[Content Note: Slurs, Rape Denial]
Last night, I noticed a couple hashtags on Twitter making the rounds: #WhitesCantBeRaped and #EndFathersDay. Both trended worldwide, and #EndFathersDay alone has 52,000 tweets. #WhiteCantsBeRaped purports to be a hashtag started by feminist women of color, a prank that seems concocted by a Jägermeister-fueled Michelle Goldberg. #EndFathersDay claims to be a hashtag dedicated to abolishing Father’s Day, because men are worthless deadbeats or some other such strawfeminist rot. Of course, neither are hashtags founded by any feminist within the movement, and instead seem to have taken root within the internet’s seedy underbelly, 4Chan (click image to enlarge):
This sort of thing is, unfortunately, to be expected of 4chan. It’s a site that, in its 10-year existence has been known as a stomping ground for pedophiles, has hacked Trayvon Martin’s email account, and harassed an eleven-year-old girl so badly that she had to be placed under police protection. That a site who addresses its members using seemingly endless variations of the f-slur would also be anti-feminist is to be somewhat expected. It also appears as though Thought Catalog (that increasingly awful, racist, pile of garbage) has ties to the #EndFathersDay tag. Anne Gus, author of other gems like “HELP! Fuglies Won’t Stop Pretty-Shaming Me,” and “When He Says “No”: Denying A Woman Sex Is Rape,” has posted there claiming to be the feminist founder of the tag:
I’m seeing so many great, fierce, and empowered posts under the hashtag, something that makes me super-duper proud to be a feminist in this day and age. Some people however, are like saying that it’s only a joke-hashtag or something like that. This is 114% FALSE. I made that hashtag from my HEART cuz I, along with most feminists, truly believe fathers are totally evil creatures.
This is unsurprising to those who have been following Thought Catalog’s descent into rabid poo-slinging. What may actually surprise some is the number of people who seem to have fallen for these hashtags. Of course, it’s difficult to say who is genuinely taken aback by the hashtag, and who is in on 4chan’s joke. But one thing is for sure – it’s definitely the fault of liberal feminists (and hoes, of course):
Y'all wanna #endFathersDay cuz u dumb ass hoes pick the wrong dude to let nut in you. Bitch YOU the problem
— lil duval (@lilduval) June 13, 2014
https://twitter.com/HarrietBaldwin/status/477803798815981569
The left is tweeting why #WhitesCantBeRaped. Tell me again how that is the good and loving side?
— TeenagePatriot. (@SamSaunders42) June 13, 2014
@moeinaba Seems starts as a hoax, but taken soon seriously from #feminsits and defend as #whitescantberaped. a lot of #misandry in #feminism
— GerK_HuMan (@GerK_HuMan) June 14, 2014
People will no doubt continue to use these strawfeminist constructs as proof of social justice warriors run amok (some will even do so while admitting it’s a hoax!). After all, confirmation bias is still a thing. No matter how loudly we denounce these so-called movements, people will continue to place blame on those misandry-fueled feminists. As of now, there’s not a shred of evidence that either of these hashtags are even tangentially related to the feminist movement, which anyone practicing even a hint of skepticism would notice. To quote Laci Green, “everyone can take their “this is why i hate feminism” rage pants off now.”
These sites show that if you have a large enough base of followers, you can make almost any tag go viral. It’s sad they choose these tags.
Notice the name Straw Feminist. I should hope nobody takes an admitted troll on a site full of nothing but trolls seriously. Oh wait, it’s the internet, of course somebody will take an admitted troll on a site full of nothing but trolls seriously. :(
Dear 4chan, please stop tricking MRA’s and garden variety misogynists. They are low hanging fruit. They will believe literally anything that confirms their world view. You could tell these people that a roving band of feminists killed the president and are now animating his corpse using magic ala Weekend at Bernie’s 2, and they would be certain that it is true and something worthy of a Twitter tantrum.
In the end, tricking someone easily tricked just leads to an exhausting exchange of reasonable people saying “No, that is not real, here is the obvious evidence.” with the misogynists responding “Yeah but I just know it has to be!!!” Trick someone intelligent with excellent reasoning skills, 4chan, I promise it will be more satisfying.
I wrote about it on my blog as well, there are many fake “feminist” accounts pretending to agree with the hashtags. Then are even arguing amongst themselves about who is a troll and who is not! The vast majority are “jewish” and “WoC” accounts, surprisingly 4chan are racist too…
This is something I see in YouTube comments fairly often. A troll will say something like “castrate all men” and get the MRAs all riled up.
I’m reminded of a concept I came across a while ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_Turing_Test
Someone who’s familiar with feminism wouldn’t think for a second that these twitter hashtags have anything to do with the feminist movement, but we do recognise them as touching on common straw-feminist themes.
What is it with the damn’ Guy Fawkes mask from ‘V is for Vendetta?’ I did see the film etc. etc. BUT Guy Fawkes as a Dutch mercenary hired by right wing catholic conspirators to blow up the seat of an elected government–well at least the Lord’s chamber…
Of course no government of 1605 is going to look particularly pleasant to modern eyes. But as a progressive symbol, Fawkes makes about as much sense as John Wilkes Booth or Nathan Bedford Forrest.
FWIW, I don’t exactly consider Anon a bastion of progressivism. They’ve been pretty shitty on feminist issues IIRC.
Hackers (the bad kind) love to present themselves as the good guys and Anonymous is no different.
Cyber-Criminals want to brag to the press so they knock over ‘pedophile’ or ‘neo-nazi’ sites. But they don’t mention that they are also stealing $10,000/month through credit card fraud and hacking into their girl friends computer to turn on the video cam and see her naked.
One of the first things malware tries to do after infecting a computer is to disable any other malware on that machine. The chief difficulty in botnet herding is keeping the herd from being poached. So there was a German malware author trying to pass himself off as a misguided hero trying to disinfect machines!
‘Anonymous’ is a no-lose proposition from a PR perspective. Any attack committed by any party that is popular is claimed for ‘Anonymous’, attacks that are unpopular are quickly disowned. It is however now a matter of public record that one of the closely related lulsec offshoot has just received a time served sentence for cooperating with the feds despite admitting stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars. His co-conspirators that pled out are serving serious time.
It does not surprise me that the anarchist right has chosen Guy Fawkes as a symbol, he is actually rather close to what they stand for: Authoritarian anarchy, a world in which there is no government and laws are made up by whoever has the biggest guns.
I was once complaining to William Gibson about the idiots who suggest that the Web was an attempt to build the type of world Gibson imagined. The fact is that is the opposite of what we were trying to do with the Web. Nobody in their right minds would want the type of society Gibson describes. He agreed and used the phrase ‘Reaganesque dystopia’ to describe the world of Neuromancer et al. And I think that is a very good description of what the likes of Anonymous want to create.
Most Anonymous running gags began as some sort of meme or another, usually a 4chan one, but not always. In this case, it began with a silly alliteration of /b/. You can find the whole thing on Urbandictionary.
The mask comes from Chanology, which was a big protest against Scientology, Scientology is known for large scale harassment and stalking of people against them. So Chanology and the group name of Anonymous, from the chat boards fact that most users are Anonymous, used the v masks as the movie had only recently come out, and they were in shops and could be appropriated as a symbol of protest due to the themes of V for Vendetta.
It provided a statement, symbol and protection from Scientology.
Ironic now that the symbol used for protesting against the harassment techniques used by Scientology has now been used to represent people who like harassing.
I think feminists should take a moment and consider why this hoax worked. Not only did it work in convincing non-feminists that feminists created the hashtags, it also worked in getting actual feminists to retweet the hateful hashtags and write hateful tweets of their own.
The hoax because these two hashtags are no different than the #NotAllMen and #KillAllMen hashtags feminists did create. This hoax is a perfect example Poe’s Law. The positions feminists hold and the things they say are so extreme that when someone makes an extremist parody of feminism even feminists cannot tell the difference.
The irony is that the objections have nothing to do with the feminists disagreeing with the hashtags. It does not appear that they do. The complaint is that the hashtags are being used to make feminism look bad. This is akin to the Tea Party not objecting to the “Barack the Magic Negro” song, but complaining that playing the song makes them look bad.
That is also why the hoax worked. When presented with something clearly indefensible, feminists say nothing about it other than mentioning it damages their image.
“I think feminists should take a moment and consider why this hoax worked.”
Because people are gullible and have a complete lack of understanding about what feminism is?
“It also worked in getting actual feminists to retweet the hateful hashtags and write hateful tweets of their own.”
Yes, there are shitty people in every group of people. No one who holds any sway or influence over feminism RT’ed or contributed in a positive manner. People who contributed positively to the tag were almost exclusively from 4chan. I’ll wait while you try to find someone who a) isn’t part of 4chan, and b) actually represents feminism in some capacity.
“The complaint is that the hashtags are being used to make feminism look bad. ”
Actually, I don’t see anyone who is complaining solely about that. I denounced the hashtags themselves in this very post, and you don’t even have to read past the title to see that. I wouldn’t even say the tags make feminism look bad – I think it makes ignorant assholes who actually fall for it look bad.
“When presented with something clearly indefensible, feminists say nothing about it other than mentioning it damages their image.”
Again, a lie.
The question is not whether one feminist or tea partier can be found that holds the views described, it is whether the views are typical of them or not and whether they would lead to someone who was prominent in the movement being condemned or not.
It is not necessary for people to spend all their time condemning bad actors on their side. But if you have someone who is prominent in the movement frothing with hate speech and nobody disowns them, its a tell. This movement has disowned rather a lot of liabilities. Richard Dawkins being one of the more prominent ones. But nobody is going to take Ingrams to task for her attacks on Cantor because the GOP/Tea Party is actually rather anti-semite friendly. Nobody on the right took O’Keefe and Breitbart to task for their obvious misrepresentations and dishonesty even after they were exposed as frauds beyond all doubt.
The mechanisms have changed as well. Back in the 1980s the mainstream media let Edwin Meese decide who led the feminist movement and there was nobody to stop them. So Erica Jong was decried as ‘anti-feminist’ because Katherine MacKinnon didn’t consider her a proper one.
There is really no doubt that ‘kill all the men’ types exist or that they have zero influence in the feminist movement. Just as there is no doubt that racists, bigots and psychopaths exist in the Tea Party and they are the principal voices the movement follows.
“I think feminists should take a moment and consider why this hoax worked.”
Considering…Could it be because the media tend to strawman feminists? Because MRAs consider fem-dom fetish porn (written by men) a reliable source for what feminism is and isn’t? (Seriously. Some MRAs talk about the threat of men being kept on farms and harvested for semen.) Maybe even because some no-name blogger might’ve blogged something misguided at some point in the history of the internet, and MRAs immediately determined she (or he) was a representative of feminists as a whole?
“I think feminists should take a moment and consider why this hoax worked.”
It worked for the same reason that in the UK it’s easy to persuade euroskeptics that the EU are trying to ban sausages (or whatever other nonsense gets put in the tabloids), or why Republicans believe in “death panels” and “FEMA camps”. Namely that if someone despises a particular group they accept negative things about them more easily than they would about a group they didn’t despise.