The self-described ‘Men’s Human Rights Activists” at A Voice for Men have shown time and time again that they have approximately zero interest in actually promoting human rights, but would rather devote their time (and the more than $100,000 the site collects in donations annually) to attacking feminists and women in general.
The latest bit of evidence? The “meme” above, designed not to actually raise awareness of child abandonment but as a sort of “gotcha” aimed at one of their favorite targets, the “Don’t Be That Guy” anti-rape campaign that has been credited with significantly bringing down the incidence of rape in at least one major Canadian city.
AVFM’s Paul Elam introduces the “meme” with this little bit of vitriol:
For those unfortunates who did not get the memo that the Don’t be That Guy meme campaign was offensive because it painted all men as potential rapists, then perhaps this meme will drive that point home. Remember, Don’t be That Hypocrite.
If we pretend for a moment that AVFM’s meme is intended to address a real social problem — child abandonment — do Elam’s claims of hypocrisy make any sense?
Rape is widespread; roughly 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. Men (outside of jail) also face the risk of rape, mostly from other men, though the numbers are much lower; the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign addressed that issue as well. (Incarcerated men — and women — face a much higher risk of rape, at least in the United States, where prison rape is treated as a joke; LGBT prisoners are disproportionately targeted.) Most rape victims know their attackers, making the “date rape” focus of the awareness campaign doubly appropriate. RAINN reports that there are more than 200,000 victims of sexual assault in the US every year.
While the number of rapes is obviously higher than the number of rapists, there’s still a tremendous number of rapists in the general population — and a lot of people who witness rapey behavior, and who might be inspired by the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign to step up and step in to stop it.
Child abandonment, while horrific, is not widespread. While solid data on the actual number of babies abandoned is scanty, the numbers reported tend to be in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands, per year. One 2011 story in the New York Times, for example, noted that 63 babies were abandoned illegally in Illinois over the previous ten years. One article I found on the Columbia Journalism School website cited “an unpublished 1999 report by the Department of Health and Human Services [that] found that 108 infants were abandoned in 1998 out of 4 million births.”
In any case, anyone who was truly interested in reducing the numbers of babies illegally abandoned, quite possibly leading to their deaths, would have provided information about “safe haven” laws (which exist in all 50 states in the US) that allow parents to legally give up their babies while ensuring that they will be cared for.
Rape is a crime of entitlement; child abandonment is a crime of desperation. Providing young mothers who are feeling overwhelmed to the point of panic about an alternative to dumping their baby illegally seems a somewhat more sensible approach than shaming them. AVFM’s meme graphic of course provides no such information.
That’s no surprise. As Elam’s intro makes clear, he and his fellow “Human Rights Activists” don’t actually give a shit about abandoned babies. The comments about this new meme are, well, instructive in this regard. For most of the commenters, it seems, this dead baby joke of a graphic is a most hilarious form of human rights activism.
Some selections from the comments:
And apparently only the thought of me “twisting” their words kept some of them from making even more blatant dead baby jokes.
Truly the most important Human Rights Movement of the 21st Century.
Although they are demonstrably being petty, so you’re not technically wrong.
So….Regarding Man Boobz: The Magazining or whatever we’re calling it. I just found hosting to use .org for all of $3 a month for 2 years if prepaid, free domain registration, $14 for whois privacy and spam/malware protection and auto-backups. I’ve wanted server space to toy with PHP since my bestfriend took his server offline…I’m tempted to register whether y’all are interested or not. (And, being me, I know how to run a hidden sandbox off the main Magazining site without borking anything, so me having test space and running our little project can both work)
This is a sweet enough deal that I already asked my mother if it’d be a viable Christmas present, and it is. So if y’all are interested, let’s do this?
I’m going to go start a forum thread on this I think!
The thread, it is done — http://manboobz.forummotion.com/t1165-man-boobz-the-magazining#30613
Argenti – damn it, now I need a forum account. 😛
Hm… ok, so re: dead baby jokes… 1/5 pregnancies are miscarried, most of them are after you’ve found out about it, but not always. So, assuming that’s something included, they aren’t that rare. Alternatively, people who are not my generation likely know someone or are someone who lost a child – obstetrics and paediatrics have come a long way in 50 years. It’s something to think about with those types of jokes.
Same with holocaust. Likely someone you know knows someone affected by it. It’s not that far into the past…
And with the realistic portrayal of living spaces on TV, I think QI was the place that said British people live in the smallest square footage for the largest amount of money in the world? That could be a part of it, since people aren’t used to seeing huge houses amongst peers regardless of class/wealth, so it could be that, because the UK is so small, and North America is so big (and hopeless with loans for houses) that it’s just a cultural expectation thing? People can get larger houses in places where there is more land mass to build them. I don’t think NYC qualifies, obviously, but NYC is more a cultural icon to put your story in, than an actual city where people are trying to live, in TV-Land.
>>>Although they are demonstrably being petty, so you’re not technically wrong
Well yeah, in the case of Julie Bindel and the trans* exclusionary feminist (not sure if rad) she was defending, “petty bourgeois” does fit.
However, as it’s often used as a term of oppobrium against anarchists by Orthodox Marxists, I kind of have an instinctive dislike for that sloppy usage when used in general to refer to academics (in particular since it’s a particularly rich irony when Orthodox Marxists accuse anarchists of being a bunch of academics).
RE: money in media
I’ve discovered that since my housing/finances went down the drain, a LOT of what breaks my suspension of disbelief in media is, “How do they PAY for all this?” I mean, I made the equivalent of a full-time, minimum wage job, and I could still only comfortably afford the cheapest rooms in town. To have even a studio was completely laughable.
I really wish I saw more of what I actually experience–you know, the state that my volunteer gig referred to as “three meals away from a felony.” You know, juggling basic needs like housing, food, and medical care, and only being able to afford two of the three at best… and then you get hit by a car. How everything is only kept going through a lot of cut corners and jury-rigging and prayer that your house of cards won’t topple.
And shit, y’all, I could write a fucking SERIES about living in weird housing/roommate situations. After living in a closet, that one place where I got surprised by strangers in the dark TWICE, and the one where all my power came from an extension cord through a hole cut in the wall, I am SET.
RE: auggziliary
Never Google ‘yaoi paddle,’ that’s all I’m saying. Also, people make HOLOCAUST JOKES? D8 That’s terrible! I’ve got friends whose relatives DIED in that! Why on earth would people joke about that?
I get pretty skeeved by Holocaust jokes and dead baby jokes, but the crucial difference is that nobody thinks dead babies and the Holocaust are Good Things (or not as bad as everyone makes them out to be, or what have you), so you’re not contributing to a culture that doesn’t care about them.
@BlackBloc
Hey man, it’s not transpobia, they’re just keeping it real. Put down your fancy academic texts and jump on the people’s dehumanizing stock prejudices-fueled hate train.
…that’s a pretty ugly argument.
Wow, I didn’t even notice the “gRAPE” part of Tentacle Grape soda until I read the post where Katz painfully spells it out. In my defense I immediately tune out after someone uses the words ‘anime’ and ‘tentacles’ together. That’s a fucking terrible way to make something a novelty item, just to state the obvious.
Alice — email me and I’ll post it with an “Alice says:”?
This nym, gmail.com
That’s a good instinct. (Meanwhile, I automatically lose interest because it’s grape-flavored soda. Ugh.)
Bostonian: That’s a really good quote, but what’s the deal with the rest of that post? I mean, wtf is this about?
katz, here, I can break it down!
A = B
C = B
Therefore A = C
See also:
God is good
Grapes are good
Therefore God is a grape.
Total Logicked.
I think you’re right about dead baby jokes not contributing to a culture that condones infanticide, but Holocaust jokes are a bit different in my view. While of course the Holocaust has been widely condemned, there are surprisingly and unfortunately a large number of conservative religious folks who at the very least blame the Jews for the Holocaust. I’ve even heard some ultraconservative Muslims say that the Holocaust was justified.
Plus, I think Holocaust jokes are a form of microaggression against Jews given that they trivialize a tragedy that happened to their fellow Jews. It’s kind of like how in the US, even though the enslavement of black people is openly condemned, racist jokes about white people enslaving black people still serve to promote anti-black racism. Those jokes also trivialize a legacy of racist abuse that affected countless black people.
That’s my take, at least. Any possible incoherent rambling is solely a result of being under the influence.
@katz: It’s basically an argument that some genres are terrible in and of themselves, as genres, due to the fact that the genre itself is predicated upon certain mechanics that are terrible. I’m a bit sympathetic to it after years of being a RPG fan before realizing that everything I revile about Zynga games is basically just what would be called “game play” in an RPG, while people were decrying some very real attempts at going beyond some of the terrible legacy choices we’ve made under the guise of “keeping to genre” in Dragon Age 2 (which had its own problems, but the problems of that game were not the thing people complained the most about).
I think it easily veers into the sort of snobbishness that has been thrown at genre fiction in literature, though, and I’m not surprised that the author is pointing the finger at FPS as a genre rather than one of the “game as art” favored children.
Ally: I think you’re correct, especially in regards Holocaust jokes being microaggressions. Frankly, unless someone is Jewish–and not just in the very broad sense of being able to connect matrilinearly, despite having been raised a Lutheran or whatever, but rather identifies, culturally at least as Jewish–they should just avoid the subject as a humor topic. (Oppressed people get a bit more of a pass in terms of gallows humor, for obvious reasons.)
I’m always skeeved out by upper class liberals who assign prejudice (racism, misogyny, etc) to the working class exclusively. (The old “racism is just something that a bunch of Southern rednecks do, here in we’re living in a post-racial society”.)
I’m doubly skeeved when they do it in order to excuse their own prejudices in order to give themselves working class bona fide.
Obviously that’s what he’s going for, but (setting aside his inability to communicate by just saying that if that’s what he meant) if he honestly thinks FPSes are inherently all terrible, then he shouldn’t have been reviewing Bioshock Infinite at all. A post about FPSes in general and his opinions on them, certainly, but once he’s done that, his review of any particular FPS will by definition not have anything interesting to say.
That’s the real reason that you shouldn’t review things in a genre you don’t like: Not that you aren’t entitled to your opinion, but simply that saying “I hate all X; this is X; I hated it” is not useful information for any possible reader.
I’m also leery in general of people who go around trying to convince other people to hate all kinds of stuff.
I disagree about the Holocaust jokes. There are neo Nazi groups that believe death of all those who are different would be a good thing. This assumes that they even believe the Holocaust took place. Some people argue that the Holocaust was a Jewish conspiracy* and millions of Jews decided to commit suicide in the 1930s-40s. One could argue that these are extreme groups/people, but one could say the same about the MRAs.
*never mind that many who died weren’t Jewish
Tangential to the Holocaust joke conversation, I know of someone who went on a date recently.
The date was fine but the other party made at least one crack about Germans. When called out by this person (Wait a minute, I’m German!), the other party’s response was, “I’m Jewish.”
Seemed like a big jerkass move to me, to make a mean joke and then hide behind PEOPLE YOU SHARE A HERITAGE WITH DID AWFUL THINGS TO PEOPLE I SHARE A HERITAGE WITH.
Am I wrong?
Ally and neuroticbeagle: True, you are right about the Holocaust jokes.
Argenti – Sure. Remind me to do it tonight, I need to do math homework (fuck maths).
Jumping back to the topic of class and class in media…
It seems really popular among liberals (and now I’m using the word in the Swedish sense, meaning someone who’s okay with a little bit of welfare state but it must absolutely not grow too large because we need to keep taxes low and free market is wonderful and yada yada) to talk about class as if it’s all about culture. Like, the difference between a working class and upper middle class or upper class person is that the latter unlike the former go to the opera and knows how to use different forks for different dishes at fancy restaurants. And that really bugs me. I’ve never been to the opera in my life, and I always take the wrong fork whenever I happen to end up at a fancy restaurant. I have no problem explaining that with me coming from a working class background, but I would never say that I am working class.
My parents worked their way up from working class to upper middle, meaning they went from a strained financial situation to being able to afford everything they want and being very secure work-wise. Their life really changed. They still don’t know anything about opera and forks, but that’s really inconsequential! I get that some people may feel it’s embarrassing not knowing about forks or opera (I don’t), and that sucks for them, but that problem is nothing compared to the problems that face people because they have actual working class jobs and actual working class incomes.
I think liberals like to pretend that it’s all about forks and opera because they want to pretend that real class-related problems don’t exist. That not knowing various operas or which fork to grab first is the very worst problem a working-class person ever faces because of their class.
ANYWAY, my guess is that lots of people in the movie and TV industry are liberals. Therefore they think class differences are merely cultural differences. Therefore they portray working class people as having different clothes and listening to different music and so on than upper class people, but shy away from the fact that working class people can’t afford things.
Idk Alice, I mean, you hate my beloved maths! (I’m kidding)
Dvärghundspossen — and then there’s me, only not homeless cuz I moved back in with my parents, but I know you start with the silverware on the outside and work your way in (fuck if I know operas though!)
My checking account balance is far more pressing than operas or forks.
Argenti, check your privilege! Complaining about MONEY! Look at ME! I may have received a research grant for the next two years, but I mix up the forks ALL THE TIME! Seriously, there are people in the world with REAL problems you know!