The Internet is a wasteland — or, if you’re feeling more glass-half-full, a haven — for trolling, pandering, and self-aggrandizing, whether it be in innovative or particularly reductive ways. Every day there are at least one or two obnoxious things that are deserving of our hate-click, and our temporary outrage only brings the unnecessary attention to such ridiculata. Yet we can’t help ourselves from promoting it, now can we? Join us in our rage, for each week we nominate the worst Internet-based events of the previous five days, and determine which of the nominees is, in fact, The Worst.
In fact, this week the Internet outrage machine under-produced a bit, leaving us with only one nominee which has become our de facto winner. On Tuesday, the ladies at Jezebel celebrated the publication of The Book of Jezebel, an encyclopedic curation of important pop culture, fashion, and feminist artifacts. And no, that’s not one of the worst things on the Internet — it’s actually quite good! But, of course, it isn’t for everyone, and those who don’t fall into Jezebel’s target demographic (read: idiot right-leaning misogynists and the women who love them) unsurprisingly found ridiculous ways to trash the book.
I’m not even touching the Amazon reviews, because The Actual Worst Thing is author Mark Judge’s review on The Daily Caller. He gets right to the heart of why those poor little feminists are so angry: daddy issues! “The bogus ‘war on women’ is really nothing but liberal women acting out against bad fathers,” Judge writes, acknowledging, in a roundabout way, that, yes, feminism is a direct response to male assholery. I mean, if we’re going to throw around irrational (yet charmingly retro) generalizations, one could say that folks like Mark Judge are conservatives because they only care about themselves and other white people, and they’re also just mad because feminists don’t want to fuck them. But that wouldn’t get us anywhere, now would it?