Culture

Surely This Asinine 'Mancrimination' Campaign Is Parody. Right?

Pretending to troll is trolling.

What the hell happened over at Maggcom, a site that went from obscure to reviled in no time flat? Today it seems to have launched a ridiculous/offensive PSA-style campaign against “Mancrimination,” a made-up word for made-up male grievances like being expected to open doors and having to pay to get into clubs and having to get a partner’s consent before screwing them.

Maggcom, an Internet backwater with fewer than 200 Twitter followers, all of a sudden was picked up on by sites like Jezebel. Are these a stupid idea of a joke, or are they merely a stupid idea? Hard to tell, when the website spreading these attempted memes was a generic fashion-news site only a few days before. The pivot into misogynistic garbage seems … odd. And now, because some people bought into the message, it’s going to stick to the site regardless:

Pretty much every other tweet for the site is a mix of confusion and anger at the slapdash PSAs. Are these making fun of trolls, terrible typesetting and all? Or are they asking to be taken seriously as sexist swill?

There have been no public statements regarding the sudden tonal shift in the site. Maybe they were hacked. Or drunk. Or just making a desperate play for traffic. Apologies here for feeding the trolls on the way to bringing you the message not to feed the trolls. “Mancrimination” is sad and dumb. It belongs in your vocabulary only as anything but a cautionary tale: Don’t be the mancrimination guys.