Or so says Matt Forney, in response to a comment I left on his blog giving his most recent post a C-.
"Herds of rabbits???" I wrote in imaginary red ink in the imaginary margins of his unimaginably weak essay. "Logic?" "Over generalizing!" and "Please support this assertion."
I know, I know: quit picking on Matt Forney! He has enough problems, especially now that half of Portland Reddit is about to tar, feather, and ride him out of town on a rail. And God knows I have enough grading to do without taking on another recalcitrant student; it's not like I'm getting paid by the head.
Yet I can't help laughing. Cancer! Really? In typically hyperbolic, manospheric fashion, Matt will never reach for a fly-swatter when he can fire his really big cannon.
Now I realize I'm not just some overworked, underpaid, ineffectual frump with a crummy M.A. Rather, I am a curiously powerful, even dangerous creature, part of a vast malignancy invading the highest portals of learning, stealthily inserting the tentacles of feminism and liberalism into every nook and cranny. The horror! The horror!
In fact, when I say that I "toil in the basement of academe," even that's a stretch: I teach remedial English in a community college (or, as one wag put it, "13th grade with ashtrays"). Which means that going to the manosphere for recreational reading is, for me, a kind of busman's holiday. It also means that Young Matt greatly overestimates my Power to influence young minds, either for Good or Evil.
Trust me, had I such powers, my students would recognize comma splices by now.
Cancer is no joke, of course. At the moment, I have four-count 'em-four friends
who are either in treatment for, or in remission from, cancers of various lethal sorts plus two peers who have died in the past two years (I really don't have many friends, so that is a lot.) And since everyone in my circle is aging at an even faster rate than I am, "cancer" is likely to become an ever-increasing presence in all our lives. Bummer.
"Everybody's dead or dying and I don't feel so well myself," as my mother used to grimly chirp -- before she died too.
Back to grading essays! I am twenty down, fifty to go. Each essay takes at least 15 minutes to read and mark: you do the math.
Oh the manosphereans sure do love their hyperbole, don't they? Particularly hilarious is when they try to portray themselves as the dangerous ones, the ones who pose a deadly threat to Western society (at least in its current decadent, "feminized" form). After all, they've taken THE RED PILL, so they see through all the lies the rest of us poor deluded sheeple have bought; even more terrifying, they know GAME, which is like some sort of SUPER POWER or something! That must be why our feminazi overlords have sent their hordes of sinister mangina minions out to silence them! Oh hurry, you brave truth-tellers of the manosphere - hurry and get the knowledge of GAME out to the masses before it's too late! You're our only hope! Ahem, yes. Moving right along now...
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, re Matt Forney, I have a friend who looks like him (with the glasses and the bald head), though he thankfully seems to be a very different individual. He's been in a relationship for several years now with a woman who's not only around his age (late '30s), and who's done work for the Australian Sex Party (which means she must be, like, some sort of SUPER SLUT or something!), but who already had a few kids when he met her! The horror! The outrage! The scandal! (Seriously, though, they seem very happy together, and he seems to like being stepfather to her kids, so that's cool.)
Funnily enough, Matt Forney looks a little like a former boyfriend of mine!
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