Newsweek Mischievously Compares Feminists To Vampire Bats

Naughty old Newsweek! This morning I was reading a feature about those terrifying nocturnal blood-suckers, vampire bats, and it dawned on me: under the cover of describing social hierarchies in these misunderstood winged creatures, the magazine has slipped out a devastatingly on-point assessment of how internet feminists and social justice warriors operate.

You see, “Vampire Bats Groom One Another, Reveal Complex Social Order” isn’t really about web-winged mammals of the order chiroptera at all. It’s about how the herd of Twitter outrage merchants manages to stay alive despite being some of the most unpopular and scary monsters in the online ecosystem.

Check out some of the quotes and tell me I’m wrong. “Vampire bats, which live in Latin America and feed at night on the blood of large animals like cows and deer, are surprisingly brainy and social creatures, engaging in certain behaviors such as social grooming. Vampire bats spend as much as 6 percent of their waking hours grooming one another.”

Surely this is Newsweek identifying the phenomenon so regularly observed among far-left authoritarians, whereby these terrifying, parasitic creatures will spend all day on Twitter cooing and patting each other on the back and trumpeting the virtues of the sisterhood, versus friendly, productive mainstream society, here depicted as cows and deer, who just want a quiet life without being gnawed on by a herd of rodent-like irritants.

The report continues:

Vampires, for example, are unique in their habit of sharing blood-meals with other adults to whom they are not related. To do this, they have the adorable habit of regurgitating blood into one another’s mouths.

Vampires, you see, don’t have the easiest lives, as it’s not infrequent for them to fail to find a blood meal at night. Blood is relatively nutrient-poor to begin with. Going without blood—which serves as their sole source of food andwater—for a short period of time could lead to starvation. 

For blood, read “internet drama” or “anything that might be misconstrued as an expression of heteropatriarchal white oppression.” Witness how feminists all share each others’ blog posts when outrage is thin on the ground and they need to keep anguish levels up. Nothing generates more Likes on Facebook, RTs or NPR guest slots than discussing your virtual trauma in front of a group of mesmerised white knights.

Consider also Patreon cross-donations, whereby social justice warriors share money with one another so everyone just about stays afloat and everyone looks more popular. There aren’t a lot of social justice dollars compared to hungry mouths, so sharing helps maintain the colony.

Grooming helps maintain the social order that facilitates that sharing. It helps strengthen bonds, and time spent grooming another can serve at a “social investment,” Carter says. Likewise, when one bat pukes up blood into another’s maw, that’s a type of “social capital”—the puker is more likely to be shared with in the future.

Newsweek notes that vampire bats have no external parasites because, let’s be honest, who’d want to feast on a feminist? Anyway, read the whole thing yourself. It’s a remarkable piece of satire. Bravo, Newsweek. And there was me thinking this was nothing more than a bit of spooky Halloween clickbait.

Of course, further study of vampire bats is likely to uncover even more compelling parallels. For instance, what about the high-pitched shrieking both creatures emit? Bats use echolocation, crucial for the poorly sighted, while furious “trigger specs”-wearing FemSoc officers use a similar sound (sadly, within human hearing range) to identify each other on campus.

Vampire bats almost certainly turn cannibal when they scent weakness or when they realise that one of their group is no longer useful, even if that bat was formerly one of the group leaders. Compare that to the vicious ostracism practiced by feminists when one of their number steps off the ideological reservation, such as Germaine Greer refusing to toe the line on transgenderism.

Bats share the same “fight or flight” instinct as feminists: 100% flight. Bats will always scarper when disturbed, just as feminists run away when the statistics come out, using Twitter blocking and appeals to “abuse” and “harassment” and a lot of crying and pretending to run away from home, to avoid any risk of a serious debate.

Both vampire bats and feminists have been mythologised by Hollywood. Vampire bats are depicted attacking people and transforming their shape, while feminists are depicted as strong, independent, smart, beautiful and accomplished. Neither is true.

One species of vampire bat, Diphylla ecaudata, is even colloquially known as the hairy-legged vampire bat in what is surely an homage to their human equivalents. In just a year, a 100-bat colony can drink the blood of 25 cows. 100 feminists could probably achieve the same in a single day, if only they weren’t all vegans.

I’d always thought of Anita Sarkeesian as a bloodsucking creature of the night, but not until this brilliant bit of satire from Newsweek did I realise just how right I was. Happy Halloween, everybody!

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