MRAs spend an awful lot of time getting worked up by hypothetical injustices. On the Men’s Rights subreddit, angry Men’s Rightsers regularly post links to stories of women behaving badly – or who may have been charged with or convicted of a crime – with indignant headlines suggesting that the women in question would be treated far worse if “she had been a man.”
The latest example of this outrage over imagined injustices? This post, found in r/mensrights today, with 87 net upvotes:
If you follow the link, it goes to a brief story about the alleged incident in The Huffington Post. I say “alleged” because the woman in question has not yet been convicted of anything. As the story reports, the police arrested her because
school staff told them the assembly was halted and the cafeteria cleared after Meaders began dancing onstage and took off some of her clothes.
She’s charged with seven counts of endangering the welfare of a child and one count of public lewdness.
An Albany City Court clerk says Meaders was arraigned Friday afternoon and ordered held on $3,000 bail. She doesn’t have a lawyer yet.
There is no mention of putting her on a sex offenders registry because, and let me be blunt here, YOU HAVE TO BE CONVICTED OF A CRIME TO GET PUT ON ONE. She’s merely been CHARGED.
There is no “pussy pass” for women that enables them to bypass the sex offenders registry ONCE THEY ARE CONVICTED of public lewdness. The relevant NY State law can be found here; as you can see, the gender of the convicted offender is not an issue. (It took all of 30 seconds on Google to dig that up.) Meaders isn’t getting special treatment because she’s a woman; she’s not on the offenders registry because an arrest is not the same as a conviction.
Enjoy your imagined oppression, fellas.
Of course, they’re just going to say that in this exact situation, a man would get worse because the law is biased against men. We know this because a man doing a crime like this would get it worse than this woman
Nothing is too small for them to froth over, is it? Even if this story was about a man, my first reaction would be,” Huh? That’s weird.”
And if it was a man doing it, they’d find some way of saying it wasn’t lewd or endangering children or anything at all, it was natural and right that he should do it. Or that he was driven to it by women not catering to his boner, or something.
I think this demonstrates some consistency on the part of the MRA. They actually are treating women’s alleged crimes the same way they treat men’s. After all, they treat rape accusations as if they are really no different from convictions so why not stripping?
And I’m not going to let the fact that the MRA is consistently wrong stand in the way of recognizing that. (They really should learn more about the criminal justice system, though. Maybe then they could actually help men.)
It says she took off some of her clothes. It does not state or imply she got unclothed to the point of being “stripped naked”.
MRAs, continuing to inaccurately report since…. MRAs were invented?
Somehow I’m thinking of this as the sort of stripping trolls do on the Discworld – since they don’t wear clothes, the “stripper” adds clothes during her act, until she’s muffled up in overcoat and scarf and boots and hat, and the male trolls in the audience are going wild.
The New York penal code suggests that a woman showing her nipples would be classified as public lewdness: http://newyorkcriminaldefenseblawg.com/2012/07/public-lewdness-desk-appearance-tickets-exposure-of-a-person-desk-appearance-tickets/ and I assume that buttock-showing would also fit the definition.
At my high school, a male teacher took off his pants in the cafeteria amd was only fired. He wasnt put on a sex offender list or even charged just fired. So no, I dont think a man would get it worse simply because hes a man. He also used to spank himself in class. So…yeah.
Didn’t almost every school have that one teacher who due to either a drinking problem or just being a bit weird had a reputation for odd sexual behavior? Luckily that didn’t involve molesting the kids in any of my schools, but we definitely had some teachers who were universally side-eyed.
I’ve never had something like this come up, though I imagine if it did it wouldn’t lead to a conviction unless, you know, rape happened, or something equally bad. It kind of bothers me that there are still people who think the sex offender registry is actually that draconian. I mean sure there are false positives, but it’s nowhere near the conspiracy against male sexuality that MRAs think it is.
LOL our teachers were side-eyed all right, but mostly because they’d do things like turn up in a silver leather jacket …
MRAs think everything is a conspiracy against male sexuality.
@Kittehs’
This is true.
This was one of my freaky high school stories:
http://www.keprtv.com/news/local/11986956.html
I think every school has some problems.
I always disliked this guy because he gave me the creeps.
I usually go with my gut because I didn’t like my friends step father either and later found out he molested her.
Aworldannonmous, there is one area where the sex registry IS bad. In Aus, and I think in other western countries, young people who consensually send naked pictures of themselves or their boy/girlfriends will be charged with distributing child pornography, put on the register and their lives f..kd. I’m talking about when both halves of the couple were enjoying the play, NOT those horrible cases where it is done to an ex partner for revenge.
Has the law caught up with that yet, Yoyo? I just Googled it and the most recent news was from 2011, saying the Victorian government was doing the mirror response (ie. “looking into it” – and they said Bracks and Brumby were good at that!)
The kitteh, no, unfortunately no change yet, because we have a “hard on crime” lib govt. now they are really nervous that the old shock jock listening members of the community would get too upset. Which is why we still have the stupid war on drugs and the privatisation of prisons and all things stupid but populist.
@Kittehs
I just recently participated in a focus group with a criminologist from UWS and a sociologist from Macquarie Uni on that exact issue – they were asking young people about attitudes towards and prevalence of sexting. It’s definitely illegal in NSW but no-one underage has been charged as of yet.
re:Dodgy teachers
My high school had an incredibly creepy PE teacher who should’ve been fired ages ago, plenty of “benign” old-guy sexism in various faculties, a woman teacher (normally really cool, so this was right out of nowhere) who suggested that female students not wear their skirts rolled so high because they might “tempt” the boys, and the world’s least likable and competent music teacher ever.
Since I’ve left, my brother tells me we’ve gained an incredibly racist Geography teacher (of the One Nation variety, in a school with a prominent Asian population).
This is probably better than most schools around, too. . .
I went to a high school for people with learning differences. The goal of the school was to get students to adjust to society, and it was a really small school that was K-12. All of these factors mean that they chose their teachers carefully, so none of this really happened. Although they did fire one teacher for being too friendly with students, and by that, I don’t mean anything sexual, just being friends with them. Yeah, I don’t understand that either.
My boarding school had a really creepy doctor who technically wasn’t on the faculty, but the bulk of his hours were spent on us. He insisted on giving the incoming 12 year olds exams that included prodding around at our bellies supposedly to gauge our level of development and see if it was on track. I have my doubts about the effectiveness of this, since he announced that I would probably start my period soon after I’d already had it for 3 years.
He also sneezed during a friend’s exam, while he was poking at her upper half, and said “oh dear, I seem to be allergic to your breasts”. Creepy…
Also, public urination puts you on the sex offenders’ registry, if what I heard is correct. That’s also a bit too extreme. That should probably just be a fine at most. Unless, that is, you were intentionally trying to be seen by people who didn’t want to see it or in other cases, but those are different things entirely.
My creepy PE teacher:
– Detailed attendance rolls with descriptions of the students in the class, including such things as “big tits” and “fat asian” for my year 7 PE class
– Made homophobic jokes about a student (in retaliation for the student’s homophobic jokes about him, so it wasn’t bullying a gay student directly, but still)
– Acted really flirty with girl students of all ages
– With dance-based assessments, filmed students dancing and kept the tapes for quite a while; they’d end up shown to students in other classes to laugh at
– Insisted on ballroom-dancing with every female student in those assessments, putting his hands a little lower than they should have been
And probably other stuff I don’t remember. Only the rolls thing was ever officially dealt with.
TW for rape:
They’re mad about this too. Also what this woman has to say is irrelevant too because she’s ugly and fat and no one would rape her anyway! http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/18nmre/saw_this_on_my_facebook_feed_kinda_pisses_me_off/
gotta love this comment too…and by love I mean want to vomit in disgust. I can’t begin to count how many times they laugh at the idea that we need to teach consent and of course people know not to rape yet comments like this pop up:
[–]DinosBiggestFan 1 point 1 hour ago
Even ignoring her looks, if you’re dressing like a slut and say yes, you shouldn’t be allowed to change your mind after the fact.
After all this time I still dont get what is wrong with these people NO MEANS NO APPLIES TO EVERYONE WHO DOES NOT WANT TO CONSENT TO SEX. This is a message they should get behind but all they do is get mad over nothing. The irony is that in the comments the OP accuses feminists of doing the same thing -_-
Also holy crap it’s been awhile. I still read the posts on here but haven’t the time and energy to partake in the comments though I sometimes read through them on the bus or something to laugh at the silliness. Hope you’ve all been well! 🙂
It’s a point made in the original post, but for me, the funniest part of this is the actual wording: “he’d be listed as a registered sex offender.” Not “he’d be listed as a sex offender,” not “he’d have to register as a sex offender.” No, he brings ’em both: “he’d be listed as a registered sex offender.”
PROTIP: The most common way to be listed as a registered sex offender is to have registered as a sex offender. If somebody “lists,” i.e. says in print, that you’re a registered sex offender, and you have *not* registered as a sex offender, they have committed a crime, and I encourage you to sue them.
It’s rhetorically quite similar to the old canard about the homosexual agenda trying to force people to be gay. If someone is forcing you to have gay sex, that is a crime. Please call the police.
If public urination put you on the sex offenders’ registry in Victoria, a great many of the idolised AFL footballers would be on it.
Mind you, from all reports a great many of them should be on it, and not for peeing in public.