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my tumblr, they found a twitter acct that I don’t even use, they even found an old [dating site] profile of mine with outdated info …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.
cloudiah and men should have the right to express themselves in public. Clearly this doesn’t always happen
“Kittehserf the right to speech and peaceable assembly you horrifically unpleasant thing”
Oooh, I’ve been called an horrifically unpleasant thing! Do I win the thread?
If equality isn’t “white guys getting kicked off the bus” (which, by the way, I haven’t seen on any feminist sites), why do so many MRM sites call for more women to die in shipwrecks, on the job, in the army, etc.? Funny, because my focus has always been, “Men are dying in large numbers in ___? How can we make that stop?”
I uh? what?
I was making an analogy to Rosa Parks. She didn’t want the white guys kicked off the bus for a while to make up for the years she was, she just wanted equal rights, you know, first come first serve. Saying it’s OK to be awful to people who look like those who were historically privileged is idiotic.
Ha ha ha, men “don’t have the right to express themselves in public” if a woman disagrees with them. That’s seriously his argument, guys. IT’S SO UNFAIR THAT MEN ARE CRITICIZED! THAT MAKES YOU A HATE GROUP! WAH.
I’m going to sleep soon. Maybe now. I’ll probably refresh to see if there’s anything entertaining, since I’m still waiting for one load of laundry to dry…
@clintskeen:
Wow. A bunch of people on a subreddit sarcasming around is not in anyway the same as any sort of historical institutional oppression. SRS doesn’t want it to be signed into law that SWASCMs must be ridculed in the same way that minorities have been, they’re providing a space where the cultural script is flipped. And even then, the script is flipped in absurd ways that is obviously satire and over-exaggeration.
Only someone who desperately wants to see opression of a non-opressed class would think that satire of real opression is real opression.
Ooh, revisionist history! Like how Columbus was awesome, slaves were well-treated, and women were respected! That revisionist history?
“This is hilarious. It’s like you don’t even read. People have mentioned to you I believe THREE times now, that SRS is populated in large part by straight white men. How could this work? Do you think a lot of straight white men hate THEMSELVES?”
It’s not most of them, but again, you don’t have to hate yourself individually to hate a group you’re a part of. I don’t care what SRS’s demographics are, they are a hate group by definition.
“I dare you to produce a single comment thread, in context, that shows that SRS hates straight white men as a group. This should be funny.”
Here’s one recently posted to SRSsucks. This is just one random comment, one of literally thousands:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SRSWomen/comments/1a74nc/my_sister_says_i_hate_men/c8uqav7
Hey clint, care to show the rest of us exactly where Redhead advocated preventing MRAs from speaking?
It -was- in fact wrong of someone to pull the fire alarm, but Redhead herself didn’t pull it. She -was- mocking MRAs, but that’s not the same as advocating for them to be censored or silenced. Mocking is just that. Mocking.
You keep claiming that Redhead is trying to prevent MRAs from being heard, but there’s no proof, anywhere.
MRAs have as much right to compare themselves to Rosa Parks as Justin Bieber has to compare himself to Anne Frank. This dude must be a poe, right?
Nekora, don’t think I said Hi and welcome before! Argenti should be around sometime to give you the welcome package if you haven’t already had it. 🙂
As a cis white able-bodied bisexual-but-in-a-hetero-relationship man, I can assure you it’s not your straight-white-maleness that’s making you feel unsafe.
This would be more convincing if anyone actually believed your assertion that SRS demonstrates hatred for straight white men.
And I actually asked if you could quote some of the lines that are jumping out from that link as “hateful” to you, because I skimmed the first several, didn’t see anything notable, and stopped reading. I’ll understand if you don’t feel like pointing me to what you find objectionable, but then you’ll have to understand if I assume you’re just overreacting.
kirbywarp no I don’t. I’ve said several times two wrongs don’t make a right. Everyone knows that. 4 year olds know that. The point is, no matter how egregious the second wrong was it never makes the first wrong right. Also what they were doing wasn’t a lawful protest. It was an attack meant to completely disrupt a lawful assembly and stop discourse.
Demonstrating dissatisfaction with a group’s message, and taking away their right to discuss that message among themselves is not the same.
Hell, PEMRA doesn’t need revisionist history, he’s creating plenty of revisionist present. Oh, white straight men were only historically privileged? Tell another one!
oh darn I posted before remembering to respond to the bit conflating posting on the internet with picketing funerals “in principle.” Let me fix that now:
LOLOLOLOLOLOL
“SRS doesn’t want it to be signed into law that SWASCMs must be ridculed in the same way that minorities have been, they’re providing a space where the cultural script is flipped. And even then, the script is flipped in absurd ways that is obviously satire and over-exaggeration.”
I disagree that it’s “obviously” a joke- again, see the link I provided. Those are jokes, that’s serious politics. Secondly, I’d argue that the SRS hate group does, in fact, want to encourage hatred against their chosen targets… it’s the foundation upon which the sub was founded, after all.
Hey clint, care to show the rest of us exactly where Redhead advocated preventing MRAs from speaking?
um yeah, I linked the video a long time ago. You can see where their guest speakers can’t be heard because Channity is literally outside the door, inside the building shouting on a bullhorn so they can’t be heard
That’s the difference between peaceful demonstration and civil disobedience
Maybe trolls can’t tell the difference between funerals and the internet, because they come here to die? 😀
“As a cis white able-bodied bisexual-but-in-a-hetero-relationship man, I can assure you it’s not your straight-white-maleness that’s making you feel unsafe.”
Of course it is. That’s the group of people that the SRS targets. I don’t want to participate in a community that targets members of my group for ridicule based on intrinisic traits we cannot control. That’s what hate groups do.
Okay, PEMDAS, what does your theoretical “hating white men” look like? How is it expressed in the real world? How does it impact you personally, or even anyone you know?
Okay, Sir and I are off on our travels. Keep swatting those trolls until we get back (and wish us luck with the glorious public transport system).
🙂
PEMDAS, I swear on the Flying Spaghetti Monster that the only intrinsic trait people mock you for is your shitty personality.
Here’s another one, in the same thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SRSWomen/comments/1a74nc/my_sister_says_i_hate_men/c8v2mn6
Quote: “rightfully resent them for it”. This is a roundabout way of legitimizing and condoning hatred.
Maybe I wasn’t being clear enough before. You are imagining this hatred directed at you. It is not real. I can tell, because I can look at the posts you cite as hateful and experience nothing but bemusement at your feelings of victimization.
I suspect what you experience as “hatred” would be more accurately described as “loss of privilege.”