Deprived of new women to hate in Toronto, A Voice for Menners resort to rape jokes, gay bashing

Pity the poor MRAs who travelled hundreds — if not thousands — of miles to AVFM’s big weekend in Toronto hoping for a confrontation with the evil feminazis that never happened. They wanted footage of angry women they could watch again and again on YouTube. They wanted new names and faces to put up on Register-Her. In short, they wanted new women to hate.

But alas, the feminists, for the most part, stayed home. And the ones who showed up were mostly dudes, from the LBGT activist group BashBack.  Making things even worse, they didn’t block any doors or try to crash AVFM’s rally. What they did, mostly, was chant things the MRAs didn’t like.

No, it was the MRAs who ignored the explicit instructions of the police to stay away from their opponents. Evidently hoping to provoke the confrontation that had been denied them thus far, a sizeable proportion of the AVFMers and Mens Rights Edmontoners in Toronto that day leave the spot designated for their rally to face off against the BashBack counter-protest.

How do we know this? Because Men’s Rights Edmonton filmed them doing it and put it on YouTube. And AVFM posted it on their site as well.

It’s kind of remarkable that they did. For one thing, it provides even more proof of how tiny the rally itself was. And it shows pretty clearly what an immature misogynistic buffoon Nick Reading of Men’s Rights Edmonton really is.

For those who don’t have the patience to watch the whole thing, here’s a quick summary:

The video starts over near where the MRA rally itself is being organized (or had just finished up). Nick Reading introduces himself.

Then, in the distance, the counterprotesters begin chanting “racist, sexist, anti-gay, MRA, go away.”

“What’s wrong with being racist and sexist?” Nick shouts in response. “It’s awesome!”

No, really. It’s about 40 seconds in.

Shortly afterwards he marches over and into the small crowd of counterprotesters, clearly itching for some kind of ideological smackdown. He’s followed by Dean Esmay, who’s indignant that MRAs are being called “anti-gay.” Which makes me wonder if he ever actually reads the website he’s the “Managing Editor” of. He yells about this for a time, then leaves. An assortment of others from the MRA crowd also show up. Some yell, others film.

Nick, who remains in the midst of the BashBackers, does his best to try to provoke, explaining his Patriarchy Party candidacy and generally acting like an ass. Eventually he elicits an angry reaction from several group members by declaring, roughly 5:50 into the video, that rape is funny; indeed, that “sometimes it’s hilarious.”

But that’s as close as he gets to provoking the confrontation he’s clearly itching for. After several minutes, apparently having run out of inspiration, he finally decides to leave.

And, scene.

This embarrassing video is in fact the first real footage of the events in Toronto that AVFM has put online so far — all the others they’ve put up have been interviews after the rally.

But I guess the folks at AVFM figured that posting this was preferable to posting video of the anemic rally itself.

And it’s true that the counterprotesters don’t exactly come across brilliantly in the video either. Despite their admirable restraint in the face of the MRA provocations, their overheated rhetoric is often way off the mark, and their old-school chants seem faintly ridiculous in an age of YouTube. And, seriously, wearing pink hammers and sickles to show support for LBGT folks being persecuted in Russia today? Stalin made male homosexuality punishable by five years in a labor camp; that law wasn’t repealed until 1993.

But it is really hard to see how Nick Reading telling a group of mostly gay men that rape is “hilarious” helps to solve the “crisis” facing men and boys– the ostensible reason for the rally in the first place.

Even more interesting than Reading’s abortive attempts to bait the BashBack protesters in Toronto were the reactions of AVFM readers to the video itself. Deprived of new women to hate, they turned instead to bashing the gay men in the video instead.

Mike Hunt — oh, very funny! — offers this totally not homophobic at all assessment of the BashBack activists:

I fully support gay rights and I am the last person to discriminate against gays, but did anyone else notice that all of these protesters seem to be gay? And not self assured, confident in who they are gay, but feminine and completely out of touch with any aspect of themselves that is masculine gay?

JinnBottle, meanwhile, claimed that AVFM had cured his homophobia — no, really — but that these protesters were making him think that maybe he should return to his old ways.

I came to AVfM definitely not “the last person to discriminate against Gays” – at least in my thinking. That thinking specifically took the form of repellence to the ubiquitous ball-busting of (mostly straight, but even other gay) men by gay guys I’d witnessed for 35-plus years in both the politico-social and personal spheres, ever since gay men had “come out”, about 1969.

Subsequently I saw that some of the clearest thinkers, potent social observers and eloquent writers on AVfM are gay – and bi … I rethought my thinking, and thought … the Radfem/Misandric Gay Guy was becoming a thing passing.

Now along come this fresh troupe of Gay misandrists and feminist allies representative of the old notion that, if not *all* gay males are self-hating masochist insulated style-boys, then a majority are.

Riku, meanwhile, didn’t hem or haw or pretend that he was anything but a bigot — and went right for the rape jokes:

You should have raped them guys. These guys literally begged for it. That’s what you were there for, no? 🙁 Thought I’d see some rapes on the event.

AVFM: Where jokes about raping gay men are a form of human rights activism.