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.
To give the swiss some credit, they did a tricky thing (established a non-aristocratic federation in a late feudal age), and managed to maintain it.
Part of that was because they were fanatics. partly because they militarised almost everyone, and partly because they didn’t have enough of what people wanted to be worth spending the money/time to go and take.
Which is why, for ages, the prime export/moneymaking enterprise in Switzerland was violence. They were very good at being hired thugs. The Swiss Guards at the Vatican are just the last vestige of the Swiss as mercenaries, but the practice goes back more than 400 years.
It made them painfully scrupulous at keeping the exact letter of a contract, which they exploited to steal all those assets I was talking about earlier.
But Hershele, we weren’t supposed to compare him to Switzerland in WW2, we were supposed to compare him to the Ideal of the Neutral Swiss who are honest as the day is long.
The ethical Swiss, who woudn’t dream of cheating someone with the exact letter of a contract as tool to prevent execution of intent.
Not the sort of people who say, “fuck you, we got ours,”. We weren’t supposed to compare the real Swiss (as an historical object, not individual people), to the real Brandon (as exposed in his writings and confessed ideas/actions/philosophy).
We weren’t supposed to to that, at all.
@Hershele: It did. I was only comparing myself to Switzerland in the sense that they were neutral during WW2. Anything more than that and you are reading too much into it.
So we are supposed to ignore the role they had in screwing families out of their life savings during the war as well as after?
You may be a mental midget but the rest of us are not.
@Elizabeth: Clearly you don’t know the difference between a simple comment and a full blown debate.
“‘@CassandraSays THIS IS A METAPHOR
‘That’s a spoon.’
“And this is Sparta.”
It’s not a cigar?
Maybe Brandon had better follow up his metaphors with a careful explanation of what parts of the example he is and isn’t referring to, if he can sort out such a thing.
CassandraSays: Why do I get the feeling you went to a lot of Red Wings games?
Goddamn it, Brandon, don’t sully Batman characters by associating their phrases with yourself.
Don’t sully the Swiss, either. I really doubt they want to be known as Brandon Land.
@Brandon: Intent doesn’t matter diddly in communication (and if you always have to explain how your ‘intent’ was totally different than how a group interpreted what you said, ur doing it rong).
As I explained to DKM, metaphors (or analogies) are tricky in discussions that tend toward the argumentation (claims + evidence) areas of rhetoric — and that’s what most of the discussions here are! — you evoke the parallel with Switzerland, people will analyze it and point out all the similarities which you are apparently pig ignorant of (which is why metaphors can be dangerous in untutored hands).
And the “this is just a simple comment” in a discussion originating from a post about the extreme rhetorical violence directed at women online in which you have figured the MRA and the “feminist movement” as equally bad is NOT just a FUCKING SIMPLE COMMENT. Plus your misunderstanding of Dracula’s (I think?) first response again shows how little you know about the actual history and how much you’ve accepted and operate off common knowledge (which is usually also fucking wrong because of the stereotypes).
It’s part of the debate and can expect to be treated as such, especially with the ongoing way you try to strike Olympian poses and explain your lofty disdain and superiority to the scrabbling mortals down below you (then keep losing it because, as others have said, you really can’t craft text worth a damn.)
Shorter version: you fail at metaphor; you fail at defending your use of metaphor, and you don’t get to wriggle off into “simple comment land.”
MRAL:
FTFY
Brandon:
Then the word you wanted was not “Switzerland” but “neutral.” How silly of me to think that by “Switzerland” you meant “Switzerland.”
What’s even more interesting is that even when Brandon’s saying he’s above it all, quite a few of his previous comments have revealed he has serious problems with ladies. If you’re writing about how you think getting consent from women is impossible and how you only date “fun” women (i.e., women who never disagree with you), it kinda indicates that you already picked a side, Bucko.
Hershele, wtf? For one, I’m pretty sure that anti-Semitism isn’t the central motivation behind the MRA hate spam these guys sometimes get. For two, I don’t think either one of them…. is actually Jewish.
So glad Brandon came down from on high and told us we don’t get his staggering use of metaphor and that we’re just doing it wrong in general. Whatever would we do without him?
Have more cookies?
I checked and Schwyzer isn’t Jewish, he’s Christian. It’s plastered all over his blog. Nice try, dumbass.
I’m sure Ashley thought his metaphor was awesome.
One wonders how Brandon feels about the Swiss in terms of gender relations.
Men who don’t serve in the Army are discriminated against, but women don’t have to serve and they get to vote (they’ve had suffrage for more than forty years).
On the flip side Meller would probably approve of Swiss law on marriage, as there was still coverture, and where the man wanted to live, the wife had to live, in 1971 when women gained the vote.
I don’t know if this is still the case (Google on coverture in Switzerland was particularly unhelpful), but the law does say that in a divorce the primary wage earner cannot be made to suffer too much financially, so a large number of women, and their children, are immediately thrown onto the welfare rolls as soon as a divorce happens.
No fear of sperm-stealing women getting rich off a man’s labor in Switzerland.
Another episode of The Brandon Show? Pass.
LOL. “The Alas a Blog guy.”
We get a weirdly large amount of anti-semitic storm front stuff about “the Alas Jews.” It gets worse when one of the “Alas a Blog guy”s cartoons gets linked around the scaryosphere.
So I realize this was hours and pages ago and the conversation has moved on and I don’t know how comment sections work, but as far as the whole “don’t leave home without a big strong man to protect you from rapists that jump out from bushes (the only rapists!)” thing… How does a woman find a man if she can’t leave home in his absence? Does daddy bring one around? I guess it doesn’t really matter if your prospective mate interesting to you at all since you’re going to need one of them in order to step outside. Even lady-preferring ladies.
Viscaria: Internet dating? 😛
“I’d enjoy long walks on the beach, if I felt safe enough to leave the house. I need a big strong man to protect me! Message if interested.”
“I need a big strong man to run security while me and my girlfriend take long walks on the beach, please assist”
Then when a woman who was forced to rely on someone else is abused by that person, it’s the woman’s fault, ofc. Arks is stupid, but I’m not always so certain with some out and out misogynists like this XD
Viscaria, I think that was one of the advantages of arranged marriages. Yes, daddy WOULD indeed seek out a husband for his daughter when time came for her to be married, without his little precious leaving the house! Would this work today in the USA, Canada, or Europe? Maybe not, but it is an idea that should not be dismissed out of hand when the safety and purity of young, unmarried women is concerned.
Food for thought….
I think we’re supposed to look up “Manly protector” in the Yellow Pages every time we leave our homes and don’t have a dad/husband/brother handy to be our escorts. These manly protectors would be delivered to our door in thirty minutes or less, just like Domino’s.