A detailed post by Java expert and game developer Sierra describing the harassment and vilification she’s faced for the crime of, well, basically for being a woman in the tech world. While long and a bit rambling in spots, this is an important piece that, among other things, describes how harassers can sometimes transform slanderous assertions about their targets into “conventional wisdom,” details the damage that “trolls” can have on a person’s reputation (and their life generally), and offers some sobering reflections on the culture of harassment and how difficult it can be to fight.
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
If you hope to make it through the day without losing all hope in humanity, you may not wish to read the following thoughts on Ray and Janay Rice from our old friend from The Spearhead, W.F. Price.
I know people instinctively and reflexively sympathize with the victim of a brutal attack, but …
Yeah, I’m giving you all one more chance to back out of this right now, because we all know that nothing good is going to come after that “but.”
War Machine, thinking positive thoughts about himself.
If you’re worried that your view of humanity is excessively sunny, well, here’s one way to fix that: take a look at the hashtag #FreeWarMachine on Twitter, full of people who seem to honestly believe that mixed martial arts fighter and sometime porn actor War Machine either didn’t beat his ex-girlfriend nearly to death, or that, if he did, she probably deserved it anyway.
In other words it’s a virtual parade of the very worst people currently living on planet earth. I’m posting some of the, well, milder tweets below, but even though I’m avoiding the worst you should seriously consider heeding this TRIGGER WARNING and visit @CuteEmergency instead.
“The MRM aims towards improving the rights of all men, not small subsets of men.”
I suppose none of us should really be shocked that the death of Michael Brown, a black teenager literally shot in the back reportedly shot six times by a white officer, has caused barely a ripple in the world of the Men’s Rightsers — there are only two small threads on the subject on the Men’s Rights subreddit at the moment, and the only active one is filled with a lot of tut-tutting about “violent” protesters. It’s hardly news that MRAs, almost all of them white men, are more interested in lamenting their own imagined oppression than they are in dealing with the real injustices faced by young men of color.
But I have to admit I was a bit surprised by the callous “logic” in the following, currently the top comment in the only thread devoted to Michael Brown’s death in the FeMRAdebates subreddit:
“Egalitarianism,” you’re doing it wrong.
The FeMRAdebates subreddit is supposed to be a neutral forum for feminists and MRAs to discuss issues, yet somehow manages to be even more cringe-inducing than the Men’s Rights subreddit.
(Thanks to diehtc0ke on Reddit for pointing out this amazing comment.)
Captain America and the guy who’ll be taking over his job
So it turns out that Red Pill Redditors aren’t the only ones in a tizzy about Marvel comics’ plan to replace Thor (the superhero, not the actual Norse god, all praise him) with a woman. All over the manosphere, jimmies are rustling at the news.
The proudly racist, woman-hating pickup artist guru known as Heartiste is not only outraged by the “gelding” of Thor but also, and even more vehemently, by Marvel’s decision to make Captain America black, which he bizarrely describes as a kind of racial cuckolding:
Liberals are gloating over the recent editorial choices to geld Thor and race cuck Captain America. The former will become Whor, the female Thor, and the latter will become Captain Gibsmedat, the numinous negro who saves the right kinds of white people from the wrong kinds of white people.
“Gibsmedat” – I had to look it up – is a term that ridiculous racists like to use to describe welfare checks and other “goods, services, or material … given predominately to minorities, in exchange for their tacit agreement to reciprocate by not burning down America’s cities.” It’s short, you see, for “gibs me dat.”
Heartiste continues, lashing out at a “fat white liberal quasi-male named Devin Faraci” for publicly supporting Marvel’s decision to (at least temporarily) give the Captain America costume to The Falcon, another public-spirited superhero who happens to be black:
You all got the memo about #EndFathersDay fiasco, right – the phony “feminist” hashtag, seeded and spread by 4chan trolls, that aroused so much consternation on Twitter the other day, and that took in so many who’re already given to thinking the worst about feminism?
It would be nice if we could just dismiss this whole thing as trolls being trolls – no harm, no foul. But there’s a bit more to it than that.
For one thing, the troll campaign worked. At least on some people: While feminist writers quickly rushed in to point out that the whole thing was an antifeminist hoax, more than a few in the right-wing media were taken in utterly.
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Thanks! (And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.) Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
Well, the great minds of the manosphere have been going into overdrive trying to explain away the fact that a man who had a lot in common with them, ideology-wise, murdered six innocent people on Friday as part of a “Day of Retribution” that he had hoped would involve a lot more dead bodies, particularly of the blonde, female variety.
We had noted cultural commenter JudgyBitch (Janet Bloomfield) looking at Elliot Rodger, a man who wrote a 140-page manifesto detailing his hatred of women and girls, a manifesto that contained the following paragraph:
Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such.
.. and which ended with a fantasy of putting all the women in the world in concentration camps and starving them to death, while Rodger took a position in a giant tower built just for him “where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die,” and suggesting that Rodger wasn’t actually a misogynist, because he wasn’t able to get into the sorority and murder all the “blonde sluts” he had hoped to murder and so ended up killing more men than women.
A chart posted by Elliot Rodger, giving his chilling spin on a manosphere meme depicting supposed female “hypergamy”
When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime.
But when a man filled to overflowing with hatred of women acts upon this hatred and launches a killing spree targeting women, many people find it hard to accept that his violence has anything to do with his misogyny. They’re quick to blame it on practically anything else they can think of – guns, video games, mental illness – though none of these things in themselves would explain why a killer would target women.
In the case of Elliot Rodger, who set out on Friday night aiming, as he put it in a chilling video, to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut” in a popular sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, some Men’s Rights activists and other manospherians are doing their best to convince the world that misogyny had nothing to do with it.
White men: Hot local girls are waiting for you now!
Here’s a horrible comment from Reddit’s always horrible White Rights subreddit that reveals some of the ways that the central ideas and obsessions of the manosphere are oozing their way into the thinking, such as it is, of the racist right. Birds of a feather flock together, and I guess the same is true of hateful shitheads.
What’s interesting to me is how easily Mr. Saturnine83 here is able to take the traditional racist paranoia about white women not popping out enough white babies to keep the white race going and make the whole “problem” about stuck-up ladies who won’t date him decent white men. For those filling out bingo cards, note the references to”disposible” men and “involuntary celibacy.”
Oh, we have no doubt you could go on and on endlessly. Guys like you always can.
If you’re interested in exploring further connections between “Men’s Rights” and “White Rights,” check out the MRMorWhiteRights subreddit, which tracks this stuff in an entertaining way, and which is where I found the link to Saturnine83’s little screed.
Just wanted to let you all know about avery diverting — and damnably difficult — little game you can play on the internets: Reddit or Stormfront?
The premise is simple: You’re presented with an assortment of terrible comments, and you simply have to guess whether each one came from the hive of whiteboy bigotry known as Reddit … or the hive of white supremacist bigotry known as Stormfront.
It’s actually really hard. I’ve been playing it off and on since last night, and I’m barely doing better than pure chance.
The game was evidently inspired by the funny/disturbing Reddit-critical subreddit, SRSsucksOrStormfront. You might also enjoy perusing MRMorWhiteRights.
![ZorbaTHut Egalitarian [score hidden] 8 hours ago* Well, first, homicide may be the leading cause of death among young black men, but it's not the leading cause of death among men. It is certainly a concern, but the good news is that there are many organizations already concerned about it. The MRM aims towards improving the rights of all men, not small subsets of men, and spending a bunch of effort on an issue that is already well-covered would be a gross misuse of the MRM's relatively meager resources. That said, keep in mind why you've heard about this at all. Michael Brown's murder isn't getting airtime because he was male; it's getting airtime because he was black and because he was killed by a white police officer in a massive show of police power. If he was white and homeless you might have heard a bit about it, but it certainly never would have been discussed by the Tumblrsphere. If he was killed by someone who wasn't a police officer, nobody would give a shit, black or white. The problem isn't that the MRM is ignoring Michael Brown. The problem is that everyone else ignores all the male murder victims who weren't a black person killed by a white man in power. This problem isn't solved by making even more of a media circus around the one-in-hundred-thousand male murder victim that Jezebel decides to bother with.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/zorba.png?resize=497%2C408&ssl=1)
