Well,I got carried away there. It’s not literally the whole world. Only a teensy weensy portion of it.
The fellows at A Voice for Men, you see, evidently stung by criticism that they aren’t activists, have begun engaging in real, honest-to-goodness real-world activism, by which I mean that a handful of them, some in Canada and at least one in Australia, have been putting up posters advertising the AVFM website.
In other words, their activism consists of putting up posters for a website whose only activism thus far has consisted of putting up posters for itself.
Well, eventually they’ll get the hang of it, I guess.
In any case, the A Voice for Menners have discovered something about activism: if you do things that are offensive enough, people will be offended. And so they’ve managed to offend some people in Canada and in Australia where their posters have gone up. In Australia, there have even been a couple of news articles written about them! For example, one in Melbourne’s Herald Sun says:
A MAN who is littering the city with posters promoting a website that encourages men to support rapists has declined the opportunity to explain himself.
The website, which the Herald Sun has chosen not to name, is campaigning to get men sitting on juries for rape trials to “vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true”. …
The website’s publisher, Paul Elam, told the Herald Sun he was too busy watching the movie Air Force One to be interviewed, but later said by email he stood by the campaign.
Ooh! How very, very alpha of him.
Other articles (see here and here) describe the posters as “hate posters,” because one of them seems to suggest that women provoke domestic violence against themselves. The text of the poster reads “Domestic Violence Women Are Half the Problem.”
In fact, Elam and company are trying to suggest that women instigate half of all domestic violence, and thus are “half the problem,” but they’re so wedded to the easily misunderstood “half the problem” slogan that they somehow cannot seem to get this idea across in poster form. (This idea is itself incorrect, but that’s a whole other kettle of angry dudes.) Elam and company don’t quite seem to understand that an important part of activism is actually conveying your ideas to the general public rather than simply provoking people.
You can’t buy this kind of publicity!
Well, technically, you could, but no one would, because no one would willingly pay money for a publicity campaign that makes them appear to be hateful assholes — and in fact, even a teensy bit more hateful than they actually are.
So, congratulations, I guess?
If anyone wants to help AVFM in its publicity campaign, the super-sarcastic poster below, and a number of other poorly thought out and badly designed posters, can be downloaded from AVFM here by “anyone who wants to print and distribute them.”
Note: THIS IS A REAL AVFM POSTER. I didn’t make it up. See here.
Paul Elam of AVFM said that. And when asked for a quote by the paper, he said he was too busy watching a movie.
@Ugh – Basically, yes. I’ll drop a line by here sometime and let you know how I get on with it.
See ya.
“Yow said that his suicide was an example of MR Activism. He was protesting having his children taken away from him just because he assaulted one of them and refused to go to anger management. Do you think the judge should have taken away his kids or not?”
His protest what about the entire process and not just about his kids being taken away, but how the courts favor women and abuse women.
My own personal take is that the courts do favor women, mostly, but it’s actually more cynical than that, that the judge on the first day of the first case determines which partner can best pay for all the attorney and court services involved and then everything is determined after that (in 95%) of cases.
But you can recognize that Ball’s protest was about the systematic institutionalized misandry of family court without agreeing that he was ever right to hit his kid.
My feeling is that if what Ball claimed was accurate, that he slapped his kid once out of anger, that it is certainly justified for him to lose custody until he has gone to enough anger management and other course to substantiate any claims that he is no longer a danger. It is certainly reasonable to give him supervised visitation in the meantime.
And that given how often we see courts and CPS give kids back to mothers with enormous additions, alcohol problems, who then run into more problems, etc., there is no reason to think that Ball’s issues couldn’t have been resolved in the future.
If he refused to attend court mandated anger management classes after that, he was a fool.
That he encouraged violence against others makes him an asshole.
That does not excuse misandry in the court and the various ways family courts abuse people.
“Yow said that his suicide was an example of MR Activism”
I said his suicide was an example, along with F4J, this was to refute David Futrelle’s claim that MRAs and FRAs do nothing but put posters up. I also stated over and over that I disagreed with much of Ball’s behavior.
This stopped precisely none of you from intentionally misrepresenting my view points, something I would expect from Fox News, Republicans and other propagandists.
In his case, for all we know, the court might just have been biased against child abusers. That is definitely a documented tendency,
That was the original deal. He turned it down.
So we’re in agreement. That was what you claimed. The a child abuser, protesting that he was no longer alloowed to abuse his children, killed himself in the hope it would inspire terrorist attacks. That’s your example. That’s an example of what your movement is about.
I think you should let that sick in for a bit.
Do you expect it from the dozens of MRA sites that “neglect” to fill in the details about WHY he lost custody?
Stick the flounce, abuser’s lobbyist.
actually no it was about an angry dude lashing out because he was required to take a modicum of responsibility for his behavior and this proved too much for him
yeah dude, not rolling over and accepting your framing was the greatest crime of all time. cry harder you fucking baby.
Do you seriously believe that abusers and terrorists ever take any actions for reasons other than their own narcissism? I’ve got a bridge to sell you, pal.
No it wasn’t. It was about him being the most unbelievably selfish father possible.
No, not really.
So the courts dealt with him fairly, but his protest against the courts was valid? WTF?
So your argument is ‘MRAs do more that put up posters! They do horrible, unjustified things that I disprove of! So there!’
The question you really have to ask yourself is :”Why didn’t Ball take the court ordered anger management to keep his kids?”
It’s because he didn;’t want to be expected to not hit his kids. He was willing to give up his kids and kill himself instead of taking basic responsibility for his actions.
@Pillowinhell, I’m so sorry that you went through what you went through as a child.
@The First Joe, I’m very sorry that you, too, went through such horrible things as a child.
@Some Guy, CHILD ABUSE IS ALWAYS WRONG YOU ZEKE.
Oh, no. Some guy compared us to Fox News, whatever shall we do?
I vote point and laugh.
And hugs for you, Pillowinhell. I’m sorry for what you went through as a child.
Yes, I’m just catching up, too (having posted without reading everything first).
Pillowinhell, I’m so sorry they did that to you.
The 1st Joe, I’m sorry that happened to you, too.
From Elam’s little bit re:being interviewed but watching Air Force One instead:
A lot of MRM things make me sad or angry or frustrated, but for whatever reason that’s the one thing that’s made me saddest. “I don’t think so.” 🙁
The goggles! They do nothing!
Yeah! We MRAs do more than just put up posters! Sometimes we set ourselves on fire!
Joe, you’ve prompted me to take a look at what DV shelter services for men exist in my metro area (Boston). I can’t find any specifically for only straight men who are victims of violence. There is the Gay Men’s Domestic Violence Project, which provides emergency shelter and other DV services for gay, bi, and transmen, which arose because queer men were being shut out of DV shelters. Elizabeth Stone House provides for “individuals and families,” so presumably they could help straight men. I don’t see anything specifically for men outside of Boston metro; there doesn’t appear to be much in the surrounding burbs. There are multiple homeless shelters for single men, but nothing specifically for male victims of DV. What resources are out there are not easy to find. I imagine that has a lot to do with the budget cuts affecting all shelter services; emergency shelter services were cut by $23 MILLION last year in this state.
Tomorrow I’m going to call the GMDVP and Elizabeth Stone House and ask what resources they have for straight male victims, or if they know of others. Once I get that answer, I’ll take that data to a friend of mine who works for the state in DHHS, and see about getting it put up on the DV resources page specifically under a quick reference section for male victims. It shouldn’t have taken me 20 minutes to figure out that maybe Elizabeth Stone House could help me if I were a straight male victim.
Oh the irony, that even the Murdoch tabloid Herald-Sun has a go at these dipshits. It’s not exactly the number one anti-misogynist paper around – it barely contains its disgust that we have a woman Prime Minister (though I daresay it’d cope if she were a Liberal-National). I’m glad to say I haven’t noticed any of these stupid posters around town.
And all this ‘free speech’ crap – hello, stop importing stuff from the US Constitution that refers to American government not persecuting its citizens! This is Australia and we don’t actually have that clause written into out constitution, besides which this has nothing to do with government anyway.
@ The Kitteh’s Unpaid Help – Oh, I completely missed that it was a Murdoch paper! That makes it so much funnier. If you’re too reactionary for those guys…
As for free speech, I know it’s not constitutionally protected in Australia, but I still think it’s an important thing to fight for. That said, I don’t think private citizens tearing down or defacing posters is an attack on it. All sorts of posters get torn off, torn up, painted on, defaced and pasted over. You put something on a wall, you take your chances.
Well, unless you’re Banksy, I guess.
This was in fact the thesis of David’s post. I am just here to point out how boring his schtick is.
To whom?
He’s getting lots of hits. He has an active commentariat, with new users, older users, steady users, intermittent users, trolls and outside groups linking to him.
He’s been invited to take part in wider world discussions of the subject. The MRM hates him, but can’t seem to actually show him to be wrong.
So who is it that’s bored with him?
Manboobzers are hilarious. I had to memorialize all the posters here, so that I’ll have a place to go if I ever need to start laughing hysterically.
To be frank, I’ve predominantly given up on Boobzland; it’s been frankly frustratingly futile, and I also believe that some new faces are doing an excellent job taking you all to task – Joe, for example, I have great respect for. But this is simply too much.
When you get right down to it, A Voice for Men is now sending its feelers into the real world – yes, it is a burgeoning human rights movement, and thus the first priority is to raise consciousness. That is, to get people- especially those inclined to sympathy- on board.
And naturally, Boobzland sneers. Well, you’ll be talking out of the other side of your mouths soon- check back in five years. We’ll see how tough feminism is then.
Ewww.
I have already condemned this in the strongest way,
That is by saying the response to it (refusing him visitation until he took one anger management counseling session) was unjust, and his terroristic protest was activism.
That’s some definition of condemn you’ve got going there. Could you cite the dictionary you’re using?