Thursday, June 20, 2013

IN PLAIN SIGHT.

James Taranto, who thinks the American gynarchs are waging "war on men," catalogues the unkind comments women have made about him (e.g., "woman-hating troll"). While butchly insisting these barbs don't bother him, Taranto laments that the ladies are brutal in ways he and his fellow oppressed males would never be:
All this viciousness was in the service of denying that there is, as we wrote in yesterday's article, a "war on men." Well, imagine if a prominent feminist journalist wrote about the "war on women" and dozens of conservative male writers responded by subjecting her to similar verbal abuse. Would that not be prima facie evidence that she was on to something?
Taranto seems not to have heard of that key figure in the "war on women," Sandra Fluke -- pretty prominent and a journalist as well as a law student. It wouldn't be hard to get up to speed: I wrote a couple of columns about some of his colleagues' reactions to Fluke (for example, "Rush Calls Some Slut a Slut and Everyone Gets Sand in Their Collective V@g!n@"), but if Taranto doesn't want to endure my prose, he can just put "Sandra Fluke" and "whore" into Google.

You know, I'm just kidding. I'm sure Taranto has heard of Sandra Fluke. I'm even fairly confident that he knows where the power actually resides in male-female social relationships. He's just very good at pretending not to.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B: "Uh, yeah. It's almost like Amanda Marcotte doesn't exist. Or Jessica Valenti. Or Joan Walsh. Or Naomi Klein. Or any woman writer at The Nation. Imagine though if those people existed, I'm sure conservatives would be gallant." Amanda particularly seems to attract the psycho freaks of the right, probably because she pretty clearly doesn't give a shit, an attitude known to infuriate bullies.

UPDATE 2. Removed reference to "screenwriter" among Fluke's achievements -- I had conflated her with Lena Dunham, for obvious reasons.

25 comments:

  1. Derelict10:16 AM

    Would that not be prima facie evidence that she was on to something?


    I've always loved this as a defense for writing something completely fucked up. People are writing in to tell me I'm completely wrong. Therefore, I MUST be right!


    Jonah the Fail uses this defense frequently (perhaps best displayed in his "even though the dictionary says my definition of fascism is wrong, it's still right by my own standards" defense of his magnun dopus, Liberal Fascism. That Taranto resorts to it after having dozens of people (men and women) point out how hideously wrong his column was is simply par for the conservative course.

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  2. Substance McGravitas11:00 AM

    Logic suggests that the right course of action is for Taranto to molest children.

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  3. JennOfArk11:01 AM

    I'd say it's more like prima faeces evidence.

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  4. JennOfArk11:03 AM

    Taranto laments that the ladies are brutal in ways he and his fellow oppressed males would never be:
    Yes, in that Taranto and fellow oppressed males are incapable of brutally denying access to vaginas they don't possess to folks like Taranto and his ilk.

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  5. Teresa11:14 AM

    In the mental tilt-a-whirl that is Taranto's mind, it's always a war on men like him when he says something ignorant and the world did not just pretend he was a genius of the universe. Now it will be weeks of him whining about how picked on he is.

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  6. sharculese11:16 AM

    If I hadn't seen pictures of him I would assume that "James Taranto" was the pseudonym for a group effort by the nastier parts of reddit.

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  7. Substance McGravitas11:23 AM

    But the underlying subject matter is far from funny. The objective of these ideologues is to destroy the lives of men.



    Well, I AM doing a good job on my own life, but I don't see that the scope of my project is so expansive.

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  8. Doc Washboard11:47 AM

    Has anybody else ever noticed how often those on the Right preface what they have to say with "imagine if?" Listen: we all conduct arguments in our heads--with our bosses, our significant others, our teenaged kids--but conservatives seem to have accepted these imaginary battles as perfectly valid links in their chains of evidence.

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  9. Uncle Kvetch12:09 PM

    "Assume I'm right about everything. Now..."

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  10. Taranto has indeed heard of Sandra Fluke, having written a column excoriating Ms. Fluke and dismissing critics of Limbaugh's hateful outburst against her. The comments contain some choice examples of right-wing male civility:

    Dear Sandra..You will never need the pill if you let Bill
    Clinton teach you his sure fired method of birth control...Think San Juan
    Capistrano and the yearly migration of the Swallows...



    She has the right to keep her legs closed, but apparently
    just not the ability



    It's pronounced Fluck and it rhymes with you know what.



    And in a single comment:

    Sandra Fluke is a non-aborted fetus...

    Which now makes her an expert at Liberal Women’s rights to abort at any time of her feminist desires or when whims move her loins...and make the rest of us
    fund it

    She is the epitome of feminism wildly unchecked and a man eater...man hater...

    In another time she would have been called a who-re...

    5 years ago she would have been called a lesbian...

    Today they call her a speaker for the DNC.</blockquote.

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  11. Jay B.1:06 PM

    Well, imagine if a prominent feminist journalist wrote about the "war on women" and dozens of conservative male writers responded by subjecting her to similar verbal abuse.

    Uh, yeah. It's almost like Amanda Marcotte doesn't exist. Or Jessica Valenti. Or Joan Walsh. Or Naomi Klein. Or any woman writer at The Nation. Imagine though if those people existed, I'm sure conservatives would be gallant.

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  12. Jay B.1:16 PM

    Life's a bitch and then you marry one! Amirite?! It's almost as if he has a problem with women overall...Hmmmm.

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  13. calling all toasters1:21 PM

    Dear James Taranto,
    Have you ever considered trying *not* to be a loser? Sure, that's a firing offense at a Murdoch paper, but you might find that women won't regard you as repellent.
    Love,
    c.a.t.

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  14. Well played.

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  15. Not to mention all the Black feminists, who get it not just from both the sexist AND the racist angles. Lucky them.

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  16. If we imagine a world in which the Laffer Curve is a highly scientific and valid description of reality, you'll see my point about cutting taxes.

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  17. If Taranto has ever in his life head to deal with anything like this, I'll consider taking him seriously.

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  18. marindenver1:37 PM

    Considering that the "war on men", as defined in the offending column, was primarily the efforts to get sexual assault in the military under control and Taranto thinks that's a BAD thing ("an effort to criminalize male sexuality"), it's just more evidence that these guys just don't get the concept of *consent*. Nobody is trying to criminalize actual sexuality - they're trying to control behavior that is already criminal. Like, you know, rape. Sexual assault. That kind of stuff.

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  19. It's almost fascinating (ie, it would be if it weren't so irritating) how you can mention violence against women on Reddit, and like clockwork watch some MRA show up to ask why we aren't talking about violence against men instead.

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  20. sharculese2:00 PM

    5 years ago she would have been called a lesbian...

    Today they call her a speaker for the DNC.



    Ignoring the fact that a national columnist is apparently still quite capable of screaming 'lesbo' at any woman who dares to speak up, lesbians can speak at national conventions, James. They're not just fictional beasts who appear in porn films.

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  21. I'm even fairly confident that he knows where the power actually resides
    in male-female social relationships. He's just very good at pretending
    not to.


    I know that wingnuts need to be graded on an extremely steep curve, but "very good" still seems a bit much. "Brazen" or "shameless," I would accept. But especially in light of Stratplayer's link to Taranto's own column on Sandra Fluke, he's not really pretending all that well.

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  22. Gromet2:41 PM

    Is it wrong that I want to give Taranto a wedgie for typing "prima facie"? I won't do it, though, because he'll never understand why he got that wedgie.

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  23. Origami_Isopod3:08 PM

    Somewhere in this thread Taranto was described as "garbage made flesh." I rather like that.

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  24. gratuitous3:20 PM

    Oh, you libruls! Don't you know that there are no prominent feminist journalists, certainly none on a par with James Taranto? You all fell into his clever trap, citing all these lesser journalistic lights, and pretending that the abuse heaped on them was either (a) unwarranted or (b) in any way comparable to the outrages endured by St. James.
    Suckers.

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  25. sharculese3:42 PM

    I also love how every time Salon has an article on women's issues, their top reddit discussions always have one for some normal subreddit and then another for /r/redpill.

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