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]
.
.
.
.
.
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.
Wait, I’m not thinking clearly enough due to lack of coffee. Clearly what my kitty needs is a fedora.
Not to mention that the traits and behaviors associated with ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ vary widely across time and cultures. In Victorian era western society, for example, cassandrakitty’s kitty avatar would have been read as royal and extremely masculine. Pink and blue gender assignments flipped post WW2 thanks to Hitler associating pink with homosexuality. The more you know.
None. That’s why I’m not losing my shit trying to defend the honor of femininity, the way you are losing yours trying to defend the honor of masculinity.
My kitty is part purple, therefore clearly it is an emperor (not sure of where, we’ll figure that part out after coffee).
This just in: Male cats have been detected.
You may now resume your regular scheduled idiocy.
Lies! All cats are female, because something something masculinity.
@vaiyt
“No, it’s not – you forgot to ask the golden question: why are the poor overwhelmingly Irish?”
There could be many reasons. Lets say in this case they are refugees from a large natural disaster. The poverty of a refugee has nothing to do with their race.
@fromafar2013
“It has to do with toxic masculinity in white men”
The white men weren’t the one’s who were identified as toxic.
“Here you make clear that you have no idea how things like systemic racism exist, how in group behavior is encouraged by creating an ‘other’ and how one person’s act of violence can be encouraged by society as a whole.”
Kind of like the group behavior your anti-masculine friends are exhibiting here in their mistreatment of me? I understand group influences, however the behavior of an individual is not defined by a group. The individual still makes their own choices, they can side with the group, they can go against the group, or they can do something completely unrelated to the group. There were civil rights activists who were white, there were segregationists who where black, there were Jewish people who turned in other Jews to the Nazi’s. Just as there are male feminists and female misogynists. Being part of group does not determine the behavior of the individual.
“This conversation is starting to look like it’s over your head.”
Baseless ad hominem.
“Really? Do you know what hate speech is? Do you understand the concepts we are talking about? You’re showing your ignorance here.”
More condescension and insult to further amplify your hate rhetoric.
“So, you do realize that this means that personalities change after birth, right? Plus you’re ignoring the SOCIAL CONDITIONING part, which is huge. And not just because I put it in all caps.”
This is where you need to rewind. I specifically stated the factors in personality to include genetics, epigenetics, and social influences. Epigenetics are not socially influenced.
@cassandrakitty
Purple is a color commonly associated with a feminine identity, but I’m sure you knew that.
How dare you suggest that my cat is not an emperor? He’s very offended now.
It’s a fact. Facts don’t vilify anyone, they just exist. The real kicker is what conclusions we draw from them.
Racists and sexists point to facts (Irish are over-represented among apple thieves, women being less represented in STEM jobs) and conclude that the blame lies in something inherent to the group in question (Irish are a thieving people, women are stupid).
We’re arguing that shooters are overwhelming white men because something in our culture makes white men think they’re entitled to react violently when they don’t get their way. Culture is something that we can change.
Dear gods, the stupidity is strong in this one.
you personally may associate purple with a feminine identity. Doesn’t mean the whole world or even everyone in your part of it does. Idiot.
We’ve nothing against “masculine”, poppet. I’m afraid it’s your willful stupidity we’re anti.
that’s right, sweetie. And peer pressure isn’t a thing. /sarcasm
Baaahahahahahahahaha you’re fucking intellectually bankrupt. Yeah, let’s all pretend that your carefully crafted hypothetical has every possible bit of racism scrubbed from it.
You’re a fucking wanker. And just for the record, nobody is born with personality. You’re born with *temperament*, personality is the intersection of that and your upbringing.
What a fucking wanker.
Oh dear. I know it’s tempting to conflate masculinity and sexuality. They both end with “-ity” so they must be basically the same thing, right!? Wrong.
Sexuality – whether we are attracted men, women, both, neither – does not actually change depending on time, place or cultural context. A gay man is still attracted to other men whether he is born in China in 1342 or Canada in 1951. What changes is the performance of that sexuality, the words we use to describe it and society’s attitudes towards it. But the fundamental attraction – of a man to women, a woman to both, a man to neither, etc. – does not change.
In much the same way, the biological reality of being male does not change. But masculinity – which could be better understood as a performance of maleness – does. There’s an abundance of evidence for this, the most obvious being that there has never been one normative or dominant masculinity over the centuries. What a society considers “masculine” varies wildly depending on the era and the society. For example, Georgian England was known for its “masculinity of manners”, where high class men wore wigs and powder, and verbal wit, high education and impeccable manners were considered the markers of true masculinity. Today, these men would be called fops, dandies or a whole heap of much crueller words, because their masculine presentation would read as incredibly camp in our society. This is in stark contrast to the “muscular Christian” masculinity that came to dominate the American psyche, which values honour, independence and a rugged physique.
Of course, you would know this shit if you’d done even the most cursory reading around the concept you are so ardently defending. I learned it in my first year “Constructions of Masculinity” class in university, then again in “Gender and Performance”, and again in “Masculinities in the Gothic” (totally fascinating, we went all the way from Frankenstein to Norman Bates). The first paragraph of the freaking Wikipedia article on masculinity covers the basics. You cannot be born masculine because masculinity means different things depending on time, place and cultural context. Maleness is innate. Masculinity is not.
LOL, I missed that part. What is Tom of Finland?
This conversation has been over t1oracle’s head since I first had to explain what an adjective is and how it works, and t1oracle still doesn’t understand even after that.
How convenient that you try to pick a tailor-made hypothetical to avoid answering my question honestly. In *this* particular case, all the starving poor being Irish MIGHT be a coincidence. However! Even assuming that this particular community is all composed of people fleeing from a natural disaster that hits only Irish people, why are they starving? Why do they stay poor? Are they forced to stay in shitty places with little to no help in rebuilding a community? Are the people around the Irish suspicious of them, leading to them having more trouble landing honest jobs and being arrested more? Were they living in a place prone to natural disasters because they had nowhere else to go? How much all of those things make people avoid identifying as Irish when they can, thus making them even less represented among the not poor?
See, even in your hypothetical situation that barely resembles the real world there can be more than coincidence in which groups are poor and which aren’t. Of course, in the real world an uniform group of poor people just doesn’t pop into existence out of nothing, and when particular groups are over-represented, the specter of oppression is basically certain to follow behind.
You realize that each of these options has consequences for the individual though? Most people, in their daily lives, will choose the path of least resistance, especially if the situation would not directly affect them otherwise.
Like a group of friends at a party and one tells a sexist (or racist, etc) joke. Some people will simply think it’s funny. Some won’t. Most that won’t, will choose the path of least resistance; laugh along or at least remain silent. Someone who chooses to speak out and say ‘not cool’ runs the risk of being made a target themselves. The toxic part of toxic masculinity is that most often, men police the behavior of other men in ways that can get violent, or at least lower their status in the eyes of their peers (read emasculation).
An extreme example is the man who was hospitalized after being attacked by a group of men who were harassing women. He stood up to them, made a choice to go against the group, and in retaliation, the group took their rage out on him. http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/national-international/Man-Punched-Knocked-Unconscious-During-Rittenhouse-Square-Attack-270588441.html
In your example, the white people who stood along side black people during the civil rights movement were subject to the same violence and were often murdered for their efforts. If that isn’t a signal that speaking out isn’t the path of least resistance, then I don’t know what is.
This is the socialization part. This is society setting a standard, in a weird feedback loop kind of way, that tells individuals, based on the choices of different individuals, what the socially acceptable reaction is and what the consequences of going against it are. This is what is meant by systemic when talking about racism and sexism and homophobia, etc.
No insult; your knowledge on this subject has major gaps, which you need to fill if you really care about understanding this topic. Read books. Read. Geeze.
@vaiyt
“It’s a fact. Facts don’t vilify anyone, they just exist. The real kicker is what conclusions we draw from them.”
“Toxic masculinity,” is not a fact. It is an opinion based on hate.
“We’re arguing that shooters are overwhelming white men because something in our culture makes white men think they’re entitled to react violently”
You have nothing to prove causation. Correlation is not causation. It could be that the shooters where white men because white males have greater access to firearms. The reasons why they have that access may even be cultural. Lots of white males like to hunt, there is a long history of that. Not all white males share that culture however. Furthermore, your motive of “entitled to react violently” is completely unfounded. There is no basis for that.
“Idiot.”
“Baaahahahahahahahaha you’re fucking intellectually bankrupt. ”
More insult to convey your rhetoric of hate.
You don’t need to be masculine to be heterosexual. You also don’t need to be violently entitled to be masculine.
What is the difference between singular and plural, and how does one express this in a sentence?
“You realize that each of these options has consequences for the individual though? Most people, in their daily lives, will choose the path of least resistance, especially if the situation would not directly affect them otherwise.”
Mass shootings are not the path of least resistance. I have never seen someone cheer on or support mass murders for showing off their “masculinity.”
“No insult; your knowledge on this subject has major gaps, which you need to fill if you really care about understanding this topic. Read books. Read. Geeze.”
There goes your condescending attitude again. :-
Gods above. Do I really need to point it out here? The words. They’re right there.
No, epigenetics are not socially influenced.
But social influences? Those… might be… socially influenced.
-_-
That isn’t possible. For instance, the word “deer” can be both plural or singular. This example proves that English has no mechanism to distinguish plural from singular.
Shorter t1oracle: you’re just a load of man-haters!