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
I don’t much like SatC, but I’m not really in the target audience either. When it first aired in 1998, I was 9.
I appreciate its cultural impact, though. For all of its flaws, it showed a group of women who had not only romantic, but also sexual, desires and preferences that they would actively pursue. And those women were in their 30s and 40s! The oldest character sought out and enjoyed casual sex on a regular basis, and the show neither laughed at her nor condemned her for it. Neither did her friends with different relationship styles. It showed that different approaches to sex & love could all be valid – as long as you were a straight, wealthy white woman, that is.
Without SatC, I don’t think we could have a show like Grace and Frankie, for example, where characters in their 70s are presented as sexual beings and aren’t mocked for it.
America’s Next Top Model gave us Nyle DiMarco, for which we should be grateful, even though Tyra Banks basically destroyed the show by using it to showcase every half-baked idea that flitted through her head. Australia’s Next Top Model is free of her meddling and is much better for it.
Word.
My soon-to-be roommate works at the Army, and she’s been amazed she found a few “cracks” in an otherwise backwards, extremely Catholic, literally fascist environment.
One of those was, in fact, RuPaul Drag race, at least for one of her (male) military coworkers.
She says that guy came up to her and told her about that unbelievable tv show in which guys dress like women but -hear this- they don’t actually want to be women! I know a few participants actually came out as trans women during/after the show but hey, the military guy could get the main concept right, and he was amazed rather than horrified!
I don’t know if this was on topic but I’ve been away for a while and the RuPaul comment reminded me of it and I really felt like sharing.
So here’s a kitty expressing my feelings:
http://bestanimations.com/Animals/Mammals/Cats/you-are-beautiful-cat.gif
@NickNameNick
Sure, I like plenty of things NOW that some would consider to be “for girls” (the most obvious and prevalent example being that for the last 10 years or so I’ve VASTLY preferred music with female vocalists) but I got into Daria when I was in high school, when it was still airing on MTV. And, you know, teenage boys in the ’90s…
This seems vaguely on topic
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/20/ghostbusters-trashing-internet-tantrum-change-troll-reviewing
I have noticed blatant sexism in imdb reviews and discussion forums a long time ago.
It should be a neutral platform, but it has gotten to a point where it is used by mratrolls and other ilk to rant and spout their poison.
I think it’s time that imdb and similar platforms introduce a comments policy and that just paying members can vote (under real name) on the site. Maybe also just hire professional movie critics and reviewers to do the ratings and reviews.
It is very easy for mratrolls to organize on reddit and 4chan to co on downvoting sprees. Just look at the new Ghostbusters movie.
Since mratrolls can’t achieve anything in real life, they are pretty busy poisoning all online platforms and they shouldn’t get away with it.
I’m not sure if the difference lies in what we call stupid TV, or how we react to it. I know in my case it only adds anger on top of everything else – especially if commercials get involved but I guess that’s something else altogether. The same kind of “irrational” anger that can be compared to “irrational” anxiety or depression.
@Alan
Exactly, and so was Molière (because every country needs its playwright icon of yore) and a bunch of others. Dude was actually depressed that his “real art” was nowhere near as successful as his “buffoon stuff”, but that’s what he was great at. Now any MRA who’s been paying attention and working their brains a bit more than usual would probably say that FEMINAZISM made culture DEVOLVE and that’s why yesterday’s low brow is today’s elite. But… ehh. Screw ’em.
Also, the scroll kitty made my day.
Oooooh, organized trashing because the new Ghostbusters is “ruining their childhood”.
My childhood was ruined when my favorite band’s frontman turned out to be the kind of asshole who beats his mistress and kills her in the process, and then pushes his wife to suicide years later after getting out of jail.
Guess I’m one of those people who will never know true pain because they didn’t like Ghostbusters in the first place.
Oh, I love this and I love that a statistics nerd has dived fully into this, because this was a phenomenon my ex and I noticed awhile ago (back when we were together) when we would look for movies about queer women or with lesbian themes. Basically, every wlw movie on imdb tops out at 7 at the most, including absolute classics like “But I’m a Cheerleader”, “Better than Chocolate”, and “The World Unseen” earning scores in the 6s (context for this score? universally panned toxic bomb Pixels has a 5.7 rating on imdb), whereas movies with more of a dude focus, the movie ratings were a better barometer at least of how they matched my ex’s tastes (my ex was a major cinephile who almost got a Film Studies minor back in college).
User reviews (at least back in the day), used to be choked to the brim with pretentious dudebros trying to make their overall revulsion to lesbian themes some high-minded commentary about art. And back in the day movies about gay male leads tended to be rated higher (I just went back to check on that and it looks like the MRA invasion has “fixed that” and now movies with men loving men themes are being rated down pretty harshly as well, though not as harsh as wlw movies).
I’ll always remember that, because I think it was my first major real-world moment of education of how the biases of white male audiences leads to universal disappearance or undervaluing of queer and women’s work and that I needed to distrust “objective” reviews from white men or spaces that were white male dominated surrounding work that was not white or male focused.
Sinkable John-
Moments like now where dudebros are acting like a single movie not being for them or a single dude-focused property having an entry that’s not dude-focused is the worst thing that could happen to someone really highlights privilege in stark terms.
Because it’s literally men throwing a giant tantrum because not everything is about them, because yes, they grew up in a world where they were trained to assume everything would be about them. That major blockbusters and “big movies” would only ever be about men and movie studios would only care about the male audience. They were trained to believe that all characters in their media would reflect their white male experiences.
And now that that’s starting to unwind a bit as studios slowly realize women are driving blockbuster money, these type of men feel hurt, because to them this doesn’t happen, this is new, and this is the first time they’ve felt alienated from a work and so it feels like how they imagine oppression must feel.
Because they’re so privileged that’s the closest they’ll ever get to that feeling everyone else gets of having to ignore the awful sexist/racist/homophobic themes in a work or ignore that the creator of a work is a batterer or a rapist or just tune out the fact that nothing in the work even marginally reflects your life experiences and the works that do are written by people who have literally no clue what your life experiences are actually like.
They use “it raped my childhood” to describe works that aren’t about them because they’ve never experienced CSA and because they’ve never been alienated by a popular work before. They attack feminist critiques in video games because they’ve never had to awkwardly dance around the awful sexist themes in a game to keep enjoying it. They scream and holler and smash everything they can when a work they don’t approve of finds its niche, because they are used to completely dominating the culture to a ludicrous degree. Because they are man-children who have been coddled and protected from ever having to notice that other people and other experiences to theirs exist until now.
Luzbelitx-
Yeah, RuPaul’s Drag Race is an interesting phenomenon, because it seems to have a lot of fans who are cis and straight who are absolutely glued to it. I remember back when I first came out as trans, a lot of people’s first barometers of how to understand it and first questions all came from their experiences watching RuPaul’s Drag Race (for better and for worse).
Alan-
Here’s part 1 of 3 of the decision:
https://twitter.com/UnburntWitch/status/733403115320311808
Parts 2 and 3 are the next tweets down. You may need good eyesight to read it, because twitter images are ableist as fuck as far as accessibility goes.
That chain also has my absolute favorite turn-of-phrase for the abuser who started the whole harassment campaign: “bargain bin Killgrave”
On vacuous pop culture-
I dunno if it’s the amateur socialist and media analyst in me, but I feel there’s a lot in “vacuous” popular entertainment that can be deconstructed including regarding national attitudes surrounding race or class or regionalism or so on… I mean, a million people have dissected wrestling to death and how it serves as a Soap Opera but with enough anxious masculinity and “no homo” thrown in so that the mostly male audience won’t feel like they’re accidentally watching something for women or how reality television is often specifically created to reflect sexist ideas surrounding women and how they act and so on.
And it’s not even just bad, there’s also a compelling personal touch to even works that are pure irredeemable trash and even the most empty-headed works can be the thing that helps keep a person with depression and anxiety going.
I dunno, that all might just be because I’m pretty much Hernando from Sense8 with almost literally everything I watch. Luckily my enbyfriend tolerates my long rants deconstructing dumb cartoons and tv shows. 🙂
Oh yeah, wrestling is basically soap operas on steroids. I really need to save that Anita Sarkeesian popcorn gif somewhere handy. Goes back to the point that’s been repeatedly made about their masculinity being SO fragile. When it’s not about them, they feel threatened. When it is about them, it has to cast them in a “favorable” light (I mean, favorable in their eyes) otherwise they feel even more threatened. And I say “them” even though I AM a straight, white, (mostly) cis male, ’cause I’m definitely not smart enough to be truly counted among the fine philosophers, culture analysts, and overall Very Serious and Smart People that they are.
Well, not really starting to unwind, since women’s roles are static or declining. But that doesn’t stop men from feeling like they’re under attack.
@ Nequam & Sinkable John
When it comes to Shakespeare I think I’ll have to leave the last word to my favourite philosopher Philomena Cunk:
ETA: Cheers Cerberus. Was Twitter an offshoot of those charts they have in opticians?
@katz
From my admittedly limited respective it looked like the opposite. I mean, I thought the trend had shifted to being a lot more inclusive… has that changed since ? And could that be due to some backlash effect, i.e “less movies entirely about straight white dudes, let’s make movies entirely about straight white dude to strike at the newly forming niche” kind of thinking ?
http://variety.com/2015/film/news/women-lead-roles-in-movies-study-hunger-games-gone-girl-1201429016/
@Alan
It’s a thumbnail compressed to fit in the feed. Click on it and you get the full-sized image. Which in this case is low-contrast small font, but that’s a problem with how we do legal documents. Also, this is doing something I’m not sure I’ve seen before with extra small thumbnails off to the side, and if you click on the main one you can click and drag in some manner I can’t quite figure out to scroll to the others.
@Handsome Jack
*Facepalm* I’m glad at least the “users found this review helpful” scores were accurate.
“The animation is the worst I’ve ever seen”
followed by “I like Dexter’s laboratory”
“The main characters are ‘bossy’, ‘coward’ and ‘obnoxious'”
followed by “I like Ed, Edd and Eddy”
“The show is predictable because the good guys always win”
Because clearly the PowerPuff Girls is the only show where that happens.
And saying “Bubbles has an annoying voice” is a fuckin’ riot considering that’s Tara Strong, AKA one of the most prominent voices for kid’s cartoons (and video games! She’s the voice of Rikku from FFX). Dude complaining about Bubble’s allegedly ‘annoying voice’ also claims that he much prefers Dexter’s Laboratory and MegaXLR. Well guess who does voices for those two shows? Tara Freakin’ Strong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_Strong
I use to “hate” powerpuff girls just like I use to “hate” card captor sakura. AKA I was an insecure little boy and terrified of what would happen to me if I liked a girly show. Naturally I was right there watching both to ‘prove how much I hated them’.
Jackie Chan Adventures, on the other hand, I was 100% behind. I loved that show.
I checked IMDB and fortunately it seems the main criticism was the show’s fillerness rather than “protagonist is a girl”. Although this Jade-hater brought it to creepy levels
I’m gonna sidestep this dude’s desires to assault a 10-12 year old cartoon girl and point out that Jade would probably kick his ass if he tried.
http://i.imgur.com/noqwECA.png
Considering…considering…
@Moocow
Well, you know, the difference between Dexter Laboratory and the Powerpuff Girls is that Dexter is a boy and boys are automatically better and less annoying nener nener.
You know, I think you’d be hard pressed to find a cartoon that DIDN’T have Tara Strong in it. And Jennifer Hale. Video games too. They’re goddamn everywhere. (Also Troy Baker and Nolan North.)
Goddamn voice actors and their huge range of voices and versatility! Playing Timmy Turner, Omi, Bubbles and Raven and fuckin’ Twilight Sparkles and Terrence from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and both Toot AND Clara in Drawn Together! HOW DARE YOU TARA BE SO TALENTED ENOUGH TO PLAY TWO LEAD CHARACTERS IN A CARTOON SHOW!
What kind of a cut-rate production is this?
I watched Daria as a teenager, never thinking it was “for girls”. I was an intellectual type, so obviously it was for me.
King Of The Hill actually felt awkward enough that I figured I must be missing something. Mostly cultural context, as it turned out. Most US shows seem to be generic enough for us foreigners to “get”.
I’m just gonna say that I love Daria forever. Yes. The bestestest show in telly.
And I did get Beavis & Butthead’s humor, and used to watch it whenever I had a chance… especially for their metal commentary.
“This sucks.”
I double-dog-dare y’all not to hear that in Butthead’s voice.
These “brave heroes” shall go down in the annals history as “they who fought for men’s rights by downvoting a movie”.