We Hunted The Mammoth
Straight from AVFM’s terrible Facebook page — if anything even worse than the site itself — comes the meme below, courtesy of AVFM meme king “John Galt.”
I’m putting it after the jump because it — and the comments that it inspired — may well ruin your Christmas.
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.
GamerGaters sure do love their Based Mom! Christina Hoff Sommers, as you may or may not know, is a libertarian think-tanker who’s been grinding away at feminism for two decades, while still, rather perversely, claiming to be feminist. Though not a video gamer herself, she’s jumped aboard the GamerGate train, and GamerGaters have repaid her interest in their little crusade with interest, anointing her their “Based Mom” and talking about her with weird reverence.
That is, when they’re not making creepy fan art about her. Today, five of the most disturbing examples I’ve found so far.
GamerGate, so depressing and destructive and … inadvertently hilarious?
Like the MRAs I write about so often here, GamerGaters have a certain fondness for the propaganda of the meme, attempting to win hearts and minds with elaborate infographics, repurposed propaganda, and basically any sort of graphic they can pull together in a few minutes with Photoshop or MSPaint.
They are, unfortunately for them, terrible at it. It’s not just that the amateur graphic designers of GamerGate lack a basic understanding of good design. They are also so completely lacking in self-awareness that they are unable to see when their graphics completely undercut the messages they are intended to convey.
So today, let’s take a look at the The Top Five Most Ridiculously Ironic #Gamergate Memes that I’ve found posted recently on 8chan and Twitter.
It’s been a pretty shitty week. I don’t think I need to explain why. So here’s something to help take the edge off — a new meme featuring a phrase anyone who’s ever said anything critical of GamerGate has heard, again and again: “Actually, it’s about ethics in games journalism.”
This new meme, which started really taking off today on Twitter and Tumblr, seems to be becoming the new “not all men.” Which makes sense: “Not all men” is to mansplaining what “Actually … ” is to Gatersplaining.
Here are some of my favorites, taken from Twitter and from the new Tumblr blog titled, naturally, Actually … it’s about ethics in games journalism.
Well, I took another look at the A Voice for Men Facebook page. Lo and behold, their little meme makers have been working overtime! So here’s a little gallery of some of their latest work.
I have to admit that these aren’t quite as baffling as the John Galt meme originals we looked at a couple of weeks ago, or these also-very-confusing AVFM memes I posted last spring. But they are pretty darn terrible, in all respects.
Click on the pics to see the originals on Facebook, complete with thoughtful commentary from AVFM’s fans (except in the case of this next one, which I found reposted on an anti-MRA Facebook).
The unquestioned king of A Voice for Men’s crew of meme-makers is the mysterious fellow known only as John Galt. Galt, whose contributions are often chosen as AVFM’s “meme of the week” and posted to AVFM’s Facebook page, is truly the meme-maker AVFM deserves — a graphic designer whose graphically challenged photoshopped masterpieces are as baffling as they are offensive.
I highlighted several of his, er, designs in my recent post on Inexplicable AVFM Memes. Today, I’d like to delve further into the photoshop disasters that fill his own Facebook page, some of them official AVFM memes and others posted under his own fake name.
But first, a little introduction to Mr. Galt, as found on his blog.
