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.
I think the point is, gents, the posters weren’t necessarily illegal, just linking to some vile and entirely unethical sites. The sort of thing your average citizen might take offense to, like these folks did.
Steele, did you mean “throw the bedrock out with the bath water ?”
“at AVfM and other spaces. In those places, certainly, feminist stupidity is not welcome.” Here, MRM stupidity is cannon fodder- can’t take the heat over at AVfM I take it, or any form of dissent. In fairness, feminism does have things like reason and overwhelming data and common sense on its side- really quite an unfair weight advantage.
Throw the bedrock out the window? I’m laughaging.
Things Steelebutt could have meant:
Throw the baby out with the bathwater
Throw the ballast overboard
Throw caution to the wind
Steele, you truly owe the English language an apology and maybe a footrub for all the abuse you heap on it.
So… I guess when people don’t behave precisely as IR would expect, that makes them wrong and/or cowardly. Get off your high horse, dipshit.
What, where was he screaming? Because I’m not seeing it.
Steele, Jules Winnfield has a few words for you.
Why was the bedrock indoors in the first place?
*inserts obligatory “geologists make the bed rock” joke*
BASTA: How much *more* MRA than NCFM would they have to be for you to acknowledge that they were in fact MRAs?
Cite the action they took. Show the people who say they were persuaded, by members of NCFM. That one group did something antoher group agrees with does not mean the two are related.
Show your work.
BASTA: You keep telling us how ignorant of US Gender politics, racial politics, etc. you are.
Yet you persist in telling us how the gender politics are fucked up, because they don’t properly adress male issues.
So which is it? Do you know about US gender politics?
Are you ignorant of them?
You can’t be both.
But for some reason you expect us to accept that you are both, and treat you as an expert in the former, while forgiving your glaring failures because of the latter; while the two claims are completely incompatible.
Which means we are all idiots, or you are.
Do you think that coming up to property which JtO had prior consent to post on and destroying his property was an acceptable course of action? It is worth mentioning that many ideologies that are mainstream in certain areas are considered sacrilegious in others. 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. Certain feminists of the 60s and 70s had some very vile and unethical views, just as some MRAs do today.
I never claimed anyone was cowardly, but it is not unexpected for a mob of angry, misguided people to scramble over to private property and censor things which offend them. I am curious as to how calling someone a “dipshit” and misrepresenting what they say (against site policy) somehow brings us closer a more just and equal society, though. It strikes me that you are using social justice movements more as a means to dump on others and feel justified in doing so.
Look IR/FF, you fucking idiot, postering is ephemeral BY DESIGN. Getting all upset about it makes you look like, well, an idiot. There was no “mob” you fucking idiot. There were maybe 6 people tops. JtP IS a dipshit, so there’s no misrepresenting; he really is a dipshit. In fact, YOU are a dipshit. The MRM is simply not a social justice movement as presently constituted. So to recap, you are an idiot and you’re on the wrong side of history. Congratulations?
Individuals tearing down posters isn’t censorship no matter who the posters belong to, or what ideas they express. Now if there was a government agency that paid people to go around tearing down only those posters that expressed a very specific viewpoint, and leaving others up, maybe you could call that censorship*. But that’s not what happened in this case.
* With certain exceptions in which yes, it’s censorship, but it’s also justified. If the government wants to pay people to tear down neo-Nazi posters on the grounds that they violate hate speech laws then they can go ahead and do that without getting my civil liberties dander up.
Cloudiah, how does all of this negativity and aggression make your social justice movement seem more palatable?
So how is the video game industry responding to Preggo Puchit? Any takers?
You can, actually. They did it on Mythbusters.
> 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.
> BASTA: You keep telling us how ignorant of US Gender politics
I have not once told you that I am ignorant of US *gender* politics.
Funny you capitalized “gender”. Too bad it is plausibly a typo.
I felt much that way when I was in LA. The cops there have such a bad reputation and the friends I was staying with are PoC. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if we’d been pulled over for no reason other than that. Hell, I was nervous of what would happen if an LA cop spoke to me, and I’m a white Australian woman, I have considerable privilege in the “not being automatically deemed a criminal or a threat” field.
You know, I’m normally wary but not exactly scared of cops (because I have both race and class privilege), but in LA? Yeah, I was very much thinking that making sure I did not catch their attention in even the most legal and benign way was a good plan.
Fersure. I can’t imagine going up to an LA cop and asking directions the way I have in London (pretty cool when a bobby radios in to his station to find out where the nearest laundrette is for you!) or here in Australia. Not that our police have an exactly clean record either, mind you.
Oh, belated, but I LOLed at your extra definitions of ‘prior activism’ – especially since I used to have a cat called Abbey!
Now I just want to find a picture of a prior or abbott jumping up and down with a placard or something. 😛
Well, that’s me for the evening. Time for telly and knitting. Niters, all!
It’s kind of a silly point, but since so much ado is being made of it, it doesn’t seem like he actually did have permission. He apparently got permission to post his posters from the construction company that put up the hoarding, which is all well and good, but they didn’t actually own the property. And unless their contract for some reason lets them put whatever they’d like on the hoarding (and in that case, I suspect they’d be selling it as ad space), it’s the people who own the place whose permission he’d need, not the construction company.
Pasta, you said your familiarity with gender politics is limited to conversations with feminists. And if this conversation is any indicator, you really didn’t get a whole lot out of those either. Actually, that you would expect someone to read that and not determine that you are ignorant on the subject of gender politics is kind of embarrassing.