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.
@Athywren
“Gender Feminist” is actually an anti-feminist catchphrase. They’re contrasting “gender feminist” with “equity feminist”… I.e., they, the equity feminists, are real feminists, who want equality. But “gender feminists” want more than that, they want female supremacy!
Ergo, they say the wage gap is just because of women’s choices, and requires no intervention. And there is no rape culture, so it requires no intervention. And so on.
RE: Marie and Athywren
It’s okay; it was a long time ago, and I feel like I’ve laid that part of my life to rest. And it’s okay, because then I met hubby and he was great, and we have lots of happy consensual funtimes, so yay! Happy ending!
RE: Ally
Again, people seem to have this idea that this kind of manipulated sex just ends in blah, kinda boring sex but not particularly unpleasant. They don’t realize it comes in my flavor, which, like I said, ended in me just lying there like a corpse with tears running down my cheeks, and the whole, “I’m sorry you had to experience that, but we had to do it so you could learn to like it,” discussion. Sure, the guy chiseled an, “okay, whatever, just get it over with,” from me, but it took a few months of systematically breaking me down to believing I had a mental problem hat could only be cured by being fucked, whether I liked it or not. Plus, you know, I WAS A CHILD, so that bullshit actually WORKED.
Like, sure, sometimes my husband is way hornier than I am and I decide, OF MY OWN FREE WILL, to give him a good time. But I do it because I want to, and even if I’m not horny myself, I can enjoy my husband’s pleasure. It’s moving from a position of strength, not fear.
These people don’t seem to realize that. They can’t tell the difference between giving someone pleasure for fun and lying there crying while someone pumps away.
Christina Hoff Sommers coined “equity feminists” and “gender feminists” as a euphemism for “good” and “bad” feminists, basically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_and_gender_feminism
And this, by the way, is why I get SO ANGRY whenever some self-righteous fellow queers insist ace folks can’t be under their umbrella. Because pretty sure corrective rape to ‘fix’ my sexual behavior counts as pretty fucked up.
I recall posting this beautiful video about consent on my Facebook page:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5H6QvNmfjY&w=420&h=315]
I love it, since it’s fun and not accusatory (IMO,) just explains what consent is in a delightful way.
So imagine my surprise when one of my friends informed me that he found the video offensive, and accused feminists of trying to extend the definition of consent too far.
I worry about some of my friends sometimes. O.o
@ Athywren:
From what I know of the difference between gender feminism and equality feminism, ‘equality feminism’ is basically liberal feminism that only really believes in changing the law, and so long as the formal legal equality exists if women don’t take up STEM, say, it’s because biologically women don’t like STEM. Gender feminism is basically the idea that women are subject to male domination and patriarchy and that biological differences do not exist.
Here are some interesting articles/studies:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131007-sexual-violence-rape-teenagers-sociology/
“The study found that females and males had carried out sexual violence at nearly equal levels by the age of 18. Of the survey respondents who reported being perpetrators, 48 percent were female and 52 percent were male. Interestingly, females tend to assault older victims, while males are more likely to choose younger victims. Females are also more likely to engage in “gang rape” types of activity and act in groups or teams (1 in 5 females reported this type of activity, compared with 1 in 39 males).”
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/09/living/chris-brown-female-on-male-rape/
“The study also found that males and females carried out sexual violence at strikingly similar rates after the age of 18 — 52% of males and 48% of females. The study classified sexual violence into a few categories: foresexual or presexual contact (kissing, touching, etc. against their will), coercive sex, attempted rape, and completed rape. Women were more likely to instigate unwanted foresexual contact.”
Good… Bad… he’s the one with the dumb.
I love how Good spews out these links that don’t actually support what he’s saying and then ignores what he just posted and spews out more links that don’t actually support what he’s saying. The pattern is starting to get tiring now, though.
These guys really do live in a time capsule, because dead baby humor went out in, maybe, about 1979. It was funny at about the time of the bicentennial. Contemporaneous with Steve Martin with an arrow through his head. That old.
Remember…this was the last time this stuff was funny. Which doesn’t mean it couldn’t make a comeback, but if it does…somehow I’m not confident that these guys will be the first to know.
It mostly makes me wonder if this is how he converses offline too. Must be a bit awkward for everyone else.
Also, this
and this
actually imply that rape is still committed by mostly men, especially since, according to the study itself
So no, female perpetrators of sexual violence aren’t actually as common as male perpetrators.
I can imagine it going like this:
Good: Misandry is a serious problem – men are falsely accused of rape almost all the time.
Acquaintance: Actually that’s not true.
Good: Also, female rapists are just as common as male rapists.
Acquaintance: I thought we were talking about false rape accusations.
Good: The courts are biased against men!
Acquaintance: V_V
@AllyS, also there’s the fact that the study only reported perpetration (those who commit rape tend to do it more than once), only reported between ages 14-21
Given that it stated that men are more likely to rape victims younger than themselves it’s interesting that by design it excludes men over 21 who rape younger women and girls, isn’t it?
Whups, full comment:
@AllyS, also there’s the fact that the study seems to report perpetrators and not incidence (those who commit rape tend to do it more than once), only reported between ages 14-21, and also found that male perpetrators were more likely to target younger female victims.
That’s odd, I never found the “Don’t be that guy” campaign offensive towards my gender. Perhaps that’s because I don’t excuse rape like Paul “freaking begging” Elam does.
For extra yuck, the average age when males first committed these acts was like 14 or something, and they tended to commit them against younger people…pedophile in training?
Thanks for the context, peoples. Seems like an odd distinction to make, but then I guess that’s not surprising.
@Good
Wolf! Wolf!
One day you might post some articles/studies that actually are interesting, and nobody will bother to read them. Doesn’t that bother you?
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/11/barbara-kay-women-are-not-always-the-gentler-sex/
“Most rapists were subjected to some form of sexual abuse in childhood. A startling amount is perpetrated by females. Peer-reviewed studies conclude that between 60-80% of “rapists, sex offenders and sexually aggressive men” were sexually abused by a female.”
He really is oblivious to irony, isn’t he?
@good
care to bother responding to the people who actually read your links? Because right now you’re just being boring.
For extra yuck, the average age when males first committed these acts was like 14 or something, and they tended to commit them against younger people…pedophile in training?
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/11/barbara-kay-women-are-not-always-the-gentler-sex/
“According to a 2004 U.S. Department of Education mass study of university students, 57% of students reporting child sexual abuse cited a male offender, and 42% reported a female offender. Interestingly, 65% of the survivors of female abuse who opened up to a therapist, doctor or other professional were not believed on their first disclosure. Overall, 86% of those who tried to tell anyone at all about their experience were not believed”
I wouldn’t shed a tear if Good was banned.
@ Athywren: the problem is the dichotomy of a) good v bad, which has been mentioned, and b) the tactic of lumping everything that isn’t liberal feminism into one group, I mean to give an example Steven Pinker says in his book “The Blank Slate” that gender feminism is allied with Marxism, social constructivism and postmodernism, but those aren’t the same thing. Marxism and postmodernism for example have long been at loggerheads. A Marxist approach would always put class first, a radical feminist approach would put gender first, a postmodernist approach would talk about multiple power, resistances and discourse, a social constructivist would talk about gender roles and socialisation, etc