In this, the inaugural episode of an occasional series I’m calling Just Another Day on Twitter, we will meet a very concerned Twitterer who showed up in my mentions today.
Jemoi1, you see, is unhappy that I suggested the other day that Richard Dawkins’ recent tweets about Chanty Binx, the red-haired Canadian feminist who’s become a favorite target of MRAs and others of their ilk, would almost certainly worsen the harassment that she’s been facing on a daily basis for nearly three years.
“[B]y accusing people you disagree with of harrasing you are pissing on the experience of real harrasment victims,” Jemoi1 tweeted at me, claiming to be a harassment victim himself. In a followup tweet, he accused me of chasing page views “while ignoring victims of harrassment.”
As I pondered whether or not to bother to respond, I clicked over to Jemoi1’s Twitter feed. And this is what I saw.
As you no doubt noted, I blanked out the names of those he was targeting as well as some of the more obscene language.
There are literally hundreds of tweets like these — angry, obscene, scatological, abusive.
Jemoi1 is a little bit obsessed with horses.
And with other people’s mothers.
Oh, in case you’re wondering, when Jemoi1 refers to “racism,” he (naturally) means racism against white people. This is the main theme of perhaps a third of his tweets.
Despite his obsession with racism (against white people), he is happy to drop the n-word into his own Tweets. Here’s one lovely example:
While most of his tweets target feminists and those he deems anti-white racists, Jemoi1 also has some strong feelings about e-sports, spamming a number of professional e-sporters with the same vicious, vaguely threatening message:
In a couple of cases, he moved past mere threatening language and simply sent his targets death threats.
It seems to me that if Jemoi1 were truly concerned about the victims of harassment, he would have long ago DELETED HIS ACCOUNT.
If these supposedly “shy” men are meeting up with women from OKCupid, evidence suggests that they already know how to date.
@ Bernardo Soares
Okay, that’s pretty definitive. I expected they would be gross, you have to be or you’re not communicating to MRAs and MRA-adjacent groups in language they understand. But these guys are clearly feeding the resentment, not engaging in any sort of constructive effort. I regret my insufficient cynicism.
Thank you for your research efforts.
It really is disappointing to know Zimbardo is an MRA, or at least an MRA-lite. You’d think with something like the Stanford Prison Experiment – he’d be more aware of how actual power structures work and their negative effects, especially patriarchy.
Then again, as Richard Dawkins or Ben Carson prove, being knowledgeable or skilled in one field or another doesn’t make one enlightened.
Goddamn, that last sentence just drips of insincerity…
It’s like how, in South Park, they’ll spend an entire episode dismissing the usefulness of hybrid cars (because…some people are smug about it…?) and then end by doing a convenient 180-degree turn around to act otherwise – while still attaching the insipid advice of “just don’t be smug about it!”
Um, yeah, that doesn’t take away from the fact you just spent mocking the existence of hybrids purely because some drivers are smug about it. Which, as far as complaints go, is really petty and completely besides the point.
Oh boy, that ‘ol chestnut!
So, yeah, put the onus on single mothers who do their damnedest to raise a kid by themselves – oftentimes without the child support payments expected by the father of their child – and act like it’s all their fault…’cause it isn’t like things such as social class or race ever come into it.
Or, y’know, the fact the person who sired the child doesn’t want to contribute to raising them. You’d think that’d be the obvious culprit of fatherlessness, not the women who had their child and spends most of the time fucking raising them.
Bernardo Soares:
And if she’d done any research on this, she’d know the answer! It’s not “reverse sexism” it’s sexism against women. And thanks to feminists, they’re already talking this week about when women will be added to selective service registration! So congrats MRAs! Feminists will soon have solved one of your problems!
Seems like feminists do more for men’s rights than MRAs.
This chaps my hide as well. In addition to what others have already said (class, poverty, available support networks etc), it’s also spoken about as if only male children are in single-mother households, or as if having no father in your life only affects male children somehow. As if young men can’t learn how to become good people unless they have an older man in their life? My husband , and many other men I know, contradict this.
I’m not particularly fond of applying the Bechdel test on a work-by-work basis. There’s a variety of entirely valid reasons for a given work to fail it, because it’s specifically measuring whether there are two named female characters who have an onscreen conversation not about a man. Obviously, any work that only has one speaking character fails. Likewise, any work strictly locked onto a single male character’s viewpoint is fairly likely to fail. And I watched The Martian recently, and I think it fails (possibly depending on how you count group conversations) because there is one man stranded on Mars and virtually all the dialogue in the entire movie is about that fact.
The factor of actual interest is the count of works that fail the Bechdel test vs. the count that fail the reverse Bechdel test: There are at least two named male characters who have a conversation about something other than a woman. And yes, there are things that fail that one and not by the trivial exercise of not having more than three gendered characters and failing one of the two by default. Not very many, but they exist.
Correction
I have to correct what I said way back on p. 2. Bang did not sell 985 copies on Amazon. It had 985 reviews, which is a very respectable number of reviews. And as of today, the book has 993 reviews.
That said, I still don’t think Roosh makes a living from his books and lectures. His talks are poorly attended (35 or so guys at his Canadian talks this summer). And I don’t know how many books he sells from Amazon, his own website, and any other venues, but I do know is that it’s extremely difficult for any author to make a living from books:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/15/income-for-us-authors-falls-below-federal-poverty-line-survey
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/17/writers-earn-less-than-600-a-year (That’s 600 pounds, which is $874.95 in US dollars.)
Back to the reviews of Bang: Of the 993 reviews (that’s a gratifying number for an author), 35 percent are 1-star reviews (that’s an unsettling number for an author).
Here’s an excerpt from a 1-star review by P.G. (January 15, 2016):
But, Tessa! Us widdle feeemales aren’t fit for combat because we’re naturally weaker than men! And we’re distracting because boobs! So this is a problem of us mean ol’ femicommunists trying to make us women more powerful than we really are and trying to distract the MAYUNLY MENFOLK while they’re off doing MAYNLY MENFOLK THINGS like fighting in wars to impress us feeemales!
[/HEAVY sarcasm]