So there has been a great deal of controversy surrounding the recent talk that old school Men’s Rights guru Warren Farrell gave at the University of Toronto. Protesters troubled by Farrell’s repugnant views on incest and date rape, among other things, blocked the entrance to the building holding the talk; police broke up the blockade. You can find various videos of what went down on YouTube. I’m not going to try to sort out all the various claims and counterclaims about what happened.

I personally don’t approve of blocking people from giving talks, even if their ideas are repugnant. But I certainly do approve of holding people responsible for what they say, and Farrell – in addition to being wrong about nearly every aspect of relations between men and women – has said some truly awful things over the years.

Exhibit A: A notorious interview he gave Penthouse magazine in the 1970s in which he discussed a book he was researching about incest, tetatively titled The Last Taboo: The Three Faces of Incest.

Let me put a giant TRIGGER WARNING here for disturbing discussion of incest and child sexual abuse.

In the interview, he argued that incest could be a good thing for everyone involved. Indeed, he waxed poetic about the possible positive effects:

“Incest is like a magnifying glass,” he told interviewer Philip Nobile. “In some circumstances it magnifies the beauty of the relationship, and in others it magnifies the trauma.”

The book Farrell was working on never appeared, and Farrell would apparently prefer it if what he said in that interview simply vanished into the memory hole, but a radical feminist site called the Liz Library has a copy of the original 1977 magazine in which it appeared, and has put high quality scans of it online. You can find them here.

Here are some of the things Farrell said in that interview. I’ve put the direct quotes from Farrell in bold; the rest is Nobile’s summary of what Farrell told him.

The article summarized the “findings” of Farrell’s (at that time incomplete) incest research, starting with his take on mother-son incest:

Mother-son incest represents 10 percent of the incidence and is 70 percent positive, 20 percent mixed, and 10 percent negative for the son. For the mother it is mostly positive. Farrell points out that boys don’t seem to suffer, not even from the negative experience. “Girls are much more influenced by the dictates of society and are more willing to take on sexual guilt.”

Apparently, in his view, girls feel bad about the abuse not so much because abuse is inherently bad, but because “society” tells them it’s bad; he returns to this theme repeatedly.

Apparently Farrell’s “findings” about father-daughter incest were not quite as cheery:

The father-daughter scene, ineluctably complicated by feelings of dominance and control, is not nearly so sanguine. Despite some advertisements, calling explicitly for positive female experiences, Farrell discovered that 85 percent of the daughters admitted to having negative attitudes toward their incest. Only 15 percent felt positive about the experience. On the other hand, statistics from the vantage of the fathers involved were almost the reverse — 60 percent positive 10 percent mixed, and 20 percent negative. “Either men see these relationships differently,” comments Farrell, “or I am getting selective reporting from women.”

Yea, that’s right. He’s saying that the overwhelming majority of the abusive men he interviewed enjoyed sexually abusing their daughters, but for some baffling reason their daughters generally didn’t enjoy the abuse. And the explanation for this is that perhaps the daughters are lying – er, sorry, “selectively reporting?”

The bit about advertisements seems to suggest that Farrell went out of his way to try to find and interview women who felt positively about being sexually abused, but still was unable to find more than a small percentage who did.

The article continues. (This is Nobile summarzing Farrell, not Farrell’s direct words.)

In a typical traumatic case, an authoritarian father, unhappily married in a sexually repressed household and probably unemployed, drunkenly imposes himself on his young daughter. Genital petting may have started as early as age eight with first intercourse occurring around twelve. Since the father otherwise extends very little attention to his daughter, his sexual advances may be one of the few pleasant experiences she has with him.

Let’s just repeat that last sentence for emphasis:

Since the father otherwise extends very little attention to his daughter, his sexual advances may be one of the few pleasant experiences she has with him.

The article continues:

If she is unaware of society’s taboo and if the mother does not intervene, she has no reason to suspect the enormity of the aberration. But when she grows up and learns of the taboo, she feels cheapened.

So the incest “taboo” is the main problem, not the abuse itself?

And here is a doozy of a quote from Farrell directly:

“When I get my most glowing positive cases, 6 out of 200,” says Farrell, “the incest is part of the family’s open, sensual style of life, wherein sex is an outgrowth of warmth and affection. It is more likely that the father has good sex with his wife, and his wife is likely to know and approve — and in one or two cases to join in.”

(Note: I’m relying on the Liz Library’s transcription of this quote; some of the text in their scan of this page is blurry.)

Farrell told Nobile that he was feeling hesitant about publishing his book, because it might encourage exploitation of daughters, but that he felt compelled to continue researching it for two main reasons:

“First, because millions of people who are now refraining from touching, holding, and genitally caressing their children, when that is really a part of a caring, loving expression, are repressing the sexuality of a lot of children and themselves. Maybe this needs repressing, and maybe it doesn’t. My book should at least begin the exploration.”

“Second, I’m finding that thousands of people in therapy for incest are being told, in essence , that their lives have been ruined by incest. In fact, their lives have not generally been affected as much by the incest as by the overall atmosphere. …

Farrell also hopes to change public attitudes so that participants in incest will no longer be automatically perceived as victims. “The average incest participant can’t evaluate his or her experience for what it was. As soon as society gets into the picture, they have to tell themselves it was bad. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. “

According to The Liz Library, Farrell now claims that the bit about “genitally caressing” children is a misquote, and that what he really said was “generally caressing.” You can see the scan of the page here; Penthouse clearly has him saying “gentitally.”

But let’s assume that Farrell is telling the truth and Nobile misheard the word. Here’s the quote again, with that one word changed.

First, because millions of people who are now refraining from touching, holding, and generally caressing their children, when that is really a part of a caring, loving expression, are repressing the sexuality of a lot of children and themselves.

I’m not sure that’s much better; he’s still talking about “touching, holding, and … caressing” children in a sexual context.

Farrell has not, to my knowledge, challenged any of the other quotes in this interview besides that one. Nor, again to the best of my knowledge, has he forthrightly repudiated the substance of what he said. If he wishes to clarify or challenge any of this I will happily give him space here on this blog to do so.

I should note that in the interview Farrell stopped short of actually advocating incest. But his reasoning here is curious, to say the least:

“I’m not recommending incest between parent and child, and especially not between father and daughter. The great majority of fathers can grasp the dynamics of positive incest intellectually. But in a society that encourages looking at women in almost purely sexual terms, I don’t believe they can translate this understanding into practice.”

So apparently father-daughter incest – ie, sexual abuse – isn’t a good idea because in a sexist society fathers are likely to do it wrong?

I encourage everyone with the stomach for it to read the entire Penthouse piece, which also discusses the incredibly creepy views of some other incest “researchers” at the time.

I will highlight more of Farrell’s problematic views in future posts.

Some men are also Bread

On his newish blog Return of Kings, pickup-guru-turned-philosopher Roosh V has come up with yet another way to justify his creepy obsession with women a lot younger than his hairy self: he compares them with loaves of bread.

When a loaf comes out of the oven (puberty), it’s warm and delicious. You can’t help but stuff yourself. (18-24 years old)

When you leave the loaf out, it gets a little hard. You have to heat it up with a toaster first, but it still won’t taste fresh. (25-29 years old)

If you leave the bread out for too long, mold develops. You can cut away the mold, toast the bread, and still be able to eat it, but you won’t enjoy it. You’d have to be starving. (30-34 years old)

If you leave it for even longer, mold takes over and completely destroys the bread. There is no way to excise the toxic portions. You must throw it away before the mold makes you sick. (35 and up)

The lesson in this? Live next to the bakery.

Well, that was creepy as fuck.

Also, he seems a bit confused about when puberty actually happens. Or he just doesn’t want to state outright that he’d really rather be “dating” 15 year olds.

Eww.

Reddit novelty accounts are usually bad, bad news, an excuse for horrendous racist or misogynist or otherwise appallingly Redditish “humor.” But a reader has pointed me to one new novelty account that’s actually pretty hilarious: the 3-day old account of MRAbot2000, which posts perfect distillations of MRA-think at every opportunity. (These are all from different discussions; the different widths of the various images are due to my laziness and incompetence.)

Despite Reddit being something of a cesspool of misogyny, MRAbot2000 mostly gets upvotes. (The comment above with the negative votes is in ShitRedditSays, where the mods have rigged it so downvotes equal upvotes.) Then again, MRAbot2000 hasn’t yet posted in the Men’s Rights subreddit, where somehow I suspect the reception would be a bit more chilly.

You can find many more nuggets of MRA “wisdom” in MRAbot2000’s comment history.

Even the Bionic Woman had trouble with fembots.

Yesterday we looked at far-right manospheran clod/philosopher Vox Day’s melodramatic response to a Canadian sexbot ban that’s completely imaginary (but that Vox, natch, believed was real). Today, let’s look at an almost 3000-word post by one “Ian Ironwood” of the Red Pill Room, spelling out the dire implications of this imaginary legislation.

ProTip: Before writing 3000-word screeds denouncing something, spend 5 minutes with Teh Google to see if what you’re denouncing is in fact real.

Ironwood opens his argument with this dramatic (if slightly ironic) assertion:

The Sexbot threat to feminism is real.

No one wants to admit it, but it’s coming.  Indeed, the only people who recognize it as such are the radical feminists and the radical nerds, and rarely do folks take those groups at face value when they speak.  But they both have it right, sexbots are in our future.  Indeed, they’re closer than you think, and their capacity to seriously screw with the SMP is very, very real.

For those not fully versed in the pseudoscience of pickup artistry, SMP stands for “sexual marketplace.”

Ian starts us off with a little trip to Japan:

Japan, the undisputed global leaders in male masturbation technology, are [sic] investing literally millions in research into this market.  Why?  Because of the herbivores.

 The “herbivores” are the adult males (I hesitate to call them men) in Japanese society who have opted out of the dating-and-mating SMP entirely.  In consideration of the exhausting and complex web of social and financial penalties involved, these men have just . . . given up on women. 

Manospherians like to pretend that Japan’s much-discussed “herbivores” are essentially the Japanese version of Men Going Their Own Way. I’m no expert on Japan but even I know that’s a bit of an oversimplification.

Naturally, in Ian’s mind, it’s all the fault of those uppity ladies:

You think American women feel entitled?  Japanese “princesses” put them to shame.  Their demands and requirements for a husband are often so grandiose or unrealistic that they have turned-off an entire generation of Japanese men to the very idea of marriage, just at the point where their female contemporaries, themselves working in corporate jobs, are starting to consider it.

But when your day consists of going to work in a cube farm and playing the corporate warrior competing with women all day, apparently it saps your desire to deal with them all night, too. 

So, naturally, these poor cube farming herbivores are turning to vagina replacements:

Long an important part of international sex culture, the last few decades have seen rapid advances in masturbation technology, including the disposable Tenga “egg” stroker you can buy in a vending machine for those long lunch hours.  Japanese dudes whack it a lot, and that’s big business.  

And soon – oh, so soon — Japanese masturbation technology will be able to replace not just vaginas but entire women:

[B]y 2018, and certainly by 2020, we’ll see animatronic Sexbots available for purchase that you will not be able to distinguish from a human being more than ten feet away.

Ian, I will bet you literally a billion gazillion dollars that you are wrong about this.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Ian is correct, and let him continue his most interesting – and increasingly NSFW — survey of the future.

Every aspect of the phenomenon is being developed: realistic-feeling skin, realistic-looking eyes, realistic-sounding voice, realistic weight and mass, realistic movements …

The current state-of-the-art is still primitive, but that’s changing rapidly.  By 2020 your Sexbot will be able to walk, talk, see, hear, suck, fuck, give you an endless handjob, take it up her vibrating butt and do stuff no mortal woman can. 

“Endless Handjob” is going to be the name of my ambient-drone cassette label.

You will be able to order them in any style, from African to Asian to European to Latin and beyond, any height, any weight, and you will be able to personalize them to suit your particular fetish.  Advanced models will have changeable bust sizes and other options.  Hair, eyes, and accent?  Standard options.

I am glad to hear that sexbots will indeed have eyes as an option. It would be sort of weird otherwise. Can they have more than two? Could they have eyes instead of nipples, and nipples instead of eyes? Could you simply swap out various body parts as if your sexbot were some giant sexy Mrs. Potatohead?

Sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away with all the possibilities.

Let’s go back to Ian’s post, which is sounding more and more like some sort of sexbot informercial.

And just how much will dudes have to shell out to get a perfectly-programmed girlfriend delivered to their door?

About the price of an economy car.  Estimates indicate that the best consumer price-point for a Sexbot is about US$7,000.00 (2013).  Leases will likely be available.  So will financing.  But for the average dude, shelling out that kind of cash for the perfect sexual companion is a no-brainer.

I’m pretty sure Ian isn’t thinking with his brain at this point. Heck, he’s even wrong about the cars: a decent economy car is going to cost you at least twice that, and most of them don’t even have vibrating butts.

Imagine a dude getting home from work in his single apartment.  His Sexbot has been pre-programmed to start his dinner and have it ready on demand.  She greets him at the door, asks about his day, gets his dinner, and then spends the rest of the evening satisfying him any way he chooses.  With a sophisticated AI (one of the major focuses of the effort) she will be able to converse with you on nearly any topic or stay blissfully silent.  And you don’t even have to ask about how her day went.

After two years, trade her in for a newer, more advanced model.  Repeat as necessary.

And fellas, this stunningly realistic female human being replacement, with a vibrating butt and as many eyes as you want, will be yours for less than half the cost of a cheap car – in as little as six years from now!

And heck, these sexbots won’t just replace women – they’ll  even replace women who are whores.

Our children’s generation will look forward to a whole lot of men (if Japan is any indication, over half) depending on Sexbots for their erotic entertainment over actual human beings.  Even whores.  Because sexbots are safer than prostitutes by any estimation.

Sounds like life for heterosexual-yet-woman-hating men will become some sort of wondrous sexual utopia!

What could possibly stand in the way of this glorious dream?

Oh, you guessed it already: jealous, and probably ugly, feminists – who for some reason apparently want all of the woman-hating straight men for themselves.

Ian trots out that wholly imaginary Human-Robot Personal Relationship Act that we talked about yesterday. The “proposed law” that turned out to have been an assignment in a law school class about law and robotics. The law that Ian didn’t bother to Google before writing his long, long screed.

Ian is as worked up about this imaginary law as he is excited about his imaginary robot girlfriend(s) of the future. “[T]he thinly-veiled, incredibly obvious motivation behind this freakish proposed law,” he thunders, is that

 feminists are upset because when dudes can buy a girlfriend for less money than an engagement ring, and then have elective temporary vasectomies to cover their bases for the few times they do end up with a real woman, then the future looks an awful lot like a male paradise and a female hell.

Wait, now all men are getting vasectomies as well? Even though they have no reason to bother with mere human females, what with all their talking and their lack of vibrating butts? I’m a little confused now.

What happens when you’re a woman, you want to be a mom, but not only can’t you find a husband . . . you can’t even find decent sperm?  When in order to conceive, you have to convince a dude to commit to providing you with semen, which he can do only AFTER he consciously gets his vasectomy reversed?  No surprise pregnancies, no one-night-stands gone wrong, suddenly the only way a woman can get pregnant is if she can convince a man to commit to her?  If she can even find one who is interested? …

What happens in our society when a majority of working women can’t find husbands – or even dates, thanks to the Sexbot craze – and end up working and paying taxes to subsidize other women’s childbearing?  What happens when a dude with superior genetics can start a bidding war on his balls?

Yeah, but what if Japanese women develop ROBOT SPERM and use it to get pregnant and somehow force men to pay child support for their new human-robot hybrid babies? Did you ever consider THAT, Ian?

I’m not quite sure how all of that would work, exactly, but, hey, the Japanese are awfully clever so presumably they could whip up something like this in, oh, six to eight years or so, right?

But let’s just assume that my idea of robot sperm remains a pipe dream, and that Ian’s pipe dreams somehow become reality. He continues:

The temporary vasectomy is literally just a few years away.  Throw in Sexbots, and suddenly men have reproductive power the likes of which they’ve never dreamed, even at the height of the Agricultural Age.  They will decide when they conceive as a conscious choice, not as a whim of Nature.  Have a bad date with yet-another desperate woman who only wants you for your sperm?  Kandi the Asian 19year old Sexbot will make it all better.

Why is her name Kandi? Is that a common name in Asia?

And that’s why feminists are trying to ban them.  Not because they “objectify” women, but because they make women largely redundant to men.  Suddenly the allure of their genitalia will pale in comparison to the outrageous sexual bombshells rolling off of the Kyoto assembly lines. 

I’m sorry; I just love that last sentence there so much I have to repeat it:

Suddenly the allure of their genitalia will pale in comparison to the outrageous sexual bombshells rolling off of the Kyoto assembly lines. 

Ian dreams on:

Sexbots will actually cure a plethora of social ills: STDs, AIDS, unwanted pregnancy, sexual frustration, loneliness, heartbreak, child sexual exploitation, and more.  Far from making men objectify women . . . it will merely make them ignore them.  Men with Sexbots won’t treat women poorly, because more likely than not, once they have the “perfect” programmed girlfriend at home, there really won’t be any reason to interact with women unless you’re at work.

Yes, because aside from sticking his penis in them, there is clearly no possible reason why a man would ever want to have anything to do with women.

Just imagine a society where any man can get his ashes hauled at any time, in any way, without having to ask a live woman to participate.  Just imagine a society where women can’t get “accidentally” pregnant anymore.  Not only is the impetus to marry absolutely killed, but even the impetus to mix with the opposite sex.  And that’s what is scaring feminists, not the potential for objectification.

Yes,  I’m sure feminist women are crying themselves to sleep at the notion that asswipes like Ian will refuse to “mix” with them any more.

Happily, for him, Ian concludes that the (wholly imaginary) Human-Robot Personal Relationship Act won’t stand up in court. Because of NAFTA, or something. (I kind of skimmed this bit.) But then he’s back to imagining the wondrous possibilities of a sexbotted-up world. Which apparently involves a lot of robot dismemberment.

Just imagine the result if sex with “realistic” Sexbots is actually made illegal . . . why not just pop an alien head on?  Or a animatronic animal head?  Or just a silvery glass sphere?  That’s the real danger for women when it comes to Sexbots: their ability to be customized in ways no woman would ever consent to. 

Uh, I’m pretty sure no living creature, regardless of gender, would consent to having their head “popped off” and replaced with a sphere.

Can’t have a “realistic” full-body Sexbot?  Then just buy her from the waist down.  And then next year spring for a separate torso and head.  You can use them separately, or together! 

Who needs a human girlfriend when you can just fuck a torso?

Cant’ have a Sexbot that portrays a minor?  Get a really, really small model, and no one knows what happens in your imagination.

How thoughtful! So even pedophiles will have a place in Ian’s sexbot utopia.

So while imaginary feminists propose imaginary laws to fight the coming sexbot utopia, Ian will be licking his chops.

I, for one, will be welcoming our new Sexbot masters.  It’s going to tighten up the SMP worse than gay liberation did.  And it’s going to make shallow, poor-quality women completely and utterly undatable, and leave them little or no options to reproduce.  And the women who do reproduce will do so only with the permission, consent and acquiescence of men.

I’m beginning to wonder if this “red pill” is actually some sort of hallucinogenic.

Over at The Spearhead, the boys are thinking about tomorrow – to be more specific, about the year 2020, the date at which an MRA calling himself The Fifth Horseman predicted in an eccentric online manifesto that a convergence of forces would lead to the popping of what he calls “the misandry bubble,” and that the ensuing gender apocalypse would put the uppity ladies of the world firmly in their place.

In a post, Spearhead head boy W.F. Price notes that “cliodynamicist” Peter Turchin is also predicting big changes around 2020 (though unlike The Fifth Horseman, Turchin doesn’t base any part of his theory on the development of super-hot Virtual Reality sexbots). This naturally inspires the assembled Spearheaders to start scratching their own crystal balls, enthralled with visions of a future Armageddon that forces the ladies to come crying to them for forgiveness.

Jay R, a sort of apocalyptic deficit hawk, blames the ladies for the US government’s big debts:

Government has acted as though economic principles don’t apply to it — borrowing can increase forever without significant consequence. Riiiiiiiiight. And let’s not forget that the bulk of government debt and spending is a transfer of resources from men to women. It is primarily women who owe this debt. Will they be able to repay it? Only with massive devaluation of the currency.

And then he imagines women owing men a whole other sort of debt, which he has simply made up, and predicts that this debt will come crashing down on women’s heads – a notion that seems to give him a bit of a rage-boner:

Similarly, women’s social debt to men — the incalculable damages resulting from women’s wholesale breach of the social contract — is unsustainable, and when the crash comes, women’s tears will be bitter indeed. This is justice — but still regretable, if one thinks how things might have turned out if radical feminist hatred had not comandeered the process of compromise between the sexes.

True equality for women is on the horizon. When they finally are accorded the same treatment as men, and realize how far they have fallen — how much they themselves have been devalued as a sex — they will think themselves in hell.

Rod Van Mechelen of Backlash.com has an even more elaborate apocalyptic fantasy – although he’s a bit less certain about its outcome being a good one for men. In this portion of a long comment, he speculates about a couple of possible (by which I mean completely and ludicrously impossible) outcomes:

Demographically, the relative value of fecund females is set to go hyperbolic by 2020, when insane policies in Asia and the Subcontinent will manifest a shortage of women of child bearing age. In the past, when war has created a shortage of men, peace and prosperity were the result. What will happen when we have a shortage of women? Will we see a rise in female power, with matriarchies like the ones in Robert Heinlein’s classic, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? Will we see rampant homosexuality and mandatory sexual servitude for women, as in J. Neil Schulmann’s The Rainbow Cadenza?

Uh, I think I’m going to go with “none of the above.”

Prolific MRA commenter and regular A Voice for Men contributor Keyster predicts (surprise, surprise!) economic collapse and riots in the streets.

[W]hen the money runs out and California becomes Greece, the federal government will step in with “emergency funds” and National Guard troops…a federal government that continues to borrow abroad to sustain itself. Do you see the snake eating it’s tail yet? And we have to wonder why there’s a nationwide shortage of guns and ammo?

Naturally, the rioters will be black.

If you thought inner city blacks were angry over Rodney King, just wait until they become desperate for food. Asian shop owners will be over-run in days, further distribution to these war zones will cease – and they’ll branch out to the tony suburbs seeking sustinence and easy prey. Drones will be called in to contain the rovering marauding gangs.

Keyster predicts that all these scary riots will lead the (presumably non-black, non-rioting) ladies to start batting their eyelashes at big strong (presumably non-black, non-rioting) men.

Men will notice a decided shift in women’s once hostile attitude towards them. “Can I get you a sandwhich honey?” “Are you thirsty?” “Need a back rub?”

They will be actively engaged in seeking out male protectors and openly using sexual allure to attract them as mates. Men are so much better at defending themselves from bad guys, so you’ll want one with you if you’re a woman.

Greyghost, meanwhile, imagines that the anti-uppity-female effects of an economic collapse will be enhanced by … the development of a male birth control pill. (You may need to read this one slowly; Mr. Ghost is not what you’d call a great communicator.)

[L]et’s say a male birth control pills comes out before cold fusion or some other extender of government wealth. What happens when even a coward to stand up to the femine imperative knows this misandry is unsustainable and figures out a male pill will maybe cause a correction while he still can be a coward. A woman without child is a worker drone and not eligible for entitlements.The US may look like China with low wage factories full of female workers with male mechanics/technicians keeping the machines running.

What is really funny and would be interesting to check out. Knowing women from reading and discussing female nature with you all here in the manosphere in general with the male pill being a pleasant wife might be the herd status symbol of the future. Take civil unrest combined with poor economic opportunities with men having the finale say so on who gets pregnant or not and we have a new status symbol.

Like Keyster, who once boasted on The Spearhead of dating a 14-year-old when he was 25, Greyghost seems enamored of relatively weak and dependent gals:

Next to a dog female fear is a mans best friend. Fearful insecure women tend to be more polite and pleasant to those around her.

Dream on, guys. Dream on.