At the risk of splitting the “misogynist dickbaggery in the atheist movement” discussion in two, I really need to mention the amazingly well-timed Reddit meltdown of TheAmazingAtheist. It’s already been covered pretty well by PZ Myers and by Jen McCreight of BlagHag but, what the heck, I’ll throw in my two cents as well.
TheAmazingAtheist, for those who don’t follow these things, is (or was?) a popular atheist podcaster well-known, and beloved by some, for being something of a misogynist dickbag. He’s been on a anti-feminist kick for the last couple of months, winning himself many plaudits on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit, though even the MR regulars couldn’t help but notice that he’s a bit of an ass.
Well, now he’s pretty much revealed, with a series of horrendous comments on Reddit, what a complete and utter asshole he is. Let me put a second TRIGGER WARNING here (for violent talk about rape), on top of the default TRIGGER WARNING I put on all my blog posts.
The context : a discussion (which he started) about the propriety of one feminist Redditor calling themself ICumWhenIKillMen. I’m not going to defend that nickname, which obviously makes light of violence in an obnoxious way. But AmazingAthiest was apparently so troubled by this sort of language that he felt compelled to spew forth a succession of violent rape threats.
Let me draw your attention to some of the highlights. (Click here to see his whole comment history on Reddit, where he comments as terroja).
Things started going south about 19 hours ago, when he told one detractor:
I’m going to rape you with my fist.
He followed this with:
I will make you a rape victim if you don’t fuck off.
It got worse:
I’m tired of being treated like shit by you mean little cunts and then you using your rape as an excuse. Fuck you. I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow. Actually, I don’t believe you were ever raped! What man would be tasteless enough to stick his dick into a human cesspool like you? Nice gif of a turd going into my mouth. Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole? Or was it both? Maybe you should think about it really hard for the next few hours. Relive it as much as possible. You know? Try to recall: was it my pussy or my ass?
He continued in this fashion for some time, mocking those who pointed out that rape threats can be triggering, and regularly referring to his opponents as “cunts.” (Each of the following paragraphs is from a separate comment of his; click the quotes to see the full comments in question in their original context.)
BTW, you have to admit, when I told you that I hope you drown in rape semen, you got a little wet, didn’t you? It’s okay. We’re friends now. You can share.
Yes, you read that right: he was saying this shit to a rape victim.
Eventually, theAmazingAtheist found himself stopped short by this scathing critique, from the Redditor called veerserif.
I now know that, apart from being misguided, intentionally ignorant, and quick to resort to pathetic excuses, you are also a purposefully hurtful person with no sense of empathy, and no sense of remorse. You’re not just unintentionally uninformed, you actively turn what you know against people who should be deserving of your sympathy.
I was mistaken before. I thought, maybe, just maybe, after the circlejerking and the giggling, I could try showing you the stuff you said I didn’t highlight. I could show you what feminism has done for men, or maybe tell you about the existence of sex-positive feminism.
But this… this is a whole new level.
Your reputation, in my eyes, has fallen so far that dragging it back up to “mild disgust” would require nothing short of a miracle. You pretend to care about other people, but you really don’t. You like to think that you’re a decent human being, but you fall so far short of that you’re practically on separate planes of existence.
Deliberately triggering a rape victim? Equating being called out on your bullshit to the trauma of rape?
You know what you deserve? You don’t deserve death. You don’t deserve rape. You don’t even deserve some cosmically mandated, hilarious schadenfreude which would not only be brilliant, but just.
What you deserve is for everyone to know this side of you. You deserve for anyone who thought you were a good person to know what you’ve just done. You deserve your fans’ adoration turning to hatred, you deserve the judging stares and looks that people will give you. You deserve to be reminded, every day, of what you do and what you’ve done. You deserve to remember every day that there are people who suffer more than you, that there are people who are stronger and smarter, braver, more principled and better than you, in every way, until the day you realise exactly how wrong your actions have been.
I don’t want to see bodily harm visited on you, because I don’t want to see bodily harm visited on anyone. What I do want is for you – and, for that matter, every shitposter I’ve ever seen – to learn that anonymity is not an excuse.
At this point, theAmazingAtheist backed off, offered a whiny, petulant non-apology apology for, as he put it, “SOME of the statements I made,” and wondered aloud why people were still so mad at him.
He went on to make, yep, a little video about his experience, and to offer a weird and unconvincing “rebuttal” to PZ Myers’ comments on his meltdown. See PZ Myers’ post for links to the video, as well as the rebuttal itself (which is effectively re-rebutted by Myers). See here and here for a transcript of the video.
Naturally, there’s a discussion of the meltdown on ShitRedditSays as well.
One heartening sign in all this: the massive numbers of downvotes theAmazingAtheist got for his worst comments. I hope that a significant number of them were from actual Men’s Rights Redditors, and not only from people who came into the discussion from elsewhere on Reddit, but of course there is no way of knowing.
Will atheists and MRAs drop theAmazingAtheist like a hot rape-threatening potato? Or will they start rallying around him as some sort of heroic truth teller and rape threatener? Somehow I suspect there will be a bit of both.
Weren’t we just talking about this douchenozzle on the forums? Clearly, manboobzers can exert vile misandrist psychic pressure through calling a man a sexist that leads him to snap. Further research necessary.
It’d be really nice if the MRM would for once acknowledge that maybe rape is bad, but you know, if they couldn’t manage it in the Sandursky case, I’m not going to bet they’ll do it here.
Note to all MRA’s reading this: HE WAS SAYING THESE THINGS TO A MAN WHO HAD BEEN RAPED BY A WOMAN.
If you defend him now, there’s really no “men’s rights” pretense for you to stand on.
Wow. What a dickbiscuit. I can’t… why would you even think for a second that was OK stuff to type at someone? And then proceed to double down on it.
Jesus Tapdancing Kee-rist on the Concorde.
At least veerserif restores a little of my faith in humanity.
Assholes like Amazing Atheist are why I don’t go near online atheist communities.
It’s worth noting that TheAmazingAtheist truncated the username. Here’s the complete name: ICumWhenIKillMen ~not even joking~ acquitted by the misandrist court system
(source: http://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/peojo/personally_im_sick_of_all_the_pansyass_emo/ )
Actually, I don’t expect the MRAs to defend TAA. (Although, God, I’ve been wrong before.)
I expect them to quietly and politely ignore the whole thing. I expect them to not write furious essays about him. I expect them to not threaten to put him on a “registry” or track down his personal info. I expect him not to be called a b*tch, a c*nt, or be told he’s only good for sex. I expect him not to get an inbox full of rape threats or gendered slurs or stalking fantasies (well, not from MRAs, at least).
It’s not that I want MRAs to do any of these things, except maybe the essays. I just think it’s going to be really fucking hypocritical that they won’t defend a male rape survivor, because TAA is neither a woman nor a feminist, and who gives a rip about male rape survivors if you don’t have a woman/feminist to take it out on?
David,
I’ll add another link to one of the less well-known FreeThought Blogs, the Atheist Experience, where Kazim came with a spin on this assholish behaviour as being the result of a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect for bigotry, which I think might be worth teasing out:
Horrible people don’t realise they’re horrible
The idea being that if someone doesn’t get called out on minor instances of assholishness or bigotry, or associates with groups where such behaviour is normalised, such an individual finds self-justification for increasingly assholish or bigoted behaviour. This is not in any way to excuse people of their behaviour, because they should be ashamed for bigotry; it does seem to fit with a remarkable number of assholish and bigoted trolls both on-line and in real life.
Worth noting that digging into the reddit comments, TAA’s displayed almost no empathy for the people he attacked or who were caught in the cross-fire, and reading the transcript of his video it’s an obvious not-pology as well.
@Holly, I don’t really want to read the original threads, but you say he was saying it to a male survivor? I’m wondering about the quotes above, then, which specifically mention female body parts being violated by male ones? (Unless the survivor is a trans man?)
Glove – I don’t know if the survivor is trans or cis, but he is a man who was raped by a woman. TAA didn’t know the survivor’s gender, though, only that he was a rape survivor, so he just assumed “cis woman raped by cis man” and went from there.
Xanthe, you’d think with all the call-outs our trolls get for their asshole behavior, some of them would have stopped and become decent people by now.
Glove, he seems to have just made the assumption that the person was a woman and the rapist a man.
oops ninja’d
TAA is a putrid creature who has zero redeemable features and an overblown sense of his own worth.
Supposedly he’s getting married. I hope the girl runs and runs far.
Ah, thanks Snowy and Holly for pointing that out. That really puts an extra level of asshattery onto his contemptible words.
I really did not think it could get worse when I read the first statement.
I was wrong.
I watched one of his videos for the first time this morning and I want those five minutes of my life back.
“Weren’t we just talking about this douchenozzle on the forums? Clearly, manboobzers can exert vile misandrist psychic pressure through calling a man a sexist that leads him to snap. Further research necessary.”
Wait…
Does that make David Futrelle Akira…or Tetsuo?
hellkell, I think a lot of what we say to the trolls goes in one ear and out the other… you know the one about how many Buddhists does it take to change a lightbulb?
But yeah, seriously, put this guy on edge. And holy shit, this thing is happening fast, and the guy is already placing himself on a cross.
I’m sure it does, Xanthe.
I don’t know that one, lay it on me.
Hey, thanks for the shoutout. I’ve actually been lurking here for some time 🙂
I guess it was too much to hope that he’d turn around, huh?
I love TAA’s fauxpology. Dude, just step away from the computer and think about the smackdown you got.
TJ has a large enough fanbase of fanbois who will high five him and stroke his ego. He’ll never “get it.”
Or better yet, think about why you got the smackdown! Continue thinking until you have an answer better than “people just decided to be mean to me for no reason.”
I cannot even fathom how someone could consider it even remotely okay to consider posting those words, let alone actually typing them and hitting submit. I’m not sure I want to be able to fathom it, though I’m sure Xanthe’s link will discuss that thought process when I read it.
For some reason, my initial thought upon reading this post was a lyric from some song I haven’t heard since junior high: “I hope you love your life, and live with your guilt.” So I suppose that’s my thought on this, but without the “love your life” portion. veerserif was right on the money.