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.
Joe, you want to link to this constant refrain around here? Of course not, because it doesn’t exist.
Shorter some guy: Dictionaries, how the fuck do they work?
@Ugh, I think it’s both. They can’t communicate to anyone outside of their little abusers’ lobby/fan club even the parts of their message that aren’t actually hateful — like raising awareness that men are also the victims of domestic violence. But yeah, as a general rule I think they fail both on the content of their message, AND on the way they communicate it.
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?
Haha alternate definitions, how do they work?
Hint: they’re still valid usages of the word.
Every single one! Except the ones that don’t. But other than those ones that don’t, every single one does!
Some asshat dude.
You do realize that you’re playing right into abusive thinking right? Lemme tell you something
When I was a little girl, I used to get beaten. A lot. But when I tried to tell people what was going on it was always “well, it just happened once” or “so and so cried after? I’m sure it won’t happen any more” and from those who beat me “when I was a child I was beaten bloody every day, sometimes we got broken bones”. So long as no bones were broken, it wasn’t abuse. So long as the bruises could be explained away by childhood mishaps, it wasn’t abuse. The fact that I flinched at any sudden movement was just me being a drama queen.
I’ve been hit. A lot. And I know from personal experience that an adult hitting a child is blindingly, headspinningly painful, and that’s before you get into the it left a bruise/ left them bloody territory.
Fuck you asshole. I don’t need meds. I also don’t need some pathetic excuse of a failed human being explaining to me what abuse is, or just how bad it should fucking get before someone decides, quite arbitrarily, that its “serious enough”.
I know what it is to be small and terrified as you look way way up into the face of someone you know is supposed to protect you, and they are the one of the people you fear most in all of creation.
I also know that once hitting of children starts, its almost never “just once”. I know that everyone would far rather look the other way than do anything about the abuse. It goes double for the courts and CAS. And the abusers themselves rarely ever admit, even to themselves, what’s going on. Not even when they are standing in front of a jury for the murder of their own child.
I was lucky. My family did stop, eventually. I figure my lifetime good luck was all cashedin at once the day my mother sat me down and swore I would never be hit again.
I’ve read too many stories where children weren’t so lucky. The one that haunts me most is that of a two year old little girl beaten black and blue from head to feet. Her family took pictures of her on the beach looking frightened and confused, because that’s how normal it all seemed to them. Everyone on that beach had to have seen her…looking like that. No one called for help. She died a few days later, massive trauma to the head. That could have been me.
you actually condemned it in the most meal-mouthed and half-hearted way so you could get back to whining about how mean we were being to a terrorist, but whatever
omigod you could not possibly be being a bigger baby about this.
You came here by claiming Thomas Ball was an activist for men’s rights. He actually is a terrorist and a child abuser. You are the one who is not being truthful or direct.
Also, the MRM isn’t direct becuase none of their activities are designed to advance men’s rights in any way, shape or form. They just spend their time trolling feminist blogs with tales of child abusers fighting the system that stops them from abusing children.
5:11PM-5:35PM — shortest Costco run EVER!
Just how “play” is, in totality, both a cathartic activity and a work of drama!
Seriously, pick up a 4th grade ELA textbook.
@Ugh – That’s not what that one fella said, he just took issue with your “spinning” of what Thomas Ball did to make it sound EVEN worse than it was.
Your spinning it was totally unecessary IMO, because what Ball did was plenty bad enough:
I read Thomas Ball’s own account of his actions and he said that he’d slapped his very young daughter in the face, making her lip bleed – because… she “kept licking his hand”.
What the fucking fuck!??? That’s all I needed to know about Thomas Ball. He hit his own kid. For basically – no reason. What a shit.
(That’s exactly what my psycho father was like. He hit my newborn bro – for crying. No, really)
So, I have ZERO sympathy with Thomas Ball, and I do think it’s total BS that large parts of the MRM gloss over him hitting his kid. When you know he hit his kid – BY HIS OWN ADMISSION – it makes perfect sense that he not be permitted to be alone with that kid.
So, I do NOT see him as an MRM hero at all, and I’ve said so over on the Spearhead.
As someone else said, there are plenty of good dads who’ve had shitty deals in family court that would make much better “poster boys”.
Also, I actually AGREE with you Ugh that the “Women are half the problem” slogan is crap. It’s imprecise in the statement of the problem, it can be taken to imply “victim blaming” and it fails to indicate a solution.
That’s why I stick to quoting the ACTUAL recorded % of DV victims who are men and the disparity between that and funding for men’s shelters – precise statement of problem + obvious implied solution.
Incidentally, it’s rarely pointed out that the murder of men by their wives / gfs has dropped as women’s shelters have become more widely available (there are different speculations as to why, but either way, that’s a win-win, right?). Whether or not a similar vice-versa phenomenon would occur once men’s shelters meet the % of men DV victims, I don’t know, but wouldn’t it be good if it did??
So, just as I am able to criticize Tom Martin as being totally full of shit e.g. with his stance on statutory rape of child prostitutes, (and indeed with his stance on consenting, adult sex workers – see that thread where I loudly took him to task)… I am also able to say that yes, parts of the MRM could do a lot better in helping men & boys who are victims of DV.
As to the whole “refusal to hand in a guilty verdict” thing (I don’t know who said that) – I have no problem condemning that as dangerous bullshit too. Certainly, if you’re sat on a jury and you sincerely assess there’s not the evidence to convict, you must aquit. But to decide the verdict before you’ve even heard the evidence?? Fuck that. No. That’s wrong.
The only reason I could see to apply that would be if you had grounds to doubt the legitimacy of the entire system, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish, and would apply to all cases not just rape.
@Cloudiah
I mean, can that really be called part of their message? They have never done anything remotely like launching DV awareness campaigns.
Occasionally they like to appropriate it from actual groups because it sounds legit, but let’s be honest, it’s kind of like the KKK going on about “state’s rights.”
Funny, feminism as a movement seems quite a bit more successful than your woman-hating circlejerk.
The MRA doesn’t really give a blue fuck about the male victims of DV except to use them as a beatstick against feminism, Joe. Go take up with them.
About DV – I was always taught (in my MRM family) that women are ALWAYS the cause and carry full blame for all DV.
Either the woman starts the violence, or by being “female” she deliberately provokes the male so much, that even though he’s doing everything he can to avoid violence, eventually he cannot resist any longer. Thus, women are not half the problem, they’re the whole problem. I’m not sure where this “half” idea comes from – no MRA I’ve ever known would agree with that.
(Again, for clarity – I am NOT agreeing with the MRM viewpoint – just commenting since this was ingrained in me from birth.)
Pear force one.
Oh God! Thank you for that!!
You guys are totally awesome.
Actually, what he said was that Thomas Ball was an example of a men’s rights “activist.” That’s why we call it “the abuser’s lobby.”
So why are you upset that people are tearing the posters down?
Has it ever occurred to you that, in actual human rights movements, the vast majority of people DISAGREE with child abuse?
And a lot of shelter networks have opened branches for men. Virtually every major city has at least one sexual assault center open to men, almost all of them feminist-run. I’ve worked for one.
However, this is totally irrelevant to the discussion because the MRM is not and has not ever been involved in setting up shelters for men or boys. While feminists are bulding men’s and gender neutral support systems, they’re too busy arguing about how many times child abusers hit their kids.
Paul Elam.
Go do so over on A Voice for Men. See the rape apologia for yourself.
“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.) ”
It seems lardarse is too lazy to click the link to STATSCAN that were left in the comments of the Monash articles or search for the very similar CDC analysis of IPV.
So For any of his readers that can manage to point and grunt here it is:
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/050714/dq050714a-eng.htm
“An estimated 7% of women and 6% of men in a current or previous spousal relationship encountered spousal violence during the five years up to and including 2004, according to a comprehensive new report on family violence.”
Or on sexual violence look at this from the US Dept. of Justice’s own Bureau of Statistics:
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?iid=2113&ty=pbdetail
95% of adult staff sexually abusive juveniles in custody are women. Women do not make up 95% of juvenile correction staff. Therefore, in this case it seems that women may be more prone to perpetrating sexual abuse than most people are even comfortable considering.
The ONLY thing wrong with making the claim that “women are half the problem” is that it may be an understatement.
So, the feminist controlled DV/IPV campaigns that paint only men as abusers and only women as victims are not only sickening they are in need of a voice to challenge their erroneous and bigoted claims.
Loudly challenged. Before more of their fault ideology is enacted into law. Or any more tax dollars are given to a bunch of otherwise unemployable old shrews.
Understatement of the year.
@Ugh – you asked for quotes. Here you go:
Rutee said – “Awareness of nonexistent problems you’ve invented out of wholecloth is not a step in fixing oppression.”
And Ugh said – “Feminism fails because it’s a real movement with real people debating real issues!
The MRM is so much more focused, because the only two points that matter are:
1. Women suck.
2. Abusers should not face consequences.
Everything else is just details.
Vs. one of the issues raised by the poster campaign in Vancouver was: DV against men, and violence against men in general.
Problems that definitely DO EXIST and that the MRM IS helping raise awareness of (albeit sometimes cack handedly, see above).
@Sharculese – why, oh why do you fear reading many words?
Shortest trip to Costco evah!
All kidding aside:
If you aren’t defending Ball beating his child and you don’t think he should’ve retained custody, why did you bring him up when talking about father’s rights.
Oh, and I love how quickly you wanted to back away from the first definition you posted as it stated quite plainly that beat means : 1. to strike violently or forcefully and repeatedly.
So is this going to be your schtick? Willfully obtuse passive aggression with a side of whine?
“[T]here are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.” – Paul Elam
Hey, how about putting this on a poster?
Has Joe produced a citation that verifies his assertion that the manboobz regulars constantly claim that women don’t commit domestic violence against men?
@Ugh, I’m not really sure there’s a disagreement here, or if there is it isn’t clear to me what it is…
Oh, good. Here’s Joe. He’s more entertaining than the other guy. Dim as a guttering candle, but entertaining.