The title of this post is a play on the title of a short story by the late Herb Gardner that was made into a feature film. Unlike Harry Kellerman, the name of Gardner’s fictional character, Amanda Marcotte is a name well known to readers of left-leaning blogs and users of Twitter, some 32,000 of which follow her. Her name is also bandied about in conservative circles because her feminist rants are so off the wall. (Exhibit A: A two-part diatribe she wrote at Raw Story in which she demeans babies as “time-sucking monsters” and avows that she will “totally abort” if birth control fails. Let’s offer up a fervent prayer that that doesn’t happen.)
Marcotte’s tweet is interesting insofar as it is her last. Well, in a sense anyway. Here it is:
http://t.co/07ZzQMeQ48 I’ve stopped reading any people tweeting at me. Here’s why.
— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) September 8, 2014
In other words, she is not giving up tweeting, but rather giving up on reading tweets directed at her. Her reasons are tendered in an accompanying blog post at Slate:
I was an early adopter of Twitter, getting an account in 2007. I quickly fell in love with the service and how it dumped a constant stream of interesting information, insightful comments and jokes into my life. I particularly enjoyed the ease with which I could tweet at someone I didn’t know and, with the “mentions” feed, get feedback on my work from smart people all around the world.
All of which is why I’m saddened to realize that it’s time to permanently delete my mentions feed and give up looking at anyone tweeting @AmandaMarcotte. While there are still plenty of people who tweet at me with helpful comments and thoughtful opinions, including people who disagree with me, in the past few months (years?), most of what I get is harassment from users harboring a bilious hatred of feminists. Or, sometimes, just a hatred of me, a person they do not know.
Her presumption that her detractors harbor a bilious hatred of feminists as a group is a little facile, as is her claim that she is “a person they do not know.” What many conservatives find problematic with feminism in the 21st century is that it has become a caricature of itself, partly thanks to extremists like Marcotte, who think nothing of cashing in on false proclamations, such as the well-rehearsed lie that women earn 77% of the money men are paid for the same job.
Her claim that people who find her odious don’t know her is borderline laughable. As noted earlier, Marcotte has 32,000 followers on Twitter as compared with 840 whom she follows. She is, in other words, a public figure whose work, for better or worse, makes her eminently knowable to people with even a passing familiarity with it.
If she wants to ignore those who reach out to her Twitter, that is her prerogative. If on the other hand her goal is to get people to stop saying all those terrible things about her, then she should stop writing the crazy, offensive drivel that has become her calling card.
Related Articles
- Amanda Marcotte’s continuing assault on facts, decency, and reason
- Babies are ‘time-sucking monsters,’ I will ‘totally’ abort if birth control fails
- Hypocrisy alert: Clinton Labor Secretary earns buckets of money to teach about evils of income inequality
- Paul Krugman offered $225K contract to ponder income inequality
- Marriage fixes income inequality
- Why Obama frets about income inequality, not family breakdown
- Study undercuts Obama’s income inequality argument
