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.
He’s like that person who sits next to you on the train even though the compartment is empty and just won’t stop talking at you, despite your complete lack of response.
Like you give two shits about male victims at all, “Good”.
MRAs are gross.
@Ally S | October 28, 2013 at 3:57 pm
“The study found that females and males had carried out sexual violence at nearly equal levels by the age of 18.”
Lets emphasize “BY the age of 18”, which means that girls catch up by 18 or 19. This includes all sexual violence before and up to that age.
So… from the abstract of the study, itself:
Sample of 1058 respondents
10 female perpetrators
48 male perpetrators
…whoops, I’m seeing a problem, already.
There’s not a detailed breakdown of age/gender results, but I read the data available as “of the identified group of men/boys and girls/women who were between the ages of 14-21 and reported perpetrating an attempted or completed rape, a roughly equal number of male and female respondents reported “first perpetration” at age 18.”
In the article, this becomes: “The study found that females and males had carried out sexual violence at nearly equal levels by the age of 18,” which seems like a pretty bold reinterpretation of what I read in the study: http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1748355
Hey Good, do you have an argument yet? Or did you confuse this page with your Facebook timeline?
The only way to know with a decent degree of certainty is to have a study with a larger age range and find that, overall, female perpetrators are more common. The kind of ill-informed extrapolation you want to do here is not going to help you.
Also, we were originally talking about rape, yet even in this study it is shown that most rapists are male. Suddenly shifting the topic to sexual violence in general is a very dishonest and sneaky move on your part.
You noticed how he attempted to imply that an unwanted kiss and rape are basically the same thing, right?
Good, did you read on in the National Geographic story to where it says:
“But when you get into coercive and attempted rape, it does seem to differ”—with males committing 75 percent of these crimes, compared with 25 percent committed by females.
and goes on further to say:
“But they also found that completed rape is predominantly a male crime.”
Personally, I’d like to look at the actual study, rather than this National Geographic blurb. Also, I’m sure there will be lots of people dissecting it in the future.
I had to deal with a similar shithead recently. Not only did he do that, but he also took a picture of me without my consent and said “Hey, maybe one day when you become the next Mark Zuckerberg, people will see the picture I took!” And before we entered the bus he kept standing within less than a foot away from my face.
Here’s the actual study: http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1748355
@ Ally
Is there any reason he decided you were the next Zuckerberg?
First time I ever took the bus in San Francisco a guy about 30 years my senior sat next to me (with many other empty seats all around) and asked me to marry him. Perhaps this is just me being too British, but that strikes me as an odd way to say “hello”.
I know Good is to busy digging up more links but I’ll bang my head against this brick wall for a moment.
You realize that the Nat Geo article is discussing the 2010 CDC Hoff Sommers denounces as “careless advocacy research” and demands a recall of in Wash Post, right? The CDC study that defines “sexual violence in impossibly elastic ways and then letting the surveyors, rather than subjects, determine what counted as an assault”.
The CDC study is able to cover sexual violence committed by Female partners is because it goes beyond what “everyone would call rape”.
The Nat Geo article:
Wait, isn’t this where the feminism-afflicted “CDC effectively set a stage where each step of physical intimacy required a notarized testament of sober consent”?
This is the conclusion of the Nat Geo article:
According to Hoff Sommers, “defining sexual violence down obscures the gradations in culpability that are essential to effective criminal law, and it holds up a false mirror on our society”. Her conclusion is that all this interpersonal sexual violence fakey non-data blather just pushes feminist talking points and somehow takes focus away from real rape. How that happens exactly is unclear, but what do you expect from an reality denying polemicist like her.
Oh my Gorilla Grod, now my comment is in moderation, but other people are continuing the conversation. Will my post look out of place or be misinterpreted when it appears? WILL it appear?! What should I do? I’m thinking I’ll panic. Sound good?
Why yes, my social anxiety actually does extend to and, in fact, intensify when I try to discuss things on the web, thanks for asking!
Thanks Ally. I’ll try to plough through it a little later.
@Brooked: The Nat Geo article mentions that CDC studiy, but the main focus is of the study linked by AllyS. But yeah, it’s absolutely at odds with the Sommers stuff Good posted earlier.
1. He thought I looked like Mark Zuckerberg. Which is an odd thing to say considering that this is what Zuckerberg looks like and this is what I usually look like. In any case, I was annoyed because I’m not male, although to be fair I didn’t think he was the right person to come out to.
2. I had told him earlier about me being a computer science major who enjoys coding.
I’m sorry to hear that happened. If that happened to me, I’d be really freaked out and scared.
I mistakenly conflated the JAMA pediatrics study and the CDC study, but I think Hoff Sommers criticisms hold true for both.
The JAMA study is also go well beyond her beloved FBI “gold standard in crime research”:
@dlouwe
Thanks for backing me up!
I’d already been living in London for years by that point so my response was mostly shock that anyone was talking to a person they didn’t know on public transport – the tendency of creepy old men to harass young women, however, felt sadly familiar.
Uhh, Not So Good? Now, I know making a coherent argument isn’t your strong suit, but whatever is the connection between teenage boys victimizing kids and victims not being believed?
The goalposts aren’t moving, they’re travelling through wormholes.
LBT:
Okay, who didn’t feed the blockquote monster last night?
I’m going to apologize for the ugly grammatical mistakes in my previous posts and stay away from the comment button for a bit. Yeash.
@Matt: I read your comment, and it is a good comment you should feel good about.
@ Matt
All first time commenters go into moderation, I think, so don’t stress.