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For A Voice for Men, and its Edmonton offshoot, terrifying women is a form of “human rights activism.”

Men's Rights Edmonton activist at work
Men’s Rights Edmonton activist at work

So the self-described “human rights activists” at A Voice for Men have found three more women to harass. Here’s the story, which for many of you will have a depressingly familiar ring:

Members of Men’s Rights Edmonton, a small group that is for all intents and purposes a local chapter of A Voice for Men, has been putting up pictures targeting Lise Gotell, the chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta. The pictures, which seem inspired by “Wanted” posters of yore, feature a large portrait of Gotell and the caption:

Theft isn’t black. Bank fraud isn’t Jewish. And rape isn’t male.

“Just because you’re paid to demonize men doesn’t mean rape is gendered. Don’t be that bigot.

Gotell’s crime? She was involved in what appears to have been a remarkably effective rape awareness campaign focusing on date rape and featuring the slogan “Don’t Be That Guy.”

A Voice for Men took exception to the campaign because, even thought it did deal with the male victims of rape, it didn’t devote equal time to the problem of evil, false-accusing “girls.” No, really. Men’s Rights Edmonton Activists put up “satirical” versions of the campaign’s posters with the slogan “Don’t Be that Girl.” Now, MR-E and AVFM, at least according to the “argument” advanced on their new poster, seem to be upset that the campaign didn’t devote equal time to the problem of female rapists.  [Note: this paragraph has been corrected; see note at end of piece.]

Gotell spoke out against the posters, and now Men’s Rights Edmonton and AVFM are doing their best to smear her as a “bigot.” Because she doesn’t believe that women are responsible for half of all rapes.

Since this is not actually true — more on this in a later post — it’s hard to see how this makes her a bigot.

As a rule, I don’t support tearing down the posters of one’s ideological enemies. Free speech and all that. But these posters are different: they’re slanderous personal attacks designed to harass an individual. Were they posted in my neighborhood I would tear them down.

And evidently that’s what some people in Edmonton have been doing.

Indeed, one recent night, several members of Men’s Rights Edmonton claim to have caught two women doing just that. While they don’t seem to have video footage of the women tearing down the posters, the MRAs filmed themselves following the women down the street and angrily confronting them for this alleged crime.

They posted the video to YouTube, and AVFM posted it as well, under the typically overheated title “Men’s Rights Edmonton confronts fascists.” They screencapped images of both women from the video and announced their intention to uncover their personal information:

MR-E would like to know the names of these two women so that charges of destruction of property can be laid against them. Also, the world should know the identities of those who seek to silence and censor messages advocating for human rights.

Of course, this is ridiculous. Tearing down a poster that was almost certainly posted illegally in the first place isn’t “destruction of property.” No one is going to be prosecuted for this. The police have better things to do.

But of course that’s not the real intent here. The real intent here is to scare the shit out of these women and other feminists by exposing them to harassment online — like the woman labeled “Big Red” and countless other women who have been targeted by AVFM and other MRAs (sometimes completely erroneously).

AVFM’s Paul Elam gave the game away with an “editor’s note” added to the post:

[A] woman who vandalizes man’s property and then flips him off when he confronts her about it on a dark street at night only acts in this manner because she is certain she has absolutely nothing to fear. Feminists terrified of MHRAs? My ass.

Elam could not have made it any clearer: the main point of this kind of “activism” — which has become AVFM’s bread and butter — is all about intimidating women, not helping men.

AVFM, where terrifying individual women is “human rights activism.”

Here’s the appropriate response to that:

edmontonfingerPN

CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION: I rewrote the paragraph starting with “A Voice for Men took exception,” which confused AVRM/MR-E’s current objection to Gotell’s views with its original “argument” against the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign.

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seleukosnicator10
11 years ago

yah good old AVFM Edmonton have jumped the shark real good on this one. I’m not sure how they keep claiming the 50% of all rapes are committed by women story alive. I debunked Typhonblues BS reading of the CDC study long ago. At this point they’re just flat out lying. But then again they aren’t really known for their ability to tell the truth in the first place in the MRA

druidwinter
11 years ago

Reblogged this on winterdominatrix and commented:
well it all gets nutz from here.

Boumbette
11 years ago

I’d love to see rape as an agendered crime (I do see it in that way in the sense that all genders should get equivalent punishment for the same thing). However, MRAs are huge atgendering rape. AVfM rape apologia, their victim blaming and accusations targeted at women, and their points about men being ‘biologically wired’ to rape (she was asking for it by going outside) summarize this quite well.

Also, nice to see they want a police state (prosecution for ripping a poster? Now that’s an effective allocation of public funds!

magnesium
magnesium
11 years ago

So do these guys sit by each poster they put up day and night, waiting to film someone removing it?

Seems like, if they honestly gave a shit about female perpetrators of sexual assault, they would have made posters telling women to ask for consent. If they did that, I’d be supporting them, as I hope most people would. Instead, though, first they encouraged victim blaming/disbelief, and now they’re just full out harassing people again, because lord knows they can’t go ten minutes without committing libel and personal attacks on private people. They honestly just can’t risk helping a man if it doesn’t somehow harm a woman in the process. What would be the point, amiright?

SittieKitty
11 years ago

Where’s the link for that debunking?

DireSloth
DireSloth
11 years ago

Ah, so after JTO’s boxcutter thing, this must be the next blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women poster-tearers? The MRA Poster Wars is truly the epic saga of our era. I love how Elam’s note basically says “Women not afraid to walk somewhere at night? Unacceptable!” like it’s somehow a moral fault that his cronies intimidation tactics arent working.

SittieKitty
11 years ago

Yea, magnesium, they don’t care about female perpetrators, they care that men aren’t accused. They really don’t care about rape at all beyond not wanting men to be accused.

Feminist Bees
11 years ago

I’ve always thought that when AVFM, GWW, and other MRAs who try to explain why they did their “Don’t Be that Girl” poster parade, the explanations always seems mixed up. What I mean by this is that their arguments come from a lot of different directions and don’t really make sense when brought together.

For example, their complaint about the the original rape awareness campaign “Don’t be that Guy” is that they think that it erases the existence of female rapists. However, there posters aren’t suggesting that women can rape too. Actually the posters are about how MRAs think that women flippantly “lie” about being raped for “reasons.” So… the MRA response to a perceived erasure of female rapists is to argue that women lie about being raped?

Their reasons for posting those posters aren’t consistent or well thought out (later which is obvious). I kind of think that it’s more about the spectacle that MR-Edmonton and AVFM just loves creating, and as a consequence they are trying to create a villain out of Gotell to justify the drama they want to be part of.

Katherine
Katherine
11 years ago

Do people who throw around sensationalized community college-level rhetoric like calling people “fascists” and discussing every single minor form of expression as meaning something in relation to the first amendment actually think they sound smart? They sound like college freshmen (Sorry – fresh “people”. Can’t single out men.)

hellkell
hellkell
11 years ago

Truly the human rights movement of our time. Fuck them.

cloudiah
11 years ago

So do these guys sit by each poster they put up day and night, waiting to film someone removing it?

Somewhere on AVfM I saw that MR-E admitted they deliberately put the posters up right near a feminist coffee house or book shop or something. So yes, they are putting them up in locations where they are most likely to get torn down or defaced, and then hanging around with video cameras.

Alice Sanguinaria
Alice Sanguinaria
11 years ago

1. Someone tell me how to debunk that CDC study, I want to see it because it keeps being brought up by MRAs as the “so there!” when the subject of rape comes up.
2. AVFM isn’t really about helping men but about shutting down women. I feel as if all they want to do is to have us regress to 1950s morals.

DireSloth
DireSloth
11 years ago

@Feminist Bees, it’s almost as if they’re being intellectually dishonest in order to disguise the fact that they are essentially pro-rape. But surely that can’t be the case with the Men’s Rights Activists, heroes of the new millennium?

hellkell
hellkell
11 years ago

I love the snitfit they’re having over “their” property being defaced after they’ve vandalized someone else’s. What a bunch of nitwits. Elam really doesn’t get irony.

Feminist Bees
11 years ago

@Alice Sanguinaria: Actually, A response to the CDC stuff was posted on /r/AMR on reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/againstmensrights/comments/1lq3n3/cdc_responds_are_40_of_rapists_women/

@DireSloth, yeah… It’s not surprising, just one of those things that make me wonder what those MRAs who’ve put their names onto these arguments think about in their down time. I mean, do they actually think about these things all the way through? Because if lack of thought is obvious (which it is), then what kinds of people actively work to be seen on the news talking about a campaign that is disconnected from the very subject they are claiming to address.

Of course, it’s very reasonable to guess that it’s plain intellectually dishonest, but those kinds of realizations have to keep MRAs up at night… lol.

Ally S
11 years ago

@Alice Sanguinaria

I wrote this a while ago – maybe you’ll find it interesting: http://mellowness.dreamwidth.org/14991.html

It’s a refutation of argument that concludes that rape is an agendered crime by citing the CDC study.

hellkell
hellkell
11 years ago

Yeah, these dishonest assholes are real fond of using 12-month data instead of lifetime to try and bolster their shitty little biases.

thebionicmommy
thebionicmommy
11 years ago

A woman who vandalizes man’s property and then flips him off when he confronts her about it on a dark street at night only acts in this manner because she is certain she has absolutely nothing to fear.

It could be that a woman who is afraid on that dark street at night would flip him off in hopes of scaring him away. So not only is Elam saying he wants her to be afraid, he doesn’t acknowledge how common it is to react with hostility when you’re threatened. Sorry, I’m having a tough time wording this, but basically flipping someone off =/= not afraid.

Marie
Marie
11 years ago

@cloudiah

Somewhere on AVfM I saw that MR-E admitted they deliberately put the posters up right near a feminist coffee house or book shop or something. So yes, they are putting them up in locations where they are most likely to get torn down or defaced, and then hanging around with video cameras.

Wow. That’s just..illogical. It’s like they don’t want to try to convince people of their viewpoints, they just wanna fight.

LBT
LBT
11 years ago

Wow, these guys are really something.

I’ve had folks tearing down my garage sale and Sneak’s pet-sitting posters. TRANSPHOBIA!

Except not.

Marie
Marie
11 years ago

@cloudiah

Followed your links and found this.

Lies, the CDC is obviously a feminist shill.

::giggles:: and the next one said “wake up sheeple” non ironically, I believe. As MEN, shouldn’t mras be more easily swayed by stats/logic/w/e.

Marie
Marie
11 years ago

@LBT

Folks torn down Sneak’s pet sitting posters? 🙁 That is sad.

LBT
LBT
11 years ago

Also, WTF, the idea of chasing down someone who tore my posters down in the middle of the night to interrogate them as creepy and douchey as hell. WHO DOES THAT?

Right. These douchebags.

Wereterrier
11 years ago

Sorry, I’m having a tough time wording this, but basically flipping someone off =/= not afraid.

Exactly. I had one experience when I was young, in which I wasn’t afraid of being raped, but afraid of being mugged. So, I acted like a crazy badass. I threw my piece of pizza into the street and said, “WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU ASSHOLES WANT?!” Then, not waiting for an answer, I got into my car, locked the doors, and left as fast as I could.

They might not have actually been about to mug me, but the point is that I felt threatened. I was afraid. And so I put on a hostile display, because I didn’t know what else to do. I sure as hell didn’t react that way because I felt I had nothing to fear.

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