We Hunted The Mammoth
So I found the meme above on a Facebook page called “Feminist Hypocrisy.”
I also found this familiar pic posted there as well.
And this highly edifying discussion underneath it:
Huh. I’m seeing some hypocrisy here, but it doesn’t look much like feminist hypocrisy.
Do the Sarkeesian Effect dudes — now in the midst of a painful and noisy breakup — not realize how ridiculous they look to the rest of us?
Ok, maybe that’s not the right question to ask. After all, we’re talking about Davis Aurini, a sort of low-budget Anton LaVey with a plastic-skull fetish who actually put this picture of himself on his website on purpose:
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 breakup videos 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:
So the other night I watched Lucy, a highly entertaining movie with an incredibly silly premise: Scarlett Johansson develops superpowers after a drug enables her to use more than the standard 10% of her brain. (Yes, I know, and the film’s director knows, that the idea we use only 10% of our brains is a myth. And that being super smart wouldn’t give you power over the laws of physics.)
Anyway, after watching the film I took a peek at the IMDb message boards to see if anyone had a way to explain one particularly baffling plot point. Someone did. But I also encountered this charming fellow, who started two separate topics in order to express his extreme displeasure that the main character was … a woman:
Fellas, make up your minds! Are feminist ladies wily seductresses out to entrap innocent men using the power of their sexiness? Or are they evil uggos who never get laid?
While the zeta males over at A Voice for Men lament their alleged victimization at the hands of an alleged undercover feminist honey trap, who allegedly lured them into skeezy behavior by, among other things, crossing and uncrossing her legs, our old friend Heartiste once again assures his readers that feminist ladies are icky fugs:
A powerful shiv to the bloated gut of feminism is to remind normal, attractive women of the gross, ugly, and deranged feminist women (and their effete male lackeys) who purport to speak for all women. Women are nothing if not herd followers, and if it’s made clear to the Normal Majority of women that feminists are unbangable fugs no worthwhile man would touch with a manlet’s micropeen, then the herd will change course and leave the losers in its dust.
Hate to break it to you, dude, but you’re not the first person to try to defeat feminism using the brilliant strategy of calling feminists ugly. It never works.
If you’ve read Jeff Sharlet’s magnificent GQ account of his lost weekend amongst the “Men’s Human Rights Activists” at A Voice for Men’s conference last summer (or my take on it here), you know that some of the creepiest moments his account involved his friend Blair, a twentysomething writer who came along for the ride and ended up, by her account, being groped and propositioned by AVFM’s “director of collegiate activism” Sage Gerard.
Sharlet never mentions Blair’s last name, but Elam outs her in a AVFM post with the lovely title “GQ’s Jeff Sharlet pimps out Blair Braverman for clickbait.”
Men, beware! The woman who just texted you “happy birthday” isn’t a nice person wishing you a “happy birthday.” She is, rather, a demoness from hell. Or at the very least a creepy “attention whore tease” who won’t let you into her pants.
According to racist shitbag “game” blogger Heartiste, any woman who texts men on special occasions “is a cocktease in digital form” trying to make sure you remain one of her “beta orbiter … cuckubines,” which is his fancy way of saying “friend.”
As he sees it, these dastardly Special Occasion Texters (SOTs) have only bad reasons to text dudes on special days. The SOT may be doing some routine “Beta Orbiter Maintainance.”
That gun-loving gamebro who flipped his car while on his way, he said, to “race” video game developer and GamerGate critic Brianna Wu? It turns out he’s not the delusional and potentially dangerous asshole he seemed to be in the countless videos he’s put online.
No, he’s actually an aspiring comedian in an “extreme” comedy troupe known for trolling everyone from anime fans to TED talk attendees, and “Jace Connors” is just a character he’s been playing, a sort of parody of a basement-dwelling, monster-drink-guzzling gamebro douchebag who can’t tell the difference between real life and video games. His harassment of Wu — what he called “OperationWupocalypse” — was all part of an elaborate comedy bit that he’s been doing for years.