What #TrigglyPuff Means
Posted on | May 1, 2016 | 192 Comments
The phenomenon of #TrigglyPuff — Cora Segal, the angry feminist who disrupted an event at the University of Massachusetts this week — deserves extended analysis, and I’ve got a 4,000-word draft in queue, awaiting the final touches. Spending two days analyzing the social significance of this comedic phenomenon was perhaps too much, but that’s my job. You need someone to totally overthink it? I’m available.
Anyway, while working on that brain-straining endeavor, it dawned on me what a small world radical feminism actually is. Cora Segal became notorious in March 2014 for a “Fat Justice” event at Swarthmore College that I blogged about, and here she is two years later, notorious again.
Some people on Twitter were claiming that Cora Segal was being “doxed” simply because she had been correctly identified. This is a misuse of the term “doxing,” which properly means the publication of otherwise private information — home address, phone number, etc. — of a person in order to make them a target of direct harassment. Having been the target of criminal harassment (a crime that was the subject of federal prosecution), I understand how serious this issue is. “Doxing” is a tactic developed by certain hackers and trolls who, behind the screen of online anonymity, would deliberately violate someone’s privacy in an attempt to ruin their antagonists’ lives. Some people don’t seem to understand what “doxing” is and what it is not. Consider, for example, the case of Deb Fritsch, a former university professor who lost her job after she harassed blogger Jeff Goldstein in 2006. Was it “doxing” to identify Fritsch? No, she was engaged in seriously evil behavior online while employed at a taxpayer-supported public university and, as it subsequently turned out, was so completely crazy she was repeatedly arrested for stalking. (She has a Ph.D. in psychology, ironically enough.) Likewise, identifying Reddit troll “Violentacrez” as Michael Brutsch — “a vile sociopathic monster undeserving of sympathy,” as I called him — was not “doxing.”
Deb Frisch (left); Michael Brutsch (right).
In both of those cases, bad people were doing bad things online and, once they were “patched” (their online persona connected to their actual real-life identity) the negative consequences were predictable. This wasn’t about personal vendettas or political quarrels, and it wasn’t about putting someone’s home address into an IRC channel in a conspiracy to incite some troll to SWAT the targeted person.
Because no one has appointed me Internet Ethics Cop, I don’t waste much time worrying about the nuances of this stuff. It’s a dangerous world, and protecting myself and my friends is about all I can do. We find that feminists claim to be targeted by “harassment” online and everybody in the media rushes to publicize these claims, despite the fact that the media were willing to ignore or excuse very serious harassment when it was directed at Jeff Goldstein and others on the Right whom the media did not consider sympathetic victims. Because of political bias in the media, there is a blatant double standard about such things. Shall we talk about Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt? Let’s not . . .
What does this have to do with Cora Segal? Like other trolls, her behavior had been problematic for a long time before she — unexpectedly! — had her Internet Famous (Not in a Good Way) Moment.
We know who Cora Segal is and we know what Cora Segal believes because Cora Segal has told us these things. Cora Segal is an activist, and when an activist goes to a public event and disrupts it by shouting obscenities — “F–k you! . . . Keep your hate speech off this campus!” — her public activism is newsworthy. Identifying her is not “doxing.”
Cora Segal is a feminist and her crusade against “fat phobia” is an expression of radical feminism’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual agenda:
Hostility to “beauty ideology” has been a core theme of feminism since the emergence of the Women’s Liberation movement in the 1960s. Its first major protest occurred in September 1968, when about 100 feminists staged a demonstration at the Miss American pageant, condemning how the contestants “epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women.” The protesters claimed “women in our society [are] forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously.”
Lesbianism also emerged early as a core theme of the Women’s Liberation movement. . . .
Radical lesbians played key roles in founding Women’s Studies programs at many universities. . . .
So-called “fat-positive feminism” is a movement that “addresses how misogyny and sexism intersect with sizism and anti-fat bias.” While feminists blame “anti-fat bias” on male supremacy, the health risks of obesity are serious, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): “Obesity is a national epidemic and a major contributor to some of the leading causes of death in the U.S., including heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some types of cancer.”
Obesity is such a serious problem among lesbians that the National Institutes for Health funded a $3 million study to determine why “nearly three-quarters of lesbians are overweight or obese.”
When that study made headlines in September 2014, Mari Brighe wrote at the lesbian blog Autostraddle that lesbians “tend to be less critical of their bodies than straight women,” because they don’t “suffer the incessant, unreasonable pressure of the male gaze.”
You can read the whole thing. The claim that “sexism,” “misogyny” and “the male gaze” are to blame for “anti-fat bias” is feminism. Is there any feminist who says otherwise? Is there any feminist who does not denounce male preferences as “ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards”? Feminists have written a vast library of books attacking the idea of beauty as a “myth” which they blame on the “misogyny” of patriarchal culture. The feminist argument can be summarized succinctly: Men like beautiful women, and therefore beauty is bad because men are wrong.
FEMIINISM: All social norms and standards are wrong, because patriarchy. pic.twitter.com/bX7iOc0Y02
— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 1, 2016
Feminism is an ideology of hatred, dishonestly masquerading as “social justice.” Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It. Because feminists cannot defend their hateful beliefs against intelligent criticism, they seek to silence their critics, which is why madness erupts whenever feminists are confronted by the truth.
Feminism Is a Synonym for ‘Shut Up’ https://t.co/dNLLvVzKTR
cc @TheRalphRetort @nero @scrowder #TrigglyPuff #tcot pic.twitter.com/BpJbxy0ALk
— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) April 29, 2016
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!
Please consider buying my book Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature, or hit the tip jar, because patriarchy is really just a synonym for “paying the bills.”
UPDATE II: Linked by Gerard Vanderleun at American Digest — thanks! — and now a Memeorandum thread.
Comments
192 Responses to “What #TrigglyPuff Means”
May 1st, 2016 @ 10:57 am
This issue of obesity and lesbianism have remarkable similarities in terms of how certain women have dealt with it. In each case an at first small cadre of women decided to construct an ideology of faux-academic and social reasoning to show the abnormal is normal. They create self-serving loops of logic which are quite revealing and in each case equate to the dog ate my homework.
In the case of being fat the overall psychology isn’t that complex; they are generally lazy, undisciplined people of low character. Those who radicalize their lesbianism reveal something different; perhaps a traumatic event in their childhood. I’m not sure what else could account for an ideology springing up fundamentally constructed around the concept of the sexual liberation of children in terms of lesbianism, incest and adult/child sex. That is what French Queer Theory stipulates is the cure for “Patriarchy,” a word which in their mythos means nothing more than the heterosexual family. French Queer Theorists assert men have used the “fiction” of heterosexuality to control women by banning incest and adult/child sex, both of which serve to suppress what radical feminists consider a more natural spectrum of unending perversion they then use to justify their own unending spectrum of mental illness.
The amount of obvious self-loathing and an unworkable social model for civilization can easily lead one to believe radical feminism is a suicide cult for women too human to want to die, too traumatized to live and too cowardly to kill themselves. They wish to project that onto all society so we may all be as miserable.
May 1st, 2016 @ 11:01 am
I was stunned by this infantile behavior.
I thought this person might well stroke out during her infantile outbursts.
No wonder so many recent college graduates can’t find work. They aren’t civilized enough or skilled enough to do anything useful to modern society.
Obnoxious people like this person will learn that there is not a big demand for you in the marketplace when you only skill is to rant and disrupt meetings.
You have to wonder if these people will eventually be hospitalized to protect society and themselves from themselves.
May 1st, 2016 @ 11:04 am
“We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family”
“Children are fully capable of participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic impulses.”
From those two quotes by Andrea Dworkin we come to a recent Hugo nominee:
“Foz Meadows ?@fozmeadows Don’t tell your kids what they should like or be based on what you think their genitals mean. Let them discover themselves, & love THAT kid.”
“Foz Meadows ?@fozmeadows Fuck the gender binary, is what I’m saying. Fuck it sideways with a chainsaw, and ESPECIALLY when it comes to children.”
“Foz Meadows @fozmeadows Apr 19 @EkaterinaTrayt people are so invested in binary gender expressions for toys and animals, Christ”
May 1st, 2016 @ 11:05 am
The logic seems to work this way:
1. I am in some way disadvantaged in society;
2. This cannot be my fault;
ergo
3. Society is wrong!
It doesn’t matter what the nature of any person’s disadvantage may be. If they can organize a movement and convince liberals that they are victims of social injustice, any unpopular minority can achieve credibility this way. Thomas Sowell talks about this in The Vision of the Anointed. Liberals are always looking for some “oppressed” group to turn into mascots for their next social-justice crusade, and it doesn’t matter whether it is Communists (alleged victims of “McCarthyism” in the 1950s) or the “homeless” (alleged victims of Reaganomics in the 1980s) or transsexuals (alleged victims of transphobia now), so long as the group’s suffering can be blamed on America.
May 1st, 2016 @ 11:21 am
Does this Triggly person have Y chromosomes?
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:03 pm
This idiot is about to learn the hard way that The Internet Is Forever.
Unless, of course, she has no aspirations beyond being a professional feminist her whole life. She can go from Wymyn’s Crises Center to Radical Lesbian Collective and never set foot in the real world. Which in my book is a win-win.
Anyway, she had best have a plan to remain in an environment where her public behavior is not a net negative.
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:04 pm
People like Foz are a big reason fathers buy shotguns.
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:11 pm
As a bearer of Y chromosomes, I am offended by this question.
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:13 pm
This is the face behind the mask of feminism. #Trigglypuff is the death rattle of the movement. She murdered the loathsome beast.
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:33 pm
They aren’t civilized enough or skilled enough to do anything useful to modern society.
IOW, LIbEral artS degree.
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:36 pm
I don’t get it. Do even Lesbians find that appealing?
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:37 pm
How ugly all that fat looks is to blame for anti-fat bias.
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:38 pm
Unless, of course, she has no aspirations beyond being a professional feminist her whole life.
I’d say the probability of that approaches 1.
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:43 pm
My goodness gracious! Can you imagine what her bat mitzvah was like? Or what Yom Kippur is like? Her screaming “Fuck you! Zionism is racism!” as she takes (yet another) snort from the kiddush cup.
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:44 pm
I notice in her “Workshop Goals/Key Takeaways” presentation, #trigglypuff notes in point #3: “Health is NOT a moral obligation…”
I happen to agree with that.
So common sense would dictate that #trigglypuff is against the ACA mandate, and will stand with conservatives against the expectation that healthy people are morally obligated, let alone mandated by government, to underwrite the health and habits of unhealthy people.
If #trigglypuff wants to sit around screaming and gesticulating with her little dinosaur arms all day on a diet of Yoo Hoo and donut holes, that is perfectly fine with me. But a natural outcome of the ACA is that it can no longer be “perfectly fine with me” to leave her to her own business. It’s now totally my business to yank the chocolate milk bottle from her mouth and seize her box of donuts. I’m paying the bill now. We all are. And it is totally our business to fat shame her into costing us less money.
Wonder where this shows up on her chart of “intersectionality”.
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:45 pm
It’s about lowering standards, see?
Whatever “society” considers good, whatever “society” considers a criteria of success, these standards must be attacked, because designating some things “good” implies that other things are bad, and recognizing “success” means that others have failed. Therefore, in order to make themselves feel better, people who are disadvantaged by social standards will seek to undermine those standards. These are the motives and goals of feminism and all other left-wing identity politics — an attempt by misfits to change society to benefit themselves.
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:47 pm
Frisch & Brush were breaking laws so I don’t see an issue with identifying them. Segal is an idiot & should be called out as such but is no danger to anyone. That makes me a little more on the fence for putting out identifying information on her. Further, her thinking is so screwed up that pages can be devoted to making fun of her for it without ever touching on her less tha stellar looks. I’d rather read takedowns on that than her jiggling.
May 1st, 2016 @ 12:54 pm
I doubt she’s set foot in a synagogue. You know what a patriarchal religion Judaism is.
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:01 pm
She obviously has issues
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:05 pm
You can be sure it doesn’t.
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:07 pm
When one is determined to get their 15 minutes of fame, one can hardly complain when that 15 minutes turns out to be not what they expected.
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:08 pm
She’s married with a baby.
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:14 pm
Only if she got some guy drunk enough.
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:30 pm
Somebody has to ask the tough ones.
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:30 pm
There’s not enough ethanol.
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:32 pm
So the ZooMass sea pig who made public university students look bad is actually from rich weirdo Hampshire College. Big fat surprise.
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:35 pm
First, I agree that “she’s fat and ugly” is normally not an argument. However, when you find a feminist attacking “beauty standards,” the question of motive is not entirely irrelevant, eh?
Second, as for Cora Segal’s “identifying information,” I haven’t seen anything online about her that wasn’t originally published by Segal herself, or written about her public activities. That is to say, to my knowledge, no one is actually doing a “dox” on her, which is something else.
Many young people seem not to realize that in posting something to social media (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), they are actually publishing it, just the same as if this information had been printed in the NY Times. There seems to be a tendency to think of “social media” as something shared only among one’s friends, family and (in the case of political activism) with one’s supporters and allies. On more than one occasion, I’ve quoted something a feminist posted on Tumblr and provoked a panic-stricken reaction: “OMG! Harassment!”
It seems to never occur to Tumblrinas that their rants might be read by someone who disagrees with them, and so when they are quoted on my blog — which gets several thousand visitors a day — this is the kind of large-scale hostile scrutiny that every feminist fears. Of course, I always focus on some particularly obnoxious or absurd case (e.g., Miriam Mogilevsky) and they do not like having their absurd obnoxiousness exposed to criticism.
Why? Epistemic closure. Feminists are used to arguing inside their own ideological bubble, where no one ever questions the basic premise of patriarchal oppression. They simply do not recognize alternative viewpoints as valid, and therefore their arguments cannot withstand any genuinely objective criticism.
So, Cora Segal is a “fat justice” activist who believed shouting “fuck you” during a public event was a clever thing to do. She was wrong.
End of story.
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:44 pm
Poor kid.
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:47 pm
Honey Boo-Boo is a goddess by comparison.
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:50 pm
As a teen, I felt life was unfair. But, in spite of trying, I could not find anyone to reasonably blame it on. I realized I just needed to work harder, lift weights, study better, run. And that worked a lot better than self-pity. BUT: this movement gives young ladies an easy out, someone to blame for some amorphous unfairness. Of course don’t tell them that women are getting 60% of college degrees these days…that would be unfair.
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:52 pm
Seriously, what does a person like “her” do in real life??
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:53 pm
Why am I suddenly having Marion Zimmer Bradley flashbacks?
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:53 pm
You! Citizen 830A6!! Up, in front of the Telescreen! Time for calesthenics!
May 1st, 2016 @ 1:57 pm
You have to wonder whether it was the chicken or egg that came first…was Cora’s insane worldview the result of her morbid obesity, ot did the ideology come first?
May 1st, 2016 @ 2:14 pm
Have you ever been around Marines? There’s at least one in the Platoon who subscribes to the “Any port in a storm” viewpoint.
May 1st, 2016 @ 2:23 pm
I hear that Starbucks is hiring.
May 1st, 2016 @ 2:23 pm
I always find it fascinating to read the biographical details of a person like this and find, at the end of their list of bugaboos, hang-ups and foibles, “anti-capitalism.” What, pray tell, will these useless, mewling creatures actually DO without capitalism? Does Triggly truly think that, in the ruined aftermath of her Glorious Overthrow of capitalism there will be much use for her rather particular skill set? Is she going to read Noam Chomsky aloud to the subsistence farmers as they harvest sugar beets? Is she going to do a performance art piece where she eats frosting from the jar during a slam poetry session while her comrades stand in line for a cup of broth? Good luck, sweetie. 24 hours of the world you say you want and your only value would be as “the other white meat.”
May 1st, 2016 @ 2:25 pm
Wow, this is how you do understatement! Kudos!
May 1st, 2016 @ 2:29 pm
Yet more proof we need congressional hearings about women’s and gender studies programs. They are teaching pure hatred. Their insane theories do not pass academic rigor and therefore deserve no accreditation.
May 1st, 2016 @ 2:52 pm
I don’t wanna know. I saw the headline and pix and….
May 1st, 2016 @ 2:53 pm
“Feminism” is just socialism in panties….in the case of Cora Segal,XXXL size panties
May 1st, 2016 @ 2:54 pm
“Does Triggly truly think that, in the ruined aftermath of her Glorious Overthrow of capitalism there will be much use for her rather particular skill set?”
Cora Segal’s father was a distinguished Harvard professor who was 59 when she was born, and who died when she was 14. She was raised in affluence, and her good fortune had little or no connection to free enterprise system. She is able to attend a private college where annual tuition is nearly $50,000 and yet thinks of herself as “oppressed” by capitalism, etc.
To try to explain to her that the rest of us must earn our living by working for money, and that our well-being is therefore directly dependent on the prosperity of the market economy — well, it’s like explaining palm trees to an Eskimo.
May 1st, 2016 @ 2:58 pm
And she’s screaming at the panelists – who were invited to speak – that *they’re* not welcome at Amherst.
Huh.
May 1st, 2016 @ 3:01 pm
One can be sure she can’t pull a plow.
May 1st, 2016 @ 3:03 pm
I submit that Eskimos could understand the concept of a palm tree.
May 1st, 2016 @ 3:18 pm
Comforting.
May 1st, 2016 @ 3:26 pm
Starbucks, believe it or not, has standards. They wouldn’t hire this hambeast.
May 1st, 2016 @ 3:26 pm
I never watched Honey Boo-Boo but always felt sorry that people made fun of her.
May 1st, 2016 @ 3:35 pm
Kinda chubby, ain’t she?
May 1st, 2016 @ 3:35 pm
I agree that identifying her when she clearly presents herself as a public persona (necessary if you’re an “activist”) isn’t doxxing. I still feel like internet pile ons are unseemly and often cruel. Other than that, I just wanted to say… if someone is going to find a religion to give their life meaning they’d be better off finding Jesus or even Islam than social justice. And I’m *not* surprised if she comes from a wealthy background, as that seems to be usual.