I‘ve been traveling, so I’m a bit late getting to the whole “Don’t Be That Girl” poster controversy in Edmonton. For those of you who don’t already know all about it: A group called Men’s Rights Edmonton, closely associated with our favorite Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men, has been putting up some pretty obnoxious posters parodying an anti-rape poster campaign called “Don’t Be That Guy,” turning the anti-date rape message into one that targets alleged false accusers of rape.
Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams has a pretty good dissection of the whole thing here. As she notes, one of the biggest problems with the “Don’t Be That Girl” posters is
the idiotic defensive assumption that [the original “Don’t Be That Guy”] campaign expressly created to educate men and women about consent merits a hateful, finger-pointing response. And it makes the classic presumption that getting drunk, hooking up and then crying rape is a standard chick operating procedure — an idea that is based, by the way, on no solid statistical evidence.
That’s as good as far as it goes, but I would go a bit further:
I don’t think that MRAs are really concerned about false accusations. If they were, they would be working with groups like the Innocence Project that actually help men (and women) who have been wrongly convicted for crimes they didn’t commit.
No, it seems to me that what they’re really worried about is true accusations.
MRAs, with these posters, and with their endless whinging about the alleged complexities of sexual consent, are trying to push back against the date rape awareness campaigns of the last several decades. MRAs and PUAs like to pretend that consent is a complicated and weirdly arbitrary thing — something that women decide to bestow or not to bestow on a whim, and that women sometimes like to retract after the fact.
Feminists say that whenever there is a question about whether or not you have consent, you need to stop and ask. MRAs and PUAs pretend that this somehow means the death of spontaneous sex if not all sex altogether.
Ironically, for all their complaining about the allegedly blurry line between consent and non-consent, many MRAs and PUAs want to keep that line as blurry as possible. But unlike feminists, who want the blurriness to be resolved before anything happens, most MRAs and PUAs seem to want “blurry” to count as “yes.” That is, unless a woman is shouting no, guys are good to go, and if a woman later says she was raped, it’s because she’s “That Girl” and she’s arbitrarily decided to revoke her consent after the fact.
That’s what’s so insidious about the “That Girl” poster campaign.
And that’s why those responding to it should point out the history of the people sponsoring the campaign. Men’s Rights Edmonton and its spokesperson, Karen Straughan (Girl Writes What) are both closely connected with A Voice for Men, which is actively helping coordinate MRA activism around the issue.
So it’s worth pointing out what A Voice for Men has previously posted about rape — and perhaps putting some of these things on posters.
AVFM founder and publisher Paul Elam blames date rape on its victims, writing in one notorious post — which regular readers here will no doubt remember — that women who are raped after drinking and going home with a man are “begging” to be raped:
I have ideas about women who spend evenings in bars hustling men for drinks … paying their bar tab with the pussy pass. And the women who drink and make out, doing everything short of sex with men all evening, and then go to his apartment at 2:00 a.m.. Sometimes both of these women end up being the “victims” of rape.
But are these women asking to get raped?
In the most severe and emphatic terms possible the answer is NO, THEY ARE NOT ASKING TO GET RAPED.
They are freaking begging for it.
Damn near demanding it.
And all the outraged PC demands to get huffy and point out how nothing justifies or excuses rape won’t change the fact that there are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.
Elam has also said that if he is ever on a jury in a rape case he will vote to acquit even if there is clear evidence that the accused is guilty, and he has urged other men to similarly “nullify.” Here is his exact quote:
Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.
The post of his in which this quote appeared is now missing from the AVFM site, but he has confirmed he’s said this elsewhere on the site. [EDIT: I’ve been informed that the original post is also available via the Wayback Machine here.]
Meanwhile, AVFM Editor in Chief John Hembling takes a certain pride in his callousness towards rape victims, and has gone so far as to make several videos in which he’s announced that he doesn’t care about rape, and that if he ever sees anyone being raped, he will simply walk on by. (You can find excerpts of both vidoes here.)
There are many other examples of the site’s utter contempt for rape victims, but perhaps the most telling is the site’s use of the term “rapetard” to describe people who take the issue of rape seriously.
The people behind the Don’t Be That Girl posters claim that they’re merely trying to protect innocent men from false accusers. Their real agenda is much more insidious than that.
So these posters promoting the idea that women accuse men of rape because they regret one night stands come from a group that’s affiliated with another group where the head guy in charge thinks that some women are “begging to be raped”, that he would vote not guilty on a rape trial even if there was overwhelming evidence that the victim (and I’m assuming the victim would be a woman, because according to Paul Elam, “women are begging to be raped”) had been raped, and where another prominent member of the group says that he’d just walk right on by if he saw someone (again, presumably a woman) being raped.
Wow this “men’s rights movement”, it’s…it’s certainly a big, rancid pile of something, that’s for sure.
About fourteen-fifteen years ago, during my student days, I think a friend of mine falsely accused a guy of sexually assaulting her (although I didn’t say to her that I didn’t believe her, since obviously I couldn’t be certain). Without going into lots of detail, I doubted her because
a) her story was pretty weird, for various reasons
b) I had also found out that she was a mythomaniac who made shit up all the time, but had trouble even herself separating truth from stories (she’d sometimes tell different versions to different friends of hers, and once even lied to me about something that had happened when I was present, which she wouldn’t have done if she’d been completely conscious about her own lying).
She had a drug problem, and I think trying to cover that up was what started her lying.
She never went to the police with this accusation, but told a number of people in our student club. Although most people ended up believing the guy, who claimed that her story was completely made up (i e, he didn’t say they’d done something consensually, but that the story was completely without any basis in reality).
My guess would be that those few cases of false rape accusations that do happen are stories like this, where the accuser is deeply troubled in some way. I think if someone were to research cases of actual false accusations, zie’d find not just that false accusations are rare to start with, but also that the typical MRA scenario of “woman has one-night-stand, regrets it the next day, tell everyone she was raped” makes up a small percentage of these false accusations.
@becausescience: Ugh. I desperately want to like that article, but in the first paragraph they try to pass of Diederik Stapel as an evolutionary psychologist and he just kinda wasn’t. Creepy weasel-wording “his work shared a lot of overlap with evopsych” is terrible, too.
Even a noble cause like this, no justification for stuff like that,
SittieKitty – I’m baffled: you’ve told your friend umpteen times to cut it out with the playing devil’s advocate/treating real issues like an intellectual game, and he stops doing it on that topic – but starts all over again another time on another topic?
WTF is with him?
And given the things that they claim are “destroying male sexuality”, I have to wonder what exactly they think male sexuality IS. Like, if making sure you have consent from your partner before sex, and not making repeated unwanted/inappropriate sexual advances towards people is “destroying male sexuality”, then you’re saying that you think male sexuality inherently means unchecked sexual aggression.
That too. Are you guys aware just how much negative information about yourselves you’re giving away there? Because by making those arguments you may as well write I AM A POTENTIAL RAPIST, YOU DON’T WANT TO EVER BE ALONE WITH ME on your forehead.
becausescience – yes, if those things were “male sexuality” then damn, yes, it should be destroyed.
Kitteh, he likes to argue. I like to argue as well. Usually it’s about silly things like proper ways to train my kitty to eat wet food or what he should do to convince his brother’s wife to help out at the cottage. I also suspect he’s envious of/really interested in my way of thinking and trying to understand it in the only way he knows how. He’s got practically no social skills when it comes to picking up social cues, and has a mental block about what’s implied vs what’s actually literally said so he doesn’t get implications of words or body language almost at all. Yeah, he’ll stop on that topic at that time but will bring up something similar or whatever at some later time.
I’m an incredibly patient person and usually really happy to explain things best I can. There just comes a point where it seems like I’ve lost track of the conversation and I get frustrated because, while I’m brilliant at explaining things in text-based formats, I’m not so good at verbal explanations. Plus, I’m way beyond Feminism 101 subjects, so trying to impart all the knowledge you need to have in order to have higher level discussions is really challenging for me, because I’ve forgotten what it is I can’t just assume is common knowledge. I am surrounded so much by people who know and understand feminism that I always have trouble “dumbing it down” in order to try to explain to someone who doesn’t understand the feminist critique structure and common established tropes. Especially when I’m attempting to do it verbally. Usually, in text, I can do it really well, but verbally I keep remembering things I have to add in order for my main point to make sense and I try to give too much information all at once.
Honestly, I think he wants to see the world my way, like he knows there’s something broken in his way of thinking, and is trying to get to my position as logically as possible – kinda like how people who read a script/book ask questions about perceived plot holes in an effort for the narrative to make perfect logical sense? Unfortunately, the lack of social skills really impacts his ability to ask questions in a sensitive manner. And he’s mighty privileged, but he’s more ignorant of how that privilege manifests than recognizing that he has privilege and then deliberately/maliciously ignoring the consequences. Sometimes I think he tries to say “Oh, I was just devil’s advocating” in order to avoid embarrassingly admitting he doesn’t understand/his thinking is broken so he can save face a bit.
You have so much more patience than I do. Which isn’t a criticism, just an observation about differences in relationship styles. When I run into people who do the devil’s advocate thing I tend to just go “either you will stop doing that or I will stop discussing these issues with you”. I also have little to no patience with people with few social graces (another reason I avoid the SFF community irl). I’ll cut people slack for saying or doing something obnoxious once, if I like them and don’t think any malice was intended, but one second chance is all they get.
Which I guess is part of why so many trolls get very angry with me. I’m actively refusing to fulfill a social rule that women are “supposed” to take on.
Oh jeez.
“Give him a reading list” is all I can think of after that! I couldn’t deal with someone like that, seriously. I haven’t the patience, and I think I’d have reached the “STOP TREATING HORRIBLE THINGS THAT HURT REAL PEOPLE LIKE THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS” stage long since. That’s without having anything like your depth of knowledge about feminism.
OT but that reminds me of a funny bit of – not mansplaining, exactly, and certainly not devil’s advocate douchery, at work the other day. Co-worker is all excited ‘cos he heard a radio program about Louis XIV, and wanted to tell me all about it, ‘cos Mr K.
1. He got the king wrong.
2. He went on to get it wrong about who that king was married to (two wives, neither of whom was called Louise).
3. He made a bollocks of trying to talk about Versailles.
4. He knows I’ve been learning about Louis since before he was born.
The boss sat back and tried not to laugh during this – “this” mostly being co-worker getting a fact wrong and me interrupting him to correct it. “That’s not a topic where I’d dare try teaching you to suck eggs” was boss’s comment when we were laughing about it later.
/derail
Cassandra – hear, hear!
In general, I’m vocal about my feminism and happy to explain to people who seem ignorant (I admit, I’ve been told by many different people that I’ve more patience than anyone they’ve ever seen.) For example, when I’m around people with whom I value the friendship I have with them, and I know their reaction/arguments to a certain position I have, I just refuse to have any discussion at all with them about any of it. Which kinda annoys them, but I tell them flat out we can either discuss this and risk my never wanting to be around them again, or we can not discuss it and they can keep their shitty opinions to themselves (I have a couple friends like that).
There are issues I refuse to discuss with him. He tends to get a pass on the devil’s advocate bullshit because it’s a) not frequent, b) he isn’t doing it out of anything other than ignorance, c) he does legitimately try to understand my view and I think he wants to believe as I do (which leads me to believe he’s often not actually devil’s advocating even when he says he is) and d) he really is like family, and I have been very blessed to have a very good relationship with my family so I would find it hard to divorce myself from that.
Ha, Kitteh, I know that feeling (re: coworker). I get that about my muse every so often and mostly just facepalm and smirk at the reactions I’m getting from him in my head (my muse is snarky).
I’ve started to amass a reading list of links, I think I’ll just send him a bunch of stuff every week and after he’s read it I’ll let him talk about it. My convo last night about the rape/false rape accusations made me send him the stats on false rape accusations, linked upthread, and the CDC report on IP and Sexual violence. I’m kinda interested in how he’ll react.
Seriously, I’m admittedly kinda fucked up. I love to argue entirely too much, I like explaining shit – it’s almost a compulsion – stopping arguing with OF the other days on here is prolly the fastest I’ve ever stopped explaining to someone and that was only because a) victim-blaming shit made me pissed and b) he got banned. I’ll argue shit even after I’ve been triggered as long as I’m not a crying mess, and I’m massively good at compartmentalizing so I don’t deal with anything emotionally triggering until after the argument is done when I start to break down and obsess. It’s a self-harm fault. I’m better than I was, but I’m still not great at it. And having the patience I do only makes it worse, not better.
One thought – although you’re willing to tolerate the devil’s advocate shit to some extent because you love him, others may not be. If it was me I’d be inclined to point out that if he doesn’t learn to rein that in then it’s going to cause him to lose friends and alienate people for the rest of his life.
I must object to the idea that society would expect women to explain to male idiots why they’re wrong. I think the female gender role is rather to accept, when a man says something, that he’s got a valid point.
I ignore the trolls here because they’re hopeless anyway, and I personally don’t find shouting at them amusing, but each to their own. When it comes to not-quite-hopeless-people I do explain to them, whether afk or on the net. There’s this guy I meet through work sometimes who tend to make MRA:ish comments from time to time, and I’ll usually go “no, that’s wrong, because VALID REASONS” (sometimes I can’t be bothered to correct some misunderstanding of his, but usually I’ll point out where he goes wrong). He’ll be like “um, okay, maybe, I have to come back to you about that” although he never does. I don’t think women have an obligation to explain why men are wrong when they are, but I don’t think it’s more revolutionary to just get pissed off and yell at them either.
He knows it, he’s okay with it. Neither of us have very many friends – he doesn’t like people because they’re unfathomable to him with the social cues issues and I don’t trust people and can’t bring myself to trust people in person unless they’ve been proven trustworthy through years of interaction. The people he is friends with already understand his oddities and accept it. And he can be charming enough when he wants to be, he just knows to avoid talking about anything in depth with people who don’t understand his way of interacting with people.
Adding: Although I’m not actually friends with people who have idiotic views. I can’t be arsed to actually sustain friendships with people like that.
I’ve been told plenty of times that it’s my job as a woman to patiently explain things to men, and hold their hand through the process of figuring out how to be a decent human being. Whether or not a given woman feels like it’s worth doing so in a particular situation is up to her, but there’s nothing wrong with saying “fuck it, this isn’t my job” and walking away.
Also with the popehat thing we just witnessed an entire thread of “but the ladies need to patiently teach men how to behave/talk to them!” so, you know, not exactly a radical idea to point out that this is a social dynamic that exists.
You’ve got a point, Cassandra.
Yeah, I guess everyone just have to figure out for themselves how much they feel like explaining stuff, and that’s it. My personal limit: I’m fine with saying “you’re wrong because VALID REASONS” to someone who isn’t hopeless and will listen to the valid reasons in questions, but I’ll just ignore hopeless trolls. If someone wants to either explain over and over again to hopeless trolls, or shout angrily, or ignore everyone, that’s their call to make.
It depends what people are arguing about too. With some things I’m willing to engage, but if someone’s argument is based on the premise that women/POC/queer people/other marginalized group are un-people and don’t deserve the same level of rights and respect as white men then my inclination is to just cut the person out of my life. It’s a boundary issue – either you agree to give me X level of respect or you can GTFO.
I would posit that patiently explaining to someone is a form of acceptance. You accept the words – or at least, pretend that the man has a valid point, then try to politely negotiate a way around them so that both of you are walking the same path.
I have varying definitions of what hopeless trolls is, depending on my patience at the time. If it seems like there’s some way to explain, I’ll usually have a go at it. I suspect that’s more my annoyance at cognitive dissonance/misunderstanding words however, and not my desire to follow prescribed gender roles. When I’ve had enough I’m done though.
Well, there are different ways of explaining something to someone. There’s a difference between a) no, you’re wrong, because REASONS, and b) Oh, I see where you’re coming from here, I understand what you mean, although I don’t quite agree with you, I rather think that MY OPINION.
And yeah, everything in between a and b.
Yeah, I think B is more what Cassandra was talking about. I suspect that most people (even me) on this blog will say “No. You’re wrong because [valid reasons]”, where B is much more the prescribed feminine gender role when dealing with conflicts.
Also I think both/many approaches are useful because they combine to teach hypothetical person with awful idea how not-OK that idea is. For example, if hypothetical person states their stupid idea to three people and person a. tells him that they find that idea so offensive and dehumanizing they don’t want to be around him any more, person b. yells at him and calls him an idiot, and person c. explains why they find the idea so troubling, then part of what person with stupid idea is learning is that many different people with very different personalities and relationships to him all consider his idea to be unacceptable. I don’t think it’s an either/or situation where only one approach is valid, what determines which approach is right for you is your own personality/tolerance for explaining things/patience/level of emotional investment in that person.
I would find having someone repeat a pattern of “let me play devil’s advocate” after I’d told them that it drove me up the wall completely intolerable, but not everyone has the same personality.