A couple of days ago I had replied to a Facebook status from an old female friend of mine, offering my condolences to her, as she just gotten separated from her husband of 15 years. A few hours after I made the remark, as I scrolled through many of the other comments left by her friends, expressing sadness and sympathy, I stumbled upon one comment that read “I bet he cheated on you. You should cut his dick off and feed it to the dog!” To my amazement, the next day I saw that particular comment had three likes and a couple of responses of ‘LOL’ and ‘Right on’! I didn’t understand how a sentiment like that got cheered on like it did; was I missing something?

I wanted to see how common these types of remarks were, so I hopped on to the trend analysis site Topsy, one of the leading comprehensive search sites for Twitter. I started to search for comments such as the one I saw on my Facebook feed, and to my amazement, not only were phrases that advocated violence towards men widely used, many of the worst offending ‘tweets’ were re-tweeted multiple times. I came to the realization just how socially accepted discussion of violence towards men in our culture is, and became even more horrified to see just how ugly and terrifying many of these comments could get.

So I decided to run a small test to see how many times eight certain phrases were used in the past thirty days on Twitter. I realize the phrases and wording I choose to include in my search are subjective, however my intent was to explore common phrases that are often used in the advocation of both physical and sexual violence towards men. The difficult part of this was to exclude references to these phrases that were clearly meant in the context besides actual violence towards a human, or those that where spoken in a purely sarcastic manner.

Moreover, the line between a harmless rhetorical phrase and one said not in jest was at times difficult to judge. Even after subtracting the false positives from the count, the retweets of the truly unsettling original tweets brought the number over three times higher than the actual original tweeted comments. The results were absolutely shocking.

I’ve included some screen shots from almost two dozen of the more abhorrent advocations of violence from this exercise below, since I think it is important to show just how wickedly disturbed some of the sentiments were.

Advocation of violence towards men – 30 day sample from the Twitter feed – True total number are about three times as many as each result due to the high amount of re-tweets.

“cut off his dick” – 646 instances

“chopped off his balls” – 102 instances

“chopped off his dick” – 60 instances

“chop off his dick” – 232 instances

“rip his dick off” – 31 instances

“going to kill him” – 374 instances

“I hope he gets raped” – 34 instances

“I want to stab him”- 66 instances

If retweets are taken into consideration, just on these phrases alone which only represent a fraction of the variations out there, the number exceeded well over 4,000 genuinely disturbing comments in just 30 days. While the comments came from both men and women, I found comments made by women were the overwhelming majority. (those accounts which were clearly female)

Here are almost two dozen screen shots comments, with the twitter account names blocked out. Warning: some of the comments below are fairly extreme. (Click on the image to see the full size text)

If you don’t believe me, try typing in a phrase like one of those above into the Topsy search engine, and you will not only be able see how many times that phrase was used in as a tweet, but also how many times it got retweeted.

One important item of note, when I did a similar search for various phrases on violence against women, I found only a small handful of comments. Take these non-scientific numbers and comments for what they are worth, nonetheless, it is quite apparent that advocating violence towards men has become pretty acceptable in our society now. Am I missing something, or has misandry like this always been so widespread and so very troubling?