Men’s Rights Redditors discover a new woman to hate (and it’s one of the ones I wrote about in my last post)

Reading comprehension: a bit of a problem for the angry dude crowd. So in my post earlier today I wrote about a Redditdude who got so angry reading a relatively innocuous Forbes column by a WOMAN ON TEH INTERNET that he called her a “cunt” and threatened to murder people and got more than a thousand net upvotes. All based on a complete misreading of her article, of which he obviously only skimmed the first paragraph.

Well, now the Men’s Rights subreddit has gotten hold of the Forbes column, and they too are pig-biting mad – not so much at the column itself, which it’s clear not many of them have actually read, but at a straw column they’ve written in their heads which is nothing but EEEVIL MISANDRY.

To reiterate: Kashmir Hill’s column in Forbes notes that some people have come to regard people without Facebook accounts as somehow suspect in our hyper-connected world. Hill finds this a bit silly, and writes:

The idea that a Facebook resister is a potential mass murderer, flaky employee, and/or person who struggles with fidelity is obviously flawed. There are people who choose not to be Facebookers for myriad non-psychopathic reasons: because they find it too addictive, or because they hold their privacy dear, or because they don’t actually want to know what their old high school buddies are up to. My own boyfriend isn’t on Facebook and I don’t hold it against him (too much).

Note to the painfully literal: that parenthetical “too much” in the last sentence is what’s called a “joke.”

Naturally, Reddit’s Men’s Rights squad, not having read much beyond the sarcastic title of Hill’s piece (“Beware, Tech Abandoners. People Without Facebook Accounts Are ‘Suspicious.’”) has concluded that she’s an evil misandrist who’s demonizing men without Facebook as creepy psychopaths. Yes, in addition to getting the argument of her piece completely backwards, they’ve also decided that it’s all about men.

MauraLoona, who submitted the link under the misleading title “Men without Facebook: You’re suspicious and potential stalkers, creeps, and psychopaths” explains in a comment:

While the article uses gender neutral pronouns in some places, the message is obvious: This suspicion is directed at men.

I suspect this might be a case of xenophobia: “I am a woman and love technology, so if you’re a man and don’t share that love for technology, you’re suspicious.”

JohnTheOther, a virtuoso in the fine art of getting things wrong, offers this take:

Forbes, apparently is now in the business of creating boogiemen. No evidence of anything equates to evidence of sinister intent. What utter fear-mongering drivel.

And our old friend Liverotto concludes that when Hill says she doesn’t hold her boyfriend’s lack of a Facebook account against him (much), she’s just lying, like women do:

Yes, of course, she doesn’t hold it against him, that’s why she wrote a full article about people without Facebook being suspicious.

Women are just liars, that’s it, that’s all it is, liars and dissimulators, if you trust what a woman says you are naive.

MRAs really do live in imaginary backwards land, don’t they?