Oh, Reddit, where the demographics are so skewed that virtually every discussion amongst and/or about women ultimately gets taken over by dudes doing the old “what about the dudes” routine. It’s no secret that the TwoXChromosomes subreddit has long been overrun with MRAs and FeMRAs. And now it’s become pretty clear that the Feminism subreddit has gone MRA as well.
If you want all the details of the drama, here’s a thread in the subreddit in which the feminists who’ve stuck with the subreddit take on the MRAs and MRA-symps amongst the mods.
Check out the Feminisms and SRSWomen subreddits if you want to discuss feministy stuff on Reddit without having to deal with endless derailing from MRAs and other shitlords.
EDITED TO ADD: More links:
SRS takes on the whole mess (lots of useful links).
SRS links to r/feminism mods defending MRAs
An r/feminism thread about the recent Captain Awkward posts about creeps that is, naturally, full of endless hang-wringing about the evils of “creep-shaming.”
(Thanks, Cliff, for the links.)
SHITLORDS!!!!! yes, this is the PERFECT term for MRAs and others of their ilk!!!
It’s disappointing that these asses have chosen to infect every corner of Reddit with their slime, but thanks for linking SRSWomen — “where mens get bens.” It’s very entertaining to see how they deal with the trolls.
That little boy in the page gif is a little shit. Look at him laugh.
Asshole.
For those who don’t mind pages of Internets Drama, SRS has a bit more detail on the whole situation here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/y8b9x/meta_rfeminism_just_updated_their_related/
And the result of all this is threads like this one, in which 90% of the posters are “anti-creep-shaming,” and one is defending attraction to 16-year-old girls:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Feminism/comments/y7ofz/the_c_word_captain_awkward_talks_about_creepy_and/
SO FEMINIST.
Or, oh God, this [TW for rape] shitshow:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Feminism/comments/y6ysk/no_means_no/
It’s like, yeah, there are feminists in the discussion, but they’re swamped by guys saying things like:
(Why do MRAs always think “what if you’re both drunk?” is going to break our brains like telling a computer “this statement is false”? If you’re both smashed drunk don’t have sex, and if you have sex anyway, it’s rape by whoever initiated it. This shit isn’t that complicated unless you don’t really believe in consent but are just looking for loopholes.)
Mention SRS on r/feminism? Instant delete, those people are evil bigots. Defend rape on r/feminism? IMPORTANT ALTERNATE VIEWPOINT, WE MUST ADDRESS IT POLITELY.
can we go burn some fedoras on Reddit’s lawn
srsly
Oop, one more link and then I’ll give it a rest:
http://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/wksar/meta_an_%C3%A9xp%C3%B3s%C3%A9_rfeminism_is_run_by_mras/
In which there are screencaps of basically every r/feminism mod vigorously defending “men’s rights”, or outright saying they’re an MRA.
They all think they’re God’s gift to logicians. They also think a “gotcha!” is an argument winner.
I think I’ve posted this before, but they all think they are the young woman in the feather boa in this video, and feminists are the poor computer she busts:
“what if we are both drunk” is such a stupid question. Its like asking if its okay to drive drunk if the pedestrian you hit is drunk too. Somehow I think their tiny brains could figure out how meaningless that question is.
so just what does r/feminism think feminism is?
“we defend a woman’s right to apologize to men when they make them slightly uncomfortable”
“we recognize women are first and foremost human beings with their own needs, unless some dude is afraid of a rape accusation”
“we support equality for people of all genders, but most definitely equality for men because otherwise we’d sound like gross lesbians”
Ugh. It’s people like that who make me want to scream “I don’t care if Benedict Cumberbach was hypothetically hitting on me, if he was doing it in an inappropriate place/time/manner, he would be creepy. And I’d stop thinking he was attractive afterwards.”*
* I was creeped on by guys I would otherwise find attractive on a couple of occassions. However, what sticks in my mind is that they were creepy!
The backlash to the Captain Awkward post is so weird. I mean, neither letter was anywhere near a “maybe he’s just shy and didn’t know he was making people feel uncomfortable” situation. Both guys were so clearly over the line, had been told they were over the line, and kept on creeping.
I seriously have no idea why “Knowingly making people around you feel uncomfortable is bad” is still a controversial idea anywhere in society.
Don’t ya just hate when men think for themselves? Women herd so easily. Why can’t men do the same?
SRSWomen is more of a safe space for women, not a place to talk about feminism per se. The newly created SRSFeminism might be a better place to link especially for male readers, who aren’t welcome on SRSWomen.
See, I want to defend reddit here, but at this point I’m pretty sure it’s just a knee jerk reaction left over from my neckbeard days. It’d still be nice if I could be unbanned from SRS though.
They just want an excuse to continue to make people feel uncomfortable and scared. I mean, most people realise that “you’re making me/other person feel uncomfortable” generally means “your bizarre medical history is not good casual conversation” or “not everyone wishes to subscribe to your mental issues”* et cetera et cetera.
These guys’ response is probably “YES! I made someone uncomfortable!” but they know that doing a butt-wiggling victory dance in public is somewhat unacceptable*, so they just point at everyone else and say “but they’re being oversensitive! And mean! I’m just socially awkward, but I’m a good-natured person really!”
* I have a slight oversharing problem which I am working to rectify
** and lose them creep-targets
Aw, NWO, your stock phrase doesn’t even make sense here.
If men want to “think for themselves” about whether feminism is a good thing, they can do it somewhere besides a dedicated feminism forum.
I hope I don’t regret asking this, but how in the world did you get banned from SRS
SRSFeminism sounds promising, but there aren’t any posts there yet.
Isn’t it odd how an aggressive, predictable herd of interchangeable dolts who all sound exactly alike are independent thinkers according to Owly?
I suspect this may have something to do with how Owly’s definition of Marxist includes Ayn Rand.
Kladle – SRS bans people a lot. I got banned once (got unbanned by apologizing to the mods and asking nicely) for sarcasm-indistinguishable-from-real-bigotry. It’s their style of moderation, and considering the constant influx of Redditors providing extremely-real-bigotry, it’s understandable.
Honestly, I think some of their rules are too strict, but I respect the fact that they enforce them fairly and zealously, and that the ultimate point of the rules is “no, you can’t be even a little bit sexist/homophobic/ableist here.”
Ah, Reddit drama.
Well wayyy back when I was slowly starting to come out of my MRA phase and learning about feminism, I was confused by much of the drama between SRS and the rest of reddit. On the one hand most of reddit holds some disdain for SRS for having a somewhat overzealous banning policy, or so they said, I’d never seen anything there that validated any of the hate, so I went on SRSmeta and posted questioning exactly why there was so much hate. A bot then informed me that my post was brought up on antisrs, and having considered myself a neutral party at the time, I went over to that thread to clarify that I was merely trying to make sense of everything that was going on. Turns out posting in antisrs at all results in an autoban, which somewhat upset me at the time, and started to reinforce some nasty aspects of my beliefs back then which I would really rather not dig up. I was also banned from SRSmeta due to the controversial nature of my post. Since then I’ve figured out exactly what I did wrong and have been trying to get myself unbanned.
I’ve really come to the conclusion that I was being admittedly a bit of a shitlord, though I was trying to be somewhat benign.