Coming to you live from the set of The Sarkeesian Effect (Picture and caption borrowed from @PachiPortrait on Twitter; original art by KC Green of gunshow.com)
I admit it: I enjoy schadenfreude so much that I can usually spell the word correctly on the first try. And there’s a lot of schadenfreude in the air these days.
Indeed, I’ve been reading through the YouTube comments of the Sarkeesian Effect breakupvideos I posted earlier and chuckling quietly to myself, not just at the assorted skull jokes but at the unintentional comedy, including all the bizarre contortions some Sarkeesian Effect supporters are going through in order to pretend that this ridiculous breakup is somehow less ridiculous than it actually is.
As I can’t in good conscience ever recommend that anyone actually go read the comments on YouTube, I’ve collected together some of my favorite ones. Here are the Top 11 Most Unintentionally Hilarious YouTube Comments About the Sarkeesian Effect Breakup.
If you watch only one 15-minute interview with Davis Aurini about his breakup with his former Sarkeesian Effect collaborator Jordan Owen today, make it this one!
Ok, I realize that might not be quite persuasive enough to get all of you to click play, but, seriously, this is pretty primo internet drama here, especially when a very testy Aurini starts comparing Owen to Elliot Rodger and basically telling us that his former filmmaking partner has none of the skills necessary to make a film.
And yep, it appears that they really did have their big falling out over Roosh. Which is a teensy bit ironic, because criticizing Roosh is pretty much the only decent thing that Owen has done since he first started obsessing about Anita Sarkeesian.
Anyway, the whole interview is worth listening to. Honest. But if you’re in a hurry, or just can’t tolerate 15 minutes of Aurini, skip ahead to 8:38, where it starts to get juicy, or to 10:30, where it gets even juicier. Here’s a partial transcript, courtesy of CringingAtTheWorld on the GamerGhazi subreddit .
I give it 4 “Ethics in Games Journalism” out of 5.
H/T — r/GamerGhazi, and everyone else who pointed me to this video.
Oh, say it ain’t so! The creative team behind The Sarkeesian Effect has fallen apart in a wave of mutual recriminations and accusations and general bad feelings! Owen is accusing Aurini of blackmail! Aurini is accusing Owen of being a nerd who can’t get laid! They’re both accusing each other of trying to take the money and run!
And apparently Roosh V — yes, that Roosh V, do you even know of any others — played the Yoko Ono role in this breakup. (Sorry, Yoko, it really wasn’t fair to drag you into this, so I’ll post a video of your awesome Walking On Thin Ice at the end of this post.)
Owen announced the firing of Aurini in this video:
You know that little war that Elam has going on with the MGTOWers, or more accurately, the MGTOWFAFPE (Men Going Their Own Way Far Away From Paul Elam)? Mr. Hembling and his girlfriend/comrade Diana Davison have allied themselves with Elam’s many enemies in the MGTOW world, and, well, Elam doesn’t seem to like this very much.
I present to you three recent skirmishes in their little war.
Emma Watson: The woman who nearly destroyed A Voice for Men
Yesterday, A Voice for Men published an article so extreme, so hateful, so beyond the pale, that even Paul Elam, the site’s founder, was taken aback by it. Elam, who said he hadn’t read the article before other editors on the site posted it, claimed in a comment that when he finally did read it, it made him literally sick to his stomach.
Today, he took the extraordinary step – for AVFM – of taking down the article and offering an apology for publishing a piece so “counter to every aspect of our mission and values.” (It’s still up, for the time being, in Google cache; the original can also be found here.)
So what did this terrible, terrible article say? Brace yourself.
In this edition of Misogyny Theater, we hear from pickup guru Roosh V, who has some thoughts about the female Men’s Rights Activists – FeMRAs – that we’ve seen so much of in the media of late.
He doesn’t much like them. Not because they’re hateful nitwits like their male comrades in the Men’s Rights movement. But because, you know, they’re women, representatives of what Roosh so memorably calls “a gender who has no loyalty to men.”
He accuses them of pandering to men for attention, and accuses male MRAs, in turn, of being too easily ensnared by their feminine wiles. It’s a mirror image of the accusations that MRAs like to throw at male feminists, and likely to infuriate more than a few MRAs, both male and female.
We may be seeing more from Roosh in Misogyny Theater in the future. For the dating-guru-cum-reactionary philosopher, from his secret lair located somewhere in Siberia – no, really, he has literally exiled himself to Siberia — has announced in another video his plans to take over YouTube over the course of the next year or so.
Will he be able to do it? On the one hand, he’s a reactionary woman-hating piece of shit, which means that he should be able to appeal to YouTube’s vast reactionary woman-hating piece of shit demographic. And he has managed to build up his Return of Kings blog into a must-read site for terrible people; a quick check with web traffic monitor Alexa shows that, trafficwise, ROK is trouncing the most popular Men’s Rights site, A Voice for Men.
On the other, as you may have gathered from this video, he has about as much charisma as a sack of potatoes. Stay tuned.
The pickup artist scene is a haven for manipulative assholes — and manipulative asshole wannabes — so it was hardly a surprise to see a post on Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog last week defending some of the internet’s most ubiquitous manipulative assholes: trolls.
Embracing rather than challenging a recent study that found internet trolling “correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism,” RoK’s runsonmagic suggested that such “dark triad” traits can serve leaders well and that trolling, handled expertly, can be a form of “provocative art.”
“Trolling can actually contribute to our culture by revealing our societal triggers and emotional weaknesses,” he wrote.
Emotionally secure people are not harmed by others perspectives, genuine or trolling. … If you feel like you are being trolled or become angry at something you read online, see if there is a way you can learn from the experience and be grateful for it.
Well, Roosh’s fans have just undergone quite a learning experience, but they’re not feeling very grateful.
A bit of drama in the land of misogyny: The guy behind MGTOWforums.com, the leading site devoted to so-called Men Going Their Own Way and one of the most reliable purveyors of highly mockable misogyny, has decided to, well, go his own way. (Sorry, I had to.)
Last night, MGTOWforums founder “Nacho Vidal” (not the real porn star) took the forums down, replacing them with a rather embittered farewell letter. But as of a few minutes ago, the forums were BACK UP again, albeit with no explanation and no new posts since last night. (Perhaps the site is just going to remain up as an archive?)
More on this as it develops, but in the meantime, let’s take a look at Nacho Vidal’s long goodbye:
Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, published twenty years ago, defined much of the agenda for what’s become the contemporary Men’s Rights movement. If you hear a Men’s Rights activist prattle on about “male disposability”or “death professions” or complain about draft registration (even though the draft itself has been dead for decades), you’ve got Farrell to thank, or blame.
So when Farrell decided to release a new ebook edition of his most famous book, it was perhaps not all that surprising that he decided to turn to the folks at A Voice for Men, probably the most influential Men’s Rights site around, for advice on a picture to use for a new cover.
But what was surprising was the pictures he asked the AVFMers to choose from, three sexually charged, and slightly NSFW, pics highlighting what Farrell evidently sees as the key female challenges to male power: their vaginas, tits and ass.
The He-Man Manosphere Cat Fight Continues! The long-awaited 20/20 story on the Manosphere did not, alas, run as scheduled last night — it’s been postponed until who knows when — but the Men’s Rightsy infighting it inspired continues!
Yesterday, you may recall, the Spearhead’s WF Price called out A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam for his alleged naiveté in going on the show in the first place, and for generally being a shitty backstabbing narcissistic asshole — all fair enough criticisms.
Well now Elam and his AVFM attack squad have responded to Price’s attack in the comments on the Spearhead– as various Spearhead readers have stepped forward to offer their own thoughts on Elam, many of them even less flattering than Price’s screed.
