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a voice for men a woman is always to blame antifeminism are these guys 12 years old? artistry attention seeking creepy evil single moms evil women men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny MRA paul elam shaming tactics taking pleasure in women's pain that's not funny!

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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Howard Bannister
11 years ago

@LBT

Ah, geez, that’s just the kind of ‘this is not really rape’ auditing that you should never have to deal with.

And that’s the whole core of their claim that rape rates aren’t that high; that some of this stuff can be defined away, that it isn’t really rape.

Gross doesn’t begin to describe it.

dlouwe
dlouwe
11 years ago

@Monster

there is just no coherent, consistent plan coming from these guys other than ‘men and only men being able to do whatever they want whenever they want regardless of who it screws over’.

I think it’s actually closer to “me and only me” – they don’t really care about men; they just happen to be men. That’s why they have no trouble othering men who don’t think like them, or don’t share their specific set of issues, ie: gay, black, trans*, etc. It’s also why the manosphere in general is fraught with rifts and schisms and offshoots – the only real common thread between them is they all think they are infallibly correct, and they want to be surrounded by people who won’t challenge that.

Good
Good
11 years ago
marinerachel
marinerachel
11 years ago

If these people weren’t so fucking slimy everyone would be glad to agree with them that there are a few limited arenas in which women are privileged beyond men. Instead of looking at the issue and asking “Hm, why” though it becomes a diatribe on the evil that women do. I can’t work with that, yo. I can’t be a vessel of hate and anger.

dlouwe
dlouwe
11 years ago

@Good: What’s your point?

often_partisan
often_partisan
11 years ago

“The likelihood of the baby going Galt is effectively 0.”

LOL Now I’m picturing that baby from the “controversial new columnist” satire in Private Eye talking about how he’s going to crawl away and set up his own business or something.

Argenti Aertheri
11 years ago

Not So Good’s bullshit is based on this sort of “logic”

It found them by defining sexual violence in impossibly elastic ways and then letting the surveyors, rather than subjects, determine what counted as an assault. Consider: In a telephone survey with a 30 percent response rate, interviewers did not ask participants whether they had been raped. Instead of such straightforward questions, the CDC researchers described a series of sexual encounters and then they determined whether the responses indicated sexual violation. A sample of 9,086 women was asked, for example, “When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you?” A majority of the 1.3 million women (61.5 percent) the CDC projected as rape victims in 2010 experienced this sort of “alcohol or drug facilitated penetration.”

What does that mean? If a woman was unconscious or severely incapacitated, everyone would call it rape. But what about sex while inebriated? Few people would say that intoxicated sex alone constitutes rape — indeed, a nontrivial percentage of all customary sexual intercourse, including marital intercourse, probably falls under that definition (and is therefore criminal according to the CDC).

Drunk sex is common, therefore asking that is exaggerating the rape rate…not that I didn’t find years ago that only a quarter of respondents will flat say they were raped.

Oh, and it’s an opinion piece.

Dvärghundspossen
11 years ago

@Augzilliary: Although rape and theft can’t be compared with regards to infringement on your physical integrity etc, I do think it’s really enlightening to compare how the law in various countries and common sense morality regards consent when it comes to body vs property. Only a few countries (sadly, mine is not one of them) have consent laws regarding rape; it’s way more common that what happened didn’t fit the legal definition of rape unless there was some explicit threat, physical force or the victim was absolutely helpess due to intoxication or the like. But banging someone who merely lies there, that’s very often legal. When it comes to property, on the other hand, I don’t know any place where it’s legal to just take someone’s stuff and run off with it if that person became too perplexed or shocked to say anything until it was too late. You need actual consent to take someone’s stuff. Either verbal or consent, or that the person, say, wrap paper around something, put a ribbon over it and hand it over as an obvious gift.
Likewise with common sense morality – everyone expects everyone else to realize that it’s not okay to take other people’s stuff without their consent, but when it comes to bodies, it’s suddenly soooooo complicated and difficult to know what the other person wants that you might just accidentally rape someone.

dlouwe
dlouwe
11 years ago

@auggziliary

I’ve been with my partner for 2 years now, and I’ll still ask if she’s okay if I have even the slightest indication that something is amiss during sex. I always thought this was just common sense? I can’t fathom how people can enjoy sex (or even perform, for that matter) when they aren’t 100% sure of their partner’s willingness.

Howard Bannister
11 years ago

Another study finds the same thing, and Hoff Summers trots out the same disingenuous bullshit. “That’s still not rape!”

Note that in the first study they specifically asked ‘did you have sex with somebody that you did not want to have sex with because of alcohol.’

Goddammit, Good, what do you think you’ve just proved? Because all you’ve proved to us is that you’re VERY motivated to call certain types of rape “not rape.” And when somebody is that determined to say it’s not rape? Welp. It doesn’t say good things about you, is what I’m saying.

LBT
LBT
11 years ago

RE: dlouwe

Good never says. Just drops links like turds and then flies off before anyone can ask what part of the study he actually cares about.

RE: auggziliary

I know a LOT of socially awkward and autism-spectrum people. Shockingly enough, even if they have trouble catching subtleties sometimes, they generally recognize tears as a sign of something being terribly wrong, or if told someone is upset, they try and do something to make things better. And my rapist took PRIDE in what he considered his emotional sensitivity, so he knew I was upset. He even said he was sorry afterward… but he also said it had to be done, so he could train me to like it more.

Yeah, he knew EXACTLY what he was doing. Plus he was an adult, while I wasn’t.

zoon echon logon
zoon echon logon
11 years ago

I just wanted to point out that AVfM could have, for the same amount of effort, made a poster campaign drawing attention to male rape victims.

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
11 years ago

You’re very close with that person and obviously paying attention

I see at least two areas where this isn’t going to work as an analogy for how misogynists have sex.

bodycrimes
11 years ago

Hey, off topic question here – sorry David – but maybe one of you guys will know the answer. Does anybody know what Captain Capitalism’s (Aaron Clarey’s) qualifications are? He spends a lot of time railing against ‘twats’ (girls) who get ‘worthless’ degrees and then take ‘make work’ jobs. Just wondering if anybody knows what his qualifications are, if any.

Athywren
Athywren
11 years ago

Interesting thing in Good’s first article. Citation 60 of “we don’t have a rape culture, honest guv!” shows that the recorded rates for forcible rape in the US are three times higher than in the UK, and almost forty times higher than in Japan. I’m not sure how this is supposed to prove that things are peachy in America. They’re “more overtly patriarchal than [America]” so this proves that America’s rape problem has nothing to do with patriarchy? Firstly, citation needed that they’re more patriarchal, but more importantly, perhaps there’s some combination of issues? Patriarchy + the dehumanising effects of barely regulated capitalism? Patriarchy + the viciously divided political landscape? Patriarchy + the ubiquity of violent rhetoric? Sometimes there’s more than one thing to blame for a problem, but that doesn’t mean that one of those things is freed of all blame.

Also, seriously, opinion pieces aren’t scientific rebuttals. They’re opinion pieces.

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
11 years ago

I have to chime in to comment about the Japanese stats – underreporting, so much underreporting. If you look at population surveys that directly ask people if they’ve been raped or sexually assaulted you get rates that are similar to or higher than you get from similar surveys in the US.

Howard Bannister
11 years ago

Also, seriously, opinion pieces aren’t scientific rebuttals. They’re opinion pieces.

I mean, a really persuasively worded opinion piece that laid out a case for major methodological gaps might persuade me to dig deeper.

Whining ‘but that’s not rape!’ just because the victims don’t self-identify as rape victims? No.

LBT
LBT
11 years ago

Yeah, I was going to say, CassandraSays. From what I know of Japan, it doesn’t seem like it’d be a place where people would be open about that kind of thing happening.

Marie
Marie
11 years ago

@LBT

And my rapist took PRIDE in what he considered his emotional sensitivity, so he knew I was upset. He even said he was sorry afterward… but he also said it had to be done, so he could train me to like it more.

Ugh, that’s so fucked up 🙁 All the internet hugs from me, if you want them.

And yay for all of you who dig through good’s links. I usually can’t be bothered, but always like seeing people rebuff them :3

Athywren
Athywren
11 years ago

I have to chime in to comment about the Japanese stats – underreporting, so much underreporting. If you look at population surveys that directly ask people if they’ve been raped or sexually assaulted you get rates that are similar to or higher than you get from similar surveys in the US.

I was going with an “even if we take these numbers entirely seriously” look… apparently forgot to include those words. But yeah. All low reported rates prove is low reported rates. I don’t have a great deal of experience with Japanese culture, but I’ve played a few of those interactive novel games they have over there. Considering that every one that had multiple storylines with sexual content included at least one where the “romance” starts with a rape… yeah, that raises flags in my mind.

katz
11 years ago

That poster is another really great example of MRAs having no idea how to communicate. They start with an image that’s so odd it’s kind of funny (it’s the “thanks” that does it), thus making it likely that people will just notice the picture and not pay attention to the caption.

Then they add a caption with a message about child abandonment. But it’s not actually about child abandonment, as evinced by Elam’s explanation. You’re not supposed to look at it and care about abandoned babies. You’re maybe supposed to look at it and think about how men aren’t allowed to abandon their babies and that’s not fair (even though the poster doesn’t say anything about men).

But the message you’re really supposed to get is that it’s mean to put up posters telling people not to do things. Which you could only understand if you had both seen another set of posters on a totally different topic and also been following the response to them.

Athywren
Athywren
11 years ago

And my rapist took PRIDE in what he considered his emotional sensitivity, so he knew I was upset. He even said he was sorry afterward… but he also said it had to be done, so he could train me to like it more.

I’m a pacifist, but if I could start fires with my mind…
Hugs if you want them.

Athywren
Athywren
11 years ago

Btw, is “gender feminism” a thing that is a subset of feminism, or is it just a way of saying feminism that makes it sound weird and dogmatic?

Ally S
11 years ago

That recent Hoff Sommers article is just embarrassing. Just look at this:

The agency’s figures are wildly at odds with official crime statistics. The FBI found that 84,767 rapes were reported to law enforcement authorities in 2010. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, the gold standard in crime research, reports 188,380 rapes and sexual assaults on females and males in 2010. Granted, not all assaults are reported to authorities. But where did the CDC find 13.7 million victims of sexual crimes that the professional criminologists had overlooked?

Seriously? Official crime statistics for rape are based on rapes reported to law enforcement authorities, not victimization surveys. So asking why the CDC study, a victimization survey, found more victims is a ridiculous question. She has no intellectual honesty.

Consider: In a telephone survey with a 30 percent response rate, interviewers did not ask participants whether they had been raped. Instead of such straightforward questions, the CDC researchers described a series of sexual encounters and then they determined whether the responses indicated sexual violation.

She can’t understand survey methodology for the life of her. The survey methodology developed by Mary Koss and her colleagues is the most accurate way to measure victimization. Even if it were true that asking straightforward questions isn’t terrible methodology, it wouldn’t actually be a legitimate criticism of studies like the CDC one.

A sample of 9,086 women was asked, for example, “When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you?” A majority of the 1.3 million women (61.5 percent) the CDC projected as rape victims in 2010 experienced this sort of “alcohol or drug facilitated penetration.”

What does that mean? If a woman was unconscious or severely incapacitated, everyone would call it rape. But what about sex while inebriated? Few people would say that intoxicated sex alone constitutes rape — indeed, a nontrivial percentage of all customary sexual intercourse, including marital intercourse, probably falls under that definition (and is therefore criminal according to the CDC).

The question asks whether someone was drugged/passed out/drunk AND unable to consent. I’m pretty sure Hoff Sommers can read.

Other survey questions were equally ambiguous. Participants were asked if they had ever had sex because someone pressured them by “telling you lies, making promises about the future they knew were untrue?” All affirmative answers were counted as “sexual violence.” Anyone who consented to sex because a suitor wore her or him down by “repeatedly asking” or “showing they were unhappy” was similarly classified as a victim of violence. The CDC effectively set a stage where each step of physical intimacy required a notarized testament of sober consent.

Yeah, manipulation is coercion. If you were manipulated into sexual activity when you didn’t want to, you were sexually assaulted. Calling it “consent” like she does is not only nonsensical, but also disgusting and very much pro-rape.

And AGAIN with that stupid “But then we would have to sign consent contracts!” bullshit. Who are these feminists who advocate such a model of consent? I sure as hell haven’t seen them.

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
11 years ago

I still remember reading an article about rape in Japan which contained the single creepiest rape-related comment from a cop that I’ve ever seen – “He couldn’t afford a prostitute so he used you” (said to the victim, in an attempt to tell her to get lost and stop complaining). But yeah, in general looking at rates of reported rape is even less useful there than it is in the US or most of Europe because of how heavily the system leans towards defining rape as stranger-jumps-out-of-bushes. Almost all rape that happens within relationships is going to be invisible from the perspective of criminal statistics.

(Not that that isn’t a problem in the US and Europe too.)