Earlier this week, as you may recall, Men’s Rights Redditors pretended they were shocked – shocked! – that anyone might think that MRAs had anything to do with the doxing and harassment of that red-haired Canadian activist we’ve been discussing. Couldn’t be them! Had to be … trolls!
Then on Wednesday the Men’s Rights Redditors found a blog post by a woman claiming to be a “conservative feminist” with a recently minted doctorate who was working in her alma mater’s admissions office — and, she claimed, rejecting out of hand all the applications that she thought were “dripping with white male privilege.”
If true, this would be an incredibly shitty and obviously discriminatory thing to do. Trouble is, it smells like a hoax.
But Men’s Rights Redditors were pig-biting mad nonetheless. Commenters attacked the possibly imaginary blogger as a “bitch,” a “twat,” a “skag,” and (yes) a “cunt.” “Can we just agree some people deserve to be put down?” a Redditor with the lovely name Blow-it-out-your-ass helpfully added.
And calls went up to … dig up all her personal information and try to get her fired. In other words, to dox the hell out of her.
Other Men’s Rights Redditors argued against doxing, but it was too late: A Men’s Rights Redditor by the name of HarlequinzEg0 had already gone a-doxing, digging up what he said was her personal information and posting some of it to the subreddit.
But there were a couple of little problems with this – blatant hypocricy, the fact that the blog might be fake, and the fact that HarlequinzEg0 was IDing the wrong woman. (See my post here for proof.)
Oh, there was one other problem: that Reddit has rules against doxing; the mods of the site’s assorted subreddits are supposed to report and ban doxers.
That’s not exactly what happened here. Yes, Men’s Rights mods did remove some posts with personal information in them.
But then a couple of the mods, instead of banning HarlequinzEg0, instead offered him and any other potential doxers advice on how to skirt the doxing ban – and still make sure that Men’s Rights Redditors could get hold of all the juicy info the doxers were able to dig up.
Some of the incriminating comments are now gone, but happily for everyone I happened to screencap them when I first saw them appear. These aren’t formatted properly for this blog, but if you click on the image you’ll get a bigger version, and I suggest that you do read it. You’ll see both handsomemod and sillymod chiming in with advice on skirting the doxing ban in such a transparent manner that it would be obvious to anyone that it violates Reddit’s rules.
What happened next was kind of amazing. A site admin actually stepped in and banned both handsomemod and HarlequinzEg0, and issued a stern warning to sillymod that if this behavior continued the whole subreddit could be shut down.
The threat to ban the whole subreddit is almost certainly a hollow one, and intortus said nothing about the link to the doxing-obsessed site A Voice for Men in the Men’s Rights subreddit sidebar, but, hey, having Reddit call them on even a small fraction of their bullshit is something lovely to behold. Head over to Reddit to watch this controversy as it continues to unfold.
There are several relevant threads in Againstmensrights, SRSMeta, and of course SubredditDrama. I’m sure there are many appalling things to be found within them.
As I finished this up, I saw that A Voice for Men has run a post identifying someone they think is the blogger. As I mentioned above, they’ve got the wrong person. More on A Voice for Men’s massive doxing incompetence here.
The use of the word “privilege” and constant muaha-ha-ha-ing in that blog post are pretty typical of right-wing types trying to satirise progressive writing. Admittedly, quite a few progressive types lean towards being pretty easy to parody (, comrades and comrade-identifying folks!), but you need more than the MRA level of writing savvy.
Reblogged this on iheariseeilearn.
I will admit I cackled with glee at them being told off. Bravo.
Somewhat OT but in GWW’s most recent video, she completely ignores the death/rape threats and “I know where you live” comments that Red-haired feminist received, claiming the only comments she remembers seeing that was very angry sounding on David’s post on the matter was the person who said Red was an embarrassment to real feminists.
Quite the selective reading she’s got there, not to mention flat out lying by omission and not at all mentioning that Red’s PERSONAL INFORMATION is now online…but hey, according to her she can’t imagine aaaanyone harming Red or other UofT feminists so they should “get big girl pants”
Yes. That’s her response death/rape threats and doxxing. Smugly Mocking and pretending all that fear is just completely baseless and because she thinks no one will act on them means it’s completely irrelevant.
GWW and MRAs are vile, disgraceful human beings. Can you honestly imagine if this happened to one of theirs and some feminist told them to pull their big boy pants in response? the internet would explode.
If anything though this video proves what a liar she is, and how she will omit facts to suit her agenda. I mean jesus christ you’d think despite differences in opinion we can all agree that doxxing and rape/death threats are wrong but nope! MRAs will defend the indefensible, because if it involves a feminist being harassed and victimized then it MUST be ok, or no big deal or whatever. The bias…it buuuuuurns!!!
Remember the trolly outrage when David linked to people’s Youtube accounts? Yeah. Me too. I’m sure those guys will be super angry about this. Right?
I hate to derail with procedure and such, but the other problem with the supposed scandal is that admissions just don’t work like that. No school would have a set up where a single, it sounds like fairly junior, staff member could reject applications on her own say so. The stack of admissions folders I have to read each year (not at GU, but I checked and their system seems quite similar) is evidence of the fact that applications get reviewed by a number of people, including faculty members. Where I am, and I would be surprised if it were different at GU, even applications that are dismissed early on for “mechanical” rwasons (e.g., TOEFL scores below our cut-off) get signed off on by a member of the senior admin staff and the senior faculty member who chairs the admissions committee (he has to read EVERY file, and I don’t envy him his job at all).
What made it sound fake to me is a recent PhD. staying on at their school. That rarely happens in academia. And in the admissions office? Bullshit.
I read the AVfM post last night and could not stop laughing at the idiocy of the commenters. Anyone who thinks that certificate equals Ph.D. and that admissions officers are grad students hired at the last minute is seriously ignorant, and also incapable of logical reasoning. If I was this girl, I would sue the hell out of all these assholes for libel, but of course, that poor girl is too busy saving the world to give a rat’s ass about these useless fools. Thanks for doing the Lord’s work, David, you handsome devil.
Oh! And someone showed up in the AVfM post and pointed out why the girl could not be the blogger, and OF COURSE the little circle jerk of MRAs adamantly refused to believe blatant proof that they could not be the same person. Like…did not even allow that this could be a possibility. Their counterargument was, “Why are you showing up to defend [the girl] if you don’t even know her that well?” Because, um, that’s what decent people do. Good grief. What little circle jerk of dummies.
This is all clearly a load of rubbish, but MRA’s will leap on any sliver of a story that fits with their way of looking at the world, no matter how little credibility it has or how little evidence that it is true.
And then they love to claim that Feminists and Women are “irrational” and “illogical” and don’t engage in critical thinking.
“The threat to ban the whole subreddit is almost certainly a hollow one”
Just let me dream, would ya?? Can you imagine?
I went to the site to try and see their response to the site admin, but couldn’t find the post.
As to whether the blog post is fake or not, all I can say is that I would expect someone with a degree in women’s studies to be able to spell the word “privilege.”
My particularly favorite moment was when MRAs infiltrated the post on SubredditDrama and began a downvote brigade on any anti-MRA comments. I believe one of the comments went so far as to accuse SRS of brigading the thread, citing as evidence the fact that a specific anti-MRA comment “had more upvotes than downvotes” but of course by the time I reached the thread, the MRAs had begun their own brigade and that post stood at negative with far more downvotes than upvotes. So what does that prove, hmm?
@Quackers
Wow. O_o More reasons for me to loathe GWW. Ugh, on one hand all of this stuff is really getting to me recently, on the other hand I love hanging out here and talking with you guys. ::trying to figure out if I need a break from all this manosphere stuff::
@ms getta lode
*dreams with you* I’d love it if they were shut down… *happy sigh of imagining*
Eh, they’re probably just going to populate a subreddit like r/masculinism. And the same ol’ shit will start again.
I’ve never seen such terrible internet harassment in my life regarding the red-haired feminist and this lady. Trying to get her fired? Really? What good would that do, they’d only be ousted for the scum that they are.
Boy, is this nice to see.
Also, ignoring context and very often content to suit their agenda is GWW’s strength.
Or maybe they’d decide that Reddit as a whole was irreparably overrun with feminists and lackeys and there would be a wholesale exodus. Hey, while we’re daydreaming…
“Or maybe they’d decide that Reddit as a whole was irreparably overrun with feminists and lackeys and there would be a wholesale exodus. Hey, while we’re daydreaming…”
I like the sound of that! *dreams along with everyone else*
Yeah like when GWW tried to make the argument that patriarchy is better than matriarchy because the of the two species closest to us, chimps and bonobos, the matriarchal bonobos are going extinct. She conveniently left out that chimps are also going extinct and the cause of both is humans poaching them and destroying their habitat.
Random and off topic, but super annoying. I posted on cheeseburger and my comment got moderated. What got posted was…..not okay.
When I said vagina (because that was what the post I commented was about) it got changed to “special area” and when I said penis it got censored to P***s. WTH.
Wow.
@melody
that is so weird. Also really vague. If I saw ‘special area’ and could get it out of context I’d assume the comment was about the whole area (vulva? I suck at anatomy names) instead of just the vagina. Gah, I hope that made sense.
http://np.reddit.com/r/college/comments/1clvpz/i_hope_this_bitch_isnt_reading_your_application/c9hx6io
Better special area than pit of despair.
When I did life-drawing classes back in the 80s our teacher said he he was going to refer to the “pubic area” and didn’t want any silly giggling (this to a class of seventeen-year-olds – he had Buckley’s chance). We promptly dubbed it the Unspecified Pubic Area.
Stupid WordPress – changing my handle between one post and the next!
Knowing MRAs, they’ll refuse to learn anything from this and probably will get banned, at which point Paul Elam will write yet another awful rant about how mean Reddit is. I can’t wait!
wanna hear a joke?
men’s rights.
@Kittehs’: And ‘ow’d yer get to be queen, then? I didn’t vote for yer!
@Falconer – that’s cos it was a secret ballot!
(No watery tarts handing out swords, neither.)
test to see if I can embed links
does this work too?