By David Futrelle
Like the titular character in The Princess and the Pea, the members of the Great Internet Lady Hating Machine have developed a truly impressive sensitivity towards the slightest perceived discomfort. And so it shouldn’t really come as that much of a surprise that a small army of perpetually outraged comics fanbabies are currently losing their collective shit over a milkshake selfie.
On Friday, Heather Antos, a Marvel comic editor who just happens to be a woman, tweeted a selfie featuring her and a bunch of her female co-workers enjoying some delicious beverages together. “It’s the Marvel milkshake crew!” she announced to her Twitter followers.
She was immediately swarmed by a squadron of fanbabies furious that such “fake geek girls” had made their way into Marvel’s inner sanctum.
https://twitter.com/BAR199323/status/891847749599199232
https://twitter.com/DiversityAndCmx/status/891978745715843072
You're right, @DiversityAndCmx. No life experience, the creepiest collection of stereotypical SJWs anyone could possibly imagine. https://t.co/ywIRk8UTYx
— DarkJester (@DarkJesterofOz) July 30, 2017
According to Antos, the private messages she got in response to her tweet were considerably less polite. “[T]he internet is an awful, horrible, and disgusting place,” she wrote, noting that she woke up Sunday, two days after she posted the selfie,
to a slew of more garbage tweets and DMs. For being a woman. In comics. Who posted a selfie of her friends getting milkshakes.
And yes, the fanbabies are still going at it today. For many of Antos’ “critics,” the selfie proved a perfect excuse to rant about Marvel’s alleged “anti-white, anti-men agenda.”
https://twitter.com/MonsieurBallin/status/891666775015694336
This is why marvel comics is killing the industry no one wants to be fem moaned feminist propganda in a superhero comic.
— Ceecko of one (@Ceeckoful) July 30, 2017
Maybe Marvel should just close shop. I'd rather that than see them lose their dignity for a Marxist agenda.
— Maeko (@MaekoDaekal) July 29, 2017
https://twitter.com/Red_Vanguard/status/891918378352472064
One fellow wrote out a mini-manifesto explaining how the eeeevil SJWs were destroying comics.
https://twitter.com/W00dlee/status/891874744802398208
The critics filled their angry tweets with an assortment of buzzwords that will be instantly familiar to anyone who followed GamerGate.
https://twitter.com/DiversityAndCmx/status/891875572741230592
https://twitter.com/CanuckCon/status/891822485305516038
https://twitter.com/darling_kun/status/891850198552653824
Not that the fanbabies didn’t have their own “narrative” to promote. One of the central tenets: that so-called SJWs only pretend to like comics.
https://twitter.com/thebechtloff/status/891705124405604357
Comics themselves were irrelevant, SJWs wanted another notch on their bedpost of Moral Victories. It was never about content, just control
— RJ Frazer (@rjfrazer) July 29, 2017
https://twitter.com/DiversityAndCmx/status/891674600475676673
Some saw the all-female selfie as a threat not only to men but to … white people in general, predicting an imminent White Genocide of Marvel characters.
Diversity for #Marvel Comics means get rid of all White Men.
— Veritas (@Veritas4UToday) July 30, 2017
https://twitter.com/thebechtloff/status/891515050502107136
It didn’t take long for things to get creepy.
https://twitter.com/thebechtloff/status/891503206282522624
Naturally, the reactionary fanboys turned on those who offered solidarity to the Milkshake Crew.
https://twitter.com/eldermeeseeks/status/891905588925521920
https://twitter.com/johndavidson83/status/891799233275322368
https://twitter.com/Daddy_Warpig/status/891857865140445184
And others tried to dismiss the whole thing as fake:
https://twitter.com/DoctorDooomile/status/891683546246643712
https://twitter.com/DiversityAndCmx/status/891985792591122432
https://twitter.com/laughingdrag/status/891834215377096709
https://twitter.com/DiversityAndCmx/status/891984421519314944
https://twitter.com/Stmpy_Mch/status/891916686953136128
Happily, at this point the “virtue-signalers” are winning. A wide assortment of non-reactionary comics artists, sellers and fans, female and male, have been showing their solidarity with the Marvel Milkshake Crew, filling the #MakeMineMilkshake hashtag with tweets like these:
https://twitter.com/PlinaGanucheau/status/891848514170433536
https://twitter.com/bookswpictures/status/891766052463325184
https://twitter.com/mollyjane_k/status/891742534074073090
@Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
We’re not a monolith though. Even within our own countries. We have anti-communism and conservatism to thank for that. We’re still plagued by the poisonous ideologies left behind by fascist dictators and their fact-resistant hordes of idiots.
@ surplus
I recently described the shenanigans at the White House as “the biggest clusterfuck since M22 and w Cen hit it off on Tinder”; but nobody got it. Wish you or EJ had been there. 🙂
Scildfreja Unnyðnes
Ah hah! I could load up my index of several hundred videos on agroforestry, watershed management, fighting desertification and other exciting goodies, but I won’t.
What I _will_ give you is …
Ethiopia. Abaháui – The Father of Fire.
India. Hiware Bazar: The Water Miracle
Kenya Wangari Maathai green belt movement
China Lessons of the Loess Plateau
The Abaháui, Wangari Maathai and Hiware Bazar videos show what can be done when one outstanding individual inspires a village or a region – and even earn a Nobel Peace Prize in Wangari Maathai’s case.
The China example is of terra-forming on a massive scale – the landscape of the “project” is the size of Belgium. One thing to note about the China and Ethiopian govt run projects – they can only get the population fully involved when they finally, _eventually_ realise that nothing will get done without changing-granting land rights.
If you hunt around for videos on India, particularly the Maharashtra region, for watershed management, you might like to think about the approach of WOTR – started by Father Hermann Bacher. They don’t just get everyone involved in building check dams, they make damned sure that women are empowered by-during the process. Very different from Maathai’s approach, but different strategies for the same ends. Whatever you want to do about culture-religion-social structures, there’s a couple of examples of combining hard physical work with literacy and other social change.
In more fan-baby twitter news…
Reacting to Marvel Milkshake pic, DC posts pic of many of the women working at DC.
Marvel posts pic back of milkshake with 2 straws.
Tiny minds? Blown.
I can’t be the only one, who imagines the Marvel-DC relationship like this:
http://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/88/61/1116421028-.jpg
I know almost nothing about south american politics, but I have heard a nice song about them… Junta! The musical.
http://imgur.com/a/3b65X
#MasculinitySoFragile
As a long-time Marvel fan, I will never understand why these individuals would have ever read Marvel comics, and I somewhat suspect that many of them never did. Marvel has always been quite progressive for a comics publisher. I mean, Black Panther and the African nation of Wakanda – the most advanced country on Earth in the Marvel universe – were introduced back in 1966! How progressive is that?
Northstar, an openly gay superhero and mutant, has been around since 1979. Storm, a black woman, led the X-Men for a while back in the ’80s, and has been team leader several times since then. And M aka Monet, a mutant heroine who was introduced in 1994, is a Muslima. Granted, she’s not particularly religious (unlike Dust, an Afghani mutant girl who joined the Xavier’s school in 2002), but she’s still an example of the diversity that has always been part of the Marvel universe.
Needless to say that Marvel’s writers have always strongly condemned racism and other forms of prejudice, bigotry and discrimination against minorities in their stories. There may have been unconscious biases on display in past decades, but Marvel has never catered to the misogynistic, homophobic white supremacist crowd. And until a few years ago, I’ve never heard this choir of complaints about alleged “SJWs” with scary agendas in the comic book industry. I have a hard time believing that these types have ever been actual Marvel readers and fans.
A lot of my peers are starting to get attacked and harassed. Do we have any actual ways to stop gamergate?
@Whoever
There are tons of female created comics especially depending on how you parse things.
DUMB by Georgia Webber is a great comic about coping with a disability.
ZODIAC STARFORCE by Kevin Panetta & Paulina Ganucheau is a magical girl comic
SPELL ON WHEELS by Kate Leth, Megan Levens & Marissa Louise is a witches on a road trip comic
IMMORTAL SOULS by Joamette Gil is a upcoming kickstarter and follow up to POWER & MAGIC. Both are beautiful anthologies
MAGDELINA by Tini Howard, Ryan Cady, Christian DiBari & Mike Spicer is cool horror comic
REDLANDS is a new comic by award winning colorist Jordie Bellaire
Tini Howard is also writing Hack/Slash, Power Rangers:Pink and Assassinistas (later drawn by frick fakking Gilbert Hernandes)
KORRA coming out through Dark Horse has female editors, and Irene Koh (line artist)& Vivian Ng (colorist) are working on it.
SMALL FAVORS by Colleen Coover is really great
MY LESBIAN EXPERIENCE WITH LONELINESS has everyone all broken up
Iron Circus is putting out loads of books by artists like Melanie Gillman and Sophie Campbell
MOONGIRL AND DEVIL DINOSAUR has a mostly female team
I mean that is an absolutely small start and I can keep going if you need me to, but I can make it more targeted if I have your taste in comics.
AKA the Marvel comic that endures despite the dudebros counting on its cancellation since at least issue #4. (Apparently Marvel made a deal with Scholastic, who sell a metric shitton of it in schools, but as that’s not going through Diamond (the quasi monopoly of comic book distribution), it doesn’t appear in publicly available sales data.)