Last night, a regular commenter in the Men’s Rights subreddit — inspired by a thread on 4chan — posted a link to an online form on r/mensrights under the headline “Feminists at Occidental College created an online form to anonymously report rape/sexual assault. You just fill out a form and the person is called into the office on a rape charge. The “victim” never has to prove anything or reveal their identity.”
This headline is not only inflammatory but untrue: Yes, Occidental College has an online form that allows victims of or witnesses to sexual assault to report the incidents to the school. But, as a statement at the top of the form makes clear, the point is to collect data on how much sexual violence there is at the school, who the victims are, and so on.
If the person reporting the crime names the alleged perpetrator,
a member of the Dean of Students Office will meet with that person to share that the person was named in an anonymous report, review the Sexual Misconduct Policy, and inform the person that if the allegations are true, the behavior needs to cease immediately. Information shared in this form alone will not result in anyone going through the grievance process.
I’ve put the last bit in bold to emphasize a point: No one will be charged with anything based only on information gathered using this form. As would be clear to anyone who thought about the matter for more than a few seconds, it’s rather difficult to investigate, much less prove, a rape if you don’t actually know who the victim is.
Somehow this rather elementary fact eluded the OP, and virtually all of those who left the hundreds of comments on the popular post.
Indeed, a host of Men’s Rights Redditors were so convinced of the innate evil of the online form they all had the same bright idea: let’s flood the school with false reports of rape and break the form. Here are some of their comments. (There are more in the thread.) Note the number of upvotes each of these suggestions got. (Click the images to see the comments in context on Reddit.)
While a few commenters stood up to point out that in fact the school will not charge anyone with anything as a result of anonymous information gathered by the form, they were outnumbered by Men’s Rightsers gleefully reporting that they in fact had reported false information. Among them:
![froggymorning 46 points 15 hours ago (59|13) I've already filled one out. permalink source parent save give gold hide child comments [–]Muffinizer1 6 points 7 hours ago (9|4) Was kind of fun. I swear to god though, if they track us down it would be terribly ironic, however it's mildly likely.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/froggy.png?resize=546%2C171&ssl=1)
It’s one thing to criticize an anonymous reporting system because of its potential for abuse; this is something else entirely.
The post has been up for 17 hours at this point, with more than 700 net upvotes, and some of the calls for “breaking” the form have been up for nearly as long. The moderators of Men’s Rights have done nothing to stop their subreddit being used to interfere with a school’s attempt to assist rape survivors — including men.
“Breaking” a school’s rape reporting mechanism is apparently a form of Men’s Rights activism.
If they’re not rapists, it doesn’t. But then helping rapists is the MRM’s raison d’etre.
And right around the corner is a nice metal fridge that they can all stub their pinkie toes on.
And when they stumble after that, they’ll bang their hip-bones on that sharp corner of the kitchen bench, and the towel rail that sticks out will catch their pockets and rip them.
When they hobble into the lounge, they’ll find out the hard way (via their shins) that someone moved the coffee table.
They finally find some nice couches to sit on – only to hit their funny bones on the arm rests.
*witch cackling and thunder*
The couches all have one bum leg, so when they finally sit, a corner of it collapses.
Plus a random dog or cat has just been in and puked on the couch. They don’t find out till they’ve sat in it.
@LBT
I love it when I see something that’s even more perfect than the most perfect thing I could have imagined. That’s wonderful.
And when they fall on the floor, they land on cat puke.
Ninja’d!
Then they’re told the couch can’t be repaired and they have to buy a new one, and when they put their puke-stained jeans in the wash, they forget to take a tissue out of the pocket.
Oh, and the fridge they banged their toes on? It breaks down and all their food rots.
Maybe we can put our heads together and devise a method to cause MRAs to randomly lose their proprioception at inconvenient, but not overly harmful moments. Essentially a clumsiness curse.
Then the tissue clogs up the washing machine and they have to take it apart. While they have it apart on the garage floor, their housemate drives in the garage and runs over the parts.
@melody
I know. The irony, it hurts :/
@argenti
I don’t know if it’s sinking to their level, but it’s missing the same amount of hypocrisy, since mra’s frequently whine about false rape accusations. On the other hand, whoever’s got to go through them (assuming it’s not a computer) probably has enough shit to wade through, so spamming more probably wouldn’t help.
@la strega
It’s okay! all they have to do is find one feminist to turn, and she’ll* reveal the rest of us, what with the feminist hivemind connecting us and all 😛
*all feminists are women. Men are only feminists to get laid, and non-binary people don’t exist. /sarcasm.
I think people need to make a Halloween amusement park attraction for MRAs only called The Feminist House of Horror. Free admission for Paul Elam, GirlWritesWhat, Warren Farrell, Roosh V, Camile Paglia, Christina Hoff Sommers, and The Amazing Atheist.
I love that this is what counts as activism in the MRM. Never change, MRAs.*
*by “never change” I mean JESUS CHRIST STOP BEING SUCH AWFUL HUMAN BEINGS IMMEDIATELY
I believe that victims have the option of naming the perpetrator, but it is not required so if they’re worried about that they can always fill out everything else but leave off the name of their attacker.
Watch out for randomly placed refrigerators in the dark and trapdoors that lead to Lego pits!
I’m glad you covered this, David. I was going to email you but I feel like I’m constantly spamming you with “You should write about this” messages and you’re just too nice to say, “Um, cloudiah, you have your own blog you know.” 🙂
Yeah, they’re all up in arms over the fact the Gender of Perpetrator section is free-text. It’s rank misandry to not have a set 2 choices in a drop-down menu.
That’s too nice. I think the curse should say, “they forget to take their baggie of pot* and all their paper money out of the pockets.”
*Perhaps even enough pot to trade for a tiger.
I emailed David about this earlier today. So I basically ninja’d you outside of Man Boobz! =O
Someone already did.
All of the above! Plus as serrana noted, the tissue clogs the machine (as well as scattering bits over everything in it) and when they take it apart, their housemate runs over the parts.
Oh, and because it’s such an old model, they can’t get replacement parts. It’s also an odd size, and all the available models are too big for the space, so they have to sit taking up the whole floor, or really small, so they have to do twice the number of loads they used to.
Meta-ninja! 😯
Cloudiah (and everyone else), I’m always glad to get suggestions, tips, etc, about stuff to write about. I get a lot of topics for posts that way.
It’s also helpful when people email me about trolly stuff going on in the comments.
Don’t worry that you’re spamming me!
MRA: male rapists association — for rapists.
If we’re not helping you get away with your rape today, we’re doing a bad job!
[/sarcasm]
David, you have opened the floodgates! (Just kidding.)
Also, the r/mr mods have doubled down.