When is a false rape accusation not a false rape accusation? When it’s leveled against a feminist man.
That, in any case, is the logic behind an appalling post on A Voice for Men attempting to smear a male feminist blogger named Jason Thibeault, who posts on FreeThoughtBlogs as Lousy Canuck, by proclaiming him a rapist.
The post is a typical bit of AVFM “satire” — that is, sophistry — arguing that “by his own feminist standards” Thibeault is a rapist … because he was once accused of rape by a girlfriend, as he wrote about in a recent post. And since feminists believe that ALL accusations of rape are true, AVFM’s Birric Forcella argues, Thibeault is thus a “confessed rapist.”
Obviously, this argument is ludicrous on its face. Feminists don’t believe that all accusations of rape are automatically true. And Thibeault, for his part, says that he was falsely accused.
This doesn’t stop AVFM from giving their piece the frankly libelous headline: “FreeThoughtBlogs’ Jason Thibeault, confessed rapist.”
AVFM may defend its post as “satire” — they have a rather expansive definition of the word — but that headline is pure libel. It’s false — and would be so even if the accusations of rape were true, as Thibeault (who’s responded to the AVFM post here) maintains his innocence.
And AVFM’s intent is clearly malicious. In the first comment to the piece, AVFM founder and publisher Paul Elam declares frankly, and revealingly, “Karma is a BITCH.”
Thibeault’s real crime, in AVFM’s eyes, is that he has publicly supported women who have come forward in recent weeks to accuse prominent skeptic writer Michael Shermer of rape and sexual assault.
And so they have responded by making what is an unequivocally false accusation against him in a headline on their site.
Of course, this isn’t the first time A Voice for Men has falsely accused someone of something based on bad evidence or no evidence at all.
In April of this year, Elam (along with a number of other MRAs and an assortment of White Supremacists as well) worked himself into an uproar over a blog post from an alleged feminist allegedly working in a college admission office who claimed she was routinely trashing applications from white males.
Though even the most rudimentary amount of fact-checking would have revealed that the woman they blamed for the blog had nothing to do with it, she had her contact information posted online by MRAs and others, leaving her open to harassment and widespread vilification. Elam contributed to the hubbub by posting a vituperative post identifying the wrong woman by name — and only after being called on his mistake by numerous other MRAs did his finally retract the post.
You can read about the whole appalling affair here.
Elam has also made false accusations against little old me. In yet another case of libel-by-headline, he accused Jessica Valenti and me of being “child abusers” … because we’re feminists. (Seriously, that was the entire basis of his accusation.)
And at one point, either lying outright or misled by a troll, he put forth the absurd conspiracy theory that I was somehow responsible for an appalling Reddit forum known as the Beatingwomen subreddit.
In his post on the subject, he claimed to have “intel” from two separate sources that “confirm[ed]” my involvement in the subreddit — he provided none of this evidence — and promised that “further word” on the subject would be forthcoming.
Of course, this evidence never materialized — because it was fraudulent and/or imaginary. Elam dropped the subject. I had and have no connection to the subreddit.
And not long ago, AVFM’s Dean Esmay very publicly accused its former Canadian News Director Kristina Mendez (AKA TheWoolyBumblebee) of (maybe, possibly) running off with the money she collected for a center devoted to the memory of Earl Silverman, a Canadian MRA who committed suicide partially out of frustration over the difficulties he had in funding the DV shelter for men he ran out of his home. The folks at AVFM have admitted quite plainly that they have no evidence of wrongdoing here.
Apparently, AVFM’s strategy is to prove that false accusations are common by making as many of them as they possibly can.
EDIT: Added the bit about Valenti and me.
(And, hey, come up with a better term, I’ll use it as long as other people understand it. “TERF” doesn’t really cover enough of the belief cluster, but it’s all we have at the moment.)
I’ve yet to figure out just what sex-negative is supposed to mean. Sex-positive gets the caricature of “all sex is great, yay, everyone should be doin’ it and the kinkier the better” tossed around, but it is at least known to be a caricature. Sex-negative … well, unless it’s side-eyeing that caricature, or a caricature of some of the ideas Dworkin had (frex), I’m stumped.
*Side-eyeing the caricatured version of sex-positive, that is, or is itself a caricature of Dworkin et al. That was one botched sentence.
I think you’d have a legitimate case for telling them to go fuck themselves, honestly. That’s not terribly different from accusing someone of being a hypocrite because they don’t check off all the boxes of someone’s Straw Liberal Checklist.
Also, like Anders is saying, context. Some of the people concerned haven’t been in a hetero relationship since the 70s, and things were a lot different then. And, to complicate things further, the people we’re talking about are part of the reason WHY things are different now, because they spoke out back when things were very different.
kittehserf:
Like I said, the whole thing is not terribly coherent, and I suspect it varies based on who you ask. “Negative” definitely isn’t the right word for it, I agree.
TERF does seem to cover a lot, if what I’ve seen from old Radfem posts were any indication. The one about how the vagina is only meant for pushing out babies and how inserting a penis into it is TOTES UNNATURAL was worthy of a Poe’s Law award. 0_o
Agreed on that, CassandraSays. That’s the sad part, but it seems to be the case in a lot of fields of endeavor that sometimes people just hit a wall. Sort of like Einstein and his unwillingness to accept quantum mechanics.
AndersH – great post.
I almost wonder if the very questioning all the toxic stew of sex and gender roles and so on was enough to earn the label “sex negative” in the first place. We’ve all seen how that bullshit still gets thrown at women just for being feminist at all.
It’s sad that some of those people don’t seem to have been able to absorb the extent to which things have changed, especially since they deserve some of the credit for those changes. I tend to find talking to people like that more depressing than anything else.
@ kittehs
Even now just pointing out obvious sexism can get you labelled as sex-negative, which is part of why I find the term so unhelpful.
So, it’s resolved. We definitely need a new term. Unfortunately, I can only come up with words like “menufacture” and “descabitate”. That sort of silliness is not helpful here.
FST- Feminist Sex Tyrants?
no. the mras and assorted asses would have a field day. I probably should get some sleep
Yeah. Snark isn’t really appropriate for this particular job.
Cassandra – exactly. It’s like “guys, don’t do that” mentioned in passing in a fragment of a vlog got turned into “you want to stop all teh sex ever/castrate men” etc, etc, etc.
Are there really that many notable voices in mainstream feminism these days that could be called “sex negative” in the sense of hetero sex being automatically bad and to be avoided? It seems so unlikely (correct me if I’m wrong). Like you, I’m wary of the term simply because of how it’s used to swipe at any questioning of anything sexist.
Niters, neuroticbeagle! 🙂
I can think of one well known columnist in the UK who more or less fits into that bucket (Julie Bindel*), but in the US? Nope, not a one.
* And even then I don’t disagree with everything that she says, it’s just that as teiresias put it, she seems to have hit the wall in terms of her ability to look at things and contextualize them in a way that’s appropriate to current circumstances. Her attitude towards trans issues, otoh, I have zero sympathy for.
There’s not a whole lot of talk in the mainstream media here about sexual issues from any feminist perspective. We don’t have many newspapers that aren’t Murdoch-owned. My state has only two dailies, the Age and the Herald-Sun. The latter’s Murdoch and is getting more like the Sun in the UK every day. The Age … well, it’s left-wing by comparison with that rag (and don’t the Hun mob love complaining about it as if it’s a red ragger’s delight), but it can be pretty cringe-inducing itself at times. Feminist-leaning articles tend to be more about workplace stuff, for instance, or our grotesque politicians. And the Age still gives column space on occasion to that rape-promoting shit Bettina Arndt ::hurl::.
I can think of ONE occasion where I’ve seen an actual article about intersex issues, and trans* people might as well not exist for all the acknowledgement in our media.
I am the second “accused” in that mess of an article. My “defence” is that I was in India and the UK and can prove so via the fact I have no US Visa that’s valid at the moment so could not have physically been present at The Amazing Meeting (2013) in order to rape someone.
This is not only a false accusation it is also a stupid one.
The problem is? I kind of knew people would be coming out with this “AHA” moment. I work in charity. So I outed myself and defended my accusation with “the truth”.
For my troubles people are assuming that this is a breakdown, desperate cry for help and my girlfriend left me when all it really caused was a couple of weeks of chaperone, days off for administrative purposes and reinstatement. Why?
I am working in women’s healthcare in India.
The antis decided to defend it as “Accusing the person who brought up the slanderous comment on twitter falsely” which lead to more of the MRA Spartacuses passing on the accusation. The lovely folk at AVfM know me.
I regularly mock their pieces on India which would be laughable were it not for the fact that people were trying to stop women from being angry about someone being raped to death by blaming everything from the time of day (What? 8 PM) to her boyfriend (everyone knows if you have a boyfriend you are easy!) to the fact her boyfriend wasn’t a “real man” (because he didn’t win in a fight against 5 armed men who promptly beat the crap out of him with a metal rod. Never mind how they tried to run her over. Never mind how the police reacted slowly to the ACTUAL call out leaving the victims to wait for 45 minutes before assistance came. Never mind the police arbitration, callous treatment of the victims including forcing the young man who in the end required hospital care to CARRY his girlfriend to the ambulance (Some ambulances are just vans with a bed bbolted into the back) because “he would get blood on their clothes and car.
All the while the victims were still naked. The women who fought running street battles in Delhi were portrayed as “Rabble Rousers”>
They were mums and daughters. The problem was that the rapists hit someone middle class. A student and students in India grow up on Gandhi. They still haven’t had India crush that out of them and I hope they never do.
They were willing to die for this, the protests turned ugly when police opened fire because “women wouldn’t leave a politician’s front door after he said something incredibly insulting and stupid. (Either she should have prayed or she shouldn’t have gone outside). They reacted with violence causing more.
And AVfM used this time to go “INDIAN MEN HAVE IT BAD”.
I took the time to mock that. It was so stupid. But Paul Elam’s sat there going good? It’s bad enough for Indian women without Paul Elam coming in to stamp all over them.
Oh and relax this wasn’t the worst thing they did.
They have a piece defending the treatment of women in Afghanistan too.
Paul Elam would be considered a horrible human being but that insults the word human.
” It makes no sense to apply the 6% to a random sampling since it’s “6% of accusations are false”, not “6% of people are accused falsely”. But in any case, If there’s a 6% chance that an event occurrs, there’s a 0.36% chance that it occurrs twice. So if there’s a 6% chance that A OR B are false, there’s a 0.36% chance that A AND B are false. ”
That supposes A & B are independent events.
I don’t see much of that sex negativity stuff nowadays, but people writing in the 70s definitely ran the argument quite often that marriage was little different from prostitution in the sense that women offered sex in exchange for monetary and other support.
Prostitution was never, ever OK. Therefore, marriage was not much better for most women. Then you find out that Betty Friedan, of Feminine Mystique fame, was physically abused by her husband. There’s no discussion of DV in the book that I recall. And the other feminist figures of the time included Gloria Steinem who used her knowledge of makeup to make Friedan presentable for at least one major meeting they were all speaking at.
The other big issue in the 60s and 70s was the near stranglehold of Freudian and pseudo-Freudian ideas on women and their role in relationships. The focus on sexuality really came from the deeply toxic general culture being already obsessed with women being defined as sexual beings. With the nagging fear of being unfulfilled sexual beings if they couldn’t manage the right kind of orgasms within the right kind of submissive relationship they were destined for. If you’d been brainwashed that that was what sex should mean for women, you’d probably be pretty negative about it too.
mildlymagnificent, thank you! It’s a relief to hear from someone who was there and knows what was going on.
And FUCKING FREUD. Gods how I loathe that piece of shit. May be be surrounded by all the ferns forever.
I’m also appreciating the addition of some context. I mean, imagine that your context was the PUA view of sex – that’s what you’d been taught sex was like for women, and there was no alternative floating around in the culture for you to grab onto. How positive a spin would you be able to put on that? If I thought for a second that the Roissy/Roosh way of talking about sex was what it was actually like then I’d never want to have sex again (luckily this is not the case).
I can see how stuff from that time period reads really oddly to a lot of people now, but like I said earlier, the fact that the people whose writing on sex seems really dated and strange now wrote what they did back then is part of the reason why we have a much healthier sexual culture now. They helped to kick off a cultural change so big that they made themselves into anachronisms, basically.
I was a kid in that era (born ’63) and I can only say I’m so grateful not to have grown up with that really toxic stuff ringing in my ears.