So earlier this month the feminist writer and serial-misogynist-annoyer Lindy West announced that she was leaving her job at Jezebel “to work on personal projects. (I am also available for freelance. Hire me!)”
I took this to mean that she was leaving her job at Jezebel to work on personal projects and do freelance work, because this is something that writers, especially talented writers with a lot of options, sometimes do.
Over in the Manosphere, though, the fellas had a rather different interpretation, which went something like this HA HA THE FAT SLUT GOT FIRED HER CAREER IS OVER WE WON YIPPEEEEEEEEE!!!
Or, as the always charming Roosh Valizadeh put it, in a comment on his site’s forums:
[S]he has been defeated. It would be like me quitting my blog and saying I’m going to focus on Twitter. No matter how they try to sugarcoat it, she quit a site which has given her the biggest possible bullhorn she can have. Unless she’s going to the NY Times or anchoring the nightly news, her voice will now get much more quiet.
This is great news for men, and America.
The delightful domestic violence advocate Matt Forney devoted an episode of his podcast to a “Lindy West Jezebel Firing Celebration Party.” On Thirty Days to X, a minor-league manosphere blog, “Robert” titled his celebratory post “Why Lindy West will go broke and fall into obscurity.”
SPOILER ALERT: It turned out that Lindy West did not so much go broke and fall into obscurity as GET HIRED BY GQ YES THAT GQ less than two weeks after leaving Jezebel.
Big news: @thelindywest is coming to http://t.co/iWLJv8Giyw as our new culture writer. Trust us, she's worth a follow.
— GQ Magazine (@GQMagazine) September 17, 2014
In your face, baby men!
On Roosh’s forum, the fellas went through all five stages of grief as they attempted to come to terms with the tragic news.
1) DENIAL:
Private Man wrote:
The announcement that Lindy West snagged a job at GQ is likely satire.
That’s the only explanation.
Aphelion agreed:
I’m convinced that Lindy writing for GQ is satire. I would have to see it to believe it.
2) ANGER:
RioNomad sniffed:
GQ is probably read mostly by homos and women anyways.
3) BARGAINING:
AnonymousBosch tried to convince himself it wouldn’t be so bad:
Lindy West doesn’t have strong convictions one way or another, but will simply pump out whatever her employers require, so I doubt her GQ writing will be ALL CAPS / excessive punctuation, or have a major feminism focus, even for a blue pill mag like GQ.
Most likely she was hired because, as I long ago mentioned on here, the Jezebel page views for her ‘celebrity culture’ pieces quadrupled the numbers for any of her ‘political’ pieces.
4) DEPRESSION:
Bacchus sighed:
even GQ, despite having an audience of single men, cannot avoid advancing the feminist agenda by hiring the mouth of the fat slut movement. There are no males spaces left in mainstream American culture.
5) ACCEPTANCE:
Days of Broken Arrows offered the fellas some hard truths:
GQ doesn’t care if you hate Lindy. They care if you click on their Web site. That’s what brings in advertising dollars. They know she’ll probably enrage men, and her stories will go viral via Facebook and Twitter.
Also, come on, she’s a great fucking writer. Not that any of you twits will ever admit it.
Anyway, let’s just gloat a little bit more at this FLAWLESS VICTORY over manosphere delusions by quoting some of what the baby men wrote back when they thought the great and powerful Lindy West had been defeated.
“Robert” on Thirty Days to X confidently predicted disaster for West:
She’s starting a free Tumblr blog and begging for others to hire her.
No, really. The best that this strong independent woman could do was stick her hand out and write on a platform that people use to share erotic fan fiction about My Little Pony dolls. That’s pretty pathetic if you ask me.
I’m 21 and somehow manage to afford my own website, and do it without ever asking readers for a dime. …
Lindy West, like her lard loving pal David Futrelle, built a career around providing idiots with mindless trash that ridicules the labors of others. An article about doing something like building up a blog, or increasing your brain power has longevity. An article about “12 things dudebros need to stop mansplaining” is relevant for about 30 seconds. …
If you look at the situation that Lindy’s in it is easy to see why she will fail with all future endeavors.
[BORING WRONG CRAP OMITTED]
Lindy West is a great example of what not to do as a professional writer. I look forward to checking in on her “exciting new career” in about two months so that I can say “I told you so!”
D’oh!
On Roosh’s forum, meanwhile, the fellas spewed out fat jokes, declared her boyfriend gay, and wished her the worst.
Germanico indulged a sadistic fantasy:
Freelancing? I would be willing to chip in a few dollars if someone … can find a way to troll her into taking some job that embarrases herself.
You spelled “embarrass” wrong. Embarrassing!
Quintus Curtius pontificated about her alleged hackery:
The shelf-life of a mediocre party-line hack like West is never going to be longer than 5 years.
They last while they last. Having nothing interesting or original to say, and nothing to offer except a repetition of the same hackneyed slogans, they are cheerfully rotated out by their masters, who are always looking for fresher, newer flunkies to mold.
She’s old, used-up, and has nothing to show for all her screeching. They’ll let her go to pasture, and there she can write melancholy homilies about the virtues of raising her surrogate brood.
I hope it was worth it, Lindy.
Yeah, it kind of probably was, don’t you think?
The Lindy hatred is hilarious and expected, but it’s like these guys don’t realize there’s, like, a ton of stuff going on that they just ignore because it doesn’t directly affect their weird little world view. Like, Jez has gone through a ton of changes recently, and while Lindy is too professional to say that she’s leaving for those reasons specifically, it’s a much bigger possibility that she is leaving because of them, than because she was fired. Just…it’s so sad how elaborate their little fantasy worlds are.
Ah, I love the taste of schadenfreude in the morning.
Also, last I checked, Mammoth wasn’t your career, David. Since you know, you only do fundraising every once in a while and that’s about it.
There’s an old cliche about counting and chickens, misters. You should learn from it.
I never get why people criticize people and organizations that rely on fundraising. I mean, I get that they are just looking for anything critical to say about things they don’t like, and somehow, relying on people to decide the value of the service/projects/whatever and give an amount they can afford to that effort is totes pathetic.
I’ve seen this argument all over the place. “LOL, NPR only survives on handouts!” “Anita Sarkeesian is pathetic because she asks people for money for her videos!”
Such a silly argument! I imagine these people wouldn’t criticize the ASPCA, Doctors without Borders, the Red Cross, and the like. Yeah, what losers for soliciting funds so you can help others or do a project.
This video is perfect for this and especially for this line:
“There are no males spaces left in mainstream American culture.”
http://youtu.be/Kv4XUaFERds
Experience suggests that this may be just a teensy bit too optimistic.
Lindy is fiercely talented. Roosh couldn’t find a job on a magazine like GQ because he comes over as a misogynistic sociopath without the charisma to back it up.
She’s been earning a living as a writer since at least 2005.
Bah! Everyone knows that unless you have a boss or ARE a boss, it’s not REAL work. Freelancing, volunteering, crowdfunding, begging, independent recycling, all of that is fake work. If it were REAL work, there’s a boss.
Mhhh, manbaby tears. Delicious, delicious manbaby tears.
What is it with the hatred of Lindy West? Jezebel is hated by the manospherians in general, obviously, but they really have a rage on for her. Is it because she’s fat and doesn’t hate herself because of it? Is it because she spoke out about rape jokes? Is it because she defies the stereotype that feminists aren’t funny?
In any case, I’m pretty happy she got hired by a publication that is targeted to men.
http://thesecretliberalagenda.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/sweet-male-tears.gif
It could be argued (fairly, I think) that asking for donations for a service one provides without an up-front charge is offensive because it turns the free-market system upside down. In normal economics, you give me money and I give you a product – you don’t get the product until you’ve paid, or at least entered into a binding contract promising that you will pay.
The donation system works in the opposite direction – I give you a product, and if you like it you pay me. Insofar as the ASPCA, etc., they are providing a product that the donors probably don’t even receive themselves.
For a libertarian, I can see where this model might be really threatening. If it works (and we’ve seen that it can, in fact, work) it threatens the notion that the traditional market is the only/best method for allocating resources.
Congrats Lindy and good call, GQ.
As for the misogynists, suck it.
I noticed the other day that fauxminist C H Sommers was tweeting complaints at GQ that Lindy was a meanie mean, and it was hurting her feelings.
https://twitter.com/GQMagazine/status/512372034316165120
It’s nice to see Lindy moving on. I enjoy her writing, but never really cared for Jezebel. I’ve never really read GQ, but I suppose I will start.
Why do they hate Lindy West so much? She’s a fat woman over 30 who doesn’t give a shit about whether or not they approve of her. Of course they hate her.
Aw, I think their poor, manly fee fees are hurt. They probably need a juice box and a nap.
Good for Ms. West. I always thought she was the best of Jezebel, actually too good for them. Not a Jezebel lover.
That is VERY bold of GQ though. I love that they slapped Sommers down publicly.
The whole screed about this particular journalist’s time being up and that she’ll never find any work again is very reminiscent of the lies one tells oneself when they’re very angry/jealous at a person for being popular and imagining that their audience will evaporate.
Most people grow out of this sometime in their early 20s. As comforting as the fantasy is that your worst enemy will suddenly hemorrhage their support base, it doesn’t happen by magic.
Even people who are consistently assholes don’t hemorrhage their support base as fast as would be preferable, even when they’re outright conspiratorial-level hacks.
Case in point.
@marinerachel
Know that old Vulcan proverb, “Only Nixon could go to China”? Okay, that’s actually a thing that political scientists say, whether they are Vulcan or otherwise. Nixon had the conservative cred that he could open relations with China without anyone calling him a red commie lover – everyone knew he wasn’t one, and he could not be credibly tarred with the red brush.
I feel like GQ has similar cred here, although they aren’t the only magazine in this situation. Nobody in their right mind is going to call GQ a mangina rag. You just can’t do it and retain your credibility as someone who knows how the world works.
@weirwoodtreehugger
Hmm. Can you guarantee that your Male Tears™ are only harvested from dudebros? I heard that some versions use just any old tears from anything male that has tear ducts. Including crocodiles, which I find to have a rather cloying artificial flavor.
(I don’t even.)
I wonder how much of their audience GQ has pissed off.
Marinerachel, I somehow doubt that there’s a lot of overlap between the men who read GQ and the ones who ragewhine about Lindy West. Now, if Maxim hired her. . .
that WOULD be funny.
Wow, CH Sommers. Try not to be so petulant.
@Policy of Madness
Fair points about the notions libertarians have of the free market. Personally, I think mechanisms like charities, crowd-sourcing and the like are all part of a free market system, but every libertarian I have chatted with has thought that the free market is supposed to be whatever he (and it has always been been although I’m sure some women are out there too) thinks it ought to be. They have always thought whatever benefits them is a good idea from patents to police force to other things that mean they make money. And they never cared about pesky things like product safety (let the market decide if it’s safe even if people die!), or truth in advertising…. or many other things that I like.
Awww, poor widdle babies. Poor Rooshie-Dooshies and Christina Hoff Bummers! Wouldums like a diaper change?
Yeah, I’m enjoying the Schadenfreude right now. Lindy was the best thing Jezebel had going, so the real loss is theirs and no one else’s. GQ, on the other hand, are lucky ducks.