Why yes he is! Let Ted Ross at Buzzfeed tell you why:
1. Those matching American Flag trunks.
2. A full-fledged alcoholic, Matlack was destroying his relationship and neglecting his young children. When his wife discovered him cheating on her, she kicked him out. He remarried, she didn’t. What he learned from that is: “Despite being “perfectly attractive,” he explains, she hasn’t entered another serious relationship since leaving him. “Too much of a bitch,” he adds, with some glee.
3. He fudges connections and uses people until they threaten to sue him:
Matlack knew Weiner from Wesleyan, they were friendly, and he agreed to show up. What Weiner apparently didn’t know was that Matlack had been using their connection to each other, and Mad Men, as props in his writing and public speaking, riffing on the idea of remote, irresponsible masculinity. (“We’re obsessed with Don Draper because he’s us. It’s like this guy is actually falling apart and you can’t see it. And we’re actually falling apart and we can’t see it.”) Weiner objected to having his intellectual property sullied in this fashion. Sometime after the L.A. event, Weiner’s lawyer contacted Matlack, telling him, “If I ever mention him again in print he was going to sue me.”
4. His site, the Good Men Project, featured the work of several MRAs, including ones like Paul Elam who have used their platforms to threaten feminist writers and activists.
5. This was his response to an asinine article from a dude complaining about women in yoga pants giving him a halfy:
Matlack, predictably, defends Graziano, calling him a “good guy” who had merely put voice to “what every guy — every straight guy — I know thinks.” His logic: “All these women are walking around in yoga pants, including my fucking 18-year-old daughter. It makes me uncomfortable because it makes me horny” — women other than his daughter, presumably — “and I don’t want to be horny because I don’t want to objectify women. And people went crazy. Because ‘he’s a sexist pig!’”
6. When GMP published the articles “Nice Guys Commit Rape, Too” and “I’d Rather Commit Rape Than Quit Partying,” the problem wasn’t that the site published articles blaming women for “walk[ing] like a fuck” and from an admitted rapist. According to Matlack, the problem was that everyone just missed the point: “Publishing them was fine. The way we handled the framing of them was less than ideal. I think people missed the point and I wrote at the time that people missed the point. To somehow characterize us as being pro-rape or rape apologists is ridiculous.”
7. You silly girls think you’re feminists? Ha. Matlack is The One True Feminist:
Worse than the MRAs, though, was the “virulent strain of feminism that has more or less taken over any discussion of gender anywhere.” Contemporary feminists, he explains in his office, riled him to no end, because they weren’t really feminists, not in the way he understood it.
“I thought of feminism like my mother did,” he says, strains of righteous indignation creeping into his voice. “Equal rights. Reproductive rights. Fair playing field. Let’s vote for Shelly Chisholm.”
“Shirley,” I interrupt.
“Whatever. I’m all for Shirley Chisholm. I went to Wesleyan. We didn’t spell women with an ‘E,’ we spelled it with a ‘Y.’”
8. And while Matlack is happy to be the internet’s foremost authority on feminism, don’t you dare criticize his site i you’re a girl: “This is a men’s site; who cares what you think? I don’t give a shit! We’re trying to have a conversation about what men actually feel. That might ruffle feathers with women, but they have a thousand places to talk about that. Go write for Jezebel, for God’s sake. Don’t do that here.”
Read the whole piece here.