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!
Also:
Endless And And – Pop Rock
Fearmongering Stream – Indie Folk
Out-group Cultivation – Electronica
Absurdly Nature – Indie Folk
Rancid Cultivation – Metal
Noooo.
“There is a rape culture.” (positive claim)
“I’m not convinced there is a rape culture.” (negative claim)
“There is no rape culture.” (positive claim)
This is why smart atheists, though we’re quite capable of demonstrating that the god as represented in the bible doesn’t exist, at least not as represented in the bible, simply state that we find the claims being presented to be without merit. Again, skeptic fail.
Goddamn this person doesn’t know dick about science for somebody demanding scientific proof of something (and then squatting and shitting out a totally made up set of fulfillment criteria)
He’s clearly one of those atheists who watches the rest of us debate the religious, then copies our statements without bothering to understand the rationale behind them. It’s cargo cult skepticism. 😛
Good grief. This is what happens when you piss away your youth in a gender studies class rather than studying something useful like mathematics or chemistry. Your ability to think logically is obviously indelibly compromised.
Look here, sunshine
‘Obama is NOT the president of the US’ is the *opposite* of the *positive* factual statement ‘Obama IS the president of the US’, so it follows, logically and inescapably, that the first statement is the *negative* of the second statement. Statement #1 says ‘no’, statement #2 says ‘yes’.
The burden of proof rests with he who says ‘yes’. In this example, the person who says ‘yes’ will have an easy time proving his case, but the original burden of proof still rests with him. The person who says ‘no’ does not have to prove anything, until and unless he has been confronted with compelling ‘yes’ evidence.
Argenti, I hate to break this to you, but your going to have to stop doing those handy statistic break downs. The troll doesn’t think you know math.
The irony is strong with this one.
Also, I’ll admit, I’m not getting the whole ‘burden of proof’ with yes/no statements. I think Pencunium’s definition was good. But it’s not something I really know much about so I’ll ignore that part.
Ps: troll please respond to the damn studies Argenti Aertheri linked you do.
ahostileworld, you are an idiot.
Null hypothesis does not mean what you think it means. It refers to whether you have enough evidence to support a claim. Hence, the proper null is “there is little evidence to support the hypothesis that rape culture exists”, not “there is absolutely no rape culture”.
The former is the null. The latter is a claim.
Of course, it’s not as if Wikipedia can’t tell you the nuances of null hypothesis, or did you think that your degree from the University of Google made you better than everyone else here?
I’m speaking as someone who’s taken a few stats classes, and is studying for a STEM field.
ahostileworld: Nope, now your just trying to twist out of actually trying to prove yourself.
pecunium, auggzillary and Athyrwren are correct.
So where is your proof?
Also, RE burden of proof: I’m aware that you can’t prove a negative, so we have to prove the positive. We did. We already did our part in providing you our burden of proof on whether rape culture exists. You have refused to acknowledge our evidence.
This doesn’t make you smart, it makes you look like an even more idiotic dumbass.
“You’re” not “your.”
I’m giggling too hard to type correctly.
Oh it’s okay, I majored in a “soft science” — psychology. (With a minor in that oh so subjective field of “studio arts”, I’d have commented, but art theory bores me and color theory goes over most people’s heads)
Now, as for this positive claim confusion…Spot! That! Fallacy!
(shifting the) Burden of proof (see – onus probandi) – I need not prove my claim, you must prove it is false.
Onus probandi – from Latin “onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit, non ei qui negat” the burden of proof is on the person who makes the claim, not on the person who denies (or questions the claim). It is a particular case of the “argumentum ad ignorantiam” fallacy, here the burden is shifted on the person defending against the assertion.
That says, rather literally, that the burden of proof is on he who says it, not he who negates it. No mention of having to make a claim that something is true, claiming something is false is still a claim.
Oh, good, I should go back to my alma mater and return my PhD in Mathematical Logic. Not only am I not a feminist, I am apparently not a mathematician or logician either. @ahostypost says so.
I’d ask him to prove it, but he could’t prove his way out of a paper bag.
No, no dear. You clearly have mistaken the grammatical negative (the use of the word “not” in that sentence) with a propositional negative. The sentence “Obama is not the president of the United States” may have a negative grammatical construction, but it does not contain a propositional statement that can’t be objectively and conclusively proved. It would be simple, really. There are a set of criteria for establishing who is the president of the US, and a very simple set of questions could be asked to determine the truth value of that statement.
Even if you say that there is no such thing as rape culture, there have been numerous studies which establish that for established criteria, rape culture does in fact exist and its effects are palpable and measurable.
Of course you know this, which is why you set your patently ridiculous ‘only on odd numbered Tuesdays when the moon is full and everyone with an AB+ blood type is standing on their left foot’ set of criteria. You don’t want to accept that there is a common set of myths, misconceptions and outright obfuscations that are used to explain away and excuse rape, so you declare the established criteria invalid and pick your own.
But putting on a paper crown does not make you the king of Luxembourg, baby, so get over yourself.
Logically positive is not semantically positive.
“There is not” is a positive statement when used as an indicator of a possibility to be explored scientifically (Mentally “And here is why” to your statement and see how it makes sense).
“There is not…. and here is why”
(Further: “There is not a rape culture, and here is why…”)
“There is…. and here is why”
(Further: “There is a rape culture, and here is why…”)
“There is not” is a negative statement when used to talk about things that aren’t there.
There is not a lot of understanding of positive and negative statements in the quoted section above.
If positive and negative worked as you described here, with the burden of proof always on the person who says yes, at all times, it’d be utterly impossible to convince anyone of anything they did not want to agree to, because anyone could just say “Ah, but no”. Also, some proof has already been supplied.
Also-also:
26) Good Grief Gender Studies! (Environmental Pop)
27) Mathematics, Indeliby Compromised (8bit retro music)
28) Class Ability (Newwave)
29) Piss Away (Death Metal)
30) Obviously Compromised Youth (Really angry punk)
31) Logically, You Happen (Pop)
32) Rather Good (Really smug pop)
Also-Also-Also:
33) Miscommunicating Positivism (One man band by a depressed scientist)
Yeahyeahyeah, you’re totes studying a STEM subject. You do realise that consistent lack of evidence results in the rejection of the hypothesis? Yes? So if I claim there is a teddy bear under my bed and people have a look and they don’t see one, they will conclude that there is no teddy bear under my bed? Right?
Claim: ‘There is a god’
No compelling evidence
No compelling evidence
.
.
.
No compelling evidence.
Conclusion: ‘no compelling evidence has ever been delivered in support of the claim “there is a god”. Hence, the claim must be rejected, which is to say: there is no god.’
The agnosticism of the null hypothesis is relevant for cases where the jury is still out. The jury is not out where the ideologues and Christian apologists simply make claims without evidence. Claims without evidence are rejected.
In order for me to believe that the thing under my bed is a teddy bear, it’s gonna have to fulfill these criteria.
1) It must make me feel safe and good about myself.
2) It must be an actual living bear.
3) I must be correct.
You have been offered evidence, sweetcheeks. Lots of it. We aren’t theorizing about the existence of a stellar teapot but about a social force with definitive, measurable and well documented effects on the lives of real people.
The avoidance two step is a nice dance, and you are really good at it, but don’t think that we don’t notice that every time you can’t formulate a “winning” response to a particular point you skip to another one.
I am finding it hard to believe that Asshole McGee (or whatever we’re calling him these days) has the intellectual wherewithal to tie his own shoes. But good on the rest of you for staying on him.
Exactly. But if you weren’t being wilfully ignorant, you’d see that you’ve been given evidence. And, since we have evidence for our positive claim that there is a rape culture, and you have no evidence for your positive claim that there is no rape culture, then we can reject your claim.
“There is no evidence of a rape culture” is a negative claim. “There is no rape culture” is a positive one.
Where did you get your STEM degree, so that I can cross it off the list of schools to potentially send my nephew and/or eventual children to?
(I’m just going to assume, since the only people who make snide comments about Gender Studies tend to be STEM, MBA or Economics majors, and only the STEM majors have any leg to stand on when it comes to complaining about BS degrees.)
@ahostileworld
People have given you buckets of evidence, fool. You just chose to ignore it.
Yep, you don’t have anything, do you ahostileworld? You keep ducking the question and bringing up random shit.
So far you have not provided us with anything to support your claim that there is no rape culture.
And you’ve been given plenty of evidence that there is, and have yet to speak to that.
You have been offered evidence, sweetcheeks. Lots of it. ‘We aren’t theorizing about the existence of a stellar teapot but about a social force with definitive, measurable and well documented effects on the lives of real people.’
You have not. You just have not. You like your own imaginary friend better than other people’s imaginary friends, but it is still just that: an imaginary friend.
@ahostileworld
RESPOND TO PEOPLE’S LINKS, YOU DISIGNEOUS SHIT!
The willful ignorance is strong in this one.