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.
Marie — of my roommate’s, you’ve heard of two. The worst the other two did — exploded a rice ball with octopus in the microwave (whoops!), and, uh…screwed up instant ramen? Oh, I know, blue cheese. Every time I cleaned out the fridge I had to do a check on which cheese was supposed to be moldy.
(That was also the fridge of “we have ketchup, and booze, I think we may want to get groceries”)
@ Marie
The worst any roomate of mine ever did was leave her lazy biker boyfriend in the apartment with me and piss off back home to see her parents. Plenty of thermostat wars with my parents, but that’s because my Dad likes being cold.
@Argenti Aertheri
Well at least the other ones weren’t so bad?
One of my friends from when I was in high school never had anything in his fridge except a very elderly jar of half-eaten pasta sauce (the same jar, for at least a year) and bread. This was the same guy who at one point put his space heater in the (empty, thankfully) bathtub, where I found it when I came over. Domesticity wasn’t really his strong point.
I always thought the appeal of dead baby jokes was exactly the transgressive aspect. Same as the infamous ‘Aristocrats’ joke, which, to me, is no more ‘funny’ than dead baby jokes, just more elaborate. I imagine that smashing a shop window might provide an equivalent thrill.
On the class issue – imnsho, Americans are hampered in the area of class consciousness by how many myths and illusions we have on the subject. Neither of my parents were college educated, they were not professionals or business owners, and we lived on my father’s salary as a postal worker (and his wartime disability benefits), yet I always thought of us as middle class. When I got to college and encountered people who were middle class by income, rather than culture, it was somewhat of a revelation.
@cassandrasays
O_o What did he eat?
@ Marie
Chips (Brit kind, not crunchy-with-BBQ-powder kind), or fried rice from the Chinese take-away downstairs. Very occasionally he bought cheese (and usually forgot to put it in the fridge). I never did figure out of he planned to put the pasta sauce on the bread.
auggz: Well nvm then, I was thinking they at least got the identity of her, not necessarily asked her later how the baby was doing. That way if someone accused her of dumping her baby, there would be a record of her giving birth and not doing a hospital abandonment.
That’s what I thought you meant, and you are right. They take blood type, and footprints, and weight, so there is a record. It is, in fact, how many of the fatal abandonment cases which are solved, are solved.
argenti: Oh, and it’s an opinion piece.
By Christina Hoff Sommers; no agenda there.
Oh jeez, awful roommate stories! My last semester of college, I shared an apartment with two other women: One who remains one of my best friends to this day, and one who showed up with a small zoo without having cleared it with either of us prior to move-in. I have allergy issues with various dander-y animals, and the ferret (specifically forbidden in the lease) and the five or six hamsters (allowed per the lease but still) were not my idea of a good time. She also started growing pot in her closet, and would move our things around when high, or just outright take them. I don’t remember anything expensive going missing, but when your toothbrush or the stockpot or something like that is suddenly “mysteriously” gone, it’s not really funny giggles and joytime.
Oh, also she let the ferret just run around free in the apartment and poop wherever it wanted, and then would get pissy whenever someone asked her to clean it up. Ferret poop in the kitchen is just not sanitary living, blech.
I ended up being really glad I was living there off the lease somewhat extra-legally, and therefore wasn’t on the line for the damage deposit. I don’t think they ever managed to deodorize the place from the ferret being there for a year.
bodycrimes: Aaron: Well my background is primarily in banking where I’ve worked as a credit analyst and an economist. I also moonlight on the side as a ballroom dance instructor and of course am an author.
And Matt Forney thinks he’s cooler than me:
Aaron Clarey is cooler than you.
He’s an economist. He explores caves. He teaches salsa dancing. He rides a motorcycle. He collects fossils. He’s not married. He doesn’t have any kids. He’s self-employed and doesn’t answer to a boss. He lives life the way he wants to, not the way anyone else expects him to.
Matt Forney is wrong.
Hi David,
So I take it that, according to you, we shouldn’t address problems that are less common than others? Nice try, but your pathetic “logic” is anything but.
Paul has your outstripped in Alexa.
He had you outgunned, with his staff.
He regularly outmaneuvers you with his pithy blog posts, flicking aside your “rebuttals” as if they were nothing more than a fly.
Stick a fork in it, David. Give it up.
Argenti: I hate the smell of maggots. I feel your pain.
That’s all I’m going to say about it.
p.s. they will go for veggies. Bluebottles are not a fussy fly.
Oh.. black coffee (and tea) will grow mold; I don’t know what the mold is eating, but it happens.
Oh.. katz: I tweeted your pumpkin. It is being well received.
It wasn’t even the smell (I think my nose was broken at that point, both dogs did their business indoors and oh boy the amount of pot smoked in that apt)…picture a crockpot, now line the inside, the entire inside, with a mass of maggots. A putrid white squirming mass.
Yes, the smell was bad, but if it was noticeably bad I’d have found the damned thing sooner (we had a deal, dishes were my problem, garbage was his, I had to collect the dishes like his damned mother or something [ok, no, I met his mother, she’s insufferable])
And
it’ smolderingit’s mold. Thegerm Opheliacgermophobic (I’m glad autocorrect likes EA, but this is just absurd) should stop reading now.It’s mold, it’s a fungus, and that shit is airborne. I mean, I get it in fish tanks that have been scrubbed beyond belief. If it an colonize plastic, it can colonize coffee.
Ok, I will say more. Imagine your crockpot. Now make it a 40 gal. trash can.
Make it recurrent.
Oh gods, his is why the trash at camp got dumped daily (thanks, you just reminded me of the smell of yesterday’s diapers in August sun, ah family camp…”bring out your dead!” [it was the only way to make pushing a cart of trash bearable])
Aww… look guys, I think it’s a new chew-toy!
Kronos: No, that’s not what this is about, and the column above makes that quite clear. The first quote he makes (the one that ends, “Don’t Be That Hypocrite”) makes it abundantly self-evident that this new poster, like the rest of the Don’t Be That Girl campaign, has absolutely fuck + all to do with the issue being addressed (here, infant abandonment; prior occasions, actual false rape accusations). Instead, it’s all about complaining about the Don’t Be That Guy campaign. DBTGirl isn’t about social justice activism; it’s about trying to undermine a different group–nothing more, nothing less.
Kronos
Where was it written anywhere that we should not be concerned with less common problems? All David is “rebutting” is the false claim that women are perpetrators of 40% of rapes. This is false, incorrect, and concluded using bad math. He is pointing out moronically wrong interpretation of data by misogynistic asshats.
One rape, by either man or woman, is one too many. No one here said it’s all hunky dory since it’s less often.
And David does not rebut Elam, he mocks him. The website is “misogyny: I mock it”. Not “I debate it”.
Pemal’s staff is also a gun? Is he a wizard? With a transformer staff that is also a gun? Or a country gentleman with a shooting stick? I think there could be a fantasy novel in thes, you knw …
Oops, my comment to the troll combined this and the next post. Regardless, dumping babies is bad, even though it occurs less (much much less) often than rape. Also, it has been dealt with quite effectively with safe haven laws. Rape is at epidemic proportions. But still, baby dumping is still wrong. Got it?
… or maybe a tabletop roleplaying game.