So yesterday, I appeared (albeit very briefly) on TheStream on Al Jazeera English along with Helen Lewis of the New Statesman, social media researcher Alice Marwick, Skepchick blogger Rebecca Watson, and others. The topic: online misogyny and harassment of women. No sooner had the show ended than I ran across two perfect examples of precisely the sort of misogynistic harassment we’d just been talking about, courtesy of Reddit and Roosh.
First, Reddit. On Monday, Forbes columnist Kashmir Hill – female, beep boop! – wrote a piece mocking the notion (apparently widespread in some circles) that in these hyper-connected days people without Facebook accounts are a bit suspect. But part way along towards making her point she committed the terrible error of making the following not-to-be-taken-literally remark:
We’re “addicted” to our iPhones, and Facebook, and Twitter, and Android, and Pinterest, and iPads, and Word with Friends, and fill-in-the-blank-with-your-digital-dope-of-choice.
Not literally true, or meant to be taken as such, but a fairly commonplace observation.
Yet it managed to enrage one dude in a Reddit discussion of her piece, who offered this response (which I am hoping is also not to be taken literally):
To the writer: I’m not addicted to any of that, you stupid cunt.
Damn, this “article” is so full shit I’m seriously considering becoming a mass murderer.
This being Reddit, his comment got, last I checked, ONE THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND FIVE upvotes, and 727 downvotes, for a net score of 1071.
Never mind that the Forbes writer put “addiction” in ironic quotes. Never mind that she was suggesting it’s a bad idea to assume that anyone without a Facebook account is a psychopath.
None of that matters, because a dude on Reddit who obviously only skimmed the first paragraph of her piece decided she needed to be taken down a peg.
HOW DARE SHE MENTION PINTEREST I’M NOT ADDICTED TO THAT SHIT I ONLY SPEND MOST OF MY LIFE ON REDDIT POSTING DOZENS OF COMMENTS A DAY.
(Which the guy actually does, by the way.)
I doubt that many of the upvoters really had much of an opinion of the issues at hand; they were, I imagine, just happy for the chance to upvote some dude calling a woman on the internet a cunt.
Meanwhile, over on Blag Hag, skeptic blogger Jen McCreight found herself the target of a fellow we here at Man Boobz have been coming to know quite well: Roosh “When No Means Yes” Valizadeh, the, er, dating guru. McCreight, you see, recently took aim at a post of Roosh’s that argued, with the help of a little homemade chart, that educated women are “boner killers.”
His response to her takedown? A tweet with her picture attached to it and the question “would you date this girl?”
Naturally, that was all it took to unleash a this torrent of tweets from Roosh’s fans:
Other dudes popped into her comments section and offered more detailed assessments of what they saw as her deficiencies in the boner-inducing department. According to a fellow called Karl:
Your overall level of physical attractiveness (negative 10, if your photo is anything to go by) is enough to keep self-respecting, non-totally-desperate men away from you. Misogynistic or not. Your level of education has nothing to do with it.
Happily, McCreight has thick skin, and doesn’t particularly care that men she finds repugnant aren’t interested in dating her. But not everyone does.
As harassment goes, these aren’t even particularly egregious examples. This is just the sort of stuff that happens every single day to women on the internet who have the temerity to say things that some dude, or some dudes, don’t much like.
Ironically, I wrote about the same Roosh post more than a year ago. Yet none of his fans showed up in the comments here to tell me they wouldn’t date me.
Oh, sure, I get lots of shit from the MRAs of the world. Heck, after hearing about my Al Jazeera appearance, our old friend ThePigman had this to say about me on Reddit yesterday:
For the sake of those who will be watching i really hope Dave wears both his paper bag and a girdle.
But the thing is, I’ve written literally 800 posts about misogynist assholes like ThePigman and Roosh, and the worst thing they can think to say about me (aside from pointing out my weight) is that I’m a not a real man – that I’m a “mangina,” a “dickless wonder,” “such a girl,” “Little Ms. David.” (Those last three quotes are from some of the first truly nasty comments I got back on this blog shortly after starting it in 2010. ThePigman, with his talk of girdles, continues on in this fine tradition.)
As the case of Forbes’ Kashmir Hill and her Reddit detractors above makes clear, women can get even more violent responses after writing only a single sentence that somehow, even due to a gross misreading, pisses off some dude on the internet.
the thing that never ceases to amaze me about mras is their boundless capacity to behave like fucking children
I read that on Blag Hag. Wow. I keep coming away from all this woman-hatred just being flabbergasted, mainly because the men I know are, you know, actual human beings. I have not actually encountered this hatred in what some people call meat space. It really horrifies me and shakes me up. In which I guess I’m just hopelessly naive. I feel like throwing up.
It’s like a bottomless pit of woman-hate, isn’t it.
Oof. So much butthurt they have. Even found some on Esquire, but he tried to take it all back at the end.
http://www.esquire.com/_mobile/features/thousand-words-on-culture/contempt-of-women-0912?src=rss
All that hate and these guys claim their gender has superior logic.
That was a stellar example of a man whining there on Esquire. Goodness.
Well, my disdain for reddit is slowly expanding to include the internet as a whole.
He says, on the internet.
We’re not that bad, are we?
I think I’m going to go back to my high school dream of building a house somewhere in the Sierras and living alone with no electricity.
I mean it will be hard to be a mad scientist that way, but at least I won’t have to talk to anyone ever.
I fail.
I’m a regular reader of Blag Hag and somehow I managed to miss that post. *Facepalm* (Though I did see the latest one on the topic of AVfM-on-the-Mars-landing that links to the post here). Thanks for link though!
(Also I missed the Roosh one before that too apparently, I are super fail.. But, d’awwwwwwwww, Pixel!)
And yet, Reddit dude would likely argue that feminists are the ones who are always angry. He must be exhausted, flying off the handle every time any woman says anything.
In what language was that Esquire article written? Those words look familiar, but none of the sentences make sense.
@clairedammit its cause they’re using the Russian/Spanish alphabet, i think… 🙂
Well, I come here because y’all are as sharp as a razor and your wicked clever takedowns make me feel better about humanity.
I wonder I’d MRA will ever be properly diagnosed as a social disorder?
That Esquire piece was an unsupported steaming pile. Double for the Reddit and Roosh BS.
Oh my god, that Esquire column. My favorite passage:
Michelle Obama loves to describe her husband’s morning breath and struggles with smoking and failure to put away his socks. Her pull quote: “He’s a gifted man, but he’s just a man.” Got that, boys? You can be editor of the Harvard Law Review, first African-American president, director of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, loving husband and father, and an innovator of “absorption marijuana ingestion” to boot, but in the end “just a man.”
Um…yes? Is there supposed to be a point where you level up at Man and become the Starchild or something? What does he want Obama to say, “He’s a gifted man, and therefore he can fly and lightning shoots from his penis”?
It’s such a weird column. It’s like he realizes halfway through that his thesis is ridiculous, so he reverses his position and then just kind of trails off.
Also, I call no more using “Sex and the City” as proof of any current trends involving the evils of women. It’s been off the air for almost ten years. I know there were movies, but sheesh.
Some years ago, because of a Mafia joke I made, I posted as “La Piovra”, a grammatical feminine which, like “Cosa Nostra” and “Mafia” itself, designates a criminal syndicate whose members are mostly male. That in itself was enough to make me the target of incandescent filth…on CNN, which carefully screened out words like “Constitution” and “tectonic plates”, but ignored the grossest forms of personal abuse. I feel like there is a deliberate attempt to *normalize* this behavior, and wouldn’t be surprised if the upsurge in pathological misogyny were being stoked by deliberate agitators who don’t believe it themselves but need useful idiots.
@Shaenon, Perhaps this would mollify him:
1. “He’s a gifted man, but in the end, he is a God on earth.”
2. “He’s a gifted man, but in the end, he is my lord and master.”
3. “He’s a gifted man, but in the end, because I am a woman, i suck.”
“Sex and the City” is long gone, so thank goodness “Girls” has come along to fill the “TV show I haven’t actually watched, but I hear it’s about chick stuff and the lead chick isn’t even hot, so it must be some man-hating feminist thing” void.
I’ve gotten some of that. It’s interesting to see here… when some misogynist shitbird thinks I’m female, I get various levels of disparagement. When they find out I’m male, it’s usually “mangina”, white knight (NWO liked that one for a while) or the like, then some serious engagement then (more often then not, e.g. Varpole), I get ignored.
The female commenters here get people who make a point of attacking them, for being female. Some (I’m looking at you Al, Brandon) move from one to the next, as the target of their abuse proves to more than they can handle.
Oh no, you said the name! You said the name!
Is … is it all that unusual? I thought everyone’s did. No, I kept my eyes to myself in the locker room.
Are you sure? Huh.
Excuse me, I had better call my doctor.
@Pecunium: I am sometimes amused at their angry flailing when they discover that some of us speak more than just English.
It’s like they’re desperate to convince everyone that learning another language is So Very Not Cool.
yeah… I’m living on the edge like that I trust the Wards of Power, with the Glyphs of Protection Dave set up will keep him at bay.
I also figure that if he’s stalking us… it strokes his ego to see people talk around him, as if he were more than just stultifying.