Thursday, August 16, 2012

The Gathering Shitstorm

Apart from Rebecca Watson, the individual most responsible for constantly stirring the shit and keeping the radfem jihad boiling over in the atheist and skeptic movements is the odious more-feminist-than-thou PZ Myers. As I've mentioned before, Elevatorgate would have fizzled out in a matter of days had not Watson attacked a fellow female (and less privileged) blogger in an unconscionable way, been called out on it, and needed a distraction from her asshole behavior. That's when Elevatorgate suddenly and conveniently became a massive shitstorm that is still raging over a year later, thanks in large part to Professor Zerobrains.

The opening salvo was a post entitled "Always name names!", defending Watson's behavior by grossly misrepresenting the Stef McGraw incident. Stef had made it clear that what she took exception to was not being named, but being put in a position where she was attacked with no ability to defend herself. Myers knew this but chose to join the radfem chorus attacking Stef as a mindless parrot of "standard misogynist thought." (Myers' post is still on the old Scienceblogs site, though only part of it, and without the comments. Anyway my policy is not to link to SlavethoughtBlogs because they make buttloads of money in ad displays, especially Myers who appears to be gaming the system so that he benefits from hundreds of ad displays from every visit, especially if you use Google Reader. If you must go to SlavethoughtBlogs, be sure to use software such as AdBlock or Do Not Track to avoid the ads.)

Anyway, what I really found stunning was the comments on this thread. There were something like 10,000 comments, the vast majority of them screaming about what evil pigs and rapists men are. It was a real red-pill moment for me to see such seething, mindless hatred being expressed against men - all men. The few brave souls who dared to question Watson's behavior towards Stef McGraw were screamed down with accusations of being a rape apologist if not an outright rapist. Because apparently in what passes for a brain among radfems, being on the receiving end of a clumsy but polite pass is exactly the same thing as being raped. And because of course it's very convenient to be able to confuse two totally separate incidents in order to distract attention from your goddess's feet of clay.

Again and again I saw the same pattern: "Fuck you, rapist. You are a man, therefore I can dismiss out of hand anything you say without reading it, but I demand that you drop whatever else you were doing today and read through the 27 lengthy treatises I (along with 4,567 other womyn) have cut and pasted links to."

There were even some pathetic grovelers who whined, "Please forgive me for being male, I am a recovering misogynist who only recently became aware of the awesome overwhelming privilege he possesses, please educate me and help me to understand why what happened to Rebecca was rape. I'm sure you're correct, but I just don't understand how." (Response: "Fuck you, rapist," etc. etc.)

When I looked at some of the links, I only got even more depressed. There was that godawful "Schrödinger’s Rapist" screed (funny, I never knew Schrödinger had been raped - but men do get raped too, you know), there was the stupid story about the husky and the iguana, which is supposed to make some point about "male privilege" - apparently all men are dogs, or something. And there was a whole shitload of privileged upper-class educated (and probably mostly white) Western women moaning about how tough they have it.

And then Richard Dawkins entered the fray, which led to the shit really hitting the fan. More on this later.

No comments:

Post a Comment