Some people like to refer to “misogyny” with those scare quotes; it doesn’t really exist, they imply, and it’s certainly not worth fighting against. Others go so far as to deny sexism against women at all — oh, it’s really the men who are discriminated against. But you don’t hear stories about men being harassed off the internet, as commonly occurs to women. There are people who work really hard at making the internet a hostile place for anyone who supports feminism.
Once a woman is singled out by a men’s rights group such as A Voice for Men, the misogynist Reddit forum The Red Pill or even just a right-wing Twitter account like Twitchy, she is deluged with hatred. The barrage, in addition to scaring its target, serves as a warning to onlookers. Jill Filipovic, a senior political writer covering feminist issues at Cosmopolitan, says she recently tried to persuade a friend to run for office. “There’s several reasons why I wouldn’t want to do it, but one of them is that I follow you on Twitter, and I see what people say to you. I could never deal with that,” the friend told her.
Many people can’t. Last year, abortion rights activist Lauren Rankin pulled back from writing online and, for the most part, from Twitter because the threats and insults were becoming so wearying. She continues to serve on the board of the reproductive rights nonprofit A Is For and faces off against antiabortion protesters as a volunteer clinic escort, but she no longer engages publicly. “I don’t like the idea that it seems like I was scared or intimidated away from the Internet,” she says. “But I think I’ve recentered why I do what I do, in ways that I can maintain my mental sanity. Unfortunately, that really doesn’t involve the Internet as much.”
I get a faint echo of the abuse women do, and I can testify that it’s wearing, draining, and exasperating. There really are people who spend all their time online in campaigns of harassment that target feminists, and especially feminist women, and worse, there are far more enablers who downplay the problem, who typically respond to the most hideous examples of hatred with the denier’s triad: “grow a thicker skin”, “Free Speech!”, and “That guy is mentally ill.”
Those are excuses ignore a major problem festering on the internet. That such an essential part of the modern technical life has become actively inimical to the participation of non-dudebros ought to be a huge issue, a major obstacle to getting diverse representation on an important medium. If nothing else, all of us white dudes ought to be concerned that we aren’t always going to be in charge — the demographic data in America runs very clearly in one direction, and it’s not in our favor — and we ought to be thinking seriously about mechanisms to protect the rights of minorities from suppression on the internet…because face it, boys, one day soon we will be them, and the traditions we build now will affect us in the future.
As if he has to make my case for me, Vox Day has spoken on that article. He thinks it is a good thing to drive women (that is, women who are not compliant and submissive to his will) off the internet, because they are all baby-killing Nazis.
#GamerGate has them on the run. They can’t take the heat. What they call "harassment" and "abuse" is seldom anything more than free speech answering free speech. They have a right to speak their piece, and we have a right to speak right back. We have a right to speak back with all of the contempt, disdain, and loathing that we feel for their insane and societally suicidal ideas.
Open up your hate and let it pour over them. Don’t think for even one nanosecond that they don’t deserve it every bit of the criticism, of the contempt, of the disdainful dismissal that overwhelms them. They are trying to destroy Western civilization. They are trying to destroy marriage and civil society. They are advocates of child murder. They are advocates of a philosophy that makes National Socialism look merciful and Communism practical and Fascism coherent by comparison. Do not hold back. Speak back twice as hard. Speak back until they fall silent.
Women are particularly susceptible to shame. So shame them relentlessly. Shame those who agree with them. Mock their white knights who rush in to save them. Above all, dignify their views and voices with all the respect you would show to a particularly noxious fart in an elevator.
Vox Day is not mentally ill. He’s just a hate-monger with a small following. But don’t think he’s totally irrelevant and marginal, because the one thing the internet has given him power to do is to scream in women’s faces, and to incite more bully-boys to do likewise. That matters. That is a problem. What are we going to do about it?
If you reply with a simplistic “Free Speech!”, I shall point you to Theodore Beale’s own words: Speak back twice as hard. Speak back until they fall silent.
There’s a conundrum for you — that free speech can be used silence other people’s speech. Give a maniac a bullhorn or a mob, and they can trample other people’s rights, and even make life miserable for them. Free speech is not a panacea. Sometimes you have to have ways to tell some people to sit down and shut up and give others a chance to speak, and sometimes you have to recognize that speech can be abused.
The other evasion used to shirk a responsibility to give everyone a fair chance is to throw the problem on to the victim’s shoulders. Toughen up. Grow a pair. We all agree that Theodore Beale is an obnoxious crank, we’re ignoring him, why can’t you? That’s easy to say when you’re not his target, or the target of ten thousand other Beales on the internet. He used a key word: relentless. A few people can be obsessive to the point of danger. No, one person cannot and should not have to bear that burden of focused hatred.
You cannot look at these interactions and be neutral. In one corner, Person A is screaming their contempt, urging one and all to mob Person B and hound them into silence. In the other corner, Person B is trying to write about their own experiences, explain their view of life, and ignore as best they can the lunatic who is calling them fascist Nazi Communists who wants to kill babies and destroy Western Civilization. Yet somehow there will be people who look on that scene and think A has every right to call down hellfire on B, and B is the guilty party who must adapt. They are the ones who shape the nature of the arena we all have to live within.
It is a lawless arena, apparently, where the winner is simply the one who can bellow the loudest. That isn’t a good thing.
I think the racists getting fired tumblr was a good start. Name them. Shame them. Once their information is out on the internet women can find it and make an informed decision on whether to get into a relationship with them.
This may sound stupid coming from a grown man, but I have essentially lost friends over these issues. I have seen otherwise sharp, rational men reduced to ranting, frothing lumps of rage over Gamergate. Initially, I avoided the discussion for fear of confronting my friends, but eventually I had to chime in and assert myself. You can guess how that ended. I’m now persona non grata at the water cooler, and my refusal to sneer at justice has left me in odd standing with many of my peers.
Coming out as an atheist was hard, as a socialist even harder, but neither compares to the hate I’ve received for showing even the slightest sympathy with feminism.
I’m so pissed that they took the term “red pill”. I wanted to get a custom license plate like R3DP1LL to represent leaving religion behind but now I’m afraid someone will think I’m one of those MRA d-bags.
So many people and groups are allegedly bent on destroying the USA and other Western nations. If even half those claims had any credence, none of the nations named would still exist.
I’m not trying to minimize the impact of their diatribes, of course. I have some small idea of what the full impact would be like, and I wouldn’t want to face it.
Anonymity? Is that why I see so many blatantly misogynistic, racist and hateful comments left all over the internet by people using their Google and Facebook accounts with their real names, pictures, and places of employment?
@ #5 caseloweraz:
Problem with your analogy is individuals aren’t nations. An individual doesn’t have the collective power of an entire country, with all that entails, with which to resist torrents of abuse, or to undermine those who seek to bring them harm.
It will never stop until these horrible people suffer real-world consequences for their e-world savagery. And though I know it’s unworthy, never mind unworkable, my fantasy is a flying squad to administer a few sound beatings. I think it would be quite surprising how quickly a lot of this would stop.
@PZ Myers
Yep, the “white moderates” equivalent of the internet. The type of people who whine about “tone” and wonder why we can’t all get along, but always manage to blame the people speaking out against harassment and abuse from the status quo for calling it upon themselves.
I don’t think it’s going to change until we actually get some real consequences (legal and otherwise) for this type of cyber-abuse leading to cyber-terrorism*. As long as harassers can do stuff like doxxing people, distributing their personal information in order to drive whackjobs to them, or even calling down SWAT teams on them falsely without any real repercussions from law enforcement and society, the predators will move in to whatever venue you have for discussion and turn it to shit. Especially since the internet has made it easier than ever for them to amplify their harassment.
* We also need the idiotic idea of “it’s online and therefore not real” to finally fucking die.
I hadn’t realised before how right wing a lot of Vox Day’s ideas are. I have the luxury of not paying much attention to him, but I wouldn’t have guessed those praising gamergate would be ‘destroying civilisation, marriage and babies’ lunatics, that’s all US fundie tripe.
I wish I could believe it was possible to wrestle ‘free speech’ back into a useful position. It’s an incredibly important concept being violated all over the world right now by religious and political powers, yet somehow it’s come to be synonymous with the right of the privileged to drown out minorities.
Free speech means the right to say what you believe in a public forum without being arrested. That’s all it needs to mean.
Following someone down the street yelling abuse is not ‘free speech’, it’s harassment, and I find it tragic that so many otherwise intelligent individuals don’t seem to understand.
And there are a lot of women it has kept off the internet to begin with. Every time I get the crazy idea that I might start a blog, I am brought back to reality by reading the abuse other women get. Because no matter how hard I try, sooner or later I would make a feminist comment (it might take me at least 15 minutes, but it would happen). As someone who has suffered her whole life from low self esteem and depression, I decided I can’t deal with the howler monkeys.
Isn’t it ironic that Vox speaks about our sacred culture and heritage being under fire and then accuses the alleged society-ruiners of fascism? Am I misunderstanding the tenets of fascism or is he?
Vox Day used to write for WorldNetDaily.
His father was one of the early backers of WorldNetDaily, and was a director there before he ended up in prison.
Aside from being somewhat on the Rand Paul side that the U.S. shouldn’t have gone into Afghanistan, yeah, he’s pretty intensely right-wing in that odd, mostly U.S.-specific religious right way. The ‘advocates of child murder’ bit is pretty blatantly an anti-abortion whistle.
Liberturds call anybody who disagrees with them fascists or communists. They are a broken record of slogans, hate, and paranoia.
Oh Voxy and his typical logic.
The abuse and harassment is really just free speech, he assures his. Free speech that just so happen to be full of contempt, disdain, and loathing, he adds. Free speech that is also hateful and used to shame them, because they are evil Nazis that deserve it, and doing so will make them silent.
Well, he undermined his initial point while also showing himself to be self-centered and fucking monstrous. So, the typical Vox Day experience.
“Open up your hate and let it pour over them.”
Don’t these people (I use the term loosely) recognize the dark side when they see it? How can they claim to be on the right side of this debate with rhetoric like that?
Luke was a beta SJW, and Vader’s freeze peach was being repressed by those rebel bullies.
/nerd
They are the new brownshirts
mentalcase79: Well, ya see, Evil is Cool. And your nerdy references to evil characters only makes them stronger.
Suddenly, the Dark Enlightenment comes to mind. I would be surprised if Vox hadn’t already thrown in his hat with those folks, because they were basically Gamergate before Gamergate: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/03/07/more-like-the-dork-enlightenment-am-i-right/
(They definitely align with Voxy politically as well, being essentially a hybrid of libertarianism and fascism: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement)
It reminds me of people crying out for anti-stalking laws and law enforcement saying that they couldn’t do anything until the stalker DID something. Lack of response to these cries for help led to tragedy. Then a female lawyer took up the cause in California. Now–the law of the land. Next?
“Vox Day is not mentally ill.” Are you sure about that? He’s certainly not a poster boy for mental health, and all of this “hatred” he spews? Boy just ain’t right. But thank you, Dr. Myers, for continuing to put a spotlight on his ranting and spewing. Poor widdle Vox; I guess Mommy didn’t wuv him enough. No sympathy for this creep from me.
Epicurus, why do you assume that someone has to be ‘ain’t right’ in order to be a sexist, racist asshole? I have depression, anxiety and ADHD… Mentally I ‘just ain’t right’ yet *I’M* not a raging bigot.
So yes, we’re fucking very sure that being mentally ill is not a requirement for being an asshole.
actias @2 – I salute you.
Several things:
1) I thought feminism was the red pill. The red pill is belongs to people who don’t have that much power over the system, but can absolutely see its machinations.
2) This “limits of free speech” thing is weird to me. To me, it’s not free speech gone awry. Telling people you’re going to rape them and publishing their home address- I’m sorry, but where I come from that’s called making terroristic threats. When I was growing up, in the fourth grade, my best friend got a visit from two police officers. He was nine-years old, and two cops came to visit him in school, because he told a girl he got mad at that he would shoot her with a machine gun. I get that we live in a gun-obsessed society and that maybe there was some kind of precautionary principle at play, but if grown-ass men can go around threatening violence in the same world we treat children like criminals… something is seriously wrong, and I don’t think it’s the Internet.
@20
I have no clue, none whatsoever, if he is or isn’t mentally ill. I do know for a fact, that I have suffered from mental health issues. I’m a little bit of an asshole, but I don’t think it’s related. I don’t want to say he’s not mentally ill, because it’s incredibly common for people to have one psychological ailment or another. But mentally ill doesn’t translate to “asshole,” nor would it upgrade you to “asshole-plus.” Not unless you think that the introduction of psychology as a science magically did away with personalities and replaced them all with diagnoses.
epicurus @ 20
Last I looked at the DSM “is a raging, bigoted asshole” does not appear as a symptom for any recognized mental illness.
Yeah, but BPD is.
Both/and. Always both/and.
What are you trying to say, Michael Kimmet?
Man, are you stupid.
You’d feed right into their persecution complex, and you know it.
It seems important to note, regarding the Vox Day and his ilk not noticing that they are on the “dark side”, that he is selling a narrative of civilizational doom. For some, fascism in defense of civilization is no vice. Most of them probably don’t recognize their own fascism when they see it, though.
This book (I believe I saw it linked from another Pharyngula thread) has really helped me see what these guys are all about: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
epicurus @ 20:
No, but I’m sure I’m not a doctor, and I’m sure he’s not my patient.
And so long as I’m not and he isn’t, I shouldn’t assume an illness, as I have neither the qualifications nor the information to make such a call.
And if I was, and he were, I couldn’t talk about it.
So, the only people positing mental illness on the part of VD are people who have automatically outed themselves as being totally unqualified but still willing to do so. Which is to say, idiots.