Category Archives: not-quite-explicit threats
Facebook: Page advocating murder of feminist blogger “doesn’t violate our community standard on bullying and harassment.”
Several months ago, you may recall, feminist activists got Facebook to agree to remove blatant sexist hate speech from its site — much to the chagrin of many Men’s Rights Activists, like Paul Elam of A Voice for Men, who declared, in a post filled with alarmist rhetoric, that “feminist ideologues are co-opting Facebook, and they will root out any and all opposition to their worldview.” AVFM’s John Hembling, meanwhile, denounced the feminist activists as “fascists.”
Ever since then, Men’s Rights activists have been playing a game of “gotcha” with Facebook, trying to prove that the hate-speech monitors there only care about misogynist hate speech, and don’t actually care about hate speech directed at men. Every few days, it seems, there is a new thread in the Men’s Rights subreddit purporting to document this alleged “double standard.”
Ten days ago, for example, a Men’s Rights Redditor called dizzy_j got nearly 400 upvotes for a post complaining that “I reported three anti-men Facebook pages for gender-based hate speech today. Only one was removed.” Six days ago, DerDietrich got 580 upvotes for submitting this supposed evidence of a double standard. Trouble is, you can’t actually prove a double standard with a handful of examples.
But I would like to suggest an alternate hypothesis, which also fits the anecdotal data provided thus far by the MRAs, and provide an additional piece of anecdotal evidence that supports my theory and undercuts theirs.
My hypothesis is that Facebook is shitty at recognizing and dealing with hate speech and harassment, no matter whom it’s aimed at.
My evidence for this? Well, yesterday bloggers at Skepchick noticed a Facebook page targeting a specific feminist/skeptic blogger and asking if she “should … be murdered.” The anonymous poster — who identified her by name and posted pictures of her on the page — coyly avoided a literal call for murder, writing instead:
We should not ever break the law. Rather, we should advocate , through lawful land constitutional processes, to have the law changed so that it is legal to kill [name redacted by DF]. Alternatively, we should, where legal, request that [name redacted by DF] kill herself. Relevant laws should be changed so that suicide, and advocating suicide, is legal.
The Skepchick bloggers reported the page to Facebook for its obvious violations of the site’s harassment policies.
And they received this reply from Facebook (I’ve covered up the blogger’s name):
I think it’s fair to say that if Facebook can’t recognize a page calling for the literal murder of someone as harassment there is something very wrong with its system for dealing with harassment and hate speech.
The page has since been taken down, though it’s not clear if it was removed by Facebook or by the original anonymous Facebooker.
Get your act together, Facebook.
For A Voice for Men, and its Edmonton offshoot, terrifying women is a form of “human rights activism.”
Men’s Rights Edmonton activist at work
So the self-described “human rights activists” at A Voice for Men have found three more women to harass. Here’s the story, which for many of you will have a depressingly familiar ring:
Members of Men’s Rights Edmonton, a small group that is for all intents and purposes a local chapter of A Voice for Men, has been putting up pictures targeting Lise Gotell, the chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta. The pictures, which seem inspired by “Wanted” posters of yore, feature a large portrait of Gotell and the caption:
Roosh pal: Attack on Pax Dickinson is “like a gang of angry, deformed and diseased street cripples overcoming a confident and successful alpha male.”
Roosh: A baby Hitler for the Internet age?
So I want to move on from the whole Pax Dickinson thing, but I feel I would be remiss to do so without first mentioning a remarkable post on Roosh’s Return of King blog with the seemingly innocuous title Pax Dickinson And The Culture Of Tolerance. Written by a Roosh forum regular who goes by the name scorpion (nice), the post is ostensibly a critique of alleged “cultural Marxists” whom, he charges, “claim to be tolerant of everything [yet] are … intolerant of traditional masculine behavior … .”
But his post is in fact a plea for intolerance so over the top that, save for some manosphere-specific jargon, and its focus on “feminists, white knights, manginas, fat acceptance activists and homosexuals” rather than, you know, Jews, it might as well have come straight from the pages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Killing an ex-wife: A Men’s Right?
Evidently it is, at least according to these Men’s Rights Redditors and the people who upvoted them:
Oh, I know, they were JOKING. Pretty hilarious joke there, fellas!
I’ve got a few more based on the same formula:
How many [insert name of group you don't like] does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
It only takes one to “accidentally” electrocute themselves doing this routine household chore, if you catch my drift, nudge nudge.
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Why did the chicken cross the road?
I don’t know but it would be a shame if he didn’t make it all the way across if you know what I mean.
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Knock knock
Who’s there?
It would be a shame if the person you let in the door were to murder your family, hint hint.
Yeah, those really aren’t jokes, per se, are they?
Thanks to Cloudiah for pointing me to this lovely little Men’s Rights subreddit exchange.
The Facebook/Feminist Plot to Destroy Free Speech, Male Liberty, and 10-13% of A Voice for Men’s Traffic
Evil feminist removing male ideas from the Internet
Men’s Rights, er, activists are waving their arms frantically in the air over what they see as a dire new threat to men and manhood: Facebook’s recent annoucement that it was going to try to do a better job of taking down violent images mocking victims of rape and domestic violence, and other kinds of misogynistic hate speech.
Men Violent Because of Women, Says Man Who Hates Women
I blame women.
Over on This is Why MGTOW, the blogger who calls himself Cerberus Alpha (dude, seriously?) attempts to answer the question: Why are men more violent?
Rather than attempting to engage with the extensive scholarly literature on the subject, or even making a token effort to do any research on the subject whatsoever, Mr. Alpha instead spins a few familiar manosphere fairy tales into “evidence” that it’s all the fault of those evil sexy ladies and their evil sexy and/or feminist ways.
Misogyny as Activism: The Spearhead “On the Urgent Necessity of Criticizing Women.”
It’s all Carole Lombard’s fault.
There are many, many, many reasons why the Men’s Rights movement is not now, and I suspect never will be, ready for prime time. One of these reasons is that even when MRAs are doing their best to wax eloquent, in the fanciest language they can muster, about the urgent need for men to save civilization from the degradations of feminism and cultural Marxism and whatever by saying even more bad things about women, they just can’t keep themselves from using phrases like “pussy pass.”
Men’s Rights Redditor: Watch out ladies, or we’ll make Friend Zoning illegal!
So the Men’s Rightsers over on Reddit are getting worked up over the evils of women “friend zoning” men, and one especially angry fellow by the name of andreipmbcn has a warning for the ladies: if they don’t watch themselves, the men’s rights movement might just rise up and make friend zoning illegal:
What this means is not exactly clear to me. Would women actually be required to have sex with all men who are aggressively “nice” towards them? Who knows. But judging from the dozens of upvotes andre’s comment got, Reddit MRAs like the sound of it.
(Thanks to Cloudiah for pointing me to this lovely comment.)
MRAs at The Spearhead Blame Women, Feminism for Cleveland Abductions
So The Spearhead has weighed in on the Cleveland abduction cases, and has not failed to disappoint.
Spearhead head boy WF Price uses the terrible unfolding drama as an opportunity to attack the notion of patriarchy. His logic: the alleged abductors weren’t rich dudes, so therefore patriarchy is a lie. No, really, that’s his argument:
With courthouse violence on the rise, Men’s Rights activists continue to lionize the author of a terrorist manifesto urging men to burn down courthouses
Poster at a memorial event for Tom Ball, an MRA who advocated burning down courthouses and police stations.
EDIT 6/15/13: Tom Ball’s manifesto is no longer posted on A Voice for Men, though it isn’t clear if this is a website glitch or a change in policy on AVFM’s part; no announcement about taking it down has been made.
EDITED TO ADD: In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, it seems even more important to reinterate that influential Men’s Rights website A Voice for Men continues to host, in its “activism” section no less, a terrorist manifesto literally calling for the firebombing of courthouses and police stations. Until and unless that manifesto is removed, and A Voice for Men apologizes for hosting it, I will be linking to this post every time I mention A Voice for Men.
There has been another courthouse shooting. On Monday morning, the father of a man due in court for a child support hearing pulled out a semiautomatic handgun and shot his son’s ex wife and a friend of hers as they entered the lobby of the New Castle County Courthouse in Wilmington Delaware. After an exchange of gunfire with police that left two officers wounded, 68-year old Thomas Matusiewicz took his own life. The two women Matusiewcz shot were pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital.
