Patriarchy: Also good for protection against hell lizards.
One favorite tool in the misogynist’s toolkit is the old “if women want to be protected from violent men it proves they need patriarchy” argument. It’s a rather silly argument, but those making it tend to do so with enormous smugness, feeling that they’ve got the ultimate “gotcha” to use against feminists.
“Well feminists, I’ve been waiting for this a long time, and it’s finally come,” the ROK contributor who calls himself runsonmagic writes. “I’ve been waiting for the day you’d ask us to bring back patriarchy.”
Julien Blanc, also known as RSD Julien, is a self-described “executive dating coach” seemingly without a conscience. In expensive seminars held in hotels around the world the Real Social Dynamics instructor teaches men to “Make Girls BEG To Sleep With You After SHORT-CIRCUITING Their Emotional And Logical Mind,” as his breathless promo material puts it.
What this means in practice? Manipulation, mind-fuckery and in some cases outright physical assault — none of which he makes any attempts to hide.
GamerGaters like to loudly profess that they oppose harassment. They also like to claim that most if not all of the harassment that has occurred comes from people that aren’t “real” GamerGaters.
So what do GamerGaters do when they’re confronted with evidence that someone in their ranks — not an anonymous nobody but someone with some standing in their community — is harassing someone?
Yeah, well you’re a slut anyway, you stupid bunch of grapes.
Who knew Aesop’s Fables was a pickup bible?
I assume you’re all familiar with Aesop’s story of the fox and the grapes: A fox wants some grapes, but can’t reach them. He walks off in a huff, sniffing that the grapes are probably sour anyway. The moral: “Any fool can despise what he can not get.”
The moral that pickup guru Heartiste draws from the story is a little different. As he sees it, the fox is a super cool alpha male who’s come up with an awesome way to put those slut grapes in their place.
The Sam Pepper situation just gets uglier and uglier. As YouTube sex educator Laci Green explains in the video above, Pepper, under fire for “prank” videos on YouTube that appear to show him sexually harassing numerous young women, is now facing serious accusations of sexual misconduct from numerous women – including, in one case, violent rape.
For those who haven’t been following the story as it’s developed over the past week: Sam Pepper is a former Big Brother UK cast member and YouTube personality best known for a series of unfunny “prank” videos which have often featured him sexually harassing women in various creepy ways.
So last night I discovered the PunchableFaces subreddit. That’s right, an entire subreddit devoted to posting pictures of people so that Redditors can fantasize about doing them bodily harm.
While most of the pictures in the subreddit are of boys and men – some targeted for being “faggots” – the recent posts (as of this writing) with the greatest number of upvotes and comments were, naturally, aimed at women. Specifically, at two outspoken feminists who’ve been singled out by Men’s Rights Activists and #GamerGaters for endless harassment: video game critic Anita Sarkeesian and Canadian feminist activist Chanty Binx, perhaps better known amongst her enemies as “Big Red.”
“Surly Amy” Roth, a Los Angeles artist and writer for Skepchick, has created an art installation that attempts to capture and convey what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the relentless abuse she and too many other outspoken women face online.
With the help of members of the Los Angeles Women’s Atheist and Agnostic Group, Roth has built a small office-within-an-office inside the The Center For Inquiry-Los Angeles – and covered every surface with printouts of actual harassing messages sent to her and an assortment of other misogynist bete noires, including Rebecca Watson, Amanda Marcotte, Soraya Chemaly and Lindy West.
There is a false notion that online spaces are not real. That what happens online does not have an effect on the regular day-to-day life of people. As we have seen recently with the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence, high profile women are seen as mere objects and targets or play-things meant to be stolen, acquired and used- that if they can not handle these made up rules- that they should leave the internet and all forms of technology behind.
My art exhibit is meant to put you, the viewer, in their shoes if only for a moment. See what it is like to be obsessively judged based on “fuck-ability”, “rape-ability”, as an object, or alternatively as what seems to be a target in a socially accepted (or otherwise ignored) game of online stalking, harassment and silencing techniques.
The opening reception for “A Woman’s Room Online” is tonight, September 13th at 7pm at the Center for Inquiry in Los Angeles; the installation will remain up through Oct. 13th.
4Channers discover that Zoe has been spying on the #IRC channels where they’ve been planning and coordinating their “raid.”
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
Ah, sweet schadenfreude! The gamebros at 4chan have been insisting publicly that the whole #GamerGate campaign — you know, the vicious attacks on game developer Zoe Quinn and other women in gaming — has been a spontaneous grassroots uprising against corruption in the world of game journalism, not a targeted campaign by misogynistic 4channers and their allies to ruin the lives of Quinn and everyone even vaguely connected with or even just aligned with her.
Well, it’s just become a lot harder to make that argument with a straight face. Last night, Quinn announced that she’s been lurking in the IRC where 4chaners have been diligently and often quite deviously planning this “spontaneous” uprising. And she’s started posting screenshots that seem to offer pretty incontrovertible evidence of just how duplicitously 4channers planned every element of #GamerGate.
A prostate cancer charity has returned $6000 to donors from Reddit because it doesn’t want to be associated with their toxic money. Chalk this up as another proud day for Reddit.
So here’s the story: With Reddit emerging, over the past several days, as one of the central distribution hubs for a vast cache of stolen nude pictures of assorted celebrities – including not only an adult Jennifer Lawrence but at least two celebs who were underage when their photos were taken – one Redditor thought he saw a way for the newly created TheFappening subreddit to spin itself as a public-minded enterprise rather than as a large-scale enabler of criminal activity: why not take a few minutes off from frantic masturbation to raise a few bucks for charity?
If you’re a straight guy looking for “fapping” material, the internet is your friend. It’s awash in freely available pictures of naked women of every size, shape, color, age, or hairstyle you prefer. And if you want more than pictures, the internet is happy to oblige, offering up videos featuring women of every description engaging in every sex act you can imagine, and then some.
You might think this would be enough.
But for some straight dudes, it evidently isn’t. They don’t just want to look at the mind-bogglingly enormous selection of women out there who have agreed to pose naked, or even perform explicit sex acts, on camera.
No, they also want to look at women who haven’t agreed to have their nude photos put on the internet. Hence the popularity of “ex-girlfriend” or “revenge porn” sites, filled with pictures that are (or at least purport to be) of ex-girlfriends who never wanted the pictures they shared with their then-boyfriends posted for the world to see.
