By David Futrelle
It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between a certain subspecies of contemporary leftist — the anti-“identity politics” types who take a naughty delight in dismissing their foes as “retarded” — and the pepe-posting assholes of the alt-right and/or the woman-hating dinguses of the Men’s Rights Movement.
Take, for example, the putatively leftist podcaster and Twitter provocateur/bad-take-factory Aimee Terese. Several weeks ago, you may recall, Terese caused a bit of a stir by suggesting that journalist Talia Jane, who had gone public about the skeezy sexual DMs she’d gotten from a male colleague, has such an unbeautiful face that she should have been flattered that any man would “even contemplate ejaculating on it.” (No, really, she actually said that.)
Today Terese is back at it again, posting comments about #MeToo that are virtually indistinguishable from some of the worst things that professional misogynist Paul Elam, founder of the hate site A Voice for Men, has said on the subject.
How indistinguishable, you ask? Well, see if you can distinguish them. One of the quotes below is from Terese; one is from Elam; and one I made up for this quiz.
1) “#metoo is [a] long awaited catharsis for ageing starfuckers everywhere. That time your naked 19 year old self gave a handy to a celebrity photographer is now your trauma ticket to the 15 minutes of fame you were denied back then.”
2) “Elderly ex-star fuckers have seized on #metoo both as a means to take down the alpha males they once idolized and to round up a white knight brigade of emasculated shitlib soy boys eager to tell them they’re still oh so pretty.”
3) “[Prominent celebrity’s] victims? Or just a bunch of drug whoring star fuckers?”
When you’re ready, scroll down for the answer.
.
.
The first quote is from Terese; the third is from Elam (and the celebrity in question was now-convicted-rapist Bill Cosby); the quote in the middle is my best approximation of the sort of rhetoric the two share.
In any case, the answer to the question in my headline is that both Elam and Terese have now publicly called #MeToo accusers “starfuckers,” the only real difference between their rhetoric being whether or not they put a space between “star” and “fuckers” or not.
Here’s the full quote from Terese, in a Tweet today:
In addition to being a reprehensible thing to say about #MeToo accusers in general, Terese’s tweet seems pretty clearly to be snipe at one accuser in particular: model-turned-writer-and-podcast-producer Jamie Peck, who went public with her story of sexual abuse at the hands of predatory photographer Terry Richardson in 2010 — which was, incidentally, a full seven years before the #MeToo hashtag went viral. Not coincidentally, it also took seven years — and countless other women coming forward with similar stories about the powerful photographer — before publishing giant Conde Nast and several large fashion houses finally dropped him.
As for Elam, here’s a link to a post I did on Elam’s horrific take on Cosby. The quote in question was the title of Elam’s post, in which he also referred to Cosby’s accusers as
a bunch of greedy women who commoditized their bodies like groupies who managed to get backstage at a rock concert.
As it turns out — no great shock here — Terese has had quite a few other terrible things to say about #metoo.
Sometimes she makes an effort to drape her retrograde opinions in Marxoid buzzwords.
When she’s not spouting buzzwords, she likes to present herself as the True Voice of working women — fighting against the rich ladies and the giant corporations (?) that are supposedly benefiting from the movement.
Apparently #MicrosoftMeToo comes pre-loaded with Windows 10. But you can disable it in “settings.”
While Terese normally likes to pretend she’s pushing some uber-enlightened Marxoid philosophy when she attacks #MeToo, she sometimes forgets. It’s pretty hard to discern even a pretend progressive impulse behind a tweet like this:
I dunno, it kind of seems to me that a joke suggesting that #metoo accusers are a bunch of “frigid women” isn’t really very funny, even with a a winky-tongue-sticky emoji stuck in the middle of it? But what do I know? I’m probably just some emasculated careerist shitlib soy boy who needs to read more Marx and 4chan.
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@A.Noyd, @silly-bollocks:
Yeah, what A. Boyd said. I think the translation goes something like:
= “They used bourgeois women’s rage (about men’s behaviour, specifically sexual harassment) to push the notion that patriarchy (and not Capitalism) was to blame (women’s oppression).”
Oops, just realized I forgot the footnote to my post above:
¹And just how much is she banking on people not knowing the difference between economic liberalism and social liberalism, I wonder?
The problem with this (well, one of the problems with it) is that it’s completely confused about which clause is which. Is it
or is it
?
@Bakunin, she is not very good with words, no 🙁
But she does have a high opinion of her own intelligence:
Here’s a recent convo about AOC that’s especially charming:
@Rabid Rabbit
It’s the first one. They (ie. economic liberals) are doing the consent manufacturing. It makes slightly more grammatical sense if you know “manufacture consent” is a set phrase referring specifically to something capitalist media does to mislead people.
In more plain language, she’s saying, “They did X in order to make people believe Y is to blame.” But plain language would be easier to see through, so of course she avoids it.
Just don’t ask me to explain what she’s accusing them of blaming Y for.
Should she be called Vox Night ?
@A. Noyd
I’d still have flunked her if I’d had her in one of my writing classes.
@Rabid Rabbit
I wouldn’t blame you for flunking her. Any sensible teacher would also flunk her for reusing the same language over and over. Maybe she uses a script to generate her li’l nuggets of “wisdom.”
Oh god, just what the left needs… that lady is not my comrade.
@A. Noyd
OHHHHHHH!!!!!!! HOLY CRAP, THANK YOU SO MUCH! You have no idea how much this was bugging me.
She’s very proud that she’s heard of lots of $5 words, isn’t she? She is like those uni students who think that by throwing every big word they’ve ever heard all into the one paragraph their lecturers will be in awe of their brilliance, but all the big words in the world are useless if what they’re used to say is garbage and unintelligible.
Also I got the quiz right – but then I knew Aimee Terese was Australian and “handy” was immediately identifiable slang.
OK. :: sharpens pencil, dons Marxist editorial hat ::
Bourgeoise …???!!
Adjective – bourgeois.
Noun – bourgeoisie.
There is no bourgeoise.
Others have done their best with the rest.
I’m trying to picture this hat. Please provide a full description (as well as the etsy site where they can be purchased…)
?
And here I thought true Marxism was about standing together with the people standing up to those abusing their power, regardless of their background. What Aimee Terese does is is the opposite, she just looks for any excuse to blame the victims and excuse the abusers in power, and ironically, it’s exactly this mentality, to dismiss those not “oppressed enough” and claim only “real victims” have the right to stand up for themselves that has allowed the right to divide and conquer to the point that there barely is any viable left-wing political alternative in the west today, only neoliberalism or right-wing nationalism, and her using the fact that she’s a woman to hide her misogyny just makes her all the more awful.
Anyway, speaking of women doing misogynist things, has anyone else read about Jennifer Kent’s movie The Nightingale? When I first heard about it and learned that the movie was going to be a brutal revenge movie with a female protagonist set in 1825 Tasmania, my first thought was immediatelyn“please don’t give her a rape backstory, please don’t give her a rape backstory” because that’s what always happens in all historical movies that aren’t Jane Austen adaptions, but I was carefully optimistic that a female filmmaker would respect this and dare to do something different, but nope (CW for rape), apparently it was bad enough that audience members walked out of it due to two graphic rape scenes that serves as the heroine’s motivation for revenge (plus the villain also kills her husband and child after making them watch her rape, but that was overshadowed by all the rape). And the worst part of all are all the people defending this by saying that hey, it was directed by a woman, and claiming HisToRiCAL aCcURacy.
I’m just so damn angry because this isn’t subversive, it’s the default for female protagonists in media, and using it as a motivation for a brutal revenge quest is not a respectful or realistic depiction of trauma but only reinforces the notion that survivors are “damaged goods” that neither can nor want to heal and resume a normal life, and graphically depicting it on screen only serves to desensitize people to it, and the fact that Kent outright said she’d understand if people walked out only makes it worse in my eyes, since she clearly knew she was going to upset many people who were predominantly women with those scenes yet still went ahead and filmed them. I’m just sick to death of women perpetuating the same disgusting narratives and conventions as misogynist men while pretending being women automatically makes the misogyny OK.
I’m starting to think all those people who said perhaps letting the “dirtbag left” become as big as it did and making thingsthat appeal to those kinda chuds would be a problem was pretty right
also holy shit, ok like if you want evidence someone is one of those marxists who maybe likes authortianans and bigotry a bit to much see if they use the terms radlib or anarcholib, since whos are literly oxymorons, a liberal canot be radical, and a liberal cannot be an anarchist, its like one step above them just going “Those stupid anarchokiddies” and comparing anarchosydiclists to anarchocapitlists
The institutional power part confused me but I assume it’s an extra way for her to play the unfairly maligned, powerless victim. As far as I can tell, she’s an asshole who lashes out at everyone for even the slightest perceived misstep but can’t take what she dishes out whatsoever. If you’re going to be an asshole, at least be an asshole who doesn’t cry foul any time someone calls you out on being an asshole.
@Mayu, wikipedia has a decent general article on that usage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radicalism_(historical)
I think in Marxist perception it means people who seem too friendly to capitalism and not seeking the ultimate goal of communism, so what we usually call social democrats these days, and seemingly centering their politics more on social liberalism and individualism than class relations.
But I’ve seen even weird types of libertarians and quasi-fascists use that characterization to own the libs on twitter. The former don’t dislike capitalism and the latter despise aspects of socialism like internationalism despite coopting much of it. So who knows what’s going on these days?!? The internet is a strange place.
@Mayu the Emotional Support Succubus
Well, just about the only positive takeaway I’ve seen from the whole normalization of nazi rhetoric online is that I’ve seen considerably fewer people using the word “Feminazi”.
Like seriously, one of the first things the nazis did when they came into power was to burn all research on gender studies, and one of the reasons they were so big on slave labor was because unlike the allies, who’d send women to work in factories replacing all the drafted men, the nazis deemed factory work unfit for aryan women and replaced their drafted factory workers with POWs. Plus soldiers on the eastern front had orders to execute captured female soldiers immediately upon capture (captured nurses and civilians were mostly sent to POW camps, but female soldiers were explicitly killed because female soldiers were deemed unnatural by them). Basically, Nazi ideology is just as misogynist as it’s racist, yet way too many right-wing pundits and trolls still used the word “Feminazi” just because they knew the nazis were the baddies, but didn’t want to examine why they were evil, likewise, they now use terms like radlib or anarcholib just because radicals and anarchists scare them.
Surely women can be oppressed by both capitalism and the patriarchy.
@Specialffrog
Nonono, don’t you know there is, and always has been, only ONE axis of oppression? All the others are made up by Them in order to prevent people from fighting the One True Oppression. That’s why we need to devote ALL of our efforts to destroying people who fight against Fake Oppression, because that will help the fight against Real Oppression. Somehow.
After all, if there were more than one axis of oppression, forming some sort of, I dunno, KYRIARCHY, then the world would be complicated and my simple, singular Solution To Everything wouldn’t work. And we can’t have THAT.
She claims to be intelligent, but used “it’s” when she should’ve used “its.”
*offended English major flaps her cape*
O/T, but may I pick Mamotheers’ collective brains?
I’ve done an article about defamation law. It’s for an animal rights site; but it might be applicable to activists generally I guess. Its purpose though is just to give people the knowledge to fend off attempts to silence them through threat of defamation proceedings.
People are being really helpful in terms of editing and suggestions; but the one thing they all agree on is I need a snappier title (currently it’s ‘Defamation law for activists’).
Any and all suggestions gratefully received!
@occasional reader:
More like “Vomitus Noxious” if you ask me.
@ All:
Quick, please, I’m confused… can someone find me a post from Aimee that ISN’T a collection of vague insults… PLEASE!!!