Jelly. Baby needs jelly. pic.twitter.com/mnl8CAul46
— Cigaretta (@thedirtbird) October 12, 2015
Baby needs jelly bad.
An open thread for non-personal stuff. No MRAs, trolls, etc.
It’s probably about time for another open thread for personal stuff. As is always the case with these open threads, NO MRAs, no trolls, none of that shit.
You may remember the massive tantrum the internet’s baby men threw after Emma Watson gave her famous speech on feminism to the United Nations a year ago.
Men’s Rights Activists and other haters of feminism declared that the #HeForShe initiative the Harry Potter star was promoting was little more than a misandrist effort to return to chivalry. They called her a “man hater.” They even attacked her for dating a rugby player.
And of course they put her down as a “first world feminist” focusing on trivial issues that only well-off white women could possibly care about. Of course, her detractors in the Men’s Rights movement don’t actually give a shit about third-world women and girls; their attacks on first-world feminists are mostly just an excuse to rant about the allegedly “pampered” and coddled women of the industrialized west.
“Emma Watson is typical feminist. Rich, pampered, and white,” one longtime MRA declared.
“This lumping together of many valid issues that women (and men of course) in the third world face with those of the privileged and pampered first is frankly obscene,” a commenter on A Voice for Men complained.
And on the Men’s Rights subreddit, another Watson anti-fan sneered that she was
a fucking uber-celebrity on a power-trip stoking her ego by claiming to speak for a group she doesn’t understand, at all. If she keeps this up she’s going to ruin her long term career by becoming divisive and toxic. The backlash is already beginning and it serves the idiot right.
These were some of the milder, er, critiques.
Now, there are certainly things to criticize about Watson’s feminism. But there is also something to be said for choosing Watson, an actress known for playing a beloved character in the Harry Potter films, as a goodwill ambassador to the non-feminists of the world.
Watson may not be able to speak for women in the third world, but it turns out that her message managed to speak to one young woman whose life has been the absolute opposite of pampered: Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Nobel Peace Prize winner who was famously shot in the face by a man trying to kill her and her crusade for girls’ education in Pakistan.
As the New York Times reports,
Malala Yousafzai told Emma Watson she decided to call herself a feminist after hearing her now famous speech at the UN, to launch the “He for She” campaign, which aims to encourage men to fight for women’s rights. “It has been a tricky word. When I heard it the first time I heard some negative responses and some positive ones. I hesitated in saying am I feminist or not?” she told Watson during an interview at a screening of the He Named Me Malala documentary at the Into Film Festival. “Then after hearing your speech I decided there’s no way and there’s nothing wrong by calling yourself a feminist. So I’m a feminist and we all should be a feminist because feminism is another word for equality.”
You can watch the entire interview below:
I can’t even.
I’ve been tracking misogynistic ridiculousness on this blog for five years, but I’m not sure I ‘ve ever run across anything quite as ridiculous as this.
A prominent Open Source guru, Eric Raymond, is warning tech dudes to be extra super duper careful around their female colleagues, because any one of them could turn out to be a secret feminist “honey trap” aiming to frame men in tech with false allegations of harassment or rape.
Bad news, ladies! Some dude who hates you thinks that you’re incapable of love!
In the Men’s Rights subreddit, a dude calling himself Cerehectus lays out his totally irrefutable argument against the women of the world. He’s a wee bit verbose, so I’ll put the best (i.e. worst) bits in bold.
“Red Pill” director Cassie Jaye has responded to what she calls my “slanderous claims” about her. You can find her video on the subject, and a transcript of it, on her Kickstarter page. (The posts that offended her can be found here, here and here.) It would be quite an effective takedown of me, if what she wrote were actually true.
I was going to write out a detailed response but instead let me give you the tl;dr version as it played out on Twitter last night:
I found this insightful manosphere graphic on the Blue Pill Subreddit; it seems to have originally come from a blog called “Females exposed.”
I hope all the women reading this will see this as the challenge that it is: Gotta Catch ’em All!
Click the pic for a much larger and far more readable version.
Not that long ago, the internet’s far-right weirdos had a victory of sorts: they managed to inject the made-up word “cuckservative” into mainstream Republican political debate. A combination of “cuck” — short for cuckold — and “conservative,” the insult was used against, well, pretty much all Republicans who weren’t Donald Trump.
Fresh off this tiny triumph, far-right manospherians are now launching another cuck-based humiliation campaign, this time against the charmingly schlubby comedy star Seth Rogen and his upcoming Christmas comedy. Using the hashtags #CuckRogen and #BoycottTheNightBefore, supporters of this new crusade are filling up Twitter with lovely sentiments like these:
Pickup artist and rape legalization proponent Roosh Valizadeh continues his attempts to woo the white supremacist crowd.
This past weekend, he attended the annual conference of the white supremacist National Policy Institute with his longtime pal Matt Forney, the odious fat-shaming blogger who is himself a little big-boned, if one’s belly counts as a bone.
The story of Cassie Jaye and her Red Pill documentary gets curiouser and curiouser. In an interview with Tracy Clark-Flory of Vocativ she admits that she’s actually a bit scared of the MRAs whose cause she now seems to be championing.
As Clark-Flory puts it: