So it’s official: the Emma You Are Next web site, which was threatening to release nude pictures of Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, is a hoax. The site now redirects traffic to the home page of something called Rantic, a mysterious supposed “social media marketing enterprise” with a reputation for hoaxes.
Rantic is now claiming that the real agenda behind its website was a noble one: to expose the evils of leaked celebrity nudes – and, by painting 4channers as the evil hackers behind it all, to get 4chan itself taken down.
And somehow, to do this, they had to threaten to release nude pics of Emma Watson? It’s like fighting death threats against women – by sending death threats to women. The idea that this is a feminist “false flag” — an idea already being floated in Men’s Rightsy circles — is plainly ridiculous. Rantic’s actions are about as unfeminist as its possible to get.
Indeed, it seems pretty clear that Rantic’s new site is as much of a hoax as its last one.
Rantic’s own, er, “explanation” for the Emma Watson site is a masterpiece of concentrated bullshit:
We have been hired by celebrity publicists to bring this disgusting issue to attention. The recent 4chan celebrity nude leaks in past 2 months have been an invasion of privacy and is also clear indication that the internet NEEDS to be censored. Every Facebook like, share & Twitter mention will count as a social signature — and will be step closer to shutting down www.4chan.org.
Nothing about this makes any sense whatsoever. How do you protect celebrities from threats by threatening a celebrity? How do you use the Emma You Are Next hoax to get 4chan taken down … when everyone now knows that you, not anyone on 4chan, was behind the hoax?
Add to this a call for censorship that seems calculated to enrage the internet masses, and it’s hard not to conclude that Rantic is still playing the internet like a fiddle. For what aim I don’t know. Maybe, like some Men’s Rightsers we could mention, they figure that bad publicity – scratch that, catastrophic publicity – is better than none.
That’s more or less what Business Insider has concluded. In a piece published this morning, BI’s James Cook writes
Rantic Marketing doesn’t exist. This wasn’t a marketing stunt at all, but a social experiment run by the most notorious gang of pranksters on the internet. …
Rantic Marketing is a fake company run by a gang of prolific internet spammers used to quickly capitalize on internet trends for page views. The group go by a variety of different names. Collectively, they’re known as SocialVEVO … The only known video footage of the group is a rap song about pickles that they used dubious spam techniques to make incredibly popular. The song used to have over 8 million views on YouTube.
As for that supposed plan to shut down 4chan? It’s only served to rally 4chan’s defenders.
In any case, the best way to fight celebrity leaks isn’t to shutter 4chan. It’s to find and prosecute those who’ve hacked celebrity nudes (including photos of several young women who were underage when the photos were taken) – and those who’ve knowingly spread them around the internet.
It may be hard to find the original hackers, but it’s certainly not hard to find those who distributed the nudes. Hint: Look at Reddit. Hundreds of thousands of Redditors were involved in what became known as TheFappening, and Reddit itself apparently profited handsomely from the attention and traffic.
Though the original TheFappening subreddit was belatedly shut down, leaked celebrity nudes are still being distributed openly on Reddit. This is criminal activity. Enforce the laws.
And Rantic, whatever your game is — just. fucking. stop.
Here’s a survey that might help you:
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/11/18/the-decline-of-marriage-and-rise-of-new-families/
It’s recent (2010) and has the following takeaways:
I don’t see a breakdown in answers by gender, but you don’t get a 93% rating for “love” without the vast majority of both men and women buying into this rationale.
@sunnysombrera:
You ask women. There is no better method of assessing motivation unless you have a carefully thought out and put-together experiment to bring out that motivation. He’s got a hell of a job trying to provide evidence for his position; you are perfectly allowed to say “that’s not good enough, you haven’t made your case strongly enough that I need to refute it.”
Good. What’s the point in debating someone who dismisses any actual evidence you provide while claiming his own “evidence” is solid when it isn’t? Not everyone is worth trying to convince.
sunnysombrero:
From the Pew Research Center:
You’ll see that they didn’t find that women “con a ‘beta male’ into marriage so they can live off his paycheck after years of fun with ‘alpha male bad boys.'”
Another area you could look at is average number of sexual partners; if I’m remembering correctly, women tend to have slightly less than men, but both are about the same. This would put the lie to women “riding the cock carousel” in their youth and having a lot of sex with a lot of different men ( of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a lot of sex with a lot of different people, and you can throw that little factoid at ’em, too) and then settling down to marry a financially secure “beta male” when they “hit the wall.” Of course, you could also put the burden of proof back on the MRA – even if a woman has sex with the “alpha males” when young and then “settles down” later, how on earth do they know that woman isn’t marrying for love? I mean, having fun while one is young and single and then finding someone you’d want as a life partner when one is older and has different priorities – that’s not exactly unheard of.
But basically, the whole, “alpha fucks, beta bucks” thing is just a whine about how those lousy women won’t have sex with him. He can’t prove that women are only having sex with “alpha males.” Because there’s is no proof, because women are human beings that have different sexual preferences, just like men.
And where do lesbians fit in with this? You could ask ’em that, too.
I’ll note that if your MRA comes back and says that This Isn’t Evidence™ (as he might) on the grounds that people lie on surveys, you’d be within your rights to point out that that makes any and all postulates in the social sciences unfalsifiable, and you’re now outside the bounds of science and into the realm of fantasy, where he clearly wants to be.
Thus Spake Zarasunnysombrera
I don’t think I’d even try. A PUA and a few random blog posts aren’t reliable sources; I’d simply have said “Ha ha ha NO. How about some citations of peer-reviewed research?”
Personally, when I hear the “Women Only Like Assholes!” argument, I point out women aren’t a homogenous group, any more than men are. They are just as complicated and diverse as men are. Sometimes a man or woman is looking for a no-strings hookup, and may not care that the hookup isn’t a very nice person. Some men and women marry for love, but some men and women marry for convenience, or money, or for complicated and private legal reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with romance. In general, it’s not other people’s business.
There’s also a lot of misogyny tied up with WOLA!, but I won’t get into that here and now… though I will point out the implicit contradiction in MRAs and PUAs ranting about “Women Only Like Assholes!” in one breath and in the next whining about the character flaws of the “bitches” they dated. So… if a woman dates a man who is not very nice, it’s because women are evil, but if a man dates a woman who is not very nice, it’s because women are evil. Remember Rule One of the Manosphere: It’s Always Women’s Fault.
Ninja’d!
I’m fine with people using females as a collective term for women and girls as long as they’re also using males as a collective for men and boys. Granted, once females and males are being used, I also prefer age groups being referred to as infant, young, adolescent, adult, and elderly. If you want to use men or boys, you had better use women or girls as well. Terminological consistency is a thing.
I also prefer that if someone wants to use females and males, what they write had better be scientific, with actual data. Otherwise, the terms are just dehumanizing.
Since the manosphere basically believes that genetic programming is the cause of gender stereotypes I bet they think, “I’m programmed to rule over feeeemmmaaallleees and no amount of thinking otherwise will prevent it.” I call it a lot of baloney.
Oh, oh, I found the full report. If you want to play his game, just link him to the 122-page report here:
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/11/pew-social-trends-2010-families.pdf
Because writing about how something has been shown to be a hoax is being duped into making a fool of yourself.
Well if the whole Five Guys thing is any indication, the saw “4chan is not your personal army” is very easily circumvented when you can outrage them enough to WANT to band together. Want 4chan to stop moping and snapping at each other? Attack their sense of unity and their pride in their ethical foundation (that of non-censorship). Even if you’re involved in 4chan, that’s kinda what you have to do to make them behave and organize.
Sorry, Policy of Madness, but I had to use the word “female”, even stretched out, to mock the manosphere and those who believe that domination over another group, especially when hurtful, is natural in humans and can’t be changed.
Here’s an interesting bit from the full report:
I’d like to emphasize:
That’s kind of the opposite of what your MRA claims, isn’t it?
If the theory were true, all assholes would be poor and not engaged and the rich would be the nicest people on the planet, I suppose. The two categories he’s using to describe dating only contain a hilariously tiny fraction of all datable people in the first place.
There are plenty of rich or married celebrities you can point towards to show that. Like those football stars or that south african Paralymics runner who was all over the news recently.
The only fool here is you, Malcolm.
Time for a man in short denim shorts break. Yes, that’s me with the not perfect legs.
http://i1315.photobucket.com/albums/t586/ralmcg/photo0051_zps5f3bb025.jpg
@Policy of Madness
I suspect that’s your “rational” MRAs(yes, I’d say that they and their cohort of similar thinkers make up at least 6% of men, sadly) responding to the survey that actually make up the difference there. Because they couch things in those terms, it’s intuitive that, to them, money is what matters to anyone else. They can’t construct a nuanced non-greedy world.
@ikanreed
Were that true (and I have no reason to believe or doubt it) then the insistence that women marry beta bucks would amount to projection, wouldn’t it?
Sorry, this is way late to the allergy discussion, but:
No, no, no, no, no. Please no. Allergies aren’t the result of “snowflake parenting”, any more than autism or schizophrenia.
One of my twins has severe peanut and egg allergy, and I’m the farthest thing from a helicopter parent there is. Nobody would willingly sign up for parenting an allergic kid if they knew what it entailed.
It sucks. It hurts to watch my son realize he’s not like the other kids, to have him be afraid of food, to tell him no all the time. It sucks to scrutinize labels and have to vigilantly police what he puts in his mouth and still get burned periodically and end up in the E.R. from time to time. It’s a pain in the ass. I hate it. I have no idea where this came from. Nobody in my family has these allergies, and as far as I know, nobody in his father’s family has them either.
Having dietary restrictions doesn’t mean kids are frail, hypochondriac, or overprotected. FWIW, my peanut-allergy guy is currently the only kid in his preschool who can make it all the way across the monkey bars. That’s because I’m a lazy old-fashioned submarine parent who would rather loaf on the bench at the playground, so he’s had a longer leash physically than other kids his age. I wish I could have been similarly laid-back about what he eats, but fate had other ideas.
As for banning treats from schools, that sucks too, and I wish we didn’t have to live in that kind of world. True, it’s done primarily to minimize the potential for accidental contact, but it’s also about fairness. Do you want to be the one to tell the one allergic kid that no, he can’t have a cupcake, he has to sit and watch everyone else enjoy them? And it’s not just allergies – it’s diabetic kids, and PKU kids, and other kids who might be on restricted diets. (Plus, I imagine teachers aren’t too keen on having to deal with 25 sugared-up children for the rest of the afternoon).
Sorry for the rant. I definitely agree that helicopter parenting is Not A Good Thing, but it’s totally unrelated to allergies.
And those categories don’t even describe any one individual. The same person can exhibit “alpha” behaviors in some domains, and “beta” behaviors in others. For example, how “alpha” is it to be constantly fretting over your notch count and your social value, and shelling out $$ to manosphere hucksters? Isn’t it way more alpha to recognize bullshit, dismantle it, and, say…mock it?
I wouldn’t even be able to categorize the men in my life as “alphas” or “betas”. It’s a useless framework that shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Buttercup: All the men in my life are alphas in their own way.
I wonder…If it were true that all women first fuck a lot of alphas and then settle down with some beta to pay the bills, what happens to the used up alphas who have become too old or too ugly for the cock carousel? Do they become betas or do they just wander off and starve somewhere (seeing as they can’t cook or do laundry)?
RE: ralmcg
Interesting that he said that strength is a male principle. It makes it seem that females who have strength are not “real females”.
And men without strength? Gee, I wonder what they get labeled as…
RE: WWTH
Couldn’t the kids with severe allergies just not eat the homemade treats? Why deprive everyone else?
Do you really want to be the adult explaining to a gluten-intolerant five-year-old why everyone in the class can have a cookie except them? I have friends who make gluten-free cookies, but most folks do not. I don’t even have food allergies, but I know enough people with weird sensitivities and seen the sort of social barrier that comes with being unable to eat others’ food that I don’t begrudge them. (Seriously. One of the people I know here is allergic to everything. EVERYTHING. I feel bad for her, because oh fucking god, you have no idea what this poor woman goes through to avoid an ER visit. Lactose, corn, gluten, grass, nightshades…)
Or is it the result of helicopter parenting and wanting their kids to be special snowflakes? Any thoughts?
Some people don’t discover their severe allergies until adulthood. (See: my gulten-intolerant friend who just stopped eating a lot as a kid because the pain was so bad.) It’s just now people are more aware, so parents are a little less likely to go, “Shut up, bread can’t make you sick, just eat the fucking bread.”
The linked blog post about the supposed radfem conspiracy is really funny. At some point, the blogger decided that the whole ostensible 4chan threat was a feminist conspiracy. And now that it seems to be the work of garden variety trolls out to cause trouble, he’s even more convinced that it’s a feminist conspiracy.
And then at the end, he concludes that he must be Cassandra for having foreseen it all… Conspiracy theorists. Confirmation bias. So weirdly lovable.
(I also noticed that the “founder and CEO” of Rantic goes by the name of Brad Cockingham… Eep, trolls.)
The alpha/omega ratings idea—I think it’s funny that they rate people to begin with. But what’s even funnier is that they put people with the worst possible traits at the top of the whole system. Do they think it’s necessary to behave like an asshat in order to find a partner? Maybe that’s why so many of them are so bitter all the time.
Policy of madness,
Yeah, the antibiotics in livestock is terrifying. In addition to the resistance issue it messes with our gut flora. I wouldn’t be surprised if this had a lot to do with the obesity “epidemic” as the gut flora of thin and fat people are different.
Well of course I wasn’t trying to say all allergies are over dramatized. Just wondering why the increase.
Kids on restrictive diets understand they’re on one at a fairly young age right? I still don’t get why that means other kids can’t have treats. Disappointment management is an important thing to learn.