When Minecraft’s developer Notch fell prey to the latest crew of triggered SJWs, I wasn’t too concerned. Perhaps I should have been, after all, idiocy seems to be a full-time career these days demonstrated by media coverage of the event. Considering I live in China, it isn’t exactly rare for me to look at the news and think “huh this is a good fiction novella”, but that didn’t used to be the case for western media. Recently, I have found myself a lot less proud of my position as a video game journalist and it is mainly due to stories like this.
She cleverly captioned it ‘Mansplaining the Statue’ though I can’t give her too much credit since this stolen tweet originally went viral a year ago when Ash Hernandez first uploading it. A year ago, this statue which depicts the sculptor’s daughter and a male student chatting happily, was the centre of SJW melodrama which has unfortunately been revived. One tweeter mentioned that the statue was actually called ‘Classmates’, the title of which would imply to a sane person that the couple depicted were friends. However, this fell on deaf ears and his tweet was quickly written off as ‘mansplaining’. Jennifer Scheurle followed up with another tweet on this super serious issue of men telling women information against their will and received a reply from Notch.
A few people think that Notch shouldn’t have got involved, but I personally admire him for taking a stand. It’s like I often say when talking about Social Justice “if you ignore cancer it just gets worse”. As you can see Notch replied in a perfectly reasonable manner, and it is hard to argue with his statement. Mansplaining is simply a derogatory term coined by third wave feminists to silence men. Other well-known terms include ‘manspreading’ which is the act of a man separating his legs when he sits to avoid physical pain to his genitalia and ‘man-slamming’ which is the act of being walked into by a man. These terms that most people would see and define as sexist are not viewed the same way in feminist circles. Most feminists believe that men are ‘oppressors’ and therefore even if a man is raped or beaten or born into poverty he is privileged. This is how Destructoid’s Steven Hansen is able to describe Notch’s comment as “It’s kind of like arguing that calling it “necrophilia” shames corpse-fuckers” without reality encroaching on his writing.
Privilege is essentially the ‘Original Sin’ of Adam and Eve from Christian literature but transcribed into feminism. In this system, all women are victims, from Beyonce to Kim Kardashian. Now that may sound terrible and you may wonder why feminism would seek to disempower women in this way, but victim status is actually a commodity in feminist circles. The more ‘oppressed’ you are (by which I mean the more minority groups you belong to rather than actual oppression) the higher your status in the community. This phenomenon is known as intersectional feminism, usually practiced by rich university students who wish to bury their silver spoon from the public eye under a thin veil of ‘oppression.
If you managed to do the mental acrobatics to follow along with that, then you may be able to understand how Destructoid managed to publish this article:
It doesn’t seem to matter that at no point does Notch say he feel oppressed. He simply states what we know; that ‘mansplaining is a derogatory term used to silence men. If you don’t believe this you need only search the term on Twitter’s live tweet feed for hundreds of examples per second.
I do find some delicious irony in the fact that the journalist of this piece opens his piece by calling the self-made billionaire a ‘sad-man’. Funny how the little dogs always make the most noise isn’t it? He also claims that Notch “took umbrage with a joke online and proceeded to call a couple women “cunts” for effect.” Hmm, that doesn’t sound right. He didn’t seem angry in the slightest, in fact, his tone reminded me of the fictional billionaire, mister Tony Stark. As for the accusation of him calling women cunts, this is the actual tweet:
Which in context, we can all understand is not an insult. It is merely mirroring the term ‘mansplaining’ since the term ‘cunt’ actually means vagina. So it is painfully obvious that he isn’t ‘calling women cunts’ and that is essentially propaganda. I also find it amusing that a man who’s Twitter name is ‘pussy-getting-bloggr’ takes such offence to the word ‘cunt’. Maybe it is my British origins, but ‘cunt’ is practically a term of endearment in my family and I have never really understood why it’s particularly bad in America. My best guess is there must be some particularly gruesome looking vagina’s over there. I’m afraid I can’t ask why, since Steve closed the comments and ran to his safe space, presumably to hide from mean old reality.
Notch has handled the situation smoothly, with the no-fucks-given attitude that only a billionaire can muster.
Sorry Social Justice, but it doesn’t look like you’ll be able to bring Notch down like you did Richard Dawkins. Once again, gamers have shown they know how to fight monsters. If you enjoyed this piece why not check out this one on the Balder’s gate controversy.
Original Author: Stephanie Smith