UPDATE: I have no reason to believe that the harassment alleged by Kyle Lovett — which I discuss below — involved anyone even tangentially connected to this site, or indeed that it ever happened. The “evidence” he provided only showed that he got traffic from a link on this site. He never provided any evidence that the alleged harassment occurred or that, if if did, it was perpetrated by anyone who found his site through my site. The rest of my piece still stands.
The other day, a commenter here linked to the blog published by one of the moderators of the Men’s Rights subreddit. Kyle Lovett, the mod in question, says that not long afterwards, someone contacted his workplace saying that he was a member of a “hate group.” Claiming to be concerned about his safety, he temporarily hid his blog. And stepped down as mod.
Lovett says he suspects that this person who he says contacted his work is a Man Boobz reader, and has now provided evidence that seems to back up this suspicion. If Kyle is indeed telling the truth about the harassment, it was a Man Boobz reader who contacted his workplace. (There is no evidence it was one of the regulars here, merely someone who was reading the comments in that one thread. Nor am I completely convinced that the alleged harassment happened; Lovett has lied about things in the past.)
But if the harassment happened let me be blunt: That’s not cool. I don’t like that sort of harassment when it’s directed at feminists, and I don’t like it when it’s directed at MRAs. As Rebecca Watson once said, in a different context, “guys, don’t do that.” Seriously, DON’T DO THAT.
All this said, Lovett and other MRAs are acting as if the link to his blog here was in some way equivalent to “doxing” – that is, tracking down the personal information of someone posting anonymously, and posting it online, for purposes of harassment..
It isn’t. Kyle publishes his blog under his own name, and he regularly posted links to it on Reddit. It was no secret that he posted on Reddit as Qanan, just as my real name Is no secret.
I’m not sure why it’s necessary to point this out, but I will anyway: If you publish things on the internet under your own name, people will indeed connect your name to these things. There is absolutely nothing wrong with posting a link to someone’s blog. No one here advocated harassment in any way.
Needless to say, the indignation on the Men’s Rights about this is hypocritical, to say the least. MRAs harass feminists all the time.
A Voice for Men, the worst offender in this regard, has published the personal information of feminists, and once put out a thousand dollar bounty in an attempt to find out the identity of one feminist who had been posting anonymously online. AVFM head Paul Elam talks about “stalking” feminists and on his radio show gleefully discussed the prospect of not only revealing the names and addresses of women he considers evil, but also their routes home from work. He orchestrated a harassment campaign against one commenter here, which led to people contacting her workplace in an attempt to get her fired. There are many more examples.
Meanwhile, today on the Men’s Rights subreddit, one commenter’s call to harass a woman got two dozen upvotes from the regulars:
Guys, don’t do that.
EDIT: I have added a few comments in the post above to highlight my concerns that the alleged harassment may be a fabrication; I will remove these comments of Lovett provides proof, publicly or privately, that the harassment occurred.
I just checked and all of Kyle Lovett’s comments from $1000 Reward for Vliet Tiptree are now erased. Other people still have responses to him thanking him for doing the work to find out the woman’s publisher. He still has a comment to a man working on the Swedish SCUM play in another thread (until it gets deleted now that I’m mentioning it, lol). He said,
I do think it’s fair to say that he is hypocritical about cyberstalking and doxxing. He was all about tracking down vliet tiptree’s personal information, and being hostile to a member of a Swedish play group. That doesn’t make it right for anyone to contact his employer, though. Two wrongs don’t make a right. I would like outsiders to look at feminists’ behavior and see how people respond to misogyny with humor or counterarguments, not harassment. When they see things like register her and the bounties made by AVfM, they can see what the MRA’s are about. The meaner they get, the more they discredit themselves. We don’t have to do that because we have the truth on our side.
Owly darling, if you’re working eighty hours a week to support your children and only seeing them occasionally, then you can continue to do that when divorced. For instance, you can work eighty hours a week, send a child support check, and see them every other weekend. You would be in literally the exact same situation as you were when married. That is not discrimination.
Of course, I HIGHLY doubt most men are working eighty hours a week to support their kids…
I don’t necessarily NOT support violence: I think there are circumstances in which it’s justified that aren’t immediate self-defense (for instance, in rebellion against a tyrannical government). However, I think that violence is definitely a last resort, and that violence against MRAs is taking them entirely too seriously and merely feeding their persecution complex.
Kyle Lovett’s comments from $1000 Reward for Vliet Tiptree are now erased
Noticed that. The comments I made on his blog post, calling him out on that, are gone as well. Whatta man.
Ithiliana, thank you – sincerely – for your hugs. This isn’t actually real upsetting to me, though it was very weird to see Kyle’s post putting my comment at the center of this teapot-tempest.. though he got the pseud wrong. “Cotton Tail Pony” is very cute, however: sort of a rabbit-horse chimera? I’ll consider it.
The only excuse for denying a man equal custody if he wants it is that the divorced woman hates the man she divorced.
Let’s say that (TW for explicit description of abuse in this sentence) a woman was beating her children to the point that they were regularly at the hospital, never fed them until they reached the point of starvation, screamed at them constantly that they were worthless, and had raped them; she has said that she will kill them if she’s alone with her kids. (Of course, this is extreme, but once the principle is established we can sort out details.) Would you support her having equal custody if she wanted it? Would you say that the father’s desire for her not to have custody was rooted in hatred?
Why would it be different if it were a man?
It’s too bad I didn’t make screencaps, because now he can just deny he ever wrote that. I don’t have a screencapping tool on my browser, though, or if I do, I don’t know how to use it. Oh well, I know what I read and I’m not going to let him do gaslighting on me and say it’s all in my imagination.
Kendra: The Wayback Machine might have the deleted blog posts.
Also, “best interest of the child”, this is not a meaningless phrase. To a child, the person who has been their primary caretaker, who makes them breakfast, who reads them stories, who looks after them when they are sick-that makes a huge difference, and disrupting a child’s life and personal ties is no small thing. Taking a child and telling them they suddenly now have to spend half of their time away from the person who has been caring for them and spend it with what may be in many cases a virtual stranger, is rough on the child. Having a bias in favor of the primary caretaker (of any gender) makes sense when one pauses to consider that children are people, and custody decisions are supposed to take their interests into account.
A cottontail horse?
@AMZB
I’m around the TO way too. I just moved from North York to Woodbridge a couple of months ago, so I’m not in Toronto anymore.
@NWO
I know it’s hard for you to comprehend facts and statistics but, contested custody cases i.e. using “State violence”, tend be close to 50/50 on who gets custody. The majority of uncontested custody cases, i.e. not using “State violence”, tend to result in women getting primary custody.
Reality NWO, it doesn’t change if you yell at it.
Generally, when someone says they’ve been harassed, I believe them. I have doubts about Kyle’s story because I don’t think he’s been honest with me or about me in the past, and because I think he likes to stir up internet drama. (He quits as mod, he returns as mod, he makes his blog private, he makes it public again, etc etc.)
Also, the alleged harassment came very quickly after he posted a comment here saying, “you guys have doxed me!” (Which of course we hadn’t.)
I don’t have proof of this, so I’m not going to say that his story is false. Just that I, personally, don’t believe it.
@ozymandias42
I’m afraid your math is flawed. If a man works 80 hours a week, a far cry from the 50 or 60 I said, he does that to support 3 people. He does it out of love and caring, he is as much a primary caretaker for his efforts.
After the divorce he would be only supporting himself and his child 1/2 the time, equal custody. He could then work 40 hours a week and offer the same financial support to his child and free up 40 hours to spend with that child. The only excuse that could be offered to not give him equal custody would be the hatred of man.
What right does any woman have to deny a man the right to love, care for, and spend time with his children? How can men be equal parents when the very people complaining they don’t spend enough time with their children, forbid them to even see their children?
—————
This hate policy is the same as every woman specific policy.
Deny men access to their children, then pull up stats how only women care for children.
DV is the same. Create laws where men are always the “primary aggressor” depending on who shows more emotional distress and then beat men over the head with stats that only men are DV perpetrators.
—————-
Where does it end? Why do you bother with your bogus site that is supposedly helping men? Be sure to include your opinion as to why you support the neccesity to deny men the right to love and care for their children, other than being an ATM. Is that the love and care you’ll allow men show their children? Should men be grateful for the generosity women like you show us?
NWO, do you enjoy posting the same lies over and over and then having them pointed out as lies? Couldn’t you read a Star Wars novel or something?
I… don’t? I talk about fatherhood all the time! My official position on custody is that society should move towards accepting men as primary caregivers of their children when they want to be, and that by simultaneously making more men primary caregivers and eliminating the assumption that women are the “real” parents we will gain equal custody.
NWO, you don’t really get how 60-hour-a-week jobs work, do you? You don’t get to just be like “so, I’m only going to be working forty hours now.” You’re pretty much stuck with working ridiculous hours, or you get fired.
Also why do you assume that that person wants equal time with their children? My mother was a great parent, but as a part-time parent and provider; my father would have received primary physical custody if they divorced, simply because she got more fulfillment out of working than being home at 3 to pick up the kids, and there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.
How can men be equal parents when the very people complaining they don’t spend enough time with their children, forbid them to even see their children?
I just wanted to highlight the masterpiece of stupidity and misdirection that was that sentence.
NWO, how much time are you going to have to spend with your family if you are spending 80 hours a week at work? Srsly, on a schedule like that, you’re basically just gonna commute, eat, and fall into bed. You’re not going to be able to tuck your kids in at night, help them with their homework, or pick them up from school. You may bring them money, but you and them will be strangers to each other.
In NWO’s scenario, women never work, of course.
Two points.
Circumstantial evidence doesnt hold up. Someone clicking on a link here and then someone reporting him at work are not necessarily related. If a bunch of blog reads were from one IP address that does not mean they are the same one who called his work. Maybe they liked his writing.Theres no causal link. Theres only timing and some overlap in subject matter. Everything else is some kind of projection.
He has called other MRA guys crackpots and quacks, that they wanted to live in 1800 or whatever, said he thought women should have equal opportunities and other stuff. We all know how well that goes down with some people. How does he know its not one of his own crew feeling betrayed?
@ozymandias42
As always, Ozy, You miss the point completely. Father isn’t just some made up legal statute. It is as an inailenable right. It isn’t a right that can be taken away. Child custody is not something that can be negotiated like a bargaining chip. I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed by your godstate.
Do name the conditions by which the State allows a man to retain custody of his children.
To be fair, that depends on the job. I burned out of a job working 54 hours a week and they let me cut back to 40.
But whatever. The bigger issue here is that NWO doesn’t know the difference between “Dad sees the the kids several times a week and they stay with him on the weekends, but Mom has primary custody” and “Dad has no visitation and a restraining order.”
Holly: Fair enough, I shouldn’t have overgeneralized. But for at least a very significant proportion of sixty-hour-a-week jobs, the hours are to a certain degree out of your control.
Re: work hours.
Here’s a fascinating piece on what counts as work when it’s the CEOs who do it:
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/03/13/wheres-the-boss-and-what-counts-as-work/
Oh gods please no. No one deserves that.
CHILREN ARE PEOPLE! HOW MANY FUCKING TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS?
when friends of mine were going through a bad patch, he told me he was going for full custody because he knew it would hurt her. and he was the one who had cheated on her, by the way.
his wife, during their separation, went out of her way to ensure the kids saw their dad, didn’t involve the kids in their fights and maintained to everyone that he may be not such a great husband but he was a great dad.
i listened to both of them (complicated situation) through the whole episode and i know she always put the kids first. He consistently referred to them as ways to inflict pain on her. whilst he had other legitimate grievances (i felt) about the relationship, as did she, i still remember him telling me about his custody plans and the look of spite on his face.
They have since reconciled but if they had divorced and if for some reason he had got the kids full time, they would have gone into full time daycare Mon-Fri. a regular working week, including travel time would have mandated this. so he wouldn’t have any more time with the kids than before, they would be in formal daycare which costs a helluva lot and her quality of life would have been trashed for the sake of him inflicting revenge on her.
Yeah, she was such a misandrist.