Last month, police say, University of Mary Washington student and feminist/LGBT activist Grace Mann was murdered — bound and asphyxiated by a male housemate and fellow student.
An antifeminist blogger is blaming her death on feminist jokes about misandry.
As Mike Oelke of the Feminism is a Fraud blog sees it, Mann’s death was the inevitable result of the unwillingness of feminists to “learn misandry is not a joke.” In an older post, Oelke had predicted that
one day a feminist wearing an “ironic” KILL ALL MEN t-shirt will walk down the wrong street, enter the wrong room and encounter the wrong man; a man that does not value her as a woman and chooses not to treat her as an equal. The man will not see the t-shirt as ironical humor, but be offended and beat her savagely, laughing as he licks the tears from her crying eyes.
WIth Mann’s death, he says, this “prediction has somewhat been proven true.” And he promises that there will be more violence directed at feminists who
constantly laugh off their misandry as a joke, while treating misogyny like a scourge. Some types of males are going to take that badly with predictable results.
While he says he doesn’t “feel good” about his prediction “somewhat” coming true, he also claims that
this young woman’s death serves a purpose. She “Took one for the team.”
That callous and cruel last line, whatever Oelke meant by it, seems more than a little ironic given the facts of the case.
While we still don’t know the motive of the man who allegedly murdered her, Mann’s death took place on a campus that feminist activists say has become an increasingly hostile environment for them.
The campus group Feminists United — of which Mann was a member — has faced a barrage of harassment and threats online and on campus since last fall when it started to “expose the insidious misogyny and hatred” on campus, as the group’s president Paige McKinsey put it in an op-ed for the school paper in January.
The most egregious example of this “insidious misogyny” was the violent chant — celebrating the rape of dead “whores” — that the school rugby team performed at a party last fall. Surreptitiously recorded by a (male) friend of McKinsey who happened to be at the party, the noxious chant was brought to the administration’s attention by Feminists United last November.
Once the school began disciplinary actions against the team earlier this year, its supporters reacted with outrage — and an even bigger wave of harassment against campus feminists, including hundreds of threatening comments made on the anonymous chat app Yik Yak.
There were rape threats and numerous vicious, sexually explicit personal attacks against McKinsey; Mann was also targeted and threatened with rape. One supporter of the team warned that feminists would “burn” if the team was suspended and that “there will be no survivors.” Another threatened that “Dandy’s about to kill a bitch … or two.” When Feminists United reported these threats to the school administration, they were reportedly told that the school could do little about them.
The rugby team was suspended in March. Mann, a prominent member of the group whose activism led to the team’s suspension, was murdered in April. The suspect, a returning student named Steven Vander Briel, was a former member of the rugby team.
And while there is as yet no clear evidence that there is any connection between the suspension of the team and her murder, it is hard not to wonder if she was killed, not for any ironic jokes about misandry, but for challenging the culture of violent misogyny that seems to infect the Fredericksburg, Virginia, campus.
Mann, who was gay, was not involved with Vander Briel, police say; she was assaulted during what was supposed to be a brief stop at her home after returning from a Day of Silence event to raise awareness about bullying and harassment directed against LGBT folks.
In the wake of Mann’s murder, Feminists United, along with the Feminist Majority Foundation, has filed a Title IX complaint with the Department of Education charging the University of Mary Washington with a “systemic failure to protect” members of the group “from a sexually hostile school environment, from sex-based cyber assaults, and from threats of physical and sexual violence.”
At a media event on campus announcing the complaint last Thursday, Frederickburg.com reports,
Attorney [Debra] Katz said the complaint does not allege that the university caused Mann’s death, but that it “failed to act in the face of vicious abuse and ridicule” Mann suffered.
According to Frederickburg.com, Julia Michels, a University of Mary Washington student and one of the complainants in the Title IX complaint, said at the media event that while
she hopes the threats did not have anything to do with Mann’s death … when she heard the news … her thoughts immediately went to the threats.
“I know she had been mentioned by name on Yik Yak, and I know she was scared, as I am,” Michels said. “I know she was angry, as I am. Most of all, I know she was disappointed in her school for failing to protect her, just as I am disappointed at UMW for failing me.”
We will know in time, one can only presume, what motivated Mann’s murderer. But the damage that can be done by the sort of violent misogyny that she and other members of Feminists United were subjected to on the University of Mary Washington campus — and which her friends still face — is already very clear.
“Misandry” is a joke. Misogyny can kill.
NOTE: This discussion thread is a NO TROLLS, NO MRAs, etc thread. If you’re a troll, an MRA or similar and you comment in this thread you will be banned.
EDIT: I have added a few things to highlight Mann’s LGBT activism.
This is all too horrifying for words.
I really hope the university will finally step in to prevent any further acts of hostility and violence. But I’m disgusted to think that it will have taken a death to make people take misogynistic harassment seriously.
I am so, so sorry for Grace’s friends and family.
🙁 That poor woman.
Remind me again how many men’s rights activists have been murdered by feminists? I’m not including cases where men died and MRAs decided women were to blame.
Reblogged this on micaylahca and commented:
A shame this.
Just….stunning
So many layers of awful at work here… and for anyone to say this is just the natural result of pushing men too far… it’s really too much to stomach.
Assuming her murder was indeed motivated politically or by misogyny, and it seems pretty likely that it was at least in part:
It’s possible to be the victim of a victim. In fact, most victims are. The culture that drives specific men to express masculinity in this way is not their fault. But murder is still first and foremost the fault of the murderer. When a member of a group that’s ACTUALLY underprivileged commits a horrible act, prominent activists from that group do not say “well, it’s unfortunate, but that’s what you get until you respect us.” They may offer an explanation, but they don’t justify it or use it as an excuse to grandstand. They just denounce it. They hold themselves to a higher standard than the privileged, partly because they have to in order to be taken seriously, and partly because the work they do makes them perpetually conscious of justice and morality, which it is the privileged’s privilege to ignore.
When less prominent members of those groups do what this blogger is doing, it may be tacky and unproductive, but at least it’s understandable. The critical difference is that desperation in the face of a system that is stacked against you, while not a justification for the murder of the innocent, is a cripplingly real problem. What these (few, specific) men are dealing with is the trauma of a changing reality resulting in explosive cognitive dissonance. Unfortunate, yes, painful, yes, but infinitely more solvable. It’s not that I DON’T pity men who have yet to come to terms with their own societal power, learn to reflect more and externalize less, and confront the biases of themselves and their peers… but I pity the people they unknowingly shove down quite a bit more.
The thought process is just so repellent. Feminists (don’t actually) wear t-shirts saying “kill all men”. Men actually kill women for being women. MISANDRY. *puke*
Anti feminists: ::makes misognistic comments including kill and rape all women and sending death and rape threats :: “It’s satire! Lighten up!”
“Feminists wear “kill all men” and “I bathe in male tears” tshirts while drinking from “male tears” mugs::
Antifeminists: “This is why feminism is considered to be misandry they seriously have gone too far!”
Antifeminists are such hypocritical terrorists. This is horrible, my hugs and respect for that poor woman’s family.
“Licks the tears from her crying eyes”? Gawd, the specificity of these anti-feminist creeps’ fantasies are so effing disturbing! You know they’re probably typing with one hand. *puke*
Reblogged this on Carmilla Voiez.
This is awful news. I am sorry for her family and sickened knowing her murderer will be celebrated by misogynists regardless of whether he had an anti-feminist motive. If so, I too am disgusted that a human being will have had to LOSE HER FUCKING LIFE for these universities to start taking blatant threats and abuse of their students seriously. Tragedies like this can and should be fucking avoided.
This is not the first time I’ve seen MRAs threaten with revenge and death for all the injustice that has been inflicted on men. It’s fucking sociopathic. It seems that some of them don’t see another way of defeating feminists instead of killing them and yet they claim they are the one with logic and reason. Lol.
That whole licking the tears from a feminist’s eyes as he beats her to death is disturbingly specific. The writer is pretending to be concerned that the poor menz will be pushed to far and snap, but really this sounds like a specific long time fantasy and he was waiting for an excuse to share it.
Truly disgusting.
I’m seriously worried that this guy is a ticking time bomb and will be committing a violent act in the near future.
THERE IS NOT ENOUGH BRAIN BLEACH IN THE WORLD FOR THIS.
FUCK ANTI-FEMINISTS. FUCK MISOGYNISTS. FUCK THEM TO HELL AND BACK, AND THEN TO HELL AGAIN WHERE THEY CAN STAY FOREVER.
I KNOW SOME OF YOU MRAS ARE READING THIS AND YES, THE ABOVE INCLUDES YOU.
No doubt one of them will screen cap my above comment, rip it out of context and then use it as “proof” that feminists hate men. Whatever.
Horrible circumstances. I have no words for her family except that I am really sorry for their loss.
Events like this show that every single instance on online threats (rape, violent, bomb, SWAT,etc.) needs to be taken 100% seriously. There is no “Oh its just a joke”,”lt its the internet”, “just ignore them” or something like that. Law enforcement really needs to start taking this stuff more seriously and putting the resources together to track down the people sending the threats.
Especially when they are so specific it could only be a few people who could do it.
If “misandry” leads to the death of feminists, then what should we as women now do since men have proven that they’ll kill us over bullshit?
Mann was murdered by a member of the rugby team after a series of death threats because the rugby team got suspended. They made good on their threats. Going by Mike Oelke’s logic, it’s time for feminists to kill the rugby team. Kill them all. Lick the tears off their faces while they do it.
You think you’re silencing feminists with terror? Well, bring it on, assholes. All my life I’ve lived with the fear of being killed or raped for being a woman, it’ll be REFRESHING to fear harm for something I actually did and not just for my gender. It at least gives me a sense of control over my destiny.
Only an MRA would see a man murdering a woman as proof of misandry. And then go on to celebrate men murdering women like Mike Oelke does here. Way to be scum, Mike Oelke.
A world approved by MRA’s and the sexist shitbags of the muddy world of the internet. Yeah, that’s the world I want to live in.
Fucking worthless pieces of garbage every one.
If anything this just proves we need to double down on feminism. Drown the misogynist beast, this fight has just begun
Oelke is a literal terrorist. MRM attracts Nazis and terrorists. One might think that this would make MRAs rethink their life choices, and wonder if maybe there’s some kind of flaw in their philosophy that makes it so appealing to literal terrorists. I guess that’s expecting too much?
Sorry in advance for the all-caps yelling, but this just has to be said:
FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER, SHE FUCKING DID NOT. AND NO, IT DOES NOT SERVE A FUCKING PURPOSE, YOU MOTHERFUCKING COCKROACH. GO FUCK YOURSELF.
Misandry wouldn’t be taken as such a joke if MRAs didn’t keep trying to label anything they don’t like as misandry. I’m not saying that actual factual misandry doesn’t exist, there are definitely man-haters out there, but it is nowhere close to a systematic problem, or even a widespread problem. There are plenty of times I’ve had a debate with an MRA and been accused of misandering. My crimes include:
1) referring to “male genital mutilation” (his words) as circumcision. (If anyone remembers it was that dude who accused me of having an “evil black corrupted cunty heart”. Who can forget such poetry?).
2) refusing to agree that men have been oppressed throughout history
3) posting counterarguments (“trolling”) a comment section under one of AVFMs memes
4) refusing to agree that false rape accusations are an epidemic.
Mras should actually be worried about tragedies like this if they ever want to be taken seriously. It’s not like feminists or the mainstream culture in general are going to turn around and say, “oh! You must have been right! She deserved it all along. We don’t want to make you mad; here, have a cookie.” Yeah, like that worked for angry incels after Elliott Rodger right?
As for that pos that killed that poor girl; I hope they throw the book at him and he has the worst possible life from here on out.
I’m afraid this is being incited.
@Bina
Yell away all you like, I did. I’m a pretty chillaxed lady, and most WHTM posts just cause me to facepalm, but sometimes some of the things David brings to light make my blood boil instead. This is one of them.
Also, there is a consistent burning in my left eye and I’m not sure what it is. I suspect some shampoo got in there while I was in the shower, since that’s when it started. Not sure what to do after running my eye under the tap for a bit. Halp?