Jack Barnes, a volatile American Men’s Rights activist known for his harassment of feminists on Twitter, is now threatening to unleash a new offensive designed “to strike fear in the hearts of feminists.” In a post on Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men bristling with violent language, Barnes declares that
we have our hands on the throat of feminism. This isn’t the time to ease up. This is the time to squeeze harder.
The ostensible subject of Barnes’ post is a several-weeks-old piece on News.Com.Au by Australian writer Kerri Sackville about a road-raging, red-Jag-driving man who shouted “slut” at her when she honked at him for blocking the road. Barnes adds to the abuse, declaring her a crazy, misogynist (!) “cunt.”
The real source of Barnes’ fury at Sackville is a campaign she launched last December to “name and shame” men who sent abusive and threatening messages to women online using their real names.
And that’s what leads Barnes to what he says is the real “point of this article,” a declaration of virtual war against “Sackville and her fellow feminazis.” He writes:
Here is what we do. We make it hurt. If they want to continue to do this then we make them regret it. They need to learn that their are consequences for doing this. They need to learn that we will extract a pound of flesh, figuratively speaking. They need to learn to fear retribution from us.
Barnes claims that this “retribution” won’t include physical violence, but he doesn’t specify exactly what it will include, merely suggesting that he will soon have the “tools” necessary “to strike fear in the hearts of feminists.” And by soon he means next month.
We won’t use violence. We don’t need to use violence. How do we make these feminists think twice before going all Gestapo on any guy who has the balls to call out feminism or individual feminists on their FemKKK behavior? Well I can’t tell you that right now. Lets just say a plan is in place and being brought into fruition as we speak. Expect it to be revealed before the end of February provided that everything goes according to plan.
Barnes then launches a preemptive strike on any even slightly ethical MRAs who might be “wringing their hand” [sic] over his mysterious threats, bluntly informing them that “this fight is about to get dirty. Deal with it.”
Barnes — using a rhetorical switcheroo common amongst MRAs — frames his threatened offensive as a defensive move. Feminism is dying, he asserts, and like many dying beasts it is lashing out against its enemies in a desperate frenzy. He predicts that
feminists will become increasingly more vicious. … MHRAs with lives ruined, imprisoned and dead is not outside the realm of possibility.
As he sees it, not just Sackville and her fellow Australian ally, writer Clementine Ford, but all “public faces of feminism” are fair game for “retribution” for whatever offenses he’s decided they’re guilty of.
You don’t get a warning. You all have engaged in this despicable behavior. You will receive consequences. Go ahead and whine and cry about the horrible MRAs threatening you. We don’t care. This isn’t a threat. This is a statement of fact. We will not use violence. But we will make you hesitate to ever do these things again.
Barnes apparently believes in some sort of collective guilt, making clear that he will hold prominent feminists “responsible” not only for their own alleged crimes, as he defines them, but for the behavior of what he calls their “mindless minions.”
This is not the first time Barnes has announced his desire to harass feminists into silence. Usually he remembers to put the word “harass” in quotes, as if this will be enough to transform harassment into something that doesn’t sound quite so bad.
Usually, but not always:
Nor is this the first time that Barnes has issued threats that he insists aren’t really threats.
Indeed, I myself have been the recipient of some of these non-threat threats. Last November, after someone doxxed him and his family, Barnes decided that I needed to be held “responsible” for the doxxer’s actions, even though I had nothing to do with that person or persons, didn’t know who they were, and didn’t even know about the doxxing until I learned about it from a video by AVFM head honcho Paul Elam a day or two later.
I made it clear I knew nothing about the doxxing or the doxxer (who later ended up doxxing me). I condemned the doxxing, publicly and repeatedly. It didn’t matter: Barnes declared the doxxer to be a “cult follower” of mine, so anything they did was somehow my fault.
“I promise you David,” he wrote in an AVFM post, “that for the rest of your life there will be nights you cry yourself to sleep in anger and frustration over me.”
Indeed, he wrote, if anything happened to his family as a result of the doxxing, he would literally show up on my doorstep for
a face to face in person discussion … No cops. No lawyers or prosecutors. No judges. No jury. No hiding behind a computer. Just me and you. …
I don’t know of any parent that would blame me for stomping a mud hole in your fucking ass and walking that motherfucker dry for what you have done!
What I’ve “done” is to condemn the doxxing that Barnes blames for putting his family at risk.
Barnes is hardly the only AVFMer who believes in this sort of guilt-by-non-association; assorted others rallied behind him on Twitter, repeating his accusations and defending his threats. The title of Elam’s video on the doxxing declared bluntly that I was “Trying to Get MHRAs Killed.” How? By writing critically about AVFM.
Elam’s bizarre inflation of my carefully documented criticism of MRAs into an attempt to literally “get MHRAs killed” is not only jarring; it’s ominous. By pretending that the writings of feminists leave MRAs, quite literally, in mortal peril, Elam, Barnes and others associated with AVFM can justify almost any actions they might take against feminists, no matter how sleazy or underhanded or even violent, as a form of self-defense.
Abusers who think — or simply pretend — that they are the victims are some of the most dangerous people in the world.
That’s the way I’ve always understood it too: people try to knock others down because they feel small in some way. Sometimes they attack the ones they see as someone who has more than they do, sometimes they attack someone just because they know they can. It’s usually a combination of entitlement and feeling of inferiority.
Max,
Your experiences with misogyny don’t mean anything because you’re not a woman. The women here and the men who make it a habit to actually listen to women about our lived experiences have told you over, and over again that misogyny is its own issue, aside from people just generally being jerks. So why are you still asking the same question over and over? There comes a point where you have to do one of two things. You can accept the answer and move on. Or you can just state that you disagree and leave. Anything else at this point is going into troll territory.
I wasn’t talking about my experience about misogyny, but of my experience with abuse as a child, and I haven’t asked the question again, I have clarified that my question came from that and this question has been answered by freja and a few others already, so please leave me alone now. At this point, it just feels like you’re looking for anything you could twist to justify your behavior.
@max;
Happy reading! Well, not happy. You know. I suggest you go read that book link – the google books resource gives you a free chapter, and it’s full of anecdotal and statistical information. It also opens the door to a mess of other problems that feminism faces down.
@Alan;
Daw, I’m flattered 😀 I’m not an expert in psychology, i’m an information scientist. It’s an eclectic field, so I end up with smatterings of neurology, psychology, social sciences, and gobs and gobs of grody maths. I will do my best to clarify what I mean!
First, the Fundamental Attribution Error, which is named very appropriately, because it is fundamental in many ways. It is a fundamental error because it mistakes the foundations of why people do things. It’s also fundamental because it causes other errors of judgement. It’s also also fundamental because everyone does it. I am speeding on the road because I’m late for work, or because no one is near me, or because [etc, etc]. That guy there is speeding because he’s a speeder – it’s in his nature to speed.
It seems to be a foundational cause of racism and sexism, at least in my meagre perspective. We rationalize our behaviours in a way that presents us with a cohesive, positive self. We rationalize the behaviours of others in a way which allows us to categorize those people for better future prediction – we stereotype them. Combine this with kin-selection bias and you get racism. Combine this with poor gender stereotypes and you get sexism.
You’re not wrong when you say that there are some people who are just shits. Internally, however they – hm. Okay. Tougher to explain this than I first thought. (As always). Let me go biology on this one.
I assume that you know what Confirmation Bias is – it’s a perception factor in humans. We are more likely to perceive things that reinforce our sense of self, and are less likely to perceive things that change our sense of self. More precisely, A person, observing an event, is likely to interpret that event in a way which agrees with our self-description.
This is unavoidable and inherent in how our brains work. When we perceive a new event, neocortical columns are activated all over the brain. Their activation strength is directly related to previous activation events – it’s a self-reinforcing system. With our brains on “automatic”, we will naturally find perceptions that fit within our sense of self.
Our sense of self, however, includes “I have enemies (that don’t behave and look like me) and allies (who do)”. We do this (to the best of my meagre knowledge) by comparing their behaviours to our own idealized behaviours in an idealized world. We’re seeing how well the observed person fits to our idealized self.
So, when we’re observing the behaviours of others, we’re trying to fit them into that form; when we are observing the behaviour of ourselves we are deciding what an enemy and an ally looks like.
Winding back to the beginning – yeah, there are certainly people who have horrible intentions to others, they’re just awful people. But they’re awful because the shape of their self-identity is twisted into miserly knots, and it’s everyone else’s fault for not fitting that misshapen mold.
Does that make sense?
tl;dr: Nasty people always have reasons. Those reasons are often not related to the nastiness, and are usually complete bullshit, but there are always reasons. Plus a bit of probably-wrong neuroscience.
@Max
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but it read like you suggested that some people who abuse and harass women online use misogyny as a sort of veneer to hide the fact that they just want to be abusive? Because if that’s so, I disagree.
Misogyny is seen as a bad word, and many of those people don’t like to be labelled as misogynists. I find it more plausible that assholes will hind behind men’s rights, or gaming, or an idea of equality to be abusive to women. Some of them will do so because they are assholes, as for the rest, they’ll do so because they are misogynists, even if they’re not aware.
I don’t think they see what they are doing as harming another person and they do it because they think it’s fun; I think (and this scares me) these people think they are harming subhuman creatures and they do it because they’re “fighthing the good fight”.
Are any Brit Mamotheers watching that programme on BBC3? “Murdered by my Boyfriend”
Sooooo resonant of the topics covered here.
(Was a bit surprised something worth watching on Beeb 3 so had to Google the background)
Interesting article here:
http://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/may/13/bafta-winner-georgina-campbell-we-wanted-it-to-be-truthful-and-real
When people are abusive towards members of a disadvantaged group (women, children, old people, people with disabilities, racial minorities, LGBT people, etc.) the group is more likely than not being intentionally targeted and more likely to be exposed to violence. Of course middle class male WASP’s can be victims of horrible abuse and violence, but nobody is saying that’s okay.
Some abusers have a specific prejudice and others are more generally misanthropic. Many men are socialized into prejudice or misanthropy in Western societies. But generally misanthropic people also tend to accept prejudices in a way that makes them not all that different from other people with the same prejudices.
Max,
Let me give you some advice: when you’re new to a community, never accuse someone better-known or more respected than you of bad faith, even if they accuse you of bad faith first. It can only ever undermine your credibility.
Your reply to WWTH would have been 1000% better without the last sentence.
@RosaDeLava
Actually, it’s more in the sense that they use misogyny as the vehicle. Basically, it would be hard for them to attack another guy for being a guy because it would end up insulting them as well.
That makes a lot of sense unfortunately, I had never thought about it that way. Now that you have said that, I’m actually inclined to believe it as well.
It probably would have, but at some point I stop tolerating assholes, even if they are respected. As for my credibility, it’s my problem. I won’t exactly lose sleep over not being credible for this type of person. I think I’ve been pretty cool with WWTH, so if you think I went over the top with that one, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
@Scildfreja
*raises hand* What’s an information scientist? (Okay, I’ll go google it xD)
I liked your explanation for why some people seem to just be assholes. I always raise a brow when I see someone saying that someone is bad just because bad is what they are. It feels a lot like othering to me.
A quote by Joanna Russ to share:
“…it is just as useless to ask why the Bitch Goddess is so bitchy as it is to ask why the Noble Savage is so noble. Neither ’person’ really exists. In existential terms they are both The Other and The Other does not have the kind of inner life or consciousness that you and I have. In fact, The Other has no mind at all…there is no explanation in terms of human motivation or the woman’s own inner life; she simply behaves the way she does because she is a bitch. Q.E.D. No Other ever has the motives that you and I have; the Other contains a mysterious essence, which causes it to behave as it does; in fact ’it’ is not a person at all, but a projected wish or fear.”
Addendum, because I so rarely get to gabble on about brain science and cognition outside of maths!
There are ways to combat (not defeat) things like the fundamental attribution error and confirmation bias! Brain regions such as the anterior cingulate cortex seem to be related to the concept of willpower. It’s a forebrain region which is connected to the hippocampus and several other cortex regions, and it seems to activate during deep contemplation and problem solving. Specifically, it inhibits activation of the hippocampus.
The hippocampus is responsible (among other brain regions) for both storing and reassembling memories from the neocortex. By disrupting the hippocampus, the neocortex continues to search for solutions to whatever it happens to be working on instead of reassembling a memory structure. I’m not a neuroscientist, but the talk of the town is that they think this is the act of conscious willpower, and is responsible for the human ability to move beyond our first thoughts to contemplate something more deeply – our ability to challenge perceptions!
The anterior cingulate cortex is, like most of the brain, power-hungry and quick to fail from synapse fatigue – it’s very hard to keep that part of the brain firing over long periods of time, and it requires a lot of nutrients (to provide energy for firing along axons) and neurotransmitters (to transmit between neurons). If you want to think rationally about something, get some rest, have a nice meal (not too heavy), and then do some exercise to get your blood moving. Prime the pump! That’ll give you a better shot at not falling for the instinctive first-arrived-at answer. (you still have to be able to identify when you’re being biased, but that’s a whole other problem). And practice! The more you use your ACC, the more dendrites you grow and the lower its aggregate activation potential becomes.
Sorry for the ramble!
@WWTH
Am I the only one who’s starting to think these polite trolls are the same one troll? I feel like when I start to watch a show on TV and realise it’s the same episode I catch every time.
@ scildfreja
That was fascinating; thank you!
I’m going to digest what you said; there’s some really interesting concepts raised that I’ll enjoy pondering.
And only had to google a few words so feeling quite pleased with myself. 🙂
@ Rosa
Interesting point about othering. I’ll have a think about that too. I suppose I’m coming from the other direction. It’s not so much demonising people as being inherently bad.
More that I’ve been wary of people putting forward ‘reasons’ for areshole behaviour as that often can seem like excusing or justifying.
You’ve both given me something to chew on though; cheers!
@RosaDeLava,
I use the term “information scientist” because when I say “I work with a university to research and build artificial intelligence systems that are part of the general intelligence problem” people tend to lose their shit in various directions. I’m a data scientist, and I’m working on how learning, motivation, and self-perception work.
‘Othering’ is complicated. We can’t help but ‘other’ people; what’s important is that we ‘other’ properly and compassionately, and that we must be quick to reassess, and that our reassessments must be deep. These aren’t easy problems.
@guest,
Fantastic quote 😀 and a great way to express the underpinnings of how we think.
@Alan;
Excuses and justifications are exactly what they are. They’re also what consciousness is, as far as I can tell. It’s turtles, all the way down.
@Scildfreja
Can I lose my shit in the direction of “omg that’s so cool you’re awesome”?
@Max
Please don’t call WWTH an asshole. That’s uncalled for.
Leda,
Yes. Max, Jo, Ben Cohen, they all sound the same. Doesn’t mean they are the same person though. The civil but tedious sealion type is common.
Max,
Here’s the thing. Your questions and points are well worn territory. You could have Googled the answers yourself. You could have perused old posts here, even. You didn’t. You came in here expecting people to give their time and effort to educate you. When you do that, some people may be nice and oblige you. But we don’t have to be. It’s not my job to teach you feminism 101 on a site that doesn’t exist to educate people, but to mock misogyny.
When someone comes in here immediately martyring themselves because they just know they’re going to be labeled a troll, it’s going to be a self fulfilling prophecy. If you had the inkling that your “interrogation” questions might be unwelcome, why did you ask them? Don’t come into a feminist space, ask why the harassment of women is such a big deal, and then whine when it irritates people. You’re lucky anyone answered you nicely at all.
@Max Prejudices in society are a type of memetic virus. Whatever the “root cause” of someone’s misogynistic behavior is, misogyny is still relevant in itself because it’s part of social consciousness. The fact that an abuser is a shithead to all sorts of different people doesn’t make his misogyny less relevant.
For what it’s worth (and I realise I’m not as much of a regular poster) Max doesn’t seem to me like an intentional troll. It just seems like they didn’t spend enough time lurking to understand the community of commenters.
Although my opinion may be swayed by the fact that I’m exceptionally mellow this evening. I’m drinking wine in a bubble bath while watching netflix.
Max – you’ve got some great links to start reading through. I hope after you read them – and the comments policy – you stick around.
@Alan
Oh, that definitely happens as well. The classic answer of fat-shamers “but I’m just worried about their health!” is, I think, a good example. Which is why I say people might have an explanation for their behavior, rather than an excuse.
But I don’t like the explanation that there are people who are born assholes, because I know of people who did terrible things and then turned their lives around. At the very least, I like to see assholishness as a treatable condition.
@Scildfreja
I took a look at it and it seems like an ample field. You job sounds pretty rewarding (at least in the way you put it).
Uh… perhaps I’ve misused that word. I mean as in seeing someone who is different almost as a non-human.
Nobody forced you to answer me. If it’s not your job, why don’t you just stay out of the discussion? Who appointed you to talk for everyone else here exactly? It’s weird how somehow you manage to blame me for you taking the time to answer. You could have not answered, but instead you came in to nitpick in order to justify your aggressivity. I’m not sure how you manage to reconcile that in your head. As for the reason I don’t Google it, it’s because I have this weird habit of asking people who know instead of believing any shit that comes up on Google.
I didn’t martyr myself, I don’t care if someone thinks I’m a troll. I said it so that people who didn’t have the energy to talk about this wouldn’t waste their time. I didn’t feel my questions were unwelcome (seriously, questions about misogyny are unwelcome on a website dedicated to misogyny? Wtf?), but I know some people will always assume you have bad intentions, so it was just a way to tell you to stay away if you didn’t want to waste time on that.
Keep twisting what I said to justify your misplaced aggressivity, you’re only fooling yourself. Now, shoo.
@Historial Nerd
Good point.
@Luna
I definitely will, I love this blog. I haven’t been around for a while though, I discovered it through the BluePill reddit.
WWTH:
Yeah. It’s gotten especially bad since my dad died and I also seem to be watching a lot more old movies lately. I’ve got death on the brain lately. Grief is weird.
@David
Can we ban Max now? He’s gone from sealioning to attacking users and I don’t think he’s sincere in his desire to learn.