[TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of rape, violent misogyny]
Today, the easy winner in my informal “Worst Thing I Saw On The Internet” contest is a horrendous little hangout for dudes with a very particular sexual fetish: they like to fantasize about raping and sexually humiliating feminists.
The Breaking Feminist Superheroines subreddit (r/breakfeminazis), with 865 subscribers, describes itself as
A Fantasy BDSM Subreddit devoted to a Supervillian who enslaves, degrades, and humiliates Feminist Superheroines to teach them their place as women
Some of these “feminist superheroines” are mentioned by name. The top two posts in the subreddit right now link to badly photoshopped fake porn pics of Anita Sarkeesian.
Another of the top posts is a story in which a TV news anchor named “Rachel” – presumably Rachel Maddow – is cavity-searched against her will by a Sherriff.
Most of the other “superheroines” remain anonymous, probably because the bulk of posts in the subreddit consist of BDSM fetish porn repurposed into antifeminist fetish porn through the use of lurid headlines:
The Feminist political prisoner is awakened from her sleep to be dragged by her hair to her daily fucking by MRA prison guards
Ex-Husbands line up to apply a paddling to the ass of the Feminist Divorce Attorney who had ruined their marriages
The Misogynist Activist gloats as he enjoys the abundant company of the sex he despises and has brought so much misery to
Clearly, the fantasies described and depicted in the subreddit aren’t only sexual; they’re derived, in large part, from the political and social fantasies of Men’s Rights Activists and other manosphere misogynists.
This is hardly surprising, considering the people behind the subreddit. One of the subreddit’s mods, and its most active contributor, seems to consider himself an MRA. He calls himself mravidz, which I can only assume is short for MRA vids, and his submissions often feature MRAs enjoying their new supremacy over women – including one in which an MRA, after a lifetime “struggl[ing] against militant Feminism [had] achieved total victory, [with] former Radical activists serv[ing] obediently as foot-rests.”
The other mod, oxymuncha, is the founder of TumblrInAction (an anti-”Social Justice Warrior” subreddit with 137,000 subscribers) and mods four other TumblrInAction spinoff subs. He’s also a mod of KotakuInAction (the largest pro-GamerGate hangout on Reddit) and the Gor subreddit (a porn subreddit inspired by an infamous series of male supremacist SF novels).
Indeed, the central fantasy underlying the subreddit – a postapocalyptic utopia in which men reassert their dominance and control over their former feminist rulers and women in general – has long been a favorite topic of discussion amongst Men’s Righsters and Red Pillers. There’s a certain kind of MRA who gets as excited as any doomsday prepper when talk turns to what many MRAs see as the impending apocalypse – when society collapses and women are forced to come begging back to men for protection and guidance.
“Men will notice a decided shift in women’s once hostile attitude towards them,” the MRA message board regular Keyster wrote in the comments on The Spearhead.
They will be actively engaged in seeking out male protectors and openly using sexual allure to attract them as mates. Men are so much better at defending themselves from bad guys, so you’ll want one with you if you’re a woman.
The Breaking Feminist Superheroines subreddit turns this rather widespread MRA fantasy into an explicitly sexualized vision of male (MRA) supremacy and female (feminist) submission, and adds some science-fictiony overtones to it all.
The subreddit’s sidebar spells out the basic narrative:
A Historical Chronicle of the Gender Civil Wars, in which Radical Feminists finally push Men too far, leading to a hot War of the Sexes in which the forces of the Feminist Menace are smashed in battle. What would a hypothetically constructed world in which Feminism has been decisively defeated, and women have been returned to their natural condition as Slaves look like?
Apparently for some of the contributors it looks a lot like a world in which Anita Sarkeesian’s face has been badly photoshopped onto porn pictures.
But others on the subreddit are a little more, er, imaginative. In a post titled “How would you tame a Feminist Leader you captured in the Gender Civil Wars?,” a contributor who calls himself femshit asks for advice in coming up with fantasy scenarios.
Suppose the Gender Polarization continues along current lines into a full blown Gender Civil War, a hot war of the sexes. Males are sick of emasculation and revolt against Feminist Totalitarianism and their mangina white knight allies.
Males quickly establish tactical supremacy. And the only advantage females have, is that MRA forces use rubber bullets, so they can capture Feminist POWs and transform them into cuntslaves.
MRA forces capture the Feminist Senate Hall of the Herpublic. And you are assigned one of the captured Feminist Senators as a War Prize. What steps do you take to break her in and teach her to accept her gender inferiority?
She is totally at your mercy, but still spouting tumblr SJW about gender equality and how her spirit will never be broken.
what are some ways to humiliate and degrade her feminist ideals of equality? how do you show her just how weak her soft feminine body really is?
how do you get her to learn the inherent inferiority of her cunt sex?
A commenter called cuntamer responds:
As a leader she’ll need to be held accountable for her crimes against men during the war. She should be put on trial in the local stadium and made a spectacle of as any man with a grievance comes forward and testifies against her. After all the intimate and humiliating details of her life are read aloud as evidence, and testimony is over, she will be sentenced appropriately for her infractions. The trial will conclude with a ceremonial stripping and burning of her and her colleagues clothing and worldly possessions as they are led off in chains.
I’ll spare you the elaborate rape fantasy that follows.
While most of the “stories” in the subreddit consist of little more than elaborate headlines, there’s a separate BreakFeminaziFavs Tumblr blog [NSFW] in which some of the fantasies are developed in more detail.
In one vignette, a new widow is turned over to “the bloodsucking loanshark who had driven her husband to suicide.” When she resists,
He handed to her the MRA Civil Code and to her horror it was all true. She would not even be given the mercy of attending her own husband’s funeral. Instead she was to be taken away immediately to become the fuck-slave of her husband’s worst enemy. Her black mourning lingerie just aroused the beast more.
In another, a former Feminist assassin becomes a pregnant slave to a mansplaining master with a fetish for Evo Psych:
For him the ideological victory over Feminist Science was more important than petty abuse.
He lectured the Feminist Ideologue like a little schoolgirl, on how her strange cravings were easily explained by Evolutionary Psychology. How Cavemen would slaughter entire tribes and take the women as booty. Women’s entire psychology was shaped to serve the children of their Master’s. Their taste buds were totally warped to protect their babies. … She no longer existed for herself but for his child. She was but a robot fulfilling the needs of the fetus.
Again and again in these little stories, “uppity” women are brought low by men they had oppressed or insulted. A “fallen” female CEO is subjected to spankings at the hands of her employees; a Feminist philosophy professor is humiliated by “Frat Bros [with] a more intrinsic understanding of the Ethics of Nietzsche”; a “Christian Fundamentalist Congresswoman” is raped and impregnated by the “Atheist Liberation Front.” An Occupy Wall Street protester is forced to serve drinks “for her Wall Street masters” wearing little more than a ball gag.
Paul Elam of A Voice for Men famously told one feminist that “the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.”
Apparently he’s not the only MRA who feels that way.
…Yes, they can be full of misogyny, and then there are the men who are submissive/have rape fantasies, the lesbians, and the female dominants. I’m kinda a bit twitchy, because the implication here seems to be that I (and the others who mentioned it) are only “okay” with BDSM because we don’t want to be seen as prudes. BDSM is only not “okay” if it’s being used as a cover for abuse or self-harm, because it keeps help from happening. That’s not BDSM, in the same way that these people are seriously horrible instead of just being kinky. And no, male dom/female sub is not misogynistic unless he is expecting that outside the bedroom/other consented to and carefully neocortex space.
…negotiated, not neocortex. Autocorrect, you are very strange.
About BDSM and rape and submission fantasies and erotica–I think there is a difference between porn/erotica written with kind of a wink-nudge that this would not be okay in real life, but the audience and writer thinks it is sexy and “erotica” like that above that seems to be written like the author really hopes this will happen. I’ll admit it is a fuzzy boundary, but so is most literary analysis.
I also think there is a difference between sexism and rank misogyny–sexism, especially in the form of rigid gender binaries, is really common in all fiction and erotic fantasies, including genres with a lot of female authors/fans, and it is worth critiquing wherever it pops up. Also, I think it is worth questioning why sexist tropes get played out in people’s fantasies*.
However, the kind of woman-hate on display here is… extreme, and is its own special thing.
* Besides being raised in a sexist culture, I think part of it is some people tend to eroticize danger and fear–possibly because it makes the danger “safe” by making it sexy and also because adrenalin is adrenalin, whatever the source. Think roller coasters and scary movies. Rape and male dominance are dangers, so…
Also, straight men aren’t immune to this–femdom is popular, and so is the trope of the femme fatale.
Re: BDSM being misogynistic
Eh, I’d make the argument that the idea of consenting male dom/female sub is about as misogynistic as consenting male breadwinner/female housemaker. They can reinforce traditional narratives about misogyny and patriarchy without being inherently patriarchal or misogynistic – people just need to recognise that social context exists and not deny it, which is something that seems to happen a lot. It’s the exact same thing as enjoying problematic media.
That Chris Kluwe sure does have some creative insults for the #gamergaters. I enjoyed reading that a whole lot. 🙂
SittieKittie–I like that analysis. And just like feminists can critique the social conditioning that makes male breadwinner/female housewife the default and the social and economic forces that devalue women’s paid labor and set up conditions where it is financially unfeasible to mothers to work without criticizing individual families that end up conforming, I think we can consider why female submission is such a popular fantasy without telling women who get off on it that they’re broken and misogynistic.
@freemage — Yeah, I know of that letter exchange between the Adams’s, hence my reaction. Not only is he citing the wrong Founding Father, he’s making it sound like it was some essay or speech that he gave as a public declaration.
Agreed. I think this is really important to both the analysis and the people who enjoy it. It’s the same as (if I may tie it back to GG since apparently that’s what is The Internet since August lol) GGs not liking critique of their games. Games can be critiqued as sexist without calling the people who play them (necessarily) sexist.
Actually, that’s pretty much all feminist critique of various media, institutions, ect. Funny how consistent that is despite us feminazis apparently only doing it to say it’s the [all] men themselves and not the subject… *Rolls eyes*
Jo, SittieKitty & wordsp1ner: Awesome points. 🙂 I was just thinking about this earlier in regards to Bayonetta. There’s a tension between society praising women as sex objects, and punishing them for being humans with their own desires. It leads to a big mess of conflicting views when a woman (or a character like Bayonetta) claim a personal sexual identity that is otherwise conventionally appealing to dudes. Trying to untangle the threads of personal identity, cultural pressures, and false consciousness narratives isn’t easy, especially when someone’s identity is wrapped up in there.
jo:
QFT.
There’s also the detail that horrendously misogynistic fantasies aren’t a derailing of BDSM, in the sense of it being around first, or something new (not sure if that was implied in anyone’s comment, it just read that way to me). Rape fantasies are a staple of pornography going back millennia. Hell, you look at Greek red-figure vases and some of their so-called orgies look a hell of a lot more like group rape. Look at Victorian porn. Male fantasies about sexually humilitating women are ubiquitous. That’s the background, the context, that has to be remembered with male domination/female submission. No, it doesn’t make any given person misogynistic. But it’s never context-free.
Also, I think there needs to be recognition that fantasies or kinks are not going to get blanket validation, nor should that be expected, in a feminist space. Not sure if that’s what anyone’s hoping for, but I wanted to say it plainly, adding to jo’s excellent comment.
@shaun Thanks for the link to the Klewe piece. I read a couple of the responses and one really stuck out. The guy (and apparently his wife) “hated Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and a host of other people”. The word hate when applied to most people, groups, philosophies has always bugged me. Disagree or dislike – hate always seems to me to be a first step to justifying bad things.
I was going to say something about how I was surprised that the MRA/Gamergaters would articulate these fantasies in a public space, if at the same time they’re going to pretend AT ALL that they’re railing against “corruption” and fighting for “equality” (under some of the same screen names, no less)… but… wait why would I EVER be surprised?! These are just the same old rape threats with a BDSM spin. Maybe this time it’s more for the sake of the threaten-ers than the threaten-ees, but it’s still a bunch of men just feeding off each other’s violent fantasies, which is the same old thing. The one thing that DOES surprise me is that clearly I’ve never gone to a funeral properly dressed; I’ve always neglected to wear the de rigueur “black mourning lingerie.”
My favourite GG moment thus far.
“One would think the realization that “all my heroes are against me” might lead to some faint flicker of self-reflection.”
Some guy named Patrick on Twitter. But the Chris Kluwe was too good to not share.
I think (and I’m not reading it to find out if I’m right or not) that the lingerie thing is likely because women aren’t going to be allowed to wear anything but lingerie in this post-apocalyptic world? So the funeral clothing for women would obviously have to be funeral lingerie. That’d be my guess if I had to guess what these guys are thinking. I’m now going to look at kitties on the internet because I’m sad that I can get into their mindset enough to even be able to guess at the ideas behind this shit…
I guess it would be black lingerie, but usually black lingerie is not associated with mourning. Not that I’ve ever seen. I guess it makes sense in MRA land. Black lingerie is usually associated with sexiness. It’s clear that get off on women’s sadness.
Shaun, that Chris Kluwe piece was magnificent!
He does some of the best invective I’ve read in ages, too.
Oh how I laughed at ‘her black mourning lingerie’. Didn’t know women’s knickers had such deep, emotional fee fees. Don’t give up the day job if that’s the misogynistic crap you fantasise about and actually write on the internet. If their pictures were next to their creepy user names I’m sure their family and friends would completely disown them.
…er. I don’t think that quite works. If video game journalists did not play video games, then that would be an ethics issue. And while not every fantasy is okay to have, saying that someone not wanting their bedroom activities critiqued is like someone not wanting certain parts of their hobby critiqued… Well, they’re not really the same thing.
Men being in charge of women is promoted by society. Society, as a whole, is negative on kink. Vanillaness is not being critiqued here.
No, I don’t think anyone’s asking for their fantasies to be wholeheartedly accepted. Just for them not to by psycoanalyzed by people who do not share them. I really, really hate to go against the general opinion of this place, since the general opinion is usually right, but I think saying “this is really important to the people who enjoy it,” if you do not yourself enjoy it, is really patronizing and, whether or not it is intended that way, perpetuates the perception that there is something wrong with people who are into BDSM.
I think we have all agreed these people are, if they would be into it at all, going about things in the most horrible way they can and that BDSM does not deserve to be associated with them?
So basically these sad bastards are guys for whom the Gor books didn’t have quite enough porn.
Guys like this, you know that from a woman’s perspective you’re about as appealing as the dogshit that we occasionally have to wipe off our shoes, right? And to continue the metaphor, the only reason your literary dropping exist in public spaces is because no responsible adult has cleaned them up yet.
I’d rather have a dog than a pet MRA, though. Dogs are cute, and some of them are even quite intelligent.
Oh, forgot to address this part. >_<
"It’s the exact same thing as enjoying problematic media."
It's similar to (not the exact same thing as) a "nuclear family" existing in media. Kink is not, by nature, problematic. It can be. But it is not always so.
I find it hilariously funny that the dude-bros think they’d be anything other than slave labor for the 1% if society collapsed. All that “superior” brute strength will be at hard labor, and guaranteed, their new masters won’t give a damn if they ever get laid.
I certainly agree with that! Armchair psychoanalysis is wrong in any case. But I’m wary of what jo described, the way people (women, especially) so often feel they have to preface any criticism of anything sexual with an “I’m not a prude!” disclaimer. I don’t want this to be a “sex pos only” space where people can’t say something gives them the creeps, or is simply way too problematic for them.
And yeah, totally different matter critiquing actual products, video games or whatever, and fantasies. As was said upthread, if these MRA jackasses would keep their gross rubbish private, it’d be their own business. They lose that when they make it public, and when it’s bleedin’ obvious they would love to abuse women this way.
I confess I’m a little confused by this bit; could you clarify? I don’t understand how it’s patronising to say X is really important to the people who enjoy it. I know sexual stuff carries its own peculiar baggage, but would it be patronising to say “Golf is really important to the people who enjoy it” or “Mountain biking is really important to the people who enjoy it,” for instance? They’re not remotely important to me, but that doesn’t mean I think the people for whom they are, are lesser or silly or weird or whatever. It’s just saying they are things that don’t play a part in my life.
@ andiexist, not sure what you’re taking exception to? GGers aren’t about ethics in journalism, they just don’t want people to critique their games because they take it personally as an attack against them and their identity.
In games critique, like wordsp1nner said, you’re critiquing the social context that the media happens in and why it’s considered enjoyable for the people who do enjoy it, not attacking the people who enjoy it as people. This is the same as being able to critique the social context of BDSM, and porn, and paraphilias, without actually personally attacking the people who like those things. Because people do enjoy it without being as fucked up as these MRAs in David’s post obviously are, is why it’s important for critique to continue being about the social context and not about the people who enjoy it themselves, as people.
Hence, it’s the same thing as critiquing/liking problematic media, you can still like things that are all sorts of fucked up or problematic to varying degrees, but you can’t ignore that there is a society that exists outside it and that certain things will help to perpetuate existing inequalities, even if inherently there’s nothing technically wrong about it, if it existed in a vacuum.
And also hence, the objection about “You can’t shame me for my fantasies” is not a valid one, for these guys to claim (as they always inevitably do) because, as I’ve stated already in an earlier comment, this isn’t about BDSM or even porn and sexual gratification, this is about self-satisfaction for their hatred, reassurance for their insecurities, and being able to show the world their hatred in a narcissistic the-world-should-listen-to-everything-I-have-to-say way.
Not to mention they seem to think they’re all uber-fit, strong, capable fellows, able to physically overcome any woman or man they don’t like. Um, keyboard warriors, I am betting this is not the case.
No, we have not all agreed.