Reader NG brought a link about Lindy West and her story of confronting an online troll.
I have to say, I’m so shocked by the article that I’m on the verge of throwing up. This is one of the most horrifying and disgusting stories I have ever encountered. The idea this Lindy West person proposes is that women are obligated to mother, nurture and emotionally service even those men who insult, abuse, and persecute them.
The story goes as follows: the Lindy person is viciously assaulted by an online troll, begins to service him emotionally in a pathetic and abject way, troll finds happiness and gets “a new girlfriend” (like a new car or a new box of trash bags), forgives the Lindy person for not starting to service him sooner, and doesn’t bash her any more. Of course, there are crowds of other trolls out there, and the question remains as to whether the Lindy person will have enough titties to feed them all with the milk of female servitude.
The most unbelievable thing is that the Lindy person identifies as a “feminist” in the very first sentence of her bizarre screed. I’ve seen all kinds of strange definitions of feminism but for the Lindy person it seems to mean “rolling yourself out like a carpet for everybody to walk over.”
Hey, Lindy person! You are a person. You are not an enormous tit filled with understanding and compassion. The world won’t end if you don’t feed parts of yourself to every passing freak. You are setting a horrible example to other female persons because you are adding one more voice to an already enormous chorus that tells them that their only goal in life is to suckle and nurture needy men.
Clarissa's Blog 
How Men’s Rights Leader Paul Elam Turned Being a Deadbeat Dad Into A Moneymaking Movement
An excerpt: Men’s rights activists often cite the first time they realized it’s a woman’s world. They call these “red pill” moments, after the scene in The Matrix when the main character is faced with the decision to swallow a red pill and recognize the true nature of the world or take a blue pill and continue living a lie. For Elam, that revelation came at age 13, when his mother tried to force him to take his diarrhea medicine.
No comment except that it seems ridiculously Freudian to me.
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I’ve got something worse: an article from somebody who claims to be a feminist yet insists that child abuse is “normal” and pokes fun at Elam for being traumatized: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2015/02/06/mras-pretty-much-what-youve-always-thought/
I was shocked and horrified by this piece.
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The commenters agree with you.
But I just find it striking that his mother and father and his brothers were abusive to him (according to the article) but he only has this lasting worldview of animus towards women. And then he grew up and was an abusive baby to his wives, children and girlfriends. He and so many of his followers are mad at the world for not being an everflowing tit.
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“Mah boy, you are so full of shit … but not for long!”
[ahem] 🙂
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That woman seems to have started to think that all this abuse is somehow normal.
Like an abusive relationship but with the whole world.
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“Like an abusive relationship but with the whole world.”
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I read her story where she seems to say she tamed the troll. I thought bravo for her, at least in this narrow situation. She tamed a troll. But generally that is not the way things work out. In fact in school systems, when young men are behaving trollish, female teachers are told to “win them over”, which means behaving like a very nourishing mother and giving them candy (literally — I was instructed this). The result is that the student-troll tries to push the boundaries in other ways and you have this endless appearance of the student-troll.
Two things we need to bring back
respect for authority
elitism
And we need to get rid of the pseudo left. (Did I just repeat myself?)
The pseudo left are those who revel in infantilism. And they take all the power away from the real left.
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“In fact in school systems, when young men are behaving trollish, female teachers are told to “win them over”, which means behaving like a very nourishing mother and giving them candy”
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I believe you may be right. I have really a horrible tendency to read redemptive aspects into people’s attitudes, because it is ALWAYS hard for me to believe that they are as low as they are. In some sense, though, she tames the troll but revealing the cowardly motivations. There’s a bit of a story there, but it’s not a solution. My view is that expecations of women have been left to slide –or actively pushed in the wrong direction by the pseudo-left — so that someone like me is so far outside of the range of expectations for women that I may as well not try to communicate at all. People these days seem like monkeys to me, expecially when it come to gender relations. I can relate my stories, but it is in a tone of contempt and bewilderment with what people will accept.
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“People these days seem like monkeys to me, expecially when it come to gender relations.” Not even at the level of monkeys.
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I’m just reading the feministe article now, that was posted in this thread. It reminds me of when some guy recently said to me that women ruled the world because they did the shopping. I asked him whether men might be free to shop as well. He said, no, men don’t need as much as women, just a razer to shave, so men do not rule the world. Truly I think these people — they are mostly Americans — are desperately in need of a rationality injection. It’s not that the pseudo-left in Australia hasn’t also made things so much worse, but most of the MRAs seem to be made in America.
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You probably already know this but John McAdams, a tenured professor at Marquette University was fired for writing a blog post that administrators characterize as inaccurate and irresponsible. The professor named a graduate student in the post who was subsequently trolled to the extent that she transferred to another university due to the amount of hate mail directed against her. He had nothing to do with the trolling but is this justification for losing his job despite his tenure?
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/stripping-a-professor-of-tenure-over-a-blog-post/385280/
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The McAdams fellow is definitely a bizarre and creepy fellow. And I really wonder why nobody cares about tenured professors who are fired all the time when their departments are destroyed due to “budget cuts.” But suddenly everybody is s huge supporter of tenure with this guy.
Yes, the university sucks. Everybody involved is a lousy teacher, and McAdams is a freak. I only hope that everybody who is so actively defending tenure at least notices the next time tenured faculty find themselves out in the street because some fat rich governor needs a new mansion.
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@NG: Tenure doesn’t mean “impossible to fire.”
Repeatedly setting up graduate students and undergraduates to be doxxed because he disagreed with their opinions doesn’t make him a free speech martyr. If I were his peer I wouldn’t want this idiot around stirring up drama every time somebody with a grievance and a smartphone came to him to write a blog post even if I agreed with him. If academics enjoyed playing playground referee they’d be in HR instead of conducting research and teaching students.
If anything this case annoys the shit out of people who don’t have anything like tenure and work in at-will states. It doesn’t look like an argument for the concept of tenure. It just looks like “academics are endlessly spoiled whiners who engage in stupid drama and can keep their jobs while I can be fired for practically any reason at all”
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Everybody in this case is equally unprofessional: Abate, the tenured guy, the student, and the administration. They are all collectively a disgrace to the teaching profession.
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Clickbaity Slate: Students are Children Who Must Be Protected
Even if you agreed, it still doesn’t explain the arrested development of swarms of “adults” and “professionals”.
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Lindy West sets a horrible example anyway …
If Dick Cavett were still around, I’m certain he’d take a few moments to call some of her not-so-special pleadings “jejune”. 🙂
[ticks off the Lindy West box on the pre-printed form that lists the reasons why I Hate Seattle …]
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