Is #FreeBleeding a Hoax?
UPDATE: Hoax Came From 4chan

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Old newsroom saying: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” So when Brandon Morse, Kim Jossfolk and others called attention to the #FreeBleeding hashtag yesterday, my skepticism was aroused. Not even feminists can be this crazy, can they?

The first thing I discovered was that the accounts most involved in this — @Roaring_Womyn and @dontjudgme3333 — were recently created and had few followers. In other words, these weren’t long-term Twitter users, which is your first clue that they’re trolls. Next, tracing the #FreeBleeding hashtag to its earliest use, I discovered an October 2011 “Funny or Die” video.

Those are fairly strong indications of a hoax. The term “free bleeding” refers to a real phenomenon, discussed here by a vendor of environmental-friendly menstrual products, and here in a 2004 post at the “All About My Vagina” site. However, there is no indication that this “Tampons-Are-Male-Oppression” message had any organic existence prior to the suspicious appearance of @Roaring_Womyn and @dontjudgme3333, and so it’s obviously some kind of hoax.

The real question: Whose hoax is it? Two alternative theories:

  1. Conservative hoax — Seeking to exploit the irrationality and credulity of the Women’s Studies/Gender Theory crowd, conservatives create this #FreeBleeding nonsense in the expectation that feminist ideologues will pick it up and run with it. Once it becomes the subject of a lunatic essay at Feministing, the hoax is revealed: “Ha ha ha! Stupid feminists!”
  2. Liberal hoax — Trying to score another “War on Women” victory, liberals create an offensive message, hoping to elicit misogynist comments from right-wingers. If they can get a reaction from Erick Erickson — or better yet, a Twitchy thread — then the hoaxers reveal the truth: “Ha ha ha! Stupid wingnuts!”

In exposing the hoax now, I understand the risk of accidentally busting an attempted O’Keefean sting by “our” side, but the danger that this could be a liberal hoax — and that my friends might be sucked into it and embarrassed — was sufficient to outweigh that risk. So if it turns out that @Roaring_Womyn and @dontjudgme3333 were actually my friends (is that you, Iowahawk?), I’m sorry. Better luck next time.

UPDATE: My skeptical hunch was correct. Daily Dot explains that the “Operation FreeBleeding” hoax began on the 4chan boards.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

44 comments

  2. The handle @dontjudgment3333 suggests a left-wing hoaxer, since the whole “DON’T JUDGE ME ZOMG!!!!1!1!” isn’t typically mocked by the right. (At least, not that I’ve noticed) But it’s occasionally mocked by those few leftists with an actual sense of humor who also understand that there is indeed an event horizon of ridiculousness. (They’re the ones who coined the term “Oppression Olympics” when their ridiculousness tolerance threshold was reached) He/she/they is/are also probably young, roughly around college age, and constantly exposed to the totalitarian PC culture and river of received words and ideas. There’s a familiarity with today’s cutting edge lunacy that’s difficult to find anywhere else.

    If that’s the case, the hoaxers are probably not doing it for our benefit, but falling back on the only shame culture they’re (somewhat) permitted. Since “SHAME IS BAD MMKAY”, they can only mock it anonymously and through over-the-top, obvious parody, since the left seems to enjoy embracing increasingly insane “causes” per the slippery slope that false “tolerance” cascades into. The good news is that if they are indeed left-wing, they usually swing rightward once they realise that the left is in the terminal stages of insanity and incapable of being cured in the current culture.

    Of course, it could also be someone from 4chan or Anonymous having fun at the expense of the mentally ill and not necessarily political. And if it’s one of ours, it’s someone who has contact with college-age young adults who report back what sort of nuttiness they’re being exposed to.

  3. Oh beans. I was hoping this free bleeding movement was real. I just tweeted my support for the Sacred Phallus and its Holy Penetration, and my outrage to the Evil Matriarchy who opposes it. I also embraced the aversion to unnatural tampons, and stated that we should also rid ourselves of unnatural toilet paper, with the hashtag #freecrapping.

    Oh well, maybe some feminist will read it and be p.o.’d. One can only hope.

  4. Regretfully, the “unnatural toilet paper” has a serious following among greenies.

    The left is almost beyond parody now thanks to pathological “tolerance”.

  14. Exactly. Useful people working to benefit themselves and others don’t usually stoop to this kind of garbage. Even as a hoax, it came from a seriously disturbed mind.

  21. My fee-yancy and I have a running joke going between us about the difference between “women’s mysteries” and “too much information”…

  22. One other hand, use that stuff and you’ll REALLY improve your time on the road march back to barracks.
    Uh, somebody told me that…

  23. You think it’s a hoax because some MAN says it’s a hoax?

    Until we hear from the Sacred Gaian Sisterhood of Wymyn, I say, “Bleed on, sister!” as I gently guide them away from the light-colored couch (in a totally nonpaternalistic way).

    I keep trying to remember Edith Prickley’s one-woman show of self-discovery from SCTV, it was called “I’m Thinking For Myself, I’ve Got My Head Screwed On Straight, And No Guy Is Gonna Tell Me It Ain’t” or something to that effect. It was profound.

    Ah, yes, the Golden Age of Estrogen – before you could easily purchase ball gags on the interwebs.

  24. Robert,

    However, there is no indication that this “Tampons-Are-Male-Oppression” message had any organic existence prior to the suspicious appearance of @Roaring_Womyn and@dontjudgme3333, and so it’s obviously some kind of hoax.

    It does, however, extend a theme aired by, among others, Sharra Vostral, an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois. Ms Vostral writes,

    These ubiquitous yet invisible technologies provide women with the means to hide their periods, but the history of embedded politics in menstrual technologies reveals that they can be used both as artefacts of control and empowering tools of change.

    Quite why
    the humble tampon should constitute an “artefact of control,” i.e., a tool of dastardly patriarchal oppression, isn’t made clear. She does, however, tells us,

    Though menstrual hygiene
    technologies have been used and construed as personal and private, and even at times secretive, these hidden artefacts function in a similar way as visible artefacts because they help to represent the body as something else: not bleeding. The importance of this is that the representation is both outward and inward. The act of technological passing presents an
    altered external identity, but also requires the technological user to agree to a sort of temporal amnesia.

    At which point it becomes easier to see why
    an estimated 98% of humanities scholarship goes uncited or unread.

  29. Is this some sort of anti-gay Boy Scout trash? What do you have against shiny leaves of three? They have feelings too!

  31. Many years there was an add in a magazine, I believe it was Mother Earth, or Mother Jones, that showed a picture of a young hippy girl standing in a pristine mountain stream. The product was a menstrual sponge, the add stated that by using the sponge you saved the environment by being able to reuse it just by washing it out in the pure stream water. For the hell of it I just Goggled it and by God they still sell it, progs and hippies are funny.

  32. Great piece, especially in demonstrating that when presented with a facially ridiculous new meme bearing on feminism, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s a hoax merely by examining its CONTENT.

    For example, if a year ago you asked me whether actual feminists would ever publicly call themselves “#AbortionBitches” on Twitter, I would have said no. But then you uncovered Sarah Alcid and her cohort, who call themselves exactly that:
    http://thebadger14.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/perfectly-normal/

    It almost seems like there’s an arm’s race among feminists (and other progressives) so use ever-more ridiculous tactics to publicize their message, which makes it ever-more difficult to distinguish between actual new memes and hoaxes.

  34. I’ve heard stories of certain tribes in Africa sending their wymyn to a “period hut” for just this reason. I’m starting to think they might be true.

  41. After seeing the lovely video of the Columbia feminists getting freaky with each other, raw eggs and a dead chicken to fight “gender tension” (whatever the hell that is) in the library, this free bleeding thing seems rather believable. Nothing would surprise me from them. Today they threw blood soaked panties of the archbishop of Madrid. Really is this free bleeding so far fetched? I mean, I get this is probably a hoax, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the hoax turned into a reality with these people.

  42. What if, through this hoax, feminists actually start practicing free-bleeding? And what started out as a hoax turns into a real thing?

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