[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 agree with that and I’m glad you’re expressing it.
I’ve practiced BDSM and still do it veeeeery occasionally and might have done just what Nightraven did, or gone into the TMI you mention. I’ll keep this in mind.
Also agree we’re dealing with violent revenge fantasy which proves what sort of vicious abusive people they are….
Also: ellipsis? wtf?
What kittehserf said, x 1000. Rape fiction by horrible people and BDSM are not at all the same thing.
Exactly! I think it’s important to make sure that we don’t lump them together. The problem here is that the guys in the OP are using BDSM as a cover for their misogyny. I’m not going to condemn everyone who enjoys BDSM just because some hateful men are hiding behind the same label.
Dear God…why did I look. (*peeps through fingers)
There must be something wrong with me.
It’s not a very good cover. I don’t know why you’re explaining this point to us, as no-one in the thread has condemned everyone into BDSM. The conversations related to the OP have been on the topic “These Men’s Rights Activists and GamerGaters get off — literally — by fantasizing about sexually humiliating feminists”.
OK, seriously, why do people keep going “but the dudes in the OP aren’t about BSDM, though!” when nobody had said they were? I feel like I’m watching people have a conversation with someone who only they can see, and apparently that invisible person keeps saying the Reddit dudes are all regulars at their local dungeon.
@pallygirl
To answer your question, I was explaining in an attempt to answer Kittehserf’s question about why we are discussing BDSM at all. The only reason it came up was because the guys in the OP use it in the description of the Subreddit.
There was also a comment awhile back where someone said that another commenter’s BDSM fantasies were not that different than the MRAs, without prior knowledge of that individual’s fantasies. I was trying to avoid those kinds of assumptions and generalizations by clarifying the the OP is not about BDSM.
I apologize if I was unclear. I was not trying to argue with anyone. If you look back at my comments, most of them are agreeing with other posters, so I am not sure how that came off as argumentative. I will try to be more clear in the future.
@ej:
I didn’t notice any comments that were conflating the OP with BDSM.
The first mention of BDSM seems to be when one commenter said there can be problematic elements. That would seem to be a truism – there can be problematic elements in anything, relationships, employment, accommodation.
can i just say wtf to that fucking sub and leave it at that
Also I find that asking people to think about the social contexts of things is not the same as DONT DO THEM. I might be wrong but isn’t that an anti-feminist strawman, that feminist critical thought is the new Moral Majority-esque thought police where if something is problematic in some ways, then it’s somehow sinful as opposed to be something to be kept in mind and thought about in an, ahem, critical way?
The thing is that while BDSM can be mutual and consensual the content of that sub explicitly is not THAT and doesn’t even tend to be – it’s basically a “corrective rape” fantasy.
@pallygirl
I didn’t want to directly quote the comment because I didn’t want to be pointing fingers at anyone. I feel that is really unproductive in this kind of discussion.
You are right. There are problematic aspects to everything. I think acknowledging those problems is really what is important. It’s kind of like what Anita says in her videos. It’s possible to still enjoy something, even while acknowledging that it has problems. I do feel that the BDSM community is capable of acknowledging the problems and they know that what they are doing is not going to be OK outside of a BDSM scene. I don’t think the guys in the OP realize how many problems there are attached to what they are saying.
Cassandra,
I’d say you’re spot on in your observation the the BDSM folk are having a conversation with mostly-invisible adversaries. As an insider I feel comfortable saying that we do that fairly often. BDSM folk get a lot of criticism from a lot of angles and it’s easy to end up with a hair-trigger defensive reaction. It’s not a problem I’m immune to, either.
There maybe ought to be a word for that kind of hair-trigger defensiveness, because it’s a feature of a lot of my affiliations. I was homeschooled to age 18 and we homeschoolers are so, so defensive. It took me a while to learn that I didn’t have to jump in and defend homeschooling as a lifestyle every time a story came out featuring a homeschooling family behaving badly.
I’d even say this kind of maladaption to past threats plays a minor role in the current gaming debacle. GamerGate is certainly 99% premium unleaded high-octane misogyny, but I suspect it’s also 1% folks still seeing Jack Thompson around every corner.
I do think it’s worth noting that BDSM wasn’t brought into this thread by a defend but by a critic (SittieKitty). They (she?) didn’t use the acronym, but the post pretty explicitly says the BDSM community should not exist.
I’m kind of worried that that last sounded melodramatic, but I didn’t want to post the full analysis if no one wanted it.
I think the point is that nobody in the OP was talking about consensual BDSM, because their fantasies are explicitly non-consensual — the emotional kicker, for them, is that they would be forcing women to do what they don’t want to.One gets the impression that for them consensual sex is no fun at all, because it doesn’t humiliate the woman involved.
It sounds like the boys over at the Breaking Feminist Superheroines subreddit are working on a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
Bottom line (no pun intended), a lot of the manosphere stuff sounds like sexual fantasy. Take “Mr. Misogyny’s” comment in response to <a href="https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/10/20/ladies-your-weight-is-somehow-a-mens-rights-issue-and-five-other-lessons-drawn-from-six-terrible-a-voice-for-men-memes/"David's post about A Voice for Men memes yesterday; if that guy’s big sexual fantasy of the moment doesn’t involve him being hooked up to ‘devices’ at sperm banks, I’ll eat my hat.
Not to knock sexual fantasies in a general sense, but when you go public with them, turning them in to politicized causes, they can get a little problematic.
“Every MRAs not-so-secret fantasy. (From a vintage cigar ad.)”
The thing that differentiates that photo from the gamer fantasy is that the photo includes a woman who is playing.
File this and all the other fantasies under Shit That Will NEVER Happen, You Idiots.
For the record, not a single woman was ever transformed from a feminist to a “cuntslave” (eeeeeurgh) by lecturing, or being beaten, shot or raped. If anything, such rotten behavior by men would turn her into a bona-fide and actual misandrist.
Or, at the very least, someone who would just as soon strike out on her own and take her chances with the post-apocalyptic dire wolves and all those other things these knuckle-draggers mistakenly think they’re capable of “protecting” us from.
I got a reply about that disgusting Facebook page. They say it doesn’t go against their community standards. Grotesque anti-Semitic caricatures apparently are A-OK on Facebook.
Reason number eleventy billion I want nothing to do with Facebook.
@ Orion
Yep, on the defensiveness. It annoys the hell out of me when I can see people doing that, to be honest, and I always wish there was a way to explain to them that they’re not making the thing they’re defending in such an obviously knee-jerk way look any better, and may in fact be making it look worse to outsiders. I get that it’s an impulse that people have, but it really is smarter to try to keep a lid on it in most situations. Giving people the impression that you’re arguing with them about stuff they never said tends to irritate more than it wins over.
Also, part of what icks people out about what the dudes above (and the dude in the other thread whose comment Mary linked to) are doing is that they’re oversharing their sexual fantasies, and most people tend to prefer hearing about other people’s fantasies to be an opt-in thing, rather than just having said fantasies told to them in excessive detail without them having expressed any interest in hearing it. When it’s obvious that what they’re trying to sell as a social justice movement is basically just “my sexual fantasies, help me figure out a way to force other people to go along with them” then that kicks the ick response up to another level, and ensures that nobody is going to take the whole “but we’re a real political movement, honest!” stuff seriously.
That’s clearly not the case this time though. It’s not “oversharing” to put things on a publicly-accessible website if it’s clearly marked for what it is and it isn’t mixed with other content people need. I don’t think anyone ends up at r/breakfeminazis unless they’re actively looking for this kind of content.
If you don’t think those dudes intended for women to aren’t at all interested in hearing about their fantasies to see that stuff and be intimidated/disturbed by it I think you’re being a bit naive.
This is why I don’t date. Yes, seriously.
This is my favourite line. No explanation in this fantasy scenario of how they actually do this. No description of how the MRAs overtake the greater proportion of men who aren’t interested in enslaving women in general or in having their partners, sisters, mothers, and daughters enslaved by others. Important, complex plot points magically glossed over in one sentence. That kind of terrible writing in inexcusable.