Misogyny on the Web: ‘How to Smack a Bitch’
Misogyny on the Web: ‘How to Smack a Bitch’
For the most part, the site’s content is tailored to the tastes of frat-house revelers of the sort you’d expect to find crowded around the TV watching “Girls Gone Wild.” Its features run the gamut from towel-snapping gross-out humor like “Code Names of Dumps” to the amiably loutish “dinner for sex conversion menu”(the sex acts you can expect in return for buying your date various dishes at a five-star restaurant), along with racy fare like “Hottie of the Month” and “Jailbait” videos.
But the articles that appear under the heading “Women’s Studies” and “Whiny Feminists” are overtly political — and grossly misogynistic. “How to Smack a Bitch” by “Matt Stone” (many of the site’s pieces are bylined “Matt Stone” and “Trey Parker,” which presumably are pseudonyms) seems more like a specimen from a sociopath’s case file than a satire — and it suggests a definition of masculinity that is troubling, to say the very least. There’s an obvious similarity to some of the woman-bashing sites in the so-called “manosphere” of certain sectors of the men’s rights movement.
Ostensibly, “How to Smack a Bitch” is a college research project by a former high school jock who was introduced to the subject when his weightlifting coach passed on this piece of wisdom: “Women need a heavy hand and when they become unstable, belligerent or argumentative you must put them back in line.” The word “women” is facetiously defined as “constructions of flesh made to give pleasure to men and their penis [sic]”; “a never ending cause to [sic] problems, turmoil, bankruptcy, heart ache, blue balls, fights, police, etc.”; “a never ending source of complaints and wheel barrow of regret”; and “a being not able to have accountability or rationality.”
Most of the essay consists of deadpan descriptions of the characteristics of 10 different “bitch slapping” techniques, each illustrated with a color photograph of a woman’s swollen, bruised and bleeding face: “The Classic Bitch Smack”; “the Pimp Slap” (“if your woman was working and needed to be somewhat presentable the pimp smack takes place on the left or right side of the face without causing ocular damage”); “The Johnny Wad Slap” (“for those guys who are not pleased sexually in bed … first used in the early 1970s with female porn stars”); “The Where’s My Dinner Bitch Slap”; “The Dun Told Her Twice Slap”; “The Open Hand Slap”; “The Forearm Ticonderoga Slap”; “The Scientology Slap”; “The Red Eye Gravy Slap” (“if done correctly will cause the white in the females eyes to turn blood red from the trapped blood vessels. Everywhere she goes she will be reminded of her insolence”); and finally, “The Bitch You Gave Me Herpes Slap.”