The Southern Poverty Law Center takes on the violent misogyny so pervasive in the Men’s Rights Movement
[TW for the comments to this post; discussions of rape and abuse.]
The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization devoted to tracking and exposing hate groups, has just published a detailed report on the misogyny and violent rhetoric so pervasive in the Men’s Rights Movement — as well as the actual violence inspired by this sort of hatred of women. It’s a piece you all should read, even though few of the details will be new to long-time readers of this blog.
Arthur Goldwag, an expert on conspiracy-mongers and the far right, argues (I think correctly) that the Men’s Rights movement is largely a backlash against the many successes of feminism over the last several decades:
It’s not much of a surprise that significant numbers of men in Western societies feel threatened by dramatic changes in their roles and that of the family in recent decades. Similar backlashes, after all, came in response to the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and other major societal revolutions. What is something of a shock is the verbal and physical violence of that reaction.
[Thomas] Ball’s suicide brought attention to an underworld of misogynists, woman-haters whose fury goes well beyond criticism of the family court system, domestic violence laws, and false rape accusations.
The Men’s Rights Movement, as it exists today, is not a civil rights movement; it is a regressive, hateful reaction against a civil rights movement — that is, feminism.
Those who truly care about the rights of men, and who are not motivated by a hatred of women or feminism, need to repudiate the hate and the violent rhetoric of the Men’s Rights Movement as it exists today. Only then can there be a Men’s Rights Movement worthy of the name.
EDITED TO ADD: The SPLC has also put up a guide to some of the more hateful sites in the manosphere. Longtime readers will be familiar with most of them.
EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: And a piece debunking some Men’s Rights Myths.
EDITED TO ADD AGAIN, AGAIN: The discussion of the SPLC report on the Men’s Rights Subreddit is surprisingly reasonable, so far. (I mean, compared to what I expected. Meanwhile, over in this thread, the Men’s Rightsers are behaving as they usually do.)
Posted on March 8, 2012, in actual activism, anti-MRA information, antifeminism, MGTOW, misogyny, MRA, terrorism, threats. Bookmark the permalink. 760 Comments.
*ninja’d
Why, with all the interpersonal crimes that exist, do people always go for some violation of property rights bullshit.
For example, if I wanted to illustrate your ridiculous argument:
It’s like stepping in a ring, getting my ass beat, congratulating my opponent on a good win and then suing him/her for assault
PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth
I know! I learn the darndest things!! The way MRAs talk they’ve almost got me convinced I’m another species..oh wait didn’t we have some asshat here who couldn’t understand genetics and phenotypes? According to him every woman is a different species.
Okay, so the question now is: how many rape cases go down like this:
“Your Honor, I agreed to have sex with him, I told him ‘yes please fuck me now,’ but I didn’t mean it, and he should have known.”
I’m thinking approximately zero ever?
I think according to Roberta it was what, 75%? :P
You’re right, holly. But’s that’s only because your definition is not yet the legal definition. If it were, we’d see plenty of those cases.
“I screamed: oh god, fuck me! the whole time but deep down I didn’t really mean it. He should have known that and he didn’t. So send him to prison for 20 years for rape.”
If you were empress of the world. Every het man in existence would be in prison.
Still don’t see research Roberta. I can only see three possibilities here. 1. Your “sources” are scientifically unfounded, run by individuals whose mere goal is to make headlines. This is increasingly common in the psychological field.
or 2. You read a single study and leap to a major conclusion, ignoring evidence to the contrary, and hand picking with what might support your conclusions. If it is a scientific paper, there is often a section that discusses the results. I suggest you read the whole thing, rather then glance at a single chart.
and finally 3. You are lying your ass off and haven’t actually done any research. With your current record here and failure of understanding, I see 3 as the most likely.
Because every het man has been some woman’s regret. Do you REALLY like men?
First off, I love that you implied that I’m a big ol’ slut based on a post which explicitly discusses my boyfriend and the fact that he no longer engages in casual sex. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a big ol’ slut, but it does kind of speak to your level of reading comprehension.
Second, no one but you is suggesting that “regret” has anything to do with it – that’s your own ridiculous, disingenuous strawman. One of my exes was an incredibly selfish lover; I definitely regret all the sex I ever had with him, because it sucked. That does not in any way make it rape. It makes it sucky sex. No one here would suggest it was rape, and on some level I’m pretty sure you know that. But the time when a guy browbeat me into saying ‘okay, fine’ after I’d said “no, I mean it” fifty times and then stuck his cock in my mouth while I sat there and sobbed? That’s another story. And don’t fucking pretend you can’t tell the difference.
And once again, why would it only be het men in prison? The standard is completely gender neutral.
Shadow, I think it’s pretty clear that Roberta doesn’t like men.
See, Roberta, this is what makes me think you’re full of BS. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t have any training in it, so for all I know your everything-that-isn’t-violence definition of consent is legally true.
But then you pull this uber-specific YOU MUST BE A HETEROSEXUAL HATER thing, and threaten us with sex bots. That’s just too perfectly the MRA party line for me to believe any other argument you’ve made.
I don’t mind telling you, by the way, Roberta, that I’m a rape survivor. And if it makes you feel better, it was “rape-rape,” the “real” kind, the kind where I screamed at him to stop and everything.
And I didn’t go to the cops. Even though I had been for real raped. Even then, the idea of going through a medical exam, multiple interrogations, legal proceedings, having to tell my friends and family what happened and deal with their reactions–and for what? Putting the guy in jail? That wouldn’t gain me anything, wouldn’t fix anything. I’d do it to protect his future victims if I thought I had a chance of a conviction, but I didn’t–we’d had consensual sex in the past and I wasn’t physically injured.
(I can thank people like you for the fact that I had no chance of a conviction there, by the way. People who are so eager to spread the seeds of doubt about any rape accusation that doesn’t perfectly fit their idea of the Scary Violent Stranger Rape.)
So my thinking is… if there wasn’t enough motivation for me to go to the cops after being really raped, why the hell would someone go just because of some vague sense of “regret”? Why would someone face all that just because of some “cognitive dissonance?”
I don’t fucking believe that happens.
I disagree, ‘wanting’ or not something is a fact. Emotions are facts. If I say “I’m angry at rape apologists”, I’m just stating a fact. Now, of course, it is obvious that these are very complex and very difficult to prove fact. Does change that they’re real.
So when a internet commenter tell “I was raped without threat of violence”, I believe them by default. Apparently that sound silly to you, because I trusted his emotion.
But if they was saying “I was raped with the threat of violence”, that would be a ‘real’ rape for you, because… what? There is no more evidence in the second case, just the word of a stranger.
In addition, your way has a strong chance of hurting this person and other victims who might not dare to speak up because of people like you.
@Hellkell
I don’t think she even knows men outside of the stereotypes that she hears about.
Oh boy.
This was a fairly interesting thread to follow but when shit like this starts happening:
All pretense is of arguing in good faith is lost.
Roberta, you should probably step away from the conversation for a bit. You’ve already, perhaps unintentionally, revealed some real inner-ugliness. And, once you start pillorying the completely fabricated arguments of your opponents it becomes pretty clear that you’re just angry and lashing out.
@holly
I’m so sorry for you. You were actually raped. Something only a tiny fraction of self-described “victims” were subjected to. That person legitimately deserves to be in prison. It’s a shame you didn’t report zir.
You are not all women, though. The fact that you would never report regretted sex doesn’t mean women don’t engage in such behavior on a regular basis. My BF is so lucky to be with me. I’m one of the few women who doesn’t think all sex is rape.
He knows that, and he shows me his gratitude in all kinds of ways.
I see that Roberta realized her bullshit about what constitutes rape has been completely exposed, so she tried dredging back up “feminists think all sex with men is rape!” to deflect the issue.
Did I miss anything else?
That was…. surreal
And now we’ve gone… somewhere very, very surreal.
Roberta, I’m a big ‘ol slut, who’s slept with guys in the double digits. And not one of them has thanked me afterwards by saying “Oh my god, I feel so lucky to have found you! Every other woman I’ve met thinks sex is rape!” Forgive me while I roll on the floor laughing.
WTF?
WTF?
Citations for both of these statements needed.
Ha, ninja’d by Shadow.
@kyrie
The difference is that anyone can claim that they didn’t really want it and no one could ever dispute them. Even if we had a video recording of the sex we couldn’t dispute the claim that they really didn’t want it. That’s an unfalsifiable proposition that has no meaning outside of the speaker’s head.
Whether or not they agreed to have sex is a matter of objective fact. If we have video of them agreeing to sex, we no that no rape occured. Due process has meaning with such a standard.
Under the standard holly advocates, we might as well just do away with trials all together. Just immediately jail anyone accused. Because there’s no way to dispute the “victim’s” completely subjective allegation.
You are aware, that more than a few feminists do actually enjoy the hum… intimate company of men? Even if we can’t convince you we’re not man-haters, maybe we can convince you we like having some men around? And maybe that some feminists are men themselves.
Why the obsession of straights anyway?
And Roberta, you seem to be missing the fact that you’re in a conversation with sex-positive feminists. They like sex, for the most part.
And one of the things they want to do? Change the adversarial model of sex (or whatever you feel like calling it) — the one that says that women lose something by having sex. Even if you’re correct in saying that women’s cognitive dissonance and regret causes them to falsely accuse men of rape, why do you think that tightening up on false rape accusations and keeping the narrow legal definition of rape is helpful?
Nice fucking divide-and-conquer, asshole.
The only difference between me and the women you’re calling liars is that I screamed. If the same things had happened and I hadn’t screamed, you’d be throwing me to the wolves. And hell, I only screamed after he’d started. Maybe before that he had no way of knowing I didn’t want it!
Thanks to people like you, people who make sure every judge and every jury hears “BUT WOMEN LIE WOMEN REGRET THINGS,” I wouldn’t have a chance of a conviction.
Have you met a woman? For fuck’s sake.
You know a lot of us here have sex with men, right? Men that we’re not accusing of rape, right?
Be careful around a man who tells you “your kind is terrible, but you’re one of the good ones.” It turns to “you’re just another one of them!” the instant they get angry.
Roberta: You completely discount the possibility of regret. Something that research shows us is extremely common. Especially among women.
That’s it… now I can call you a misogynist with a clear conscience.
Fact: Women like sex.
Fact: Women are people.
Fact: People get to decide whom they fuck, when they fuck, and how they fuck.
It’s really simple. I want to have sex with someone. I let her know. She says, “that sounds lovely, your condoms or mine?\
She says, “nope. not interested.”
Those are the two main ways such a conversation goes. Sometimes someone will say, “I want to have sex with you”,and I’ll say, “What sort, because I’m not in the mood for PIV, or anal, but hands and mouths are ok.”
Sometimes she says, “Ok,’ and we have fun. Sometimes she says, “hands are ok, but I’m not into getting oral”. I’ll probably say ok to that too.
Sometimes she’ll say, “I was really in the mood for some pussy-pounding” and we’ll agree this isn’t the time for us to be fucking.
That’s how it works.
For thirty years that’s how it’s worked for me. No rape charges. A fair number of repeat partners.
Communication, how does it work?
What I see, actually, is you being pissed that women get to decide whom they fuck. You are demanding that only if a dude uses force (or a really credible threat of force/violence) that it’s not rape. That means men can be as pushy, and manipulative, as they like. Use a bit of weed, or booze, to get her loosened up, and then press on until they get a, “yes”. Once they have the magic word, it’s game on ’til they pop.
What I don’t understand is why you like this model better? What’s in it for you? What’s in it for society? I see what’s in it for jerks and assholes (male or female), but what about the rest of us?
PS. the buy a jaguar thing… not so much, purchases of more than $5,000 in Calif. have no “cooling off period”, but if what you bought is less than $5,000 and the seller refuses to take it back and give you a refund… that’s an actionable tort, and a crime.
Consent, even to purchase, is revocable. Refusal to accept that recovation is a crime.
I kind of think Roberta’s “BF” is like Antz FOREIGN BRIDE.
” I’m one of the few women who doesn’t think all sex is rape.”
Until I read this I was simply rolling my eyes at Roberta, but now she has lost all credibility as a person arguing in good faith. And while your repeated apologies for the rape stories being revealed seem sincere, I can’t honestly take her as a reliable person any further. I give most people the benefit of the doubt and simply assume they’re just wrong headed in their assumptions because of past experiences. But this comment is so over the top and vile that I simply cannot do anything but lump her in with the likes of the Backward Male and people who think pedophiles are okay as long as the child they rape didn’t say no.
Roberta: Whether or not you agreed to have sex is a matter of objective, empirical fact.
Really? Is there some record of my willing participation? A recording of the event? A barometer of my mens rea?
Where are the records kept? Who is the arbiter? How are close calls decided?
I think Roberta has just crossed the line into Poe territory. “All women think sex is rape” could just be sarcasm, but her BF “showing his gratitude in all kinds of ways” is just strange.
I’ll be back in a hour or so, I have to get chicken for supper. Have fun with the piñata while I’m gone. If there’s any candy left when I get back I’ll take my whacks too.
Blockquote>I’m so sorry for you. You were actually raped. Something only a tiny fraction of self-described “victims” were subjected to. That person legitimately deserves to be in prison. It’s a shame you didn’t report zir.
You are not all women, though. The fact that you would never report regretted sex doesn’t mean women don’t engage in such behavior on a regular basis. My BF is so lucky to be with me. I’m one of the few women who doesn’t think all sex is rape.
He knows that, and he shows me his gratitude in all kinds of ways.
Nice fauxpology. You’re not sorry at all.
I don’t believe a word you say. Up to and including your BF and how lucky he is.
Y’know, a lot of your MRA buddies would have words for you about the gratitude your BF shows you, and they aren’t nice words.
@pwxunium
Ok, I’ve been trolling the last few posts, but you seriously lack intelligence if you can’t see how that would make an enormous difference come trial.
No person can ever know with certainty whether or not you genuinely want to have sex with them. The question of “want” is entirely subjective. Perhaps you gave ever sign that you wanted to have sex, but this was only to avoid hurting your BF’s feelings. A recording of some sort would also be insufficient to prove innocence. Even if said recording showed what appears to be enthusiastic consent.
You could just argue that you were putting on for one reason or another, and no amount of video evidence could disprove that claim. Your desires are subjective and unfalsifiable. Your agreements are a matter of objective, empirical fact. The difference is pretty god damn clear.
Goddamn blockquotes.
You know, maybe I’m missing something here, but it seems to me if there were any significant number of women accusing man after man of rape, the people dealing with them in the judicial system just might fucking notice.
This is just sad.
Yeah, the men in your life are so lucky to have you…..
Holy fuck that statement was so surreal I thought I’d glimpsed another universe. Who the hell thanks a woman for that!
Scene in my head: roberta and partner post coitus having a smoke. Just before he rolls over “Thanks babe, for not calling it rape. I’m so grateful you can stay in my bed until I get up in the morning. But you better be gone before the coffee’s made”
Also Roberta, your refusal to answer my post about three beers, I’m just going to assume that you realized how stupid your thinking is on that. Its okay, you can thank me later for straightening that ouyt for you.
There is no appreciable difference between Roberta “trolling” and Roberta just being Roberta…
Nobinayamu, if it’s true, it’s only because she tells the man all the time how lucky he is.
What a great relationship. “You’re lucky to have me, I could be accusing you of rape, but I’m not! Tee hee.”
Wait, just a second ago you said that if Holly what lord of the world all mhet men would be in prison, now you wish that all women were good girls as Holly? Keep you BS straight.
If you don’t like Antz and things are not so well with your lucky BF, you could meet another of our (former in this case) residents, B____ (sorry, I can’t say his name, it’s bad luck)
Ok, one for the road:
You’re right, holly. But’s that’s only because your definition is not yet the legal definition. If it were, we’d see plenty of those cases.
“I screamed: oh god, fuck me! the whole time but deep down I didn’t really mean it. He should have known that and he didn’t. So send him to prison for 20 years for rape.”
If you were empress of the world. Every het man in existence would be in prison.
Roberta… I’d love to see you plead a case. I think I could contain my laughter enough to avoid being eject for disorder.
Roberta is the sum of all trolls. A little AntZ, a pinch of DKM, a soupcon of NWO, and a dash of B___.
Just in case you missed it the first time.
@pillow
you must have missed the part where I said:
“Nowhere in the world is 3 beers enough to make someone incapable of legal consent (unless you are incredibly tiny and a tremendous lightweight). A popular misconception is that any amount of drinking means that someone can’t consent legally.
It varies somewhat by jurisdiction, but standard is almost always incapacitation by alcohol, not just impairment by alcohol. Incapacitation means that you are so drunk that you are unable to properly understand the who, what, where, why, and when of what’s happening. Nearly, or actually, passed out.
Having a few drinks and somewhat impaired judgement is never legally rape. So long as you are awake, alert, and consciously aware of what’s happening, then you can consent.”
So Roberta, what the hell are you doing having sex? If women are these lying liars when it comes to sex, what makes you so special?
@Pecunium: I can’t find it on Youtube, but all I can think of after reading your comment is the Catch Me if You Can scene in which Frank impersonates a lawyer. The one where the judge ends up asking “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Well at least Roberta got brief-er, if not any more coherant, logical, sensible, realistic or entertaining.
Especially entertaining.
Still bored, back to work.
But Roberta, that’s exactly what happens to me after 3 beers. So now what? There’s no way to objectively prove what someones alcohol tolerance is while in court.
So essentially what you’re arguing is that men should just have to trust women not to call regretted sex rape. You know, just like women should just trust their male partners to not become abusive.
We don’t need anti Domestic Violence laws. Just trust us. We promise that we wont abuse our power. Anyone who disagrees plainly just hates men. How dare you stigmatize a whole gender as abusive? You don’t need VAWA. Just trust us.
A subjective felony that entirely dependent on the “victim’s” interpretation of his/her own feelings? That’s fine. Anyone demanding any kind of concrete due process specifity in our rape laws clearly just hates women. Just trust women not to abuse their power and label regretted sex “rape.” Anyone who demands any kind of due process protection or an objective definition of rape, plainly just hates women.
Just to blow your mind, I’ve had sex. Several times. None that were rape. It was with a man. And I’m a woman.
Ergo, some women outside you don’t define all sex as rape.
Nice dodge Roberta. Now what makes you so special that you won’t become the lying liar that all women are?
Slight derail here, but maybe a good example of how feminists, you know, ORGANIZE instead of just trolling on blogs:
Personhood for Women Petition on change.org
You should accuse those men of rape.
How can you know with certainty whether or not you really wanted to sleep with them. Maybe outside social pressures played a role in your decision. You can’t discount that possibility, so under Holly’s definition you are honor bound to accuse every one of those men of rape.
No. We’re saying (or at least I am) that whether or not you have physical evidence of the rape doesn’t change the fact that the rape happened. See the the difference?
Accused men already have due process. Some fucking lawyer you are.
Take your objective standard and cram it sideways with walnuts, you rape apologist gasbag.
And I’m making a different sort of supper, so I have a moment.
Roberta: I’m so sorry for you. You were actually raped. Something only a tiny fraction of self-described “victims” were subjected to. That person legitimately deserves to be in prison. It’s a shame you didn’t report zir.
Why do you believe Holly? All she said was she was, “really raped”. No evidence.
Then again, you believed LBT, until you didn’t.
My BF is so lucky to be with me. I’m one of the few women who doesn’t think all sex is rape.
Really?*
Whether or not they agreed to have sex is a matter of objective fact. If we have video of them agreeing to sex, we no that no rape occured. Due process has meaning with such a standard.
Nonsense, “Your honor, we have no way of knowing what happened prior to the start of this recording. It is completely possible the accused threatened to kill the victim’s cat, as she claims, prior to the start of filming.”
That’s just one hole in the idiocy of your, “objective facts”
I so want to see you arguing an actual case. I mean it will probably suck for your client, but it will be memorable. Probably not Orly Taitz memorable, but few people can rise to the level of sublimely ridiculous of an Orly Taitz.
*My personal experience differs. Bewteen my personal partners, my friends, and my friends partners (to say nothing of the people I know on the internet, women who don’t this sex is rape are bog-standard.
Roberta, you’re forgetting to pretend to be a woman.
Also, yes, people do need to put some trust in their partners. Because if a partner is totally untrustworthy, they can just lie. If you think a woman’s capable of anything, then she’s capable of telling the cops “he held me down, I was screaming.” You do have to trust a woman not to do that.
Your “objective” definition of rape always seems to come down to “a definition that the woman doesn’t have too much say in.” If a guy does everything right by your rules, then he can have sex with a woman who doesn’t want it! She shouldn’t get to just decide otherwise.
And it’s worth noting, for the brain-deads out there, that feminists are not trying to get rid of it.
Also, Roberta, the reason I told you about my rape was not to get your fake sympathy.
It was to demonstrate how hard it is to report an actual rape, how many discouraging factors there are. If it’s that not-even-worth-it to report something that really happened, I have trouble believing droves of women would go to that trouble just because they have some regrets to work out.
Me, reading this: pbbbbtt–HAHAHA
Seriously, what a delusional jackass.
Roberta: Ok, I’ve been trolling the last few posts,
Only the last few?
No person can ever know with certainty whether or not you genuinely want to have sex with them. The question of “want” is entirely subjective. Perhaps you gave ever sign that you wanted to have sex, but this was only to avoid hurting your BF’s feelings. A recording of some sort would also be insufficient to prove innocence. Even if said recording showed what appears to be enthusiastic consent.
You could just argue that you were putting on for one reason or another, and no amount of video evidence could disprove that claim. Your desires are subjective and unfalsifiable. Your agreements are a matter of objective, empirical fact. The difference is pretty god damn clear.
It is? Well if the standard is, “I somehow got him/her to say yes without leaving a mark on them”, then yes, it’s pretty clear.
But the rest of your argument is basically, “There is no such thing as rape, unless there is violence, and there are witnesses.”
Which is pretty fucked up, but I can see why you say you are one of the few who don’t believe sex is rape. It’s that you are one of the few who thing practically nothing is rape.
I really want to see you in court.
Then clearly these ignorant women are in need of some education.
@holly
If someone lies about objective facts, there exists the possibility of proving them wrong. You clearly have never seen witness testimony subjected to court scrutiny before. If someone lies (or even just misinterprets) their own subjective feelings, then their word is law. There exists no possibility to dispute their claims.
Whether or not they “really wanted it” is entirely in their own head. No one could ever state anything otherwise. Even seemingly enthusiastic consent is not enough to call their complaint into question.
It’s sort of a moot point anyway. The law on rape will never be “sex that you didn’t really really want way deep down inside” no matter how long you kick and scream. Even feminist criminal attorney’s would recognize such an idea as farcical.
It’s still way too dangerous to sleep with women, though. Thank god I’m attracted to men. Hetero males basically have to choose between celibacy and imprisonment.
And now that we’ve decided dinner, I’ll be gone for a bit.
Play nice while I’m gone. Try not to break your toys.
And are still doing it :’pwxunium’.
The discussion started when you told a man that crawling on the floor while crying wasn’t enough to count as a rape. So stop the bullshit about the impossible to understand consent, the signs too small to perceive and what not. This kind of rape apologism is nowhere near to original.
Pecunium once again nails it:
You ARE the Neville Longbottom of manboobz. :-)
“You clearly have never seen witness testimony subjected to court scrutiny before. ”
Neither have you, Roberta.
This is probably true. But it’ll still be rape.
…And you, apparently.
Funny how there’d only be one trustworthy woman in the world, and we’d find her here? I mean, what are the odds.
What makes you such a special snowflake Roberta? Why aren’t you a lying liar like the rest of us?
Or hetero males could chose not to live in a fantasy world in which all women ever want to accuse them of rape (except Roberta, of course, who is Jesus) and just ask if people want to have sex before they fuck them.
But that would be too hard, I suppose.