So the musician who goes by the name Pogo, best known for his magical audiovisual mashups using snippets of old Disney movies, is now declaring that the awful misogynistic nonsense he recently posted on his blog and on YouTube was “somewhat of an experiment for myself,” intended to rile up

the enormous breed of hyenas out there taking gender equality and feminism hostage, and bending it into a social status to validate their feeling that the world owes them everything because of their gender.

As Pogo (real name Nick Bertke) explains it in a new blog post today, his attacks on women were intended to expose these fake feminist “hyenas … as the self contradicting brats they are.” To do this, he says,

I uploaded videos and blog posts to draw this mentality out and see just how much of it plagues my own circles. I mashed together the most radical views I could find about women and feminism on the internet, doing my best to present it as my humble opinion and honest observations. It wasn’t long before my Twitter, which I haven’t touched in months, was absolutely blazing with “equality seeking, compassionate and understanding people” putting every one of their ideals through the shredder and back again. A few people had excellent things to say, but watching the rest of them was like watching a bunch of vegetarians turn cannibal and tear apart a newborn.

Bertke gives zero examples of this.

Looking through Twitter’s list of “Top Tweets” mentioning Bertke’s now-deleted @PogoMix Twitter account, I didn’t find a lot of cannibals. I saw a bunch of Tweets like this:

@PogoMix Just watched 'Why I Don't Take Feminism Seriously'. As one of my favourite artists, this is tremendously disappointing.#feminism :/ — Andie Cox (@Andie_Cox) January 29, 2015

rip @PogoMix

Used to love your mixes a lot. No more. Please look into what feminism actually is, then we'll talk. — Cassie (@plaidkazoo) January 30, 2015

.@PogoMix I adore your music. Your anti-feminist video made me feel ill. Please tell us it was poorly judged satire. — Ross Hardy (@rosstavo) January 29, 2015

The harshest tweet of the bunch was this one:

https://twitter.com/dearmothica/status/560999015295483905

Looking through some of the rest of the Tweets referencing his account, I found more disappointed fans, a few more people asking if his antifeminist videos were poor attempts at satire, and a number of people (mostly dudes) challenging him to back up the various dubious assertions he’d made in his blog posts and videos.

The most abusive tweet of the bunch was the following one, from a self-described troll — seriously, the word “troll” is in his avatar.

@pogomix im gonna beat you up — Speedcore Henry (@FilmCritGRINCH) January 30, 2015

There were not a lot of cackling feminist “hyenas” to be found, unless you count this Tweet as a sort of hyena howl:

https://twitter.com/HELLOK1TTY4EVR/status/561006261572222977

There are a couple of obvious problems with Bertke’s claim that the whole thing was an “experiment.” For one thing, as I pointed out in my last post, he’s apparently had misogynistic eruptions before. For another, his “honest views on feminism and gender equality,” as he puts it, are still pretty shitty.

While avoiding overtly misogynistic statements — you know, like claiming that women are basically just children begging for discipline — Bertke’s post today is full of the same sort of ignorant and vaguely infantile attacks on feminism you see on Men’s Rights sites. In addition to calling his feminist opponents “hyenas,” he also suggests that many self-described feminists are “brats pocketing what they think is a ticket to a special club for getting special treatment.”

And in his earlier post Where Feminism Goes Wrong — which he hasn’t taken down, and which he says he stands by — he makes similarly ridiculous claims:

The irony of feminism is that, by focusing largely on one gender, it in inherently supports the segregation of genders and raises a breed of self victimizing gold diggers who think historical injustice to their sex makes them personally deserving of special treatment today.

So, yeah, not buying it. And if Twitter is any indication, there aren’t a lot of other people buying it either.

I guess we’ll have to see what he comes up with next.

EDIT: Reworded the sentemce starting “For another” which wasn’t quite right before.

Like Loading...