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.
“We suspect of others what we know to be true of ourselves.”
–quote not originally about MRAs and false-accusation-paranoia, but it fits so well, doesn’t it?
Haha wow a group of people looking and complaining about posters=gang of boxcutter wielding people? XDXDD
Is this guy under the impression that other posters are left up eternally and occasionally lovingly fed and watered by passersby, or…? Maybe Vancouver’s a really really clean polite city or something but surely you could disabuse yourself of that notion by, perhaps, being in an urban area with open eyes for more than about half an hour.
Wait, so some people laughing at you is this terrible hate crime? No wonder they get in such a tizzy about mbz.
Also Canadian accents are fantastic. Closest I could see to boxcutters was, like, maybe one of the guys around was called Stanley or something?
Anyway, it’s surprising to see a hoarding like that (looks like a building under construction) with any literature on it that isn’t a debate on the merits of Mr. Bill Posters’ case. I always assumed that was for some kind of safety reason, but apparently posters are fine or at least commonly put up up on them up Vancouver-way?
“Men are smarter than women, biologically… If any of you guys come to your senses, become reasonable…”
Where did this dude get his ideas about what effective advertising might entail, anyway? Couldn’t he at least play up the custody thing or the “dating marketplace” thing or something that people who are only slightly misogynistic rather than flat-out raving sexists might buy pretty easily and relate to?
And who the hell puts apostrophes in lolcat speech to represent shortening? Just type fonnetiklli.
I read an article today in one of our newspapers by representatives from the Environmental Party. They argue that the Stockholm City Council ought to arrange a men’s shelter for male victims of DV. They claim that one out of six DV victims is male. If you merely look at DV victims who need hospital treatment for their injuries the number is lower still – BUT these men still EXIST. Often they have nowhere to turn, so there should be a men’s shelter.
So this is campaigned for not by MRA:s, but by a mainstream political party, a party that has an explicit feminist ideology.
Just saying.
@Dvärghundspossen
And I bet they managed without writing articles that threaten violence against women as a whole or use derogatory terms for sex workers over 50 times! Any advertising material was probably prettier too…
Hah, the phrase “collective tantrum” is perfect.
She really likes the sound of her own voice. It’s brutal. There’s no way I could watch an entire one of her videos.
I remember once on YouTube I saw a video of a young man talking to the camera about the MRM – wearing a ski or hockey mask!!! It was absolutely bizarre – and scary. How could anyone possibly think that’s okay?
… and yet this is the same group of people who feels that women’s reports of sexual assault are dramatically overblown.
The irony, it burns.
To be fair, cat farts are pretty bad. However, is JtO new to cities? What does he think happens to posters? Hell, for the longest time in Seattle, there was a poster ban.
Lowquacks, yeah, I read the entire article and found not a single threat or “whore”. Imagine!
I used to moonlight as a poster hanger for a music collective in Vancouver, years ago. Other people tearing down your posters is pretty much par for the course. I mean, sometimes the posters I’d spent half an evening hanging were mostly gone by the next morning, and it’s not like I was hanging anything that people find offensive.
Plus, JtO was putting up his little nuggets of wisdom in probably the leftiest area of the city. He must not actually go there much if he finds the residents’ reaction surprising.
@hellkell – The city of Vancouver even has people who are paid to go around and tear down posters, though usually only on public property. There are also a lot of rules about where and how you can hang them on public property, though it doesn’t sound like JtO was breaking any of those.
Clearly spoken by someone who has not experienced my owner’s flatulence. That cat is rotten on the inside. Her favorite move is the “fart and run” near my face when I’m laying in bed.
Bingo. Projection, they haz it.
Feminists = Neighbourhood Bully
Jezebel has posted an update on this story, in the form of a letter written by the woman who wanted to have a debate on this topic. The original article mentioned that she cancelled the event due to “threats” but did not specify who was making the threats. Her letter makes it clear that it was the MRAs who were threatening her. She’s had to delete her Facebook account because her employment is at risk now that they know her personal information.
Stay classy, MRAs.
Obviously, tearing down posters is worse harassment than threats and attempts to get someone fired. Whodathunk it. Offer the MRAs a space to speak and they promptly piss all over it.
Best. Activists. Ever.
blitzgal: Just when you think MRAs can’t get any worse.. Plus, more evidence that they just don’t give a shit about men at all, when they’re sabotaging opportunities to get their viewpoint out there.
So much for spreading the word about the “plight of men”.
This brings to mind the post John “theother” wrote about western women having the social development of a 4 year old. “Excepting a tiny minority, it appears that Western women, through a failure of socialization, are trapped at the socialized developmental level of a 4 year old child, or a chimpanzee.” http://www.avoiceformen.com/women/socialized-psychopathy-modeling-female-misbehaviour/
I don’t know why the guy even bothers denying he hates women, with the exception of the ones who serve his purposes. I really hate watching this woman blabbing because she just goes on and on and on and on but I did get through it and all I can see is that, as usual, they get all crazy and hysterical when anyone disagrees with their views which is all that’s going on here.
On the other hand, the more they talk, the clearer it becomes that they are, indeed, a hate group. Paul Elam and JtO both are nuts.
Lowquacks, that’s specifically a western Canadian accent. It changes significantly as one moves east across the country. I guarantee that aworldanonymous’ accent sounds very different from mine.
Wait…. is JohntheOther actually from Vancouver? If so, I kind of want to move now.
Jesus tapdancing christ, thanks for the update, Blitzgal.