Men’s Rights activists have discovered something that Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and the rest of his gang at the Westboro Baptist Church learned a long time ago: outrageously offensive signs can mean media coverage.
Canadian MRAs associated with A Voice for Men recently got attention in Edmonton for posters mocking a date rape awareness campaign. Now some of their compatriots have captured the attention of the media with posters in Saskatoon.
This time the MRAs toned down the offensiveness in favor of simple outrageousness, combined with a healthy dose of incomprehensibility. The most incomprehensible of the current lot is probably this one, which comes straight from the A Voice for Men poster page:
But my favorite is this one:
I was originally going to write a sort of rebuttal to this, pointing out that by most measures Canada is, generally speaking, a rather unfrightening place for men (and women), what with its high standard of living, decent health care, relatively low crime rate, and so on.
I mean, if I were to pick a frightening country to live in, as a man (or a woman), I would probably pick someplace like, you know, Somalia, North Korea, Sudan or South Sudan, someplace like that. Syria’s probably not a great place to visit at the moment either.
But then I was thinking: Canada’s main problem, in terms of its international reputation, is that people tend to think of it as boring, not frightening.
Maybe Canada should embrace the whole “most frightening place to be a man” thing, and take advantage of this silly quote from Erin Pizzy to promote itself as scary, edgy, intense, EXTREEEEEMMME!
Maybe with some posters like the one at the top of this post?
I don’t know. I’m not that great at photoshop. Perhaps some of you would like to have a go at it? I know we’ve got some talented MRA poster-parodists here.
I was under the impression that high heels were originally used to accentuate a man’s calf muscles and give him height. However, it appears that they were originally used to help keep a rider’s feet in the stirrup. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21151350
Yup, they started as riding equipment and went on to become fashion. That shoe at the top of the page is a very high late-seventeenth century effort. Heels like stilettoes were around by then, and not for women necessarily, either. If you look at Philippe d’Orleans in this picture (he’s standing just left of centre, behind the King and looking out at the viewer) you can see how much narrower his heels are than the block heels most of the men are wearing.
It’s also a great picture to show how far French and Spanish fashion had diverged by 1660.
Sorry about it being black and white, it was the biggest pic of the tapestry I could find.
Not that riding boots had to be high-heeled, of course; just some sort of heel was helpful. Charles I was noted as a tasteful, fashionably dressed man; he was also short, about 5’4″, but he doesn’t bother with uber-heels here.
And ‘cos I can, here’s someone else in beautiful boots.
I wonder about the bit that says Louis XIV was 5’4″; the Bourbons were medium-to-short, yeah, but is that in English or French measurements? Mr K is about 5’7″ these days and he was described in his earthly time as being of a “middlesized proportion”, but Anne was taller than he (though I think the Habsburgs were tallish – anyone know about that?)
Oh poop, html fail.
Charles I and Henrietta Maria departing for the chase.
There’s a Gor parody, quite a bit longer than Houseplants of Gor, titled “Bejeweled Gay Nazi Bikers of Gor”, that I enjoyed quite a bit. Found it through the Encyclopedia Dramatica entry on Gor, which is also, but not quite as, amusing. There was also one titled “Nosepickers of Dawr”, that I read so long ago it wasn’t online, but in print.
In short, people have been finding Gor amusing / horrifying for a looong time.
The best part about the story Robert is talking about was the ultimate punishment once delivered to a slave girl.
(Being made to copy-edit the narrator’s manuscripts.)
Heh – I read a long thread about Gor yesterday and one comment was that part of what made the later Gor books even worse was that nobody seems to have edited them at all.
I had a comment disappear earlier (thank you wordpress) and wanted to add, high-five to taskshak’s friend who got Norman pissed off with her role-reversal parody. Welldonewelldonewelldone!
This is particularly fucked up, because GWW was almost sexually assaulted herself, and the only reason it didn’t happen was because the two boys about to do it saw that there was someone watching them. She wrote about it on her blog, it’s a post called “My Recovery From Sexual Assault,“ I think (don’t feel like going there now to link to it). I mean, the person who stopped them was just standing there… Does she really not see how bystanders have a HUGE influence on people’s behavior? Also, she doesn’t go into a huge amount of detail about the boys, but says they were typical “bad“ boys from her school, and how she wonders if they were terrified about getting in trouble, and how whenever she sees them again they look super nervous. She does not make it sound like these were psychopaths. These sound like regular, stupid, drunk teenagers.
It’s sa, because her post had potential to be really good; She talks about how on her walk home afterwards, she realizes that she would have still been the same person as before, and it’s actually is pretty empowering. But of course, this experience gives her no understanding of what other people go through, how different people take more time to get over things, how sexual assaults can be extremely violent, etc,. It gives a lot of insight on why she thinks the way she does about rape. She says that by the time she got home, she felt so much better about it that she didn’t even feel the need to talk to her parents about it, just knowing that she could get them in trouble made her feel better (and talks about how she smiles at them every time she sees them again because of this). So, we can see why she doesn’t have much, or ANY empathy to rape victims. HER rape wasn’t traumatic, she didn’t even tell her parents about it, rape can’t be THAT bad!
It is not a bold statement at all to say she lacks empathy. She most certainly does.
There is my GWW rant for the day.
**It’s sad
Grrr I wish I could edit posts!
Personal experiences like that aren’t necessarily formative. I mean, some people start out with a certain political perspective and then everything they experience is colored by that perspective. A victim of rape that has started out as an fMRA can easily rationalize any traumatic feelings away as a personal weakness that she needs to overcome that doesn’t reflect on the horror of rape. It might not be psychologically healthy obviously.
>>>Hmm. I notice a trend where once women start trying to be included in something, that thing drops in status.
Or vice-versa. During the early days of computing (WWII), programming a computer was considered akin to secretarial work and was done by women. Job only got status when men started doing it.
@Misery: My speculation is that people interpreting everything that happens to them in a way that confirms their original beliefs is actually more common than people changing beliefs due to new experiences.
TIL about high heels shoes. Tbh, they are about the most painful thing you can do to yourself, and cause permanent damage if used over a long enough time. I haven’t read either of the stories, so I don’t know what Save the Pearls is, and the MRA one’s been taken down, not that I care to read it either. I still think that wearing high heels all the time is worse, it would be so incredibly painful
For the wiki Gor link, anyone notice this little blurb at the bottom?
(Emphasis mine)
I mean, censorship and misandry all in one!! Canada is truly a land of terror. Also, while I’m aware that Canada has some strong censorship laws, particularly regarding sexual exploits, I’m surprised that these books are so bad that they’re in violation of the law – you can pick up Marquis De Sade books at the local Chapters (which, as an aside, are also in violation of Canadian law)… Maybe it’s because it was image and not written word?
Although, I should add, that the law makes no distinction between written word and imagery, if it’s illegal in one for (sexual) censorship reasons it’s illegal in the other.
re high heels and riding: The Heel is a defensive tool in non-military riding. It keeps the foot from passing through the stirrup if one is unseated; it also lets one apply a lot more leverage if one has to fight the horse for its ‘head’ (and the word headstrong comes from a horse that doesn’t like to be controlled with bit and bridle, but I digress).
But in regular circumstances the ball of the foot is what’s in the stirrup. A high heel (more than about 2′) actually makes it a bit harder to ride, because the weight pulls the foot down, and if one has to put one’s heels down (i.e. go all the way into the stirrup) they point one’s toes up too far for really good control.
A low heel gives some advantages in muscle driven fighting, with weapons, on foot, as well as making it easier to march with a heavy pack.
*High* heels have always been a purely fashionable device (E.g. among the vaqueros of the American West. The super tall heels were to show that one was so good a rider the handicap wasn’t a problem).
I want to highlight part of this: One of the more methodologically sound studies out there puts the rate of accusations determined false to a reasonable doubt standard among university students at 5.9 per cent. Keep in mind that, despite being three times higher than the false report rate for other crimes, this is a minimum estimate of the false report rate, just as the 6 per cent of rape reports that end in conviction is a minimum estimate of rate of genuine sexual assault reports.
1: Straughan takes a subset (college students), and compares them to all rape cases.
2: Straughan accepts that ~6 percent of rape accusations are false.
3: Straughan accepts that of those non-false accusations ~6 percent lead to convictions.
4: Straughan makes a difficult to comprehend statement about what that 6 percent means, but the implication is that only those “real” reports lead to conviction, by extension the lower bound of one (false reports) is extremely lower, and the lower bound for the other is somehow reflective of the actual numbers.
The idea is, I think, that juries see through all those lying women who lie, and so acquit their intended victims.
What I see is that rape is really hard to convince juries of, unless there was a weapon, injuries, a lack of acquaintance, and some dark bushes to leap out of.
SittieKitty: Perhaps de Sade gets an exemption on the idea of it being “classic”?
Fuck if I know pecunium, it’s straight up child sexual abuse prose. I don’t know why it’s so easy to purchase in stores. It’s not even in an adult’s section in my store (like, adult as in directed to adult, not even adult as in “Adult’s only”), it’s sitting on the fiction/fantasy shelf with other modern fiction novels. It’s painfully easy to find and it’s not just one of his novels, but most of them that are in print. But really, even if it’s “classic” because it’s written hundreds of years ago (and it’s shitty writing actually, having read them because I’m completely masochistic some days and I read everything I get my hands on, like really shitty writing just on a technical level), it’s still in violation of Canadian child porn laws – which is any description/depiction of children in sexually suggestive situations regardless of media used, or anything used to encourage arousal even if it’s not sexually explicit. Things written hundreds of years ago shouldn’t be given a pass simply because they’re old. I mean, the word sadism comes from de Sade for a reason.
I took a few horseback lessons about 15 years ago. I got some cheapo shoes with a heel of less than an inch.
Pity I learned to ride English in the South. Everyone else wants you to ride Western.
In general I enjoy riding, but I sometimes have trouble with the height and there’s always the underlying feeling that the horse has a will of its own and might take it into its head not to listen to me.
… I guess I’m not all that good in the saddle. At least I’m not a complete dead weight at a trot.
I used to take riding and jumping lessons. I always preferred Western saddles, but English was so much easier to tack up and you can’t really do jumping in Western. I grew up in the west, so ranching was pretty common and horses were something I had a bit of an obsession with when I was younger. I had to stop because it got too expensive, but I’ve always loved riding.
RE: Falconer
You too? We took some horseback riding camps back as a wee singlet, though it was all Western style. It was pretty good; we learned a few simple tricks and how to groom horses. All Western though, of course.
AFAIK, Western isn’t so different from English except in how you hold the reins.
I learned more about grooming a horse than about riding. I didn’t even pick up any tricks, and I’ve never jumped a horse.
We grew up with a horse, who used to be a racehorse but got too old (by which I mean, like, five) and our grandfather bought him and gifted him to us. We tried riding him, but I stopped after I fell off when he decided he wanted to head for the barn and didn’t have the sand to get back on the horse, which I regret to this day.
He wasn’t the sweetest of horses.
By “we” I mean my brother and I.
Our lessons were bought from a woman just outside Lexington, KY. I remember turning up one day and the stallion she was boarding had put his hoof through the door to his stall in the night.
I don’t think he was very hurt, but boy was I glad I was just riding mares.
She was boarding this deep black mare with a white star, and kept her in the stall while the sun was out at the direction of the horse’s people, so she wouldn’t fade to chocolate, so I didn’t get to see her except through the stall door. She was gorgeous.
Always double check your cinch.
I used to ride English style too, Falconer, and I prefer it to Western — Western saddles are bigger, and that made it harder for me to communicate with the horse (and vice-versa). My favorite horse was a retired Olympic jumper, and I used to love taking him over jumps.
But my very first experience on a horse involved him bolting because something spooked him, so it’s amazing I ever got back on.
RE: Falconer
We never did jumping. Thankfully, we never had much fear of horses, and the camp we rode at, the horses were very docile. I never remember having a problem with any of them. Good thing too; if it comes to a fight between man and horse, the horse will win.