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.
Serious question, do you sincerely believe that any average difference in male/female behaviour or difference in proneness to dertain antisocial behaviours are solely due to social constructions of gender and masculinity/femininity?
Plus, let’s just put it out there, though I feel like it’s already been said; Calling something a social construct does not make the thing ‘not real’ or ‘not important’. It means, ‘not immutable’ or ‘is actually changeable’ via socialization.
That’s because t1oracle understands “East Broadway” to mean that all Broadways are East, so when West Broadway is encountered it causes a synaptic cascade failure.
@vaiyt
That’s fair, I have been vague about the specifics while defending the general, so here goes:
Male
aggressive (physically and emotionally)
concerned with power and control
physically stronger
tendency toward objectification (of things and people)
driven to spread his genetics far and wide
Female
cooperative
verbally focused
physically less strong
has more at stake regarding sex
require long periods of safety while bearing kids
Caveat: IN GENERAL. Of course some of those traits are interchangeable to a degree, and some are not. But social constructs like masculinity/femininity are meant to address the tendency of the majority in order to have a functioning society. And frankly, it’s mostly about harnessing the male tendency towards destructiveness. As for the true outliers (although again, only in a few of those traits), that is where the framework needs and is getting (I think) tweaking. But even in 2014, the vast majority of the human population seems to fit, if not completely, into those categories. Those men exhibiting toxic masculinity? That’s an issue of lack of a framework, not of a bad one. In my opinion.
Wow, that’s some serious-business misandry you got going there, JV.
fromafar2013
“There isn’t a single word or concept that you actually grasp the actual meaning and usage of, is there?”
Ad hominem.
“Gender identity, gender roles, sex assignment at birth, chromosomal arrangement, phenotype expression of secondary sex characteristics, gender expression, sexuality, sexual orientation… these are all very different, but intersecting concepts. It’s like you’re standing at the crossroads and have no idea which way is which.”
Oh cool. You have a vocabulary, but no actual argument. How interesting.
@t1oracle:
Dang, dudes get all the best character traits to be central to their identity. What’s left for femininity?
*adds “censorship” to the list of words oracle doesn’t understand*
@t1oracle:
Yes, that is indeed another concept you do not understand.
Now we just need ole t1 to go all Humpty Dumpty on us. At least then he’ll have gained a modicum of self awareness.
@kirbywarp
Empathy, nurturing, socialization, the ability to bring life into the world.
Have we found a concept that he does understand yet?
You think women are naturally fickle, lazy, cowardly and selfish when compared to men, and we’re the mean ones. Fuck you.
No they don’t. They just fight for the sexual attention of female seahorses. You’re projecting. Neither do hyenas in fact. And trying to model our society by cherry-picking behaviors from dumb animals is dumb.
Not yet.
So basically, decent human beings and good fathers are feminine?
Feminists want to take trucks away from boys now? Um, no we don’t. But we don’t think boys are hardwired to prefer toy trucks over dolls. If a boy likes a truck, fine. If he likes a doll, fine. If he likes both, fine. The same goes for girls.
You have provided no evidence that the traits you described are biologically masculine. How would you even know if a male seahorse feels confident?
Also, if you think self sacrifice for others is a masculine trait, you haven’t seen female cats kicking ass to defend their kittens. They’ll go after much larger animals.
SO MUCH PROJECTION
Did everyone catch that? Men are not necessary for bringing new life into the world.
You heard it here!
@emilygoddess
If you’re paying any attention at all you will see that I am trying very hard to be civil against a crowd that makes no such effort. That is of course, if you can see past your own biases.
Another aspect of male identification is the cultural description of masculinity culinity and the ideal man in terms that closely resemble the core values of society as a whole. These include qualities such as control, strength, competitiveness, toughness, coolness under pressure, logic, forcefulness, decisiveness, rationality, autonomy, self-sufficiency, and control over any emotion that interferes with other core values (such as invulnerability). These male-identified qualities are associated with the work valued most in patriarchal societies-business, politics, war, athletics, law, and medicine-because this work has been organized in ways that require such qualities for success. In contrast, qualities such as cooperation, mutuality, equality, sharing, compassion, caring, vulnerability, a readiness to negotiate and compromise, emotional expressiveness, and intuitive and other nonlinear ways of thinking are all devalued and culturally associated with femininity and femaleness. – Gender Knot
What a useful book.
What’s funny is that dude just unknowingly defined masculinity as a social construct designed to bolster men’s fragile egos, which is the first thing he’s been right about. Shame it wasn’t on purpose.
So, according to trollacle, a woman who is infertile, has had a hysterectomy, past menopause or on birth control is unfeminine?
@t1oracle:
Is your civility masculine or feminine?
Hooray, I didn’t totally miss the silly masculinity troll! I wanted to share with him this excellent example of male heterosexuality, ergo masculinity.
http://www.thirdyearabroad.com/media/k2/items/cache/17c2b3ce4732475c7746c079f65d091b_XL.jpg
OFFICIAL MOD NOTE: simply saying that one is being civil or that one didn’t intend to be insulting is not the same as ACTUALLY being civil and not insulting. I can read your comments for myself.