And in this corner, Matt Forney!
Two of the internet’s most terrible people are engaged in a bitter grudge match that, one can only hope, leads to the utter defeat and humiliation of both of them.
In one corner, we have the excitable Dean Esmay, the former A Voice for Men Number Two who has become a formidable Twitter activist, if by “formidable” you mean “a slanderous, slur-spewing, own-goaling nitwit who really, really needs to think about switching to decaffeinated coffee and possibly getting off the internet forever because he embarrasses himself with such regularity.”
Checking with my dictionary, I see that this is not actually what “formidable” means.
Anyhoo, you may recall from my last post on Esmay that he has been loudly denouncing what he calls the “rape hysteria” in Cologne in Tweets like this one:
I call bullshit on the supposed mass rape attacks in Cologne. Go ahead and put me on record. It's classic rape hysteria and no more.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) January 7, 2016
In an irony-meter-breaking twist, Esmay has drawn a great deal of flak for this stance not so much from feminists as from an assortment of alt-right racists who want the world to believe the worst about Muslim “rapefugees.”
If you poke around on Twitter you will find Esmay being denounced as a rape apologist by such unsavory characters as Matt Forney and Roosh Valizadeh, who are, as readers of this blog know, not only repugnant misogynistic PUAs and far-right racists but also rather enthusiastic rape apologists themselves.
In a blog post, Forney expanded on the accusations and asked “Why Did Dean Esmay Call the Cologne Rape Victims ‘Liars?'”
Esmay has responded to these not-really-that-far-off accusations by screaming bloody murder and making a bunch of accusations of his own. After accusing Forney and Roosh of vile slander for suggesting that he thought that each and every one of the reports of sexual assault in Cologne were false, he went on to accuse Forney and Roosh themselves of rape.
Confessed rapists RooshV & his friend Matt, also a confessed rapist, still haven't retracted their quote-mined lies. Hmm. Wish I could sue.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) January 13, 2016
Esmay seems far more concerned about the alleged “quote-mined lies” being spread about himself than he does about the possible victims of Forney’s and Roosh’s alleged rapes.
Esmay’s blog post on the subject is more solipsistic still:
Confessed rapist Matt Forney has recently lied in public and, using Futrellian quote-mining, made it look as if I said women in Cologne lied about being raped. He knows this isn’t true, as does his cult leader RooshV, the king of the PUA rapetards and creator of the bizarre “NeoMasculinity” secular religion. Yet despite knowing the truth, and having had ample opportunity to retract his story, he and his creepy rapetard cult members keep saying it.
I’m not quie sure why Esmay thinks he’s going to convince anyone he’s not a rape apologist by calling his accusers “rapetards” — a nasty and thankfully not too widely known little portmanteau slur that AVFMers and former AVFMers like Esmay have generally applied to feminists fighting rape.
You know, I can only think of one reason to continually make a false allegation like that: Guilty men like to virtue signal by white knighting. So it appears that Matt Forney and RooshV are trying to recover some respectability by attacking innocent men. Why else with their disgusting lies about what I said on Cologne?
Now, we’ve all seen the evidence in Roosh’s own writing that has suggested to many observers that he’s a rapist. But what evidence is there against Forney?
Esmay points to a blog post of Forney’s with the appalling title “Why Girls Rarely Mean No When They Say No.” The post, which an apparently embarrassed Forney removed from his site some months ago, is as rapey as the title suggests. In it, Forney argues that “No Means Yes/Maybe/Take Me, You Sexy Beast!” and explains that
When a girl says “no” to sex or a particular sexual act, she rarely if ever means it wholeheartedly. While girls have sexual boundaries, theirs are not nearly as strong or well-defined as yours. With the right mix of persuasion, persistence, and audaciousness, you can get a girl to do just about anything you want. I know, because I’ve done it.
He follows this little confession with a story about how he once sort-of, kind-of forced sex on a “fuckbuddy” of his even though she “was in no mood to fuck.” She explicitly told him no; he removed her clothes and had sex with her anyway. “After about ten minutes,” he writes, “she started yelping like she was having her fingernails ripped out with a pair of pliers.” He kept going, nonetheless.
The twist ending? She didn’t actually charge him with rape.
Did she yell at me? Run off to the phone to call 911? Complain about how I’d ignored her wishes and fucked her anyway even though she didn’t want me to?
No: she hugged me and told me that I was “the only man on Earth who didn’t make [her] want to throw up.”
Make of that what you will.
Forney, in a blog post defending himself against Esmay’s accusations, describes this post as
a blog post I wrote a while ago and deleted, both because it was poorly-written and in poor taste (even for me), a post that has nothing to do with rape.
Esmay then brings up some other rape allegations that have been made against Forney by blogger Rachel Haywire. Haywire hasn’t accused Forney of raping her, instead claiming that Forney raped a female friend of his; according to one anonymous tipster Esmay quotes in his blog post, the boyfriend of the woman in question walked in on Forney raping her as she lay passed-out on the floor. According to the source, she didn’t remember any of it.
Forney’s defense against these accusations is similar to the one he used in his blog post — noting that the alleged victim isn’t the one making the accusations and that she’s still a friend of his. On Twitter, he’s posted photos of the two of them together, smiling. Make of that what you will.
Could the grudge match between Esmay and Forney get any uglier? I think it could, and probably will.