A university bake sale with prices based on statistically demonstrable gender pay gaps seems pretty innocuous right? Probably not something you’d, say, threaten to murder someone over? Well clearly you’re a bit more reasonable than some other dickheads on the internet because, in case you missed it, that’s exactly what’s been happening.
Organiser and vice president of gender and sexuality at the University of Queensland Union Madeline Price wrote an article for The Guardian outlining her frankly heroic experience dealing with the misogynist shitheels who crawled out of the woodwork to pretty much prove that UQ‘s feminist week is actually a super good idea:
“Far from simply starting a discussion about wage disparity in Australia, the online backlash over the Gender Pay Gap Bake Sale brought to light hundreds of other issues of gender inequality, from sexual violence and threats against women, to why we still need feminism in the 21st century. This bake sale did its job and more.”
Madeline wrote that they had been getting rape and death threats weeks before people had a chance to even buy a cupcake, through comments on the Facebook event, email, Facebook messages and, in one case, as a voicemail message.
Overall, though, she reckons the effect has been a net positive, with people who previously thought feminism was unnecessary changing their tune after seeing the outpouring of extremely gendered and extremely unhinged hate that something as chill as a bake sale got. Weirdly, it turns out MRAs aren’t just massive gronks they are also not tactical geniuses. Weird.
Source: The Guardian.
Photo: Instagram / @Spiffytownbakery.
