Mr. Vinczer followed up this perplexing tweet with a bunch more insinuating that I’m a “hack,” a “pathological liar,” a “criminal,” and so on — as well as some links to what he apparently sees as “dirt” about me. (More on the latter in a moment.)
Apparently Vinczer — the “Activia Director” for men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men and the son of the genius who designed that AVFM commemorative coin — was stung by my gentle criticism of his father’s coin-designing skills.
So he has decided to dox me, apparently going as far as hiring a private detective to look into my allegedly sordid life.
PI will confirm, every living and non living fact about you. Enjoy your soon to be elevated infamous public status.
So far his doxing of me is not going very well, in that the “dirt” he has dug up about me is either wildly inaccurate, not particularly “infamous”– or not information about me, specifically, at all.
You may have heard that A Voice for Men is sponsoring what it calls the First International Conference on Men’s Issues later this month in Detroit, featuring such notable celebrity speakers as “internationally recognized writer, lecturer and videographer” Karen “Girl Writes What” Straughan, “former mental health professional” Paul “Boy Yells A Lot” Elam, Warren “Boys Aren’t Hurt By Incest a Lot” Farrell, and, well, a collection of other equally exciting names.
But there have been some doubts about it happening from the start. It took some time for the AVFMers to sell enough tickets to enable them to cover the costs of the event.
And now it the costs of the event are going up further: according to a letter that Elam has posted to his site, the hotel that will be hosting the conference has gotten “numerous calls and threats” of a violent nature because of the conference, and is demanding that AVFM cover the costs of additional security at the event.
If you’re a feminist holding an event, and you don’t want to have recordings of that event posted online without your permission by MRAs, it looks like your only option is to ban anyone and everyone associated with A Voice for Men from the premises. AVFM “activism director” Attila Vinczer has made that very clear.
Earlier this month, you see, Jaclyn Friedman – feminist writer, speaker, founder of Women, Action & The Media (WAM!) – gave a talk at Queens University in Kingston, Canada, followed by a panel discussion.
A number of Men’s Rights Activists associated with everyone’s favorite hate site A Voice for Men showed up with cameras and other recording devices, as they do.
No long post today. Instead, I urge you to go over to the AgainstMensRights subreddit to read about how several long time Men’s Rights Redditors have doxxed and harassed a college student, with one of the regulars gleefully setting forth a plan to stalk her and ruin her life and another seeming to suggest he might want to pay her a visit to “debate” her.
Some screenshots from the original Men’s Rights subreddit discussion:
The thread (which remained up for many hours) has now been scrubbed by the Men’s Rights mods — I got these screenshots from u/Aceyjuan and u/TraceyMorganFreeman’s respective timelines — but as of right now none of the doxxers have been banned from the subreddit, or from Reddit itself.
The “crimes” of the woman in question? According to her main stalker — who has apparently been harassing her for months — she’s tweeted comments like “white men are like the gum on the bottom of my shoe” and “Jared Leto looks like the kind if guy that gives you herpes.”
Yep. Apparently the second-worst evil misandrist comment she made was … a joke about Jared Leto. For these comments, apparently she deserves to have her life ruined.
Here’s the thing: If you don’t like someone’s comments online, you are certainly well within your rights to quote them and point out why you don’t like what they said. That’s kind of the point of this blog. But it’s one thing to point out these comments, and another thing entirely to track down their identity and stalk them in real life. It’s another thing to whip up a virtual mob against them.
Doxxing by Men’s Rights Activists isn’t an accident; it’s the inevitable result of the peculiar style of Men’s Rights Activism.
MRAs, you see, seem utterly incapable of engaging in any kind of activism that might actually benefit men in the real world in any concrete manner. What they as a group specialize in is demonizing women, and in the case of too many MRAS, nothing gets their activist juices flowing faster than the opportunity to attack an individual woman.
That’s why A Voice for Men “activists” put up “wanted” style posters featuring their favorite feminist villains of the day; it’s why they started Register-Her.com. That’s why a certain red-haired Canadian activist who yelled at some MRAs once at a protest now finds her image splashed everywhere online as a visual representation of an evil feminist. That’s why MRAs show up at protests with cameras and threaten to expose the women they film — even if they’ve done nothing more than stand there with a sign.
And that’s why they doxx.
The Men’s Rights movement isn’t a civil rights movement. As it stands right now, it’s a union of abusers, and their enablers.
EDITED TO ADD: Lest anyone claim that the OP didn’t “really” dox the woman in question because he didn’t literally post all her personal details, he provided enough to allow anyone with even rudimentary Google skills to find out her real name and a great deal of other personal identifying information in less time than it would take to order a pizza online.
The diabolical Not Me strikes the Men’s Rights subreddit yet again
Some updates on the Occidental College situation.
First, for those who didn’t see my post yesterday, a quick recap: Yesterday, Men’s Rights Redditors discovered that Occidental College has an online form that allows victims of and witnesses to sexual violence to report the incidents anonymously.
Although the information is being collected to track trends, and no one will be charged with anything as a result of such a report, a number of Men’s Rights subreddit regulars decided it would be a great idea to flood Occidental College with false reports to basically break the system, and they suggested this to much acclaim; others proudly reported that they’d sent in bogus reports.
So what has happened since then? The story has been picked up by a number of sites, including Gawker, Business Insider, RawStory, and LAist. In a followup post, Adam Weinsten of Gawker confirmed that Occidental College had indeed been hit with some 400 bogus rape reports in the past 36 hours — that is, after posts encouraging false reports appeared on 4chan and the Men’s Rights subreddit.
Meanwhile, on the Men’s Rights subreddit, after belatedly realizing that this whole thing makes them look kind of bad, the subreddit’s mods are trying their best to make the whole embarrassing thing go away — and not really doing a great job of it.
Welcome to the first installment of “what the hell is wrong with people, I mean really,what the hell Saturday.”
Today we’re going to look at a couple of recent controversies in the world of gaming. And by “controversies” I mean “women daring to get involved in the gaming industry and getting harassed by misogynistic assholes.”
First up, let’s look at the tale of a woman who’s now facing an angry internet mob because she drew a picture of the video game character Mega Man … as a woman.
Well, this is depressing. The Raw Story is reporting that
An Ohio University sophomore has deactivated her social media accounts and is afraid to leave her house after she was falsely identified as the woman who reported she’d been raped in an incident captured on cell phone video by a passerby.
The student, Rachel Cassidy, now falsely accused of being a false rape accuser, has had her personal information — not just her name but her address, the name of her sorority, her social media accounts, even her Pinterest page — listed on a Men’s Rights site called Crimes Against Fathers. (I won’t link to it.)
The man behind Crimes Against Fathers? None other than the notorious Men’s Rights extremist and crackpot Peter Andrew Nolan — or, as he prefers to be known, for reasons I don’t fully understand, Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c) . Apparently taking inspiration from Paul Elam’s Register-Her.com, Nolan’s site does what Register-Her only threatened to do: it actually releases the personal information of those it identifies as “Man-Hating Women.” He will even add names of women you don’t like to the list for a fee of $70 (Australian).
So far the site has several hundred women listed, most of them apparently women who have run afoul of Nolan or his most active lieutenant on the site, the pseudonymous “John Rambo” of “Boycott American Women” fame, either online or in real life. In most cases, luckily, the amount of personal information given out is relatively scanty and the number of people who’ve actually viewed the posts (which is listed on the site) has been small.
That’s not the case with Cassidy, whose life Nolan and “Rambo” have set out to ruin as thoroughly as they can. In addition to her personal information, the site has also dug up an assortment of pictures of her scraped from various sites on the internet.
And, unwilling to believe that she is not the woman in the video — and a false accuser of rape — the two have taken aim at those who’ve stepped forward to defend Cassidy. They’ve posted the personal information of Jenny Hall-Jones, the Dean of Students at Ohio University, for the “crime” of publicly saying that Cassidy is not the woman in the video, as well as several other women who’ve come out in support of Cassidy.
On Crimes Against Fathers, “Rambo” writes
[C]onsidering that women will always try to cover for their fellow women, and will NEVER hold their fellow women accountable, there is a very strong possibility that Jenny [Hall-Jones] is LYING and that Rachel Cassidy IS the girl in that video. This means that Jenny Hall-Jones is a CRIMINAL because she is covering up for the CRIME of making a false rape accusation. Therefore, she is a criminal and needs to be publicly exposed as such.
Neither “Rambo” nor Nolan has leveled similar accusations against Ohio University president Roderick McDavis, a man, though he too has said that the woman in the video is not Cassidy.
Men’s Rights activists like to say that Nolan isn’t really one of them. If this is the case, they should be willing to stand up and denounce his reprehensible actions, and the very idea of his Crimes Against Fathers “Man-Hating Women” directory.
EDITED TO ADD: I should note that Nolan’s site also has a “Name and Shame the IgnorMANuses” forum directed at alleged man-hating men, including Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad) and Nacho Vidal (the pseudonymous dude behind MGTOWforums.com). The list is considerably smaller than that of the Man-Hating Women directory, and none of the entries I saw listed any personal information that went much beyond links to Facebook pages.
So the self-described “human rights activists” at A Voice for Men have found three more women to harass. Here’s the story, which for many of you will have a depressingly familiar ring:
Members of Men’s Rights Edmonton, a small group that is for all intents and purposes a local chapter of A Voice for Men, has been putting up pictures targeting Lise Gotell, the chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta. The pictures, which seem inspired by “Wanted” posters of yore, feature a large portrait of Gotell and the caption:
This just in: Men’s Rights Activists are some of the most gullible nincompoops in the history of ever.
The latest evidence of this? The regulars on the Men’s Rights subreddit were fooled by an obviously fake “screenshot” of an article from Jezebel that had been altered to make it look like a Jezebel staff writer thinks that paternity fraud is justifiable as a way to fight patriarchy.
