We Hunted The Mammoth
“Andy Bob” of A Voice for Men has decided that the recent threats against Anita Sarkeesian are fake because … they’re too melodramatic.
In a rather remarkable bit of logicking titled “Anonymous feminist provides Anita Sarkeesian with a potential new source of revenue,” Andy Bob quotes this line from the threat email:
The latest brilliant plan by the GamerGaters to bring gaming industry corruption publications that say mean things about them to their knees?
OPERATION KRAMPUS, which is literally a plan to RUIN CHRISTMAS by … boycotting every game maker that continues to send review copies of games to the ever-growing list of game-related publications that the GamerGaters have decided aren’t sufficiently adoring towards the GamerGate Revolution.
No, really:
Speaking of harassers, as I was in the previous post, everyone’s favorite PR maven and serial libeller, Janet “Judgy Bitch” Bloomfield, has been suspended from Twitter — this time, one hopes, for good, as she’s a prime example of someone using Twitter as a “hate amplifier,” which she has stoked in the past with deliberate and malicious libel. She also made a second account to get around her previous suspension, which one would think would in itself be enough of a TOS violation to justify permanent suspension. The real question isn’t why she was suspended; it’s why she wasn’t suspended for good a long time ago.
EDIT: Removed portions of this post so as not to further inflame the situation.
Sometimes when I post links, they’re simply interesting things I’ve run across. These, though, are essential reads:
Why the Trolls Will Always Win, by Kathy Sierra, Wired
A detailed post by Java expert and game developer Sierra describing the harassment and vilification she’s faced for the crime of, well, basically for being a woman in the tech world. While long and a bit rambling in spots, this is an important piece that, among other things, describes how harassers can sometimes transform slanderous assertions about their targets into “conventional wisdom,” details the damage that “trolls” can have on a person’s reputation (and their life generally), and offers some sobering reflections on the culture of harassment and how difficult it can be to fight.
Who knew Aesop’s Fables was a pickup bible?
I assume you’re all familiar with Aesop’s story of the fox and the grapes: A fox wants some grapes, but can’t reach them. He walks off in a huff, sniffing that the grapes are probably sour anyway. The moral: “Any fool can despise what he can not get.”
The moral that pickup guru Heartiste draws from the story is a little different. As he sees it, the fox is a super cool alpha male who’s come up with an awesome way to put those slut grapes in their place.
EDIT: Bloomfield says she found the screenshot on Facebook. Details below.
Janet Bloomfield – A Voice for Men’s compulsively lying “social media director” – is at it again.
A couple of months back, Bloomfield – who goes by JudgyBitch1 on Twitter – decided for some reason that she could best serve AVFM’s social media directing needs by straight-up libeling feminist writer Jessica Valenti – by making up inflammatory quotes and attributing them to Valenti in a series of Tweets. She later boasted in on her blog that the quotes – which she admitted she’d conjured out of thin air – had inflamed hatred of Valenti and caused her to catch “a bit of hell.”
Now Bloomfield is pulling the exact same stunt again. This time, her target is feminist cultural critic and #GamerGate bete noire Anita Sarkeesian.
On Saturday, Bloomfield tweeted an obviously doctored “screenshot” of a tweet that Sarkeesian never made.
Bill Frezza, the overgrown, overtan frat man who warned the frat boys of America about the gravest threat to their very existence — drunk chicks — may have lost his gig at Forbes, but he’s found a new fanbase amongst the MRAs of Reddit, who’ve hoisted him aloft as the latest martyr to femifascism. In a couple of highly upvoted threads in the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars celebrated his heroism and good sense.
Let’s just take a look at some of the wisdom they deposited in the threads.
We might as well start with the most-upvoted comment of all, from the legendary JohnTheOther himself, who is evidently well aware of the threat that drunk chicks pose to his very life:
Heartiste – real name James Wiedmann – is a proudly racist, woman-hating “pickup artist” guru known for advocating manipulative and often quite abusive “game” techniques to give men the upper hand in relationships and in the dating market. These run the gamut from emotional abuse – what he calls “dread game,” an elaborate portfolio of gaslighting ploys to keep women feeling insecure and off-balance – to straightforward physical abuse – slapping women “when necessary” to assert “alpha male” dominance.
Now he’s suggesting that wannabe lotharios borrow some tips on how to “game” women from the Duluth Power and Control Wheel, a widely used violence intervention tool designed to fight abuse, not provide a blueprint for it.
The Duluth Wheel highlights some of the most prevalent kinds of abusive behavior. Heartiste mines its descriptions of abuse for dating tips, claiming to find in it “a few curious nuggets of anti-feminist truth about relationships and how to keep them going.”
In his recent post, Heartiste goes through some of the descriptions of abusive behavior on the Duluth Wheel – and recasts them as handy tools for would-be “alpha males.”
So what do you do when a fondly held fantasy crumbles? That’s a question that both Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen have had to ask themselves this past week, when something they both desperately hoped was true – that Anita Sarkeesian had lied about contacting the police about death threats she’d gotten on Twitter – was shown convincingly to be false.
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.]
