You remember the Men’s Rights Bronies we met not so long ago? Well, I have discovered another one, this one on Twitter! In addition to being brony and a “highly active MRA,” he is also – brace yourself for this – an atheist who loves to wear fedoras and talk in public about what he likes to do with his penis. (And they say stereotypes aren’t true.) His personal creed? “Love & tolerance.”
Anyway, his name is Epic Atheist Brony, and here’s his Twitter profile.
[NOTE: Mr. Brony seems to be a troll. See update below for details.]
Here are some recent highlights from his Twitter timeline. (Note: “clopping” is Brony slang for masturbation.)
Love & tolerance, everyone!
But you gals will have to enjoy your love & tolerance in the kitchen, while the clearly superior Epic Atheist Brony whacks it to cartoon ponies and tweets about which cartoon ponies his penis likes the most.
UPDATE: It seems likely that Mr. Brony is a troll/Poe. “His” original Twitter profile pic was a photo of a guy in a fedora, supposedly him. Trouble is, the actual guy in the pic stepped forward and explicitly denied being Mr. Brony (and, for that matter, being a “sexist fucktarded meme-spewing Redditor.”) Here’s the pic the real fedora-wearing dude posted as evidence. Thanks to @mister_smiley on Twitter for the link.
@ShadetheDruid-… I may or may not be writing an ethnography in my head of a matriarchal society based on the Nuer in West Africa and the Celts for a D&D setting. The idea of the society is that they are herders/warriors who place TREMENDOUS cultural value on sheep/ land and grazing rights and on clan loyalty. The Clan Mother’s word is law, and no decisions are made without her permission.
It’s based on this series of articles from the guy who writes Order of the Stick (http://www.giantitp.com/articles/5auSGfgpCb6Zh9QKBl3.html). Also, there are gnomes, and magic people who channel the energy of the Sun and Moon, often to disastrous results.
… I think we should be friends.
@ Shadow
I’m actually going to be going to Saint Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. While I suppose it’s not completely wise to be giving out this kind of information just anywhere, I honestly don’t think it can hurt here, since nobody here seem like the kind of people who’d want to harm me.
😛
It’s been ages since I read Order of the Stick regularly, but I think I remember reading that article series. I’ll have to go take another look.
Beware the trolls, though. MRAs seem to have a fondness for tracking down people who offend them online and publishing their whereabouts in the hopes of inciting violence.
Do take advantage of campus security. Most places have safe-walk programs, and will do an orientation, so that you know what to do in scary situations before they happen.
@ShadetheDruid- The matriarchy bit wasn’t part of it, I just want to be able to play female warriors in future campaigns (when move and get back into RPGs), and a female-dominated society seemed like a good way to do that. Also, I LOVED that the particular article included lots of ways for POC to exist as main characters in that particular universe.
@ Unimagitive
I will keep that in mind, thanks for the advice.
@Myoo- I guess that I am having trouble understanding why it is totally fine to speculate that a troll must actually want to take on female gender roles and mock him for said speculation, but it is totally verboten to speculate about the possible roots of said troll behavior from the view of problematic gender role indoctrination and my mistaking of this troll for another who explicitly described his abuse at the hands of women as justification for his misogyny. I have admitted my error and yet still keep getting the “you are not allowed to even *think* about that sort of thing because that will minimize NWO’s experience, (even though he has not posted saying anything of the sort)” lambasting by several posters on here.
I thought we were supposed to mock and discuss, not silence and police people’s speculative thoughts. It is not as though I was speaking in absolutes or proposing to speak directly for anyone.
M Dubz: It’s been years since I was actually involved in proper RP. I basically started with Neverwinter Nights 1 and played that for about 7 years (from when it was released). But since videos games tend to have a limited playing life (compared to tabletop RPG systems anyway), it basically had to end sometime. I mostly just design my own stuff now, even if I don’t get to use it (I tend to leave things half finished as well, so trying to use it wouldn’t be easy 😛 ).
Back in the day (this was before I was a feminist or that interested in social issues), we always tried to design stuff that wasn’t too “medieval style” (we wanted to do things differently than the standard, something new and interesting), so we ended up things that were pretty egalitarian almost half-unintentionally. At least in terms of binary gender; I wasn’t very knowledgeable back then so it was lacking in non-binary, trans, etc, but we tried to do things properly in terms of binary gender, race and sexuality at least.
That’s part of why i’m interested in social issues and how they relate to D&D (and fiction in general), since how we did things in D&D was pretty important in changing how I thought about things in the real world (it helped lay the groundwork at least).
Anyway, enough of my rambling. :O Can’t wait to see what knowledge you can throw at us.
@cliff
but do they use the same alphabet?
The issue was never you “calling out his behavior” it was about attacking him as a (supposed) victim of abuse, rape, or molestation and throwing that in his face. That’s not acceptable to do to anyone, including bad people.
The fact that he’s human and may have legitimately experienced these things makes what you did more horrible, not less. You tried to internet diagnose someone using throwing their having been a victim in their face. That’s awful. This is a horrible thing to do to any person. I don’t defend NWO out of any love or respect for him as an individual, I do it here because of how fucked up and absolutely unacceptable your avenue of attack is against anyone.
Again, I never criticized you for calling out NWO behaving badly, I called you out on engaging in attacking him as a suspected victim around his suspected victimization. If you want to say that NWO is being a fucking asshole and a sexist douche, by all means do, his having been (or not) an abuse victim wouldn’t excuse him in that, but bringing up someone else having been an abuse victim out of left field when you are arguing with them as an attack or to dismiss their opinions is fucked up and is victim blaming/attacking victims.
This is irrelevant to your behavior.
Attacking someone based on their status as a molestation or abuse victim is not an “honest conversation”, it’s an attack and a cruel one. And it is not fucking an “honest conversation” or “good dialogue and understanding” to act like you know someone better than they do based on the fact that they have been molested or abused, and it’s not “good dialogue or understanding” to dismiss people’s opinions on things on the grounds that they were abused on molested. That’s attacking victims.
Stop trying to downplay your behavior by victim blaming. “It is your right to feel offended”, don’t fucking condescend at me. I am discussing your specific fucking behavior and what it does to people.
If I don’t like seeing attacks on molestation or abuse victims by you, just leave? How insightful of you. If you “express yourself” by attacking a molestation and abuse victim and using fucked up narratives around molestation and abuse, I’ll continue to tell you to fucking stop it and to STFU.
And, again, I hate being fucking condescended to, this bullshit adds further insult, it doesn’t reduce the effect of your behavior and your words.
You really wanna double down on this?
I thought the difference between “mock for being a bigot” and “mock for maybe being a trauma survivor” is pretty goddamn self-explanatory.
(And we’ve never mocked an MRA for being feminine! We’ve mocked Meller about the dolls but not because they’re a girl thing, just because they’re a weird creepy thing.)
@Nanasha- Here’s the thing (and I’m putting this up here in good faith, don’t make me regret it). There is a difference between mocking a poster for something that he has directly avowed for hypocrisy and something which he has absolutely no control over. OWLY complains all the time that he can’t be a teacher/ is not allowed to spend more time with his niece and nephew, because it goes against male gender roles or he will be seen as a pedophile. We can mock this, because he is actively undermining himself by supporting strict gender roles.
HOWEVER, it is really fucking insidious to imply that someone is the way that they are because of something that happened to them beyond their control. Not everyone who is an asshole is an asshole because of damage. Not all people with traumatic experiences in their past is an asshole. While we all dislike OWLY a bunch, there are trauma survivors on this thread who are lovely human beings who stand up for justice. When you say that OWLY is the way he is because of abuse, you feed into a long-standing cultural narrative that the survivors of trauma are broken, twisted, sick individuals who are unworthy of compassion.
If that doesn’t convince you, maybe this will. You are HURTING other people on here who are trauma survivors. They asked you to stop. While you may not understand what you have done wrong right now, people on this forum (and I speak from personal experience, as someone who has pretty badly fucked up in this space) tend to be cool with people who make a genuine apology, sit back, and take some time to actively think about why their behavior might have been offensive. Nobody will be extra mad at you if you do that, and not have it all figured out right now. The trick is to do the figuring out on your own time, instead of figuratively flailing around with your hurt feelings and damaging other people in the process.
Please note that I’m not being glib. It can hurt when you realize that you’ve fucked up or you feel like everyone’s ganging up on you, and that’s a valid response. You just have a responsibility to sort out your hurt feelings in private. If you never see what you did wrong, you may end up with some people on here you actively dislike. Other people may dislike you (see our interactions with Ruby). You may decide to leave. But if you keep going, you are actively hurting other people with your confusion, and that’s not okay.
Hey Nanasha, no one’s speculating about NWO and female gender roles. He said himself that one of the happiest times of his life were caring for his nieces and nephews, acts that are seen as female roles in this culture. So asking him why he’s not persuing a career in childcare isn’t speculating jackshit, it’s called reading what the man wrote.
I want to make an argument here abot how we shouldn’t describe people as “xenophiles” because the word means other-love, and loving nonhuman sapients isn’t about fetishing their Otherness, but recognising their common people-ness 😀
In the game I’m drawing “species-queer” from, there is no such thing as foreign or ancient languages, so “xenophile” gets complicated, because is that a word we can even think of? And if it is, is it as academic as it sounds, or would common people use it? And then it’s just easier to say oh, yeah, so-and-so is speciesqueer for humans.
@Nanasha: Signing on to support what Darksidecat, Cliff, M. Dubz, and Hellkell say. In fact, I’ve never seen a more beautifully laid out explanation of the problematics of internet diagnosing somebody than what DSC said. I hope you can understand this is not a pileon/attack on you, but an attempt to make a better space here (it isn’t meant to be safe in some of the ways other feminist spaces are, but one thing that impresses me about the people here is the ways in which certain behaviors are off limit, and the ways in which despite some of the horrific behaviors exhibited by trolls here, IF they say they were raped/abused, they are offered sympathy for that (just not for claiming it’s all a feminist plot).
M. Dubz gave you pricelessly good advice–I hope you can take it.
“According to some research I did for a class a million years ago, there are a surprisingly large number of similarities between Indian and Japanese culture.”
From what I’ve seen and read I think that Buddhism is part of the reason for this. The caste system in Japan that resulted in the creating of the Burakumin class, for example, is pretty directly tied to the introduction of Buddhism and the effect that it had on how society looked at certain types of work.
Nanasha, you can think whatever you like, because no one can read your mind, so if you must speculate about the origins of NWOs hatred for women then that’s your business, as long as it happens within the privacy of your own head. When you post something publicly that has potential implications that are damaging to a whole lot of people, though, that’s a different issue. It’s especially problematic when the potentially hurtful thing is said as part of what was clearly intended to be a smack-down. If you can’t see the difference between what you said and, say, what Shaenon said, I’m really not sure how to explain it to you because it seems so glaringly obvious.
Why wouldn’t we be able to think of it? The meaning of the word doesn’t depend on it being formed from Greek roots. Or am I misunderstanding your objection?
I am interested in non-asshole things, e.g., languages.
Nanasha, I’ll mock NWO for being an idiot, I’ll mock him for being a racist, I’ll mock him for ignoring most of the female posters except when he decides to internet-stalk them, and I’ll mock him for his sexism. I will not mock him for the only thing I’ve seen in two years that appears to make him happy.
DSC and M Dubs have done wonderful jobs explaining why saying that he must have been abused is not only factually problematic but also unethical, and mocking someone for liking unconventional things would also be cruel. You seem like an OK person, if a bit quick on the verbal trigger. But if you think cruelty is the point of what we do here, you’re mistaken
High five M Dubz: cultural historian / gamer here. Have you seen the 7th Sea setting? They make the critique of sexism an explicit part of the game.
Also, since fucking WHEN is wanting to be a stay-at-home-dad identical with the “sissification” fetish? Are gender roles so incredibly central to you that any comparatively mild attempt to breach them is the same as a kink that not many people have?
I think what they were saying is that it’s ok if we use this word to talk about things in our universe, but in a fictional setting where Greek never existed, nobody would use Greek words to describe anything.
Right, they’d coin an equivalent word out of native-language morphemes. In a world where Latin never existed, no one would use the word species either, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have a word for it.
Nanasha, NWO brags a lot about how he can clean an entire house, get groceries, do laundry, and fix three meals and two snacks in only one hour, even while taking care of babies and small children. I am very skeptical of his claims because I have actually worked at a daycare, I’ve watched kids out of my house, and I am raising two children of my own. While he minimizes how much work it takes to be a caregiver, he still talks about the lives of SAHM’s, nannies, and housekeepers as being greater than anything he could ever imagine. He described it as a vacation.
In the US, housework and childcare are coded as “women’s work”, but it’s what he loves doing the most. We mocked him because it’s not feminists that are keeping him from doing what he loves. It’s the MRM that’s convinced him that he is not allowed to go into pink collar professions, so instead he works a job he hates and then whines about how great SAHMs’ lives are.
Of course NWO also imagines all stay at home moms live a life like Ann Romney. He assumes that if a family lives on one income, they must be upper class. He doesn’t know about the reality for other parents, who live on one income because the other person’s income isn’t enough to pay for daycare, so working is more expensive than staying at home. He’s never read anything like The Motherhood Manifesto, The Second Shift, or The Truth behind the Mommy Wars to understand the choices moms make in their careers and lives.
I also roll my eyes at him saying SAHMs have it so easy when some have struggles like Cheryl Seelhoff, a woman that raised eleven children as a SAHM. While her husband’s job was decent paying, they still struggled. Their religion forbids them from taking government help in the form of food stamps, Medicaid, or public education, and they’re discouraged from ever going into debt. Seelhoff managed to feed her family of 13 with only $200 US a month, and while they lived in a schoolbus. This was from the book Quiverfull. So I also mock NWO for describing all SAHM’s as living a life of luxury even though what he describes is only for a tiny number of single income families.
None of this is speculation on my part. He goes on and on all the time about how moms* have it so great, and poor NWO has a job he hates. If he could stop his pity party for just one minute, he could actually go get one of those childcare jobs he envies so much. Hell, my cousin worked at a daycare when she was only nine years old. The parents had no idea a 4th grader was taking care of their babies while they worked. The industry is under regulated, and the regulations aren’t enforced very well (at least in MO). Daycares have a high turnover rate, because the job is so demanding while the pay is so low. I don’t think he understands this reality at all.
I mock NWO for how he envies everyone else and how he assumes everyone’s got it so much better than him. I’m sick of his martyr act and his attitude. He rants about subjects he knows nothing about, and when any of us correct him, he ignores it and repeats his same old BS again.
That being said, it’s still wrong to speculate on whether or not he is an abuse survivor. Trauma doesn’t make people into assholes.
*I guess stay at home dads don’t exist in his mind, or nonbinary parents either. Or any other type of legal guardian raising children. In NWOLand, all families are nuclear families just like on Ozzy and Harriet.
@M Dubs- Thank you for the useful and eloquently written response. It has given me a lot to think about and has helped me to understand the problematic nature of my original points.
I’m going to take a break for awhile.
@aworldanonymous
Oh cool. Did you grow up in Brunswick, or are you just going there for uni? If you have Cultural Psychology, or an analagous course I highly recommend you take it, especially if you decide to go the psych route (though it seems like it’s something that would interest you regardless of your major).
Re: personal information, I would always think twice about what you reveal on open fora when it comes to social justice or sexuality (there may be others, but these are what come to mind for me) because, even if the regulars are a decent group (which they are here), you never know who else is reading, and these types of fora tend to attract vehement detractors. I’m somewhat open about things like my uni and location because I’m in a densely populated area, but even still I’m cautious about it.
And congrats on having a clue about what you want to do, it puts you head and shoulders over most people I knew (including me) when I graduated!