[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.
Every MRAs not-so-secret fantasy. (From a vintage cigar ad.)
[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.
Who would have thought this dude would turn out to be a nerd-baiting douchebag?
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).
This graphic by somewhat_brave on Reddit pretty much nails it. (Click here to see a larger version.) When #GamerGaters talk about “ethics” in journalism, this is pretty much code for “journalists shouldn’t be allowed to say anything critical of us!”
And in case you missed the all-Cat version of the manifesto, here it is again:
There’s a lot of really good stuff about the whole #GamerGate fiasco on Twitter. Here are several excellent collections of Tweets that have helpfully been put into Storify form for easy reading.
The He-Man #gamergate-rs Club. A collection of Tweets from @a_man_in_black showing that #GamerGate just the latest, if the most virulent, “outburst of a larger misogynist movement going back years.” He looks at the sordid histories of a number of current #GamerGaters and finds that many have been involved in misogynistic and transphobic harassment for years.
The most startling discovery: The creator of the “Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian” game you may recall from two years ago … well, he still hates Sarkeesian, only now he’s a #GamerGater who pretends that he’s against harassment.
Click on that Tweet to see more from @a_man_in_black on Bendilin.
For still more on the background of some of the worst in the #GamerGate movement, check out The Bad Apples of #GamerGate on Medium. Also essential reading. You’ll notice some familiar names on the list.
@EffNOVideoGames has put together an amazing account of the origins of #GamerGate, poiting out that the “movement” has always been about spin. Deftly rebuts the notion that #GamerGate is about “ethics,” and provides numerous screenshots offering clear proof of the misogyny that’s been there from the start.
Oh, and if you want to see how serious #GamerGaters are about actually fighting harassment in their movement — which always seems to be the fault of a few “bad apples” — check out what happened when @ShadowTodd asked them to show their sincerity by donating money to help the women who’ve been harassed by these “bad apples.” SPOILER ALERT: What happened was a lot of victim blaming and “false flag”-crying and not one penny donated — even when Todd suggested that even if they hated Anita and Zoe and the rest, donating money to then would at least make them look less like the unrepentant woman-haters they are.
There was literally no downside. The only way it would hurt your cause is if your cause was actually… to hurt female VG critics…. OH GOD
She reflects on the decidedly mixed performance of the media in all of this, and a bit on her thoughts what it means for her as an academic studying gender, in another set of Storified Tweets, Katherine Cross on the effects of GamerGate.
