What’s Current: Men harass & threaten women daily, yet Bahar Mustafa was charged for tweeting #killallwhitemen

Bahar Mustafa
Bahar Mustafa

Student diversity officer, Bahar Mustafa, charged by police for sending a #killallwhitemen tweet. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go check my twitter notifications, where several men just threatened to decapitate me and sexually violate my corpse.

Women are largely abandoned by the criminal justice system when it comes to receiving violent and specific threats to their safety online. Yet a woman tweets a political hashtag making use of rhetorical irony, and SHE gets charged by police. Male privilege never ceases to astound me. One writer asks:

“Is there really any man who has looked at those three words and sincerely feared for his life? Any man who has planned a longer, more arduous route from the pub to his home simply because it is better lit, to avoid meeting with women on quiet roads? Are there men who have seen that hashtag and wondered which school or cinema will be gunned down next because a young woman wasn’t as sexually active as her peers, or found it hard to make friends? Frankly, ‘kill all men’ relies on the knowledge that we couldn’t, even if we wanted to.”

Why is it that women’s speech (especially feminist speech) is regarded as so dangerous? The University of Manchester Student Union thinks that Julie Bindel is worse than ISIS. It’s clear that no-platforming is an attack on feminism, pure and simple.

Young man who grew up in a porn culture feels so entitled to women’s bodies that he threatens to “kill all the girls” on the cheerleading squad because they wouldn’t send him any “freaking nudes.” Since he made a threat related to violence at school, authorities took action to investigate.

Young male feels so entitled, that he becomes belligerent over not having Mac and Cheese.

Just a reminder.

Suffragette film protest: Activists take the spirit of the film and put it into action, storming the red carpet to protest cuts to local authority services:

“Janelle Brown, spokeswoman for Sisters Uncut, told the BBC: ‘We came to the Suffragette premiere today because the struggle is definitely not over. Dead women can’t vote.’”

Susan Cox

Susan Cox is a feminist writer and academic living in the United States. She teaches in Philosophy.