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.
What if said organizations refuse to work with them or they can’t find funding to start their own? Earl Silverman did try this and look how that ended.
Same response as above. When people are oppressed, then these things are precisely what you can’t do. It’s clearly not for lack of attempts that MRAs aren’t doing this.
If you think it can be done, then why don’t you show us all how? Lead by example. I bet you that’ll do more to fight misogyny in the MRM than anything you’re doing now.
Women started building the domestic violence shelter network at a time when we weren’t allowed to have our own credit cards. If MRAs aren’t building anything, it’s not because they’re too oppressed to do so.
So they’re just not trying? Does that response work for other oppressed people in the word too? I doubt it.
*world*
Maybe you should ask them why they’re not doing practical activist work, rather than asking David.
I ask both. In fact I ask everybody.
I’m asking David specifically, because he claims to know ways but all he’s said so far is what people have tried for decades.
Look, if you guys are right, then it really would do great things for the entire gender discourse if you’d just show us how it’s done. Even if only to funnel potential MRAs to your side. That alone should be a compelling reason for you.
Mmn101,
Men aren’t a marginalized group. Women are the historically marginalized group and you’re blaming us for the misogyny in the MRM? Bullshit. There are already examples of activism out there. Feminists, civil rights activists, LQBTQ rights activists, the labor movement etc. have already led by example and the MRM has chosen to ignore those examples and base their “movement” on hate. That’s nobody’s fault but theirs.
I’m having a really hard time believing that you asked your original question in good faith.
Oh, I’m laughing at this.
In what way are white men so oppressed they couldn’t organise to do charity or volunteer work? Who is stopping them from doing things? MRAs wouldn’t even do stuff at Men’s Shed level. All they’re interested in is hating women. It says a great deal that men like Sodini are their heroes.
On the attraction thing – are we talking “would have sex with given the opportunity, at least hypothetically” or just “that’s an aesthetically appealing face/body”? Because I only ever feel the second way about anyone ‘cept Mr K. He gets my full quota of the first. 😉 So I’m never even sure what people are talking about when it comes to attraction.
If you want to help you could try doing any of the above things. Or you could try educating people on actual issues, not the kind of stuff that they do on MRM sites, which is mostly whine and blame women for everything.
Real activism is actually helping people. For instance, I go out of my way to educate people on issues of race. I don’t have to (I’m a white woman, after all) and sometimes people don’t listen to me, just like sometimes they don’t listen to me when I talk about feminism and LGBTQA+ issues, but trying is the best you can do.
Yelling at women on the internet, giving away their information, calling women cunts and sluts and getting angry that they won’t put out, that’s not activism. Putting up posters around a town that not only don’t make any sense, but use company logos is not activism.
Activism is going out and trying to educate people on the issue(s) that matter to you and if you can get involved in volunteer work and donation.
I just read through the thread on the AgainstMensRights subreddit. That’s horrible. The harassment is going to escalate unchecked until someone gets seriously injured or killed. These guys are menaces and you just know they’ll play the innocence card when something does happen.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Prof. Adele Mercier canceled her panel gig at Queen’s University out of fear for her personal safety. I’m not optimistic that QU will do a damned thing for her. After all, they broke ground by allowing a men’s rights group on campus. What a hostile environment for female professors and students.
Why don’t POC attempt to help the KKK solve their “problems”? Why, I ask you? I mean, it would really help to win those potential KKK members over to their side.
@Kitteh
Well as an ace I’m talking about sexual attraction. I am perfectly capable of aesthetic attraction, though misandrist that I am I find about 90% of women aesthetically pleasing and only about 5% of men aesthetically pleasing.
Also, on the “what should they do” question – even if they’re clueless about activism, nothing gives them the right to doxx, stalk and harass people. Not to mention that they’re targetting SCHOOLGIRLS for this. It’s not an oppressed group fighting the oppressors: it’s men stalking very young women, or girls, and inciting violence against them.
So you know, you can go fuck yourself if you equate that with activism of any sort. The MRM is the abusers’ lobby, nothing more.
Lids – misandrist attraction for the win! 😀
I often think I’m about 99% ace, or something along those lines. “Single target sexuality” is a thing as far as I’m concerned.
This conversation is far more interesting than the one disingenuous dude is trying to instigate. So, about the idea of sexual attraction…do other people actually see someone and think “yep, would definitely fuck, no caveats at all”? Because for me I look at people and think that I might want to have sex with them, but whether or not I’m actually interested in doing so always, always depends on whether or not I end up liking their personality and feeling some sort of connection.
@kitteh
Demisexual then? Like you only feel sexual attraction for someone when you’ve developed really strong feelings for someone, and it doesn’t always happen? I’ve had people try to convince me I’m demisexual, and of course I can’t know that I’m not because I might just not have met someone I’ve connected with the right way, but it irritates me because I’m 99.9% sure I’m asexual.
(I’m sure this is misandry in some way, even though it applies to women as well as men.)
@cassandrakitty
As an ace I of course can’t say what sexual attraction is like lmao. But I can say that there are people I would be more likely to have sex with than others (I’m not a sex-repulsed or sex-indifferent ace), but it definitely hinges more on personality than anything else.
Off topic: A commenter on Io9 just compared making fun of Ayn Rand and her fans to racism (of the assuming all Arabs are terrorists sort). When I called him out on it he accused me of a “rabid animalistic attack.” It was pretty hilarious. All I could really do was post a picture of a whaaambulance in response.
Come to think of it, he kind of reminds me of the MRAs we’ve been discussing in this thread. Maybe he and mmn101 were the same person?
If it turns out mmn101 actually did ask his (or her) first question in good faith, I will be seriously shocked.
A lot of the time when I see ace people talking about how they perceive sexual people to go about hooking up it feels really off to me, as in what they’re describing doesn’t match my experience at all. Almost like they think that seeing someone and immediately feeling attraction means that there aren’t still other things that determine whether or not you’ll actually end up wanting to do so in the long run, or like the attraction can’t vanish if the person you’re attracted to turns out to be an awful person. I dunno, it just never matches what the experience of feeling attracted to someone actually feels like to me, which is why I tend to avoid those conversations.
mmn101 is the walking definition of “whiny-ass titty baby.”
In theory there are men that I would fuck with caveats. In reality though, an extremely virulent personality probably would put off. It just hasn’t ever happened any time I have had the opportunity to be with someone I find physically attractive.
Lids, do you find people are typically really invested in telling you that you aren’t or shouldn’t be asexual? I can never understand why people have a problem with respecting what another person’s chosen label is.
Oops. That was supposed to be without caveats.
It doesn’t even have to be a virulently awful personality for me, even just a feeling of nope, nothing in common with this person, not really connecting means that I’m not going to sleep with them because I can’t imagine enjoying the sex. I may or may not still find them aesthetically appealing, but that “must get hands on now” feeling goes away if I don’t feel any sort of connection, and if I really dislike them then the idea of being physically intimate with them is either repulsive or scary, or both, depending on what it is about them that I don’t like.