Category: Uncategorized

It’s probably about time for another open thread for personal stuff. As is always the case with these open threads, NO MRAs, no trolls, none of that shit.

You may remember the massive tantrum the internet’s baby men threw after Emma Watson gave her famous speech on feminism to the United Nations a year ago.

Men’s Rights Activists and other haters of feminism declared that the #HeForShe initiative the Harry Potter star was promoting was little more than a misandrist effort to return to chivalry. They called her a “man hater.” They even attacked her for dating a rugby player.

And of course they put her down as a “first world feminist” focusing on trivial issues that only well-off white women could possibly care about. Of course, her detractors in the Men’s Rights movement don’t actually give a shit about third-world women and girls; their attacks on first-world feminists are mostly just an excuse to rant about the allegedly “pampered” and coddled women of the industrialized west.

“Emma Watson is typical feminist. Rich, pampered, and white,” one longtime MRA declared.

“This lumping together of many valid issues that women (and men of course) in the third world face with those of the privileged and pampered first is frankly obscene,” a commenter on A Voice for Men complained.

And on the Men’s Rights subreddit, another Watson anti-fan sneered that she was

a fucking uber-celebrity on a power-trip stoking her ego by claiming to speak for a group she doesn’t understand, at all. If she keeps this up she’s going to ruin her long term career by becoming divisive and toxic. The backlash is already beginning and it serves the idiot right.

These were some of the milder, er, critiques.

Now, there are certainly things to criticize about Watson’s feminism. But there is also something to be said for choosing Watson, an actress known for playing a beloved character in the Harry Potter films, as a goodwill ambassador to the non-feminists of the world.

Watson may not be able to speak for women in the third world, but it turns out that her message managed to speak to one young woman whose life has been the absolute opposite of pampered: Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Nobel Peace Prize winner who was famously shot in the face by a man trying to kill her and her crusade for girls’ education in Pakistan.

As the New York Times reports,

Malala Yousafzai told Emma Watson she decided to call herself a feminist after hearing her now famous speech at the UN, to launch the “He for She” campaign, which aims to encourage men to fight for women’s rights. “It has been a tricky word. When I heard it the first time I heard some negative responses and some positive ones. I hesitated in saying am I feminist or not?” she told Watson during an interview at a screening of the He Named Me Malala documentary at the Into Film Festival. “Then after hearing your speech I decided there’s no way and there’s nothing wrong by calling yourself a feminist. So I’m a feminist and we all should be a feminist because feminism is another word for equality.”

You can watch the entire interview below:

I found this insightful manosphere graphic on the Blue Pill Subreddit; it seems to have originally come from a blog called “Females exposed.” 

I hope all the women reading this will see this as the challenge that it is: Gotta Catch ’em All!

Click the pic for a much larger and far more readable version.

Sorry, folks. I’ve been out of commission with a migraine most of this weekend. I should be back to regular posting tomorrow, knock on wood (but not on my head).

I guess the folks at Ubisoft didn’t get the memo that only dudes hunted mammoths.

(Maybe because it’s not true. It may be that no one did. But a video game about people looting already dead mammoths probably wouldn’t sell many copies.)

UPDATE: The shooter apparently posted his intentions on 4chan yesterday; see my post here for more details.

What the media is reporting so far:

• A man opened fire in a multiple classrooms in the science building at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon
• 10 have been killed; 20 have been injured. One report claimed 15 dead, but that seems to have been erroneous
• The alleged shooter is apparently in custody or otherwise “neutralized”
• Police know who the shooter is; he apparently posted on social media earlier today about what he was planning to do
• Police are still searching the campus in case the shooter had an accomplice

This is what is being reported; it hasn’t all been confirmed.

For the latest news coverage, see here. Please post any seemingly reliable information you find out about the shooting in the comments below

I love it when a plan comes together! Also, when something totally unplanned comes together in an amazing way, as was the case with this video by actor and voice actor D.C. Douglas and animator Rachael Leone, based on a series of tweets from feminist writer Anne Thériault.

As Douglas explains on his website,

While doing auditions from my home studio I stumbled upon tweets from Anne Thériault that began with “narrator.” I couldn’t resist and started recording…

He posted the recording on YouTube, where it took off immediately. So he got Leone on board and she turned it into this lovely little animated film.

Thanks to everyone who sent the link to me! It’s too good not to share with the rest of you.

Technology is weird. In their attempts to build neural network software that can process images and recognize objects in them, Google’s neural network researchers have created software that hallucinates, transforming mundane photographs of things like people and pets into bizarre fever dreams filled with strange mutant dog creatures and, for some reason, an excess of eyes.

Here’s one “before” pic of an ordinary kid:

So Em Ford, a popular YouTuber known for her makeup tutorials, recently put up a video detailing some of the nasty and abusive comments she got when she dared to put up some pictures of herself without makeup, revealing red skin, pimples, and, you know, other human imperfections.

Someone posted about her video to the Men’s Rights subreddit, and the regulars there offered some nuanced and measured thoughts on our society’s beauty ideals.

Just kidding! They attacked women as fickle, hateful narcissists who use makeup to deceive men — and who should probably not be allowed to run companies.