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my tumblr, they found a twitter acct that I don’t even use, they even found an old [dating site] profile of mine with outdated info …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.
um how did fire alarms pop up into this? There was no mention of fire alarms in the original post
I mean, Christ, I’ve heard all sorts of cruel wingnuttery from assholes before. And fuck, I wouldn’t wish hundreds of death and rape threats on FRED PHELPS, and he’s the most repulsive living human I can think of off hand.
So Clint, why should I give a shit and think it’s okay for this woman, who is no Fred Phelps?
God clintshit is annoying. Who wants to ignore him? I mean, you guys don’t have to if you’re having fun with him, but I’m bored now. I was having more fun with edude, cuz I felt like he had a slightly larger chance of getting the point. Clintshit’s just whining.
LBT, are you fucking dense? Show me where I said it was justified. i’ll save you the time, I not only said it didn’t but I said they were wrong.
My whole point is that there is a kind of one sided reporting going on here that lead to bahumbugi saying that it was because of a 0 tolerance to harassment while ignoring or being ignorant of the fact that the person being harassed was herself involved in harassment and intimidation
Fade that is precisely my point. David left out the fire alarms, the disorderly conduct, and all the other things that happened. My POINT was that the fire alarms weren’t mentioned in the OP
@clintisshit
Dude, you’re fucking implying it.
Um… anyone who is a semi reliable source? Because I am so not buying anything Clintshit says.
And Clintshit… EVEN IF THERE WAS UNRELIABLE REPORTING NO ONE WOULD DESERVE FUCKING RAPE AND DEATH THREATS! JESUS!
And the way that you are saying “no but (some bs I probably made up)” makes it SOUND like you think that if that is true, then she deserves the threats. Words. Can imply. Things. That are not exactly a word for word translation.
Hence, when people say “he scared me to death” I don’t assume they are a zombie.
You think I’m implying, but I said several times flat out in black and white text I don’t condone the response, but I think the framing of how things went down is completely disingenuous
RE: clintiskeen
LBT, are you fucking dense? Show me where I said it was justified. i’ll save you the time, I not only said it didn’t but I said they were wrong.
Look at the tagline, ya nimrod. We mock misogyny. That is what we’re here for. We are ergo mocking the misogynistic overreaction to her. We’re not talking about YOUR talking point. We’re talking about the post.
You’re the one coming in here like talking about basketball in a football forum is some brilliant act.
Women have the right to choose because pregnancy (usually) occurs inside a woman’s body, and thus she has a right to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. In an instance where a male gets pregnant, he would also have the right to terminate the pregnancy.
The idea of a “paper abortion” draws a false equivalence between a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and a man deciding he doesn’t want to support a child.
The equivalent of a woman having the choice to terminate a pregnancy occurring in her body is a man being able to terminate a pregnancy occurring in his body.
Not everything has an equal and opposite. Drawing false equivalence where there is none leads to shit like “Why isn’t there a WHITE History Month???” or “How come there aren’t STRAIGHT pride parades??!?” or “If slut shaming is a thing, then CREEP shaming must be a thing too, right??!”
(Protip: the male equivalent of shaming a woman for having “too much” sex, or “too many” sexual partners would be shaming a male for same, and this isn’t generally a thing because men are expected to always want sex).
If “mra’s” wanted to reduce their odds of having to support child they didn’t want, they could be doing things like:
1. Pushing for the creation of a male birth control pill (from my understanding a big reason for the delay with this is that pharmaceutical companies don’t want to invest in it because they don’t see big profits in it).
2. Supporting comprehensive sex education and wide accessibility of contraceptives, thus reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies overall.
And if a guy is really, really wants to reduce his chances of fathering a child he didn’t want, he could get a vasectomy. Last I checked, there are no evul femuhnist groups standing in the way of any of the above.
Clint: fuck off, no one cares that David isn’t “reporting” to your liking. Still doesn’t justify the shit this woman is getting. Grow up and learn how to act human, don’t come back until you do.
Watch the video I linked. It’s in the video you can watch it and see for yourself
Shorter Clinty:
Waaaah, why is everyone acting like words have meanings and stuff!?!!!eleven
No. Doesn’t matter, Clint.
@because science
YES. QFT
Hellkell, you are putting words in my mouth. I didn’t ever say EVER that what is happening to her is right, what I said is that if we’re truly going to have 0 tolerance for harassment, we need to admit that she was also guilty of harassment instead of portraying her as a blameless party whose only crime and I quote:
“Her crime? She wasn’t exactly polite in responding to the interrupters”
If we can all admit that sentence is untrue, then we no longer disagree on anything
OKay, I saw people shouting in the hallway and people leaving the building because of the fire alarm… so I don’t get where you said they were blocking anyone, unless you were talking about the density of the crowd.
But… they didn’t even try to go through the crowd, they just walked through another door.
esmnmb:
“The top two reasons I can find are:
1. I can’t afford to have a child.
2. Having a baby would dramatically change my life.
So these reasons have little to do with the body. So a persons right to have an abortion isn’t just one that can be made on it’s my body, my rights. It can also be argued that because it’s my life, it’s my right as the top reasons all related to changing a person’s life.”
I think you’re confusing a right with a reason. A right in this case just means autonomy: the decisions about the pregnancy are up to the person who is pregnant. They will then weigh various reasons, like the ones you listed, for choosing their course of action. Saying that someone has a reason to want something and saying that a decision is up to someone are two different things.
Clintshit, how was she harrassing people? Because the video didn’t show who pulled the fire alarm…
You guys would tell me if I was being super annoying, right? I feel kinda weird today because headache acting up, and I think I’m acting strange, but can’t tell. Anyway, tell me if I’m bugging you :/
The physical blocking of the door was from the Warren Farrell incident from the year before.
The point is they effectively took away someone else’s right to free speech by bringing bullhorns in and generally acting like assholes. There is a pattern of harassment at this university and Chanity was the one out front with the bullhorn. It seriously doesn’t matter what group was saying what, these people were wrong, acting in a disorderly fashion, denying someone’s right to peaceable assembly, and generally acting in a manner consistent with intimidation.
I don’t mind people being angry at the way she was treated afterwards, but pretending this happened in a vacuum and all the harassment is happening because she wasn’t polite to people is bullshit. She was the leader of a group who broke up their conference. They aren’t interrupters, they are the interrupted.
I don’t find her disgusting because of men’s rights or whatever else. If she had done this to any group who wanted to peaceably discuss issues important to them because she didn’t agree, I would find it equally disgusting
Good one, I’m sure the fire alarm (which are found in hallways) was pulled by a completely unrelated party to the mob in the hallway.
For the people basically saying “Well yeah, maybe they crossed the line a bit with the death threats, but SHE WAS RUDE (so she kinda deserved it, amrite???)”
Even if you were going to attempt to justify that in this particular instance, the response was in any way proportionate (it isn’t), that’s not really the issue.
The issue is that this is just the latest in a consistent pattern of behavior where mra’s engage in, incite or facilitate harassment and threats towards women they don’t like. And the woman is always somehow or another “asking for it”, according to mra defenders.
This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s a systemic problem with the “men’s rights movement” and the type of men it attracts.
Oh, so the video doesn’t show what Clint says? Shocker.
Fuck off, Clint. Keep fucking that chicken.
Marie, this thread is getting flooded by this doof and you think you’re the one who might be annoying people?
(You are not annoying anyone.)