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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@Alan, “how to be mean to capital and get away with it”?
If the media was trying to serve capitalism by manufacturing consent for Me Too, why is it that they were some of the ones allowing sexual harassment to happen? Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Les Moonves etc. It doesn’t make sense.
There’s a point to be made that the movement is focussing too much on privileged women. But the solution to that is to focus more on marginalized women who face sexual abuse and harassment, not give men an open free for all to harass all women.
Oh, and as I posted on one of the other threads, Aimee was busted liking some Nazi tweets. She used the “I didn’t know he was a Nazi” defense even though it was really obvious. So for those who think she’s a couple of ratioed Twitter threads away from coming out as a full fascist and blaming it on liberals, you’d be right.
@Mish
Imagine writing that first tweet seriously and not melting your brain from the ridiculousness
“One of the things about being intelligent is, you don’t have to read an entire book to be able to misrepresent its central thesis…”
From my “lefty geek/nerd” days…. If we were discussing a book, and someonE allowed as how they’d read it “but not all of it”, the conclusion would be that they DON’T GET TO COMMENT ON IT, AS THEY’D NOT READ IT.
Ok, i found the receipt
https://twitter.com/hannahgais/status/1139374091998248960?s=19
As I’ve said before, Aimee Terese is an ideological sister to TERFs. They’re both reactionaries LARPing as leftists in a transparent attempt to discredit actual leftist schools of thought.
(Also, note to David, I already apologized on Twitter, but sorry again for dragging you into that MRA thread yesterday.)
@Alan
How about something like: “How to roundhouse defamation laws” or something that uses martial arts and self defence as a metaphor?
Kupo says “Hey, it’s pretty sexist to assume women can’t be terrible and/or misogynistic people.”
Women can absolutely be sexist and terrible, BUT they don’t tend to insult other women the same way men do. For example, it is almost always the purview of men to insult a woman by calling her too ugly to be f*cked or sexually assaulted. I have never in my life heard an identified feminist (Marxist or otherwise) use such language. This trope is used almost exclusively by misogynistic men (see sargon of akkad) to insult women. The language is the give away – the persona presented to us is not genuine, we are being trolled in a major way.
https://splinternews.com/alabama-republican-refuses-to-apologize-for-ranting-abo-1835610390
what is the word that the igno-right uses in situations like this…???
oh, yeah! “SNOWFLAKE!!!“
@Alan
An Activist’s Field Guide to Defamation Laws?
Yeah my boomer mom sometimes tells me that “good women don’t go out late at night”, or warns me about false rape accusations. I still love her to bits, but in the moment it’s just like: “????????”
@Casta That has not been my experience at all. In fact, I find that misogynistic women are very quick to deride the physical appearance of other women regardless of how irrelevant it may be. These tend to be women who have very much internalized the values of the patriarchy so they lash at at women as “uggoes” or “desperate for attention from men” or insult them as inadequate mothers. In my experience misogynistic women hit exactly the same points as misogynistic men, but if anything they tend to hit those points harder and faster because they know a certain percentage of people will insist that women can’t be misogynists. Certainly there are male misogynists who are just as bold (frequently covered on this blog), but most of the male misogynists I encounter in real life often want to rely on misogynist talking points while denying that they are actually misogynists.
@Alan
Defamation Nation: Activism and the Law?
Using the Activist Voice: Avoiding Defamation?
Breakfast of Animal Champions: Chewing Over Defamation Law/Defamation is Crunchy/Taking the Bite out of Defamation
Defamatory Oratory or Speaking Truth to Power?
Caska wrote:
I was wondering if she was actually a person. She writes like an AI trained on input from Marxist (for the jargon) and MRA (for the attitude) sites. GIGO.
@mildlymagnificent:
She could have been trying to put a feminine ending “e” on “bourgeois” (compare “blond” and “blonde”), as shown here… or maybe she’s just a wanky pseudo-intellectual?
Now I’m just a humble middle-class furry who’s rather new to the socialism thing, but I don’t think Aimee Terese is doing praxis right. The only credit that I’d give (and this might be too much) is that she does have a point that the media’s focus on celebrities undercuts the point of the MeToo hashtag, which was that women everywhere across the socio-political spectrum have shared in the same experiences with harassing, coercing, or domineering men. From the minimum wage worker at Arby’s to Amber Heard. That’s why the hashtag was (and continues to be) so powerful.
Will capitalism attempt to co-opt a popular grassroots movement? Undoubtedly. That doesn’t remove from the underlying problems the grassroots component of the movement is attempting to push to the fore, nor does it make the initiatives to ameliorate the conditions that allow harassment to take place less important. Granted, if they’re being undertaken by charter school champions The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I’d question their commitment and efficacy, but that’s not the conversation Aimee’s having. She seems to have learned a bunch of, as David said, “Marxoid” words recently and think they make her sound like the Chapo guys or something.
@ Alan
“Defamation Law for Fun and Nonprofit”?
Nequam
Using my super-duper fake-Marxist detector (patented by the Inspector Gadget Accessories for Intellectuals factory) …
… get the setting right on this knob here … wanky pseudo-intellectual b-b-beep-beep-beep-beeeeeep-twang.
I think you’re right.
@Casta:
Well, there’s Germaine Greer, and I’m not just talking about her terfy side. I’m thinking of the time she wrote about Suzanne Moore: “hair bird’s-nested all over the place, fuck-me shoes and three fat inches of cleavage”.
@VP:
edna_mode.gif
@Moggie
Ha!
@Nequam
(It’s the Road to Eldorado “Both is good” gif – in case it doesn’t show up)
@Gaebolga
Ooh! I like that one.
Aside: any incels out there having terrible opinions about this guy?
https://heavy.com/news/2019/06/brian-clyde/
He’s making some Internet rounds because of this picture that was taken of him before he was shot down by cops:
@Casta
Just as with the example I gave in my previous comment here with the female filmmaker relying on exactly the same type of misogynist tropes as male edgelords with a camera, I’ve seen plenty of other examples of women doing or saying just as horribly sexist and misogynist stuff as men, even those self-identifying as feminists.
More often than not it’s the result of the “cool girl” attitude as described here with an additional dose of “not like other girls”, paired with internalized misogyni and the sad fact that people are raised to believe that the only way to lift women up is to tear other women down or for them to renounce anything too feminine, of which empathy is usually the first thing to go.