We’ve seen a lot of epic flip-floppery from Men’s Rightsers in the last few days on the subject of the Occidental College fiasco — that is, for those who haven’t been following it closely, the organized spamming of Occidental’s anonymous online rape reporting form with false reports by Reddit MRAs and 4channers. Notably, the Men’s Rights subreddit mod known as sillymod went from blaming the false reports on trolls one day to hailing them as necessary activism the next.
But a reader has alerted me to an even more epic flip-flop, this one from Pierce Harlan, a blogger obsessed with what he sees as an epidemic of false rape accusations.
Harlan started out as one of the voices of reason — at least by MRA standards — on the Occidental College spamming. Refraining from the hysteria of his fellow Men’s Rightsers about Occidental College’s anonymous form, he actually pointed out in one post that the form wasn’t being used to punish anyone and that anonymous reporting may be “a necessary evil” in order to get a true picture of the extent of rape.
On Friday, he went further, announcing in a post on his blog The Community of the Wrongly Accused that he was so disgusted with the behavior of his fellow Men’s Rightsers in the Occidental fiasco that he was planning to give up blogging entirely. The phony reports from MRAs, he sadly noted, “did no favors for the wrongly accused,” and this sort of “activism” only served to make MRAs look bad.
[T]he actions of the spammers were misguided at best, puerile and malicious at worst. They’ve given those of us who are trying to raise awareness about these issues in a serious way a black eye. I couldn’t care less how some radical feminist characterizes this incident, my concern is how it plays to middle America — and this can’t be spun in a positive way.
The incident, he wrote, was
the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. We’ve long sought to engage our readers, both here and via Reddit, to take certain actions that we felt could actually make a difference for the wrongly accused. These efforts invariably were met with either a lukewarm response or the sound of crickets chirping. …
Yet, now, someone suggests men’s righters spam a school’s rape reporting site, and for that they come out in droves. Hundreds of false rape reports. …
If we could have had this kind of support for the various initiatives we’ve tried to launch, I think we actually could have made a difference for the wrongly accused. We didn’t.
And so, he concluded in frustration,
the time has come to hand this blog over to others who will continue to raise awareness about the injustices to the wrongly accused. I will continue to follow the issue and offer my two cents on issues I think are important, but I’m not going to run this blog any longer.
Yep. That’s right. MRAs are such shitty “activists” that their most notable and attention-getting work of “activism” since I’ve started this blog drove the MRA most dedicated to that issue to such disgust and despair that he announced he was basically giving up the fight.
But Harlan’s retirement didn’t last long.
Apparently deciding that his camel’s back could handle a bit more straw after all, Harlan quickly took down the post announcing his retirement — though it’s still up, at least for now, in Google cache, and when that goes away, here’s a handy screenshot. (In case you’re not an ant, click to see it full size.)
On Saturday, Harlan came out with a new post suggesting that maybe he’d been wrong to challenge the hysteria of the false-report-submitting MRAs in the first place. Remember that bit from above in which Harlan said that the actions of the false-report spammers “can’t be spun in a positive way[?]” Well, Harlan decided he was going to give it the old college try:
Progressives are having a bona fide conniption over the Reddit Men’s Righters who spammed Occidental College’s anonymous rape reporting system with fake “rape” claims (from what we can tell, they were not really false rape claims, just snarky comments about the injustice of anonymous reporting). The righteous indignation from feminists is deafening. The spam attack, they tell us, is typical men’s rights hysteria, the result of an undeservedly privileged class being stripped of its power.
The men’s righters were out to prove that it’s too easy to abuse the college’s anonymous reporting system. We disagreed with the men’s righters and said we weren’t much concerned about the anonymous reporting system, but the more we read the progressive take on the incident, the more we wonder if we blew the call — maybe we should be concerned..
There was, of course, no reference to his post from the previous day, no acknowledgment that the “activism” he was now defending was the very same “activism” that had led him only one day earlier to decide to quit blogging altogether.
Down the memory hole it went. (But Google cache remembers.)
I guess when you’re a Men’s Rights activist, you have to take what you can get, and incredibly shitty slacktivism is about as good as it gets.
This has nothing to do with the post, but I hope anyone on here who lives in Southern Ontario is ok, and has power and wasn’t hurt in the storm! I lost power yesterday, but was ok today.
Yes, but with the WRONG bad boys/alphas/not poor suffering betas, serrana, you hypergamous slutty mcslutster, you!
(Did that cover everything?)
Perfect, thank you for the addendum, kittehs.
Glad you’re well, canuck!
Thanks serrana! I’ve been texting/calling people all day–a bunch of people I know have lost power, they say some of it may not be restored until Christmas Day. I couldn’t go to work this morning and literally did not leave my house–which normally I wouldn’t mind (who doesn’t love a lazy Sunday?)–but hate when the weather forces it on me. I’ve had the worst case of cabin fever.
Yikes, I can’t imagine having no power in the cold. Do people in your area tend to have gas stoves, at least, so that they can make hot food?
Reblogged this on iheariseeilearn.
I mean to say “Feminists love all animals” — I blame sleep deprivation.
Well, as we all know, I like coffee. So MRAs must hate it. Which actually explains a great deal — raging like that must be tiring and without coffee…no wonder they’re so incoherent!
Sleep deprivation’s a good reason. How’s your mum doing, cloudiah?
I suspect MRAs would be raging miserable bastards even if all their wishes came true – if women were their slaves and they got sex on demand from whoever they fancied. Somehow it still wouldn’t be good enough for them.
She’s Doing A Little Better, Kittehs, But It’s Slow. Sorry About My phone`S Capitalization.
Hey canuck! Glad you are ok.
I’m in SE ON for Christmas and we lost power a few times yesterday and all of last night. It was back by 7 am this morning though. Trees are down all over our neighborhood and the roads are kind of a mess. Last night I was really starting to think we were going to be in another ice storm. I would be worried about anyone without power for awhile because it’s supposed to get really cold by Tuesday, like -20’s cold. I hope those people have a warm place to stay.
OK. Thought experiment, where the MRA universe is real (brace yourselves).
I am a female student at Occidental. I have sex with a dude, and then the next morning I have typical female shame and regret, so I decide to accuse this dude of raping me. I log on to my school’s anonymous online rape reporting form and fill it in with some shit I made up, including the dude’s name! “Haha, this will get me off the hook for being such a giant slut,” I probably think!
And then, what happens exactly? The dude gets a visit from the Dean, who says “Yo, just so you know, someone has accused you of raping them via our anonymous online reporting system. If you did happen to rape anyone recently, please let me remind you that this is very serious and totally Not OK.”
An uncomfortable conversation, absolutely no doubt about it, but what was the benefit for me, the heinous female false accuser? If I want to preserve my anonymity, I can’t tell anyone about it. The dude I accused never has to share the conversation he had with the Dean with anyone else. Exactly nothing else happens. So why bother with the form? If I really had super-bad-sex-regrets and wanted to lie about what happened by saying I’d been raped, a much better tactic would be to tell some of my friends and let it spread around the student body, thereby damaging the dude’s reputation and preserving my own, while not actually reporting him to the police, which could potentially expose my lies.
Alternative scenario. I hate my ex boyfriend’s guts and I am such a malicious person that I want to ruin his life. I decide that accusing him of raping me the best way to go about this. I fill in my school’s anonymous online rape reporting form. “Haha, that will teach him for dumping me for that hot bimbo cheerleader,” I probably think.
I remain anonymous and my ex gets a serious talk from the Dean. Nothing else happens. My ex has no idea who accused him, but it’s quite possible that he will chalk it up to his awful jealous ex trying to get at him. Again, an upsetting and unpleasant situation, but the ball is now in his court. If he never tells anyone about the accusation, we’re at a stalemate and he’s free to move on with his life. That’s no good for me, the angry ex-girlfriend who wants to hurt him. If I really want to cause him stress and emotional pain, I will have to take my false accusation to the police. Since this is MRA land, the police will believe me by default, they will certainly not probe my story for holes and they will officially charge my ex based on the minimal evidence which I have managed to fabricate. My ex will face a biased court full of feminist sympathisers and quite possibly end up doing jail time based on little more than my word. Even if he gets off, he will be forever branded a rapist. Surely, reporting to the police is the best route for me if I really want him to suffer? The online reporting system is not useful for my malicious purposes.
In MRA world, the primary reason women make false rape accusations is to hurt men, right? So WHY again is this tool such an apparent godsend for all the eeeeevil feeeeemales make a false rape accusations over the tiniest male transgression when it’s practically impossible to actually hurt anyone or damage their reputation by filling it in?
Cloudiah, I’m So Glad To Hear That Your Mom Is Doing Well. And I Am Sorry Your Phone Is Being Such A Pain In The Ass.
Ah, but you forget
the logic trainwreck
yet
I will happily help deduce the cause of their ill news:
You post a post a online form
declaring someone did bad things (evil things, to fit the norm)
And this is now on the Internet
So now someone far away in the NSA will look at it some day
and say
“Anonymous Poster at Occidental
has called this male antirapist credential
get me a swat team there right pronto
kick in his door and drag him off to 50 years in a grotto
because our matriarch overseers what pay the bills
have written this power into our bill”
And suddenly, someone is arrested and shipped off to the Re-education camps.
Because that’s how those forms work. Right?
right
When they complain that there is so much false reporting, are they meaning accusations of actual rape that they don’t think should count because they’re not “real rape” as opposed to complete fabrications? Suddenly I see why they think it’s so dire. I don’t want to read Mr.Thongs website, but if anyone else has – does he defend actual innocent people, or mostly people that no one but a rape apologist would think were innocent?
holy hells, yeah! Glad to hear your mum is doing better cloudiah. That is fantastic, and I wish things get even better from here.
I think we’re missing a golden opportunity here. Bear with me.
I am a feminist and I hate reading up on feminist theory and recognising the truth in it and becoming a feminist instead of staying on the surface of a stagnant pond.
Thanks all!
Nice one, Shaun!
That’s it ..Im done ..I can not support it. It’s like misandry and shooting the false reporting epidemic in the foot. Main America will never realize how widespread false reporting is because of it .100 out of 100 people will never realize 99% of all rape accusations are false by misandriast because of this breaking of the camels back.(refer to pyramid A and correlate it with the charts) I may comment but Im done because you ruined the whole real seriousness of the nature of this rampant widespread injustice oppression against men .
And I can totally understood why you did that . You totally proved misandry . Now maybe they will understand our cause .It may make mainstream pause and think what is happening to men ..GOOD job!
You owe me a cup of tea!
LOL!! Why do they call it the community of wrongly accused ,have the nerve to say its not based on gender ,but then limit their “fight” to men wrongly accused of rape by women ?Who do they think they are fooling by the mere claim its not gender based?
Wonder how many false claims they(men) made to Occidental that another man raped them? But no its not ‘gender based.” Its just the community of wrongfully accused. Wonder about all the people that are framed or forced into false confessions by the police(for all sorts of crimes) ? NOPE its not about gender .(hating women) its sincere concern for the “falsely accused.” ROLL eyes.
My pleasure . As long as you will take green tea with honey a lemon.
I’ll give it a try, never drunk green tea! 🙂
@hellkell
It does seem at times like the MRAs picked up their keen understanding of gender dynamics from a Benny Hill marathon.
If you’re too young to know who Benny Hill is, count your blessings.