We Hunted The Mammoth
Yesterday morning, a man wearing a military helmet and a Darth Vader mask entered a school in Trollhattan, Sweden, carrying a sword. After posing for a picture with two students who thought his outfit was a Halloween costume, he stabbed a teacher with his sword and began attacking other students. He killed two and seriously injured several others before being shot by police.
Mia Matsumiya, an L.A. musician, is also a human female on the internet, and in the latter capacity has been getting — and saving — creepy messages from creepy dudes for a decade, more than a thousand in total.
Now she’s posting them on Instagram, supplemented by some of the especially creepy ones her friends have gotten as well. Along with a wide assortment of extremely weird sexual come-ons, she’s gotten racist abuse, death threats, and, she told DAZED magazine, “pages and pages of fantasy stories about coming to my concerts and then raping me in the bathroom” from a lovely fellow who “ended up getting arrested for stalking another Asian woman.”
Good news for Star Wars fans: when you finally get your chance to go see Star Wars: The Force Awakens in theaters, you won’t find yourself stuck sitting next to a white supremacist. Or Chuck C. Johnson.
Yes, it’s true, #BoycottStarWarsVII is a real thing, brought to you by more or less the same motley crew of racist trolls and “alternative right”-wingers who catapulted the term “cuckservative” into mainstream Republican discourse not that long ago.
It’s not exactly news that Lou Reed was an asshole. But a new biography of the musician, who died in 2013, suggests that “asshole” may be too mild a description of what he was. A better word might be “monster.”
That’s the conclusion biographer Howard Sounes reluctantly came to after interviewing 140 of those who knew Reed best. Their recollections of Reed painted a picture of a bitter, angry, volatile man who spewed racist epithets and violently abused women.
Inspired by a post on GamerGhazi highlighting some terrible MGTOW graphics, I went and took a look in the archives of MGTOW.com, and found a bunch that were even more terrible, including the one above.
Let me ease you into the terribleness, starting with some whiny, self-pitying fat-shaming:
So the fellas over on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit are having a little debate, of sorts. What unappealing inanimate object is the best metaphor for women over the dreaded age of 30? You know, elderly women.
Someone calling himself mlpl2015 goes with an old favorite: spoiled milk.
The #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag took off yesterday after a Buzzfeed article highlighted a bunch of products being marketed to men with some of the most cartoonish evocations of old-school masculinity you could possibly imagine, from grenade-shaped shower puffs for men to Man Chocolate.
The point of the hashtag was fairly obvious: to look at, and mock, the ways these ads try to capitalize on male insecurities and suggest ways men can free themselves from destructive stereotypes of masculinity.
The repulsive pickup guru and wannabe philosopher of “neomasculinity” Roosh Valizadeh has long made it clear that he has a problem with women making decisions about their own lives, whether that decision is picking a college major — or saying “no” to sex with him.
In one notorious post, he explained to his readers that, as he sees it, a woman’s “no” pretty much never means “no.” Only if she uses the magic word “stop” does he stop. But he doesn’t think she really has a right to use that word, because, in his mind, once a woman “gives” him an erection, she owes it to him to finish the job.
“A man’s nut is sacred,” he wrote, “and for her to impede that should be criminal. I’m serious.”
Given all this, it perhaps should not come as a shock to hear that Roosh thinks women should have their right to make decisions taken away from them altogether, not just when he’s trying to get his “nut.”
So a couple of coffeeshop owners from Asheville, North Carolina just got outed as the two creepy, rapey, misogynistic assholes behind a skeezy pickup podcast, and, it turns out that a lot of their customers aren’t terribly happy about that.
The two have posted apologies (of sorts) and tried to buy forgiveness by donating to a local rape crisis center — which has refused to accept their money.
Given what the two have said — and allegedly done — that reaction is more than understandable. Read on for the details.
“They’re called tropes in games or something like that?”
— Brad Wardell, Game developer and Anita Sarkeesian expert
The Sarkeesian Effect, which premiered as a $3.99 “on demand” video on Vimeo yesterday, and which I forced myself to watch all two and a half hours of, is not so much a “documentary” as an object lesson in why it’s never a good idea to hand over tens of thousands of dollars to hateful, incompetent ideologues barely capable of making mediocre YouTube videos and expect them to produce a documentary that looks even vaguely professional.