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 dunno. This is the group, after all, that made that idiotic pear poster. The odds of them understanding anything at all seem pretty low.
Internal consistency isn’t really a thing for MRAs. Because they have to hold diametrically opposed things as equally true to support their belief system (e.g. women shouldn’t work AND women shouldn’t be financially dependent on their spouse), they don’t notice when they contradict themselves within the same poster. Or paragraph. Or sentence.
In fact, that was my biggest issue with TS. He kept insisting that two sentences in the same paragraph didn’t have to be related to each other, and the fact we kept interpreting them as having something to do with each other meant we were willfully misinterpreting him.
Unimaginative, why are you so wheatpastist?
(wheatpasteist?)
In that case they’re probably trying to manipulate people’s good natures. No-one wants to hear they’ve ‘violated someone’s human rights’.
Unfortunately for them most peoples’ upper limit for bitgoted arseholery is higher than the fetid depths they’re spewing, which would shock them out of that doubt. (That was probably a wordy way of saying ‘tolerance only goes so far’…)
Maybe I am a bit charitable. I tend to assume idiocy before malice.
I love ELame blowing off the press he’s been courting all this time. Guess it wasn’t positive enough for him. Some movement leader he is.
It’s especially funny that the movie he blew off the press for came out in 1997. Yeah, I can’t talk to you right now because it’s urgent that I catch up with 15-year-old entertainment.
Priorities are also not an MRA thing.
Elame was probably pissing himself with fear that he was about to hear how little people agree with him, that he would be roundly mocked and that men would not be secretly sending him email support. At least, not as many men as angry people bent on giving him a piece of their mind.
He might have been able to spin the posters, but that would have had to include a “this person is slightly mistaken” notpology to pull off. And, a lot of prayers that people don’t start pulling his own comments from his own blog.
@clairedammit
I have never heard of wheatpaste. Rather than google it, I will assume you’re making shit up to be offended by because you are an evil feminist looking for things to be offended by. Since that’s what we do, and all.
These posters make sense, in a world where all men are constantly surrounded by angry feminists and all men live in constant terror of being accused of rape. If you lived in that world, you wouldn’t need it spelled out what the fuck the MRAs are going on about.
…It’s really weird to think that they literally believe our world is like that.
@creativewritingstudent: to guilt-trip someone, first that person would need to have some clue what they are talking about,
@Ruby, it’s a quote from a fictitious character in a novel, but MRAs cling to it as if it were some agreed-upon feminist tenet. See explanation here:
http://manboobz.com/2011/02/15/factchecking-a-list-of-hateful-quotes-from-feminists/
You know, there’s a reason most companies have a PR department and that all questions from media are to be addressed by that department, not by your average employee. Also most have a marketing communications department that worries a lot about building and maintaining the brand.
I vacillate between laughing at how inept they are and being truly grateful that they are so inept. If they were a bit savvier, they could actually be dangerous.
@aceofsevens
I didn’t say it was good manipulation. It’s like what someone said about the MRM being a ‘cargo cult social justice movement’.
That first poster, the one with the red borer, just fails so hard:
– the “with its lies and fake statistics” bit in parenthesis for some reason;
– the unclear clipart image;
– the “take the red pill” bit that would be totally incomprehensible to anyone who is not an MRA;
– the “Men’s rights are human rights” line in very small print at the bottom of the poster like it’s an afterthought;
– the fact that it’s a .BMP file;
– and last but most ridiculous, that row of exclamation points. I mean really, that’s the kind of thing you do to mock overly excited people on the Internet.
It’s like a parody of a poster but they’re being totally serious about it.
Also this one? I’m pretty sure that’s not oppression going on there.
*red border*
Ooh, that’s a really good description in so many ways.
“We’re a real social justice movement, so we need… oppression! We need oppression. And slurs, those are important, let’s go pick out some slurs. Can we find any injustice? Well, crap, we might have to make some injustice up. Okay, moving along, media representations!”
“…And a clubhouse!”
I think that’s a dominatrix, but it looks more like a bad photocopy.
@Cliff Pervocracy
I think I first heard it on here, but I can’t remember who. It is a really good description though. 😀
inky sex oppresses men? Who knew?
Also, these guys need graphic design 101.
…And what is with the old fashioned 1930s print style anyways? Nothing says irrelevant to todays generation than old timey anachronistic black and white crap.
inky sex oppresses men?
Yeah, those damn squid just ooze misandry! 😛
Pillowinhell – It’s not their fault. The government has evilly refused to provide free graphic design services for them! You know, the ones all feminist organizations automatically get?
Or anyone who hasn’t seen, or doesn’t remember that scene in The Matrix.
There was a really funny troll in the early days of Manboobz who brought up femdom erotica when asked to provide examples of misandry. Because clearly no men are sexually aroused by the idea of being dominated by women.
Yeah, I had to think about it but then it made so much sense. “I’m not getting the attention I deserve. It’s unfair. I demand justice! Social justice!!!!!!!”
Their posters remind me of when my son was in kindergarten and wanted to start a club. The first thing he did was go to the computer, open up The Print Shop, and make business cards. Then he handed them out to his classmates at recess who wanted to be in the Rock Club, the purpose of which was to collect sparkly rocks on the playground. It was adorable when he did it. It’s not so adorable when grownups act like kindergarteners.
“Take the red pill” is also kind of insulting if you know what it means. It’s like screaming “Wake up, sheeple!”