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The Week in Woke: Unhealthy Woke Mask Mandate Edition

Boldly resisting the culture of wokeness

It’s time for another of our weekly looks at the world of “woke” — the all-purpose insult that’s the right-wing’s new version of so-called political correctness. Right-wing ideologues (and Bill Maher) are still railing about the allegedly “woke Olympics” and the evils of “woke capitalism.” But there are a few other examples that caught my eye this week.

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On Friday, Anita Sarkeesian called out "toxic masculinity" on Twitter. Here's what happened next.

Anita Sarkeesian's Twitter notifications (Artist's conception)
Anita Sarkeesian’s Twitter mentions (Artist’s conception)

What a surreal life Anita Sarkeesian must lead, in which virtually everything she says and does becomes grist for the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine, Sarkeesian Division.

Take the latest blowup, which followed a few comments Sarkeesian made in the wake of Friday’s school shooting in Marysville, which may have been triggered by the shooter’s angry response to a romantic breakup. On Friday, Sarkeesian posted a few thoughts on the matter on Twitter:

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Turns out VICE made a video about that Men’s Rights rally in Toronto. GO WATCH IT.

This is not an embedded video, so don't click on it.
This is not an embedded video, so don’t click on it.

I don’t know how I missed it, but a couple of weeks back Vice posted a short video about that EARTH-SHATTERINGLY HISTORIC Men’s Rights rally in Toronto that captured the attention of the world a tiny fraction of a percentage of people in the world (including the people at it and readers of this blog) a little over a month ago.

Alas, WordPress won’t let me embed the video here, but you all need to go look at it. Not only does it capture pretty well what a dinky event it was, but it also contains a bunch of mini-interviews with some A Voice for Men folks that are rather revealing.

The most revealing one of the bunch starts about 2:40 into the video, when AVFM’s Suzanne McCarley explains that

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For A Voice for Men, and its Edmonton offshoot, terrifying women is a form of “human rights activism.”

Men's Rights Edmonton activist at work
Men’s Rights Edmonton activist at work

So the self-described “human rights activists” at A Voice for Men have found three more women to harass. Here’s the story, which for many of you will have a depressingly familiar ring:

Members of Men’s Rights Edmonton, a small group that is for all intents and purposes a local chapter of A Voice for Men, has been putting up pictures targeting Lise Gotell, the chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta. The pictures, which seem inspired by “Wanted” posters of yore, feature a large portrait of Gotell and the caption: