GamerGate provides a rare example of rats climbing aboard a sinking ship.
As the “movement” stews in its own conspiratorial rage, a small army of reactionary misogynists, sensing opportunity, have joined the cause. Sure, right-wingers like Adam Baldwin and Milo Yiannopoulos have long been Gaters, but it’s only in recent days that they’ve been joined by some of the better-known manospherians, from angry lawyer and juice seller Mike Cernovich to the charming Roosh V.
The latest manosphere douchebag to take up the GamerGate cause is the lovely and talented Matt Forney, who has promptly claimed for himself the mantle of GamerGate leader and hero.
Oh, sorry, he hasn’t done this, as this actual tweet from his real Twitter account makes clear:
I'm not a hero or a leader. I'm not here to be worshipped, merely to be read. All I care about is the truth. #GamerGate
— Matt Forney (@realmattforney) October 27, 2014
No, he’s just a humble man drawn to the movement because of his deep Vivian Jamesian love of video games. Oh, wait, that’s not it either?
I have no designs on being a #GamerGate leader or major figure. I don't even really play games anymore. But I hate hypocrisy and liars.
— Matt Forney (@realmattforney) October 27, 2014
Ok, well, maybe he feels a certain kinship with gamer culture? I mean, like a lot of angry gamebros, Forney likes to think of himself as a sort of outsider maverick misunderstood and underappreciated by the masses.
Maybe these excerpts from a post he wrote last year will help to shed some light on this. You know, the one where he described hardcore gamers as
narcissists. … the basement-dwelling, poorly-shaven, masturbating troll of legend. The kind of person who doesn’t shower and has gigabytes of porn on an array of portable hard drives. The nerds. …
Because these dorks don’t have the social acumen to build normal human relationships, their false identities involve submerging themselves into trashy pop culture. …
I remember trying to research an article about Mass Effect around the time of the game’s release, sifting through thousands of angry threads on BioWare’s forums before giving up out of depression. Seeing all these people crying, fuming, screaming, acting like their lives were over because of a fucking video game… it made me want to drink.
Huh.
Well, anyway, he’s part of #GamerGate now, and hoping that the movement will help him in his neverending battle with the Real Enemy: “Weird Twitter.”
No, really. He thinks the anti-GamerGate “movement” is an elaborate plot orchestrated by Gawker and a bunch of people who make weird jokes on Twitter.
How many of these Weird Twitter sockpuppets are formally connected to Gawker? How many of them ARE Gawker writers in disguise? #GamerGate
— Matt Forney (@realmattforney) October 25, 2014
We've already seen massive collusion between SJW game journalists. Weird Twitter being a Gawker operation is not impossible. #GamerGate
— Matt Forney (@realmattforney) October 25, 2014
There’s just one problem with Matt Forney’s new gig as not-leader and not-hero of GamerGate: he’s such a reprehensible pice of human dogshit that even GamerGaters find him a bit repellent.
After all, this is the guy who thinks women with tattoos are “broken,” psychopathic, “unlikable cunt[s].” He’s the pudgy wannabe Lothario who believes that “fat girls don’t deserve to be loved.”
He’s the guy who once declared that “[w]omen should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps,” and who wrote D-I-Y guides titled “How to Beat Your Girlfriend or Wife and Get Away with It” and “How to Crush a Girl’s Self Esteem.” (As Forney sees it, constant gaslighting and generous helpings of emotional and physical abuse will do the trick.)
Anyway, in order to address the issue of his own loathsomeness, Forney today posted what he called a “Publisher’s Statement Regarding Matt Forney’s Articles and GamerGate.”
Yes, he published this on his own blog. He’s the “publisher” making the statement, and referring to himself in the 3rd person.
In the “statement,” Matt Forney’s publisher, Matt Forney, offered a bit of a mea culpa for some of his more, er, questionable past statements.
I have said things that I have later disavowed. For example, two years ago I wrote an article gleefully celebrating the suicide of a teenage girl who engaged in a gangbang with several football players. While I still believe that [name redacted by DF] behavior was evidence of a poor upbringing and deeper psychological issues (which the media coverage about her suicide completely ignored), rejoicing in her death was morally abhorrent. For that, I apologize.
Well, gosh, I guess you deserve a few points for recognizing that a post “gleefully celebrating the suicide of a teenage girl” doesn’t look too good on your resume. Pity you had to sully that “apology” by suggesting that she was psychologically damaged and that the media should have been saying even worse things about her than it did.
Still, given that a lot of GamerGaters seem to have no problem gleefully harassing vulnerable women, Forney’s other big apology might turn out to matter more to his potential gamebro allies:
[F]our years ago, I wrote an article for my now-defunct In Mala Fide blog titled “Why Nobody Likes Nerds, and Why You’re Justified in Hating Them” that advocated bullying as a way to “shame” nerds into normality. …While I am and will remain critical of nerds and geek culture (a big part of why I have no desire to be a “leader” of GamerGate), I’ve since realized that bullying is wrong. I may not want to hang out with nerds, but they’ve never hurt me and they just want to be left alone. Again, I apologize.
Huh. Well, that may be all you need to become a GamerGater in good standing.
Matt Forney, I now pronounce you King of GamerGate.
PS: Forney has the approval of at least one prominent GamerGater: the amazing Davis Aurini:
@freiherrKvK @jordanowen42 imo, @realmattforney is a modern bukowsky; his stories should make you cry, but you're too busy laughing.
— Leo M.J. Aurini (@Aurini) October 26, 2014
Uh, you spelled Bukowski wrong. But you’re right about one thing: I’m laughing.
A lot of…is simply.
Waiting for all the abuse for “fake gamer girls”, including women who, er, are actually gamers, games creators, games fans since way back, being turned on this dudbro (ah, was intending to type dudebro but I like it better as it is) who states openly that he pretty much doesn’t play games at all.
Waiting….
Still waiting…
Why should a blatant misogynist who has no interest in video games get involved in a video game movement that has nothing to do with blatant misogyny.
Clearly a false flag.
Considering I’m on twitter specifically for feminism and weird twitter (that’s even what is in my bio) I’m happy to discover that they are working together to bug these guys.
Viscaria, you made me LOL 🙂
Every time I see what one of the shit-on-a-stick misogynists really looks like, I’m astounded at their mental disconnect with reality and their sense of innate superiority, what they think they’re entitled to as far as women go, and their belief that they should be making all decisions about what women should be and what their lives should be like.
Fucking. Hilarious. They couldn’t make bigger fools of themselves if they tried.
Matt Forney, is raging without anything going for him, other than a supportive family. But that’s not an accomplishment of his own creation. It’s not something he could nurture and grow into a point of pride when he’s 40.
He took many if those videos and posts down now, but in the beginning, Forney shared being unhappy with every aspect of his life: his body, job prospects, absence of sex/romance, inability to start and/or finish projects, ect.. He raged agains the government and the older generations. He raged against the bullies of his youth. In a touching post, Matt talked about his awkward shyness and inability to even say “hi” to one of his favorite musicians after waiting for a long time to do just that, and how that relates to his inability to talk to girls. In the beginning, he wrote a lot about wanting to be important, special, talented and famous.
It doesnt look like he has a plan. It doesnt look like he’s made much progress. He seems to be stuck without much hope for the future.
@proxieme: I don’t have a daughter so I wouldn’t be able to tweet a pic of her. Were you intending to address someone else? The closest I have to a daughter is a female cat.
Just do yourselves a favour & block Matt Forney’s twitter. Don’t feed this troll.
Well, her suicide *was* the result of mental anguish and physical/emotional trauma. Not sure what kind of ‘changes to her upbringing’ would prevent the end result.. Unless one is referring to adjusting the surrounding culture we live in, or, you know, not being raped.
I’m a terrible person. I know this. But I wish people who so nonchalantly harp on suicides were forced to endure inescapable, unrelenting depression or ubiquitous and invasive social ostracism. I’d love to see how THEY fare in the circumstances of the victims they so readily call weak.
“GamerGate provides a rare example of rats climbing aboard a sinking ship.”
I suspect these people are so delusional that they either think the ship isn’t sinking so fast that they can’t get off or they believe they’re boarding The Flying Dutchman, so they’ll have eternal undeath to look forward to as they travel beneath the waves. Even if they’re somewhat rational, they may be so unable to resist a cargo of potential followers that they can’t restrain themselves from boarding. There’s nothing like the lure of a flock of fresh marks to attract con men.
Today I have read Forney’s “How To Beat Your Girlfriend Or Wife And Get Away With It” and watched it disprove itself. (Still waiting for it to vanish in a puff of logic.)
Here’s the key:
“if you spank her for specific infractions, you’ll gradually program her to stop doing things that displease you, in the same way a child learns why sticking a fork into an electrical outlet is not smart. Females are infinitely malleable, and with time and effort, you can mold any girl into precisely what you want.”
Infinitely malleable.
Any girl.
Any.
Into precisely what you want.
Precisely.
What you want.
(And the essay makes clear that ‘she will never report you’.)
If this were true, actually true, really true, provably true, then the mean scary feminist women would still be around why? Only because men want them to be, I am forced to assume.
In the words of the immortal Bill Paxton as ‘Hudson’ in Aliens, “That’s it, man. Game over, man. Game over!”
Now I don’t know whether to feel sorry for him or laugh at him. On paper he pisses me off, but once I see him in action I can’t decide whether to laugh or to pity.