We Hunted The Mammoth
Congratulations, assholes of Reddit! You’ve driven another woman away from your internet clubhouse.
This time the woman in question was the site’s now ex-CEO Ellen Pao, who resigned today after a week of “Reddit Revolt” that included racist and misogynistic abuse aimed at “Chairman Pao” as well as the occasional death threat.
Indeed, the abuse was so bad that Pao felt the need to address it in her resignation note:
Is MRA thinking simply beyond satire?
Cartoonist Rebecca Cohen (@GynoStar on Twitter) recently decided to offer a satirical take on the false rape accusation paranoia that’s endemic in Men’s Rights circles, producing the list of tips below, designed to mirror some of the terrible advice that’s regularly given to women on how to avoid rape.
So Reddit is in a tizzy again. This time, surprisingly, it’s not because Redditors are outraged that the site admins have hired a woman, or shut down one of dozens of subreddits devoted to, I dunno, stolen pictures of dead celebrity babies, or some other typically Reddity thing for Redditors to get outraged about.
No, this time Redditors are angry because Reddit seems have fired the one staffer who was genuinely liked by a wide swath of Redditors — that staffer being Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s Director of Talent, perhaps best known for keeping the site’s mega-popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) threads running smoothly, which extended to relaying questions to famous guests and transcribing their answers.Â
The lovely fellas in the Red Pill subreddit are up in (possibly imaginary) arms about a new anti-troll law that, they’re convinced, has made “the Red Pill …Â illegal in New Zealand.”
On Fathers Day, somewhere on the internet, the following meme was posted:
The Men’s Rights subreddit reacted, as it so often does, with manly indignation: how dare these women take our Fathers Day from us! Even by normal Men’s Rights standards for empty outrage this seems a bit much. After all, it’s not exactly news that a lot of women raise their kids by themselves, when the fathers of their children, refuse to act as, well, fathers to their children. Indeed, “financial abortions” — that is, consequence-free child abandonment for men — is one of the central demands of the Men’s Rights movement.Â
Less than 24 hours after an apparent white supremacist murdered nine black churchgoers in cold blood during a prayer meeting in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, one prominent MRA is trying to put the blame on feminism, because of a remark the killer reportedly made about rape.
One of the survivors of the church killings reported that, before he began shooting, the killer told those in the prayer group that “you rape our women and youâre taking over our country. And you have to go.âÂ
Last year, I wrote about a repellant little “community” on Reddit: the PhilosophyofRape subreddit, devoted to promoting what it called the corrective rape of “filthy, unmitigated, sluts … [t]hat badly need to be punished. Badly.”
Reddit being what it is, the subreddit remains up to this day. And now the folks behind it have taken their repugnant “philosophy” to the web. Earlier this week, one of the subreddit’s numerous moderators, a veritable cauldron of bigotries who calls himself European88, announced the grand opening of a new Philosophy of Rape website. He urged his fellow “philosophers” to “[s]ubscribe and submit your rape tips … !”Â
Karen Straughan, the soporific, pseudoscientific YouTube antifeminist, doesn’t seem on the surface much like a “Red Pill Woman.” She’s a single mother with short hair, well past “the wall,” who makes a point of not wearing makeup in her videos.
But she’s got one quality that apparently makes up for all of her other defects as a Red Pill gal: she tells the Red Pill guys exactly what they want to hear, defending their noxious views, feeding their sense of victimhood, and hand-waving away their blatant misogyny.
So it’s hardly a surprise that she got a warm welcome when she showed up yesterday in the Red Pill subreddit to do an “ask me anything.” Today, I girded my loins and popped a caffeine pill and read through her answers. Well, skimmed them, anyway; I’m no masochist.
I learned a lot. Unfortunately, most of what I learned was not true.Â
So I was reading through a rant on the Red Pill subreddit that’s so over-the-top ridiculous that it got downvoted to zero by the Red Pill masses. (Or maybe they voted it down because it wasn’t woman-hating enough? Hard to tell, where the Red Pill is concerned.)
Regardless, the rant inspired some, well, revealing commentary from other Red Pillers. Like this creepy and amazing mini-masterpiece of misogyny, from a comment by beerthroway that actually got some upvotes from the Red Pill masses. I’ve bolded some of the best –by which I mean the worst — bits.
