Asha James – otherwise known as TyphonBlue – has taken issue with something I wrote about A Voice for Men, the hate site she has chosen to affiliate herself with. In my post detailing the hundreds of horrendous and disgusting threats and abusive comments one Canadian feminist has received after she appeared in a YouTube video that was heavily promoted on A Voice for Men and other Men’s Rights sites, I wrote that AVFM had only distanced itself in a “superficial way from some of the harassment it has played a central role in unleashing.”
Ms. James, posting on Reddit, was unhappy with my use of the word “superficial.”
No, I do not think you are obliged to stop talking about her, or anyone you wish to talk about.
But you asked for suggestions as to WHAT MORE YOU CAN DO, and so I have some for you.
In fact, I have an entire 12-step Program to help you and your colleagues at A Voice for Men fight your addiction to hate.
1) Let’s start small. If you’re going to make such a big deal out of how you and your AVFM colleagues are removing the red-haired activist’s personal information from your site, you might want to, you know, actually remove her personal information from the site? Links to her dating profiles remain up in the AVFM forum.
2) Recognize that doxing is not the only form of harassment there is, and remove the post and the comments referring to the Canadian activist as “Little red frothing fornication mouth,” which is, I think even you have to admit, a kind of a hate-y thing to say about somebody. Remove the comments calling her a “bitch” and a “cunt” and a “bint.” Remove the barely comprehensible but clearly hateful comment from AVFM contributor Dr. F (Ian Williams) comparing her to some sort of animal. Remove ImNotMraBut’s surreal, and exceedingly nasty, comment fantasizing about finding her body “at the back of the Women’s Locker room, crucified up-side down and set on fire with Lard from the Federal Pork Barrel Buffet used as a substitute for Napalm.” I mean, what the hell.
3) Of course, this isn’t the first time that AVFM has launched a giant hatefest aimed at a particular woman. Oh, no. Not by a long shot. Indeed, launching campaigns of hatred against individual women (and, once in a long while, individual men) seems to be AVFM’s primary form of, er, “activism.” And it’s certainly the only kind of, er, “activism” it’s any good at.
It’s telling that AVFM rarely targets truly influential or even particularly famous women for its attacks, with the notable exception of one comedic actress. No, AVFM instead tends to target women it thinks it has a better chance of really hurting – from female bloggers and journalists to individual student activists. Going after vulnerable individuals: In this way, as in many other ways, the principals at AVFM think and act like abusers.
And so, Ms. James, after you and your colleagues are done taking down the vicious posts and comments about the red-haired activist, I would recommend that you and your colleagues at AVFM renounce altogether, and apologize for, the site’s strategy of demonizing individual women. While you’re at it, go back and scrub all posts and comments of misogynistic terms like “cunt” and “bitch” and “fuckmuffin,” either directed at individual women or at large swaths of womanhood. Scrub all posts and comments of the term “mangina.” I would provide links here, but I would have to pretty much link to every AVFM post and comment thread. (If anyone can find posts and/or comment threads on AVFM that are actually free of misogynistic language, please let me know.)
4) Then take down Register-Her, your phony “offenders registry” devoted to demonizing feminist writers and activists as well as other women (from “Mommy bloggers” to comedic actresses) who have somehow managed to offend the AVFM crowd.
In no way are writers like Jessica Valenti, or actresses like Katherine Heigl, or any of the other women listed as “bigots” on Register-Her the “moral equivalents” of the “pedophiles, rapists, murderers and other violent criminals” you have listed elsewhere on that site. Most of the alleged “bigotry” cited on Register-Her is trumped-up nonsense. Putting these women on your phony “registry” is a clear and deliberate attempt to intimidate them, both by making them fear for their personal safety and by deliberately trying to tarnish their reputation and hurt their chances of future employment. Again, these are total douche moves on your part.
You can read more of the dirty details about Register-Her here, in case you’ve forgotten.
5) Stop using violent and threatening language when referring to your ideological opponents – and apologize for past instances in which such hateful language has been used. You might start off by having your boss Paul Elam apologize for his notorious comments suggesting that he finds feminist-bashing to be sexually arousing:
I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection. …
We are coming for you, and we are coming for all the liars out there that have been ruining people’s lives with impunity. …
You are SO fucked.
I know Mr. Elam is probably very proud of his work here, but you should know that to most decent human beings it comes off a tad, well, unhinged? As well as — here comes that H-word again! — hateful. Let’s put it this way: I’m fairly certain that this post by Mr. Elam will never end up next to Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in any anthology of the writings of famous human rights visionaries.
6) And while you’re at it, drop the hateful and threatening (and rather potty-mouthed) slogan “Fuck Their Shit Up.” Is that really the slogan you want your site and your movement to be remembered by? Do you kiss your mother with that slogan?
7) Renounce the site’s policy “to seek out and make public the identities” of opponents, a policy reiterated as recently as last weekend by Mr. Elam. Now, Mr. Elam insists that this policy only applies to “individuals who break the law or who indisputably attempt to harass, bully or abridge the free expression of others in the furtherance of their ideology.” But a quick look at those listed in Register-Her’s “bigots” category makes clear that AVFM has an extreeeeeeemely broad notion of what counts as lawbreaking or harassment or bullying, at least when it comes to people who aren’t MRAs. How is Katherine Heigl breaking the law, or harassing or bullying or abridging anyone’s free expression?
8) After renouncing doxing as a policy, frankly apologize for each and every one of A Voice for Men’s threats to dox individual women in the past.
You might start by having Mr. Elam apologize for the comments he made on AVFM radio in which he said that Register-Her would be used to post the personal information of female “false accusers.” In case you have forgotten, here is the relevant clip from that radio show.
If for some reason that clip does not play properly on your computer, here’s the money quote:
[If] Mary Jane Rottencrotch out there wants to say that her husband beat her just for the sake of gaining leverage in a divorce, he will now have a resource where he can come and post your name, your picture, your work telephone number, your address, perhaps even your route that you take to get to work, if you bother to have a job.
Yes, that’s right: “the route that you take to get to work.”
In case you’ve forgotten this promise of his, you can find Mr. Elam’s comments on the AVFM radio show that ran on June 28, 2011 titled “FTSU Big Time.” They appear about ten minutes into the show.
Once Mr. Elam has clearly and publicly renounced this statement, I would suggest that he apologize for the $1000 bounty he once offered to anyone able to supply him with the personal information of a number of Swedish feminists.
No, that wasn’t a weird dream. He really did that.
9) Apologize for the cavalier attitude shown by AVFM’s principals to the possibility that revealing the personal information of opponents could put these people in actual physical danger. You might start by having AVFM’s John Hembling (“John The Other”) apologize for these comments about the Swedish feminists targeted by AVFM, in which he frankly acknowledged the dangers that AVFM’s strategy could pose to the personal safety of those it was targeting:
Some individuals may criticize the intent to publish not only names, but also addresses, phone numbers, employers and other personal information – on the grounds that such exposure create a risk of retributive violence against individuals who openly advocate murder based on sex. It is the considered position of the editorial board of AVfM that any such risks are out-weighed by the ongoing hazard to the public of these individuals continuing to operate in anonymity.
Emphasis mine.
In case you are wondering, the feminists in question did not, in fact, “openly advocate murder based on sex,” or murder based on anything at all. In an attempt to promote a theatrical production based on Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto, they made a brief video in which a woman pretended to shoot a man. You may find many examples of similar if much longer videos available on a site called Netflix. There’s even one called Basic Instinct in which actress Sharon Stone pretends to murder a man with an ice pick. No, really. With an ICE PICK! There are also videos in which men pretend to shoot other men, if you prefer that, and even some in which men pretend to kill women in a variety of inventive ways.
When he is done with that apology, Mr. Hembling may wish to apologize for another statement he made to me on the same subject:
Mr. Hembling might want to then move on to apologizing for this statement of his, which he posted on AVFM and on the Men’s Rights subreddit as a sort of preemptive rebuttal to critics who might point out the obvious fact that posting someone’s personal information could put them at risk. (I’m not sure I’ve ever run across someone so insistently cavalier as Mr. Hembling about the possibility that something he’s done might cause someone else physical harm.)
If some pea-brain wishes to claim that publication and public accountability is dangerous because it might facilitate some bad-brained moron to engage in retributive violence – kindly provide a workable mechanism for public accountability which is totally and perfectly safe – then criticize us for not using it. Until then, SFTU.
And you, Ms. James, may wish to apologize for your own blithe dismissal of the sort of harassment that the red-haired activist has been receiving.
If you had read the post of mine you were ostensibly responding to, you would have seen that the activist in question did in fact get one very blunt and direct death threat. (And she did report it to police.)
She also received not one, not two, but literally of hundreds of other threatening comments, many of them wishing death, rape or other forms of physical and/or sexual violence upon her, with one YouTube commenter going so far as to announce –TRIGGER WARNING – that he “would actually cum while cutting that bitch’s throat.”
It may be possible for some people to brush off one or even several “I hope you die” comments. It’s a bit harder to brush off several hundred of them – especially when some of these threatening remarks contain your address and phone number. That’s not really “kafoodling,” now, is it?
I’m a little perplexed that you didn’t understand this, as I posted literally dozens of examples of these comments in my earlier post. You did read that, didn’t you? I mean, you were offering your opinions about it in a public space, so I can only assume you read it, then somehow instantly forgot the dozens of horrendous comments I posted there, which were of course only a fraction of the total number received by the activist you and your colleagues hate so much. (There’s that pesky H-word again!)
10) Remove the personal photos of feminist writer Jessica Valenti that Mr. Elam posted to AVFM without her permission in an attempt to embarrass her. I won’t link to the post in this case; you can find it. I’m not quite sure that Mr. Elam realizes that by posting these photos he’s embarrassed himself far more than he’s embarrassed Valenti, as his actions reveal him to be a sad, angry, petulant old man, and one obviously jealous that Valenti, roughly half his age, has already had a far more successful career as a writer than he ever will. Also, she’s not a morally bankrupt asshat.
11) Publicly renounce and ban AVFM contributors and commenters who have engaged in doxing, threatening or harassing of opponents. You might start by banning long-time AVFM “activist” Frank James Spencer, otherwise known as KARMA MRA MGTOW, who recently gave me a decidedly non-friendly phone call at 1:38 AM to inform me, in falsetto, that “feminism will die,” a classic example of the sort of personal harassment that you would think anyone purporting to be in a “human rights movement” would want to distance itself from.
12) And finally: Take down, and apologize for posting, the terrorist manifesto by Men’s Rights Activist Thomas Ball you’ve got up in your site’s “activism” section. You know, the one that calls on men to literally firebomb courthouses and police stations, and which frankly acknowledges that such firebombing could very well cause many deaths.
I can’t believe that any group purporting to advocate for “human rights” would want to have this on their website, especially in the wake of the recent events in Boston.
Do any of you people have any sort of moral compass at all? Do you even know what a moral compass is?
Of course, I am under no illusion that AVFM will take even one of the twelve steps I have recommended. I spelled them out mainly to make a simple point:
After years and years of this shit, after literally offering literal $1,000 bounties for the personal information of your enemies, and while a literal terrorist manifesto remains posted on your website, you don’t really get to pretend that you’re shocked – shocked! – to find doxing and harassing going on in your Men’s Rights movement.
And this has implications beyond A Voice for Men and those associated with it.
A Voice for Men has, for better or worse, made itself the most influential Men’s Rights site online, and has begun bringing its particular form of “activism” to the real world as well. As such, helps to set the tone for the Men’s Rights movement as a whole, and to define the movement in the eyes of the public. And you guys are doing a bang-up job of it, he said sarcastically.
By sometimes excusing, other times encouraging, and in some cases directly fomenting, campaigns of bullying and harassment aimed at individual women, AVFM is helping to ensure that the entire Men’s Rights Movement, such as it is, goes down in history not as a human rights movement but as a reactionary hate group that has more in common with the White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s than with, say, the civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King.
Ms. James: The people harassing and doxing and threatening to dox women are your people – some of them quite literally your regular readers and commenters and contributors, and others “your people” in spirit. That is, hateful, spiteful misogynists and would-be terrorizers of women. These are your people, and you’re welcome to them.
But there are a lot more of us out there than there are of you, and ultimately you and the rest of the so-called Men’s Rights Movement — sorry, Men’s Human Rights Movement — will go the ways of the White Citizens Councils you’re increasingly growing to resemble.
—
NOTE TO MRA DOOFUSES: Yes, I am using the real names of the AVFM folks. Lest you assume I am doxing them, you should probably know that the AVFM folks, after several years of hypocritically doxing people while claiming it was unfair for anyone to know their real names, finally gave up and started using their real names on their site. Heck, I didn’t know That Typhon Blue wasn’t actually named Typhon Blue until I read it on AVFM recently. This makes me wonder about other weird names I’ve run across. Might they be fake too? Surely “Wolf Blitzer” can’t be that guy’s real name. It’s probably just “Wally Blevins” or something like that.
NOTE TO FANS OF CORRECT SPELLING: Sorry for the typo in the name of the sound clip. I’m not sure how to fix it and too lazy to find out.
Dude, (a) Most decent people don’t have the life goal of frightening people, therefore your attempted insult carries no weight; and (b) clearly none of us are really frightened of the petulant asshats of the MRM, since even the very woman they are focusing their threats on is committed to remaining an activist.
You are asshats, and you are also pathetic and ineffective. I’ll take that combination of qualities in a political opponent any day, since mostly you make our case for us.
Dixie: I guess if you think bad publicity is a good thing, you’re welcome. What you don’t seem to realize is that this publicity shows what miserable people you all are.
Publicity is publicity sweetheart. We all thank you for it.
FYI for MRAs: Social movements are not like movies, where if you want to see it out of morbid fascination your money is just as green as if you want to see it because it looks really good. Seriously, duders, there is such a thing as bad publicity.
Right, like writing critically about white nationalists would somehow help them…
Anyone who reads this and decides “Hey, AVfM sounds like a cool place” is already beyond help. Or they’re teenage boys, just aching to use “edgy” bad language and be treated like all their ideas are super important — at least those have some hope of growing out of it.
Dixie: Uh, ok? I’m certainly happy more people are learning you guys are bitter petulant children – but hey, if that’s your brand own it.
Katz: Keep telling yourself that while our readership continues to go up.
@ dixie
Your lack of self awareness is endearing. Cognitive dissonance goes a long way!
Maude: Your lack of a brain cell is really obvious. Get some help, dear.
I like how David made the Antidotes to Boobery list for me to know good places to visit. That’s because I like to go to websites with decent human beings, though.
And other people have already corrected your Spanish. I have a Spanish degree, so bad grammar and pronunciation are pet peeves of mine. I know it’s hard to learn a second language, but to write “Mucho gracias” is just plain disgraceful. And a tip: Click “Alt”, then 0241 to make the ñ.
Oh yeah, ha ha, it’s so funny that some people have had traumatic events in their lives and benefit from being warned before encountering things that can cause trauma and anxiety. It’s just a barrel of laughs that PTSD can make a person relive a trauma over and over due to certain sounds or reminders. I don’t know why I’m bothering trying to appeal to your sense of compassion, though. In one ear, out the other.
But just look how effective AVfM-endorsed “activists” are! Why, they’re just as effective (and respected) as Orly Taitz!
Why is it that PTSD is only a real thing when we talk about war vets? I bet that in discussion groups with war vets, people perform the simple kindness of avoiding things that trigger the vets.
Considering that people get PTSD from a variety of areas of life, like say, car accidents, I would think most people would have some empathy even if they don’t fully understand what’s going on.
And for the MRAs, I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss people who have triggers. Triggers and flashbacks are hell to live with and can drive a person to depair, and yet many people with triggers are resilliant enough to live and thrive through all that hell and help others who suffer in life as well.
As Cloudiah pointed out, the fact that “frightening” others is your main agenda is extremely telling.
This is so true. My brother is a laid back guy who drinks beer, drives a pickup, chews tobacco, works at a factory, fishes, hunts, loves country music. I showed him AVfM, and he was absolutely horrified. He was so disgusted, he was ready to start his own blog just to say how men like them no way in hell speak for him or any man he knows. I showed him manboobz just to reassure him that some people are already aware of them and trying to counter their bullshit. My dad’s reaction was “Don’t they have women in their lives they care about, like moms, sisters, or anything?”. They both guessed the MRM must mostly appeal to guys who are mad they can’t own women like the way you’d own a car.
My husband just says, “Why would you care what a bunch of slimeballs think about anything? They’re not worth giving a second thought to”.
So even if the MRA’s followed all of David’s good advice from the OP’s list, they still wouldn’t appeal to most men.
Ferfucksake, AVfM posts about women doing activisty things, and then their readers get all mad about how those woman activists totally suck. So obviously they understand the concept of bad publicity in practice.
…Omigod, total reverse psychology time. They need to stop posting about women on AVfM because there’s no such thing as bad publicity and so they’re helping the women by talking about them.
@thebionicmommy
Agreed. I love to introduce people to the MRM, because without fail, the response of every single person, male or female, is amusement. They can’t believe these people exist, and find them both pathetic and hilarious. And about 75% of them wonder if they aren’t just gay, which is a problematic response, but it happens.
I like how the guy who was complaining about someone else being insensitive to suicide victims is now being totally insensitive to people who’ve suffered trauma awful enough to be triggered. Apparently empathy and sensitivity are only required for male suicide victims–no one else deserves them!
MRAs: demonstrating how double standards work since forever.
Last night, I had a bad time dealing with PTSD. A supercell storm was producing tornadoes in OK, and it was coming towards us, so they issued a tornado warning for Joplin. My weather radio went off, the sirens sounded, and my husband and I grabbed the kids and we hid in our basement closet. The sirens went off again, so I put helmets on the kids, gave us all whistle bracelets, and wrapped everyone up in blankets to prepare for the worst. We waited an hour like that until the warning passed. The worst of the storm went south and didn’t hit a populated area, thank goodness. But that whole hour, I was physically shaking like you do when you have a high fever. I was sweaty, nauseous, and my heart was racing. I think it was the sirens that caused me to feel such extreme fear.
I know how bad that is, and because of that, I wouldn’t want to say or do anything to make someone else feel like that. I also would never dream of ranking traumas, or deciding which kind of trauma should be taken seriously. It should all be taken seriously, and there should be no contest of whose PTSD is the “most legitimate”.
Don’t act like you know what people who suffer from triggers go through you insensitive dipshit.
lol, burn.
Given the comments sections of the last few posts here, your timing seems impeccable – lots of “MRA” traffic means a few more reasonable souls might actually be swayed. Good stuff, Boobz, as always. -lifts glass-
Another thing amusing about what Mark said is his assumption that the trigger warnings are for everyone even though Futrelle has explicitly said “You may run across upsetting and possibly triggering things in the posts and in the fairly loosely moderated comments as well.”
Reverse psychology is MISANDRY!
David, you forgot to list the first step in every 12 step program out there: admitting they have a problem. For example: We admit we are powerless over our addiction to baseless, hysterical & frothing-at-the-mouth misogyny, cowardice, hypocricy and terrorist mentality – that our lives have become unmanageable.
And Mark, obviously MRAs are threatened by feminists to an extent; why else would they have such an obsessive hatred for them?
“I like how the guy who was complaining about someone else being insensitive to suicide victims is now being totally insensitive to people who’ve suffered trauma awful enough to be triggered.”
You’re right, it was insensitive and hypocritical of me to post that. Let me rephrase it in a more positive way. If anyone here threatened me, why would that bother me?
“(b) clearly none of us are really frightened of the petulant asshats of the MRM, since even the very woman they are focusing their threats on is committed to remaining an activist. ”
So why all the trumped up dramatics about how frightening and scary “MRA terrorists are?