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By now you have probably heard about the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers who threw himself off the George Washington bridge after his roommate broadcast live video of him having sex with another man on the Internet. It’s a terribly sad story in itself, and because, as L.M. Fenton points out on Salon’s Broadsheet blog, the suicide rate among LGBT youths is such an “an enormous, devastating problem.” In the past month four other gay teens have also killed themselves, two of them only 13 years old.
None of these other deaths caught the attention of Pierce Harlan, a prominent Men’s Rights blogger. But today on his False Rape Society blog, Harlan decided to write about Clementi — apparently because the case gave him the perfect excuse to rail against … feminists.
Why? Because the male roommate who broadcast the streaming video, and his female accomplice, weren’t, er, white. And one of them isn’t a man. “Gay tormentors who drove young man to suicide don’t fit the stereotype, do they?” the headline asks.
It’s a perplexing headline for a perplexing article. Neither of the accused are gay; I will charitably assume Harlan called them “Gay tormenters” because their actions caused harm to a gay man, not because Harlan has somehow convinced himself that they are themselves gay. Or has he? After briefly lamenting the tragedy, Harlan gets to his real agenda:
[T[he alleged perpetrators don’t exactly fit the stereotype of white heterosexual males seeking to perpetuate their supposed supremacy by attacking the oppressed, now do they?
In the three remaining paragraphs Harlan manages to work in three more references to “white heterosexual males,” and one to “white male jocks,” sexual orientation unspecified. Huh? Neither of the accused are “white heterosexual males,” per se, but they’re both heterosexual, and Dharun Ravi, the one who allegedly set up the camera, put the video feed on the internet, and told other people to come and watch, is definitely male. But no matter. Harlan moves on to his main point:
Trust me. If the perpetrators here had been two white heterosexual male jocks, the feminist blogosphere would be having a conniption.
Because feminists only discuss crimes when the perps are white men? Have you ever heard of OJ? And, actually, the case is being discussed widely by feminists online, on, among other places, explicitly feminist blogs like Feministing and Shakesville, on Salon’s Broadsheet blog and the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, and in Reddit’s TwoXChromosomes subreddit, which is where I first heard about it. It’s also being discussed on numerous feminist-friendly LGBT blogs. Given that the victim in this case was male, wouldn’t it make sense that the case get some attention from MRAs? I haven’t seen it discussed on any Men’s Rights blogs other than Harlan’s. Apparently MRAs don’t care much about gay men, unless their deaths can be used to score a cheap political point.
You know, I didn’t bother reading the whole thing, which has something to do with Carl Paladino, and apartheid, and elephant poking, whatever that means, but this little nugget stood out in the latest post on In Mala Fide, a generally retrograde Men’s Rights-ish blog:
