We Hunted The Mammoth
Most conspiracy theorists are surprisingly uncreative in their choice of villains, blaming all the ills in the world on one or more alleged evildoers in a fairly short list: the Jews, the government, the Illuminati, space aliens, and a handful of other familiar suspects.
One Men’s Rights activist wants to add a few more names to the list: the women’s magazines Glamour, Allure, Self, Vogue, and, most terrifyingly, Teen Vogue.
Every once in a while, a hostile commenter wanders into the discussion here nattering about the evils of “Cultural Marxism.” One stopped by last night, prompting another commenter to ask what exactly this Cultural Marxism was, anyway.
I responded by saying the term essentially meant, at least to most of those using it, “the Evil Jews But We’ve Learned We Can’t Just Say That Publicly Outside of 4chan and Stormfront Without People Realizing We’re Basically Nazis.”
Well, you have to admire their ingenuity, I guess: The terrible people at the lady-hating megasite Return of Kings have figured out a way to blame feminism for … revenge porn.
No, really. Here’s the argument, such as it is, from regular RoK contributor Mark Webster:
Dean Esmay — Men’s Rights Activist, AIDS “skeptic,” big old white dude — has added another skill to his resume: Arbiter of Blackness.
If you haven’t been following the activities of Mr. Esmay of late, the A Voice for Men “chief operations officer” has been having a rather extended Twitter meltdown, posting endless puzzling yet impassioned Tweets to his own #SpankAFeminist hashtag, addressing an assortment of imaginary feminist enemies.
Some of the more puzzling have involved race, like his repeated charge that feminists are a bunch of white racists because, well, let’s let Esmay explain:
Pride parades are a bit more fabulous than usual this Pride Weekend, on the heels of the Supreme Court ruling making gay marriage legal across the United States.
A Voice for Men “CEO” Paul Elam is using the occasion as an opportunity to “warn” unwary gay marriers that they may be embarking on “a trip to the gallows.”
Elam, you see, considers himself a bit of an expert on marriages — possibly because he’s had so many of them himself — and wants gays to know that marriage is terrible and that their celebrations this weekend will ring hollow once they end up in divorce court.
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.
It’s yet another reminder that online hate has consequences. In a manifesto of sorts he posted before he shot and killed 9 black people in a Charleston church, Dylann Roof noted that he had learned his racism online. He even specified one of the hate sites that fuelled his hate: the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Now it appears he was also a regular commenter at The Daily Stormer, an especially vicious neo-Nazi “news” site.
Dean Esmay, the Chief Operations Officer (whatever that is) of A Voice for Men, has scored a major public relations coup for the Men’s Rights movement with his aggressive promotion of an exciting new Twitter hashtag, #SpankAFeminist.
In what I can only assume is an attempt to convince the world that MRAs do indeed spend a good portion of their days fantasizing about doing physical harm to feminists, Esmay explains in a post on AVFM that the hashtag is necessary “because it’s finally time to put abusive liars over the knee.”
Today’s lesson in Men’s Rights pseudoscience comes from a regular contributor to A Voice for Men named Stephen Jarosek, who also goes by the name “Codebuster.” The “code” he has “busted” this time? The code of the Seekret Matriarchy That Runs the World. And he’s busted it with … SCIENCE! (Or at least a very, very rough approximation of it.)
Put on your wrong-thinking caps, because Codebuster is going to get all technical here! He starts off his essay with a lengthy discussion of sciencey stuff that includes sentences like these:
If their reaction to the widespread mockery of The Sarkeesian Effect trailer is any indication, the two biggest critics of the “critic who cannot be criticized” cannot handle much in the way of criticism. Davis Aurini, the Nazi-er of the two Sarkeesian Effect auteurs, has been blocking the critics on his Youtube channel, evidently oblivious to the ironies. Jordan Owen, the one with the hair, has been yelling into his computer and putting the results up on Youtube. (See above.)