Friday, January 16, 2015

Monetizing misogyny

Speaking of misogyny, by way of Pharyngula is this article in Boing Boing about misogynists who make money by firing up mobs of fellow misogynists.

One of the things that completely convinced me that Will Shetterly was no longer one of the good guys was his siding with the misogynist assholes of #gamergate against Anita Sarkeesian and  Zoe Quinn. This is how deranged Shetterly became - in addition to siding with Koch brothers employee (by way of the AEI) Christina Hoff Sommers he also approvingly quoted another professional feminist-hater, Cathy Young, yet another Koch brothers employee (by way of Reason magazinewho said this:
When GamerGate members claimed to have found the man who had sent threats to Sarkeesian, anti-GamerGate blogger David Futrelle responded by accusing them of harboring some of Sarkeesian’s harassers in their midst—citing as his example a netizen known as “thunderf00t,” who has done little more than to engage in sharp criticism of Sarkeesian’s work.
That's the kind of right-wing Bizarro World (or just Shameless Lie-ville) that anti-feminists live in.

As Jay Allen in Boing Boing noted:
Many of these professional victimizers are anti-feminist video bloggers, who combine the income from YouTube video ads with funding through Patreon, a service which allows people who create content to charge subscribers per-release or per-month. One of the highest-profile examples is atheist and anti-feminist video blogger Phil “thunderf00t” Mason, formerly of Freethought Blogs. In addition to his promotion of atheism and debunking of pseudoscience, he focuses on attacking feminism and particular feminist personalities. In particular, he’s focused on video game cultural critic and video blogger Anita Sarkeesian, making multiple videos with names like “‘Feminism’ Vs FACTS (Anita Sarkeesian DESTROYED!)” and “Anita Sarkeesian- BUSTED! 
Most of these videos rely heavily on editing short segments out of context and belaboring them, but that’s typical for the level of discourse in YouTube video blogs. What makes Mason different is that he actively exhorts his viewers to express their disagreement with personal abuse. In a video titled “Anita Sarkeesian and the BITCHY tweets”, he tells his viewers, “People call [Sarkeesian] a bitch because they think [she] acted like a bitch. That’s really not sexism, but a conclusion.” He describes this abuse as “part of the public marketplace of ideas”. And his viewers take that message to heart, often even citing thunderf00t by name while heaping personal abuse on Sarkeesian. For these videos, which often have hundreds of thousands of views, he gets approximately $1.50 USD per thousand views (recent estimates of YouTube income ranges from $0.60 to $5 per thousand), plus more than $2500 per video through Patreon. 
Mason—and others, like Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini, planning a feature-length documentary titled The Sarkeesian Effect—have targeted Sarkeesian for more than a year; they only joined up with GamerGate to promote their already-existing anti-feminist agenda.
You can understand why  professional feminist-haters like Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Summers support thunderf00t and the rest of the mobbing evil misogynist freaks - that's exactly what the Koch brothers pay them for. What is Will Shetterly's excuse? He started out by justifiably attacking real Social Justice Warriors, like the conscience-deficient Mikki Kendall and K. Tempest Bradford, but he seems to have concluded that since they claim to be feminists (while spending their time attacking "white feminists" whom they hate more than any member of the Ku Klux Klan who ever lived) the real problem must be feminists and so we must attack feminists, including Sarkeesian who was never a Social Justice Warrior.

My guess is that Shetterly was never a true feminist and the existence of Social Justice Warriors has allowed him to fly his right-wing misogyny freak flag. Fortunately I never included Shetterly's SJW web site in my blogroll, so I don't have to take it down - but I am adding David Futrelle's "We Hunted the Mammoth" partly as a response to Shetterly's going over to the right-wing Koch brothers-supported misogynist side. As much as I hate the hardcore SJWs I will always side with feminists against misogynist-sympathizers like Will Shetterly.