We’ve seen a lot of epic flip-floppery from Men’s Rightsers in the last few days on the subject of the Occidental College fiasco — that is, for those who haven’t been following it closely, the organized spamming of Occidental’s anonymous online rape reporting form with false reports by Reddit MRAs and 4channers. Notably, the Men’s Rights subreddit mod known as sillymod went from blaming the false reports on trolls one day to hailing them as necessary activism the next.
But a reader has alerted me to an even more epic flip-flop, this one from Pierce Harlan, a blogger obsessed with what he sees as an epidemic of false rape accusations.
This whole exchange is worth reading — it continues on for a number of comments beyond this, with sillymod’s rationalizations becoming increasingly baroque. It’s extremely rare to see critical remarks like those from TheIdesOfLight actually get upvoted in the Men’s Rights subreddit. The Occidental College fiasco has divided the Men’s Rights subreddit like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Some are appalled by it; others are digging in their heels.
Speaking of which, here’s former subreddit mod Celda defending the false rape reports in much more straightforward terms than sillymod:
Thanks to the AgainstMensRights subreddit — which, again, is not actually against rights for men, but against the reactionary clusterfuck that is the Men’s Rights movement — for keeping close track on all this.
This has to be my favorite quote to come out of the whole Occidental College fiasco; it’s staggering in its moral blindness and fanaticism and its complete lack of self-awareness. It also captures well the peculiarly self-defeating quality of so much Men’s Rights rhetoric and, er, “activism.”
At this point in the story, even the normally obtuse Men’s Rights Redditors realize they have a disaster on their hands, and are trying to blame anyone else they can.
But Hembling thinks it’s the perfect time to cheer on the false accusers amongst the MRAs.
That’s right: apparently jealous of all the attention Reddit MRAs have gotten for their cloddish “activism,” he’s decided to jump aboard this train — after it’s left the station, derailed, and fallen into a ravine.
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.
This headline is not only inflammatory but untrue: Yes, Occidental College has an online form that allows victims of or witnesses to sexual assault to report the incidents to the school. But, as a statement at the top of the form makes clear, the point is to collect data on how much sexual violence there is at the school, who the victims are, and so on.
If the person reporting the crime names the alleged perpetrator,
a member of the Dean of Students Office will meet with that person to share that the person was named in an anonymous report, review the Sexual Misconduct Policy, and inform the person that if the allegations are true, the behavior needs to cease immediately. Information shared in this form alone will not result in anyone going through the grievance process.
I’ve put the last bit in bold to emphasize a point: No one will be charged with anything based only on information gathered using this form. As would be clear to anyone who thought about the matter for more than a few seconds, it’s rather difficult to investigate, much less prove, a rape if you don’t actually know who the victim is.
Somehow this rather elementary fact eluded the OP, and virtually all of those who left the hundreds of comments on the popular post.
Indeed, a host of Men’s Rights Redditors were so convinced of the innate evil of the online form they all had the same bright idea: let’s flood the school with false reports of rape and break the form. Here are some of their comments. (There are more in the thread.) Note the number of upvotes each of these suggestions got. (Click the images to see the comments in context on Reddit.)
While a few commenters stood up to point out that in fact the school will not charge anyone with anything as a result of anonymous information gathered by the form, they were outnumbered by Men’s Rightsers gleefully reporting that they in fact had reported false information. Among them:
It’s one thing to criticize an anonymous reporting system because of its potential for abuse; this is something else entirely.
The post has been up for 17 hours at this point, with more than 700 net upvotes, and some of the calls for “breaking” the form have been up for nearly as long. The moderators of Men’s Rights have done nothing to stop their subreddit being used to interfere with a school’s attempt to assist rape survivors — including men.
“Breaking” a school’s rape reporting mechanism is apparently a form of Men’s Rights activism.
So a fellow over at Roosh Valizadeh’s Return of Kings blog has come up with a new way for men to “dominate” the women in their lives. And it’s inspired by … prison rape.
Let’s let him explain. The RoK writer who calls himself raywolf was allegedly hanging out with an alleged old friend of his who’d allegedly just gotten out of prison after 20 years for his part in an armed robbery in which a security guard was killed.
His friend “Jake” was apparently a bit taken aback by the changes that have taken place over the last several decades. Surprised by the ubiquity of tattoos amongst the general population, and by what he saw as a lot of “masculinized” women out there, he concluded that life outside of prison these days is a lot like life inside prison.
And this brings us to the prison rape. Or, as Jake prefers to call it, eliding entirely the issue of consent, sodomy:
Not the apology that Clint Carpentier is looking for.
We met new A Voice for Men writer Clint Carpentier earlier this week, when we took a look at a recent post of his waxing nostalgic about the good old days before marital rape laws, when wives couldn’t say “no” to their husbands and expect the law to take this no any more seriously than a husband intent on rape.
In a second posting, he’s doubled down on the whole marital rape thing and incorporated into a vast and fantastical vision of the past and future of humankind that bears so little resemblance to reality that it’s worth quoting in detail as a sort of case study in Men Going Their Own Way delusions.
Has A Voice for Men just declared itself in favor of marital rape?
In the midst of a long and otherwise fairly tedious piece complaining about wives asking their husbands to do their fair share of the chores, Clint Carpentier offers some rather startling thoughts on marital rape laws, and how he thinks they help to make marriage a losing proposition for modern men.
In the good old days, he writes, “sex was a wifely duty she was obligated to provide as per the terms of marriage.” But “since the advent of ‘marital rape,’ sex [in marriage] is no longer a loving duty, so it has become whim and weapon … .”
Yep. Apparently “being raped by your husband” is really just a way to fulfill your “loving duty” as a wife.
So, Carpentier concludes, if wives demand that you do the chores around the house, and you can’t rape them at will, what’s the point of even having one in the first place? After all, he argues, in an age of washing machines and readymade meals chores are easy, and men can get “once per day of blasé sex” from “any street-hooker” or splurge on “mind-blowing sex once a week [from] a well trained call-girl.”
And so, he writes,
If women are demanding that their husbands do their “fair share” of the chores, then why do men need wives at all? In man’s attempt to make their wives lives easier, they have reduced the wifely duties to next to non-existent. Why, women? Why oh why would you drive those final coffin nails of obsolescence in? Aside from children, there’s no benefit left to having a wife.
Well, if the only “benefits” you can see in having a wife are someone who will do the cooking and cleaning and whom you can rape at will, then, no, there is no benefit to you in having a wife now that marital rape is illegal. And there is certianly no benefit to any woman in marrying or dating or possibly even being in the same room as you.
Where have all the good men gone? Well… where have all the good women gone?
That’s right: A man who considers marital rape to be a husband’s right honestly thinks that he’s one of the good ones.
AVFM’s Paul Elam loves to rail against the evils of traditionalism and chivalry. Interesting that marital rape is one element of traditionalism he apparently has no problem with.
I’m pretty sure that feminists aren’t the ones expecting men to pay for dates, so I’m not sure why feminists should be held to account for something they’re not doing, but in any case, the Men’s Rightsers don’t seem much interested in hearing explanations from feminists. No, they’re rather offer their own theories.
Enter a new convert to Men’s Rightsism called MrKocha, who enlists the aid of SCIENCE to offer his own explanation of this terrible date injustice:
One of the issues that many Men’s Rights activists profess to be Very Concerned About is prison rape. This alleged concern translates into essentially zero actual activism beyond the occasional indignant reaction to someone making a terrible rape joke about men in prison. But then they’ll turn around and make similar rape jokes themselves.
That’s right: MRAs don’t only joke about rapes in which women are the victims. Like many Americans, sadly, quite a few MRAs seem to think that rape is an appropriate — and even sort of hilarious — punishment for men they don’t like.
![sillymod 6 points 7 hours ago (13|7) First you have to believe that we did something wrong in order to want to get our reputation back. Sometimes people fighting for a cause are going to do something that is unpopular in order to make a statement. I don't think we do need to get our reputation back. I think the act stands for itself, and it will get people to stop and think. permalink source save give gold hide child comments [–]TheIdesOfLight [+20] 15 points 4 hours ago (22|7) So I guess that whole "We were trolled"/"It was SRS!" bullshit is off the table? You can't pass the buck and convince yourselves everyone else is guilty but you and now it's become an act of bravery? Wow. Yeah, watching you flip flop on this for the past three days has been both alarming and rewarding. You didn't make any kind of statement, Sillymod. The entire internet and media is sneering at you and you still can't just say WE DID A TERRIBLE THING. PERHAPS WE SHOULD REFLECT ON IT AS A WHOLE. permalink source save parent give gold [–]ninioquiroz 6 points 3 hours ago (12|6) No, because that would require a level of maturity and self-awareness that this "movement" clearly lacks. But, does anybody else think feminists are to blame for all the world's problems?](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/sillymod2.png?resize=493%2C520&ssl=1)
![Celda [-1] 5 points 18 hours ago (9|4) I agree that the subreddit deserves some responsibility for that. But - there was nothing wrong with those actions. I saw the news articles in which it says they were spammed with hundreds of reports, of being raped by fictional characters, accusing the staff of the Dean's Office (the form is run by the Dean's Office), etc. Those reports are non-harmful - and the goal of shutting down the online form is quite a laudable one. I am actually quite disgusted by the number of people who are defending the existence of an anonymous online form intended for reporting people as rapists.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/celda.png?resize=521%2C231&ssl=1)
![johntheother [-37] -8 points 3 hours ago (11|19) "‘Men’s rights activists’ conspire to cripple college rape reporting system with false reports" GOOD! Go forward, brothers, and fuck their shit up. rape is a crime. If somebody has a report to file of being the victim of this crime - file that report with a POLICE ORGANIZATION, not with some jumped up kangaroo court or administrative star chamber. And when operating in an environment where the star-chamber rules - FTSU with the same fraudulent reports they've tuned their system to process against you. permalink source save give gold hide child comments [–]O-Fortuna 3 points 35 minutes ago (4|0) This came off so silly and juvenile I thought it was one of the troll comments the mods talked about, but you seem to be some kind of widely known mra. In favor of making false reports. Appalling.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/jtoonbrothers.png?resize=535%2C306&ssl=1)
![froggymorning 46 points 15 hours ago (59|13) I've already filled one out. permalink source parent save give gold hide child comments [–]Muffinizer1 6 points 7 hours ago (9|4) Was kind of fun. I swear to god though, if they track us down it would be terribly ironic, however it's mildly likely.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/froggy.png?resize=546%2C171&ssl=1)
