Shorter @AmandaMarcotte: ‘Masculinity Killed Those Gay People in Orlando’

“The horror story of Orlando lays bare what damage that this kind of dominance-oriented masculinity does to our society . . . It’s a stark reminder of why we, as a country, need to get past the politics of tough guy posturing and move towards a more thoughtful, inclusive society.”
— Amanda Marcotte, June 13, 2016

“Progressives only have one good trick, and men keep falling for it.
“They keep calling you a coward, so that you’ll do or say whatever they want to prove that you are not a coward.”
— Jack Donovan, Nov. 28, 2015

Some things are predictable — Muslims murdering innocent people, for example, and also Amanda Marcotte saying incredibly stupid things:

A picture is quickly starting to form of who Omar Mateen, the shooter, was. His ex-wife describes a man who was controlling and abusive. A colleague says he was always using racial and sexual slurs and “talked about killing people all the time.” Both his ex-wife and his father describe him as homophobic, with his father saying he spun into a rage at the sight of two men kissing. He was clearly fond of guns, having not one, but two concealed carry licenses. He worked at a security firm, a career that can be attractive to men with dominance and control issues. He was investigated by the FBI in 2013 for making threats to a coworker.
There is a common theme here: Toxic masculinity.

Marcotte then goes on to distinguish “toxic masculinity” as a specific thing that means, basically, “things men do that feminists don’t like,” which is to say, everything men do, except (a) shut up, and (b) vote Democrat. Of course, Omar Mateen was a registered Democrat — a fact that Amanda Marcotte omits from her description of his “toxic” traits, because her definition of “toxic masculinity,” like everything else Amanda Marcotte has ever written, is nothing more than partisan propaganda.

This is one of the aspects of contemporary feminism that, I think, gets too little scrutiny. To what extent can the “feminism” of Amanda Marcotte, Jessica Valenti, et al., be distinguished from the general political and policy agenda of the Democrat Party? And with Hillary Clinton running for president, this simple-minded “vote your vagina” message is being echoed and amplified by the media to such a deafening level that we can scarcely hear anything else. Propaganda always requires demonizing scapegoats who, according to the political calculus of the Democrat Party in the 21st-century, are always male, always white, and always Christian. Democrats win elections by maximizing their vote among unmarried women, among black and Hispanic voters, and among atheists. This divide-and-conquer tactic of identity politics appeals to utterly irrational impulses, the tribal tendency of people to thinks of themselves in opposition to a hated Other, so that their emotions — including self-pity and envy — overpower their ability to analyze policy and calculate their own actual best interests. Trust me, I used to be a Democrat.

My sentimental working-class attachment to the party of “the little guy” blinded me to the reality that Bill Clinton (a) never actually give a damn about any “little guy” except his own penis, and (b) was never going to implement any policy that would actually help my wife, my children, or myself. My parents were both loyal “yellow dog” Democrats, and I never even met a Republican until my junior year in college, so it took me until about 1994 before it dawned on me how thoroughly Bill Clinton had bamboozled, scammed and hustled me. Some people never figure out what a complete fraud the Democrat Party is, because they never see through the propaganda slogans — “Equality! Progress! Social Justice!” — and never ask questions like, “What has the Democrat Party done for Detroit?” or “Why are taxpayers fleeing from California to Texas?”

Amanda Marcotte will never ask herself those questions because she is a professional Democrat. The only reason she is published at all is because she is a reliable partisan propagandist who can be counted on to put a “feminist” imprint on whatever spin serves the political needs of the Democrat Party at any particular moment. She is too stupid even to understand how transparent her hackery is:

So, to be excruciatingly clear, toxic masculinity is a specific model of manhood, geared towards dominance and control. It’s a manhood that views women and LGBT people as inferior, sees sex as an act not of affection but domination, and which valorizes violence as the way to prove one’s self to the world.
For obvious political reasons, conservatives are hustling as fast as they can to make this about “radical Islam,” which is to say they are trying to imply that there’s something inherent to Islam and not Christianity that causes such violence.

Notice how “radical Islam” is in quotation marks, as if nothing of the kind actually exists — it’s a paranoid right-wing fantasy that Muslims want to kill us, according to Amanda Marcotte — who then does an reversal so obvious as to be childish. The subject at hand, after all, is an atrocity committed by the son of an Afghanistan Taliban supporter, and yet for some reason, Amanda Marcotte insists that what we should be discussing is the real problem of “toxic masculinity” among Christian men.

It’s those Lutheran extremists and radical Methodists we must fear, according to the hacktastic Marcotte, and why? Because Christian men are “living in fear” and “posturing” as tough guys:

Toxic masculinity aspires to toughness but is, in fact, an ideology of living in fear: The fear of ever seeming soft, tender, weak, or somehow less than manly. This insecurity is perhaps the most stalwart defining feature of toxic masculinity. . . .
If toxic masculinity was just about men posturing around each other in a comical fashion, that would be one thing, but this persistent pressure to constantly be proving manhood and warding off anything considered feminine or emasculating is the main reason why we have so many damn shootings in the United States.

You see? For the propaganda purposes of a Democrat Party hack like Amanda Marcotte, the story is not about the actual story — i.e., the specific motives of the Orlando shooter — because that story is not good for the Democrat Party. No, the narrative must be twisted so that somehow, this heinous act committed by a registered Democrat can be shown to reflect badly on the kind of men who vote Republican, for example, gun owners:

Toxic masculinity is also the reason it’s so easy for men with major issues to get a hold of the high-powered weaponry necessary to commit these crimes. Sure, the pro-gun movement in this country likes to roll out a bunch of half-baked pseudo-arguments pretending at rationality to justify the lack of gun control in this country, but really, the emotional selling point of guns is that they feed the cult of toxic masculinity. Being able to stockpile weapons and have ever bigger and scarier-looking guns is straightforward and undeniable overcompensation insecure men, trying to prove what manly men they are.

Translation: “White men with small penises vote Republican!”

This is merely a sexualized insult and, in point of fact, is contradicted by actual crime statistics. Maybe white guys own more guns but Justice Department numbers show that black guys and Hispanic guys are more violent and, as a feminist like Amanda Marcotte would be obligated to mention, if she were not just a Democrat Party hack, violence against women is more common in minority communities.

Does Amanda Marcotte think everyone is as stupid as she is? Does she think she can just hatefully insult people for spite — “White guys are gun-crazy murderers because they’re overcompensating for their small penises!” — and that nobody will fact-check her claims? Does she think she can just blame “toxic masculinity” as “the main reason why we have so many damn shootings,” and that no one will mention Chicago, where there have already been nearly 1,700 shootings this year, including 256 fatal shootings? June is not halfway over, and there have already been 27 homicides in Chicago this month, but does Amanda Marcotte blame the violence in Chicago on “insecure men, trying to prove what manly men they are”? No, because Chicago is a Democrat fiefdom whose Mayor Rahm Emanuel is Obama’s former chief of staff. Nor can Amanda Marcotte, who lives in Brooklyn, be bothered to notice deadly violence when it strikes close to home, as when Michelle Marks was shot to death in Brooklyn Bridge Park this month:

On Tuesday afternoon, investigators arrested Lamont Wright, an ex-boyfriend of Ms. Marks; she had filed harassment complaints against him, including one on Sunday, authorities said.
Mr. Wright, 53 years old, has a criminal history that includes two stints in prison, the first starting in 1990, and is currently on probation, authorities said. In 2007, he pleaded guilty to a charge of third-degree rape in a case in which he admitted having consensual sex with a 16-year-old girl he met on a chatline, authorities said. He was sentenced to six months in prison and 10 years probation.
Family members said Ms. Marks had planned to use her day off Tuesday to seek a restraining order against Mr. Wright. The two had dated on and off until about two weeks ago when she ended the relationship, they said.
The woman’s mother, Pauline Marks, said that in the report her daughter filed on Sunday, she told police Mr. Wright had a gun and she was afraid of him.

 

Lamont Wright is a career criminal with 15 prior arrests, but for some reason Amanda Marcotte didn’t cite him as an example of “a specific model of manhood” that “valorizes violence as the way to prove one’s self to the world.” The death of Michelle Marks inspired no pious feminist sermons about “men with dominance and control issues,” because some murder victims are more equal than others in the eyes of a dishonest Democrat propagandist like Amanda Marcotte. No, she has her hobby horse and she’s going to ride it:

That’s why any attempt to discuss putting even the smallest, most commonsensical restrictions on guns turns into a bunch of right wing dudes squeeing about how the liberals are coming to taking their guns. This isn’t a discussion being held on the plane of rationality, but is a psychological drama about these men’s fears of emasculation, represented in an unsubtle way over their attachment to guns and their fear that liberals, stereotyped as effeminate in their imagination, are coming to steal the guns away.
And, of course, in the Orlando situation, we have the added problem of homophobia, which is called a “phobia” for a reason, since it’s so often rooted in toxic masculinity and the terror of anything even remotely feminine.
What is particularly frustrating about all this is that, even though toxic masculinity is clearly the problem here, you have a bunch of conservatives running around and pushing toxic masculinity as the solution, as if all we need to end violence and terrorism is a bunch of silly posturing about who is the biggest man of all the menfolk out there.

Whenever you want a discussion “held on the plane of rationality,” Amanda Marcotte’s the first name that comes to mind, right? She thinks you are too stupid to see what she is doing when, in fact, these propaganda tactics have been analyzed brilliantly by Jack Donovan:

Progressives use every man’s natural fear of showing fear to manipulate him — inventing fake “phobias” and implying he is afraid of everything they want. But what men are truly afraid of are the legal, social and financial consequences associated with challenging the progressive agenda. . . .
Progressives get men to do whatever they want by manipulating our fear of being afraid. When you recognize this manipulation, you’ll begin to see it in nearly every argument appealing to men and every progressive narrative written about men. Their strategy is to portray masculine men, even men who have demonstrated courage in battle or in legitimately heroic endeavors where they have faced and overcome fear, as being driven primarily by fear and a sense of inadequacy.

Read the whole thing. Once you learn to spot the psychological manipulation tactics of propaganda, you resent the arrogance of people like Amanda Marcotte almost as much as you despise their dishonesty.

Orlando gunman had used
gay dating app and visited LGBT nightclub
on other occasions, witnesses say
— Los Angeles Times

Drag Queen: Anti-Gay Terrorist
Omar Mateen Was My Friend
— Daily Beast

Gunman Omar Mateen visited
gay nightclub a dozen times
before shooting, witness says
— Orlando Sentinel

Orlando shooter Omar Mateen
was gay, former classmate says
— Palm Beach Post

This is certainly an interesting development. Do you think maybe Amanda Marcotte will revise her claims to take account of this new information? Gay Democrat kills gay people in gay nightclub he had visited frequently? How do these facts fit into her “toxic masculinity” theory?

Oh, and what about the fact that gay patrons of the Pulse club blocked the door, preventing other people from escaping the gunman?

But never mind the facts, I guess.

Amanda Marcotte is a Democrat, and facts don’t matter to Democrats.

The attempt by Democrats to deflect blame from the actual perpetrators of terrorism is something else. #Orlando pic.twitter.com/CHPQYQX2DB

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) June 14, 2016

UPDATE: Guess who noticed the latest headlines?

https://t.co/A5ASNuIvIF I wrote this before evidence emerged that Mateen was interested in sex with men. If true, proves the point.

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) June 14, 2016

That said, it’s too easy to say all men suffering from toxic masculinity are suppressing same-sex urges. Fear of the feminine is broad.

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) June 14, 2016

Amanda Marcotte’s rationalizations show how feminism is a cult ideology. No matter what the facts are, a feminist can never admit she is wrong.

All males are sexist oppressors and all women are victims of patriarchy — these are the unquestionable premises of Feminist Logic™ — and everything is interpreted as evidence that proves feminism is right.

So if a Muslim Democrat kills 50 people at a gay nightclub, this proves “toxic masculinity” is to blame, and if it turns out the killer was gay himself? Well, this doesn’t prove Amanda Marcotte was wrong, because she is a feminist and it is therefore impossible for her to be wrong.