What do you think of the website We Hunted The Mammoth? Do you think it does good work?
I used to be a regular there! Back when it was called Manboobz, in like 2012! But then there was kind of a forum meltdown (the kind where all the answers seem clear now but it was a huge mess while it was happening) and David closed the forum and I left and have only been back sporadically. The forum was a really tight-knit group when it was good though, and I still stay in touch with some people I met there.
I also have kind of mixed feelings about how the blog comments sections were, back in the day. They were like 90% feminists and 10% some really persistent MRA trolls and a large part of the activity was making sport of debating/taunting the trolls in ways that were sometimes interesting, sometimes unproductive, and sometimes verged on unsafe. If I was doing it all over again, I would want to be a lot more serious and thoughtful about the ways we were engaging with people who were obviously miserable and potentially dangerous.
But this was before “incel murders” were part of the national conversation. And honestly, this is the saddest thing of all–when Manboobz started, the manosphere was kind of a fringe thing. It was relatively benign (relatively) pick-up artists who sold each other shitty PDFs on hypnotizing women via silly hats, plus some bitter divorced dads who were trying to make “I don’t want to pay child support” into a political movement, plus some 19-year-old boys ranting about how they were giving up on women forever because they hadn’t dated a supermodel yet. Each of these groups consisted of, like, a hundred guys.
So it was kind of just funny at the time, and often even felt like punching down. We didn’t realize yet how big a force online right-wing radicalization was going to become. The stuff we were watching was in some ways the gestation of the alt-right. I thought it was all silly little online cults, but they’ve grown larger and more malignant over time. (Except for the PUAs, I think, but even that is a sad thing–the idea of “get a girlfriend via nonconsensual magic” has been largely displaced in the manosphere by “you can never have a girlfriend because women are evil.” At this point, most of the manosphere heavily discourages any activities that could cause their members to accidentally end up in a healthy relationship.) I honestly thought online misogyny would get better as Internet culture became more mainstream; instead, it’s racked up a body count.
I don’t think any of this is WHTM’s fault, of course. I think David has done very good work documenting the evolution of all this, and patiently deconstructing the logic behind it. I approve of the site. It just makes me sad in a lot of ways thinking about it.
