Culture

Anatomy Of A Troll Job: The xoBang Gang And The Business Of Rage

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Felicia Sullivan is a blogger, memoirist, and social media marketer. Though Felicia lives in New York, like me, and probably runs in the same techie-journo-bobo circles I do, I had never heard of her until one Wednesday last December, when she called me an ignorant, inbred troll.

That Wednesday was, on the surface, an unlikely day for Felicia to make my acquaintance. According to her Twitter account, she was on vacation in Australia. She seemed to be enjoying herself. At one point, she shared a set of pictures taken in Melbourne:

Later, she tweeted her plans to finance the purchase of a pony by selling internal organs of unspecified provenance:

At 10:25 PM EST, Felicia made a lighthearted crack about hypothermia:

All was well; just another fab day in the life of a blogger-memoirist-marketing professional—until Trouble reared its 140-character head.

After joking about death by exposure, Felicia noticed some Twitter friends venting about a “sexist” article published recently on the internet, of all places. Though she identified herself as a feminist—in her Twitter bio, no less—Felicia had yet to view this particular instance of online sexism. Her curiosity was piqued.

Humdrum though it may seem, this was a pivotal moment for Felicia. She was in a foreign country, surrounded by people and places she might never see again. The sun was shining, the air was warm. Internet sexists weren’t going anywhere; Felicia, however, was going back to New York in a few short days.

Felicia didn’t need to look at the sexist article. Outside the narrow screens of her Apple devices, a wide world full of real people and real experiences beckoned. All she had to do was turn the power switch to “off.”

Oh, but it’s hard to say no:

With that tweet, Felicia departed on her journey across a sea of hurtful words. Of course, we already know how that story ends; you just had to wait for it…

…wait for it…

…wait f—

The sexist article had so incensed Felicia that she couldn’t help but send the tweet above: ALL CAPS, two “fuck”s, one allegation of sexism, and a hyperlink so that you can experience it too!

Think any of Felicia’s four thousand nine hundred thirty six Twitter followers might’ve clicked that link?

Attention whores: take note.

Would Bang by Breadcrumb

“Would Bang” by Breadcrumb; originally published in “xoBang”

I’ve heard the hardest part of a creative venture is making anyone else care. But writing “xoBang: The Typists of xoJane, Ranked by Bangability”—the article that upset Felicia so—couldn’t have been easier, and it sure made a lot of people care.

Frankly, when my friend “Breadcrumb” and I sat down to write the piece, we didn’t have a plan, nor even a concept, and not much concern what the final product looked like. All we cared was that it would piss a lot of people off.

Now, anyone who’s lived a day in his life knows the easiest people to piss off are women, and the surest way to piss them off is calling them “ugly.” The only insult that approaches ugly is “slut,” and that one has lately become a badge of honor.

As for our targets, we needed chicks with enough cachet to raise an e-lynch mob…but not so much cachet that they had better things to do than gnash and wail about us. So, girl bloggers.

Among girl blogs, xoJane’s Selfie-In-Every-Post policy makes it uniquely convenient to judge the looks of the blog’s writers. xoJane also has the virtue of being “surpassingly stupid,” as we noted in xoBang, which lessened any pangs of conscience Breadcrumb and I experienced while criticizing the women responsible for it.

With targets acquired, it was only a matter of copy-pasting the photos of some recent xoJane contributors and writing down what we thought of their looks. As we went, we lumped the girls into three broad groups—”Would Bang,” “Could Bang,” and “Could Not Bang”—and arranged them within those groups in rough order of attractiveness. In our haste, some uggoes surely got classed among the hot chicks, and vice versa—making our ranking strictly accurate wasn’t the point.

Sitting in Breadcrumb’s living room, my fingers flew across the keyboard as he and I offered praise and shame for our subjects. More than once, we hearkened back to the vernacular of our high school hallways for just the right insult: ug-mug, f.u.p.a, fattitude. To expedite the writing process, we codified a few standard criticisms that applied to many xoJane contributors: slovenly attire; obsolescence (i.e., old age); willful disfigurement of self (i.e., pixie cuts, tattoos, fatness).

At the time, Breadcrumb was working on a series of drawings of obese women; he tossed a few of those together to create the art that accompanied the xoBang. Meanwhile, his girl fixed us a lasagna (scrumptious). Breadcrumb finished the drawings. We added them to the piece and hit publish. Not two hours after we began, our work was done.

For some initial traction, we tweeted the link to a few bloggers. Heartiste, arguably the most influential “Manosphere” blogger, retweeted it without comment.

Within an hour of publication, “xoBang: The Typists of xoJane, Ranked by Bangability,” written by “Cornbread” (my pen name) and illustrated by “Breadcrumb,” had 40 views. Not bad.

I thanked Breadcrumb and his girl for their hospitality and walked back to my apartment. It was the evening of Tuesday, December 10.

Throughout the day Wednesday, I watched the stats on our article creep up: 100 views, 200, then 400. Around 7 PM, we hit 800.

I texted Breadcrumb: “We’re close.”

“Any minute,” he wrote back.

If 800 views in 24 hours doesn’t sound like much, keep in mind that the author named “Cornbread” and the illustrator named “Breadcrumb” never existed before xoBang’s publication. We invented those identities for this story. Before the article went live, no one ever heard of them. They had no platform from which to publicize their work. They had a strange little article calling a bunch of New York blogger chicks ugly, and literally nothing else to their names.

So what Cornbread and Breadcrumb needed was somebody to handle publicity for them. Heartiste’s re-tweet helped. But to send their page views suborbital, they needed someone even bigger.

With the view counter holding steady around 800, I left for a dinner date. When we returned to my apartment, I checked Cornbread’s email, which was synced to my own: three Twitter notifications. I read them one by one:

I texted Breadcrumb: “Look at the Twitter feed.”

“I guess they noticed,” he wrote back.

“You cool if we take the piece down?”

It took Breadcrumb a while to respond, and I knew what he was thinking. Although we had agreed to pull xoBang before it could really blow up, it would be interesting to see how far our little hit piece might go, if we didn’t un-publish. How many impassioned wowjustwow’s and what in the actual fuck’s could we inspire? I was certainly wondering that.

But, after a couple minutes, Breadcrumb agreed: “We got our proof of concept. Take it down.”

I went back to my computer, deleted the original text of “xoBang,” and pasted in our prepared retraction. Then I republished it, and went to bed.

(Those interested in reading “xoBang” can find the full text, minus identifying details of most typists, at NAPALM. The version posted on Medium will remain retracted.)

The aftermath

While I slept, Twitter seethed. Though the article was retracted, there remained much angry typing to be done.

And elsewhere online:

cheetos

dickbag

There were a few approving comments for the pseudonymous “Cornbread”:

…but they were outliers. Their encouragement couldn’t change the fact that the web had weighed our work, and found me and Breadcrumb wanting—not only journalistically, but also physically, emotionally, intellectually, professionally, and by virtue of our undersized dicks.

The disastrous effect of strangers’ opinions on my life

The next morning, after turning off my phone’s alarm, I lay in bed for a while scrolling through the full Twitter fiasco. I read every criticism and insult I could find. Even I was surprised by how much attention we stirred up.

Then I set my phone aside and spent a moment taking stock of my situation. Astoundingly, I found I was little changed from the night before.

Despite the Twitter mob’s insistence to the contrary, I wasn’t fat, and I wasn’t sweating; if anything, my room has a chill on winter mornings. I hadn’t eaten Cheetos or Domino’s Pizza in years. I couldn’t name a single anime cartoon. Had I realized you can jerk off to them, maybe I’d know a few.

Contra Aly Walansky, I wasn’t in my parents’ basement; I was in a sixth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side. Anna, a 23-year-old ballet dancer I was then seeing, was asleep beside me; otherwise the apartment was empty, as I’d expect, given that mine is the only name on the lease. I still wasn’t inbred. My penis remained large enough to brag about, supposing I felt like it, which I do: Sumbitch girthy.

It was as though the criticisms of strangers on the internet—no matter how deeply personal they got—still had zero bearing on my reality or lived experiences.

Why then did these women give a shit what I wrote about them? And why did they bother with this ritualistic Twitter-rage about me and my article?

For very compelling reasons, I think. But before I get to that, let me explain why I give a shit about this.

The business of clickbait

cb

“Could Bang” by Breadcrumb; originally published in “xoBang”

When I’m not busy ranking girls by their bangability, I work (among other places) at a Manhattan agency that creates print and online ads. Though we’re small, odds are good you’ve seen our work. Two summers ago, a husband and wife who own a niche luxury brand asked us to design a campaign for their company. They had an excellent product with an interesting backstory, and were open to any angle we chose.

It was a dream account, but for one catch: Their advertising budget was almost nil. After paying us, they would have no money left to actually purchase ad space. Rather than turning down work, we proposed they try a “guerrilla” campaign: We’d design the ads and distribute them on the cheap, as fliers and online, in hopes that they would go viral.

We warned the couple that guerrilla marketing is high risk and high reward. There’s no guarantee your ads go viral, and if they don’t, you don’t get your money back. But if the ads do catch on, you can get more attention, more quickly than traditional advertising could ever deliver, and at a fraction of the cost.

Also, we told them that guerrilla marketing practically requires controversy. There are other ways to get lots of attention, but there’s nothing as reliable as being, as our Creative Director put it, “horrifically inflammatory.”

I’ll never forget the woman’s response:

“Then horrify us,” she said, without missing a beat.

Creating Horror

Because of our NDA, I can’t share the company’s name or the exact ads we created for them. Instead, I’ve mocked up several fake ads that approximate the tone and spirit of the originals.

The real client wasn’t a liquor company, and the jokes shown below aren’t the same ones we used in their ads, though they are similar. But for our purposes here, these are essentially the same as the fliers we designed:

rok_asking

rok_begging

rok_raw

rok_facedown

rok_swallows

We printed $200 worth of these on plain LaserJet paper and hired some guys to hand them out around two large cities. We probably should’ve given them hazard pay—two got slapped by women, and one of them almost got punched by a dude—but we didn’t.

There was a lag of about 24 hours between the first flier hitting the streets, and the first outraged blog post hitting the web. Over the course of a week, dozens more posts appeared, and the ads were shared all over social media.

Early in the controversy, a blogger noticed that all of the posters were viewable on the company’s website. In her screed about the prevalence of misogyny and male-on-female violence in advertising, she included a link to the site. Other bloggers followed suit.

A petition calling for a boycott of the company circulated for a couple days. Outraged missives were sent and recieved. More than one tearful vlog was recorded in protest. Our unpaid intern catalogued all of this for the client’s monthly report.

By our rough estimates, the number of people who read blog posts about the company and its ads leveled off somewhere in the 1–1.5 million range. Before the controversy, the company’s website got 200 hits on a great day. During the controversy, it received 200,000 in two weeks.

Publicity like that can’t be purchased. It can only be given—and only by people like Felicia Sullivan.

That experience got me thinking about viral marketing, and specifically what it does for my company, my clients, the media, and the audience all three of us share. Those guerrilla ads earned my company, and by transference me, a nice payday. They were also fun to create: We expensed an eighth and a stack of pizzas to petty cash, got stoned to high heavens, then banged out the posters in a single night. No complaints there.

My client got enormous exposure. For every potential customer they alienated, there were ten more who became aware of them for the first time. The outraged bloggers, for their part, got pageviews and uniques and followers, which their bosses cashed out in the form of ad sales and impressions, and then some small portion of the ad revenue trickled back down to the typists—excuse me, writers.

The short end of the stick went to you, the audience. All you got was offended, annoyed, and sucked into another virtual pissing contest about sexism in the media.

(You also, perhaps, acquired brand awareness of my client—a company that wants your money in return for overpriced shit you don’t need.)

To recap: I won. My client won. The bloggers won. Everyone else got fucked. And though I never had any illusion of advertising being God’s work, I wasn’t comfortable with that. It seemed that viral advertising was the only advertising we designed to be a specifically negative experience for the audience. In our other work, we aimed for advertisements that were informative, if not outright entertaining. We wanted to engage and inspire. We wanted to be compelling, authentic, and honest.

Viral advertising takes the virtues of that approach and negates them. It asks “creative industry” workers like me to imagine something awful, and then do it.

I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore.

 Rage and the fem-o-sphere

rok_cnb

“Could Not Bang” by Breadcrumb; originally published in “xoBang”

But enough about me. Let’s discuss Felicia Sullivan & co.

The Twitter backlash to “xoBang” was nearly unanimous in its insistence that the piece be removed from Medium, the publishing platform we used. (In case you’ve forgotten, see here, here, and here for reminders.)

You might assume the ladies’ goal in calling for the removal of “xoBang” was to limit the exposure it received. Maybe if they caused an outcry, Medium would feel the heat, the piece would get pulled, and total pageviews would be drastically reduced.

Kinda makes sense, right?

Let me show you what actually happened.

Like I said above, total views of “xoBang” were hovering around 800 before Felicia Sullivan and her friends got hold of it. As soon as I noticed the ladies passing the link around Twitter, I checked the numbers again:

rok_stats1

xoBang stats, ~20 minutes after going viral

Already it had racked up an additional 500 views. Around that time, Medium’s stat counter froze—I don’t know why—and didn’t refresh until about 4 PM the next day.

At that point, the graph looked like this:

rok_stats2

xoBang stats, 4 p.m. on December 12

Visitors had kept pouring in, even after the retraction. Before the week was out, total views topped 6,000.

We can’t break down exactly who is responsible for each of those 6,000 views, but based on the timing of the traffic, I think it’s fair to attribute about 1,000 of the views to Heartiste and others in the Manosphere, and lay the remaining 5,000 at the feet of the Twitter chicks linked earlier.

Which is to say, the angry ladies extended the reach of “xoBang” 500 percent. To put a finer point on it: Felicia Sullivan and Friends, who acted so anxious to get xoBang censored, and were ostensibly opposed to anybody seeing it, were themselves the primary vector through which the piece was spread.

But for the efforts of highly-visible women like Amber Katz (25,900 Twitter followers), Aly Walansky (25,500), Dina Fierro (23,700), Melanie Notkin (22,300), Grell Yursik (58,200), and of course Felicia Sullivan (4,900), xoBang would have continued in its obscurity. Nobody else would’ve known it was written. Nobody would’ve realized they should feel offended by it.

Had Felicia Sullivan kept her anger to herself, rather than sharing it with her 4,936 Twitter followers, it would have been as though xoBang were never published—which, again, is what she claimed to want.

So why the hell did Felicia share it?

The psychology of the hate-share

One last digression before we get to that.

I have a term for articles and videos like xoBang and like the liquor posters above: malignant viral content. The best way to explain what malignant viral content is, is by explaining what it isn’t.

A video of a kitten snuggling with an adorable walrus that gets 10 million views overnight is viral, but not malignant. Same goes for stupid songs, Buzzfeed’s compilations of 76 incredible GIFs, meme-y Tumblrs and Twitters, brief works of gourd humor, etc.

These things have the virtue of being harmlessly entertaining, and that alone justifies sharing them. There’s value in content that makes us laugh and feel good, even if there’s not deep meaning behind it. Of course, plenty of content goes viral without being entertaining. Some of it’s quite upsetting—but still not malignant.

A prime example is the footage of the 2007 Baghdad airstrikes, in which a U.S. Army Apache helicopter attacks and kills unarmed Iraqis and two Reuters reporters. One copy of the video on YouTube has almost 15 million views. To watch it is stomach-churning, but your understanding of America’s involvement in Iraq is incomplete until you’ve seen it and read the surrounding story.

Similarly, Gawker’s 2010 story about Christine O’Donnell’s drunken hookup with an almost-stranger was a revealing look at the character of a woman on the verge of becoming a U.S. senator. In 2011, the child sex scandal involving Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was sickening to read about. But to avert your eyes was to miss the truth about the corrupting influence of athletics in higher education.

Those stories angered those who read them—same as “xoBang” did—but the anger was caused by meaningful information that exposed real problems among America’s leadership and governing institutions. The outrage was worth it. Those stories weren’t malignant.

Compare that to xoBang.

What does xoBang tell us about society? About ourselves? What trends does it reveal? What flaws does it expose, or even hint at?

Before anyone thinks too hard about those questions, let me just tell you: xoBang tells us nothing. It reveals nothing. It is not indicative of anything except what two anonymous guys, acting by themselves, wrote in order to get a rise from a small group of Twitter entrepreneurs.

There is nothing about xoBang that merits protest, or consciousness raising, because it is a wholly anomalous and aberrational offense. There is no trend of men making lists of the ugliest female journalists. There’s no reason to think that will catch on in wider society.

Put simply, there’s nothing about xoBang to oppose, or to combat, because virtually everyone who reads it will recognize that it tramples all over society’s well-established standards for how we treat other people. So once you finish reading xoBang, there’s nothing about it that merits further attention—not from you, and certainly not from everybody who happens to see your enraged tweets.

The utter insignificance of xoBang was by design, and it’s an important distinction between our piece and the things that Roosh and Tuthmosis write, or one of Ryan Holiday‘s publicity stunts. Those guys have platforms and connections to broader movements or organizations, and that gives journalists and activists a pretense for bitching when Roosh observes that some dog-looking feminist is ugly, or Tuth releases an exhaustive slut diagnostic. Amanda Hess or Katie J.M. Baker or the staff of the Southern Poverty Law Center can take something Roosh or Tuth writes and parlay it into a pageview bonanza, all while semi-plausibly claiming “social justice” as their motivation.

But Breadcrumb and I had a hypothesis that the “social justice” component of these Twitter tantrums in response to the SWPL outrage du jour is bullshit, basically; a convenient cover for less noble aims. xoBang, which is both irresistible to the social justice warriors and completely unworthy of their attention, was created to test that hypothesis.

The piece is so obviously out-of-bounds that no reasonable person would argue it requires a response in the name “social justice.” That fact dampened the social justice crowd’s enthusiasm for sharing it exactly as much as we expected: not at all. The girl bloggers and their assorted hangers-on were drawn to “xoBang” like lemmings to a precipice, and upon reading it, promptly took the bait and lost their shit.

And why? Well, for the most banal reason imaginable: Because they’re paid to do so.

The viability of rage profiteering

Felicia Sullivan selfie

Felicia Sullivan (shown in selfie above) tweeted about xoBang—a wholly inconsequential internet obscurity—17 times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17) because Felicia Sullivan is a rage profiteer.

The same goes for Amber Katz, Aly Walynsky, Grell “Afrobella” Yursik, and Melanie Notkin: rage profiteers, all. There are rage profiteers operating on every public platform, and catering to almost any special interest or demographic group you can imagine. You are probably no more familiar with Felicia Sullivan than I was, but it’s virtually guaranteed that you follow other rage profiteers (as I do), and allow them to command an outsized share of your attention.

That’s what rage profiteers do: They traffic in content that is so irresistibly inflammatory that it hijacks our attention and forces us into the rage profiteer’s audience. Rage profiteering has surely existed, in one form or another, from time immemorial. But the diffuse lens of the internet and digital media created an extraordinary range of new niches for rage profiteering, and has thus caused a proliferation of rage profiteers such as society has never before seen.

Recall that Felicia’s own bio describes her as a digital marketer and author: two professions in which visibility and success are synonymous. Felicia builds her business and lines her pockets by gaining your attention, and I know better than anyone that a great way to capture someone’s attention is to piss ‘em off.

Piss ‘em off—as Felicia did with her tweets about “xoBang”—and they’ll retweet you and respond to you. Your Twitter handle will appear in other people’s Twitter feeds, where their followers will see it. You will gain new followers and, above all, increased prominence and recognition. The attention you receive will be positive and negative—but the negative hardly matters, as long as you keep pulling the people’s strings. That is the bargain by which the rage profiteer lives.

I’m not saying that Felicia Sullivan’s barking about xoBang made her micro-famous. It didn’t. Rage profiteering, and content marketing in general, is a gradual, accretive process. Share enough malignant viral content, and slowly but surely, your Twitter following will grow.

I believe Felicia Sullivan when she calls herself a feminist. I don’t doubt she’s genuinely interested in what our society dubs “social justice.”

As such, I suspect that if given the choice, she’d rather tweet about real injustices that might benefit from the antiseptic powers of press coverage and public attention. Who wouldn’t prefer their life be meaningful and outward oriented, rather than hollow and self-serving?

But as a practicing rage profiteer, Felicia Sullivan will not hold her fire just because her target is something as inconsequential as “xoBang.” She has 4,936 Twitter followers who represent the lifeblood of her personal brand, and they start forgetting about her the moment she stops providing them interesting and infuriating shit to gawk at.

Your attention (as distinct from your education, enrichment, or well-being) is Felicia’s stock-in-trade. That is why her online persona has been meticulously calibrated to hijack your time, thoughts, and emotional state. Her goal is to make you look her way, then parlay you into new Twitter followers, bigger social marketing clients, better Amazon sales numbers, and—above all—more dollar bills in her purse.

What I’m submitting is that rage profiteers like Felicia Sullivan, and like me in times past, do not freely provide you with tweets and links to splenetic columns of wrath and bile. You re-pay the rage profiteers dearly, with your time and frustration. Your anger is their livelihood. When they alert you to the latest bit of “can’t miss” hate reading, what they’re telling you is, they cannot afford for you to miss it.

Your relationship with the rage profiteers is transactional, and you are getting hosed in the deal.

So when I ask, “Who benefited from the tweet below?”

…the answer should be obvious: Felicia Sullivan, her rage profiteering colleagues, and absolutely nobody else.

Now one last question— who was the troll in this story?

Illustrations by Breadcrumb.

“xoBang” was originally published on Medium.com, a publishing platform similar to Tumblr or WordPress.com. Medium was uninvolved in the creation of “xoBang,” and as with most pieces that appear on Medium.com, did not review “xoBang” prior to publication.

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97 thoughts on “Anatomy Of A Troll Job: The xoBang Gang And The Business Of Rage”

  1. Ugh… man what is it with people and social media like Twitter and Facebook. Seriously, this projection of narcissism will never end.
    Fuck Facebook and fuck Twitter. Anyone who uses these platforms, needs to evaluate their life.

  2. I feel like I did when I came to the end of the movie “Layercake” and Daniel Craig’s character, Mr. X, asks me his name.

    1. It truly is funny to watch all of the “outrage” by these feminists (while cashing in on it). They are so outraged by the material found yet though don’t return the money?
      You just have to laugh.

    2. So are our universities now. It is disgraceful how we will sacrifice cold hard objectivism to make these princesses feel good about themselves.
      **********
      I would have chosen a different word, but I agree with you completely.

  6. Its like the saying goes, you can take the girl out of high school, but you can’t take the high school out of the girl.
    Except, also add boy to the above saying.
    Seriously, in all my life, I have never witnessed the sad decline of society, where I see grown men and women behaving like school kids all day with the Facebook and Twitter. I just don’t understand the need to show the world what you ate for dinner or pictures of your car (which you probably bought with credit) and acting like you are someone important.
    You read about all these divorces happening because of someone’s Facebook account or someone getting fired because of somebody saying something on Twitter.
    You fucking hipster social media assholes. I got news for you: YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL. Instead of wasting time using garbage like Facebook, spend that time in a more productive way. For example, instead of wasting 6 hours on Facebook, you can use that time to learn about mutual funds and investment schemes, build new skills like programming or learning a foreign language.
    Anyway, who cares what I say right? Once the final economic collapse or WW3 happens, your social media won’t be able to save your life.

    2. I think one of the main reasons why society is the way it is today is because there’s barely any wisdom being taught to BOTH children and adults in general. Everything is through a screen. All people care about now a days is fulfilling their desires, pleasures, and things that are fun. Why? Because everything is easy now a day’s, people getting hand outs for doing nothing but dick, etc. There’s no coherence to the importance of self-discipline, the struggle, and will power to do the things we sub-consciously know we have to do.

    3. You’re right! And they are in the process of using social media to TAKEDOWN civilization. When that happens, people like me are going to hunt people like them.


    6. Good work! I think this video *may* be of interest to folks here!
      It’s some of the xojane staff sexually harassing a new girl. The woman behind the camera makes comments about the girl’s “fine piece of ass” and elsewhere race and class are alluded to “they’d call me bitch, white trash, white” (more on that in a minute). If a man had said those things on camera, It would be pounced upon by any number of xojane’s editorial, there’d be an article on it before lunch; after lunch the guys concerned would’ve lost their jobs.
      Different rules/different boundaries/different standards for the people who get to enforce the standards…

  7. Salon published a hate piece on how women react to men’s genitals, with the requisite annoying stock photo. As if the author’s twat were a thing of beauty. Almost begs for a counter-essay “Stock Photo Men React to Salon Vaginas” :

  8. Bunch of fat pigs masquerading as adults. I saw the pics of these creatures. I’ve seen more attractive woman working the 3rd shift at waffle house.

  10. The hypocrisy of the responses was too good! The girls were so butt-hurt about women having their appearances critiqued. However, the only thing they can think to do is cast identical insults in return. What’s the difference between you calling a girl SIF, and then a girl calling you a sweaty fat man? It is just too perfect.

    1. Funny. I looked into the article still posted NAPALM and I matched (some) of the pics to xojane’s site’s author photos.
      Many have changed their photos (lol)…I guess due to the bang rating received or criticism received?
      Many of them (no matter the photo)…there is just no help at all.

      2. I’m too lazy to go to that kind of effort. How hilariously close did breadcrumb get to the Rubenesque beauties in question?

      1. Responding to you because I want for my friends to see your comment.
        *********
        Does any of the behavior described in this article describe DG(GLAXYZ)s behavior? I think this neatly explains away his trolling.

  11. Melbourne is honestly a mentally ill city- couldn’t name a place with more tranvestites, bleeding-heart libtards,, sexually confused hipsters, androgenous blobs. Every single time i sit down to drink my coffee and rest my head some feminist wants my sperm on her because i’m the first person to tell her that people might take her seriously if she didn’t shave all the hair of her head and that its not an attractive look and one should not parade around with in private let alone public.

    1. Any Anglo-conquered area should have that foregone conclusion, which I previously pointed out with Singapore and Hong Kong.

    3. As per an earlier ROK article, tell her,
      *********
      “That is not very feminine.”
      *********
      Regardless of her vicious response to you, she will reconsider her actions privately.

  12. LOL @ Aly Walansky for claiming it was “the most revolting thing I’ve ever read” One of the most revolting thing I’ve ever read was how a 7-year-old girl was found hanging from a tree, in a village in eastern India, after she was raped in July.
    This is the strongest proof we have yet that ‘Feminism’ is an ‘exclusive’ movement.

  13. Cailin Koy….
    “Sidebangs are the one-night stands of haircuts: minimal commitment and in two weeks, you forget you even had them.”
    Why not just wear a T-Shirt that says “CUMDUMPSTER” and save time and money instead?

  14. long, but well-written and informative piece
    “To recap: I won. My client won. The bloggers won. Everyone else got fucked” – one of the first articles to really address the symbiotic relationship of the internet food chain. Would ROK win or lose if jezebel shut down?

      1. but they’d just disappear up each other’s black holes and appear somewhere else with greasy chops and the same gobby attitude

  15. Interesting social experiment. Always funny to see those bitches squawk in the name of social justice/feminism or whatever the fuck stupid made up cause. I never thought to look at it from the perspective that these people are just carriers for mind trash, spewing out random unimportant bullshit to fill their pockets and get likes. Thanks for the enlightenment.

  16. “You are a beautiful, strong, wonderful writer.”
    Wouldn’t it be great if men supported each other in the same way as SWJs. We get called a lot of nasty things too don’t we? Where’s the love and emotional support from the brotherhood?

        1. I am sensing a new niche collection of Hallmark cards here. And we already have a fine way to market them.

        4. True. May a warm flock of fresh pussy magically find its way to your genitals and titillate you to your heart’s content, kind sir 😀

    2. I find younger men to do this out of competitiveness, older men seem to be more supportive and wanting to assist the younger ones. Personally, the older mentors I’ve had were excellent at giving confidence boosting compliments. Correct me if I’m wrong here.

      1. I was kind of satirising the fake compliments the sisterhood are so good at giving each other but its true that supportive ‘brotherly’ praise (and constructive criticism) can be helpful / confidence boosting But the phrases these women tend to use provides a model of how not to go about doing that

  19. Our culture and fellowman are dead. These whores are elevated on social media to conjure up an excess of emotion for an unimportant issue. Although when you’re overweight, irrational, and possess an inflated ego; the instantaneous gratification of clicking culture is more appealing than life itself.

  20. The irony IMO is that all these women gathering together online to talk about how “bad” this breadcrumb poster is probably piqued their sexual curiosity.
    I bet underneath all this squawking their lizard brains are calculating “Who is this guy everyone is talking about today?”
    These backwards posts are certainly more interesting than the IT guy at the grocery store wearing a pair of sensible glasses purchasing a loaf of low-sugar whole-wheat toast-bread.
    The next day, they’ll be thinking about some guy with ripped abs who fights for the right to wear dirty socks on our hands…

  21. ah, the double standard in play. You got to love how every single feminist claims that this kind of behavior is always negative on all women, having men call them out on their shortcomings, but when women do it, it’s perfectly OK! Worse yet, they get paid metric assloads of money to stir the pot.
    I remember this one time I got into an argument with some chick on Facebook. She kept calling me all kinds of nasty names while telling me I’m not allowed to basically say anything negative about her. the very first second I pointed that out to her, she started erasing all of her messages in that thread. You want to talk about somebody who really doesn’t get it until you point it out to them. I’m pretty sure if you went to this Felicia Sullivan chick and told her she’s being a double standard inducing cunt that’s making a shit ton of money, I’m sure she would erase everything, that’s to say if you make a compelling enough point.

  22. LOVED this article! Very level headed, thoughtful … It reminds me of one strategy from a certain video game, I think it was Command & Conquer: You irritate the enemy into attacking you, and then pick them off one by one. My brother commented it was like throwing rocks at a wasp nest.
    Irritating SJWs is like throwing rocks at a wasp nest, from a safe distance. I love it. Man, they’re annoying.

  23. The language coming out of these gals mouth. “You kiss your kids with that mouth” comes to mind. Wait these bitches don’t have any kids . What was I thinking.

  24. As one of the women who tweeted about “XOBang” when it was originally
    published, I want to ask the author what he thinks I should have done
    about this attack on my friends. These so-called “girlbloggers” are real
    people, and people like me who know them naturally chose to defend them
    by calling the article what it was: insulting, objectifying filth. And
    because of that, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with how people
    reacted.

    1. Fuck off.
      If you wanna whine about “objectifying filth” start with that shallow ass shit called women’s media.
      Also spare us the bullshit. This wasn’t about defending your friends…. this was about girl bloggers and their crazy ass internet tendencies.

    2. How you dumb bitches reacted was almost as funny as the post! How do you give a fuck about some random dude writing insults online? The effort for you to give a fuck is hilarious!

  25. That xo bang post was not funny ,intelligent, or worthwhile. It was fucking hilarious, side splitting painfully hilarious, and the best shit I read in December. When you took it down I had to find it in some xo vain re post ( you deleted it so they kept it alive on another site solely to complain it should never have been posted) and I damn near died laughing. That shit was almost Delicious Tacos funny and even my girlfriend was like “damn he went in on those typist bitches!”. Definitely worth a read my friends.

    1. Thank you Atlanta Man. Louie G likes to get high-minded but for my
      money the most rewarding part of this affair was the opportunity
      to write that article and tell those bitches ackrite. Warm regards,
      Breadcrumb

  27. Brilliant article. It is mind-blowingly easy to create click bait for activists and feminists these days. Where even Gawker and Buzz Feed are afraid to venture, there is alot of potential cash to be made of e-rage.
    This is the internet, yet people are shocked when people say things they don’t like. It’s like consistently being a senior citizen browsing reddit or 4chan for the first time – except still being shocked and outraged – after looking at the same damn threads and boards for 5 years straight.

  28. Great Article.
    This shows how modern cultural Marxism works:
    Start (the author) or encourage (the”offended” retweeters) a fight, and then profit (in this case advertising) when people show up ready to fight.
    The correct response is to understand who the profiteers are, and to shame them out of society for the parasitic remoras that they are.

  31. I seem to remember a piece of advice about making sure to get your book on a few banned book list, to assure its success. Howard Hughes was always sure to let the religious right know all about the sinful nature of his newest film. The religious protests always guaranteed an audience.

    1. Probably the reason why Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code had such a big success. It pissed off religious zealots. Controversy sells, without a doubt.

  32. You make a fantastic case that the outrage put on public display by twats like Sullivan has a component of self interest in that she becomes more recognizable, enhancing her marketability … you should also consider the tribalistic aspect of a good sacrifice and sharing in a victory (regardless of how meaningless it is) with ones tribe.

  34. XOJane proved that the feminiazi SJW movement is eating itself when they fired Melissa Stetten, the only entertaining writer they had, over an amusing but obscure joke in a tweet she had posted months (if not years) before.
    Instead of quietly letting her go they called her out as publicly as possible, accusing her of racism and purposely trying to ruin her chances at getting another gig. It was fucking disgusting.
    And I’m not white-knighting Stetten. Yes, she is attractive but she is also a really good writer, albeit a bit wordy at times.

  36. Gentlemen, this data indicates why it is so important NEVER to link to feminist articles, YouTube posts, etc. Each time one of us clicks, a feminist gets paid. Don’t take the bait.
    I first became of RoK last year as a result of a feminist hate post about Fat Shaming Week on Facebook.

  37. …thick bitches…the only time they ain’t eating is when they’re squawking about how “beeauuuutiful” they are.

  39. It’s a long winded article but it proves a vital point about the professions of young women. When did being a professional twitterist become a job that pays real money to buy real things? Hey daddy I’m a blogger, my dreams came true, I’m a real writer now just like Dumas or Hawthorne!
    These modern bitches are truly and irrevocably hopeless. Dick Masterson is right on all accounts.

  40. This is an excellent article. Informative, thought-provoking, and with the right amount of dry humor. Well done.

  43. What a fantastic, well written article. I can honestly say that I came away with knowledge I didn’t know before (the rage profiteering angle) and a better understanding of why there is so much feigned “rage” in the world today.
    Great trolling job, and fantastic article. Top shelf stuff.

  44. Really eye opening stuff. As they say, the best way to hide something is to put it in plain view of everyone. How many take the rage profiteers’ bait without even realizing what’s it real purpose? The currency of the information age is publicity, no matter what form it takes. Great analysis.

  45. I recently learned about “click bait” and now I recognize them most of the time and am much more stingy with my clicks.

  46. inside baseball on internet marketing, concern trolling, social justice through twitter, the narcissism of twitter…. Fantastic article.

  47. Excellent and enlightening!
    Here’s an important factual correction that actually reinforces your thesis. Outrage, even over lies and deception, is long lasting and pernicious…
    The Apache crews didn’t kill “unarmed Iraqis”. They were not only armed with RPGs and AKs, but were also setting up part of an ambush which was already unfolding nearby. The “Rueters reporters” were only stringers, not real reporters. Not only that, the stringers had an uncanny knack for capturing combat action on film, usually from the perspective of those attacking coalition forces. They were in bed with the enemy to make money off of selling images of coalition forces being killed.
    Just search for “debunking collateral murder”. It was reprehensible to release a highly edited video with a limited field of view that omits: important radio calls, context provided by previous events that day, other things seen before and after the engagement that weren’t on that one gun tape, patterns of behavior, experience and most important of all… forensics.
    Collateral Murder is a case study in deception and information operations.
    http://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:4Arg_B0r0YwJ:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=0,44

  48. excellent article, although I wish you hadn’t been so self-effacing… The Louie’s campaign was brilliant.

  49. Ryan holiday’s book confessions of a media manipulator go deeper into the whole outragebait content that sells well. its a great followup group for how blogs->media->booksales industry is fought

  50. Feminists want the right to objectify men… but call it a hate crime when men objectify them…

  53. that was some beautiful writing, you pussies should have left it up and been proud.

  54. Wow.
    More fuckheadness.
    You are rage-profiteering too.
    Way to increase the odds of humanity’s self-destruction.
    Your life as of now hurts the species. :/

    1. And there you go just proving the author’s point.
      Again ask yourself, since you’re obviously touring off the back of the anti-tattooing article: who told you about that article?

  55. way to go……you managed to bring every self conscious, undesirable, unfuckable manhating dyke out of the woodwork……makes the good ones easier to sort out

  56. Now I know why Matt Forney publishes half the shit he writes…rage profiteering and trolling.


  57. Good work! I think this video *may* be of interest to folks here!
    It’s some of the xojane staff sexually harassing a new girl. The woman behind the camera makes comments about the girl’s “fine piece of ass” and elsewhere race and class are alluded to “they’d call me bitch, white trash, white” (more on that in a minute). If a man had said those things on camera, It would be pounced upon by any number of xojane’s editorial, there’d be an article on it before lunch; after lunch the guys concerned would’ve lost their jobs.
    Different rules/different boundaries/different standards for the people who get to enforce those standards :/

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