Turns out VICE made a video about that Men’s Rights rally in Toronto. GO WATCH IT.
This is not an embedded video, so don’t click on it.
I don’t know how I missed it, but a couple of weeks back Vice posted a short video about that EARTH-SHATTERINGLY HISTORIC Men’s Rights rally in Toronto that captured the attention of the world a tiny fraction of a percentage of people in the world (including the people at it and readers of this blog) a little over a month ago.
Alas, WordPress won’t let me embed the video here, but you all need to go look at it. Not only does it capture pretty well what a dinky event it was, but it also contains a bunch of mini-interviews with some A Voice for Men folks that are rather revealing.
The most revealing one of the bunch starts about 2:40 into the video, when AVFM’s Suzanne McCarley explains that
Men, as a class, have never ever oppressed women, as a class. Men have always protected and provided for women. And protected them from oppression from others.
From others? What kind of others? Like, space aliens?
Women have never objected to this, and in fact have always been grateful because it’s how they survived. It is only in the last few hundred years when women of privileged class who don’t even know what they’re being protected from feel disadvantaged because they’re not comfortable with the level of protection they have.
Wow. A few hundred years? Sometimes people accuse MRAs of wanting to take us back to the 1950s. McCarley apparently wants to take us back to the 1750s.
They don’t even understand what they’re being protected from.
Wolves? Sharks? Dishpan hands? Space aliens?
They have no concept how dangerous the world is for them but gosh they’re just not happy because, you know, the males in the family tell them what to do and make all the decisions for them and control all the money. That’s not oppression. That’s protection.
Wow. So I guess slaves and prisoners are the most protected classes of all.
It’s what kept our species alive and what built … [she gestures at the park and the buildings around it] this beautiful city.
Wait. I thought Jefferson Starship built this city. On rock ‘n’ roll.
Anyway, there’s also some footage of a speech about the evil oppression of white men given by an unknown speaker at the rally. He also complains that men working for the government are men who’ve had “their things cut off and are toeing the politically correct line.” (Hopefully after the bleeding has stopped.)
There’s an interview with Paul Elam, who for some reason looks like he’s wearing mascara (which I’m pretty sure he isn’t). He delivers this puzzling pronouncement:
Looking at men in government and saying they have all the power is like looking at women in grocery stores and saying they have all the food.
Not only is this way more revealing about gender inequality than Elam may realize, but it’s also a tad ironic, because Elam not that long ago used (unreliable) data about how women “control” most consumer spending — that is, they do most of the shopping — in order to argue (twice!) that women were the ones primarily responsible for destroying the environment.
There are assorted other bits of misinformation and ignorance and just plain old bigotry from the MRAs.
There’s also some commentary from the counterprotesters that made me wince. No, MRAs aren’t all Marc Lepines waiting to happen. They’re shitty enough people as it is; you don’t have to compare them all to a misogynist mass murderer to make your point. And in fact, you undercut yourself with that kind of rhetoric. Focus on what they actually say and do. It’s bad enough.
And the “racist, sexist, anti-gay” chant? Drop that. MRAs are, for the most part, driven by misogyny — not by other bigotries. Yes, some are racist, including one of the speakers featured on this very video, but that’s not the driving force for most of them. Some are homophobic, but that’s not the driving force for most of them. Some are transphobic — including Elam himself – but that’s not a central issue for most of them.
It’s worth pointing out these other bigotries, but to make these issues the centerpiece of your counterprotest is to miss the point — it would be a bit like attacking the Ku Klux Klan as “sexist and racist.” I’m sure plenty of KKKers are sexist as hell, but with the Klan racism really is the main thing; with MRAs, misogyny is.
And in this case it gave AVFM’s Karen Straughan the opportunity to appear (at least for a moment) like a reasonable person by pointing out that she in fact is not straight.
Anyway, watch the video. It’s amazing.
Posted on November 2, 2013, in a voice for men, actual activism, antifeminism, evil women, FemRAs, FeMRAsplaining, GirlWritesWhat, imaginary backwards land, imaginary oppression, incoherent rage, ladies against women, men created civilization, misogyny, MRA, oppressed white men, paul elam, reactionary bullshit, Suzanne McCarley, things that aren't fascism, we hunted the mammoth and tagged a voice for men, antifeminism, men's rights, misogyny, MRA, toronto. Bookmark the permalink. 1,097 Comments.
Well, you’ve never randomly accused someone of transphobia because they disagreed with you about torture, so I’d say you’re OK.
@pecunium
Can you please clarify what you mean by “The Rational Actor?” Is that idea based on the assumption that all people are rational beings? If so, that isn’t really a necessary assumption underlying anarchism, especially not anarcho-communism.
Ally — I’m gonna guess he’s off to work, but I think you’re right about what he meant.
Pecunium — dude, I’ve read plenty of you talking about torture, and yeah, it’s by and large level headed retorts of why the other person is Very Fucking Wrong.
Manboobz: The Magazining update — sidebar is done, typography is more or less done, search bar is giving me a headache. Need to redo the comments, figure out how to mark admin comments, and sort out wtf I want to do about author blurbs since it seems we’ll be having plenty of authors :) (start writing y’all!) And a few more HTML elements need to be styled (namely tables, which I’m avoiding because I remember the days of doing design layouts in tables (this is horrid practice, never do this!)
The jQuery and anything else I forgot.
Why? I like vibratey things. Especially when they’re warm and snuggly and let me tickle them.
Vibrating in between your legs?
“Maded betterer”?
Nooo, vibrating on my lap – because of the purring – which makes me feel less horrified by the attempt to remove parts of my anatomy… because purring is a get out of jail free card.
I was assuming you didn’t mean to suggest what would happen if someone read about the Hello Kitty vibrator and decided to improvise, but as you can see from Argenti’s comment…
….Hello Kitty vibrator? o_O
Search bar is done, the Argenti needs a nap.
There’s a Manboobz : The Magazining forum thread, can interested parties pop over there and give me some idea what we’re looking at for categories? Like, I know we have Furrinati, Scented FUCKING Candle Reviews, etc, but what about Teh Serious. Or you want to lump it all under that and the other under Teh Goofy and worry about sub-categories later?
Ally: Can you please clarify what you mean by “The Rational Actor?” Is that idea based on the assumption that all people are rational beings? If so, that isn’t really a necessary assumption underlying anarchism, especially not anarcho-communism.
Yes, it is what I meant, and it may not be a stated requirement, but for a lack of gov’t to work there has to be a shared sense of what is right, and a willingness; on the part of everyone, to play by the same rules. This is because (so goes the theory) that set of rules, when obeyed by everyone, is the best course of action.
And it may be, but (to borrow a phrase from Bruce Schneier) all it takes is a small number of “defectors” and the trust required to make the system work falls apart (btw, I strongly reccommend Bruce’s writing, but “Liars and Outliers” is the one which touches directly on this topic.
BTW; Brooked, that was some of the most endearing compliment I’ve been on the receiving end of.
As to the allusion, I don’t recall making it, but it causing me to show the film to someone tonight.
Manboobz: The Magazining update — things I need to do before we can put up anything resembling content // justify the horrendous $4 a month server cost: redo the comment formatting, add author blurbs and format author pages, and jQuery.
Also, what are we doing content-wise? I know there’s a strong idea we should go serious feminist critique, not MBZ spin-off, and that people do want MBZ humor. So I’m thinking, and bear with me here, this might get complex…
Main site, what you see on loading the home page — feminist critique, tags and categories in sidebar limited to ones used by those posts, link in the menu nav for the MBZ humor. I’m undecided on some things about that, but that’ll be in the next paragraph.
Click said link, get sent to the humor, sidebar loads the tags and categories for that stuff only, menu bar stays the same as the default, or does what I’m about to get to asking about. Now, my question here is, do we want to do “misogynist trolls say the darnedest things”, “scented FUCKING candle reviews”, etc as categories, all mixed together on the main humor page, or as categories and separate out the humor section by giving each category its own page? And if we do that, should the main menu bar list those pages as drop down pages (I have the coding for drop down child pages done already, so either way works fine), or do we have them only display on the humorous subsection?
…this is going to need a diagram huh? Give me a second!
A diagram of Argenti’s website. (JK, I do understand what you’re planning.)
Katz! How did you get that picture of my database’s relationships file?!
At the risk of sounding like an awful person, why not have the main humour page have all of them mixed together, and provide links to a separate page for each category in the sidebar?
(For the non-PHP aware, I swear, that’s not as much of a horrible thing to suggest as it sounds. I am not the monster you’re currently thinking.)
Also, made it to chapter 33 of 48… woo! I will make this book readable if it kills me.
A non-snark diagram :-p
And fuck, that bottom chunk, Menu 2 is two options:
Menu 2a, same as Option 2
Menu 2b, last menu on that page
So, overall options for y’all to fight amongst yourselves over —
1) Option 1 and Option A (excludes all other options)
Option 1 and Option B
2) Menu 1 (same menu on both the serious and humorous sides)
3) Menu 2a (main menu excludes snark drop down, snark includes it)
4) Menu 2b (main excludes snark, snark menu is last option on diagram)
Option 2 and Option B
5) Menu 1 (this’d be odd, it’d put the snark as a drop down menu on the serious side, and exclude it from the menu on the humorous side, I only list it for completeness)
6) Menu 2a (same menu on both the serious and humorous sides)
7) Menu 2b (child snark pages as drop down on serious side, as menu nav on snark side)
————
So, order 1-7 in order of presence, and I’ll do the math for ranked voting (Borda count to be specific)…because I have a thing for averages and a serious hatred for the flat out majority-rules system the US votes by, and it’s voting day here! Thus, in honor of all those Independent, Green Party, etc voters stuck voting for their second choice, I’m doing ranked voting (not that I think we’ll have much of that issue…but it is sorta how Bush got reelected…so yeah, Borda it is)
Btw…that’s basically how I determined outliers on the survey.
Athwyren — uhh…cuz that’s how category pages always work? Go click one, I’ll wait :)
You’d give 1 your first choice then.
There is no such thing as a pretty E-R diagram.
Bully. :(
My brain is clogged up with unexplained line breaks and “couM”s where “could”s should be. Thinking is haaaard! :P
Ennehwayz.
1,3,4,7,6,2 (do you actually want us to include 5 in our list of preferences?… I’ll put it last) 5
Chapter 36… going a bit cross-eyed.
Include 5 if you want, but yeah, I except it to mean “I hate everything after this” (FTR, you can just leave them off if you only like some — you want to amend your list?)
Nah, I honestly don’t mind any of those options. I just prefer the first 3-4 of them.
37!
Wow, what a gross meltdown. Especially with the whole, “sure, maybe I left and came back, but you guys are all homophobes and transphobes!”
Also, since I pretty much missed a lot of those fights, am I the only one uncomfortable how it comes up and yet is also sorta hushed up? I keep hearing these little glimpses and shit, and yet nobody will talk about it openly, and it bugs me.
RE: katz
I’m actually kinda on the anarchist side (I see it as something I don’t think would work for our world right now, but I hope that maybe one day, it WILL be doable) but I’ve been lucky, and most of the anarchists I’ve met were actually involved in their communities. They were running the zine library, or internet cafes, or the bike workshops, or distributing food, or doing little educational lectures and skillshares and stuff. They were actually doing bigger things than being a dick on the Internet.
RE: Kittehs
Because tractors are sometimes painted red.
Oh god, I actually have on my computer this awful song called ‘Traktor,’ which is all about how well-built Soviet tractors were. I am not even joking. The first lines are, “Traktor, Traktor/it is big and it is Red/if it hits you you’ll be dead/because it weighs five tons, HEY!”
Athywren — ok
LBT — I think, from private conversations, that part of the silence is fear it’ll explode again, and not wanting to talk about the people who left since they aren’t here to denied themselves (which would make it explode again). Basically, there’s a live landmine in the room and no one is going to be he one to poke it.
@LBT: I must admit to being curious about the fights when they get mentioned. I think I missed a lot of them, or I have a bad memory.
But I gotta be honest: It’s mostly a rubbernecking impulse for me. I don’t need to go gawk at people being ugly.
It is to my benefit, therefore, that they are so damn hard to find that I can’t be arsed to go looking. I think one at least happened on the fora.
Also LOL at the Traktor lyrics.
The trouble is that a lot of it happened in the secret room and we’re not supposed to repeat that stuff publicly.
Yeah, I guess in my case, it’s just sort of frustrating, because it’s been a year now, and it just keeps coming up, but nobody will actually say exactly what happened. I don’t know. It’s just like everyone’s pretending it didn’t happen, when it’s so obvious that uh, yeah, it totally did. (And it was a lot more complicated than anyone will say BUT WE AREN’T GOING TO TALK ABOUT THAT OKAY.)
Just… I don’t know, I find it weird.
Ahhh, okay. Secret room. So we aren’t supposed to talk about it publicly… so it just keeps bubbling up like swamp gas from the depths. Yech.
Wait, I am totally lost.
*what happens when you don’t comment for several days because of homework*
*homework is MISANTHROPY! :P *
So, since the topic’s been brought up… is this presumably Tolkienian conflict the reason that the forum’s got so much tumbleweed bouncing through it?
Also, “the first rule of Secret Room…”
That’s cool. It would be nice to see more activists of all stripes doing those sorts of things.
Unrelated: I keep meaning to ask you if you listen to Janelle Monae, since you are interested in robot-human relationships and her albums are about an android who falls in love with a human.
RE: Athywren
I have NO idea.
RE: katz
Unrelated: I keep meaning to ask you if you listen to Janelle Monae,
I haven’t! I have a rough idea who she is, and have heard like one song of hers, but I didn’t know that about her album! Which is it? Maybe I’ll have to check it out…
LBT:
I wanna hear the disco version.
Traktor, Traktor, ploughing furrows in the soil
And good fortune to us all, Hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh, Hey!
Traktor, Traktor, join us for Collectives’ Show
We’ll go dancing ’round the clock, Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah, Hey!
Re: the Great Unspoken, at least one person involved in that is STILL being an arsehole about it elsewhere, and putting their side without anyone they’re accusing getting a chance to speak for themselves. I’ve read the public side of those threads and there was a fuckton of Who’s Queer Enough policing going on, and people being driven off the site who were not the ones making the noise. Frankly I think this site’s a damn sight safer and more welcoming generally than it was then, and I’m a little tired of tip-toeing around that business. Yes, I know some people left in support, or because they too felt the site wasn’t right for them, but they weren’t being arseholes to other people and weren’t, at least publicly, the centre of that storm.
It’s all of them; they’re a series. First is her EP, Metropolis: The Chase Suite, then The Archandroid (which is the best one), and then The Electric Lady. This video is from the EP.
(Remember the days when all music videos were big-budget? I miss that.)
If anyone desperately wants to gaze into the abyss, you can read this thread, which is public, and wherein David gets called a “cis hetero fuckwad.” (I think that’s aimed at David.)
RE the great Manboobz war of the past, those of us who were around at the time but not active on the forums missed a good chunk of it too, and woke up afterwards just as confused about WTF had happened.
::nods:: I’ve read that thread before, as well as the ones on the blog proper. The outrage from someone very good at driving other people off site for Not Being Queer Enough was ironic, to say the least.
And then I have a weird biased view of it for…reasons…I wasn’t around at the time, but was still emailing people, so I got the back end version, and none of what I heard was meant to be made public, so I can’t really help, sorry LBT.
I’m with kitteh though, I’m much more comfortable without…um…certain people being here anymore.
Yeah, I never felt Queer Enough in those days…
In things I will openly discuss, I just got done editing the WP back end so it will let you pick what pronouns you want to have displayed in your author blurb. Defaults to ze / zir / zir’s if blank, and that’s mentioned on the now edited user page.
Less PHP, more CSS >.<
Hey, I think I’m one of the sycophants mentioned in the first post.
And, um, kitteh, Katz, Cassandra, LBT, y’all have my email if you want to take this to private spaces.
Probably no need to beat about the bush: It was Darksidecat. Zie was an asshole. Zie was an asshole in almost every way it’s possible to be an asshole and zie loudly and adamantly defended zir right to be an asshole.
There were other obnoxious people like Blackbloc, but they would have been a very minor problem if it hadn’t been for Darksidecat.
Something from the public threads here: attacking people for asexuality and identity and essentially doing a “not welcome in the treehouse” was as assholish as anything else I’ve seen from non-trolls on this site.
Well, since that’s been said…
Yeah, that. So much that. So very much.
Though, DSC’s assholery is part of how pecunium and I became friendly, so I guess some good came out of it. (This is, btw, why I think I’m one of those “sycophants” — defending pecunium’s pedantry against cries of homophobia)
There was this weird undertone that in order to be genderqueer by them I was going to have to disclose what’s in my pants. Idk how to explain it, but I was really irked about the claims that non-cis people are excluded when the only people I felt were policing me were the ones making the claims.
Link?
Rutee was second only to Darksidecat and is still being an asshole about the whole thing elsewhere. Yeah, not sorry either of them’s gone.
I think you just summed DSC up perfectly, katz.
…and the mac just crashed. Guess I won’t be doing any more coding right now!
What link, Argenti? The blog thread? No idea, it’s months and months since I read it.
Your mac needs kitties inside it to make it work proper!
One of the weirdest things about that whole mess was that at around the time it happened, both before and afterwards, there were occasionally comments that suggested that everyone else should know what the conflict was about in terms of specifics, but some of it apparently happened in a secret (members only I guess?) room. So how would anyone without access to that room have known what happened there? I found that part particularly odd and a bit frustrating. Like “you should be angry at person X because you should know what zie said” and, um, how, if you don’t even have access to the space where it was said?
That is weird.
Maybe True Allies are supposed to be mind-readers?
But then I thought that sort of thing was Unacceptable Woo … /snark
Ugh, I remember that.
Pecunium was arguing about DADT and was talking about how the laws also got applied to things like pedophilia, IIRC, and through the world’s worst game of telephone, that turned into “Pecunium thinks homosexuality and pedophilia are the same thing” and then anyone who tried to point out “he didn’t say anything like that” got a bunch of “Why are you defending a homophobe, YOU HOMOPHOBE!”
Defenses were actually made of assuming that if you mention two things in the same sentence, you’re saying they’re the same.
I’m not fond of whole secret room concept in general, though, so that may be influencing my perspective.
RE: Kittehs
I wanna hear the disco version.
The band put it up for free, so you can listen to the full song. I warn you, though, it’s REALLY bad, and in very bad taste. I’m embarrassed that I have it. (Then again, I also listen to Super 8 Cum Slut, so yeah.)
“One thousand years past the decline
Of Marxism — you’re tractor’s fine!
Sky blue pain with pinstripe line
Prevents against decay — HEY!”
RE: CassandraSays
woke up afterwards just as confused about WTF had happened.
Okay, as long as I know it’s not just me who’s badly confused, that makes me feel better. I guess I just felt like I was the only non-newbie not in the loop, and I was overreacting to that feeling.
RE: katz
Ooooooh. *goes to watch the vid* Damn, but Ms. Monae is a classy person. She makes me think of X-men’s Storm in her mohawk days.
By which I mean, if people want to talk to some others about stuff that they don’t want to share with everyone, why not use email? That seems less weird than making a secret room that not everyone is allowed to enter, and then getting annoyed when people don’t understand what happened in the secret room that they’re supposed to be angry with someone about.
For me, of course, it was the asshole atheist thing. Darksidecat adamantly believed that, since atheists are a marginalized group in society as a whole, that gave zir the right to mock and insult anyone who had religious beliefs. Of course you weren’t allowed to complain or disagree, because you were “tone trolling.”
Afaik, the secret room was a long standing thing on the forum, meant to serve as the open threads do, but with the ability to truly enforce the no trolls allowed rule. You needed permission to even read it, making it, in theory, a safe space to talk about things you didn’t want the likes of Owly to see. In practice…clearly it went to hell.
Katz — that thread really was something wasn’t it? Like, dude, I am bi, my last relationship was another genderqueer person, I’m fairly sure I can tell homophobia from pedantry!
Ah yes. And my dear Mr. Mango was de facto supporting all the evils of the Catholic Church (all of it, from homophobia to pedophilia…which may explain that conflation) by merely being Catholic.
That part is why, uh, I guess I can say it as he’s alluded to it…it’s why he tends to stay out of religion discussions now.
And the asshole atheist bit is definitely why so many of us noptopus when religion comes up.
I don’t think I was considered queer enough either. Oh well (shrugs).
Part of what bugged me was that “Goodbye, Cruel Forum/Blog” posts feel a bit wanky in general. I dunno, maybe I have a weird attitude towards this stuff, but if I’m sick and tired of a space and find that I don’t like a lot of the people there I just leave, and come back later to see if things have improved. I used to be on Jezebel all the time but didn’t like the new comment system, and felt like it changed the overall dynamic to one where trolls got too much airtime, so I left, but I didn’t make it big dramatic comment before doing so, I just left. And still occasionally check in to see if it might be worth going back at some point.
@ Argenti
IIRC I was apparently supporting the Catholic Church’s homophobia by not wanting to call everyone Catholic an asshole.
Yeah, the professional Asshole Atheism is another reason I’m bloody glad they’re gone. They were assholish even by Pharyngula standards – and Rutee’s the reason I’m not going to that site anymore, though it’s more like the term Argenti uses about you do not go for my friends. (Yeah, I’m calling you lot my friends! ::blows raspberry::) Zie about the Great War pretty well every fucking time MB is mentioned.
It was one of those things that sounded like a good idea, but didn’t work in practice. So there’s a private room and long-time regulars are grandfathered in and from then on you vote to let new people in. So far, fine.
But what do you do if you want to get rid of someone? Can just one person get someone else permanently kicked out? How do you discuss it when the person you’re discussing is in the secret room? What do you do if there are two people who are mutually uncomfortable with each other and each want a place away from the other? And so on.
Yeah, I could see it making sense on a blog like this when, uh, for example, I went and disappeared for months, but what I should’ve done was a simple “real life is killing my mental health, I’ll be back when I can”. Or, as some in that thread did, a simple “I won’t be around anymore either”.
Makes sense to tell people you’re friendly with how to contact you when you leave the group, but beyond that? Idfk.
“Zie rants about” that was supposed to be, dunno where the “rants” went!
The other problem with a secret room concept is that it needs moderators, and when the moderators are the ones who leave the site, what happens then? I applied to use the room soon after I started commenting (ie. long before I heard about this) but never heard back about it.
Yeah, “I’m not going to be around any more, you can contact me at…” makes perfect sense, it’s the Last Word-ism that often accompanies it that I find offputting.
A bit wanky? It was the wankiest wank that ever wanked a wank! It was a bald excuse just to air grievances and to convince everyone else to leave too (successfully), no doubt in the hopes of teaching us a lesson by ruining the blog’s whole commentariat (unsuccessfully).
Doubly so when you add that David then removed those folks from the secret room and they then threw a shitfit because they didn’t want to actually leave-leave, they wanted to loudly announce that they were leaving and then still complain endlessly about everything we’d ever done that they didn’t like.
Not just convince people to side with them and leave, no, I think they were more hoping that “the opposition” would be driven off.
It’s a bit wanky in general. Certain people are of course able to elevate it to wank as an artform.
Oh crud, so it was a flounce with added get-off-the-cross-we-need-the-wood!
What really pisses me off is that (iirc) those two effectively bullied lauralot off the site.
At least BlackBloc’s tanty the other day has brought this out in the open at last.