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.
Edit plz? Can a mod redact that name for me?
Also, Elam directly calls for readers to email the staff member in question in the new article. Directly. Calls. For. It.
That’s gotta cross a line. Right?
Unfortunately no. The courts have been very clear. There’s no expectation of privacy in public. Therefore it’s okay to take pictures of anyone and put them online.
Of course, these free speech laws don’t apply when people want to take video of police. Or if an animal rights activist wants to take pictures of factory farm property from a public road :/
If you want to wear high heels you have to learn to wear them. You don’t just put them on and stomp around. You break them in. You start engaging muscles you wouldn’t normally. You learn how to balance and how to maneuver your weight so that your feet don’t hurt as much.
You also learn not to wear heels if you are not sure of a very good parking space because if you should need to run…
I know women who can run in heels. They hustle all day in them. They’d never be those women in a scary movie who fall. They’d sprint like gazelles and never smudge their mascara. But most women are not Glamazon’s who can jog in heels, apply lipstick and text the office at the same time.
So we learn that our footwear could be the difference between life and death.
That people don’t take that as a sign that our society is completely fucked up is ridiculous and depressing.
I’m not sure how closely anyone in the US is following this, but the infamous Sun tabloid (I hesitate to call it a newspaper) in the UK has dropped its topless models from page 3:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11356808/Decision-to-drop-Page-3-cautiously-welcomed-by-critics.html
The comments are about what you’d expect, with the exception of one saying that it’s a step towards Islamification, because he’s a bloody idiot.
In fun news, just because all this crap is making me sad:
My husband and I just moved in with my mom (she and my dad are divorcing, and we’re helping her make mortgage payments so we can keep the childhood home), and we now have a huge, fenced back yard.
My dog, Hank, has gone from an apartment dog to King of the Back Yard. He has spent the morning so far literally running around in massive circles, tail wagging the whole time.
I have never seen him more happy and it warms my soul.
Yup. And I can already hear the kvetching to that effect.
And now I need to lie down.
It does indeed. It’s a call for harassment. And that IS illegal. Even if there is no credible threat of violence (or death) involved, deluging someone with ugly messages creates a hostile work environment and makes them unable to do their job, which is exactly what Paulie wants.
I hope someone’s screenshotting him for evidence, as he’s been known to take down anything that he knows could get his ass in trouble.
re: actionability of threats online
I’ve seen subpoenas and indictments for people posting/sending threats online, but those were cases where the perpetrator was either an abusive ex or a prospective SO who was refused a second date, and the harassment got pretty invasive and included threatening phone calls and e-mails, so I don’t know that this would qualify.
IANAL and all that
@davidknewton: Yep, nipple enthusiasts across the nation have written opinion pieces likening it to censorship.
Except that it was a decision made by the publishers, responding to popular opinion. And it’s not even the long overdue improvement it initially sounds like, as the young women will still be pictured there solely to be ogled, but will now be wearing bikinis.
There’s a similar piece in the Guardian, because the quest for “balance” means giving airtime to people who are wrong about shit. Comments include “now those women are out of work” and “men are objectified just as much these days”.
Bina: I agree that it’s what Paulie wants, but the problem is that he’s usually quite careful to avoid calling for, or even issuing a sarcastic counter-call against, the activity that he so clearly is hoping to achieve. Things like, “Now that I’ve posted this person’s name, address and headshot, I certainly hope that no one goes out and tries to take voyeur shots through their window/beats them up/calls their boss to report them for pedophilia.”
And sadly, the problem with changing the law to make it possible to nail him is, in some ways, very similar to the problem with creating a definition of ‘acceptable doxxing’. We live in a largely unjust society. When given vague powers, the authorities invariably use them against the most downtrodden first, in a manner that protects the most privileged. Figuring out the legalese can be like threading a rope through a needle–you end up having to choose between leaving atrocious behavior that SHOULD be banned by a decent society in the ‘legal’ category, or catching people whose conduct should be acceptable in a potential dragnet.
Now, that said–I do think that if they looked harder, they could’ve found something to charge this loser with. Sadly, many schools try to downplay criminal offenses in order to be able to boast about low rates of crime. Come to think of it, though–this IS a state school, meaning they get both state and (likely) federal dollars. Forwarding a copy of the video to the right government agencies might force some degree of re-consideration on the part of the administration. Let’s see… I’m gonna see if I can dig up contact info for the proper authorities to report a Title IX violation to–if I have any luck, I’ll post it here.
In the meantime, this should be a link to some awesome brain-bleach. If it’s a borked link, or embeds as some sort of huge poster, I do apologize ahead of time:
?oh=98303e454c14a9853a0ceeb95062092e&oe=552FA588&__gda__=1429004910_f43db67b90d1f013ba6b1ad319f90bc5
If that was a dogpile, it was the sort with sleepy puppies.
http://i.imgur.com/oRgd4ed.jpg
This whole mess is such a clustercuss of just-within-possibly-sort-of-kind-of legal action.
I did hear back from the IDS Department, and they were aware of the issue. So. That is good at least? That doesn’t detract from the truth that they probably walked in to an office overflowing with threatening voicemails and emails and who only knows what sort of nasty, though.
I just hope this is actionable on a campus level, for the same of the faculty, staff and potential students that will be effected. The retaliation taken (which obviously goes above and beyond wanting to hold anyone “accountable” or whatever AVFM is claiming) has to create a hostile work environment.
OMG Bina those kitties are so beautiful
How did Gerad get the complaints? Was it standard policy or a leak? Either way it is kind of scary that happened.
@watermelonsugar
Happy dog: awwwwww!
Complete strangers threatening people at work: *shudder*
Ugh “men are objectified just as much”. Call me back when we can see some nice underwear tents on TV and in the newspaper. No, a topless man is not the equivalent of a topless woman.
@cyberwulf
The willful blindness of pretending objectification is an act not a tool. I tend to assume men who say that are either too ignorant to argue with, or know perfectly well what they’re not saying.
@freemage
When given vague powers, the authorities invariably use them against the most downtrodden first, in a manner that protects the most privileged.
Q.F.pithiness!
I’ve watched the video about halfway thru now and I don’t get the thing I have read about over most of the thread about guns on the sticker. I can’t see one. Maybe he has other stickers in another style? I don’t really want to watch any more; I had the video on mute till I saw the interaction with the woman in the parking garage and had to turn the whole thing off when he snapped his fingers and gave the thumbs up in the women’s restroom after applying sticker #2. Ugh.
Also, dude needs to wash his sheets, I think.
I hate this part so much. As in, I don’t hate your writing – I hate how right you are.
So there is a short article where a woman pulls a condom up over her whole lower leg to debunk the “I’m too big for condoms” excuse from guys.
http://viralwomen.com/post/myth_busted_woman_put_a_condom_on_her_leg_to_prove_no_man_is_too_big?ref=n?&utm_source=upworthy.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=pubexchange
The comments section is peppered with dudebros who insist that they really are too big for condoms, or that condoms are uncomfortable, generally ignoring the point of the image. Near the bottom of the comments is a dude who goes into full on meltdown mode, and I quote:
CONDOMS ARE OPPRESSION YO.
Read the rest of his comments, they’re hilarious and he goes into AVFM style rants about how awful women and society is to men. “Abusive”, even.
How handy it is for this commenter, then, that sexual protection is by and large assumed by society to be the responcibility of women so that he doesn’t have to go around telling women to get IUDs or female condoms. God forbid he be labeled a misoginist!
On condoms, though–when my husband and I first started dating, the first time we tried to have sex, we could not get a regular condom to fit. Period. It simply would not go. After a frustrating and awkward trip to the store to get larger ones, everything was fine and dandy.
Watermelonsugar: not to mention that women largely go and get IUDs and contraceptive pills on their own initiative.
And there are indeed plenty of blokes who insist that women go on the pill, so they don’t have to wear condoms. Nobody objects because like you said, society says its on women to not get pregnant. STD? Well she shouldn’t have had sex.
And I’ve just realised I basically repeated what you said.
There are larger size brands or just larger sizes that aren’t hard to get hold of. I think the point was that she wanted to bust the guys who insist they’re too large for any condoms at all.