What a surreal life Anita Sarkeesian must lead, in which virtually everything she says and does becomes grist for the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine, Sarkeesian Division.
Take the latest blowup, which followed a few comments Sarkeesian made in the wake of Friday’s school shooting in Marysville, which may have been triggered by the shooter’s angry response to a romantic breakup. On Friday, Sarkeesian posted a few thoughts on the matter on Twitter:
We need to seriously address connections between violence, sexism and toxic ideas of manhood before boys and men commit more mass shootings.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 24, 2014
Not a coincidence it’s always men and boys committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic masculinity in our culture.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 24, 2014
While it it not literally true that every single mass shooter in history has been male, we are talking about an almost exclusively male club: one recent attempt at crunching the numbers found that 97% of school shooters have been male, and 79% of them white. (The Maryville shooter was Native American.)
In any case, the notion that a crime so heavily associated with men might have something to do with our society’s notions of masculinity isn’t exactly a radical notion. Indeed, it seems rather obvious.
But to Sarkeesian’s many haters, on Twitter and elsewhere, it was as if Sarkeesian had just posted a video of herself drowning puppies. Cue the twitterstorm.
Here are just a selection of the literally hundreds of lovely comments that Sarkeesian had Tweeted at her on Friday and Saturday after making her original comments.
[Giant TRIGGER WARNING for violent, explicit threats, harassment]
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There were, of course, the explicit threats:
And the implicit threats:
And the sexual harassment:
And those who merely expressed their hope that Sarkeesian would kill herself:
Or die a horrible death:
Or simply die :
But not everyone wished violence on her. Some just told her that the threats and/or harassment she’s already getting is totally justified:
(Apparently by “fishing” Mr. de Alba means “expressing an opinion or making an observation.” Also note that the tweets that set off this latest wave of harassment didn’t contain the #GamerGate hashtag. )
Speaking of harassment, we’re just getting started in our chronicle of the latest wave.
Let’s continue with an assortment of Tweets using the c-word, a favorite slur amongst Sarkeesian’s detractors.
Why, yes, that is Suzanne McCarley, A Voice for Men’s “Assistant Managing Editor” happily adding her voice to the harassment.
Others pulled out the f-word:
She was called a “bitch.”
She was called a “whore.”
She was called a “terrorist.”
And a Nazi:
One fellow said that he thought Sarkeesian’s tweets were actually worse than the shooting itself:
And one even declared her “officially worse than Wil Wheaton,” the former Star Trek:TNG actor who has won mass opprobrium from internet dicks for publicly expressing his belief that people should not be dicks.
To add insult to injury, a few reported Sarkeesian herself to Twitter for various imaginary infractions:
Another asked why she wasn’t in jail for her, er, crimes:
Just to remind you: these tweets are all from TWO DAYS’ worth of harassment and threats on Twitter. And this isn’t all of them.
At this point anyone who claims that Sarkeesian is “making up” the harassment she gets, or writing it herself, or just the work of a “few trolls,” is either disingenuous or delusional.
I’ll leave the last word to Sarkeesian herself.
Our culture is deeply sick when simply asking questions about how toxic forms of masculinity may harm men leads to hours of hate on Twitter.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 25, 2014
EDITED TO ADD:
ATTENTION NEW COMMENTERS! I would like to draw your attention to this bit from my comments policy:
[I]f I’m writing about someone who’s gotten harassed by misogynists on the internet, and you want to talk about how much they deserved it, or what a lying liar they are? Well, fuck you! Your comments go right into the trash.
So take that into consideration. It might save you some time.
CORRECTION: I removed a screenshot of a Tweet that wasn’t threatening but was posted by a troll. See here.
I think too many people would implode from lack of practise at restraining their baser impulses.
FFS.
You couldn’t even be bothered to look up what the term means, but you know it gives you bad feels and that you have every right to show up without doing your homework to tell the mean ladies what’s what.
You’re a tedious, sexist ass. Shut up and listen or go away.
*ALARM SOUND*
It hasn’t been 24 hours since she was last harassed!
No, she was giving her opinion.
Here are the statistics on women and child abuse:
■ More than one-half (53.5%) of perpetrators were women, 45.3 percent of perpetrators were men,
and 1.1 percent were of unknown sex.
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm2012.pdf
Now imagine if someone looked at that and declared there was toxic feminism problem causing child abuse?
We need to stop this insanity of blaming one sex or the other for problems that created by people. No sex is better than the other. No sex has the moral high ground. Stop shaming men for their masculinity. Stop spreading hatred and misandry. Stop with this battle of the sexes.
@Lea
Misandry is sexism, wanting equality between the sexes is the opposite of sexism. So, you can slander me all you want but the facts disagree with you.
So men perform way less than half the childcare hours in the US and still manage to make up nearly half the population of child abusers, and so we need to stop the insanity of talking about male violence. Logic!
There’s a big difference between 53 percent and 97 percent. The reason the percentage of women who abuse is a bit higher is that women are more likely to be the primary or sole caretaker of the kids.
You still haven’t presented an alternate hypothesis for why a huge majority of mass shooters are men. You’re only rejecting the toxic masculinity hypothesis and drawing false equivalencies.
This kind of article is very important: by making the harassment visible to all and simply incontestable, it makes the ordeal Ms Sarkeesian is going through at least not completely and utterly pointless. Thanks a lot for this, and for your great work on this blog in general.
53.5% is actually surprisingly low, considering that women are still the ones taking care the most of children. That the statistics are almost even actually makes “toxic feminity” a much less relevant argument (and toxic feminism woulde be utterly illogical to even argue – it says a lot about YOU, though, that you consider feminism the opposite of masculinity).
Considering that women spend most of the time with children (and thus having power over children), one’d expect the statistics to be 65%+ women.
That it’s only 53.5% actually paints a pretty grim picture on men. The difference between men and women abusing children violently is statistically irrelevant, and it shouldn’t be. Look up statistical variance, you’ll be shocked once you understand what the 3.5% really mean.
Meanwhile, what were the statistics on mass shootings again? Oh, nearly 100% men. Toxic masculinity seems to be pretty accurate, considering all the whiny men defending the shooters and the whiny men doing them because, gasp, a woman rejected them.
Just look at yourself. It paints a very, very grim picture about you and men like yourself.
Thankfully, most men aren’t whiny little shits like you.
Also, nobody is allowed to discuss why more child abusers are women any time a child has recently been abused. That’s the new rule.
I don’t know if anyone has actually worked this one out but I would bet that the rate of child abuse per hour spent with the children is at least twice as high for men. Not to mention that a very high percentage of child abuse among women is committed by poor single mothers with no source of help and support.
I’m waiting for you to trot out the study that says men and women commit equal amounts of domestic violence because a woman shoving a man to get away from him makes her the aggressor and if he murders her, he’s only responding to her violence.
And as far as I know it’s not slander if it’s the truth.
The slight gender difference in child abusers is easy to explain by measuring it in child-hours: women spend far more time with children. By that measure, men are disproportionately high.
t1oracle:
The opposite of masculinity is “femininity”, not feminism.
And yeah, I’d say it’s absolutely worth exploring toxic femininity as a possible cause of child abuse. My ego can take if it means reducing child abuse.
However, the most likely explanation for this particular statistic women in our society spend far more time caring for children than men, therefore abusers who are also women are more likely to have access to children and have more opportunity to abuse them.
The “toxic feminism” line really is the most demasking thing these MRA-trolls could ever have posted 😀 It’s beautiful in its sheer level of failure and intellectual bankrupcy.
And, as I stated above, single parents are far more likely to be women and in stressful situations involving poverty and lack of other resources, which leads to higher levels of abuse.
Having been a single parent for a couple of years, I can tell you that a man who is a fairly good father gets lots of praise and other positive response. Being a fairly good mother is absolutely the minimum expected of a woman, for which she’ll get approximately zero credit.
@weirwoodtreehugger
“You still haven’t presented an alternate hypothesis for why a huge majority of mass shooters are men.”
You haven’t shown logical proof that masculinity leads to mass shootings. Correlation is not causation. I don’t owe you an alternate theory, because I am not the one making an accusation.
@GrumpyOldMan
“I don’t know if anyone has actually worked this one out but I would bet that the rate of child abuse per hour spent with the children is at least twice as high for men. ”
If you believe that without evidence to support your claim, then you are sexist.
@tinyorc
The actions of the individual belong to that individual, not to the sexual identity of the individual. If an Irish man steals an apple it does not follow that Irish men are thieves. That would be racist. Just as your assertions about masculinity are sexists.
@GrumpyOldMan
“single parents are far more likely to be women and in stressful situations”
See how you were willing to dig deeper to find more understanding? Now please, try to extend the same courtesy to males.
Boooooored.
1
As long as women continue to be charged for failure to stop a man from abusing or killing their child the statistics will skew to women being the abusers.
I agree that even with this skewing of results the percentage is remarkably high for men considering how little time they spend with children.
2!
@t1oracle: What did I assert about masculinity, exactly? And how it is sexist?
Also, your false equivalence is false. If 98% of apple thefts were exclusively committed by Irish men, I think it would be important to explore the link between Irishness and apple-based kleptomania. Though if you wanted to really hammer the Irish stereotype home, you should have gone with potatoes. Total beginner’s mistake.
That could actually be pretty entertaining. I like to make fun of the spelling. I saw one once that said “Fuck you to bitch,” which makes me wonder where bitch is.
3
Irish is a race? Huh. Does that make me a Scandinavian-Scottish-Irish-German mixed breed? Does that increase or decrease my value on the race marketplace?
Irish is the “race” that commonly held up as an example of LOOK WHITE PEOPLE ARE OPPRESSED TOO. Usually by people who have never been to Ireland and think “Gaelic” is a language.
@t1oracle:
“If you believe that without evidence to support your claim, then you are sexist.”
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t09.htm
Sorry, sexist whiner, but statistics show a clear picture. Women spend twice as much time with children. They should be at LEAST 66% of perps.
Yet they are not. Men, who spend HALF AS MUCH(!) time with children manage to abuse almost as much – the same, if you take statistical variance into account.
This is painting an absolutely awful picture of men. I’m honestly quite shocked that you brought this statistic yourself. Do you hate men that much? Personally, I’d have been horrified at the statistic.
The abuse Anita continues to be subjected to is horrible. It’s unfathomable to me as a man and a human being how one could threaten violence simply due to disagreeing with someone. It’s pathetic.
Is this the right place to discuss the contents of Anita’s tweets regarding the school shooting? I don’t know, I’m hesitant to because the main point of this post is the threats and abuse she’s receiving. But, it’s also the only post here about this topic, so here goes. This comment from @t1oracle describes my initial thoughts exactly:
Men are more violent than women, statistically. There’s nothing controversial there. Is it due to social conditioning or the concept of masculinity? In my opinion, no, it’s more of a physiological phenomenon, one that concepts such as masculinity are meant to refine and control. That in no way means men can’t help it. Of course we can. My issue is, Anita’s tweets regarding the school shooting suggest that aspects of masculinity that have been distorted are to blame. I’m genuinely asking, what is “toxic masculinity? Which aspects of masculinity are being distorted by this school shooter? Impulse control? A sense of entitlement? Disenfranchisement? None of these are unique to men. Is violence inherently an aspect of toxic masculinity? If so, what behavior is the non-toxic form of that? Assertiveness? I don’t see a direct correlation there, but I could be missing something.
Ultimately, ascribing “toxic masculinity” to male murderer is just as unsound as labeling a female murderer “hysterical,” when something like “mentally unbalanced” will do in both cases. It’s clouded the very valid issue that it’s mostly men who kill and that we need to get a handle on how to address this.
I’m a father of 3 boys who all play video games, and so have been following Anita’s videos with great interest as I am concerned by the content of some of the games, as well as the immersive quality of the technology. I completely agree with her assertions in her videos; in fact, I’ve agreed with everything I’ve read from her until the school shooting tweets. I think she’s brave as hell to do what she does (it’s sad she that she as to be brave to do it in the first place). I think she’s off base on the toxic masculinity thing, but taking her work in the past year into account, this is hardly worth rebutting. I’m mostly a bit taken aback by some of the commenters here, whom I was hoping to support.