Men’s Rights Activists have a new hero: a Cleveland bus driver who punched and choked a belligerent female passenger who had apparently refused to pay her fare.
The top post in the Men’s Rights subreddit at the moment, with more than 500 upvotes, links to a petition urging the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority to reinstate the bus driver, Artis Hughes, who was suspended after video of the incident leaked out. (See videos here and here.) According to the petition,
As a bus driver, mr. Hughes was lied to, insulted, threatened and eventually attacked by one of the passagers. He was clearly justified in striking back. Were he to suffer any negative consequences to his employment as a result of defending himself and striking back, this would set a disasterous precedent: he and other employees would legitimately believe that their workplace expects them to put up with harrassment, and that they will lose their jobs if they choose to stand up for themselves. …
As well as being a bus driver, mr. Hughes is a man, and [Shidea N. Lane, the passenger] is a woman. We continue to live in a world in which some people see fit to scold men for fighting back against the women who abuse them. After mr. Hughes struck ms. Lane, a woman could be heard protesting about it, saying “That’s a [censored] female”. Mr. Hughes responded by saying: “I don’t care. You want to be man? I’m going to treat you like a man!” This is a healthy attitude: if men refuse to strike back, fearing that the law will favour their female abusers over them, we create an environment in which women can harrass and victimize men with impunity. Instead, a man’s decision to fight back against a woman should be respected.
It is for these reasons – the fact that the bus driver was the real victim and was justified in hitting back; that he and other bus drivers should not fear the legal consequences of responding to attacks by passagers; and that men in general should not fear the legal consequences of responding to attacks by women – that we urge you to reinstate mr. Artis Hughes following the investigation on the incident, and hope that future policies will safeguard him and other bus drivers from legal assault whenever they respond to a passager’s physical assault.
There are a lot of things wrong with this statement, up to and including the spelling. But perhaps most germane to the discussion at hand is the fact that the various videos of the event circulating on YouTube make very clear that Hughes was not acting in self-defense.
Yes, it’s clear from the videos and the police report on the incident that the passenger was acting obnoxiously. And according to witnesses she struck first, spitting on Hughes, pushing him and apparently punching him in the head. (All I saw in the video was her pushing him.) That would be more than enough to charge her with assault, though Hughes declined to press charges.
But after she allegedly assaulted him, she backed off. When Hughes punched and then choked her, he was not defending himself; he was retaliating, and with disproportionate force – his punch literally knocked her to the floor.
In this case, Hughes’ victim was a woman. But what he did would have been equally wrong had he punched a man with similar force.
This isn’t the first time, by a long shot, that MRAs have defended the idea of responding to violence from women with disproportionate force. A year ago, you may recall, Men’s Rights Redditors and other MRAs jumped to the defense of Rayon McIntosh, the McDonalds employee who responded to an assault by two customers by beating them with a metal rod – and continuing to beat them after he knocked them to the floor. (See video of the incident here; TW for extreme violence.)
And as longtime readers here know, in one now-infamous post Paul Elam of A Voice for Men suggested that it would be proper for men abused by their female partners to
beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.
And then make them clean up the mess.
In the wake of the bus incident, a number of commenters in the Men’s Rights subreddit reacted to Hughes’ assault on the young woman with something close to glee. (Click on any of the yellow comments to see them in context; they’re all from different parts of the thread .)
True, some suggested that the response was disproportionate, but they tended to get a much less enthusiastic response from the regulars than those reveling in the punch:
And MRAs wonder why some people describe their movement, such as it is, as “the abusers lobby.”
LOL! I’ve never heard Valley Girl speak but I can well imagine it.
None of our cats has had anything like what you’d think of as a normal meow. One would deign to open her lips a bit, and all you’d get was the sound of leathery cat lips unsticking. Another would do a sort of trilling noise. Of our current two, one varies between squeezing her sides and producing a squeak, or trilling (we have quite the conversations when she’s in that mood) and the other, who’s selectively deaf, just YOWLS when she wants to tell us something. Or when she doesn’t. 😉
My cats were hovering around my computer because people food. I’m eating spicy carrot salad and my girl cat dove in. And ran around yowling when she realized that spicy carrot salad is spicy.
My boy tested the waters and decided to mooch my mortadella instead.
Amandajane, I thought for a moment there you were missing your kitty ’cause he’d crossed over – I am so glad it’s not that, though it sucks that you’re ill and away from him. 🙁
I wonder if one of the ‘toons would come closer to him if you used the fierce eyes and teeth? Some of the kitty gravatars here are downright frightening, lol.
This is my trillly tortie-tabby, the source of my gravatar.
Well, time for me to go home and feed kittehs … niters, all!
I miss my kitties too–I’m a college student and they’re with my parents. One at least was my buddy when I was home last weekend, but the other seems to have forgotten that I like to sleep in. (She used to come cuddle with me while I was still in bed and the parents were up.) My parents have promised me a kitten as soon as I’m in a place to own pets, and I think I’ll get a couple of littermates if possible.
@amandajane,
I’m sorry to hear you’re not feeling well and can’t be with your kitty.
I know how you feel about missing him. Mine ran away a while back, and I’ve put out treats and a litter box in the yard but haven’t seen her. Then I got a call from a vet in Neosho saying that someone found her and got her shots and a checkup. They called me because they found the microchip I put in her at the Humane Society. But the people that found her said they were going to keep her. We’re all sad that the Neosho people have “custody” but at least the new family is responsible enough to take her to the vet.
For the OP, it’s so gross how MRA’s search out stories like that just so they can fantasize about hitting women with no legal or social consequences. Abusers’ lobby indeed.
No. Wow. She’s being a complete fucking asshole, shoves/slaps/pushes him, steps back and he punches her to the ground and picks her up again to continue beating her. Not fucking okay. They both need to be charged with something and spend some time in anger management.
And, to be honest, I *was* initially inclined to be more sympathetic to the worker, because I’ve had asshole customers get in my face and scream and throw things and threaten me (though they haven’t hit me yet). But he completely lost it on her.
She deserves to go to jail for assault and be permabanned from the bus if that’s how she’s going to act. But once he turned and deliberately beat her down, he crossed a line and became the villain.
Also notice MRAs don’t give a shit about women being assaulted or harassed in the workplace, only menz.
@sticky
So you agree that this kind of misogyny and immaturity is widespread in society. Well done. You’ve actually come to a sensible conclusion for once.
I was on a bus once where one of the passengers started yelling and carrying on because she missed her stop and blamed the bus driver. She was abusing him and telling him to stop and let her off. Bus drivers in Sydney have rules about not opening the doors except at proper bus stops for safety reasons.
Most of the other passengers were just silent and mortified, though a few people were yelling at her to shut up and to leave him alone.
Eventually, we stopped at some lights where it was safe enough, and he broke the rules and opened the doors to let her out. Then he called the cops to come get her.
Everyone cheered, and it didn’t become a shitstorm on the internet.
Here’s our two original ragdolls as kittens, on my computer desk. The cream point is now around 9.5kg and the seal point is now around 6.5kg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/87531085@N02/8089307459/
Am I the only person to notice that before he hit her, she spit on him, called him a racial slur, and hit him? My view is that I am not sexist to their being of different genders and think that when someone does violence to others, they should expect that the other person might fight back, especially if they were also spit on and called a racial slur.
That this woman was of the same race as the man she attacked does not make it any less offensive IMHO. If it was a White man brandishing hate speech in addition to spitting on and punching the Black bus driver, who among us would chastise him for that?
I feel bad for that woman because she so internalized the prejudices of the dominant culture that she thought Black men do no deserve respect, so, therefore, she can say behave toward him like she did.
Yes, she assaulted him. That’s not really a matter of contention here. The issue is that, after she backed away and stopped assaulting him, he got up, approached her and assaulted her. They’re both guilty of assault, from what can be seen from the video.
It should be common sense to expect that, if you hit someone, they may very well defend themselves. However, this was not a case of self defense. It was a case of someone deciding that, because they were assaulted, they had every right to beat the living shit out of someone who was no longer an immediate threat to them. That’s not self defense. That’s assault.
As far as the verbal altercation went, both sides were participating fully. She used the N word repeatedly, he stated that her face looked all cut up (it was, she survived a shooting/ stabbing.) Words are not equal to physical assault and you don’t get to clock someone, because they called you a bad name or insulted you. It doesn’t really matter what either of them said. Nobody in that situation had the right to hit anyone. As they both did, they’re both violent assholes and ought to be spending some time in jail or, at the very least, anger management.
Some people are douchebags. We, as individuals, can decide how we’re going to handle that and take responsibility for our behavior.
Usually, people fighting under the banner of “equal rights” are trying to end workplace discrimination, or fight harmful gender stereotypes, or raise awareness of abuse and rape.
MRAs really want to be able to punch people in the face.
@thebionicmommy – how could the people who found your kitty be able to keep her? She’s your cat, you were identified as her owner by the microchip (hell, that’s the whole reason for using them). How could they possibly keep her legally? And why didn’t the vet say “No, sorry, she’s not your cat”?
Two of those examples are comedy sites. But that’s pretty much how I view r/mensrights anyway
Men’s Rights: No Worse Than 4chan!
Now there’s a slogan.
@Crumbelievable, yes they do. 🙁 It’s not self-defence, as others have pointed out, the response was neither timely (i.e. occurred during the original assault/battery), nor was it proportionate to the level of threat.
I find this particularly interesting given the shit-storm that happened around Rebecca and the incident in the elevator, where all she did was give that as a general example of male behaviour that could be considered creepy. It’s beyond the pale for a woman to make a general comment about guy behaviour, yet perfectly valid for a guy to physically deck a woman who is no longer a threat = MRA logic.
Maybe he’s saying that he holds bloggers to a standard just as high as to which he holds cops?
I think he’s saying that police officers and bloggers are fair game for abuse. Which is really sick.
He’s decided to focus on bloggers since they’re less likely than cops to shoot people who abuse them.
Maybe it’s just lack of sleep, but I can’t stop giggling over schtick boy constantly whining that he can only post three times a day, and then blowing each post one right after the other instead of just making one big post.
THAT IS LOGIC.
You don’t know how to state this legally because it’s not a legal argument. It’s a social one.
You can think assaultive individuals shouldn’t get “applause” all you like. That’s fine. Some people agree with you, some people don’t, some people don’t know, some people don’t care. But the legal definition of “assault” does not change depending on how you or anyone else feels about “applause.”
Where do these guys get off defending disproportionate assault, I mean that fellow who said that the sexes in the equation are irrelevant is right. It’s almost as if these guys just plain hate women.
Just want to say, their premise that he was only disciplined because he hit a woman is BS on its face. We had an incident in my hometown where a bus driver got into an altercation with a homeless man who was known to be peeing on buses. The driver ejected the man from his bus and closed the doors. The man jumped on the bus, clinging to the side mirror. The bus driver then chose to drive away with this guy hanging outside of his vehicle. He did the wrong thing, regardless of how wrong his passenger was, and he lost his job. Same thing happened here.
Bus drivers have to put up with an amazing amount of bullshit, and I certainly don’t envy them on that front. But no way should they be assaulting passengers like this. What is obvious to me is that the only reason this particular incident is being celebrated is because there are a lot of angry keyboard commandos out there who hate women and want to be the one throwing punches.
ttf: The McDonald’s dude left the room, got a pipe, and came back. Much as the bus driver did.