Mamamia hits out at ‘gutless abusers’ on social media

It’s terrible news to hear about how horrible and pathetic people are when they have a keyboard weapon, and such disgusting behaviour is completely not on. In all sincerity.

But I do have to ask… is it actual fact that all these ‘abusers’ referred to in the article are men? A little bit of a detour, but you only need to go through Mamamia’s Facebook page, and a number of the negative comments are from women…

Not trying to cause a stir, but I can’t help but think that one of the triggers to this recent tirade was for pinning David Koch up as a misogynist when it was a bit of harmless (albeit potentially inappropriate to some) fun – and whilst I make absolutely no excuse or allowance for the behaviour of those pigs online, I have to think that all this constant man hate is also a bit uncalled for.

Just a thought.

It also comes a day after The Conversation posted a similar, and more articulate, message to its readers. It seems like all the writers ever do at Mammamia is copy and paste.

Sanctimonious man-bashing is her bread & butter.

You’ll probably appear in her next blog post under the title “Dear Hmmm from Mumbrella”.

If you spend two minutes on Mamamia, it’s quite evident that most of the people attacking women, are other women, as ‘Hmmmm’ said above. I think you’d struggle to find a man who gave a shit about what was and wasn’t said about Kochie.

I agree with Hmmm.

You’ll probably find that these “women-hating” people probably don’t discriminate. They hate on everybody and, as hmmm rightly points out, they’re not always men.

Of course one simple answer is if you don’t like the way people behave on social media, don’t play on social networks. You won’t feed the hate, but you won’t make any money either.

Just this morning Mamamia has removed a post which said something along the lines of “there is a special place in hell for people that kill their children”. The mother of the murdered child had been at pains, despite the horror she must be going through, to point out that the father of this child had serious mental illness. Surely if the mother of the murdered child does not want the perpetrator demonised, Mamamia could show some restraint. NOTHING excuses what he did, but I for one was very, very tempted to unleash a tirade of abuse at Mamamia for their very, very ugly article.

THIS is why they get the comments they get. They repeatedly, before getting a grip on the facts, head off on their judgemental, ill informed path of condemnation. Just like they did with David Koch – no clue about what’s happening here, but let’s just have a chop anyway. Plenty of women are pretty fed up with this man bashing approach, so god knows how fed up most men must be.

They also appear to presume to speak for “all women” on a regular basis. They regularly delete comments they don’t like or that hold a robust view that differs from theirs. They hypocrisy of the contributors and the site in general is very often laughable. I’ve voted with my feet and left the site. And whilst of course it is not ok for some of these keyboard warrior idiots to make death threats etc, surely these people have been around to witness trolls, haters and other web wankers before? How about you all put on your big girls pants and stop whining “they are being soooooo meannnnnnnnnnnnn”.

@Hmmm I’m not sure in the Mamaimia editorial it states that men are the sole perpetrators. It doesn’t really refer to gender at all. There are women misogynists too….

Good call. While nobody would go so far as to say that these kinds of hateful posts should be censored from the internet, it’s good that a strong, contrary voice is standing up and saying in no uncertain terms that we will not be not be intimidated by a bunch of keyboard warriors and their hollow threats.

It is terrible that they are receiving death threats. They certainly aren’t the only female writers to do so. I am just not sure what the blog post is supposed to achieve?

PR effort, I suspect.

I found this difficult to read. It begins “It is not often we are able to jointly edit a post” and then continues with “in fact, this is the first time ever.” You would think if the staff were all putting their name to it then one of them could proof it. They also claim millions of readers, they must have had a bump since the 1.2 monthly viewers reported last year. Good on them.

Nobody deserves to be abused, it’s appalling behaviour but this is could have the headline “Awful people are awful”. The terrible people abusing them are doing so to upset them and get a response. Mission accomplished. If they ignored them and reported them to the police when appropriate they might go away. I can’t see how this will make any difference.

Having been banned from Mamamia because I took Mia to task on her ‘respectful blackface’ article and stated that I would allow a middle class white woman to decide what was racist or not the moment she allowed men to decide what was feminist or not. Someone took umbrage at my respectfully stated comments and banned me.

They need to spend more time researching their articles, and stop copy posting articles from HuffPo and Jezebel, without due diligence.

I think the thing that irritates most people about Freedman is that she tries to have it both ways by writing judgemental, sanctimonious pieces on MM but also wanting to play the ‘I’m just a stupid woman’ card.

Her stint on The Project last night was a perfect case of this. No mention of her awful, awful ‘This Dad should rot in hell’ article and when she asked a question about politics she prefaced it with ‘explain it to me like I’m a dummy’

They seem to confuse trolls and haters with people criticising. Mia has never apologised or accepted that she is wrong. Even with her ‘Burn in Hell’ article this week she just simply changed the title, took her name off it and bumped it down the site.
Why anyone listens to her or her contradictory site is beyond me. they do more harm than good.

Some of these comments are really off. Whether or not you read or even like Mamamia – surely we can all agree that having and voicing an opinion shouldn’t be an invitation for violent abuse. Have a go at what these women say, sure but threatening violence is so screwed up and so is anyone defending it.

Continually representing women as “victims” has been very profitable for Mamamia, for all the wrong reasons. It’s a false representation of Australian women.
The women I know are strong, confident, smart and in control of their lives.
South African billionnare heiress Mia Freedman clearly has too much time on her hands. We are getting tired of trust fund activists and their faddish social engineering.

The weird thing is, a fair proportion of the abuse directed at Mamamia on social media is not by men but by other women. Clearly the brand of feminism espoused by Mia Freedman is not being supported by the demographic its aiming for. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mamamia closed within a year.

I am more concerned about the design of Mamamia than the content, to be honest.

@Kate – spot on. Going on about “poor us, we’re getting trolled” gets Mamamia noticed in mainstream media.

Guys, EVERYONE in the public eye gets trolled – Mia has for years now – along with many who are not.

Ignore. Block.

I’ve also come under the banhammer from the team at MM. When they published the letter the other day, I made this comment:

If you’re so keen on not shutting women’s voices down, why do you censor perfectly respectful, reasonable comments by either editing them (without any suggestion in your commenting guidelines that you do) or just not publishing them at all? Or banning people with no explanation as to why? Not as robust as you claim, huh?

It needs to cut both ways. If you’re loud and proud about women’s rights to opinions, you have to allow dissent on your page too. Which you haven’t. Instead you’ve been petty mean girls not posting stuff from people who used to just really ask you to be accountable. Like Bradley, kris2040, beans, and a few others. Whenever people ask about what happened, you guys are silent. If you’re so tough, why ban people who do nothing but ask questions?

I made it under a pseudonym because my username has been banned. This comment got a ton of thumbs up, and responses. Mia herself responded and said that “claims of censorship were plainly bollocks”, after which a flurry of comments were published by a heap of people saying that they had not had comments pass moderation a LOT.

It used to be a good site, with interesting, thought provoking articles. Unfortunately it’s become a Mean Girls tabloid club and they are complete hypocrites.

No-one deserves death or rape threats for saying what they think, but as (and I’m so glad I’m not the only one who thinks this) others have commented, if you want to put yourself out there, especially for people who claim to be savvy internet types, you’re going to cop it.

The article with punter comments is here: http://webcache.googleusercont.....rolling%2F

Yes, I was banned because I asked the wrong questions. By that I mean I asked questions that the MM Team didn’t want to answer. Quite often the articles are full of sweeping generalisations that are not supported with anything that resembles a bibliography. More often than not I was accused of being rude for simply expressing a firmly worded argument to support why I disagreed with particular articles.

Often I was attacked for daring to comment on a “woman’s site”, my crime being born male. Of course, what would a male know about women’s issues ?

I for one believe that if it is a case of “the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy dog”, don’t embellish the matter with self-righteousness or assumptions that the fox had some ulterior motive in mind when he made the jump. For a site that proclaims that it supports the empowerment of women, it is always too quick to paint women as helpless victims.

Day after day, the site runs articles based on three (or so it seems) topics. Although the authors may differ, the content is more or less the same. No new angles are ever apparent, just the same story over and over, but instead of the events occurring in Sydney they now occur in Melbourne or somewhere in the snowbound wastelands of Siberia. Reading some of the material is akin to watching a terrier with a lamb chop. Shaking the chop for all it’s worth but never actually getting any of the meat.

The site has now become the home of raging sycophants, each one declaring their undying support for Mia, Jamila, Kate or Rosie and absolutely agree with, and loving everything that they write. Makes for pretty boring reading. They truly need to return to the old days. Stop being so censortive and permit some colourful conversation. To be honest, it was that spontaneous debate that seemed to erupt out of nowhere that first attracted many to the site. Nowadays, MM is little more than a place to go to read advertorials and flagrant plagiarism.

In closing, MM is little more than a fool’s paradise these days. All that was good about the site has been shot, strangled and raped by a handful of arrogant individuals intent on pushing their own wagon.