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.
[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.
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.
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.
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).
Over the last several days, the #GamerGate hashtag on Twitter has been speckled with self-contragulatory Tweets by Gators boasting that they have “found Anita’s harasser.”
Who, this guy?
Return of Kings contributor “Billy Chubbs,” whose previous contributions to the wisdom of the ages include posts titled Men Should Not Help Sluts, Bangable Women Can Still Be Gross, and Unmarried Older Women Need To Go Away, has outdone himself in the awfulness department with a post this week attacking 17-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai as “A Coward And A Hypocrite.”
Apparently inspired by Chubbs’ bold move, the Sarkeesian-hating, Anton LaVey-looking far-right nitwit Davis Aurini has junped on the bandwagon with his own blog post dissing Malala.
We’ll get to him in a minute. But first, Chubbs.
“Andy Bob” of A Voice for Men has decided that the recent threats against Anita Sarkeesian are fake because … they’re too melodramatic.
In a rather remarkable bit of logicking titled “Anonymous feminist provides Anita Sarkeesian with a potential new source of revenue,” Andy Bob quotes this line from the threat email:
Men’s Rights activists are the only ones asking these tough questions about the recent threats against Anita Sarkeesian and other outspoken women in gaming.
Reading through the luridly threatening email that forced Anita Sarkeesian to cancel her talk at Utah State University, originally scheduled for today, I found myself wondering, a bit dumbfounded: just where does this kind of hate come from?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself again and again in recent days as I contemplate the ongoing fiasco that is GamerGate. How on earth have all these people gotten so angry, so worked up, so willing to dox and harass and threaten women (and some of their male allies) over video games?
How exactly does someone reach a point where it makes sense to them to threaten – and perhaps even to seriously plan – a “Montreal-style Massacre” because they don’t like a few videos pointing out sexism in video games?
Even after years spent tracking and trying to understand the misogynistic online culture that’s given birth to GamerGate, I don’t have an answer. And I’m not sure where to get one.
And so, as a kind of preliminary step towards finding an answer to this question, I thought I would ask a simpler and more empirical question: where does the language of hatred found in the threatening email sent to Utah State officials come from?