We Hunted The Mammoth
Paul Elam, the maximum leader of hate site A Voice for Men, has responded to the first wave of media coverage of his phony White Ribbon site with a truculent little rant.
Salon.com, Thinkprogress.org and the ever intellectually flatulent David Futrelle have rage-written on this issue barely 24 hours after we launched the site.
How does he know about the flatulence? In my defense, I’m still recovering from Dollar Taco Tuesday.
GamerGaters like to loudly profess that they oppose harassment. They also like to claim that most if not all of the harassment that has occurred comes from people that aren’t “real” GamerGaters.
So what do GamerGaters do when they’re confronted with evidence that someone in their ranks — not an anonymous nobody but someone with some standing in their community — is harassing someone?
Well yesterday we had an opportunity to see just that. I wrote about a couple of instances of sexual harassment from a GamerGater known as Cameralady.
[UPDATE: The real White Ribbon Campaign has responded; I’ve added excerpts at the bottom.]
Apparently, A Voice for Men is just itching to be sued.
Paul Elam and the gang over at everyone’s favorite Men’s Rights hate site have just launched a new website — WhiteRibbon.org — that seems pretty clearly designed to undermine and co-opt the real White Ribbon campaign, a long-running international initiative to fight violence against women.
The REAL White Ribbon campaign has a number of websites, reflecting its international reach — in Canada, where the initiative originated, as well as in the UK, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand. and other places. But apparently the organization didn’t buy up all the related domain names.
Sexual harassment: it’s not just something that dudes do. And here’s a little story from the GamerGate wars on Twitter to demonstrate this.
Yesterday, an anti-GamerGate Twitterer known as @Auragasmic directed a question to Adobe Software. And got an indignant reply from a GamerGater known as Cameralady.
GamerGaters sometimes try to rebut charges of misogyny by pointing out that the targets of their wrath aren’t only women. And that’s true. They also target men … who stand up for women.
Mike Stuchbery, a writer and teacher in England, recently aroused the wrath of the Gaters by posting a brief essay titled “A Letter To The Gamerdudes In My Classes” on his blog. In the essay, he wrote “[d]on’t be part of the mob that attacks whichever target GamerGate is going after this week.”
So now he’s become “the target GamerGate is going after this week.” Or one of them, anyway.
[TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of rape, violent misogyny]
Today, the easy winner in my informal “Worst Thing I Saw On The Internet” contest is a horrendous little hangout for dudes with a very particular sexual fetish: they like to fantasize about raping and sexually humiliating feminists.
The Breaking Feminist Superheroines subreddit (r/breakfeminazis), with 865 subscribers, describes itself as
AN OPEN LETTER TO DAVIS AURINI AND JORDAN OWEN UPON THE RELEASE OF THEIR FIRST SARKEESIAN EFFECT TEASER
Hey guys, big fan here.
Just watched your Sarkeesian Effect teaser video. An outstanding job! Even though this is, I know, a rough and unfinished trailer using raw footage from the first couple of days of shooting, it’s clear that this film – this epic journey into journalism, if I might coin a phrase here (you can totally use it!) – will more than live up to your earlier work.
Meanwhile, Zoe Quinn offered a somewhat more coherent take on the subject on MSNBC today.
H/T — @alexlifschitz for tweeting that first video.
If you search Google for “Anita Sarkeesian” and “not a gamer” or “not a real gamer” you’ll find links to hundreds of angry gamer tirades against the gaming critic for allegedly not knowing what she’s talking about, among them several videos devoted to proving her “not a real gamer,” an article declaring her “the worst thing to happen to videogames since Sonic ‘06,” and an Encylopedia Dramatica entry that declares her to be, among other things, “a feminazi bitch and “pop culture critic” with whore earrings” as well as “a filthy Jew and a white race traitor [with] sandn*gger parents.”
Given this obvious antipathy towards people who aren’t gamers but who still have opinions about gaming, you might not expect the #GamerGate masses to embrace putative allies who who admit they’ve never played games. Yet #GamerGaters have not only welcome but lionized neo-con faux feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, Breitbart “journalist” Milo Yiannopoulos and PUA blogger/lawyer/juice marketer Mike Cernovich, a #GamerGate crusader who recently offered to fight entrepreneur Anil Dash in order to prove something or other about bullying. (Yeah, I don’t get it either.)
Well, it turns out that not only are Yiannopoulos and Cernovich not gamers, but before their emergence as #GamerGate celebrities both of them had histories as nerd-baiting gamer haters and bullies. Matt Binder — yep, the guy from The Majority Report with Sam Seder who recently gave Paul Elam a drubbing in a YouTube debate — has been poking around in the Twitter histories of both men, and has uncovered some pretty foul stuff from both.
Well, I took another look at the A Voice for Men Facebook page. Lo and behold, their little meme makers have been working overtime! So here’s a little gallery of some of their latest work.
I have to admit that these aren’t quite as baffling as the John Galt meme originals we looked at a couple of weeks ago, or these also-very-confusing AVFM memes I posted last spring. But they are pretty darn terrible, in all respects.
Click on the pics to see the originals on Facebook, complete with thoughtful commentary from AVFM’s fans (except in the case of this next one, which I found reposted on an anti-MRA Facebook).