I can’t possibly complain about my hate mail after seeing what Feministing receives.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I can’t possibly complain about my hate mail after seeing what Feministing receives.
There are just so many sick f*****s out there. As a man, my reaction to that email is to want to exert some extreme pain on the writer. He may as well be talking about my wife and daughter.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet the real face of conservative religiosity, and the heights of the anger of pathetic and powerless people.
This is proof that religious devotion beyond reason, founded in literal translation of any religious text, is the single most effective device in bringing about the most animal, uncivilized and disgusting of human tendencies.
The disturbing thing is that the writer is probably a fairly normal human being.
Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Utter Waste of Protein
Well, that’s a slight restatement of Tycho and Gabe’s Greater Internet [expletive] Theory.
But just how anonymous. There is usually some ability to trace. Would the police consider that a death threat?
(I bet it was more of a death threat than Bill o’R got)
I concur…
As a man, my reaction to that email is to want to exert some extreme pain on the writer. He may as well be talking about my wife and daughter.
..and that’s the exact reaction intended.
the letter isn’t directed at the “women”, it’s directed at the men “behind” the women.
for in the mysoginist’s eyes, women are nothing without their men.
it’s a blatant attempt, IMO, to “call out” the men for some sort of ritualized brawling to show who is the “real” man.
If unattached, the women who received the missive wouldn’t be worthy of addressal to them anyway.
It’s like getting riled up by some idiot who jumps up and down in an ape suit and screams at people in public.
“how dare he act like a complete idiot in front of my wife!”
a call to the cops to get the idiot off the streets is more appropriate than attempting to beat the “ape” with sticks.
These past few days have really convinced me that I made the right choice when I decided to be a nihilistic misanthrope. A toast to global warming, may it kill us all off.
“People suck, and that’s my contention. I can prove it on a scratch of paper with a pen. Give me a fucking Etch-a-sketch, I’ll do it in three minutes. The proof, the fact, the factorum. I’ll show my work, case closed. I’m tired of this back-slapping “aren’t humanity neat?” bullshit. We’re a virus with shoes, okay? That’s all we are.” – Bill Hicks
Sorry to be off topic, but I think this thread needs one more Bill Hicks quote, since he’s basically my hero.
Boy, I’ve never seen an issue so divisive. It’s like a civil war, isn’t it? Even amongst my friends, who are all very intelligent; they’re totally divided on abortion. It’s unbelievable. Some of my friends, for instance, think these pro-life people are annoying idiots. Other of my friends think these pro-life people … are evil fucks. How are we going to come to a consensus? You ought to hear the arguments around my house: “They’re annoying, they’re idiots.” “They’re evil, they’re fucks!” Brothers, sisters, come together! Can’t we once just join hands and think of them as evil-annoying-idiot-fucks? I beseech you. But that’s me …
“They’re evil, they’re fucks!” Brothers, sisters, come together! Can’t we once just join hands and think of them as evil-annoying-idiot-fucks? I beseech you. But that’s me …
I thought this was already addressed by the adoption of the term:
“Demented Fuckwit”
?
Hmm, I dunno. “evil-annoying-idiot-fucks” has a pretty nice ring.
The disturbing thing is that the writer is probably a fairly normal human being.
Indeed.
The creepy thing isn’t the sexual stuff. Any adult woman knows men think about the wink wink nudge nudge; we certainly do it ourselves. It’s not even the violence–a lot of perfectly nice people play at BDSM.
It’s about them crossing the line between amusing themselves with silly fantasies, and believing that they’d be justified in having women in general raped, tortured and killed in reality; and as a woman, realizing that, among the men you know, men you talk to every day, some think this way.
This type of male creature probably drives a Hummer, carries a .50 calibre Desert Eagle, and wears camo to kill animals for sport. He’s probably catastrophically insecure in his manhood and imagines that, though he couldn’t even stand up to another man in real life, he could probably handle a woman. Truth is, most women I know could kick his ass, too.
One thing I don’t get. How exactly is the Pennsylvania shooting misogynistic? As far as I’m aware, dude was a psychotic pedophile who’s preference was for little girls, girls that he targeted out of some deluded belief that they were the cause of his flaws. I understand that misogyny is very real, very ignorant, very dangerous, and despicable but what does it have to do with the Amish school massacre?
How exactly is the Pennsylvania shooting misogynistic?
¿Como?
Uh, the guy didn’t come on to these girls with bowls of ice cream and Barbie dolls and “shhhh, don’t tell your folks.” He systematically cut the boys loose and shot the girls. Because they were girls.
He didn’t have sex with them, he just shot ’em. That’s what he did.
If we’re going by what he may have meant to do, it’s clear that any sexual plans he may have had for them involved violent rape followed by shooting them.
Sounds misogynistic to me. You seem to be arguing that it’s not misogyny because the little girls just happened to be the only kids there with vaginas.
It has something to do with the Colorado school hostage situation that ended with the death of 16 year old Emily Keyes. The whole thing was a sex crime. I will not repeat the name of the perpetrator, who should be buried in an unmarked grave.
I disagree Ichthyic. The only call to men in that “demented fuckwit’s” email is to suggest that other men might share the writer’s sentiments and will want to watch the resultant video.
I’m quite happy for demented ape-suit wearing idiots make fools of themselves in front of the women in my life. They’ll laugh and, if he gets too close, either kick him swiftly or call the police.
But, as a man, I have a responsibility to act against misogynistic shit from turds like this. It’s no pissing contest. It’s a clear and present danger.
Its emails like this that make me ashamed to have a Y chromosome.
Hey, why all the fuss ?
Anyone who opposes evil in the public should simply get used to receive death threats from various monsters… So why anyone ( but the cops ) cares about such pieces of shit at all ?
I wonder if guys who say this kind of thing realize that they might as well walk around Main Street with a poster saying: “Look at me – I’m so insecure that I feel threatened by other people expressing their opinions, and so stupid that I can’t think of other ways than violence to deal with those opinions!”
What difference does it make what woman this writer threatens? We should be outraged no matter what.
And I still marvel that anyone can think of the Amish school shooting as anything but a hate crime directed at females. The guy went there clearly intending on molesting, and then killing the little GIRLS. If he had gone in and just shot all the non-white kids would we be asking how it was a racist crime?
Can we drop the whole “hate crime” business? It does nothing but distract from the actual crimes committed in this atrocity.
May I say–despite analogies to the Taliban being clichéd–that this is precisely how the Taliban took over? Targeting schools, targeting girls in schools…breaking citizens’ will to the common good (public schools, libraries, public space to peaceably assemble, etc.). A recent survey of adolescents indicated that the boys expected a woman to be a traditional homemaker, whereas girls expected to have a career; this plus the generally dismal rate of boys’ performance in school, now that education has become cool for women (too many men now see education as “womanish”), and the general carnage (male genocide?) among too many young men, particularly men of color–something bad is coming, I fear.
Is there some way that someone sending hate mail making a specific threat like that can be prosecuted? It’s a terroristic threat in my opinion.
Maybe I didn’t word that right. My question about the Amish school massacre was this; If the pedophile in question was fixated on boys rather than girls, would we then have said that he hated men? All I’m saying is that this particular psycho was motivated by pedophilia, by a hatred of children– hell, by a hatred of himself for his twisted desires, and that gender, in this case, was secondary. The same type of event could very well happen with boys singled out and the gender of the children still wouldn’t matter as a causation.
If the pedophile in question was fixated on boys rather than girls, would we then have said that he hated men?
Yes, I would say. There are two kinds of pedophiles–those who kill, and those who don’t, who prefer the company of children, etc. Those who kill definitely hate children–and those who are fixated on boys and kill boys, yes, I would say hate boys, just as those fixated on girls and kill girls hate girls. Killing the victim says it all. Likewise, there are women who hate men (take my word for it), and if you’re not down on men with them they’ll tell you that you “hate yourself.” (And if you’re a girl interested in, gasp!, science, instead of “girly” things, look out…to these fanatics you “hate women,” too. Groan.)
Which is not to say that pedophiles who do not kill don’t do any damage! They do. But they would never dream of killing–these are the Humbert Humberts, who hang around children, want to remain a child, love the “purity” of children, etc. That’s my understanding, anyway.
That type of hate mail directed at perceived ‘liberal’ sites is nothing unusual. Up until a year or so ago, religioustolerance.org used to publish the mail they got (or a big chunk of it at least), and about a third of it was from fundie loons who would routinely say shit like “YOUR A BUNCH OF ATHIEST HOMO FAGITS JESUS SAVES! YOU SHOULD ALL GET RAPED IN THE ASS IN PRISEN AND DIE OF AIDS, AND THEN BURN IN HELL FAGOTS”. As the staff of RT described it, ‘not for the faint of heart’.
Their mail isn’t posted anymore. I think they had a big system crash last year.
Oh, it’s real easy to be hateful when you’re anonymous — not to mention on a different continent from your target. You can just sit there making up shit, then tweaking it to make it even nastier, and no worries about getting your ass kicked! Then you send it off with a keypress, and gloat about how “you showed that bitch”, never mind that all you’ve done is show a complete stranger just how impotent and helpless you really are.
This seems to be a common theme; insecure men blaming women for their sexual desires. It reminds me of a conversation a friend shared from IRC, with some fuckhead in Egypt who simply could not get his mind around the idea that she might have reasons for wearing “revealing” clothing (jeans and fitted t-shirts) other than wanting men to look at her and to “tempt” them.
It’s bad enough when you see it on the net, but it’s even more disturbing when you encounter in in person. In the last couple of years before I left the States, I had a couple closet mysogynists “open up” to me at work. They somehow got their wires crossed, and figured I was a good ‘ol boy, and started telling me about beating up hookers, about threatening them with guns, etc. This was not your standard “locker room talk”, but brutal, hateful stuff. There wasn’t enough detail to really do anything about it, and all I could do is avoid working with them later on… Another guy started talking about why he moved from Minneapolis to the suburbs to get away from lesbians and ethnic minorities, and how he admired what the Nazis were able to accomplish. I’ll skip the details, but the strangest part was that it was told to me in a very relaxed conversational tone.
The scary thing to me was that these weren’t raggedy-looking 19-y.o. skinheads, but industry professionals (senior engineers and project leaders), who were normal-looking, upper middle class WASP’s who were able to hold down jobs and keep it together for the most part. There’s a lot of them out there — more than we’d like to think. Their ideas are not part of the official mainstream, but let’s be honest with ourselves: they’re not enirely far from it. There’s something wrong with our culture, and I’m not sure how to fix it.
Unfortunately, the white supremicists, radical fundamentalists, and closet fascists have plenty of ideas on how to “fix” things. And as The Powers That Be become increasingly Machiavellian, the range of “solutions” becomes broader and more unsettling.
insecure men blaming women for their sexual desires
This is a symptom of a culture that teaches that sex and lust are sinful and wrong. Of course men will blame us for “making” them feel those things (and women will blame themselves for having the same feelings – it’s a lose-lose for us.) What sort of Creator imbues his creations with biological imperatives and then declares the following of those imperatives to be morally reprehensible?
(Did I say that right? I’m still one cup of coffee short of clarity.) :-)
“This type of male creature probably drives a Hummer, carries a .50 calibre Desert Eagle, and wears camo to kill animals for sport. He’s probably catastrophically insecure in his manhood and imagines that, though he couldn’t even stand up to another man in real life, he could probably handle a woman. Truth is, most women I know could kick his ass, too.”
IOW, Ted Nugent…