Comments on: Battleground Twitter: Women, Misogyny, and #MenCallMeThings

By: Tiger Gray

Tiger Gray — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 04:41:07 +0000

Jesus, his posts are fucking awful.

By: Tiger Gray

Tiger Gray — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 04:39:50 +0000

that solves exactly nothing but I am guessing you knew that already.

By: Tiger Gray

Tiger Gray — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 04:38:54 +0000

Word. The most horrific things I see say, on my twitter feed tend to be from people who self identify as cis women. The one time a self identified cis male said something I thought was awful and I took him to task, he explained and apologized. Everything is so terribly complicated it’s crazy. The “emotional dick sucking” comment further down resonates with me because I once saw retweeted a man saying something like, stupid sluts get what they deserve, and the NEXT tweet was a woman assuring him SHE wasn’t a slut, and yeah fuck those ladies! Ugh.

By: jennifer

jennifer — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:34:30 +0000

I couldn’t agree more. Yeah, lots of different people say terrible things on the internet and misogyny is in all of us. But the really chilling comments are threats that seem like they could actually happen. That make me think, is this what even a small percentage of men I encounter in real life are thinking? Women say mean things sometimes too but rarely do I feel physically unsafe with women. If I thought there was no chance a guy could ever harm me I wouldn’t even really mind catcalls. But the threat of real violence is underlying.

By: Megaera

Megaera — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 14:24:21 +0000

The joys of privilege. It makes other people’s problems invisible and even inconceivable.

When I was 18 I stayed in NJ for a few months, with a highly educated, intelligent, professional, politically-aware black family. I commented one day that there was a huge difference between soaps in the UK and those I’d seen in the US, in that the UK soaps focused on working-class people struggling to make ends meet, whereas the US soaps I’d seen focused on the wealthy, and even the ‘poor’ people were pretty middle-class really. This intelligent woman’s answer? ‘I think it’s because we don’t really have poor people in the US like you do in the UK.’ I was actually dumbstruck!

By: lesemicolon

lesemicolon — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:12:34 +0000

I guess what I’m feeling is that by making it specifically about *men* rather than the cultural institutions that cause the men to say what they do and act how they do, we are treating the symptom and not the cause.

I believe that men wouldn’t make such threats nearly as often as they do if it weren’t for the implication from our society that it is *okay* to do so. Women participate in encouraging and perpetuating these behaviors by engaging in misogyny themselves. And I have definitely heard women say things like “she should get raped,” etc., which maybe is different from “I want to rape you,” but maybe also not?

Not that violent threats aren’t absolutely horrifying and that they shouldn’t make you sick to your stomach, but I feel like addressing misogyny from all its angles and getting to the root cause is just as important in stopping them.

By: Beek

Beek — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 08:34:11 +0000

Amber, why does your avatar look fatter than the others? How are you doing that?

Thanks

By: Raksha

Raksha — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 06:29:41 +0000

Yeah, the misogyny coming from women is just as much a problem and doubly as frustrating in some ways.

I was actually just reading a blog post a few days ago written by a feminist lesbian kind of working through her feelings about her women friends. She was saying she’s realized recently that she has a really hard time trusting or getting too close to straight women because it seems their first emotional allegience is to men and they so often end up doing what she referred to as “emotional dick sucking” that they end up perpetuating a lot of sexism in a (mostly) unconscious attempt not to alienate men.

I’ve noticed some of that too in the past, but hadn’t articulated it like that. Sadly, I’ve seen that even in vocally feminist women. Like, they’re plenty radical when it’s just us women, but get a man in the room and they trip all over themselves to reassure him that when they say they’re a feminist, it’s not *him* they have a problem with (even when they really, really should). It’s very disheartening.

By: amber

amber — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:51:08 +0000

https://twitter.com/#!/rooshv

Speaking of trolls… this bastard (evidence: http://www.rooshv.com/the-bolivia-effect) is trolling the #mencallmethings twitter stream. Can one of you ladies with a twitter stream connive to disable his penis through internet voodoo?

By: Lesbian Mom Today

Lesbian Mom Today — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:50:40 +0000

Exactly, it is way easier to type that kind of crap into a screen. The chances of any of these people actually saying the same thing to someone’s face is probably zero….so, it’s pretty cowardly really.

By: Katharine

Katharine — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:00:48 +0000

Actually, some of the worse things that men have said and done to me have be sexual harassment and groping in person. I basically tune out the shit people come up with online, but some of the things that I’ve been subjected to in the past made me incredibly fearful for my life/personal integrity.

By: C

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:48:36 +0000

My favorite distraction from studying is to go on sites (CL rants and raves is a great one), write a misandrous comment and then wait to see the s**t hit the fan, so to speak. Guys are so easy to provoke, it’s so funny. I know this article is about misongyny, but sometimes fighting fire with fire is more entertaining.