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.
My other thought about this is that people HAVE spent exhausting amounts of time “digging deep” to find out why angry boys commit horrific crimes. We *don’t* actually spend much time digging deep to find the material or social causes of child abuse. Default assumption is that child abusers are just monsters and bad people who should rot in hell for what they’ve done to innocent children. Done.
I actually think we’re a lot more thoughtful about why mass shootings happen, to the point where I’m totally sick of it.
Hell, I stayed up til 5AM one night reading Eliot Rodger’s entire manifesto/diary trying to suss out what his motivations were, how the UCSB shooting could have been avoided. I’m not alone.
In the aftermath, there were TONS of think pieces and discussion on how to prevent this kind of horrorshow from playing out again in the future. Every time this happens, we have that conversation. More funding for mental health services! (not applicable to Rodger’s case, he was already in care thanks to well-off parents.) More gun control! (Maybe, but this is the US, so… chortle!) Less bullying! (ok, good, but Eliot doesn’t really mention being bullied)
Eliot himself thought putting women into concentration camps was the solution to his problems. He didn’t just need a competent therapist or an afternoon off per week to blow off some steam or enough money to afford his basic needs. (That’s all stuff low-income parents and carers forfeit for years at a time, btw, and no one thinks this is remarkable)
Sometimes there’s an underlying need, something easily addressable. In the case of overextended parents and carers, it would be SO easy for the American political system to be just a liiiiittle bit less shitty to the people raising its next generation. We just don’t care to do it.
But, sometimes there’s not any apparent underlying deprivation. In the case of a lot of these school shooters, I think that is the case. They are so often comfortable, middle-class guys with overwrought entitlement complexes, underdeveloped empathy and outlandishly easy access to guns.
Since we are collectively unwilling to do anything about the guns, all that’s left to talk about the entitlement complex.
I think it’s worth noting mass shooting are mostly done by not only whit males but particularly by American white males. There’s been what, four mass shootings in the US this year?
I’m not trying to defend anyone but the rest of the world’s males shouldn’t be victimized for a tipically US citizen behaviour. My country hasn’t had a mass shooting in it’s entire history and we have strongly male privileged society.
@GrumpyOldMan
OK, let me try.
Males have suffered greatly from a lack of instruction on how to behave like decent human beings. OK? Courteous enough for you?
@fxc
Ah, I’m sorry, but since you were factually incorrect on the single point of Ms Sarkeesian NOT having weathered abuse before making her videos, you now deserve every single accusation of ‘troll’ and other criticisms, because that’s how being wrong works. Clearly you were maliciously lying about her status (because no one is ever mistaken or uninformed when it comes to statements they make, everything is purposeful) in order to further your own villainous agenda and you have no right to attempt to stem any amount of criticism you get.
in fact, you are now obligated to talk to every single person who disagrees with you and give them individual attention and justify your existence to them, or you deserve everyone getting mad at you and “harassing” you by calling you a troll. If they STILL call you a troll, you clearly haven’t explained well enough and it’s all your fault.
“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.”
Why should proof be provided for a claim that was never made?
That was just your strawman.
I don’t know if other commenters have confused it here, but “toxic” mascuinity was the subect.
What a boffo idea! Here’s my contribution, which isn’t really MINE, understand, I just saw it in the girls’ toilet at a hockey arena when I was 9 years old and never forgot it, but have been simply dying to use in some context, which you have just supplied. Ahem:
“Those who write on bathroom walls
Should wrap their shit in tiny balls.
And those who read these words of wit
Should eat those tiny balls of shit.”
I cordially invite you to do likewise, snotball.
The level of vitriol in many of your responses to criticisms of the strength of evidence, not even the thesis as a whole shows how dogmatic you are. You believe you are making progress, but you do that by encouraging dialog and understanding not by building walls, which accomplishes nothing but reinforcement of tribalism. I started this by saying that I believe her thesis to be solid and many of her examples to be well presented. The fact that I have stated that I have issue with some of the arguments was enough for many of you to respond in overly-aggressive, immature, and insulting ways. All on a post about how horrible it is when people harass others online. I’m done here as this is clearly not a safe place for someone that doesn’t fit your mold.
inb4 – a slew of more of the same shit.
My apologies to the few that were respectful and refrained for turning this into a flame war, but the overwhelmingly “warm” response that I have received here has completely extinguished any desire I had to engage in a discussion on this forum.
Holy shit, I have no words for how fucking disgusting this is:
https://twitter.com/jwilcox79/status/526813711408046080
FXC, you focus on vitriol here on *this* post, with *this* content, with no irony.
I sincerely hope fxc sticks his flounce, but if not, I will merely say that his calm-reasonableness act isn’t going to fool anybody here, when he accuses Anita of LYING about something that informed people regard as a DEBATABLE point. That proves his mala fides right at the start.
So you created this sock so you could pretend to be making a reasonable complaint about vitriol on a post containing horrendous abuse?
Do stick the flounce trollysanta. I give you an E for effort.
WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP!!!!
Sorry, that was my MRAdar going off.
WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP!!!!!
Aaaaand there it goes again!
I think what troll #1 is trying to say is that misogyny isn’t sexism, it’s just “wanting equality between the sexes”. Nice try, but NO. Misandry isn’t a thing, dude. There is no time-honored social hierarchy privileging women over men. There is, however, very much the opposite of that. And that is what we are here to mock, including in trolls that try to justify it with bogus-egalitarian arguments and dime-store wall-hanging wizdumb.
And troll #2? Well, in plain English, it’s “I can’t back up any of my assertions here with solid proof, and seeing as I’ve been challenged beyond my capacity to answer (when I expected not to be challenged at all), well…I’m a-scurry on outta here like a cockroach after I get one last snide dig in. And pretend that I really did want reasoned and logical debate and shit.”
Yeah. So logical. So much wow.
Bloody marvellous.
Dudebros don’t understand what “toxic masculinity” means, but they know they don’t like it.
Response: Throw tantrums. Hurl abuse.
(Nope, no problem here! Toxic masculinity? What’s that?)
For someone who was so recently complaining about straw men, you sure managed to cram a lot of them into a small paragraph. No one here has claimed or done any of these things.
You haven’t shown logical proof that humans evolved from other primates. I don’t care if there’s decades of prior theorizing that led to this conclusion, I demand that you lay it all out for me so I can decide whether those of you who’ve actually studied this topic are correct in this one instance!
@JV,
Are you serious? Unless there’s been a massive disaster and Google isn’t working atm, there’s NO REASON you should be demanding that a bunch of strangers explain a concept whose definition and finer points are easily accessible to you with a tiny bit of effort. “Toxic masculinity” is not a new term and you should have no difficulty doing your own damn homework.
@ceebarks,
Sure, but since Oracle and JV and the others haven’t heard of any of it, it’s our job to explain it to them. Apparently.
@Richard,
“Victimized”? Really?
Wow, it’s almost like gender roles are different in different cultures! I bet no feminist has ever thought of that before.
@fxc,
That’s ironic, coming from you.
Guys, we were mean to the asshole and now he’s not gonna stay around and be an asshole any more! Are you all as sad as I am?
Yo, dude? YOUR SEX STARTED IT.
And stop spreading misogyny.
Heartbroken.
I am crying in my sangria.
I am crying because I have no sangria.
@emilygoddess
Fair enough. I got this definition from the Geek Feminism wiki (is that a credible source?):
“Toxic masculinity is one of the ways in which Patriarchy is harmful to men. It is the socially-constructed attitudes that describe the masculine gender role as violent, unemotional, sexually aggressive, and so forth.”
“Violent, unemotional and sexually aggressive” is absolutely a toxic blend of characteristics. I guess my initial reaction to Anita’s tweets was based on my conflation of “masculinity” and “male-ness”. I am aware that masculinity and femininity are social constructs, but I don’t tacitly ascribe those aforementioned traits to them, nor think of either as inherently negative or toxic, nor do I believe men and women should or even can fit neatly into either of them. Many others obviously feel differently. Hope we can all find some common ground.
Why are you obsessing about the masculinity part, and ignoring the toxic part? We could talk about friendly masculinity, or confident masculinity, or fluffy masculinity. (Mmmmm, fluffy.) But our goal is to improve the lives of people, and reduce violence committed against people, so we talk about TOXIC masculinity. Because it’s toxic, and has toxic effects, and needs to be burned out of our culture.
Nice job pretending to be Just Asking Questions, tho. Points for originality. I mean, no, bugger off.
Are you a sock for the guy who was trolling here earlier? Because neither of you seem to know how adjectives work. Putting the word toxic in front of masculinity should be a clue that people are talking about a certain type of masculinity that is promoted by our culture. Not masculinity as a whole. The point is that patriarchy socializes men to not express emotions other than anger and that they are entitled to women and that violence is a manly (therefore good) way to solve problems.
I really don’t get why this is so hard to understand.
I really wish feminists could just discuss things without having to constantly pause and pat men (and even some non-feminist women) on the hand and assure them “now, now dear. Not all men. Of course not. Never fear.” It gets pretty tedious after the first hundred times.
Eh, the “just asking questions” thing ain’t that original, but I was genuinely asking questions and didn’t Google it first because I didn’t want to assume the cloud’s definition was the one being referred to on this thread.
I’m obsessing about the masculinity part because I believe it can be a valid and necessary social construct used to inform and refine boys as they grow to manhood. We’re just gonna continue to disagree, so I’ll stop typing now. I’m a big fan of Anita’s and will continue to follow her work. Happy trails. Buggering off…
So long as we continue with the radical notion that feminism is about women’s issues and analysing what causes problems for women, we’re going to get these doofuses.