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:
I’m always an outlier. I’d prefer dumb over stupid any day. At least with the dumb ones I can pretend there’s hope.
KathleenB | November 1, 2011 at 10:48 pm
Ten internets says he’ll be back tomorrow, whingeing about how the Repressive Feminist Gynocracy hurt him in the last week.
Of course he’;ll be xD He doesn’t appear to DO ANYTHING ELSE w/ his life XD He’s the most consistent commenter here… which is kinda disturbing cuz he also HATES it here xD So I guess this is a form of self torture or something…. but he’s here prolly in total more than anybody else xD
@Holly that’s a good point xD I mean NWO has trouble dealing with two letters XD and he expects to fight the good fight against a giant conspiracy which controls every aspect of his life and can throw him in jail at any moment? xD
Surprisingly timely:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19468_5-logical-fallacies-that-make-you-wrong-more-than-you-think.html
hey CB did you see my halloween costume? 😀
True, but it was worth it to finally get some straight answers out of Slavey. Some lurkers got an education in the truth of the MRM tonight.
Again the cult series turned novel is “Light’s Out”. I can’t believe how many Americans have taken it for fact… perhaps Ron Paul has a chance? 🙂
I don’t know how he does it. I have no life and I barely have enough time to read all the threads, much less comment on them.
NWO is totally number 1 on the logical fallacies thing.
True, but it was worth it to finally get some straight answers out of Slavey. Some lurkers got an education in the truth of the MRM tonight.
Oooh!!! Does that make the rest of us various Zerg? 😀 I wanna be a Hydralisk! 😀 Or Kerrigan XD But I imagine Holly as Kerrigan actually…
Maybe I’m a defiler! 😀 I certainly defile every thread I show up in from NWO’s PoV XD And I can create clouds where he does no damage! 😀
Google Title IX, preponderance of evidence. Respond afterwards and tell me I have my facts wrong. The only thing you’re right about is I do live on a despicable planet.
‘sup. title ix is actually one of the things i hope to specialize in, so i’ll be happy to set you wrong.
i’m not sure why you’re talking about preponderance of the evidence. that’s an evidentiary standard, ya, but im not sure what you think that the fact that it exists proves.
anyway, onto title ix: there’s two things you can talk about when you talk about title ix enforcement. you can talk about the statutory penalty of loss of all federal funding. that’s a pretty extreme thing, which means its invoked basically never. DoE can and does insist very strenuously on certain things you must do to be title ix compliant, but things have to be pretty atrocious before they’ll yank your federal money.
there’s also private rights of enforcement under title ix- situations under which a private citizen can sue to correct a violation. back in the seventies, when the supreme court was into giving full effect to congressional action, that was a pretty broad right. for title ix, the high point was a 1979 case called cannon v. u. of chicago, where SCOTUS found that a woman could sue to correct the disparate impact of u chicago med’s acceptance policy. the theory was that loss of federal funds is such a harsh penalty that congress must have anticipated judicial remedies for lesser violations.
and then the pendulum shifted, and we got gebser v. lago vista school district, where a gym teacher pursued and repeatedly had sex with a female student, and SCOTUS said that the school district wasnt liable. Part of their reasoning was that loss of federal funds was such a severe penalty it must mean congress only intended title ix to apply in extreme cases. they didnt overrule cannon, they just kind of ignored it.
and that’s been the law pretty much since then. actually its gotten worse since then. the idea that anybody is out there enforcing title ix is pretty silly. you can barely get a court to listen to your obvious title ix violations. why do you think title ix is mostly associated with sports? because that’s about the only place you can prove it.
Oh Lord… this again, NWO pretends to understand the concept of “zero-sum”.
That, or he really doesn’t believe in the idea of win-win, and wants to oppress women.
Hrmn…
Maybe both… he doesn’t understand zero-sum and he want’s to oppress women (with FREE, bonus degradation thrown in as a lagniappe).
P.S. I will accept the mantle NWO has thrust upon me. As A Man I will now Pronounce, on the subject of women’s dress.
Wear anything you damn well please. If any other man gives you grief, tell him you have not only my permission, but my express command. If he protests, feel free, on my behalf, to bash him on the head with a nerf-bat, and chase him down the street.
I think we are seeing the meltdown of the NWOslave. Not only has he failed to convince anyone of the rightness of a single aspect of any of his pet theories, the claims he makes about his life have been challenged.
We don’t know the truth of them, but he has been forced to consider what he has claimed, and compare it to his present state.
As a result… well we saw it last night, and more today. He admits his preferred state of the world is that each woman should be the property of a man.
No wonder he hates the law, and thinks the Constitution has been perverted.
It must suck to no longer have the gov’t making it possible to enslave human beings and reduce them to possessions.
But he is now prohibited from enjoying this thing which would make for him an earthly paradise.
And there was much rejoicing.
I feel like this dynamic eventually ruins many commenting sites. I used to read the comments on Salon, years ago, but the same very bitter and irrational men would apparently sit by their computers day and night to post insults toward any poster perceived of as female. A back and forth between serious commenters and a few unbalanced trolls eventually becomes tiresome, but Salon never did ban or otherwise deal with the creeps. I also experience some anxiety constantly reading irrational nastiness about women, which is why I can only read the comments and original links on this site sporadically. I just don’t know how to deal with individuals who seem to be founts of vitriol and irrational hatred. It’s not as if one can reason with them.
Sorry for the big chunky repost, but: THIS. I watched Salon degenerate for years as a paid user, and nowhere was it worse than in their Broadsheet section (which itself degenerated, partly IMHO through attrition of serious writers who were sick of being abused, and of serious readers who were sick of the vitriol in the comments.) Though every editorial by Joan Walsh gave Broadsheet a run for its money, as the misogynistic comments always piled up immediately. I wrote them probably dozens of times saying “I am paying for your service. I am appalled at your comments sections, what the hell?”
This ties directly in with the recent pair of posts, themselves inspired by posts at Tiger Beatdown and other blogs, about the unending stream of abuse directed at female bloggers. And woman-oriented spaces are apparently no better off. God forbid a woman or women should get to talk without getting shouted down, catcalled, threatened, stalked, and degraded.
I don’t know what to do any more. I used to host a discussion board for conversations about gender and feminism on my WWIV BBS way back in the day, and thought “it’s cool to have a space where you can openly have dialogue and answer questions and consider these issues since everywhere else is kind of a sausage fest” (well, we didn’t have the phrase “sausage fest” in 1992 but anyway.) And now, you couldn’t pay me enough to run a high-profile site on feminism.
Well, you probably could, but it’d have to be in the mid 6-figures, and I’d spend half of that on therapy and the other half on bourbon.
It just makes my stomach hurt.
And I can’t read here regularly or really participate much in the comments for the same reason.
Well it’s late and all your hate and denial of hate is quite draining.
Continue with your hatred.
@ Elusis – I think the solution to this issue is liberal application of the banhammer. Either that or a commenting system like the one on Gawker where you have to be approved to comment, but without the tendency to allow massive trolling in an attempt to drive up page views.
NWO: In fact, everyone google Title IX, preponderance of evidence. Tell me I’ve got my facts wrong.
I have.
You have your facts wrong.
Title IX only applies to schools. That’s one.
Two, it doesn’t change the standards of proof, nor the rules of evidence for either civil complaints, nor criminal proceedings.
Go ahead, cite the passages that prove you are right, and I am wrong.
Kave: “…How about our resident mra’s rise to the challenge of finding one blog entry or thread on a forum of theirs that was co-opted by feminists…”
Challenge accepted.
/R/SRS pretty much took over this thread of mine: http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/lwzuk/is_anyone_else_in_rmensrights_finding_that/
That’s weird. Whenever I read Slave’s posts, half the time I imagine him as a 16 year old. Then again, the other time, he acts exactly like my ex boyfriend, who was in his 40’s. It’s hard to read his crap and not get depressed. The guy needs help.
Yes, Maggie, they showed up in a thread where you specifically called them out.
Sheesh.
Btw, ami, I googled you and found a youtube post of yours, you are pretty awesome.
🙂
I can only hope that NWOslave will find it within himself to participate with Movember.
This is a huge thing that men do.. and it a good thing. All you have to do is grow a fresh mustache and get sponsors. It’s huge where I live with all benefits to prostate cancer.
@NWOslave:
Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s suppose, just for the sake of argument, that you are right–that women are engaged in a collective war against men, using the long arm of the government to get their way, and that every bad thing any man does to any woman, from Internet asshattery all the way up to real-life rape and murder, is simply self-defense. Let’s take all that as a given.
What if women stopped? And thus men stopped in response? What if we made peace? Once the dust had settled, what would society look like? Would there be equality between the sexes?
You seem to attribute everything about society that you don’t like to this war between the sexes (and Jewish bankers), so what do you imagine society would be like absent said war?
It isn’t really meta that a male troll derailed this thread, that’s what happens on almost ever manboobs thread. Rarer types of derail are things such as “shieldmaiden derail” and “non-troll derail”.
Some of my friends are participating in Movember. It sounds awesome! And, as a woman who can’t grow a mustache, I feel in no way oppressed or isolated regarding this event. See what I did there, NWO?