We Hunted The MammothSo @benschoen, the putatively feminist co-founder of feminspire and the former co-host of a popular Harry Potter podcast, is having a bit of a meltdown on Twitter at the moment.
Well, more than a bit of a meltdown. He’s flying apart like the washing machine in the video above, announcing and quickly canceling online “press conferences,” lashing out at critics with bizarre “jokes” and weird threats, and generally acting like a giant ass.
For example:
Congratulations, neo-Nazis, quasi-Nazis and panderers-to-Nazis: You’ve managed to catapult your obsession with “cuckolding” into semi-mainstream political discourse.
It’s no secret that those on the far right in the US can’t stop talking about “cuckolding.” Some have been using “cuck” as a handy insult for any man they don’t like; others have concocted weird paranoid fantasies about black men “cuckolding” white men and the white race, literally and symbolically. It’s a ridiculous mixture of racism and misogyny.
When the lovely Dean Esmay jumped (or was pushed) off the good ship A Voice for Men last week, we were told that he intended to “take his activism in a different direction.”
So far that “new direction” looks suspiciously like the “old direction.” While Esmay has reduced the frequency of his intemperate, accusatory, free-associational Tweets from a flood to a trickle, he hasn’t stopped Tweeting — apparently his primary form of “Activism” for now — and his Tweets are as intemperate, accusatory, and free-associational as ever.
So over the weekend some enterprising 4channer decided to try to create some mayhem and make a few quick bucks by concocting a fake feminist conference, and selling tickets to it.
He — I’m pretty sure it was a he — headed to /b/ to round up some accomplices.
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.”
It’s been a while since I took a look at the Twitter feed of noted non-feminist philosopher king Fidelbogen. And, well, it’s still there. And as perplexingly Fidelbogenish as ever.
Let me know if any of these Tweets make any sense to you.
The other day, you may recall, I wrote about a little slut-shaming campaign that a number of A Voice for Men staffers, including top banana Paul Elam, were waging against a former AVFMer who’s turned into a critic of the site. Her crime? She had put some topless photos of herself online — or, to be more precise, had sent them to someone who’d passed them along to others.
The horror.
Now Elam and his AVFM buddies have launched a campaign to frame feminists for allegedly getting topless photos of the pseudonymous AVFM “social media director” Janet Bloomfield taken down on Facebook.
Today, the first in what will be an occasional series of posts on the Twitter activity — sorry, “activism” — of Men’s Rights Activists and other misbegotten misogynistic miscreants.
Sorry about the cheap alliteration at the end of the sentence there, but I’ve spent the last few hours reading Tweets from Attila Vinczer (@Alvhun) and I guess his penchant for tacky rhetorical special effects has rubbed off on me a little.
Attila, the “Activism Director” for Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men, is an energetic Twitter “activist.” While not quite as hateful or vicious as his colleagues Dean Esmay or the now-banned Judgy Bitch (aka Janet Bloomfield), Attila has developed a Twitter style all his own, spewing forth minor masterpieces of overwrought incoherence that are the unintentional result of his attempts to pull off complicated literary maneuvers without a mastery of the basics. There is a kind of poetry to them.
Добро пожаловать, мои новые воображаемые русских друзей! Пожалуйста, наслаждайтесь Моя прекрасная блог и аккаунт в Twitter.
This, Google Translate tells me, is Russian for “Welcome, my new imaginary Russian friends! Please enjoy my fine blog and Twitter account.”
I popped onto Twitter this morning to discover that I have suddenly become popular in Russia again. Or at least in Imaginary Russia, home to countless imaginary Russians used by Twitterers who aren’t as popular as they want to be, in order to pad their follower account and make themselves look more popular. If you are so inclined, you can buy these imaginary Russians (and imaginary humans of many other nationalities) in bulk from specialists in the imaginary Russian Twitter user business.
So last week I pointed out that several A Voice for Menners, as well as one of #GamerGate’s E-list celebrities, had managed to amass impressive armies of fake Twitter followers — more than 70,000 amongst the four of them. Generally speaking, one does not get that many fake followers unless one literally buy them from the sort of sleazy people who make a living selling fake Twitter followers in order to make oneself appear more popular.
The next day some generous soul bought me well over a thousand fake followers to call my own. When I wrote my post, I had a bit more than 5000 followers. Now I have more than 7000, with most of the new additions obviously fake accounts with Russian names, a tiny handful of spammy Tweets to their credit, and pretty much zero followers of their own. Here are a couple of them: