We Hunted The Mammoth
By David Futrelle
There are few creatures on this planet who are more badly misnamed than the Men’s Rights Activist. For one thing, most MRAs seem less interested in expanding rights for men than they are with taking away the rights of women. For another, as I’ve been pointing out since I started this blog nine years ago, they don’t actually do any activism beyond yelling about, and at, women online.
By David Futrelle
Porn actress Mercedes Carrera was enthusiastically embraced by the Gamergate crowd after she spoke out in favor of the journalism ethics movement misogynistic harassment campaign in its heyday back in 2014.
By David Futrelle
It’s not uncommon for aging libertines to have second thoughts about the casual hedonism of their youth. Neil Strauss followed up his 2005 book The Game, which brought the “pickup artist” subculture into the mainstream, with The Truth, in which he confessed that his celebrity as one of the world’s most famous PUAs had in many ways ruined his life and the lives of those around him. (Still, he didn’t return the royalties from his earlier book, as far as I know, or take it out of print.)
So it’s been a while since I checked in on the heroic Twitter activism of the legendary Men’s Rights Twitter Activist Dean Esmay, formerly the Number Two at A Voice for Men, currently either the “Online Activism Director” or the “online outreach director” for the National Coalition For Men — the first according to him, the second according to the NCFM.
So right-wing garbage site Breitbart has apparently decided to pander to the angry gamer demo even more explicitly with the launch of Breitbart Tech, “a brand new vertical dedicated to coverage of tech, gaming, and web culture.” Naturally, they’ve tapped the unlovely and ungracious Milo Yiannopoulos, Gamergate panderer par excellence, for editor.
Yesterday Milo went to the KotakuInAction subreddit, one of Gamergate’s main hubs, to announce the good news.
One Puckish Redditor gave Milo a little pop quiz to test his knowledge of technology and gaming. Milo, well, failed it.
Yesterday, I wrote about Vox Day’s extravagantly evasive — yet highly revealing — interview with David Pakman. But the interview also featured a few striking moments of candor. One of these came when Day — a sometime gave developer as well as the biggest asshole in Sci Fi — offered his answer to the question: “What is Gamergate really about?”
Suggesting that the issue of “corruption in game journalism” was little more than “the spark that set the whole thing off,” Day declared that
what Gamergate is fundamentally about is the right of people to design, develop and play games that they want to design, develop and play without being criticized for it.
Which is an. er, interesting perspective, as there is in fact no “right” to be immune from criticism.
Longtime readers of this blog will be familiar with a fellow who used to call himself Peter-Andrew: Nolan© — with the hyphen and the colon and the copyright symbol — and now calls himself Joschua-Brandon: Boehm© — also with a hyphen and a colon and a copyright symbol.
I think it’s fair to say he’s the world’s worst MRA.
So that was A Voice for Men founder Paul Elam’s response to a recent post of mine talking about Christopher Cantwell, an AVFM contributor who also likes to tell people to kill themselves.
In an AVFM post also titled David Futrelle: Please kill yourself, Elam waxed eloquent upon this theme:
David, please go kill yourself.
You should, however, before you slip away into the dark void that resembles your capacity for logic, consider that you may want to get out more. A lot more, actually.
“Please kill yourself,” in the context of Twitter and a lot of other internet exchanges is par for the course.
That is sadly true, Paul. I see that as a problem; you apparently see it as an excuse for the harassment and abuse you and your followers so enjoy heaping upon your opponents in the name of “Men’s Human Rights.”
Apparently, in Elam’s world, the best way to fight male suicide is by telling other men to kill themselves.
Oh, but one of Elam’s fans has an answer to that, too:
Human rights advocates at work!
Watch out, Milo Yiannopoulos, you’ve got competition! #GamerGate has a new journalistic champion — and this one, like Milo, seems to have come straight from central casting, a virtual embodiment of every snooty reactionary preppie stereotype from every bad 80s movie.
A libertarian think tanker and erstwhile journalist with the unlikely name of Mytheos Holt, this new contender has one great advantage over young Milo: as you can see in the photo above, which I have not photoshopped in any way, he appears to be made entirely of wax — which means that unless someone accidentally sets him near a heater he will last forever.
GamerGate, so depressing and destructive and … inadvertently hilarious?
Like the MRAs I write about so often here, GamerGaters have a certain fondness for the propaganda of the meme, attempting to win hearts and minds with elaborate infographics, repurposed propaganda, and basically any sort of graphic they can pull together in a few minutes with Photoshop or MSPaint.
They are, unfortunately for them, terrible at it. It’s not just that the amateur graphic designers of GamerGate lack a basic understanding of good design. They are also so completely lacking in self-awareness that they are unable to see when their graphics completely undercut the messages they are intended to convey.
So today, let’s take a look at the The Top Five Most Ridiculously Ironic #Gamergate Memes that I’ve found posted recently on 8chan and Twitter.
