We Hunted The Mammoth
You know how, in The Poseidon Adventure, the giant cruise ship gets flipped over by a huge wave and the passengers have to make their way through the upside-down ship to the bottom of the hull, which is now the top, in order to survive?
Well, the Men’s Rights subreddit is kind of like that. The only way to get upvotes is to look at everything upside-down.
See, e.g., this comment addressing the issue of rape, and why feminists allegedly lie about it:
Leave it to Vox Day, the proudly reactionary sci-fi author and game developer, to say what most of his #GamerGate comrades spend so much energy denying: that their little movement is at least in part a backlash against women in gaming. At least against real women, with their own opinions.
As Vox writes in a post on his Alpha Game blog,
You may remember woman-hating white nationalist F. Roger Devlin as the guy who invented “hypergamy” – or at least the misogynistic cartoon version of the concept popular in Men’s Rights and other “red pill” subcultures.
Well, Devlin also has some thoughts on domestic violence, and they make even less sense.
Was Marysville school shooter Jaylen Fryberg trying to exact revenge on a girl who had rejected him? Various news accounts suggest that Fryberg was reeling from a recent breakup; a number of angry, anguished, and frustratingly enigmatic recent comments on Fryberg’s Twitter account seem to back this up.
So it may be that the shootings on Friday were yet another reworking of an old story.
It’s no secret that many men, for an assortment of reasons, react badly and often violently to romantic and sexual rejection. This can range from self-described “nice guys” of OkCupid sending vicious messages to women who say no all the way to angry men who stalk and harass and sometimes kill ex-wives and girlfriends. Women who leave abusive relationships often suffer greater violence at the hands of exes unwilling to let them go.
I’ve written before of the striking ways that Men’s Rights Activism recapitulates the logic of domestic abuse; it’s no coincidence that so much MRA “activism” consists of harassment of individual women. So the question naturally follows: does the rage that drives so many MRAs come from the same dark place in the psyche as the rage that so many romantically and sexually rejected feel towards their exes?
“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:
Not content with simply being a misogynist piece of poop, the “game” guru Heartiste is also, among other terrible things, a flaming racist given to hyperventilating about the alleged civilization-destroying powers of people with skin darker than his – and the alleged naiveté of white people who aren’t as racist as he is.
In one recent post, Heartiste awarded “freelance comment of the week” status to a racist rant posted on his site by someone calling himself Anton Chigurh, who thinks Western countries are being wimpy about ebola because they don’t want to offend Africans and seem racist.
“Chigurh” made his, er, argument in possibly the most racist manner imaginable:
Zoe Quinn has had it.
Yesterday, fed up with the equivocating bullshit that’s constantly being said in the media and within gaming circles about #GamerGate, and pissed off at all those who think of themselves as good people but still refuse to see the hatred and misogyny and harassment and doxxing that has been central to GG since the start, Quinn posted a series of (justifiably) angry tweets calling out the cowards in the profession who know that what’s going on is deeply evil but won’t say anything, and documenting the unending harassment she and her boyfriend, and her family, and his family are still getting.
Was that even a sentence? I don’t know. The point is she’s STILL getting harassed. She’s STILL getting “prank” calls. She’s STILL getting death threats. People are STILL digging around in her personal life and the personal life of everyone connected to her.
And she’s not the only one. The newest target of #GamerGate wrath? Indie game developer Brianna Wu, who, as I noted in my last post, got death threats … for posting memes on Twitter.
Meanwhile, two creepy obsessed assholes are still begging for money to make a documentary they hope will ruin Anita Sarkeesian.
Oh, but #GamerGate is about ethics.
I’m just going to paste in a bunch of Quinn’s Tweets here, because they pretty much speak for themselves.
Is Anita Sarkeesian secretly trying to hypnotize us all with her videos? Like, literally hypnotize us, in the “now you’re a chicken” sense?
That’s the central insinuation of an inadvertently hilarious video by YouTube blabber Jordan Owen, one of the guys behind that Sarkeesian Effect “documentary” that’s allegedly in the process of being made.
Owen’s video isn’t a particularly new one – he put it out in January – but it’s been recently resurrected by the good folks at A Voice for Men, who reposted it earlier this week, saying that it offered “very thoughtful, erudite” criticism of Sarkeesian that’s “particularly enlightening and full of information a lot of people don’t know.”
So that’s a good enough excuse for me to talk about it. Also, did I mention that the video is hilarious?
I don’t often write about Alison Tieman – the eccentric FeMRA videoblogger known better as Typhon Blue – in large part because, well, have you ever watched one of her videos? Her arguments and assertions bear so little relation to what the rest of us know as reality it’s as if she lives in some weird inverted world of her own making.
It’s rather difficult to address the arguments of someone when virtually everything she says is wrong – logically, historically, morally – in some fundamental way.
But I’m going to have a go at her latest video anyway, because, well, it’s only 4 minutes long, which will make unpacking its fractal wrongness a little less of a daunting task. Also, there’s a kitty in it.
Men’s Rights Activists love to chastise feminists for allegedly dealing mostly with “first world problems,” trivial annoyances that pale in comparison to the REAL issues faced by women (and men) in the rest of the world. So it’s a good thing that MRAs only get themselves worked up about life and death issues.
Like COOKIE MISANDRY.
Let’s let Men’s Rights Redditor kizzan explain this insidious danger to modern man:
