We Hunted The Mammoth
Lucy Walcott, who publishes a blog called NotParticularlyPauciloquent, isn’t afraid of the big questions. The tough questions. The important questions.
And in a recent post she takes on what is perhaps the most important question of our age: What is We Hunted the Mammoth?
To paraphrase the great Marge Gunderson, I’m not so sure I agree 100% with her police work.
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.
If Paglia was feeling a little starved for attention, the short piece she published on Time.com yesterday (donotlink version here) with the portentous title “The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil” should fix that problem in a hurry. An appalling bit of rape apologia gussied up as a bold meditation on human evil, it’s already generating applause from Men’s Rights and Red Pill Redditors, The Daily Caller, and fellow antifeminist feminist Christina Hoff Sommers.
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:
Never doubt the ingenuity of the internet’s misogynists in coming up with new reasons to hate a woman they’re already inclined to hate.
Actress and geek icon Emma Watson has been near the top of the new Misogyny hate list all this week, in the wake of the speech she gave at the UN gently praising feminism and suggesting that traditional gender roles aren’t always such a good thing for dudes either. She’s made this point before, declaring in a Tweet last month that
So it’s official: the Emma You Are Next web site, which was threatening to release nude pictures of Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, is a hoax. The site now redirects traffic to the home page of something called Rantic, a mysterious supposed “social media marketing enterprise” with a reputation for hoaxes.
Rantic is now claiming that the real agenda behind its website was a noble one: to expose the evils of leaked celebrity nudes – and, by painting 4channers as the evil hackers behind it all, to get 4chan itself taken down.
Christina Hoff Sommers is an old school faux-feminist who’s devoted the last several decades to trashing feminism. Lately she’s apparently decided to appeal to a younger audience — or at least a more immature one — by pandering to the #GamerGate crowd.
That’s probably worth a post or two in itself, but in the meantime you might enjoy this excellent song that deftly rebuts the, er, arguments in her recent video about sexism in video games and why she thinks that’s somehow not a real issue because, you know, dudes like to look at boobies when they play games. No, that’s really her argument — though I’m not sure it even qualifies as an argument, technically speaking.
Anyway, enjoy!
And here’s her original video, if you’re feeling masochistic and would actually enjoy sitting through six and a half very long minutes of simple-minded, patronizing, disingenuous, evidence-free pseudoarguments delivered by someone desperately pandering to terrible, terrible people.
Congratulations, A Voice for Men. You are having an impact upon the world.
Or at least upon one organization in India, a truly reprehensible group called Masculinist India, which has adopted the histrionic rhetorical style, and even some of the specific arguments, advanced by AVFM and other North American Men’s Rights groups for a series of graphically challenged “masculinist” memes posted on Facebook and on the group’s web page. Masculinist India has even adopted AVFM’s preferred nomenclature, describing its members as “Men’s Human Rights Activists.” They are of course the complete opposite of “human rights” activists, campaigning instead against basic rights for women.
The influence of AVFM and other Western Men’s Rightsers can been seen again and again in Masculinist India’s posts and memes, which have all the sophistication and subtlety of Chick Tracts.
The “feminists made me a misogynist” logic of the meme above, for example, echoes the argument made in “Hate Bounces,” an influential MRA screed by MRA/MGTOW elder “Zed,” and by countless other MRAs including former AVFM Number Two John Hembling.
Other memes borrow not only the arguments of Western MRAs but recycle the same tired stock photos, like the angry woman in this meme, a favorite amongst Western MRAs.
When I saw this quote from our old friend, A Voice For Men’s repeatedly-banned-from-Twitter Social Media Director Janet Bloomfield, it seemed to me to be so extravagantly confused that even the most confused cat against feminism would be embarrassed to have said it. So I made a new meme for it. Ta da!
Here’s the whole paragraph the quote comes from:
I am often accused of simply not understanding what feminism IS when I dare to criticize it, especially on Twitter. Get a dictionary, blah blah blah whatever. See, here’s the thing: I know exactly what feminism IS and the claim that feminists stand for gender equality is not only outright laughable, I’m beginning to see it as a calculated, deliberate, malicious lie. Feminists damn well know they are seeking superiority and the wholesale destruction of society as we know it to be replaced by a brutal matriarchy in which all women and the remaining men will be subject to totalitarian controls that would make Stalin green with envy.
Not all the remaining men! I have been assured I will be guaranteed a spot in Women’s Country with the other male servitors.
Anyhoo, if anyone else feels inspired to do any meme-ing, there are certainly any number of quotes about feminism from MRAs that might work well for similar graphics. No need to stick with cats. There are any number of animals that might better symbolize confused MRAs, from dung beetles to snakefish to bat guano. Ok, that last one isn’t strictly speaking an animal, but you get the idea.
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!
Ah, sweet schadenfreude! The gamebros at 4chan have been insisting publicly that the whole #GamerGate campaign — you know, the vicious attacks on game developer Zoe Quinn and other women in gaming — has been a spontaneous grassroots uprising against corruption in the world of game journalism, not a targeted campaign by misogynistic 4channers and their allies to ruin the lives of Quinn and everyone even vaguely connected with or even just aligned with her.
Well, it’s just become a lot harder to make that argument with a straight face. Last night, Quinn announced that she’s been lurking in the IRC where 4chaners have been diligently and often quite deviously planning this “spontaneous” uprising. And she’s started posting screenshots that seem to offer pretty incontrovertible evidence of just how duplicitously 4channers planned every element of #GamerGate.
Men’s Rights Activists have become known, not without reason, as belligerent assholes whose main forms of “activism” consist of harassment and threats.
One bold Men’s Rights Redditor known as El Rellok thinks he’s come up with a way to counteract this perception and deliver a powerful men’s-rightsty message at the same time.
He wants MRAs to send feminists … pictures of bloody feathers. No, really.
Now, to most people, getting a bloody feather in your email inbox would seem to be the digital equivalent of having a bloody horse’s head left in your bed. But in El Rellok’s world it is a rational and reasonable way to express “outrage” at feminist evil, and anyone who might possibly think otherwise is by definition unreasonable.
Let’s let him explain, because I certainly can’t explain how sending pictures of bloody feathers to someone you hate could be construed as anything but threatening:
