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!
A voice for men’s last Facebook picture… It shows a photo of a young woman holding a sign that says “no means no and yes doesnt always mean yes”. Idk what to think of it. If she is talking about threats or intimidation then the poster makes sense, but idk if she’s talking about that or not. The comments are horrible as usual.
Also delicious irony, they have some photo saying basically “don’t like avfm? Then don’t go there!” And other crap. It’s got a drawing of some guy on it, like its a quote.
I want to post a parody of it but with AVFM replaced with Facebook. However I know I will be banned.
This whole idea that women go to the police and cry rape because they had consensual sex but regret it the next day MAKES NO SENSE. It may make sense in an alternate universe where people ADMIRE rape victims, but not in the goddam universe WE live in.
Seriously. It does happen that someone has consensual sex and the next day is like “WTF this is embarrassing I slept with a total dickhead” or something. So, what do you do in a situation like that? 1. Don’t make a big deal out of it and wait for everyone to forget about your embarrassing one-night-stand? 2. Make a rape accusation so that everyone will be talking about this, like, FOREVER from now on, and divide between regarding you as an evil lying bitch or a poor helpless little victim whom everyone has to tip-toe around from now on?
This is a fucking no-brainer!
If I were FB, I’d just ban AVfM as a hate group, period.
Yes, some of the things they publish are ‘ok’, but do you really want to pay mods to comb through their every post to see if it’s really rape apologist-y or not?
Looking up the “it’s not rape just because you regret it” poster I mentioned, apparently it wasn’t created BY avfm, but it has avfm’s url on it, and Dean Esmay said while they didn’t create it themselves, they still support its message. Yuck.
Here’s the blog post I found that has both the poster in question, and Esmay and Elam in the comments section, Esmay spouting the usual “false rape accusations are just as bad, if not WORSE, than rape, and women rape men just as often as men rape women, studies prove it!!!!”
http://thetruepooka.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/dont-be-that-activist/
Wasn’t Erin Pizzey saying just a month or so ago, that she thought feminism should be banned from being taught at universities, and mra’s ate it up, and now they’re all WHAT ABOUT ARE FREEZE PEACH when it suits them?
Hippie redneck –
What’s the point, is everything facebook decides the fault of all feminists now? It’s their private decision. I think most of us thought it was idiotic that they banned a sex ed diagram depicting the female reproductive system, but maybe that was feminists’ fault too? We didn’t invoke North Korea though.
That photo you’re talking about is pretty idiotic. Feminism questions traditional gender role. Since women are traditionally treated as children legally, the whole “she must have been brainwashed by a man to commit this crime is what feminism fights against. Yes, you’ll find different brands of feminists who think differently. However, if your argument is that Early Modern Europe (where this legal mindset originated) was plagued by feminism, then I don’t think we can have a discussion based on reality. However, Facebook can ban whatever it wants. Your free to get your friends to pressure the advertisers to have Arias’ picture back if you want.
The point of the discussion here is that mras actually think that the very exercise of free speech of private individuals is somehow censorship. While banning all who don’t fall in line with Elam. (again, the call to ban a commenter on the JtO post because she dared to say that she valued men’s rights as much as women’s rights is pretty interesting). In the meantime, they cry “authoritarian gynocracy” whenever they’re not allowed to piss on other people’s private property against the owner’s will.
Also, cognitive dissonance is a pretty interesting topic.
Taking down the Jodi Arias thing was probably an overreaction. OTOH, it’s also so much horseshit, so, yeah. (I can find no major feminist voices speaking in Arias’ defense. At most, a few noted early on that yeah, the crime bears some marks of the sorts of behavior that come out of long periods of abuse, meaning it was worth investigating that claim–which, far as I can tell, her defense team did to the best of their ability. In other words, the only ‘feminist defense’ of Ms. Arias was in the fevered and delusional minds of the MRA twits. Hell, even Redstate pointed out [read: whined] that feminist blogs were ‘silent’ about Arias, as opposed to claiming there was some campaign to defend her.)
Now you’re complaining because FB removed a picture that glorified violence against men?
Misandry!
(I am aware this was once again one of those AVfM attempts at “humor”, but the fact is that they suck at sarcasm/snark and you can’t expect some corporate drone to care about the fact that this was “just joking”. Hell, I expect the riot girls who post things like “Kill all cis men!” on my Twitter in an ironic manner would get any image that said such things banned as well.)
I seriously love this place! You guys are so awesome I’m normally content to lurk, because I feel like there’s nothing more to be said. Today, though, I feel compelled to address something that was said on the previous page.
Spukikitty said, in an otherwise very sensible post with which I thoroughly agree,
“I wouldn’t even call these losers “MEN”. They’re not worthy! I’ll call them “males” but not men.”
I feel like I have to speak up (and, spukikitty, please don’t take this as an attack against you personally, because I don’t mean it that way at all) because I’m incredibly uncomfortable condoning a view of gender or gender identity in which a person’s right to be referred to by words that describe their identified gender can be revoked because of that person’s actions. There is no action—not a single one—that can make an adult male-identified person lose the right to be a man, so refusing to use the word, to me, seems disrespectful in a way that harms not only the AVFMers (who deserve little to no respect, but, crucially, for a different reason) but to all people for whom the right to their preferred gender words is not automatically a given.
I don’t think you were trying to gender-police AVFM at all, spukikitty, but refusing to use the word men to describe people who identify that way smacks very much of the idea that there is a finite number of ways one can “be” a man, and if you step outside the bounds you deserve censure on the basis of your failure to adhere to gender expectations. I’d like to request that everyone be mindful of the ways in which language like this can entrench patriarchal and transphobic attitudes toward gender and gender identity. Thank you, all!
And we can, of course, continue to blast AVFM and their smelly movement-at-large for having terrible ideas and putting them out into the world in horrible ways, since that is, in fact, true! 🙂
@drashizu
<3 <3 <3
@girlofthegaps
Aw, thanks! *blush* I so like that this is place where I can say that and people get what I’m saying and why it’s important, too! You guys are awesome.
@drashizu
Yeah, I’m always wiggling in my chair with glee when someone’s like, oh hey, that’s ableist, or that’s a little transphobic, or what have you, and the other person is all, oh, you’re right, I didn’t mean it like that, I’m sorry, won’t do it again.
What is this rational behavior of apology and trying to change for the better! 😀
drashizu, that is a good thing to point out. Culture loves to play the “she’s no lady” card to anyone who doesn’t behave the right way (and often the “is she even a woman?” card to people who don’t look the right way), and saying “he’s not really a man” is no better.
I don’t know about their manhood, but their humanity is definitely suspect.
@ David Futrelle
That’s exactly what the evil feminist mastermind would say!
@drashizu, thanks for speaking up. 🙂 That comment made me a little uncomfortable too but I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it nearly as well as you did.
Hey, so I know nothing really terrible has happened today, but I happen to have some industrial-strength brain bleach here and it does have an expiration date.
What Kitten Rescue did last weekend. Expires next Wednesday, so enjoy it while it’s here.
@drashizu, I read spukikitty’s usage of “man” to mean “male adult” – and these guys certainly fail at acting like adults – but you make an excellent point.
@katz – *looks at cute guys*…*looks at cute kittens*…*cute guys*…*cute kittens*…*asplodes from cute overload*
When I was child I had problems with my mother, so I find outrageous the sentence given by feminism to justify fb double standard: men are less sensitive to hate speech than women. Also women can be bad and also boys can be sensitive and offended. It’s not just a matter of gender, it’s a matter of bad people and good people. I’m italian and ask being tolerant with my english.
Facebook has said that men are less sensitive to hate speech? Where?
Uh, sorry, you said feminism not fb. Anyway, I don’t know about all feminists out in the world, but the one’s I know don’t think men are less sensitive to hate speech. Where did you get that from?
I’ll search the source, be patient please.