David Futrelle

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David Futrelle is the abortion as the result of the lovechild between Moviebob, Jim Sterling and PZ Myers all impregnating RationalWiki that somehow comes to live and get a shitty blog, where it can write about how it will never get inside a woman, and how much it despises MRA's, meaning that it absolutely despises itself. Which it should. Currently David has a blog called wehuntedthemammoth.com, where he whines about everything.

Early years

Money Magazine

Somehow this fat dyslexic waste of skin got a job at Money Magazine. His entire career there can be summed by up this review he gave of a book.

	“	If you put a million monkeys without diapers in a room filled with word processors, surely it wouldn't belong [sic] before they produced a book better than this one.	„
	—http://www.smallpieces.com/index.php, David Weinberger

Listen and believe is bullshit

Back in 1996, this madman and complete nutjob actually wrote a TL;DR article on how most abuse cases are faulty, and how you should not believe children if they told about an incident.

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First, lurid accusations of bizarre child sexual abuse, of children forced to eat fried rats and cockroaches by their sadistic parents. Then the equally dramatic recantations of the children themselves, who now insist the abuse did not occur.

It was not surprising that the case against Barbara and Gerald Hill fell apart--after all, many similar cases involving accusations of bizarre abuse have crumbled in recent years. But the case is significant in what it reveals about the mind-set of today's child abuse "experts"--and about those in the media who cover the cases such experts claim to unearth....reporters covering the Hill case treated the bizarre claims of abuse uncritically; indeed, they were far more bewildered by the recantations than by the original charges. The media coverage of the case--particularly the coverage of the Chicago Tribune--shows that many of the assumptions that led to the original abuse hysteria linger on in the minds of many in the media....

By now, one would think, reporters would look upon charges of extreme abuse with an almost instinctive skepticism. But no... There was barely a hint of skepticism in the article.

The next day, though, the case took a strange turn indeed when three of the four children, whose words were the only evidence in the case against their parents, recanted their story to Tribune reporters. They alleged that these words had been put in their mouths by others--perhaps family members, perhaps investigators intent on finding sexual abuse where there was none. Amid questions of investigative incompetence and prosecutorial misconduct the suspects eventually were released on signature bonds, and prosecutors admitted that they might have to drop charges altogether...

Many SRA (Satanic Ritual Abuse) proponents claim that up to 50,000 children are ritually murdered by cults every year--i.e., twice the number of people murdered in the more conventional manner, by criminals, relatives, enraged postal workers, and famous sports figures...

Yet despite a decade of research, no one has ever been able to uncover any physical evidence to prove these elaborate allegations. Nothing. A 1994 survey, conducted by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect and costing taxpayers some $750,000 over five years, examined over 12,000 accusations of ritual abuse and found no evidence to back up any of them...

The ritual abuse scare grew out of a strange confluence of fundamentalist Christianity and a kind of feminism allergic to sexuality in almost all forms...

The case seems likely, now, to simply fade away. But it serves as a sobering reminder of what can happen when investigators, prosecutors, child abuse experts, and reporters are all too ready to "believe the children" when abuses are alleged--and unwilling to listen when children tell them what they don't want to hear.

David Futrelle

Defending Actual Torture Porn

In a news article he co-wrote along with his sister, now a Gawker Media employee, this hypocritical fuck actually argued for a movie that is like A Serbian Film, only worse. A film that shows underage boys literally eating shit is according to David "not exactly family entertainment". And it gets even worse, for this tormented fuck and his sister, whom he probably fucked while writing the article, because he goes on to argue that the store selling the film should be fined for renting films that go over the head of the average undercover cop.

• The good folks over at TheAntiFeminist has the scoop.

Gloria Steinem Is Psychobabble

In yet another TL;DR article, titled Reading: The Feminine Mistake, this time from the year 1992, David goes on how to explain how Gloria Steinem's Revolution From Within, is one of the worst things ever.

	“	Gloria Steinem's new book, Revolution From Within, was not merely bad but irredeemably bad	„
	—David Futrelle

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Unfortunately, Steinem's problems transcend her new-age literary eccentricity; her feminism, liver spots and all, has lost its way. Revolution From Within is a sprawling and surprisingly ambitious work, part autobiography, part self-help manual, part feminist manifesto....

The confusions in Revolution From Within go well beyond the central contradiction between feminist personal politics and Steinem's brand of self-help. She never clearly defines self-esteem, and it becomes a catchall for everything from individual self-doubt to vague all-encompassing notions such as national will. Even when she stays close to the personal, her concept of self-esteem is muddled...

The advice Steinem offers barely rises above the level of the most vapid self-help manuals, and her specific suggestions come in the form of cliches....

The book's forays into international politics are no less troubling--Steinem reduces history to the banalities of pop psychology....

Beyond this kind of historical naivete, Steinem offers vague suggestions to promote better worldwide living through self-esteem. Most of them sound like little more than politically correct versions of Robert Fulghum's kindergarten wisdom...

Steinem is no more successful at telling her own story than at explaining social theory...

Struggling through Steinem's clumsy psychobabble, I couldn't help but be reminded of another attempt to offer America a painless psychic salvation through individual self-redemption...

David Futrelle

Pro Porn And Against Andrea Dworkin

Before the internet, if you wanted to see tits, you had buy something called magazines, that had pictures of naked women. In a 1992 article David utterly slams Dworkin.

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The antipornography advocates are quick to exploit the equivocation of their opponents, defining porn in the broadest possible terms. Going beyond the extreme rhetoric of the early antipornography movement--"Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice"--Andrea Dworkin and MacKinnon have declared that pornography is itself rape. This is the central assertion (I hesitate to say argument) of Only Words. "Protecting pornography means protecting sexual abuse as speech," MacKinnon writes, "at the same time that both pornography and its expression have deprived women of speech, especially speech against sexual abuse."

She simply ignores the question of consent, implying that all pornographic sex (and perhaps most heterosexual intercourse) is somehow forced upon always unwilling, always female victims for the benefit of sadistic, always male victimizers. There are, of course, a few empirical problems with this dramatic assertion: a great deal of porn is designed for gay men and involves no women at all, women (straight and lesbian) consume plenty of porn, and some porn is explicitly egalitarian, produced by and for women. But there's a philosophical problem as well: MacKinnon looks upon female sexual desire with uncomprehending condescension, claiming that all expressions of consent in sex are so defiled by sexual inequality that they don't count as consent.

The assumptions underlying such a view--partially obscured by MacKinnon's deft, sweeping rhetoric--are startling. She rails, for example, at any depiction of "a penis ramming into a vagina." Unless one equates all heterosexual intercourse with rape, it's hard to imagine what's inherently awful about that. Her distrust of any expression of sexuality is almost palpable: "Once you are used for sex, you are sexualized," she writes. "You lose your human status." At least the Meese Commission on pornography was more open (and perhaps more honest) about its assumptions and its censorious ideology. According to the commission, any and all explicit depictions of sex are beyond the pale, even representations of sex that is "intervaginal and between two married adults who find mutual pleasure in it and for the sole purpose of procreation."

MacKinnon also obscures free-speech arguments by avoiding the difficult question of definition that has always been at the heart of the legal wrangles over pornography and censorship. She never clearly sets the boundaries between what is and what isn't porn, and she refers to everything as almost equally degrading, though she focuses mainly on the most graphic and most violent subsets of the genre. The legal definition of pornography she has promoted--"graphically sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words"--is designed to run the gamut of the industry, "from Playboy, in which women are objectified and presented dehumanized as sexual objects or things for use; through the torture of women and the sexualization of racism and the fetishization of women's body parts; to snuff films, in which actual murder is the ultimate sexual act, the reduction to the thing form of a human being and the silence of women literal and complete." But what about, say, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition? (It objectifies women.) What about the fashion photos in Vogue? (They objectify as well.) What about the lingerie section of the Sears catalog? One suspects that for MacKinnon everything is as nasty as she wants it to be.

But if she won't quite say what pornography is, she is willing to say what it is not: speech. She argues that while porn may contain ideas (the idea, for example, that women are designed to serve men sexually), it doesn't serve as a vehicle for the expression of ideas in any conventional sense. She then explains away this contradiction in a curiously circular fashion: she simply restates her premise in different words, arguing that porn "works . . . not as a thought or through its ideas as such, at least not in the ways thoughts and ideas are recognized as speech."

In short, porn is merely a stimulant for male erections, and erections are little more than stimulants for the abuse of women. It's not that men think with their dicks; it's that the possession of an erect penis makes thought irrelevant. MacKinnon quotes with obvious satisfaction an old Yiddish saying: "A stiff prick turns the mind to shit." The penis, she explains, "is not an organ of thought. . . . Having sex is antithetical to thinking." And since porn is nothing more than a primitive stimulus for primitive, vicious behavior, the First Amendment is irrelevant and the question of censorship merely a distraction. "An erection is neither a thought nor a feeling, but a behavior," she states, though she doesn't bother to elucidate the distinction she's drawing. "Pornography consumers are not consuming an idea any more than eating a loaf of bread is consuming the ideas on its wrapper or the ideas in its recipe."

In this view, the effect of pornography is easy enough to predict. Since all pornographic images--even soft-core Playboy centerfolds--not only reflect but are a kind of two-dimensional rape, the images of porn inevitably and inexorably lead men to commit rape in the real world. "Sooner or later, in one way or another, the consumers want to live out the fantasy in three dimensions," MacKinnon writes. "Sooner or later, in one way or another, they do." It's a remarkable display of rhetorical bravura--the phrases "sooner or later" and "in one way or another" qualify her statement to such a degree that it's nearly impossible to disprove. Yet the effect of the passage is to imply that all consumers of porn are compelled to rape--and that all who oppose her view are in a sense accessories to the crime.

MacKinnon is as sloppy with her evidence as she is with her assumptions. She claims a small stack of "scientific" surveys backs up her startling conclusions, but doesn't discuss the evidence she says is embedded in these reports or the methodologies of the research. We must take her word for it that science has concluded decisively that pornography "change[s] attitudes and impel[s] behavior in ways that are unique in their extent and devastating in their consequences." Curiously, she then goes on to argue that "there is no evidence that pornography does no harm; not even courts equivocate over its carnage anymore."

The courts may not "equivocate," but researchers certainly do: studies of the effects of pornography are far less decisive than MacKinnon claims. At worst the studies simply "prove" what the researchers thought all along; at best they're inconclusive. MacKinnon and her supporters can cite studies "proving" that porn inspires rape and abuse; their opponents can find studies that "prove" the opposite.

Arcand cites some studies that show that, far from being slaves to porn-induced madness, "violent rapists and pedophiles are not very fond of pornography" and find it embarrassing or upsetting rather than arousing. According to Leonore Tiefer, a psychologist who works with the National Coalition Against Censorship, women face more dangers from censorship than they do from pornography. "Pornography is about fantasy," she argued at a recent anticensorship conference. "Suppressing pornography will harm women struggling to develop their own sexualities, because history teaches us that any crackdown on sexuality always falls the hardest on the experimental and on women." However, this assertion is as unprovable as MacKinnon's.

As Gore Vidal has suggested, the only thing pornography is known to cause directly is "the solitary act of masturbation." And even this, he suggests, is not guaranteed: since people have different tastes, the same images may excite one person and bore another. To Vidal, this is all that can reasonably be said about the subject. "The worst that can be said of pornography is that it leads not to 'antisocial' sexual acts but to the reading of more pornography," he writes. "As for corruption, the only immediate victim is English prose."

David Futrelle

David The MRA

How About a Bookstore for Men and Adults?

	“	The one bookstore we do have, Women & Children First ["Breaking the Chains," June 4], is a decent place to turn if you want to stock up on Andrea Dworkin or pick up the latest issue of Bust, but pretty much useless if your tastes range beyond the limits of the store owners' admittedly specialized sensibilities. By campaigning against Borders, Women & Children First's owners are effectively declaring themselves antichoice, which strikes me (a lapsed feminist) as a teensy bit of an irony.	„
	—David Futrelle

A Year Of Despair As A Woman He Was Not Even A Relationship With Dumps Him

How fucking hard can you get friendzoned, and then friendzoned so hard you are no longer friends, because she finds you to be a fat ugly pervert? Not as hard as David, no matter how hard you tried, that's how.

David arguing for Child prostitution

Because your friendly neighboorhood Ediots are lazy, the evidence for David's lust for children has been lifted from Janet Bloomfield.

	“	Throughout the article, Futrelle specifies that he is talking about women, and that Victorian purity campaigns target prostitutes specifically. But when it comes to overzealousness, he identifies not only girls rather than women, but young girls. Let’s assume that a woman for Futrelle is a female who has reached the age of modern consent – somewhere around 17-18 years of age. Girls would be what? 12 – 16? Just how young are these young girls whose sexual behaviors must not be coercively controlled? And note he did not say sexual feelings – this is not about a budding awareness of sexuality – but he very specifically says behaviors.	„
	—http://judgybitch.com/2014/08/04/is-david-futrelle-defending-child-prostitution-you-decide/, Janet Bloomfield

Modern Day

Defending A Homophobe

Because David needs to get rid of all his white guilt by stroking his ego over younger people at least 3 times a day, he one day saw a tweet a from Richard Dawkins that was linking to a video made by SyeTenAtheist on Sargon of Akkad's YouTube channel. But this was making fun of a Muslim, so before doing any fact checking on who the Muslim in the video could be, David had already written a blog about how the video was totally unfair or something.

The video that made David's panties sour

Yes, this white knight actually thought it was based on all Mudslimes and not one specific person, that's how much of a racist this cunt really is. And it turns out that Dawah Man, as the video character was based around is almost as big a piece of shit as David.

	“	It’s not something you were born with, the same way a person who’s sick, we’re all born healthy but then you get an illness so you take the treatment to get rid of not only the symptoms, but the disease...Homosexuality, sodomy, is an act that in the sharia… comes under the category of ‘obscene, filthy, shameless’ acts.	„
	—Homophobe defended by Futrelle

Exploiting Murders of Men and Women For David's Financial Gain

After Elliot Rodger did the right thing, David didn't even fucking wait until the bodies were cold before using the tragedy to beg for money.

See Also

• The Sarkeesian Effect
• Anita Sarkeesian
• Moviebob

External Links

• Theantifeminist.com - has a lot of stories on David
• Janet Bloomfield has a lot of dirt on David as well

David Futrelle is part of a series on Social Justice Visit the Social Justice Portal for complete coverage.