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, no of course I don’t need names and addresses. Just an example of some MRA activism that actually helps men in some real way.
For example, I have a friend who feels strongly about abortion rights, and so she organizes demonstrations and regularly volunteers as an escort at a clinic so that patients can get into the clinic without being harassed by the anti-abortion assholes who go to the clinic every day to harass people. So that is what she is doing.
When I was in college, I was part of the divestment movement, trying to pressure the school to divest from companies tied to south africa, as a way of putting pressure on the Apartheid govt there. We organized talks, protests, sit-ins, shanty-towns, wrote letter to the editors, arranged speak-ins, got signatures on petitions to give to the administration.
So what are you guys doing? I don’t need operational details, just some things you are doing.
> Hey David, you’re a blogger, and this is crazy, but securing
> abortion rights in the States: make that happen, maybe?
Some goals are harder to achieve than others, and in fact most establishments still have some original goals unachieved the day they are toppled (e.g. “conquer and enslave Europe, then the world”, or “complete the legal tunnel between leniency for maternal infanticide and legalizing on-demand abortion in more advanced stages of pregnancy”), but they are establishments none the less.
Oh, I should mention another friend of mine whose big issue is rape. I’m not sure she would consider herself an activist, exactly but she regularly volunteers with a rape crisis center; sometimes she is on call to go out to meet with rape victims (which may mean staying with them for 8 hours at the hospital as they are examined/treated by doctors there, and talk to police), sometimes she coordinates the other volunteers who do this. She works with female rape victims; but there are other volunteers always on call to work with male victims as well.
> So what are you guys doing? I don’t need operational details, just
> some things you are doing.
You are lying right now. Not directly, oh no, you are too silk gloved for that. You are lying by implication. Everyone knows that you are a scrutinous reader of the AVfM website, and in this context your request for examples of us actually helping men implies that such examples cannot be found zero-clicks from the AVfM front page. In fact they are right there under your nose. You just choose not to acknowledge them.
Yeah, David, you can find fine examples of real men’s rights activism from the very front page of AVfM! Why, right under the “activism” tab, it pulls up Thomas Ball’s manifesto, which talks about all sorts of
violenceactivism. Right below that, you’ll see a s00p3r srs petition to rename the city of Vancouver as Mancouver.Really, I don’t know why you bring this question up at all, when all this great info is just staring you in the face!
Pffft you’ve just called David a scrutinous reader (meaning carefull, inquiring, or strict) of MRM pages and now you’re claiming he’s managed to miss all that wonderful stuff they’re doing to help men?
Riiiiight.
I suppose he uses his dastardly CIA-learned hacking skills to get into the pages and wipe out all that stuff, too. Because oddly enough, nobody outside the MRM sees it either.
> but there are other volunteers always on call to
> work with male victims as well.
So, rape crisis centers now accept calls from men. Not “accept men”, mind you, all they’ll do is forward the case to one of their volunteers who work with male rape victims. That’s a small change, but who do you think made it happen? Hint: it was not Catherine Commins.
@David Futrelle:
One more thing:
> Oh, I should mention another friend of mine whose big issue is rape.
> I’m not sure she would consider herself an activist, exactly but she
> regularly volunteers with a rape crisis center;
If she does not consider herself an activist based on that alone, she is almost certainly right. Not all social work is activism, and this is an example of one that is not. It is however institutionally possible thanks to prior activism, and possibly she was even *exposed* to the idea of doing such work thanks to prior activism which got the idea into circulation. The MRM is currently at this “prior activism” stage.
Yes, here’s a picture of David.
Sadly as a blogger David’s budget only covers gloves of the cheap wooly variety.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cJTEWeVNOLw/TpsxmKfNuuI/AAAAAAAAACw/WkXsN6piu-g/s1600/DSC01013.JPG
No, no, David will do the suave-but-dangerous Elizabethan look a la the Earl of Southampton, complete with kitty:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DF6KUii0nj4/TJ3NMl3mJBI/AAAAAAAAAHc/_v1AtZbic7Y/s1600/HenryWriothesley.jpg
Hmm, let’s see. The options are a) people who work at the rape crisis centre or b) a whiny bunch of arseholes who do nothing to reduce incidences of sexual assault and rape, but instead actively encourage it by putting forth dual notions that every sexual assault/rape is deserved and simultaneously, there is no such thing as sexual assault/rape, while laughing at victims of sexual assault/rape and only acknowledging that these things affect men when they want another excuse to be evil towards female victims…
I’m going to go with a).
Also, given that you say
, the answer has to be a).
“Prior activism” sounds like something going on in a monastery.
As opposed to abbey activism, which is either activism involving nuns or what happens when your Abyssinian cat decides to remove every single item from one of your drawers just for the hell of it.
“Prior activism” means “well we haven’t done anything yet and we’re not planning to so all we’re really doing is being shitheels on the internet and excusing abusers and rapists but since we’re calling ourselves a civil rights movement I guess that totally means we’ll maybe do something good once, one day, possibly! Yeah, who are you calling non-activists?”
Or to put it another way, people with genuine complaints of oppression take the path of oppression -> activism -> civil rights movement, whereas the MRM think that saying they’re a civil rights movement means that they totally must be doing activism, which means that they totally must be oppressed.
I fucking knew they lived in opposite world.
Basta. Really? You guys are the weirdest activists I’ve ever run across. Most activists, when you ask them what they do, will actually tell you what they do.
But you can’t say what you guys actually do to help men because somehow I will do something nefarious with that answer? Yet despite your need for operational secrecy I can still find out what you guys are doing by reading AVFM?
As far as I can tell, the only activism that AVFM does is 1) promote and raise money for itself and 2) glom onto and sometimes claim credit for the things SAVE does and 3) organize giant demonstrations in Washington DC to protest the Titanic, or something. Oh, wait, that last one didn’t happen.
Could you remind me again what activism AVFM does besides these things?
Paul Elam watches Air Force One for mens’ rights?
@David Futrelle
“For example, I have a friend who feels strongly about abortion rights, and so she organizes demonstrations and regularly volunteers as an escort at a clinic so that patients can get into the clinic without being harassed by the anti-abortion assholes who go to the clinic every day to harass people.”
Helping women so they won’t feel bad about premeditated murder. You got your priorities backwards, mate. Why not escort Charles Manson about so he doesn’t feel bad?
Getting answers to this, and to “who/where are these moderate MRAs,” is like pulling teeth.
Princess NWOslave has no sense of perspective.
And this is coming from someone who had a full-on anxiety attack because there were gherkins on my bacon cheeseburger.
Owly, Defender of the Unborn!
Actually no, this would be better for Owly.
…I’ll stop spamming videos nao. 😛
> Could you remind me again what activism AVFM does besides these things?
I am talking about MRM in general, you narrow it to AVfM. Shifting goalposts much?
As far as AVfM is concerned they are doing the activism that keeps you busy running this blog. That one I trust you won’t deny. And while you are running this blog, you are not doing more harmful things. That is a net plus for men.
As for general MRM activism – attn TheNatFantastic – it was MRAs, so self-identified or not, who a few years back started putting some real pressure on institutions like rape crisis centers to recognize male victims. The actual institutions targetted were DV shelters, but other institutions and organizations based on similar “women good, men bad and never victims” paradigm apparently took notice too.
Ah, I see the game is going to be “Appropriate other people’s achievements as our own”.
@BASTA!
Dude, you were talking about AVFM on this same page, do you think we can’t scroll up?