We Hunted The Mammoth
So I found the meme above on a Facebook page called “Feminist Hypocrisy.”
I also found this familiar pic posted there as well.
And this highly edifying discussion underneath it:
Huh. I’m seeing some hypocrisy here, but it doesn’t look much like feminist hypocrisy.
Do the Sarkeesian Effect dudes — now in the midst of a painful and noisy breakup — not realize how ridiculous they look to the rest of us?
Ok, maybe that’s not the right question to ask. After all, we’re talking about Davis Aurini, a sort of low-budget Anton LaVey with a plastic-skull fetish who actually put this picture of himself on his website on purpose:
I admit it: I enjoy schadenfreude so much that I can usually spell the word correctly on the first try. And there’s a lot of schadenfreude in the air these days.
Indeed, I’ve been reading through the YouTube comments of the Sarkeesian Effect breakup videos I posted earlier and chuckling quietly to myself, not just at the assorted skull jokes but at the unintentional comedy, including all the bizarre contortions some Sarkeesian Effect supporters are going through in order to pretend that this ridiculous breakup is somehow less ridiculous than it actually is.
As I can’t in good conscience ever recommend that anyone actually go read the comments on YouTube, I’ve collected together some of my favorite ones. Here are the Top 11 Most Unintentionally Hilarious YouTube Comments About the Sarkeesian Effect Breakup.
If you watch only one 15-minute interview with Davis Aurini about his breakup with his former Sarkeesian Effect collaborator Jordan Owen today, make it this one!
Ok, I realize that might not be quite persuasive enough to get all of you to click play, but, seriously, this is pretty primo internet drama here, especially when a very testy Aurini starts comparing Owen to Elliot Rodger and basically telling us that his former filmmaking partner has none of the skills necessary to make a film.
And yep, it appears that they really did have their big falling out over Roosh. Which is a teensy bit ironic, because criticizing Roosh is pretty much the only decent thing that Owen has done since he first started obsessing about Anita Sarkeesian.
Anyway, the whole interview is worth listening to. Honest. But if you’re in a hurry, or just can’t tolerate 15 minutes of Aurini, skip ahead to 8:38, where it starts to get juicy, or to 10:30, where it gets even juicier. Here’s a partial transcript, courtesy of CringingAtTheWorld on the GamerGhazi subreddit .
I give it 4 “Ethics in Games Journalism” out of 5.
H/T — r/GamerGhazi, and everyone else who pointed me to this video.
Oh, say it ain’t so! The creative team behind The Sarkeesian Effect has fallen apart in a wave of mutual recriminations and accusations and general bad feelings! Owen is accusing Aurini of blackmail! Aurini is accusing Owen of being a nerd who can’t get laid! They’re both accusing each other of trying to take the money and run!
And apparently Roosh V — yes, that Roosh V, do you even know of any others — played the Yoko Ono role in this breakup. (Sorry, Yoko, it really wasn’t fair to drag you into this, so I’ll post a video of your awesome Walking On Thin Ice at the end of this post.)
Owen announced the firing of Aurini in this video:
Welcome back, my friends, to the harassment that never ends.
It’s not news that GamerGate is fading – the media hubbub has died down, and the last I checked the volume of Tweets to the #GamerGate hashtag has dropped to only about a fifth of what it was in its glory days.
But it’s too soon to say it’s over. Because while the number of Gaters has shrunk, the harassment of GamerGate’s targets goes on, and on, and on. Indeed, for the three “Literally Whos” who’ve been the central targets of #GamerGate harassment little has changed. The death threats, the rape threats, the insults, the harassing Tweets and comments and emails and phone calls all continue.
And then the Gaters accuse the “Literally Whos” of faking their harassment in a bid for sympathy and cash.
Let’s look at each in turn:
“Cultural Marxism” – the alleged conspiracy of alleged secret Marxists allegedly trying to destroy Western Civilization through Political Correctness and feminism and racial equality – is a favorite boogeyman of the far right.
That includes, of course, large sections of the “Red Pill” world. Roosh V’s Return of Kings site publishes reactionary diatribes with titles like Cultural Marxism Produces Matriarchy and Tactics For The War Against Cultural Marxism In 2015; Heartiste rails against the alleged evils of “cultural Marxism, feminism, equalism, and … racial self-annihilationism.”
Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield may not have mastered the fine art of public relations in the real world, but amongst those who live in imaginary worlds of their own making she is something of a PR genius.
Bloomfield, A Voice for Men’s “Director of Social Media,” was recently booted from Twitter (again) for “targeted abuse” — evidently her harassment of feminist writer Jessica Valenti, which included making up inflammatory fake quotations and attributing them to her.
Whoever said that a picture is worth a thousand words clearly hasn’t been looking at the artwork of #GamerGate — unless by “a thousand words” you mean the word “poop” repeated a thousand times.
Nonetheless, to honor the hard work of GamerGate’s unsung graphic heroes, and on the off chance that I might not be fully grasping the subtle meanings of these aesthetically impaired visionaries, I would like to present to you all today a series of [] incomprehensible GamerGate Cartoons, which I have collected from 8chan and Twitter and various other places I don’t even remember.
CONTENT WARNING: Cartoon violence, misogyny, raging anti-Semitism, really bad drawing.
This somewhat alarming video was recently posted in Reddit’s GamerGhazi subreddit. It features Sarkeesian Effect co-creator Jordan Owen explaining, at some length, his disagreements with antiporn feminist Gail Dines over the book Fifty Shades of Grey. (Dines, you see, was Owen’s previous obsession, before he discovered Anita Sarkeesian; this video is a couple of years old.) Alas, the sound cuts out about halfway through the nearly hour-long video, so you won’t get to hear the whole thing.
You might also be slightly distracted by the fact that Owen delivers this lengthy critique while sitting naked in a bathtub.
