By David Futrelle
Porn actress Mercedes Carrera was enthusiastically embraced by the Gamergate crowd after she spoke out in favor of the journalism ethics movement misogynistic harassment campaign in its heyday back in 2014.
She was regularly celebrated on Kotaku in Action, Reddit’s main Gamergate hub, won lavish praise from prominent Gamergates like Mike Cernovich, and even made an appearance in the star-crossed Gamergate “documentary” The Sarkeesian Effect. She once described herself as “the waifu #GamerGate deserves.”
But it wasn’t only Gamergates who embraced her and her reactionary, antifeminist politics. As Jared Holt notes in an article on Right Wing Watch, Carrera
was the subject of glowing articles from right-wing media at the time, landing flattering features at The Daily Caller and Breitbart, and appearing on programs hosted by right-wing media figures who supported Gamergate, including Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and Infowars personality Paul Joseph Watson.
The Daily Caller piece was especially effusive in its praise. “Carrera talks fast and thinks fast,” gushed writer Patrick Bissett.
She sees patterns and connections far quicker than the average person, an ability she attributes to her Asperger’s syndrome.
The article concludes by declaring that “wherever the name Gamergate is mentioned, the name Mercedes Carrera won’t be too far behind.”
Now that she and her porn director boyfriend Jason Whitney (known in the business as Daemon Cins) have been arrested and charged with multiple counts of sexually abusing a child under the age of 10, many of the people who became her fans because of Gamergate are channeling Mariah Carey, pretending that Carrera was never really a big part of the movement and “wondering” why anyone is even talking about Gamergate in 2019 anyway?
The charges against Carrera are serious indeed: she and her boyfriend are accused of repeatedly abusing her 9-year-old daughter over a four-month period. Police say they found evidence corroborating the girl’s accusations during their search of the house, alongside meth and two loaded handguns. Police also say there may be more victims.
Carrera, in a statement, has proclaimed her innocence, saying that the accusations are a ploy by the girls’s father, and Carrera’s ex-partner, to gain custody of the girl. “The charges are absolutely false and horrifying,” she wrote, “and a last ditch effort to keep me from contact with my daughter for the rest of my life.”
While many of her longtime fans (or perhaps now former fans) are holding out hope that she’s telling the truth, their support for her has been largely limited to bland restatements of the phrase “innocent until proven guilty.”
They are a little less inhibited when it comes to denying that she was ever really a big-name Gamergater at all. Which is utter nonsense
During Gamergate, and for several years afterwards, the regulars on the Kotaku In Action subreddit frequently celebrated her as a woman “who gets it” in threads with titles like Mercedes Carrera drops a couple of truth bombs and Mercedes Carrera tells SJWs to F OFF!
One of her fans in the latter thread raved:
Another added:
Now, though, many Kotaku in Action regulars are acting like they barely know who she is.
These are all from a single thread; there are more.
Meanwhile, alt-lite conspiracymonger and former Gamergate celebrity Mike Cernovich — a Pizzagate promoter with a long history of baselessly smearing his opponents as pedophiles –has got to be even more embarrassed by his friendship with alleged child sexual abuser Carrera, whom he described in a 2015 blog post as “highly intelligent,” “strong and smart ,” and “thoughtful, intelligent, and fiercely independent.” (Cernovich could probably benefit from an editor, who might have removed a few of these redundancies.)
Now that this “thoughtful” woman has been arrested for allegedly doing the exact same horrific thing that Cernovich regularly accuses his opponents of doing, he has said not a word on the subject — and seems to have deleted any past Tweets he sent her way, though you can still see her side of the extensive discussions they appear to have had.
In his Daily Caller profile of the now-accused porn star, Bissett declared that “[p]ersonal responsibility is a defining motif for Carrera, and one she returns to repeatedly during our conversations.” Apparently Cernovich and Carrera’s many other former Gamergater fans don’t take personal responsibility any more seriously than Carrera herself seems to.
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Once again, I have to ask: do you think that these “certain patterns of thought and behavior” are biological imperatives, because I am picking up a very strong gender essentialist signal from your statements.
@OxytoSin
Citations, on the double.
Hmm. Complete rejection of agency, biological essentialism, women’s liberation as a biological struggle, and special pleading for child abusers who are women.
Hmmmmmm.
*mimes putting on my thinking cap*
Any bets on OxytoSin’s feelings re trans people?
That’s the whiff I’m getting, alright.
It is SO HARD living at the mercy of my biologically inherent violent instincts. Just thinking of all the times I didn’t want to violently attack people, but was forced to against my will be those hardwired imperatives.
What’s that? I’ve never assaulted anyone in my nearly forty years of life? Why, it’s almost as if people are in control of their own actions.
squint
[citation needed]
For someone whose screen name is a neuropeptide, you don’t seem to understand much about neuropeptides. For the audience:
our guest here is talking about creativity and perception, which is an incredibly complicated set of brain functions. The claim is that womz can’t creat or percept apparently, which is a pretty common claim but has no basis in reality. It’s just a smear used to justify the sexism. Moving on.
[citation needed]
For someone whose screen name is a neuropeptide, you don’t seem to understand much about neuropeptides. For the audience:
our guest here is talking about violence. The claim is that men can’t control their violence because they’re so gosh darn full of masculine manly testosterone. The womz better watch it or the mens can’t be held accountable! It’s standard abuser tactics.
Fun fact, we know a lot more about this than we do the first assertion. Violent behaviour is correlated to serotonin much more than it is testosterone. High serotonin is linked to aggression and violence, not testosterone. Moving on.
Oh good, an opinion and not an assertion. I can put the paddle away.
For the audience: What we have above is a double entendre, where the words “equality” and “liberation” are left hanging. Our guest is asserting (aw jees, it is an assertion) that feminism is in pursuit of complete equality in defiance of reality, and not that good old fashioned you know right-to-vote-and-work stuff of yesteryear. Our guest is ignoring the fact that seeking social equality is seeking liberation. In other words, dear guest, learn to word more better.
Yes, that would be a great idea! The women can move to an Utopian society underground, where they live in peaceful splendor and loving cooperation and men will turn into marauding gangs of raping murder-monsters on the surface, like our primitive killer-brains demand.
Apparently, one episode from Rick and Morty has become the basis of your gender-politics. And I thought the Senchuan-sauce thing was the low point of that phenomenon.
Wow, an actual lesbian separatist? Don’t see too many of them nowadays. Thankfully.
Some GGers have shown up on the previous page.
Where did anyone say it’s your fault? The post was just poking fun at GGers for pretending like you never knew her. That said, it’s hardly a surprise that someone in the movement is a child abuser given the affinity GGers have for anime teenagers.
No. Participating in a misogynistic harassment makes you the bad guys.
Pretending to not have ever known or associated with someone is not disavowing them. It’s sweeping things under the rug. And I don’t know who Sarah Nyberg is, but given the GG tendency to completely make things up about the women you don’t like, I’m going to reserve judgement until you come back with an elaboration and a citation.
Warning: Bad attempt at erudition ahead.
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes
I respect your thoroughness, but I humbly submit that you are misrepresenting our guest’s beliefs.
If we read the original statement in the context of the original comment that @OxytoSin posted,
And then the (sarcastic) reply by @TheKND
We then see that the statement
Rather than being
is to be read along the lines of “no woman can independently conceive or countenance the act of sexually abusing a child, because women are not programmed that way”.
Which is also patronizing, but oh so subtly different.
Similarly, the statement
is then to be read along the lines of “men are always the actual abusers, and by their violent instincts* they force women to be their unwilling accomplices”
*and, presumably, the threat of male violence
rather than
In light of the previous statement made by @OxytoSin that
I submit that we’re therefore not dealing with a manospherian, but a “gender realist”.
@Cat Mara
I don’t think that a lesbian separatist would have such little respect for the cognitive ability of women, honestly.
Here’s one:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_Gamergate_claims#Just_plain_old_libel
In other words, Sarah Nyberg got the James Gunn treatment (though, in the interests of accuracy, it should actually be “James Gunn got the Sarah Nyberg treatment”).
Yeah, I figured it was something like that and not something equivalent to actually sexually abusing a child.
Nyberg herself owned up to her shit at the time as opposed to trying to memory-hole it like GG are trying to do with Mercedes Carrera. This is the kind of weak sauce whatabouttery one can expect from GamerGate apologists, drawing a false equivalence between jokes about child abuse made by an edgy teen to allegations of actual child abuse committed by an adult. GTFO.
@Cyborgette
Yeah, that first comment from OxytoSin put me on edge right quick.
Y’all, I’m going to run out of popcorn if you keep this up.
Not complaining though.
Please, explain as you would to a womz, what’s so different that it deserves credit as being somehow better than Scildfreja’s (obviously hyperbolic) interpretation.
@kupo
Why would you use (a parody of) manospherian cant to characterize a TERFy argument?
@Ariblester
Because you’re treating an argument that women naturally aren’t abusive as if it’s somehow more valid than an arguement that women can’t be abusive. So obviously you think very little of women if you’re going to lend even a spec of validity to this nonsense.
IOW you’ve pissed me right the fuck off.
@Ariblester
C’mon, I think we know that kupo is not a TERF. JFC.
And yeah, MRA and TERF talking points look similar, because both are fascism proximate.
@Bakunin
Yep. Either that or an MRA troll fishing for spinnable responses.
The horrifying thing to me about TERFs in cases like this, though, is they have a way of framing arguments that appeals to lots of people with trauma induced by men. LOTS of people. They’re very good at selling lite fascism to progressives, especially trans people with a history as emotional abuse survivors.
There was a time when I would have swallowed my misgivings and accepted that creepy bullshit as gospel, and that makes it all the more nauseating to me in the present day. That thing about trying to create complicity? TERFs know all about that, and it scares the shit out of me how effectively they do it.
@kupo
No, I wasn’t. That statement of “oh so subtly different” was sarcasm. @OxytoSin’s argument is totally invalid, and ultimately misogynistic. However, if the aim is mockery (which it is), it is more sporting to use their own jargon against them.
@Cyborgette
I’m not calling kupo a TERF! I was saying that @OxytoSin was making a TERFy argument.
@kupo
To be clear, I read Scildfreja’s (hyperbolic) statement of
Not as saying that
But as a (hyperbolic) statement that women cannot be creative or perceptive, at all, period.
Which, I feel, is a mischaracterization of @OxytoSin’s argument.
Mock @OxytoSin for what they actually said.
I am sorry that I pissed you off. It was a badly-phrased response that could be read as defending TERFs. I will do better.
The power/entitlement argument doesn’t adequately explain pedophilia, and since obviously this is a lot more common in males, it’s not unreasonable to think it might in some way be tied to biology in combination with other factors (possibly a higher libido being subject to greater levels of maladjustment/sadistic perversion.) Don’t see how that constitutes an excuse for the behaviour or a removal of agency for the minority of female abusers.
Eh, I guess I don’t give MRAs enough credit to try for quote mining. The gender essentialism and implicit “true women don’t even conceive of abusing people” screamed TERF. It’s a short trip from “women don’t think of some actions without help” to “and anyone who does is not really a woman”. Classic TERF nonsense, assert that “women” don’t do that, then shout “Karen White” at the top of your lungs.
Oh hey another fly-by troll. (Bryce, above.)
I am way too tired for this shit tonight TBH.