[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.
@kittehserf
…I may just have read it completely wrong, but I think what they said was that *critiquing* BDSM was really important to the people who enjoy it. Which is kinda patronizing. So was the GamerGate comparison, since kinks tend to be a bit more personal than hobbies, ya know? 😛
@Sittie
Oh, I know that it’s not about ethics. I’m saying that there *would* be something to complain about if the journalists didn’t actually enjoy or partake in the hobby. GamerGate is full of ugh, for sure. But journalists should know about their subject, and so that comparison breaks down *because* GamerGate is full of stupid.
I’m still rambling and loopy. This makes for me not being good at posting. :/
…I should probably read through all the emails before replying next time. @thebewilderness, I’m sorry. I’m not sure which part of it you aren’t agreeing with, though?
Basically, what I am saying and what I thought the general opinion was is that “If any of these guys would actually be into consensual BDSM, they are going about things in a horrible way and this is bad.”
Dunno why I put quotes there. Sorry about the seperate posts.
Some people are opposed to torture for any reason, andiexist.
How someone goes about torturing people is beside the point if one is opposed to torture for any reason.
@andiexist re: your response to kitteh about me, No, I said keeping the separation between critiquing the social construct and activities how they relate to that, and the actual activity itself (as presented in a vacuum), apart was important to the people who enjoy BDSM (and any media). Because as I said, activities themselves aren’t (generally speaking) the problem, it’s the social crap that goes along with them as baggage due to history that is and anyone who enjoys any activity has to recognise that the activities don’t exist in a vacuum. And anyone who wants to critique has to remember the same, that many activities in a vacuum aren’t inherently bad but that it’s the social crap that goes along with them that changes the dynamics and what the activity means to society.
@thebewilderness
BDSM community terminologies aside, BDSM is not torture. People do not consent to torture. People do not enjoy torture. Torturers do not care about the person they are torturing.
I cannot think of any other analogy but this, so trigger warning? I am still not very good at when to trigger warning. But mentions of rape below, so better safe than sorry. And space just in case. I am not good at trigger warnings.
Saying BDSM is actual torture, whether people pretend it sometimes or not, is like saying that sex is rape. One is about love, or at least mutual fun, trust, and consent. The other is about actually having real power over someone else and ignoring their personhood.
Ah, here is another analogy.
Less trigger warning analogy: It is like saying that someone who has fun, safe, consenting casual sex is like a PUA.
I have probably been ninja’d or such by now, though.
@Sitte
Ah, I misread. Thank you for your clarification, and I apologize for the misunderstanding! 🙂
I am repeating myself now because you do not appear to have understood me the first time.
No. We have not all agreed.
I consider your attempts to police people’s words unfortunate.
Oh, gotcha, I thought you meant the activities themselves.
Ugh, not this conversation again. Look, even if we put aside the discussion about whether or not sexualizing power differentials is a bad thing in general for feminism (and I really don’t think this is the space for that conversation for all kinds of reasons), it should be pretty obvious that there’s a difference between “I like being submissive/I like being dominant because (whatever)” and “I like being submissive because it gets me in touch with my true womanly nature, which btw is totes to be submissive, because that’s what women are all about/I like being dominant because I am a man and being dominant is manly and when I dominate women that’s how you know I’m a real man”.
If you’re doing the latter (which the guys in the OP are), that’s inherently anti-feminist. It’s also something that people who’re feminist (or even people who’re not) are allowed to find troubling and/or problematic regardless of who’s doing it.
People are allowed to find the other stuff problematic too, btw, even if some of us have done it and/or like it, and I think it might be a good idea to just acknowledge that no, everyone is not going to agree on these issues, and trying to force them to is not going to end well.
::points up::
What I was trying to say, only succinct.
Speaking of Anita a new FB thread recently was started. It is… charming, and deeply anti-Semitic.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Oy-de-la-Vey-XV-Triumph-of-the-Shill/292799997595961
Every time I think these people can’t go any lower, they find a bigger excavating machine.
Seconding cassandra. That’s what I was saying, shit can be enjoyed even though it’s problematic, but that’s not what’s happening in the OP and so anyone saying “But but but shaming my fantasies” is talking out their ass.
I reported that whole page. I know Facebook is shit about this, but please report it anyways.
Good idea Nathan, done.
Page reported. Fucking hell…
(And I apologize for whatever part I played in the derail. The OP is dealing with fetishized bigotry and weaponized pornography. That shit just ain’t right.)
Reported the page. Are you Gaters sure your ranks are not full of assholes?
Reported.
I don’t think these people actually know how evolutionary psychology works.
I don’t think they know how evolution works. Then again, neither do evo psych people.
I reported that page as well.
@ weirwoodtreehugger
I think the thing about evo psych people is that they keep focusing on the origins of immoral behavior, and they forget that you can’t remove the behavior from context and completely ignore the fact that their findings have moral implications that need to be discussed.
Also, they don’t really talk about the evolution of moral behavior alongside the immoral behavior. So it ends up looking like being a rape-y asshole is “natural” and wanting to punish said asshole isn’t.