By David Futrelle
Australian podcaster and putative leftist Aimee Terese has annoyed a lot of people on Twitter with her bizarre attack on freelance journalist Talia Jane for going public with the gross DM she’d gotten from a male journalist, suggesting to Jane that she was so ugly that she should feel flattered that anyone would even “contemplate ejaculating on [her face].”
No, really.
Turns out that Terese is not quite as thick-skinned as she expects her targets to be, and she was evidently herself annoyed by the post I wrote yesterday about her anti-Talia-Jane tweetstorm.
First, she responded with a flurry of buzzwords:
I have no idea what she’s going on about either.
Then, perhaps realizing that calling someone excessively “discursive” was not quite the killing rhetorical blow she had hoped it would be, she tried again:
Now this tweet I understand, because I have seen so many different variations of these, er, arguments used against me by so many Men’s Rights Activists over the years.
I’m a White Knight? I’ve certainly heard that before.
And apparently when I’m not white knighting women I am “step[ping] on the necks of dissenting women” like Terese. Never mind that I only wrote about her because she viciously attacked a women for reporting apparent sexual harassment; clearly I’m being the hateful one here.
This, again, is the same sort of nonsense I’ve heard from MRAs every time I’m said anything critical about antifeminist women — often with a bogus “gatcha” attached: You say you’re a feminist, yet here you are criticizing a woman!
Fans of Cassie Jaye, the director of the Red Pill documentary, widely panned by feminists as a whitewash of the misogynistic Men’s Rights movement, tend to be the most enthusiastic about this particular rhetorical strategy. They also like to conflate writing about someone on a blog with harassment — just as Terese turned “mentioning someone in a blog post” into “stepping on someone’s neck.”
Once wound up, Cassie Jaye fans — her white knights? — just can’t seem to stop. Last month, one of her admirers on Twitter demanded to know “how many lies about Cassie Jaye have you posted this morning?” At that point i hadn’t written a word about her for nearly two years.
Terese doesn’t just ape the rhetorical tricks of the MRAs; she also seems to agree with them about certain things. Or at least to agree with Jordan Peterson, something of an idol for many MRAs. Last year, as Terese reminded me yesterday, she took issue with my suggestion that incel forums, breeding grounds for violence and misery, should be shut down if possible.
Her solution to the incel problem? Aside from vague talk about ending capitalist alienation by ending capitalism itself, this is the only specific suggestion she offered:
Now, I don’t think she’s literally suggesting that every incel in the world be awarded an “attractive, eligible” Palestinian woman of his own; she later clarified that she had offered this suggestion “not as an answer in itself, but more as an example of creative thinking.”
But this “creative thinking” isn’t really so creative after all; it sounds an awful lot like Jordan Peterson’s “enforced monogamy” and/or economist Robert Hanson’s “sex redistribution,” ersatz “solutions” to “sexual inequality” that would require imposing some sort of sexual tyranny on the women of the world, some of whom would have to be cajoled or threatened or coerced into having sex with the sort of guy who thinks shooting up a mall is an appropriate response to not being able to get laid.
If you’re a socialist who sounds this much like an MRA, you really need to start rethinking your socialism.
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