#TheTriggering lies limp and unable to perform


It probably doesn’t help when the targets of all your aggressive thrusting are laughing at you. This recent impotent effort by loud man-babies to be as offensive as possible on Twitter fizzled feebly, and here’s one good elegy for the fucked up mess.

I had a great deal of fun with #TheTriggering today, as did many of my most adamantly and bullishly feminist friends. It was a chance to point and laugh at an idea that could not have backfired any more spectacularly. But I think it’s also important to remember that while the planning and execution were pathetically bad, this was a plan born of genuine hatred and fear of women, people read as women, and anyone who supports their liberation and fair treatment.

The people behind #TheTriggering weren’t dauntless free speech advocates—just sad and spiteful little gremlins who genuinely think that trans people should die and women need to talk less.

Don’t get me wrong : that should definitely not stop you from mocking them. Mock early, mock often. Mock loudly and proudly and get all your friends to join in. Sometimes, the best cure for hatefulness is abject derision. Something to smile about: almost all of the top tweets in the hashtag are either people mocking the creators, or the creators getting mad at the people mocking them. It’s kinda beautiful, really. This really could not have gone any more wrong in any more predictable a way.

Just remember that in reality, safety and freedom from harassment and violence are no joke. It’s sad that there are people so devoted to a quixotic crusade against the perceived tyranny of “cultural Marxism” that they can’t see that.

Comments

  1. Saad says

    What better way for something to backfire than that!

    Aaminah is an awesome writer.

    Today, we get the MRAs to embrace the trigger warning. Tomorrow, we teach them that catcalling isn’t praise. And eventually, one day, they’ll take a sobering look at themselves, their computers littered with “offensive memes”, their rooms likewise littered with Ayn Rand and the dead forgotten husks of once-young pizza rolls—
    and maybe, just maybe, they’ll realize that they’ve had a “safe space” of their own all along.

    Beautiful.

  2. rq says

    There’s a great comment at the link that names the proponents of #TheTriggering Entitlement Warriors – which handily shortens to EW. I like it.

  3. says

    The Triggering sounds like the name for a bad horror movie. Appropriate, since MRAs are pretty close in temperament to the villains in horror movies.

  4. HappyHead says

    @timgueguen #3:
    I’ve always felt that they sounded more like 1980’s cartoon villains than horror movie ones. It’s like they didn’t realize that Cobra Commander and Skeletor were not intended as role models to emulate.

    Skeletor: “Curse you, Social Justice Warriors! You may have won today, but my Antisocial ways will win in the end!”

  5. blf says

    Teh EWs will presumably declare a great victory on grounds such as being noticed, and having freeble attempts made to rebut / mock their posing. I mean positions. And feeble, albeit freeble somehow works better…

  6. says

    After reading choice bits at WHTM, it’s easy to see why it failed so, um, hard limply. They just repeated the same shit they type 10 times a day already. When you’re occupied with strewing shit all over the place, it’s hardly impressive when you mark out a special day to strew shit all over the place.

  7. A Masked Avenger says

    @Caine #8:

    Yes, exactly. They couldn’t really come up with too much to tweet, because “tweet the most offensive shit you can think of” is their everyday behavior. WHTM documented some of the surrealism that resulted when they flat-out couldn’t think of anything more to tweet.

  8. anteprepro says

    They went too far up their own ass. They decided to mock the idea of triggering itself by spewing out “BETACUCK SJW #WHITEGENOCIDE lulz”, which is basically just everyday Twitter. They did this instead of aspiring to what they initially promised and posting shit like, I don’t know, Headless Lemon Party, Two Girls One Cup of Aborted Fetus, Goatse where, if you look deep enough, you see a concentration camp. That kind of “Lol look how offensive I am” kind of shit. The entire point of it was to be as offensive as possible, and all they could manage was to spew out standard “politically incorrect” bigoted garbage. I guess that’s for the best though. They probably failed miserably in their purported goal to trigger people, which is itself probably just a sick joke for them, and the last laugh was all on them. Glad it could all turn out that way.

  9. killyosaur says

    I think it highly entertaining that this whole #TheTriggering worked just not in the way the organizers wanted. I would have participated in the mockery had I not had better things to do.

  10. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    I don’t twit, but if I did, I would have posted something like:

    free speech means you have to listen to social justice warriors talk about how bad your behaviors and attitudes are exactly as much as the rest of society has to listen to you talk. #theTriggering

  11. anteprepro says

    I am baffled by the sheer number of those among the Gamerchanian Manservtarian diaspora who are insistent on using “triggered” as if it were identical to “upset” or “offended”. As the New Meme equivalent to “U Mad Bro?”

    It means one or both of the following:
    1. They sincerely believe that this is what people actually meant when they described “triggering”
    2. They sincerely believe that being the 30,000th to intentionally exaggerate “triggered” into “offended” is a clever and hilarious joke.

    I honestly would bet on both, because this particular crowd is simply masterful when it comes to throwing out critical thinking in order to “believe” everything and its opposite (exclusively in service of battling women and minorities, of course).

  12. gijoel says

    There’s a great comment at the link that names the proponents of #TheTriggering Entitlement Warriors – which handily shortens to EW. I like it.

    Winner, winner, chicken dinner. I’ve been searching for a term to describe them, and that is bang on target.