Category Archives: rape culture
A Voice for Men’s Honey Badgers ask: Why hasn’t Anita Sarkeesian been harassed MORE?
A Voice for Men’s so-called “Honey Badgers” — its little super-team of female MRAs, led by blabby Canadian videoblogger Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan — have a new theory about Anita Sarkeesian. And it’s a doozy.
Sarkeesian, you may recall, is a feminist cultural critic who’s faced pretty much nonstop harassment from misogynistic internet assholes since she launched a project to dissect sexist tropes in video games. AVFM has contributed, in its own special way, to this wave of harassment, with articles describing Sarkeesian as, among other things, a “moneygrubbing liar” and a “queen bee … girl interloper” in the world of video games; AVFM’s Dean Esmay also held her partially responsible, along with an assortment of other internet feminists, for the suicide of one Canadian Men’s Rights Activist.
The principals at AVFM have blamed her for — either inadvertently or deliberately - bringing this harassment on herself by going to 4chan and posting about her project. (As I noted in a previous post, there’s no actual evidence she ever did this.)
The Honey Badgers, for their part, are certain that getting harassed by 4chaners was part of her devious plan all along.
In a teaser for their internet “radio” show tonight, the “Honey Badger” known as TyphonBlue writes:
Like all professional damsels in distress, Anita Sarkeesian had to choose a good dragon. Just the right looming shadow to fall over her delicate and fragile sensibilities; just the right cackling stage-villain to inspire her cries of helpless horror.
She chose 4-chan. An internet forum known for it’s underbelly of foul-tempered and hair-triggered trolls.
Then, after accusing Sarkeesian of inviting countless rape and death threats upon herself (and only a portion of it from 4channers, I should add), the Badgers take their weird conspiracy theory one step further:
But we at Honey Badger Radio have noticed something… odd. The wave of so-called hate that Anita received from her carefully chosen dragon, wasn’t really all that bad.
Yeah. A year and a half (so far) of pretty much unending harassment and baseless criticism, complete with violent threats directed not only at her but at other women who have defended her — that’s nothing.
Compared to 4-chan’s usual scorched earth strategy–raizing [sic] everything to the ground and pissing on the ashes, Anita got a little singed, like she sat too close to a campfire.
So we have to ask… Did 4-chan white knight Anita? I mean, come on. Was that the best 4 chan could do?
Yes, that’s right. The Honey Badgers are accusing those who sent rape and death threats to Anita Sarkeesian … of “white knighting” her.
I can’t even.
Spearheaders: Prison rape is just fine, if the prisoner is Hugo Schwyzer
Prison rape jokes help to perpetuate rape culture
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.
For evidence of this, one needs look no further than a recent discussion on The Spearhead, in which WF Price’s followers fantasize about disgraced “feminist” and confessed almost-murderer Hugo Schwyzer being raped in prison.
A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam duped by obviously fake article on satirical website
Hamsters: Still less gullible than Paul Elam
How gullible is Paul Elam, grand pooh-bah of A Voice for Men? Well, he just wrote an frothingly angry denunciation of a Canadian business school dean based on an obviously phony story on a satirical website called The Syrup Trap. A website that declares at the top of the page that it is “Canada’s favourite humour magazine.” A website whose logo is a cartoon beaver with a plastic cup on its head.
A quick factchecking of yet another list of “misandrist” quotes reveals the same old MRA sloppiness and dishonesty
He’s making a list, but not checking it once.
The MRAs have a new list! A list of evil, man-hating quotations, that is. This list, put together by A Voice for Male Students, has a rather pretentious title: “The language of misandry in academia: a collection of quotes by faculty members, students, and administrators.”
A Voice for Men responds to Jaclyn Friedman’s takedown of the Men’s Rights movement with fart, fat, rape jokes
So A Voice for Men has finally responded to Jaclyn Friedman’s masterful takedown of the Men’s Rights movement:
No, sorry, my mistake. AVFM didn’t respond to her article by farting. It responded with an article accusing her of farting. No, really.
In an article with the fart-referencing title “Gone with Jaclyn’s wind,” AVFM “Honey Badger” Diana Davison tries to rebut Friedman with some really, really strained fart metaphors:
CDC: MRA claims that “40% of rapists are women” are based on bad math and misuse of our data
Feminists often complain, with considerable justification, that Men’s Rights Activists try to turn every conversation about women’s issues into a game of “what about the men?” You’re talking about female rape victims — well, what about the male rape victims?
The trouble with this strategy, from the point of view of the Men’s Rights Activists anyway, is that this little “gotcha” is much less of a “gotcha” then they’d like it to be.
In the case of rape, for example, feminists are well aware that men are raped as well: the “Don’t Be That Guy” ad campaign, which sent so many MRAs into hysterics, focused on male victims as well as female ones. The emergency room rape advocate organization that a friend of mine volunteers for provides advocacy for victims regardless of gender.
So many MRAs have started playing another game: trying to twist the conversation around in order to cast women as the villains. Rape is a bit tough for them here, since the overwhelming majority of rapists are male. So MRAs talk about the alleged epidemic of female false accusers instead. Or they change the topic entirely and make dead baby jokes (see my post yesterday).
Recently, MRAs have tried a new strategy, seizing on data from The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, a massive study conducted in 2010 under the aegis of the Centers for Disease Control, to claim that “40% of rapists are women.”
Men’s Rights website falsely accuses Ohio University student of being a false rape accuser
Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c): False accuser
Well, this is depressing. The Raw Story is reporting that
An Ohio University sophomore has deactivated her social media accounts and is afraid to leave her house after she was falsely identified as the woman who reported she’d been raped in an incident captured on cell phone video by a passerby.
The student, Rachel Cassidy, now falsely accused of being a false rape accuser, has had her personal information — not just her name but her address, the name of her sorority, her social media accounts, even her Pinterest page — listed on a Men’s Rights site called Crimes Against Fathers. (I won’t link to it.)
The man behind Crimes Against Fathers? None other than the notorious Men’s Rights extremist and crackpot Peter Andrew Nolan — or, as he prefers to be known, for reasons I don’t fully understand, Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c) . Apparently taking inspiration from Paul Elam’s Register-Her.com, Nolan’s site does what Register-Her only threatened to do: it actually releases the personal information of those it identifies as “Man-Hating Women.” He will even add names of women you don’t like to the list for a fee of $70 (Australian).
So far the site has several hundred women listed, most of them apparently women who have run afoul of Nolan or his most active lieutenant on the site, the pseudonymous “John Rambo” of “Boycott American Women” fame, either online or in real life. In most cases, luckily, the amount of personal information given out is relatively scanty and the number of people who’ve actually viewed the posts (which is listed on the site) has been small.
That’s not the case with Cassidy, whose life Nolan and “Rambo” have set out to ruin as thoroughly as they can. In addition to her personal information, the site has also dug up an assortment of pictures of her scraped from various sites on the internet.
And, unwilling to believe that she is not the woman in the video — and a false accuser of rape — the two have taken aim at those who’ve stepped forward to defend Cassidy. They’ve posted the personal information of Jenny Hall-Jones, the Dean of Students at Ohio University, for the “crime” of publicly saying that Cassidy is not the woman in the video, as well as several other women who’ve come out in support of Cassidy.
On Crimes Against Fathers, “Rambo” writes
[C]onsidering that women will always try to cover for their fellow women, and will NEVER hold their fellow women accountable, there is a very strong possibility that Jenny [Hall-Jones] is LYING and that Rachel Cassidy IS the girl in that video. This means that Jenny Hall-Jones is a CRIMINAL because she is covering up for the CRIME of making a false rape accusation. Therefore, she is a criminal and needs to be publicly exposed as such.
Neither “Rambo” nor Nolan has leveled similar accusations against Ohio University president Roderick McDavis, a man, though he too has said that the woman in the video is not Cassidy.
Men’s Rights activists like to say that Nolan isn’t really one of them. If this is the case, they should be willing to stand up and denounce his reprehensible actions, and the very idea of his Crimes Against Fathers “Man-Hating Women” directory.
EDITED TO ADD: I should note that Nolan’s site also has a “Name and Shame the IgnorMANuses” forum directed at alleged man-hating men, including Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad) and Nacho Vidal (the pseudonymous dude behind MGTOWforums.com). The list is considerably smaller than that of the Man-Hating Women directory, and none of the entries I saw listed any personal information that went much beyond links to Facebook pages.
Paul Elam of A Voice for Men: In His Own Words
[UPDATE: THE 20/20 STORY HAS BEEN POSTPONED ONCE AGAIN.] The long-awaited 20/20 story on the Manosphere is scheduled to run tonight — that is Friday, October 18 — at 10 PM EST on ABC. (I’ll open a thread for live chatting during the show.) The story will include interviews with Paul Elam of A Voice for Men, who is rather well-known already to readers of this website, to put it mildly.
Elam is probably, for better or worse, the most influential figure in the Men’s Rights movement (or, as he prefers to call it, the Men’s Human Rights Movement).
Elam is also a fierce misogynist with a penchant for angry, violent rhetoric full of only-slightly veiled threats. But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps the best way to get to know Mr. Elam is through his own words.
So here are some of Elam’s thoughts on a variety of issues, taken from postings on his website A Voice for Men. I have linked each quote back to its source on A Voice for Men.
What Matt Forney’s “Case Against Female Self-Esteem” Reveals About His Own Deep Insecurities
Matt Forney is desperate for attention; it’s as glaringly obvious as the giant MATT FORNEY that adorns the top of his blog, creatively named MATT FORNEY. And like some caricature of an emo teen “acting out,” the misogynistic manosphere blogger has decided that any attention — even bad attention — is better than no attention.
And so, perhaps at least dimly aware that his ideas are and his prose are both too lackluster to command much attention on their own, he seems to be trying to rile up as much of the internet as possible with posts that are deliberately designed to offend liberals and feminists and pretty much anyone who is not a woman-hating douchebag. He had a minor hit a this spring with a post entitled Why Fat Girls Don’t Deserve to Be Loved, which did in fact live up — that is, down — to its title.
Now he’s got an even bigger hit in a post titled The Case Against Female Self-Esteem.
Deprived of new women to hate in Toronto, A Voice for Menners resort to rape jokes, gay bashing
Nick Reading and Dean Esmay amongst the counterprotesters
Pity the poor MRAs who travelled hundreds — if not thousands — of miles to AVFM’s big weekend in Toronto hoping for a confrontation with the evil feminazis that never happened. They wanted footage of angry women they could watch again and again on YouTube. They wanted new names and faces to put up on Register-Her. In short, they wanted new women to hate.
But alas, the feminists, for the most part, stayed home. And the ones who showed up were mostly dudes, from the LBGT activist group BashBack. Making things even worse, they didn’t block any doors or try to crash AVFM’s rally. What they did, mostly, was chant things the MRAs didn’t like.
