By David Futrelle
Reductress, if you don’t already know, is kind of a feminist Onion, poking gentle fun at women’s magazines, clickbaity “inspirational” web sites aimed at women, and the feminism-ultra-lite that permeates women’s media generally. Gleefully absurdist, its headlines (and the news stories that accompany them) are easily spotted as the parodies they are.
These are the sorts of headlines you’ll find there on any given day:
So yeah, pretty obviously NOT REAL HEADLINES.
At least obvious to most people. Not so much when the people in question are proud Men Going Their Own Way and the headline involves vaginas. Last year, you see, Reductress posted a fake story titled “Wow! This Woman Stood Up to Gender Norms By Naming Her Son ‘Vagina,’” and MGTOWs lost their shit.
The mod of one MGTOW page on Facebook posted this a couple of months ago, with the lovely caption “C*NT…feminists HATE MEN. #MGTOW”
Naturally, other dudes chimed in with their similarly furious takes on this terrible injustice to the poor (imaginary ) child and men in general.
Now there were a few commenters wise enough to realize that the headline was probably a joke; several even pointed out that Reductress is a satire site. But that didn’t stop the assembled angry dudes from raging, and raging, and raging some more.
These aren’t cherry-picked comments; these are almost all of the comments in the thread, minus a handful that were boring or redundant.
Antifeminsits love to mock feminists as easily outraged, humorless “snowflakes.” But, seriously, hell hath no fury like a MGTOW who doesn’t get the joke. And they never get the joke.
I can’t believe this discussion of sf&f and trying to recommend progressive authors has gone on this long without any mention of Greg Egan…