Today I’d like to share with you two quotations. One is from Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader whose legacy we honor today. The other is from someone who considers himself the leader of a human rights movement that follows in the footsteps of King.
The first quote:
Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
The second:
[Name redacted], I hope you are looking forward to our date. I certainly am. … [I]t is clear that you have gone to great lengths to keep your image off the internet.
Nice try.
Is that a threat? No, it is a promise. Big difference.
As we have been saying here for years, the time for collegial, polite discussion and negotiation with these piles of refuse is over. …
We have people working on securing her image. Meantime, $100.00 to the first person who gets us a clear image of her which we can verify. Something large and clear enough to be used as a feature image is preferred.
As you have probably gathered, the first quote comes from Dr. King. It’s from his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, in which he sets forth a powerful argument for the transformative power of nonviolence, which, as he notes, “nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.”
The second quote comes from Paul Elam of A Voice for Men. I’ve taken the liberty of redacting the name of his target.
Yes, this self-described “humanitarian” is launching yet another campaign of doxxing and intimidation aimed at an ideological enemy who just happens to be female. And once again, as he so notoriously did several years ago, Elam is offering a bounty for the personal information of one of his targets – in this case a clear photograph of her face.
It’s a strategy that draws not on the tactics of Martin Luther King but on those of his enemies – in particular the Ku Klux Klan, which in the 1960s posted “wanted posters” featuring the faces of civil rights activists, including King himself. Some of those whose faces appeared on these “wanted posters,” most famously King himself, were later murdered.
In more recent years, anti-abortion activists have posted similar “wanted posters” featuring the pictures and addresses of doctors who perform abortions – some of whom were themselves later murdered.
Now AVFM has taken up this classic technique of intimidation.
Last year, AVFM activists – including the site’s “activism director” Attila Vinczer — posted hundreds of wanted-style posters of feminist philosophy professor Adele Mercier on and around the campus of Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario. The year before, a Men’s Rights group in Edmonton closely associated with A Voice for Men put up similar posters targeting Lise Gotell, the chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta.
We can only assume that Elam has a similar campaign in mind for his latest target.
So what are Elam’s charges against this new woman to hate?
According to him, the woman, a professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, accused AVFM activist Sage Gerard (aka Victor Zen) of “demonstrat[ing] a desire to kill women” in a complaint she filed with the KSU administration.
Elam has posted the complaint on his website. Her name appears nowhere in the complaint, nor does anything about Gerard wanting to kill women.
[ Clarification: Elam has now posted a separate campus police report about an incident in which Gerard came to the office of the Interdisciplinary Studies department requesting to see the professor; the police report contains her name as well as notes from the officer saying that “she has seen the cartoons, videos and blogs online and believes Gerard demonstrates having violent fantasies about hurting and murdering women.” ]
This anonymous complaint, along with another complaint about Gerard, were evidently triggered by a video Gerard posted last year of a late-night “sticker run” he made on the KSU campus.
The video, which Gerard filmed and narrated on the fly, is more than a little creepy. In it, Gerard describes his preparations for his “activism” as if he were launching some sort of covert operation; at one point he talks about hiding his stickers in the sleeves of his jacket. As he heads out the door to start his stickering, he announces “let’s go fuck with people.”
Gerard clearly sees what he’s doing as a deliberately provocative act. He talks about putting AVFM stickers in places “where they cannot be ignored” and about his desires to “push the boundaries” by plastering them in places they’re really not supposed to be put – most notably in a women’s bathroom where, thankfully, no women were present.
Weirdly, given that he later posted the video on his YouTube channel, Gerard also took steps in the video to conceal his identity and cover his tracks, wiping his fingerprints off of some of the stickers after pasting them in a bathroom. Later, apparently wanting to look as much like a serial killer as possible, he dons latex gloves.
At one point, Gerard jokes about how he’d like to paste one of the stickers over the mouth of a feminist to shut her up.
His behavior in the video and in his interactions with others on campus, as well as his affiliation with AVFM, clearly rattled some on the KSU campus. The anonymous complainant to the KSU administration suggested that Gerard’s actions were creating a “hostile work environment” for some faculty and staff and making students fear for their safety.
Elam has posted the actual complaints, which, in what seems to be a pretty clear violation of privacy, were sent to Gerard with the identity of one of the accusers laid bare. Here’s the anonymous complaint that Elam has attributed to his current target:
Among other similar offenses by the same individual, a KSU student (Sage Gerard) posed as a custodian and entered the women’s bathrooms on campus, placing stickers intended to intimidate women. … Gerard’s behavior indicates contemplation of violence against women (he posts art depicting guns pointed at women’s symbols, as well as other violently anti-feminist themes). His behavior has created a hostile work environment for multiple KSU employees who do not only fear intimidation and harassment, but actual physical violence against themselves and their families. KSU students have also expressed real fears for their own physical safety on campus . . . I do not feel safe on this campus. As an advocate of women, I feel strongly that I am at real risk of becoming the target of violent retaliatory actions perpetrated by Sage Gerard and the organization sponsoring him, A Voice For Men.
Emphasis mine.
The KSU administration investigated these complaints, and concluded that Gerard was not responsible for creating a hostile work environment, and that his speech was protected under the first amendment. The complaints were dismissed; no charges against Gerard were even filed.
He was asked to stay out of women’s bathrooms in the future. And the KSU counsel who prepared the report also had this suggestion:
We do recommend that Mr. Gerard continue to refrain from further contact with the persons who made the hotline reports (or those who Mr. Gerard believes may have made them), to avoid any real or perceived retaliation. In addition, we recommend that Mr. Gerard refrain from further contact with the members of the Interdisciplinary Studies Department to avoid escalating the situation to the point that it becomes a hostile environment in the legal sense.
That’s right. Gerard wasn’t charged with anything. He faced no sanctions. He was simply asked not to contact those on campus he was making uncomfortable.
But apparently this “no contact” request is so offensive to Gerard and his AVFM comrades that they have decided to launch the very retaliation campaign that the KSU complainants were afraid of. Thus, once again, proving their critics have been right to label them a hate group in the first place.
AVFM’s new target joins a long list of women (and a few men) who have been doxxed and/or harassed in retaliation for their “crimes” against Paul Elam’s delicate sensibilities.
Elam started off this parade of harassment shortly after this site started by attempting to get a woman fired from her job at a women’s shelter for a comment she made here in which she wondered aloud if Elam had a criminal record.
Since then, Elam and his AVFM cronies have:
Started Register-Her, a fake “Offenders Registry” designed to vilify and intimidate women. (The site is now in the hands of AVFM defector John Hembling.)
Gleefully participated in the unending harassment of a Canadian feminist that one AVFM author dubbed “little red frothing fornication mouth,” for her crime of … arguing with some AVFM activists at a demonstration once. Unflattering images of “Big Red” at that demonstration have since been plastered all over the internet; she even has a page devoted to her on KnowYourMeme.
Launched a years-long harassment campaign against feminist writer Jessica Valenti. Starting with a 2011 post in which Elam himself attacked her as a “stupid, hateful bitch,” the hate campaign has moved on to labeling her a “child abuser,” posting her personal photos on AVFM without permission, putting her on Register-Her.com, and libeling her by making up inflammatory quotations and attributing them to her. (AVFM’s “social media director” and serial quote-fabricator Janet Bloomfield was evidently permabanned from Twitter for her persistent harassment of Valenti.)
Supported GamerGate’s harassment of cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, with AVFM’s PR whiz Bloomfield doing her part by blatantly libeling her on Twitter.
Launched a campaign of vilification against a Chicago-area “mommy blogger” for writing that she felt uncomfortable with the idea of a male day care staffer taking young girls to the bathroom.
Along with an assortment of white supremacists and online assholes, joined in a hate campaign against a young woman wrongly accused of trashing applications from white guys as a staffer at a college admissions office. Elam declared the woman, by name, to be a “warped by ideology” with “deep seated prejudices that guided her unscrupulous actions.” The blog was a hoax, and the woman Elam so eagerly vilified had nothing to do with it.
Published an article falsely accusing a male feminist blogger of being a “confessed rapist,” because, as Elam puts it, “karma is a BITCH.” (AVFM’s defense? It was being “satirical.”)
Accused a former AVFM staffer, with no evidence, of absconding with money donated for a men’s shelter.
Attacked feminist and skeptic Rebecca Watson on numerous occasions, including a post from Elam in which he used the term “whore” several dozen times.
And of course AVFM has accused me of everything from starting Reddit’s terrible BeatingWomen subreddit to somehow faking my site’s traffic stats on Alexa. (AVFM has never even bothered to provide “evidence” for any of their various accusations against me, perhaps because none of them are even remotely true.) Elam has posted bizarre sexual fantasies involving me, called me a pervert, and publicly suggested that I kill myself. One of AVFMs most, er, enthusiastic activists once left me a creepy, threatening voicemail at 1:38 AM. And AVFM “activism director” Attila L. Vinczer has tried to dox me, with somewhat comic results.
This isn’t even close to an exhaustive list of AVFM’s assorted retaliatory campaigns against feminists and other critics.
AVFM has made it very clear to the world – through its actions and its rhetoric – that if someone starts putting up AVFM posters or stickers on your campus or in your neighborhood, you have every reason to worry.
AVFM is not a civil or human rights group by any stretch of the imagination. It is a hate group, plain and simple, less akin to Martin Luther King Jr. than it is to those who so stubbornly fought against him.
NOTE: Here is Sage Gerard’s (aka Victor Zen’s) video of his sticker “activism.” You can probably see why people found it a little unsettling.
I’ve never introduced myself. I just started commenting. Sometimes my comments get responses but usually they don’t.
Newbies who go into moderation with their first few comments are likely to be just honestly overlooked, because their comments appear in the order they were made and not in the order they were approved. I don’t know how everyone else does it, but I follow active discussions via the “recent comments” list on the front page, and a newbie who made a comment more than 30 minutes before it was approved out of moderation is just not going to appear in that list, period.
But, the reality is that MOST comments here get no response. Most of mine get no response. If you feel dissed by this, I don’t know what to say except that I’m sorry, but that’s the reality of commenting on an internet message board. It’s not like being in a group of people sitting in the same room, where saying something and being ignored by everyone is a snub. Online, having no response to your message is not a snub. It just means nobody who read it had strong feelings about it.
Thanks, katz. That was very big of you and validating for myself and probably several others. What you did for Ally came from a place of kindness and that isn’t a bad quality to have.
Feeling as though you’re responsible for shielding and empowering Ally on your own isn’t reasonable though. It was the culture of the active commentariat at the time to swoop in and wrap her in cotton batting as soon as she squeaked. I was too scared to say anything about my frustration with Ally controlling the comment section here for a long time. I thought I was the only person who felt that way.
I’m irked with how a small number of people on both sides of the discussion behaved. There are individuals at fault everywhere you look on this matter. I’m sure some people are irked with me. Like katz, I hope someone tells me if they are. As long as they’re not talking to me in the manner Donna does, I’ll even listen!
I respect what David’s done including pulling mod status from someone who took a side on a really divisive matter relevant to the blog. I’m sorry he had to do it. I don’t want kittehserf to leave anymore than I wanted Ally gone and I didn’t want Ally gone. I just wanted her to stop abusing the position of privilege she had here.
I’m referring to Ally in that last sentence.
I’m hopelessly confused about the recent thread. I’ve read through it and I understand that it’s an important issue but I have no idea what conclusion people came to or what an acceptable attitude to those issues would be. I do have an opinion about said issues but I’m never likely to be prepared to talk about them for fear of saying the wrong thing.
I feel shell shocked and depressed about the whole thing and I miss Kittehserf, although I’m not even sure if it’s OK to say that.
@SeranVali
Of course you can miss her, Kittehserf added something to this site. Up until this incident, I can’t think of one bad thing to say about her. Beyond that I think it really drives home how it’s almost impossible to really communicate effectively in a comments section. Like you know how in person you can make a statement then shape it over time, on here you have to be so careful to express yourself fully in one shot. I would bet a good amount of money that 65% of the fights on any website come out of that problem. Does that make sense?
Sort of my point.
And Policy of Madness, yes, I understand that. I know I’m not special. I comment frequently on a few other sites, and sometimes! — someone will respond, even if I’m not one of the top five contributors.
Anyway, that’s not so important. My real frustration was with the double standard. Can’t hurt one person, but it’s okay to scoff when someone else is hurt. I just don’t understand, no matter the reason, why that is okay. At least, here, I wouldn’t think that’s okay. I don’t know, maybe my expectations are just too high here, but it’s for a reason.
Thanks for your response.
@Katz
For what it worth. I think your being harder then you should be on yourself. I can say even in disagreement you where always professional. I am not an atheist so maybe I did really notice, but I can’t recall you being hostile or unwelcoming to them in the past. Also your comic is one of the funnier things and spot on things on the topic we all are interested
I miss LBT, and I will miss Kitteh. They both helped me with my personal issues. LBT’s statement about just eating something, even if it is bad for you (And yes, with my eating issues the approval is paramount), and Kitteh’s friendly responce to my posting. They both helped me and made me feel accepted. As I have said in a previous post, this is the only place I feel free to say what I feel.
I stayed out of the now-shut-down thread because I’m a lurk far more than I comment, so it wasn’t my place. I was around when the thing with Ally went down, and I talked with her a bit on an open thread for Ferguson. Between that thread and the last one, I still don’t really understand what’s going on, which is another reason I didn’t comment. I guess I feel like the chromosomes we are born with shouldn’t be given much weight when trying to predict personality, because we are complicated. I have been traumatized in ways that have carved neural pathways into my brain, and that clash with society has characterized me more than my hormones have. My hormones have got nothing on my brain’s mental-illness-related shenanigans.
But when it comes to science and medicine, of course those little XX or XY (Or XXY or XYY?) chromosomes matter. They do have an impact on our physical form.
The weird thing is that I feel like everyone here pretty much agrees with my take on this (ugh, that sounds arrogant and I can’t think of better phrasing) but in threadmageddon…I don’t even understand what happened there. It’s just weird to feel like I would have agreed with everyone on that thread if I was alone with them in a room, with no mental gymnastics required, but it wasn’t coming across that way in the fall out.
Typing this is hurting my brain, so my own attempt to make sense of this isn’t working out for me. *rubs temples*
Gilshalos,
If it helps, I’ve been through EDs too. So if you want to talk about that stuff here you will have someone who understands.
I just want to jump on the missing LBT and Kitteh bandwagon. LBT helped me understand their personality disorder in a way that helped me learn to fear my own clashing personality traits a little bit less. A lot of people here have helped me leave some of my fear behind, actually. I love all of you.
And Kittehserf was someone who would make me hold my breath with surprise and delight on the few occasions she responded to my rare posts, because I admire her quite a bit. And her art was fabulous.
Hey Lurker! How are you? I wanted to chime in on the response thing… I don’t often get responses on most places I comment, either.
There have been two times here at this blog that I really got responses. The first was an episode I am still massively ashamed of, when I went off on how “how not to get raped” was motivated by cynicism instead of misogyny. I was being sincere, but I was also desperately wrong and ended up flouncing, and was rightly labeled a troll at the time. It took some time stepping away to realize that the commenters here were right in how they responded to me and were right overall. I was the one being an idiot. I completely deserved the response I got.
The second was much more recent, and I was inquiring about cats, because I very much want a cat.
I will grant this, though… it doesn’t bother me that I don’t get responses. For one thing, many of these threads move fast and I’m not surprised when people miss what I post. For another, I’m often just repeating what others have already said about the OP, so there isn’t really anything to respond to. I guess it just depends on what you’re commenting and what you have to say.
And for me, that’s true just about everywhere I post (I’m at Freethought Blogs as well, and am a huge fan of basically everyone who blogs there).
It really is okay, at least for me. I’m more interested in saying my piece. I don’t necessarily need a response to everything I post. Plus, when I come in, many commenters are already established. I do have major social anxiety, so I’m always loathe to insert myself, so I personally don’t mind when I don’t get responses.
And really, cliques aren’t exactly abnormal in social groups. It happens. It’s normal and I actually don’t think cliques are necessarily a bad thing. They can become a bad thing, yes, but they aren’t on their face.
You aren’t alone in not getting responses, I guess is what I was trying to say. But for me personally, I guess I’m okay with it. I’m still technically an outsider, and based on previous history (noted above), it’s probably right that some still aren’t entirely trusting of me… and I wouldn’t blame them at all if that were the case.
But anyways…
^I want to second everything Nathan said.
And add that I think part of the reason a lot of comments don’t get direct responses is because there is no way to reply to an individual comment the way you do in the comments sections at Cracked.com or even Youtube. Comments go right to the bottom of the thread, so a lot of people who saw something they’d want to comment on a page or two back from the most recent comments will choose not to say anything at all because they don’t want to derail the current conversation. At least, that’s the conundrum that I have going on more often than not.
Thanks guys, you’re sweet.
I will miss kittehserf; she could be really nice and she said a lot of interesting stuff. I wish we could have worked it out. It’s too easy for a disagreement to feel like a referendum about you personally and to feel like the only options are to get complete agreement or to leave. (And FWIW, I respect her enormously for never abusing her mod powers at any point.)
Aw, a baby orca! I’ve loved them since I was a kid, partly thanks to Free Willy, and partly thanks to finding Shamu stuffed animals at rummage sales everywhere. I was really drawn to high contrast, black and white color schemes. And yin yang symbols. Thank you, 90’s.
In hindsight, I still think Free Willy was a brave movie for showing how inhumane keeping cetaceans for entertainment was/is. Well, less brave, more following a trend in saving the environment and respecting mother nature that was big at the time, but it was still poignant. Most live-action children’s movies don’t withstand the test of time, but I think that one did.
Lurker: I’m sorry your comments have been getting overlooked. It definitely wasn’t intentional — the welcome package is our way of (theoretically) demonstrating our non-cliquishness and willingness to welcome new people, but no one is “in charge” of it, and you don’t know whether someone is really new or whether you just didn’t see them before, and so on.
Of course if you post 10 or 15 times and don’t get a response that feels like a huge number of posts, but when you consider that this thread alone has 290 posts (many of which, I am sure, did not get replies), you can see how it’s possible to post quite a few times and just happen to never get responded to.
There are a lot of people here, so it’s hard to stick out; I think a lot of people don’t get noticed until they develop a distinctive persona or trait that makes them stand out (for instance, I’m sure a lot of people think of me as “the AVFP person” or “the number ninja person”).
@Ken L
It’s certainly difficult to communicate effectively when you become reduced to lines of text on a page. All kinds of things can be assumed that you may not have meant at all and there’s no way of allowing a discussion to develop over days or weeks or even years. You can’t revisit a point of view or simply grow out of a worldview. In real life that kind of thing happens all the time. We change our minds about an issue and that’s OK. Here (meaning the net) you’ve had to commit yourself to text and that’s much harder to deal with. I’ve had an online presence for thirty years and I’ve changed a huge amount in that time, the last thing I’d want was to be judged on something I said twenty years ago, or even two years ago.
I still haven’t figured out what exactly the issue was here. It seems simplistic to say that you accept people as they present themselves and then pursue a relationship with them based on how they behave and if they present as women then why would I even question that? What right would I have to do so? It’s none of my business. But whatever was being said sounded do far more detailed and specific than that and not being a transperson how can I understand how it feels to be one?
I’d like to throw in my best wishes to Kitteh and I ardently hope she can make her way back here. I saw her Louis avatar disappear early on and my heart sank.
I was livid when I finally saw those shitty comments about her on Feministe. Yes, I guess you can call her eccentric, but I find eccentrics often tend to have a better grasp of richness of human experience. She certainly has more emotional intelligence and more to contribute in general than a bunch of douche canoes who seem to think walking lock step in group think is the grandest of achievements. “Back in the day we were polite when she occasionally briefly discussed her private life.” Yeah, you weren’t smug assholes to her face back then, congrats.
I admit I floundered bit on that thread and I wish I did a better job expressing myself. I’m glad the thread was closed in the end, it wasn’t going to get any better.
The one bright spot for me was marinerachel coming in to deftly defend science as a for real biologist reminded me of Marshall McLuhan’s cameo in Annie Hall.
http://youtu.be/9wWUc8BZgWE
Hey Nathan. Totally see what you mean, but again, I’m not too bothered by the lack of responses. That’s just sort of a wonder, like I’d think after a few introductions, someone somewhere might acknowledge. Or I just assume that because most of the time, everyone seems so friendly with each other. Meh.
Otherwise yes, exactly. You were unpleasant, suddenly you’re heard. It’s sort of like my situation here. I just felt bad for the most recent commenter to be run off. That’s all.
Thanks Katz. My original comment was definitely motivated by frustration because of — I can’t exactly remember, Kyglab? She just seemed so upset, and I thought too quickly… Anyway, sorry if I overreacted.
As more of a lurker on this site myself, I know what you mean about feeling a lack of response, but to be fair, most threads are pretty big and a lot of the comments don’t get responses, especially if there isn’t much to respond to beyond “Yes, I agree with this statement you just said.”
If you want to open up more of a dialogue, I find that responding to other folks’ comments generally gets a reply from them at least, and sharing ridiculous stories about yourself tends to garner some response, once a thread has veered completely away from the original topic and onto one relevant to your ridiculous personal story.
Someone like that turns up from time to time.
They’re not trolls, though that’s not obvious every time. But they’re super-sensitive to any criticism or reservation anyone expresses. I tend to categorise them in the one-way thin skin group. Nearly oblivious to any hurt or offense they cause to others themselves, but worse than a princess complaining about a pea under a hundred feather mattresses when it comes to their own gossamer thin skin responding to others.
Plenty of others turn up, say something iffy, someone else points out we don’t do that here, they apologise, others acknowledge the apology. All done and dusted in no time at all.
Moar brain bleach!
?oh=db670140f163188017acec7e3b317946&oe=552F01A2
*reads back a page or two*
:-/
I’ll miss kittehserf and anyone else who’s left.
I don’t think I’m a “regular”, but so read all of the comments (well, on new threads when the meatspace doesn’t have other demands), but I can say that there are many that I nod alon with but don’t respond to because doing so on my phone sucks (I’m usually reading this site while doin something else, hence mobile).
^ As always, forgive odd typos.