Never let it be said that Men’s Rights activists can’t accomplish great things. Oh, sure, in what the old fogies call “the real world” their victories are pretty much nonexistent; they can’t even manage to organize conferences for themselves two years in a row.
But online, their brilliant strategy of “running around being dicks to everyone” has been an amazing success, causing numerous websites to shut down their comments because they were so sick of all the MRAs gumming them up with endless blather and abuse.
And now it appears the Men’s Rights movement can claim another victory: They have knocked the IMDb rating of the show Sex and the City down more than a point!
Take that, show that ended its run twelve years ago, but that MRAs and other manosphere dudes can’t stop talking about for some reason!
A statistical analysis by Walt Hickey of the data-driven site FiveThirtyEight suggests that men are swarming the IMDb profiles of shows aimed at women in order to give them low ratings.
One of the shows most obviously affected by this new form of cyber-activism is Sex and the City, a show despised more less equally by MRAs, MGTOWs, Roosh, and right-wing mass murderer Anders Breivik.
As Hickey points out, women collectively rated this show at 8.1 out of ten. But so many men gave the show bad ratings that they were able to drag the final score down to 7, which, as Hickey notes, is a below-average rating for the site.
And we’re not talking about a handful of statistical outliers taking down the score. More tha 78,000 people have rated the show. So there are thousands if not tens of thousands of guys out there taking out their anger at women by downvoting one of the most influential recent TV shows aimed at women — often, I would guess, without ever having watched an episode.
It’s a man’s world on IMDb, where, Hickey notes,
[s]eventy percent of IMDb TV show raters are men, according to my analysis, and that results in shows with predominantly female audiences getting screwed.
Why is that? It’s not just that men outnumber women on IMDb; they are also far more likely to give shows not aimed primarily at their own gender terrible ratings. As this chart shows pretty clearly, the more a show appeals to women rather than men, the more likely it is that a man will rate it a rating-killing one star.
“The overall effect of this imbalance is profound,” Hickey notes.
Among shows with 10,000 ratings or more, the average rating of the top-100 male-skewing shows was 8.2, while the average rating of the top-100 female shows was 7.4.
Is it possible that shows aimed at women are just objectively worse? Hickey thinks not. “Everybody watches crap,” he points out. “Men, women, everybody.”
Women may watch more than their share of terrible reality shows like “Say Yes to the Dress,” he notes. But they didn’t make up much of the audience for Beyblade, which, Hickey notes sardonically, is a show based around spinning tops. Spinning tops that fight each other.
Nope. The real reason for the difference is that men are far more likely to poop on the ratings of shows aimed mostly at women than women are to poop on shows aimed mostly at men.
Women rated only two shows appreciably lower than their male raters did. Men, by contrast … well, just take a look at this chart that Hickey put together:
Are the men who make up the Angry Man Downvote Brigade all card-carrying MRAs? For the most part, probably not. And I haven’t run across any evidence of organized IMDb downvoting anywhere in the manosphere (though I haven’t looked all that hard).
But if you’re a dude who literally devotes his evenings to giving crappy ratings to TV shows that women tend to like — just to show those ladies what’s what! — I think that makes you pretty much a de facto MRA. The MRAs should send you a little thank you note, at the very least.
Dad, what did you do in the culture wars?
Son, I gave The Mindy Project a one star rating on IMDb.
EDIT: Hickey made that last chart into a handy gif:
Men Are Sabotaging The Online Reviews Of TV Shows Aimed At Women https://t.co/cc6DsQf7hi
My point, in one gif: pic.twitter.com/GWKFr9Cv36
— Walter Hickey (@WaltHickey) May 19, 2016
Thanks, Katz, for the link!
EDIT 2: My favorite misogynist response to Hickey’s post:
https://twitter.com/Coondawg68/status/733298158202032128
The response on Twitter was…predictable.
These are almost certainly the same people throwing tantrums because a video game got less than a 10 on some review. They are obsessed with meaningless ratings numbers and also are giant babies.
They do the same with Black movies/shows. They’re mostly all rated very poorly on IMDB regardless of quality or success.
shit like this is why Nancy Drew was deemed “too female” to pick up.
I’m an old-school feminist who found Sex and the City utterly vapid and unwatchable. Never cared enough to attack it at IMDb or anywhere else, though.
I can’t understand giving a low rating to a show you haven’t seen. Sex in the City never interested me, but I just don’t watch it.
I’m somewhat curious why women don’t like the Star Wars cartoon (is that the Genndy Tartakovsky shorts or the CGI series?Or both?) Beevis and Butthead I can get not appealing to women but why Star wars?
There are many problematic things about SatC. But the hatred misogynist douchebags have for it makes me want to rewatch the whole series.
Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder must have really low ratings then. They both star black women and have a black woman showrunner. Oh, the horror!
🙁
I actually love Beavis and Butthead and think it’s really underrated. It’s so much more successful at misanthropic humor than South Park, which can be so unbearably smug when they do shows about political topics. I think too many people make the mistake of thinking Beavis and Butthead are supposed to actually be the protagonists of the show. The fact that they fail in every single one of their attempts to get laid, get money, befriend cool guys, or obtain alcohol should be a clue.
Sexual Harassment is one of my favorite episodes because it reminds me of MRAs. They try to sue a female classmate for “sexually harassing” them by being attractive and giving them boners. Needless to say, the judge hearing their case was not amused and she yelled at them for being misogynistic idiots.
No doubt some of this is conscious and deliberate, but I bet a lot of it is more subtle than that. I bet there are plenty of dudes who run into Sex and the City on IMDB and don’t think “I’m going to rate this low to show those ladies a thing or two!!!” Instead I’m sure some of them think: “Oh yeah, I saw half an episode of that once. It was about boring, vapid characters* talking about really shallow stuff**. They were unrelatable*** and abrasive.**** I’ll go ahead and give that a low rating, because my opinion is of value here.*****”
*women
**things of interest to women
***not men
****not talking to a male audience
*****and everywhere else! Because I’m a man!
Men Going Their Own Way… by committing petty, childish acts of online vandalism? What bothers me most about this is that these clowns aren’t content with having shows that cater to their tastes. They apparently want to monopolize the media by making sure that other people’s tastes aren’t catered to. It’s as if their thought process isn’t just “I don’t like Sex and the City“, but “Sex and the City–and any other show not aimed at white men–shouldn’t exist.”
Well if they weren’t actively downvoting before, now this has gotten so much publicity they is going to be a rush to start downvoting now. *sighs* Why does this all just make me feel tired & start craving a gin & tonic?
Okay can someone explain Sex and the City for me? I feel like once I take that plunge I’m going to end up in a very weird place.
I’m surprised Sex and the City had an 8/10 to begin with.
I saw the episode with the foot fetish guy when I was going through a “I will be the GIRLIEST GIRL” phase as a teenager and was just unimpressed.
It’s a comedy about four upper-middle class white women in New York and their sex lives and is just as appealing as how I summarized it. To me at least.
I mean, people had to like it enough for it to have 8/10 in the first place, but, yeah.
But you know what else has an 8/10 rating?
The Big Bang Theory.
Clearly humans have shit taste.
I’ve seen a few episodes of Sex and the City and it doesn’t appeal to me, but I’m a guy, it’s not aimed at me. It’s clearly aimed at women, it doesn’t matter if men like it or not…especially on IMDb.
Off-topic for thread, but on topic for site: Zoe Quinn posted the ruling on her ex’s appeal to have his “right” to talk about her online given back, which was denied.
I’d really like to hear what everyone thinks about the 12 pages of legal-ese that essentially translates to “No”.
So, my kid is kind of obsessed with the Beyblade show, and it is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. It is like a group of executives bet each other that they could turn the most inane and useless product into a show and it worked. Have you seen the Onion News video about Dominos putting literal garbage on pizzas to see if people would eat it? And they did? That is this show.
Four upper-class women who live in NYC act exactly how sexists stereotype upper-class women who live in NYC, complete with cock carousels and infinite talk of shoes and clothing.
@ Weirwood
Fair enough. I haven’t actually seen the show and I was just going by reputation. (And I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks South Park is overrated.) Maybe I’ll give it a try.
@ Viscaria
I think another part of it is that guys often fear not being seen as “Real Men”. So bashing stuff like Sex in the City is done to prove to their masculinity. I can’t deny that I can feel embarrassed to admit that Princess Tutu is my favorite anime but won’t feel any over enjoying some dumb action movie.
Re: Quinn
I laughed really hard. Perfect description of the guy. Kudos, Zoe.
What fem-identifying person isn’t aware of this, at least subconsciously? This is exactly what encouraged me to hide my shameful Sailor Moon obsession FOR YEARS! XD
What exactly is the male (MRA) problem with Full House? Oh no, several men being awesome parental figures to little girls. The… horror?
Seems like a MRA wet dream to me. Damn those misandronist females for liking heartwarming shows about single fathers. The misandrony.
It’s been many years since I’ve seen Bevis and Butthead, but I second WWTH. Plus, B&B was the source for King of the Hill and Daria, and Daria was fucking awesome.
12 pages is a lot, but as to the message:
I just spent a solid hour trying to figure out why the hell The Nanny would be on that list over the dozens and dozens of other sitcoms with the same plot…
… It’s because DA JOOOZ, isn’t it.
@mrex
That one’s a lot easier to figure out: They’re paedophiles. Seriously. 4Chan in particular’s hated Full House ever since the Olsen twins grew up and “Got old.”
I could never get myself to watch Sex and the City.
Four thin white beautiful rich women have problems.
And you know, thin white beautiful rich women do have problems, but I just can’t. I can’t.
I’ve seen one episode and in it,
Round 1, protagonist wins
Round 2, rival wins
Round 3, two dragons came out of the tops and started dueling. Both tops are neck-to-neck until one
*Gasp*
falls to it’s side.
I’d mock it, but I watched Yu-Gi-Oh religiously when I was a kid.