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.
@yaoi huntress earth,
Ewww, those guys are terrible. One of them, Wald, said
I feel sorry for girls and young women that would ever run into guys like him. “Mold the future wife” *shudders*
Also, do you mind if I ever shorten your name to yaoi?
Maru got a sister:
Freemage: I wasn’t even thinking of Gawker as investigative journalists, at all, ever. I think Chen doxxed VA completely and did it on a blog.
Cloudiah, those cats are just adorable. Maru’s a perfect name! (I think it means “Ball” in Japanese) 😀
Mara has a sister!
If we refer to one of our commenters as yaoi I’m going to get super confused and wonder if I’m on the wrong blog.
cloudiah, I always thought that giving out addresses and workplaces was doxxing. I may be wrong though.
Ew. No. Ugh. No.
Besides the obvious creep factor this just doesn’t even sound correct… I didn’t have boobs or a pimple-free free face until my 20’s, I definitely did not “peak” in highschool.
Curious asked him
and LaidinNYC answered
So even though LaidinNYC is awful, Curious took the top prize for awfulness. Congrats, Curious!
Yeah, so I just looked up yaoi on urban dictionary. Oops, that’s embarrassing. Forget I asked then.
These fucking MRAs are making me want to become a recluse. Who the fuck are they anyway, & what the fuck are they thinking? They are suck ignorant fucks that they have no fucking idea what feminism is really about. It’s only about 1 thing & has 1 ultimate goal – the goal of having women being treated as regular people, not “females” or “princesses” or “trophy wives” or any of that other shit. Just regular people. With that goal, feminism has taken a very hard stand on many things, like owning up to the sick fact that there are women who are rapists, child molesters, & child abusers of both genders. Oh & feminism has nothing to do with hating men & boys.
These sick fucking thieves, the thieves of the term “Men’s Rights”, they don’t care about men or boys. They don’t even want to own up to the fact that men rape & abuse anyone. A rapist, to them, is some guy, some mysterious pervert, who is prowling the streets & hiding in bushes at 3am. Not “nice guys”, not “decent guys”. Well, you fuckheaded MRAs, do you want to know who was considered a “nice & decent guy”? A guy who was considered smart, attractive, & could get just about any woman he wanted? Fucking Ted Bundy! & still he assaulted & murdered so many women. He would trick them by sick means, he would break into their houses & apartments & attack them in their sleep, & he would stalk women too, before he would attack them. Do you really want to be associated with the kind of thinking & behavior of someone like Ted Bundy, a convicted murderer & rapist that was sentenced to death?
& calling feminists “fascists” is a bunch of bullshit too. If anyone is fascistic & totalitarian, it’s the fucking MRAs. They want to shut women up, they want to shut anyone up who isn’t like them, & doesn’t agree with them. Pretty fascistic, wouldn’t you say?
For the sake of comic relief since this thread hasn’t been much fun, have a SNL sketch from Korea (with subtitles) about yaoi fanfiction. Apparently they based the sketch on an actual fanfiction (DBSK, I believe).
Hana is super-cute. *Nods* And the SNL K thing is… wacky, on several levels. Thanks for the amusement, CassandraSays.
Before continuing: I’m still working through it all. Cloudiah’s comment (“smack me if I’m just JAQing off”) is very much applicable to me as well.
Cassandra: That was why I specified “followed the rules of journalism” (and I should have said, “followed the rules of professional journalism” to be clearer that I’m trying to use a very specific set of standards). That’s something I actually am more than passingly familiar with, and from what I can see, Chen really did do everything that a professional, paid-by-a-media-company journalist would do in that situation–most importantly to my mind, confirming beyond doubt that the ID was correct, and then giving VC an opportunity to speak for himself (which the vast, vast majority of doxxers never do, obviously).
hellkell: Hrm… Okay, then–what about that column makes you put it in the Dox category, as opposed to the Journalism category?
Cassandra: thanks for the brain bleach/eye candy. I didn’t know there was an SNL Korea. The guy with the longer red hair has the best facial expressions ever.
Freemage: why are you so insistent on this being journalism? Do you consider Watergate doxxing?
Maybe I’d feel better about it if the internet had a better track record.
@PJ
BUT IF I DON’T WHINE HERE, HOW WILL ANYONE SEE MY GLORIOUS, MANLY OPININONS????ELEVEN
@sarahlizhousespouse
I know. Not enough time to have fun poking them, but still to much time having to look at their boring, deraily, comment.
You’re supposed to learn something new every day, and today I learned what yaoi is. I’ll call that a win.
@ hellkell
The Korean version of SNL is new to me and I’m loving it so far. This is my favorite sketch (about plastic surgery and how judgy people get about it).
And this one is just weird, though I have to give the dude props for being willing to do it, since there aren’t many men that famous for being hot who’d be willing to make asses of themselves in public that way.
Kendra, considering I assume you just got an unexpected eyeful, that’s a very positive attitude to take.
@thebionicmommy : It’s ok, you can shorten it. Most people do. And there’s a story behind the whole name, but I don’t want to bore you with it.
The thing with the response is that these guys still don’t acknowledge their wives after the children are born. They’ll mention the kids (as in “my kids”) and their boners, but the wife is just something to tolerate after she hits 30. If all they can value is her looks, youth and virginity (the later two will be gone), how can they respect her as a person?
Oh, that’s just sad. I’m unmarried, but I always imagined that, if I do eventually marry, I’d marry someone that I, you know, loved. It must be a shitty life if you pick by birth-date alone.
My answer? Leave her. She’ll thank you for it… though why she hasn’t already left you by this point is a mystery for the ages.
@Ally
Yeah. I think ‘drive by’ and ‘interesting’ don’t go well together 😛
@thebionicmommy
Ugh, yes. May they step on all the legos forever.
baileyrenee: Part of the problem with that definition is that in the current era, one usually leads to the other. (That is, if I post your name, someone else will be inspired to do the hunting for your home address and your boss’ phone number.) Since the consequence is fairly predictable, the onus then falls on the person making the decision to name-drop to determine if that’s an acceptable outcome.
On that link… that horrible, horrible link… Ugh.
Maru has a sister! Most important and cheering news of the day (and between politics here and my jerkbrain making life difficult, I could do with it).
Also Hana is SO PRETTYYYYYYYYYYYYY.
Yea, identifying someone can lead to officially doxxing them for sure, and a lot of the time trying to find someone’s name is basically just hoping someone else will doxx them. I think it can be an important distinction to make though, because with, let’s say, David’s name out there, someone could doxx him and then be all “well, he doxxed himself first! His name is out there already!” But, maybe to avoid that, just putting out anyone’s personal info they didn’t want known should be considered doxxing. Either way the whole thing makes me scared of the internet.
This Korean SNL is way better then American SNL, btw. I’m liking it.
though why she hasn’t already left you by this point is a mystery for the ages.
But that’s the strange thing…when she does leave, they have huge fits about it. It’s like they never think that the woman has thoughts or opinions of their own, and girls do mature, even after 22, even if they think they “molded” them. So it completely takes them by surprise that their sex-dispensing sandwich making machines leave them, all because they were totally wrong about women. But instead of going “Huh, I guess I was completely wrong about that”, they whine and bemoan the fact that women are horrible.
Sporklift – yup, they never do grasp that they can’t turn a woman into a Stepford wife, even if they’ve had the opportunity to do their pedo-grooming from puberty.