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 want a go!
http://i1245.photobucket.com/albums/gg595/capnben1/1592ac97.gif
Going back to the original post (what a concept!):
Here is another way NOT to organize effectively, and it reveals the same basic error that the posters do. Paul and his ilk are preaching to the choir, and only preaching to the choir. Given the chance to bring his message to the larger community, Elam makes a sarcastic joke that he knows will play well with the AVfM audience. But based on the journalist’s entirely accurate account of the exchange, any person not in on the joke will conclude only that Elam is either an idiot or an asshole.
They have NO idea how to communicate a coherent message to anyone but themselves.
@Joe
“Women are half the problem in domestic violence” is not the same thing as saying “men are victims too.”
See the difference? One expresses what the MRM is actually about, removing the blame and consequences for men who abuse women, and one is what they say they’re about whenever you challenge them on it.
See the difference between rape apologia and actual pro-male-survivor activism?
Hey Joe, you fuck off. Your straw arguments don’t stick — no one here ever claimed men never suffer from domestic abuse.
Hey Anathema, how did you get to the OED? Do you subscribe? I actually visited there and it seemed a subscription was needed.
Anyway, you can see that they also emphasize the repeated nature of a beating, so thank you.
Um, if you have any more ideas about posters for MRAs, I do suggest you forward them to avfm. I am not a member, and am still not sure how I feel about Paul Elam, so I am really not the person to give them to, but I really do agree with your ideas.
Got to go, or else the freebies at Costco are going to start drying up.
@Joe
Also, you were super upset at me the other day when I say that MRAs were rape apologists.
Well, right here in this thread, there is a dude arguing that it was unjust for a child abuser to lose custody of his kids. Here’s your chance to prove you’re not all about the abuser apologia, why not say something critical of him?
Bodsworth, that may be the best (and by that I mean the worst, which is the best) of all the really bad (by which I mean so bad they’re good) posters posted here today.
My name is cloudiah, and I approved this incoherent message.
Pick up a 4th grade English textbook while you’re out! Maybe it will succeed where I failed an actually teach you to read a dictionary.
Really, an OED subscription won’t get you very far if you can’t even understand the format of what you’re reading.
Bodsworth, that may be the best (and by that I mean the worst, which is the best) of all the really bad (by which I mean so bad they’re good) posters posted here today.
Seconded! I literally laughed out loud at the bodged placement of the url. 😛
@cloudiah
I mean, “the choir” is rapists, abusers, and those who make up excuses for them. I think it’s not so much that they’re unable to communicate their message to other people, as that their message when articulated is wildly unpopular amongst people who are not abusers or abuser apologists.
Thanks!
Citation needed. If it’s a constant refrain, I’ll bet it wouldn’t be challenging to find ONE example of it, eh?
@Joe
At least one of them by the MRA’s chosen hero Thomas Ball.
Those pear/pair lines might actually be clever if they were satirizing Dude Culture.
As it is, major fail.
This is pretty much my reaction to most MRA bullshit, but the image is particularly relevant because of today’s post
http://cache.ohinternet.com/images/d/d7/LOL_WUT_PEAR.jpg
Caught up with the thread now. Poor attempt to move the goalposts, some guy. You’ve got to be less blatant about it.
Also: http://9gag.com/gag/101332
@ Some Guy:
I get OED through my college.
But as Ugh said, being able to access a dictionary isn’t particularly useful if you don’t know how to use it. A lot of words have multiple definitions. These definitions are all separate. You can’t add them all together and somehow achieve the one, true definition of a word.
Mind you, I ‘m not all that fond of dictionary arguments in the first place. Just like everything else. dictionaries are imperfect. Typically, I think the content of what someone says is more important than the words they use, as long as most people can understand what they’re saying.
We all know what was meant by “beat” in this case. Arguing about how it doesn’t really qualify as beating because some definitions of beat require repetition just avoids the real issue — that Ball hit his daughter so hard he made her bleed.
I was trying to understand the Air Force One thing, if it was an injoke or what, so I googled and found this. THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY, everyone!
http://www.avoiceformen.com/a-voice-for-men/herald-sun-interviews-paul-elam/
It’s quite funny. Paul Elam believes the question “Why did you set up this website?” was a “myopic and transparent attempt at a setup.” So he got off on the wrong foot with the journalist.
Also, there is this weird thing going on in the article and the comments where Paul Elam referred to “women who support this website financially,” the journalist asked him how many women were paid supporters of the site, and Paul and the commenters all took that as an insinuation that women had to BE paid to support the site and refuted it righteously.
@AlexB
Really, as Joe has shown, any attempt to rephrase or argue against MRA arguments is automatically “strawmanning.” So, really, media coverage in any form would be a setup.
Hahahhaha, oh my god, this is amazing. Some guy has no idea how dictionaries work. “Well, the definition for ‘beat’ references ‘flog,’ and ‘flog’ references ‘beat,’ so we end up in an infinite regression! HOW WILL WE EVER FIGURE OUT WHAT THESE WORDS MEAN?”
oh cool joe is back with another huge block of unconnected text. apparently organizing your thoughts coherently is RACIST
I notice he hasn’t disputed the definition of ‘terrorist’ in relation to Ball.
The truth is (or what his claim that I don’t recall was refuted by his ex) that he slapped his baby.
I have already condemned this in the strongest way, but the feminists here have absolutely misrepresented what I have to say and say that I have defended that action, or said he should not have lost custody.
The truth is that one slapping is not what most people consider “beating, bashing, pummeling” and that by being truthful and direct with one another is the best way for people to dialogue and understand and arrive at consensus and change things.
The truth is that in every single definition posted, “repeat” is emphasized until you get down further to find one or two alternate definitions.
The truth is that the totality of all of those definitions come to emphasize the repeated nature of the hits in a beating, as I said, as you have folks have misrepresented.
Who misrepresents things this way?
Fox News? Republicans? Feminists? David Futrelle?
Gotta go, since its totes fashionable to use silly contractions and zs, for realz.
Later haters.
Sorry, guys, I don’t have time to represent my website and writings. I’m busy watching Pear Force One.