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!
You. Still.
And which scene? “No Ace, just you”?
Yeah.
It’s a 1911 Colt. A semi-automatic. He fires it in the air, then points it at Ace. The line, “No Ace, just you”, is emphasised with the clicking that comes of him pulling the hammer back to cock the gun.
Can’t happen.
Still not ‘they’. Classic goalpost shifting.
You know if you’re going to nitpick to avoid answering a question, you could at least pick something that makes sense.
But what all these stupid tactics is displaying is the fact that you know that F4J are, like all MRA groups, not actually doing anything to help men, just trying to get attention and shitting on women. In fact, F4J are even worse, since they’re not even helping themselves. They’re a bullshit movement founded by an abusive bloke with substance abuse problems to demand the right to treat children as property and endanger them by placing them with the tiny fraction of people who have been judged as unfit to look after them. And you know it.
I want the record to reflect the goal posts have been shifted* so much I have no idea what we’re actually supposed to be talking about.
* *cough* ahostileworld *cough*
So first you say’they’, then you say, ‘the individuals who’, then you say ‘they again’, and now you are talking about one individual ‘with substance abuse problems’ (bigotry against drug addicts much?). Here’s a hint: it’s blatantly obvious what you are trying to here. You are conflating things to create guilt by association.
#shellgame #goalpostshifting
OKay, I have no idea what ahostileworld just said but I am 100% sure it was totally hilarious…
Actually my friend is a woman, so the TERFs were being transphobic the OTHER way to her. There was just also a trans man who weighed in and got his gender TERFsplained. It was garbage all around.
Luckily, said friend was distracted by a polycule outing to pick apples and make more apple dessert than I have ever made in a single sitting.
Also, pokemon.
I said ‘they’ originally, because that’s the way to refer to a group of individuals collectively.
Then I explained that.
Then I used ‘they’ again because I presumed (apparently incorrectly) that even a child could have understood what I was talking about.
I said the movement was started by him, because it was. He’s abusive. He shouldn’t be allowed to look after infants, especially not unsupervised. I then pointed out that other individuals had been judged to be incapable of looking after children, and pointed out that plotting to kidnap children is usually not the most effective way of demonstrating that it’s safe to allow a person to be near children.
So, riddle me this: when I said ‘they’, when talking about F4J, what did you think I was referring to?
Pecunium — didn’t realize it was semi auto. Of course, I just woke in a cold sweat from one that had a damn revolver apparently firing crossbow bolts (that part makes sense, it’s the one VtM ranged weapon I can deal with using). Guns are not exactly my strong suit.
And I’m dying laughing at the idea you aren’t a feminist, says Mr. Rape Culture is just buzzwords. I’ll have to remember that next time you’re telling my jerkbrain why I wasn’t “asking for it”.
Ally — whut? So many whuts. I’m totally non-binary cuz I got bullied for being…no wait, I got bullied for being too much not…
Wow. Just wow.
Oh, going back to the baby clothes thing, apparently in the 80s all my mother could find was a blue and white striped stroller, but I was dressed largely in white onesies. And when she did the tour of my kindergarten class, she found the idea of me playing with the gender segregated toys hilarious (I don’t have the foggiest why 5 year old would have toys for boys and toys for girls)
I’m continuing to ignore hostile, since he is.
Nat — vampires. You were talking about vampires. Am I right? XD
Athywren — I am less than thrilled with the stunning lack of occult items that were in the original, from the box no mods or patches, game.
Hostility (your’re soaking in it).
Your entire post is an outright false statement. I did not *imply* anything. I asked one interlocutor what they made of the suffragettes, if they thought defacing some generic, mawkish, non-descript piece of ‘artwork’ was an eeeeebil thing to do.
The rest of your speculations about my motivations on here are just that: speculations. For instance, you say I am against feminism. Here’s a hint for you and all those other paranoid people out there who see the enemy everywhere: I have never been an opponent of feminism. But then, you don’t really strike me as a feminist.
You made a comparison, one which implied any person who decried the defacing of art must also decry the destruction of telegraph poles. When the difference in kind was pointed out (object of mass production vs. unique works) you attempted to create the idea of, “the artistry of British Engineering”, to trump the idea of objects of a utilitarian nature being different in kind from those meant to be expressive*, and so avoid that essential difference in the nature of the works being any defense against the destruction.
You are correct that there isn’t any basic reason to see the question as indicative of ill-intent, but we have more than the one example of your “reasoning” on this subject. When presented with a flat statement of my opinion on the subject (wrong to have attacked infrastructure, but an act of different real harm because the two things you are attempting to conflate have a categorical difference, you engaged in hand-waving.
At that point your value as an honest actor evaporated. You are out to “score points”. You’re agenda is, “to win”§.
So, if “winning” is your objective, whom are you trying to defeat? Us. Who are we? Feminists. How are you going about it? Defending a couple of MRM related groups. So, prima facie you are hostile to the aims of feminism, as that movement is hostile to feminism. Since we have said the base ideas F4J, etc., pursue are ideas we agree with, but question their final goals (based on the hostility to women we see in their rhetoric) and think their methods are, at best, counter-productive, and at worst criminal, the difference must be at level more basic.
What could that be? One does spring to mind (when your writings, and rhetorical techniques are taken as a whole, rather than treating each little one as if it were sui generis): you are anti-feminist.
As to my not striking you as being a feminist… why the fuck do I care what you think of my feminism? You, son, are a dishonest asshole. Ten lbs.s of shit in a two-pound bag. Your disdain, dislike, etc. are the sugar in my tea. They are an elixer (like the tears of men) and give me strength.
*You do seem a bit weak on artistic theory, so think of this as sort of mini-course from the Open University: You’re attempts to both attack the nature of the one piece (while completely ignoring that more than one work of art was defaced) as being objectively, “not real art”, while defending, “art is what the viewer thinks it is, is either 1: disingenuous, 2: a piece of performance art worthy of Dada, or 3: the result of an inability to keep more than one thought in your head at a time. If you take a moment and review your previous comments you might be able to keep the narrative arc consistent. On the other hand attentive readers have already pointed out you have trouble managing that in the same paragraph, so perhaps the fundamental failures in reasoning ability are both greater, and more affective, than is true for most people.
§ Good luck with that. Not only are you out of your depth, you are trying to “defeat” multiple interlocutors; most of whom demonstrate a better grasp basic logic, practical rhetoric, and emotional maturity. Coupled to their practice in the art form, a willingness to quote you back to yourself and your inability to keep the thread of your own arguments, even in a single paragraph… starting a land war in Asia might have been a better idea.
@inurashii
Sorry for misgendering your friend. :/
…you put sugar in your tea but call my coffee too sweet?
I’m just gonna assume that was adapting the cliche.
aug – Given that zie doesn’t understand how feminism works, maybe. But then that begs the question on who let this troll pass a grammar class?
Pronouns are misandry! As evidenced by my being a zie creature. (Cuz calling me something that sounds like sea creature is such a huge insult [oh, my wee wittle fishies are getting big enough to spot fins!])
Marie, no harm. You didn’t misgender my friend because you didn’t have adequate information to know that there were two people being radscummed at. I wasn’t clear and mentioned a male person so I don’t consider it misgendering 🙂
*derails thread*
So I have somewhere between 10 and 12 wee wittle cories at last count. Adult cories are hard enough to count, babies are damned near impossible. But they’re getting color and big enough to see their fins and I caught some of them schooling the other day! Dear gods are ~1cm fish that are mostly clear schooling absolutely adorable. Wiggle wiggle wiggle!
Went through three fish tanks and a box before I found my spare thermometer, because that tank never had one, being a snail tank and all. It’ say balmy 80~ in there. Just a smidge too warm, but for a tank with a non-adjustable heater, it’s lovely.
Had a fun little scare in the 29g a few nights ago. Got told they taught I had a dead cory, it was belly up on the bottom. I get my net and go down and cannot find this fish. Ask where, get told which corner, see a cory sitting up staring at me. Have my mother come over…”poke it with the net”…I do, it swims off all “wtf, I was comfy”. Consensus is that it was sleeping. And she was all “but it skipped dinner”! It’s a bottom feeder, it’ll get to it!
Argenti – D’aww, that’s cute. 🙂
How long does it take fish babies to mature?
Hostile: You could have had this easier. If you had asked me, ‘are kidnappers to be trusted as parents’, then my answer would have been no straight away. Who is doing the goalpost shifting now?
You are.
The question was completely referent to F4J, whom you have been defending categorically: saying that any action they perform benefits, “The Cause” because it garners publicity, which leads to “interest” in the subject.
This has been contradicted; you have ignored it. Me, I think such levels of ridiculous, and often stupid, stunting means that the only people they are likely to attract are those who are as foolish, short-sighted, and conspiracy minded as themselves. In short it’s going to attract more people who think climbing bridges in super-hero costumes is more useful than lobbying MPs, writing op-ed pieces, speaking in public fora; such as universities, where one can try to shape peoples opinions while they are more open to new ideas.
Instead your lot has Tom Martin, and Batman.
Asshole McGee: So first you say’they’, then you say, ‘the individuals who’, then you say ‘they again’, and now you are talking about one individual ‘with substance abuse problems’ (bigotry against drug addicts much?). Here’s a hint: it’s blatantly obvious what you are trying to here. You are conflating things to create guilt by association.
I think I see why you don’t logic, it’s because neither do you grammar.
1: F4J is a group. As such it takes a plural pronoun (it seems to me that someone who was natively speaking a declensional language; one with three modes of pronomial form in the nominative, and had mastered a non-declining language with only two, would understand this, but I digress).
2: Members of that group (again, plural) engaged in an act.
2a: Referring to them requires a plural pronoun (see parenthetical remark to point the first).
3: You objected to the indefinite plural (as “they” could be seen to refer to all members of F4J).
4: An adjustment was made to make the referent a partitive pronouns (some individuals”: this is still a plural form, again see parenthetical remark at [1]).
5: You again pretend to miss the point.
6: The response uses the pronoun they, which; true to the rules of pronomial usage refers to the usage in the prior instance (“those individuals”) and so is plainly a partitive usage; no longer referring to all of F4J.
6a: You pretend this is all too confusing for your highly logical Germanic brain; which uses both archaic americanisms from a school of fiction/film, as well as vulgar, and somewhat affected, Aussie slang.
Hope that clears it up for you.
NB: the more cynical among us might thinks this was an attempt to derail the conversation away from the questions you have been asked (e.g. What do you think of those members of F4J who do things like plot kidnappings [and has F4J done anything to distance themselves from it], or, “How does defacing artworks [note the plural, don’t forget the Hay Wain] help the cause), or to keep us from reminding you that you’ve not managed to keep to a single line of argument on any of the topics you introduced.
Those of us who are experienced, would be certain.
@Argenti aertheri
Yay for your fishies! 😀 they sound so cute.
(Good job, you got me thinking fish are cute, what more evil will you inflict on me :P)
Argenti:
…you put sugar in your tea but call my coffee too sweet?
I’m just gonna assume that was adapting the cliche.
Is tea coffee? No.
Ergo the have different rules.
For the record, I take my tea black, or with milk and sugar. (green teas are taken neat). If iced I take it with only sugar (unless it’s Thai, in which case, like Thai iced coffee, it gets sweetened condensed milk, Vietnamese coffee is also taken with sweetened condensed).
If it’s frozen, “green tea” (which usually means matcha) gets heavy cream, and lots of sugar: 🙂
Alice — sexual maturity is like six months, big enough to seem like actual fishies is a month or two. I’m probably putting them in the 55g once they are big enough and strong enough that the filter isn’t a risk, cuz 10+ cories in a 2.5g tank? No, not working.
If I absolutely have to I could do a massive tank shift, but it’d be a mess. The 29g fish could go in the 55g, but that tank’s filter is no better, so then I’d have to more puff into the 29g and the cories into his 30g. And I so don’t want to have to resort to that. I’m hoping they get big enough for the 55g before the ammonia in the 2.5g becomes an issue. The 55g has my beloved fluval, so I could turn it all the way down and put a stocking over the intake if I had to. It’s way understocked and has lovely biocolonies, so that could work.
I’m hoping hey can stay where they are until they can handle the filter though, it’d be easiest.
My other option is to convert the 10g back to fish. Pecunium, I think your African violets are ready to come out, but baring needing that tank for fry, I’m just going to leave them until you can take them.
(Yes I have a lot of fish tanks)
*
Is this an abortion reference? If you’re trying to imply that people who obtain abortions are not fit to be parents, it seems to me that that’s more of an argument FOR reproductive choice, rather than against it. In my experience, people who wouldn’t make good parents (either because they don’t want to be parents, or aren’t ready to become parents yet) often damn well KNOW it and that is why they take action not to become parents.*
Or are you trying to imply that because some women obtain abortions, therefore no women are fit to be parents? That seems a little silly, but hey, if you’re advocating for men to be the ones to be primary caregivers for children, ok then.
Or are you trying to imply that humans in general are not fit to reproduce because plenty of children die every year from malnutrition or from violence in war zones? That’s kind of a defeatist attitude, but I can kind of understand that. Still, it’s not really a fair reasoning for limiting people’s reproductive choices.
*This can also be filed under “shit no feminist would ever say.”
**This of course elides the fact that there are quite a few people who obtain abortions because they are ALREADY parents to other children they are struggling to provide for and simply know that they cannot care for another child in addition to the one they are already caring for.