By David Futrelle
On Sunday, the Australian “Fortnite” streamer known as MrDeadMoth was arrested after inadvertently broadcasting an argument with his wife that ended with him — just off camera — allegedly hitting her in the face while one of their children screamed in the background.
Naturally, some of the internet’s worst people are defending him and blaming his wife for “provoking” him into hitting her.
“MrDeadMoth didn’t do anything Wrong,” declared someone calling himself Burrito6920 on Reddit’s UnpopularOpinion subreddit.
Let’s say he did hit her. Guess what, she fucking deserves it. She’s a loud, shitty wife. She throws shit at him and acts like she’s more important than him. If your man tells you to leave him the fuck alone, you leave him the fuck alone. … If he hit her it can be justified as self defense from her verbal and physical harassment.
And even if it’s not legally justifiable, she’s a fucking bitch. Just because she’s pregnant doesn’t make her better than or special over anybody else. … [A]ny person that’s that much of a c*nt needs to be taught not to be such a c*nt.
While this opinion has indeed proven to be an unpopular one on r/UnpopularOpinion, with other Redditors voting the post down to zero, similar arguments have been getting a much more welcoming reception on KotakuInAction, Reddit’s main forum for reactionary gamers, a subreddit that still officially describes itself as “the main hub for GamerGate on Reddit.”
“She was abusing and violent towards him,” someone called Gathrax asserted in a comment in a KotakuInACtion discussion of the incident.
Everything she did was to make it sound as bad as possible on stream. This was classic female vindictive abuse.
They both suck but I am sick of people saying it was his fault when all he did was a simple Sean Connery to get her to stop abusing him and maybe even abusing the kid.
This comment got 77 upvotes from fellow KotakuInAction readers.
“I don’t want to say she’s ‘asking for it’ but she’s basically asking for it,” another commenter called tosi-ebin opined.
A classic case of “how long can my man take abuse and try and de-escalate the situation before he loses his shit”. The “crying” stops real quick and she comes back for more each time.
Tosi-ebin got 38 upvotes for this, er, wisdom.
“Ladies, at this point, can we all just admit that an ass whoopin’ just doesn’t fall out of the goddamn sky?” wrote yet another KotakuInAction commenter called astonwave.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re both horrible fucking people for putting their child in this situation, but she essentially instigated this by throwing shit at him, and people are surprised he’d had enough and retaliated?
A commenter called spliffcitycanada joked “Save yourselves, go mgtow.”
All of these comments also got upvoted by the KotakuInAction gang.
Meanwhile, over on the internet Nazi tip sheet the Daily Stormer, one of the site’s regular contributors offered a strikingly similar, if somewhat more colorfully worded, defense of the alleged wife beater — then worked some anti-Semitism into the mix.
“Twitch Streamer MrDeadMoth Arrested for Defending Self Against Hysterical Aggressive Fronthole” the headline blared.
In the article itself, the Daily Stormer’s “Luis Castillo” attacked the wife for not being properly appreciative of her husband.
“This man apparently gave this woman a place to live and have kids, and bought her some food for her to cook for him, which she cooked as a service to him,” he wrote.
Then she went full aggro on him for not eating the food she made for him. …
Women will do any sort of shit they can get away with. This used to not even be a problem, because our grandfathers used to not let them get away with stupid shit. This continues to not be a problem outside of the West, because non-Westerners continue to not let their women get away with stupid shit.
This is only a problem in the West, now, because the Jews created Feminism and pushed it on us through their control of our cultural institutions and legal system.
Most of the Daily Stormers commenters agreed.
“This is the perfect example of a psycho wife using psychological assault,” declared a commenter called ashenone.
“The pimp-slap heard aroud the world” someone calling himself Xbowjoe1 joked.
“He should have fucking punched her in the mouth and locked her in a room and told her to think about what she did,” declared bossn*gger.
But not every Daily Stormer commenter was quite so impressed with MrDeadMoth. Someone called Alt-Reich attacked him as a “f*ggot” — not for beating his wife, but for playing video games in the first place.
That guys is a fucking f*g and a disgrace as a dad, how many hours has he been playing that game …
[A]re you seriously defending this f*ggot! A lot of men seem to know all there is about how fucked up women are now (they are), but they need to take a good look in the mirror, because they too have become absolute disgraces as Men…
Jews own most guys now, they have fucked up the men as much as the women … .
It shouldn’t be much of a shock to see commenters on Reddit’s “main hub for GamerGate” in close agreement with Daily Stormer Nazis — that last anti-gamer comment notwithstanding.
The Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin cut his political teeth — and learned how to troll — in the fetid misogynistic and anti-Semitic swamp that is 4chan’s /pol/ board. 4chan also helped to birth the GamerGate movement and the reactionary gamer culture left in its wake; GamerGate was steeped in fascist (and often blatantly antisemitic) imagery even before the resurgence of the far-right in 2015 and 2016.
Of course, during the heyday of GamerGate, commenters on KotakuInAction at least generally tried to pretend that they weren’t raging misogynists. They don’t seem to feel the need to bother any more.
You can see the whole incident these lovely people are arguing about here.
H/T — Thanks to Twitter’s @0utofBeta for tipping me off about this.
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I’m sorry, everyone. Please keep this thread going. Don’t end it.
Good start.
And fumbled.
I’m not entirely sure, but I think there are at least a few neuroatypical regulars here.
In any case, if you want to understand, ask questions, like in that first quote block. And…refraining from accusing people of ganging up on you is probably a good idea too. That second quote block is called blame-shifting.
Being atyp in a neurotyp world is hard.
@Spukikitty,
Take a nice couple of measured breaths, have some water, calm down a bit, my duck. Kitty. Duck. Animal-of-choice. You feel strongly about this, for good reason. And that’s okay! You’re not saying that people have to fight back, you’re saying that you want them to fight back. You’re saying it strongly.
The issue, sadly, is that an opinion, voiced strongly, is basically the same as a directive as far as communication is concerned. It relies on the audience accepting that anger and dealing with it, managing it, and recognizing that the anger isn’t part of the message. It’s just the volume.
When someone gets upset, angry, loud in volume, etc, it’s a typical thing for a community to retract a bit. It’s nothing to do with a clique, It’s out of a desire to avoid conflict.
I’ll be more direct. Expressed anger clouds what you mean to say. Puts readers on the defensive, even if they aren’t the target of the anger. The expression of anger itself is enough to trigger that response. It makes your words seem more confrontational than you intend, and makes readers think that you are confronting them, even if you aren’t.
That’s not just advice for you. It’s advice for me, too. My last name here means “freedom from anger”, and it’s more a reminder to myself than it is any sort of description of who I am. Not yet, at least.
Your anger is important and shouldn’t be bottled. That’s not healthy. Your anger is valid, and shouldn’t be denigrated. That’s unfair. Just try to avoid mixing them, if you can. I’ve walked that road, and it’s not easy, but it’s crucial in making sure people understand what you mean to say, and not just the words as written.
I am a little drunk so this is more rambly than it needs to be but you’re all gettin it raw and unfiltered. Mea culpa.
EDIT: I lied, i done an edit. hahahaha!
@Rhuu
Yup, we’ve had this exact same discussion with Spukikitty before. Seems like it’s going to be a reoccuring event:
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2017/09/07/check-out-my-the-cut-piece-on-betsy-devos-and-her-terrible-campus-rape-announcement/comment-page-2/#comment-1652301
@Megi Stardust
Uh, no. That’s not how humans work. There’s more wrong in your statement than I can unpack in a reasonable amount of time, though. Suffice to say that humans don’t breed true. Also, given the sex ratio in most human populations, you’d need to persuade a load of unattached men that they mustn’t have sex or form relationships with tough, strong, single women who want families.
Patriarchy is very effective on a social/cultural level, but don’t confuse that with population genetics.
There’s also the minor little matter that if men did select exclusively weak women, the effect would be to create a selective pressure for weak humans, not weak women. Most genes influencing physical strength and the like are on autosomes and almost nothing important is on the Y, the only sex-exclusive chromosome, save for SRY. Select against genes that increase strength and you breed weaker offspring, period.
In simpler language, you can’t really breed for one sex to have specific traits because all humans share a common gene pool.
That being said, sexual dimorphism happens, though there’s little of it in humans away from the genitals/breasts/overall-body-shape area. It’s a long and involved evolutionary road to get such dimorphism. Even thousands of years of selective breeding is unlikely to produce significantly different dimorphism in a species, other than maybe to tweak an already-dimorphic trait. Maybe millions of years could.
Somewhat related: A site I read posted a link to this 5-minutes-into-the-future short story. It’s a bit hard to describe without spoileration but think maybe Black Mirror except considerably more upbeat & very much exploring the idea of abusers operating in an age of ubiquitous surveillance. (Content warning for some descriptions of sexual violence)
Well I found one of those citations
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1077801206294807
The other one (where women underestimated their physical strength, and men overestimated) has been utterly buried beneath a mountain of MRA broscience rants and obesity opinion articles.
This is why I used to download copies or summaries of studies I saw, cause crucial information has a habit of going “missing” from google.
@Jane Done
Thank you, and ugh. Kind of like what happened with stuff appearing to confirm huge male/female brain differences vs. stuff contradicting that.
@Jesalin
Yeah, I’m autistic, or at least outwardly close enough that it’s shaped my experiences of trauma and exploitation through my entire life. It has not been a fun trip. To this day predatory people, especially men, will notice my social awkwardness etc. and assume they can just freely mess with my head without consequences. (And get disgustingly offended when I call them on it.)
Edit: TBH I think I’ve met more autistic or otherwise non-NT trans folks than NT.
@Cyborgette:
It is something that’s not gone unnoticed by TERFs either, who’ve used it to insinuate that autistic or non-NT teens are somehow being peer-pressured into transitioning and are not mentally competent to make this decision for themselves. Or they’re just broken. You know, just to add a soupçon of ableism to the already foul stew that is TERFism. ?
(It seems quite logical to me because people with autism spectrum disorders often have difficulty reading social cues and basically have to consciously perform many social rituals that come unconsciously to neurotypical people; so they are better placed to know when their gender “performance” doesn’t accord with their biology– if you accept Judith Butler’s theories of gender as a performative construct. Which I think I do, or at least my five-minutes-on-Wikipedia understanding of them ?)
He has previous form:
There’s some bonus grossness to this whole story if you do a little math. Deadmoth is 26 and his wife is 21. Their oldest child is 3. That means that she was almost certainly pregnant when she was 17 and he was 22! And presumably their relationship existed for at least some time before that, which makes it seem an awful lot like he was grooming an underage girl.