So over on A Voice for Men, the regulars are all congratulating one another for their grand victory in Toronto. In AVFM’s official post on Saturday’s tiny “rally,” incongruously titled “Historic MHRA rally in Toronto huge success,” Elam — who in photographs of the events looked rather befuddled by it all — declared that the day had been magical for him:
“This was one of the greatest things I have ever done in my life,” said Elam. “Meeting all of these people and talking to a crowd that was five times bigger than the opposition was a remarkable event.”
Given that most of the opposition made a clear decision to ignore the AVFM/CAFE rally and lecture — much to the obvious disappointment of many MRAs who were there in Toronto or watching on the sidelines on the Internet — this was not much of an accomplishment.
Other commenters on AVFM were equally effusive.
“It’s an amazing day!” declared Tara J. Palmatier, the Men’s Rights therapist. “What a fantastic turnout, congrats to all the people who took part in this momentous rally,” wrote the easily impressed Onca747. “This truly is a historic moment,” agreed Unregistard. “OUTSTANDING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” added JJ.
Not to be outdone, Attila L. Vinczer of Canada Courtwatch, one of the speakers at the “rally,” declared it to have been both a “COLOSSAL” and a “complete success,” adding that
Saturday, September 28, 2013 will be remembered in history as one of the most important turning points for Men and Boys in Crisis.
The obvious question is: Do they know?
Do they know what a miserable failure their little rally was?
This was to be the great shining moment for the burgeoning Mens (Human) Rights Movement. It was trumpeted in no less than 17 posts on AVFM itself and in numerous other posts on affiliated and sympathetic sites elsewhere. Numerous MRAs flew in to be there. And the event drew … a tiny handful of rank-and-file MRAs and other onlookers. I’ve seen bigger crowds waiting for a bus. (See the pictures here to see how tiny this “historic” rally really was; see here for people making fun of those pictures.)
A Voice for Men has a long-established habit of promising big and delivering tiny, or not at all.
Oftentimes, the site simply moves on, and hopes no one remembers the promises and/or predictions.
In this case, they seem to be trying to cover up a giant failure through the sheet power of their own bluster.
Or do they really believe their own nonsense?
Recently, I read the classic sociological study When Prophecy Fails, by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. It’s a study of a small UFO cult led by a woman named Dorothy Martin who claimed to have received messages from planet Clarion predicting an imminent apocalypse in the early morning of December 21, 1954. The researchers — in a move that would now be considered completely unethical — managed to infiltrate the group, and so had a cult-members-eye-view to watch what happened when this prophecy (SPOILER ALERT) didn’t come true.
There are a couple of aspects of Ms. Martin’s story that I think are relevant here. Prior to her big failed prediction — and the collapse of her little cult — Martin made a number of smaller failed predictions, claiming that the aliens had told her when and where they would be landing their ships. Each time, she and some of her followers went to their alien appointments and waited, only to be stood up. And each time, Martin’s imaginary alien friends came up with an excuse for their absence which somehow mollified her followers.
When the apocalypse itself failed to appear, to the great consternation of her followers, Martin again turned to her alien friends for an explanation, and told her followers that their efforts had so pleased the aliens that they had decided to not destroy the world after all.
Instead of rejecting this as obvious nonsense, her most fervent followers grabbed onto this explanation excitedly. After days of dodging the press — which had been writing jokey stories about the group as they prepared for the end — the group members eagerly started calling every reporter they could think of to share the good news about the earth’s reprieve.
In other words, the failed prophecy, in the short term, actually served to invigorate the group and strengthen the beliefs of its truest true believers — as they tried to combat their unconscious sense of disappointment with ever-more-frantic activity.
But only for the most fervent followers. Those who weren’t in direct contact with Martin faded away from the group.
The sociologists didn’t really get a chance to see what would have happened with the true believers because the real world intruded on the cult in other ways: Police threatened to arrest Martin for contributing to the delinquency of minors (by scaring them with her UFO stories) and suggested that she might be sent to a mental hospital. She went into hiding, and her group dissolved. Two years later Festinger’s book was published.
But Martin hadn’t vanished forever. Several years later she emerged again as a proto-new age guru, and she continued channeling her same alien friends for many decades until her death in 1992.
So on the one hand, she managed to keep peddling her bullshit for as long as she lived even after being proved catastrophically wrong again and again.
On the other hand, she never became the great prophet she imagined herself to be, and has gone down in history as little more than a footnote in the history of People Who Were Completely Wrong About Everything.
There may be a lesson or two here.
For more about Martin and her group, see here. If you’ve got a Kindle, you can get an ebook version of When Prophecy Fails cheap on Amazon.
They aren’t even as plausible as Martin was.
On one hand, I can’t believe they’ve collectively got the requisite cognitive dissonance to believe that was a resounding success.
On the other hand… I feel that way in regards to cognitive dissonance about basically everything the men’s “human rights” “movement” comes up with, so… yeeeaaaah.
I feel like it’s because a lot of people don’t really want to be associated with hate sites in public. They’d rather sit in front of their computers ranting about how women suck, and then they go out in the real world and act normal.
If I were a leader in a small movement that I hoped was going to take off, I’d be happy with this event. Fun chance to meet people IRL, attracted a few visitors, maybe a little local media coverage. No big debacle, didn’t blow tons of money on it. But that’s all: a modest not-failure. I wouldn’t be jumping for joy, either.
katz – And that’s normal. I’d be happy too, I’m happy when my blog gets one more follower a day and sometime today I reached the five followers mark. That made me happy, especially since it’s been a week since I started it.
I wouldn’t call it a monumental day, but it is a start, I guess.
I think Alice has it. It’s all very well to post MRA stuff online, but if they went to a rally like this people might get their picture in the paper, and then their families would know that they believe that stuff.
Yeah, I could totally understand if their comments were of the “we had fun, spread our message and met good people” variety. But this? This is justifying failure on par with David’s example.
I don’t know that it makes much sense to get excited about the rally being five times larger than the “opposition”. It would make more sense to be excited about the friendly turnout.
If a GOP rally in a small town amounts to a total of 10 people and only two people show up to protest the rally it doesn’t mean that all the non-GOP members sitting at home are suddenly non-existent.
It’s because they overestimate the extent to which feminists care about them. They were assuming that every feminist within 100 miles would show up to counterprotest, so they’re interpreting a response of “meh” as “we don’t dare to oppose you, you big strong men that you are”.
@Alice Sanguinaria
Especially if they think that feminism is the dominant position. As with many similarly repulsive views, they are best served to willing audiences, i.e. each other in insular spaces.
Katz, I think the event is a failure relative to the hoopla made about it beforehand (and now); if you say, hey we’re having a little rally, and you have a little rally, that’s one thing. if you promise the showdown of the century and throw all of the energy of the MRM’s biggest and really only activist blog into promoting it for a month, and fly people from across the country to it, and this is what you get, well, it’s a giant failure.
Whereas pretty much everyone I know knows I’m a feminist.
Don’t you people unnerstand?! This is the fulcrum of history! Hence forth everything will be different! One day callenders will refer to this as year zero of the New Age!
Morrigan – Exactly. I think that they prefer the anonymity that the Internet gives them, to be honest. Anonymity makes it easier to post things without having it associated with your real name or your professional identity, for example.
Doesn’t mean that what you post won’t have consequences. But it does make it easier to troll, to be an asshole, and to hate on half of the population with encouragement from your circlejerk friends.
cloudiah – I was speaking to my housemate about this. She was surprised that people ACTUALLY think like MRAs. She also enjoyed my parodies of MRA texts. We’re both of the agreement that women are lucky that many MRAs aren’t sleeping with them.
Most everyone that I consider my friend are feminists or people with feminist sympathies. At the very least, they don’t hate on half of the population for no reason.
Does anyone actually believe that MGTOW aren’t actively pursuing sex and/or relationships? Because honestly, I don’t buy it. I picture them more as being in trying-to-get-laid mode most of the time, and then going into “well, I don’t want you anyway, cause I’m going my own way!” rants upon each rejection.
CassandraSays – You know, I honestly don’t know. I believe that many of the MGTOW people are actually people “going their own way” (whatever that means). I also of the belief that many of them are just saying that because it gives them an out for their sour grapes, but that they don’t actually practice this “doctrine”.
I am*
Stupid grammar mistake.
It seems to mean whatever it’s most convenient for it to mean at the time.
So basically one day it means avoiding all women, and another day, it means allow your mother to come in and take care of you and make that chicken soup you like because you feel sick?
As long as you’re not being too nice to women I think you qualify as going your own way.
MGTOW does make it sound like the bloke has made his own decision rather than being the unwanted consequence of his own behaviours.
Didn’t we have a troll once who said that you could be married and still be a MGTOWer so long as you had the MGTOW “attitude,” which he declined to define specifically?
IIRC the dude who wrote and performed the Go Your Own Way song is married.
(I remember this because it provoked many lulz at the time.)
Oh, come on, you people are so negative. Think about it this way:
First, in Montana, zero attendees.
Then, MRAs shatter the law of multiplicability with 7 attentees in Washington D.C. (over infinity fold the attendance in Montana).
Now, we don’t have the numbers, but it looks like attendance was once more raised by 500%. Looks like there are at least 35 people there.
Seriously, the feminist movement can’t raise it’s activism by infinity nor by 500% in only a few months. AVfM was able to generate over 2 people per article (minus the organizers).
No, asshole, it was not a failure at all, They said themselves (avfm) that they were expecting about 100 to 200 people. This movement is growing more and more with time no matter what smart-ass remarks you make. Slow or not the continuing success of this movement proves that your smear campaign is the only “miserable failure” going on here. But hey, chins up, David. Your finally beginning to prove yourself as funny. Your sure as hell making us laugh.