You all got the memo about #EndFathersDay fiasco, right – the phony “feminist” hashtag, seeded and spread by 4chan trolls, that aroused so much consternation on Twitter the other day, and that took in so many who’re already given to thinking the worst about feminism?
It would be nice if we could just dismiss this whole thing as trolls being trolls – no harm, no foul. But there’s a bit more to it than that.
For one thing, the troll campaign worked. At least on some people: While feminist writers quickly rushed in to point out that the whole thing was an antifeminist hoax, more than a few in the right-wing media were taken in utterly.
On the National Review Online, Molly Wharton warned that “Twitter anti-fatherists” were taking aim at a holiday that they said “glorifies rape, patriarchy, and child abuse.” The Washington Examiner railed against #EndFathersDay as “the latest ridiculous hashtag from the feminist outrage machine.”
On Fox News’ Fox & Friends, antifeminist author and “Princeton Mom” Susan Patton went further:
They’re not just interested in ending Father’s Day, they’re interested in ending men. …That’s really what they want.
A similar warning came from the self-proclaimed leader of the self-proclaimed Men’s Human Rights Movement:
https://twitter.com/AVoiceForMen/status/477679872761135104
The Daily Caller tried to play it a bit cooler, acknowledging that the phony campaign had started with 4chan but contending that “feminists quickly picked it up and ran with it.”
The evidence? The alarmists cited tweets like this one, from “Phoebe Kwon” a self-proclaimed “Lesbian, Korean American, Feminist” from “San Fransico.” [sic]
https://twitter.com/PhoebeKwon/statuses/477262894552195072
Kwon was also responsible for this charmingly subtle Tweet – I’m not sure how the right-wingers missed this one.
https://twitter.com/PhoebeKwon/status/477294012492431362
Had any of these commentators looked closely at the “outrageous” tweets cited as evidence of this feminist anti-fatherite uprising they might have figured out that something was up: They all seemed to come from a tiny handful of Twitter accounts, most with only a few followers, many of them festooned with elaborate Social Justice Warrioresque self descriptions, like this one, from @CisHate11
Polyamorous Pansexual Otherkin (faerie), Marxist Misandrist. Fucker of the patriarchy. I majored in womyns studies and procrastination
Phoebe Kwon, one of the most-quoted of all the alleged anti-fatherites, not only spelled the name of her alleged home city wrong; as one We Hunted the Mammoth reader pointed out to me, her avatar was actually a stock photo:
And, oh yeah, 4channers – at least those in on the joke – have acknowledged her as one of their own.
As the Daily Dot noted, this was not the first time 4channers had angered the gullible and annoyed real feminists with a fake feminist #hashtag campaign. In January they got some traction with a phony “thinspo” campaign “BikiniBridge,” celebrating what one Tumblr blog called “the graceful space created by a woman’s hip bones suspending bikini bottoms from their abdomens.”
This was followed by the even more ridiculous Operation Freebleeding, which denounced tampons and sanitary pads and all devices used to staunch the flow of menstrual blood as tools of the patriarchy.
So, some trolls trolled some people. Big deal right?
Well, not exactly. Because this isn’t just trolling for the sake of trolling. This is trolling with an agenda.
If you scroll back through “Phoebe Kwon’s” tweets, you’ll see that “her” account originated back in August of 2013, in the midst of a Twitterstorm around the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen. While that hashtag was a real one, started and promoted by feminist/womanist women of color to critique white allies (and “allies”), 4channers jumped into the fray with fake Twitter accounts in an attempt to poison the discussion and further divide feminists along racial lines.
“Kwon” and other faux accounts also jumped into the more recent #YesAllWomen hashtag with deliberately and sometimes ridiculously inflammatory tweets.
https://twitter.com/PhoebeKwon/status/367766686503407616
https://twitter.com/PhoebeKwon/status/367460519776485376
The trolls behind these campaigns aren’t just trolls out to create chaos, though they are that. They’re also racist, homophobic, transphobic bigots out to fuck over feminism.
Indeed, a few months ago, a writer for Roosh Valizadeh’s Return of Kings blog who goes only by Douglas reported that he’d gotten a mysterious message from someone called “Bavarian,” who told him that 4chan’s antifeminist campaigns were all part of something called “Operation Lollipop,” a “black propaganda” campaign to fracture feminism. Bavarian wrote:
I was told you are interested in my group’s (Codename: Lollipop) ongoing operation against the PoOs (People of Oppression). My group poses as feminists on twitter. We bait other PoOs into agreeing with us as we subtly move them more and more to the extreme. The purpose is to make moderate feminists turned off with the movement, as well as cause infighting within the group. …
We manly pose as women of color and argue with white feminists. We “check their privilege” to the point that they are fed up. For example, if they say “it’s not our time to talk, white ladies, it’s our time to listen,” we say “the last time white women just listened, George Zimmerman walked free.”
The campaign began during Hugo Schwyzer’s public meltdown, which Bavarian described as filtered through his own racist lens:
This group started when the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen started trending. It referred to an incident where the feminist Hugo Schwartz [sic] had a mental breakdown and revealed on twitter that feminism was a fraud. He further revealed that WoC were incompetent and only got in the way of the movement. Some white women offered him sympathy and told him to get help. The WoC got angry and started the hashtag.
Bavarian pointed him to a page documenting the phony tweets, many of which come from the same accounts that posted the most outrageous #EndFathersDay tweets. (The site he linked to is now down, but this blog, still available through the Wayback Machine, appears to be some sort of mirror.)
Douglas, for his part, was delighted by the deviousness of it all.
I can only imagine the chaos such an operation would wreak upon the feminists. I look forward to seeing how it all works out. Maybe it will cause the level of mistrust to skyrocket to levels that would hinder the feminist machine. Maybe it will give me more things to laugh at on the internet. All I know is this concept is quite dastardly and funny.
It’s all a bit ridiculously cloak and dagger, but I don’t think we can dismiss it as a joke. The people behind it are trolls, sure, but they are also nasty bigots obsessed with fucking up feminism and “progressives” in general. And people still get fooled by these campaigns.
Now that we know what they’re up to, the trolls may find it harder to fool quite so many people in the future. They may keep trying, to lesser and lesser effect. Or they might come up with something a bit more sophisticated. I guess we’ll see.
EDITED TO ADD: Check out the Twitter hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing, devoted to exposing these fake accounts; so far they’ve IDed 200 or so. This Storify is useful, too.
Here we go, yapping about ‘rights’. Let me clue you in, toots. Rights aren’t real. They’re made-up, imaginary, like the bogeyman and Santa Claus.
u mad
Yeah, I dated this guy.
The use of this tired cliche out to disqualify therealmacai outright.
If you’d bother to read, you’d see that the comments section of a blog dedicated to mocking misogynists has more rationality and thought-out arguments than any anti-SJ person like you has ever used. Seriously, how are you disrupting the “echo chamber” when you haven’t presented anything of substance? Is screaming random bullshit at people your idea of a discourse? It really isn’t. Nothing you say makes any logical sense.
I don’t think you have any rational arguments regarding social justice. All of your claims until now have been emotional, based on your personal prejudices, not rational arguments. Want to challenge my claim? Come on, present an actual, logical argument that doesn’t rely on begging the question. I dare you. Until you do, I’m going to use Occam’s razor and assume you have nothing of value to offer.
Therealmacai might just be the most worthless troll that’s trolled these comments in a while. He doesn’t have anything to say except standard bullshit that only anti-SJ folks would use, he has no empathy, no understanding of standard debating techniques, nothing. Just a tantrum. I sure won’t miss him when he’s banned.
macai,
We get it. you hate women and you don’t care about our ability to navigate the world safely and without men bothering us about their lonely boners while we try to prepare for things like, visiting our dead father’s on Father’s Day. You purposefully left out the part where I mentioned that the threat of violence or verbal assault is a part of our daily lives, because you are dishonest and the truth does not support your hate and bias.
If men do this in broad daylight in convenience stores, how do you think they behave elsewhere? If I’m worried about his reaction on a Sunday morning in view of many other people, how do you think I feel when something like that happens when I am alone at night? I’m 38 and not scared of much. How do you think a younger woman or girl in her teens feels when this happens to her?
You don’t, because you don’t think. Yes, he went on with his life. How nice for him. The next time he goes out, I wonder if he’ll worry that he needs to dress down and be more plain to avoid women treating him like he exists for their pleasure? Because I have. I’m considering changing my hair, my style etc in order to be less noticeable, because being noticed by men as a woman makes me less safe. It interferes with my ability to enjoy my life.
Wow, we are dealing with an old school troll right here folks. Can’t wait for “teh epic lulz” and the homophobic slurs
Dude ejaculated on my leg on the train. Better not mention that.
Our angry new friend is banned. Thanks for the heads up, everyone who sent notes!
I’ll be adding the new mods later today.
macai,
You’re argument has boiled down to: “I have rights, but no one else does! Argelbargle slur, lie, slur!”
I’m so glad you are what misogynists and ableists have for allies. Please stay loud and proud, someplace else. We don’t have to worry with mocking you nearly as much when you so happily make asses of yourselves.
This is the really fun part, actually, the cream filling of hatred.
Women can be raped at horrific rates. Women can be barred from full bodily autonomy. Women can face a wage gap, an employment gap, all that… not sexism, and it’s completely weird how anybody would call it that.
Rape?
URGGGH. Not even going to touch it.
Just, blah.
marinerachel,
I’m sorry that happened to you. You should be able to use public transit without worrying if a man will decide to treat you that way. It’s inexcusable.
Thanks for the banhammer, David. You’re the best.
I’m going for a lunchtime stroll with my hubs. I hope everyone else (Not you troll) has a beautiful day.
marinerachel, FWIW, our newly banned friend tried to post another comment, and said that he had dated someone named rachel in high school.
Ugh. Good riddance. Thanks, David, much appreciated. Therealmacay’s pathetic display of willful ignorance is just… confusing. I’m still convinced he can’t have been older than 12, and even then, he’s very annoying for his age.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, marinerachel. Sorry to hear about the dude on the train, that’s fucking disgusting behavior. And thanks for your story too, Lea. Privileged and ignorant has the makings of a terrible person.
Anyway, I’ll be getting some sleep now. I bet the boss has me working overtime again tomorrow, even though I just did today. I’ll have to thank my ancestors’ pagan gods for the Midsummer festivities starting soon. Three days off sound like just what I need right now.
Does that mean he is old enough to have graduated high school? Wow. What a pathetic idiot. It really says something about him that we all assumed he was a kid.
David – Thank you! 😀
Hahaha, I didn’t date in high school (just got my tits grabbed and leg ejaculated on on public transit.) Too socially inappropriate and depressed. I had an unemployed internet boyfriend who didn’t really care about me from sixteen to eighteen. I didn’t get pretty until eighteen.
Needless to say, I’ve never dated a high school student.
Hugs and wet wipes to @marinerachel.
That troll was… interesting. I’ve seen toddlers put up better arguments.
therealmacai was a pure troll; that is, he had no knowledge or argument to offer, just insults. I think such trolls are easily identified and should just be ignored, because to them this is just a game in which the object is to get noticed by riling people up, so your response is the payoff. Unfortunately I have not always been able to resist the urge to respond, but, in general, if a poster does not have anything real to say, it’s better to ignore him (I will take the risk implied by a gender-specific pronoun here).
I remember hearing a talk by a college professor from New York City who assigns as a class exercise an essay on “The Precautions I Take to Avoid Being Sexually Assaulted” — and then watches while the women scribble away furiously and the men sit there with a bewildered expression. Most men just don’t realize just how common the experience Lea describes is, or the fact that, leaving aside the unwanted nature of the sexual advance, she has to decide in an instant whether her safety and perhaps even her life are in peril and how she can get away from him quickly without causing an excessive commotion. (If she does cause a commotion, he’ll probably say that he was just being pleasant and she’s being a paranoid bitch.) A man looks at this and says, “He was a real jerk.” A woman isn’t thinking about his manners, she’s worrying whether she’s dealing with a sorry POS or a potentially violent predator.
I do the family grocery shopping and when I’m in the supermarket I tend to smile and try to be pleasant to the ladies (and men, too, of course, but they are mostly ladies) as we maneuver the shopping carts down the aisles. And mostly they smile and are pleasant in return. But I am a large and potentially threatening-looking man, and every so often a woman will give me a funny look and obviously move away quickly, and I think to myself, “Oops.” I think that I should try to figure out ways to make sure it doesn’t look like I might be hitting on someone, but I’m not sure it can be done — women do have to have sensitive antennae which can’t be perfect, and after all the guy who perfected the art of seeming non-threatening was Ted Bundy.
I don’t actually know whether #NotAllMen was a product of the MRA crowd but most men can relate to it. Most men were totally horrified by Elliot Rodger’s crimes. Only men who are familiar with the extent to which the potential for male violence permeates most women’s lives, who have some background in feminist thought, and are aware of things like MRA and PUAHate can really understand the connection between Rodger and everyday male behavior. Most men do not actually hate women or think of themselves as capable of rape or sexual harassment, but they often not understand what their beliefs and behaviors look like from a woman’s point of view. When I was young I served 18 months in prison as a Vietnam-era draft resister, and since I was young, good-looking (at least to a guy who’s been locked up for a while), and non-violent (real men fight; a man who won’t fight must be gay) I got to have the experience of being a sex object (men telling me that I was cute and sexy and walked with a wiggle like a girl) which most men never get even a glimpse of.
I plan to write a post on the question of whether the MRA/anti-feminists are acting out of anger or fear soon — it is a very important but complicated question, and in order to treat a disease you must determine what causes it. The short answer is that anger and fear are inter-related, and that the basis of the anger/fear is the fact that they have bought into the false (IMO) view of manhood that our culture tries to inculcate, and that they fear that they have failed to achieve real manhood and are angry that (in their view) women are refusing to help them satisfy the requirements.
On a lighter note, I decided that I would like to have a real avatar, and a kitty seemed to be appropriate to a blog that seems to have a disproportionate number of cat-lovers. (No offense to dog-lovers, I hope.) Unfortunately Nikki, the Siamese in my avatar, died two years ago. She was at least 17, so she lived a good life (we got her as a adult cat and had her for 16 years). She was a very sweet-natured kitty, but in the right lighting she had those red-glowing devil-kitty eyes and that is why I chose her for the avatar. We currently have six cats.
Grumpyo;dman,
I like the new avatar. She was a beautiful cat.
I’m sorry you’ve we imprisoned for something that should not be considered a crime and that you were then subjected to sexual objectification and the threat of sexual assault that comes with it. I wish there were fewer people in prison and that our prisons were safe.
(Hugs) if you want them.
I meant to add the comment that I lived for 18 months with unwanted sexual advances and the low-level but constant threat of sexual assault; women effectively serve life without parole in that situation.
In other words, it was a net positive, because I learned something important that I probably couldn’t have learned any other way. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (and possibly wiser). And my former wife (who was/is schizophrenic) and my mother suffered much more from my incarceration than I did.
And thanks, Lea. I think women have to keep talking about these things, no matter how uncomfortable they make you, until men who are capable of understanding learn to understand the way women have to live their lives.
therealmacai: The point is that you lot are a bunch of extremist nutcases disconnected from mainstream thought. Your on par with anarcho capitalists, national socialists, and those tinfoil illuminati people.
Get a grip. And until you do, you deserve every bit of mockery you get.
So… you think the idea that women are people is on a part with the idea of a small group of people who secretly run the entire world from a cave in Switzerland.
And just what do you mean by, “mockery”? People calling us evil? People blaming us for all the ills of the world?
People saying the men who kill us, and plan to kill us, “have a point” because the idea of women being equal members of society is just so outrageous that gunning feminists down in the streets is an “understandable” reaction.
Because that’s what happens to outspoken feminists. That’s what you are calling “mockery”.
Regarding prisons, I don’t know if this is the right place for this story — which actually happened in NH in 1992 — but here goes.
Alan was a young man with problems. He was sent to prison for 1-3 years for forgery, which probably means he was an alcoholic. (Forgers who get caught are usually writing bad checks to finance a binge.) Since he was non-violent and probably shouldn’t have been in prison anyway, they sent him out to work on the prison farm. One fine summer day he commented to a guard that it would be a beautiful day to be at the beach. I don’t know what was wrong with the guard, but he treated it as a threat to escape and wrote Alan up for it. They took him back inside the wall and put Alan — who had a record of having problems defending himself — in a cell with the prison’s most notorious sexual predator. (They claim that this was an administrative error, but nobody is that stupid. I’m enough of a cynic to surmise that they were trying to control a problem prisoner by distracting him with some “penitentiary pussy”) Within a short time (a few hours) Alan was strangled to death for refusing to put out. I think the murderer thought he was being given tacit permission by the administration to rape Alan and was enraged when it didn’t work out. In addition, a fellow inmate who tried to save Alan by getting a guard’s attention was stabbed to death by two other inmates who regarded him as a snitch, which is a capital offense in prison.
The three murderers, who were all serving life with no prospect of being paroled, are now serving life without parole. One might say that Alan and the other dead prisoner were beneficiaries of successful prison treatment; murdered prisoners have a very low recidivism rate.
Bummer! I keep missing the troll bashing! Oh well at least I can give hugs and kisses for everyone who had to deal with Therealmacai and other trolls. And also to anyone who needs them.
http://www.sendscraps.com/mobile/img-6625.html
Sparky
That pig is so CUTE!
Here is a cute ducky
http://youtu.be/oV3MXD7pzkw
These guys were trolling before it was cool
http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20131009170934/disney/images/7/77/Trolls_frozen_disney2013.jpg