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At A Voice for Men, dead baby jokes are a form of “men’s human rights activism.”

Just because it's you baby doesn't mean it's your trash. Don't be that girl.
Men’s Rights “humor” at its finest.

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:

baby1baby2baby3baby4

And apparently only the thought of me “twisting” their words kept some of them from making even more blatant dead baby jokes.

baby5

Truly the most important Human Rights Movement of the 21st Century.

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kittehserf
11 years ago

Don’t try to make sense of Pell’s word salads, it’ll make your brain melt.

Athywren
Athywren
11 years ago

…but it’s a server!
My nose sure is running a lot suddenly…

kittehserf
11 years ago

::hands Athywren bunch of Kleenex Man-Size Tissues::

Alice Sanguinaria
11 years ago

Did Kronos try to do an appeal to popularity as an argument? LOLOLOLOLOLOL

Unimaginative
11 years ago

We already knew that David didn’t get any traffic because Pell used his leverage as a major ISP shareholder to install a keylogger on David’s server.

I thought we were all David (or cats or ferrets in David suits, or David in a variety of cat and ferret suits). This site actually has no traffic at all, because there is only David, posting and then commenting as hundreds of sock puppets. It’s exhausting, I must confess, especially when David comments from all around the world, all day and all night. I never sleep.

kittehserf
11 years ago

It’s scary new kitty gravatar day! 😯

Alice Sanguinaria
11 years ago

kittehs – MEROW. >:D

kittehserf
11 years ago

Eeeeeeek!

Alice Sanguinaria
11 years ago

The best to scare away MRAs with. *nodnod*

kittehserf
11 years ago

Feminist Halloween kitty!

SittieKitty
11 years ago

what about the menzing kitteh

Athywren
Athywren
11 years ago

@Kitteh
I is a vampire cat!

kittehserf
11 years ago

I thought you might be, Athywren! 😀

… though aren’t all cats vampires?

Aren’t you a cute kitty ::pat pat pat:: OW!

Shadow
Shadow
11 years ago

@kitteh’s

Like sittiekitty said, What About The Menzing

kittehserf
11 years ago

neuroticbeagle winz the pics again!

I wish I had a pic of Offie (RIP) that showed his maginificent vampire fangs. You can get a glimpse of one here. Between them, his general looks and his voice he was one scary cat, but he was a sweetheart.

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
11 years ago

That cat has ears like a bat. He was a vampire!

kittehserf
11 years ago

PS “Offie” was short for Off Licence. Don’t ask, his dad never did say why he gave him that name! (Yes, I know what an off licence is. I lived on chocolate biscuits from one when I was in Edinburgh.)

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
11 years ago

Hey, one of my besties from high school had a cat named Stir Fry (because the cat tried to climb into a wok full of same as a kitten).

kittehserf
11 years ago

Ears like a bat and the voice of the banshee, typical Oriental cat, that boy! 🙂

This feller (called Bela!) is quite like him:

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3105/3196707989_1e18867f4f_z.jpg

kittehserf
11 years ago

STIR FRY oh dear! 😀

SittieKitty
11 years ago

he’s beautiful kitteh, did you know the breed? almost looks havana, but not brown…

kittehserf
11 years ago

He was an Oriental Black, as far as I knew. No idea whether he was purebred, but that breed certainly predominated. He was a lovely boy, though; I wish I’d had time to meet him again (I was with him for a few weeks flat-sitting). If you Google “Oriental black” the images that come up are just like him.

Neko Namida
Neko Namida
11 years ago

Gentlefolk, I give you… Thumotic!

Wow. Reading their site gave me a headache. The first post is about Sexual Market Value. You would think someone with such an academic background could grasp a concept as simple as the difference between objective and subjective to realize that making a graph determining value does not make it accurate to how sexuality plays out in reality and is certainly not something to be used to make generalizations about evolutionary mechanics at work in society.

I love how the post starts off with a valid critique of how the graph isn’t actually measuring anything substantial by PZ Meyers and the blog writer admits to being ignorant of him and yet calls him a Young Earth Creationist or a Scientologist and rags on his wrongly perceived scientific beliefs without directly rebuffing his critique. Goes to show that having a strong academic education and background does not necessarily make you intelligent.