A little gender experiment confirms that Reddit is full of douchebags
Now that's what I call a bridegroom.
So someone on Reddit did a little experiment that confirmed what we already know: that Reddit is overflowing with misogynist douchebags. Here’s the experimenter explaining her somewhat casual experimental protocol:
I noticed after two months as my female username I was constantly having to defend my opinions. I mean constantly. I would post something lighthearted, and have people commenting taking my comment literally and telling me I was dumb or I didn’t understand xyz. People were so eager to talk incredibly rudely and condescendingly to me. People were downright hateful and it made me consider leaving.
Then I decided to experiment with usernames and came up with an obviously male name. While people still disagreed with me which is to be expected, I had more people come to my defense when I had a different opinion and absolutely no hateful or condescending comments. I am completely shocked at how different I am treated since having a male username. I am not saying Reddit is sexist, well kind of yes, but I think it’s really interesting and thought that some other girls on here would want to get male usernames and see the difference for themselves.
She posted this in TwoXChromosomes, a subreddit devoted to women and women’s issues that is regularly overrun with angry MRA dudes and an assortment of FemRAs. This time the MRA squad didn’t take over the discussion, and numerous 2XCers reported experiences similar to that of the OP.
earthpeesfire noted:
I had a feminine user name years ago. Fuck that. It was like having a target on my back.
cantstopthe tried to duplicate the experiment on a smaller scale:
Just wanted to say that I made an alt yesterday with a female name, and continue to post the kind of things I normally post under this account. And today I was told I should be raped.
That has NEVER happened in all my 4 years of being on this site with various neutral names.
misscastaway also tried posting with a clearly female name:
I just tried posting on an discussion from this account. Immediately an insult including the word cunt and remarks on how I’m making a fool out of myself.
Might be a coincidence but when posting from my regular account (which is very gender neutral) that I use for discussions related to science, fitness, books etc I have never received this kind of behaviour. Not even when it turned out someone knew more about the subject and I was wrong/short in my knowledge. Then I was given another point of view, with a source – that was it.
I guess I’ll keep using those accounts in parallel now just to see if this was just by chance or if it really makes such a difference.
fatchick400 reported on the results of a similar experiment:
I created this account a few days ago to comment on some fat-hate, and have actually found it really interesting to see reddit from a different point of view.
The biggest surprise for me is the difference in how fat women are treated vs fat men. There is so much more hatred towards the fat women. A lot of people even refer to these women as “it”, completely negating their gender all together.
Meanwhile in the posts about fat men there are a few hateful comments, but they’re mostly full of light hearted jokes. In a few posts where the guys were obviously morbidly obese, barely anyone commented on the guys’ weight at all. Yet in posts with woman who are maybe 200lbs , mocking her weight always seems to be the main focus of conversation.
twofish added her experience to the pile of anecdotal evidence:
Most people on reddit assume I am male until I make it a point to say otherwise. More often than not, once it’s discovered that I own a vagina I’m no longer taken seriously, my opinions are belittled, and a slough of sexist and misogynist jokes/accusations get thrown my way.
I love Reddit for many reasons but it is one of THE most hostile places on the internet to be a woman.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, meanwhile, the locals largely dismissed the experiment as unscientific and biased. As DavidByron put it:
Just seems like someone who set out to “prove” her own biases. She was biased to begin with, she ran the “experiment” in a biased way, interpreted the results in a biased way and then presented them to support her initial assumptions.
It’s the usual princess feminism which says men have it easy and women have it hard even while the exact opposite is happening. Why wouldn’t she say which usernames she used in her “test” so others can look at her methodology? Of course it’s not serious but then that’s the point.
Others explained that they weren’t really sexist because they’re such earnest fanboys of GirlWritesWhat, a woman who is able to bypass the usual MRA misogyny by pandering to the misogynists’ fantasy of male martyrdom.
The woman who posted about the experiment in the first place has now popped in to the r/menrights thread, and has (very politely) suggested to Mr. Byron that he try the experiment himself. I guess we’ll see what happens.
Posted on April 22, 2012, in antifeminst women, douchebaggery, FemRAs, harassment, it's science!, misogyny, MRA, rapey, sexual harassment, the c-word, vaginas. Bookmark the permalink. 286 Comments.
As a man, I find this experiment fascinating and very revealing.
And as a man I certainly have the authority to say so.
The reason I started coming here is because of the sexism I was seeing all over the internet. I guess people’s true colors come out when they can be anonymous online.
I’ve been curious to try out the gender experiment… but it’d probably just raise my blood pressure, which I can’t afford right now.
I’d do the experiment, but I don’t want to go and see if people on reddit want to rape me. I’m a little flower sometimes…
Ah, that shitstain David Byron turns up like a bad penny! Quelle surprise.
I really love DavidByron’s economy of language: the phrase “princess feminism” has this wonderful effect of essentially proving their point while disagreeing with the point in the rest of the paragraph.
My guess is that we won’t see DavidByron attempt to replicate their results (lol Internet science is not scientific enuff), I would like to suggest a few alternative handles:
xXShelley69xoxo
StephanieDickinson
Sappha
LadyByron
Well, a minor bright spot: The Spearhead has been down for about a day now. Some degree of relief.
Scarlett: Not relief! I was craving hardcore lulz >.>
I’ve been doing this online for nearly 20 years with various gender neutral nicks and in offline correspondence sign letters etc. with my first two initials followed by my last name. Invariably responses start “Dear Sir” (They don’t even write “Dear Sir or Madam” any more like they did in the 80s and 90s) and address my concerns directly.
Over all that time it has become evident to me that things are getting much worse. I had suggested to various misogynist commenters in some forums to try this experiment but the reaction was always negative along the lines of “It wouldn’t prove anything”. Threatening belief with real life experience, that is observable factual events, seems to be the issue. Willful ignorance is certainly some people’s version of bliss.
Looking through DavidByron’s comment history I see that along with being an MRA he’s also … a Stalinist, who is basically the equivalant of a holocaust denier when it comes to Stalin’s genocidal mass murders.
Of course it wouldn’t prove anything to them, but the anecdata they pull up like with that group of lacrosse players or that girl who accused her father of molestation prove, beyond a doubt, that there is a matriarchy and that women are evil.
I imagine they are unwilling to test the experiment because they know full well what the results will be and that scares them. They’re afraid of having their fragile egos shattered when they’re called irrational, get insulted, and threatened. They would also have to endure the harassment that many a woman online has faced when she steps into a male-dominated forum. Then they’d have to admit that we’re not just making it up.
I mean, with my own experiences on youtube and message boards, I can cite many instances where I was called irrational, my appearance was attacked, sexist insults were hurled, I was told I was either boyfriendless with no hope of finding one, or that my boyfriend must be miserable, that everything I experienced in my life was in my head. All because of differing opinions. And I screen capped a bunch for a recent tumblr post too.
I would love to see this experiment play out complete with screencaps of similar ideas being said by the same person under differently gendered usernames and see the results. Someone should wait a while and try it. Document everything!
If I wasn’t so zonked, I’d go dig out the linguistic experiments that show the same text is evaluated completely differently when attached to clearly male name as opposed to female name. But I doubt that the rabid denialists would consider that any more substantive.
I would hope some of them would try posting under clearly feminine names, heh heh heh.
If they did post under a feminine name and get rape threats, they would still say women are too sensitive. After all, THEY weren’t worried by the insults and threats, why don’t women just laugh it off?
I’m going to do my own experiment and have an attractive female in photos, even when it’s totally unnecessary. Let’s see how positive her ratings are and how everyone agrees with her. There wouldn’t be a negative view of females on reddit if they didn’t use their gender for karma. She can change her user name all she wants but I would still be able to tell it’s a female from the lack of logic and accountability.
I haven’t seen any men cyberbullying a suicidal woman. Only females have done that to a MRA on reddit. You conveniently leave that out of your blog.
True. *sighs dispiritedly*
Also:
Look at all the hate against men on this blog. Look at all the hate for men who post on parenting blogs or wander into a mum’s blog. There are sites dominated by men and then there are female sites. It’s okay for females to have their own space but any time men try to have their own safe space they are called sexist.
Ithiliana, have a funny to cheer yourself up:
http://leasthelpful.com/post/21592764497
“If they did post under a feminine name and get rape threats, they would still say women are too sensitive. After all, THEY weren’t worried by the insults and threats, why don’t women just laugh it off?”
Pretty much this.
For a guy telling a woman that her experiment was “biased”, Byron doesn’t realize that he and his own movement have a skewed view on EVERYTHING. Nearly everything they quote is either a misrepresentation or a lie, and even when there are a FEW things they are right on…what do they do with it?
“Looking through DavidByron’s comment history I see that along with being an MRA he’s also … a Stalinist, who is basically the equivalant of a holocaust denier when it comes to Stalin’s genocidal mass murders.”
AKA Democrat
This is relevant to the OP http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2006-07-12-transgender-scientists-bias_x.htm
also there have been studies done that prove in the workplace, overweight women are judged more harshly than overweight men. Just another consequence of being born the sex class.
Very scientific.
I know a guy who was forced by a woman to drink radiator fluid. This proves that all women force men to drink radiator fluid. This in turn proves that all women hate all men.
Feminists are so full of it, there is no way to even talk to any of you.
LOL @ MRAs suspicious of anecdotal evidence, when that’s pretty much all they use
“I know a guy who was falsely accused”
“My brother’s friend’s wife totally screwed him in a divorce”
“A woman called me a creep for no reason”
these are the things you hear from these idiots all the time, but no one should dare question their manly, objective experiences!
Also the studies they DO use are either discredited and full of methodological flaw. They never examine the counter studies because it’s dismissed as feminist dogma or some bullshit. Many MRAs go as far to not even believe anything from academic institutions because it’s “leftist”
‘I guess people’s true colors come out when they can be anonymous online.’
Trudat
As usual, Antsy describes himself quite well when he thinks he’s describing others.
Zarat, you are so full of it that you are on a different planet.
And yet, you troll on…
Says the self-professed lying troll.
Except you idiots make arguments like that all the time! are you really so blind to your cult? its not radiator fluid, but its all women are golddiggers, all women are out to get men, all women will falsely accuse you if they can get away with it, all women have a programmed need to discriminate against men.
This is a comment from your beloved AVfM
above comment is for AntZ (obviously)
Go on Antz, do the experiment and show us your results.
Magpie, thanks a lot for that link. Now I have another timesuck to look through. :)
Try commenting as a woman on The Spearhead or RooshV! Even the most innocent remark is met by “Shut up you dumb bitch” and so on. For this reason I post on Yahoo Answers as a male, and I get much more respect, though someone did call me a Mangina the other day. But the abuse leveled at women online is remarkable. It’s easy to anonymously vent your rage online as your victims are unable to retaliate. I doubt they would ever have the balls to hurl such insults at a woman IRL.
WordSpinner – not my fault :) I found that as a link from a link in the sidebar here at Manboobz XD
it’s hilarious seeing women on the spearhead agree with them but still get downvoted. The most extreme MRAs are so emotional when it comes to women they can’t even see when she’s agreeing with them.
I wonder how many misogynists even know a woman IRL. Besides their moms, I mean.
“It’s easy to anonymously vent your rage online as your victims are unable to retaliate. I doubt they would ever have the balls to hurl such insults at a woman IRL.”
They’re probably self-hating White Knights, Manginas. I see these guys doing everything for a woman and she still has no interest in him. They would be better off to get some balls and treat women how they deserve in public.
none I would hope, for the sake of those women. But there are lots of female misogynists and FeMRAs who rationalize the misogyny away by believing themselves super special and above those horrible women who dare stand up for themselves!
@Fembot See, even when insulting men they use gendered terms to discredit them. A feminist man is a mangina. He’s a pussy, a bitch, or a girly man. This is the issue I was taking with an interview of girlwriteswhat the other day. She talked about how she tells her son to “pull up his big girl pants” when he’s being lazy or whiny. They are not sexist, yet all their insults are insinuating that women/their sex organs are inferior. How often do you see feminists calling GWW or the other lady MRAs dicks or wopenises (lol, I don’t know, because I honestly can’t think of an insult that is similar. Maybe tranny or drag queen but that’s more a dig at the inferiority of lgbt’s than men).
Oh fuck Reddit so much right now:
http://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/smyet/you_didnt_have_the_guts_to_say_no_and_regretted/
TW for victim-blaming and mass harassment of a FOURTEEN-YEAR OLD RAPE VICTIM.
Zarat, why the hell do you want to talk to us?
Holly, that link… wtf. That poor girl.
There’s a lot of people either saying or almost-saying that rape is a suitable punishment for a girl doing pot at 14.
Yep. Reddit is full of douchebags.
Actually, Jesus, I didn’t even fully process how fucked up that is.
Doing pot at 14? You are too young for such things! Someone should contact social services! You’re a bad, bad teenager, and deserve whatever happens to you while high, because you’re just too damn young.
Consenting to sex while high? Yeah, you’re totally mature enough to do that. In fact, you should know that you need to shout “no” 9 or 10 times so that the guy, who is young and naive, truly understands that you’re not interested in doing anything more.
Vomit vomit vomit.
I’ve done this experiment. I did it back on usenet. I did it in BBSs. I’ve done it on Blogs.
Digby did it, and the comments to her posts, when she revealed herself as a woman, changed.
One of the things I did was to look for a perrenial topic. Then I’d make a post, and save the text. A month, or two later, when the topic came round again on the guitar, I’d make exactly the same post, and see what I got in response. Some of the time I got very different responses from people who had previously commented.
Dx
That is SO fucked up. For Christ’s sake.
PROTIP: If someone says they’re unsure about sex, STOP.
I’m not even going to look at that post. There’s not enough of this amazing Märzen I’m drinking to cope with that.
It’s really good. The malt was dried over a slow beechwood fire, and tastes sort of like whisky, but without the burn. I rather like whisky, which makes this a really interesting beer. I shall have to get more of it.
What I notice most are the comments about my tone. I say something I think of as fairly dry and I am typing with an actual smile on my face and all sorts of people tell me how I am being too emotional or angry.
>>Yep. Reddit is full of douchebags.
Melisandre: “Lord of Light, shine your light on us. For Reddit is dark, and full of douchebags.”
When a female MRA is attacked by misogynists the other MRAs are too scared to defend her or even condemn the attacks. Don’t want to be called a white knight or Mangina…
What do we expect? Feminism has been hating on men for 50 years. Of course once ordinary men realize how they’ve been betrayed, they’re going to misconstrue feminism (modern chivalry) for womanism, and they’re going to hate on women. These are silly experiments conducted without regard to relevant parameters. We are simply witnessing the symptoms of an already diseased culture.
The hatred of women is a predictable response to the past 50 years of feminism. No surprises there. And it’s going to get a lot worse. You cannot hate without expecting hate in return. Any movement with the superiority of one gender implied in its name will ultimately be interpreted as a gender-supremacist movement, with a backlash being its inevitable result. I would have been more interested in these experiments had they been conducted before contemporary feminism had taken root.
Antz, go away. You add nothing of value to the world or to the discussions here. The former is actually more important than the latter; it’s okay that you waste our time and insult us*, but more troubling that you are actively trying to leave the world a little worse, with a little more suffering, than you found it. You are the dogs in this cartoon: http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/It-s-not-enough-that-we-succeed-Cats-must-also-fail-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8542217_.htm
(*Protip: Since I think you are a lousy human being, every insult just confirms for me that I am on the right path. I would be more worried if you didn’t insult us.)
And fuck reddit, oh god, that is so terrible. A 14-year-old being attacked like that. Antz, I hope you’re proud of your people.
@chuckedee
So you’re saying since feminism started it women deserve to be hated en masse today? I think you spend too much time theorizing on the Internet. Btw, I doubt any of the men who have called me a cunt online would say it to my face. Even without my “white knight Mangina” there to defend me. You MRAs don’t just hate women–you’re scared to death of us.
Oh sure chuckee, ’cause misogyny doesn’t predate feminism by thousands of year or anything. It’s totally a modern invention, created by MRAs and Redditors out of desperation. That or you’re an idiot.
Immediate failure with history: Strong start.
…Such as?
The disease is misogyny, yes.
Is that why it’s decreased in most of the western world? Hell, it’s decreased in the US, it’s just decreased less.
You can’t see the irony, can you? Not that feminism or feminists really hate, but you do realize it’s a century-long reaction to millenia of misogyny, right?
Oh, I get it, I think you are searching for a different universe, in this one feminism is the name of the civil rights movement for women.
Buttman and Chuckeedee (and Antz too, come to think of it), thank you for providing insight as to what the world looks like in Imaginary Backwards Land.
@ Buttman
“They would be better off to get some balls and treat women how they deserve in public.”
How bout they get some balls and stop expecting women to fuck them for being “nice.” And I like how you presume that women deserve is to be treated badly. Do you include your mother in that? Your sister? I’m all for people being held accountable for their bad behavior (yes even
women) but maybe these “white knight manginas” aren’t being as nice as they think. Oh, and you don’t have a constitutional right to get laid. I love how MRAs think they’re entitled to promiscuous condom free sex with hot young chicks with no responsibility to pay child support if she gets pregnant. Her body her choice her responsibility? Your penis your problem.
I wish you MRAs would just come out and admit you enjoy hurting and raping women. Pretending that you actually stand for equality is somehow making you look even worse at this point.
So, um, what hatred of men am I actually DOING?
Other than the name. The name is a legacy thing, sorry.
“How bout they get some balls and stop expecting women to fuck them for being “nice.” And I like how you presume that women deserve is to be treated badly. ”
I hate it when we agree and you act like we’re saying something completely different. I presume it because I see it every day. They DO need to stop being nice and start being assholes. That what women want. My sister? She has screwed guys AFTER they beat her.
“Her body her choice her responsibility?”
False. Men are required to pay medical care bills for “her body, her choice”. Women have a number of options to avoid responsibility before and after birth. Females have zero accountability.
Looking at that thread on REddit with the 14 year old rape victim, I see that it was linked to by r/mr, and that some of the worst comments are coming from r/mr regulars.
There’s also the strong possibility that the reddit post is another false flag against men’s rights. There have been two cases in just the last month of trolls making up stories to hurt men’s rights. The original post has been edited in a way that makes the comments seem more outrageous.
@Buttman
Sounds like you have been reading RooshV and other PUA blogs. My point was not that men should stop being nice and act like assholes; it was that they should stop faking being nice in order to get sex. Guys like this pretend to care about a woman but then flip the script and say “you gonna put out now?”. Then they whine about assholes getting all the chicks. The fact that your sister is in an abusive relationship just further points to your dysfunctional history with women. I have never “rewarded” an asshole for sex. I only dated men who behaved as gentlemen, and I married a wonderful kind caring man who treats me well. If you think you will be happier in life being an asshole, I don’t care. Just don’t pretend that the women who respond to your Assholery aren’t damaged, sick human beings like your sister. When you spend all your time in a hospital you tend to forget that there’s an entire world outside full of healthy people. Live among the sick and you become one of them.
Hey Man-Butt, since when do the statements “Stop being a passive-aggressive asshole.” and “Start being an actively aggressive asshole.” agree with each other? Did you not understand the meaning of the quotation marks around “nice”?
That feels really out of line to me
Buttman, even if you don’t consider her age, which she disclosed after her OP, there are a bunch of r/menrightsers who invaded the thread and justified what was obviously rape.
Troll or no troll, r/mensrightsers could always, you know, choose NOT to invade threads in other subreddits in order to justify rape.
chuckeedee, can you explain what you mean by this? I’m on the edge of my seat here.
Calling abuse survivors “sick and damaged” is pretty fucked up.
@ Shadow
I’m sick of this “women only fuck assholes” stereotype that is so pervasive. Obviously it wouldn’t be if more women demanded respect from their sexual partners. And what am I supposed to call a woman who sleeps with a man after he beats her? Healthy?
You guys keep saying this. There`d be no point in making up things MAs said because the things actual MRAs say are already so fucked up that they are beyond parody. For example, one of your most beloved figures, Paul Elam, once wrote that rape victims were “stupid conniviing bitches” who were “begging for it”. What could a troll possibly say that would make the MRM look worse than Elam?