How Not to Be a Misogynist Doobag or at the Very Least a Bit Less Rapey

The big news in Koko this past week has been a woman being stabbed to death in a Gangnam toilet while out for drinks with her boyfriend and some friends. The assailant was some self-aggrieved men's rights doobag on the prowl for a random woman to stab as penance for his own personal shortcomings as a not-creep. Chances this guy has said "Why won't these sluts go out with me I'm such a nice guy" out loud: two hundred forty-durrrrrrrrr percent.

The police manhunt took all of two minutes to conclude since there is CCTV in every Korean back alley ever and our dickbag didn't even bother concealing himself nor the name of the restaurant plastered all over his work clothes:



The investigation took even less time since the police didn't have to waste time constructing a motive after the dickbag just gave it to them straightaway:

The suspect has since told the police that he committed the crime because he “hated women for belittling him.”

There you go, case closed.

What's left in the aftermath have been the reactions. From the women's side of things have been comments along the lines of #YesAllWomen where they detail the times, both general and specific, when they've feared for their lives or sexual security while doing completely innocuous shit like going to work, looking at a cloud, or drinking a can of beer somewhere other than a cold, dark cave. A makeshift memorial has actually emerged near the murder site that is made up of post it notes left by women sharing their own experiences with run-of-the-mill douchbag men.




Men's reactions have been, as you'd probably expect, a little more varied. Four responses, basically:

• I hear you, sisters. 
• That's horrible. I can't believe someone would do that. Women should feel safe. So where the bitches at tonight? 
• Women shouldn't incite the lustful wrath of rapey men aka wear a burqa and never leave the house, except if you do that then I'll suddenly feign concern about equal rights because I'm not only sexist, I'm racist too. 
• I'm a men's rights activist. The murderer is the real victim here. He was just standing his ground against all women's sexual appeal.

That about covers it for immediate reactions, which I'm not going to debrief more fully here since if you're a man and really want to understand the millions of different little ways institutionalized misogyny is manifested in everyday life then there is probably some lady sitting nearby you could ask. Actually, never mind, because if you ask her and she tells you she's busy then you'll probably call her a bitch or something. Let's just move along.

What I do want to point out is the ensuing dipshittery, particularly the defense of fake non-misogyny by trying to lay this particular crime at the feet of mental health in an attempt to explain it away as just a one off rather than as symptomatic of cultural attitudes that treat marginalized groups like shit, in this case women. This guy literally said "I killed a woman because I'm a misogynist," and instead of being all, "Yeah, alright, that's probably the reason he killed her," like 75% of men have instead fallen all over themselves to say it must have been something else. Which I don't get. It's like having this conversation:

"Hello, what's your name?"

"Leroy." 

"LEROY ISN'T REAL YOUR NAME IS FRANK!" 

Or this one:

"What do you want for lunch?" 

"A hamburger." 

"NO YOU DON'T YOU WANT TO COBBLE TOGETHER A PAIR OF SHOES WHILE SITTING ON A ROLLER COASTER!" 

Seriously, the guy said misogyny. He killed a woman to get back at all the women who belittled him. He felt belittled by women because a misogynistic culture made him feel that a woman with a contrary opinion was the equivalent of literal castration. Why is his admission so hard to accept? And what are the repercussions of accepting that explanation? That men will have to systematically stop raping women, or at the very least not feel entitled to a Saturday night out with one just because they sent her a Tinder dick pic? (Go take a scroll thought the Bye Felipe Instagram.) Just accept that men, in thousands of little subconscious ways, tend to make life a little less carefree and a lot more shitty for women and then work on trying to be less of a douchebag. If that's too hard then just nod your head yes the next time a man says he killed a woman because he hates women since that's the reason he killed a woman.

The refusal to believe misogyny is a thing is just one half of the dumbfunkery, though. The other half is conveniently blaming every hate crime ever on mental health, which is entirely stupid because (1) durrrrrrr; (2) anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of mental health can tell you the mentally ill are most often the victims of crime, not the perpetrators, and pinning the blame on schizophrenia - as we will soon see is the case here - unfairly stigmatizes the 99.9999999% of people with schizo who get through their lives without stabbing a single person; and (3) if mental illness is where you've planted your head in the sand then you're just as weak sauce as the Korean police:

The suspect, who had no prior contact with the victim, told police that he had committed the crime because he had been “belittled” by women many times in the past.

Police pointed out that killing the first woman Kim saw in the toilet meant that his crime was neither planned in advance nor systematic.

“There is a need to distinguish between hate crimes and crimes driven by mental illness. The latest case falls in the latter category,” the police said in a press briefing. “Hate crime arises from prejudice on a certain group, while mental illness-driven crimes are usually committed due to symptoms such as delusional thoughts and auditory hallucination.”

After police profilers had hours-long interviews with Kim on two occasions, they concluded that the crime was “accidental” as the suspect had no direct cause to murder the victim and his symptom of schizophrenia had deteriorated at the time of the crime.

According to the police, Kim, who was an only child, has lived alone without interacting with his family. He used to work with women at a restaurant as a waiter, but had to move to the kitchen for his personal hygiene problems, which Kim claimed was due to his female colleagues badmouthing him.

He allegedly told the police that he could not stand mistreatment by women anymore and had to kill them before he got killed. 

A rudimentary fisking of their public comments would include the following golden nuggets I downloaded from Magnum, P.I.'s personal Moleskine:

• Waiting around in a bathroom with a knife stolen from work for the express purpose of killing any ol' rando woman can be reasonably thought of as "planned." 
• If "systematic" is so essential to the definition of a hate crime then the Nazis are the only hate crimers there ever were. 
• Hate crime arises from prejudice on a certain group...spoken right after the guy said he hates a certain group of humans. 
• ...while mental illness-driven crimes are usually committed due to symptoms such as delusional thoughts and auditory hallucination...said just before that thing he never said about the voices in his head. Thanks for the Intro to Fake Psychology lesson but but maybe next time apply your pretend diagnoses to a situation where that pretend diagnoses possibly applies.
• According to police, Kim had no direct reason to kill aside from the hours of interviews where he detailed all his whiny woe-is-me reasons for hating women enough to kill one of them.

So basically, if you're a person who thinks misogyny doesn't constitute an obvious M.O. here then the above fisking is a geometric proof of You = (dumb)²(ass)³/(go play)+(in traffic).

For feces and haha's, though, let's just go ahead and blame this murder on mental illness, more specifically psychotic disorders since that's the bogey man Donald Trump would blame if Megyn Kelly ever asked him about this. A summary from the U.S. National Library of Medicine:

Psychotic disorders are severe mental disorders that cause abnormal thinking and perceptions. People with psychoses lose touch with reality.

In other words, mental illness - and more specifically, psychotic disorders - is a dysregulation of thought processes that impairs one's ability to function normally within a community. Okay, I buy that: this guy who murdered a woman in the toilet was definitely mentally ill. Why? BECAUSE MISOGYNY IS A MENTAL ILLNESS! For real, if you've had a photo shoot with your dick so that you can fire off faxes to women you've just noticed online then you are not interacting with society the way Jesus intended. If you've ever blamed a woman for her own rape then there is something definitely wrong with you, Booboo, and you should probably go see a psychiatrist about a Blarap® prescription, which is a drug I just made up that helps moderate the cognitive processes associated with rape culpability. (Blarap® is an amalgamation of blame, rape, and on the fucking rapist.) And if "she's a crazy bitch" is the sum response to being told by a woman, however politely, that you aren't quite the King Dick you've always fancied yourself then maybe it's time to discuss treatment options. My recommendation for you is cognitive-behavioral therapy since Google tells me that is a short-term intervention and the goal here is to get you to stop being an asshole as quickly as possible. Benchmark for the first week: Stop telling women to smile. 

In conclusion, it's a shame that misogyny literally means "hatred of women" because it gives all the misogynist doobags a faux-pedantic out. "Durrrrr...I can't hate women since I love my mom!" In the meantime, praise be to Allah that I have been allowed to include actual misogyny - the attitudes and behaviors that contribute to a culture of dickbaggery toward women, whether it be mild condescension or actual rape - in the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders so that all the gross men in charge of government policy will start taking this issue as seriously as they generally take other mental health issues, which is not at all. 

Conceptual Blog Map for How to Navigate the Toilets in a Target Superstore

Since this blog is such a community treasure, we who work here take our role as the thought police very seriously, which means we generally don't accept requests. However, our EIC's sister recently called in this favor:



Before considering her request, it is important for all 17 of you to understand how this blog decides which topics to write about. Basically, we have editorial meetings every Tuesday between either lunch and our afternoon nap or our afternoon nap and a siesta. During these meetings we evaluate whether or not we have any original thoughts to add to the discussion at hand. Those thoughts don't have to be purely original in the sense that no one else in the universe has yet to have them, but they do have to be original in that we haven't encountered them somewhere else before passing them off as our own. There's a term for that, and it's not plagiarist. It's parrot, which is far worse than plagiarist since a plagiarist is just some dude with a deadline he wants to meet as quickly as possible so he can go outside and drink a can of beer. Anyhow, these editorial meetings of ours generally take place after any point worth mentioning in a debate has already been made, so instead of writing anything we just go home, watch Game of Thrones, and fall asleep for the fourth time that day.

As far as the Target bathroom policy goes, we thought it prudent to know what their actual policy was before deciding whether to take on this request. Their policy is:

In our stores, we demonstrate our commitment to an inclusive experience in many ways. Most relevant for the conversations currently underway, we welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity.

Practical enough. We here at ISWYD applaud Target for their sensibility and would like to call it a day, except our dear reader above was probably less interested in the actual policy than in the general histrionics surrounding the question of whether or not transgendered folk can use the potty when out in public. So okay, some background before we get started in order to understand why Target had to develop a policy like this in the first place.

Background - There are a bunch of bathroom bills being proposed, considered, or passed throughout the USA, Land of the Free. The basic crux of these bills is that a person must use the bathroom designated for use according to his or her biological sex at the time of birth. We don't know if these bills address the differences between transvestite, transgender, and transsexual but of course they don't.

The most high profile of these bathroom bills - probably because it's the only statewide dipshittery to have been passed into law - is North Carolina's, which was passed two months ago, one month before the entire state went bankrupt because every non-discriminatory business in the universe moved to far more accommodating South Carolina instead. The most humorous of these bills was proposed in Texas and would have allowed someone trapped in the bathroom when a transgendered walked in to sue that transgendered for $2000 plus the costs associated with treating their mental anguish. We say humorous because this bill was proposed, no doubt, by a guy who only five minutes earlier was complaining about political correctness causing the downfall of the joint US/Roman Empire. "It's totally unfair I can't say fag or queer anymore just because it might hurt someone's feelings but ohhhhhh the mental anguish caused by another human having a bladder. Hold me!"

Opposing viewpoints - If you're reading this blog then you probably agree with our editorial board that using the toilet corresponding to your gender identity is NBD, and you probably already know that transgendered folk, when forced to use the bathroom opposite their gender identity, are susceptible to a wide range of harassment when all they want to do is make a poo and check their Instagram in peace. You've probably also been brainwashed to believe there are zero documented cases of transgendered people attacking their non-trans cousins in the toilet, which is totally false since (1) you probably hadn't noticed most of the trans folk you've encountered were even trans; and (2) there was most definitely a time at the club when a trans lady confronted a non-trans lady in the bathroom about looking at her man. Fights happen.

If you're not reading this blog then you probably disagree with our editorial board but aren't able to defend yourself here, so we will build a straw man on your behalf and call him Ted Cruz. Not ideal, but at least this way our readers will be able to understand (1) the rationale behind your support of bathroom bills and (2) why that rationale betrays your dumbfunkery. And yes, we realize that Ted Cruz is totally irrelevant now that he's dropped out of the presidential election but his face is still the best representation of all the ugly arguments that follow:

Think of the children! - Nearly every argument put forth by Ted Cruz has been some iteration of grown men and little girls, the insinuation being that trans women are not actually women on a mission to pee but rather dudes on a mission to coach Penn State football. Okay, but if we're going to use oddly sexual right-wing fantasies as the basis for public policy then we should also use statistically relevant facts too, which means Ted Cruz's own father can no longer use any public bathroom because it's just common sense that traveling preachers shouldn't be allowed anywhere near children, let alone in North Carolinian toilets. That also means Ted Cruz himself should just pee sitting down at home and nowhere else considering what he does for a living. Do you know who your Republican congressman is?



#NotAllTransgendered - Ted Cruz later softened his stance by saying transgendered people themselves weren't the problem but acknowledging them as human beings was, his rationale being that predators would take advantage of that courtesy by buying a dress and walking into every toilet ever to get their molest on. To that we say:

THANKS FOR GIVING THEM THE IDEA, TED!

If you'd have paid closer attention in Bible study then you would already know that it's been scientifically possible since Jesus first invented gender-segregated bathrooms for men to disguise themselves as women in order to spend all of Tuesday afternoon hanging out in the Walmart ladies room. But that hasn't happened yet. Why? Because it took until now for some repressed Texas Republican (like four redundancies in just three words there) to concoct the Oceans 11 of sexual assault scenarios before using the national media to disseminate that shitty idea to every pedo in the seminary library who has been wasting their time studying for the long con. So of course some totally non-trans dude is going to take that suggestion and end up in the ladies room now, though unfortunately for Ted Cruz the only fools sneaking into the opposite bathroom haven't been his hypothetical child assaulters, it's been members of numerous pro-family advocacy groups, which makes sense since pro-family is really just code for lashing out at those who remind you most of the skeletons in your own closet.

Don't look at my wang - The North Carolinian governor - whose name we don't know so will just call him Ted Cruz - recently defended his state's bathroom bill by saying its purpose doesn't have anything to do with discrimination because it's all about protecting the expectation of privacy and nothing else. Well, if privacy so important to you, Ted Cruz, then don't use a bathroom with 13 other toilets inside. Also, when you never become president make sure to sign an executive order mandating walls and doors for the men's urinals since those are straight up peek shows, especially if you're urinating next to a pro-family marshal of sexual unliberation.

What if we're wrong? - If our position on pees and poos is all wrong then we must consistently apply the logic behind Ted Cruz's arguments to all of public policy, not just toilet time. That logic boils down to:

• Think of the children
• A few hypothetical, totally imaginary bad apples have spoiled it for everyone
• Ted Cruz is a dick 

By exporting those ideas to other issues, we now have a world where toddlers don't shoot each other because their dipshit parents, who swear by gun safety, can no longer buy the loaded guns they're just going to leave around with the safety off; no one goes to church anymore because that's where creepy priests live; women only date and marry other women since single men are too rapey; and all children everywhere only drink bottled water, because Flint. We'd actually consider trading trans toilet rights for all of that, come to think of it. Vote Ted Cruz!

In the end - If little girls are so vulnerable in public toilets then perhaps accompany yours to the toilet. If you're a man that means taking her into the men's room, which had never been a problem until Ted Cruz used a failed presidential campaign to confront his failed subconscious. Also, if you've ever special ordered a hamburger at McDonald's because the ones under the heat lamp weren't for you then you have zero right to tell someone else how to feel about their own special-ordered identity.