The whole story.
This is almost too poorly written to even warrant a response, but here is the actual series of events for those who are curious! Yay, storytime!
Alexander Ryking, who has a history of attempting to silence women bloggers (he told Jess of STFUConservatives and the other “feminazis” to “go kill themselves” several months ago, and has also been rude to women of color but I haven’t been on Tumblr long enough to have personally witnessed that), defended The Amazing’s Atheist’s violent rape threats on Reddit by tagging his posts with “I support TAA.”
I and many, many other Tumblr users were disgusted by this, so we decided to tag our criticisms of Ryking that night with “Ryking’s banana republic”—a reference to his co-opting of SJ concepts, NOT a homophobic dig, and the person who coined it was a queer man anyway. Someone also wrote a few jokingly romantic lines about Ryking’s blind defense of TAA and new atheism, and Ryking interpreted this as homophobic and misandric…it wasn’t, but because I reblogged it, Ryking insists that I am now a homophobe, which is hilarious given my own sexual identity but whatever.
We also responded to some of his posts with pictures of extreme close-ups of our eyes.
Seriously. That is what this guy is calling “abuse.”
We did NOT threaten him, make personal attacks against his sexuality, tell him to go kill himself, send him rude messages, or commit any other acts that could reasonably be interpreted as the “cyberbullying” Ryking claims it is. I did temporarily change my URL to rykingsbananarepublic and I make no apologies for that. Why should I? Why shouldn’t a group of feminists and their allies be allowed to respond creatively to misogyny? The only actual cyberbullying that has taken place was TAA’s initial rape threats on Reddit; I wouldn’t even go so far as to claim Ryking’s tweets to me and other Twitter users are cyberbullying, though I leave it up to the other people who were insulted by him to label their experiences as bullying or not.
Anyway, a few nights later, I tweeted something in defense of Whitney Houston’s legacy, and suddenly there was Ryking going ballistic. He found me on Twitter, called me a cunt right off the bat, and insisted that I claimed Whitney Houston’s death was “more important than the death of 5,000 Syrians” (I didn’t! Here is what I actually said!). I had never exchanged tweets with this man before, and was confused about his sudden interest in my thoughts about Whitney Houston and Syria. Naturally, I responded, told him how wrong he was, and the next day I screencapped some of the things he said and posted them here. I never expected that post to get the amount of notes it did, but I think that just goes to show how widespread the dislike for him is.
This author’s claim that I “deliberately baited” Alexander Ryking is pathetically inaccurate. There is an enormous difference between what we did,—creating a tag for our criticisms of Ryking’s sexism and general ignorance—and what he did, which was seek out women on Twitter to attack and personally degrade however he could. As I’ve explained recently, his behavior here is reprehensible because it takes place in a culture where women bloggers are targeted simply for being women. Ryking’s attacks were deliberately personal (“do you have daddy issues?”), deliberately wielded against women (“you feminazi cunts”), and deliberately violent (“go die in a fire”). There are NO similarities between the way we approached him and the way he approached us, period.
If you want to follow Ryking, unfollow me please. Thanks.
-Jess
Ryking continues to be a piece of shit.
the fact that any of this even needs to be said nauseates me
