What can you do when you realize that you’re losing the war of ideas? You can rethink some or all of your ideas, seriously considering the unnerving possibility that you might be, well, wrong. You can reconsider how you present your ideas.
Or you can give up on ideas entirely, and attempt to pressure or harass or even terrorize others into some form of surrender. That’s what the the uber-radical Weathermen did in the 1960s and 70s, turning first to violent direct action in the aptly named “days of rage” and then to bombs when the revolution that many in the New Left had been prophesying failed to materialize. That’s what the anti-abortion movement has been doing for decades now, with some in the movement harassing women trying to get abortions while more radical antis bomb clinics and kill doctors. .
And now we’re seeing rhetoric from Men’s Rights Activists that suggests some in that movement may also be giving up on talk. Consider A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam, who declared in a fundraising letter a couple of months back that:
Progress for men will not be gained by debate, reason or typical channels of grievance available to segments of the population that the world actually gives a damn about. The progress we need will only be realized by inflicting enough pain on the agents of hate, in public view, that it literally shocks society out of its current coma.
Elam is – presumably deliberately — vague about what exactly he means when he talks about “inflicting … pain,” and as far as I know he has never explicitly endorsed violence. But he has spoken openly about “stalking” individual feminists and otherwise “fucking their shit up” by, among other things, posting personal information about them on the AVfM-sponsored site Register-Her.com for all would be vigilantes to see. And in the “activism” section of his website he has reprinted a manifesto explicitly calling for the firebombing of courthouses and police stations.
Elam isn’t the only MRA who has officially given up on “debate and reason” in favor of “inflicting … pain” on feminists. The “counter-feminist” wannabe philosopher who calls himself Fidelbogen makes a similar argument in a recent post on his blog:
Feminism is your enemy, and the obligation to treat feminists as fellow human beings is officially waived. They are not fellow human beings, they are ALIENS.
Dehumanizing the enemy always a good start.
[L]et’s not hear any crap about so-called “hate speech”. You see, there is simply no way that you can resist evil, denounce tyranny, or call pernicious things by their right names, without crossing a fine line into “hate speech” or something very like it. Extremism against a bully is no vice, and since bullies have their own moral economy, you are entitled to pay them in their own coin.
It’s not hate speech if you really do hate them?
The important thing to understand about the feminists is, that they will not change their outward behavior unless social heat and pressure are inflicted upon them.
Fidelbogen, a sometime contributor to A Voice for Men, is also vague about what exactly he means by this “social heat and pressure.” He continues:
What, do you think they will stop what they are doing just because somebody intellectually convinces them they are mistaken? They will do no such thing, because they are people with an agenda who know they are “right”, and they lack the gift to see themselves as the rest of the world sees them.
IRONY ALERT. IRONY ALERT.
Over on Reddit, meanwhile, the charming JeremiahMRA – who used to post comments here as Things Are Bad – thinks the “inflict pain” policy should be extended to all women, any time they engage in “bad behavior.” Responding to a poster asking how to handle a disagreement with his mother, he explained his theory in (sometimes redundant) detail, receiving several dozen net upvotes for his post:
The ONLY way you change women’s bad behavior is by punishing them if they won’t start acting like adults. …
The only way you change a woman’s bad behavior is by making sure they know it hurts them. …
Reasoning with her will not work. The only answer is to use the power he has as her SON to threaten to hurt her emotionally. Women are emotional creatures. Nothing else will work. This is what it means to be a man: you do what you have to do so that things will be better in the end, even if you don’t like it. …
It isn’t about convincing her what’s right, it’s about showing her she will suffer if she doesn’t do what’s right. That is the only thing that will work.
The Men’s Rights Movement likes to pretend that is it a civil rights movement. But threats, harassment, hate speech, and emotional blackmail aren’t the tactics of a legitimate civil rights movement. These are the tactics of angry narcissists clinging to retrograde prejudices, who have given up on the war of ideas because on some level they know that history is against them, and that they will never win.
@Roberta:
“the second asking is coercive and disrespectful of the other party’s lack of interest” and could quickly lead to rape =/= asking for sex twice is rape.
Maybe asking me to pay attention was a bad move on your part.
So if someone asks me over and over, for half an hour, if I want to fuck after I have repeatedly said no, there’s nothing coercive in that without the threat of violence?
@Roberta:
Congratulations on summing up a major portion of “enthusiastic consent” and the blog post you linked to. ^_^
@Roberta Why, I bet they would say they “simply asked more than once in a non-threatening way and this nice lady gave us $20.”
You sure about that. According to wikipedia the average sentence for a sexual assault conviction in the US is 11 years. Not to mention a lifetime as a registered sex offender. Which effectively makes it a life sentence as a burger-flipping social pariah.
God forbid a rapist be a social pariah.
@debba
Holy reading comprehension skills, Batman!
I don’t get this discussion. Since when are there cases against someone for rape after “Please, it’s been awhile?” one where there was a conviction and where rape shield laws came into play? This is nonsense.
Right! I mean, that person is “simply asking” right? Sigh.
“Roberta has discovered a novel strategy for defending her claims. Do you use that one in court, too?”
It goes nicely with “make a sweeping generalization that you have no way to prove, and then when people point out that it’s not true in their experience, pretend that never happened and carry on to the next unsupported assertion”.
“Well, it’s good to know you wont call the police the next time your partner asks you to sleep with them. Though plenty of feminists would.”
Old MacTrolland had a blog, EE-I-EE-I-O,
And on that blog he had a troll, EE-I-EE-I-O,
With a fake false rape accusation here and a legalistic excuse for rape there
Here an anti-feminst dowhistle, there a “I’m a lawyer!, everywhere a bit of rape apologism
Old MacDonald had a farm, EE-I-EE-I-O.
If you genuinely can’t stop someone’s badgering without consenting to sex (you have no other options to shut them up), then that can be rape. If you don’t have any reasonable choice, then it’s rape. That’s pretty much the standard of the law.
Duress and all that.
Ok, yeah, maybe “non-threatening” doesn’t cover the spectrum of coercive behavior, which is the other major part of “enthusiastic consent” and the blog post…
The point was, I was trying to get you to admit that the context and environment around the proposition matters. It’s what makes it so complicated, because there’s a ton of shit that can coerce someone to say “yes” to sex without wanting to, which is why feminists tend to go on the side of caution with “yes means maybe, no means no.”
The link actually had a (in my opinion) interesting construction of the phrase:
Both of these are decent summaries of the complexities of consent with either positive or negative answers.
Oh man, whenever I’m given the option of unclear or clear implicit threats of violence, I’m totally down for staying in the clear implicit threats section.
*the above post addressed to @Roberta
Yes means maybe. So every time you have sex with an apparently consenting partner, you might be raping them? Even if their consent seems clear?
Sorry, I just can’t get behind that idea.
Let’s deliberately misconstrue things! It’s awesome!
@Roberta:
Dawww, you didn’t read it, did you? That’s adorable. Yes, the phrase “yes means maybe” is the same as “this yes means maybe,” another point which the author of the post predicted would be a criticism. ^_^
You don’t think an implicit threat can be clearly communicated. Surrounding you and glaring at you menacingly is an implicit threat. While saying: “Do it or I’ll kill you” is an explicit threat.
Either way, they’re both pretty damn clear.
Man… mangled sarcasm for the win!
Clearer: “No, the phrase ‘yes means maybe’ is not the same as ‘this yes means maybe,’ which is another point that the auther of the post predicted and addressed.”
You sure are choosing to interpret her words rather generously, Kirby. I tend to believe that people mean what they say.
@Roberta:
From the post, given as a sort-of hypothetical:
If nothing else, I’d like to thank Roberta for the link to that article. I found it really, really interesting, and a clearer explication of radical feminism than I think I’ve ever read.
So, thanks. And I’m really sorry you think she’s supporting your point.
*sigh*
And the whole quote is itallics, so an itallic tag does not provide emphasis…
In any case, it’s something of a moot discussion for the following reason. Consent has nothing to do with whether or not you actually want to have sex.
Consent just means that you freely agree to have sex. Doesn’t matter why you are agreeing: desire, money, afraid he’ll leave if he isn’t satisfied, peer pressure, cultural norms, believing that it’s what’s expected, etc. So long as you are not under actual duress and you are reasonably capable of declining the sex, then your consent is still freely given and legitimate.
There’s all kinds of outside social, cultural, relational, and personal pressures on our choices in all contexts. So long as that pressure isn’t severe enough to forcibly compel you, then you still have some measure of legal and moral agency.
Consent is: saying yes, when you are capable of saying no.
(And how fucking awesome is it that she quoted Holly? The corner of the internet I frequent is a really small place.