No long post today. Instead, I urge you to go over to the AgainstMensRights subreddit to read about how several long time Men’s Rights Redditors have doxxed and harassed a college student, with one of the regulars gleefully setting forth a plan to stalk her and ruin her life and another seeming to suggest he might want to pay her a visit to “debate” her.
Some screenshots from the original Men’s Rights subreddit discussion:
The thread (which remained up for many hours) has now been scrubbed by the Men’s Rights mods — I got these screenshots from u/Aceyjuan and u/TraceyMorganFreeman’s respective timelines — but as of right now none of the doxxers have been banned from the subreddit, or from Reddit itself.
The “crimes” of the woman in question? According to her main stalker — who has apparently been harassing her for months — she’s tweeted comments like “white men are like the gum on the bottom of my shoe” and “Jared Leto looks like the kind if guy that gives you herpes.”
Yep. Apparently the second-worst evil misandrist comment she made was … a joke about Jared Leto. For these comments, apparently she deserves to have her life ruined.
Here’s the thing: If you don’t like someone’s comments online, you are certainly well within your rights to quote them and point out why you don’t like what they said. That’s kind of the point of this blog. But it’s one thing to point out these comments, and another thing entirely to track down their identity and stalk them in real life. It’s another thing to whip up a virtual mob against them.
Doxxing by Men’s Rights Activists isn’t an accident; it’s the inevitable result of the peculiar style of Men’s Rights Activism.
MRAs, you see, seem utterly incapable of engaging in any kind of activism that might actually benefit men in the real world in any concrete manner. What they as a group specialize in is demonizing women, and in the case of too many MRAS, nothing gets their activist juices flowing faster than the opportunity to attack an individual woman.
That’s why A Voice for Men “activists” put up “wanted” style posters featuring their favorite feminist villains of the day; it’s why they started Register-Her.com. That’s why a certain red-haired Canadian activist who yelled at some MRAs once at a protest now finds her image splashed everywhere online as a visual representation of an evil feminist. That’s why MRAs show up at protests with cameras and threaten to expose the women they film — even if they’ve done nothing more than stand there with a sign.
And that’s why they doxx.
The Men’s Rights movement isn’t a civil rights movement. As it stands right now, it’s a union of abusers, and their enablers.
EDITED TO ADD: Lest anyone claim that the OP didn’t “really” dox the woman in question because he didn’t literally post all her personal details, he provided enough to allow anyone with even rudimentary Google skills to find out her real name and a great deal of other personal identifying information in less time than it would take to order a pizza online.
@Kim & @Kittehserf
Haha, fair enough! While this kind of obsessive, horrific persecution of feminist women just angers me so much (not to mention how much it depresses me), I should be more sensitive to speciesism! I just have a hard time viewing them as human, as they’re utterly inhumane, but calling them “boys” is unfair to young males who haven’t had a chance to mature yet. Maybe man-boyz to show that they’ve had that chance and chose not to?
Lids: A good thought experiment might simply be to ask yourself what you feel you want out of a relationship or a family, if you had one. It might be that your ideal relationship is really just having a friendly room-mate, or caring for a foster child.
A life without a romantic partner isn’t necessarily empty, and plenty of people choose alternate family arrangements for themselves, Lids, not to be nosy, but where do you live? If you’re currently in a not so progressive area that might be adding pressure to hop on the dating/marriage/buy a house/have kids train that might potentially be minimized a bit by living in an area where there’s less pressure to follow that life model. Like leftwingfox said, what do you want? What would be your ideal living situation?
Balarick – LOL I’m thinking of the Furrinati enforcing their dominance over mere humans. Not that they have much trouble doing that, it comes nat’ral.
Lids – seconding cassandra, lack of romantic partner (especially when you’re not romantically or sexually drawn to people anyway) doesn’t equal emptiness. It’s almost fish needing bicycle stuff.
Also, going on a date to try to see if anything clicks romantically sounds like a really bad idea to me. It sounds like trying to force feelings or attraction to exist, or talk yourself into it. Can’t the date just be dinner/whatever with a friend, and enjoyed for its own sake, and if you should develop feelings for someone, let that happen in its own time? Pushing yourself to want someone, or to want to want someone (that’s not a typo) because you’re lonely or because it’s painted as THE way to live sounds like a recipe for unhappiness, at the very least.
Forgot to add: my whole life is without a romantic partner by most people’s standards, and a lot of it had underlying loneliness before I was in contact with Mr K, but it wasn’t empty. Even if one has a romantic partner, that’s no cure for emptiness: look at all the unhappy relationships around, and partnered but unfulfilled people. Don’t fall for the propaganda!
I know, I just feel like I am missing out on something important. I know I can’t change my sexual and romantic orientations, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to. And honestly, I don’t feel pressured to date, no one is pressuring me to date at all. I guess I just feel like I’m going to be left behind because the people I’m closest to are married and dating and it makes them happy. Like today, I spent today with my two best friends for one of their birthdays. One of them is married and brought their husband, and the other is dating a guy that is their ideal in like every way. And they were cuddling and having private conversations and I guess I feel like a 3rd wheel in those situations. Even though I did have some fun I felt like maybe it didn’t matter that I was there because I was just sort of a background object. And I know my friends weren’t ignoring me, I just feel like the person outside the sphere.
Yeah, been there a lot with the third wheel. Most of my friends (back in the day when I had a meatspace social circle) were partnered at one stage or another. Feeling outside the sphere is just how I felt most of the time.
I think my main issues are a) I feel like I’m missing out and, b) I feel like I can’t really relate to other people because romance and sex are such big parts of people’s lives and I don’t actually desire those things. They just make me uncomfortable and awkward. Whenever I date, even when I think I’m interested in someone, I end up feeling like awkward because I’m supposed to be kissing this person and a deeper inspection of my feelings tells me I just see them as a friend (though, to be fair, I just don’t like kissing – i hate touching other peoples’ faces and I hate how squishy lips are ughghghg).
And I mean I’m trying to figure out how to deal with the situation with the guy. He’s legitimately nice, and he seems legitimately interested in me but I know that if I go out on a date with him it won’t be any more than an experiment to see if it’s possible for me to click with someone. He’s cute, he’s nice, he thinks I’m pretty and wants to cook dinner for me. But I find him kind of boring, like he’s nice but I couldn’t see myself even trying if I was pursuing him as a friend because he bores me. Our conversations are stilted (though part of it is the language barrier, he’s still learning English) and I don’t know.
To clarify, just in case there are lurking Nice Guys, I don’t find him boring because he’s nice, he’s just boring. Our conversations are boring to me.
I think someone asked this upthread, but are you in a big/small sort of town? What sort of social possibilities do you have? Any interest groups or the like, places where the focus isn’t on ROMAAAANCE but just on sharing interests? Or (one can dream) any contact groups for asexual people? That would be something, to have contact with people where it was understood that sex wasn’t part of the equation.
There’s a reason why I asked that! In the Bay Area, where I live now, and in London, where I used to live, it’s easy to find people who aren’t at all focused on marriage as an end goal, and even when people are dating it’s usually not the focal point of their lives (except maybe in the super obnoxious early stages that most romances go through), and it’s pretty easy to meet people who you can bond with via other stuff that takes up a lot of their time, and that they leave their partners behind to do something else when they’re doing. Whereas where, say, most of my family lives, you don’t see people over say 30 or so hanging out in groups that don’t seem to have a romantic focus or just kind of doing their own thing solo as much.
TL;DR – I just feel like more cosmopolitan areas might be a better fit for people who aren’t planning to focus their lives on their romantic relationships, because it’ll be easier to find other people who’re similar, and even if all your friends are partnered they’re unlikely to treat you like a weirdo because you’re not.
::nods::
Yup.
I don’t live in a small town, no. The area I live in is medium sized I guess? Not a cosmopolitan area by any means though.
I’ve not met any other asexual people, I mean I’ve talked to a few online via ace groups on facebook, but really I don’t talk to them outside the groups.