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.
I had a minor epiphany reading the comments & wanted to share. Totally off-topic.
I’ve never really understood why the MRAs always mention SitC, when it rarely has anything relevant to their POVs, until someone mentioned soap operas here.
When you look at the ‘talking points’ of most MRAs, it’s not in SitC that you’ll find ‘examples’ to prove their points, but you do find them in soap operas (specifically american anglo soaps).
Soap opera trope staples:
Women as golddiggers – yup
Women who make false accusations of rape – yup
Women who take advantage of drunk/unconscious/non-consenting men – yup
Women who judge themselves & others based on appearance – yup
I could keep going, but I really don’t want to. My point is, *this* is what MRAs seem to see as reality. Soap operas.
And since actually admitting that their views on women eerily parrallel the over-the-top silliness of soaps, they probably scream ‘Sex in the City’! to make it seem more legit.
‘Kay, back to lurking.
My sister was just visiting, and I told her I’d been reading (manboobzer-recommended) scifi+ lately, and she spent way too much time explaining how reading that kind of stuff was beneath her (and by implication, beneath me). She’s not a terrible person by any means, but it did piss me off a bit. She always has had snobbish tendencies, though.
@Moldy: Also, “women have useless fluff jobs” – in loads of TV series people don’t really do anything on their job other than gossiping and scheming.
@matt
Is it your first comment? Because everyone starts in moderation. It will appear where you typed it, people will just have to roll back to see it, so don’t worry 🙂
Ps: love your use of ‘oh my gorilla grod’ :3 maybe I’m just weird that way.
@ophelia
Hugs, if you want them.
@cassandrasays
All the seconding! I’ve also got some weird feelings about the way female characters emote in fiction, like idk. But especially when I was younger, I felt like I couldn’t connect to them because often female characters aren’t very angry (or at least angry in a way that resonated with me) and I was a very angry teenager.
Ditto. I know I was watching a show with a laugh track recently and couldn’t stand it, but I don’t remember the show…
(Sorry for the comment on old stuff. Does it seem like I’m butting in? Idk I just feel that way :/)
@ SittieKitty
*Ok, I have David Attenborough on in another window and he just said ‘the puppy, on the other hand, is very active*
Cough. @Sittiekitty, I also have always imagined the space and price of land in the US makes the (seemingly) ginormous houses you see on American tv more of a possibility. I’ve only ever been to NY but I know thats an outlier. Isn’t there even parts of Alaska that don’t even have housing regulations? (Yes I’m aware my grammar is terrible.)
The holocaust/dead baby delightful conversation – In my experience there is much more side eye, awkwardness, calling out with holocaust jokes, whereas a dead baby joke is generally met with a groan, eye roll. But then I suppose it’s only mra’s that would associate a dead baby joke with ‘womens r rubbish’ whereas everyone knows holocaust jokes can be very hurtful to Jewish people/people with general empathy.
Now I want a TV show that’s about two roomies sharing an apartment and their rent gets raised so they need to get a third roommate. Every episode, a new weird person responds to their ad and somehow ends up getting kicked out or having to leave by the end of the episode.
Sadly, I must remind you that there are congresscritters in the US who are absolutely in favor of killing what they call “terrorist babies”.
They are, of course, opposed to abortion for any reason.
@Katz
I could totally contribute to that show. How about the potential roomate who flirts with your partner pretending you’re not even there, even though you’re the one who put the ad up and has been corresponding with them all along?
Or how about the one who has a massive nosebleed and unashamedly bleeds over all your stuff?
The klepto who starts out by taking little things nobody notices and by the end is just sitting around wearing your clothes. The one who’s always playing loud music and inviting people over at night and then sleeps during the day and complains if you make the slightest noise. The one with no personal hygiene. Endless possibilities!
That’s not to say that I was flirting or that there’s anything wrong with nosebleeds. Literally ignoring someone to the point of turning your back while that person is showing you around their home is fairly uncool.
As is dripping blood on my stuff. I showed you where the bathroom was so you could sort yourself out, not so you could ruin several rolls of toilet roll then wander about the flat.
Even better, the couple who stay out all night, then come home to listen to samba music at 4am only to have their horrible (I don’t know why girlfriend left me, I never even beat her!) friend sleep on the sofa all day and complain about any disruption.
If anyone wishes to buy me a place feel free!
There’s an old meme about how Americans never think of themselves as ‘poor’, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Poverty is a sign of moral weakness, after all. Note: not endorsing this. Cracked had a decent article a while back by John Cheese about how growing up poor in America fucks up your head, to the extent that if you do escape the trap of poverty you don’t really know how to live like someone who grew up with financial stability. Extreme example being the lottery winner who’s broke within a year. I’m guessing a middle class person who wins the lottery is more likely to pay off the mortgage and invest in mutual funds than buy new cars for all of hir friends. As for working one’s way out of poverty – heh, I’m dating myself there, aren’t I?
One under examined factor could be the constant corrosive effect of the wider society’s message to those who cannot ignore the fact of their own poverty. To be told that life is a competition based on ability that you have already lost – well, that’s gotta leave a mark.
I only ever had one bad suitemate, but you could get several episodes out of her:
-Made coffee once in someone else’s coffee maker. Left it until it got moldy. Then threw away the coffee maker.
-Had an alarm loud enough to be heard all over the suite that would go for a full hour before shutting itself off. Left it on in her locked room while she was gone on vacation.
-Had friends over who nobody else knew. Decided it would be funny to lock one of the boys in the bathroom while one of her female suitemates was showering.
-Didn’t like one of the other suitemates’ boyfriends. Tried to disrupt them any time she thought they might be having sex.
I tend the find that the only people who have ‘real’ jobs on tv shows are the police characters. It’s like, everyone wants the fantasy of no-effort careers, but we also want to be reassured that our police people are really doing their jobs.
And there would DEFINITELY be an episode about thermostat wars. Everyone’s had a thermostat war, right?
It’s the American dream isn’t it? Oh, except capitalist societies only work if there’s plenty of un/underemployment, so in actual fact there can only be people at the top if there are lots and lots at the bottom, so there’s literally no possible way of everyone being at the top, or even apparently having enough to eat in the richest countries in the world. Yay choice!
Idea for roommate show:
Roommate who sneaks in feral kittens, & they proceed to pee on everything black (the kitties, not the roomie).
Hmm, I have put other people mouldy stuff outside. I have kicked doors in when there have been alarms/ceaseless noise, I have taken thermostat dials off walls/messed with the electrics to stop people rinsing it.
Perhaps I’m the bad housemate after all!
Re: the whole ‘knowing which fork to use’ thing – who do they think set the table???
When I’ve heard this sort of argument, it’s always been for the purpose of proving that people who are poor deserve to be poor because they just don’t know how to manage money and so no matter how much money they get, they’ll always end up poor in the end.
The obnoxious flip side is the idea that rich people are rich because they’re so damn good at managing money and so the kids of millionaires become millionaires because their parents taught them to manage money, not because of trust funds and nepotism, and if millionaires suddenly lost all their money they’d be better at being poor than all those stupid poor people and they’d gain it back because of their amazing money-management skills.
(I’m not a fan, obviously.)
I read that John Cheese article and thought it was quite refreshing. There are people who will twist it to be ‘poor people r stoopid’ but I don’t think that was the intention at all.
@katz
bleeeehhhh. How long does coffee need to take to get moldy, anyway?
With my mom, all the time XD Usually she wins, because she’s paying the bills, but when we had a really tiny apartment with low heating bills I had it warmed enough to wear tanktops in the winter.
A lot of it was about the mindset of constant fear and worry you develop when you have to struggle. Which is something that isn’t often talked about (that I’ve seen anyway).
“bleeeehhhh. How long does coffee need to take to get moldy, anyway?”
At least four days (yeah I have managed to avoid it for that long, I was kinda, uh, [TW: suicide] in no state to do anything after attempting to overdose.
But longer than a weekend, and I’ve never seen coffee itself grow mold, just the grounds.
My worst? Left his crockpot hidden in a corner long enough it had maggots. If I never bleach the sink because
it’ skullit’s full of maggots again…*shudders*auggz – it wasn’t the lack of the word “joke” I meant as a typo, it was the implication that anyone making jokes about the fucking HOLOCAUST is doing something minor and just in the realms of bad taste. That is every bit as horrific as rape jokes.
And yeah, what SittieKitty said about dead baby jokes. SIDS is a thing. Miscarriage is a thing. I don’t react as viscerally to those but hello, they’re all fucking abhorrent.