You did it, guys! Angry dudes knock down IMDb ratings of shows aimed at women

Sex and the City will EAT YOUR SOUL

Never let it be said that Men’s Rights activists can’t accomplish great things. Oh, sure, in what the old fogies call “the real world” their victories are pretty much nonexistent; they can’t even manage to organize conferences for themselves two years in a row.

But online, their brilliant strategy of “running around being dicks to everyone” has been an amazing success, causing numerous websites to shut down their comments because they were so sick of all the MRAs gumming them up with endless blather and abuse.

And now it appears the Men’s Rights movement can claim another victory: They have knocked the IMDb rating of the show Sex and the City down more than a point!

Take that, show that ended its run twelve years ago, but that MRAs and other manosphere dudes can’t stop talking about for some reason!

A statistical analysis by Walt Hickey of the data-driven site FiveThirtyEight suggests that men are swarming the IMDb profiles of shows aimed at women in order to give them low ratings.

One of the shows most obviously affected by this new form of cyber-activism is Sex and the City, a show despised more less equally by MRAs, MGTOWs, Roosh, and right-wing mass murderer Anders Breivik.

As Hickey points out, women collectively rated this show at 8.1 out of ten. But so many men gave the show bad ratings that they were able to drag the final score down to 7, which, as Hickey notes, is a below-average rating for the site.

And we’re not talking about a handful of statistical outliers taking down the score. More tha 78,000 people have rated the show. So there are thousands if not tens of thousands of guys out there taking out their anger at women by downvoting one of the most influential recent TV shows aimed at women — often, I would guess, without ever having watched an episode.

It’s a man’s world on IMDb, where, Hickey notes,

[s]eventy percent of IMDb TV show raters are men, according to my analysis, and that results in shows with predominantly female audiences getting screwed.

Why is that? It’s not just that men outnumber women on IMDb; they are also far more likely to give shows not aimed primarily at their own gender terrible ratings. As this chart shows pretty clearly, the more a show appeals to women rather than men, the more likely it is that a man will rate it a rating-killing one star.

“The overall effect of this imbalance is profound,” Hickey notes.

Among shows with 10,000 ratings or more, the average rating of the top-100 male-skewing shows was 8.2, while the average rating of the top-100 female shows was 7.4.

Is it possible that shows aimed at women are just objectively worse? Hickey thinks not. “Everybody watches crap,” he points out. “Men, women, everybody.”

Women may watch more than their share of terrible reality shows like “Say Yes to the Dress,” he notes. But they didn’t make up much of the audience for Beyblade, which, Hickey notes sardonically, is a show based around spinning tops. Spinning tops that fight each other.

Nope. The real reason for the difference is that men are far more likely to poop on the ratings of shows aimed mostly at women than women are to poop on shows aimed mostly at men.

Women rated only two shows appreciably lower than their male raters did. Men, by contrast … well, just take a look at this chart that Hickey put together:

Are the men who make up the Angry Man Downvote Brigade all card-carrying MRAs? For the most part, probably not. And I haven’t run across any evidence of organized IMDb downvoting anywhere in the manosphere (though I haven’t looked all that hard).

But if you’re a dude who literally devotes his evenings to giving crappy ratings to TV shows that women tend to like — just to show those ladies what’s what! — I think that makes you pretty much a de facto MRA. The MRAs should send you a little thank you note, at the very least.

Dad, what did you do in the culture wars?

Son, I gave The Mindy Project a one star rating on IMDb. 

EDIT: Hickey made that last chart into a handy gif:

Men Are Sabotaging The Online Reviews Of TV Shows Aimed At Women https://t.co/cc6DsQf7hi

My point, in one gif: pic.twitter.com/GWKFr9Cv36

— Walter Hickey (@WaltHickey) May 19, 2016

Thanks, Katz, for the link!

EDIT 2: My favorite misogynist response to Hickey’s post:

@WaltHickey every show is aimed at women. Women drive media and advertising. They've sabotaged the culture.

— THE Chris Coon (@Coondawg68) May 19, 2016