We Hunted The MammothDudes, are you finding that your attempts at humor are falling flat? Are your clever quips getting you written up regularly by HR? Are they causing your friends to get fired when they drunkenly defend your “jokes” on live television?
It’s possible that what you think is humor is not actually humor. Consider the following list of things that are not humor:
Last month, police say, University of Mary Washington student and feminist/LGBT activist Grace Mann was murdered — bound and asphyxiated by a male housemate and fellow student.
An antifeminist blogger is blaming her death on feminist jokes about misandry.
A writer from Roosh Valizadeh’s terrible Return of Kings site recently got himself into a bit of trouble at a white power convention in Tennessee.
The problem wasn’t that the writer, one Blair Naso, didn’t fit in with the motley assortment of Hitler-lovers and former National Review writers who attended the 2015 American Renaissance conference, put on by an organization that actually has won itself an official “hate group” designation from the Southern Poverty Law Center for its virulent racism and its obsessive advocacy for a white “homeland.”
No, he fit in fine, ideologically speaking. In a post for Return of Kings, Naso praised the AmRen crowd for “doing a wonderful work,” and “saying the things that others are terrified to say.”
The problem? Well, Mr. Naso got a wee bit drunk and started harassing women at a local bar. As Naso sheepishly admits in his ROK post,
The story of Jeremiah True — the Reed College student who made headlines last month as a self-proclaimed free speech martyr, and who was arrested last week for harassment and sexual abuse — only seems to get stranger the more I look into it.
The latest development: On Friday, True pled not guilty to charges that he groped two young women on a high-school Rugby team who were practicing in a Portland park; he remains in custody.
We now have some more details on what he’s charged with. The Oregonian newspaper has reported that
So there’s a giant, growing, and extremely creepy megathread up on Reddit at the moment, and for once, the creepiness isn’t coming from inside the Reddit. Well, less of the creepiness is coming from Reddit than you might expect.
Yesterday, you see, a Redditor known as BA_Baracus posted a couple of simple questions to AskReddit: Women of Reddit, when did you first notice that men were looking at you in a sexual way? How old were you and how did it make you feel?
This wasn’t the first time he’d posted a question to his fellow Redditors; he’s posted a bunch, including “People of reddit with eyes that point in different directions, which one of them is usually looking at me?” and, er, “Recent rape victims of Reddit, how did it happen, and what the hell were you doing in India?” None of these questions got much of a response.
But this time, well, thousands of “women of Reddit” stepped forward to tell the horrifying yet in most cases completely unsurprising stories of the first time men started perving on them, in many cases before they were even teenagers.
Here’s a sampling of some of their stories. TRIGGER WARNING for extreme fucking creepiness.
Last Thursday, John Robert Lind of Blaine Minnesota pled guilty to misdemeanor “lewd conduct” charges. Lind’s “lewd conduct?”
He repeatedly, over the course of six months, jacked off into a co-worker’s coffee, and onto her desk, when she wasn’t there.
In his must-read GQ story on A Voice for Men’s conference last summer, Jeff Sharlet detailed an unsettling encounter between his friend Blair and AVFM’s “collegiate activism director” Sage Gerard, who, Blair told Sharlet, crudely propositioned her and gave her “the most unconsensual hug I have ever known.” (I wrote about it here.)
Now Gerard has offered a rebuttal of sorts to Sharlet’s article and, well, it’s nearly as creepy as the incident itself. Gerard admits that he was indeed flirting with her and that, yes, “[m]y talking to her included a reassuring knee pat and a hug.”
He also claims that Blair was literally hired by GQ in order to flirt with men at the conference and lure one or more of them into raping her.
If you’ve read Jeff Sharlet’s magnificent GQ account of his lost weekend amongst the “Men’s Human Rights Activists” at A Voice for Men’s conference last summer (or my take on it here), you know that some of the creepiest moments his account involved his friend Blair, a twentysomething writer who came along for the ride and ended up, by her account, being groped and propositioned by AVFM’s “director of collegiate activism” Sage Gerard.
Sharlet never mentions Blair’s last name, but Elam outs her in a AVFM post with the lovely title “GQ’s Jeff Sharlet pimps out Blair Braverman for clickbait.”
A few days before alleged “men’s human rights” website A Voice for Men held its first convention last summer, the site’s founder and head boy Paul Elam put up a post imploring the alleged human rights activists planning to attend the event not to go around calling women bitches and whores and cunts, because the news media would be there, and this might make his little human rights movement look bad.
I’m paraphrasing here; Elam was a teensy bit more euphemistic, telling his followers that anyone caught “trash-talking women, men, making violent statements … anything that can be used against us” would get a very stern talking-to and, if they persisted, would be asked to leave.
Good news, everyone! Futurama reference aside, this actually is good news: Julien Blanc, the creepy PUA who taches men how to “pick up” women by assaulting and gaslighting them, has been barred entry into the UK.
Here’s Newsweek with some of the details:
