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Ironic Misandry Claims Its First Victim
A woman tweets #KillAllWhiteMen and the Internet explodes.
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Last month student union leaders at Goldsmiths, University of London, organized a meeting for minority students to chat about their stake in the student protests being staged at schools across London over the high cost of tuition. Bahar Mustafa had just been re-elected to her post as welfare and diversity officer for Goldsmiths’ student union, and she eagerly recruited her Facebook friends to help spread the word. Oh, and “if you’re a man and/or white PLEASE DON’T COME,” she wrote in a note. “Don’t worry lads we will give you and allies things to do.”
Instead, one Goldsmiths lad screengrabbed the post and published it on a student news site. Mustafa has “made it very difficult for cis white males on campus,” an anonymous member of the demo complained to the paper. Soon, local tabloids had scooped up the story, delighted by the irony of a “diversity officer” banning students by race. While some members of the Goldsmiths student union pledged their support of Mustafa, an anonymous faction of students filed a petition with the union early this month calling for a vote of “no confidence” in her. They alleged that Mustafa had repeatedly posted hashtags like #Misandry and #KillAllWhiteMen to her personal Twitter account. This constituted “hate speech based on race and gender,” they argued. Some students felt “intimidated” and “silenced” by her tone.
The press ate it up. The hashtags drew headlines in Britain’s Daily Mail, Sweden’s Nyheter Idag, fun fearless Cosmo, and the right-wing Daily Caller. Google now counts 70,000 news items citing Mustafa’s name. Her tweets, the Daily Caller said, “appear to call for white men to be exterminated.” People who had never heard of Mustafa, Goldsmiths, or whatever a “welfare and diversity officer” is suddenly had an opinion. A Change.org petition emerged demanding that Mustafa be arrested on charges of hate speech and terrorism. The imps of 4chan pitched in, deeming Mustafa a “feminazi kebab” and pledging to pack the petition with fake ethnic names and dummy emails. (The petition has amassed 19,000 signatures so far.) The saddest man on YouTube posted a video calling Mustafa a “butterface.” One story about the controversy drew upward of 2,500 comments on Reddit before moderators locked the thread; one moderator told my colleague that the conversation had devolved into calls to “rape her in the cunt with a chainsaw” and could not be revived. And this week Scotland Yard told reporters that after receiving a tip, its officers had launched an investigation into Mustafa’s social media activities, searching for evidence of a “racially motivated malicious communication.”
So, that escalated quickly. Mustafa is not the first to have her reputation raked across the Web on account of some lousy tweets. But she may be the first to crumble over a case of ironic misandry, a tongue-in-cheek form of discourse favored by the young feminist Internet natives. You may have spied them on Twitter or Tumblr, working on their “KILL ALL MEN” cross-stitch or sipping from a mug labeled “MALE TEARS.” Ironic misandrists say they’re poking fun at long-standing stereotypes about militant feminist man-haters. That seems to fit Mustafa’s tweets. In a statement to Goldsmiths students, she owned up to using the hashtags, calling them “in-jokes” between herself and other members of “the queer feminist community.” If some people failed to get the joke, well, that was kind of the point.
[center]
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Last month student union leaders at Goldsmiths, University of London, organized a meeting for minority students to chat about their stake in the student protests being staged at schools across London over the high cost of tuition. Bahar Mustafa had just been re-elected to her post as welfare and diversity officer for Goldsmiths’ student union, and she eagerly recruited her Facebook friends to help spread the word. Oh, and “if you’re a man and/or white PLEASE DON’T COME,” she wrote in a note. “Don’t worry lads we will give you and allies things to do.”
Instead, one Goldsmiths lad screengrabbed the post and published it on a student news site. Mustafa has “made it very difficult for cis white males on campus,” an anonymous member of the demo complained to the paper. Soon, local tabloids had scooped up the story, delighted by the irony of a “diversity officer” banning students by race. While some members of the Goldsmiths student union pledged their support of Mustafa, an anonymous faction of students filed a petition with the union early this month calling for a vote of “no confidence” in her. They alleged that Mustafa had repeatedly posted hashtags like #Misandry and #KillAllWhiteMen to her personal Twitter account. This constituted “hate speech based on race and gender,” they argued. Some students felt “intimidated” and “silenced” by her tone.
The press ate it up. The hashtags drew headlines in Britain’s Daily Mail, Sweden’s Nyheter Idag, fun fearless Cosmo, and the right-wing Daily Caller. Google now counts 70,000 news items citing Mustafa’s name. Her tweets, the Daily Caller said, “appear to call for white men to be exterminated.” People who had never heard of Mustafa, Goldsmiths, or whatever a “welfare and diversity officer” is suddenly had an opinion. A Change.org petition emerged demanding that Mustafa be arrested on charges of hate speech and terrorism. The imps of 4chan pitched in, deeming Mustafa a “feminazi kebab” and pledging to pack the petition with fake ethnic names and dummy emails. (The petition has amassed 19,000 signatures so far.) The saddest man on YouTube posted a video calling Mustafa a “butterface.” One story about the controversy drew upward of 2,500 comments on Reddit before moderators locked the thread; one moderator told my colleague that the conversation had devolved into calls to “rape her in the cunt with a chainsaw” and could not be revived. And this week Scotland Yard told reporters that after receiving a tip, its officers had launched an investigation into Mustafa’s social media activities, searching for evidence of a “racially motivated malicious communication.”
So, that escalated quickly. Mustafa is not the first to have her reputation raked across the Web on account of some lousy tweets. But she may be the first to crumble over a case of ironic misandry, a tongue-in-cheek form of discourse favored by the young feminist Internet natives. You may have spied them on Twitter or Tumblr, working on their “KILL ALL MEN” cross-stitch or sipping from a mug labeled “MALE TEARS.” Ironic misandrists say they’re poking fun at long-standing stereotypes about militant feminist man-haters. That seems to fit Mustafa’s tweets. In a statement to Goldsmiths students, she owned up to using the hashtags, calling them “in-jokes” between herself and other members of “the queer feminist community.” If some people failed to get the joke, well, that was kind of the point.
Source.
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