I was a little saddened to read recently that A Voice for Men — the self-proclaimed “Men’s Human Rights” site that has posted an open call to firebomb government buildings in its “activism” section — will no longer be writing about little old me.
Yes, it’s true. In a recent post announcing that he would no longer be writing or caring about journalist Arthur Goldwag, who famously took on the misogyny of the Men’s Rights movement in a piece for the Southern Poverty Law Center, AVFM’s head douchebag Paul Elam also noted that he would no longer be writing or caring about me either.
“In the early days of this site, we used to write a fair amount about David Futrelle,” Elam wrote. “He was a nice, soft target; pudgy actually.”
But now, apparently, AVFM has gotten much too important to bother with soft, pudgy nobodies like me or Goldwag or the SPLC.
We don’t mention David anymore except as a passing joke. He is just another low-end blogger with a small audience of neurotic women who talk more about cats in his comments than what he writes. It is as close to physical intimacy as the guy will ever get.
It’s a little strange how much time Elam, a fiftysomething straight man, spends thinking about my sex life, but I suppose it will be a bit of a relief not to have to read so many of these fantasies of his in the pages of AVFM. Not to mention Elam’s bizarre conspiracy theories about me — like this one. (I wonder why Elam never came forward with the proof of those allegations like he promised he would? Hmm.)
So I was a little surprised when, only one day after Elam bid me that not-very-fond farewell, AVFM’s “managing editor” Dean Esmay decided to set forth yet another conspiracy theory about me and my alleged army of evil minions.
In the midst of a long, weird, barely coherent tirade directed at a writer for Vice magazine who’d approached AVFM with some questions for its stable of female MRAs, Esmay accused my evil minions (in advance) of writing to the Viceman pretending to be female MRAs in an attempt to make female MRAs look bad:
[M]aybe … one of David Futrelle’s minions will show up in your inbox and say “yeah I’m a female MRA and I support taking rights away from women and I hate women too because we women suck, put women who have abortions in prison praise jesus blargh!” and so on and so forth, because that’s just what a whole lot of people who oppose compassion and fundamental human rights for boys and men do: pretend to be MRAs or to be quoting MRAs just to make us look bad. We’ve seen it in action more than once. At least one asshole we know of pretty much does it as a full-time gig.
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but none of my “minions” needs to pretend to be a female MRA in order to make female MRAs look bad. Female MRAs like JudgyBitch and GirlWritesWhat and TyphonBlue are already doing an exemplary job of that already. I mean, seriously, did you read JudgyBitch’s thing about pedophilia the other day? I mean, wow.
Of course male MRAs are also doing a fantastic job making themselves look terrible as well, from Warren Farrell on down to that dude who thinks “friend zoning” should be punishable by law (and the dozens of Men’s Rights Redditors who upvoted him).
But, really, no single website has done more to make the Men’s Rights movement look terrible than A Voice for Men.
Seriously, fellas (and FeMRAs), take a bow. We here at Man Boobz couldn’t do it without you. I couldn’t make up the shit you spew if I tried. (And, for the record, I don’t try.)
ATTENTION-WAY AN-MAY OOBZ-BAY INIONS-MAY: I-way am-way alling-cay off-way our-way evious-day an-play o-tay impersonate-way emale-fay As-mRAY. Ean-day Esmay-way as-hay igured-fay it-way out-way. Ease-play eturn-ray o-tay alsely-fay accusing-way apless-hay etas-bay until-way urther-fay otice-nay. And-way on’t-day orget-fay o-tay eed-fay e-thay ats-cay.
Some of them seem like they might be delusional in the clinical sense, but then you also have the ones like Elam who’re just assholes.
One might say they’re determinedly delusional, clinging to their fantasies about how women rule the world and keep poor poor men under their control. Still not the same thing as mental illness.
Yeah I don’t agree that asshole = crazy. That’s ableist. I mean I’ve had mental issues before, like depression and delusional stuff(i don’t know what its called, since I didn’t see a doc), so it’s insulting to me. Just because someone is “crazy” doesn’t mean they can’t understand basic stuff… like women aren’t responsible for being raped or abused (unless someone has some really really bizarre hallucinations that would make that seem sensible to a person with empathy).
No, no, really not so much.
Psychopathy – that is a diminished capacity for remorse and possibly lower emotional responses to things – has actual standards for someone being determined a sociopath, and there is training involved for the people doing the determining. There is actually a test created by a psychologist in Canada, but he has pointed out severe errors with the test (despite it’s 80% predictive quality) and how it is used by the criminal justice system. An overview is here. It is – and should be – a high bar, not something we say about people we met now showing their best face on the internet.
Claiming that a population of people has a higher rate of not only a stigmatizing mental illness, but one associated with criminality, is frankly bullshit. You have no evidence, you have not run tests, all you have is “these people do and say things I don’t like” with your automatic response of “lets insult them with a heinous mental illness”.
This is ableism – the use of a mental illness diagnosis not accurately, but as an insult. It muddies the water significantly.
Firstly, in terms of accurately figuring out who might be sociopathic (if indeed it is a diminished ability to read the emotional states of others, this is something which could possibly be taught and thus the negative effects of the mental illness lessened) by making it such an enormous stigma that no one could possibly wish to have the term applied while minimizing it’s actual meaning.
Secondly, in terms of taking a rather delicately defined thing and making it into “I don’t like this person,” which is not sufficient evidence of a mental illness even if thousands of people act like it is.
Thirdly, it limits the amount to which we can mark how MRAs are not individuals with some sort of mental illness, but rather are a community which reinforces the behavior that we don’t like – that is, the behavior is not INDIVIDUALISTIC but rather SOCIALLY SANCTIONED, and it is the social sanction which we are really concerned about. The most likely solution to the damage that MRAs cause is negative social feedback on a broad range telling them that their beliefs and actions are unacceptable within this society. That simply cannot occur if we dismiss them as individuals with mental illnesses instead of seeing the reality that they are sane people seeking their own ends through violence and cruelty toward others.
I would NEVER describe a person with, say, depression or bipolar disorder or schizophrenia as “crazy.”
This is very individual. I have worked with someone in the past who used “I was being crazy” to refer to when her delusions took over and her behavior was really inappropriate, and then we’d discuss how she could “be less crazy” and what caused it, and what the actual diagnostic words were (delusions, hallucinations, paranoia). The trick was that I worked hard to make it not stigmatizing – she wasn’t bad when she was “crazy,” but she did things she later didn’t like, so we worked together so that she could be the best person she wanted to be all the time.
Likewise, I personally am all right with using the clinical terms WHEN THEY ARE ACCURATE. There is actually a “bizarre beliefs that are not delusional” within the diagnostic assessments, though, and I personally think – based on knowing people who actually have clinical delusional disorders – that is where what laypeople call “delusions” these beliefs lie.
I actually teach people with delusions how to tell between reality and delusions. It can be surprisingly complicated.
Deoridhe – “(if indeed it is a diminished ability to read the emotional states of others,”
I thought it was not an inability to read others, but lack of empathy and indifference to their feelings or needs – often with superficial charm and manipulativeness? I thought the inability to read was what the Asperger’s/autsim spectrum was about.
*autism, not autsim.
@trtina congrats on almost six months of sobriety! I’m a recovering alcoholic too, and I also find the long comments about drinking a little alienating. But as others have said, you have to be your own advocate: people won’t know something’s bothering you until you tell them.
And you know what? I know it’s hard to deal with in early sobriety, but we live in a society where alcohol is part of daily life, and it’s unreasonable to expect that people will stop drinking or talking about it just because some of us are alcoholics. You can ask, and people will often choose to accommodate you, but discussing alcohol or talking about how drunk they are on a public forum is not ableist. On of the hard and uncomfortable facts about recovery is that no one is obligated to make it easier for you.
Determining the cause if a lack of empathy is really difficult – does the lower ability cause the individual to value it less, or does valuing it less cause it to diminish, or some combination of the two? There is some evidence that some people are simply born with a diminished capability; some become criminals, and some become people who studies the criminals, and a lot of the difference appears to be nurture, not nature.
The problem is, there is no way to randomly assign symptoms, so every study of mental illness is by definition a quasi-experiment, which means there is no way to determine cause without a lot of extra work (and even then, keep your salt lick handy). Also, the possible studies we could do are unlikely to pass the board of behavioral sciences, and correctly so.
From what individuals with autism and aspergers have reported, I personally have concluded Aspergers may have some inability to read social cues, but not necessarily emotional cues; the two often interact, but are not identical. Individuals with autism and aspergers have indicated empathy, though; Temple Graiden’s deep empathy for animals, and her ability to think and react like them, informs her career intensely. In my own year working with kids with developmental delays and autism, the problem seemed less in an inability and more in a tendency to become flooded with other peoples’ emotions – that is over, rather than under, sensitivity.
So much of the assessment of autism is based not on the experiences of people with autism, but on experiences of their caregivers, and if there is one thing I have learned as a psychological clinician it’s that my clients know more about their symptoms than I do. That causes me to give much more weight to what autistic people say than the studies of them.
Akk. I was mixing up thinking of emotional cues with social cues, there. All I can think of is that the people who’ve spoken from experience here about not reading cues have all mentioned distress at not being able to do so, and trying very hard to get it right. That certainly suggests empathy to me, and nothing like sociopathy. The latter seems to fall into the “treating people as things” category. I mentioned yesterday reading an extract from a book (being published in June) by M E Thomas, called Confessions of a Sociopath. Maybe it’s just her fitting the cliches, but she came across as a totally repellent person, whether it’s caused by her condition or it’s just her personality.
(TW animal cruelty)
The extract starts with a description of “a young woman” (I don’t know if it’s a metaphor or an actual incident) seeing a baby possum struggling in a pool, tormenting it by draping a net over it to push it under, watching as it gets free and then leaving it to drown. The whole thing left me feeling sick.
Deohdride:
“Claiming that a population of people has a higher rate of not only a stigmatizing mental illness, but one associated with criminality, is frankly bullshit. You have no evidence, you have not run tests, all you have is “these people do and say things I don’t like” with your automatic response of “lets insult them with a heinous mental illness”.
Yes, this has always bugged me. I’ve managed my depression for most of my adult life. I always feel a sting when people use mental illness to either insult, or to explain a heinous behavior. Like this whole focus on mental illness when considering gun control. I’m all for gun control, but by and large mentally I’ll people are just a danger to themselves. There are many high-functioning, capable, and kind mentally ill folks out there (I’m one of them). Very successful people too, in high power and high responsibility jobs have bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, you name it. The stigma is so incredible and the ignorance so vast, that it’s even being considered in gun legislation. I’m sure many a gunman has been mentally ill, but many have not, just like any other person who makes choices to hurt people: some are sick, some are not.
*should read “mentally ill people”, not mentally I’ll.
Right. A lot of the “autistic kids have no empathy” steam comes from parents who want hugs, not from the kids too overwhelmed to want give hugs. It’s not wrong of the parents to want hugs – physical affection is common for humans – but it does lead to a misread of the situation.
And like I said, one of the scientists studying the brains of people with sociopathy himself has the lower bar of emotional response (he studied himself and had a somewhat rude awakening). Clearly there is more going on than just the native state of the brain.
Animal cruelty (along with wetting the bed late into childhood and setting fires) are common childhood signs found in the childhoods of people who do reprehensible things, but we don’t actually have data on how common those are in childhood – that is, we find the reprehensible people and study their pasts in order to figure out how they became reprehensible, but we don’t study non-reprehensible people to find out what might be in common. For that reason, you have to be chary with conclusions based on a lot of the data we have on criminality and mental illness.
About 30% of teenage/young adult offenders in mass shootings (in the US) had previous contact with mental health services. There appears to be some evidence of depressive symptoms combined with some symptoms of sociopathy which might lead to these events, but the data is very thin, and I feel the need to emphasize that this is such a subset of the population of both people with depression and people with sociopathy that it is completely inappropriate to make any conclusions based on either a diagnosis of depression or a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder.
“*should read “mentally ill people”, not mentally I’ll.”
OMGS auto-correct does that to you too?!
Deoridhe — I think the point was that even if 100% of shooters where mentally ill, they’d still be a tiny fraction of mentally I’ll people. So when the media just says “shooter is mentally ill” all people hear is “mentally ill people are dangerous”, not “dangerous people are more likely to be mentally ill than other sub-groups of the population”.
I mean, I know you get this, but 30% of shooters are mentally ill gets read by the public, when MSM does it, as 30% of mentally I’ll people are dangerous. Because (to steal a favorite line form MiB) “a person is smart, people are stupid.”
Oh, yeah, that is absolutely accurate.
Oh, I wasn’t trying to draw/suggest conclusions with the animal cruelty example, I hope it doesn’t read that way! It could come from all sorts of sources, couldn’t it? A childhood of abuse comes to mind, though I don’t know whether that’s accurate. No, I mentioned that section to illustrate how utterly horrible I found the person who wrote this book, and because it was an example of lack of empathy that went straight into sadism territory. That’s the sort of extreme I associate with sociopathy. That the author is then going on about “Hey, you could be a sociopath too if you have this, this or this characteristic! Welcome to the club!” just made it worse. It was less like an actual disorder/mental illness/thing the person can’t help than someone revelling in being a total shit.
Which goes full circle to MRAs and PUAs, curiously enough.
Nor is the media likely to mention that hey, guns are everywhere in the US and look at the resistance to background checks and so on …
Deoridhe:
“About 30% of teenage/young adult offenders in mass shootings (in the US) had previous contact with mental health services.”
I would venture to say 30% of the whole us population has at one point sought mental health services. It is entirely too common an experience for humans; good humans and despicable humans alike. Therefore, it can scarcely be a determining factor in really any behavior. If I’m understanding stats correctly, which it is highly likely I’m not, hehe.
Argenti,
Yeah it does! And never when I actually want it to. Like texting hubby “ill get kids” and he thinks I’m telling him their sick.
Autocorrect seems to be one step dumber than the grammar correct in Word, and that’s saying something.
My autocorrect used to correct “so” to “do” all the time. I fixed it one day by just typing “so” over and over and correcting it back every time until the silly phone got the message.
To be quite selfish for a moment: when people use “crazy” to mean “bad person” it reminds me that not only do they not trust me to be fundamentally good, but that they don’t even care enough about me to give a damn how it might affect me if I am exposed to that opinion. Or, more generously, they just forgot that people like me are common enough that any of us might see it. When people call out use of ableist language here, I am reminded that this is one of precious few spaces where people do trust people like me to be good, and they do care. /self-centred ranting
AVFM got ahold of a satire piece and are now shopping it throughout the manosphere as though it were legit.
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/study-reveals-female-rape-victims-enjoyed-the-experience/
Actually that’s a random question – why does Word insist that himself and herself aren’t real words?