Category: bullying

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Video Tuesday: PBS on Reddit’s sexism, and a dramatic reading of “SCENTED F*CKING CANDLES.”

Can you find the woman in this picture of Reddit’s admins? (Screencap from PBS Off Book video about Reddit.)

I’m not big on posting videos here on Man Boobz – aside, of course, from those involving kitties and/or other adorable furry animals, and, obviously, my own – but here are a couple you all may enjoy.

The first is a short PBS “Off Book” feature on Reddit. Most of it is fairly glowing, but at about 3 minutes in there’s a segment about the rampant sexism on Reddit, which includes interviews with several mods from Shit Reddit Says – who are the only women interviewed for the feature, and who elected to appear anonymously due to the very real threat of harassment from angry Redditors.

Naturally, plenty of Redditors were pissed that SRS got any airtime at all, and some were shocked and stunned to hear that anyone could possibly think there was a lot of misogyny on Reddit. (SRSers responded to it here.)

SRS also regularly deals with the rampant racism, homophobia and transphobia on Reddit, but there was no mention of that in the PBS piece.

The second video is a dramatic reading from YouTuber and regular Man Boobz commenter Jessay of that SCENTED FUCKING CANDLES rant I wrote about the other day.

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New Men’s Rights Posters Fight Misandry with Racism, Homophobia, and Giant Trotskyist Fists [UPDATED]

Even North Korea is better at propaganda than the Men’s Rights Movement. Text reads: “Come to North Korea! We’ve got, like, shitloads of fish.” (Note: I do not actually know Korean.)

It’s sort of reassuring how bad Men’s Rightsers are at communicating with those outside their tiny movement. I should amend that: how bad they are at communicating what they want to communicate — that is, that they are the 21st-century version of the heroic and in many ways successful civil rights movements of the late 20th century. What they tend to communicate instead is what they’d rather the world not see: how blinkered and reactionary and hateful so many of them really are.

Browsing through the Men’s Rights subreddit last night, I ran across a batch of graphics one MRA had prepared for other MRAs to freely use, whether as online graphics, dorm room decoration, or posters to wheatpaste on the nearest family courts building. While avoiding the hysterical misogyny of so many of the graphics up on the Artistry Against Misandry website we looked at recently, CAGeorge’s posters reveal a bit more about himself and the MRM than he perhaps intends them to. Take this poster, ostensibly a call to “resist feminist bullying.” How exactly do you resist such bullying? Apparently, with a giant fist.

Huh. Your movement is known for its violent rhetoric, for downplaying and whitewashing domestic violence against women by pretending that DV affects men and women equally, for promulgating a sort of false-rape-allegation hysteria in no way proportionate to the actual extent of false-rape allegations. In some circles, it’s labeled, fairly or unfairly, as “the abusers lobby.” Do you really think putting this fist on this poster is going to help?

Apparently not. Apparently that fist ISN’T GIGANTIC ENOUGH. Meet MEGA FIST:

So, yeah. Also, FYI, that particular version of the old clenched-fist graphic has been used by the far-left International Socialist Organization (ISO) for several decades. Take a look at the little ISO fist to the right here. Same fist. You may want to switch that out, dudes, lest you inadvertently convert potential MRAs to Trotskyism.

And while I have to give CAGeorge a few points for avoiding the crass misogyny of Artistry Against Misandry, he doesn’t do quite as well avoiding racism and homophobia. Hence this poster, apparently an attempt to scare potential false accusers by suggesting they could end up sharing a cell with a scary and probably dark-skinned dyke.

Naturally, CAGeorge’s artisty won mostly plaudits from the Men’s Rights redditors who stopped by to look and comment.

EDITED TO ADD:  Woah.  Strike that last sentence. Returning to r/menrights I see that a real, critical discussion of the flyers has erupted. Many of the regulars are unhappy with various aspects of CAGeorge’s choices. Numerous commenters are critical of the fist imagery, including ignatiusloyola, one of the subreddit’s mods, who objects in one highly upvoted comment. One person even mentions the ISO!

Our old pal Sigil1 (a.k.a. the legendary banned Man Boobz commenter Eoghan) is especially critical of the “roommate” poster, and for a good reason: that it essentially threatens prison rape for false accusers. (He doesn’t mention the racism or homophobia.) But he still can’t help but blame the posters on a conspiracy of evil “false flag” feminists trying to make the MRM look bad.

Paul Elam of A Voice for Men, naturally, thinks the posters are fine and dandy.

CAGeorge, meanwhile, defends his poor choices. Here he is dealing with criticism of the “roommate” poster:

The bit about “nullification” is of course a reference to Elam’s infamous suggestion that MRAs should undermine the legal system by voting “not guilty” in trials involving men charged with rape, “even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.”

Still, this is a real discussion. If the Men’s Rights movement has any chance at all of transforming itself into something really resembling a real progressive movement, it’s going to need to have a lot more discussions like this — and those who really do want to improved the lives of men instead of simply demonizing women will need to make clear that Elam and his ideological comrades are no longer welcome in the movement.

EDITED TO ADD, PART 2: Now the legendarily cloddish MRA videoblogger Bernard Chapin has made a video attacking the posters and the dude who made them. He’s not worried about the violent imagery, or the racism, or the homophobia — as I pointed out recently, he is himself a bit of a homophobe. Nope. He’s mad about the use of evil leftist imagery, and accuses the maker of the posters of being a sneaky Marxist infiltrator trying to co-opt the MRM with evil Marxist symbolism.

Gosh. Paul Elam said he liked the graphics. Is he a secret Marxist infiltrator too?

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Spearheader “warns” women to stop being so feministy, or else!

More mustache-twirling from the MRA crowd.

Another day, another threat – sorry, prediction – of impending violence towards women from someone on The Spearhead. This time from a fellow called James, in his twenties:

The OLDER MEN simply do not understand what it is like to be a young man today.

I will say one thing though- a very big percent of young men of my generation do not believe in this feminism or white knight bullshit, and they have very little tolerance towards it.

Older men will allow themselves to get ass raped in divorce courts, but the younger men of my generation have no such tolerance.

So if the younger women think they are going to treat the younger men with the same level of hatred that the older women do to the older men, they have a big surprise waiting for them.

1. Either the men will just entirely boycott the younger women

or

2. They will actively fight for their rights, even with force, if it requires it

What I mean by that is, the younger generation of men are much more violent than the older generation. So in plain English, if women think they are going to treat the younger generation of men like shit, then we are going to see a huge increase in violence against women.

In short, the men of my generation are not as willing to tolerate the abuse from man hating women as the older men are. Young women would be very wise to take note of this.

Unfair quote-mining on my part? Not exactly. James got 72 upvotes for this bit of wisdom on The Spearhead, and only  8 downvotes.

Meanwhile, our old friend at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog highlighted James’ comment in a post of his own, quoting the whole thing, and adding his own spin:

 The younger you go on average you will find less tolerance for anything pro-female.  This is not surprising.  Even looking at my own life, I have been dealing with feminism since I was in elementary school especially if we define feminism correctly as feminine-ism.  I remember (female) teachers being pro-female and anti-male going back to first grade.  As bad as I had it, it is worse for men younger than me.  They’re not going to listen to lies about how women are oppressed because all they have seen with their own eyes are the opposite. …

By 2020 the balance between men who are currently old vs. men who are currently young will have shifted.  There will be less old men who remember life pre-feminism.  There will be more young men who have spent their entire lives under the feminist jack boot.  There will be more men who are completely fed up with women.  Around 2020 there will be a lot more men willing to take radical direct action against feminism.

“Radical direct action against feminism?” What does this mean? Generalized violence against women, as James seems to suggest? Firebombing police stations and courthouses, as MRA “martyr” Tom Ball urged in his manifesto? Like most of those in the Men’s Rights movement who like to talk ominously about what they hope will be a massive anti-feminist backlash, the PMAFT blogger is vague about what exactly this might entail. But it’s not hard to connect the dots here.

Protip: MRAs, if you don’t want people to see the Men’s Rights movement as a hate movement — you need to stop posting, stop upvoting, stop even tolerating this kind of hateful shit.

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a voice for men announcements bullying hypocrisy MRA

On Harassment: Don’t Do It

UPDATE: I have no reason to believe that the harassment alleged by Kyle Lovett — which I  discuss below — involved anyone even tangentially connected to this site, or indeed that it ever happened. The “evidence” he provided only showed that he got traffic from a link on this site. He never provided any evidence that the alleged harassment occurred or that, if if did, it was perpetrated by anyone who found his site through my site. The rest of my piece still stands.

The other day, a commenter here linked to the blog published by one of the moderators of the Men’s Rights subreddit. Kyle Lovett, the mod in question, says that not long afterwards, someone contacted his workplace saying that he was a member of a “hate group.” Claiming to be concerned about his safety, he temporarily hid his blog. And stepped down as mod.

Lovett says he suspects that this person who he says contacted his work is a Man Boobz reader, and has now provided evidence that seems to back up this suspicion. If Kyle is indeed telling the truth about the harassment, it was a Man Boobz reader who contacted his workplace. (There is no evidence it was one of the regulars here, merely someone who was reading the comments in that one thread. Nor am I completely convinced that the alleged harassment happened; Lovett has lied about things in the past.)

But if the harassment happened let me be blunt: That’s not cool. I don’t like that sort of harassment when it’s directed at feminists, and I don’t like it when it’s directed at MRAs. As Rebecca Watson once said, in a different context, “guys, don’t do that.” Seriously, DON’T DO THAT.

All this said, Lovett and other MRAs are acting as if the link to his blog  here was in some way equivalent to “doxing” – that is, tracking down the personal information of someone posting anonymously, and posting it online, for purposes of harassment..

It isn’t. Kyle publishes his blog under his own name, and he regularly posted links to it on Reddit. It was no secret that he posted on Reddit as Qanan, just as my real name Is no secret.

I’m not sure why it’s necessary to point this out, but I will anyway: If you publish things on the internet under your own name, people will indeed connect your name to these things. There is absolutely nothing wrong with posting a link to someone’s blog. No one here advocated harassment in any way.

Needless to say, the indignation on the Men’s Rights about this is hypocritical, to say the least. MRAs harass feminists all the time.

A Voice for Men, the worst offender in this regard, has published the personal information of feminists, and once put out a thousand dollar bounty in an attempt to find out the identity of one feminist who had been posting anonymously online. AVFM head Paul Elam talks about “stalking” feminists and on his radio show gleefully discussed the prospect of not only revealing the names and addresses of women he considers evil, but also their routes home from work. He orchestrated a harassment campaign against one commenter here, which led to people contacting her workplace in an attempt to get her fired. There are many more examples.

Meanwhile, today on the Men’s Rights subreddit, one commenter’s call to harass a woman got two dozen upvotes from the regulars:

Guys, don’t do that.

EDIT: I have added a few comments in the post above to highlight my concerns that the alleged harassment may be a fabrication; I will remove these comments of Lovett provides proof, publicly or privately, that the harassment occurred.

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A Voice for Men responds to the Southern Poverty Law Center. With love.

Welcome to the fifth and final day of the Man Boobz Pledge Drive. If you haven’t already, please consider clicking the little button below and sending a few bucks my way.

Thanks! And, once again, big thanks to all who’ve already donated. I’ve been amazed and humbled by the response, which was greater than I had ever expected. Seriously, you rock. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:

The look of love, AVFM-style.

[TW for rape apologism and domestic violence.]

Paul Elam of A Voice for Men has responded to the Southern Poverty Law Center report on the Men’s Rights Movement with an letter to the organization’s head. Apparently, the SPLC is confused, and AVFM isn’t hateful at all! Indeed, it’s like the opposite of hateful. Loveful, you might call it. Here’s Elam:

Contrary to what readers of your site may be led to believe, the goals of SPLC and AVfM are quite similar: We both work to identify groups who seek to oppress others, and inform the public of the inequities they would perpetuate. … The work of AVfM is vital and, despite what you may think, not dissimilar from the goals and aims of the SPLC.

Indeed, AVFM might better be thought of as “a human rights organization.”

Elam also clears up a little matter of terminology:

[T]he term “mangina” is not a euphemism for “weak men,” but rather a label for men who enable and excuse female misconduct – ranging from physical violence to exculpatory false reporting of crimes …  – solely because the offender is female (and to gain women’s approval).

I think I can speak for all manginas when I say, thanks for the clarification, Paul!

At the end of the letter, Elam gets all Martin Luther King on us:

Those who fear truth, and brand it as hatred and bigotry, hide behind the worst kind of cowardice – the sniveling complacency that for generations allowed the rich to starve the poor, for one person to own another because of the color of their skin, and for the officers at Nuremberg to claim they were “just following orders.”  …

This movement will grow, as it has since its inception, and the time will come when the SPLC (and other groups) must admit our fundamental similarities and aspirations.  I am inviting you, with open arms, to do just that.

The alternative, I fear, is that you come down on the wrong side of history, with the likes of Dred Scott as your legacy.

Inspiring stuff, Paul. Nazis, Dred Scott– you totally nailed it. Who could possibly doubt your passion, or your deeply moral vision?

Here’s a link to his letter.

Oh, wait, that wasn’t a link to his letter. That was a link to a post of his in which he tells a feminist that:

I am not going to stop. You see, I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.

Here’s the link to his letter.

Oops! That was actually a link to a post in which he suggests that “vermin” like me (and another feminist writer who has also been critical of the Men’s Rights movement) deserve to be killed. Or have something awful and permanent happen to us that would solve “the problem” that is us. He’s a little vague.

Here, at long last, is the link.

Oh, sorry, that’s actually a link to a post in which Paul puckishly suggested that October, currently designated as Domestic Violence Awareness Month, should be renamed “Bash a Violent Bitch Month.” As he explained:

I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women – to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.

And then make them clean up the mess.

What a wit!

Anyway, here’s the letter.

Gosh darn it. I’m not doing too well with links at the moment. That’s actually a link to a post in which Elam suggests that women who drink and go home with men are “freaking begging” to be raped:

Damn near demanding it.

And all the outraged PC demands to get huffy and point out how nothing justifies or excuses rape won’t change the fact that there are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.

I guess that’s what they call “human rights advocacy” right there.

Ok, finally, the letter:

Damn. That wasn’t even by Paul. No, that was a guest post on A Voice for Men by a fellow named Keith, with an explanation for why men don’t just beat women all the time. (It’s not why you’d think!)

Let’s face it guys if it was about size or domination, or patriarchy or anything other than power, wouldn’t we be kicking the shit out of women on a daily basis in the streets? The only reason men don’t randomly pound the shit out of women who can’t keep their mouths shut, is because they don’t mean anything to us and they have no power over or in our lives. They are not worth the trouble! That’s the only reason there isn’t bodies strewn all over the streets.

That’s enough human rights advocacy for me for now. Here’s the actual link to Elam’s letter.

—

This post contains some

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MRAs: The way to defeat feminism is not through debate but by “inflicting … pain” on feminists.

Men's Rights "Activism"

What can you do when you realize that you’re losing the war of ideas? You can rethink some or all of your ideas, seriously considering the unnerving possibility that you might be, well, wrong. You can reconsider how you present your ideas.

Or you can give up on ideas entirely, and attempt to pressure or harass or even terrorize others into some form of surrender. That’s what the the uber-radical Weathermen did in the 1960s and 70s, turning first to violent direct action in the aptly named “days of rage” and then to bombs when the revolution that many in the New Left had been prophesying failed to materialize. That’s what the anti-abortion movement has been doing for decades now, with some in the movement harassing women trying to get abortions while more radical antis bomb clinics and kill doctors. .

And now we’re seeing rhetoric from Men’s Rights Activists that suggests some in that movement may also be giving up on talk. Consider A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam, who declared in a fundraising letter a couple of months back that:

Progress for men will not be gained by debate, reason or typical channels of grievance available to segments of the population that the world actually gives a damn about. The progress we need will only be realized by inflicting enough pain on the agents of hate, in public view, that it literally shocks society out of its current coma.

Elam is – presumably deliberately — vague about what exactly he means when he talks about “inflicting … pain,” and as far as I know he has never explicitly endorsed violence. But he has spoken openly about “stalking” individual feminists and otherwise “fucking their shit up” by, among other things, posting personal information about them on the AVfM-sponsored site Register-Her.com for all would be vigilantes to see. And in the “activism” section of his website he has reprinted a manifesto explicitly calling for the firebombing of courthouses and police stations.

Elam isn’t the only MRA who has officially given up on “debate and reason” in favor of “inflicting … pain” on feminists. The “counter-feminist” wannabe philosopher who calls himself Fidelbogen makes a similar argument in a recent post on his blog:

Feminism is your enemy, and the obligation to treat feminists as fellow human beings is officially waived. They are not fellow human beings, they are ALIENS.

Dehumanizing the enemy always a good start.

[L]et’s not hear any crap about so-called “hate speech”. You see, there is simply no way that you can resist evil, denounce tyranny, or call pernicious things by their right names, without crossing a fine line into “hate speech” or something very like it. Extremism against a bully is no vice, and since bullies have their own moral economy, you are entitled to pay them in their own coin.

It’s not hate speech if you really do hate them?

The important thing to understand about the feminists is, that they will not change their outward behavior unless social heat and pressure are inflicted upon them.

Fidelbogen, a sometime contributor to A Voice for Men, is also vague about what exactly he means by this “social heat and pressure.” He continues:

What, do you think they will stop what they are doing just because somebody intellectually convinces them they are mistaken? They will do no such thing, because they are people with an agenda who know they are “right”, and they lack the gift to see themselves as the rest of the world sees them.

IRONY ALERT. IRONY ALERT.

Over on Reddit, meanwhile, the charming JeremiahMRA – who used to post comments here as Things Are Bad – thinks the “inflict pain” policy should be extended to all women, any time they engage in “bad behavior.” Responding to a poster asking how to handle a disagreement with his mother, he explained his theory in (sometimes redundant) detail, receiving several dozen net upvotes for his post:

The ONLY way you change women’s bad behavior is by punishing them if they won’t start acting like adults. …

The only way you change a woman’s bad behavior is by making sure they know it hurts them. …

Reasoning with her will not work. The only answer is to use the power he has as her SON to threaten to hurt her emotionally. Women are emotional creatures. Nothing else will work. This is what it means to be a man: you do what you have to do so that things will be better in the end, even if you don’t like it. …

It isn’t about convincing her what’s right, it’s about showing her she will suffer if she doesn’t do what’s right. That is the only thing that will work.

The Men’s Rights Movement likes to pretend that is it a civil rights movement. But threats, harassment, hate speech, and emotional blackmail aren’t the tactics of a legitimate civil rights movement. These are the tactics of angry narcissists clinging to retrograde prejudices, who have given up on the war of ideas because on some level they know that history is against them, and that they will never win.

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MRA: Making women suffer is a highly ineffective way to put them in their place

Making women cry: Highly ineffective.

Given the enmity towards women in general, and feminists in particular, that’s omnipresent in the manosphere, it seems logical to assume that most of the dudes lingering around MRA, PUA and MGTOW sites online would take a certain secret pleasure in seeing women suffer.

As regular readers of this blog know all too well, oftentimes the desire to see women suffer is not so secret: some MRAs and others of their ilk  literally laugh at women getting cancer, declare that rapists should be given medals, openly fantasize about “beat[ing] the living shit” out of women,  and tell feminists who complain about this sort of shit that they’re “so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.” (Those last two examples come from Paul Elam, one of the MRM’s most influential bloggers.) Still others send rape and death threats to outspoken women online.

But good news, folks! It turns out that not all manosphere misogynists want women to suffer. Why? Because suffering is an ineffective way to put women in their place. That, at least, is the argument of a fellow calling himself Höllenhund. In a comment on Susan Walsh’s Hooking Up Smart blog, he offered this argument:

Making women suffer wouldn’t achieve anything in itself – I’m pretty sure the overwhelming majority of the Manosphere would agree. Women are normally solipsistic and they fail to understand their own urges and don’t comprehend the connection between cause and effect. They’d never understand why they’re suffering in the first place.

So, basically, in his mind, women are dumber than dogs and thus harder to train. Even worse, the suffering women can sit down in the street and cry, and countless “white knights,” hoping to win their approval (and get in their pants) will rush to their aid:

Suffering only motivates them to fish for male sympathy (and thus investment) through crying and whining, to blame ‘ bad men’ for their ‘misfortune’ and thus play the game of ‘let’s you and him fight’. That’s how it has always been.

So making women suffer is largely pointless. I’d go further and say it’d actually be detrimental to men because it encourages white-knighting and intra-male competition. …

And some of the ladies even seem to sort of like it:

Not to mention the fact that many women actually seem to find some sort of twisted pleasure in suffering, that all this’d simply serve to justify more anti-male legislation and whatnot.

Poor Höllenhund doesn’t have much hope that women will ever see how totally terrible they really are

[T]he notion of making women ‘admit their faults’ is pie-in-the-sky as well. Again, I’m sure pretty much everyone in the Manosphere would agree. You have a bigger chance of seeing pigs fly.

If women are to recognize their faults in this SMP [Sexual Marketplace], they need to have a realistic picture of both their own sexuality and the SMP in the first place, plus they need to have empathy for beta males …

Er, you’re lecturing us about empathy?

Sorry, on with the rest of the sentence:

plus they need to be imbued with the sense of morality without which the very concept of ‘fault’ is meaningless.

And lecturing us about morality too?

I think we’ll sooner see Haiti become a dreaded military superpower.

I’d rather see that than live in a world in which women were so self-hating that they actually believed they were guilty of whatever unnamed sins Höllenhund attributes to them.

NOTE: I found Höllenhund’s comment because the blogger at Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology cited it as a prime example of the sort of brave “truth telling” that will get you banned “on feminist sites that supposedly support men.” And yes, it apparently did get poor Höllenhund  banned from Hooking Up Smart. I’m not quite sure how Susan Walsh, a traditionalist  devoted to slut shaming in a thousand different flavors, counts as feminist, but that’s not the point. The point is: I’m regularly accused of “cherry picking” comments from MRAs. In this case, Mr. PMAFT picked the comment for me.

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Men oppressed by not being allowed to bitch about ladies in public restrooms

I'm pretty sure this happens more often than conversations in men's restrooms

A startling new development on the frontiers of anti-male oppression. According to the loquacious lady MRA known as girlwriteswhat on Reddit, men are being oppressed by evil feminist dudes cruelly clamping down on their right to bitch about ladies in the bathroom. In a recent comment she writes:

No space is allowed to be male-only, or male-viewpoint-only, but women insist on female-only or female-viewpoint-only spaces all the time.

The only male safe space left on the planet is the men’s bathroom, ffs. And even then, there will be feminist-leaning men policing what is said. It’s very frustrating.

As a dude feminist who is a regular user of men’s restrooms, I should note that dudes do not actually talk in restrooms.

Happily, this does not prevent me, as a dude feminist, from policing the non-existent speech of other dudes in said restrooms.

Here is the complete transcript of a restroom discussion I recently policed:

Dude One: [silently urinates]

Dude Two: [silently urinates]

Dude Three: [silently poops]

Me: Goddessdamnit, keep it down with all your lady-bashing! Men are bad!

Always glad to help.

HT to Shit Reddit Says, which has just ended its month-long moratorium on r/mensrights posts, for pointing me to girlwriteswhat’s observation.

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antifeminism bullying creepy douchebaggery manginas men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny MRA PUA rape rapey sexual harassment threats violence against men/women

“Please Killl Yourselves”: MRAs respond to #mencallmethings

Well, that was … instructive. The Twitter hashtag extravaganza that is #mencallmethings is still going strong. But I think at this point it’s safe to say that it has basically served it’s purpose: to highlight the obnoxious, obscene, often threatening misogynist shit that women who express their opinions about almost anything on the internet get in their inboxes or in comments online on a regular basis. Women with feminist blogs who actually call out this kind of misogyny get this sort of abuse basically every day.

Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown, who started up this hashtag campaign, explained in an eloquent and angry blog post why she did it: to point out how absolutely routine this sort of shit is. When she started her blog, she really hadn’t anticipated the sheer volume of vicious shit she’d get:

I got targeted. With threats, with insults, with smear campaigns, with attempts to threaten my employment or credibility or just general ability to get through the day with a healthy attitude and a minimal amount of insult.

The intent of all this abuse is simple: to intimidate. When someone says to a woman online “I hope you get raped with a chainsaw,” the point is to get her to shut up. The person who posts this sort of violent shit, Doyle notes,

hopes that the next time you sit down to write, you’ll remember that yikesy chainsaw-rape thing and think, “you know? Maybe this isn’t such a great idea. Maybe I don’t need to say this. Maybe I’ll piss someone off, and maybe it will be more than I can handle, and you know, maybe my thoughts on this topic just ARE NOT IMPORTANT ENOUGH for me to risk the headache/fear/irritation/distress/panic attack I know I will get.”

 And then, when you say that aloud, they call you a whiny little girl who can’t handle the Internet. Because, of COURSE multiple chainsaw-rape comments aren’t a big deal! They’re just words! Sticks and stones! …

To you, my friends, I say: Fuck that noise. All of this matters. A hostile work environment matters. Being afraid of your own in-box matters. Deleting your blog because that’s the only way for you to have a normal, non-hate-filled life matters. “Accepting” that continual, virulent, hateful misogynist abuse is a pre-condition for being a lady who talks about thing, or for challenging sexism in any way, no matter who you are: That matters. And if you think we’re fragile, well. LET US COUNT THE WAYS we have hacked it, under conditions your pampered manly self just cannot imagine. LET US DEMONSTRATE FOR YOU the shit we wade through, every day, in order to talk about whether or not we liked that one “Community” episode or Lady GaGa album.

Naturally, critics of the whole hashtag campaign have done their best to minimize and dismiss this sort of routine harassment in exactly the ways that Doyle predicted they would.

The charming Ferdinand Bardamu of In Mala Fide responded to #mencallmethings with a bunch of obnoxious comments that conveniently proved basically every point Sady Doyle was trying to make with the hashtag in the first place. He started off with this bit of rapier wit:

He followed this up with a clumsy fat joke:

He continued on in this vein for awhile, so proud of his insightful critiques that he made a blog post about it.

Encouraged by Bardamu’s example, blogger PMAFT (Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology) announced a #MenCallMeThings Trolling Contest. The highlight of his own contributions to this contest:

Over on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit, c0mputar offered slightly more coherent, if equally misguided, response.

The reality is that most of the “misogyny” they face is just criticism to their feminist viewpoints. I see this a lot when I confront feminists arguments, present my arguments, and get called a misogynist, amongst other things characterized by misandry. It happens on both sides …

Really now? Here are some actual examples of comments posted on #mencallmethings (taken from a comment from Shaenon in the discussion here).

here’s some to start: ‘I’ll rape your mum, faggot fuck’ “I’ll come to your house and kill you”

#mencallmethings, impersonate me on FB, & make disgusting sexual comments, post my name & # when I helped organize Slutwalk

cunt, whore, ugly, disgusting, cold, feminazi, shut the fuck up bitch, manipulative, crazy, playing the victim, sociopath

Bitch, whore, being sensitive, little girl, dumb, subject of jokes involving physical and sexual assault.

Any variation on fat and/or ugly at this point just makes me yawn.

I’ve had so many emails and messages telling me I deserve a beating, I don’t even keep track any longer.

“13? Judging by the size of your titties, I’d of thought you were 18.”

(censored version) If you keep talking the way you do, you deserved to get raped.

My #mencallmethings moment – receiving an email consisting of 1600 lines plus of the same insult over and over. My crime? Being fat.

I’ve had so many guys tell me how good I must be in bed because I’m fat and therefor will do anyone

I usually get ‘sweetheart’ just before they dismiss my argument as being ‘stupid’. No counter argument.

Will not repeat the violence that’s been directed at me but this one made me laugh “Blubbering self-important herd animal.”

apparently I’m a lesbian… I was unaware until #mencallmethings.

I’M ON ANTI-DEPRESSANTS AND I CANT EVEN JERK OFF CORRECTLY NOW & ITS BECAUSE OF WOMEN SO FUCK ALL YOU INFERIOR COWS

“You should have your tongue ripped out.”

I get sent one rape threat a month on average.

I was once told “get back in the kitchen you ugly bitch” for posting on a Linux board (can’t remember which one now)

Have you ever wanted someone to tell you that your genetalia should be stapled shut with bugs inside, start a blog

How about being choked to death during a forced blowjob? Start a feminist blog.

Not worth the effort to murder: the most recent example of what I had to delete off the blog when #mencallmethings

C0mputar, in his Reddit post, went on to offer another argument that seems to be a favorite of those trying to trivialize the abuse catalogued by the contributors to #mencallmethings:

In the end, veterans of the internet know there is no protected demographic. Everyone gets shit on, but if you make a point of belonging with a group, you get shit on even more, and more so the smaller you are. You know who gets shit on more than feminists? MRAs.

Really? Some MRA types on Twitter tried to get a rival hashtag going: #womencallmethings. Needless to say, they didn’t have much to work with.

One Man Boobz non-fan — whom I banned for his repeated comments about anal rape — tried to post a sarcastic little comment here last night dismissing #mencallmethings on similar grounds. Here’s a screenshot from my wordpress account, with his identifying data erased:

Let’s just, for contrast, take a look at the previous comment he tried to post here:

Another day, another “hope you get raped” comment.

Ironically, though I’m pretty thoroughly disliked across the manosphere, I actually get a lot less of this sort of abuse than most reasonably well-known feminist bloggers who happen to be non-dudes. Oh, sure, I get called a “traitor” and a “mangina,” and once in a while someone points out that I’m, you know, fat, but when it comes to the really nasty shit, the abusive commenters and emailers seem to much prefer going after women. This may be because they are misogynistic assholes. That’s just a theory, though.

Categories
alpha males bad boys beta males bullying manginas masculinity men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny MRA PUA racism thug-lovers violence against men/women

Lady, killer; killer, lady.

What do women want? Freud never found a definitive answer to his famous question, but the blogger who calls himself Delusion Damage thinks he’s got it figured out: women want men who can kill people with their bare hands.

DD is a sort of compound MRA-PUA who argues for “Men’s Liberation Through ‘Game,’” as he put it in a Spearhead post some months ago.  Apparently, if dudes learn how to get the hot babes to give them strings-free sexy times, through the magic of “game,” this will help to “reduce the unilateral enslavement of men through marriage.”

And what attracts the ladies more than the ability to kill? Not much, apparently. If you’ve got that magic killing touch, everyone around you will sense your manly power:

You are a man. A man is a survivor, a hunter, a protector of loved ones. The essence of manliness is controlled power. … That is what women love and what other men respect. Women, most of them anyway, are unable to use force and must rely on men where force is required. … If you lack the ability to kill other people with your bare hands, you will be perceived as if something is missing from your manliness. …

If you can kill, the ladies will pick up on this instantly:

[H]aving the ability substantially raises the value she instinctively perceives you to have. Which, as we know, leads to all manner of good things.

I believe he’s referring to blowjobs.

Oh, and other dudes will be impressed, too:

The respect of other men is also greatly influenced by your killing ability. Up until graduation from high school, the male social hierarchy has a great deal to do with “who can beat up whom”, and although the hierarchy among adult men is more dependent on social and professional status signals, men never stop instinctively evaluating you by what they perceive your killing ability to be, and respecting or disrespecting you accordingly.

And this will set you apart from all the wimpy emo hipsters of the world, who couldn’t even fight a girl:

If there is a “defining” degree of killing ability that makes you “manly”, it is defined by comparison with the female of the species. …

In these dismal times, men who fall short of this line are not terribly rare. Many of the emaciated hipsters and cubicle-dwellers of our generation would have trouble against a Juanita from a rougher neighborhood. These men, due to their lack of killing ability, are seen as unmanly by both men and women. 

Meanwhile, your ability to kill will make others sit up and take notice:

The ability to kill makes your feelings relevant. If you lose your temper, someone dies.

This of course implies good things about you – the fact that you aren’t in jail right now means that you are a man in control of his emotions. A man who never loses his temper. Everyone around you subconsciously understands this and respects you for it. It lets people know they can trust you.

Yeah, nothing screams “trustworthy” more than a guy going on and on about how he could kill you with his bare hands.

Also, the ability to kill can help to prevent the ladies from blabbing endlessly about their stupid lady crap to you:

A woman who knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that she will have less than three seconds to live from the second she makes you lose your temper is not going to set out to intentionally poke and prod you past your breaking point.

Aw, yeah, it’s good to be a potential bare-hands killer:

[Y]ou will be afforded a completely unprecedented kind of respect. …

When you are The Man, everyone around takes note. It is a form of celebrity. Women gravitate to you, pulled by the invisible streams of attention, respect and deference which we all subconsciously sense in any social situation.

Given the sort of adoring attention DD must get from the ladies, it’s sort of amazing that he finds time to even keep up a blog at all.