You may recall how Christina Hoff Sommers, right-wing think tanker and longtime pseudofeminist, was transformed into the idolized “Based Mom” after she cannily jumped aboard the #GamerGate train and started going to events with noted ethical journalist Milo Yiannopoulos?
Now GamerGaters and Anime Nazis and other elements of the Internet’s Trump-loving sh*tlord army are turning on the woman they thought was one of the cool girls.
Sommers’ crime?
She signed a petition in support of Michelle Fields, the former Breitbarter who lost her job after being manhandled by Donald Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski at a Trump event.
Sommers’ fans — well, ex-fans, really — aren’t taking it well.
Those were some of the more polite reactions.
Others were a bit more, er, blunt.
But not everyone has deserted this Jewish agent of Lucifer. Sommers has managed to hold on to the endorsement of at least one influential Tweeter.
It’s almost touching.
Thanks for the well wishes, all. It’s not a huge problem, just an irritating rash around my lower lip. I’ve seen the doctor, he said it was most likely just a form of herpes that popped up due to stress. Apparently I’ve had the herps floating around in my system ever since I had chickenpox and it can morph into other strains while in your body, so yeah. He’s prescribed a weeks worth of pills that he said should knock it out of the park, but that I should keep an eye on my stress/tiredness levels to avoid it flaring up again.
@K ” Oh, come on, you know feMRAs only do it because they have a bad case of Stockholm syndrome. They do it because they want male attention – from abusive assholes.”
It’s more likely that women become FeMRAs after seeing this kind of attitude from Feminists. There’s a great lie in FeMRA circles that MRAS are open minded and encourage discourse. Ha! These fake twitter face heel turns on the part of “teh men’s rights” are another reminder that the only loyalty these guys show is towards misogyny. I could hope that FeMRAs view this as a wake up call, but I’m not holding my breath.
Remember, MRAs have many good debate points. They wouldn’t be half as dangerous if they couldn’t wrap their toxic misogyny up inside of legitimate issues; such as the emotional abuse of men, or male circumcision. Telling women that care about these issues, (or for that matter women that vote for Bernie Sanders), that they are only doing so in order to gain male attention, is a form of toxic misogyny *all in itself*.
@EJ
Yep, same goes for Milo Yiannopoulos and (since he’s appeared in the post) Mike Cernovich – both who were incredibly dismissive of videogames and those who played them…until GG became a bastion for anti-feminist right-wingers.
Thanks for the well wishes, all. It’s not a huge problem, just an irritating rash around my lower lip. I’ve seen the doctor, he said it was most likely just a form of herpes that popped up due to stress. Apparently I’ve had the herps floating around in my system ever since I had chickenpox”
Shingles? Ouch. I know people who have had that, and I had to get tested to make sure I was immune, because I was pregnant and apparently you can catch chicken pox from Shingles. They said that the rash burned like hell.
Well, come on! Men don’t have copulins at their disposal — what else are they supposed to do? /s
On a related note, I think someone mentioned in the Paul Elam retirement thread how MGTOW videos are even more difficult to make it through than MRA videos. S*ndman videos are the embodiment of this to me. I tried to watch the “Vagina Monsters” video that’s linked in the above WHTM post, and I think I made it about a minute before I had to turn it off, lest I start screaming, “Why are you ending every single sentence that same way?!?” and try to gouge out my eardrums.
@mrex
I don’t think it’s shingles since I’ve never had spots/rashes that appeared in a line, which is a key characteristic of that disease. I HAVE had acne/blotchy face ever since chickenpox though (I had pristine skin before then) which might have something to do with the pox/herpes virus in some way – if I go solely by timing. If it is, I guess it might go down with the pills as well, who knows.
@NickNameNick:
Your point is a good one. It’s terrifying how little integrity some people have.
Given that Milo Yiannopoulos is in fact the pseudonym under which a collective of monkeys publish the results of their typewriter-banging, I’m hardly surprised that he’s capable of pirouetting his attitudes.
Thanks for expressing what I’ve been feeling but unable to articulate.
I also don’t think, at all, that FeMRAs get into the gig because they’re afraid of MRAs and are using protective camouflage, which is another idea I’ve seen bounced around here on multiple occasions. I have no doubt that when a FeMRA is contemplating leaving the movement, she’s going to take into consideration the way she’s seen other women treated as she’s mulling over her options. That’s really different from saying that she was taking that into consideration when getting into the scene in the first place, which I don’t think is actually a thing that happens amongst the women around AVFM. If JB were afraid of MRAs and trying not to run afoul of their wrath, the easiest way to do that would have been for her to not actually get involved with them in the first place, not to snuggle up to them and pretend to be one of them, and make sure all of them knew what she looked like. I just don’t see how this explanation makes actual real-world sense.
On of their champions is literally 40 people with no identify and pay.
Ethics in ghostwriting indeed.
@sunnysombrera – I had shingles right after giving birth to my 3rd kiddo (no sleep + nursing problems + work stress + people not paying their frikkin’ rent in the place we were renting out b/c we were upsidedown in it = quite physically and emotionally stressed) and it wasn’t in a straight line. It was more of an awful bloom that started under my armpit and then encircled my trunk.
Either way, whatever you have going on sucks!
Good luck with it.
Remember not to scratch.
I read the first few and thought, “I got the misogyny but where is the random anti-semitic comment.” It’s like having toast without the butter.
Luckily a brave twit reminded us that “Then again, she is a jew.” World restored. Thanks brave internet crusader. Thanks.
I love how you all are pacifically and rationally talking about David’s article and the various issues with the manusphere while Mark’s mantrum on page 2 was completely ignored.
@Tizio
Who? Oh that guy didn’t even notice him.
@Tizio
His comment must have only just made it past moderation after several more comments were published beneath his, which tends to be how the system works. It’s too far back to bother with now, and he’s only spewing ridiculous strawmen that we’ve combated a thousand times before.
Meh I say. Meeeehhhhhhhh.
I went back and looked at Mark’s comment and now want to be compensated for the seconds of my life I spent on that cliche-fest.
http://i.imgur.com/MpI5tHI.gif
@ Everyone
Sorry for posting such a creepy link. Maybe I should have put a TW. I’ll be more careful next time. 🙁
@Freemage
Youtube appears to have a similar algorithm. If I watch a feminist video, I’ll get a bunch of “why Feminist are total [insert slur here]” suggestions. I got so frustrated. I ended up finding an app that blocks specific YT channels in order to get rid of all the Sargon/Amazing Atheist type MRA garbage from my suggestions. It’s just called “Video Blocker”, and if you have Chrome I highly recommend it. To bad it doesn’t work on the entire internet.
In a different thread David had mention that there should not be any PUA type ads on the site so I just thought to point it out in case something can be done? I’m new to the site so I wasn’t sure if there was a procedure (other than just complaining about it like I did).
Re: the ads thing
If PUA ads appear on sites where there’s no target audience to click on them does that mean they’re wasted? Not sure how they work but, horrible as people may find them, aren’t we acting as decoys to draw their fire so they expend ad revenue fruitlessly and reducing the chances of the ads appearing somewhere where they might entice people?
@Alan
That’s an excellent point…but I for one still don’t want to see ads of scantily clad women with an offer of learning how to “bypass the female brain” or “activate her inner slut with this one trick!” Given that this blog frequently touches on the subject of rape culture, I’d just rather not see a live example that’s presented with a positive spin.
What a pointless article and waste of everyone’s time.
Such a waste of your time that you had to spend more of it telling us what a waste of time it is, huh Xarael?
Cute. Run along and play now.
Is Mark another Jamie/Aris sock? One of them did also say feminism was cancer.
Xarael is, going by his picture, a set of male genitalia that goes running. I wonder where he finds tiny running shoes.
@Mrex:
While I agree with your overall sentiment about being presumptuous about why FeMRAs are FeMRAs, I do take issue with one or two comments…
I doubt a woman would become a FeMRA that easily – besides, different schools of thought in Feminism disagree with one another and still consider themselves Feminists – because, based on observation alone, a lot of it stems more from personal incidents and their negative attitudes towards other women was there well before they considered themselves FeMRAs. Though, in my opinion, being incredibly misinformed/ignorant about gender politics and gullibility exacerbate that process.
That said, it is often difficult to believe their anecdotes as to why they ended up becoming FeMRAs because, as Andrea Hardie/Janet Bloomfeld has shown, they’re often prone to obfuscation to make their case sound convincing or visceral enough to have an emotional appeal.
For example, many of them love to bring up the roving gangs of Dworkinites that roam every university campus to start violent arguments for no reason at all. I’m generally not one to dismiss the personal experience of others – but it’s fishy as fuck when something is made out to be ubiquitous and you never come across it even once. Plus, the only time I hear about is over the internet and no where else.
Perhaps I’m being really nitpicky, but I wouldn’t call them “good” as much as “disingenuous.”
A lot of MRAs like to bring up circumcision and male victims of domestic abuse, which are legitimate problems, as rhetorical ammunition against Feminists and more specifically women than because they’re truly concerned about those issues.
The other thing is their dismissal of nuance and insistence that, say, prevalence of female-on-male rape should be equal to that of male-on-female rape…which is ridiculous. Men being raped is horrible, especially when prisons make it such a likelihood yet people make jokes about it, but acting as if it is as commonplace as women being raped has less to do with fact than it does demanding validation and confirmation bias.
There was a troll here, not too long ago, who equated his being circumcised as an infant as important as having policies put into law that restrict women from having control over their own reproductive health. The fact he thought that is part of the problem, because it assumes that – when women talk about gender issues – perceived infractions against men still somehow take priority over the disproportionate treatment of women have faced throughout history and even now. Of course, they think that’s “true equality” but these are the same people who think they’re “rational” even when having emotional meltdowns.
@POM
“Thanks for expressing what I’ve been feeling but unable to articulate.”
Thanks. It’s something that’s been bothering me for a long while in different contexts myself, and I’m still struggling to articulate it. And sometimes I do it myself! Blerg. Internalized misogyny is the worst, and any freedom I gain from it feminism’s greatest gift to me.
@Nick
“I doubt a woman would become a FeMRA that easily”
You’d be surprised. Girls are already raised to view other women with suspicion. Even if this attitude is waning as feminism becomes increasingly “mainstream”, if a young girl’s early experiences towards feminism are full of hypocritical misogyny, it’s a huge loss of trust.
The problem with the quote wasn’t that she oversimplified, it was that she relied on misogynistic stereotypes to oversimplify. FeMRAs are FeMRAs because they care about MRA issues. Full Stop.
Now, I think that FeMRAs are going about solving those issues all wrong, but to *assume* that FeMRAs really have Stockholm syndrome, or that they’re really only boy crazy, or that they really are too stupid and fickle, or too disingenuous, to mean what they say, is the exact same sexist bullshit that misogynist’s use to dismiss women as “fakes”.
Women are fake geeks.
Women are fake scientists.
Women are fake FeMRAs.
Fuck that noise.
” There was a troll here, not too long ago, who equated his being circumcised as an infant as important as having policies put into law that restrict women from having control over their own reproductive health. The fact he thought that is part of the problem, because it assumes that – when women talk about gender issues – perceived infractions against men still somehow take priority over the disproportionate treatment of women have faced throughout history and even now.”
I missed this troll, so perhaps I’m missing something important, but I’m inclined to think, “so what?” Everyone has things that are very important to them, usually things that hit close to home. Trolly may be obnoxiously entitled for filling up a feminist space with his man problems, but circumcision being a big deal ™ ; doesn’t take time or energy away from feminist issues unless we allow it to by playing Oppression Olympics with trolls. 😉
Or lets put it this way. There are huge consent issues surrounding non-religious male circumcision. It’s not my place, or your place, to decide how important this is for others.
Sommers must be feeling down and trawling for pity, because she just retweeted a thing I posted making fun of her FOUR MONTHS AGO and now my feed is full of MRAs rushing to her rescue.
I’m not even kidding. It is magical.