Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos is less a journalist than a professional attention-seeker, building up his notoriety (and his Twitter followers) though an endless series of calculated outrages designed to delight his fanbase of garbage people while offending pretty much everyone else in the world. But even he seems to have gotten bored with this increasingly stale schtick.
His latest attempt at outrage — a Breitbart post titled “Why Women Should Leave The Internet” — is so predictable and pro-forma I wonder if he simply farmed the whole thing out to his alleged army of interns. Or cut and pasted it from some 4chan thread. It’s Internet Outrage by the numbers.
Milo and/or his minions start out with an old chestnut, sniping at women for allegedly “invading” the allegedly male spaces on the Internet.
Time for some honesty. Women are — and you won’t hear this anywhere else — screwing up the internet for men by invading every space we have online and ruining it with attention-seeking and a needy, demanding, touchy-feely form of modern feminism that quickly comes into conflict with men’s natural tendency to be boisterous, confrontational and delightfully autistic.
“You won’t hear this anywhere else?” Actually, you’ll hear it everywhere else.
Here’s my suggestion to fix the gender wars online: Women should just log off.
Aw, but Milo, then who would your fans have left to harass?
Given that men built the internet, along with the rest of modern civilisation, I think it’s only fair that they get to keep it.
We Hunted the Mammoth to Feed … Ourselves?
And given what a miserable time women are having on the web, surely they would welcome an abrupt exit. They could go back to bridge tournaments, or wellness workshops, or swapping apple crumble recipes, or whatever it is women do in their spare time.
I guess we have to give him a point for not mentioning cats in his hackneyed list of Dumb Lady Things That Dumb Ladies Like Because They’re Dumb.
I, Donald Trump and the rest of the alpha males will continue to dominate the internet without feminist whining. It will be fun! Like a big fraternity, with jokes and memes and no more worrying about whether an off-colour but harmless remark will suddenly torpedo your career.
And this would be different from the currently existing internet how?
Milo and other right-wingers love to go on about how “political correctness” is killing free speech, even as they make careers out of spouting “politically incorrect” blather designed to appeal to the Internet’s worst people. Meanwhile, harassers of women worry so little about having their careers “torpedoed” by saying something offensive online that they often post literal death threats under their own names.
Milo goes on to suggest that women should get their own separate-and-unequal internet, adding that “[w]e could probably throw in all of the low-T male feminists too, since they haven’t got any balls anyway.”
Evidently in Miloland this counts as some kind of EPIC BURN.
Apparently afraid he hasn’t offended enough people, Milo tosses in this random swipe at trans folks:
Transgender people won’t be able to use the internet at all because they won’t know which ethernet cable to plug in, but they’re generally too busy hacking away at their forearms to remember to check Gmail.
Oh, Milo, this is just plain embarrassing.
DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT.
H/T — Thanks to @JoeKlemmer for the tip.
Oh get a life Milo! And learn a bit of science history, it’s not difficult to pick up a book and read. *major eye rolling*
Lichen Craig,
Please explain how this is irony. Milo and his fans are pro harassment and have a long history of using the tactic as a means of silencing women. Even if he’s being hyperbolic in an attempt to be funny, it’s not irony.
It would be irony if a feminist blogger suggested men are too fragile for the internet and should leave it because the sight of online feminists is so upsetting to them that they throw tantrums. It would be ironic because feminists aren’t the ones trying to harass an entire gender away from public discourse.
It can’t be called irony or satire if you really believe what you’re saying.
I think Milo is trying to write (or cut-and-paste, as you will) satire, in a Jonathan Swift-y sort of way, but he hasn’t the talent. He can’t even resist explaining the gag at the end. I suppose that he had some concern that his readership wouldn’t get it.
@ Lichen –
What Milo did was, at best, hyperbole, sweetiemuffin. “Verbal irony” is when a person means the opposite of what they say. “Hyperbole” is when you exaggerate a perception or position in order to stir up more intense emotion than what you know honesty will achieve.
Don’t you feel better and smarter now? I’m glad we had this time together.
Milo the misogynist should be his new name now.
Kurt Vonnegut had these “ironic” jackholes pegged 55 years ago: “We are what we pretend to be.”
I live every day of my life infinitely, divinely grateful that I do not live burdened as this man so obviously is. He just seems to live in a hell of his own making.
http://boingboing.net/2012/06/03/nyt-men-invented-the-inter.html
Thanks, but…
Milo is more entertaining when he’s calling Drumpf “Daddy”. Doing those copy and paste daddy memes and turning them Drumpf would create a better reaction than the playground “No Girls Allowed” shit here.
This reminds me of the neighbor I had who got upset that I parked on the street between our two houses and so he blocked my car in (he intentionally parked in the street in a way that made it impossible for me to get my car out). I woke him up at 5:30 am to move his car so I could get to work and told him next time I would have him towed. I pointed out that there was plenty of other parking available on the street (there were maybe 3 cars parked on the street and tons of open spaces) and he pointedly said, “yes, there is” like he expected me to park elsewhere when I get there first.
I’m pretty sure trans people are well aware of their gender.
And you know what? I think I can actually support a segregated internet.
Though, I support Milo and his fellow Trump-Thumpers on one internet, and the rest of us on another.
Viscaria, you are badass awesome. That is all.
i, my best friend, and my brother are all varying degrees of autistic, and i think we’re all in agreement that it is indeed delightful (despite all its drawbacks)!
Did anybody else happen to notice Milo’s and Juicebro’s pathetic attempt at making the hasthag #MiloGirlsBreakTheInternet trend last week? Milo encouraged female fans to tweet pictures of themselves with the hashtag. On June 30, about 10 women participated, including a Swedish teenage nazi. After that, the hashtag was immediately abandoned. So, there are 10 women in the world who don’t hate Milo?
Ive been openly trans online for a while and have seen plenty of bullying and hate, but this is the first time Ive heard that we are all hacking at our arms? Is that a reference to self injury or what?
Indeed.
IP – you’ve called our friend Lichen Craig out too soon. I wanted to know exactly what point MY was making that went over my head.
Is it that women are complaining too much about internet harassment and the slim irony was just to ‘log off’, when he really meant for them to just actually log off and shut up.
I’m going to repeat the quote from above.
But I’m a little hungover – so maybe I really have missed something.
“It’s irony! It’s satire! It’s out of context!” they cry as they’re called out on the horrible things they spew. Always without explanation, always without considering that maybe the people they’re trying to convince might actually know what those words mean. It’s almost more like a reflex at this point, like those people whose first reaction to being called out on racism or sexism is to accuse the person calling them out of being the actual racist/sexist.
I’d be more interested in his ludicrous proposal if it included suggestions on how, practically speaking, the various internets would be segregated. how do you prove to the bro-net that you’re really a dude? is there a socket you have to stick your dick into?
But…I don’t feel it’s natural for me to be any of those things! Especially not delightfully autistic. I personally prefer being a decent human being but that’s apparently not manly enough.
Surely his fans must be annoyed that he’d pigeonhole them in such a stereotypical way right?
Right? 🙁
@Viscaria
Can I steal this insult?
Am I parsing this wrong or are you implying these are mutually exclusive?
Do we need to explain to Lichen Crag the difference between “punching up” and “punching down” while we’re at it?
While we’re naming women who contributed to computers and the internet … how about Hedy Lamarr?
Lichen Craig wrote:
I fully agree. Milo was not being ironic (as it seems you are unaware, that’s what the scare quotes you used imply).
Also, it’s pretty rich for someone who thinks that kids should be taught that climate change is a hoax to tell others that they are “censoring science”.
On the subject of humor: liberals are way, way funnier than conservatives. The difference between punching up and punching down is enormous. Laughing at someone saying something that is simultaneously extremely bigoted and extremely stupid is cathartic. It’s a way to cope with hatred that avoids returning it in kind.
Laughing at “SJWs” and transgender people self-harming and committing suicide is just dark. It’s a way to enjoy wishing death upon people you disagree with politically — an excuse to justify the worst kind of othering impulse. If you find that kind of thing funny, you’re kind of a bad person.
I get tired of people using irony to describe hyperbole.