We Hunted The Mammoth
Lucy Walcott, who publishes a blog called NotParticularlyPauciloquent, isn’t afraid of the big questions. The tough questions. The important questions.
And in a recent post she takes on what is perhaps the most important question of our age: What is We Hunted the Mammoth?
To paraphrase the great Marge Gunderson, I’m not so sure I agree 100% with her police work.
So yesterday I discovered a #GamerGate manifesto that started with these dramatic pronouncements:
We are Gamers.
We are alive.
And that was just the opener.
As the telltale “cats with money” pic indicates, the time has come for the Third Quarter 2014 We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive!
To repeat my simple pitch from my previous pledge drives: If you enjoy this blog, and can afford it, please click on the “donate” button below and send a few bucks my way. Or, if you’d prefer, a lot of bucks. You don’t need a PayPal account to donate; you can use a credit card, and there are other options as well. If you’re outside the US, PayPal should be able to handle your weird foreign money.
Oh, and the PayPal page will say you’re donating to Man Boobz; don’t panic! That’s just the old name of the blog.
As always, your donations are all greatly appreciated, whatever size they are. They keep me, the cats, and this blog going. Oh, and that other blog of mine as well, that Confused Cats thing.
Big thanks to everyone who donated during the last pledge drive. Thanks as well to those who’ve donated since the last pledge drive, and to those especially generous souls who donate on a regular basis. And to those who donate in other ways, from our amazing commentariat to our outstanding mod team to all of those who’ve offered their talents and expertise to this project and this community.
If for whatever reason you can’t donate, don’t feel guilty. Seriously. I know what it’s like to be broke.
We Hunted the Mammoth is reaching more people than ever these days, racking up close to 3 million more page views just since the Second Quarter Pledge Drive only a little more than 3 months ago.
And the number of comments is not-so-slowly but surely creeping towards half a million. No, really. We recently topped 450,000. Holy crap. That’s a lot of comments.
So how much do some angry gamebros hate Anita Sarkeesian? Enough to send me death threats … for writing about the death threats sent to Anita Sarkeesian.
Shortly after my post on the threats against Sarkeesian went up on Thursday, I got these messages sent to me as anonymous “asks” on Tumblr. These were all in succession, in this order; I’m pasting each one individually instead of the whole bunch at once so you can read them in the order in which I got them. [TRIGGER WARNING: Violent threats; I’m putting them past the jump.]
Good news everyone! You can now snag yourself some nifty Confused Cats Against Feminism swag, and help out a couple of charities at the same time The Confused Cat Store on Zazzle is now open for business, offering everything from key chains and coffee mugs to 126 different styles of shirts and other tops for adult humans of all shapes and sizes, not to mention babies, dogs, and pretty much anything and anyone that can wear a shirt. (Sorry, squids, you have too many arms, or legs, or whatever those things are.)
There are two awesome designs to choose from, both featuring my very own Sweetie the cat, who has no idea that she’s on a shirt, or what exactly a shirt is. Big thanks to designer JohnnyKaje, who also provided the awesome designs for the old Manboobz store.
All my royalties from the Confused Cat store will go to two charities, the Global Fund for Women, a well-respected organization working for the rights of women and girls worldwide, and No-Kill Los Angeles, an initiative to “end the killing of healthy and treatable pets in city shelters in Los Angeles, California, by the year 2017” by providing spay/neuter services and working to increase pet adoptions.
Oh, and today there’s even a 10% off SALE going on!
Also: I will also be opening a new We Hunted the Mammoth store up soon. We’ve got a good Mammothy design, but I also wanted to do some shirts, etc, featuring some infamous quotes from some of the terrible people I’ve written about on this site, or who’ve come by to drop their own peculiar wisdom in the comments here. I am taking requests, so if you have any favorite quotes you’d like to see on a t-shirt or a mouse pad or whatever, post them in the comments below!
EDIT: Well, turns out that, as of right now (3 pm CST), the products are NOT up for anyone but me. Apparently Zazzle is still processing them. So, uh, check back in a couple of hours, I guess?
So I did an interview about my Confused Cats Against Feminism blog with Catster.com, a site that devotes itself to collecting “helpful and hilarious information for the worldly but still infatuated Cat aficionado.” Alas, as a result of publishing this interview with me yesterday, they now seem to be collecting angry MRA commenters as well.
Here are some highlights of the, er, debate so far, which I’ve waded into myself, perhaps unwisely. (These are selections, with a bunch missing, though the comments that look obviously like they are responses to other comments, are.) Maeve Connor is the author of the post about me.
CORRECTION: THIS NOTE WAS NOT FROM THE OFFICIAL “WOMEN AGAINST FEMINISM” PAGE; IT WAS FROM A COPYCAT SITE. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO IGNORE IT OR AT LEAST TO LAUGH AT IT FOR THE CORRECT REASON. SORRY!
Just posted this on Confused Cats Against Feminism, but it was too good not to post here as well:
So I just got this curiously impersonal email from the admin at Women Against Feminism. (Gosh! Could it be a form letter?)
Hi David Futrelle,
I wanted to say thanks for writing the article about Women Against Feminism.
Whilst it’s clear that we don’t agree on all points, hearing both sides of the argument will get more people thinking about what they believe in and which set of points they feel aligned with more closely.
This can only be a positive step forward, not only for women, but for society as a whole.
To help get more people thinking about what they really believe, I was wondering if you could make add a link to our new website in your article?
We’re trying to create a centrally located hub where the discussion about Women and Feminism can flourish, with everyone getting a chance to share their opinions, and we believe that a website is the best place to do it.
Would you be able to help facilitate that conversation by adding a link to the site?
The URL is http://womenagainstfeminism.com
Once again, thanks for furthering the discussion about women and feminism through your article. Even though we don’t agree on all the same points, we really appreciate getting these concepts heard and empowering people to make up their own mind.
Many thanks,
[name and email redacted]
So I wrote back:
There already is a central hub for this discussion: http://confusedcatsagainstfeminism.tumblr.com/
Could you redirect all of your traffic there? Thanks!
Oh dear. Some very confused dudes on the A Voice for Men Forums are angry at the Huffington Post for suggesting that Confused Cats Against Feminism might just be a parody of Women Against Feminism.
A guy calling himself Humansplaining w/ Jarred starts off the thread — titled “HuffPo tries – and fails – to politicize ‘Cats Against Feminism'” — with this little rant. (I’ve bolded some of the especially silly stuff.)
So, being that ‘Women Against Feminism’ is an internet phenomenon, through Tumblr as well as Twitter, the internet inevitably took this thread in the direction it takes EVERYTHING nowadays – cats.
If you read through all the ‘Cats Against Feminism’ memes, you’ll notice that they pretty much all revolve around, well…CATS. Go figure, huh? References to food, tuna, shedding, and biting predominate these posts. The references to ‘Feminism’ are basically incidental, since this is just piggy-backing on the viral success of ‘Women Against Feminism’. Those posting these memes never really express whether they are in favor of, or against Feminism. It’s clearly not meant to appeal to EITHER side of the issue. Rather, it’s simply a silly meme meant to produce a few chuckles for ANYONE that happens to run across them. Just like every other stupid cat meme on the internet, of which there must literally be TRILLIONS.
But HuffPo apparently sees things differently …
You know what? I think those CATS are smarter than the people at Huffpo that produced this article. THEY think that Feminism is a stupid and pointless human concept, and they wish you’d stop talking about it and fighting amongst each other, because they need you to FEED them!
Seriously HuffPo, learn to take a joke, and give the ideology a rest for 5 FUCKING SECONDS already.Because the cats are laughing at YOU now…
AVFM forum dudes, I hate to break it to you, but the cats aren’t laughing at the Huffington Post. They’re laughing at you.
Maybe I need to start up a new blog: Confused Cats Confused by Confused Cats Against Feminism.
I just posted this over on Confused Cats Against Feminism, but I want to share the good news here as well:
Wow!My kitties and I are humbled by the response this little blog is getting!
Scratch that bit about the kitties; they’re never humbled by anything.
But I am. Confused Cats Against Feminism has picked up more than 2000 followers in the two days since I announced the blog to the world, and my various inboxes are overflowing with dozens of pics of adorable cats who are very confused about feminism indeed.
So far Confused Cats has been featured on Buzzfeed — thanks, Rachel Zarrell! — The Frisky, and SFWeekly, and the cats and I are preparing for a major interview with an important publication in the cat world. Well, the cats are sleeping, mostly, but it is good to be well-rested.
This amazing response clearly shows that it is not only humans who can be really, really confused about feminism.
And if your cats (or any of your animal friends) are confused antifeminists, SEND MOAR PICS PLEASE! You can submit them here, or by emailing me at futrelle [at] manboobz.com.
Granted, I’m still sorting through all the pics I’ve gotten so far, but like cats I can always use more good things delivered to me. If your pic isn’t up yet, it may well be in the queue.
Oh, and if you like this blog, you might also like my other blog, We Hunted the Mammoth, a slightly less cat-centric look at confused antifeminists, Men’s Rights Activists, and misogyny in general on the internets.
Thanks!
David, Sweetie Pie, and Pantz
PS: If you see this blog mentioned in the media or on website you frequent, could you drop me a note with a link? Thanks!
Amazing! And keep those pics coming!
