Collage of images from the PhilosophyOfRape subreddit
For a social media site with pretensions to respectability, Reddit shows an astounding tolerance for hate. As anyone who has ever explored the site’s dark underbelly knows well, the site hosts a vast array of subreddits devoted to celebrations of such things as “white pride” and violence against women.
The latest addition to this archipelago of awfulness is a 3-day-old subreddit with the pretentious and appalling name PhilosophyOfRape, set up by a user of the same name in order to promote and celebrate “corrective” rape of “sluts” and “harlots.”
In a manifesto announcing the subreddit to the world, the user known as PhilosophyOfRape set forth his basic thesis, which he insists is as “serious as a heart attack.”
So last night I discovered the PunchableFaces subreddit. That’s right, an entire subreddit devoted to posting pictures of people so that Redditors can fantasize about doing them bodily harm.
While most of the pictures in the subreddit are of boys and men – some targeted for being “faggots” – the recent posts (as of this writing) with the greatest number of upvotes and comments were, naturally, aimed at women. Specifically, at two outspoken feminists who’ve been singled out by Men’s Rights Activists and #GamerGaters for endless harassment: video game critic Anita Sarkeesian and Canadian feminist activist Chanty Binx, perhaps better known amongst her enemies as “Big Red.”
I’ve been so busy the last several days I forgot to put up a link to this interview I did with a writer from Vice. Check it out!
I’m happy with the interview overall. Though I should point out that my comments were edited somewhat, and there are a few places where the writer removed some of the context and/or simplified what I said by removing some qualifying statements. Thus, for example, where I talk about how rape threats towards men have less of an impact, I don’t want to suggest that no men outside of prison fear rape; obviously that’s untrue, and obviously there are many men outside of prison as well as inside who have been raped. What I was trying to say — and what I suspect would be much clearer in the unedited transcript of my interview — is that the typical (straight, cis) man outside of prison doesn’t spend much time worrying about rape, and is much less likely to take rape threats seriously than women, who have every reason to take them much more seriously.
4Channers discover that Zoe has been spying on the #IRC channels where they’ve been planning and coordinating their “raid.”
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
Ah, sweet schadenfreude! The gamebros at 4chan have been insisting publicly that the whole #GamerGate campaign — you know, the vicious attacks on game developer Zoe Quinn and other women in gaming — has been a spontaneous grassroots uprising against corruption in the world of game journalism, not a targeted campaign by misogynistic 4channers and their allies to ruin the lives of Quinn and everyone even vaguely connected with or even just aligned with her.
Well, it’s just become a lot harder to make that argument with a straight face. Last night, Quinn announced that she’s been lurking in the IRC where 4chaners have been diligently and often quite deviously planning this “spontaneous” uprising. And she’s started posting screenshots that seem to offer pretty incontrovertible evidence of just how duplicitously 4channers planned every element of #GamerGate.
Hat of choice for the discerning Men’s Rights Activist
Men’s Rights Activists have become known, not without reason, as belligerent assholes whose main forms of “activism” consist of harassment and threats.
One bold Men’s Rights Redditor known as El Rellok thinks he’s come up with a way to counteract this perception and deliver a powerful men’s-rightsty message at the same time.
He wants MRAs to send feminists … pictures of bloody feathers. No, really.
Now, to most people, getting a bloody feather in your email inbox would seem to be the digital equivalent of having a bloody horse’s head left in your bed. But in El Rellok’s world it is a rational and reasonable way to express “outrage” at feminist evil, and anyone who might possibly think otherwise is by definition unreasonable.
Let’s let him explain, because I certainly can’t explain how sending pictures of bloody feathers to someone you hate could be construed as anything but threatening:
Bloomfield, for her part, is suggesting that it might have to do with some cakes she was baking. No, really:
So it seems that my account on Twitter has been suspended. I find that odd since most of my most recent tweets have been about baking a wedding cake. Not exactly controversial. I suspect some sort of automatic response was triggered when a lot of people simultaneously reported me for abuse but I have no idea.
Naturally, Bloomfield’s comrades at A Voice for Men have spun this as “Judgy Bitch was censored for a cake!”
So how much do some angry gamebros hate Anita Sarkeesian? Enough to send me death threats … for writing about the death threats sent to Anita Sarkeesian.
Shortly after my post on the threats against Sarkeesian went up on Thursday, I got these messages sent to me as anonymous “asks” on Tumblr. These were all in succession, in this order; I’m pasting each one individually instead of the whole bunch at once so you can read them in the order in which I got them. [TRIGGER WARNING: Violent threats; I’m putting them past the jump.]
On Monday, Anita Sarkeesian posted the latest installment of her Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games series on YouTube, a half-hour examination of the ways in which video game makers use sexualized violence against women as a cheap way to spice up their narratives and appeal to straight male gamers.
Her tone was measured, her analysis clear and logical and supported by dozens of clips from a wide assortment of games.
A Voice for Men’s grandly titled First International Conference on Men’s Issues wound down a week ago. But the drama continues.
Today, in a post on AVFM, maximum leader Paul Elam set forth a series of accusations against the Doubletree Fort Shelby Hotel (where the conference was originally going to be held); against an unnamed security contracting company in Houston; and even against some hypothetical “privileged little college girls” who might have had the conference booted from the Doubletree by simply making a couple of irate phone calls, because, at least in Elam’s imagination, “privileged little college girls” have that power.
But the bulk of Elam’s complaints lie with the Doubletree, as the typically understated title of his post makes clear:
Jessica Roy, a reporter for Time magazine covering A Voice for Men’s recent :”Men’s Issues” conference in Detroit, found herself the target of a vitriolic tirade from AVFM maximum leader Paul Elam before she even sat down to write her account of her time amongst the MRAs.
Elam, evidently incensed about a handful of sarcastic remarks that Roy tweeted during the conference, denounced her as, among other things, a “hack,” “a liar and bigot” and a practitioner of “journalistic scumtardery,” whatever that is. Commenters on A Voice for Men happily joined in the hate, denouncing her as an “airhead,” a “disgrace and a liar,” “lil’ miss hair-o’or-her-eyes,” and a “little asshole [who] will look like a right nazi in five-to-ten years time.” Amazingly, no one pulled out the c-word. Evidently AVFMers are still on their best behavior.
Roy’s “What I Learned as a Woman at a Men’s Rights Conference” appeared on Time.com on Wednesday. Far from the hack job Elam and pals were predicting, her piece turned out to be a long, thoughtful and nuanced account that, while skeptical of AVFM and its brand of hateful nonsense, displayed considerable sympathy for some of the troubled men she met at the conference, men who could benefit from a movement that truly tried to offer solutions for men in difficulty instead of encouraging them to scapegoat feminists and women.
Reflecting on her discussions with several conference attendees, Roy wrote,
