This a steaming pile of crap from 2012, actually called Raising Boys Feminists Will Hate, by someone name Doug Giles. I took a peek because I had recently had a run-in with a tween who had all the answers and one of them was that women are lesser than and feminism is a scourge.
Doug Giles says that feminists want nothing more than to:
“take your son and eradicate his masculine uniqueness.”
I don’t think I need to explain much beyond the first two sentences of the Introduction:
“Feminists would love nothing more than to take your son and eradicate his masculine uniqueness. They hate men, and therefore, they will hate your son.”
I’m not sure if Doug Giles means to imply that all those feminists with kids actually hate their own male offspring, or that feminists don’t actually have children. Draw your own conclusion I guess.
But don’t worry. The author is totes not a misogynist. AT ALL. In fact, Doug Giles loves girls. He loves girls so much he has even written a book for girls! It is entitled, get thisL “Raising Righteous and Rowdy Girls,” the cover of which includes a 50-inch stiletto heel, a tube of red lipstick and a gun. Because we all know that THAT is what being a woman is all about, for every person born with two X chromosomes.
This is another “book” crapped out by Doug Giles and it is called: “Rise, Kill and Eat”. Because, yeah.
So there you go. If this guy wants to assume that we “man-hating feminists” want to neuter little boys, then I’m going to assume, based on the cover of one of his books and two sentences of the other that a) he wants his daughters to be gun-toting sexpots, because the only value they have in society is related to how sexy they are, and b) he is raising his sons to be hard-muscled walking penises, because the only value they have in society is spreading their seed and learning to kill stuff. I’m going to assume that the author lacks the IQ points to realize that there is more than one way to be a man, to be a woman. Because blanket statements and ill-informed presumptions are totes helpful, right?
Swallowing the Red Pill: A journey to the heart of modern misogyny
“….feral boys wandering the digital ruins of exploded masculinity, howling their misery, concocting vast nonsense about women, and craving the tiniest crumb of self-confidence and fellow-feeling. The discussion threads are a mixed bag of rage and curiosity: screeds against feminists, advice on how to masturbate less, theories on why women fantasize about rape, descriptions of arguments with girlfriends, guides to going up to strangers on the street, and, most of all, workout schedules and diet regimes.”
If there is one thing Republicans and a large swath of everyday men really hate, it is political correctness. “Why,” they ask, “must I care about other people’s feelings? How is that fair? If this were truly a free country, everyone would think it was perfectly terrific when I use racial slurs, call women bitches and cunts and be legally required to laugh very hard at all of my super terrific rape jokes!”
These men are sick and tired of people creating “safe spaces” where they are less likely to get their feelings hurt or experience racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia instead of being cool and just dealing with that shit. Oh, how they pine for the days when you could just go around insulting and brutalizing people, and those people would thank you for being so good at expressing your freedom of speech! How they cry that said free speech is being taken away by people being offended by the things they say, and insisting it is terribly unfair for them to ever have to think about or consider anyone’s feelings.
However, this all changes when their feelings are the feelings that are being hurt, and nothing hurts Men’s feelings like being called a SEXIST. In fact, the traditional wisdom among many men is that being called a sexist is approximately 6.12 billion times worse than actually saying or doing a sexist thing to begin with. Why? Because the sort of people who say sexist things are generally incapable of empathy, and thus cannot possibly fathom that anything they could say could hurt someone as much as being called a sexist hurts them. They know in their hearts that they are not misoginists. So stop calling them on the stupid sexist things they say or write. Look into their hearts…
Not to get all Jean-Paul Sartre on you guys, but I kind of feel as though with things like sexism, existence precedes essence, no? Like, if you keep doing and saying sexist things, as men do, what, exactly, is the difference between you and someone who is “sexist in their hearts,” as they are wont to say? And how can we tell? Because for some reason, every time someone gets caught doing or saying something sexist, they somehow reason it out by saying “SURE, that thing I said and/or did could maybe be interpreted by pretty much anyone as being incredibly sexist! But I am not sexist in my heart, so it totally does not count!” Apparently, you can get away with saying and doing some pretty terrible things if you are only sexist with your mouth and not your heart or other organs. It is very convenient, considering the fact that there is literally no way to prove what is in someone’s heart other than through their actions, and if their actions don’t count, then we could all be perfect in our own hearts. Heck, in my own heart, as far as anyone knows, I could be Teddy Roosevelt!
This is not Parenting. This is Neglect.
The problem with video game/technology culture is that women continue to be a big problem. HUGE problem. Insisting that somehow the fact that they are women was even noteworthy, AS IF. Let’s start with the genuinely horrible and end with the slightly less horrible, shall we? From the seemingly endless morass of misogyny and stupid (plus very legitimate concerns about gaming journalism) that is “gamergate” comes the news that, for a time Amazon carried a self-published e-book detailing a violent rape fantasy about Zoe Quinn, one of the game developers who has been the target of online harassment by a raving pack of assholes who somehow have convinced themselves that threatening her and other women game designers will somehow bring justice to the world.
(If you’re lost and confused about what the hell Gamergate is, Gawker did an explainer)
Zoe Quinn is hated because she developed a game, and then an ex-boyfriend accused her of having sex with game reviewers. Never mind that the only true parts of the story are that she created a game, she had a boyfriend, and they broke up. On the internet, things don’t have to be true — besides, she complained about misogyny after the death and rape threats, so she’s the sexist.) Some witty fellow — we’ll assume, sexists that we are — wrote a 3000-word e-text and published it for Kindle with this charming description:
Zada Quinby is a controversial video game designer who may have crossed the line … ,” When her latest game offends the nation, five upset players decide to teach her a lesson. This gang of gamers decides to give Zada of [sic] piece of their mind, and much more!
Minutes after RawStory covered the existence of the thing, it was pulled by Amazon; an Amazon rep told RawStory’s Scott Kaufman that the book
appears to violate Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing’s Content Guidelines, which indicate both that “[w]e don’t accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts” or other “offensive content,” which they define as, “[w]hat we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect.”
The book was up long enough for Ms. Quinn to find out about; on Twitter, she noted its existence in a couple of tweets:
And of course, with the incredible logic of the internet, when Kaufman tweeted an update to his story , noting that the book had been pulled by Amazon, someone complained that he hadn’t given credit to the true heroes of the story:
After all, how could it have been removed if some gamergate stalker hadn’t created it in the first place? (Yes, we know — maybe it was written by someone who just wanted to make gamergate look bad.)
On a somewhat less loathsome note — which we must emphasize is a very relative judgment — comes a story from Wired by three computer scientists at MIT who did an “Ask Me Anything” post at Reddit. Elena Glassman, NehaNarula, and Jean Yang started off the event by writing,
“We’re 3 female computer scientists at MIT, here to answer questions about programming and academia. Ask us anything!”
Well Jesus, what were they thinking, being such rank sexists? The questions came in pretty quickly, mostly getting to the most important word in their post:
“Why does it matter that you’re female?”
“Why did you put gender in the title?”
“Why should your gender matter if you’re talking about research?”
Silly women, why did they have to go and rub their boobies all over the computer screen like that? In a truly equal world, no one would ever mention gender, and then there’d be no sexism! They also got some questions about their bra sizes, and multiple orders to make a sandwich (hahaha, that joke NEVER gets old). There were also some more clueful commenters, like the person who said that the whole AMA became “a parody of what it’s actually like to be a woman working in a STEM field.” So as you can see, they’re just raving feminists. Of course, if they hadn’t included the word “female” in their description, gender wouldn’t have come up at all, right? Not that women face any barriers or discouraging messages about participating in science and tech.
The writers do explain why they included that red-flag word in their Reddit description:
As computer science PhD students, we were interested in fielding questions about programming, academia, MIT CSAIL, and how we got interested in the subject in the first place. As three of the few women in our department and as supporters of women pursuing STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics], we also wanted to let people know that we were interested in answering questions about what it is like to be women in a male-dominated field. We decided to actively highlight the fact that we were three female computer scientists doing an AMA, to serve as role models in a field that’s less than 20 percent female.
So as you can see, they’re just raving feminists, as demonstrated by the fact that they even knew that percentage. It shouldn’t even be noticed. Of course, if they hadn’t included the word “female” in their description, gender wouldn’t have come up at all, right? Not that women face any barriers or discouraging messages about participating in science and tech.
Ultimately, though, they believe that despite all the idiots, it was a worthwhile effort:
We were able to raise awareness about technical privilege, implicit bias, and imposter syndrome. The questions and responses in the AMA also gave both male and female Redditors a platform to share their own experiences in and suggestions for environments unfriendly to women. Many women supported our answers by telling stories of their own experiences. Numerous men asked how they could help be allies–and many people jumped in to offer helpful responses.
And if you are looking for a silver lining, it is that even on the interwebs, sometimes people can learn things … that you rather wish they didn’t need to be taught at all.
If you conceive of yourself as the sun in a morally Copernican universe, then your subjective assessment of your own conduct is all that really matters. The one teensy problem with that model is that there are, you know, other people.
A young man – literally way less than half my age – recently derided me as an SJW. It was pedantically explained to me by this song feller that SJW stood for SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR (tell me more, oh wise child). And here we must back up and do MORE explainering: Gamergaters do not like “Social Justice Warriors” — i.e., anyone who thinks maybe social justice is a good thing and the world might be better off without racism, sexism, homophobia, hatred of trans people, and so on. The Gamergate and MRA crowd really can’t stand “SJWs,” which was confusing to me the first time we saw the term because we wondered what single Jewish women had done to piss them off so much. And then there’s the title, which refers to videogame critic Anita Sarkeesian, who outraged a lot of manchildren by making a series of videos critiquing how women are represented in videogames. Really. OUTRAGED like you wouldn’t BELIEVE.
(Wow, I knew patriarchy was ugly, but I had no idea it was this ugly)
These freaks above , Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini, have been working on a very serious crowdfunded documentary called The Sarkeesian Effect, whose important goal, according to their crowdfunding appeal, is to:
explore how gaming and tech culture have been hijacked by Social Justice Warriors as well as look into the background, ethics, and methodology of some the movement’s most prominent voices.
After raising roughly $56,000 to make their takedown of the whole Social Justice Warrior scam, Messrs Owen and Aurini have had a great big falling out, and Owen has given Aurini his walking papers from the project — except there are no papers, because the two Professional Filmmakers never actually had a written contract, so now there are sadfaced videos and butthurt blogposts aplenty. Aurini pledges that his betrayal will be avenged, and that The Sarkeesian Effect will be completed, and that there will be many words spilled in High Manly Dudgeon:
This project will see fruition, and it will be a palpable blow against the Social Justice movement. As I tried to explain to Jordan several times, this project is bigger than him, than me, than us, even than all of you – this project is a moral obligation. I will see this project done.
A moral obligation, yes, that’s what it is. Another of the dramatis personae, the offstage presence of“Roosh V,” a legendary in his own mind pickup artist (PUA), antifeminist, and leading light of the Manosphere. You know, another woman-hating asshole. So this is why Aurini really thinks Owen fired him (as if he even had the power to):
I strongly suspect that he undermined this project because of an irrational jealousy of Roosh, and any man who’s able to relate to women easily. He’d been asking me for advice about women since the get go — which led me to recommending my colleague Roosh who has done much to support us — but every time I spoke about him, it seemed to fill Jordan with rage. Eventually leading to a panic attack that got him kicked off of an airplane — the last time I saw him in person.
Remember, you have to remember to run this passage through the MRA/PUA translation filter, so that you understand that “any man who’s able to relate to women easily” does not mean “a man who can talk to a woman as if she too were a human being” but rather, “men who get laid a lot because sadly some women have poor senses of self-worth.” Also, he suspects that Owen may actually be a closet liberal, since even though they agreed that the project would be “apolitical” — yes, an apolitical look at how “Social Justice Warriors” are ruining the tech world — Owen had increasingly “made a point of attacking anybody on the right whom he could get away with criticizing, culminating with his attack on Roosh.”
“I strongly suspect that he undermined this project because of an irrational jealousy of Roosh, and any man who’s able to relate to women easily.”
Now, any man who is able to relate to women easily would not be part of the Men’s “Rights” Movement, you idiot, in fact that’s a huge part of what drives assholes to join it, as the movement is composed primarily of two types; bitter middle-aged divorced men who are very angry that their wives were allowed to leave them of their own free will, and that they have to pay child support (a lot of these creeps were abusive in the marriage(s), too); and bitter young virgins angry that they’re not “getting” the women they believe they deserve, who instead of looking at their own behavior and realizing that, say, bathing every day might be a good idea, decide instead to blame all the women in the world, because no one will fuck a “Nice Guy” like them (they’re not actually nice). I’ve actually seen many MRAs try and claim that he wasn’t one of them, usually with the argument that he wasn’t a part of the People’s Front of Judea, but part of the Judean People’s Front. But what about the People’s Popular Front of Judea? I hear they allied with the Judean People’s Front, but are really agents for the Samaritan League. None of whom are very popular. Incels are very scary people. I think that “incel spectrum disorder” exists, with our 2 heroes at the wimp/nerd end and Elliot Rodgers at the psycho/sociopath end.
I was going to link to one of their sites but, for your own mental health, take my word for it. Sad, sad dangerous people.
I’ll be over here, quietly seething and visiting with my friends’ sweet, smart kids who have high IQs and ever higher capacities for empathy and inclusiveness, and do not play video games or even know what Reddit is.
