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my tumblr, they found a twitter acct that I don’t even use, they even found an old [dating site] profile of mine with outdated info …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.
Hé! A French compatriote has found the way to the manboobz-planet! Welcome to you Yellaine, I was beginning to feel very lonely being the only proud representative of the country of cheese and surrendering in this lovely place.
@esmnmb
In the page you linked to:
It is similar to what our pleasant red-haired Canadian activist shouted in the faces of these threatening Mras (between two shut the fuck up fuckface)
As far as I know, it’s not the institution of patriarchy which creates and supports these grotesque laws which deny men’s presumption of innocence and allow women to make false accusations against men without fearing of being prosecuted.
Otherwise, all these feminists and women’s right advocates which promote those unfair laws are unconsciously misguided by the invisible hand of the patriarchy. This is possible, knowing of sneaky the evil patriarchy is.
Um, I don’t think homophobia is necesarily due to the patriarchy.
However I also know that false rape accusations are Not A Thing, Brz
I’m like Howard Bannister, and giving this a side eye, too. Usually, when men talk about their reproductive rights, it either comes to them wanting “paper abortions” or the power to deny women their right to choose. If you’re wanting cis men to have the right to an abortion, I can’t help you, because cis men don’t get pregnant. If you’re wanting men to have a veto power over their pregnant partner’s decision to abort, I also won’t help you. The pregnant person is the one who makes the choice, because it’s their body at stake during the pregnancy and delivery.
Now for parental rights, this is another problem caused by patriarchy. Society expects women to do the lion’s share of work raising children. The work is exhausting and undervalued, just like the work of taking care of elderly people, so some dads just assume mom can do it all. In order for more men to get more custody, they will need to do more caregiving from the get go. It’s not a good idea for a married dad to leave it all to mom, and then when the divorce papers come, decide “Hey, now I want to be an involved dad”.
Even so, if a dad wants 50/50 custody, and asks for it, he will have a good chance of getting it as long as he’s not abusive and doesn’t have substance abuse issues to work out. I’m pretty skeptical about men bringing up custody issues, just because I’ve seen too many MRA’s whose real agenda is the ability to make mothers do all of the work of raising children, but the dad has a final say on decision making and of course, doesn’t have to contribute a penny to the mom or kids.
I think you are missing the point here. This was someone representing a mob that formed with the intent of taking away the right of the group to have their meeting and have a couple of published authors speak. The protesters went into the building shouting and chanting to the point where the speakers who had microphones still couldn’t be heard. They pulled the fire alarms and did everything in their power to make sure the men’s issues group couldn’t have their meeting. This is the second time something similar happened at U of Toronto. The first time was when noted men’s advocate (and incidentally 3 time board member of NOW, and the only man to hold that distinction) Warren Farrell, and they barred the doors in effort to keep him from speaking.
No matter what the men are wrong, and that’s why they are angry. I’m not going to defend the actions of a few dozen bad seeds out of the millions on the internet, but imagine, just imagine for one second what the media coverage would be like if all the roles were reversed. If somehow a college had gained a track record for having mostly male protesters shut down feminist meetings. You are losing the real story and instead running with the SHOCKING news that “some people on youtube said dumb shit” like we don’t all damn well know you find the same stupid comments on everything. I promise you if you go to just about any video with a sufficient number of views there are people there saying all kinds of horrible things. I mean I just happened to have a youtube video open with judge judy and I looked at it and guess what? Everyone in the comments is horrible.
Furthermore you neglect to mention that this wasn’t her only video. She’s poorly making the case that feminism is in fact addressing all the issues they have on the table there. I don’t know why if they agree as she is claiming that they would want to keep the other group from assembling instead of working together, but that’s something only someone as deeply hostile and awful as Chanity could comprehend. A normal person would want to link the two groups together.
Also it’s being omitted that no one was really upset by the fact she was loud and unpleasant, the part that made people angry is in another video. Some of the people from the meeting that was dispersed asked her if feminism was working on the discrepancy in male suicide rates and she started singing “Cry me a river”. I mean every year men kill themselves at a very high rate, and her answer is to make a joke out of it. She isn’t even laughing, she’s making a spiteful face like she really enjoys the fact she’s making people as miserable and angry as she must be all of the time. This is really shitty. If you are going to talk about someone being harassed online, it’s unfair to represent it as being for reasons other than the reasons why people were angry in the first place.
I wasn’t refering specifically to false rape accusations in my comment, but, yeah, anyway, if for you that’s “Not A Thing”, if you think that alleged (female) victims of rape always tell the truth, there’s no need for presumption of innocence, in fact, there’s no need for any fair trial at all : a woman just have to point a man and says “he raped me” and we put him in jail. Easy.
I don’t know why feminists would be against men worrying about their own health issues without them, but you know, Toronto. The thing is she goes on about how feminists are already working toward any goals men could have for their own health, well being, and societal position, and when confronted with statistics about men’s suicide, dismisses it by singing. Of course the men’s right’s goons don’t know what to do with this and are yelling “GO LOOK AT GRAVE SITES” or whatever morons say, but that’s a problem. There is an automatic assumption that it’s just better to be a man. Everything is roses for men. Suicide is a joke, as long as it’s privileged men pulling the trigger.
http://doccarnage.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/as-far-as-feminism-goes/
ensmrb: I’m a bit confused at your claim that you’re still working on creating a blog, because you already have a blog. And, judging by it, your claims that you want to be very careful to have everything just right before putting it out there fall a bit flat.
Wait… you think that thinking false rape accusations are common enough to be the issue MRAs think they are means we should do aware with fair trials?
WTF?
ensmrb: so much for distancing yourself from the MRM, huh?
Brz: shut up. Enough of your bullshit, faux-French.
I guess by “men’s reproductive rights” he could mean a male pill…
…But if so he’s really misusing the word “rights,” which rather implies that men are being denied something, rather than that it simply doesn’t exist yet (in FDA approved form).
Shut up, nopestories, the grownups are talking.
Just ignore him.
katz: whoops.
Fuck off nopestories.
Ignore the buzzing of these two angry trolls. (Just a suggestion, since they’re neither interesting nor entertaining.)
esmnmb, I think you have lots of work to do, and you need to go off and do that work rather than talking about it here.
What a strange game. The only winning move is… not to be nopestories.
I don’t understand this sentence. “we should do aware with fair trials” ?
Hey, this might be stupid, but has anyone heard from kirbywarp yet?
Come back any time you’re less likely to proclaim people mentally ill based on out-dated definitions of the term and a misunderstanding of the phrase “disorder”.
We’ll still be here 🙂
meant away
you are such a cool edgy rebel who definitely isn’t starving for attention
can i be like you please teach me teach me
Edgy is kind of a compliment, so yay?
Reading this is so weird…i feel like nope actually realized what an asshole they were and is now trying to cover it up by pretending to slowly lose their mind *the shining’-style…
Anyways, sorry, I should be ignoring noPESTories.