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my tumblr, they found a twitter acct that I don’t even use, they even found an old [dating site] profile of mine with outdated info …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.
Gandhi? Wasn’t he the one who was all like “Oh, terribly sorry to bother you, might we harvest a bit of salt? No? Okay then.”
kittehserf have fun, I say hatefully and bitterly.
“It’d be silly to generalize an entire group based on the actions of a few.”
Which is exactly what your quoted comment does. And NO- it’s not a “joke”. It’s not “ironic”. This quote doesn’t come from the SRS “circlejerk”, it comes from SRSWomen. So it’s a serious opinion- saying that she hates X group, because of her (probably incorrect) perception of what some of them do.
Since this is the SRS mainstream position, SRS hates X group because of a preconception. Ie, they are a hate group, by definition.
“As my links have clearly demonstrated” is the new “Help me I am out of my depth and being eaten alive by my intellectual opponents.”
The only reason I don’t comment on SRS is because I don’t have a reddit account. I’ve been sorely tempted to create one though… And as an authorative special snowflake pretty-much-actual SWASCM, I just continually fail to see any actual hatred of men on that site. And I’m not even self-hating! Amazing, that. And I’ve been reading SRS itself, not a community dedicated to hating on it. Primary sources for the win!
kirbywarp: “expressing frustration at a group”
I’m sorry, the quote was in fact, “I hate men”. That’s not “expressing frustration”, it’s expressing hatred.
Ie, hate group.
“Primary sources for the win!”
I’ll remind you yet again that SRSsucks always links to primary sources. So, you’ve got nothing.
If you can get in contact with her, I don’t know how close to Chicago she is, but if she needs an immediate safe place to stay I live in a housing cooperative in Chicago and I know there are a half dozen housing co-ops that would let her live here free of charge. I would encourage her to check out other cooperatives if she needs a place to stay. It must be hard for her to trust these offers so I don’t care if she contacts me particularly (but she is welcome to), just know that housing cooperatives are traditionally inclusive and therefore feminist friendly.
@PEMRA:
No, what you linked to was not joke or ironic, it was an expression of genuine frustration that literally any human being with an ounce of sympathy/empathy could recognize. Have you never felt close to hating someone when they were nothing but frustration to you? Do you hate us in that way?
Seriously… How are you not understanding this? It’s like you skim for buzzwords without reading for comprehension.
and still no comment on this
http://imgur.com/RALUTFR
from srssucks. But srs is a hate group. O….K.
Not literally eaten alive. If we were literally eating MRAs alive, we really would be a hate group.
I feel like I need to spell that out, since our current trolls seem very literal.
It must be exhausting moving those goalposts. I said OPENLY-GAY, and IN the hate-group itself. You failed on all counts.
This is, again, bullshit. Violence or incitements to violence IS required to be a hate group. Just not liking certain people doesn’t cut it. Furthermore, I don’t believe that’st he ‘mainstream SRS position’. I’ve seen lots of much more moderate people on SRS, myself. You are simply cherry-picking the most radical people, and EVEN THEY aren’t saying what you claim they are.
Basically, what the woman in the thread you linked said is that she personally does not like men, because they have classically either been her oppressors or have ENABLED her oppressors by not getting it. She used the word ‘hate’, to express the strength of her antipathy. And she has EVERY RIGHT to have antipathy towards any group of people she wants. As long as she doesn’t cross the line into HARMING them in any way.
Again…let me know when you see someone advocating harm towards single white men. Threats of violence, discriminatory social arrangements, denial of humanity and agency, etc. Any of these will do. Just haven’t seen it yet.
If one individual woman hates men, that proves that women hate men, which proves that women are a hate group. Or a hate organization. I can’t remember which one.
OMG, I am so close to understanding the MRA mindset. I think I must snorfle my kitties for a while.
Did I say single? Wow, I need to go to bed. I meant STRAIGHT.
“it was an expression of genuine frustration”
You mean, an expression of hatred. I can read the actual quote, you know.
“Have you never felt close to hating someone when they were nothing but frustration to you?”
An *individual* person, sure. A group of people who share a common trait? No, of course no. That would be wrong.
“Bitches be crazy, you know what I mean.”
“That is a terrible thing to say about a whole class of people.”
“Loosen up, it’s just a joke.”
Said all MRAs ever.
@Pro-Equality MRA:
I doubt you go through the effort of reading through comment chains that are linked very often. And whatever you read is always colored by what you see first, which is SRSSuck’s interpretation. When you do read through, you probably just look through and shake your head, finding confirmation of your original opinion rather than taking the source at face value.
And I’m still amazed that you literally cannot see past the word. Do you think Garfield is a hate group against days of the week? When someone says to you “man, I hate when that happens,” do you recoil in horror at their unbared fury and passionate loathing for whatever they were talking about? When people say “I just it when people mix up “there,” “they’re,” and “their””, do you think that a new nazi movement is being born from grammar rather than ethnicity?
Cause if you said you did, at this point I might actually believe it.
Also, kirbywarp, you realize that the WHOLE POINT of SRS is to cherry-pick “expressions of frustration” as you so euphemistically put it, and hold them up for ridicule.
Why should I have compassion for this SRSter’s “expression of frustration” when her whole community is built upon mocking others who say similar things?
“Do you think Garfield is a hate group against days of the week? When someone says to you “man, I hate when that happens,” do you recoil in horror at their unbared fury and passionate loathing for whatever they were talking about? When people say “I just it when people mix up “there,” “they’re,” and “their””, do you think that a new nazi movement is being born from grammar rather than ethnicity?”
Uh, what? No, of course not, because that’s obvious hyperbole. I see no evidence that this Redditor was being hyperbolic… she said, in all seriousness, “I hate men”, and spent a paragraph justifying that as a reasonable emotion.
So no, that is no equivalent.
And you know what, [genuine anger here] I was hanging out with some actual 60s and 70s civil rights activists today, and FUCK YOU MRAs for trying to appropriate the experience of people who fucking despise you. Every single one of them, male and female, was a feminist, based on their actual lived experience. I told them about the existence of the MRM, and you were compared to the people who denied access to white schools, water fountains, etc.
You are not on the right side of history.
There were more than 2 of us, which I suspect makes us a hate group. Organization? Whatever.
@PEMRA:
All from the front page of SRS. Tell me which one is just an expression of frustration.
So when actual civil rights activists, who faced being beaten, jailed, or even killed, despise you, who’s the hate group?
Alright, I have a comment in moderation that contains a list of quotes from the front page of SRS. It’s probably because there were slurs in the linked comments… I should have censored them.
But, PEMRA, tell me which quote in the front page of SRS right now is just an expression of frustration.
Could you summarize what that justification was? Because honestly, I don’t even trust you to read it at the moment. You don’t need to comment on whether it was good or bad, I know you think it was bad. Just summarize it.
And honestly, given that shitty things always happened to Garfield on Monday, it probably wasn’t hyperbole. 🙂
Uh, no, I’m saying SRS is not a hate group, first, and that evaluating whether or not a given group counts as a “hate group” is impossible unless you first examine how that group relates to the power structures running through society. “Feeling” marginalized has nothing to do with it; being marginalized does.
(Which is not to say that it is logically impossible to have a hate group comprised of members of marginalized groups, only that you can’t just point to a marginalized group complaining about how much it sucks to be marginalized and cry “HATE GROUP!!!”)
I am aware that the SPLC monitors black supremacist groups, yes. I think that some of them have some pretty awful ideologies, most of them are pretty reasonable reactions to a white supremacist society, and all of them are probably harmless. What’s the relevance, here, exactly?