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.
Also interesting thing about how masculinity is contructed in North America – when Kariya started doing yoga everyone seemed to be fine with it. Old school folks thought it was a bit weird, but no one really shamed him for it. But when Lindros did the same, everyone was lining up to go “see, told you he was a wimp”.
It’s a narrow, constricting prison, the American idea of masculinity.
The problem w/ Bobby Clarke, is he wanted Lindros to be Bobby Clarke… and Lindros isn’t that guy, and it was like Clarke thinks “I would have fought through that head injury if I was playing, so you should do” and etc >:
And yeah there was a lot of that “not measuring up to masculinity” stuff w/ Lindros… I think magnified because he was 6’4″ and so big and strong physically and people wanted to dislike him because of how he was acting and how he refused to play for the team that drafted him, and so they took it out on every show of “weakness” he did :
Sports is rly bad for this sorta thing, and hockey esp : I remember when Shayne Corson took himself out of the Leaf’s lineup during the playoffs and it was revealed he was suffering from depression and fans just JUMPED on him 🙁 I defended him a “letter of the day” in the Toronto Star… b/c I was also suffering from depression and had tried to kill myself that winter 🙁 But it was awful the amount of vitriol he got : I mean this is his life and mental health and people are jumping on him about a sport?
@Cassandra I think it has to do with the way ppl perceived Kariya and Lindros, and a lot of that had to do w/ their size, and the way their skillsets were seen, and what people expected of each. I also wonder how much Kariya being half Asian played into how they saw the bar of masculinity set for each. That Kariya wasn’t perceived as that masculine to begin with, so the bar was already low for him :
(do you have IM or something btw? O: this convo might be better on that XD )
pssst…. chatroom!
I dunno if she’s on the chatroom…
I’m there 😀
*cough*
Yes… well… Jolly good, hashtag #mencallmethings. Good show, and all that.
*wipes monocle clean*
In MRAL land, average is short, and no man under 5ft10 has ever had sex. Which kind of makes me wonder how I came to exist, since my Dad is about 5ft8.
Sometimes, when he’s really worked up, MRAL proclaims that a man has to be at least eight feet tall to get laid. It’s a wonder our species manages to perpetrate itself.
My dad’s about 5’8″ too. My mom flat-out doesn’t like tall men. Not that you’d ever notice his height if you met him, because he’s one intimidating mofo.
FUCK IT’S AMI ANGELWINGS RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! #menshouldcallmethings
I think you meant perpetuate xD
But I think some ppl would accuse our species of doing some pretty good perpetrating too :
I do have IM but I can’t post it here in trolllandia. Can you imagine FUCK GASH HER ROYAL HIGHNESS why don’t women like short guys like me? popping up randomly in your IM?
@Shaenon – Did you really mean to write eight feet? MRAL is under the impression that human women only want to have sex with giraffes and elephants?
(Continuing derail…)
I do think it was about both how Kariya and Lindros were perceived in terms of their physicality (funny since Kariya isn’t actually a small guy at all, he’s just small-ish by NHL standards) and about race. In fact, I think Kariya was perceived as smaller than he actually is because of his race. When I used to go to games he actually seemed bigger than, say, Pavel Bure, who people also saw as not huge but didn’t seem to see as physically fragile in the same way, even with his wonky knee. Yzerman can’t have been any bigger than Kariya either, but again, not seen as physically weak in the same way. Style of play is a part of that too though – people see Forsberg as super tough and he’s about average sized really, and it’s because of how he plays.
I think you meant perpetuate xD
But I think some ppl would accuse our species of doing some pretty good perpetrating too :
Everything a woman does is perpetrating. Perpetrating EVIL!
@Shaenon – Did you really mean to write eight feet? MRAL is under the impression that human women only want to have sex with giraffes and elephants?
I believe he sometimes goes as high as nine feet. I assume he’s deliberately exaggerating, but he seems to genuinely think that the taller a man is, the more attractive he becomes, and that six feet is the absolute minimum height for ever getting a girlfriend.
Actually, it’s no picnic being six foot plus from the age of thirteen – far from thinking you’re God’s gift to women, you’re often painfully self-conscious because you can’t hide in a crowd no matter how much you might wish to. In fact, I’m willing to bet that my dating track record wasn’t much better than MRAL’s up to the age he is now, despite this apparently massive advantage.
Anyway, if he’s “average height”, I simply don’t see what the problem is. Most women I know just don’t care about that kind of thing – they’re after an engaging personality, an interesting conversationalist, a keen sense of humor and an expression of genuine interest in themselves as people, not as potential sexual partners.
Shorter Brandon (again): Nuh Uh!
I always miss out on all the fun =(
Why would we have to guess Brandon’s intentions? Seem pretty clear to me: make an idiotic, irrelevant metaphor, hope no one will notice, and then when called on the idiocy, claim to be trolling/have secret intentions nobody knows about!
I feel for you, Joanna. I always seem to miss out on the stupid WWII parallels as well.
Me too, Joanna. But I guess the metaphor makes sense if you think Switzerland almost never get attacked because they’re so smart and above all that. (or that everybody like chocolate and swiss knives too much to endanger the production)
I think most people are too scared of the military’s uniforms. Who wants to be killed by someone in that?
I too am disappoint on missing out on the fun! Ami, isn’t the point of “feminist morality” that it’s supposed to be an oxymoron? Cos we’re feminazis after all, and Nazis had no morals, or something like that, say the MRAs. Natch we have no morals, when we won’t get back in the kitchen and make them poor undomesticated menz a sammich!!11! XD
(That’s me trying to take a leaf from Ami’s fun and fluffy style-book.)
Are most commenters in the US judging by the gun love earlier? The gun as self-defence meme is pretty scary, I would have thought producing a deadly weapon needlessly escalates and raises the stakes, unless the situation has already gone to hell, and if things go wrong weapons can be turned against their owners. I’m just over 50 kg/under 120 lbs and slight-build so my first strike would be a kick to the crotch and running like hell. Why not non-lethal alternatives like a can of mace? Apart from the fact that I live in a country where carrying guns around in daily life is not the norm.
I personally find that I cannot be properly above it all until I inform everyone of how above it all I am.
Also, anybody else really sick of “I am an asshole super on purpose just to bug you, so I win if you take umbrage! But also I win if you don’t take umbrage because my points are clearly super legitimate. Not that I believe them.”
@Lauralot: Why so serious?
Oh, and Brandon’s not the sharpest tool in the drawer, is he? After all, if your plan is less convincing than the underpants gnomes then there’s not much hope.
1. Make an unconvincingly strained metaphor
2. Get pwned multiple times from not knowing the subject
3. Whine about people not understanding ‘my super sekwet meaning’ (repeat 2 and 3)
4. ????
5. Profit!
Brandon, a metaphor works best if the elements actually parallel the thing for which it’s a metaphor. When you said you’re like Switzerland, people assumed you were comparing yourself to Switzerland.
Um, yeah, Hershele, but that’s only because we are too foolish to understand his Joker-from-The-Dark-Knight-ian wheels within wheels!
Everyone still forgets that Ireland is neutral too =D (though we did let planes fuel up at Shannon airport *cough*).