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.
Off-topic kitty!
Also, I used to like the name Ruby. WHY MUST YOU RUIN A GOOD NAME WITH YOUR BIGOTED STUPIDS?! Just… just be Roz, ok? I disliked a Roz once.
OT: Ferocious baby bulldog.
So apparently some kitties are snakes. Who knew?
Has anyone considered the possibility that the posters are being torn down by violent librarians?
Great post, fembot. I can echo some of it. I’ve thought of myself as feminist as long as I can remember (I’m pushing fifty), but also without having read any of the landmark works – actually I don’t think I’ve read any feminist literature at all. I’d never heard of the MRM until I started reading manboobz, which I think I found indirectly, via Hoydens About Town or Captain Awkward or something of the sort. The screaming, incoherent hostility of the MRAs doesn’t really surprise me, except in that they actually put it out there, because it fits what I’ve felt is the misogynist view of women for a long time: whatever you do is wrong, every choice you make, everything you believe, everything about you physically is wrong, you are not really a human being at all. I haven’t even had to deal with this in my personal life, since I’ve never known any men like this; it’s like, I dunno, air pollution or something.
Anyway, came for the mockery, stayed for the kitties and derails and more mockery and info about stuff I’d never heard of. And kitties, did I mention them?
@Fembot:
Thanks. I’d say that my experiences very much mirror your own. I’ve been studying social sciences for years now, so I’ve been acquainted with some feminist texts, but I never really thought of myself as a feminist.
Since meeting the MRM, I realized how vitally important it is for me to be a feminist and to be confidently a feminist. Not perfect, of course. But not being afraid to speak out (and occasionally be wrong) is an on-going goal I’ve set for myself.
Now I’m in a class about feminist epistemology and dominating forms of knowledge production. I am HAPPY!
Violent Librarians – another great band name!
Ahem. I was nowhere near Vancouver recently.
I was there. I actually got JohntheOther in my face because I was shooting down his ‘free speech’ accusations with “free speech protects you from the government, not from social punishment”. I even got to flip him off ^_^;;;
One of us DID have a box cutter, but it was being used to remove posters. Nothing more. We’d been at Commercial and Broadway countering some anti-choice demonstrators, and someone had alerted us that the MRAs were postering there, so we decided to go take down some hate speech =D
Boo fucking hoo, John. Your shitty posters got torn down.
Maybe try letting someone finish a sentence for a change, before you talk at them about silencing and censorship.
That previous comment of mine refers to the “violent librarians” comment. I am really not that violent either… 🙂
Librarians are much more interested in preserving posters, when they are graphically interesting and/or historically significant. (The AVfM posters don’t meet either criteria.)
Here are two fine examples from a collection of global AIDS posters:
Germany.
Morocco.
MRA : The most terrible thing ever happened to me. It was worse than war, famine, or pestilence.
Eager Audience : What happened?
MRA : Well it was feminists and manginas that did it so you know it was awful.
EA : What did they do? Tell us! Did they beat you? Shove hot pokers up your nose? Flay all the skin from your body?
MRA : They…they…(sobs) they took down my posters!
EA : …oh.
@XARDOZ
“At this point NWO and other tinfoil MRAs should be seriously investigating the leaders of the men’s rights movement for ties to the Femilluminati, because they’ve done more to strengthen feminism than many feminists.”
Actually the Mens Rights Movement is on the same page as Feminists in some aspects. The MRM wants men to be able to break out of restricted gender roles and realizes the dangers of traditional male gender roles. For example, the traditional mindset that a man should not cry and not show emotion can cause men to bottle up their feelings and cause illness like heart attacks.
Paul Elam has actually been mocked by some in the MRM and PUA’s as being too moderate and wanting men to break out of traditional roles rather than learning how to be a PUA. Also, some good websites in the MRM fembot and xardoz is The Good Men Project. An effective leader in the MRM s Michael Kimmel.
You made a good point but here is an excellent link about the MRM which explains this further -please read this,it will help clarify the reason for some confusion in the MRM.
http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2012/09/long-live-the-manosphere/
I think some people had questions about the venue, etc. for the “debate” that JtO is pretending to set up, so I’ve scraped them from their FB page:
My GLBT student group have had their flyers torn down on and off for years — amazingly enough, they simply repost, and keep on going.
Too bad the big manly men of the manly rights movement can’t learn from my students.
26/F/STOCKHOLM ANYONE UP FOR A THREESOME?
“The MRM wants men to be able to break out of restricted gender roles and realizes the dangers of traditional male gender roles.”
You have got to be joking. They’re all about putting women back into roles where men are totally dominant – unpaid servant and sex object is what they’re about, and literal owners when it comes to wives and children. We’re talking about men who don’t even see women as human, who tell us we cannot think, and want to take away not only voting rigths but any human rights from half the humans on earth. Them calling Elam a moderate is only indicative of their own rabid hatred of women; he’s a rape apologist and an advocate of violence.
Hint: men cannot break out of their traditional gender roles (many aspects of which stink, I absolutely agree there) while wanting to force women back into theirs. Freeing people from gender roles and stereotypes is, believe it or not, what feminism is about.
@ Creative Writing Student
I know a very nice Ruby who’s not at all an embarrassment to feminism. Does that help balance it out?
And yeah, I’m willing to bet that the MRM is responsible for more women deciding to become out and proud feminists than NOW is. There’s nothing like being blatantly told that you’re not really a person to firm up the resolve of people who’d previously been on the fence or not quite ready to commit.
@Fembot
Fembot commented “But one day I became acquainted with a little movement called “The Men’s RIghts Movement.” That sounds cool, I thought. I have a husband that I love. Maybe I can learn something. WRONG! I was instead bombarded with every manner of gender slur: cunt, cum dumpster, bitch, whore, simply for being in possession of a vagina. I soon became aware that there was no room for me in this movement, and that I was nothing but a hypergamous whore, my husband a white knight mangina, and FTSU and NAWALT blah blah blah. But even more shocking than the insults, was the notion that in this modern age, we actually have a group of people debating whether women should be allowed to vote.
It was after this experience that I realized I was a feminist.”
Fembot, I understand your point. But the hatred of women you commented on is the extreme radical part of the Mens Movement. Similarly, there are some feminst sites like radfem that spew hatred of men.
The majority of the MRM is not hateful like you stated. Moreover , a lot of MRAs like myself are married or some have girlfriends. I am an MRA and an advocate for Men’s Right but I sincerely truly love ,my wife dearly and would never support the extreme hate groups like you commented on. Just my 2 cents for what its worth.
@ CWS: Here’s a good reason to keep liking the name.
@MGTOWMRA: Does GMP identify itself as part of the MRM? I was under the impression that they did not. Of course, I don’t really know anything about them except that Ozy’s blog moved there.
Anyone know who Lisbeth here is? Is there a repeat troll with a Millenium obsession?
That’s actually not a terribly unusual format for a formal debate…except that a formal debate has two people arguing opposing sides of an issue. If you have three speakers discussing a yes/no question, it can hardly be balanced in any case, so why bother dividing up the time so precisely?
Unless of course you’re intending it to actually be completely one-sided but you want to maintain a facsimile of fairness…hmm…
Go to bed, Mr. A.
MGTOWMRA:
Show me the moderates, please. Also. if you’re going your own way, does your wife know? How does a man GHOW when married?
@MGTOWMRA, where are the blogs and websites of the non-extreme radical part of the Mens Movement? Can you point us to where they discuss the sane and reasonable aspects of the MRM? The ones who are not hateful?
@PsychoDan
I’ve seen that film many times and the same thing has always puzzled me about it: what the blazes is that on his head?!
(Tonight’s dream about Clefairy trying to stab me in my sleep for not finishing his social link is going to get weird…)
@Hellkell
Maybe his wife goes her own way, as a lesbian separatist?