The bad publicity bonanza for Men’s Rights activists continues — and it couldn’t happen to a worse group of people.
Yesterday, the Daily Beast published a long-awaited piece on the Men’s Rights movement, and it’s a doozy. If you’re a regular reader of this site, trust me, you’ll want to read the whole thing, like now. The piece, by R. Tod Kelly, is long — some 6000 words — but worth it.
It’s mostly on the money, but with a few notable flaws.
Here’s what it gets right:
1) It captures the pervasive misogyny of the Men’s Rights movement in general, and of A Voice for Men in particular.
2) In an extended section, it profiles AVFM’s John Hembling, and tears apart some of his most blatant lies — including the now legendary box-cutter incident, in which Hembling claims to have stared down a mob of 20-30 feminists brandishing boxcutters.
As Kelly notes:
Vancouver police records show that there was indeed an altercation in September of 2012 between Hembling and others seeking to tear down men’s rights posters. However, according to the police, Hembling was arguing with two or three people, not being accosted by a “mob” of any size. When questioned by the authorities, neither Hembling nor witnesses mentioned seeing any weapons. …
Curiously enough, Hembling actually videotaped the events and had his AV4M Radio partner Karen Straughan post it online. The discussion with the police has been conveniently edited out, but the rest of the video clearly matches police records and not Hembling’s story. There are only a few young men taking down Hembling’s posters, and the video shows them choosing to ignore him except when he engages them in conversation. One of the men is seen using a box cutter to take down the flyers, but at no time does he use it as a weapon, raise his voice, or threaten Hembling in any way.
Kelly found some troubling, er, discrepancies in another story told by Hembling. Kelly writes:
According to Hembling, sometime around 1995 he was on his way home at 2:00 am after working a night shift when he came upon [a sexual] assault in progress. He says he used his steel-toed boots as weapons to chase off the perpetrator. When the victim was too distraught to speak with him, Hembling says he contacted the police, waited until they arrived, and then quietly left without speaking to them. He says they later tracked him down at his home, where he gave a statement.
It’s hard to know whether this event actually occurred or not. There is no record—at least, not in the Vancouver police files—of Hembling being a material witness to a rape, and police blotters from that time period do not show a crime that matches Hembling’s description. However, this does not necessarily mean the event did not occur. Vancouver police did not fully computerize their data until 2002, and it is possible the police never reported the incident. Hembling claims the incident took place at a specific hospital, where he says he worked as a contractor for 18 months. The address he gives, however, is for a different hospital in a completely different part of the city. This raises the curious question of whether Hembling forget the name of the hospital he contracted with for 18 months, or whether he forget what part of the city he worked in for that same period of time. The real truth of the matter is anyone’s guess, because Hembling wouldn’t comment to The Beast on that or any other matter.
In other words: Cool story, bro.
3) Another thing the story gets right: it makes clear just how little the Men’s Rights movement does to actually help men — and how in many ways it can actually be terribly damaging to men who need real help. As Kelly writes,
the movement’s radicals might … do … immediate damage to those who most desperately need the MRM to succeed.
“When we talk about recovery from trauma and abuse, there were two things that helped me,” says Chris Anderson, executive director of the male-victim advocacy group Male Survivor and a sexual abuse survivor himself. “The first was realizing that I’m not alone; the second was hearing that recovery was possible.” Anderson is quick to dissociate himself from the men’s rights movement: “In [the MRM] people get that first message, that they’re not alone. I don’t know that they ever get the second message. And when they don’t get that second message, it turns into an endless feedback loop and eventually they say, ‘Oh my God, all of society is f**ked.’”
Indeed, Kelly writes:
It is telling to note that of the professional male-victim advocacy organizations I spoke with, every single one specifically asked that I not allow readers to think they were in any way related to the MRM.
But there are also some things that I think the article gets wrong.
1) I think it gives Men’s Rights activists way too much credit for their supposed good intentions. While there are some MRAs who do seem to be motivated at least in part by a sincere desire to help men, most of the MRAs I’ve encountered in the 3 years of doing this blog have clearly been motivated primarily by anger and hatred of feminists — and women in general. They don’t really seem to give a shit about doing anything to actually improve the lives of men — and the paucity of their accomplishments reflects this. In its relatively brief lifespan, AVFM has raised many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Has it set up any shelters or hotlines or helplines for men? Not a one.
2) It wildly exaggerates the importance of Hembling to the MRM — especially ironic given that Hembling has been more or less AWOL in recent months, producing only a few short videos and one article for AVFM.
3) It paints a picture of The Spearhead’s WF Price as a Men’s Rights “moderate.” Really? While it’s true that Price is not an AVFM-style hothead given to rants about “fucking your shit up,” his views are anything but moderate. This is a guy who thinks higher education is wasted on women, who blames the epidemic of rape in the armed forces on women, who celebrated one Mothers Day with a vicious transphobic rant, who once used the tragic death of a woman who’d just graduated from college to argue that “after 25, women are just wasting time.” He published posts on why women’s suffrage is a bad idea. Plus, have you met his commenters?
I was, however, kind of amazed to learn that Price is married … and to a feminist. No, really.
4) The article, while solidly researched, contains some small errors and simplifications that will no doubt give MRAs and others the excuse they need to dismiss the whole thing. Kelly refers to Reddit subreddits as Reddit “threads!” He refers to Matt Forney as an MRA! Oh no!
Still, whatever its flaws, this is an important piece, and one that tells a lot of truth about the Men’s Rights movement. Again — go read it!
Why not? Circumcision rates are declining steadily. Education and public discussion seems to be working just fine. Why do we need to start setting things on fire?
…
Seriously? I just… I mean, I get it, I sometimes make connetions that are not immediately obvious to everyone else, and sometimes I make leaps that some people need to take in small steps, but surely the connection there is clear?
I’m not making some radial leap of logic here, am I?
Firstly, it was air fields. Those places where planes are kept and are launched into the air? You know, the things that shoot down other planes and drop bombs? Yeah. And, seriously, every mechanised nation has oil depots – not just Esso. Fuel depots, whatever. Without fuel, mechanised nations are just… nations. Try fighting a mechanised campaign without fuel. You will fail.
So you use an out of date American term? Don’t bullshit.
Sheila’s not much better these days, btw.
@ toujoursgai – where? What country? America? America is not the only country in the world and there are countries where this medieval crap is becoming more and more widespread.
Hey, jackass, you still haven’t explained why you think burning down houses is totally cool but sawing down telegraph poles is a TERRIBLE OFFENSE.
I would really like to understand this cognitive dissonance going on!
I know it’s common in other countries as well, but where are the rates increasing? And what makes you think that education and public discourse won’t work there?
Since this isn’t Disneyland, and the only way to succeed is to break shit, what shit are you going to break, ahostileworld? Come on, answer the question.
For those following along at home: The reason you can’t go “this act would be morally wrong except it’s justifiable in this circumstance because the victim deserves it and/or I’m doing it for important social justice reasons” is that the same logic could be used to justify doing bad things to anyone as long as you have a reason that you think is good. You may think it’s obvious that vigilante justice against, say, a rapist is OK but the same act against a rape victim is horrifying, but if someone else thinks that girl totally had it coming, zie can use the exact same reasoning to do the exact opposite.
Basically it moves social morality from relatively clear-cut ideas that most people don’t disagree too strongly about (like “murder is wrong because every human being has a right to life”) to completely subjective ones entirely dependent on one’s worldview (like “murdering a member of the middle or lower class is wrong because they aren’t oppressors, unlike the upper class”). So, for instance, to convince an MRA that you shouldn’t bomb a courthouse because you lost child custody, you could no longer just argue “murdering people and destroying property is morally wrong, even if someone else really did wrong you”–you now have to completely convince them to stop being an MRA and to no longer think that the judge did anything wrong!
@ahostileworld, so it’s yes to being a British WW2 obsessed wanker then?
Thread reading fail. 🙂
Bullshit. It’s said that Gandhi was an effective and powerful activist, whilst maintaining his policy of non-violence. Ditto MLK. It is not said that the civil rights movement/Indian independence movement was non-violent, neither by historians, nor the commenters here, nor by anyone even slightly knowledgeable about the subject. So either you’ve managed to round up every idiot you could find and argued with them, or you’re being incredibly disingenuous.
@Kitteh’s
The troll Cassandra’s referring to is Ullere
Re: Brad Pitt and “attractive”
I think you can make “objective” claims of attractive in reference to how well someone fits the cultural standards of beauty of the commenter and/or the person. So I think we can “objectively” say that Pitt, or JGL or Scarlett Johannsen is attractive, without it having to mean that everyone finds them attractive. Whereas someone like Goodman doesn’t fit the Western cultural standards of being extremely attractive, but that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of people do find him attractive.
Personally, I use “X is attractive” to mean that they fit the cultural standards, and use “X is attractive to me” for people that I personally find attractive, but do not fit cultural standards.
::snicker:: Reversing that, I’m wearing a faux beret right now. I finished knitting it last night and it’s cold this morning. 🙂
I notice hostilitywank only has a snipe at the portrait of the Queen (or rather, the Queen herself) and doesn’t mention the attempt to damage/destroy Constable’s painting The Hay Wain.
I wasn’t aware that a couple of nineteenth-century farm workers were parasites and predatory crates and so on.
Case in point:
http://www.dw.de/circumcision-remains-legal-in-germany/a-16399336
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_circumcision
Oh, I see – it’s increasing in Southern Africa, although not for religious reasons. Since the concern there is public health, it seems like anti-circumcision activists should be able to get by with facts and reasoning. Still don’t see how fire is going to fix much.
*ca. 47 minutes of enraged sputtering*
Honestly, I am losing my ability to tell the difference between stupidity and utter pigheaded mendacity now.
Men are not the enemy of feminism.
No, seriously. I’ll repeat that as many times as you need me to.
Men are not the enemy of feminism.
Even non-feminist men are not the enemy of feminism.
The enemy of feminism is a stultifying, regressive, essentialist, inhumane, repressive ideology, which is why giving it a name and defining it’s particulars (patriarchy, rape culture) is a useful and productive tactical decision, rather than just a ‘bandying about of buzzwords’.
Naming something helps make it possible to talk about. Talking about it makes it easier to address and resist.
Which is why feminists use those words: to assist in the process of dismantling the effects of the stultifying, regressive, essentialist, inhumane, repressive ideology that is our enemy. (How do MRAs use their words? Oh, that’s right. To harass, threaten, and vilify women)
Again, and as many times as I need to say it, men are not the enemy of feminism.
Feminists like myself resist the ideology, which incidentally harms men and boys as widely and indiscriminately as it harms women and girls. Feminists like myself resist and work against the ideology in order to make the lives of men and women and boys and girls alike better.
I’m not a feminist because I hate men.
I am a feminist because on top of all the difficulties and challenges that are still faced by women and girls, in 20 fucking 13, the immediate response to problems faced by men and boys is still to scrabble around desperately for a woman to vilify and punish.
For instance, tacky, tasteless monarchist kitsch.
Doesn’t need to. He sat for the picture.
ahostileworld, Would you advocate firebombing hospitals and medical clinics, since that’s where the bulk of European circumcisions are taking place?
I like that Mr. “spot a derailing from a mile away” has gone from talking about how nobody cares about frienzoning to rape culture to the demographics of Manboobz to F4J to what’s real art to WWII to circumcision.
It goes without saying that book burnings are fair game, right?
No.
The circumcision derail is partly my fault – sorry about that. I was just trying to make the point that public debate can alter social behavior without any violence necessary.
Oh Christ, now he’s on at the Germans.
Really? ahostileshithead.
I’m embarrassed that we’re both British, could you please try not to be such a stereotypical bigoted white British male please?
For some reason I’m thinking of Basil Fawlty:
http://youtu.be/yfl6Lu3xQW0
So… if it’s totally okay to burn down the houses of people you don’t like ’cause they’re your “opponents”, does this apply to other things as well? Is it okay to burn down courthouses because they’re some supreme EBIL, burn down PP Clinics because EBIL, crash a plane into WTC because US is some sort of EBIL?
You can use that argument to justify terrorism. And that argument reveals much about our current Boring MRA Troll.
I’m not British, I’m German, Ophie, so relax will you?
Ophie? It’s opheliamonarch to you fucknuts!