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.
I’m not seeing any way in which a system that says that doxxing is OK if the people doing it feel that it’s justified could be considered to cause less harm, given the things that we already know people consider to be adequate justification for doxxing. The position you’re laying out is one in which you’re willing to accept whatever collateral damage happens as long as we can occasionally take out some bad guys. I’m not OK with that, and I suspect that you wouldn’t be either if you were part of one of the demographics that’s most likely to end up in the collateral damage column.
PS – Saying “no, I’m not willing to accept the collateral damage, but we don’t have any other options” is in fact being willing to accept the collateral damage, no matter how prettily you word it.
Doxing should not be acceptable. Even if you ID the right person and something good happened out of it, doxing should never be acceptable because you could totally screw up and ruin some innocent person’s life.
Not to mention that even having an excuse for “justified doxing” means that the MRAs would use this with impunity under the cover of “well, she was trying to attack me with box cutters!” or some bullshit like that.
WOW, HTML code fail much? I must have forgot to add the slash.
CassandraSays: That’s fine–but then accept that the collateral damage of your position is that you are willing to accept a VC continuing to exploit and harm young women who’ve been targeted by creepshotters. Saying “No Dox, ever” is no more free of collateral damage than saying “Dox Away”.
How many more underage girls would’ve had their upskirts posted on reddit between last year and today if VC had NOT been doxxed? I don’t think that’s a question that can be easily dismissed.
Again, my preference would be goading the larger social media companies to self-police more effectively. That’s an ongoing fight, and one I support wholeheartedly. But we’ve got a space between now and then on the calendar (assuming it’s even a winnable fight), and I honestly am at a loss on what the best way to deal with the harm being done right now is. Do you have a suggestion beyond “no Dox”?
I do agree that law enforcement does not do nearly enough to protect people from cyber crimes like harassment, threats, and stalking. It’s frustrating that marginalized groups can’t depend on the police or the FBI to keep them safe, but rich and powerful people can. It’s similar to how police fail to enforce many restraining orders, and only seem to care once something bad happens and it’s too late.
But I don’t think the solution is doxxing and Internet vigilante groups. I support people to have the right to self defense, but I don’t classify online mobs as self defense.
If nothing else, if feminists are doxxing, then MRAs can point at us and yell “Doxxers!” and add something real to their list of awful things that females and betas do. Either that or use it as a justification of their own activity… or, more likely given their consistency issues, both.
Thanks for attempting to mansplain what’s best for women to a woman, dude. We duly take note of your concern for some of us, when it’s convenient and supports the position you want to take.
I’m done being nice about this, and will soon start wielding the clue bat with more force if the conversation continues in its current direction.
Shit like this is still going on, so exactly how much good did doxxing one asshole do, again?
I can easily dismiss your privilege and your ‘splaining. Watch me.
Seriously. Doxxing is disgusting. I expect to have my personal information kept private, and doxxing anyone opens them up to harassment, stalking, or worse.
This is the big argument to me: If a group you disapprove of does something you disapprove of, then you have to not do it yourself, ever, or you have no moral high ground. You can’t really go “but I only do it to people who deserve it” or “but there are circumstances that make it acceptable in this case” because those things are subjective and anyone could claim they applied in any circumstance.
Same reason I don’t approve of Name the Problem.
I’m going to keep a link to this conversation on file for the next time I need to illustrate to someone what privilege blindness is, and what happens when people choose it over their stated desire to be allies.
This might be a slippery slope here, but oh well. I think this situation really is a slippery slope. I agree that VC got what he deserved. However, what’s to stop “the good guys” from getting a thrill from defeating “the bad guy” so they start targeting people for more mild offenses? If someone says a misogynist slur online, should an online mob dox them? What if someone enjoys a problematic song like Blurred Lines or TV show like Game of Thrones? Who decides what offenses merit the punishment of doxing?
That’s what the Baldknobbers did. They first went after Confederate outlaws. But the power got to them, and they started going after anyone they happened to dislike for any reason. They got so out of hand, another vigilante group formed to fight them, calling themselves the Anti Baldknobbers. By the time the feud ended, nobody knew why they were fighting anymore, but 30 people were dead. The Hatfields and McCoys are another example.
Heh–check out this guy’s Reddit history. Apparently he exclusively comments on threads about guys sitting with their legs wide apart.
Sitting with the legs wide seems a little vulgar to me. Unless you are sitting cross-legged.
Huh, that’s a very…specific interest that Reddit dude has there.
I will cease to push the point. I probably should done this at least one post earlier, and I apologize for not doing so.
It was the point itself that people objected to, not the fact that you continued pushing it once other people disagreed with it.
This is OT, but I found this: http://laidnyc.wordpress.com/2013/09/19/the-walls-of-facebook/ and it definitely show the true, creepy colors of PUAs and MRAs. I’m sure one day they will want middle-school girls. Their delusion that they’ll all be like Shaun Connery when they hit 60 and the centerfold syndrome they have is childish at best.
Count me in the anti-doxxing camp, but I admit to sometimes being confused sometimes as to whether or not something is doxxing. Is what Adria Richards did doxxing, or is it not doxxing because she didn’t release their names or call for people to identify them? When do investigative journalists cross the line into doxxing?
Am I being obtuse? There is some evidence that my brain is not firing on all cylinders today.
Richards didn’t dox, and neither do investigative journalists. I think doxxing has a more malicious element. Doxxing is just shit-stirring, and while I’d like to have doxxers lick that particular spoon, I gotta be against doxxing them too.
Cassandra: I get that. I’m still processing the arguments you and the others have made against my point, and I’m re-evaluating my position. In the meantime, though, I kept pushing back, rather than just saying, “Hey, I need to re-evaluate this; you’ve given me a lot to think about.” That tendency is probably behind some of my most common mansplaining fails, so I try to apologize for it when I do it.
I am curious about answers to cloudiah’s question. It gets particularly tricky in the internet age, when anyone with a blog can call themselves an investigative journalist.
Oh and just smack me if I’m JAQing off.
hellkell: So because the Gawker author followed the commonly accepted ‘rules’ of investigative journalism (doing careful research, actually contacting the person to give them the opportunity to comment, etc), he didn’t actually dox VC in the sense that you oppose? I could get behind that, because it would allow for some way for people to be called on their shit, without just turning back to mob justice.
Having a blog doesn’t make you a journalist, no matter how many random bloggers claim that it does. Journalists can of course also have blogs, but it’s not the same thing. There are some blogs that host actual journalists, but even there it gets tricky. Gawker hosts some actual journalists, for example, but not everyone who writes for Gawker really merits the title.
(This is a pet hate of mine, particularly when people try to use their random little blogs as a way to acquire press passes for events, and then behave in ways that illustrate exactly why bloggers who’re not really journalists shouldn’t be given press passes.)