Sunday, August 16, 2015

Shanley Kane, The Backstory

My fascination with Shanley Kane as a manifestation of feminist psychosis got a doubling or tripling down today in the wake of a tweet from Milo Yiannopoulos, who resurrected three old columns of his. There's a lot of linked material therein, but I wanted to hit the highlights.
  • In which Andrew Auernheimer makes the mistake of sleeping with the former racist, which probably amounts to birds of a feather. Auernheimer, in case you forgot, is "a convicted hacker, a prolific internet troll, a self-confessed anti-semite and, as we reported in October, a white nationalist—though he prefers the term 'pan-European supremacist.'" So he has his reasons to misrepresent Kane's positions, now or then. But her untethered loathing for men — "She does, however, legitimately hate men with an undying rage" — is by now incontestable. Must-read: Meredith L. Patterson's Medium essay outlining her own experiences, and rejection of Kane's entitled self-absorption:
    I have since been made painfully aware that my experience is atypical. Every time, it has been a woman who has done so. Every time, it has been a lesson in how the woman I am talking with expects the tech world to relate to her and other people like her.
    After proposing and implementing a feature to an open-source project, she subsequently learned that the developer's list had a brief discussion of her proposal.
    There had been interest, but one of the committers had dismissed the idea out of hand because a woman had proposed it. It was the funniest thing I’d heard in months — I literally doubled over laughing at how nonplussed he must have been to see it not only implemented, but implemented to rousing success.
    Whether he intended this as a snub or not, she didn't take it as one at the time. This, from Kane's perspective, turned out to be a huge mistake, because "talking about my overwhelmingly positive relationship with the tech community is nothing more than a callous announcement of 'fuck you, got mine.'" That is, she was too busy doing to worry about the possible social implications of some guy's offhand comment.
  • If there's a one-piece takedown of Kane that warrants deep reading, "The Madness of Queen Shanley" appears to be it, providing as it does a significant backgrounder in Kane's dysfunctional, psychopathic behavior. I could spend an entire afternoon reading the links there. Must-read: Elizabeth Spears' Medium interview with Kane, in which Kane even takes softball questions as raging insults, and her editor Bobbie Johnson's followup outlining Kane's lunatic, paranoid response ("harassment", "coerced" among other things) to interview requests from what should have been a friendly reporter.
  • Kane confesses racism and mental illness; the obvious must-read is Amelia Greenhall's essay on what it was like to be in close quarters with someone so obviously insane. I don't think she's learned much — the end of the piece appears to be an affirmation of the sorts of things that are explicitly problematic about Kane's totalitarian brand of feminism — but it's interesting to see how very brittle the supposed sisterhood is once there's bragging rights to be established.

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