Today’s post requires an extra-large Don Draper “what” gif
The other day, you may recall, I wrote about a little slut-shaming campaign that a number of A Voice for Men staffers, including top banana Paul Elam, were waging against a former AVFMer who’s turned into a critic of the site. Her crime? She had put some topless photos of herself online — or, to be more precise, had sent them to someone who’d passed them along to others.
The horror.
Now Elam and his AVFM buddies have launched a campaign to frame feminists for allegedly getting topless photos of the pseudonymous AVFM “social media director” Janet Bloomfield taken down on Facebook.
A blurred-out version of the withdrawn cover art; click on pic for the original.
A dustup in the comic book world reminds us — as if any of us needed reminding — that the world of comics fandom is filled with a lot of the same sort of garbage people who’ve been harassing (mostly) women in the name of #GamerGate.
The sightly confusing story: On Friday, a bunch of “variant” comic book covers featuring The Joker alongside an assortment of other DC comics characters were posted online, with DC planning on releasing two dozen more “variant” covers for June.
Do the Sarkeesian Effect dudes — now in the midst of a painful and noisybreakup — not realize how ridiculous they look to the rest of us?
Ok, maybe that’s not the right question to ask. After all, we’re talking about Davis Aurini, a sort of low-budget Anton LaVey with a plastic-skull fetish who actually put this picture of himself on his website on purpose:
Coming to you live from the set of The Sarkeesian Effect (Picture and caption borrowed from @PachiPortrait on Twitter; original art by KC Green of gunshow.com)
I admit it: I enjoy schadenfreude so much that I can usually spell the word correctly on the first try. And there’s a lot of schadenfreude in the air these days.
Indeed, I’ve been reading through the YouTube comments of the Sarkeesian Effect breakupvideos I posted earlier and chuckling quietly to myself, not just at the assorted skull jokes but at the unintentional comedy, including all the bizarre contortions some Sarkeesian Effect supporters are going through in order to pretend that this ridiculous breakup is somehow less ridiculous than it actually is.
As I can’t in good conscience ever recommend that anyone actually go read the comments on YouTube, I’ve collected together some of my favorite ones. Here are the Top 11 Most Unintentionally Hilarious YouTube Comments About the Sarkeesian Effect Breakup.
If you need a bit more convincing: Buzzfeed’s long and meticulous examination of alleged “men’s human rights” activist Elam, written by Adam Serwer and Katie Baker, delves deep into Paul’s often sordid personal history, including his drug use, his numerous failed marriages, and the alternately depressing and infuriating story of the daughter he abandoned, who forgave and reunited with him as an adult, and who is now estranged from him again.
“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.
Slightly censored screenshot of one of Janet Bloomfield’s suspended accounts
Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield may not have mastered the fine art of public relations in the real world, but amongst those who live in imaginary worlds of their own making she is something of a PR genius.
Bloomfield, A Voice for Men’s “Director of Social Media,” was recently booted from Twitter (again) for “targeted abuse” — evidently her harassment of feminist writer Jessica Valenti, which included making up inflammatory fake quotations and attributing them to her.
Detail of an unintentionally revealing A Voice for Men meme
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!
From time to time I like to check in on the Facebook page for A Voice for Men, to see how that eminent men’s human rights organization’s program to advance the human man rights of human men through badly designed and even more poorly conceived graphic “memes” is going.
Well, I can report that this program is going, and going, and going, a bit like a famous battery-powered bunny.
Looking through them today, I couldn’t help but notice the weird sexual undertones — and overtones — of many of the memes, and realized that, while none of the memes tell us much about the world, they do, in an altogehter accidental way, offer some pretty interesting insights into the ids of those making and “liking” them on Facebook.
You don’t have to be a trained psychoanalyst to see the not-very-well-hidden straight male sexual insecurities that lie behind a large number of AVFM’s memes — both the ones they create themselves and the others that seem to have arrived on the AVFM page after being forwarded via email from someone’s cranky misogynistic uncle. Let’s take a look at some of them.
