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my tumblr, they found a twitter acct that I don’t even use, they even found an old [dating site] profile of mine with outdated info …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.
Sure, Mark, the harassment is totally not coming from the MRM, A Voice For Men is not an MRA website, after all.
Oh wait, it is? and they are one of the groups that doxxed her?
So you think that people other than MRAs and hangers on are threatening her with rape and death? Prove it.
Also, since you think it is perfectly rational for the MRM to scream rape and death threats at someone, I doubt your rationality.
I would like to offer her my support…how can we do that?
Cassandrasays,
ALL CANDLES ARE MISANDRY
SO IS CHEESE
ALSO, CORGIS, THOSE ARE TOTALLY MISANDRY
I thought people went overboard posting clips of her over and over.
The threats, hate comments and posting personal info is really terrible behavior. It’s hard to read that stuff.
dani pettas:
I thought people went overboard posting clips of her over and over.
The threats, hate comments and posting personal info is really terrible behavior. It’s hard to read that stuff.
So what are doing about it?
I think supporters should flood her comment boards, Twitter, Facebook, etc. with words of support & encouragement. I hope she stays strong, doesn’t back down & that something is done about this.
I would also still like to see the rational, non misogynist MRM. I have been waiting for someone to actually show a site, a document, hell, even one reasonable person, who wants to work for men’s issues and is not blaming women for everything wrong in the world.
I always say, MRAs are great freedom fighters, if you’re using it in the same sense as fire fighters. They do a great job of lessening freedom for other people through hatred and threats! Gandhi would be so proud.
Oh right then, that makes the doxxing and the death threats a-okay then. At least if you have no sense of humanity…
It isn’t really “part of the picture.” This is the standard MRM modus operandi, dude. These are your people. Own it.
And hi, Mark Joes. How does it feel being a colossal asshole who thinks death threats are in any way comparable to someone saying something that hurts your feelings? What do you do if someone ahead of you in the express checkout line has 11 items? Bludgeon them? And you call us angry…
Because seriously, guys, the
lurkerspeople who make death threats support himon emailin YouTube comments!@BlackBloc, the Mujahid guy sounds… odd. Something about the way it is phrased makes me think they aren’t legit. The insistence on writing “Allah” in arabic script but not adding “subhana wa ta’ala” afterwards, even abbreviated makes me think they are a non-Muslim emulating what they think a Muslim would sound like, without having spoken to many. But who knows.
I wager that I have done more effective work against male suicide in the last 6 months than Mark Jones or Spoon-billed MRA dude have done in their entire lives, by supporting various programs that support male prison inmates (reading programs, Just Detention, etc.).
But that is because my goal in life is to make the world a better place, if only slightly. Their goal is to make women suffer.
dani pettas: I mean it, what are you doing? Because coming here to tell us how bad you think it is don’t mean shit.
Are you taking advantage of being a poster at AVfM to tell them this is unacceptable? We know it’s bad. The MRM (as exemplified by the people like Markie) is coming in here to tell us she had it coming, and deserves nothing less.
So that’s who you need to be talking to, telling how wrong you think it is. Oh wait, you didn’t actually say it was wrong, just that it was “hard to read that stuff.”
That’s a ringing condemnation there.
So, let’s say for a moment that trolly actually does want to focus on preventing suicide among men. I am genuinely confused as to how sending death threats to this random woman who attended a protest and said things that pissed him/others off is supposed to accomplish that goal.
“Mark, you seem to have missed my question: what are you, personally, doing about the male suicide rate?”
Oh sorry, I did miss it, and I’m glad you asked.
As well as being a board member for an organization that works with teenagers in areas in Toronto that are dominated by the Metro Toronto Housing Corporation (recently expanded to include the entire G.T.A.), I am working with a major NGO on a soon to be announced program that will be aimed specifically at boys and will help educators identify which boys may be more likely at risk. There are signs that are fairly obvious but people tend to ignore.
I also help run a youth centre in my little community and provide more than half of the funding for it. It gives kids in my sleepy town something to do other than drink, take drugs, and engage in harmful activities that sometimes impact their entire futures
I have appeared on television numerous times advocating for reforms in our education system that would benefit autistic children.
That’s not even the half of it, but should be enough to counter your arrogant implication that I’m not doing anything.
I’m starting to think that’s not their real goal. And by “starting to” I mean “absolutely convinced by all available evidence”.
The only way this would make sense is if they believed that men commit suicide because feminists turn up at MRA lectures and protest them. Which, um, well, in my experience when people try to commit suicide there’s usually a rather more immediate reason for their doing so.
Why should we believe you Mark? And even if it’s true, your lack of ability to care about someone getting death threats doesn’t convince me you’d be good at working with at-risk children. I mean, what if the kid has done something bad? Then they totally deserve whatever they get, right? (Or is that only if they’re girls?)
Mark, that’s great, no snark. Now go get to it instead of boring us and condoning death threats/
CassandraSays,
I already told you, expecting men to actually help other men is MISANDRY.
The MRM needs their time and energy to concentrate on harassing obscure women at protests!
Because that is how there will be freedom!
I mean, my first response when I read this story was to think, that’s terrible! That man should be found and stopped.
But now of course I know the correct response is to say, “Well, maybe she once cut a dude off in traffic, or even told an offensive joke where a man was the punchline, so she totally deserves what she gets.”
Say this particular woman is scared so badly that she never attends a protest again, or says anything feminist in public again. Will that stop young men from committing suicide? I don’t think it will. And I think that reaching out to young men who might be at risk of committing suicide would be a more productive use of time and energy than trying to scare the woman with the red hair.
Marky, you say stuff that I don’t agree with and yet I STILL think that no one should put your personal details online and send you rape threats.
“Mark, that’s great, no snark. Now go get to it instead of boring us and condoning death threats”
Are you experiencing some kind of emotion driven cognitive dissonance? Where have I condoned a death threat?
You know, at first I thought that Big Red was an MRA-plant.
I really did. I mean, nobody sings “Cry me a river” when someone mentions male suicide and higher work fatality rates, right? Especially when moments before he/she is reading a list about how feminists already care and address male issues, right? RIGHT?
Apparently, I was wrong.
Seriously though, if you really want to protect this woman’s identity, REMOVE THE “CRIMES AGAINST FATHERS” SCREENSHOT/LINK/MENTION IMMEDIATELY. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out who she was from AVfM, but it took me about a couple of minutes of internet searching to find the link to the site with her personal data from your site and that link was the sole reason for it.
I found the Islamic Death Threat particularly disturbing and serious. She should really contact the police and electronic crimes unit about it. Nobody deserves what those maniacs said.
I didn’t find Dan Perrin’s response to be particularly threatening. It was more of a “nya nah nah nah nah – thanks for making us look good” type of response in order to rub the whole thing to her face. Immature and cruel, sure, but ultimately non-threatening.
As for the rest, it’s standard internet trolling, courtesy of 4chan, reddit, and whatever other place where your faith in humanity goes to die. As long as they don’t post fake pictures of her doing horses on image boards, or make a false porn account in her name (like they did with Thunderf00t) she will be fine.
The good news for Big Red is that the harrassment will cease in about a couple of weeks time, when the internet trolls find the next big thing to focus on -they have a REALLY low attention span- and she will have a whole bunch of victimhood screenshots/badges to show the world about how much men hate women. Everybody wins!
Frankly, I would like to learn HER side of the story. What exactly was she thinking when she did all this? Was she approached by the MRAs directly? Was she provoked? Did the MRAs accidentally hit a “trigger”? For some reason I don’t think anybody just decides to make a fool of themselves on Youtube.
The problem with the YouTube Reporting Era is that you can only get snipets of information, which consequently means that you will inevitably miss the big picture. I recall the time when Scientologists harassed the BBC reporter that made the Scientology documentary, captured the exact moment when he blew up and posted it on YouTube to “prove” that he was a lunatic who was biased against Scientology. As much as I find Big Red ludicrous and unlikeable, I can’t help but wonder if something similar happened.
Big Red should come up and share her story. Tell us what exactly happened. If she doesn’t trust her writing talents she should have someone like you ghost-write it for her. It’s the best she can do.
I’m sorry, I know it’s been thoroughly mocked already, but I can’t get over that first comment (emphasis mine):
Misandry: a word pretty much only MRAs use to describe the completely non-existent system of institutionalized discrimination against men that they somehow think is a real thing.
B-word (Great editing by the way! It’s not offensive now!): a term that can mean either “man who is like a woman in that he is weak and inferior” or (as in this case) “misbehaving woman.” Many feminists consider it a gendered slur.
White knighting: MRAs are essentially the only people who use this as a verb (although I have seen it in a few different contexts). It is used by MRAs to describe men defending women. It has negative connotations. Often, “white knighting” implies that the defender is standing up for the woman in the vain hope of receiving sexual or romantic attention from her in return — because why the hell else would you be nice to a woman, amirite??
Tell me more about how much of a feminist you are. I’m not quite convinced yet.
i’m not going to defend the woman in the video here, but nothing she said warrants the reaction she got. and wow, lmao, mras say feminists are overly sensitive harpies with perpetual PMS. look at this here. the only movement the MRM resembles is the collective bowel movement of the underachieving steers who populate the manosphere. keep doing what you do best, MRAs. don’t do anything to convince the people who matter that your movement has any value or point. don’t do anything that borders on constructive. don’t do anything to correct the issues you claim exist. just continue to be a hysterical reactionary movement to women making gains in the world. if this is what your brand of activism is, y’all will never be taken seriously. ever. no politicians will you play their reindeer games. stay obscure and pressed