We witnessed a mob of online feminists harass a male scientist to the point of tears because of his sartorial choices. Dr. Matt Taylor helped land a spaceship on a comet hurtling through space at the clip of 135,000 kilometers an hour, the first time humans had come even close to accomplishing such a tremendous feat. He is a great man who has accomplished great things for all of humanity. But when he discussed his team’s accomplishments on television, you see, he was wearing a shirt made by a female friend out of fabric depicting cartoons of scantily clad women. Quelle horreur!
The outrage couldn’t have been more over-the-top. “I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing,” read a real headline that humans with no sense of reality actually wrote and published. Shrill outrage site Jezebel claimed that Atlantic reporter Rose Eveleth, who started the “#shirtstorm,” had been subject to death threats. Their headline “Woman Gets Death Threats for Tweeting About Disliking A Dude’s Shirt” led to a story of a few people being mean to her and saying stuff like “jump off a cliff.” As one Jezebel commenter noted, “they’re death threats in the same way that saying ‘go f— yourself’ is a rape threat.” Trigger warning: A review of Eveleth’s outrage-tweets over a shirt someone wore might make you embarrassed to be human.
When University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds simply wrote an op-ed for USA Today criticizing the feminist bullying, he was accused by feminists of egregious behavior, including “doxxing” — the practice of revealing a person’s private information for the purpose of intimidation. When people pointed out that there was literally not one shred of evidence to support the claim that Reynolds had done any such thing, claims were revised to (falsely) say he’d encouraged “his flying monkeys” to misbehave. Feminists tried to suggest that Reynolds’ employer should be upset about what he wrote.
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