“Cultural Marxism” – the alleged conspiracy of alleged secret Marxists allegedly trying to destroy Western Civilization through Political Correctness and feminism and racial equality – is a favorite boogeyman of the far right.
And then there is the hair thing: believe it or not, some women actually cut their hair short in an obvious attempt to destroy the boners of modern man.
But it turns out women don’t have to get pixie cuts to oppress men with their hair. They can also put their long hair … in a bun.
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?
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:
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.
Never doubt the ingenuity of the internet’s misogynists in coming up with new reasons to hate a woman they’re already inclined to hate.
Actress and geek icon Emma Watson has been near the top of the new Misogyny hate list all this week, in the wake of the speech she gave at the UN gently praising feminism and suggesting that traditional gender roles aren’t always such a good thing for dudes either. She’s made this point before, declaring in a Tweet last month that
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.”
One of the odder folk beliefs of the pickup artist subculture is that women become worn down and used up and even a bit addled if they have sex with too many men. Men, by contrast, are said to be able to handle an equal number of female lovers with grace and aplomb.
In a recent post, our old friend Heartiste offers what he sees as decisive photographic evidence illustrating the different effects of promiscuity on men and women. One bit of this evidence: a picture of a young woman used to advertise some sort of singles event. Reflections from the photographer’s lights obscure her pupils, an offputting effect that gives her a slightly deranged look.
I don’t usually bother to read the comments on Chateau Heartiste; making it through Heartiste’s own florid yet turgid prose is exhausting enough. But after skimming a recent post of his on the increasing historical fatness of British women, I happened to glance down at the comments, only to see a discussion of the comparative anatomy of female humans and deer that was so odd and creepy I felt obligated to bring it to you all.
Brace yourself, because the following might just ruin your breakfast:
Ewwwwww.
I’m pretty sure that guy’s hunting license should be taken away from him. And if there were sex licenses for human beings, well, all three of these guys should lose those as well.