I certainly hoped The Spearhead would make some waves, but I didn’t expect them to come crashing to shore so soon. I guess that’s what’s uncanny about tsunamis — the seismic disruption catches people by surprise.
The day before yesterday we smashed our daily traffic record, and then yesterday we doubled that. Pro Male/Anti-Feminist Tech wrote a piece on sci-fi that I thought, at the time, was fairly mild and not all that shocking. Well, it turns out that he really hit a nerve, and we’ve received a deluge of attention. Seems he touched on a very sore spot in the sci-fi community, and the trolls have emerged from their burrows like a pestilent horde.
All in all it’s been a fun (if somewhat exhausting) ride, and along the way we’ve been provided with a window into the dark soul of reactionary feminism. One female blogger writes about “rage blackouts that threatened to destroy my ability to retain what my eyes were seeing” (got Midol?). However, the positives definitely outweigh the negatives here, because some very rich and hilarious material has emerged from the internet buzz surrounding our humble author.
To start with, I never in my wildest dreams imagined that The Spearhead would be denounced by Commander Data, but superlative actor Brent Spiner has written on his twitter page that we should be called “asshats” (roughly 11AM PST yesterday). In addition to the android, we have been excoriated by countless feminist sci-fi fans on Livejournal, Twitter and a constellation of sci-fi fanblogs.
PMAFT’s post is approaching 400 comments now, which puts it in the viral territory. I’ve got to hand it to the guy — he really hit this one out of the park. In fact, we even got written up in my local feminist gutter-mag The Stranger, which features Dan Savage, among other luminaries. Paul Constant, The Stranger blogger who wrote about our site is such a stellar example of a mangina that his denunciation should be a point of pride.
If there is anything that bothered me at all, however, it is this cowardly post by sci-fi writer John Scalzi, who takes his obviously valuable time to disparage our author’s points, yet refuses to even link to the piece, because “abject misogynist stupidity should not be rewarded with links.” What a cop-out. Who does Scalzi think he is, a commissar? What a fine example of American manhood we have here, who doesn’t even think people should be allowed to make up their own minds. This is the new, Feminist America, folks — smug, herb authors like Scalzi deciding what people should and should not see on the basis of their own bigoted opinions.
For now, we should all be happy to see The Spearhead making waves and starting a dialogue that has long been needed. Pro Male/Anti-Feminist Tech deserves applause for his breakthrough article, and for proving that our voice is going places.
So, dear readers, we will keep it coming, and, as always, we welcome your comments. This magazine is for you, after all.
