Last week we were warned that a “pro-rape group” would be organising a pro-rape rally in Naas, Co Kildare, and several online petitions called on the Taoiseach to ban the meeting. But there is more to the story than reports suggested.
The controversial meetings were to take place in towns and cities around the world as part of the Return of Kings website’s call for an international meet-up day.
In other words, it was a small internet meet-up in Naas of an obscure forum to meet like-minded men and discuss anti-feminist politics and pick-up artistry, or as they like to call it “game”.
Or it would have been had it gone ahead. Soon after the meetings were announced the website’s creator cancelled them because of fear for the “safety” of his followers, presumably against female protesters and potential attackers.
The website's creator, known as Roosh V, is an anti-feminist polemicist who has been the subject of petitions around the world seeking to ban him from entry to Canada, the UK and the US, each gathering tens of thousands of signatures.
He sees himself as part of a broader “neomasculinist” movement, which gained prominence within the men’s rights movement of the 1990s, reasserting a strong masculinity perceived to be under attack.
The Return of Kings website is part of a wider online constellation of anti-feminist “manosphere” subcultures and forums from pick-up artists to MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), which is made up of heterosexual men who rather unconvincingly claim to be voluntarily abstaining from relations with women.
Roosh wrote a book series called Bang, advising men on tactics to get women in different countries to sleep with them.
Political dimension
Roosh’s adventures had a political and economic dimension too, as he had a harder time impressing women in social-democratic feminist Denmark, for example, but claims to have had more luck in eastern Europe where women are, he creepily reports, more “traditional”, a virtue one might have expected to create a hurdle to the central project of Bang.
However, the “pro-rape rally” claim, repeated uncritically in headlines all over the world, deserves some analysis. It comes from a blog post written by Roosh called How to Stop Rape, in which he makes an absurd claim that making rape legal on private property will stop rape.
The pick-up artist has since repeatedly claimed that the piece was satire. What exactly it might be satirising is hard to deduce, but it is highly plausible that the failed satire wasn’t intended to be taken literally and Roosh V has repeated multiple times on Twitter and elsewhere that he does not advocate rape.
Disgusting views
One can easily argue against the sincerity of his claim, but why was this reported as a pro-rape rally, a claim now reported around the world as an objective fact, when it is an internet forum meet-up organised on the website of a man who, despite having disgusting views on women, is on record many times saying he does not actually advocate rape?
The increasingly predictable cycle of social media outrage, followed by mainstream media outrage, followed by petitioning of the State to enforce bans on speech and assembly also comes in the context of several years of ongoing online culture wars in which we have even seen feminists like Germaine Greer “no-platformed” on campuses by the new crop of younger feminists for offensive speech.
We’ve seen the language and politics of the new feminism used against left-wing pro-feminist candidates Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. The “Berniebro” myth, that smears Sanders fans as overwhelmingly male, sexist and macho internet trolls, became a source of further online flame wars, opinion and think pieces, despite the notable absence of evidence. The best way to have dealt with Return of Kings’ squalid little internet meet-ups would have been to mock, ignore or challenge them instead of calling on the State to intervene.
Incitement laws
In the context of the current immigration and refugee crisis, are progressives really going to legitimise the banning of foreign men on the basis of their opinions? And if so, who do we think will get to decide what constitutes a harmful opinion?
Given how widespread incitement to violence laws are, the way in which the press uncritically took its cue from social media outrage on the Roosh V issue should be worrying to us all, especially in the new online media economy, where outrage generates clicks. Today it may be a sexist fool with retrograde opinions but eventually the fact-immune outrage cycle may come for you too.
Angela Nagle is a writer and academic researcher