It’s not exactly news, at this point, that more and more online media outlets have given up on their comment sections, shutting them down because they don’t have the time or money or patience to deal with the cesspools of vitriol and hate they’ve become.
Popular Science kicked off the wave of comment section closing back in 2013. Since then, comments have been removed from the sites of media giants like CNN, Reuters and Bloomberg; from major newspapers like The Chicago Sun-Times and the Toronto Star; and from a wide assortment of online outlets including re/code, Mic, The Verge and Vice’s Motherboard. Most sites regard the decision to close comments as one that is both sad and necessary.
But one site is touting what seems to be the impending end of online comments — at least on sites unwilling or unable to moderate the hell out of them — as a huge victory.
In a recent fundraising appeal on his site A Voice for Men, Men’s Rights elder Paul Elam happily takes credit for making the comments sections of other sites so poisonous for so many people that those who run the sites are increasingly crying “uncle” and shutting them down.
Elam doesn’t phrase it quite so bluntly, of course. He sees the closing of comment sections as proof that feminists (and presumably everyone else disgusted by AVFM) just can’t handle the TRUTH.
“The free pass for feminists has been revoked,” he declares.
Many Major websites that continue to run misandric bullshit now often have two words in common at the end of their hateful posts.
Comments Closed. That is now a common reaction of the feminist media in the wake of average people clobbering them with dissent and ridicule.
Apparently calling women the c-word is a form of “dissent.”
Elam goes on to suggest that AVFM has led the way in making virtually everyone so disgusted by Men’s Rights activists and other, er, “dissenters” that they’ve given up on the possibility of civil discourse online.
Again, Elam doesn’t put it quite this way. He claims to be “changing the cultural narrative,” dontcha know?
I can say with certainty and pride that it was AVFM that kicked the door in on all of it. We took the daggers thrown at us by mainstream media across the western world and pushed back defiantly.
Don’t flatter yourself, dude. While AVFM and its flying monkey squad of comment-section-poisoners has definitely played a role in making the comment sections of a number of media sites even bigger cesspools than they already were, AVFM hasn’t singlehandedly ruined online comments forever.
Many other terrible people have played their part — white supremacists, GamerGaters, white-supremacist GamerGaters, the list goes on and on.
Here at We Hunted the Mammoth, of course, we know that you don’t have to shut down your comment sections to prevent them from being overrun by malignant jerkfaces. Instead, you can simply close your comments to malignant jerkfaces like Elam and his crew, inviting some of them in only as a source of amusement and banning them quickly when and if they start flinging poo.
Discuss. (Not you, MRA jerkfaces.)
Why did you list “GamerGaters” three times in that antepenultimate paragraph?
http://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/msnbc/Components/ArtAndPhoto-Fronts/COVER/080501/g-cvr-080501-mission-10a.grid-6×2.jpg
Aaaand the badly mixed metaphors continue to fly like so much monkey shit.
Funnily, though, I don’t recall anyone from the major media actually coming to AVFM to troll them in their comments sections, which is what “taking daggers thrown at us” would seem to suggest. Mostly, I just recall the odd news piece full of surprise at how awful these dudes are for a movement that allegedly advocates for the rights of half the human race.
And then the comments sections were full of indignant screechers that fully justified all the bad coverage these morons got, and then some. If that’s “pushing back defiantly”, well, dudes, now you got YOUR pushback. How does it feel to be impotent?
@Bina
It feels like schadenfreude. Bitter, bitter schadenfreude.
In some countries the news organisation can be held liable for defamatory comments so they must moderate them. This costs money and many of them are realising that the risks & costs outweigh the benefits (people don’t enjoy reading comments).
“HA HA HA! Now we can’t comment on those sites at ALL! Take THAT feminists!” – MRAs.
It’s partially a traffic thing. Major news sites can be looking at over a thousand comments on average per article. That requires a much bigger investment of time and energy, and insofar as they devote time and energy to anything (which varies) it’s to the contents of the articles.
Hmmm…I was thinking more along the lines of a guy who’s just shot himself in the foot, trying to pretend his grimace of pain is a shit-eating grin.
Now, I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop…the one where Paulie rails about how his Freeze Peach has been, like, TOTALLY castrated and all.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v715/TranceGemini/kittybawwmacro.jpg
I think I’ll try this.
Something about asking feminism to try and fix/address both women’s and men’s issues just rubs me the wrong way.
There are most certainly men’s issues that can, and should be, addressed, and most feminists I know would agree with that.
Unfortunately, the conversation about men’s rights has been hijacked by these assholes who believe that flinging feces around is somehow going to solve their problem of “wimmens won’t do our bidding!”
I’m sure if you look around the internet, Malachi, you can find some places that do Meatspace Activism for whatever particular men’s issue you want to help with.
In fact, if you can name some issues you’re personally concerned about, I’m sure some of us can help you find links to proper groups that actually do care about that issue, and aren’t just using it as a convenient cudgel to “win” “arguments” with feminists. 🙂
I’m glad you recognize this. No, seriously. There are so many men (MRAs especially) who can’t, that it’s almost refreshing to see someone write that.
Feminism exists because there are women’s issues that specifically need to be addressed. Not that men don’t have problems, but women have specific problems that women (and other people of various genders) want to address and do something about. There’s also Womanism, which specifically addresses the issues that Women of Color (specifically black women) face that white women do not.
However, there are plenty of feminists though who do devote some of their energy into men’s issues, and there are men’s issues that do overlap with feminist issues, like the idea of Toxic Masculinity and how it causes harm to both women and men. 😀
Phillip, please read the Comments Policy about using ableist terms.
I’ve bolded the particular terms in case you were wondering what they were, for future reference.
Another reason that some of these sites might be getting rid of the comments section is the emotional toll it takes on the moderators.
On I09, for example there’s a message for unmoderated comments, that you may click on, that state you may be inundated with violent pornograpghy, since MRAs like to send that stuff to all the female writers at that site. Someone has got to look at those images, before moderating them.
On heavily moderated sites, it’s not just a difficult job because of the amount of traffic, but because the moderators are inundated with the pure sewage coming out of people’s minds. And one of the reasons sites may get rid of the comments sections is to protect the emotional health of the moderators. If that’s what they need to do to protect their employees I don’t have a problem with it.
That said, I only frequent heavily moderated sites, like here and the Mary Sue and Raw Story. Once the commentary level starts to sink as it did with CNN and as is happening now on Alternet and Salon, I stop visiting those sites. To be fair to Alternet and Raw Story though, their comments section has their own banners. You have to click on them to read the comments.
WWTH- Pretty much. 😀
@Malachi:
You’re right of course. Speaking as a man, I feel that there are a lot of men’s issues which have to be handled outside of mainstream feminism. A good example of this might be convincing men to visit the doctor regularly, a seemingly-minor thing but which has very large consequences.
However.
The root causes of many men’s issues, in my opinion, are the same as the root causes of many women’s issues: gender essentialism, predetermined gender roles, socialisation of arbitrary tertiary sexual characteristics as immutables, and internalisation of objectification and the invisibility of non-conforming people. (Plus the inevitable economic and class factors disguised as gender issues.) Any men’s movement will have to tackle these things, which means we’ll have to fight an entrenched patriarchy, which means we may as well use the techniques and language that women have been using for this purpose for generations.
Crucially, it requires the realisation that men and women have the same opponents. We are not each other’s enemies, and gains for one are not losses for the other. This is something that almost every men’s rights person I’ve talked to seems to miss.
As such, I identify as a feminist, and I believe so should every man. Women shouldn’t be expected to handle our issues with priority or even at all, but inasmuch as “feminism” is an idea and a set of academic techniques rather than a group of people, it’s an idea and a set of academic techniques that we can use too.
Malachi,
I’m a white-passing American cis man; feminist or pro-feminist, whichever the local feminists prefer*. I’ve been thinking about these issues for a while. I can’t claim any great wisdom or special expertise, but I can offer my opinion.
Until recently I thought that a proper men’s movement would be useful; a movement of men who are friendly to feminists, working alongside them on issues that disproportionately affect men. I no longer think that’s the case.
I’ve been thinking about why we needed a women’s movement in the first place, and I’ve been comparing it to other movements such as labor and (black) civil rights. It seems to me that a group needs a movement when 3 conditions are met
1. There are common problems affecting most or all members of the group.
2.These problems are mostly or entirely caused by people outside the group.
3 These problems are interconnected such that their cumulative weight makes it difficult for the affected group to move any one of them.
Take feminism as an example.
–Sexual and domestic violence and fear of violence, the need for reproductive healthcare, and other issues affect women of all walks of life**. (If they exclusively affected tall women, you’d have a Tall Women’s Movement)
–Feminist problems tend to be policies written by mostly-male governments or crimes committed by individual men. (If women ran most governments and committed most violence, then instead of a Women’s Movement you have a Movement of Some Women Against Other Women)
–Women who want to stop violence need political power; women who seek power are targeted for violence; a woman who works at a nonprofit that educates girls in Afghanistan may be paid less than her male colleague, and then catcalled on her way home. (If the women being underpaid were never harassed and the women being harassed were never underpaid, you’d have an Equal Pay Movement and an End Harassment Movement but no Feminist Movement)
Now try men
–There are problems that mostly affect men (like prison and prostate cancer) but they don’t affect most men.
–Men’s problems aren’t caused by women; they’re mostly caused by other men.
–Men trying to fix one problem can do without their maleness holding them back. A man who wants, say, prison reform, can probably sell an article to a male editor, do a talk show with a male host, and then meet with a male legislator, without anyone telling him to get back in the kitchen. He can probably even do all that without anyone threatening to rape and murder him on the internet.
In conclusion: If you want to be a prisoner’s advocate or an anti-circumcision activist or what-have-you, I am all for it. I just think that there’s nothing to be gained by calling yourself an MRA. (Even if AVFM hadn’t ruined it)
*Lately I’ve been thinking of trying “Anti-patriarch” as an alternative to “pro-feminist”
**Feminists have not been perfect. Classism and racism have lead to schisms and alternative movements like Womanism.
@Lkeke35
I haven’t been on Alternet much lately so I’m disappointed to hear that the comment section has taken a nosedive. It was never as closely moderated as Raw Story but it had been doing better for awhile.
………………..
On my local paper’s site, I keep ranting about all the racists they let post there. On every article about indigenous issues, around 90% of the comments are by pissed-off racists. I wonder if they’ll kill the commenting like other sites have. They’ve shown no inclination to ban the serial offenders.
Twinja’d again.
The only way that they could ever be considered humanitarian would be if they all made a radical change to their diet.
@mildlymagnificent
Well said!
I suppose that Paulie & all manospherians have a case of “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
Or perhaps, “Better to preside over a mess of your own making and insist that it was what you had intended all along than to accept advice from anyone who doesn’t back your agenda 1000 percent. And kiss your ass.”
@Orion:
Twinja’d indeed. Your post was better than mine, though.
I think I disagree with your position that a men’s movement would not be useful, and I’m happy to explain my reasoning; however you and I have a bad habit of thread-derailing whilst admiring one another’s long winded articulacy, and doing that here might be considered antisocial.
Worse, it might lead to even more slashfic than already exists.
If you’re interested in having that discussion, shall we take it offsite?
This just in from the Associated Press regarding WWII “comfort women”:
@EJ,
Sure; that sounds potentially fruitful. How would you prefer to communicate? (And don’t suggest Updog; I’m not going to fall for that
again)But you repeat yourself, David, ha-ha.
What happened to all that Freezepeach stuff? Surely comment section closures should be seen as a bad thing by MRAs? But then they always have to find the most contrarian position in any scenario, and admitting that anything is bad for the MRM is a no-no for them.
Also, Merry holidays, everyone. I hope it’s been a good one. 🙂
@Orion:
Smoke signals or messenger pigeons are always old standbys; however in the modern age we have wordpress for long-form communication.
I’ll write something as a response to that and post it today, if
I manage to overcome my bone-deep lazinessnothing else gets in the way.They are the suicide bombers of the Internet they don’t care if they are silenced along with the rest as long as women and those defending their rights are shut up or shut down. The MRM is nothing short of gender-terrorism online.
Echoing some comments already made:
This is, ironically, what most so-called Men’s Rights Activists actually want: An end to all discussion. Anyone who has had the displeasure of following their antics knows that they only use ‘men’s rights’ as a derailing tactic when women’s issues are being discussed. They are the antithesis of social justice, a regressive force that does its damndest to silence all discussion. They know that acknowledging and talking about a problem is a necessary step to solving that problem, so they try to keep that step from taking place. If that means that all the men who are suffering under patriarchy and its rigid power hierarchies (MoC, gay men, trans men, gender-nonconforming men, male rape victims etc.) will have to be thrown under the bus, MRAs see that as an acceptable sacrifice. In fact, many of them probably think of it as an added bonus. They are awful, awful people who enjoy their privilege far too much to desire to give it up.
The utopia MRAs are trying to build is one where all moral values take a leap backwards and victims of rape, abuse and oppression stay quiet. A world in which women are treated as less than second-class citizens, and where male privilege is universally seen as a part of the natural order, with no pesky feminism rocking the boat. In this regard, they do seek to make themselves useless as ‘activists’, and it is only logical (in their privileged, empathy-deficient minds) that their only ‘activism’ would be poisoning the internet with their bullshit in order to keep discussions from taking place. When that finally happens because other people are tired of dealing with their shit, they will shout victory. Because that truly is a victory to them.
However, I don’t think that’s what Elam wants. He has made a living of manufacturing toxic masculine outrage at imaginary slights, and he’d be damned to give up his – no other way to put it – professional victimhood.