Stop me if you’ve never heard this before: an obscure feminist youtuber catches the attention of an sooper logikkkal atheist douchebro with millions of subscribers, makes a video “disagreeing” with her, and then they have a meaningful conversation that leaves the audience with a number of important follow up questions to research.
Or–wait, no. Video after video of vapid reasoning and screaming at the camera.
Or–WAIT. Ashley’s questioning their gender. Rape and death threats to the nth degree, because the only thing worse than a woman is an enby.
Ashley Mardell and Riley Dennis recount their experiences of being LGBTQ feminists on a medium known for its vicious and incoherent cishet atheist douchebros. In particular, they observe how their process of questioning their genders and how neither of them has come to the conclusion they sit on the binary seems to induce a particularly unique rage. The trolls mention the banners of freeze peach and sooper logikkkal as their rallying cries… despite their best efforts to censor free speech by shouting down anyone who disagrees with them, and also using arguments that have been refuted time and time again. Although it’s worth noting that they’re trying to “argue” about questioning one’s gender, which is not a debate anyone but the questioner should be engaging in.
Ashley & Riley also point out that the pattern of “angry video -> mentioning YouTuber by name -> said YouTuber’s channel flooded with hate” has repeated hundreds of times, and there’s no way the douchebros making these videos aren’t aware of what, exactly, will happen when they paint a target on someone. Their fans are entitled and angry, and never at any point do their tell their fanbase to back the fuck off.
Ashley–in the unlikely event you ever read this–I’m sorry this happens to you, and to anyone. For what it’s worth, I think the aforementioned douchebro’s ideas are in the same league as, say, dysentery outbreaks. I also think they’ve been complicit in so many harassment campaigns that at this point they ought to be charged with something, but police trend towards useless.
-Shiv
Very nice! (The video of course, not the things Ashley, Riley and everyone in their circumstances have to go through.) You know, something like this refutes a particularly insidious argument that anti-feminists use all the time, which exploded in popularity during GamerGate: the “SJWs harass people too! / We’re being framed!” defense. For example, recently Gizmodo run an article about Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus Rift who funded an anti-Clinton, pro-Trump iniciative, in which they also revealed that he was also dating a Gamergater. Now, for once I think anti-feminists made a good point when they complained that bringing Luckey’s girlfriend to the fore was uncalled for, even if their reasons were simply that the awful ideas she promotes were not awful at all. In any case, it seems the article earned her a harassment wave that drove her off Twitter. Then, the “SJWs are the real harassers!” chant begun.
How to explain to these biased people that, if someone is harassing a conservative woman under cries of “b*tch” and “c*nt” they are not being “SJWs”? That “real” “SJWs” know what this feels like and strongly disapprove of such words and tactics? That there’s plenty of people on the left that are as socially regressive as the staunchest Republican, no matter how much they hate Trump? Gizmodo and the other former Gawker Media blogs in particular have always been full of these “brocialists,” in fact they were some of the ones doing the complaining and chanting.
@Kreator
I’m sure it doesn’t help that Trump supporters get touchy when you call them deplorable for reasons that should be patently obvious. But yeah, I wouldn’t endorse a harassment campaign nor the use of gendered slurs to discredit her–supporting White Supremacy ought to be enough to work with.