A seemingly friendly employee offered her help
David Futrelle reports on a horrendous thing that was done to Chanty Binx – the red-haired hate figure who’s been abused by the abusive gang online for the past three years.
Now one of her haters has put her back in the spotlight again, and in a supremely creepy manner. Not long ago, you see, Binx stopped by a government-run liquor store in the Toronto area to pick up a bottle of wine. A seemingly friendly employee offered her help.
In fact, he claimed later, he had recognized her from the internet, and was hoping to hear her speak to make sure she really was who he thought she was.
After she left, he somehow accessed the store’s surveillance footage, took a screenshot of her visit to the store, and put it up on Facebook (without the blurs you see below):
Gruesome enough? Woman has the audacity to go to a store, and a worker at the store steals security footage of her and posts it on Facebook with abusive commentary.
This time Binx has decided not to lay low. She spoke with CityNews about the latest twist in the internet war on her. The report is chilling, and well worth watching.
“[I feel like] I’m being watched constantly,” she told CityNews. “No matter what I do, I’m under a monitor.”
Now that the CityNews segment has run, the hate campaign against her has predictably ramped up again.
Futrelle included a selection of the violent fantasies expressed about torturing her to death. There’s one about a gang of men ripping her cunt to shreds and stomping on her ugly tits and smashing her teeth with a hammer and fucking her face until she dies and cutting open her body and pouring in lye. Good healthy stuff, it’s great that they get it out there instead of letting it fester.
What makes me all the more disgusted by this is remembering that Richard Dawkins chose to tell his million-plus followers to go ahead and mock her a few months ago. He told them: “Yes, she deserves abundant mockery, the more the merrier.” It was before the stroke; it may be that he wouldn’t do that kind of thing now even if he hadn’t turned his Twitter account over to the RDF staff…but he did it then. He did it even though many people begged him to stop. Who knows if maybe the guy at the liquor store was encouraged by Dawkins to “mock her” by posting stolen security footage of her buying a bottle of wine.
That’s a very bad tiger to ride.
For some reason, women getting angry and standing up for themselves makes them a “horrible person” in the world of people like Dawkins. My husband and I have been talking about that a lot lately – the “angry white male” voter who gets quite a bit of sympathy from the press, and the assumption that he has something legitimate to be angry about (they do this, of course, by assuming he is angry about the economy or afraid of terrorists; they don’t bother to notice that he is often angry about those who are not white, not male, or both). The angry woman, the angry person of color, is often portrayed as a person lacking in self-control and a figure of fun, pity, or scorn. It is seen as “unattractive” in women and “terrifying” in people of color.
Chanty Binx got angry. She got angry in public. She said bad words. She acted unladylike. For this, she deserves all she gets. That is the worldview of MRAs and all who follow them, retweet them, or even sympathize with them. This is the very definition of a toxic culture.
Such a good point.
One trusts that the LCBO employee in question was dismissed for cause, or will be shortly. That’s a pretty serious abuse of his position.
I’m not even sure what his point was. “Oh, hey, I met this woman who is famous for being prickly and thought it would be funny to see how prickly she was, and she wasn’t all that prickly, I mean, I’ve worked with worse.”
What?
Why steal a screenshot to prove it?
And why does he think this story somehow makes her look bad?
In what universe does someone think it is in any way appropriate to 1) casually harass another human being, and 2) use the resources of their employer to do this?
Also, I worry for the safety of the female co-worker that Mr LCBO Employee thinks is “more unstable” than Binx. Hopefully he will soon no longer have her for a co-worker, but of course then there is likely to be backlash for the firing of a dude who was just trying to have a bit of fun…
iknklast 👍
It’s odd that this person thinks Binx spends her life wandering the streets shouting feminist slogans into the faces of random men.
MRA World must be a strange place.
Chanty Binx was a bit angry and sweary in a video 3 years ago. The ‘Amazing’ Atheist was moreso in a video last week, which was directed toward a particular person who disagreed with him rather than toward frustration at an attitude and a situation.
One gets overwhelming hatred for 3 years, the other gets half a million loves per video.
What clearer example could there be of women being punished for not shutting up and men being praised for not shutting up?
It’s hard to pick a winner from the list of horrible things Dawkins has said, but in terms of how a possibly thoughtless tweet could adversely affect another person while snagging a shitload more followers and inviting one to double-down… Yeah… that might actually be the most horrible thing Dawkins ever tweeted.
It seems clear enough that he didn’t mean any harm but it’s equally clear that he should have been able to predict the harm that might (and did) happen anyway, if only because thousands of people kept fucking TELLING HIM about the damage he was doing over quite a few years.
It becomes increasingly obvious that Dawkins is oblivious to anything he has not experienced himself. Even when he has, he assumes his response to things is universal, like the time he casually dismissed having been sexually abused as a child. Because he is secure and confident and it didn’t shatter his world, he assumes everyone can, and should, feel the same way. But many of us have not had the privilege that Dawkins had both as a child and as an adult, and it isn’t just his whiteness or his maleness. For those of us who grew up in a somewhat…rougher…socioeconomic status and life situation in general, vulnerability and lack of a good support system can make a huge difference.
Other people, like the Amazing Atheist, aren’t so much oblivious as they are arrogant a**holes, as far as I can tell.
I’m not even sure it makes sense to say “It seems clear enough that he didn’t mean any harm” by telling 1.3 million followers that it’s fine to mock a person. It’s actually not fine to mock people, so I’m not sure we can really say people who urge others to mock people don’t mean any harm. That remark all by itself, even without any background knowledge of the quantities of mockery and worse Chanty Binx had received over the past three years, looks like a harm-meaning remark to me. It’s the remark of a smug prosperous frat boy with a sadistic streak.
A definite possibility, but there’s zero evidence at this stage. I’m happy to gloat over Dawkins’ twitter corpse, but linking it to this seems a step too far.
Dawkins is only part of the problem though. The Coynes, the Pinkers, PZ & his horde, the Slymepitters, the Orbiters, the Carriers etc. all believe their worldview is Peak Rationality. The lack of introspection in the atheist world is remarkable (and depressing).
Well that’s why I worded it the way I did – wording that you clipped to make it sound worse. What I said was: “Who knows if maybe the guy at the liquor store was encouraged by Dawkins to “mock her”…”
I didn’t say there was evidence he did. My point was that it’s not at all far-fetched, and that that’s sad and horrible. What that guy at the liquor store did was basically to mock her, grossly violating her privacy in the process. My point is that Dawkins actively and repeatedly told people to mock her, “the more the merrier.” I’m not gloating by saying that – quite the opposite.
I didn’t say you were gloating, I said I was.
Every time Dawkins said something insensitive, you got a deluge of ‘Look at the bad atheist!’-type comments, made worse by the idea these people have that Dawkins is our leader.
We all know that Dawkins has contributed to the climate of hostility* on social media and elsewhere, so it’s not even relevant whether Liquor Store Guy saw the video that Dawkins retweeted. He could be a full-on Dawkbro, or he may not even know who Dawkins is. None of that changes the behaviour they both engaged in.
The point I was trying to make in the last paragraph is that no-one comes out looking good after the post-Elevatorgate flame wars. Perhaps it is easier for me to see this as I am an outsider.
*Generally, as well as toward C. Binx specifically.
What do you mean? That everyone behaved equally badly in those “flame wars”? Maybe it is easier for you to “see” that (or rather to interpret it that way) because you’re an outsider – that doesn’t mean you’re right.
If you just mean that no one behaved flawlessly, well no shit. But if you mean that everyone behaved equally badly, I say that’s bullshit.
Chanty Binx herself provides a good example of why it’s bullshit. She didn’t behave flawlessly in that incident that was caught on video. She shouted and told people to fuck off. That is not comparable to what was done to her.
Still. I get what you mean about all parties thinking they’re at Peak Rationality of course.
As for Elevatorgate itself, Dawkins is pretty much to blame for setting off a detonator button over what seemed to be a fairly minor incident*. Like the Gamergate thing, I’m still not sure what the big fuss is about.
*Watson’s comments, not the elevator thing itself.