I know, I know, just humor him for a few minutes. Because he has a rather, well, revealing notion of what triumph will look like, and it’s not one that’s compatible with the #NotYourShield propaganda that GamerGaters use to disguise its retrograde goals. Greendestiny, a veteran of TheRedPill and KotakuInAction on Reddit, sees in the video game “war” a new opportunity for gamebros to become Game Men:
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.
The threats directed at Anita Sarkeesian are intended to silence women’s voices
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?
Camille Paglia: “Young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark.”
That powerful and obnoxious odor of bullshit you may have noticed in the air? That’s just Camille Paglia, evidently aiming for a bit of a comeback.
One of the first-generation of antifeminist feminists who came to public attention in the 1990s, Paglia is less a scholar than an intellectual entertainer, astonishingly adept at generating controversy by packaging rather conventionally reactionary ideas as bold contrarianism. And then getting everyone to talk about her rather than the issues at hand.
Instant cookie access: The foundation of all Men’s Rights
Men’s Rights Activists love to chastise feminists for allegedly dealing mostly with “first world problems,” trivial annoyances that pale in comparison to the REAL issues faced by women (and men) in the rest of the world. So it’s a good thing that MRAs only get themselves worked up about life and death issues.
Like COOKIE MISANDRY.
Let’s let Men’s Rights Redditor kizzan explain this insidious danger to modern man:
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.
Goodnight, Paul! You can buy your own Misogyny Bunch pillow for only $19.19 at A Voice for Men’s Red Pill store.
Let me take a moment to ignore my regular readers and speak directly to the Men’s Rights Activists who might be reading this blog. I suspect there are a few.
What I would like to talk to you about it ironic humor. Because, here’s the thing, sometimes people say things they don’t actually believe in order to make a little fun at the way other people see them.
Thor, Captain America and other Norse gods prepare for battle.
Huh. So Thor — you know, that dude in the comic books based extremely loosely on Norse mythology — is going to be replaced by a woman. No, for reals. Marvel comics announced it on The View. No, that’s for real too.
I wonder what the alpha dogs over in the Red Pill subreddit might think of this?
Men in Canadian elevators are sometimes also used as chairs.
Does anyone here understand string theory and dark matter and all that physics crap? Because I am seriously beginning to wonder if Men’s Rights Activists literally live in an alternate universe that only partially intersects with our own.
In the universe I live in, Canada is a lovely and somewhat uncannily polite country to the north, the home of Rush and Kate Beaton and, I’m pretty sure, a lot of bears. To MRAs it is a land under the bootheel of a radical feminist gynarchy in which men cower in elevators because they are deathly afraid of being accused of sexual harassment.
No, really.
I was skimming through an old interview with good old Erin Pizzey, A Voice for Men’s pet domestic violence expert, probably because she’s the only one who thinks jokes about eating “battered women” — you know, like batter fried chicken — are hilarious.
In the interview, she was telling Dean “Long Tie” Esmay about a speaking tour she’d made in Canada — a place she describes as “one of the worst countries in the world.” No, really. Here’s what she had to say about her harrowing ordeal:
I did a six week tour, with Senator Anne Cools, all across Canada. And there were some wonderful … uh, men’s groups, just struggling to keep going. And as we traveled and talked to men’s groups, we realized how terribly dangerous it is because it’s almost as though the entire government and the judiciary–the same people–had been infiltrated by very radical feminists out to get men. And I talked to people all the way across Canada. You know my mother was Canadian, and I’m half Canadian, and it hurt actually. See I was a child in Toronto, and my feeling as we went through is real fear. I remember I was working with Anne in the Senate and I walked in to the lift, and this man who was in the lift with me was cowering over in the corner. And I came out and I said to Anne, “What on earth was that about?” And she said, “Men are frightened. They just don’t know when they’re going to be told they’re sexually harassing somebody.”
I’ve highlighted several of the passages which I think may have entered our universe from the Bizarro Men’s Rights multidimensional wormhole of misandry.
But, seriously, what planet does this woman live on? Does she actually think something like this really happened? Was there really a man in an elevator with her who was literally cowering in the corner because he thought she would accuse him of some sort of sex crime? Was there a man there at all? Was there even an elevator? Is Canada a real country? THEN WHO WAS PHONE?
So about a week ago, someone put a petition up on Whitehouse.gov asking the president to classify the Men’s Rights Movement as a terrorist group. The petition, posted in the immediate aftermath of Elliot Rodger ‘s killing spree, seems to be sincerely motivated. But it was a bad idea. The Men’s Rights movement is full of assholes, some of them potentially quite dangerous. Still, not every MRA is an Elliot Rodger in the making, and this kind of hyperbole doesn’t help those who are trying to expose the true terribleness of the Men’s Rights movement.
After their initial outrage wore off, MRAs decided to treat the petition as a golden opportunity for self-martyrdom. Dean Esmay of A Voice for Men urged fellow MRAs – sorry, MHumanRAs – to sign it themselves, perhaps not realizing that it might prove difficult to convince the world they’re being oppressed by a petition if they’re the ones most actively collecting signatures for it. (Esmay also took a moment to compare me to Bull Connor, which seems a tad odd, to say the least.)
