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!
And let’s be clear: I NEVER said that felling those masts was wrong. I used it as an example of a legitimate political movement legitimately causing material damage in an effort to accomplish legitimate goals.
I thought the original person who brought up burning houses was talking about the rape victims house getting burnt down.
Which is the main reason I’m so baffled our new little troll is going on about how burning houses is okay. Because its “okay” in war.
cloudiah: How ’bout Whistler’s “Arrangement in Gray and Black No 1” aka “Whistler’s Mother”? She obviously a matriarch….
ahostileworld: Again, what did destroying the “kitsch” accomplish?
talacaris:
I think that could be the case, but I don’t know that there’s a class-specific split in underachievement from boys specifically; are there studies that show that? I’m not saying it’s not the case, at any rate! I’d just personally thought the gender difference was more more universal, class-wise.
My assumption was that the girlification of studying and high academic achievement began when academic pursuits were opened to women (as opposed to the 1800s view that women would be mentally harmed by scholasticism and that they weren’t capable of it in the first place). Historically, men as a group seem to move away from things that were once men-only but have become gender nonspecific, which leads to those things becoming designated woman-only things, or at least “unmanly.”
Could be some of both, though! I wonder if the difference is there across the board but more pronounced in working-class boys? Anyone have any literature on the subject?
It got people’s attention.
I’ll be honest though I haven’t read ALL the comments. And am likely not going to.
I’m heading to work shortly. I’ll try to catch up on comments when I can. No guarantee (some days the shift is easy and some days the cops have to be called).
I am exactly, precisely serious. I don’t have to like something for it still to qualify as art (this is why I included the Gainsborough). Even your constant assertion that the portrait is kitsch acknowledges the painting’s status as art – kitsch is lowbrow and mass/pop culture, yes. But it is accepted as art.
Seriously, I can’t believe I have to say this, but THERE IS NO GENDER WAR.
The only “war” that exists is in the heads of MRAs. That’s why MRAs frame it as a gender war, and why feminists see it as more of a pathetic tantrum trying to peer pressure others to join in. That’s it.
We’re going over this again? There is no objective standard. What is art to one person is crap to the next one.
@ostarta
I will be so glad if trollboy answers that because I could use that kind of entertainment today.
@ahostileworld
::headdesk:::
If its up to the person then why did you dismissively say it was “not art”?
And then you get to be upset when another person defends the art…….
I don’t understand you.
You seem to go back in forth and weave all over the place. I don’t understand what you are trying to say because you keep bouncing back in forth…..
And to think, this all started because I said that I would have liked to have seen the author of the article on The Daily Beast to talk about MRAs’ faux-issues like “friendzoning”. xD
*offers a curtsy* It’d be fun to jump into this conversation and get back to that since I missed 8 pages of comments.
Sorry? You called them villains.
Last time I checked my dictionary, “villain” was a word used to describe the antagonist or “bad” individual in a situation. Now, pecunium offered you a good faith response to your question where he made the point you argue that you were trying to make
I’m still interested in your answer to the question I asked you about the difference between vandalizing a work of (admittedly political mass culture) art versus the question of a piece of industrial manufacture, without all the handwaving on the subject of individual taste.
I do not get upset. Apologies if I created the impression. If people consider the portrait, the movie ‘American Pie’ or the Harry Potter series artistic, then more power to them.
‘ You called them villains’
And you conveniently left out the question mark. Including it would have made it more difficult to wrench my example out of context. Quotemining is dishonest.
With all due respect, when the hell did this thread turn into a philosophical discussion of art theory, and what does that have to do with the failure of the journalist to present the MRM for what it really is?
Right… because not answering people’s legitimate questions directly and shrugging it off lends integrity to your arguments, ahostileworld.
I thought you said you didn’t read the thread. Quick to take sides are we?
Disingenuous at best. The individual in question didn’t go out and spray paint a sign or a poster. He defaced a painting that, whether you like it or not, is a work of art on display in a museum.
Okay, Westminster Abbey, but still, on display as a work of art. How is that equivalent to the telegraph pole example? Is it okay to burn down houses so long as they were designed by a builder and not an architect or engineer? Is it okay to deface a painting so long as it’s a portrait of a person and not a landscape? If it were not considered valuable by some people then no one would want to deface it, because no one would care.
But you indicated that cutting down telegraph poles was an equivalent act, and you suggested that this had to do with the “art” of British engineering. I’d like a little explication of this rather questionable suggestion.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&ved=0CDkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.edu.gov.on.ca%2Feng%2Fliteracynumeracy%2Finspire%2Fresearch%2Fmartino.pdf&ei=o4tlUpK2EMKh4gTEmIHICA&usg=AFQjCNFAChvrOGggOpVJFkqVqxhlsyMt0A&bvm=bv.54934254,d.bGE some article i found
Many nowadays seem to think that boy’s underachievement cannot be studied without respect to the interaction with class and ethnicity, all boys are not at risk. But I didn’t find any any conclusive answers on a quick search. Anybody has good links?
esled – Becaise something something about feminists not knowing what art is something something feminists are stupid and uneducated something something men’s rights something something they don’t really get it something something subjective something something MRA movement is really a legitimate human rights movement and not an excuse to hate on women. *nod*
(It must be my broken English!)
***Saying that the portrait was ‘a piece of art’ begs the question. ***
I don’t know how many more ways I can paraphrase this for the umptieth time. Anyone can say this or that (a telegraph mast, a dog turd, a nice jacket) is a piece of art. It does not make it universally true.
Let’s be clear, this is what got said:
I had a chance to get caught up, ahostileworld.
So tell me: what’s so legitimate about the MRM that it’s required again? And here’s a question: do we need the MRM if other groups are already handling those legitimate issues without the need for being misogynists, conspiracy theorists, and all around fools?
Go.
Galleries are full of shit that I don’t consider art. Doesn’t mean I’m willing to deface them in the name of some cause or other. Certainly not in the name of retaining rights while failing to live up to the required responsibilities. If f4j would put their efforts toward being responsible and reliable parents, they’d get their wish much sooner. (If you check out their founder’s history, you’ll notice that this is precisely how he managed to regain access to his children.)