Category Archives: misogyny
Is Reddit a magnet for pedophiles?
A much preferable kind of creep.
So the question I have it this: Does Reddit have some sort of powerful magnetic attraction to the pedophiles and pedophile defenders of the world, or is pedophilia and/or pedophile defense simply endemic amongst the young male tech geek demographic that’s so heavily overrepresented on Reddit?
This is a question that naturally sprung to my mind after reading a couple of recent posts in ShitRedditSays, documenting Reddit’s strange sympathy with the child porn enthusiasts of the world. A woman stands up on Reddit and declares herself a feminist? She’s a “bad person,” a “female supremacist,” an “utter piece of shit.” A man is jailed for possession of child porn? He’s being unjustly persecuted for a “victimless crime.”
Fxexular on ShitRedditSays has assembled a roundup of some the most disturbing comments in a thread devoted to the aforementioned man jailed for possession of CP. Amongst his finds:
Heavily upvoted comments comparing viewing of child porn to smoking weed and playing Grand Theft Auto.
A comment with 15 upvotes suggesting that the perp should only get “a stiff fine and a few weeks of community service … for a crime the judge himself probably committed half a dozen times on any given weekend.”
A comment with nearly two dozen upvotes lamenting that the child porn possessor is going to have his “life ruined over socially non-normative pictures. … this is a predictable outcome of a corrupt government which is obsessed with its own power.”
But these are just the tip of the pedo-defense iceberg. Take a look at the thread itself, where you will also find heavily upvoted comments from Redditors comparing the “persecution” of pedophiles to past persecution of gays and witches; an unintentionally ironic comment lamenting the cruel treatment of a perp who is “only 26” years old; and a comment making perhaps the strangest argument I think I may have ever seen anywhere about anything:
My core problem here, as a computer scientist, is that any photo he had is really a bunch of zeros and ones… which for anyone who is at all familiar with binary, is a number. Basically, by outlawing the storage of some form of data, we have said that it is illegal be in possession of certain numbers. Yes, these might be huge numbers that you don’t encounter in your daily life, but they are still simply numbers.
In a different thread on the same case, another Redditor gets 75 upvotes for comparing child-porn-possessing pedophiles with African-Americans in the era of the Civil Rights movement. Here’s the comment itself; here’s the ShitRedditSays thread discussing it. And here, for good measure, is the same commenter offering a Redditor who’s confessed to molesting his sister advice on how best to avoid prosecution.
Meanwhile, in an unrelated thread in Reddit’s Videos subreddit, pedophile (sorry, ephebophile) Redditors mount an all-out attack on a girl who had the temerity to complain about skeevy Redditors masturbating to pictures of herself she put in a private album on the internet when she was 14.
In ShitRedditSays, jamie11 collects together some of the creepiest comments, including these:
“Fuck yea she is developed AND judging by her smug smile, she is loving every second of this. Sure she says “OMG, so creepy herp derp” but in reality it is kind of a big EGO boost. EDIT: in b4 misogyny accusations!” [+7]
“She is an attention whore. She is really dumb. She will probably ultimately profit from this in the model/porn/coors girl industry.”[+10]
“Shes much hotter when shes quiet.” [+32]
The numbers in brackets indicate the numbers of upvotes.
Again, tip of the iceberg.
EDITED TO ADD: I hadn’t noticed before, but r/mensrights has its own discussion of the child porn case. It’s pretty much what you’d expect: Possessing child porn is just a “thought crime” that doesn’t hurt anyone.
The creepiest fellow of the lot is probably logrusmage, who offers this defense of the child porn possessors of the world:
consider that a majority of “kiddy porn” are pictures of sexually mature females taken by said females for boyfriends that got leaked on the internet or via text, where the female happens to be under the age of consent.
When someone points out that, um, the fact that these pictures are “leaked” means that the subjects of said pictures didn’t consent to them being put online (and, also, they are below the age of consent), logrusmage offers this rebuttal:
Consent is not needed for something that does not directly effect someone. Like looking at them. … Looking at a picture of someone does not require their consent.
Presumably he’d be fine if someone secretly filmed him picking his nose while taking a crap and put it up on r/creepydudespickingnosesonthecrapper.
School buses: “A symbol of women dominating men and boys.”
Evil gynofascist propaganda
Does anyone still doubt that we live in a gynofascist lady-tatorship? Some guy who calls himself Davd – because there’s no “I” in Davd! – has posted a sharp analysis of one of the most insidious tools of the matriarchy: those flashing lights they put on school buses to try to stop people from running over kids getting on and off the buses.
And no, I am not making this up. Here’s Davd, explaining it all to you:
Anyone who thinks that the women of North America were subjugated by some kind of patriarchy back between 50 and 100 years ago, need only look at the traffic on rural roads in the morning, to know better. …
Those school buses have been running mornings and afternoons for as long as i can remember—and i’ll soon be 70. They are a symbol of women dominating men and boys [and perhaps girls as well, though girls seem more able to wheedle adult women than we are]. …
[W]hy do Canadian and US school buses have big bright flashing lights fore and aft, and STOP signs that stick out from the driver’s side? I don’t remember the children who rode on them, including four of my sons, being all that grateful for the fuss; and i don’t remember them being all that frightened of the traffic. … It was obvious enough to me and my sons, that the School Buses were babying the children.
So who babies children—Mommies or Daddies? …
The School Buses with big bright flashing lights fore and aft and STOP signs that stick out from the driver’s side, are the spoils of political victory for babying Mommies, well over half a century ago, not anything remotely patriarchal.
So Davd suggest we go whole-hog and just paint the things pink, to remind us of who really runs the world:
Pink school buses will be truth in packaging: School biases against boys are more important than the babying bus lights and STOP signs, and a larger reason to paint school buses (and school doors) pink.
Naturally, most of the commenters on The Spearhead found Davd’s concerns to be completely reasonable and in no way exaggerated. Firepower, in the very first comment, one of the most heavily upvoted in the thread, Godwinned it out of the park with these observations:
Tolerating pink gear on NFL players gets you pink buses. Accepting pink buses gets you pink uniforms in the future concentration camps.
Babying and coddling American kids/boys – gets you the youth you see today.
Meanwhile, Keyster suggested that the fact that school buses are painted yellow was itself evidence of an insidious conspiracy. For, you see, that color was set as the standard for school buses after a conference in 1939 that was funded in part by a grant from – cue dramatic chipmunk! – the Rockefeller Foundation.
And yes, that’s the same Rockefeller Foundation that funded and continues to fund feminism. No surprize that they’d fund a centralized government standard for the color of a gasoline consuming conveyence meant to transport our future proles. It’s important they identify school with safety as part of the indocrination process.
Much of the rest of the thread was given over to guys gloating that the girls they used to have such crushes on when they were in grade school had now all become old and fat. Nugganu —who recently informed me that he’d like to see me “anally raped by ten well endowed black men” — got the most upvotes of any commenter in the thread with this observation:
For whatever reason I still see alot of the girls I grew up with in the 80′s fairly often. They’re all serious boner-killers now. I suppose it doesn’t help that they’re all varying degrees of fat, uglier and have the look of having had 100+ dicks stuck in them over the years. All of them are single too, surprise surprise.
Naturally, aging Spearhead dudes remain just as handsome and appealing as they were in their salad days. Everyone knows that ladies age like mayonnaise in an tuna sandwich, while Spearheaders age like fine whine wine.
“Please Killl Yourselves”: MRAs respond to #mencallmethings
Well, that was … instructive. The Twitter hashtag extravaganza that is #mencallmethings is still going strong. But I think at this point it’s safe to say that it has basically served it’s purpose: to highlight the obnoxious, obscene, often threatening misogynist shit that women who express their opinions about almost anything on the internet get in their inboxes or in comments online on a regular basis. Women with feminist blogs who actually call out this kind of misogyny get this sort of abuse basically every day.
Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown, who started up this hashtag campaign, explained in an eloquent and angry blog post why she did it: to point out how absolutely routine this sort of shit is. When she started her blog, she really hadn’t anticipated the sheer volume of vicious shit she’d get:
I got targeted. With threats, with insults, with smear campaigns, with attempts to threaten my employment or credibility or just general ability to get through the day with a healthy attitude and a minimal amount of insult.
The intent of all this abuse is simple: to intimidate. When someone says to a woman online “I hope you get raped with a chainsaw,” the point is to get her to shut up. The person who posts this sort of violent shit, Doyle notes,
hopes that the next time you sit down to write, you’ll remember that yikesy chainsaw-rape thing and think, “you know? Maybe this isn’t such a great idea. Maybe I don’t need to say this. Maybe I’ll piss someone off, and maybe it will be more than I can handle, and you know, maybe my thoughts on this topic just ARE NOT IMPORTANT ENOUGH for me to risk the headache/fear/irritation/distress/panic attack I know I will get.”
And then, when you say that aloud, they call you a whiny little girl who can’t handle the Internet. Because, of COURSE multiple chainsaw-rape comments aren’t a big deal! They’re just words! Sticks and stones! …
To you, my friends, I say: Fuck that noise. All of this matters. A hostile work environment matters. Being afraid of your own in-box matters. Deleting your blog because that’s the only way for you to have a normal, non-hate-filled life matters. “Accepting” that continual, virulent, hateful misogynist abuse is a pre-condition for being a lady who talks about thing, or for challenging sexism in any way, no matter who you are: That matters. And if you think we’re fragile, well. LET US COUNT THE WAYS we have hacked it, under conditions your pampered manly self just cannot imagine. LET US DEMONSTRATE FOR YOU the shit we wade through, every day, in order to talk about whether or not we liked that one “Community” episode or Lady GaGa album.
Naturally, critics of the whole hashtag campaign have done their best to minimize and dismiss this sort of routine harassment in exactly the ways that Doyle predicted they would.
The charming Ferdinand Bardamu of In Mala Fide responded to #mencallmethings with a bunch of obnoxious comments that conveniently proved basically every point Sady Doyle was trying to make with the hashtag in the first place. He started off with this bit of rapier wit:
He followed this up with a clumsy fat joke:
He continued on in this vein for awhile, so proud of his insightful critiques that he made a blog post about it.
Encouraged by Bardamu’s example, blogger PMAFT (Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology) announced a #MenCallMeThings Trolling Contest. The highlight of his own contributions to this contest:
Over on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit, c0mputar offered slightly more coherent, if equally misguided, response.
The reality is that most of the “misogyny” they face is just criticism to their feminist viewpoints. I see this a lot when I confront feminists arguments, present my arguments, and get called a misogynist, amongst other things characterized by misandry. It happens on both sides …
Really now? Here are some actual examples of comments posted on #mencallmethings (taken from a comment from Shaenon in the discussion here).
here’s some to start: ‘I’ll rape your mum, faggot fuck’ “I’ll come to your house and kill you”
#mencallmethings, impersonate me on FB, & make disgusting sexual comments, post my name & # when I helped organize Slutwalk
cunt, whore, ugly, disgusting, cold, feminazi, shut the fuck up bitch, manipulative, crazy, playing the victim, sociopath
Bitch, whore, being sensitive, little girl, dumb, subject of jokes involving physical and sexual assault.
Any variation on fat and/or ugly at this point just makes me yawn.
I’ve had so many emails and messages telling me I deserve a beating, I don’t even keep track any longer.
“13? Judging by the size of your titties, I’d of thought you were 18.”
(censored version) If you keep talking the way you do, you deserved to get raped.
My #mencallmethings moment – receiving an email consisting of 1600 lines plus of the same insult over and over. My crime? Being fat.
I’ve had so many guys tell me how good I must be in bed because I’m fat and therefor will do anyone
I usually get ‘sweetheart’ just before they dismiss my argument as being ‘stupid’. No counter argument.
Will not repeat the violence that’s been directed at me but this one made me laugh “Blubbering self-important herd animal.”
apparently I’m a lesbian… I was unaware until #mencallmethings.
I’M ON ANTI-DEPRESSANTS AND I CANT EVEN JERK OFF CORRECTLY NOW & ITS BECAUSE OF WOMEN SO FUCK ALL YOU INFERIOR COWS
“You should have your tongue ripped out.”
I get sent one rape threat a month on average.
I was once told “get back in the kitchen you ugly bitch” for posting on a Linux board (can’t remember which one now)
Have you ever wanted someone to tell you that your genetalia should be stapled shut with bugs inside, start a blog
How about being choked to death during a forced blowjob? Start a feminist blog.
Not worth the effort to murder: the most recent example of what I had to delete off the blog when #mencallmethings
C0mputar, in his Reddit post, went on to offer another argument that seems to be a favorite of those trying to trivialize the abuse catalogued by the contributors to #mencallmethings:
In the end, veterans of the internet know there is no protected demographic. Everyone gets shit on, but if you make a point of belonging with a group, you get shit on even more, and more so the smaller you are. You know who gets shit on more than feminists? MRAs.
Really? Some MRA types on Twitter tried to get a rival hashtag going: #womencallmethings. Needless to say, they didn’t have much to work with.
One Man Boobz non-fan — whom I banned for his repeated comments about anal rape — tried to post a sarcastic little comment here last night dismissing #mencallmethings on similar grounds. Here’s a screenshot from my wordpress account, with his identifying data erased:
Let’s just, for contrast, take a look at the previous comment he tried to post here:
Another day, another “hope you get raped” comment.
Ironically, though I’m pretty thoroughly disliked across the manosphere, I actually get a lot less of this sort of abuse than most reasonably well-known feminist bloggers who happen to be non-dudes. Oh, sure, I get called a “traitor” and a “mangina,” and once in a while someone points out that I’m, you know, fat, but when it comes to the really nasty shit, the abusive commenters and emailers seem to much prefer going after women. This may be because they are misogynistic assholes. That’s just a theory, though.
Twitter hashtag of the day: #MenCallMeThings, a catalogue of horrendous misogynist shit sent to women online
Twitter hashtag of the day: #mencallmethings, in which Women With Opinions on the Internet report some of the creepy, violent, threatening, misogynist things said to them in comments and emails by dudes on the Internet. GIANT TRIGGER WARNING for: “whore,” “slut,” “cunt,” “fat cunt,” “ugly cunt,” “cunt bucket,” “cum dumpster,” “lesbian hambeast” (huh?), assorted threats of rape and murder — the list goes on, and on, and on. I would post the, er, “highlights,” but, really, just go and look at it. This shit is relentless.
MGOTWers in Space
Women always go for the alien alpha assholes.
So a six man crew has just touched down on Earth after a nearly two-year Russian expedition to mars. Well, that’s not quite true. The five men have returned from an imaginary trip to a fake mars; in reality, they spent the entirety of the “mission” sitting in some trailers in a parking garage in Moscow. Except for a brief interlude in which several of the fake marsonauts took a brief stroll on the surface of fake mars – also inside a trailer in the parking lot.
The idea behind all this? To see if six dudes could manage to stay sane while stuck in cramped quarters together for the length of time it would take to go to mars and back.
One of the many weird details about this weird faux-mission is that it was an all-dude affair. None of the marsonauts were women. Not, evidently, because the mission planners thought that women would be less capable than men of handing the pressure of a fake (or even a real) mission to mars. But because if they sent any ladies along, the men would want to have sex with them. As one news account explains:
Controversially, the experiment did not include a woman, with researchers clearly wanting to avoid it degenerating into a scientific version of television’s sexual tension-filled “Big Brother”.
When the “returning” marsonauts stepped out of their “spaceship” at the end of the experiment, the same news account notes,
They were each presented with a flower by young female researchers in white coats as a reward for their endeavours.
It has not been confirmed if the marsonauts popped boners at the sight.
I for one support the notion of male-only spaceflights, real or phony. And not just because the ladies would turn our space capsules into deep space slutmobiles. Just imagine what would happen if a female-infested space crew had an encounter of the third kind with some really handsome space alien dudes – the interstellar equivalents of Brad Pitt. You know what would happen next: those dirty sluts would sell out our planet for a ride on the little green cock carousel.
Ah, who am I kidding, those sluts would sneer at the little green men, holding out for the tall greys.
Audiovidual supplement: Three videos. One, Rachel Maddow talking about the mission at its halfway point. Two, a brief look at everyday life on the “spaceship.” And last but definitely not least: a video of the fake-mars walk. Inside a trailer. You have to watch at least a few seconds of that one.
Johnny Appleseed: A Man Going His Own Way?
How do you like them apples?
So yesterday I quoted some random Spearheader who described women (well, white women in particular) as “complete parasitical whores roaming the landscape spreading VD like Johnny Appleseed and fucking men over.”
One reader wondered if Mr. Appleseed really went about spreading VD. So I did a little research, and it turns out that it is exceedingly unlikely that Mr. Appleseed – who actually was a real person — spread anything other than the magic of apples. And his Swedenborgian beliefs.
Why? Because Mr. Appleseed – real name John Chapman – was what these days we might call a Man Going His Own Way. Seems he didn’t have much truck with the ladies, according to one contemporary account quoted in his Wikipedia entry:
On one occasion Miss PRICE’s mother asked Johnny if he would not be a happier man, if he were settled in a home of his own, and had a family to love him. He opened his eyes very wide–they were remarkably keen, penetrating grey eyes, almost black–and replied that all women were not what they professed to be; that some of them were deceivers; and a man might not marry the amiable woman that he thought he was getting, after all.
So what led poor Mr. Appleseed to these dire thoughts about women? Apparently the underage girl he hoped to some day get with was more into dudes who weren’t him:
Now we had always heard that Johnny had loved once upon a time, and that his lady love had proven false to him. Then he said one time he saw a poor, friendless little girl, who had no one to care for her, and sent her to school, and meant to bring her up to suit himself, and when she was old enough he intended to marry her. He clothed her and watched over her; but when she was fifteen years old, he called to see her once unexpectedly, and found her sitting beside a young man, with her hand in his, listening to his silly twaddle.
That ungrateful little strumpet!
I peeped over at Johnny while he was telling this, and, young as I was, I saw his eyes grow dark as violets, and the pupils enlarge, and his voice rise up in denunciation, while his nostrils dilated and his thin lips worked with emotion. How angry he grew! He thought the girl was basely ungrateful. After that time she was no protegé of his.
But Appleseed, despite giving up on women in the real world, held out hope for the afterlife – explaining to others that he expected to have two spirit wives all his own after he died. Which I guess is the 19th century equivalent of the MGTOWers today who fantasize about the sexy robot ladies who will eventually, it is hoped, make actual human females – with their troubling “thoughts” and “needs” and “desires” of their own – obsolete.
Mr. Appleseed’s quest to remain alone was probably also helped by the fact that – if the illustration I found on Wikipedia is any indication – he looked a bit like Dale Gribble from King of the Hill. Only much, much sloppier, with long hair. Oh, and instead of wearing a baseball cap, he wore “a tin utensil which answered both as a cap and a mush pot.”
So, yeah, a creepy weirdo who hates women — definitely an MGTOWer all the way.
Oh, except that he actually did something with his life — you know, helping spread apple trees to a big portion of the midwest — instead of spending all his time going on about how all women are whores.
Some MRAs are rallying around Herman Cain because he’s not “bowing before the golden hoochie.”
So some MRAs are rallying around Herman Cain – not in spite of the sexual harassment allegations against him, but because of them.
On The Spearhead, W. R. Price notes that Cain has gotten a flood of new donations since the scandal broke. His conclusion:
The support for the conservative candidate suggests that the decades-old trend of male helplessness in the face of female accusations may be coming to an end.
Other Spearheaders are a bit more blunt:
It is refreshing to see a man (politician or otherwise) in the spotlight stand up and defend himself against a P.C. hatchet-job such as “sexual harrassment” when so many before him did the whiney-baby kiss-up “I was wrong” pandering while bowing before the golden hoochie.
Meanwhile, white and nerdy on Omega Virgin Revolt (yes, that’s a real blog) has actually put his money where his mouth is, sending along a donation to Cain.
I usually don’t bother with voting. Everyone running for most offices is either a liberal feminist or a conservative feminist. To me that is no difference. However, if Herman Cain is still in the running by the time my state’s primary happens (and if he is the Republican nominee) I will vote for him.
Herman Cain is now dealing with at least three women who are claiming that he sexually harassed them. Public figures who were accused of sexual harassment in the past didn’t take on their accusers directly, but Herman Cain did. He pointed out how what is happening to him is a false accusation. As a result of this Cain has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations in the last few days. One of those donations was my donation.
This may not seem like much, but this small act as made Cain more anti-feminist than all of the other candidates for president.
Notice that in white and nerdy’s version of the controversy, Cain has “pointed out” that he’s being falsely accused. Actually, what Cain has done is to deny that he harassed anyone. At this point, we don’t actually know enough to judge definitively whether the allegations are true — though the fact that the National Restaurant Association paid out tens of thousands of dollars to settle the cases makes me a bit skeptical of Cain’s denials. But apparently, in W&N’s brain, there’s not even a chance he’s guilty of anything other than standing up to the dirty feminazis.
One of the commenters on Omega Virgin Revolt is even more enthusiastic about Cain than the blogger himself. Jack writes:
If Cain becomes president, we might actually see an end to the incessant pandering to women by the mindless political class. It’s about time that a politician stood up and declared that women have responsibilities in life and are not entitled to a free ride. Cain might actually do that.
Over on Reddit, meanwhile, OffensiveBrute doesn’t defend Cain so much as he defends not giving a shit about sexual harassment:
I say even if Cain is guilty, who the hell cares? Sexual harassment is illegal, but not immoral. well not the kind that Cain is accused of anyway.
Skooma714 offers a similar take:
He didn’t even touch them. They probably hear shit like that on the DC Metro everyday.
They probably are over it. They want to get some paper and attention.
And, yes, both of these comments garnered some upvotes.
Of course, not every MRA out there is rallying around Cain. On Reddit, there are plenty of MRAs who are suspending judgment on the allegations, or who dislike Cain because he’s, you know, a right wing asshole. Over on The Spearhead, the only ones who seem to have an issue with Cain are those who, well, let’s just say that they probably also think burning crosses make great lawn decorations:
Black men are notorious for their sexual escapades, their testosterone being greater than that of White Men – as is their level of rape accusation. He may be innocent but he may just as well be guilty of a real indescretion.
I am happy to report that this comment got a lot of downvotes there; not every Spearheader is a raving Stormfronter. Of course, it says something about the general political and social backwardness of the site that those Spearheaders who are defending Cain from the crudest Klan-tastic racist attacks are doing so basically because they think he’s a credit to his race:
If the Blacks in America were like Herman Cain, this country would be measurably better for it and most of us would be hating on someone else.
But don’t worry: On The Spearhead they can still all agree on one central point – that women are evil, lying whores. As Keyster put it, in one of the most-highly upvoted comments in the thread:
What this indicates is that people are fed up with political correctness and the feminist/sexual grievance industry. …
In the new Femocracy you can’t date them, you can’t marry them and you can’t even work among them, without risking untold trouble for life. Is it any wonder men are distancing themselves from women, if not abandoning them altogether? How’s a man to know whether she has a “false accusation bomb” strapped to her waist or not? If you’re a man among women stay alert, you’re outside the Green Zone.
Will MRAs end up rallying around Cain in the way they rallied around Julian Assange and Dominique Strauss-Kahn? Or will something – his political views, his race? – prevent them from jumping on the Cain train? I guess we’ll just have to see.
Image of “Whore Mary” spotted in tree by local MRA
“It’s a miracle!” an MRA spokesman told the press. “Praise the lord! Also, all women are complete parasitical whores roaming the landscape spreading VD like Johnny Appleseed and fucking men over.”
NOTE: Like the picture, this quote is also real. At least the “complete parasitical whores roaming the landscape spreading VD like Johnny Appleseed and fucking men over” part of it, which I found in a heavily upvoted comment on The Spearhead.
The False Rape Society: Fighting “false accusations” with rape jokes and misinformation
Question for Pierce Harlan, the guy behind the False Rape Society blog: Do you really think this is the best way to fight false rape allegations?
The real problem here isn’t that he’s recycled an old rape joke; it’s that he’s pretending that rapists are somehow a species apart from ordinary men. His big complaint is that the PSA in question “passes off a criminal deviant as a typical guy.”
Pierce, what do you think rapists look like? They’re not villains out of some silent-movie melodrama, twirling their whiskers and cackling with glee. They don’t have giant R’s tattooed on their foreheads. No, they look like “ordinary” guys. Exactly like them. Rape prevention — and crime prevention in general — would be a lot more effective if criminals could be easily identified at a glance. But the world doesn’t work that way. Most criminals look pretty ordinary, actually.
But the problem with Harlan’s stance here go beyond that. The fact is that most rapists aren’t sinister strangers hiding in an alleyway; the overwhelming majority – something like 70% — are people known to their victims. As someone who writes regularly about rape, Pierce is presumably aware of this, which means either that he’s being completely disingenuous, or that he’s simply pretending that date rape (and non-stranger rape in general) doesn’t exist.
The PSA in question is far from perfect. Aside from the terrible acting, the main problem with it is that it it’s victim-blaming. Its depiction of a rapist as an ordinary-looking guy – and a friend of the victim — is the one thing it gets right.
To get an idea of the sort of person who reads (and agrees with) The False Rape Society blog, here are a couple of comments on the, er, “controversy.”
Here’s a comment from YouTube, posted by someone who obviously got there from Harlan’s blog (it appeared after the video was linked at the FRS; before the recent batch of comments, the video hadn’t had a comment for three years).
So the message is that if a guy is being helpful at a party, he’s probably a rapist? This is not a fair psa. It did better than some though, by highlighting the fact that the female friend ditched her.
Apparently, in this guy’s mind, trying to remove the clothes of a woman almost completely incapacitated by alcohol is just a way of being “helpful.”
Meanwhile, on the FRS blog itself:
Anonymous said…
Wow- just like TV- apparently the only people on earth who ever do ANYTHING wrong are white males- preferably fat ones to give feminists a little extra to hate.
While we’re on the subject of false accusations, here’s a strange bit of paranoid word-salad on the subject that I ran across recently from a Reddit Men’s Rightser.
Is it really possible that anyone – including the author and the people upvoting the comment — could actually believe this nonsense? If so, what a strange, sad world they must live in.
EDITED TO ADD: Holly Pervocracy just wrote a great and highly relevant post on what she calls “Slavering Beast Theory.” As she explains:
In the Slavering Beast Theory, there are two kinds of men. Two species, nearly. … There are ordinary guys and there are Slavering Beasts. And they are very, very easy to tell apart. They act different, even look different, to the point where any adult should be able to distinguish them in any casual social setting. …
This dichotomy is how someone can simultaneously believe that women shouldn’t go out after dark because rape is such a big problem and believe that tons of rape accusations are false. It makes perfect sense if you believe there are Slavering Beasts out in the dark, but if an ordinary guy is accused of rape, there must be more to the story. It explains why people are angered by rape prevention tips aimed at men–those are insulting to ordinary guys, and Slavering Beasts won’t listen. And it justifies the belief that abuse victims had it coming: either they were abused by a Slavering Beast and should have known better, or they were abused by an ordinary guy and must have done something terrible to provoke him.
Reddit’s TwoXChromosomes subreddit overrun with angry dudes
A group portrait of TwoXChromosomes regulars on Reddit?
As “activists,” Men’s Rights Activists seem to be good at only two things: harassing people, and flooding comment sections of websites with their endlessly repeated half-dozen talking points. On Reddit, for example, the local MRAs have been quite the little imperialists, invading a number of gender-related subreddits (like r/equality and r/egalitarian) and turning them essentially into r/mensrights-lite, which has effectively meant killing them. (The recently started r/masculism – an attempt to do Men’s Rights on Reddit without all the misogyny – doesn’t have a chance.)
Well, now the MRA invaders on Reddit seem to have set their sights on a much bigger target: the TwoXChromosomes subreddit. Yep, they’re trying to turn Reddit’s central hangout for the ladies into a boys club.
2XC– an explicitly female-oriented forum on a site (Reddit) heavily dominated by dudes — has always been a strange place. Though I am myself, obviously, a dude, I used to read it fairly regularly, finding it a welcome respite from all the “sammich” jokes and other idiot misogyny so pervasive elsewhere on Reddit. At the time, 2XC had a (completely unwarranted) reputation amongst the Reddit crowd as an evil place full of feminazi man-haters.
Then something started happening to 2XC. That thing was dudes. And not just any dudes – MRA dudes. Regulars on r/mensrights started linking to threads in 2XC and invading en masse, downvoting anything vaguely feminist and spewing forth their standard litanies of complaint. Some of these invaders decided to stay. And so, these sporadic raiding parties turned into a sort of occupation.
No, 2XC – despite the growing number of MRA residents, including a few female MRAs – has not turned into another r/mensrights. But at times, especially when the discussion turns to some MRA pet issue, the place looks a lot like dude central.
Case in point: this 2XC thread, expertly dissected by NauticalLittleNet in ShitRedditSays. The story: a woman posts a picture of her Halloween costume on Reddit and is bugged by a rude, creepy comment referring to her breasts (something that happens approximately ten zillion times a day on Reddit). So she posts the pic again to 2XC, hoping for sympathy. Instead, she’s treated to a barrage of comments mocking her for her alleged “persecution complex.” As NauticalLittleNet shows, the overwhelming majority of the obnoxious comments (all of which garnered numerous upvotes) were from dudes, many of them MRAs.
Naturally, this sort of thing – which happens pretty regularly on 2XC – has totally changed the dynamic of the subreddit from something that was sort of a haven for Reddit women to just another subreddit overflowing with obnoxious dudery.
As a Redditor called emmster noted recently in r/feminist, some women in 2XC have basically stopped posting anything vaguely feminist for fear of being jumped on by argumentative dudes:
I’ll be getting downvoted to Hell in the comments, but get PMs that are supportive from women who feel too afraid of the judgment and vitriol to jump in. I don’t love knowing there are women afraid to voice their opinions in a space that’s for women.
Honestly, I think the sustained r/MensRights invasion is what’s taking the largest toll. It’s like they can’t stand the idea that women have a space that’s active and popular, and they have to come ruin it.
And it doesn’t help that, as Donna_Juanita noted in the same discussion, some of the 2XC mods have essentially bent over backwards to accommodate the MRA invaders and to clamp down on feminists allegedly causing “drama.”
In ShitRedditSays, emmster offers a broader take on what’s happened to 2XC
Since young men are a majority on the site as a whole, and a pretty hefty number of them haven’t had the “There Are Places I Am Not Necessarily Welcome to Pontificate on My Opinion” realization, the space becomes less of a place for women, and more of a place to talk about women. Which is a pretty big distinction. And a tricky thing to keep from happening without raising the ire of the entitled, ignorant young dude contingent.
As a reddit friend of mine put it, it all started with the “Hey Ladies, What Do You Think of My Dick?” posts. When a bunch of guys started posting questions, trying to “understand women,” which of course is a flawed goal, because women, being people, have a variety of opinions and preferences, and cannot actually be understood as a group. Some of them were actually questioning preferences on penis size, hence the name of the phenomenon.
My hypothesis is that eventually, it will be nothing but men talking to men about what they think about women.
Not that there is a shortage of such spaces on Reddit, or in the world in general.
By the way, that picture above is not actually a picture of 2XC regulars. It’s a picture of the Huutajat Men’s Shouting Choir. Which is a real thing in the world. Here they are in action:
