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:
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.
greendaywantsavatars – Actually, I did play Runescape for a few years! I don’t play it anymore, because it gave my computer viruses at least twice and because it gets boring when you don’t have a membership account.
Incidentally, Sanguinaria is the genus for bloodroot, of which the red liquid from its roots can pretty much eat flesh and make serious wounds. So don’t ever touch the stuff with your bare hands, although the flowers are quite pretty.
@Alice
It gets so boring when you don’t have membership! and I don’t have money for one but I loved doing the quests 🙁
/fangirl mode.
Yes. You could be outside, listening to a moron rant about women. This way, you won’t get all sunburnt! Good thinking!
Okay, this is still greendaywantsavatars; I just finally fixed it to my regular name.
That sucks about your computer. Also, yes, it is sooooo boring without a membership once you get past the beginning stage. I quit because I didn’t have cash, and also it was a time soak. Leveling up in MMORPGS is freaking /hard/
Also, knowing the definition of your name makes it like, ten times more cool. XD
Marie – I know, right? I once went around cutting down trees and setting fire to wood so that I could level up my woodcutting and firemaking skills (I forget what they’re called after so many years). But all of the interesting stuff is locked behind a pay wall, and that sucks. I want to be able to wear dragon sometimes! I want to be able to go explore membership places!
As a poor thirteen year old without an allowance or a way to get money, you can imagine how much this sucked!
My brother funded his runescape membership by staying off runescape for a week (our dad told him he was spending too much time on it, and told him he’d give him five dollars for him not playing for a week).
I do not think it worked how dad imagined it. 😛
Of course, they’re moving the price up. It used to be like, what five or six dollars? And now its either eight or nine.
@alice
Ouch XD I actually suckered my parents into paying for some when I was younger (14 or so) But now I’m too old, alas, and need to use my own money.
ps, I think woodcutting and firemaking is right, no weird names.
pps, I spent like forever cutting down trees to afford and armadyl chestplate. It was took forever, and I kicked myself when I found better ways to make money later. :p like, why didn’t I know this earlier?
ppps, am I boring anyone?
@Fade
Nine??!?!?!??! wow. >:(
Fade – Yeah. I think the second time we got a virus on that thing it took us like a week to get rid of it. I quit because I didn’t have cash either, plus grinding is boring as hell (and as I said, aforementioned viruses, stupid hackers inserting code into webpages).
😀 Science is awesome. I found out about this plant because people actually use this stuff in CAM medicine as a “natural” way to treat skin cancer. Of course, you should never put this stuff on your skin, it looks terrible and can leave you with some really bad scars.
Before I was back in school, and when my depression was flaring up, I spent a time where I did not use my computer for internet at all, because there was something (i think it was a virus. Idk) that prevented me from accessing internet. It lasted like, four months or something because that’s how long it took for me to bite the bullet and take my computer in to the fixer-uppers.
Fade – it used to be $5.45 a month from my recollection. Although maybe it was simply five dollars, I forget.
Damn, that’s going to be one expensive addiction though.
Marie – Yeah, being poor sucks. I could never sucker my parents into paying for membership, they still have fits over using credit cards on Amazon. 😛
You should have seen how much time I spent in the cook’s guild trying to steal enough apples to make a shitton of apple pie. And for a long while, I cut down and burnt a whole bunch of wood, collected the ash, and sold it on the free market for six gold each.
And then there was the time that I was doing the Romeo and Juliet quest, except that instead of leaving with the sleeping potion, I just kept drinking it and making more. Funniest thing ever.
@alice
drinking the sleeping potion does sound funny XD
@Alice
That sleeping potion thing cracked me up. XD
I love the cooks guild. That’s where I spent pointless hours mass-cooking fish so I could get 99 cooking (I am not kidding) just for the freaking pie-flip emote.
also, ash was six gold? It raised in price since you last played! Last time I used it, it was like, 40 gold because it’s used in a potion. 😛 It might have gone down since… like, three years ago, tho.
wow this thread got really quiet all of a sudden.
Marie – It totally is! You drink it and then the screen starts to wobble and your avatar drops while the NPC’s like “OMG DON’T DO THAT!!” and then a fade to black and then you wake up and you’re in the same place again.
Then you do it all over again. *nod*
Fade – I would just pick so many of those purple berries and then bring them all to the NPC, and then I’d drop the potions and make more, just so that I could drink them and do it for a few hours. The reaction still cracks me up.
I spent pointless hours stealing apples and pie plates and then making pies, and then I would go down and steal jugs and grapes to make wine, because sometimes you screw up and get bad wine but sometimes you get lucky and get good wine. I don’t think I ever got 99 anything, but I wanted to get to 99 cooking because it would be awesome.
I know ash is used in at least one quest, it must have gone up with more demand because people are too lazy to make their own ash. 😛
Oh, and once, I picked up over 55k in gold. I think someone died in that spot after taking out a lot of money from the bank and I picked it up. My brother was so jealous.
I am one of those lazy people. XD If potion ingredients are too hard to collect and they’re still relatively inexpensive, i buy them.
Alice, if he does turn out to be an atheist, he’ll serve as a worthy reminder that reaching what appears to be a rational position on one issue does not necessarily imply a rational path to that position, nor the consistent use of rational thought in other areas.
The first time I commented on this blog, I spoke about a guy I know who is a generally excellent skeptic and who is capable of communicating scientific evidence to even the most ardent creationist, but who will argue until blue in the face that Schrodinger’s Rapist accuses all men of being rapists and that Rebecca Watson is a fascist.
Humans be irrational, yo? Even those of us who understand that humans be irrational be irrational. Worries the hell out of me sometimes. What if I’m wrong about… the evils of spam? (The “meat,” not the mail.)
How…. dogmatic of you. *sunglasses, CSI UK theme*
That’s right. I wear my sunglasses at night.
Then stick with your biotruths argument, and stop whining about the lack of women. Contradictory arguments just advertise your irrationality, and where’s the fun in arguing with irrational people when they display their nonsense so clearly?
If men are the only ones who can do it, fine. Stop whining that we’re the only ones doing it. If you want to whine that we’re the only ones doing it, stop arguing that men are stronger. I’d suggest taking the latter route, because strength is a variable attribute which has a degree of overlap between men and women, meaning that the statement is a nonsensically sweeping generalisation, rather than a useful datapoint.
Ahoy thar, matey! :3
So stop whining that there are no female coal miners? Your arguments contradict each other. This does not happen with rational positions. Consider that for a while. Also, who you fall in love with is not dictated by finances. Women do marry “down,” men do marry “up,” but the really lucky people marry with more regard for love
I really should just keep a tally of fallacies. This one, for the record, is a no true scotsman. So what makes a person an atheist? A person is an atheist if he or she, when faced with the question, “do you believe that a god exists,” answers in the negative. I believe in precisely zero gods, unless you count Anansi, who I only believe in for comedic effect from time to time. I do believe in women, but I believe they’re human. I… don’t see how this impacts upon my atheism? Feminism speaks to humans. Mortal beings who possess no mystical powers. There are no gods in feminism. Perhaps many feminists believe in gods, as many people in society as a whole believe in gods, but those come from other things, not from feminism.
Apologies for the wall o’ text… trying to minimise my conversational lag.
Fade – No shame in admitting it. Sometimes I got lazy and just bought ingredients, because I’m not of high enough level to do said thing myself (or I’m lazy). 😛
I had to buy most of my crafting supplies after a point because I wasn’t high enough level to mine the gemstones myself, for example. That sucked.
Did he explode, or just go away?
Most of you have done a marvelous job of taking down the new troll–once again, I missed out. *Sigh* I’ll just take a cheap shot, then:
.
No, no, Jason. See, they’re not insinuating that all men are losers. In this case, Jason, it really IS all about you.
@Alice
I did crafting the extreme way. I killed dragons to get their hides for crafting >:D
@cloudiah
as far as I can tell he just went away. ::shrugs::
Oh I see he considered himself part of Occupy. I wonder how he feels about the stamen of privilege?
Marie – Nice. I had to buy the supplies because I wasn’t high enough level to kill dragons (damn it).
I’d always bury bones too, and get prayer points, but those took FOREVER.
@Alice
Hehe. I had a low crafting level for my combat, cuz I didn’t like it, only went up for quest requirements 😛
Leveling prayer did take forever. Did you ever go to the ectofungus place? (Forget the name. There were ghosts)
Marie – I crafted stuff because I wanted to be able to craft my own armor and enchanted pendants, plus then I could sell those for gold, and who doesn’t want gold? 😛
I don’t think so. I don’t think I ever got it to be that high, because prayer takes forever and I don’t have all the time in the world to kill everything in the world just to bury bones. 🙁