While many spent the Thanksgiving holiday feasting with friends and loved ones, thousands of people within a network of blogs and social media circles online known as the “manosphere” spent their time attempting to intimidate women who sell access to nude and semi-nude photos of themselves online by reporting them to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for suspected tax evasion with no evidence.
The concerted effort, which participants dubbed the “#ThotAudit,” appears to have been started by a Facebook user operating under the name David Wu. “Thot” is an acronym for “that ho over there,” which men have used to deride women they perceive to be too sexually promiscuous. The notion of reporting women for selling racy photos online to the IRS first appeared online as a sarcastic joke, but was soon seized upon by misogynists as a way to intimidate women.
Wu leads a Facebook group called “Ancapistan”—Ancap is short for anarcho-capitalist; the latter half of the group name pays homage to the fictitious country imagined by 4chan users called “Kekistan.” In the Ancapistan group description, it states “Taxation is theft. But the best way to end the ‘pink tax’ is to tax sex workers the same as EMT and firefighters.”
#ThotAudit spread further after Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh, a notorious misogynist even by men’s rights activist standards, posted about the effort on Twitter. The #ThotAudit trend was also promoted by One America News personality Jack Posobiec, YouTube pundit Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin, and white nationalist James Allsup.
On a podcast about the effort, Valizadeh said that “a lot of these frustrated young men who are tired of hos coming on their platforms and ruining it” had been excited by the idea of reporting women to the IRS and sought to punish women for “invading a male space to show your boobs and your butt.”
Followers of the trend convinced one another that by reporting women to the IRS under suspicion of potential tax evasion, they may receive a cash payout from the IRS Whistleblower Office. One user even programmed an aggregator to identify women who posted links to payment methods for adult content to report them en masse to the federal government in hopes of striking pay dirt.
If you report a thot to the IRS and they collect taxes from her, you can receive up to 30% of that amount. There is actually a financial incentive to defeating thottery. pic.twitter.com/3BxAldTpFC
— Roosh (@rooshv) November 24, 2018
But for all its hype, the #ThotAudit trend lacks many aspects required to achieve its stated goals. To submit information to the IRS alerting the agency to potential tax evasion, one is asked—although not required—to submit a form that asks for information that would require specific knowledge about their targets that are not public information, including social security numbers, addresses, and dollar amounts of suspected unreported income. The IRS determines whether an investigation is warranted based on the severity of an alleged violation and any presented evidence, which the community has so far failed to produce.
Amanda Marcotte, a senior political writer for Salon with expertise in the American Right, told Right Wing Watch that misogynists will often utilize the government to reinforce their assertions of dominance.
“Unfortunately, it’s common to see misogynists try to use the power of the government to oppress and control women,” Marcotte said. “In recent years, we’ve seen alt-right types online use falsified calls to the police, resulting in SWAT teams showing up at their homes, to terrorize people who speak up for social justice. Authoritarians see the government as existing to maintain gender and racial hierarchies, and so are comfortable exploiting government power this way.”
