By David Futrelle
So I’ve been taking a brief “I can’t stand to look at this shit every single day” hiatus, but the thing about the manosphere is that the news never stops breaking. And the latest no-longer-quite-breaking news is that the Reddit admins have, at long last, banned the Braincels subreddit for violating the site’s newly strengthened rules against harassment and bullying.
The subreddit went down on Monday, along with several dozen other subreddits that also should have been banned a long time ago. According to the folks in the SubredditDrama subreddit, here are a few of the other subreddits that are no longer subredditing as of two days ago. I’ve had to lightly censor some of the names for obvious reasons. See if you can detect any themes here!
Several days before the crackdown, the Reddit admins shut down more than a dozen other racist subreddits with names like
Tellingly, the We_Hate_N*ggers subreddit was banned, not for hate, but because it was abandoned by its mods. “This subreddit was banned due to being unmoderated,” the Reddit admins note in their ban annoucement. “If you’d like to take it over please make a post in /r/redditrequest.”
I should note that the mods took down several subreddits making fun of white people as well, but the worst anti-white slur in any of their titles was “mayo,” which I didn’t even realize was a slur and not just something that goes great on sandwiches.
You may find yourself wondering why Reddit wasn’t already instabanning all subreddits WITH THE N-WORD IN THEIR GODDAMNED TITLES. You may find yourself wondering what sort of “content policy” Reddit was operating under that made all of these subreddits just peachy as of a few days ago.
Needless to say, numerous hateful subreddits remain standing — from r/MGTOW to r/TheRedPill to The_Donald, Reddit’s main hangout for MAGAheads.
The inhabitants of these subreddits, worried that they’ll be next, are making plans to regroup on other sites. And bravely announcing their plans to never shut their pie-holes ever.
“I’m not going anywhere,” declared someone called MaestroLogical in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit.
They don’t dare unleash us on the masses.
They remove the sanctuary and we’ll simply start espousing our ideals in every thread, in every sub.
Er, how is that any different than what Reddit misogynists do already?
While banning all these subreddits won’t shut up all of the dedicated haters who used to populate them, it will make it harder for them to find one another online — and harder for them to recruit. Reddit’s latest ban extravaganza is a step in the right direction from a site that’s generally marching the wrong way.
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The marine reads the paper and they ahow it in the video for you to pause and read.
I start to wonder whether Jacob Wohl is doing some sort of performance art based on stupidity. I mean, no one can be genuinely that stupid can they?
Speaking of cougars (no, not Katamount),
How did the slang use of “cougar” originate in the first place? To me, it seems to evoke a distinctly predatory association. Also, there doesn’t seem to be a male equivalent, presumably because for men such behavior is much more culturally normalized.
Is it predatory, then, to seek casual sex with much younger adult partners? Now that I think about this, it occurs to me that perhaps in traditional mindset, seeking casual sex with attractive partners is seen as inherently predatory. Maybe not in the sense of trying to get around people’s consent, but certainly in the sense of seeking and trying to impress. Traditionally, men were doing the seeking and impressing and often gettin-around-the-consent too. For women, casual sex and expressing sexual availability was so risky they had to at least play coy so casual sex could hardly exist without some chasing on the men’s side.
In French, seeking sex always use predatory or conquest metaphor. When I read about the meaning of cougar, it just made sense since females are often associated to cat, and seeking sex, as opposed to be submissive, is seen as either hunting or conquering. So an hunting big feline make sense.
Whether it’s the actual explanation… I will let the specialists analyze that.
(continued)
Of course, this kind of framing inherently obfuscates sexual consent and lack thereof. Traditionally, sexual morality was focused on policing sexual purity (mainly of girls and women) and normativity* rather than sexual autonomy. I think it says something about modern conservative mindset that Wohl is trying to smear Warren as kinky** and promiscuous rather than predatory.
* For example, a wild age difference in a relationship would be a breach of sexual norm, especially if it’s an old woman with young man.
** Not only the alleged BDSM thing, but also woman topping a man, woman committing adultery and old woman being with a much younger partner.
I used the word “adultery” because apparently conservatives think having an “open relationship” is worse than cheating; it’s breaking normative monogamy openly and with pride.
@lumipuna
Re: wohls intentions
Yeah, i agree with you. There is def something more going on than a simple smear campaign. He mentioned how it wasnt fair that dems get away with being a pos like john Edwards. I think he was trying to make a point about hypocrisy.
They laughed several times during the speech. They know how absurd the shit spewing out sounds.
@Lumipuna
No-one seems to know. It originated in the Vancouver Canucks hockey team ca. 1990, referring to middle aged women who attended games for the purpose of making sexual advances to the players. Why they used that particular word is not recorded anywhere that I can find.
@Dalillama:
Hunh, I did not know that.
Of course, actual cougars/pumas/katamounts/mountain lions/florida panthers/etc. are common enough in British Columbia to warn hikers about them, so it may have been Ohlmann’s comments about female==cat, hunting==predatory, and just taking the main local example.
Though the fact that ‘Florida Panthers’ is a hockey team that started in the early 1990s as well as one of the many many names for Puma Concolor may tie into this, too.
(And in the ‘today’s lucky ten thousand’ sort of thing, apparently part of why there are so many names for the same animal is that the geographically distinct groups were actually considered different subspecies for a time until modern mitochondrial genetic analysis showed that while the Florida group has suffered from inbreeding and drifted a bit, otherwise all the North American and some South American groups are the same animal.)
How did the slang use of “cougar” originate in the first place? To me, it seems to evoke a distinctly predatory association. Also, there doesn’t seem to be a male equivalent, presumably because for men such behavior is much more culturally normalized.
The closest male equivalent is “silver fox.” (I have no idea how that got started, or what the connotations are supposed to be.) It’s not as frequently invoked, though, because as you say older men with younger women is more normalized.
Can confirm. A few weeks ago, I was over at a friend’s house running our bi-weekly D&D game. Their living room window overlooks the backyard greenway of the apartment complex, and during a break, I looked out to see a full-grown lynx prowling the area. It moves on and not 5 minutes later, the neighbor’s two small children came out to play.
We went out on the balcony and told the kids to go back inside for a while, and then went to tell their parents about the lynx. They were shocked, saying “we didn’t think there would be wildlife like that here in the suburbs.”
You should have seen the looks on their faces when we told them that big cats are only one of the many threats that you’ll find in BC suburbs due to human encroachment on existing habitats. Black bears are known to venture into the outskirts of suburban developments looking for tasty picnic baskets (i.e. garbage cans) to dine from.
And don’t even get me started on the rabid raccoon menace…
Silver=grey-haired, Fox=an attractive person. Re: male equivalent of cougar, ‘manther’is a term that exists, though I can’t speak to how widely it may be used. ‘Rhino’ is a somewhat more derogatory one; so-called because the typical specimen is both ugly and horny.
OK, never heard of those male equivalents.
I have never heard ‘manther’ before, but I have to admit that it gave me a chuckle.
I’d been under the impression “silver fox” was fairly positive (i.e. meaning, as Dalillama said, “attractive older person”), and only more recently have seen it used with predatory connotations. Pity, I’d been hoping to eventually become one – I can’t be a MILF as I’m not a parent.
It can simply describe an attractive older man, but I’ve also seen it used specifically in the context of older man/younger women relationships. It does have fairly positive associations, I think: a successful and distinguished older gentleman who younger women find desirable.
Speaking of cougars and Canadians…
@Lumipuna
Neither had I until I started looking into where ‘cougar’ came from.
@Aaron
Pretty much. And/or younger men, depending what circles you move in.
Looks like they guy making the accusation is also a Ex-Marine who lied about his service record. Read the blog post below the comic
https://terminallance.com/2019/10/04/terminal-lance-a-proper-date/
“Silver fox” is definitely a positive term. It was, for example, the nickname of the country singer Charlie Rich, who used it as the title of one of his albums:
James Coburn, a debonair actor who let his hair go white while in his forties, once played a spy with the code name “Silverfox.”
“Cougar” is rather more problematic. According to one explanation I have seen, it derives from a belief that mountain lions target the weakest members of a herd or a flock. The idea is that cougars of the female human variety goes after young men because they lack the experience and sophistication to resist the women’s lures.
@Turan, Emissary of the Fly World
Well that sounds like projection to me.
While not intended as a scholarly site, TV Tropes claims that the female version of a Silver Fox is…Silver Vixen.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SilverFox
The male version of the Mrs. Robinson trope (what cougars/pumas used to be called) seems to be Dirty Old Man.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MRSROBINSON
There’s some links there that lead to a few more versions of the older woman/younger guy tropes, but I don’t have time to look at them right now to see how exactly they’re different from Mrs. Robinson.
@Redsilkphoenix:
My willing suspension of disbelief was never up to the task of seeing Mrs Robinson as the predatory older woman. When the movie was made, Anne Bancroft was 36 years old… and Dustin Hoffman was 30.
It *is* true that the concept of people who have grandchildren to have sex is considered icky and pervert regardless of the gender.
Is it sexism when one discrimate on the basis of having sex or not ? :p
“My willing suspension of disbelief was never up to the task of seeing Mrs Robinson as the predatory older woman. When the movie was made, Anne Bancroft was 36 years old… and Dustin Hoffman was 30.”
This was presumably easier to take for the film’s original audience. THE GRADUATE was Hoffman’s second film, and his first lead, while Bancroft was an established star who had been playing leads for a dozen years. He was new, she was familiar; that probably read as “young” and “old.”
Famously, the director’s first choice for Mrs. Robinson was Doris Day, and the studio wanted Robert Redford for Benjamin. The age gap would have been wider then–fourteen years–but still less than that between the characters.
By the way, if one wants an example of a celebrity cougar, there is Dinah Shore (born 1916), once upon a time a very popular singer, and then the host of a long-running talk show. She famously had a long relationship with Burt Reynolds (born 1936), and had an affair with Frank Langella (born 1938).
In his autobiography, Langella also writes of flings with Rita Hayworth (born 1918) and Yvonne de Carlo (born 1922) when he made films with them. He clearly had a taste for the older ladies.
If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on. -Alfred Hitchcock