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 don’t think there’s anything wrong with knowing your audience and adjusting accordingly. I think that it’s okay to reclaim the word “bitch” in certain circumstances as long as it’s a woman saying it. A lot of people here disagree. I respect that and don’t use the word here. No big deal. I still have plenty of ways to express myself that won’t offend the non trolls.
It’s a really fine line we try to walk here. On the one hand, we want to make the community welcoming. On the other hand, we don’t want it to be such a safe space that the conversation is stifled. On the rare occasion I read the comments at Shakesville I notice that there’s never any real conversation happening because it’s so overly policed.
When we try to balance the two things, it’s inevitably going to lead to some tension. But it’s still better than the alternatives.
Anyway, Kittehs if you’re still lurking, I hope you will come back and you’re just taking a break.
@PoM:
Yeah, I agree. There are definitely easier cases.
Trying to decide who takes priority seems like it can easily turn into oppression Olympics, and it’s why I’ve stayed out of the meat of the conversation. Cis dudes don’t really have a place in the discussion, as much as I wanted to try to play peace-maker.
While I couldn’t personally say what was silencing and what wasn’t, I could say that people were definitely not arguing against people in the room all the time. That’s something that can easily come across as silencing, because it’s basically “you shouldn’t say what you’re saying because these other people hold these views.” It couldn’t possibly be “knock it off” because the arguments being criticized weren’t ones being said by anyone on the thread.
I understood why it happened; people wanted to explain how they’ve faced oppression before, and how they were uncomfortable that it seemed as though they were going to face the same thing again. However, it just ended up escalating things.
I think there are a couple of other metrics you can apply to help untangle this, which explain why I sided squarely with the trans women in this particular case.
First, you can look at it intersectionally. Cis people are the privileged ones along the cis-trans axis; there’s a history of cis people of both genders silencing trans people of both genders, whereas there’s no real history of cis women being silenced by trans women (in part because they rarely have that kind of power). So it’s more likely that the cis women are doing the silencing, particularly when they’re saying things like “cis women don’t have privilege.”
(I’m a big fan of equal treatment, so it may help to consider how this would look along a different axis. For instance, if a white woman said that white women didn’t have any privilege over black women, I think that would rightly be considered silencing black women’s experiences, and I think people would rightly consider the fact that they’re both women to be a bit of a smokescreen.)
And second, you can look at results. I don’t think cis women are a silenced voice in this space, because cis women do most of the talking here (which is not a bad thing). But trans people are, in practice, silenced, because they stop talking and leave.
Yes, that was a problem. But I also understand the “you are walking into some history here of which you are probably not aware” thing was going on, with both sides. The cis/trans aspect made it explosive, but it was not fundamentally different from other instances of that.
@katz
I hear and understand what you’re saying. However, any response I might make would get too close to my participating in the Threadpocalypse, and I don’t want to do that. I’m not ignoring you, though.
@katz:
As much as I agree with you, your first point is an example of what I’m talking about with people arguing against people not in the room. Not that we should disregard historical context, but arguing that “there’s no real history of cis women being silenced by trans women” isn’t helpful when you’re talking about specific people in a specific conversation.
Again, I agree with the gist of what you’re saying; I’ve said the same. The results speak for themselves. But trying to use statistics to argue that individuals here at WHTM are or aren’t acting a certain way just doesn’t work, and it’s what makes people feel like they’re being held responsible for what other people do and say.
@PoM:
It was, yeah. And as far as I could tell it came from a good place, from both sides. The problem was that it was being perceived as a personal attack rather than something informative. I don’t know how to fix that… because sometimes the history being brought up was much more extreme and much worse than anything anyone had demonstrated in the thread. Bringing it up in the first place seemed like it felt like the person was equating the history with the current behavior.
Kirbywarp:
Stop me at any point here if I’m resurrecting the other conversation too much (for real, say the word and I will drop this topic).
But how do you draw the line between respecting historical context and “arguing against people not in the room?”
I’m 100% in favor of not doing the latter (there have been some way over-the-top, confusing conversations that turn out to be about some quote someone who doesn’t post here said on some other blog).
But if one decides that whether or not X group has a history of silencing Y group should not be used to determine whether someone from X group is currently silencing someone from Y group, then we’d have to dispense with the concept of men silencing women as well.
I don’t think anyone would consider the history of men silencing women to be unhelpful or irrelevant in a specific conversation between specific men and women, and I don’t think it should be any different for cis-trans conversations.
Policy, I’m sorry but I didn’t mean to imply that. It’s fine to correct someone who breaks rules. It’s not fine, to me, when everyone scoffs and rolls their eyes because someone is upset. If no one else thinks that’s what happens, fine. I don’t know what else to say.
@katz:
Do the same for me, please. I’m hoping we can stay meta enough, but yeah.
I don’t know. The best I can come up with is if the historical context being brought up is directly related to the topic at hand. It’s really contextual… Trying to explain what a certain word means to you is a prime topic for bringing up historical context, because meaning is derived from usage. Implying or assuming that other people are using the word in a certain way because others have used it that way when there hasn’t been much evidence for it (and the person in question has said they weren’t using the word that way)? Starting to cross the line, in my opinion. But again, it’s really contextual… and I know intent isn’t magic.
I disagree. Silencing is an action, isn’t it? We should be able to tell if a man is acting to silence a woman based on what they’re doing currently. History can’t tell us much about what is, just what to expect.
It depends. Is the conversation about whether or not those specific men are silencing those specific women? I don’t know if the historical context would be very helpful there, particularly if, say, the context brought up were “men have silenced women by brushing them off in conversation and only taking them seriously if another man agrees,” and the specific men hadn’t demonstrated that behavior. If they had, then by all means the historical context would be relevant.
@Lurker
Maybe an example would be helpful. I once had an ex who would say very mean things to me. Zie didn’t mean to hurt me. Zie was just being careless, and I think also zie had an underlying contempt for me that was coming out in the carelessness.
When I would get upset, zie would also get upset, because my being upset was upsetting to zir. Then zie would expect me to comfort zir, and reassure zir that zie wasn’t a bad person.
Who was comforting me? My ex got to say terrible things to me, and then be soothed and comforted. I was the wronged party, but nobody was assuring me that I wasn’t a bad person who didn’t deserve to have cruel things said to and about me. It was always about me comforting my ex for having hurt me.
Do you see how this is backwards? kylabg was upset by other people being upset. If you don’t see how backwards it is to punch someone in the face and then expect that person to soothe your feelings, in addition to having endured a punch in the face, then I can’t help you.
re the silencing. It doesn’t have to be someone literally saying ‘shush it’. But I remember a strong feeling that my experiences as a cis woman weren’t as valid as those of a trans woman. And if I were to bring up something troubling that had happened to me the conversation would quickly turn to how much worse it would have been had it happened to a trans woman. Which is true but it meant then that I wouldn’t speak up.
Sorry if this is stepping on toes. Please tell me to stfu if necessary.
@daintydougal:
Yeah, that’s a type of silencing. It’s basically the “dear muslima” argument; someone else has it worse, therefore your problems don’t matter and shouldn’t be talked about.
It’s tough, though, because sometimes it seemed like people felt like they had to prove they had it worse in order to be heard. Whoever was making the “trans women have it worse” might have just been trying to get people to listen to other, more pertinent issues they’d brought up, because that thread was a mess. Even if the result was you feeling silenced, and for good reason, the intent might have been that they felt silenced and were trying to speak louder.
*blergh* This is stepping too close to resurrecting the thread of doom and me dictating how everyone felt… I’ll stop now.
This is why I don’t think “silencing” is a strictly objective issue, and why I don’t think the question of “who is silencing who” always has a straight-forward answer.
I thought kittehserf made their perspective pretty clear via the links she shared with the public here so I’m struggling to see how attributing the belief they expressed to them constitutes tattling? Or even what good tattling would accomplish at this point. Kittehserf’s gone. I understand and support David’s actions but I don’t want this comment section to be without kittehserf.
Kirbywarp, I know. I don’t want to resurrect anything, I was just trying to explain a perspective. Beep boop.
Also it wasn’t the last thread that made me feel that, it was happening before the previous thread of doom!
It’s frustrating because we have two dynamics at play here, both of which are valid. Yeah, there are trans women who will be nasty to cis women. Those are isolated incidences, not a pervasive phenomenon, but when they happen it doesn’t make any difference to the individual victimized nor are they any less deserving of understanding. I think a lot of us were made to feel we couldn’t criticise ANY conduct of ANY trans woman or we’d be labelled transphobic and that we weren’t entitled to our hurt feelings because ally caused them and being upset with her would make us a transphobe.
On the other hand, the perspective trans women are men is entrenched, pervasive and does do widespread harm. Pretending cis women face no less discrimination than trans women is doing indirect harm to trans women. Trans women possess a marginalized characteristic that cis women don’t have and are more likely to be victimized than cis women who otherwise are intersectionally comparable as a result.
The problem is when anyone takes advantage of the fact trans women are horribly marginalized and uses that as a bludgeon to silence cis women who may well have experienced mistreatment at the hands of a woman who happen to be trans.
That’s not to say there aren’t cis women who reinforce transphobic ideas that are harmful to trans women. There are and they do. That’s not OK. That’s another problem.
That doesn’t make using “transphobe” and “TERF” as a silencing tactic against women critical of trans individuals valid.
@daintydougal:
In fairness, there have been quite a number of threads of doom. 😛 Though, also in fairness, it feels like it’s been one thread of doom that takes over threads the way Agent Smith takes over people in the Matrix. Look over, see a truck driver, look over again, boom! Blow-ups and anger right in your face.
But yeah, point taken. I can’t really speak to much of the past because hey, cis dude, and hey, sporadic commenter. I hope at least some of what I’m saying makes a little sense…
@marinerachel, if i may paraphrase an old meme, that last comment was good and you should feel good
@marinerachel, about the other thing, i apologize. I lost track of who said what in the Thread Of Doom and didn’t realize you were addressing stuff that had been said on WHTM. Sorry for assuming bad faith, that was shitty of me.
Phew. Ok, I know intent isn’t magic but it just feels impossible to talk about these things even if you know you harbour absolutely no ill will. I’m glad no one has been upset by my comment (yet). Phew.
And kirbywarp I agree. This is something that is likely to keep appearing and before you know it there’s just debris everywhere and a few less commenter’s!
@daintydougal:
And soon WHTM will be a smoking wasteland with millions of copies of Thread of Doom, standing around doing nothing for some reason while the chosen one and the original doom thread duke it out in an epic fight to the death.
… And I swear it won’t be as cool as that sounds.
For what it’s worth, earlier I wasn’t trying to suggest that you were resurrecting the doom thread here. I was only worried that I was. You don’t need to worry, and I understood you were just trying to explain a perspective.
I’ve been kind of pondering the idea, for a few months now, of the different axes of privilege and how situational social capital privilege is rarely discussed. I’m not even sure there is a name for it except the one I cobbled together there. People do talk about it sometimes, in coded terms because there doesn’t seem to be a real name for it, but not often. I think that’s something that has been in play in the WHTM comment boards since before I started to lurk.
Considering that social capital is the foundation of society, it seems kind of important to think about how the broader types of privilege interact with social capital on both small and large scales, and vice versa.
It’s not a fully-worked-out notion yet, but the direction this conversation is giving me food for thought with respect to it.
What @marinerachel said, and far better than I could. 🙂
Came upon the Thread of Doom this morning, already closed. I really do hope we (I say ‘we’ meaning this community… I don’t comment a lot*) can discuss difficult issues without blowups, but I suppose they’re gonna happen. Anyway.
*Speaking as an occasional commenter, I do wonder sometimes about my status here and if I have the ‘right’, as it were, to jump in to certain comment threads and express my opinion. The ‘social capital’ thing. I feel like I have to qualify some things I write with ‘well, I know I don’t comment here that often…’ But that’s on me – no-one here has ever made me feel unwelcome, quite the opposite.
I’m sad that this place has lost a lot of good people. I’m sure Kittehs isn’t reading, but she defended me once when someone here jumped on me in an open personal thread and I really appreciated that – along with just liking her in general.
(And right on cue, one of my cats just barfed on the rug. Somehow I think she’d appreciate that)
Anyway, just UGH about the blowups and the people who’ve gone, and happy there’s good, open discussion going on here, and I think all of you are completely awesome. 🙂 And now I have to pick up cat puke.
Sorry, I meant you’d have to get rid of the concept as a cultural phenomenon that can be used to help analyze a current phenomenon; ie, you’d have to act as though a random woman about whom you know nothing is equally likely to be silencing a random man about whom you know nothing as vice versa. Which, if I understand you correctly, is exactly what you’re saying.