We Hunted The Mammoth
By David Futrelle
The last time we checked in on the execrable racist fantasy author Theodore “Vox Day” Beale, he was urging his followers to smear leftists by posting fake memes, ostensibly from AntiFa activists, advocating domestic violence against women and children. This kind of dishonesty, he proclaimed, was a particularly “effective” form of “persuasion” that only “spergs” could possibly oppose.
It’s not exactly news at this point that the rapper known as Tyga is, as a rather self-explanatory headline in The Daily Beast put it yesterday, “a Creepy Predator Who Is Attracted to Underage Girls.”
Yesterday, the official Subway Twitter account posted a carefully worded statement declaring the actions of the sandwich chain’s now infamous former spokesman Jared Fogle as “inexcusable,” and noting that the company had already severed ties with him.
It’s certainly no surprise that Subway wants to have nothing to do with Fogle, who “has agreed to plead guilty to one count of traveling to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor and one count of distribution and receipt of child pornography,” as CBSNews reports.
So there’s a giant, growing, and extremely creepy megathread up on Reddit at the moment, and for once, the creepiness isn’t coming from inside the Reddit. Well, less of the creepiness is coming from Reddit than you might expect.
Yesterday, you see, a Redditor known as BA_Baracus posted a couple of simple questions to AskReddit: Women of Reddit, when did you first notice that men were looking at you in a sexual way? How old were you and how did it make you feel?
This wasn’t the first time he’d posted a question to his fellow Redditors; he’s posted a bunch, including “People of reddit with eyes that point in different directions, which one of them is usually looking at me?” and, er, “Recent rape victims of Reddit, how did it happen, and what the hell were you doing in India?” None of these questions got much of a response.
But this time, well, thousands of “women of Reddit” stepped forward to tell the horrifying yet in most cases completely unsurprising stories of the first time men started perving on them, in many cases before they were even teenagers.
Here’s a sampling of some of their stories. TRIGGER WARNING for extreme fucking creepiness.
You may have run across an image macro going around the internet recently featuring a picture of YouTube ranter and sometime Men’s Rights ally The Amazing Atheist – aka Terroja or TJ Kinkaid – and an appalling quote, supposedly from him, arguing that MRAs should campaign to lower the age of consent, because “[n]ature already has an age of consent. That age is approximately 12-13, otherwise known as the onset of puberty.”
I didn’t post about the quote, appalling as it is, because I couldn’t find any proof that Mr. Kincaid actually wrote or said it; I even searched several of Mr. Kincaid’s books and a document entitled “The Somewhat Complete Ravings of TJ Kincaid” to no avail. Apparently no one else has been able to find the quote either.
If this quote was fabricated, I’m a little puzzled as to why, because Kincaid has actually said very similar things before. Given the confusion about the quote, I thought it might be worth noting what we know he has said on the topic.
In a 2006 posting on a Marilyn Manson fan site, linked to in RationalWiki’s profile of him, a self-identified “atheist libertarian” calling himself Terroja argued that
So Michael Brutsch – recently outed as notorious Reddit creep Violentacrez – appeared on CNN last night to discuss the fallout from his outing. It was not a wise choice on his part. He hasn’t been making a lot of wise choices lately.
Brutsch spent much of the cringe-worthy interview in self-pity mode, talking about the horrible consequences he and his family had suffered as a result of his behavior, the most notable being the loss of his job. He seemed only barely aware that others might have suffered from his actions over the years running subreddits devoted to the exploitation of underage girls. Like, for example, the girls themselves.