The Other McCain

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‘Effectively Worthless’: Social Justice and the Infinite Stupidity of Tumblr

Posted on | December 2, 2017 | 2 Comments

 

When I started exploring radical feminism in 2014, one of the first phenomena I discovered was SJW Tumblrinas. Tumblr.com is to social media what syphilis is to bacteria — the absolute worst. When I mused here about why Tumblr is so indescribably wretched, a commenter observed that its format is so “user-friendly” that it takes zero skills, and thus attracts a user base characterized by below-average intelligence.

Tumblr also is one of the most notorious bad investments in the history of the Internet. In May 2013, the site’s creator David Karp sold Tumblr to Yahoo for more than $1 billion. Of the many misguided decisions made by Marissa Mayer during her tenure as Yahoo CEO, this was the worst. Yahoo had once been viewed as such a valuable company that Microsoft offered $45 billion for it in 2008, an offer that was rejected. At Mayer’s behest, Yahoo bought Tumblr in 2013, but within three years had written down the site’s value so rapidly that its July 2016 statement was considered an admission that Tumblr was “effectively worthless.” Tumblr proved to be a permanent drain on Yahoo’s financial resources and, in June 2017, Verizon bought Yahoo for $4.5 billion, less than 1/10th of what Microsoft had offered for the company in 2008.

 

The user base of Tumblr is disproportionately female, by a 2-to-1 ratio, and Tumblr users also tend to be young, badly educated and devoted to progressive ideals of “social justice.” This gave rise to the slang term Tumblrina, defined variously by Urban Dictionary:

An often unattractive, butthurt, and obnoxious female user of the popular site Tumblr.
Someone who complains all day on Tumblr about how oppressed they are by men, when 99% of ranting cases were provoked would be meaningless or of utmost minute significance to the average person.

Tumblr addicted female who is defined by her sensitivities and adherence to popular tumblr feminist opinions and/or trends resulting in undue drama and walls of text.

A dramatic, self-righteous tumblr-er who exaggerates prejudice and injustice . . . and tries to make other people feel shitty about existing. Also known as a social justice warrior or sjw, the tumblrina may list ridiculous “triggers” and claim that anyone unlike them has “privilege” and should apologize for being born.

My research into radical feminism focused largely on academia, quoting major feminist authors and Women’s Studies textbooks. What makes Tumblr valuable to such research is that it shows how Third-Wave gender theory — Feminism Is Queer, to invoke the title of Professor Mimi Marinucci’s textbook — is interpreted by the type of young feminists who consider themselves “social justice warriors” (SJWs). Tumblrinas express feminism as they understand it, which may not be what the typical Women’s Studies professor had in mind, but this is what feminism actually is, as it is disseminated into popular culture as a grassroots phenomenon among young women. For example:

its 2017 men still don’t understand the concept of “tell a girl if all you want from her is sex and don’t pretend you want more” and their dumbass response is “ok but they say no” LIKE SURPRISE!!! Women are allowed to say no to you if they don’t want just sex! SHOCKERRER THEY CHOOSE WHO THEY ALLOW ACCESS TO THEIR BODY WOW. WILD CONCEPT!!
It’s ppl out here who want casual sex find them! Don’t trick someone who told you I want more into thinking it’s more. You piece of shit.

This post — which accumulated nearly 30,000 notes in three months — was written by a 22-year-old African-American woman named Antonia (“Nia”), who goes by “Lucidnee” online. What struck me about this post is how it represents the feminist slogan “The Personal Is Political” dumbed-down to Tumblr-level stupidity. It’s feminism for the 85 IQ crowd.

Notice also that “Lucidnee,” badly educated as she is, considers herself authorized to talk down to men who “still don’t understand” basic concepts about sexual relationships. This is typical of all feminists, who claim to be about “equality,” even while their rhetoric reveals that they believe all men are their moral and intellectual inferiors. Feminism is based on the belief that are no intelligent, reasonable or wise men in the world, that being male is synonymous with being stupid, so that every feminist considers herself an expert, qualified to lecture on whatever subject may interest her, and men are expected to listen in silence, grateful that she has given him the opportunity to become enlightened.

Like all online social media, Tumblr has a democratizing effect, amplifying the voices of the stupid and ignorant, contemptuous of hierarchies of knowledge, and hostile to all standards of grammar, logic and civility. There are no qualifications or credentials necessary to participate, and the Tumblr readership is generally so young and poorly educated that they are unable to distinguish truth from error. In a free-for-all forum of such people, aggregating online in their various cliques and subcultures, personal prejudices are the only arbiters of “truth,” which is believed to be personal in nature — as each category of identity has its own truth, and all participants consider themselves qualified to decide what they accept as true — and yet also political, as determined by the privilege/oppression axes of “social justice” ideology.

Why does this continue? Tumblr has no justifying rationale as a business. It has never done anything but lose money. The billion-plus that Yahoo paid for Tumblr four years ago was a total loss. Now that Tumblr has been acquired by Verizon as part of its purchase of Yahoo, surely someone at Verizon headquarters must be looking at Tumblr and asking, “Why should we keep operating this toxic waste dump of bandwidth?”

Until someone at Verizon hits the “delete” button on Tumblr, however, it will continue to be an ore-rich lode of feminist insanity. And you’d be surprised at how influential Tumblr is among feminists. That post by “Lucidnee” I quoted above? It got reblogged by a lesbian feminist who is a senior at Columbia University! This is evidence of how bad feminism has become in 2017, that students at Ivy League universities consider it a good use of their time to promote such vulgar idiocy.

SJW Tumblrina bonus: The Columbia senior switched her antidepressant prescription in February. She’s diagnosed with PTSD, because attending an Ivy League school is like combat duty in ’Nam, I guess.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

Comments

2 Responses to “‘Effectively Worthless’: Social Justice and the Infinite Stupidity of Tumblr”

  1. Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove
    December 3rd, 2017 @ 10:26 am

    […] The Other McCain covers social justice and stupidity on Tumbler […]

  2. Tumblrina ‘Intersectionality’ : The Other McCain
    December 14th, 2017 @ 12:36 am

    […] Need I remind you that Tumblr is “effectively worthless”? […]