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.
And all men are totes fascinating, right, B?
@Joanna: Easier said than done.
Maybe you shouldn’t date those women.
Maybe those women don’t *want* you to date them, or at least wouldn’t want it if they knew.
Yes, it’s much better to “go your own way” than to try to date women you hate, but this isn’t a “take that, women.” That’s common sense and I think most women would agree.
@Holly: And in order to find out if they are vapid and boring…you kind of have to date them (or at least hang out with them). Vapid girls don’t usually last in my social circle and if they do, they are there because someone else invited them.
Brandon, it really sounds like you’re not trying hard enough.
Brandon: I meet people I dislike all the time. I deal with people I dislike all the time (some of whom I’m related to). It’s called LIFE. Fucking deal with it already.
Do you really want to make this your gendered argument? Do you have the smallest idea how many men are vapid twits as well? Finding someone sucks, period. It isn’t easy to find a good male mate either, and pretending it’s only men who have easier leisure activities is… amusingly stupid.
I mean, that’s putting aside that Alex Novy is trying to make this a dichotomy, which is grossly stupid. I quite frankly met my lover on a message board devoted to roleplaying games. We spent our leisure time together today sinking pirates off the coast of Africa. If you are a nerd, find a nerd. Oh, and don’t make women unwelcome in nerd dom, for any of a host of reasons including enlightened self interest
Brandon – Okay, but that happens to women too. All the time. I’ve been on dates with lots of guys whom I had no interest in and no chemistry with, and you know what I did? I didn’t go on another date with them.
I didn’t hold it against the next guy in some sort of bizarre “I had to go through three bad dates to get to you, so you better make it worth my while” sunk-costs-fallacy way.
I didn’t hold it against men in general for not all being compatible with me.
I didn’t pretend to like them so I could have date them and have sex with them anyway. It was clear that would make both of us miserable in short order..
You win some, you lose some; there’s more people out there who don’t interest you than people who do. But that’s not gendered and it’s not an atrocity. It’s life.
@Joanna: For one, I am not in the dating market right now.
Second, I don’t really try at all. I meet girls and screen them for qualities I like. Most don’t even last 10 minutes. If they pass that, then I get their number and schedule a time to meet. Even then, most don’t pass that either.
All of that rigamarole still takes a lot of effort and time that I probably could use for better things, like hanging out with friends.
“Oh, and don’t make women unwelcome in nerd dom, for any of a host of reasons including enlightened self interest”
Indeed. Guys complain there’s not enough geek girls and then when they come across one they scare them off with “make me a sammich” douchebaggery.
So wait… does Brandon want a world where all women are interesting, so men don’t have to work at finding a potential dating partner? Or is he just complaining about the things that everybody needs to go through when selecting friends/boyfriends/girlfriends/etc?
Screening women to see if they’re interesting enough to date is a waste of Brandon’s valuable time. Trolling on a blog where no one agrees with him and no one ever will is a-okay.
Brandon, you will never meet anyone interesting that way. You can’t win the lotto if you don’t buy a ticket =P
That’s normal.
Don’t try to sell that as “women suck” or “I’m so dominant.”
Only being attracted to a minority of people, and only clicking on a date with an even smaller minority, is the human fucking condition.
Boring people’s responsibility for being boring is they don’t get to date you. Their loss!
Interesting people’s responsibility for other people being boring is nothing because that makes no sense.
@Holly: You are missing the point. Some men walk away hating women while others just say “fuck this…I could be doing something I like instead of dealing with all this dating bullshit”. If they take the former attitude, I don’t think they are holding anything against the “next woman”. They are just re-prioritizing their life to where friends and Xbox take precedence over dating or actively seeking out a girlfriend.
All this seems to hinge on the idea that women aren’t included in the “friends I hang out with” category as a matter of course. Which is…weird to me. Hanging out playing video games and that sort of thing is, in part, how my last girlfriend and I got together in the first place.
Er, maybe that should be “consequence” instead of “responsibility”? Anyway.
The point is that if you go to twelve bad job interviews and don’t get hired, and then someone finally hires you, they don’t owe it to you to make up for the bad interviews you had with other companies.
You get to say “it was hard to find this job;” you don’t get to say “this job totally sucks because they didn’t make it worth my while to go on all those bad interviews.”
Okay… good for them. That’s fine then. I hope you don’t think anyone here disagrees with that. Plenty of women do the same thing.
But if these guys are posting eighteen-page screeds on how everything is wrong with women and women are ripping off their valuable “points,” that’s not moving on with their lives.
@Holly: I hate to burst your bubble, but a lot of straight men are attracted to most women (at least physically). In fact, if I walk down the street, I bet I would be attracted to 75 out of 100 women I walk by. The same is said of my male friends, father, uncles, male co-workers, etc… We can pretty much pick any woman walking down the street and talk about why she is attractive.
I spent my leisure time tonight hanging out with friends, crocheting and listening in as MrB did a solo run through the Umbra, trying to rescue one of the few surviving copies of the Silver Record as the Eye of the Wyrm was opening in the Prime plane. (He didn’t do all that well. The GM designed the children of the Destroyer well.)
The video gaming as a substitute for having any social life at all reminds me of a couple of guys I went to high school with, smart and interesting but were doing a lot of horrible homophobic trolling of anyone they suspected was gay or a dyke to get their kicks in their spare time. Both of course professed wanting to have sexual relationships with women but didn’t really have the social chops along with being bright to work out what a girl might want out of a relationship besides the sex. One of these guys came out of the closet as gay (or probably bi as last I heard he’s in a long-term with a woman), the other is a 40-year-old virgin, lives in a share-house with several other MGTOW game players with NO social lives… I keep waiting to hear of another uncloseting, but in vain. Maybe by the next 10 year reunion? (My high school was in rural Australia, so there were plenty of dumb, uninteresting guys too, damnit.) I know it’s bad of me, but because of knowing this guy I have a mental stereotype of adult male gamers as closeted homophobic anti-social virgins, which I really have to try hard not to prejudice my thinking… XD
I’ve sent like four emails to Schwyze (all at once) and I posted twice on The Pervocracy message board, (with no intent to spam or harass, they were legitimate posts). Aside from that, and Manboobz of course, and the Good Men Project a few times, and Ozymandias’ site a few times, I haven’t ever posted on a feminist site. So, I’m not the best person to ask.
@Dracula: I have female friends in my social circle. But certain topics can only really be discussed around other men. When women are around, we watch our mouths.
So you say, but I bet your ‘random selections of women’ focus on the beautiful ones.
@Xanthe: It’s not really a substitute for having a social life because you can actually have a social life around video games.