Did this local comedian go too far with his sexist tweet?

By Karissa Lund  •  in Last Word
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(source: FB)

Another day, another struggle for women to explain that the term “Men are trash” is not about relationship problems. In case you missed it, Twitterjaya was somewhat shaken last week when a semi-famous local youtuber, Harvinth Skin tweeted out what was deemed as a sexist remark.

Harvinth Skin is a self-proclaimed punde and a comedian-Youtuber who creates funny reaction videos and the infamous series, ‘Meeting With Machas’ where they discuss topics of taboo in Malaysia. His rise to fame happened recently and largely due to his ability to blend humour with controversy, and social media.

It’s not easy to cut through the noise as a content creator today, and as someone who is all too familiar with the types of audience on social media, Harvinth should have known that he’d be asking for a cyber-bashing after posting the tweet.

Instead of putting out an argument, he issued another two tweets stating this:

Some netizen also came to his defence by saying that everyone was just overreacting. Some even speculated that Harvinth created an anonymous account just to defend himself.

An account was created right when the argument started, had zero followers/following and only tweeted in defence of him, pretty fishy..

 

 

The thing is, we totally understand why people are confused with this situation. Especially with the term that started it all, “Men are trash”.

According to Medium, the phrase originated from South Africa, where women are all-too-commonly murdered by their partners, accosted in public spaces, raped, and generally treated with violence and disrespect. The hashtag #menaretrash was a direct response to the violence: A message that women have been oppressed and are angry.

(source: BoldL)

A message to make men uncomfortable. This phrase is not meant to be used in a relationship setting, or to describe one’s social life, by men or women. It’s supposed to be directed to murderers and rapists.

It has been debated that the name of the movement needs to change, and the only thing that the movement has actually accomplished so far was to polarise opposing genders. Even the Medium article we linked above for reference to the phrase’s origin is titled: ‘Men are trash’ — the powerful movement that needs a new name. So caution should be exercised before knee-jerking.

Although Harvinth made it seem as a joke, and most would chop us youngins as too sensitive, perhaps let’s just understand the context to certain things. I mean, Google is a click away.

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