[TRIGGER WARNING for picture of brutalized woman]
If you want to show someone what sort of website A Voice for Men is, have them look at the following screenshot, which I’m putting below the jump because it may well trigger some readers in its depiction of the effects of domestic violence on women:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The picture, as you can see, illustrates a recent post by Suzanne McCarley, otherwise known on the internet as Driver Suz. (Regular readers of the Man Boobz comment section may remember her as the troll who was the first runner up for Man Boobz’ Special-est Snowflake Award for 2012.)
This isn’t the first time that A Voice for Men has used a picture of a brutalized woman to illustrate a post about domestic violence. The last time, the picture illustrated a notorious post from site founder Paul Elam suggesting that Domestic Violence Awareness month be replaced by “Bash a Violent Bitch Month.”
Here’s a screencap from that post, which I wrote about in more detail here:
In her post, McCarley refrains from this sort of violent fantasy, but her basic argument – that feminism perpetuates domestic violence for profit – is even more insidiously victim-blaming.
McCarley makes it clear from the start that her post will be largely fact-free, announcing plainly that “I’m not going to quote lots of statistics and studies, or variables and technicalities.”
After some rhetorical fumfering, Suz sets forth her basic argument, such as it is:
Without DV victims, feminists would have no rallying cry, and they would lose political power. Here’s how it works:
Thanks primarily to the Violence Against Women Act, DV has become a multi-billion dollar industry. This industry employs many thousands of people throughout the nation, paying them with federal VAWA grant money. And those thousands of people have made relatively little headway in achieving their “goal” of reducing DV. Indeed they perpetuate it. This is by design; if DV went away, so would their jobs.
Every single one of these people would happily give up their job if domestic violence went away.
And in fact, as Suz would know if she had indeed done even a tiny bit of research on this subject, domestic violence has fallen considerably since the early 1990s. Indeed, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in its most recent statement on the subject, reports that “from 1994 to 2010, the overall rate of intimate partner violence in the United States declined by 64%,” with similar rates of decline for both male and female victims. That’s more than a “little headway”; that’s huge.
Suz continues, oblivious to the fact that the basic factual premise of her argument is dead wrong:
There are many, many factors involved in DV, and it’s no coincidence that feminist policies aggravate nearly all of them, but for the sake of clarity I’m going to address only a simplified but significant few of them here.
Who commits a substantial proportion of DV? Past victims or witnesses of DV. Who committed the DV that they experienced or witnessed? In too many cases to count, it is women. Women commit far more than half of all DV. Among the vast majority of violent couples, the violence is mutual. Additionally, women commit the majority of child abuse. Yes, women are responsible for most DV.
Not true. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, over the period of 1994-2010, “about 4 in 5 victims of intimate partner violence were female.” Numerous other studies using different methodologies also find that women make up the majority of victims. The only studies that find similar rates of abuse – which are also, not coincidentally, the only ones that MRAs like to cite – are based on problematic methodologies that end up essentially equating mild and severe violence, pretending that a slap on the face is basically the same as a severe beating when it comes to determining which gender is responsible for the most abuse. (For more details, see here.)
Next point, what often triggers DV? Stress. What causes women lots of stress? The constant obligations of child rearing. What causes even more child rearing stress? Not having a father in the family. How are so many fathers removed from their families? They are accused of Domestic Violence, whether it happened or not, and whether it’s mutual or not. Disagreements are exaggerated, violence is “invented” or men are blamed for any real violence that does occur.
Suz, naturally, presents no evidence for any of this; she’s simply repeating a basic MRA catechism. Removing violent fathers from the home makes the home less stressful, not more.
The result is that fathers, often the most stable influence in the family, are kicked to the curb and financially bled dry, while mothers are protected and are excused for their “missteps;” this is the unstable – and all too often abusive – environment in which their children are raised.
Violent fathers are not exactly a “stabilizing” influence on the home.
Toss in a few more variables like substance abuse, a string of violent boyfriends, and a bit of poverty, and this process is guaranteed to produce future domestic abusers.
And feminism is responsible for this how?
And this is the process that VAWA has institutionalized. It no longer happens “once in a while;” it is SOP. Was this the intent of VAWA? Who cares? That’s the result.
Well, actually, you just said explicitly that feminists intentionally perpetuate domestic violence in order to make money. You’re moving the goalposts in your own post?
Feminism cares about controlling, dominating, destroying and extorting the men who pay Feminism’s bills. Everything else is window dressing.
Citation fucking needed.
A Voice for Men uses violence porn to fight against those who fight against domestic violence. And Suzanne McCarley is happy to help.
Aw, she’s hate crushing on me.
Too bad the dumb bunny is so allergic to facts.
Nope. The battle cry of every troll is: “I’m gonna say some really inflammatory and extreme shit, but I’m not gonna back it up with facts, because FUCK FACTS.”
I’m baffled by FeMRAs but I am starting to suspect that that join a movement largely made up of bitter sex-starved me primarily because they love all the attention they get from said bitter sex-starved men.
They remind me of a certain type of female poster (or men who impersonate them) I’ve seen on male-dominated forums before- the (supposedly) female poster who knows nothing of the forum’s subject matter and spends her (or “her”) time seeking male attention, either for kudos or for teh lulz. I’ve seen them on forums about sport, music and comedy… so I guess seeing them try to worm their way in with the MRAs shouldn’t surprise me at all.
It’s pretty much what TyphonBlue does too- the whole “look at me, I’m not like other women, please like me!” act, usually accompanied details of her sexual history in her articles, and mentions of the fact that she used to do chicks before she married a dude. Of course she’s not doing it to titillate the MRAs and seek attention- she’s their ally, right? 😉
MRAs wouldn’t know a Special Snowflake if it landed right on their boner.
I don’t even check her site. If she’s saying something about me, I more or less know what it is (let’s face it, the woman isn’t exactly a fount of rhetorical creativity), and I don’t give a fuck. She wants hits, and I ain’t giving them to her.
What I always find weird (besides the warble-garbling) in MRA DV posts is they have zero suggestions about what to do about any kind of domestic violence. They insist men are largely the victims, then insist any kind of program to help any kind of victim is harmful to men. It’s like they switch who the victims and the men are throughout the piece to make sure that beaten people continue to beaten. For the sake of men?
OT, NY Times reports on test given in 65 countries that show in a number of countries, NOT the US, girls (in age 15 group) outperform boys in the same age group:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/04/science/girls-lead-in-science-exam-but-not-in-the-united-states.html
Well, see ithiliana, when boys outperform girls, it’s proof positive that men are “naturally” superior to women. When girls outperform boys, it’s because the evaluation system is rigged.
UPDATE:
“HEY GUYS!!!! PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!”
I rest my case. Let’s see if she can still maintain her boner over the ensuing rush of tumbleweed.
@ithiliana and others who may be interested.
http://disjointedthinking.jeffhughes.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Shih-Pittinsky-Ambady-1999.-Stereotype-susceptibility-Identity-salience-and-shifts….pdf
This study shows the effects of priming on a person’s aptitude in school. Asian American women who were primed of their Asian descent performed better on math tests than the control group and Asian American women primed of their sex performed worse than the control group on math tests.
Yeah, I think I’ll be skipping that. No sense in delivering the troll’s dinner to their door.
Mostly a lurker, but this post is just….mind blowing.
I assume this woman has never been the victim of DV, and if so I would be even more baffled. I just wonder if she did happen to become a victim of DV (which I wouldn’t wish upon anybody ever) would she blame herself? Come out and apologize for whatever she did to make some poor guy so mad that he just had to hit her, and write articles about what she should do differently in the future?
Trying to figure out what could possibly be going on in her head is making me feel really gross so I suppose I’ll be needing some good ole cat therapy now.
Hey Failsuz! Thanks for the invite, but I will not be rewarding your attention-whoring. If you wish to hyperventilate about something that I wrote, you can do so over on your lame blog, which I won’t visit.
Oh, and Failsuz? No one is as familiar with butthurtedness as you, what with your anti-cushion, anti-pillow lifestyle.
Another thing I picked up on is how these people can’t get their shit straight. When people moderate comment sections so they don’t turn into piles of toxic waste they scream about freeeeze peach! and say you are just like Creationists trying to stifle the comments! You don’t want to hear the truth because you just want to stick to your hive-mind thinking bla bla bla… That argument has been picked apart by many people already, but they keep on saying it.
Then they want to turn around and make posts that start off by saying they won’t be using facts and stats? They think all the stats are biased by the evil feminist overlords or something? That sounds a lot like creationists, climate change deniers, and right wingers rejecting established science because it doesn’t fit their world view.
Ok, omitting everything else that’s problematic with… well, EVERYTHING ELSE about this, how the hell do these dipshits honest to dog expect anyone to take them seriously if they can’t back up any of their claims? I mean, yes, I know, there are things like Fox News out there, who’s business it is to just spew tons of inaccurate or blatantly false shit and just generally stir people more prone to douchebaggery into a self-righteous fury of bigotry, but, I mean, surely they know that to be taken seriously, you need more than just spewed ass-facts, right? I’m in a first year writing course right now (long and boring story involving me working at a university and sucking at the necessary paperwork for getting the classes for free from the university and getting annoyed with the paperwork involved with proving I certainly have pre-requisites for the writing classes I want to take and decided I may as well take a refresher class since it’s free) and one of the first things we learned was that in order to get people to take your argument seriously, you have to be able to back it up with actual facts. If you can’t even verify that whatever problem or issue you are arguing about actually exists, you’re going to have a very hard time getting them to believe your view of the problem and an even harder time convincing them that whatever course of action you propose as a fix to the problem is appropriate.
It’s not like this is a tone argument, which IS a shitty silencing tactic, it’s just common sense. If you make a claim, expect to be asked to back it up. When I tell people about something I read or heard somewhere that they haven’t read or heard yet, the question is always the same, “where’d ya hear that?” It’s not trolling, it’s not even Academic Writing 101, it’s basic conversation back and forth. I continue to wonder how these people converse with regular folks in real life. I mean, do they just fly into vengeful rages if they tell a coworker, “Yeah, it’s supposed to rain the next few days” and the coworker says, “Oh really? Where’d you hear that?” Because this is a conversation that literally happens nearly every day in my office (varying of course, by what the weather is actually supposed to be doing – it rains a lot here, but not quite that much!).
OK, this thing I’m slogging away on currently contains about 20 citations, ANDDDD I’m going to collect my own data to add to it so I guess I am a Troll Supreme. (Also, it is all about butterflies so probably counts as MISANDRY as well). Yyyyyeeeaaaah!
Monster: Butterflies, are you kidding? Butterlies are DEFINITELY misandry. After all, they are beautiful, but can’t be fucked. Therefore their existence oppresses men.
@ostara321
From what I know of right-wing radio and Fox News (and especially considering their framing-the-issues lesson covered by the Daily Show last night), a lot of their coverage is in either making accusations that can’t be disproven (and thus providing a CITATION for a rumor) or in framing actual things that happened in really bizarre ways. They know facts are important. They owe their entire existence to the importance of facts. They know that their viewers will be confronted with (not-at-all-trollish) demands for verification. Fox News (and the radio nonsense) is there to provide verification. It actually took a rather embarrassingly long time for Fox News “facts” to be viewed as suspect by more people than just highly-engaged liberals.
tl;dr : Even Fox News, right-wing radio, and their audiences know that they will be confronted with requests for facts and citations and that they will be required to provide these things. The MRA is less intellectually honest than that lot.
Wow.
That’s how I feel about all of them. I wouldn’t waste my time reading any of their sites, regardless of them wanting hits. There’s quite enough of their garbage in David’s posts, and I read this site for the regulars and the (ahem) wide-ranging conversations. I wouldn’t read MRM hate sites any more than I’d read Stormfront or rabid fundamentalist sites or any other hate groups’ loser rantings.
Carleyblue – I’m sorry you’re also feeling wrung out by this; I’d say avoid their sites. There’s never going to be anything worth reading there, even if they weren’t making personal attacks (and their whole raison d’etre is to attack women collectively and individually). Take care, and I hope we see you back here for the fun stuff at least.
(“Regardless of them wanting hits” meaning even if the matter of hits didn’t come into it.)
“Hi Booblets! Welcome! I’m banned over in Boobville… none of you are banned from here and comments are open. Feel free to display your ludicrous rationalizations, butthurtness, and sixth-grade-girl-fight-style insults.”
Um, no thanks…I’d rather eat glass, you twit.
“none of you are banned from here and comments are open” and not a single fuck was given upon that day.
“MRAs: less intellectually honest than Faux News” about covers it, I’d say.
Though I do think it’s debatable what’s more intellectually dishonest. Is it more dishonest to just supply the world with assfax and then get all huffy that the world is all “uh, no, those are not facts” and pretend that only TROLLZ want citations than it is to make up citations and situations for your made up shit? I dunno. While the huffyness and pretending that anyone who asks for a source is just a mean mean meanie being mean is immature, I almost feel like the Faux Noooz style of citation or “source” is worse almost in a way. They just invented a new standard of what qualifies as a “source” or “fact” if the actual facts and sources don’t give them the reality they want.
Though the assfax is definitely the sadder of the two options. In closing themselves off to sources, i don’t think they’ve realized that they’ve just created an echo chamber in which to spew their bile. So, er, enjoy the sound of your own word vomit guys. To each their own I guess.
Incidentally, as well as my PhD work I’m also currently working as an undergrad tutor and the online system our university uses for marking assignments includes some buttons which allow you to drop comments into the essay. One of these is… “CITATION NEEDED”. Wouldn’t it be nice if the whole of the internet had a CITATION NEEDED button?
On second thoughts it probably wouldn’t change a thing as those needing to use citations would probably just develop a YEAH, BUT YOUR MUM IS FAT button and we’d only end up with the world’s crappest arms race.
@ostara321
I think I might agree that the callousness of inventing your own facts (and, importantly, a “legitimate” source of those facts) is worse. The MRAs invent their own facts, but don’t have a way of portraying them as legitimate (at least so far, and unless that particular “fact” is in use by the American Right). That is part of why they are a fringe movement.
The claim that asking for some substantiation automatically invalidates an opposing position is a different type of intellectual dishonesty, though. The Fox News strategy is intellectually dishonest and just plain dishonest. Assuming they believe what they say, this recent MRA accusation that just asking for citations is trolling is just intellectually dishonest. After all, if they want to be fact-less, they are allowed to be. If that is what they are, then it isn’t necessarily wrong to preemptively identify the fact-inclined as outsiders wanting to disturb their fact-less community or “trolls.” So it is an honest intellectual dishonesty?