So the self-described “human rights activists” at A Voice for Men have found three more women to harass. Here’s the story, which for many of you will have a depressingly familiar ring:
Members of Men’s Rights Edmonton, a small group that is for all intents and purposes a local chapter of A Voice for Men, has been putting up pictures targeting Lise Gotell, the chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta. The pictures, which seem inspired by “Wanted” posters of yore, feature a large portrait of Gotell and the caption:
Theft isn’t black. Bank fraud isn’t Jewish. And rape isn’t male.
“Just because you’re paid to demonize men doesn’t mean rape is gendered. Don’t be that bigot.
Gotell’s crime? She was involved in what appears to have been a remarkably effective rape awareness campaign focusing on date rape and featuring the slogan “Don’t Be That Guy.”
A Voice for Men took exception to the campaign because, even thought it did deal with the male victims of rape, it didn’t devote equal time to the problem of evil, false-accusing “girls.” No, really. Men’s Rights Edmonton Activists put up “satirical” versions of the campaign’s posters with the slogan “Don’t Be that Girl.” Now, MR-E and AVFM, at least according to the “argument” advanced on their new poster, seem to be upset that the campaign didn’t devote equal time to the problem of female rapists. [Note: this paragraph has been corrected; see note at end of piece.]
Gotell spoke out against the posters, and now Men’s Rights Edmonton and AVFM are doing their best to smear her as a “bigot.” Because she doesn’t believe that women are responsible for half of all rapes.
Since this is not actually true — more on this in a later post — it’s hard to see how this makes her a bigot.
As a rule, I don’t support tearing down the posters of one’s ideological enemies. Free speech and all that. But these posters are different: they’re slanderous personal attacks designed to harass an individual. Were they posted in my neighborhood I would tear them down.
And evidently that’s what some people in Edmonton have been doing.
Indeed, one recent night, several members of Men’s Rights Edmonton claim to have caught two women doing just that. While they don’t seem to have video footage of the women tearing down the posters, the MRAs filmed themselves following the women down the street and angrily confronting them for this alleged crime.
They posted the video to YouTube, and AVFM posted it as well, under the typically overheated title “Men’s Rights Edmonton confronts fascists.” They screencapped images of both women from the video and announced their intention to uncover their personal information:
MR-E would like to know the names of these two women so that charges of destruction of property can be laid against them. Also, the world should know the identities of those who seek to silence and censor messages advocating for human rights.
Of course, this is ridiculous. Tearing down a poster that was almost certainly posted illegally in the first place isn’t “destruction of property.” No one is going to be prosecuted for this. The police have better things to do.
But of course that’s not the real intent here. The real intent here is to scare the shit out of these women and other feminists by exposing them to harassment online — like the woman labeled “Big Red” and countless other women who have been targeted by AVFM and other MRAs (sometimes completely erroneously).
AVFM’s Paul Elam gave the game away with an “editor’s note” added to the post:
[A] woman who vandalizes man’s property and then flips him off when he confronts her about it on a dark street at night only acts in this manner because she is certain she has absolutely nothing to fear. Feminists terrified of MHRAs? My ass.
Elam could not have made it any clearer: the main point of this kind of “activism” — which has become AVFM’s bread and butter — is all about intimidating women, not helping men.
AVFM, where terrifying individual women is “human rights activism.”
Here’s the appropriate response to that:
CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION: I rewrote the paragraph starting with “A Voice for Men took exception,” which confused AVRM/MR-E’s current objection to Gotell’s views with its original “argument” against the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign.
oh blast! I screwed up the blockquoting. Sorry!
Underreported to the police and thus by the by the media in general. The rates that appear in the studies are probably far more accurate (depending on the study of course). To me, those studies are surprisingly high, even if they don’t show the MRA position of “Men have it as bad/worse, aren’t part of the problem”.
Again, modern feminist campaigns are focussing on the gender neutral issues of consent, which I think is exactly the right idea. A little token inclusion in these campaigns wouldn’t hurt either, even if it’s not “equal time”.
If AVFM _really_ wanted a helpful “Don’t be that girl” campaign, they would have a poster with a woman in a bar pressing against a guy who is obviously uncomfortable with the situation. Instead, they call the messenger a bigot and whine about “false accusations” which only helps the rapists.
@canuck with pluck,
Those are good questions. I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know how much plausible deniability an MRA has if he doxxes a feminist and then someone else commits a crime against the that feminist. But I know that’s what their goal is. They want to harm the feminist without having any legal responsibility.
At least for the US (sorry I don’t know much about Canadian law), the person who doxxes could at least face lawsuits in civil court even if he doesn’t get charged with a crime. And a victim of doxxing would probably have a good case as a plaintiff, especially if the doxxing resulted in identify theft, stalking, or worse.
We got a live one! 😀
Eh, I think “live” is overestimating his potential entertainment value.
If you mean jonatma420, not really at all. He’s been here before. His MO is to drop a single turd and run. Zero engagement.
Canuck_with_pluck in the cases from the verve article both of the men who doxxed their ex partners were prosecuted and sentenced I can’t remember or check right now because I’m on my phone but I think the shorter sentence was 65 years.
Drive-by trolls are the worst. *Sigh*
But, good morning everyone!
No, you’re pathetic, and an indictment of our education system. I’d tell you to go fuck yourself, but you’d probably need a pictogram instruction manual.
For serious, now, kittens are the most important thing in the world.
An inability to spell kitten is a failure of the HIGHEST order.
Hey, we don’t know for sure that he misspelled kitten! Could’ve been kit tin. You know… the tin, in which kit is kept. Or perhaps he has mistaken David for the sentient car, KITT, who runs the KITT Inn. It’s never good to assume is all I’m saying.
Think how much better jonwhatsisname’s life would be if he actually could go fuck himself. It would remove his main reason for raging at women, for a start.
(Although he could take care of things himself if he had a bit more imagination. It’s why Ceiling Cat gave you hands, dude.)
How would batting at dangly strings help his situation?
I kinda hope they do try to press charges against the random women who tore down their posters, if only because it would require them to tell the police about the libel and harassment they’re commiting.
Re: dudebro, I feel like it came from Shakesville, back when Judd Apatow’s movies were a big deal.
Or they’re hoping someone WILL take it that far, while trying to pretend they’re “just making the facts known” or whatever. I’m like 99% convinced that’s what happened with Bill O’Reilly and George Tiller.
Gaspode would never be an MRA. If not for ideology, then for self-preservation: imagine if Angua found out!
Agreed. I often see M/M couples (the “my strength is not for hurting” campaign from Men Can Stop Rape had a couple), and if it’s still true that 90% of perpetrators are men, it makes sense to focus on them. But idea that women can victimize men is usually absent, and I think that does a disservice to both men and women.
One of the spots on my mental “BINGO” card reads, “Kernel of truth, mountain of bullshit”. It’s reserved for situations like this, where, as you note, there’s a genuine, reasonable complaint that’s used as a launching-point for whatever horrible and irrational argument the person is about to make. I was rather irked, personally, at the decision that “rape = being penetrated” in the CDC report. It’s ignorant and regressive, and needs to be changed going forward.
But it was very clear that even with that change, the folks using the study were horribly abusing the mathematics involved, drawing conclusions not supported by the numbers at all, and hoping no one would check their work.
***********
Doxxing… It’s complicated, in my opinion.
It’s a use of force. I won’t deny that. But sometimes force is justified. The doxxing of violentcruz, or whatever that scumbag redditor’s name was, was genuinely a necessary action–it was about the only way to end his gleeful support of the exploitation of underage girls.
So I can’t comfortably issue a “Never Dox, ever” sentiment, any more than I can call for never using violence; using force in measured response to an actual threat is a real-world obligation at times.
The problem comes when the force used is disproportionate (FREX: posting home/work addresses, employer and home phone numbers, etc), or the alleged justification falls flat. Then you have an illegitimate use of force, which gets tangled up in whether you want to target the force or the fallacious justification for it.
Which all sounds very nice until you realize that the people who you’re trying to target with the “justified” doxxing will then use that as an excuse to target the people who you would prefer not to be targeted, and you’ll have helped create the online atmosphere that allows them to get away with it.
@freemage
I never heard about that before, did people drop his doxx or find his doxx and report him to the police? If something illegal is going on reporting it to police makes sense, but honestly even if something illegal is happening I really don’t see any point for just throwing someone’s information out there. The only thing that could possibly come from that is harrassment or worse.
@John-H
I just finished that article… Jesus.
Another problem with “justified doxxing” is that there are no guarantees that groups of people on the Internet will actually identify the right person. In the case of violentcruz, they actually were correct in identifying the right guy. But what if they had made a mistake? They could have ruined an innocent person’s life. That’s one reason societies make rules and laws against vigilantism.
I agree it’s complicated, though. I have zero sympathy for violentcruz, and I’m glad he was stopped.
MRM got some discussion in a recent episode of the Feminist Current podcast. This stuff in Edmonton gets a brief mention.
http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/feminist-current/2013/09/street-harassment-mens-rights-activists-and-hate-speech-inte
Basically the “it’s justified, and we can target the right people!” argument sounds to me like it comes from a position of not thinking things through from the perspective of the vulnerable groups who will inevitably be targeted most often if doxxing is a thing that people thing is justifiable. For every Reddit pedophile targeted there will be 100 people who just happened to attend a protest or post a comment that pissed someone off online while female, or black, or gay, or all of the above, because that’s how these things always go.
Can we have more interesting drive-by trolls? Or am I asking for the impossible here?
baileyrenee: VC (I misspelled the ‘nym in the earlier post: it’s “violentacrez”) was a redditor who started numerous subreddits that were pretty much all about spreading misogyny and racism. Among the most notorious of these was r/jailbait, which featured candid and secret shots of underage girls. Since the girls were still clothed (they just happened to be momentarily in poses that the vile and disgusting used for their arousal), there was no actual lawbreaking going on. When bad publicity forced Reddit to shut that one down, another one started (r/creepshots, just as nasty as it sounds), and when they started to get more heat, they asked VC to become a moderator, to which he readily agreed.
Eventually, a blogger on the site Gawker managed to identify VC and opted to dox him, publishing his real name. VC got fired, and Reddit instituted a site-wide ban on links to Gawker articles as a retaliatory strike; this later became a ban on specific sub-reddits, but not site-wide.
VC never violated the law, but he was a pernicious and disgusting presence on the internet, and I can’t say I’m sorry to see him go. Doxxing is how that happened.
So, yeah, complicated. I fully understand CassandraSays and thebionicmommy’s concerns–they’re both legit and justified, and not easily addressed. But I also don’t see how you deal with people who hide behind an assumption of the right to anonymity to harass and harm others, without doxxing, or something very like it.
So your answer is that you know that encouraging doxxing is going to create problems for people who’re already vulnerable online, and that people may be misidentified, and that may lead to vigilante crap, but you’re still going to go with “yeah, let’s dox people”?
On behalf of the people who’re going to continue to be the most likely victims of malicious doxxing I’m going to have to continue to point out how ethically questionable a position that is.
To be clear: I’m not trying to ‘encourage doxxing’; I’m saying it may be, at best, a necessary evil in the non-system we’ve got right now, at least until we come up with something better. I’d rather that Reddit, Twitter and Facebook (and all the others out there) took seriously the notion of eliminating the worst of their shit. But that day seems a long way off; we get victories on that front, but new sources of this crap pop up, and the cycle starts all over again. And even the notion of getting the companies to do it is flawed–the misogynist faction has already made it clear that they intend to deliberately spam the proposed Twitter ‘report’ function in an effort to silence voices they don’t like, rather than actual ToS violations.
I’ll accept that my position is hideously flawed, with a lot of dangers and pitfalls. But your position would leave the VC’s of the world intact. I’m not sure I see a change in the law that would work to stop them; neither do I see an easy way to deal with their shit.
Honestly? At the end of the day, I’m saying “I don’t know”. I don’t know which is worse, I don’t know which leads to less harm, and I don’t know how to devise a better system.
Just after the Boston Marathon Bombing, a page went up on reddit aimed at crowdsourcing the identity of the bomber(s). Apparently people were supposed to take the lead “a man in a hoodie and backpack was sighted in the vicinity of the Marathon shortly before the attack” and Sherlock the right guy out of it.
They didn’t.
Someone tried it again for the Navy Yard shooting and reddit shut them down fast.