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.
The primary factor in evolution?
There’s a lot of joy in this thread. But the thing that really scrambles my mind is that one. The primary factor of evolution is reproduction?
Errrrr.
I mean, it’s an argument you can make. There’s debates about the point. It’s an interesting consensus excercise in how you define “factor”, for instance. But it’s not the primary factor. It’s grammatically, semantically and scientifically meaningless. Is the primary factor of space exploration gravity? No, “gravity” is a description of the forces that work on you while you are performing space exploration.
In evolution, “reproduction” is the mechanism of natural selection. Well, technically the genetic transmission of reproducible and heritable variable traits. Reproductive success is a key part of the notion of the survivival of the fittest, since reproductive success is measured in amount of living offspring able to pass on your set of phenotype/genotype variations.
But “fittest” isn’t “Strongest”, it’s “fittest for the environment at hand”. So the “Primary” factory of evolution could be said to be a species fitness for a given environment. If the fitness capacity is zero, you won’t get any reproduction, because your species of fur wearing fat storing polar bears instantly die out in the desert due to abiotic factors. It’s a great species genetic blueprint, but it’s fitness for the environment at hand is zero.
My personal take is something a little different when talking about primary factors, since I’m inclined to assume the primary factor of a given evolutionary niche is going to be species adaption to environment modulated by varied traits. The idea is that offspring aren’t important if the offspring can’t survive, see, so if I say “reproduction success” I’ve already made the assumption that “success” implies “my offspring is fit to survive” which carries the assumption of environmental niche adaptions. Without either there’s no natural selection. Reproduction is the mechanism of evolution, it’s part of the backdrop. Inertia and gravitronic attraction is part of the backdrop of space. When I design space shuttles I know I’ll be dealing with these forces, when species develop over time they will be transmiting genetic sets through reproduction in varied ways. Saying that the salient point of natural selection is reproduction is putting the cart before the horse.
On a macro level you can also get into an interesting discussion of avaiable thropic levels. BIomass transfer availability, essentially. Without the possibility of an environment that supports multiple species over time the presence of multiple species of time is impossible (this is tautologially obvious, right?). That view means the “primary” factor of evolution in a given species is the adaption of behaviours that raise their ability to extract scarce ressources from an environment. But then another view could be that the primary factor of evolution is an environment that allows varied species to compete for success within given environment niches, so as to allow the entire process (and also filter it through their various adaptions to specific environmental features like the heat of the desert or the cold of the arctic).
Thinking “reproduction” is the primary factor in evolution is the kind of slipshod thinking that ends with people claiming that in human evolution, alpha males are the ones who sleep around a lot and thus have many children.
Because they have lots of children, that means they’re genetic succeses, right?
No, because if not one of those children survive until reproductive age, their actual reproductive success of the adaption is fucking zero and their actual energy investment far outshines the potential benefits. Species wide altruism produces really interesting adapability factors in relation to cooperation and cohabitation, so another factor of human evolution could be the primacy of altruistic kin-groups that ensure far better odds of successful reproduction by communal raising of offspring. See: essentially any primate species ever except some really antisocial monkeys.
Look, internet, when you just say “Evolution in humans is about reproduction”, you break my heart.
I for one am just glad that people aren’t like bed bugs. I’ll… let you google that yourselves. Eeesh.
Ancient proverb that I just made up! Man falls asleep with sexual problem in mind, wakes up with solution in hand.
Live by the proverb, creepy dude.
“I’m also not alone in my experience. We ended up here because the group consensus on this board seems to be there is no use for gender-based frameworks around behavior. I disagree.”
Dude, women can (and do) have high sex drives. Men can (and do) have low or no sex drives. Sex drive is not dependent on gender or biological sex. Women are constantly told that we are not supposed to have sex drives. You reaffirming that just makes you unattractive because why would we fuck someone who does not believe we want to fuck? Seriously. Women and men are telling you why you are wrong to keep stating the same debunked bullshit over and over and over and over. Can you pretend to have some glimmer of reading comprehension please?
cassandrakitty:
This is true. I have a high sex drive in every sense of the word, but I don’t make this public knowledge in my daily life because, surprise surprise, a lot of men would take this as an invitation to hit on me and then get confused and angry when “I like sex” doesn’t mean “I want to fuck you personally.”
JV:
What is a “gender-based framework”? Please give a concrete example. Do you mean a gender role, or is that something different. Please give a real life example of a gender-based framework working to make life better for a majority of people.
Like we have established that JV thinks that men in general have higher/more indiscriminate sex drives than women. I think that’s codswallop, but let’s assume it isn’t for a second. Let’s assume it’s true. Great. Now what do we do with that insight?
And I realise that I am being incredibly ciscentric in my posts, but I don’t want to confuse the poor dear any more than he already is. We can tackle trans and intersex once we get the toxic masculinity sex drive concept understood.
But you just did. In that sentence. Right there.
“To prevent sexual abuse we need social contraints that apply for everyone in the population, because generally every man in that population has a high sex-drive. Some of those men will perform sexual abuse to satisfy their sex drives”.
That’s your parsed sentence. That’s the step by step of it’s terrifying logic. And the conclusion of that is one thing and one thing only – “In a given population, all men are potential rapists”. Potential because we can’t know who is and isn’t, and thus anyone can be.
That’s… not a very kind view of men, mate. Might want to rethink that one a little.
@JV:
So you aren’t equating “high sex drive” with rape, but you are saying that there needs to be regulation (aimed at men specifically) to reduce sexual abuse because of their higher sex drive, which would cause problems if left unchecked.
Help me connect the dots here, JV, becuase you are indeed equating “high sex drive” with rape.
@cassandrakitty
I have no idea what a woman’s sex drive feels like. None. Do you also agree, as a woman, you have no idea what a man’s feels like? Do you believe there is a gendered difference there? And what are the reasons women don’t go around hitting on every guy they think is attractive? What are the reasons a lot of guys DO hit on every woman they think is attractive?
(And I don’t do that and never have, for whatever that’s worth.) Are there gendered differences there as well, or no? Is it beneficial in any way for a woman to hit on every guy she thinks is attractive? What about for men?
Sorry, but I do have a tinge of evobio in my reasoning. I know that’s anathema to many, but there you go.
Hooray, Fibinachi is here!
*pours another glass of wine*
Feminists – Men can totally control their sex drives. Also, masturbation.
Creep – Men’s sex drives are vast and uncontrollable! Which is why we need gender roles to control them! We will accomplish this by making women subordinate to men. That will definitely reign in men’s innate tendency to be sexually abusive, which they don’t have, except they do, but pretend I didn’t say that.
You are officially too clueless to participate in this conversation. Now piss off.
At least he didn’t say that people are going to lose their toes because they’re no longer evolutionarily necessary.
I still love how JV and t1oracle keep proving that toxic masculinity is a problem.
With every.
Post.
They.
Make.
JV:
“Is it beneficial for a person to hit on every person they think is attractive?”
We don’t know. It entirely depends on the person and what they want out of their interactions with other people. That is the entire point.
Huh, it may be time…
“…but I have a tinge of evobio in my reasoning.”
**snicker-snort**
Yeah, some men will, so social constructs need to be in place to mitigate that, even if those constructs also affect the men who would never act in such a way. Of course, there’s no way to tell who is who, society-wide. And that’s the reason for social constructs in the first place.
Christ, JV is still playing the “you aren’t a man, you don’t understand what male sexuality is like” card when multiple men in this very thread are contradicting him. Amazing.
@ Macha
They’re like fish going “what is water? I don’t see any water. nope, no water here!”
Oh, you mean the social constructs that until fairly recently made it legal for men to rape their wives? The ones that in some countries still make it legal for them to do so?
Yep, totally designed to reign in male predation and protect women, those.
Such a useful concept! If only we had a name for it…
I can answer that! Patriarchy! It’s the reason why Sadie Hawkins dances are a novel exception to the unspoken rule!
Because men are trained to see women as objects to be acted upon and owned, and women are striped of their agency by socialization.
Because women approaching men risk being raped or killed while men approaching women risk having their feelings hurt (and then possibly killing the object of their ‘affection’ anyway.)
Toxic masculinity, dude. The gender roles we are trying to abolish. Men wouldn’t be like this if it wasn’t acceptable and basically encouraged by society at large.
JV, what are you talking about when you say “social constructs?” Because if you’re talking about gender roles, multiple people have already described how those would do less than squat to prevent sexual violence.
Again, I never said it applied to all men, just a large enough portion of the population that it needs to be accounted for. And a man commenting that his experience is different than mine is not contradicting me at all.