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my tumblr, they found a twitter acct that I don’t even use, they even found an old [dating site] profile of mine with outdated info …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.
of course Brz hates the fact that there’s a tiny space on the internet where women don’t have to worry about their weight, as opposed to, gee, I dunno, the entire world telling them they’re worthless shit if they’re fat.
the manosphere loves the idea of women feeling like crap about themselves, hell fartiste even wrote about how women have to much self esteem.
Women having self esteem is misssaaaaandry!!!
It seems feminists want to be everywhere, that every place have to put an Adria Richards in charge who will enforce some feminist charter (like the Ada initiative) to transform it into a safe place for women/gays/trans or whatever. That’s ok for me if they leave just one unsafe place.
I just don’t believe that those “safe places” are more safe : I traveled a little bit in different countries and I just feel more safe in places where people speak their minds when they want to, where people insult each other when they’re angry and know how to handle aggressiveness without beating or killing each other. Your safe places scare me because I see the hidden aggressiveness behind the fake smiles of these people who’re always careful to never offend or insult anyone, to always be positive and I fear them when finally they let the aggressiveness come out.
I just prefer the places where people express their emotions, even the bad ones, and where people learn to handle them and think that it’s a bad thing to try to deny them.
Yeah, let’s say I’m a privileged cis-bla-bla who isn’t triggered or offended by anything. I’m clueless, I’m an asshole, I’m everything that feminists hate, I will never change. There’s other people like me, so the better solution is to leave us a place where we can live the way we want without annoying you and you annoying us all the time, isn’t it?
actually it’s more like women feeling good about themselves must mean making men feel bad about themselves. That’s essentially their…erm..”logic”
And yet you’re still here. I guess being in a space that’s not “safe” for you doesn’t bother you so much after all.
(BTW you’re forgetting to pretend to be French again.)
@CassandraSays
Internet isn’t a place. I want a town, or a piece of land, just like in “Brave New World”, where people who don’t want to live in your pleasant utopia can do the exact contrary of what you call for.
you can call it Creepytown if you want.
So buy some land. You can call your town Brzville, and recruit potential residents on the new blog that you’re going to start rather than whining here.
BTW I demand that you set up proper water distribution and sanitation systems. Demand it, I say!
So what are these wonderful places you’ve been where people are so free to say what they want, eh, Brz? Come on, name names and show us that you’re not talking about yet another place where your “freedom” actually means “straight cis men having unquestioned privilege”.
Or have you been reading Lord of the Flies and getting it all wrong?
Cassandra — eh, fuck it, if they want to die of fecal borne diseases, that’s their lot. They want a specifically unsafe space, why making the drinking water safe? You’re just being oversensitive, buff up that immune system and deal with the cholera! If you can’t manage that, then idk what you might do when the fake smiles drop and all that avoiding deadly diseases causes you to, um…
I give up channeling Brz.
Kitteh — actually, I was. Mentally at least. Cuz whiskey.
I just want to see if he’s ridiculous enough to do the opposite of whatever I say no matter how basic and sensible it is. Risk cholera just to piss off those interfering feminists? Of course! Don’t tell me what to do! And so on.
“Cassandra — eh, fuck it, if they want to die of fecal borne diseases, that’s their lot. ”
Nah. They’re so full of shit they’re probably immune.
Maybe Brz should go live with the other tough guys on Reddit Island.
“Nah. They’re so full of shit they’re probably immune.”
*dies*
Zombie Argenti will see you sometime tomorrow, no clue when as ze’s visiting zir grandfather in the hospital and then groceries and then moving shit and has to call SSI for a continuance and *head explodes*
Zombie zombie Argenti says good night
Why Creepytown, Brz? Your desire to live in a zone where you don’t have to constantly consider “Safety demarcations” isn’t exactly creepy, as such. Just call it whatever you want to call it, there’s no reason to snidely snark at other people by the insinuation that we’d stigmatize your desires to be free.
That’s not what we stigmatize or argue against.
Let’s drop out of “We” for a second – What I am going to say is this, though:
The assumption that having safe spaces and generalized rules for communication leads automatically, inexorably towards suppression, denial, misery, facades, masks and lies is wrong. It’s a pernicious little lie people tell because it allows them to stand on the side of freedom, honour, joy and love, because when they call someone a “faggot” or a “cum-bucket” or a “mentally ill craziieee” for being trans they assume they’re doing everyone a service. A favor. Speaking out against oppression! And hey, they’re just speaking their minds, too, if you don’t like it you can quit the kitchen, you oversensitive harpy.
That’s not how that works, though. You do not do anyone a favor not considering how your words an actions impact them. The appeal to no consequence isn’t a desire for a less rigid, less false, more honest, more open world, it’s an appeal to not having to face the fact that your words have meaning and your thoughts, actions and statements hurt people. It’s a direct appeal to “My laziness overpowers my ability to care”.
Stop pretending that demarcation, trigger warnings and notions that there are forms of address that should be avoided lead somehow to lies and opinions just being hidden. It’s the same argument you hear viz a viz rules against racism (It just leads to hidden racism!), rules against sexism (It just leads to quiet sexism!), rules against hate (It’s just leads to stealth hate!).
And it’s not how the world works and let me tell you why, and do so in the most pompous manner possible:
Look at the thread back there and the 1280+ responses. Count how many of those call “Redhead” there out for being a bitch, or want her punished, or some variant there-of.
How many people, do you think, don’t want to live in a world where that’s the common pattern of communication? Saying and stating and pointing out that those people, saying that, are wrong to do so isn’t an attempt at overt social control, it’s an attempt at not being complete and utter jackasses because: if you tell someone: “Hey, when you say that you wish I were raped brutally with a spoon and that kind of normalizes the notion that rape is a good punishment for uppity women and it’s funny that your first need to insult someone is to ask me to stuff stuff in my vagina. I mean why not dismiss my hair?” you are pointing out a line of thought that leads to a worse world and explaining why that is the case.
And the hope and notion is that when enough people become aware of the fact that words mean something, then they will no longer use them.
GET IT?
Because if you choose to use on your own a phrase you know would trigger someone or you know would make someone else, irregardless of the merit of your argument, feel threatened or as if they were scant more than meat, then you are proving that your ARGUMENT is worth LESS than the DREAD you hope to inspire.
Rules about communication lead to ordered communication, and awareness of context and meaning and words lead to not accidentally or intentionally hurting those around you. And it also, note this down, there will be a quiz, implies and forms the idea that you are no longer THINKING the same way.
Get it? Rules that state: “Hey, this is what we consider sexist” is not a list of things you’re no longer allowed to say because you are a bad racist bad person shame shame shame safe zone trigger warning hysteria touchy touchy feminists blah
It’s a list of notions and concepts that implies that by using, instead of the thousands and thousands and thousands of other insults, swear words and misery available, you are really basing your attack (And you’re free to fucking attack) on a sexist notion. And that makes you a sexist, because you made that choice. On your own. Which implies a whole lot of other things, then, and is a good yard stick. Because pointing out demarcation and barriers and zones leads to more individualization.
OH WHAT’S THAT? HUH? A 1:1 scale of the universe corresponds perfectly with the universe, and if everyone single thing was ordered in relation to everything else by a perfect descriptor then we’d have the ability to make perfection descriptions with no information loss and so the notion that “We just erect safe zones to control people cuz we touchy” loses all sense of meaning?
Yeah, thought so. 🙂
What do you lose by writing “Trigger warning: Rape… So I was down at the beach…” instead of “So I was down at the beach” when telling a story?
In one instance, you’re at least aware that some people would get upset by your story, and you’re giving them a choice of continuing.
In the other, you don’t. Because the insignificant second it took to do so was “wasted effort pussyfooting around the issue”.
The world isn’t as shitty as all that. And pointing out when and how people do things that are symptomatic of strange thought patterns forces them to do two things:
Acknowledge it, or ignore it.
… And Brz: If, given the choice, you choose to ignore the “Hey man, talking about that kind of hurts me because XYZ life circumstance, could you…”,
then… Hm. THat’s sort of sad, isn’t it?
Niters, Zombie Argenti! Sleep well, and don’t go chomping any MRAs, there’s no brains worth the effort there.
Ah, I got stuck in moderation. And I think I know why. Damn.
Yes, agreed, you should definitely stop annoying us. But here’s the kicker: You don’t need us to grant you a tract of land for that to happen! You can just go literally anywhere else on the internet or in meatspace and you’ll stop annoying us! The power was within you the whole time!
I wonder if eating someone with a toxic personality would give a zombie food poisoning. Maybe that’s a new marketing opportunity, zombie antacids.
CassandraSays,
That was never what I was saying, in fact I was saying the inverse and there were people arguing with me about it. I was saying, just because she received death threats, doesn’t mean she wasn’t also guilty of harassment. This all started because someone said “Harassment is always wrong” to an issue I had with David leaving out the parts of the story where Channity was being a bully, as if the other 3 videos didn’t exist.
“Her crime? She wasn’t exactly polite in responding to the interrupters.”
Bullshit. She was outside of an event, protesting. She didn’t disrupt their program by going inside. They went outside to her in order to engage her. They are fully the harassers in this situation, from beginning to end.
esmnmb: Let me clarify, if the child is born neither parent should be allowed to stop financially supporting the child.
So you don’t believe in paper abortions, good.
Please, I have been civil and kind with you, all I ask is you do the same.
People have been.
And you may not be, “bashing” women (I’ll get back to that), but you certainly aren’t being supportive of them, and are recommending some pretty toxic things (paper abortions for one).
So, to get back to how you aren’t “pro-feminist”. You dismissed womens’ bodily autonomy. That’s anti-woman. Full-stop.
Aaliyah, would you agree that a child has the right to life? Would you deny that right before the child was born?
I would not deny a child a right to life.
A fetus has no such right.
clintiskeen: You say you have a 0 tolerance for harassment, but you completely missed the fact that Chantity et al were involved in organized harassment.
You clueless moron.
1: Public protest isn’t “harrassment”.
2: Even if we agreed that the protest of that even was wrong, the scale of response isn’t the same.
What is being done to her isn’t disrupting an hour or two of a public event. It’s an ongoing campaign of terrorism. The two events are not equivalent.
I consider that harassment. Any attempt to take away rights to free speech and peaceable assembly is harassment.
No it isn’t.
I didn’t make any value judgements about Warren Farrell, I just pointed out his credentials as someone who is aware of feminist arguments by mentioning that he was a 3 time board member of NOW and the only man to ever hold that honor.
That is a value judgement. You are trying to say that one can’t protest him as being anti-feminist/misogynist because he did something, in the past, which was putatively feminist.
It’s a silencing tactic. By your measures it might be considered harrassement (yes, that’s an absurdem, but your use of harrassment is ridiculous).
Also you have done nothing to show why it’s not disingenuous to only focus in on online harassment of her, and completely omit the real world harassment and violation of rights committed by the “victim”.
Again, you are being a dishonest sack of shit. We have, repeatedly, addressed the differences in scale, scope, and focus. This is not disrupting a public event, it’s disrupting a personal life. It’s not a time-limited function; it’s an ongoing campaign, and it’s not abstract, it’s concrete threats; not just noise.
The physical blocking of the door was from the Warren Farrell incident from the year before.
Oh… so Mr. You Need To Be Honest, is telling lies. This thing you’ve included in your indictment is 1: something which happened at another event, and 2: was a group behavior you are saying she deserves to be held accountable for (and you are saying that. You “condemn” the “harrassment” but you say we need to say it’s just the same as what she did… only you admit she didn’t do it).
OK fine, then there are some speech types that are legally actionable. That doesn’t excuse mob justice
But you do. I doubt you are being this vehement in the MRA fora where this ongoing harassment; and denial of rights (to use your terms; and in this aspect I don’t find it wrong). She is being denied the right to live a life which feels safe. Compare that to being, “denied” the right to talk about how “opressed” men are. Those are the two thins you are equating. Your sense of moral outrage is defective if you can equate those two.
And by equating them you are defending the people who are attacking her.
It doesn’t fucking matter if the harassment was proportional.
Yes, it does. That you think so is why you are a moral dipshit; and why your “case” is non-existent.
Clinty: If we can all admit that sentence is untrue, then we no longer disagree on anything
Sucks to be you, because we can’t agree on that.
Then again, you are being dishonest when you say you don’t condone what they do. You are making being rude (for an hour) the same as a stalking campaign, with rape and death threats.
When you can equate those, you are morally stunted.
Clinty: What you’re not allowed to do is break laws, act disorderly, pull fire alarms, block doors, and do all in your power to disallow peaceable assembly.
Um… no. If that were the case then women wouldn’t be persons in Canada, and there would still be violent segregation in the US.
So, on it’s face, your claim to loud protests, even those which break laws is farcial.
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.
You are justifying it by saying there is an equivalence. You are justifying it by spending huge effort to try and make her as wrong as the people threatening to rape and kill her.
You are wrong.
Holy mother of fuck, what a thread. Shouldn’t have slept after all, I don’t think I’ll ever catch up.
My mum just explained to me how a guy being bullied and harassed at work totally deserved it because he has an annoying character. Blech.
And then I get to a thread with Clint repeating over and over what is wrong with an allegedly one-sided article about the harassment of a feminist on a blog about misogyny which is also not a news site. Note to self: Always report about every aspect of everything, hence in order to correctly represent everything I’m talking about I should first repeat everything about history that I could possibly know of. Otherwise it’s completely out of context. Obviously.(I so wanted to say it yesterday but sleep and reasons, now I’m too late)
Also late to saying yay, kirbywarp is alright!
Fibinacci,
I bow to you and your ability to so eloquently and patiently explain safe spaces to brz. I seriously want to copy and paste that so I can reference it the next time some privileged douche whines about pc language or trigger warnings. Thank you!