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.
Also… and this is just my personal feeling whom I don’t expect anyone else to share, but… I really hate being angry. I really, really hate that feeling. By nature, I get angry really easily, I’m a pretty aggressive person, but I hate that. Over the years I’ve sort of managed to train myself into not getting angry quite as easily, but still…
I like what I’m like when I’m on high doses of Haldol, because that makes me really non-aggressive. I really like being non-aggressive.
(I think this may have something to do with the fact that my all-time favourite super “hero” on growing up was the Incredible Hulk. I could so easily empathize with Bruce Banner.)
I read a blog post by a Swedish feminist blogger some time ago, who wrote that she felt it was pretty empowering to have PMS and be easily pissed off. I just… completely not get it. I really don’t understand how someone can enjoy being easily pissed off, I really don’t.
Or perhaps I can if one regards the only other option to “pissed off” being “intimidated and eager to please”. If these are the only two options, yeah, then I get how one would prefer “pissed off”. But I totally prefer being completely mellow and having a rather non-active fight-or-flight module to both of these. Obviously I don’t want to accept shit that’s morally wrong, or accept being trodded upon, but I much prefer to just register intellectually that “this shit is wrong, I better say so (possibly with snark)” to being all emotional about it, because I hate having those feelings.
So either I’ll tell people “you’re wrong because REASONS” (in either contemptuous snarky or neutral voice, that depends), or I’ll ignore them, block them on Facebook, stop hanging out with them or whatever. Either of these options. I won’t get into angry arguments, not because I feel sorry for them, but because I don’t like being angry myself.
But this is just me. I’m not saying it’s wrong to be angry with other people when they’re being shitheads, it’s just my personal preference that I hate that emotion in myself.
That’s a really good point.
The fact that I don’t enjoy being angry is one of the reasons that I sometimes just walk away. With the example of someone who wants to play devil’s advocate with stuff that’s deadly serious to other people but where their privilege allows them to be dispassionate, their insistence on doing so would piss me off, and why be around someone who keeps pissing me off? Plus in some situations I do tend to see it as a respect thing, ie. if I’ve drawn a boundary and said “don’t do/say this around me” and the person keeps doing it then they are being disrespectful, and I’m not willing to tolerate that.
(Obviously this depends on the boundary you’re drawing being reasonable – if I said “never say elephant around me” then that would be kind of ridiculous, but “don’t advocate for a position that you don’t actually hold just because you find it amusing to do so” is perfectly reasonable, imo.)
The way I feel about this is that sure, the world is full of shitheads, but there’s no reason that my personal life has to be full of them. If being around someone is consistently making me angry/upset/stressed out then for me that’s a sign that I would be better off not being around that person.
I don’t like being angry either. My anger is pushed off and pushed off and pushed off (patience, apparently it’s one of those virtue things people talk about?) and then eventually I snap and have had enough and that’s the end of the conversation. I learned really early that if I was angry nothing was going to happen in my life (my parents wouldn’t talk with me if I was angry so it meant I would have to be calm if I wanted to have any sort of discussion).
I feel like I should clarify, he doesn’t make me angry or upset often, it’s rare and only about certain topics and he generally avoids them. So I’m okay with giving him a pass because 99.999% of the time he’s considerate and respectful and when he’s not and I’m upset he understands he’s fucked up and respects my telling him to (sometimes literally) fuck off because I can’t talk with him anymore. If I get to the point that I can’t ever have any of those conversations with him again, I know he’d stop trying to discuss it with me at all.
I think it’s one thing I’ve become better and better at as I grow older; realizing that there’s no reason why one can’t just not hang out with a certain person if that person is a pain in the ass. One doesn’t have to resolve all conflicts and make everyone see the light, one can just cut someone off. Or, in the case of obnoxious people one has to meet through, say, work, one can “mentally” cut them off and just not discuss things with them. Mentally sort them into the “hopeless idiot” box and be done with it.
I think one of the reasons I set such clear boundaries is that my father’s family is full of pushy people who are very bad at respecting boundaries, especially the boundaries of people who’re lower in the hierarchy. I don’t mean that they’re physically abusive, but there is a lot of emotional bullying and taunting of children, and a tendency to belittle the family members who don’t toe the line, so I learned early how to defend my boundaries. It’s served me very well as a an adult, so I guess there is an upside to having several uncles and aunties who’re total assholes.
I learned the opposite, I learned how to navigate so that people would respect my boundaries without my being blunt or rude about it – so that I wasn’t rocking the boat or wouldn’t be making waves within the family. I learned very well how to emotionally manipulate people into getting a reaction I wanted because that would avoid complicating my life in ways I might not be able to fix later. Which has also served me very well, but has had people label me a sociopath with empathy on more than one occasion – which at times I’m proud of and at times I’m embarrassed/ashamed of.
I don’t particularly care if people who I dislike perceive me as too blunt. Don’t think I’ve ever been called rude – I am British after all, so icy politeness tends to be the social weapon of choice – but if they do then eh, whatever.
The fact that I don’t have to be around my dad’s family very much helps. The only real social engineering necessary is being aware of the fact that my dislike of some of his siblings would hurt his feelings if I was obvious about it and therefore making sure that it’s not obvious to him, which I’m happy to do because as much as I dislike them I love him more.
Also, surely where a person is coming from in terms of class, race, gender presentation and so on has a huge impact on which coping strategies will work best for them. I don’t think that my way of dealing with this stuff would work for me if I didn’t have a whole lot of non-gender-related privilege to back it up, for example.
I don’t like being angry either, because it’s seldom the case that I can do anything about it. I can’t stop my general manager being a fuckwit who makes idiotic decisions. I can’t rip MRA’s brains out, clean them and shove them back in their skulls. Ditto the entire Republican mob in the US, the Coalition here and douchebags everywhere. All I can do is remove myself from the source, usually by not watching the news, or mock it here. I have an irritable temper and don’t enjoy being irritated or angry at all. I want to get away from that sort of thing.
I also loathe the “I’m so superior, dispassionate, logical” men who trot out this filth and then sit back and smirk when women, and decent men, get angry about it. No, dude, an empathy bypass doesn’t make you king of rationality. Being emotionally numb or dead doesn’t make you a superior specimen. It just says you’re lower than a snake’s belly.
For me it helps to recognize that they’re not actually being dispassionate at all. They’re often reacting in an entirely emotional way to things that for whatever reason confuse or distress them, and then trying to sell that reaction as “logical” after the fact.
Pointing this out is always fun.
Same as what you pointed out before, isn’t it – clinging to their privilege, and knowing they’re doing it. Plus, sometimes it seems to be the pleasure of causing distress as much as anything else, ie. trolling, whether online or off.
May they get cat diarrhoea in all their drinks and not know until they’ve tasted it.
Yeah. Whether you’re being logical or not depends on how you draw your conclusions, not on how emotional you get. Rationality is more complicated because there are different definitions and ideas about it in the literature. The standard version of instrumental rationality says you’re rational when, if you will the end, you also will the means. Then various philosophers have added to this that full rationality requires you to also recognize reasons for action that exist apart from your desires or regard reasons as universalizable, or… well, that’s what I thought of right now from the top of my head, there are various theories. The point is, none of these conceptions of rationality require that you be unemotional. Sure, being completely carried away by one’s emotions can make people act irrationally according to one or more of these interpretations, but being completely carried away is pretty rare anyway. And people can be calm and dispassionate and still superbly bad at drawing conclusions or recognize a valid argument if it were to bite them in the face.
I really think that 99 % of all smug white men who consider themselves kings of logic really don’t know what either logic or rationality means. They just sort of think it it means being a smug asshole.
I like when they are all “rational” and dripping with superiority and then slowly that facade drops and they get more and more upset. That’s one of my favourite parts of this blog and its comments. And then and then and then, the images of kittens just pushes them into a frothy rage 😀 It’s hilarious beyond explanation how mad they get over being treated flippantly.
Part of what I was trying to get at too was the idea of women being expected to perform the emotional work of soothing men’s upset feelings. So instead of saying “that thing you just said was really stupid” we’re expected to soften the blow with indirect language and gently persuade if we’re going to disagree.
Trolls are a whole other issue, since as you said their main aim is to upset people.
There are few things funnier than watching someone throw a tantrum about kitten videos. And yeah, “I don’t care” and “wow you’re ridiculous” get under their skins like nothing else.
omg, i’m almost through that popehat thread. I kinda want to write a short fiction story about cons based on it…
Also, pecunium is amazing in it.
“I really think that 99 % of all smug white men who consider themselves kings of logic really don’t know what either logic or rationality means. They just sort of think it it means being a smug asshole.”
DING DING DING
It also means being superior to women, of course, because women are emotional and that means they can’t think like dudes, who are superior because they are not women! (Dudelogic)
Kitten power forever.
If it had been just one asshole then that thread wouldn’t have been so bad, it was the way that one person would say something jaw-droppingly dumb and offensive and then 5 others would go “indeed, how right you are my good man, if only the females would recognize your wisdom” that pushed it over the edge into GTFO territory.
Hehe, I love the “YOU’RE GOING TO LOVE YOUR CATS FOREVER [an attempt at insult] AND YOU AREN’T BEING SERIOUS ENOUGH [YOU TOO-SERIOUS FEMINISTS]!!!1!ELEVENTY!!” reactions that happen here at least once a month.
Long time lurker, first time poster.
I’ve wanted A Voice For Men and their affiliates to stand down for a long time now. Because, as a man, I do not want my “voice” represented by a bunch of fearful, hate filled wastes of oxygen. I’m not sure I can define what being a “man” is or what masculinity is but it’s not about paranoia, fear and hate towards women. The sooner they rename themselves: “A Voice For Paranoid, Afraid Individuals Who Think Women Are Out To Get Them”, the better,
I really don’t get how someone can be quoted their own words directly back at them and still be like, nah, that’s not me man. ::shakes head:: my mind, it hurts to think too hard about it.
YOU HAVE MANY SMALL FURRY COMPANIONS TO CUDDLE, AND ALSO YOU ALL SEEM TO ENJOY TALKING TO EACH OTHER.
They really don’t seem to have quite grasped the whole idea of putting a hex on people.