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Roosh V has been ‘God-pilled’

The internet’s most infamous pickup artist and rape-apologist recently announced that he “received a message while on mushrooms” and has found God. Daryush Valizadeh, who goes by the name Roosh V, will no longer allow any discussion of casual sex on the online forum he runs, and is asking users to discuss topics like “sexual activity while married” instead.

A misogynist’s psychedelic mushroom trip wouldn’t normally be newsworthy, but Roosh is one of the leading voices in the online “manosphere”. Described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “male supremacist”, Roosh has grown a devoted following by promoting a hateful ideology he describes as “neomasculinity” and sharing predatory tips for “seducing” women by ignoring them when they say “no”.

From the comfort of his mother’s basement, Roosh has spent the last decade publishing vile posts like: “5 Reasons to Date a Girl with an Eating Disorder”, “The Intellectual Inferiority of Women”, and “Street Harassment Is a Myth Invented by Socially Retarded White Women.” He’s organized fat-shaming campaigns and once notoriously suggested rape should be legal on private property because then women would be more careful about who they went home with. (He later claimed this was “satire”). He’s a douchebag but, more dangerously, he’s an influential douchebag. Hordes of angry young men listen to him.

So has Roosh now changed his ways? Will he be preaching peace, consensual love, and feminism to his angry acolytes? That’s probably far too much to hope, but one can be cautiously optimistic that he has had a positive change of perspective. In a recent post on his forum he writes that “The God pill does feel like the final destination, where life becomes about asking Him for help and performing His will in a way that embraces good. My mind is currently buzzing with this new perspective, and I wouldn’t be surprised if much of my new work will be framed around it.”

Can someone please send mushrooms to all the men’s rights activists out there? If milkshakes can curb fascism, perhaps psychedelics can advance feminism.

Siri likes being called a slut

A new United Nations report has found that AI voice assistants, which are set to have female voices by default, are reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes. The report also includes a disturbing section about voice assistants’ docile responses to sexual harassment and gendered language. If you call Siri a “slut”, for example, one of her programmed replies is “I’d blush if I could.” MIT Technology Review has a good summary of the report here.

Women outperform men after Japanese medical school stops doctoring results

Last year Tokyo Medical University admitted it spent more than a decade rigging test results in favour of male applicants. One anonymous official said the unethical practice was a “necessary evil” because, you know, women would go off and have kids, and not take being a doctor seriously. Now that the university has stopped rigging the results, women are doing better than men and the gender gap at the school has narrowed. Never let anyone tell you that increasing diversity means “lowering the bar”; very clearly, the opposite is true.

Air conditioning is a cruel tool of the patriarchy

A new study has found women think better when they are not forced to work in a freezing cold office. This will come as a surprise to no one.

Male faces dominate the news on Facebook

A new study from the Pew Research Center has found men are overrepresented in the images accompanying news stories published on Facebook by American media outlets. Pew also found that when it came to economy-related posts, images exclusively showed women 9% of the time, men were shown 69% of the time.

The Trump administration introduces new anti-transgender rules

On Wednesday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a bigoted new rule that would allow homeless shelters to stop transgender people from entering. On Friday the Trump administration further announced a proposal to get rid of Obama-era rules that protect transgender people from being discriminated against by health providers. The right isn’t just out to police women’s reproductive rights, they want to control all bodies that aren’t rich, white and cis male.

Bonobo mothers are wild

New research suggests that bonobos are very pushy mothers and make it their mission for their sons to have as many kids as possible. They introduce them to eligible women and make sure their courtship isn’t interrupted. “Once I saw a mother pulling a [rival] male away by the leg,” one primatologist told the Guardian. “It doesn’t necessarily increase their son’s mating success, but it shows that they really get involved in the whole business.”