And so the MRAs have found yet another woman to hate.
Earlier this month, as many of you no doubt know, a Men’s Rights group sponsored a lecture at the University of Toronto. The event drew protesters, and the protesters drew MRAs with video cameras. One of the MRAs filmed a confrontation between a red-haired feminist activist and a number of MRAs who continually interrupted her as she tried to read a brief statement.
Her crime? She wasn’t exactly polite in responding to the interrupters. And so, after video of the confrontation was uploaded to YouTube, and linked to on the Men’s Rights subreddit and elsewhere, she became a virtual punching bag for the angry misogynists of the internet.
A Voice for Men, naturally, led the charge, running an article by Canadian MRA Dan Perrins labeling her “Little red frothing fornication mouth” and commenting on her breasts. The Amazing Atheist weighed in with a video I couldn’t bring myself to even watch.
Since being targeted by angry YouTube misogynists and MRAs, the red-haired activist has received death threats, rape threats and literally hundreds of other hateful and harassing messages. She’s also been “doxxed” — that is, she’s had her personal information plastered all over the internet, including on A Voice for Men’s forum. Ten days after being uploaded to YouTube, the video of her faceoff against the MRAs has garnered more than 300,000 views, and YouTubers are still leaving threats and insults and crude sexual comments.
This, apparently, is what “Men’s Human Rights Activism” consists of: the doxxing and harassment of individual women.
Several days ago, she contacted me to tell me about the harassment she’s endured. Here’s some of what she wrote:
I’m the red-head. I’m sure by now, you’re one of the 260,000 people who have seen the video of me … .
Because I had the audacity to tell a dude to stfu, an MRA no less, I have since been the target of not only just online misogyny (as if that’s a surprise) but cyber stalking, rape and death threats. They somehow found my facebook, they found my tumblr, they found a twitter acct that I don’t even use, they even found an old [dating site] profile of mine with outdated info …
I also got an anonymous message on tumblr that specifically said “[name deleted] would be disappointed”. [Name deleted] is my dog that died 1.5 years ago, I don’t talk about him on tumblr, nor fb, so they would have had to reaaaaalllly dig to find this info. …
In about 12-24hours, I got about400-500 new messages on my blog, most of them hate, which included rape and death threats, also people wishing death upon me or the typical troll “kill yourself” message. They made a meme of me.
I dunno how many haters I have, and I don’t know where they are. I can’t be sure at any given second, if I’m ever outside my house … if anyone is going to recognize me and try to hurt me.
With her permission, I am reposting screenshots she sent me documenting some of the harassment she’s endured. Even though her personal information has already been widely disseminated online, I don’t want to contribute to that, so I’ve whited out any information that might reveal her identity.
TRIGGER WARNING for what follows, for threatening language and crude sexual remarks.
Here’s a death threat she received from someone claiming to represent the “Islamic Brotherhood.”
Here are some sample comments from her Tumblr inbox. I’ve whited out comments and parts of comments that consist of her contact info, which being sent to her in an attempt to intimidate and frighten her by letting her know they “know where she lives.”
Here’s another threatening comment sent to her via Tumblr:
Here are some comments sent to her via her YouTube account. You’ll notice that the second comment comes from AVFM’s Dan Perrins, who is clearly relishing the attacks on her.
And another glimpse into her YouTube inbox:
Here’s a screenshot from a Men’s Rights forum revealing her personal information.
Meanwhile, over on YouTube, the hateful comments continue to pile up. Here are some of the nastiest ones I’ve collected. I am deliberately posting a lot of them in an attempt to convey something of the relentless nature of the attacks on teh red-haired activist — though I should note I’ve only gone through a small portion of the total comments there and this doesn’t even reflect all of the awful ones I found. These are not in any particular order. I threw in a few non-threatening ones that struck me as a tad ironic or otherwise revealing.
Again, this is only a small fraction of the abuse she’s gotten on YouTube.
This is what happens when MRAs and other misogynists target a woman online. The only thing that’s surprising here is the sheer amount of the hateful comments.
I’ve seen no serious attempts from any MRAs to rein in this sort of hatred. A Voice for Men has tried to distance itself in a superficial way from some of the harassment it has played a central role in unleashing, with an official announcement asking readers to refrain from posting the personal information of the red-haired activist in the comments. Meanwhile, in the AVFM forum, comments linking to her defunct dating profiles remain up.
This is what MRA “activism” looks like.
Coming tomorrow: A more detailed look at AVFM’s role in the harassment.
Did anyone email David? I’ll email David.
When you find yourself getting enjoyment out of being an asshole on the internet, well, it’s time to take a good hard look at your life, nopestories.
You are not conversing. You’re just occasionally typing irrelevant, disgusting stuff and calling it conversing.
you’re not hurting my feelings, buddy.
Hey, everyone else, let’s ignore the transphobic troll since clearly attention is what zie wants. Also, David has been summoned. 🙂
Yellaine, simply read through their site and it isn’t hard to see that they are a men’s rights advocate.
hellkell, We are working on setting up a blog. Right now we are focusing on our platform. We want to define clearly who we are and what we stand for or against before jumping into the unforgiving internet.
No, they don’t align with the majority of MRA’s out there. When my group launches we will avoid using the trems MRA, Men’s rights advocate, MRM, and anything else that would suggest connection to those groups. We hope to one day be able to claim those terms as they have become twisted, and meaningless. The movement was hijacked by misogynist, prepubesent idiots who contribute to society’s misconception of men. If there is any other term to use other than MRA, please suggest it.
@esmnmb, Yeah, what everyone else said. I think MRM/MRA etc. as a name have all been pretty well poisoned, so you might want to come up with something new. Get back to us when you’ve organized something, since right now you’ve got nothing to show and we’re mostly pretty cynical. (I shouldn’t speak for anyone else I suppose, but that’s my guess.)
cloudiah: I’ll believe esmnmb when I see it.
Thanks for summoning the Dark Lord.
esmnmb, I’m not asking if they are men right’s advocates. (I thought ‘A’ stood for activists), but if they are MRAs, as in, do they accept this label, do they associate themselves with other MRAs. Huuuuuuuuuuge difference.
If you’re calling yourself MRA because you can’t think of an other word by yourselves, you’re either really lazy or lack fundamentally in creativity. Or are maybe a bit dishonest. Don’t know which.
Cloudiah and Hellkell, working on it. Keep an eye out for our group, it’s called Invisible men. Our main goals are to shed light on the growing number of male victims of sexual crimes and domestic violence, that society systematically chooses to ignore. We are also focused on ending society’s misconception of what is and is not normal male behavior. Our member ship is small as is our financial resources, none of us can dedicate too much time to this as we are active in other area, for instance we are also trying to start a local chapter or Navigators-usa.(http://navigatorsusa.org/)
So, ignoring the trolls, here’s something nice that was linked to from Pharyngula, an account of the Boston Marathon by one of the runners:
In praise of Boston
Thanks Ostrijj. This was really adorable http://streetmogs.blogspot.com.au/
Totally awesome brain-bleach
Yelling, Finding a word that doesn’t appear misogynistic at face value to describe your cause is hard to do. We fight for men’s rights and other issues they face. We have tried using the term Men’s issues awareness, but labeling ourselves MIA, while somewhat appropriate for an acronym, it doesn’t seem like a logical way to brand your movement.
Fun anecdote: our government is passing a law to open marriage and adoption to same sex couples. Yeah! So, obviously, homophobic people of all kind went down in the street (for the first time for many, and that saying something, given that’s France we’re talking about. We love our demonstrations) They called their big event “La manif pour tous” (the demonstration for everybody)
They chose a very inclusive name for a very exclusive thing.
Which proves:
– homophobs are either not self aware at all or have a twisted sense of humor
– the name of a group means crap.
If the “Activists for Kittens, Consensual Jedi Hugs and Rainbow” are to enslave the world, then I won’t call myself a AKCJHR nor try to rehabilitate the name.
Men Against the Patriarchy? Because lots of the issues like assuming men can’t be victims, showing your emotions is feminine and therefore bad, … stem from the patriarchy.
*Yellaine – stupid autocorrect.
“Finding a word that doesn’t appear misogynistic at face value to describe your cause is hard to do.”
The website you linked, NOMAS, seems to be doing alright in this regard. If finding a name is too hard, wait till the actual issues arrives.
Also it doesn’t have to be an acronym. You don’t actually even need a label. ‘No label’ is better than MRA.
Fade:
That is true. My apologies; I banged that out quickly before work, and was thinking more about addressing the MRA worldview than anything.
MRAs seem to try to ignore the existence of trans people entirely, and focus their stupid ideas on cis-gendered people. Their greatest vitriol seems to be aimed at those they perceive as biological females. So I was trying to make the point that being a vagina-haver does not somehow change one’s brain into something other than human.
I am sorry it came off as ignoring trans people.
Fade, we want to avoid anything suggesting men are the sole cause humans face today. Patriarchy was put in place by society as a whole. Sadly it wall also take society as a whole to end it. We’ve even thought of using masculinism, but that suggests we are opposing feminism. We also don’t want to be seen as gender specific as we do have a few female members.
esmnmb: Chie, I know all about the no true scotsman fallacy. The reason I don’t consider MRA’s that spew this stuff to be legitimate MRA’s is based on my opinion that nobody that stands for human rigths and equality would oppose feminism outright.
While I agree with your summation (that what they believe makes their stated positin untenable/false/a knowing lie), that doesn’t change that they are your movement.
They are because (if we accept your claim) “most legitimate MRAs” have a hard time because of the associations the mainstream MRM have created, it’s because “most legitimate MRAs have let them become the movement
Me, I’ve been looking at them for 20 years, or so. Newsflash, they didn’t take over. They have always been “The Movement”. You wanna claim the mantle, and take up those reasonable things you say are what, “the legitmate MRM” is all about… do the work.
As an aside, if NOMAS has been around since 1975, and one page is the best website you can manage… I don’t think associative reputation from the MRM (which nothing on that site implies) is the real problem.
Yellaine, simply read through their site and it isn’t hard to see that they are a men’s rights advocate.
Yes, it is.
Aw… nopestories still thinks that my being disabled is somehow a refution, or a thing which I am ashamed of.
Protip, when someone shares a fact with the world, and in detail, it has no sting as an insult.
He also thinks there is some great shame in a cut/paste error; as opposed to not making the needed double checks when posting a “you typed it wrong” gibe.
Then again, what he does is limited to pulling shit from his ass and expecting us to eat it with a spoon.
Where are the oppressed men?
Where are the bands of women in robes showing up to terrorise them in the night for, “stepping out of line.”?
Where is the equivalence you spouted?
Oh dude… @bahumbugi OH DOG.. you know someone is not thinking strait when they resort to talking about spelling words different instead of arguments!
Says the guy who went off about a quotation mark.
hellkell: Is this nopestories shithead our friend Pell?
I don’t think so. I am pretty sure this one has come to my wordpress blog. Not clever enough to be Pell, actually.
bahumbugi: nopester is a recurrne pustule. I’m pretty sure (from his tics) he’s posted here under at least one other handle, and has posted at my wordpress blog at least once.
Actual engagement (as you can see) isn’t his forte. He is of the furor = argument and insults = advocacy, sort of troll. One can’t even be sure he believes it.
I suspect his anger, at specific people comes from having been bested in the past; when using a different persona; before he learned that he wasn’t able to either win, nor start the sort of shitstorm drama troll live for.
:”Also it doesn’t have to be an acronym. You don’t actually even need a label. ‘No label’ is better than MRA.”
We know it doesn’t have to be an acronym. But they roll off the tongue and are easier to brand. I somewhat agree that no label at all is better than being associated with “MRA’.
Like I said, we are more concerned with our platform than coming up with a creative name for our movement. For now our group is called, Invisible Men: From invisible to indivisible.
Oh, Jesus. *rolls eyes*