We Hunted The Mammoth
I‘m becoming somewhat addicted to the Ask The Red Pill subreddit; it’s such an amazing mixture of bad ideas and weird insecurities, a place where earnest Red Pill ideologues offer relationship advice to men who really shouldn’t be in relationships of any kind.
By David Futrelle
Like Donald Trump, and like a lot of people who think they’re much smarter than they are, cartoonist-turned-Trump-rationalizer Scott Adams hates to admit he’s wrong. Trouble is, he’s wrong a lot; he can barely open his mouth on Periscope or type out a Tweet without saying something ridiculous if not patently false.
So the fellas in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit are trying to figure out why women visit their horrid little subreddit and sometimes even post mean things about them there. A fellow called VanDerVaart has an explanation. Well, two of them:
Donald Trump’s supporters, like the man himself, are not what you’d call gracious losers, so it comes as no surprise that they’re taking The Donald’s second-place finish in Iowa hard. And given Trump’s own forays into conspiracy theory (all that birther stuff), it’s also not exactly a shock to see his fans claiming that the Iowa caucuses were rigged.
What is a little surprising is who they’ve picked as the supervillain in the alleged plot against Trump. Not the winner of the Iowa caucuses, Ted Cruz, but Marco Rubio — the guy who came in third, after Trump. With a little help from the dastardly computer whizzes at Microsoft.
I doubt you would be terribly shocked if I told you that fans of the misogynistic not-quite-Nazi pickup guru Roosh Valizadeh aren’t exactly celebrating Caitlyn Jenner’s appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair. And they’re not: on the Roosh V forum, the regulars have filled a five-page-and-still-growing thread with predictably transphobic outbursts –“Kill it with fire” gifs, references to Jenner not as a “she” or even a “he” but an “it,” emphatic announcements of “would not bang.”
You might be a little surprised, though — as I was — to discover that some of these lovely fellows are blaming the whole thing on … the Jews.
Say it ain’t so, Paul! A Voice for Men’s second “International Conference on Men’s Issues” has been … cancelled!
No one could have seen that coming, huh?
Anyway, in a “Bulletin” on AVFM yesterday, AVFM “CEO” Paul Elam tried his best to explain away this little embarrassment:
The good folks at A Voice for Men, the most influential Men’s Rights site out there, like to talk a lot about how much they hate hatred. Specifically, the alleged hatred allegedly promoted by feminists. Here’s Dean Esmay, the site’s Managing Editor and Chief Operations Officer, offering some typically nuanced thoughts on the subject earlier today on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/597082318168272896
So how have the powers that be at AVFM responded to the revelation that one of their contributors, Indian MRA Amartya Talukdar, is a Holocaust denier and Hitler fan who thinks Hillary Clinton is a “Jewess?” Did they denounce Talukdar for his embrace of perhaps the most hateful hater in history, and take down his posts on their site? Not so much.
Not content with simply being a misogynist piece of poop, the “game” guru Heartiste is also, among other terrible things, a flaming racist given to hyperventilating about the alleged civilization-destroying powers of people with skin darker than his – and the alleged naiveté of white people who aren’t as racist as he is.
In one recent post, Heartiste awarded “freelance comment of the week” status to a racist rant posted on his site by someone calling himself Anton Chigurh, who thinks Western countries are being wimpy about ebola because they don’t want to offend Africans and seem racist.
“Chigurh” made his, er, argument in possibly the most racist manner imaginable:
So earlier this month the feminist writer and serial-misogynist-annoyer Lindy West announced that she was leaving her job at Jezebel “to work on personal projects. (I am also available for freelance. Hire me!)”
I took this to mean that she was leaving her job at Jezebel to work on personal projects and do freelance work, because this is something that writers, especially talented writers with a lot of options, sometimes do.
Over in the Manosphere, though, the fellas had a rather different interpretation, which went something like this HA HA THE FAT SLUT GOT FIRED HER CAREER IS OVER WE WON YIPPEEEEEEEEE!!!
Or, as the always charming Roosh Valizadeh put it, in a comment on his site’s forums:
I have a confession to make: I don’t always read the comments on posts by Men’s Rights Activists.
I realize this might come as a shock to some of you. I mean, one of the main, er, critiques I get from MRAs is that I “cherry pick” comments from MRAs to make them look bad — never mind that it is the comments that make them look bad, not me. But the embarrassing fact is that I often don’t read the comments at all.
In my defense, I have a hard enough time making it through the posts themselves. Life is short, and MRAs are long-winded. And by the time I get to the end of a lot of MRA posts, I’ve pretty much lost my patience with their nonsense. The last thing I want to do at that moment is to read the fawning word-vomit of a bunch of irritating fucks whose comments are likely to be as bad or possibly even worse than the original post.
So today I decided to do a sort of penance for my sins — and to actually read through a week’s worth of comments on A Voice for Men to see what I could learn about the world, and (perhaps more to the point) about the sort of people who actually enjoy reading posts on that terrible site.
I tried my best to do this little experiment as scientifically as possible. But I cheated a little. I didn’t read the comments to every post. And I didn’t read every comment on the posts that I did look at. I mean, what the hell. There’s a limit to my masochism. Seriously, you try reading a week’s worth of this shit in one sitting.
Anyway, here are the Top 7 Insights I’ve learned from a week’s worth of comments at AVFM. In choosing the following, I stuck with comments that were either upvoted or unchallenged by the site’s regulars, or both.
