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.
No. It’s the standard for bullying and for rape. Always pick on someone who looks weaker than you feel.
So it’s down to dead baby jokes for AVFM. It was only a matter of time, I guess.
0_o (Note the maker of the product is in the comments.)
The men laughing are pretty twisted, and I strongly encourage them to post this on their dorm room doors so other people can identify and avoid them. I guarantee it’s not going to increase their sexual opportunities.
It’s so rare to find babies in dumpsters in North America these days that when it happens, it’s a front page story. Even dogs in dumpsters are shocking and horrifying. Our collective shock at these stories is a reminder of how far we have come in the last one hundred years. But in the past (and even today in some parts of the world) it wasn’t uncommon for infants to be abandoned on river banks, in forests, on road sides by desperate women. And I can’t help but wonder how many of those unwanted babies were the result of rape…
These MRAs are so lacking in compassion, so devoid of humanity, that there is a part of me happy to see them expose themselves.
cloudiah – O_o Whut.
It’s a good point, but on the other hand, considering how terrible MRA’s are at creating coherent posters – or having any kind of coherent message in general – I shudder to think what they would come up with if they actually tried to call attention to male rape victims.
O_o is truly the only appropriate response.
Creepy AND $20 a bottle?
What I got from the poster is that you should dump your dead babies in your own trash, not somebody else’s. Which is true. That’s just good manners.
RE: cloudiah
*hides face in hands* Oh god, I knew people back in high school who would’ve been ALL OVER THAT.
$20 a fucking bottle? You can get a bottle of Scotch for that cost here! Admittedly, not very GOOD Scotch, but still.
A creep and his money are soon parted, I guess,
But seriously, it’s grape soda. Why not just buy a bottle of soda and stick a picture of the creepy hentai rape scene of your choice on it yourself?
(And then carry it around at all times, so that everyone else knows who to avoid.)
Oh look, a new thing to put on my “If Somebody Likes This Stay The Fuck Away From Them” list.
Can you imagine walking into somebody’s kitchen and seeing they have a big row of Tentacle Grape bottles proudly on display?
I can imagine backing out of the kitchen and right out the door and then deleting their number from my phone too.
“I’m not staying for dinner anymore.”
More often the lack of contraception and no access to safe (or any) abortion.
I saw a comment once on another site from a woman who grew up in Wales. Her grandmother’s generation generally had 6 plus kids. When it got to be too many to afford to feed, the following ones were just put in the coal cellar as soon as they were born. Presumably they buried them in their own gardens.
Never let anyone tell you that contraception and ready access to safe abortion are bad in any way.
While avoiding doing something productive, I checked out the OP on noted AVFM think-tank /website Genderradic and fell a little in love with the excitable Robert St Estephe’s three musings on the post.
Note: Robert jumped on the disturbing story about 17-year old shoplifter caught with a dead newborn in a Manhattan Victoria’s Secret as a gateway to broadly condemning some odd mixture of consumer culture, feminism and women in general. Kudos for topicality and the phrase “genital stimulation matters”.
Note: I look foreword to my tenured position, but as of yet have not received the appropriate paperwork.
Note: Robert has a pretty fun website which is mostly a true crime compendium of vintage texts involving criminal women and topics of interest to MRM. Feminists have failed to notice his website because they can’t handle the truth, apparently.
Note: I cannot fathom any other possible explanation for the aforementioned defeaning silence.
Note: I think this is another example of MRAs’ crimes against satire.
Note: Uh, touché?
Well. I don’t know about other feminists, but my deafening silence thus far is attributable to “Robert who?”
The fact that he’s bad at marketing is misandry.
OT: I carved my pumpkin into the scariest thing I could think of.
Wait, does he think that women get turned on by walking around Victoria’s Secret stores and that’s why they shop there?
Because, according to feminism, women can do no wrong and have no agency. Didn’t you get the memo?
No… me neither. I’m sure he’s right, though. I mean, there’s certainly no way he could have been misled, or just lying about it, is there?
RE: Brooked
That unwanted pregnancy vs. unwanted sex thing…
Riiiiiight. Oooookay then. Not sure if trolling, or just stupid.
RE: katz
That looks AWESOME!