Last week Roosh V’s planned visit to the UK was abruptly brought to my attention. Splashed across my social media, I saw that he had planned eight meetings for his avid followers in cities from London to Edinburgh. Last time I had the displeasure of Roosh infiltrating my consciousness was when I had watched, with ever increasing outrage and despair, Reggie Yates’ BBC3 documentary on the manosphere. This time wasn’t going to be any less infuriating…
For those of you who are unfamiliar, Roosh is known as a ‘militant pro-rape pick-up artist’. His self-declared “neo-masculine” beliefs stake monumentally ground-breaking ideas – from the 19th Century. These include that a “woman’s value significantly depends on her fertility and beauty”; that promiscuity in women is a “negative behaviour”; and finally that “socialism, feminism, cultural Marxism, and social justice warriorism aim to destroy the family unit, decrease the fertility rate, and impoverish the state through large welfare entitlements.”
As some-one who self-identifies as both a feminist and Marxist, I can say that I certainly do care about destroying the family unit – if it is a “family unit” from Victorian Britain. It is of utmost importance to reject the “family unit” as conjured up from the dark recesses of wretched little minds which stubbornly refuse to accept equality and freedom. I advocate for equality across sex, gender-identification, and sexuality. I advocate for rights of fertility, work, and welfare. I advocate against sexual violence in all its forms, including rape culture, and especially the idea that the way to get rid of rape culture is to legalise it (on private property). Yes, you read that correctly.
On January 19th Roosh announced his plans for organised meet-ups across the UK and the world on his website, Return of Kings. This was followed by a collective outcry on social media supported by shared online newspaper articles and eloquent blog-posts. I’d also seen the circulation of two different protest marches in Glasgow, where I had previously gone to university, and an online petition calling on David Cameron to ban Roosh’s entry to the UK.
Then, on the 4th February, only a few days after the initial outpouring of disgust, Roosh announced that the meetings were cancelled as he could not ‘ensure the safety of his followers’. I saw one social media user comment that the irony of these men feeling unsafe in the streets had been lost on them. And it had. Arguments for free speech dominated online spaces, with little regard for the infringements to women’s freedom these ‘rights’ would entail. A follow-up post on the Return of Kings site managed to incite some laughable conspiracy theories about the media and perform a poor reading of a Fight Club quote (NB: Davis Aurini, the point of the story is that you’re not supposed to blindly follow Tyler Durden, you absolute space monkey).
But if you can bare to get past the fragile masculine egos of broken Gen-X men, there is something even more horrifying in store. Dusting back those murky cobwebs we are greeted with the latent racism in our own reflection. Responses to Roosh’s visit were co-ordinated and publicised through online social networks, by brilliantly strong women and allies. But mainstream news coverage of Roosh’s visit and the resultant social movements across the UK to prevent it remains virtually non-existent. The Independent and the Guardian both have sassy online follow-ups, and even the Daily Mail have an online piece tearing into him. Yet we are found wanting in terms of extensive coverage or substantive critique. Substantive critique regarding the role he plays in our culture, the patriarchal values he embodies, and the sickness in our society he symbolizes. Symbolizes by allowing us to see there is no systematic prevention of a man who admits to date-raping women with alcohol (and shaming them for it) within poorly titled books.
How does this compare to the near moral panic incited by our media about the Cologne attacks? The story of the ‘spike of sexual assaults by immigrants’ across Europe has been making the rounds through the printed press and mainstream TV news broadcasters. The sheer amount of coverage is staggeringly different. The framing is something else altogether. “Women are told not to go out at night alone” due to “migrant rape fears”, yet the gangs of self-confessed rapists Roosh planned to bring together are not mentioned. Roosh is a “loner” at worst, and this growing community is certainly not endemic of the ugly misogyny of our culture. Not only does this discrepancy in coverage and framing highlight how deeply entrenched Roosh’s manosphere arguments and rampant misogynistic values are in our culture, it shows our not-so-well-veiled racism: our refusal to address sexual violence unless it conforms to narratives that uphold heteropatriarchal norms, and white, straight, male privilege.
Laurie Penny wrote an article discussing how we must not to let the bigots steal feminism after the Cologne attacks. Roosh V shows how they already have. Action against sexual violence is only legitimised when the men at the top of our society don’t have to feel uncomfortable about it. Yet, here it is, staring us in the face in the form of Roosh V’s over 20,000 twitter followers. And you still want to try and tell me that feminism isn’t important in the Western world? How can we begin to fight for the equality of women globally when our society not only ignores sexual violence but uses “feminism” as coded racism and neo-imperialism?
Once again we are witness to women’s bodies being subject to the petty projects of nation-states and colonial reinforcement. It is not new that sexual violence against women enacts the drawing and contestation of cultural boundaries. Rape is often a particularly fine-tuned instrument of war. The female body symbolizes the home, the motherland, and as such it can be conquered, pillaged and torn apart. For those who spoke against the Cologne attacks but do not speak against Roosh, this is what you fear: another man on your property. You are as wrong as he is, and you enact another form of violence against the women you claim to protect. Despite still living in the epoch of nation-states and the failed masculine dreams of sovereignty and private property, women’s bodies are not symbols of your ownership, power or protection. You repeatedly violate them every day with your refusal to accept the on-going sexual violence deeply entrenched within our own ‘progressive’, Western values.
It’s not just the contestation of the boundaries of Europe that are being wrought in our blurry acceptance and non-acceptance of sexual violence. American rapper Tyler the Creator was quietly banned from the UK for lyrics he wrote five years ago, but it took a whole parliamentary debate to decide it is better to greet the notorious misogynist, racist and outright lunatic Donald Trump with ‘ridicule’. Is it because banning white, straight, rich men looks bad? This society is ridicule. It ridicules and undermines sexual violence experienced daily, in all it’s forms. It refuses to see it’s own disgusting misogyny and instead unsubtly dumps its masculine anxieties on the Other. To every woman and ally who put up a fight against Roosh V and his hateful organisation, I applaud you, your bravery and your strength. But it is not a fight you should be fighting alone. So much sexual violence in our society remains invisible. It remains today that sexual violence is only seen when the perpetrator is one society is comfortable seeing as a criminal, as a rapist. Given the still shockingly high sexual violence statistics across Britain, it’s time for us to take a long, hard look in the mirror.