When I began this blog six years ago, the Men’s Rights Movement was little more than a curiosity. I’ve watched, with both amusement and alarm, as this small movement has inspired, and ultimately has been eclipsed by, a broader anti-feminist, anti-woman backlash, online and off, driven largely by the same white male rage.
Each new iteration of this backlash has been more toxic — and, sadly, more influential — than the last, ultimately culminating in the rise of the alt-right. Which is to say, the newest incarnation of fascism.
Now the openly racist, openly misogynistic idol of the alt-right has been elected president. Obviously, not everyone who voted for Trump was white or male. But his candidacy was powered in large part by the same kind of white male rage I have been writing about virtually every day for the last six years.
While Trump’s election is, without question, a catastrophe — in ways I will be chronicling in detail over the next few months and years — Trumpism isn’t built to last. Trump’s victory was a narrow one — indeed, he actually lost the popular vote — and the demographic group that served as the backbone of his movement (white men) is shrinking relative to those groups Trump has railed against.
In many ways, Trumpism seems to be a classic example of an “extinction burst,” a term used by behavior psychologists to describe a weird and seemingly paradoxical pattern of behavior. As Popsugar summed it up in a post earlier this week:
[W]hen a certain type of behavior or action isn’t really getting its desired results any longer — say, a child’s tantrums failing to get Mom or Dad’s attention — there’s often a period when a subject struggles even harder, makes more noise, and generally throws an extremely loud fit. In other words, extinction burst is that last-ditch ramping up before an inevitable flame-out.
Trumpism, like all backlashes, is doomed to fail. Unfortunately, it is likely to do a tremendous amount of damage before it goes, not so gently, into that good night. In the meantime, I will do my best to make sense of the toxic stew of racism and misogyny at the heart of Trumpism, and to provide support for those fighting against it or just trying to get by). And so I’ve changed the tagline of this blog from “the new misogyny, tracked and mocked” to “surviving the Trumpocalypse” to reflect this broader focus.
Don’t worry: I will still be writing about MGTOWs and MRAs and the other strange misogynistic creatures that I’ve been writing about from the beginning. While I recognize they are but a sideshow in the era of Trump, I just can’t quit them, and I suspect that a lot of you can’t either.
Gamer gate is what brought me to this site. My boyfriend, brother, and I are making a game (hoping for a March release on steam). I’m the designer, and gamer gate had me scared to death. I actually discussed removing my name from the game so that we wouldn’t get any backlash for having a female on the team. This site is what gave me hope that female gamers have support.
I remember when we were first looking for our 3d character model; our lead is female, and I had a rule. She must not be sexualized. She had to be strong, and relatable. We decided to use Daz3d, and my brother went about ballistic that he could not find a design that didn’t include high heels and a thong. It became a running joke around here that every female throughout history must have fought in her underwear and heels. Don’t get me wrong, Daz is amazing, it’s just that it’s a good example of the hyper sexualized female in the gaming industry.
You want a real wakeup call on how bad it is? Go to renderotica. Holy cow!!!! All I was doing was looking for a nude attachment for a male character (I wanted a beserker cut scene), and what I found was hundreds of realistic comics of women being raped, tortured, and murdered. Women being brutalized by monsters, demons, animals…It’s beyond disturbing. The worst part is that Daz has an age morph that allows you to age your characters into infants and children, which is great for your games, but not so great in the hands of the degenerates.
Making this game has exposed me to far more disturbing content than I’m comfortable with, and it has opened my brother and boyfriends eyes to the problem as well.
@Valerie
You do not have a Native friend. Because if you were actually a friend, you would know their tribe, and refer to them as such. I rather suspect that you’re making this person up entirely, but that’s another story. That said, I sincerely hope that this time next year, you and all your friends are suffering from something curable that you can’t get treated because you’ve not got insurance. And that your homes are foreclosed on as well. Also, never compare anyone to Stalin again, since you clearly have not the first fucking clue.
@Scildfreja
People already have. I know of multiple trans people who have committed suicide since Tuesday night. In at least one case explicitly because her parents (who she lived with) told her that now Trump is president, she had to stop ‘pretending’ to be a girl.
@Jack
Oh, yeah. I know that story from personal experience too. I can’t find it at the moment, but there’s a meme I’ve seen a few times about the degree to which gifted children tend to turn into adults who are emotional wrecks with a paralyzing fear of failure.
@Paradoxical Intention
didn’t the House Un-American Committee go after communists (ei people the Nazis jailed)?
is saying the House Un-American Committee was created to go after Nazis a total rewrite of history or is there something missing?
Actually, I respect his desire to be referred to as an American. My point in bringing up his ethnic background was to show that not just white Americans voted for Trump. We have been friends since we were small children, and he has always called himself simply American.
@Valerie
If you’re working on using DAZ3D for realsies, then surely you know that there’s a sale at the main site right now, including the pro packs, which contain the guy’s missing weenie.
I assume that you’re doing ready-made renders of scenes and not incorporating objects; if you’re doing the latter, you’re going to need relevant licenses from appropriate sources.
Second, there are clothes which aren’t the standard Naked-Victoria-in-a-temple-with-a-sword, and if you’re looking for maximum clothes-fit-all, go with Genesis 1 instead of Genesis 2 or 3. Genesis 1 has the benefit of wide range of morphs (and many of them are right now on sale) and you can also use typically male clothes on women and not swear too much about it.
I still heavily use Genesis 1 in my art, and you’re welcome to browse my galleries at http://skiriki.deviantart.com/gallery/ and ask for recommendations regarding more appropriate outfits.
Wow, GamerGate gotcha scared, but not Dump? Kinda weird how you only care when it directly effects you instead of the entire nation.
You didn’t respect him enough to refer to him as American in any of the post you did, so that’s a big fat lie.
Ain’t it the truth?
I hate everything.
@sparkalipoo:
They’ve always gone after communists.
To the right, Nazi and Communist are interchangeable. Yes. It’s ridiculous and shows a stunning ignorance of history, but that’s what they really think.
I hope you mean this in good faith, I really do. Because I have seen multiple right-wingers try to pretend that they’re extending the olive branch with their “let’s unite and make this work” rhetoric. But when they say that, they don’t mean “let’s discuss and find solutions for everybody.” They mean: “lefties need to shut up and let us do what we want.”
It’s likely that you don’t mean the latter. But I am highly, highly sceptical of people who use the words “everybody should work together” in the same post with sentiments such as a) “it’s too late now, we won” b) pooh-poohing people’s legitimate fears.
I also don’t understand why you’ve essentially told the left and right to stop fighting…so that the far right hateful monsters don’t get their way. Valerie, we HAVE to fight them in that case! And the right-wing moderates need to join us instead of making pithy statements about peace and solidarity while refusing to lift a finger and actually help, as is what I have witnessed for myself so far.
@Laugher at Bigots, Mincing Betaboy
You see, these fuckers always gotta twist the truth to benefit them. There’s probably hundred of thousands of Americans that believe him, too, forgetting everything they learned in their high school history classes, if they’ve gotten that far in the education system yet.
It’s a small, trivial thing in retrospect compared to other shit said but it’s misinformation still and fuck that.
@Jack @Dalillama
Count me three for that. Failure as a concept was pretty much terrifying at all angles.
@Valerie/That_Susan
Look, your disguise of appearing as a rural citizen didn’t work alongside your uncle Toms and Annes. Nor did you trying to say that the white man’s suffering supersedes minorities in all aspects was going to win you much love. Switching to a “imma real game dev gals honest” narrative isn’t going to fly.
@wwth:
Can confirm: W Cleon Skousen, one of Glenn Beck’s favourite authors, (a ringing endorsement to be sure) had a different idea of “left” and “right” than everybody else. His idea of “far-right” was anarchy, and his idea of “far-left” was the police state, which would include both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
I have no data to verify this, but based on my own personal experience as a gifted child, it certainly feels familiar.
@skiriki at the time I was looking, I didn’t realize that only the pro bundles came with genitals. I have since purchased Michael and Victoria pro bundles. We honestly had to go with a genesis one character for our lead due to the outfit issues. We found a perfect female knight clothing pack.
At first we didn’t think we could use the Daz models because of the millions of tris that they are made with, but we have figured out how to decimate them so that they no longer destroy our frame rates. Daz did recently start Morph (optimized) for the Unity engine, but it is still very limited. As far as the licensing, they require a 1500 fee for character rights, unless I need to read more into the terms.
The world itself is rendered by myself. I use speed tree and standard unity assets for the terrain.
Your darn Skippy I know about the sales, we just picked up two different morph packs last night.
I’m going to your link right now. Thanks. Also, if you can make optimized clothing packs for morph, I’m sure some unity users would be beyond thrilled.
DAZ’s own license pack covers only DOs, if you plan to use materials/stuff from other vendors, check if they have relevant licenses available. Not all do.
To me, the truly effective and insidious thing these forces have done is to get us to focus on arguing the wrong point. I’m personally among the people who find the words “scientific consensus,” when used as a political club, inimical to the very nature of science.
But I also need look no further than the London fog of 1952 to know that human pollution and weather patterns can combine to deadly effect. And I don’t have to stretch my imagination very far to admit the possibility that there could be a compounding effect over time.
So I’ve become very frustrated with the climate change is a lie, no it isn’t, yes it is arguments. Regardless of whether it’s real, there are a whole lot of people who’d prefer to breathe cleaner air, now, or be less wasteful of our planet’s resources or not have huge landfills. I think these ideas may have actually had a lot more traction before the debate became focused on whether or not global warming is happening. I think there are some conservatives who try to recycle and aren’t completely averse to the idea of installing solar panels or driving electric cars, especially when it saves them money.
Then we get people like Valerie telling us that we just need to explain climate change better. Bullshit. “Climate change isn’t real” is their enormous, frighteningly effective straw man. Arguing this point is precisely where conservative forces who don’t want to spend money on cleaner air initiatives and corporations who want to continue using irresponsible packaging want us to spend our energy. Getting us to refocus our attention on convincing people of the truth of global warming has been an even more effective way for them to divert attention from real, effective solutions to both short- and long-term pollution problems than was refocusing on litter through the Keep America Beautiful campaign.
And now we’re on the precipice of having so many good reforms and initiatives undone. And whether or not people protest the undoing will probably fall almost entirely into an overly simple polarization around whether or not they “believe in” climate change.
Thanks, I’m going to have to check today then. I thought the standard license agreement covered everything.
A) You don’t have to be clairvoyant to look at his campaign promises, 100 day plan, and cabinet choices to know this is extremely bad for everyone but the 1%. B) Harm has already come as a direct result of his words and of his election. Will you protest now?
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
What Punkle Stan said. We can’t afford to wait until the symptoms of this terrible presidency are on show for everyone to see, because by then it will be too late to do anything.
No more “let’s see how this works out.” We’ve had more than enough evidence so far.
‘Gifteds’ unite! Was it just mine, or did y’all’s gifted program get more and more integrated over time? In elementary school we had a special room and everything! In middle school, we just had classes at different times. By high school we were all jumbled up unless you took AP classes…
Listen, I could tell you about my schooling experience, or I could express it with memes.
How I feel I sound like talking about high school:
How I actually talk about high school:
http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/06/06c10cc43ce471ee57e78d172123fcf9ca1a7a8799dc71caccfe6d2a152332c6.jpg
Most predictable post-election so far: Bill Maher coming out as a Trump fan and yelling at Democrats for being “too PC” and not paying attention to white men. “What am I supposed to do, cut my dick off?” Maher said, while pretending to be progressive. Seriously, fuck that guy so much.
@IP: A lot of atheists I see around the Internets like Bill Maher for whatever reason. I think he’s sorely overrated. We can add him to the light-years-long list of anti-progressive atheist personalities. He also doesn’t believe in the germ theory of disease.
@IP
I swear to Diyu Bill Majer is a snake if I ever saw one.