.

Did you know men were always more successful until 1960s, 1970s. Did you also know that coincidences to exactly the same time when porn started to become more and more popular.

Huh. The internet has made porn ubiquitous, but somehow — to take just one not-altogether-random example — corporate boards of directors (in the US) are overwhelmingly dominated by white men with a few women and people of color mixed amongst them; indeed there are 23 companies in the Fortune 500 that have no women on their boards at all. Whatever porn is or has been doing to our culture, it’s not knocking these dudes out of the corner offices.

Did you also know porn is forbidden in Israel? Or what about the hot war time when they broadcasted free porn in the TV stations they took over in order to weaken Palestinian men.

Oh, dear, this again. This talking point has been borrowed from another Semen Retention post that I wrote about several months ago — or perhaps borrowed directly from where that poster (a raving anti-Semite) got it from. 4Chan? Stormfront? The Daily Stormer? Either that or Mr. Weirdo is the same dude who posted the original claim using another name. Or they’re both part of some weird Nazi recruitment effort aimed at men who don’t jerk it.

The claims about Israel are also factually wrong. The bill to restrict porn in Israel has been bounced around for many months now and currently isn’t expected to be voted on until after Israel’s next election. As for the other thing, well, it’s true, sort of — see my post here — but it was more an attempt to anger Palestinians, not cause them to wank themselves into oblivion,

Or have you ever considered most famous geniuses who practiced celibacy like Nicola Tesla or Sir Isaac Newton.

Or maybe they were just extremely introverted, or asexual or, I dunno, gay? Isaac Newton, an angry and insecure man (and then some) was a great scientist, but not exactly the poster child for a personal life well-lived.

What is the common point of all this information? Men who ejaculate daily and spill their vital fluid on a regular basis are inferior to women yet those who practice semen retention demonstrate better mental performance, which means they are superior to both weak men and women.

Jack D. Ripper can offer a fuller explanation here.

I’m old enough to remember when this scene was a joke, not the basis of an entire weird movement. But back to men and their BRAIIIIIINS!1!

They reach faster brains compared to constantly mediocre female brain!

They reach what now?

Doesn’t that prove that men are inherently superior.

No. These ravings — and indeed the entirety of the discussions going on daily in r/SemenRetention — certainly haven’t convinced me that semen-hoarding men are smarter than women, or even than furiously masturbating men.

Those ancient philosophers were right. Men have larger brains.

That sounds familiar.

Back to Mr. Weirdo:

The only way for women to win is corrupt male psychology.

Honestly, my research into the poisoned brains of manosphere men over the past eight years has convinced me that men are pretty good at corrupting their own psychology all by themselves.

Do you see the conspiracy?

Warning, it’s about to get ugly. Will “The Jews” make an appearance as a convenient scapegoat? Why yes, they will.

You are slowly and steadily being made to believe that you are inferior by toxic feminism which benefits Jews who don’t masturbate most.

Hey look over there, it’s THE JEWS!

But of course Mr. Weirdo insists that his scapegoating of Jews has nothing in common with Mr. Hitler’s.

I am not an Anti-Semitic but can you see the indirect love triangle? You will worship females and they will worship Israel men.

Um what? Even setting aside the raging antisemitism, and the fact that not masturbating doesn’t actually make anyone more attractive, how are women outside of Israel even going to find any Israeli men to worship, much less enough to satisfy the worship demands of all non-Israeli women? I mean, Israel has a population of less than 9 million,

That does not necessarily need to be related to Jews in general; however, it could lead to serious damage and long term power imbalances.

Is … is he suggesting the US and Israel have a Semen-Retention Gap?

I am not a misogynist, either.

Yeah, just like you’re not an antisemite.

Nevertheless, the toxic Femnazi communities might be used as a good intermediate pawns against other nations’s males.

Wait, now we’re playing some weird game of spermy realpolitik?

The main manipulator does not have to be Israel. It might be anybody of any country. Nonetheless, there is still hope because more young men are waking up thanks to the internet.

Well, to be fair, more young men are waking up in the morning and masturbating thanks to the internet and its vast repositories of free porn.

Nofap was a great mainstream movement even if the more correct path is semen retention. Men are waking up. It might sound a little speculative but if all men wake up, the old power balance will be balanced again.

Because with all that backed-up semen the men will weigh more?

Women are gonna stay below men if a miracle doesn’t happen. So don’t keep semen retention as a secret. Try to spread it everywhere. And don’t become a toxic Nazi, either. Toxic masculinity is also as dangerous. Just beware of your power. And finally, embrace your superiority!

I think I’ve stumbled upon the tentative beginnings of a semen supremacy movement.

To which all I can say is “ewwwww.”

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By David Futrelle

Racist YouTube “philosopher” and self-described Men’s Rights Activist Stefan Molyneux is saying the quiet part loud again. I guess that’s kind of his thing now.

Here are two tweets he posted last night:

The implication is pretty clear: Only white men, as a group, are smart enough to support “free speech.”

As it turns out, Stefan has rather a lot of thoughts about white males and how much better they are than everyone else.

(Dude, you realize that half of the men who died in the Civil War died fighting FOR slavery, right?)

But alas these heroic white males aren’t properly appreciated — except for their money, which of course they all earned fair and square and didn’t inherit from their parents or gain from exploiting people of color or after benefiting from better connections and educational opportunities or anything.

But Stefan isn’t fond of all white males. He worries a little that insufficiently racist white men will “rage” the entire group into slavery.

This is sort of a weird worry for Stefan, since he also thinks slavery was a pretty good deal for the slaves.

Oddly, despite his white male genius, Stefan can’t quite seem to keep track of the exact percentage of the world’s awesomeness that white guys are responsible for.

Jeez, Stefan, get it together and settle on a percentage! You’re embarrassing your race and gender.

H/T — @TakedownMRAs, who highlighted Stefan’s “free speech” tweets in a tweet of his own.

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By David Futrelle

I‘ve been covering the manosphere’s collective obsession with sexbots since the start of this blog more than eight years ago. Back then, some in this weird internet community were predicting the almost-imminent arrival of sexbots that were both affordable and (to these guys anyway) virtually indistinguishable from real women.

Indeed, some were saying that in as few as ten years, these sexy robot ladies would become so ubiquitous and so realistic that actual human women would go obsolete.

Well, it hasn’t been quite a decade yet, but I thought I’d go ahead and see how things were going in the worlds of sex robotics and woman obsoleting.

But first, let’s remind ourselves of what sexbot technology looked like way, way back in the dark age of the early 2010s. In March of 2011, I wrote about a sexy robot lady by the name of Roxxxy, put together by a company called True Companion LLC, and capable of what her creators thought were some truly seductive moves. Roxxxy, I wrote,

can turn her head like Linda Blair in the Exorcist and mechanically banter with non-robot men using a variety of canned phrases that sound a lot like what a perpetually dateless non-robot man might imagine a sexy lady would say if ever one deigned to speak to him. 

She could also wiggle a little bit in what Roxxxy’s creators evidently thought was a sensual manner.

There have been impressive, and sometimes terrifying, improvements in robot technology since then. Humanesque robots can now run and jump and pick up boxes and do a bit of light parkour.

They can even do backflips.

Some non-humanesque robots can bowl with stunning accuracy, if not in the conventional manner.

And this creeepy quadraped can get through doors, even if you, erp, don’t particularly want it to.

Meanwhile artificial intelligence and voice recognition technology has developed to the point that for a mere $30 (and the total loss of your privacy) you can equip your home with smart speakers that will converse freely with you on such topics as the current weather and how old Kirk Douglas is. (According to my friend “Google Assistant” he’s 102 years old.)

So how have the sexy robot ladies been coming along? Well, here’s the new, improved (?) Roxxxy, as of 2018. Her “conversation” still seems like a string of canned phrases.

And her allegedly human-like movements, well, let’s just say they have a way to go before they even reach the uncanny valley.

As for her sex moves? Well, if this inadvertently hilarious R-rated video of her on PornHub is any indication, they still seem to consist mostly of wiggling. (Then again, that’s also my signature sex move.)

Meanwhile,”Emma” here is definitely not ready for prime time.

There are some other “sexbots” out there that seem a tad more human-like than these two though they too have their, er, limitations.

Here’s one that was, I believe, designed to look like Scarlett Johansson, which she doesn’t quite pull off, though she is a good deal more human-looking than Roxxxy. But her mouth movements are scary and unsynchronized and her wink, well, let’s just say it could use a bit of work, unless you’re intending to use her to frighten small children and more sensitive adults.

She might also want to work on her posture, which currently resembles that of the marionettes from Team Amerca: World Police.

This sex robot head is probably the most realistic-looking of them all, at least if you’re really into rubber heads. But its “flirting” is more than a little bit mechanical. Also, it’s just a head, designed to be attached to an otherwise immobile sex doll.

So in conclusion:

Sexbots have not yet rendered women obsolete.

But if you’re a lady-hating man who nevertheless wants to fuck a lady RIGHT NOW, might I suggest a cheaper Do-it-Yourself alternative to the still-imperfect yet extremely pricey models featured above?

While lacking a little in the body department, this DIY model will answer simple questions while you go to town on its artificial vagina. All you need is a smart speaker, a Fleshlight or something similar, a roll of duct tape, and a sturdy stick. Just attach the speaker and the Fleshlight to the opposite ends of the stick with the tape, as shown below. (You can also swap out the Fleshlight with a dildo if that’s your preference.)

For added realism, you can print out a picture of your favorite celebrity lady and tape it over the speaker. Ta-da! The perfect sexbot.

Technology marches on. I’ll check back in another eight or nine years to let you know if women are obsolete by then.

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