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.
I’m 10 years younger and even so I caught the tail end of it. By the time I was old enough to be aware of stuff the transition was already underway – a lot of the bad stuff was still there, but people were aware that maybe it was bad, and talking about it. By the early-mid 80s I’d say the cultural shift was already firmly in place. I think this is why you see a bit of a generational divide when people talk about this stuff, because people born after about 1980 may honestly have no idea just how bad it used to be.
Yes, exactly. I think – I’m guessing – that Mum and I were shielded a bit by our lack of interest in popular culture, and for me, I’m pretty sure my obliviousness to things I wasn’t interested in (pretty much everything outside my toys, books and cartoons, lol) might have helped in its way. I wasn’t one of those children who takes in everything around them. It didn’t hurt that I had no interest in boys whatsoever and didn’t have to put up with any of their shit (and oy, were the boys in my year at high school feral scum) in a personal relationship.
I think traveling so much as a kid was also part of why I was aware of stuff like that from a very young age. It’s not hard to see how much this stuff is shaped by culture when you move from one culture to another every few years.
Yes indeed, our childhoods were real opposites! Mine was insular and to a degree isolated (which suited me, I’m relatively introverted). I wouldn’t recommend that as a protection/shield – we know how badly ignorance goes that way – but I was pretty lucky, overall.
Well, it’s 11pm and my eyes feel as dry as the Nullarbor. Niters!
Nice to see various familiar names from the FTBorg here. If I have anything to say, it’s on the origin of the malicious e-mail to Avicenna, which the Slymepit are denting is of their provenance. However, it is the situation they foment where they’re just a whole lot of individuals, talking about stuff, egging each other on a bit, laughing at their tired in-jokes… so if some of the antics and harassment don’t attract negative criticism, then it’s all ‘brave heroes, slyme pit refusing to bow to the PC feminism of the FreefromThoughtBlogs’ — and conversely the moment someone does something morally reprehensible (for example, the guy who made a threat about how a female blogger’s looks would be improved by having acid hurled at her), then all of a sudden the tune changes to ‘that’s nothing to do with the slyme pit, you can’t tar all of us with guilt by association, that person has never ever posted here, what proof do you have, could be a false flag’.
This is the same sort of transparent excuses made by various hate groups use – create an atmosphere where increasingly threatening and vicious behaviour is normalised, but when some really disgusting shit goes down, it’s all ‘hey, wasn’t us… how do you know it wasn’t Stormfront or the KKK.’
TL,DR: the Slymepitters are moral cowards and ethically bankrupt. Even if one of them didn’t issue the false allegation against Avicenna, it is completely of a piece with their long established moral cowardice and lack of ethics. And frankly it doesn’t seem like there’s many other obvious haters of greater obnoxiousness in that milieu than them.
Damn, as usual when I use a mobile device to post there’s an offering to the great god Tpyos; second sentence should having denying rather than denting. (The general argument isn’t that hard to follow, even where I decided to change grammar halfway through a phrase and forgot to go back and edit the first bit.)
“sex negative” = “prude”, as in “You won’t have sex with me? You’re a prude!”
No matter what nuanced phrase you come up with to describe it, it’ll mean the same thing, because the purpose isn’t to understand, the purpose is to control women’s sexuality.
That is so true. My mom would tell me about how in the 60’s, a pregnant teenager was thought of as pure garbage, and she’d have to “visit her aunt” for a year so she could adopt the baby out and pretend it never happened. By the 80’s, a teenager could choose to raise the baby herself if she didn’t want an abortion. She would be slut shamed but not totally shunned by the town. That’s a huge change. And grandma said that in her time, parents would disown their pregnant daughters. They’d say “You’re dead to me” and kick them out with no qualms about treating their own blood like that.
I’m so glad to be raised in the 80’s and 90’s. It was not perfect by any means but it was a lot better than before. And I think things are better now than they were in my teen years. It’s only been in the last ten years I’ve noticed people push back more against slut shaming, while it was just the norm in the 90’s. There is still progress to made even now about making hetero sex about both partners, and not just something women “give” to men.
It’s no wonder hetero women in older generations might not be thrilled about piv sex. For them, it was too bound up with extreme slut shaming and fear of pregnancy.
Oh geez. When I read about the abuse those slyme pitters throw at FTB and Skepchick, it’s pretty clear they’re cowards. Rather than state their arguments fair and square, they fight dirty and threaten any feminist atheists. The real heroes are the bloggers at FTB and Skepchick who keep speaking their minds even with all that abuse and harassment. It’s the same way MRA’s and antifeminists try to scare feminists into shutting up.
Yeah, I’m pretty much of the opinion that the term doesn’t need to be retooled so much as dropped, because any new term that anyone comes up with will just be co-opted to mean “this woman isn’t doing whatever sexual thing I want her to do” anyway. Not every term needs an opposite – people can call themselves sex-positive if they want without there being a pressing need to label other people sex-negative.
Prude! The so-called radical movements of the time might have had good ideas about changing society to improve the lot of the poor and disenfranchised. But the attitudes to the women within those movements was basically the same as in the churches. They were there to make the sandwiches and keep the tea and coffee flowing. With the added shitty bonus of being expected to put out for anyone and everyone who asked – after all, they had the pill so they had no need to worry about pregnancy, did they!
Any woman who declined these wonderful offers was a prude.
Eumie: You are lying. This was more than a rape accusation. It claims he is a confessed rapist. Then it weasels and pretends the follow-up can change the bald statement.
In honest to goodness journalism there is a name for that, libel.
And I see no signs of him backing off with this support of this whole “If you’re accused you’re a rapist” attitude, and people who don’t automatically believe that people like him, who were accused, were rapists, are rape enablers, apologists, etc. The stinkin hypocrisy pisses me off.
1: I don’t believe you (what with you being a liar, and all).
2: You have an agenda. You’d be pissed off if you didn’t have this stick to try to beat him with because,
3: He isn’t saying anyone who is accused is a rapist. He’s saying the default assumption on rape/sexual assault allegations should be to trust the accuser the way we do with other crimes.
4: This is (and I’ve been following it) more than one allegation and there is enouch corroboratory evidence to convince reasonable people (those who aren’t rape enablers/cheerleaders; as you seem to be) that there is reason to believe Shermer is guilty of (at the very least) regular harassement of women.
Oh great, another genius too clueless to read the “first posts will be moderated” and twittish enough to try to get in a passive aggressive dig to salve his ego/attempt to shame the blog-owner by insulting his integrity.
It is useful though, it shows us what sort of intellectual chops you don’t have.
To clarify, what I mean is that the idea that a. a person can be sex-negative and b. this is a bad thing carries with it a ton of implications about sexuality that are coercive and shaming and just not positive in any way. For the sake of argument let’s say that a particular person just doesn’t like or isn’t interested in sex – so what? Asexual people exist, and they are not damaged or in need of fixing, they’re just asexual. And I’ve seen the idea of sex-positivity used to coerce people into sexual behavior that they don’t want far too many times not to side-eye the motivation of anyone who starts talking about how sex-negative other people are.
If people want to celebrate how awesome sexuality is and how much they enjoy it then great! Let’s do that! But let’s try to do it without shaming people who for whatever reason don’t want to join the party, or would like to participate in some aspects of the party but not others.
(I have exactly the same issue with a lot of Dan Savage’s writing about sex, he crosses the line from celebration into manipulation and coercion a lot and I am not OK with that.)
and now I have to go to work.
But I will say that 1: ascribing 2nd wave feminists attitudes to “trauma” is dismissive (and offensive; and psychoanalysing a group, so suspicious on it’s face).
2:Modern feminists who are reacting to the term “Sex-positive” are not the same.
3: Sex positive feminists seem to be reacting more to the stereotype that “feminists hate sex” more than anything else.
But I can’t explore this right now, because I am behind.
I am someone who doesn’t like PIV sex. I find it hard to see sex as voluntary in relationship.
I am not sure what sex negative means really. It seems to vary from being someone who is anti-rape to someone who doesn’t want sex to someone who is against other people having sex. Oddly I’d think the term would be more often applied to someone who feels that a person has the right to reject sex than someone who tries to prevent other people having voluntary sex.
The older I get, the more I think they were very right about consent. Things may have improved somewhat, but with all the stories about rape being shared at the moment, how far have we actually come? There’s still a fuckton of work to be done around consent.
I don’t like the framing of anyone who’s not all “sex, yay” as being sex-negative. I find a lot of the uncritically sex-positive feminists to be just another facet of “choose my choice” feminism, and for the most part, they grind my gears. YMMV.
Cassandra: UGH, Dan Savage. I guess he’s fine is you’re a cis white thin gay man just like him.
I have no problem with sex-positive feminism that respects boundaries and consent (just as I don’t have a problem with sex-negative feminism that also respects boundaries and consent), but these days I feel a bit uneasy about how some forms of sex-positive feminism are. I mean, I didn’t even use to have this perspective, but now I can see how the espousal of the “sex-positive” label can lead to labeling sex as some inherent “good” that should be valued by everyone – even at the expense of boundaries and consent. Certainly folks like Cliff Pervocracy aren’t like that, and I greatly respect hir for that, but other than that I’m not very comfortable with the sex-positive label.
Over time, I’ve just stuck with the “sex-neutral” label. For me, that means that sex is just a thing people do and that while the cultural attitudes regarding sex deserve attention and criticism, there is no inherent value in sex. Maybe it’s a useless label, but I use it for myself from time to time.
I like “sex neutral” and your definition.
Ally I like your idea of Sex Neutral as well.
I hadn’t really thought about labelling myself either sex-positive or negative until recently and that coincided by sheer chance with an episode that I witnessed on tumblr.
Basically there is a blog I follow that posts lots of awesome stuff run by a Feminist who is highly critical of Sex-Positive Feminism because of the way it treats her as a rape survivor and various other issues.
There is another blogger is is avowedly Sex-positive and who deeply dislikes the first bloggers critiques of it. This blogger said a lot of generally crappy things about first blogger and also continually erases the fact that first blogger is Bi.
It culminated with the second blogger posting on tumblr that she had given a donation to a Sex and Kink positive reading group attached to a Kink club in the name of the first blogger and crowing about it long and loud and tagging the first blogger so she saw it.
Now first blogger has stated repeatedly how uncomfortable she is with many aspects of Kink culture and BDSM at least partly due to her history as a rape survivor and has explained this while not telling people they are bad or wrong for liking Kink and BDSM.
So basically this second blogger made a donation to something that made the first blogger deeply uncomfortable and with which she wants nothing to do.
So basically this second blogger potentially risked triggering the first blogger and in my view their actions were a violation and deeply immature.
So if that, that is Sex-Positive Feminism then I want nowt to do with it. Because I honestly think that such behaviour is horrifying.
Even then, with Savage, you better share all of his sexual likes or you’re a prude who deserves to be cheated on.
I could see describing sex education programs whose message is “sex is dirty and dangerous and if you do it before marriage you’ll be as gross as a piece of chewed-up gum” as sex-negative, but that isn’t how the term is typically used. Given how it is used, and how easily it can be co-opted as a means of coercion, I’d rather it just go away.
Avicenna, thank you for that context. (If anyone missed his comment, it’s here.)
Well I see I slept through a really interesting discussion again, but I like where it seems to have shaken out. I’ve never really been comfortable with that “sex-positive” phrasing, but couldn’t really articulate why and now, thanks to you all, I feel like I can. And I didn’t even need to do any of the intellectual work! 😀
I do like the idea of sex positive feminism, but I agree that it can also be done in ways that are harmful. Okay, the best thing about sex positive feminism, in my opinion, is that it gives young women a place where they won’t feel ashamed of having a strong libido or enjoying kinky sex. In a world full of slut shaming, sex positive feminism is like a safe haven for women to speak freely about their sexuality without being embarrassed.
However, it is wrong when some sex positive feminists then turn it around and try to shame asexuals or anyone that prefers “vanilla” sex instead of kinky sex. Then it’s just replacing one kind of shame with another, and that seems to go against the whole point.
My understanding of sex-positive is that it is pro-pornography and sex work if – and it’s a big IF – those in the trade are not exploited. I think it also divorces people’s sexual fantasies from the way they conduct themselves in the rest of their lives. There are still some edge cases there – I don’t know if there is such a thing as a non-practicing pedophile, for instance. I think there’s also a big side of “lipstick feminism” thrown in for good measure, and acceptance of trans-gender.
I think we still have a LOT to learn about human sexuality. Feminism’s understanding is evolving as well, and I think it will continue. It’s a difficult topic, because obviously, we ARE sexual, and an enlightened understanding needs to include sexual pleasure… but sex can also cause some of the deepest hurts in human experience. It always strikes me that in some parts of the world women still don’t have the right to insist their husbands wear condoms, while in the West, we are fighting for more social acceptance of “sluts.” We’re fighting for the right to say no to some sex, yes to other sex… it’s complicated.
I would think that sex positive feminists would encourage people to make their own choices about their sexuality. It’s unfortunate that people would use the label to say, “you must be like me,” or to erase the experience of rape survivors. I don’t understand that at all.
What do you mean by “We are sexual?” I want to give you the benefit of doubt, but it sounds like you’re erasing asexual people. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
That’s gotta be the best, most accurate, picture of Elam EVER.