A. 2016, the year an MRA ran for President
Firstly, the current context is that the nerdy manbabies of the internet are listened to by the Trump Campaign; both Trump and said consultation is something no one imagined in their darkest nightmares before last year.
https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/im-with-the-banned-8d1b6e0b2932#.tn7iv0xok
B. Male Oppression by Men, but Blamed on Women
Still with the merciless Laurie Penny, here is an efficient entry into the world of the oppressed men of the internet:
http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/on-nerd-entitlement-rebel-alliance-empire
These are the places that these angry men begin their life, starting with the least-worst and escalating fast:
4chan - a message board that spawned Anonymous among other things
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/
reddit - a news aggregate site that can be used by the man in the street
http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/07/1461444815608807.abstract
Pick Up Artist (PUA) culture
This is toxic male culture of the worst kind, and it's been around since I started going out with men, so this is the strand of abusive male entitlement I know most about. For a summary I recommend The Game by Neil Strauss, it's a classic for a reason:
https://www.amazon.com/Game-Penetrating-Secret-Society-Artists/dp/0061995320
I have attached a document called crp2.pdf which is from Strauss' website; he got his people to read all the key self-help books to find strategies to pick up women.
Recently an abusive PUA from the USA came to Australia to run some workshops and some annoying womenz protested or something and got them thrown out:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/deported-us-pickup-artist-julien-blancs-mates-plan-australia-tour-20160116-gm77z1.html
MRAs and MGTOW
So the Men's Rights Activists you've already met in Paul Elam and A Voice for Men:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/
Their tagline is "A Voice for Men – Humanist Counter-Theory in the Age of Misandry" and I seriously thought it said 'Humourless' the first time I read it.
But there is also a nascent movement to be more ... alone:
https://www.mgtow.com/
Men Going Their Own Way - is a statement of self-ownership, where the modern man preserves and protects his own sovereignty above all else.
ROK
And now, for the place I hate most on the internet, the Return of Kings; please be aware this blog will induce dry-retching:
http://www.returnofkings.com/
Roosh V, who runs the site, was nearly hosting meetings in Australia, even in little old Perth. Then the ladiez mobilised on this thing called the Interwebz and he buggered off:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/feb/04/daryush-roosh-v-valizadeh-cancels-neo-masculinist-meetings-over-safety
C. White Knights
Thankfully there is We Hunted The Mammoth, tracking MRAs the internet over:
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/
White Knights are dude feminists and they are all well and good, but sometimes it goes pretty pear-shaped:
http://jezebel.com/what-happens-when-a-prominent-male-feminist-is-accused-1683352727
HOWEVER, dude feminists can also be the best thing ever - this is my favourite dude feminist:
http://www.rejectedprincesses.com/
So, this is where things take a turn for the terrible.
D. That escalated fast!
Here I am going to list a few of the major online abuse controversies that I know of, almost all of them are about white women too, so you can imagine what happens to WOC, trans*folk and anyone outside the moral neutral of white-male-cisgender-straight-able-bodied:
1. Anita Sarkeesian
https://feministfrequency.com/
Anita has an idea to apply feminism to the portrayal of women in computer games, she set up a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to create a video series, she got torrents of abuse, she got her money, she created the videos (they are worth watching), and then she becomes the primary focus of male hatred on the internet for years until more women with ideas gained prominence.
2. Caroline Criado-Perez
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/24/two-jailed-twitter-abuse-feminist-campaigner
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/29/tech/twitter-criado-perez-abuse-media-reaction/
This was a turning point for twitter abuse directed at women, Criado-Perez retweeted the abuse she got and spent weeks reporting and recording the threats, then the police lost all the records and she had to go back and endure it all over again. The police could do little because the laws didn't allow them to do anything, so the feminists mobilised and twitter and the police magically found a way to do something.
After this incident women began to fight back with raising their voices, as in some of these projects from around the start of social media in our pocket:
http://everydaysexism.com/
http://www.ihollaback.org/
3. #gamergate
http://gawker.com/what-is-gamergate-and-why-an-explainer-for-non-geeks-1642909080
#gamergate was a terrible mess, and since the only part of the gamer community that I knew was Anita, I was naturally on the side of the women in the story.
The big impact of #gamergate on non-gaming women on the internet going about their business was the unification of all the trolls from under all the bridges. The trolls came out of 4chan and reddit and the manosphere and they did everything together and this was chilling to watch - puppet twitter accounts sending death and rape threats in unbelievable waves and doxxing public and private female citizens.
Then there was the Fappening, which is when all the nudes of female celebrities were hacked and distributed on reddit.
http://mashable.com/category/the-fappening/
Basically from here the unhappy men of the internet just got bolder and bolder and your niece knows this because she became a troll hunter for too many friends. When private citizens tag me into toxic and abusive conversations with their male 'friends' on Facebook so I can unleash the feminazi, one takes notice.
E. In our own backyard
1. Clementine Ford
If you want to see the true horrors of being a woman on the internet, I suggest you make Clementine Ford's facebook profile required reading. Start at December last year as a starter - I tagged you into that conversation in May this year.
2. Australian Feminism - Destroy The Joint vs Alan Jones, Feminist Frightbats vs Tim Blair and Everyone vs Mark Latham
Feminists in Australia got a huge filip to the collective action heart when Julia Gillard was in office because of how terrible all the misogyny was. This is a good entry point for some of the watersheds:
Everyone vs Mark Latham
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/opinion/mark-latham-needs-to-stop-his-unfair-ragefuelled-attacks-on-rosie-batty-20161101-gsfxef.html
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/sundayextra/mark-latham-on-journalism/6709500
Destroy the Joint vs Alan Jones
Book: https://penguin.com.au/books/destroying-the-joint-why-women-have-to-change-the-world-9780702249907
My review: http://insanelysociable.blogspot.com.au/p/feminist-book-club.html
Counting Dead Women: http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/when-will-we-stop-counting-dead-women-20150415-1mlzrt.html
Feminist Frightbats vs Tim Blair
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/blogs/tim-blair/crown-our-crazy-queen/news-story/42f0956231aa661813b9352d4fb1337e
3. Revenge Porn and its related abuse
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/police-probe-pornography-ring-at-melbourne-elite-private-school-st-michaels-20160810-gqpj53.html
And lastly, the treatment of women on social media in Australia that I personally witnessed - revenge porn becoming mainstream and now an objective of male bonding.
There is a Facebook Group just for women in Perth called Help A Sister Out - it has about 30,000 members - and it is Australia-wide, in every state. One morning this year I saw a post up in the group from a girl who had just discovered that there was an online server in Australia to which men uploaded nudes or partial nudes that they had on their phones of young women. They uploaded the photos into named files that were sorted by city and suburb. Those with access to the server could search their area for photos of girls WITH NAMES ATTACHED, and sometimes comments of an identifying nature.
The post was up for twenty minutes only because they needed everyone to check for themselves or their friends to see if the photos had been taken when they were underage.
I saw the server, clicked through to Perth and then the regions to see that there were too many files for me to even comprehend, and then I saw the post with screen captures of the reddit thread where the girl had found the links to the server. The language in the reddit thread was deliberately obscured to make sure an outside observer would not know that this was a revenge porn server, and it showed complete complicity, outlining how there was a new link because a previous server had been traced.
It was a chilling twenty minutes to see it for myself, see the calmness with which hundreds of women signed into the server, investigated files, tagged friends to alert them that they had a file and shared information about which ex/boyfriend/lover had those photos and who was underage.
After twenty minutes the underage girls had been found and the AFP was alerted, and the post taken down.
I still think about what I saw on that server and the way that all those women reacted with calm language and cold efficiency; I had never been prouder of the Sisters of Perth and Australia.
And that is the tip of the iceberg. I follow WOC and trans* commentators and disability advocates and islamic feminists and their stories are even more devastating, and I can direct you to them too if you want. What white feminism is fighting is pretty tame next to intersectional feminism's fight.
FAVOURITE UNCLE
Wow!! Claire I took a break from work and I am now breathless. I haven't even opened any of the links and all I can think is "are girls really having to put up with this shit?" i am stunned. My age group don't know this. We are in a bubble...😨😨😨
CLAIRE
The amazing Samantha Bee on the same topic as my email!
https://youtu.be/XQ8swY06eRU
https://youtu.be/QGn-C0G6xcw
*sigh*
It's grim stuff Uncle, and I just read about it! I have friends who have PTSD from being exposed to this in person, in real life, too often.
Intellectual fatigue is a real thing with women who are aware and active - in Australia alone, the domestic violence epidemic and the treatment of First Nation women, women on Nauru and women under the scarf can mean that sometimes you read a run-of-the-mill news article and the rage and tears arrive with no apparent trigger.
I cry automatically when I read about Manus and Nauru, I don't even have time to intellectualise my reaction, it's pure terror/horror, and frankly, it's an expression of low-level trauma from knowing too much about systems I can only change in tiny increments.
And what I've just set out for you is so little and so white. The experience of others is overwhelming - like the fate of young women in the countries that have allowed selective abortion of female foetuses - the 160 million missing girls across the southern Asian countries is so grim I had nightmares while I read Unnatural Selection (http://www.marahvistendahl.com/unnatural-selection/)
This is why I have no activities in my life that are not explicitly for women only, and educate me on my privilege. With all this evidence, I had to choose a side, and I chose my side :)
The good news is that I have pledged to Building Worlds - the only way to stop crying automatically at the news is to get my pen and write another world ... I don't know if I have ever sent you an example of what my book is like, but I have attached an extract that gives the basic idea.
Good luck with any of those links, you are down the rabbit hole now ... taking that Red Pill!
Firstly, the current context is that the nerdy manbabies of the internet are listened to by the Trump Campaign; both Trump and said consultation is something no one imagined in their darkest nightmares before last year.
https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/im-with-the-banned-8d1b6e0b2932#.tn7iv0xok
B. Male Oppression by Men, but Blamed on Women
Still with the merciless Laurie Penny, here is an efficient entry into the world of the oppressed men of the internet:
http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/on-nerd-entitlement-rebel-alliance-empire
These are the places that these angry men begin their life, starting with the least-worst and escalating fast:
4chan - a message board that spawned Anonymous among other things
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/
reddit - a news aggregate site that can be used by the man in the street
http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/07/1461444815608807.abstract
Pick Up Artist (PUA) culture
This is toxic male culture of the worst kind, and it's been around since I started going out with men, so this is the strand of abusive male entitlement I know most about. For a summary I recommend The Game by Neil Strauss, it's a classic for a reason:
https://www.amazon.com/Game-Penetrating-Secret-Society-Artists/dp/0061995320
I have attached a document called crp2.pdf which is from Strauss' website; he got his people to read all the key self-help books to find strategies to pick up women.
Recently an abusive PUA from the USA came to Australia to run some workshops and some annoying womenz protested or something and got them thrown out:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/deported-us-pickup-artist-julien-blancs-mates-plan-australia-tour-20160116-gm77z1.html
MRAs and MGTOW
So the Men's Rights Activists you've already met in Paul Elam and A Voice for Men:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/
Their tagline is "A Voice for Men – Humanist Counter-Theory in the Age of Misandry" and I seriously thought it said 'Humourless' the first time I read it.
But there is also a nascent movement to be more ... alone:
https://www.mgtow.com/
Men Going Their Own Way - is a statement of self-ownership, where the modern man preserves and protects his own sovereignty above all else.
ROK
And now, for the place I hate most on the internet, the Return of Kings; please be aware this blog will induce dry-retching:
http://www.returnofkings.com/
Roosh V, who runs the site, was nearly hosting meetings in Australia, even in little old Perth. Then the ladiez mobilised on this thing called the Interwebz and he buggered off:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/feb/04/daryush-roosh-v-valizadeh-cancels-neo-masculinist-meetings-over-safety
C. White Knights
Thankfully there is We Hunted The Mammoth, tracking MRAs the internet over:
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/
White Knights are dude feminists and they are all well and good, but sometimes it goes pretty pear-shaped:
http://jezebel.com/what-happens-when-a-prominent-male-feminist-is-accused-1683352727
HOWEVER, dude feminists can also be the best thing ever - this is my favourite dude feminist:
http://www.rejectedprincesses.com/
So, this is where things take a turn for the terrible.
D. That escalated fast!
Here I am going to list a few of the major online abuse controversies that I know of, almost all of them are about white women too, so you can imagine what happens to WOC, trans*folk and anyone outside the moral neutral of white-male-cisgender-straight-able-bodied:
1. Anita Sarkeesian
https://feministfrequency.com/
Anita has an idea to apply feminism to the portrayal of women in computer games, she set up a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to create a video series, she got torrents of abuse, she got her money, she created the videos (they are worth watching), and then she becomes the primary focus of male hatred on the internet for years until more women with ideas gained prominence.
2. Caroline Criado-Perez
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/24/two-jailed-twitter-abuse-feminist-campaigner
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/29/tech/twitter-criado-perez-abuse-media-reaction/
This was a turning point for twitter abuse directed at women, Criado-Perez retweeted the abuse she got and spent weeks reporting and recording the threats, then the police lost all the records and she had to go back and endure it all over again. The police could do little because the laws didn't allow them to do anything, so the feminists mobilised and twitter and the police magically found a way to do something.
After this incident women began to fight back with raising their voices, as in some of these projects from around the start of social media in our pocket:
http://everydaysexism.com/
http://www.ihollaback.org/
3. #gamergate
http://gawker.com/what-is-gamergate-and-why-an-explainer-for-non-geeks-1642909080
#gamergate was a terrible mess, and since the only part of the gamer community that I knew was Anita, I was naturally on the side of the women in the story.
The big impact of #gamergate on non-gaming women on the internet going about their business was the unification of all the trolls from under all the bridges. The trolls came out of 4chan and reddit and the manosphere and they did everything together and this was chilling to watch - puppet twitter accounts sending death and rape threats in unbelievable waves and doxxing public and private female citizens.
Then there was the Fappening, which is when all the nudes of female celebrities were hacked and distributed on reddit.
http://mashable.com/category/the-fappening/
Basically from here the unhappy men of the internet just got bolder and bolder and your niece knows this because she became a troll hunter for too many friends. When private citizens tag me into toxic and abusive conversations with their male 'friends' on Facebook so I can unleash the feminazi, one takes notice.
E. In our own backyard
1. Clementine Ford
If you want to see the true horrors of being a woman on the internet, I suggest you make Clementine Ford's facebook profile required reading. Start at December last year as a starter - I tagged you into that conversation in May this year.
2. Australian Feminism - Destroy The Joint vs Alan Jones, Feminist Frightbats vs Tim Blair and Everyone vs Mark Latham
Feminists in Australia got a huge filip to the collective action heart when Julia Gillard was in office because of how terrible all the misogyny was. This is a good entry point for some of the watersheds:
Everyone vs Mark Latham
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/opinion/mark-latham-needs-to-stop-his-unfair-ragefuelled-attacks-on-rosie-batty-20161101-gsfxef.html
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/sundayextra/mark-latham-on-journalism/6709500
Destroy the Joint vs Alan Jones
Book: https://penguin.com.au/books/destroying-the-joint-why-women-have-to-change-the-world-9780702249907
My review: http://insanelysociable.blogspot.com.au/p/feminist-book-club.html
Counting Dead Women: http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/when-will-we-stop-counting-dead-women-20150415-1mlzrt.html
Feminist Frightbats vs Tim Blair
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/blogs/tim-blair/crown-our-crazy-queen/news-story/42f0956231aa661813b9352d4fb1337e
3. Revenge Porn and its related abuse
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/police-probe-pornography-ring-at-melbourne-elite-private-school-st-michaels-20160810-gqpj53.html
And lastly, the treatment of women on social media in Australia that I personally witnessed - revenge porn becoming mainstream and now an objective of male bonding.
There is a Facebook Group just for women in Perth called Help A Sister Out - it has about 30,000 members - and it is Australia-wide, in every state. One morning this year I saw a post up in the group from a girl who had just discovered that there was an online server in Australia to which men uploaded nudes or partial nudes that they had on their phones of young women. They uploaded the photos into named files that were sorted by city and suburb. Those with access to the server could search their area for photos of girls WITH NAMES ATTACHED, and sometimes comments of an identifying nature.
The post was up for twenty minutes only because they needed everyone to check for themselves or their friends to see if the photos had been taken when they were underage.
I saw the server, clicked through to Perth and then the regions to see that there were too many files for me to even comprehend, and then I saw the post with screen captures of the reddit thread where the girl had found the links to the server. The language in the reddit thread was deliberately obscured to make sure an outside observer would not know that this was a revenge porn server, and it showed complete complicity, outlining how there was a new link because a previous server had been traced.
It was a chilling twenty minutes to see it for myself, see the calmness with which hundreds of women signed into the server, investigated files, tagged friends to alert them that they had a file and shared information about which ex/boyfriend/lover had those photos and who was underage.
After twenty minutes the underage girls had been found and the AFP was alerted, and the post taken down.
I still think about what I saw on that server and the way that all those women reacted with calm language and cold efficiency; I had never been prouder of the Sisters of Perth and Australia.
And that is the tip of the iceberg. I follow WOC and trans* commentators and disability advocates and islamic feminists and their stories are even more devastating, and I can direct you to them too if you want. What white feminism is fighting is pretty tame next to intersectional feminism's fight.
FAVOURITE UNCLE
Wow!! Claire I took a break from work and I am now breathless. I haven't even opened any of the links and all I can think is "are girls really having to put up with this shit?" i am stunned. My age group don't know this. We are in a bubble...😨😨😨
CLAIRE
The amazing Samantha Bee on the same topic as my email!
https://youtu.be/XQ8swY06eRU
https://youtu.be/QGn-C0G6xcw
*sigh*
It's grim stuff Uncle, and I just read about it! I have friends who have PTSD from being exposed to this in person, in real life, too often.
Intellectual fatigue is a real thing with women who are aware and active - in Australia alone, the domestic violence epidemic and the treatment of First Nation women, women on Nauru and women under the scarf can mean that sometimes you read a run-of-the-mill news article and the rage and tears arrive with no apparent trigger.
I cry automatically when I read about Manus and Nauru, I don't even have time to intellectualise my reaction, it's pure terror/horror, and frankly, it's an expression of low-level trauma from knowing too much about systems I can only change in tiny increments.
And what I've just set out for you is so little and so white. The experience of others is overwhelming - like the fate of young women in the countries that have allowed selective abortion of female foetuses - the 160 million missing girls across the southern Asian countries is so grim I had nightmares while I read Unnatural Selection (http://www.marahvistendahl.com/unnatural-selection/)
This is why I have no activities in my life that are not explicitly for women only, and educate me on my privilege. With all this evidence, I had to choose a side, and I chose my side :)
The good news is that I have pledged to Building Worlds - the only way to stop crying automatically at the news is to get my pen and write another world ... I don't know if I have ever sent you an example of what my book is like, but I have attached an extract that gives the basic idea.
Good luck with any of those links, you are down the rabbit hole now ... taking that Red Pill!
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