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:
Reading through the luridly threatening email that forced Anita Sarkeesian to cancel her talk at Utah State University, originally scheduled for today, I found myself wondering, a bit dumbfounded: just where does this kind of hate come from?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself again and again in recent days as I contemplate the ongoing fiasco that is GamerGate. How on earth have all these people gotten so angry, so worked up, so willing to dox and harass and threaten women (and some of their male allies) over video games?
How exactly does someone reach a point where it makes sense to them to threaten – and perhaps even to seriously plan – a “Montreal-style Massacre” because they don’t like a few videos pointing out sexism in video games?
Even after years spent tracking and trying to understand the misogynistic online culture that’s given birth to GamerGate, I don’t have an answer. And I’m not sure where to get one.
And so, as a kind of preliminary step towards finding an answer to this question, I thought I would ask a simpler and more empirical question: where does the language of hatred found in the threatening email sent to Utah State officials come from?
For a social media site with pretensions to respectability, Reddit shows an astounding tolerance for hate. As anyone who has ever explored the site’s dark underbelly knows well, the site hosts a vast array of subreddits devoted to celebrations of such things as “white pride” and violence against women.
The latest addition to this archipelago of awfulness is a 3-day-old subreddit with the pretentious and appalling name PhilosophyOfRape, set up by a user of the same name in order to promote and celebrate “corrective” rape of “sluts” and “harlots.”
In a manifesto announcing the subreddit to the world, the user known as PhilosophyOfRape set forth his basic thesis, which he insists is as “serious as a heart attack.”
I have a new theory that I think might help to explain why so many Men’s Rights Activists are so obsessed with false accusations of rape. It’s simple: They are so used to making false accusations themselves, about pretty much everything, that it’s hard for them to conceive of someone making an accusation that is actually true.
Naturally, as a critic of the Men’s Rights movement I’m a fairly reliable target for these false charges, and rarely does a day go by in which I don’t learn some new, terrible, and wholly imaginary thing I’m alleged to have said or done. Hell, these days I can barely make it through a Twitter conversation with A Voice for Men’s Dean Esmay without him spouting some grotesque falsehood about me.
The latest accusation from the A Voice for Men crowd – or at least from AVFM’s so-called Honey Badger Brigade – is that all the media talk about Elliot Rodger being an MRA was my fault. Or, as “Honey Badger” Alison Tieman put it in a tweet that she sent to an assortment of media outlets that had written about Rodger and the MRAs,
Most of those in the manosphere, whatever their real feelings, have been relatively circumspect about expressing sympathy with, or support for, Elliot Rodger. Sure, many manospherians – from MRAs to PUAs to MGTOWs – have long been half-warning, half-threatening those of us in the “blue pill” world that angry young men are going to rise up and take a sort of self-styled revenge upon their supposed female and feminist oppressors.
But when one man actually launches a “Day of Retribution” intended to punish the “blonde sluts” of the world (as well as any man who roused his ire or got in his way), most manospherians have tried to change the subject, denying any connection between his ideas and theirs, and in some cases even trying to pretend that the man who wanted to watch all women die in concentration camps wasn’t even a misogynist at all.
That’s not the case over at the CoAlpha Forum, a self-proclaimed “Reactionary Free Speech Forum” given over to a strange and scary patriarchal variant on manosphere ideology.
The main thing keeping the CoAlphas from celebrating Elliot Rodgers as an Incel Hero? He killed too many men – and didn’t “butcher” enough “sorority girls.”
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks! And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.
If anyone was hoping – against their better judgement – that Men’s Rights activists would be inspired by the tragedy in Isla Vista to reconsider any of their beliefs, or even to reflect for a moment on the many striking similarities between passages in Elliot Rodger’s book-length manifesto and comments posted every day by MRAs and others in the manosphere, well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you should not keep that hope alive.
It’s not that they’re not talking about the tragedy. A look through the top 100 posts in the Men’s Rights subreddit, the largest Men’s Rights forum online, reveals that roughly a third of them, including the top stickied post, relate in some way to Elliot Rodger’s rampage and the discussions that have come up online and in the media in its aftermath.
But the message of virtually all of these posts is: “Nothing to see here! Move along!” There are numerous posts expressing outrage that anyone would see any connection between Rodger’s toxic misogyny to the Men’s Rights movement; there are others mocking and attacking the #YesAllWomen hashtag; there’s even one suggesting that Rodger, who wrote about how he longed to watch all the women of the world starve to death in concentration camps, wasn’t actually a misogynist at all.
Take a look. One post, with more than 500 upvotes, complains:
Just wanted to let you all know that I will be on NPR today, as part of a special segment on Misogyny And Murder: Unpacking A Killing In California on the show On Point With Tom Ashbrook. For more details and a link to listen to the show online, see here.
I will probably be on in the middle of the show, from about 11:20-11:40.
I’ll put up a link to the archived show when it’s over.
UPDATE: The archived audio is now up, at the same link. And yeah, I was on in the middle. But you should listen to the whole show; Soraya Chemaly in particular is great.
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.)
Thanks! (And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.) Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
Well, the great minds of the manosphere have been going into overdrive trying to explain away the fact that a man who had a lot in common with them, ideology-wise, murdered six innocent people on Friday as part of a “Day of Retribution” that he had hoped would involve a lot more dead bodies, particularly of the blonde, female variety.
We had noted cultural commenter JudgyBitch (Janet Bloomfield) looking at Elliot Rodger, a man who wrote a 140-page manifesto detailing his hatred of women and girls, a manifesto that contained the following paragraph:
Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such.
.. and which ended with a fantasy of putting all the women in the world in concentration camps and starving them to death, while Rodger took a position in a giant tower built just for him “where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die,” and suggesting that Rodger wasn’t actually a misogynist, because he wasn’t able to get into the sorority and murder all the “blonde sluts” he had hoped to murder and so ended up killing more men than women.
Leave it to Dr. Helen – psychologist, right-wing blogger, friend of A Voice for Men – to come up with what has got to be the most transparent attempt to distract public attention from the obvious parallels between the misogyny of spree killer Elliot Rodgers and the misogyny of the Men’s Rights movement she supports.
In a blog post on PJ Media, she suggests half-seriously that “If Pick-Up Artists Are Guilty,[of inspiring Elliot Rodger] Then So Are the Feminists.”
The good Doctor starts by accusing Slate’s Amanda Hess of blaming pickup artists for Elliot’s rampage. Her proof? Several passages from Hess in which Hess makes very clear that she is not blaming PUAs – or the anti-PUAs at PUAhate — for the deaths in Santa Barbara, or even for Rodger’s misogyny.
