And speaking of calling women every shitty name you can think of…ManBoobz looks at how Melody puts the bullies to shame.
Futrelle got a piece of hate mail which came from the admin account at mensrightsmelbourne.com, an Australian Men’s Rights site. There he saw yet another stupid hit-piece on Melody.
The post – most of which is plagiarised directly from The Daily Mail, including the title itself – is an attack on Melody Hensley, a feminist and skeptic who is the Executive Director of Center for Inquiry in Washington DC. Hensley, who in the past suffered intense harassment from misogynists in the skeptic movement and other assorted assholes, is now facing a second wave of harassment as a result of saying publicly that the earlier harassment had given her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
That’s right: she’s being harassed for saying that harassment so fucked up her life that it gave her PTSD.
She’s being harassed for being harassed. It’s strange how that works, isn’t it.
The “argument” of Hensley’s enemies? That she couldn’t possibly have gotten PTSD from “mean words” online. Men’s Rights blogger The Native Canadian put it this way:
PTSD from being a feminist on the internet? Yeah I bet she wakes up screaming at night because of all the mean words! Must be hard going day to day with flash backs of your friends being called “femnazi’s” right in front of you! How ever do you handle life? Fucking disgraceful b****. Let’s see her tell that to someone who really knows what living with PTSD is like. …
I’m sorry but I am totally shocked, I don’t know what else to say, other than, is there nothing sacred to these cat lovers?
And that’s pretty much the argument all of them make: based on nothing but their own vague notion that PTSD is a serious thing that only happens to soldiers, they’ve decided she’s a lying “b****” who is trying to steal the sympathy that rightly belongs to men.
The meta-argument here seems to be that only violent physical harm counts as harm, therefore bullying that stops short of slamming people in the face with slabs of concrete is mere jolly social interaction.
That meta-argument is wrong. Physical harm is not the only harm.
Hrm. I wonder if there are documented cases of soldiers (male, of course) reacting to online threats of violence in a way that it triggers their PTSD.
Not that it would matter to the assholes, but the cognitive dissonance might be fun to watch, if there was a way to actually get the facts through their FUD.
Small and sort of tangential, I know but: when did “cat lover” become a sexist insult? This guy would rather hang out with pretty much any feline than with…well, the sort of people who are (rightly) targeted by manboobz.
Eamon,
That’s pretty much what the folks at Manboobz said too.
“Physical harm is not the only harm”
That’s true. Terrible things are done online. Sometimes, women go online and mention that some man — thankfully, they at least usually have the decency not to mention them by name — had approached her in a way that she thought was …. I can barely type the word… “creepy.”
I know, I know, it’s shocking to think that we actually share the planet with people so inhumane, so cruel, so lacking in empathy as to use that hurtful word to describe someone who merely violated her boundaries in a potentially threatening way. Just imagine that poor guy, reading some woman’s blog or twitter account obsessively (as you do) and realizing “oh my God, she’s talking about ME! She thinks I’m a c-word!” That poor man will be traumatized for life by this vile act of misandry.
/sarcasm
//Spellcheck insists that misandry is not a word. I hear you, spellcheck. I hear you.
I definitely have the impression that military culture not all that long ago viewed “PTSD” as fancy-talk for malingering. One wonders how all that sits with the people saying “only people in the military are allowed to have PTSD.”
@Eamon Knight #2: So, yeah, is PZ now an anti-feminist in their eyes becasue he hates cats? On the plus side, I guess the Internet Hive Mind is feminist? I can’t keep this stuff straight when they abandon any sense of factual/historical continuity/consistency.
Strange from a perspective of reason or empathy, not so much from the perspective of a predatory carnivore.
Even physical harm to veterans isn’t taken as seriously if it’s a woman. My friend’s PA is a female veteran, and was in the VA hospital in October, and given hell by the staff for taking up a bed that was by rights a man’s. What? She wasn’t a spouse of a soldier or anything; SHE HERSELF had been a soldier. She was sick, and they gave her hell for going to the hospital when they needed that bed for a REAL soldier. My friend sprung her, took her to a regular hospital and paid for her care, but of course no many bosses would do that or could afford to do that. Grrrr.
Cats are pussies. Real men have dogs.
The only thing that needs to be said about those pathetic (i.e emotionally driven) misogynstic assholes is that they hate women, it only helps if one of them is “suspiciously attention grabbing”.
Also “PTSD only happens to soldiers” that’s ludicrous and ironically doubly narrow minded, considering how often sexual assault occurs in the hell holes that are the armed forces.