So Alexander Ryking is a Tumblr blogger and one of Tumblr’s community “editors” for politics. He thinks of himself as a liberal.
He is also a raging misogynist who regularly calls women “cunts” and tells feminists to “kill yourselves you feminazi twats.”
In recent days he’s turned his douchebag-o-meter up to 11. As a result, there’s now a petition up on Change.org to have him removed as a politics editor on Tumblr. It’s already gotten more than 3000 signatures, with several hundred new signatures added in the time it’s taken me to write this post.
Here’s unknowable woman, a frequent target of his cyber-wrath, with more details on his recent meltdown. (Read the post on her Tumblr blog for links to the evidence of his douchebaggery.)
Alexander Ryking, who has a history of attempting to silence women bloggers (he told Jess of STFUConservatives and the other “feminazis” to “go kill themselves” several months ago, and has also been rude to women of color but I haven’t been on Tumblr long enough to have personally witnessed that), defended The Amazing’s Atheist’s violent rape threats on Reddit by tagging his posts with “I support TAA.”
I and many, many other Tumblr users were disgusted by this, so we decided to tag our criticisms of Ryking that night with “Ryking’s banana republic”—a reference to his co-opting of [social justice] concepts, NOT a homophobic dig, and the person who coined it was a queer man anyway. Someone also wrote a few jokingly romantic lines about Ryking’s blind defense of TAA and new atheism, and Ryking interpreted this as homophobic and misandric…it wasn’t, but because I reblogged it, Ryking insists that I am now a homophobe, which is hilarious given my own sexual identity but whatever.
We also responded to some of his posts with pictures of extreme close-ups of our eyes.
Seriously. That is what this guy is calling “abuse.”
We did NOT threaten him, make personal attacks against his sexuality, tell him to go kill himself, send him rude messages, or commit any other acts that could reasonably be interpreted as the “cyberbullying” Ryking claims it is. I did temporarily change my URL to rykingsbananarepublic and I make no apologies for that. Why should I? Why shouldn’t a group of feminists and their allies be allowed to respond creatively to misogyny? The only actual cyberbullying that has taken place was TAA’s initial rape threats on Reddit; I wouldn’t even go so far as to claim Ryking’s tweets to me and other Twitter users are cyberbullying, though I leave it up to the other people who were insulted by him to label their experiences as bullying or not.
Anyway, a few nights later, I tweeted something in defense of Whitney Houston’s legacy, and suddenly there was Ryking going ballistic. He found me on Twitter, called me a cunt right off the bat, and insisted that I claimed Whitney Houston’s death was “more important than the death of 5,000 Syrians” (I didn’t! Here is what I actually said!). I had never exchanged tweets with this man before, and was confused about his sudden interest in my thoughts about Whitney Houston and Syria. Naturally, I responded, told him how wrong he was, and the next day I screencapped some of the things he said and posted them … I never expected that post to get the amount of notes it did, but I think that just goes to show how widespread the dislike for him is.
Ryking, for his part, has responded to the widespread criticism by striking the pose of a victim, and pretending that it is somehow all related to race. Apparently, the evil feminazis are impugning his white manhood, though he’s not white.
So-called feminists have subjected me to white-bashing comments (even though I’m Hispanic) and sexist attacks impugning my manhood (slash-fiction scenes featuring me and heterosexual men; being called faggot; being told to man-up; insults about my body;) by people who don’t realize I’m gay. After nearly two decades online, I learned early on that when you’re attacked, you defend yourself by attacking right back and just as viciously, if not more so. And that’s what exactly what I’ve done. …
What’s really at issue here is not my rude behavior but that you and others like you want to punish any man who refuses to conform to your rancid, misandrist orthodoxy by discounting everything he says and using his gender and race as the excuse for doing so. …
You don’t want me stripped of my editorial privilege based on my behavior but because I reject your sick, bigoted, misandrist (per)version of feminism.
Yep, apparently the dude who loves to call women “cunts” is the final arbiter of what is and what isn’t “true feminism.” Who knew?
I signed the petition. How about you?
Yeah, pretty sure Nathan is MRAL. He’s not using the same IP address(es), but it turns out he’s using some that can’t be traced to a real world location, so presumably they’re spoofed or fake or something. Sneaky sneaky!
Well, assuming you are not him you would have to have been here awhile to know all that you know about him. I can’t imagine he talks much about himself on mra sites, so I’m guessing you learned this here. The fact that he is in Boston/in college is something thats really not brought up that much so you pretty much have to be a regular to know him that well (or you are him).
Oh, so now you know him?
Never mind that your story keeps changing, you type exactly like him and you have the same bugbears and stubborn misconceptions.
…Including, I’m guessing, the misconception that you “need” to come here under a false name because we won’t take you seriously because we decided not to like you, instead of understanding that we won’t take you seriously because of the things you have said and done.
And this is better than I expect any of Elam’s little flunkies to do with “I AM NOT GOINGT O NULLIFY THIS LAW”.
Holly: Talking only about my own experience, my father got no END of shit for going on the “mommy track” and sacrificing his career, because he could have gotten promotions and become successful and didn’t his wife want to take care of the kids? Apparently some people were under the impression that my mom forced him to, because “he wants to watch his kids grow up” is completely impossible. I think women who do similarly probably suffer from less sheer DO NOT COMPUTE.
@David Futrelle, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m sitting here in my house in CA, so far as I know using a single IP. I do know MRAL; he’s a passing member of the AVfM community which I am also a passing member of. I can’t speak to the fact that I type like him; if I do, what of it? Either way, I’m going. Goodbye.
MRAL. Spoofed IPs? For shame.
You don’t get why we don’t want you here. Too bad. You have a high IQ, figure it out.
But . . .but we would have liked him once! He was such a sweet kid!
I know I cannot imagine why an abusive person is not welcome wherever he goes.
Funny thing is that everyone using a pseudonym on the interwebs is judged by their words and actions alone. Changing that ‘nym has absolutely no effect save forcing people to rehash over the same shit while trying desperately to give the new poster the benefit of the doubt.
Terribly bad form, and unquestionably rude. /posh
Bostonian – Oh no, don’t use that word!
You know how he gets when you use that word.
Holly, you mean he gets more abusive? Yes, I have seen that to be true.
Which word–abusive or creepy? Right now he’s qualifying as both.
Although I wouldn’t call it exactly abusive on its own, inability to respect the fact that you’ve been put on moderation is in itself indicative of a lack of respect for boundaries.
It’s saying that David has no right to control his own blog, and that it’s okay to lie and sneak in order to subvert that right.
David set a boundary–he said “you are not welcome in my space,” and rather than going “bummer, but I’ll leave”, MRAL decided that he would not allow David to make this decision. That he would force his way past it, multiple times, using all kinds of tricks. He wants to comment here, and that’s that.
It’s kind of scary shit if you think about it.
It’s very scary, and it’s a good thing there’s no woman in his life right now.
MRAL, if you’re reading, I don’t mean the above in a snarky way, I mean it in a GET HELP way.
So that’s three flounces in this thread alone?
Thing is, every time he does not go all the way to totally abusive, he wants a damn cookie for it.
The hate for women,though, still bakes through, every time.
I want to see a day when MRAL brings all of his sock-puppets on to the same thread, then flounces all of them at once in some sort of super-flounce.
Then fail to stick it by coming back. That would be fun to watch.
It’s also masochistic, since he’s repeatedly said that some of the comments directed towards him have hurt him, and we’ve all seen how so many of the innocuous comments drive him into frothy rage. His continued presence here is so fucking bizarre, and the fact that he works so hard to maintain a presence here is just unfathomable.
No, not really. I mean, he says that, but that’s just how he tries to manipulate us.
I don’t usually say this, but I am not usually dealing with a lying, abusive shit (MRAL, not you); He never lost control. He could always manage to say what he wanted to in his ragetyping, f’rex. The feigned loss of rage was a poor attempt at manipulation. He wanted us to fear him.
Who was it who said that MRAL is the pupal stage of NWO?
That was me! Actually I said he was the larval stage at the time.
I think he has entered the pupal stage now.
On men and kids. I’ve been an au pair. I don’t know if it’s still the case that Sweden won’t issue an au pair visa to anyone but a woman, but that was the case in 1992.
Flip-side. When I was being the regular baby-sitter most recently (2006-7). I was still in the Army, and so looked more traditionally male, and I got all sorts of positive attention. It would start with people thinking it was my kid, and then I’d explain it wasn’t, and I’d get all sorts of praise for being so good with him (he was a 4 month old).
I never got the least idea that anyone thought I was a threat to children.
Dracula: Yep. Just as there’s a kind of man society likes, speaking very broadly, of course. Thing is, the ideal woman is still held to be inferior to the ideal man.
Hell, a lot of women (even “ideal” women) are considered to be inferior to non-ideal men.
Cassandra: My pastor’s daughter, when I was in Monterey, had been playmate of the year. Her life wasn’t free of misogyny, even though she was pretty, smart and, when all was said and done, fairly traditional (she married a Marine Captain. She also didn’t approve of my getting engaged. She was right, it was a bad idea).
Nathan: And as I’ve repeated ad naseum, Cassandra, society does have contempt for all men in a sense- just one example of which is the idea that men are predatory. The “ideal man” won’t experience this much, but it will still affect his life.
No. See above, where I discuss how society saw me (more than once, with almost 20 years between the last iteration, and the most recent), as just fine with children.
It’s also not as if men aren’t being place in positions where they are both in regular contact with children, and in positions of power over those who are in contact with children (most elementary school principals are men, same for high school deans).
I’ve rarely seen a female gymnastics coach. That’s a job where a predatory male has a lot of opportunity, but it doesn’t seem to stop people letting them coach their daughters.
The stupid? Don’t think so. Anyone with two brain cells can see that men face contempt in society,
So you are making a blanket assertion that everyone who disagrees with you is stupid (i.e. has not two brain cells to rub together). Good luck with that one, because you just said pretty much everyone on the planet (including a lot of people a hell of a lot smarter than I am; or at least a lot more versed in this subject) are abject morons.
And you’ve been making arguments by repetition, which isn’t a fallacy, just a case of fail. It’s you being so wedded to your pet theory that your lack of evidence; combined with your lack of ability to persuade, is making you think that if you just say it often enough the lot of us will have a “lightbulb moment” and come to agree with you.
Which is stupid, because we’ve been giving you arguments to buttress our position. Telling us you already told us, “The truth” and we were just too stupid to understand is, at the very least, poor strategy.