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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The dirtbag left and other such “Edgy” leftists have a really bad track record on dealing with rape and sexual assault, even chapo, who i will always remind people had anti-idpol roots which just means they used to be bad leftists, have done jokes about sexual assault, remember when they took a pic infront of cosbys hollywood star smiling and captioned it with “come at us liberals” as if treating a man who got away with rape for decades as a tee hee funny joke is something only liberals get mad at?
@It Is Over Sorry for taking so long to reply but while the marxist definition of radical might be diffrent im working from the more popular definition (If you want any bead on my political leanings i consider myself a socialist) and I’ve always avoided using the marxist definitions of common terms because i feel like they muddy the water (And marxist, as in made by a subscriber of marx not marx himself since this was way after he died, def on imperialism was literly just to excuse the USSRs own imperialism if you want my two cents) and yeah, while i dont have any big problems with communism as a whole I’ve always disliked the more authoritarian kinds who always seem to love bashing anarchists as much as they bash liberals and right wingers
And yeah I’m gonna give her a month at most before she starts spouting homophobic and transphobic shit
@Alan, since you mentioned Panopticon, have you read Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon? (Apologies if I’m repeating myself: I know I’ve recommended it online before, but I’m not sure whether that was here).
First paragraph of a Guardian review:
Mayu, I am going to repeat a point I made before: Though the problem you mention is long-standing, it has been intensified in recent years by the case of Julian Assange. Though Assange is clearly not a leftist, many on the left (operating, one can only suppose, on the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” principle) have declared him St. Julian of Assange, the one true perfect person in this sinful world. When he was credibly accused of rape, these people were faced with a dilemma: they could re-consider their ideas on Assange, or they could decide that rape was really not such a big deal. A depressingly large number of them chose the latter option.
I have not gone through Terese’s oeuvre, but she seems very much the type to be an Assange worshipper.
I guess as socialism has become more popular, it has allowed a certain faction to grow. One that is more interested in being right than in actually working towards change. Selling a vision for positive change to a populace that’s largely apathetic is really hard. Posting tweets full of sneering contempt for mainstream liberals is easy and as a bonus, allows one to feel better than everyone else.
Criticizing the mainstream of progressivism and the center- left for not being bold enough and for not fighting hard enough is perfectly valid. But when you see everyone who isn’t on the 100% exact same page as you as utterly worthless, it’s so easy to start veer towards fascism. Because that’s what fascism at its core is. The belief that anyone who isn’t like you isn’t really human.
@Hypatia’s Daughter
Harlan Saunders did live in Mississauga for a while—I think he kept control of the Canadian branch of KFC after he sold the US company– so it may well have been him.
@Silly-bollocks
The non-denominational cemeteries in Toronto are essentially run by one organization, the Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries. Their website has a list of notable interments, which they update monthly:
https://www.mountpleasantgroup.com/en-CA/General-Information/Our%20Monthly%20Story/story-archives.aspx
The ones from the eponymous Mount Pleasant Cemetery were researched by historian Mike Filey in his book Mount Pleasant Cemetery: An Illustrated Guide. I picked up this book at the library, read through the entries and marked the locations on the included map.
The Wikipedia pages for cemeteries also usually have a notable interments section. The website Find A Grave will sometimes have exact section and plot numbers, and often a photograph of the headstone or marker so you know what you’re looking for.
I realize it sounds a bit silly just roaming graveyards for famous names, but even the overall design of the stones tell a story. When I was in Nova Scotia and wandered the Old Burying Ground in Wolfville, that plot predated anything in Toronto by a good 100 years. The symbols, the wording, the material the stones were made of was completely different. That kinda thing just fascinates me. 🙂
@ moggie
I hadn’t heard of that; it does sound interesting. Although the thought of a post Brexit Britain really depresses me 🙁
@Katamount:
Any samples of J.W.’s work? Apparently there was an early 19th-century carver of headstones in Nova Scotia whose idiosyncratic style included signing the stone with his initials, usually in larger letters than those used for the actual person buried beneath.
https://halifaxbloggers.ca/noticedinnovascotia/2015/07/windsor/
Even a provincial city in England sometimes has notable interments. St Nicholas’ churchyard, Dyke Rd, Brighton has Captain Nicholas Tettersell, who aided Charles II to flee the country during the English Civil War, and Phoebe Hessel, the Stepney Amazon, an 18th Century soldier who was over a hundred years old when she died.
@Katamount:
Most of my own cemetery-wandering has been more for explicitly genealogical purposes. Which got real fun when we discovered that some of my ancestors on the United Empire Loyalist branch had been buried on a remote corner of the family property out near the Bay of Quinte because there wasn’t actually a church out in what would later become Adolphustown yet. We did eventually find the grave markers, but after 200 years without much maintenance, they weren’t exactly readable.
Of course, wandering around graveyards and seeing the number of very young children is another reason to get pissed off at the anti-vaxx types.
(Also interesting to see how many women’s names that were explicitly just modified men’s names we found, many of which aren’t used anymore. We saw ‘Keitha’ as a name more than once in that area.)
Run across any Archibaldinas?
@Jenora Feuer
I actually saw some of the monuments engraved with the UEL emblem in my wanderings.
@Moon_custafer
Didn’t find his, unfortunately (it was getting dark by the time I got to the Halifax Old Burying Ground). But Wolfville had several headstones carved by the mysterious Horton Carver, who was never positively identified, but is theorized to be someone named James Hay.
@Moggie and @Alan, “Gnomon” by Nick Harkaway (the panopticon novel you asked about) is brilliant. Partly that’s because at the sentence-by-sentence level he’s as gorgeous and funny a writer as there is in the English language — less disciplined than Catherynne Valente, more wild in invention like Zadie Smith can be, but that level of treasures being strewn everywhere.
But also we see the panopticon both via a kind, hard-working, true-believer cog in the system, and from the POV of a brilliant antisocial rebel, and they’re equally compelling characters, each with compelling arguments.
@Dalillama:
Don’t recall seeing any of those, no.
It seems obvious with a little thought why that sort of thing happens. Names get selected to honour particular relatives, and up until quite recently, people wouldn’t know the apparent sex of the child before birth. If you (as common) selected a male name and the child is a girl, well, names get modified.
@Katamount:
Not surprising; especially in Ontario, there’s a lot of old UEL families. There’s a reason why there are towns around Kingston with names like Adolphustown, all named after sons of King George III.
(There are a fair number of old UEL families out in New Brunswick as well.)
Strictly speaking, since many of the various loyalist families were granted a hereditary title as well as land in British North America, I could legitimately put ‘U.E.’ as a title after my name. I don’t because it seems more than a little pretentious. Even my mother, who submitted all the research and is a member of the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada, doesn’t do that.
@Turan, Emissary of the Fly World yeah i pretty much hold that view, while i think Julian shouldn’t be extradited to America there is far too much proof that he did commit rape and he needs to go to Sweden to face the charges, and even then, Chelsea Manning is a far better whistle blower than Julian and she has been in jail, again, for a while and is being tortured, so if they do wanna prove that they care about whistleblowers being punished, They should be talking about Chelsea not Julian