We Hunted The Mammoth
By David Futrelle
Bettina Arndt has had quite a week, so far. On Sunday, the Aussie Men’s Rights Activist and sometime-pedophile-defender was inexplicably awarded one of Australia’s highest honors for her alleged “services to gender equity,” sparking a massive outcry from feminists and others actually committed to equality.
So I’m going to appear on the Australian radio show Stop Everything on ABC RN tonight from 8-9 PM Eastern, talking about Gamergate and its legacy. (For those actually living down under, that converts to 10-11 AM Friday morning, Eastern Australian time.) The segment on Gamergate will take up roughly half of the hour-long show, but I’m not sure when in the hour that will be.
You can find the show here; it will be rerun several times and also put up as a podcast.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
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By David Futrelle
An Australian man was just convicted of maliciously burning down the house he had handed over to his ex-wife in a divorce settlement. Naturally, the regulars on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit are embracing him as a hero.
Men’s Rights Activists love to “warn” women that they may soon face a day of reckoning if they don’t shape up and start acting the way MRAs think they should. Don’t make men angry, they say; you wouldn’t like us when we’re angry!
Still, most MRAs making these “predictions” at least make a token effort to pretend to be horrified at the notion of men rising up to wreak vengeance upon uppity women. This isn’t what we want, they assure women; it’s just what will happen if you continue to “provoke” men with your bad behavior.
Other MRAs find it impossible to contain their glee; like doomsday preppers with well-stocked bunkers and enough ammo to kill every living thing within a 500 mile radius, they can’t wait for the end of the world.
Peter Andrew Nolan is one of these other MRAs. And he’s started to celebrate a little bit early.
November 25th is White Ribbon Day in Australia, a day devoted to ending domestic violence against women. This year – the 25th has already drawn to a close in Australia – there were reportedly hundreds of White Ribbon events held across the country, including a massive march in suburban Sydney that drew thousands of participants.
White Ribbon Australia, which describes itself as “Australia’s only national, male led Campaign to end men’s violence against women” calls on men to “swear never to commit, excuse or remain silent about violence against women.” It helps to coordinate events in schools and workplaces, and has gotten support from police departments across the country as well as from various branches of the nation’s military.
It’s also gotten the attention of the folks at A Voice for Men.
The other day I suggested that perhaps it was unfair to the Men’s Rights movement to allow them to handle their own public relations, given how terrible they are at it. Today I wonder if the same principle might also apply to MRAs trying to handle their own lawyering.
A case in point: the lawsuit that antifeminist lawyer, “Ladies Night” hater and hip-hop dance enthusiat Roy Den Hollander has just brought against Australian journalist Tory Shepherd, who wrote about the involvement of Den Hollander and others with links to “men’s rights extremists” in a proposed set of “male studies” courses at the University of South Australia.
It’s still not clear to me if these courses had ever been formally approved – the university says they weren’t – but Den Hollander thinks that Shepherd and another Australian reporter got them cancelled by writing about them. And so he figures that they should compensate him for losing him his teaching gig.
You may vaguely remember all of this. A Voice for Men, heavily involved in the courses, famously denounced Shepherd as a “whore” shortly after AVFM’s Paul Elam indignantly called her a liar for suggesting that A Voice for Men regularly calls women whores. (Which of course it does; Elam himself used the word “whore” 28 times in a single post about Skepchick’s Rebecca Watson.)
Anyhoo, so Den Hollander, acting as his own lawyer, has served Shepherd with the lawsuit. And it’s a doozy of a document, at least going by the excerpts Shepherd posted in a column Wednesday.
Somehow we doubt that this lawsuit is going to enhance Den Hollander’s reputation as a fair-minded analyst of gender relations.
Here are some of the best bits, as presented by Shepherd in her column as “some lessons from Mr Den Hollander, who will not be paid to give lessons at UniSA.”
Lesson 1: How to censor a journalist by accusing them of censorship.
“Two modern-day, book-burning, Bacchae reporters from down-under authored and published false and misleading information concerning Plaintiff (Den Hollander) with the intent and result of harming his economic interests and interfering with a prospective economic advantage by causing the University of SA to incinerate the section of a proposed male studies course that Plaintiff would have taught,” he writes. But wait.
Lesson 2: How to personally attack a journalist by accusing them of personal attacks.
“The two reporters, Tory Shepherd, AKA “Tory the Torch” for The Advertiser and Amy McNeilage, AKA “Amy McNeuter” for The Sydney Morning Herald, used their power as reporters to do what weak-minded ideologues have done throughout history — employ personal attacks to prevent the spread of knowledge and ideas that they disagreed with.”
Lesson 3: How to prove you are not an extremist by sounding like an extremist.
“If these two feminist book-burners had not jumped on their broomsticks and scared the bejesus out of the administrators of the University of SA, students there would have had an opportunity to acquire information and consider views not available anywhere else in higher education.”
Yeah, I’m sure that sort of thing is going to go over great in court.
Elsewhere in his lawsuit, Den Hollander denounces “yellow, female-dog-in-heat reporting,” takes a swipe at “girlie-guys,” and offers this intriguing take on Australian military history:
Thank goodness for Australians that Tory was not around for Australia’s battle against the Japanese. Her anti-gun advocacy for men might have even resulted in her and Amy ending up as Japanese “comfort girls.”
The case does at least promise to be highly entertaining, so I guess we have to give Den Hollander credit for that.
