The MRA hissy fit over Facebook continues. Over on A Voice for (Human) Men, our old friend John “The Other” Hembling offers up his take on the whole controversy, which has roused the usually torpid MRAs to “activism,” and somehow manages to be even more overheated and incoherent than even Paul Elam before him — and at times nearly as ponderous as the legendarily ponderous Fidelbogen as well.
His argument, if it can be called that, is as follows: by demanding that Facebook remove violent images of rape and abuse posted as “jokes,” the coalition of feminists who recently got Facebook to agree to ban violently misogynistic images are therefore endorsing what Hembling has decided is the “strongest signifier of fascism” — censorship.
Now, censorship is not actually the “strongest signifier” of fascism, merely one of many ingredients in the fascist souffle — alongside such things as, you know, authoritarian rule under a powerful dictator, nationalism, racism, etc. (Also they tend to have a thing about uniforms.)
And Facebook’s removal of rape “meme” pictures and the like is not exactly akin to a one-party dictatorship taking over the media and orchestrating massive book burnings. (Heck, I’m not exactly sure what exactly is supposed to make Facebook’s “censorship” any different from A Voice for Men’s recent announcement that it was clamping down on comments that Paul Elam thinks are too “distracting.”)
But even setting all this aside, Hembling’s charges against “Laura Bates, Soraya Chemaly, Jaclyn Friedman, and every their [sic] signatory to their open letter” don’t make a lot of sense. Here’s his grand summing-up of his would-be indictment:
It is a letter calling on the largest social networking site in the world to institute a program of demographically selective censorship; to institute the practice that is the strongest signifier of fascism.
Bates, Chemaly, and Friedman are not merely endorsing violence against those most impacted by it.
Um, how exactly does asking Facebook to take down pictures depicting violence make someone a proponent of violence?
Hembling doesn’t bother to explain this, and blathers on ahead to his melodramatic conclusion:
They are not merely ignorant or indifferent to the foundational nature of free speech to the establishment of all other human rights. They are not merely content to propagate false, fraudulent models of domestic violence which continue the conditions and causes of domestic violence. They are not simply adherents of an ideology of hatred and violence, wrapping itself in the increasingly transparent veneer of false and pious humanism.
Dude, you’re sounding like a stuck record here. You’ve already accused them of promoting hatred and violence — heck, you accused them of promoting violence at the start of this very paragraph!
Hembling — recently hired on to a paid position as AVFM’s Editor in Chief — desperately needs an editor himself. (Not to mention a proofreader.)
Laura Bates, Soraya Chemaly, Jaclyn Friedman are successfully promoting the signifying feature of fascism. They are fascists, and if you support their cause, that of censorship, you may be a fascist as well.
*looks at self*
No, I’m good. Pretty sure I’m not a fascist.
Hembling ends with a surreal:
Thank you for your kind attention.
Dear readers: let me just ask you to ponder the question I find myself pondering every time I read something by Mr. Hembling: Can there really anyone who reads posts like this from him and says to themself, “this makes sense!” Because his posts all seem like histrionic grandstanding to me, filled with startling leaps of illogic I think would be even too much for dedicated MRAs to make.
I can only imagine that Hembling’s MRA fans really only pay attention to the invective, and don’t bother with the (lack of ) logic, and that for them this whole post basically comes down to: feminists are fascists, feminists support violence, feminists hate men, these three ladies are bad.
They certainly aren’t checking his facts — indeed, Hembling’s piece includes numbered footnotes in the text, but he left out the actual footnotes, and links, that were supposed to run at the end of the piece, as is AVFM custom; his post has been up for several days, and no one there seeems to have even noticed the missing footnotes.
Also, Mr. Hembling, if you’re reading this, here’s a little PROTIP for you: if you want to pretend that you guys are, you know, actually against violence, you might want to think about removing that terrorist manifesto from your “activism” section — you know, the one that calls on MRAs to literally firebomb courthouses and police stations. Not really good PR for an alleged “human rights” movement, that!
“Freeze Peach” originated on Shit Reddit Says. Apropos of this discussion, it came about because of a denizen of reddit who didn’t like SRS criticizing hate speech on reddit and, like John the Otter, understood neither free speech nor proof reading.
Of course; it’s a theoretical (but possible) situation. And if it did happen, the problem still wouldn’t be private companies regulating the content on their sites, but rather a private company controlling the whole damn internet.
@katz
Right, of course. Didn’t mean to be harsh – it would just require extraordinary circumstances, like you said. It’s not often I get to flex my “sexy legal subjects” muscles in my personal injury/worker’s comp practice, so I have to do it on the internet 🙂
Facebook removed a picture of Jodi Arias holding up a sign that said “I need feminism because when I kill my husband, feminists will defend me.” How does that glorify rape or promote violence against women?
Agreed, Katz. It is a bit problematic that Facebook is so super-powerful while still a private company that plays by private company rules. But that is a whole different discussion than “how can they stop me from posting rape pics when we have FREE SPEECH!”
Plus, people don’t just pull the freeze peach regarding Facebook; they do it all the time with pretty small internet boards as well.
Babylawyer: No worries, you’re not being harsh. IANAL, as they say.
Another term that gets misused a lot is “self-censorship”. At least in the Swedish debate I think that term is constantly abused… It’s one thing to talk about “self-censorship” when you’re discussing the situation journalists and publishers face in certain countries which supposedly have freedom of speech, but where people criticizing the government tend to have accidents, and eventually everyone starts to censor their papers, TV programs and so on out of fear. That’s a real problem. But people in the Swedish debate often applies this term as well to people not expressing politically incorrect views because they’re afraid that they’re gonna have an angry Twitter mob or Facebook mob at their heels if they do. If people “censor” themselves, i e not say exactly what they think, for that reason, it’s not a problem.
@Dvarghundspossen (you’ll have to excuse the lack of the umlaut – I have no clue how to put it in there) – Excellent point. There’s a considerable difference between not venturing an opinion because you know it’s not popular versus keeping your mouth shut because you know that your opinion is widely considered actively offensive. For example, openly admitting to liking the band Nickelback, which will get you a lot of flack on the net, although their music and concerts sell well enough that there must be a lot of people who do like them, as opposed to being a Holocaust denier.
I’m curious to hear whether people think Facebook was correct* in pulling the particular AVFM image in question down, and on what grounds. Even the r/mr folks seemed to mostly understand that the statistics cited were questionable, but nothing in FB’s standards lists accuracy as a criterion. I suspect they pulled it because of the “Rape culture is bullshit” statement.
Here is the relevant section from their “Community Standards” page:
*Not whether FB had the right to do it, which isn’t in question as far as I’m concerned.
It’s perfectly okay not using ä but a instead. I write on a Swedish keyboard which has three extra keys for ä, å and ö, so I don’t have to actively do umlauts. 🙂
Considering the whole matter of those gosh darn frozen peaches, I’ve found the whole “Yelling ‘FIRE’ in a crowded theater” explanation to explain things perfectly.
Also, these MRA jackasses never consider that most decent people of either sex who want to look at those images. Facebook is not 4chan or those gore sites. Those pics should not even be considered “black humor”. Those pics show real people in real distress or bloodied & dead.
Also “Men’s Rights Movement” needs to be changed to a more appropriate term, “Masculine Supremacists”. I wouldn’t even call it a “movement”. It gives it too much legitimacy & respect.
I wouldn’t even call these losers “MEN”. They’re not worthy! I’ll call them “males” but not men.
Then there’s those Stepfords known as FeMRAs. How pathetic can a woman get?
About Peter Wright, “Occam’s RAZOAR”? Not only does he use a lot of elaborate wording in order to say, “Derp!” he can’t spell!
I went on a voice for men and It had a similar poster, saying that like virtually all rape happened to men in prison, yet people only care about those lying whores when women are rarely raped. It had some really really clearly false stats… And the background had a fence from prisons(I thought it was the fence from the holocaust actually… They might have accidentally used an Auschwitz photo but I think they meant it to look like a prison fence.)
Avfm’s Facebook page. Not their site.
@spukikitty
I don’t even know if I would consider them Male Supremacists, as they frequently demonstrate that they don’t care about all men (if they actively do anything to help men at all, which is extremely questionable). It’s more of a he-man womun haters club.
he-man womun haters club*
*only significantly less adorable than the one containing Spanky, Alfalfa, Buckwheat, etc.
…shouldn’t the word umlaut have an umlaut? Just for completeness?
(I know words and pronounciations don’t work that way, but they should)
Argenti, did you save a link to the post where you absolutely tore up those claims? Re: prison rape, lifetime vs. six months, etc.
Because, yes, prison rape is a problem. Nope, it still isn’t as big as the rape epidemic women face in this country.
I think FB is a little gunshy right now. They got caught out leaving disgusting stuff up, and now they’re over-reacting. I think it’s grey, and right now anything about rape, even if it doesn’t appear to be encouraging rape, is too much.
I think it’s because they lack the decency to actually tell what’s awful and wrong and what’s not. And unless they change their TOS, no, probably it’s not in violation as it stands.
They need to stfu about their “free speech” being violated. As noted above, Facebook is a privately owned website, and can choose what type of content it wants. Meanwhile, Paul “some women are begging to be raped” Elam “censors” his own website and doesn’t allow people to just post whatever they want. Of course, mra’s are fucking hypocrites who they want everyone else to have to live by rules that don’t apply to them, and they know damn well that if it was content on Facebook promoting violence against men, they’d be defending Facebook’s decision.
Ignorant hypocrites, the lot of ’em!
There’s a book by Jasper Fforde where a character successfully campaigns to have the spelling of “unspeakable” changed to “unspxfkble”.
Also, while it was focused on violence against women, isn’t the new Facebook policy supposed to apply to all gender-based violence? If so, shouldn’t the mra’s be rejoicing over the fact that if there are any pages making fun of men getting beat up or raped, the policy would apply to those pages too? Are mra’s (yet again) opposed to something that might actually help men, just because it also helps women and feminists played a role in making it happen?
Howard, I agree. I think there are other images on AVfM’s own FB page that would be more appropriate to report because they do target a whole gender (or at least a whole category of people-who-have-vaginas, which most people read as “women”), like stuff they’ve put up on the “pussy pass.” In fact, their image for that one also manages to be ableist as fuck.
Note: I am not reporting this image, or any other AVfM images, nor am I linking to it or encouraging anyone to report it. It just seems closer to what FB’s guidelines call impermissible.
I don’t think FB should have taken down that chart of AVFMs, but I think FB is probably gun shy at the moment and moderators are probably taking down everything that seems iffy or mentions rape. The fact that moderators are overreacting doesn’t mean this is all part of the evil feminist plan.
There was some avfm poster going around that had a picture of a woman sitting in a bedroom and said something to the effect of “It’s not rape just because your regret it the next day. Don’t be THAT girl!” I found that particularly reprehensible because rape survivors already have a difficult time coming to terms with what’s happened to them, or even acknowledging that it was rape in the first place, and shit like that poster aim to muddy the waters even further, essentially discouraging women from speaking out about their sexual assault by trying to re-position it as just “sex that you regretted”. They’re fucking vile.
My German professor was very strict about umlaut use.
http://www.theasciicode.com.ar/extended-ascii-code/letter-a-umlaut-diaeresis-a-umlaut-lowercase-ascii-code-132.html
Windows: hold alt and type 132.
On a mac, just (option + u), then a.
On Linux, haha figure it out yourself, turbonerd.
http://www.periodni.com/unicode_utf-8_encoding.html
&#D might also work, where D is the unicode decimal for the character in question. Let’s try: ä
Also useful for making ≠,™ etc.