Recently Kloo2yoo, the founder and longtime moderator of Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit, stepped down. The remaining moderator, IgnatiusLoyola, has just announced his successor, a long-time commenter in the subreddit who calls himself AnnArchist. (Despite the female-sounding name, he’s a guy.)
This is an, er, interesting choice, as AnnArchist is a misogynist asshole who thinks that violence against women is hilarious. Indeed, he’s posted in the BeatingWomen subreddit, a thoroughly vile little forum devoted to posting pictures and videos of women being violently assaulted. He says he enjoys this particular subreddit because “I have a sense of humor so I can laugh at it.” Here’s one recent post of his, and another. I don’t know exactly what was in either video, since they’ve both been removed my YouTube, the first for violating the site’s rules against hate speech, the second for its “shocking and disgusting content.” If you look through the comments on these submissions, you may also note that the r/beatingwomen regulars, in addition to being misogynist assholes, are also racist as fuck.
“Welcome AnnArchist,” the_real_misogynist wrote in response to one of these postings, “with posts like that you’ll fit right in here.”
Needless to say, AnnArchist doesn’t find violence by women against men quite so risible.
AnnArchist has also advocated murder (many, many, many times), endorsed vigilantism against a specific young woman, and suggested that false rape accusers should be stoned and/or jailed with the word “liar” tattooed on their faces.
He refers to women as “whores” and “cum dumpsters.” He’s boasted about “persuading” girls to have sex with him after they’ve said “no.” (Meanwhile, he’s said that if he woke up next to a trans woman after being drunkenly “tricked” into sex he would violently assault her.)
Oh, and there’s this bit of wisdom:
If you hyphenate your child’s last name, well its just pathetic. It means the mother was an uncompromising shrew.
I’m sure there are many other vile comments in AnnArchist’s past; these are simply the ones I uncovered with a couple of Reddit searches and by going through his most controversial comments. Indeed, as he himself acknowledges, “there is no limit to the amount of screwed up shit that I’ve posted.”
So why exactly was he picked as a moderator? Is he truly the best that r/mensrights can offer?
Apparently a lot of the r/mensrights regulars think so; most of those who’ve commented so far have praised IgnatiusLoyola’s choice, and have dismissed the critics as “trolls.” (EDITED TO ADD: The tide seems to have turned; there are now more comments up critical of AnnArchist’s promotion to mod, and posts defending Iggy’s decision aee getting some downvotes.)
EDITED TO ADD: Just wanted to highlight one of his comments on the false accuser he was targeting:
I hope she was harassed. Fuck I hope her house was firebombed. Lets be clear, I really will applaud anyone who does anything to her, be it slash her tires or slash her throat.
Here’s the full quote in context. (EDIT: AnnArchist has edited this comment to remove the violent bits. Luckily, someone got a screenshot.)
And here is a comment of his on a specific female judge:
I hope someone kills her.
Holly: can you point me to an anti-violence feminist site, one that’s against violence not just when it’s committed and advocated by its enemies but also when it’s by feminists?
Due to the extreme lack of violence in feminism in the first place, no, not really.
Any sites that are not just against men being raped in principle, but think action should be taken to help and support male rape victims, even if they don’t consider it a priority to do so themselves?
A lot, including No Seriously What About Teh Menz and Figleaf’s Real Adult Sex. Here’s a NSWATM article criticizing feminists who ignore the rape of men: http://noseriouslywhatabouttehmenz.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/memo-to-the-feminist-movement/
How about an anti-transphobia one that actually calls out transphobia within feminism, not just outside it?
How about Questioning Transphobia? Here’s a recent example of them specifically calling out a feminist site: http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3890
makomk, it is clear that you did not read any of my links that I posted. Shakesville is a site dedicated to nonviolence in every way. Also, several of the links I posted have references to men being raped and the framing of it. Also, Shakesville in particular has several trans and non binary people who post and moderate.
Where are the non violent MRAs?
I would be willing to consider one that did not care about the rape of women, if the site did not promote violence in other ways.
Holly: I’m still not entirely sure (a) if NSWATM is a feminist site and more importantly (b) whether it would be counted as a feminist site by other, more widely read feminist sites or if they’d just categorize the authors as MRAs and discredit them that way (in particular, by associating them with MRA violence.) If memory serves me correctly Questioning Transphobia isn’t exactly a feminist site, and last I’d heard Lisa Harney didn’t really identify as feminist for all the usual reasons that cause trans women to give up on feminism, though it’s kind of complicated. I’m fairly sure the feminist site she’s calling out in http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3890 is inciting violence, by the way.
Bostonian: I read the links. We’ve got rape of boys within the Catholic church (feminists already disliked the Catholic church due to abortion), rape in the military (again already unpopular due to rape of female soldiers and for other reasons – read the comments), rape of a 13 year old boy used to talk about the more important rape of women and girls (note the “cases where women sexually assault men are vanishingly rare, and virtually all of them fall under the header of statutory rape” disclaimer – if someone asked them to jusify that, no doubt they’d reel out the stats that don’t count women raping men as rape, as usual), and a post using a celebrity as an example of a general pattern of rape-denial by the media. About what I’d expect basically. It’s not that feminist sites don’t treat the rape of men as serious and important when it’s politically useful to do so in order to help women, it’s that they don’t actuallly care about it the rest of the time, attack any attempt to treat it as a systematic problem or help the victims, … (On the other hand this Feministe piece isn’t too bad.)
Also, about Shakesville: did you read the bit about the moderators being OK with a comment justifying beating cheating husbands unconscious but telling me off for criticising said comment? Having trans and non-binary people posting and moderating is also no guarantee of non-transphobia by the way; historically they’ve tended to side with the site owner no matter what, even if they’re doing something trans-101-failing like banning the use of the word “cis” because being called anything except “normal” hurts cis folks’ feelings.
As for non-violent MRAs, do you consider NSWATM to be an MRA website or not? They’re not really but are likely to be mistaken as such and are very definitely non-violent; I actually found out about this moderator appointment through a post criticising it on their site. If you don’t, what would you think if someone else called them MRAs and attempted to associate them with violence by MRAs?
For the record I was right about NSWATM: no less a figure than Sady Doyle has tarred them with the MRA brush.
Ironically the reason she’s pissed off doesn’t orignally even have anything to do with men; she wrote a blog post using her own experiences of domestic violence to cast it as fundamentally perpetrated by men against women, this triggered one of the female commenters who’d been abused by a women (for the usual reasons and because it more specificially erased her particular experiences of abuse). Sady was more than a little angry – she considered the complaints about her using her personal experiences as a political weapon to erase and trivialise other people’s experiences of domestic violence to be somehow “erasing [her] lived experience” to make a “political point”. Sady then went on to actually erase the other women’s experience because it was politically inconvenient (not to mention calling her being triggered “irrational”).
There are some tangents involving male victims, but mostly it’s about a promenent feminist ignoring a female victim’s experiences. Also notice how in a later comment she talks about her experiences as a “jumping-off point as a discussion about “abuse” or “abusers” in the abstract”, completely ignoring the specific details typhoonblue saw mirrored in her own decidedly non-abstract abuser.
Of course, Sady puts the blame for all this in the right place: it’s the fault of evil anti-feminists seducing the other woman into blaming women; if she’d healed in the proper feminist “safe” spaces she’d have been reminded that her abuse wasn’t real abuse like male-on-female DV and wouldn’t make the mistake of talking about it.
Why do I have a feeling that this particular victim-attacking by a prominent feminist blogger will get far less notice or criticism than a single comment in the deepest, darkest corner of the MRA community?