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?
I wonder if Dicky Dawkins knows about JudgyTwit, and that CH Sommers retweets her? Because if he does … yeah, he really is what he was called on FTB the other day – Richard Shovelhands.
Amazing little cognitive loop the MRM has going:
– All Men believe what we believe, like who we like and hate who we hate
– this man disagrees with us/doesn’t hate someone we hate/doesn’t like someone we like!
– ergo, this man is not A Real Man
– … because All Men believe what we believe, like who we like and hate who we hate
Conveniently excludes any and all men who don’t buy into their bullshit with their No True Scotsman mindset.
With any luck their continued drive towards ideological purity will drive away everybody but the worst cautionary examples. 🙂
Hilariously written article David…your approaching Jon Ronson levels of wit..bravo
That Poodle is Lavender! – Splitters!
“Great and powerful” seems a mild reach, but acceptable in the circumstances.
The purple poodle (if male) looks as if he’d have better gaydar than most humans.
It’s the Poodles’ Popular Front of Judea!
for a bunch of people who hate “screeching”, they sure do a lot of it.
RooshV is still around? Ha I lost interest in baiting him ten years ago. Does he play more than one note these days?
CH Simmers got a gig at the American Enterprise Institute, so why should she care? *gigglesnort*
Echoing the “eh”s for Jezebel. Fun to read and there are a couple good writers, but the overall tone is (as the blog subtitle usually suggests) rather gossipy and silly.
That is an interesting angle on crowdfunding man-ger. Never thought of it that way, but that sounds about right.
Never mind that the hardworking rulers of the meritocracy in Silicon Valley almost always started up by begging investors for funds…
The folks at briebart.com have also taken the side of gamergate. Which is appropriate, because when I think of journalistic integrity, I think briebart.com. The whole thing is slowly morphing to having nothing to do with video games (because it never had anything to do with actual video games) and is just admitting to being about “conservative values”/putting feeeemales back in their place. Sommers works for a conservative think tank. It’s her job to promote social conservative values. She has never played a video game. Also, she uses blatant bad logic as this catchy tune demonstrates http://youtu.be/-K4s7cV4Us4
It’s a new day, and I’m still loling about that “Imma get you fired” Twitter exchange with CHS. “Are your new employers aware that you’re a STINKING FEMINIST????” “Um, yes.” “Um, yes.” LOL.
What was going through her mind? That GQ might have hired this not-exactly-obscure writer without reading any of her prior work?
Reblogged this on bodycrimes and commented:
I don’t tend to read populist American feminist sites like Jezebel and xojane, because they’re not my cup of tea. Most of what I know about them comes filtered through the manosphere, whose members hang off their every word. It’s mainly because of that that I know who Lindy West is – boy, do the misogynists hate her. Recently, the misogyny sites have run hot with the news that Lindy West had left Jezebel.
Her explanation was that she’d left to pursue other interests. Their explanation was that she’d been dumped and was therefore washed up.
They danced on her grave a little prematurely, as David Futrelle points out in this post. I can’t WAIT for the apologies to roll in…
Lindy had mentioned in goodbye post at Jezebel that she had something big to announce in a couple weeks, guess this was it. Good for her.
Ooh yes please. And Judgy Janet is also jumping straight into the #Gamergate tweet-camp. Colour me unsurprised.
The irony of CH Sommers forming public relations with Judgytwit, arguably one of the worst PR directors in the world of social media … you just couldn’t make this shit up.
Sorry, don’t like pitbull-of balls, or the purple poodle. They are not cats. Hail Bootsy!
Sorry but after growing up watching a loved one’s unhealthy relationship with food put them in the hospital again and again I just can’t support Lindy West’s views on fat acceptance. It may be her body to do with what she wants but so was my mother’s and that didn’t make it ok for her to make her children watch her slowly kill herself. Everyone should be treated like a person with value, but that doesn’t mean accepting all of their poor choices.
Poodles – the original standard variety – are actually some of the smartest dogs around! Their adorable cross-breeds (Yorkie Poos, for one) inherit a lot of that intelligence, too.
I, for one, welcome our new poodle co-lords. You can never truly take the role of world domination from cats, after all.
RE: Policy of Madness
Dunno about crowdsourcing, though. That’s kind of the market at work. It bypasses certain monopolistic structures, but you’re still paying, up front, for the promise of a product in the future.
Enh, it CAN be. Depends on your definition of ‘product.’ Some people crowdsource to say, take blog posts or webcomics and turn it into a print version. So it is the creation of a new means to view content, but the material contained within is already available for free. I’ve seen some folks add bonus content to the crowdsourced product, but I’ve also seen others have content ONLY on the free web version.
What I mean is, there’s actually a pretty cool variety of ways to go about it. It’s part of why I like it.
RE: Woody
It seems as though even men’s magazines are now run by feminists and purple poodles. This is extremely disheartening.
Yup. I’m in your magazines, gaying and feministing it up. Next thing you know, MEN WILL BE KISSING IN THEM! MWAHAHAHA! And then I will steal ALL OF THE PENISES.
RE: katz
none of the stuff I did in my free time could go on an application, because for some reason the fact that I’d done it of my own volition with no expectation of recognition or reward made it not count.
Yeah, there’s this weird dichotomy of, “work is so unpleasant, you wouldn’t do it unless you were paid. Ergo, if you did it for free, it’s fake work.” I run into that a bit with art and stuff, as though I just poop on the keyboard and magic comes out. I’m a fucking unicorn like that.
Products are goods and services that are exchanged for money. They are things that one person or organization produces, that another person or organization is willing to pay money to obtain. I’m using a pretty conventional definition there.
Anita Sarkeesian is producing a product, which was paid for, up front, by people who wanted to see the videos. The videos are being released in a format that allows non-payors to also enjoy the product produced. This would be called a free-rider problem, except that in this case it’s not a problem because it’s the intention – the payors knew when they paid that this would be the case, and free-release is one of the aspects of the product that was deemed worth the money they laid down.
Some people want a physical item to hold in their hand, and think that is worth money. Thinking it is worth money to have a physical representation of web content makes the physical object a product.
RE: Policy of Madness
Gotcha. Never mind then.
I do like crowdfunding like Kickstarter, because it removes certain barriers to entry for things like Tropes vs. Women, or Pillars of Eternity. There are still barriers, but Sarkeesian didn’t have to convince a traditional venture capitalist to fund her videos. She didn’t have to persuade anybody that this would be a profitable venture and there would be a good return on investment. There is an excellent return on investment for that money, but it’s non-monetary, a cultural good rather than monetary profit.
I like economics, but economics has some serious drawbacks. The lack of adequate language for this type of thing is one of them. You can kind of force it into the language of dollars and cents, but that really misses the essential character of what Sarkeesian’s funders were actually buying. It is a product, but there’s more to the product than some videos posted on Youtube. The wider cultural conversation currently happening around games as a result of the videos is part of the product. “Externality” is what this would normally be called, but you really can’t in this instance because this “externality” is what the payors were buying, and intended to buy.
There’s a thesis in there somewhere, I promise.
Bwahahahahahaaaaaaaa!
Oh man did she play them!
RE: Policy of Madness
I do like crowdfunding like Kickstarter, because it removes certain barriers to entry
No joke! I am making more money faster through crowdfunding than I can in traditional publishing right now. I have a hard time selling LGBT speculative fiction to publishers, and even fast ones take a month or two to respond. Here, I can have money in hand usually within a week or two! Sure, it’s just one-shot cash, but for someone like me who writes quickly, it’s way better. Plus, I can insure I’m writing stuff my audience likes, because I’m writing FOR THEM and directly communicating with them.
Erika Miller, do you know what “concern trolling” is? Because you’re doing it right now.