According to one Man Going His Own Way(very loudly) known as Cybro, who blogs at Rex Patriarch,
Another male space is being assimilated.
Making the players wear pink was the beginning of the end. It may have even started before that with the female sportscasters getting in front of the cameras while men were trying to watch football but the trend is now clear.
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together. LADIES IN FRONT OF CAMERAS!
My little game collection. Yes, I’m a terrible photographer.
Ever since the bizarre social backlash now known as #GamerGate first erupted in August, we’ve heard a lot of alarmist, entitled nonsense from self-described gamers who are pig-biting mad that so-called Social Justice Warriors and, you know, girls, are invading what is inevitably described as “our hobby.”
Thing is, guys, it’s not your hobby. At least it’s not only yours.
I don’t call myself a “gamer” – largely because so many of those who do embrace the label are such immature assholes – but, guess what, I play games too.
So last night I discovered the PunchableFaces subreddit. That’s right, an entire subreddit devoted to posting pictures of people so that Redditors can fantasize about doing them bodily harm.
While most of the pictures in the subreddit are of boys and men – some targeted for being “faggots” – the recent posts (as of this writing) with the greatest number of upvotes and comments were, naturally, aimed at women. Specifically, at two outspoken feminists who’ve been singled out by Men’s Rights Activists and #GamerGaters for endless harassment: video game critic Anita Sarkeesian and Canadian feminist activist Chanty Binx, perhaps better known amongst her enemies as “Big Red.”
This gif makes a lot more sense if you’ve seen Galaxy Quest
#GamerGate and Men’s Rights: two terrible tastes that taste terribler together.
Ok, maybe that slogan needs a bit of work. But it’s true that when you combine the poor-oppressed-me-we-hate-AnitaZoe-Sarquinneesian narrative of the #GamerGaters with the poor-oppressed-me-feminazis-rule-the-world narrative of the Men’s Righsters you get some amazing outbursts of indignant self-dramatizing self-pity.
Take, for example, this melodramatic email sent by A Voice for Men’s “operations manager” Dean Esmay to … a grocery chain that advertises on the game site Kotaku, a bete noire of the #GamerGate movement. I’ve highlighted some of the Esmay-ist bits:
So earlier this month the feminist writer and serial-misogynist-annoyer Lindy West announced that she was leaving her job at Jezebel “to work on personal projects. (I am also available for freelance. Hire me!)”
I took this to mean that she was leaving her job at Jezebel to work on personal projects and do freelance work, because this is something that writers, especially talented writers with a lot of options, sometimes do.
Over in the Manosphere, though, the fellas had a rather different interpretation, which went something like this HA HA THE FAT SLUT GOT FIRED HER CAREER IS OVER WE WON YIPPEEEEEEEEE!!!
Step 1) Post an 800-word rant on the Red Pill subreddit starting with the sentence “Women are shit.”
Step 2) There is no step 2.
TRUE STORY.
I’ve seen the rant, and now you can see it too. If you’re not masochistic enough to click on that link, I’m not going to subject you to the whole thing. It contains so much pure misogyny per square inch that reading it wore me out. So I’m just going to post some giant chunks of it, make a few jokes, and then take the rest of the day off.
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.
Feminists made me a misogynist: from Masculinist India
Congratulations, A Voice for Men. You are having an impact upon the world.
Or at least upon one organization in India, a truly reprehensible group called Masculinist India, which has adopted the histrionic rhetorical style, and even some of the specific arguments, advanced by AVFM and other North American Men’s Rights groups for a series of graphically challenged “masculinist” memes posted on Facebook and on the group’s web page. Masculinist India has even adopted AVFM’s preferred nomenclature, describing its members as “Men’s Human Rights Activists.” They are of course the complete opposite of “human rights” activists, campaigning instead against basic rights for women.
The influence of AVFM and other Western Men’s Rightsers can been seen again and again in Masculinist India’s posts and memes, which have all the sophistication and subtlety of Chick Tracts.
The “feminists made me a misogynist” logic of the meme above, for example, echoes the argument made in “Hate Bounces,” an influential MRA screed by MRA/MGTOW elder “Zed,” and by countless other MRAs including former AVFM Number Two John Hembling.
Other memes borrow not only the arguments of Western MRAs but recycle the same tired stock photos, like the angry woman in this meme, a favorite amongst Western MRAs.
Where no man has gone before — and no girls allowed.
The man behind The Black Pill blog – formerly known as Omega Virgin Revolt – would like to go his own way, he really would. But he’s been feeling a bit stymied on that front, because no matter where on earth he might go, it doesn’t seem far enough away for him.
In a recent post, he looked at some of the solutions that have been suggested for discerning Men Going Their Own Way like himself, and found them all a bit wanting.
[CORRECTION: See the section on sockpuppeting for a correction.]
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!
If you’re looking for evidence of just how carefully – and how duplicitously – the campaign of vilification and harassment now known as #GamerGate was planned, from the very beginning, there’s perhaps no better place to find it than in the chat log from the IRC channel #burgersandfries.
The channel, launched when the Zoe Quinn “scandal” first erupted in August, has served as a virtual meeting place for hundreds of 4channers trying to dig up dirt on Quinn and her supporters and spread this information/disinformation as widely as possible.
Today I would like to focus on some of the dirty tricks that 4channers and others on the channel have been using in their attempts to ruin the life and careers of Quinn and her supporters, tricks that were discussed surprisingly openly.
The tricks I’ll focus on today are spamming, doxxing, and sockpuppeting – including impersonating women/people of color in order to make the #GamerGate movement seem less obviously a white male-dominated reaction to outspoken women in video games.
