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.
I’m still confused about him saying he’s against the man hitting (or whatever word he likes better) the kid. Everything else he says would make me think he’d be in favor of the father having the right to do that (he does know it was a daughter, not a son, right?). YAY if he really does think it’s not a father’s right, but I keep thinking there’s got to be a typo and he’s missing a “not” or a “…n’t” or something in there.
and btw Polliwog – I love your “f” alliteration!
I know I’m a little late, but…
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3qnfke/
Varpole: Is this going to be the same as the abandonment of Anti-Manboobz? Can you stick the flounce?
Will we care?
I can tell you this… in five years the MRA will be about where it is and feminism is likely to be doing better.
Because that’s the trendline.
That does not excuse misandry in the court and the various ways family courts abuse people.
But you agreed the courts were not out of line (though you cavil and say he should have been given visitation of the child he abused: he was given supervised visitation of his other children, because there was no allegation of abuse against them).
So your argument is what? He was protesting against a larger evil? So you approve his protest, but condemn his exhortations. How does that work?
You think he was a fool to not attend the anger management session he was ordered to attend.
But he was totes being a justifiable activist when he said people needed to kill people to change the family courts, because he had been “maltreated”.
Frank: I thought you had, “mostly given up on Boobzland”?
You did want to be Frank, right?
@Rahu
I think the problem some guy has is that he’s never thought through the implications of the MRA shit he believes. Obviously, if he’s a member of a movement, and cites a Ball’s protest as an example of your movement’s activism, he is saying that Ball’s protest was valid. In other words, he is saying that a child abuser’s protest at losing his children was valid.
However, when this got pointed out, his reaction was “I can’t really believe that, can I? Maybe an embarrassingly bad misreading of Merriam-Webster can deflect attention from me!”
Sadly, MRA blogs do not prepare people for having their beliefs thought through.
*his movement’s activism
“I only post incoherent, repetitive screeds there four, five times a week, tops.”
Okay, buddy, let’s try a slightly different thought experiment. Which movement do you think would garner more support from people on the street – the one which says that Thomas Ball was an abusive asshole for hitting his kid or the one which is really really concerned that we specify the exact number of times he hit his kid because, I mean, he may have been a child-abusing terrorist but he doesn’t deserve to be slandered, amirite?
Durn, forgot to put in that the first quote is from Frankpole and the second from some guy.
From somebody, somewhere upthread:
So I checked out your link, and I can’t find anywhere where it says that 95% of adult staff are female, or that 95% of female staff sexually assault juveniles, or whatever the fuck you’re failing to communicate.
I did see it say this:
So 95% of 10.3% of reported incidents of sexual misconduct involved female staff. That is NOT AT ALL equivalent to the vast majority of sexual abuse being perpetrated by women.
It’s horrible that children are being abused by adults who are charged with protecting them.
And again, instead of a sensible message like “Let’s stamp out sexual misconduct against juveniles in custody”, MRAs trot out bullshit like “Women are just as bad as men, so quit making it look like we’re bad when we commit sexual assault! Cuz women do it too, even more than us! So we should be allowed to do it too!”
And THAT is why you fail as a social justice movement.
Limerick time!
There was once a fella named Elam
who was watching Air Force One.
Um. That’s where it ends. Weird…
A bit late, but this is another genuinely useful resource for men who are victims of DV, or worried about their kids, or angry, or suicidal
http://www.mensline.org.au
If you are uncomfortable talking to women, don’t worry, all the counsellors here are men. (This was a problem my brother had – after abuse from a woman he was very mistrustful of women, and didn’t want to approach other support services in case the only people available were women.)
So fuck off already, no one here will miss you.
Perhaps it should raise its own consciousness first, before sending its feelers into the real world.
Blame it on the misandrist teacher who never let him develop his mad writing skillz.
Y’know, when I first started hearing about MRAs, when I saw what they were writing and visited the manosphere, I was disgusted by the misogyny and hate. As a woman, just the fact that these people exist is terrifying. And maybe this makes me an evil feminazi, but yeah, at first, all I could see is how horrible these people were in regards to women.
But now? I can’t get over how much harm they’re doing to men. Because I know guys who were victims of domestic violence, I know guys who were genuinely screwed by the court system*, and I just gotta say to the MRAs:
Stop it. Right fucking now. You are hurting men who are already victims. Your bitterness and childishness is not only keeping you from accomplishing anything; you are actively hurting those that you claim to want to help.
They are making men who have legitimate problems look like entitled babies. It’s not fair to wrap all guys who complain about the court system or who talk about abusive relationships to get lumped in with these assholes, but that is really all the MRA movement is succeding at, right now. And it makes me sick. It is already incredibly difficult for men who have been abused or raped to seek help, and even harder to actually get help*. That is where the energy of a real MRA movement should focus, if they actually gave a damn about helping men instead of hurting women.
And y’know what, guys? You really should reach out to feminists. They are your natural allies. Most feminists I know are deeply troubled by the fact that boys who are sexually abused, men who are raped, and male victims of domestic violence don’t get the help they need. But feminists cannot staff hotlines for guys in trouble (as stated above) and they cannot create the needed shelters. However, a lot of feminists can tell you how to go about starting and running those hotlines and shelters, they can give you the support you need and teach you how to make your movement successful, because they have already traveled that path and they know the way. But, I know, that would mean actually *gasp* listening to women and respecting their knowledge. And, again, these assholes think it’s more important to hate women than help me.
You fucking pricks.
*I am not in anyway saying that women don’t face these issues or that it’s easy for women to get help.
Sorry, that should have been “men” not me…and the sentence structure in the second sentence of the fourth paragraph really got away from me, there. Think you can still get my point, though. I should probably go to bed before I lose all ability to write a coherant sentence.
@EEB, thanks for that.
Hmm, could some guy be a Slavey sockpuppet?
In terms of the actual posters…they’re not exactly pithy, are they?
Wow! So many MRA’s are starting to look like some serious douche-bags. I can’t believe that I have been brainwashed by them. The way how so many of them will not differentiate between moderate feminist and “radical” feminist. The way how they blame feminism on a whole and women for so much. I do believe that they’re issues that negatively affected men but, I really don’t see how it is the fault of feminism or women anymore. It’s like so many MRA’s don’t really care about these issues.They’re more concern with putting the blame on women and feminism. They also seem to have some political agenda. It is pathetic, I don’t need to be fed with any of their misogyny.
“THIS IS A REAL AVFM POSTER. I didn’t make it up. See here”
Wait, isn’t ‘The Unknown History of Misandry’ a satire?
That Unknown HIstory Of Misandry blog is fascinating; traces the first MRA group back to 1926, and says Charlie Chaplin was a sympathiser.
I had no idea they’d been so ineffective for so long.
“It’s nonsense like this plus the usual misrepresentative pile-on that is approved by the cohort here, that keeps feminism like yours a mostly fringe movement with young women these days often saying, “I like what feminism does, but I would never call myself a feminist.””
It’s nonsense like holding up child abusing terrorists as inspiration, plus the usual abuse apologia that is approved by the cohort there, that keeps MRA mostly a fringe movement with the majority of men these days often saying “NRA? Like, the gun people? Oh, what, M? MRA? What’s that? What? They WHAT?? BWWWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA!”
Yeah, we got that three pages ago, dipstick. We also pointed out the sadfail of this satirical device as it also uses pear to mean testicles and breasts.
Here is a serious appeal to MRAs reading this blog.
The so-called “War on Drugs”, here in the US and across the whole Western World and beyond, results in a huge number of (almost exclusively) men to be jailed, criminalized and killed. Whilst in prison, they are abused, often sexually. Literally millions of men are affected by this, in some cases entire communities. Even the most reactionary, deranged anti-feminist would have to concede that vastly more men are affected by the “war on drugs” than by “feminism/misandry”.
http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/
Why don’t you do something to help these guys?
Look, “some guy”
There are multiple reasons a court can act as though hitting a toddler in the face to the tune of drawing blood is something to treat as though it was not an isolated incident.
The child was very very young. The location of the blow was inexcusable, and the result showed excessive force. Why would anyone believe that was an isolated incident?
Even if it was once, any reasonable person has reason to believe it would not be the last. Even parents that subscribe to corporal punishment choose the buttocks for good reason. The fact that you don’t get how disturbing that incident shows you minimize extreme violence. Ask parents that hit their kids what all those factors mean. This is beyond discipline old fashioned style, that was assault and battery.
Again the child was very very young. There is simply no excuse, and nobody with any common sense is going to think, oops poor Thomas just lost it that one time. How does someone lose it that bad on a harmless child? It’s not even a sassy eight year old that pushed one too many buttons, the child was FOUR.
So ok, people in the comments said “beat” and you took issue with that, but looking at all the factors here, you’re the one that looks like an abuse apologist ass. The people here are not looking like wild exaggerators so much. Hate to break it to you.