I’m almost surprised that I’m writing this blog post, but not quite. I’m writing this blog post because it might help displace a smear piece written by a pickup artist about a feminist woman, which is currently showing up as the top search result when you Google her name (I won’t link to it).

PZ explains:

A woman using the pseudonym Cinzia La Strega has been an active commenter on feminist blogs, and has her own blog in which she mocks the absurdity and repulsiveness of PUAs on the web and twitter. She’s annoying to Matt Forney because she laughs at him — she actually reads the nonsense he posts publicly and, rather than becoming aroused, she ridicules him. She must be punished for making him impotent. So he dug into public records, social media, all that sort of thing, tracked down her identity (it wasn’t hard; she admits to not being a technical person and made no major efforts to hide, other than by using a pseudonym), and exposed her in detail. I won’t be linking to that post. I’ll just tell you that he published her name, her place of employment, her RateMyProfessor page (she’s a community college teacher), her address, her phone number, her weight, photos, her sexual history, accounts about her unpleasant pedophile uncle, her relationship with a transexual “woman” (the scare quotes are Forney’s), and engages in a lot of bizarre remote psychoanalysis. And most damning of all, he accuses her of being a FEMINIST right in the title.

And now the first Google result when you search for “Cynthia Gockley” is the hateful, asinine blather of some dude who is that threatened by a feminist on the internet. That threatened, you guys. It’s part of his apparent strategy to “destroy feminism” using SEO (search engine optimization), and it includes trying to destroy the reputation of a woman who did nothing but write blog posts about how ridiculous PUAs are.

So hey, where are all you guys who talk about free speech all the time? Because there’s no such thing as free speech when those with power use their speech to silence, intimidate, and smear those with less power.

I think what strikes me the most about this is just how cowardly it is, and what a blatant attempt it is to keep people from coming to their own conclusions about pickup artists and about feminism. Tactics like this are used by people who realize on some level that they can’t win through reasonable debate, and so they resort to shutting up those that disagree with them through whatever means necessary, including online stalking and harassment.

I’ve met plenty of people who think that pickup artists are either smart psychology-oriented dudes who know what women want, or silly awkward nerds trying to game their way into a hookup. Some PUAs are probably some combination of these things, but if you look at their beliefs about women, their methods, and especially their responses to criticism, you’ll see that it’s really much more malicious than that. And while I tend to avoid ascribing malice to people where ignorance will suffice, what this Matt Forney dude (never even heard of him until now) is trying to do is pretty blatantly malicious.

Anyway, hopefully this post will bring more visibility to what’s going on and maybe provide an alternate narrative to any potential employer who happens to Google Cynthia’s name. Here’s her blog, by the way, if you want to give it a read.

And now I’ve entirely lost faith and humanity and am going to eat some chocolate and play some video games or whatever.