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:
Richard Dawkins, I think it’s fair to say, is a bit of a dick. Though he’s an expert popularizer of science he seems to be a bit of a blithering idiot on every other topic he tries to address; his broadsides on religion are patronizing and profoundly ignorant, and his forays into gender politics are even more cringey.
He puts his foot in his mouth so often on Twitter that it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between his real account and this absurdist parody.
Over on Reddit, a regular on the Blue Pill subreddit — devoted to mocking Red Pill ridiculousness — recently reposted the cartoon above, one of The Onion’s brilliant parodies of the terrible political cartoons that are pretty much omnipresent in every second-string newspaper in the country. I don’t think I’ve ever posted it here before — I’m not sure I ever saw it until today — so I thought I’d share it here as well.
What makes this particular cartoon extra delicious is that its “argument,” such as it is, is one that a lot of Men’s Rights Activists actually believe. Indeed, it calls to mind the cover of the revised ebook edition of Warren Farrell‘s seminal MRA manifesto The Myth of Male Power, in which a picture of a woman’s posterior is presented as if it truly is, somehow, a threat to the rights of men:
YouTube garbage blabber Internet Aristocrat — you know, the guy that helped to kick off #GamerGate with the first video attacking Zoe Quinn but who’s since broken from the “movement” for reasons — has been working himself into a lather over Women, Action & the Media’s Twitter reporting initiative.
So he’s decided to take a principled stance against this terrible threat to free speech — or at least free speech that includes targeted abuse and bigoted slurs — by posting a series of detailed, logical essays elucidating the dange …
Watch out, Milo Yiannopoulos, you’ve got competition! #GamerGate has a new journalistic champion — and this one, like Milo, seems to have come straight from central casting, a virtual embodiment of every snooty reactionary preppie stereotype from every bad 80s movie.
A libertarian think tanker and erstwhile journalist with the unlikely name of Mytheos Holt, this new contender has one great advantage over young Milo: as you can see in the photo above, which I have not photoshopped in any way, he appears to be made entirely of wax — which means that unless someone accidentally sets him near a heater he will last forever.
Worlds are colliding: Roosh Valizadeh, the reactionary, woman-hating pick-up guru, is starting a #GamerGate inspired game site, just as #GamerGate itself is descending into a morass of mutual recriminations and generalized douchebaggery.
Reaxxion – the title presumably a reference to Roosh’s neo-reactionary political views – doesn’t seem to have officially launched yet, but it is up, and looking a bit threadbare at the moment, with only a handful of articles posted yet. Billed as “a safe space for gamers who support #gamergate,” the site is an obvious attempt to cash in on #GamerGate anger. Roosh’s timing is a little less than perfect; he’s jumping aboard this money train as it seems to be derailing.
So on Halloween the dude in the pics above went out dressed as a … well, a Men’s Rights Activist, I guess, or maybe a GamerGater, or Redditor? Something along those lines. Whatever he was, he apparently won second prize in some sort of costume contest.
Well, the dude at the Tumblr blog Indefinite Free Pizza is having none of it:
[TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of rape, violent misogyny]
Today, the easy winner in my informal “Worst Thing I Saw On The Internet” contest is a horrendous little hangout for dudes with a very particular sexual fetish: they like to fantasize about raping and sexually humiliating feminists.
The Breaking Feminist Superheroines subreddit (r/breakfeminazis), with 865 subscribers, describes itself as
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 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.
