Boys Will Be Boys

by Clementine Ford

  Cuck!

  Feminazi!

  Snowflake!

  Fat bitch!

  Man hater!

  Cunt!

  Gone are the days when you would be required to convince an audience of your argument by using conventional methods that involve an actual critical understanding of your topic. Now it’s just humiliating the other person and talking over the top of them while everyone present laughs uproariously (see also: the behaviour of Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential debates and, indeed, his entire presidency). Ironically, the same people who bay for blood at the thought of this kind of event are always first in line to complain if they think a man somewhere might be being unfairly picked on. It’s true that I give as good as I get, and I’ve definitely thrown my fair share of insults. But funnily enough, this tactic coming from me is never defended as ‘free speech’ or a ‘debate’. Instead, it’s always loudly framed as an assault while the goalposts are quietly shifted once again in the background. Women (for it is mostly women) are expected to stand there and absorb the staggering amount of hatred that men can collectively direct towards us as some kind of payment for even having audible opinions, and fighting back often just opens us up to more abuse.

  I have never cared that Milo Yiannopoulos and his band of merry misogynists think I’m unfuckable. It’s not the first time I’ve been called that and it certainly won’t be the last now that men all over the world have a convenient meme they can just tweet at me whenever their penises get a bit twitchy. I couldn’t be happier that they don’t want to subject me to the three minutes of bad to average sex they invariably offer to the other, unluckier women (or men) in their lives.

  What angers me, though, is that this use of images and slogans to dehumanise and discredit women is a form of abuse that’s becoming far more common. I have the power to fight back against it, but countless others don’t. And in addition to the general abuse we have to field online, we have to deal with a new form of stalking that follows us into the digital space despite all our efforts to put up boundaries. I was very clear that I didn’t want to have anything to do with Yiannopoulos when he visited Australia. With the exception of a handful of tweets explaining why, I didn’t write or say anything about him publicly because I refused to give him the attention he so desperately craves (and please note the irony that women are often told to ‘just ignore it’, as if this will somehow make ‘it’ magically disappear). Yet I was still effectively harassed by mainstream media outlets determined to make a story out of our political opposition. I was still bombarded by comments and messages on my public social media accounts from his followers demanding I debaaaaaaaaate Miiiiiiiilo. And in the end, when I still refused to play the game according to his rules and give him what he wanted (which was basically the opportunity to call me a fat cat lover with daddy issues on national television, despite the fact I fucking hate cats), he decided to just insert me into his pathetic sideshow act anyway.

  This whole game is so insidious and dastardly, and anyone with any kind of moral conscience at all automatically begins playing it on the back foot. The onus is always on the person being targeted to defend themselves for being so ‘weak’ that they can’t just deal with it and move on. To show vulnerability is to lose.

  How fucking sad is that?

  In the end, this is one of the things that should concern us most. Boys raised in our patriarchal world need no help with killing off the parts of themselves that are vulnerable and earnest. Raised with the tropes of stoic masculinity and boorishness, men can find an easy home in a community of Milos. Yes, from this place of privilege they are capable of causing untold harm to anyone who threatens their inflated sense of self. But the compassionate side of me also feels sad for them. It must be very lonely to live in a world where ‘cuck’, ‘white knight’, ‘mangina’ and ‘soy boy’ are seen as legitimate ways to emasculate each other—to destroy each other and to do it gleefully and with no regrets.

  Make no mistake, we absolutely need to challenge the vicious abuse girls and women are bombarded with every day. It hampers our ability to live free and autonomous lives, particularly in the unavoidable landscape carved out by modern technology. It has a severe impact on our mental health, and contributes to the widespread gaslighting that’s part and parcel of growing up female in a patriarchal world. We do not have to show compassion to our abusers if we don’t want to, nor are we obliged to hold their hands through the inevitable change in power structures that’s coming. It’s not an overstatement to characterise the toxic teachings of men like Yiannopoulos as being central to the radicalisation of today’s young white men, and marginalised people (which includes women, but certainly isn’t limited to us) do not have to negotiate with terrorists to secure their right to live peacefully.

  But society—particularly that which thinks these problems are peripheral or nothing to do with them or just another case of ‘boys being boys’—might also think about the impact this perpetration of abuse does for the young men being indoctrinated into its ideology. As bell hooks warned, ‘If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.’ So it is that young men are not only destroying the tenacity that exists in the women they’re being taught to mistrust and fear; they’re also obliterating the vulnerability that exists in themselves. And as the grenades go off one by one, no one’s spared from the violent, bloody fall-out.

  7

  THE MANOSPHERE

  A few months after the release of my first book, I was invited by the University of Melbourne to deliver a lunchtime lecture on the subject of rape culture. When I arrived at the library, I was surprised to learn that the organisers had arranged for a security guard to be present. Apparently they had received a complaint from a men’s rights activist who was upset that a man-hating feminazi terrorist (I’m paraphrasing) had been considered an appropriate speaker. He was concerned for his safety, he told them. He had reason to believe that I might try to hurt him, because of my known vendetta against straight white men. (His fears were not ill-founded. It’s a well-known fact that I am amassing a collection of straight white men in the crawl space beneath my house, and when I have properly trained them they will be released back into society with a terrifying new skill set that includes knowing when their bedsheets need washing and being able to appreciate a gentle joke at their expense.)

  My contacts at the university reassured the worried fellow that he would be perfectly safe. However, if he was concerned, then they recommended he consider staying far, far away from the venue where I would be speaking.

  It probably goes without saying that the security guard was for my benefit.

  Having just had a baby and hence being in a slightly more vulnerable state of mind than I would normally be, I was grateful for the organisers’ consideration. Unfortunately, I can’t say I was surprised that they deemed it necessary. It’s not uncommon for me to turn up to events and hear straight away about the various people who took issue with me being there and the things they’ve done or said to make their anger about it known. Men who don’t even live in the same state (and frequently not even in the same country) flock to Facebook event pages to leave abusive comments to organisers, links to defamatory blog posts about me and images of satirical tweets I’ve written that are presented as evidence of my violent hatred of the world’s male population. Despite their fury over what they see as feminist and SJW attempts to ‘censor’ the voices of MRAs (men’s rights activists), they sure do pull out all the stops when it comes to trying to fuck with your shit.

  Before it was cancelled, I was due to speak at the 2018 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne. The post announcing me as a speaker was inundated by thousands of angry men, all eager to share their incandescent rage that I might have anything to do with a movement that rejects the concept of deities. There’s a stark irony in the fact that so many men who count themselves as atheists are also fu
rious about women who refuse to bow down and worship them. I was told that a number of rape threats had had to be deleted from the post’s comments section, because of course the best way for men to disprove a feminist’s central world view that ‘world is fukt’ is to gather together and threaten her with sexual violence.

  The threats made against feminists are not always explicitly violent in nature. Sometimes, they amount to a concerted effort to destroy your financial opportunities. In 2017, I published a Facebook post announcing I had just signed a contract to write this book. That post was shared by Avid Reader, a bookstore in Brisbane with a wonderful reputation for supporting writers, artists and the tenets of basic human decency. Almost immediately, Avid Reader’s Facebook page was bombed by one-star ratings accompanied by reviews blasting them for being ‘anti-men’. The source of the backlash was quickly traced to an online group named Anti-Feminism Australia, a noxious community of MRAs whose leader seems to be particularly fixated with me. In addition to trolling businesses that support my work, the group has circulated a petition calling for my book contract to be cancelled, trawled through my Instagram archives to find photographs to publish under the headline WHO IS THE FATHER OF CLEMENTINE FORD’S BABY? and suggested I should be investigated by authorities for abusing my son. After Avid Reader shared my post, AFA posted a link to the store’s business page with the caption: ‘Avid Reader Bookshop and Cafe in Brisbane are promoting Clementine Ford’s man hating book. Be sure to leave them a one star review for promoting the hatred of men.’

  AFA have had success with this approach before. A Dymocks bookstore on the North Coast of New South Wales closed down their Facebook page after being flooded with one-star reviews by AFA members also complaining about their ‘promotion’ of me. Afterwards, AFA wrote a celebratory post declaring: ‘A big thank you to everyone who helped expose Dymocks Charlestown bookstore for promoting Clementine Ford’s book. As a result of many 1 star reviews and comments they have removed their page! That’s what we call a success!’

  The post went on to outline their motivation more clearly: ‘We need to keep exposing and shaming any business or organization that promotes Clementine Ford or gives a platform [sic] to preach her hateful ideology. If she is rejected by enough businesses she will have no where [sic] to go and will eventually fade away. Remember this misandrist makes a living out of hating men.’

  Well, now. I would hardly call it a living. A stipend, perhaps. A bit of pocket money at the most. But not a living. If only it paid that well!

  AFA’s attempts to troll Avid Reader backfired spectacularly. Not only did the bookstore’s social media manager respond by thoroughly ridiculing them, prominent members of Australia’s literary scene (some of whom were actually Avid Reader staff alum) rallied others to leave their own glowing five-star reviews. By the end of the day, Avid Reader’s page likes had increased by a few thousand and their rating hovered at roughly 4.8. As an added bonus, Dymocks Charlestown reinstated their Facebook business page and very quickly re-established a four-star rating too.

  It’s childish behaviour from men who feel angry because they aren’t taken seriously, but tantrums such as this in response to my work are so common that it seems almost normal now. I once missed a phone call from the (now former) editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. The voicemail he left sounded so grave and serious that I was convinced I was about to lose my job. I phoned him back in a panic, preparing myself for annihilation when he said there was something he needed to discuss with me.

  ‘We’ve received some quite concerning correspondence in relation to you,’ he began.

  ‘Oh really?’ I replied, scanning my memory to see if I’d done anything illegal recently—like how you drive past a police car and suddenly freak out that you might have stolen the vehicle you’re in and somehow forgotten it.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s a photocopied picture of you with some pretty nasty things written on it. Look, I don’t really feel comfortable reading them out loud to you, but I wanted you to know that we’re taking this very seriously and we’ve forwarded it on to police.’

  Adrenaline suddenly flooded through my body and I burst out laughing.

  ‘Is that all?!’ I exclaimed. ‘For a minute I was worried something really bad had happened!’

  It’s an odd feeling to find yourself explaining to one of your most senior employers that a handwritten letter calling you a whore is actually on the tamer end of the scale when it comes to your daily fan mail. It’s an expression of aggressive misogyny, sure, but it’s also nice to see that there are some people who still know how to use a pen. The vast majority of the abuse I receive is meted out in the same default fonts favoured by social media platforms and email accounts, and it gets a bit samey. You want to see the flourishes of someone’s personal calligraphy as they call for you to be throat-raped or fucked by a donkey, and I naturally offer humble admiration to anyone who continues to persevere with the Australian postal service.

  I think some people are surprised by how easily I deal with the torrent of abuse sent my way but, honestly, it’s because it’s difficult to imagine a more pathetic group of people than the men who, for various reasons, have decided to spend their lives telling women on Twitter that a good hard cocking would cure them of their bitterness. And they could get one, too, if they weren’t so fucking fat.

  Imagine the world’s most unappealing assortment of chocolates, with flavours like ‘urinal cake’, ‘unwashed dick’ and ‘silent fart in an elevator’ all crammed into a plastic tray that’s covered in the slick grease of an unwashed barnet. Men’s rights activists, internet shitlords, teenage boys who spend too much time on conspiracy websites, Mark Latham—they might each have their own specific grievances and concerns, but if you threw them in a cauldron (you probably have a few floating around) and boiled them all down together you’d find that their flavours were fairly indistinguishable.

  At least, this is the impression gleaned after spending even the barest amount of time surveying the internet’s ‘manosphere’. Drawing together users from 4chan, 8chan, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, independently run blogs and the sewerage pipes that connect the lot of them, the vast toilet system that makes up this manosphere can be accurately summarised by three words: angry, paranoid and entitled.

  In his book Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, David Neiwert refers to MRA websites in particular as being ‘like wildlife refuges for misogynist ideas’. As he notes, ‘They call feminists “a social cancer,” and assert, “Feminism is a hate movement designed to disenfranchise and dehumanize men.”’ To illustrate his point, Neiwert references a blog written by an MRA with the moniker Alcuin. Alcuin argues, ‘Just as the Nazis had to create a Jewish conspiracy as a way to justify mass slaughter, so feminists have to create patriarchy as a way to justify mass slaughter of innocent unborn, and the destruction of men and masculinity. Rape is now a political crime, not a crime of sex or violence.’

  Alcuin appears to have made his blog private now, but I managed to track down a post in which he rails against the characterisation of MRAs as ‘angry’ and ‘hate-filled’. MRAs are kind creatures, he argues, but the ‘feminist-run media’ has painted them in a bad light. Instead, he says, ‘A lot of articles and comments simply offer observations based on experience. A guy finds out that western women prefer alphas, sleep around easily, turn their love into hatred at a moment’s notice, use shaming language, are sweet only when they want something, fuck their boyfriend’s best friend, walk out on their family or, more common, kick the husband out. Why shouldn’t he warn others about this behaviour? It’s a public service, actually.’

  It’s misogyny, actually.

  Despite their solid standing in the world’s legion of Angry Men, MRAs are a slightly more worrisome breed of creep because they use some of the genuine issues men face as a sort of Trojan Horse via which they can sneak a far more insidious agenda into the public discourse. MRAs are capable of recognising the
harm that patriarchy does to men—the increased risk of suicide, the shunting of their emotional selves, the substantial impact that violence has on men’s lives—but instead of working with feminists to dismantle this system of structural oppression, they’ve identified women as its source. The curious logic of the average MRA holds that feminism and the fight for women’s liberation is not only unnecessary (because women obviously have more power and privilege than men because we can have sex whenever we want—yes, really, this is an argument that some of them earnestly expound), but that every harm identified by feminism can be countered by an equal and opposite harm being enacted by women against men. Misogyny and misandry are treated by MRAs as interchangeable, with the latter being widely viewed as ‘just as bad, if not worse’. According to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So it is that MRAs view the battleground of sexism. Every time a bell rings, a she-witch somewhere commits a radical misandry against an unsuspecting man.

  Yes, Ben Folds said it best when he observed that, ‘Y’all don’t know what it’s like / Being male, middle class and white.’

  Central to the MRA argument is their insistence that women experience some kind of disproportionate ‘female privilege’ that actually provides them with more advantages than men. In the MRA handbook, female privilege includes the following: being able to speak to men without being considered predatory; being able to have sex ‘whenever you want’; being able to decide whether or not to continue with a pregnancy (as opposed to ‘having a child forced on you so that a scheming bitch can rob you blind for the next eighteen years’); being able to have sex with a man and then later change your mind while accusing him of rape; having the right to leave a marriage because the courts will automatically favour you in a custody dispute, despite this not having been the case for over twenty years; not having to pay for dinner or drinks. Female privilege is also receiving, as the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist George F. Will put it in the Washington Post, the ‘coveted status’ of being a rape survivor on a college campus and all the advantages that come with that (‘Colleges become the victims of progressivism’, 6 June 2014).