So I’ve been mostly avoiding writing about the whole Men’s Rights postering controversy in Vancouver, because it’s such a tempest in a teapot. The tl;dr: Some posters got torn down, and some of the people tearing them down yelled at the blabby MRA videoblogger and A Voice for Men second fiddle known as JohnTheOther.
MRAs: Given that virtually none of you have any experience as actual real world activists, you may not be aware of this, but POSTERS GET TORN DOWN. It’s annoying, and I don’t support it myself, but it happens all the time. Sometimes, you may actually run across people tearing down your posters, at which point there is usually some sort of awkward confrontation that may include yelling.
You know what you do when this happens? You put your posters up again. You know what you don’t do? Compare the experience to rape. Because, on the list of the grand injustices of the world, having posters torn down is pretty far down the list, somewhere around “stubbing your toe” and “kitten farts on you.”
That said, here are a few new “developments” in this ongoing epic.
1) Jezebel has posted a piece about the controversy. The most interesting thing about it is the following quote from, you guessed it, JohnTheOther, who apparently had this to say to someone from a local “community-driven news” website. The topic? False accusations of rape.
Maybe it’s a mistaken accusation, she doesn’t remember who she had sex with because she was drunk at the party or whatever. Some make accusations that have nothing to do with being raped; they’re angry, or they got stood up, they wanted to have sex with a guy but he said no. The fact that our society doesn’t have a balance for this is a major problem. I’m not suggesting every woman you meet is a loose cannon, but every woman you meet has the potential to be one, because for those few who are nutty, there’s no disincentive for them to go, oh, I was late for work. I know, I’ll just say I got raped.
Now, if the Men’s Rights movement were an actual civil rights movement trying to better the lives of men, this quote would be a public relations disaster. What real civil rights movement would want to have itself associated with someone who seems to think that women make up rape accusations willy nilly, when a date stands them up or when they need an excuse for being late to work?
Of course, the Men’s Rights “movement” isn’t an actual civil rights movement at all; it’s more like a collective tantrum. While MRAs are eager to “spread the word,” the more spreading they do, the more damage they do to themselves. No one is better at making MRAs look bad than MRAs themselves, which is why on this blog I spend so much of the time letting these (mostly) dudes make themselves look ridiculous with their own words. So, JtO, thanks?
2) And speaking of Mr. TheOther, we can now see video footage of the supposed dramatic confrontation that JohnTheOther had with what his AVFM boss Paul Elam called “a gang of 20-30 assholes on the street, some wielding box cutters.”
GirlWritesWhat, one of the Men’s Rights movement’s few non-dudes, has put up selections of video footage from Mr. TheOther in her video below.
As you’ll see – unless for some reason GWW has decided not to post the most incriminating parts of the video — there was no gang; it was a small group of people. No one was “wielding box cutters” in a threatening manner. The whole thing took place in broad daylight on a busy street.
Some posters were taken down. There were some raised voices. That’s it. That’s the sort of shit activists deal with every fucking day of their life.
Here’s the video:
Am I missing something here? This non-event is the alleged confrontation that AVFM has been hyperventilating about all this time? This is the evil anti-MRA harassment that Elam says “makes getting bestially raped by Richard Dawkins sound kinda funny.”
Leave it to Mr. Elam to add a rape-joke cherry to this bullshit sundae. Once again, MRAs are their own worst enemies.
BASTA: I have not once told you that I am ignorant of US *gender* politics.
Really? Let’s take a look at the record.
Sorry, but only Summers and Dawkins ring a gender controversy bell. Especially “The cop in Toronto” is an enigma to me. I live in a non-anglophone country on the old continent. Not all local news from your end of the world get translated and re-broadcast here, and hardly ever the debates that follow
And
Sadly I happen to live in one of the most racially uniform European countries, and I humbly admit to knowing as much about US internal race/minorities politics as Hollywood teaches me.
So the actual details of day to day gender issues in the US, the actual working environment you say you know jack-shit about. If it’s not international news, you don’t see it. In some cases (the cop from Toronto who catalysed the Slutwalks) you don’t even known the international ones.
FF/IR/Preggo-Punchout: Do you think that coming up to property which JtO had prior consent to post on
Citation needed.
. I’m sure feminist posters put up by individuals and small groups were torn down in earlier times, and I’m sure you would consider that censorship unjustified.
Assumes facts not in evidence. I wouldn’t call it censorship, and “unjustified” is a value term which doesn’t apply.
I’d say it’s what happens when people are engaging in passive public politics.
BASTA:
> So you agree that the NCFM was endorsing taking
> domestic violence protections away from gay men?
I agree that NCFM might be for good reasons allergic to the idea of granting special protection from violence to variously identified groups.
In plain english, that’s a yes. Thanks for clearing it up.
BASTA : Which is it? English is my late-learned second language
Or English is my fucking 4th language learned later in life
BASTA . Yes, in Mike Tyson’s case the punishment was actually dealt, and we seem to have this philosophy that when you serve your term, you are clear and deserve a new start as much as anyone else. Or do we not? Is the judge only kidding when (s)he says “6 years incarceration”, and what (s)he really means is “6 years incarceration and lifetime of ostracism”?
And you are complaining that Sharon Osbourne wasn’t fired, and never hired by anyone else. So you seem to think a man committing rape is less worthy of ostracism than a woman who makes a statement in bad taste.
Got it.
Re Cops: I am fine with cops in LA, but I lived there for 30 years. It’s cops in NY who give me the low-grade nervous. Yeah, I’m white, but “stop and frisk” is fucking evil.
I love how last night BASTA agreed that there were currently insufficent domestic violence protections for gay men, and agreed that the VAWA reauthorization would have extended protections to them that they didn’t have before, then BASTA went and slept off the logic and woke up with a frech batch of cognitive dissonance.
IR/PreggoPunchout, Are you under the impression this blog is a social justice movement? If so, you’re an even bigger dipshit than I thought previously. This is a place where people come to mock misogynists like you. Dipshit.
I never said that a blog was a “social justice movement”. However, the blog does side with feminist claims and forward feminist ideology, so it would be safe to say that the author is a feminist, and a member of the self-proclaimed social justice movement. You are also a feminist, and hence your statements and the other feminist’s indifference towards them can both be fairly associated with feminism.
But you don’t mean ‘can be associated with feminism’. What you mean is since the feminists that post here behave in this manner, all or most feminists must’. Which is absurd, of course, and pretty much a dictionary example of a bigoted statement. Dude, there are a lot of feminists out there, front lines and intellectuals and regular folks. And probably a large portion of them don’t find mocking people funny (no accounting for taste). Of those who find it funny, there are probably a fairly large portion who wouldn’t engage in this sort of mockery because they think you might actually listen to reason if reason was just presented nicely. Personally, I’ve found saying things nicely only gets them ignored nicely. And, of course (and this is a large portion) there are people who recognize the MRM comes from a place beyond reason and they don’t see the point in engaging. Fair enough, but what fun we are all having here! Personally, I think they are missing out, but my fun can be your chore.
Oh, and unlike the MRA, feminism doesn’t exist on the internet alone. Except for that one time you went to the physical public realm with your ideas and the public was repulsed, of course.
This poster made me lol http://i.imgur.com/Zys2B.jpg