The Impotent and the Potent, Part 1—In Which the Manosphere Needs a Pair

While reading about Elliot Rodger’s killing spree in Santa Barbara, California last month, I ran across a male empowerment website called Return of Kings, and it has occupied my thoughts since. The “About” page begins with a brief statement of the online community’s focus:

“Return of Kings is a blog for heterosexual, masculine men. It’s meant for a small but vocal collection of men in America today who believe men should be masculine and women should be feminine.”

The page goes on to explicitly state that “women and homosexuals” are forbidden from participating in the online forum. Then eight key beliefs are presented. They include the following:

“2. Women are sluts if they sleep around, but men are not. This fact is due to the biological differences between men and women.”

“6. A woman’s value is mainly determined by her fertility and beauty. A man’s value is mainly determined by his resources, intellect, and character.”

“7. Elimination of traditional gender roles and the promotion of unlimited mating choice in women unleashes their promiscuity and other negative behaviors that block family formation.”

The Return of Kings response to Rodger’s killing spree was a misogynist screed. The article by Roosh V, who runs the website, is oblivious to its own contradictions, shaming women who have “experienced more than a dozen different penises in her vagina, anus, and mouth” in one paragraph, and elsewhere encouraging lonely men like Elliot Rodger to solve their problems by going out to get some.

The worldview represented by Return of Kings is so wrong on so many levels that it’s fascinating. As is often the case with pernicious ideologies, it bases its narrative around a few ideas that most people would generally agree with (men and women are biologically different, animals have different sex roles, family is good, etc.) and branches out from there to far-reaching claims that exalt a chosen group while demeaning others. The appearance of it all simply following from a few common-sense premises will fool some people.

My only previous encounter with male empowerment was through Tom Cruise’s character in the film Magnolia. How humorous, I thought. How sad. In psychoanalytic terms, the more vicious members of the manosphere feel impotent in the face of modern values and react by claiming omnipotence. The symbolic order of their world is crumbling around them through increasingly open social schemes, so they desperately try to place themselves back at the center of the universe. Unfortunately for them, however, nothing could be more indicative of lacking a pair than running around, shaking your balls at everyone and shouting “Look at these!”

 

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