Russian interference was nonsense
FU Matt, you misogynist POS
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-who-terrorized-women-correspondents-in-moscow/2017/12/15/91ff338c-ca3c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html?utm_term=.db80211252f8
"There's more than one way to harass women. A raft of men in recent weeks have paid for accusations of sexual harassment with their companies, their jobs, their plum political posts. But one point has been overlooked in the scandals: Men can be belittling, cruel and deeply damaging without demanding sex. (Try sloughing off heaps of contempt with your self-esteem intact.) We have no consensus — and hardly any discussion — about how we should treat behaviors that are misogynist and bullying but fall short of breaking the law.
Twenty years ago, when I was a Moscow correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, two Americans named Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames ran an English-language tabloid in the Russian capital called the eXile. They portrayed themselves as swashbuckling parodists, unbound by the conventions of mainstream journalism, exposing Westerners who were cynically profiting from the chaos of post-Soviet Russia.
A better description is this: The eXile was juvenile, stunt-obsessed and pornographic, titillating for high school boys. It is back in the news because Taibbi just wrote a new book, and interviewers are asking him why he and Ames acted so boorishly back then. The eXile's distinguishing feature, more than anything else, was its blinding sexism — which often targeted me."
At the time, the paper had its defenders, even those who acknowledged its misogyny and praised it anyway. A Rolling Stone article by Brian Preston in 1998 described the eXile's "misogynist rants, dumb pranks, insulting club listings and photos of blood-soaked corpses, all redeemed by political reporting that's read seriously not only in Moscow but also in Washington." A 2010 Vanity Fair reminiscence by James Verini wrote: "They call Ames and Taibbi, singly or in combination, children, louts, misogynists, madmen, pigs, hypocrites, anarchists, fascists, racists, and fiends." But "what made The Exile so popular, and still makes it so readable, was its high-low mix of acute coverage and character assassination, sermonizing laced with smut — a balance that has also characterized Taibbi's work at Rolling Stone, where he has been a contributing editor for the last five years." Taibbi still writes for Rolling Stone; Ames, too, works in journalism, running a podcast on war and conflict.
I remember the eXile as a mishmash of nightclub listings (rated on how easily a man could get sex), articles on lurid escapades (sex with a 15-year-old girl, an account Ames now says was a joke), political pieces "Why Our Military Shopping Spree Has Russia Pissed Off" and press reviews savaging mainstream Western journalists. It ridiculed one female reporter as a "star spinster columnist" and mentioned women's "anger lines" and fat ankles. The paper even had a cartoon called the Fat Ankle News , about a woman who tweezes her nose hairs and gorges on doughnuts while editing a story. Some male reporters came in for scorn as toadies or morons or liars. But their outrages concerned their minds and not their bodies.
I came into the eXile's sights because David Johnson, a Russophile living in Washington who edited an online news group devoted to serious writing about Russia, asked his readers whether he should circulate the eXile's press reviews. "I'd like to encourage some discussion," he wrote.
Accepting his invitation, I replied. "Let a thousand flowers bloom, let Matt Taibbi print whatever he wants," I began. "But why reprint it? .?.?. In a recent eXile, the editor [Ames] wrote about how he dealt with his pregnant girlfriend when she refused to get an abortion. She wouldn't listen to reason, so he threatened to kill her. That worked! Then he muses on forever about another pregnant acquaintance who aborted and about his relief that this child — who would have been a 'sloped-head idiot' — was instead a dead fetus properly wallowing in the sewers."
= new reply since forum marked as read
