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.
I think one of the things I like about Girls is how flawed all the characters are and not just Hannah being a little bit fat. They all have really human challenges anyone should be able to relate to.
I have no idea why SitC is the Rosetta Stone used to interpret the lives of working women of a certain age for over a decade (Booze! Sex talk! Shoe shopping!) but I’d like for it to be stopped by something other than my death. Move on people, nothing to see here.
I’m not sure if it’s a cultural difference or a generational difference, but I don’t find the characters in Girls relatable at all. Even SatC, as boring as I usually found it, felt more relevant.
So… totally OT, but I made caramel sauce tonight and now I’m going to have to figure out how many more things I can make to use caramel sauce on!
Anyone need a sweet story? Rosie the Riveter (one of them) celebrated her 94th birthday, and she’s still working at Boeing.
Hugs, Ophelia. I’m sorry bad things are happening in your life. Do let us know if we can help.
OHNOOOOO
I wouldn’t spend three hours working on his ugly mug if my life depended on it.
Granted I lived in NYC while SitC was on the air and it was pretty inescapable in its heyday because the show is something of New York institution. So I tend to whine about more than I should.
@Cassandra I think it’s generational, but I’m going on half an episode and what I’ve read about it because that’s how I roll.
@ Brooked
I just don’t like any of the characters, plus I feel like the assumption that Hannah should be relatable just because she’s a bit heavier than the average woman on TV is really patronizing. What if we don’t like her personality? Is that not supposed to matter?
The idea that flaws = relatable also feels sexist to me. It’s just too close to the romcom idea that if you want a female audience to like a character you have to let them see her being humbled in some way, as if we’re automatically going to dislike any female character who seems too confident or competent.
The one area where I will give Girls props is that it’s far more realistic about money than most other shows set in New York. You get kind of tired of seeing people who work in coffee shops or as freelance writers living in huge apartments in great locations if you’ve ever actually lived in a big city, you know?
I’ve only seen a couple of eps of Girls, but what little I saw I liked better than SATC. There are loads of stuff I hate about SATC, like
– how sexual harassment is supposed to be cool and liberated if Samantha does it to a man
– how it’s never okay for Charlotte not to feel comfortable about something, she ought to just get over it and do it anyway in the name of liberation (I hated her character, but she still ought to be allowed to say “no” to stuff)
– that terrible, terrible ep which was all about how bisexuals are scary as fuck
– how men were from Mars and women from Venus
– how I just couldn’t relate AT ALL to Carrie, she was just super annoying and I hated her and her fucking stupid shoe collection
– and yeah, the money issue.
I’ve never lived in New York, just in Stockholm, and from what I gather it’s a bit less expensive here. But still expensive enough for it to be completely unrealistic to have a big nice flat in the middle of the city if you don’t have a posh job or parents that pay for it.
Overall, almost every TV series and movie seems to not understand money. Like how you actually need money to pay for stuff. Most shows and movies seem built on the idea that “poor” is like a different subculture from “rich” – like, if you’re “poor” you have a differently designed home and different-looking clothes and so on (and also, quite often, that you’re more authentic, more laid-back and so on), but they don’t really get that being poor means that YOU CANNOT PAY FOR STUFF and that is A FUCKING PROBLEM.
Also, you might wonder why I watched SATC if I hate the show so much. I think I’ve seen like eight eps or something like that? Which is a ridiculous amount of eps to watch if you hate a show. But I kept thinking that I ought to give it a chance since the entire world seemed convinced that it was such a great, intelligent, funny, ground-breaking etc etc show.
I can never figure out if TV producers put their characters in unrealistically big and fancy homes because they think it will work as a kind of fantasy/wish fulfillment thing for the audience, or if they just have no idea how most people live. I mean, they can’t all have been born rich, right*? Some of them should remember living in shared and not that impressive apartments in their 20s?
*I’m hoping the answer here isn’t “nope, they were all born rich”.
It’s not just the money–I could never get into most sitcoms (especially from the 90s) because, even though they’re supposedly set in the real world, there are so many unwritten rules about how their world operates that don’t really match the real world at all. You know, things like “girls and women always hang out with the exact same core group of friends” and “all single people go clubbing.”
I’ve read somewhere that one reason is that it’s easier to film in a big place, and just looks better on screen. And that Kubrick went against the trend when he decided to give the couple in Eyes Wide Shut a realistic apartment.
But considering how poverty is treated overall, I think part of the answer has to be that at least most of them were born rich and the rest have suppressed what it was like not to be rich. If it was about wish fulfillment it seems more logical to give the characters lots of money, than to make them poor and then give them a huge flat anyway.
There might be technical reasons: Big sets look better on camera, it’s easier to fit filming equipment inside (for shows filmed on location), they’re using standard-sized or reused sets (for shows filmed on set), it allows better blocking possibilities, the exteriors look more distinctive for establishing shots, etc.
Side note: Has anyone watched 2 Broke Girls? Does it fall into the same problem or are the girls, in fact, broke?
It’s interesting that a lot of British TV shows have people living in pretty realistic homes, whereas in the US it seems to be the exception. Can’t think of any way to explain that via technical issues (easier/harder to film), and I wonder if it’s related to the tendency for it to be more acceptable for there to be average looking people in TV shows. Maybe people here just want their TV shows to be more about fantasy, or they don’t but the producers think that they do?
@ katz
Another annoying unwritten TV rule – we know that people have jobs, because we’re told so, but unless the show is about their job we don’t ever see them doing it, instead it appears that they must work about 1 hour a day and spend the rest of their time either at home or out on the town.
I’ve never seen SatC, but I feel like I should watch it just to get a handle on the way MRAs think all women live.
Dvärg totally ninja’d me.
The giant-houses thing doesn’t bother me so much as the unrealistic lifestyles: Everyone having a million hours of free time and infinite disposable income and being able to take all kinds of time off and go on trips everywhere. Both unrealistic and bad storytelling.
Also somewhat OT but since we’re talking about TV – I would be very happy never to see another show with a laugh track again. If you need to tell the audience where to laugh then your jokes aren’t funny.
Not a Brit, so I don’t want to America-splain you, but could it have to do with our differing ideas about class? As it understand it, it’s maybe not more stratified but the distinctions are more marked over there, whereas over here we like to pretend there’s no such thing as class. So maybe for you guys a big fancy house would signal “upper class” and a working-class person living in that house would just seem wrong, but over here we have less of that idea (not because it isn’t true but because it goes against our narrative)?
For instance, I was unable to convince a friend that, no matter how well MacGyver manages his money, he wouldn’t be able to own Griffith Observatory.
Reblogged this on dariancase.
It may well be an awareness of class thing. I don’t know if you’ll know the shows, but take Brookside, or EastEnders. If you’d put the characters in those shows in a Friends-style apartment it would have seemed ridiculous to the audience, and part of that probably is that awareness of class. Whereas most American TV seems to think that people are either rich, living an upper middle class/well paid professional kind of lifestyle, or living the same lifestyle even though they have no visible means to pay for it. Sometimes you see actual poverty depicted in a “look, how tragic” way, but everything between lawyer-or-doctor-level income and genuinely poor is just kind of missing. It’s weird.
Also, doctors and lawyers apparently only work a couple of hours a day. I guess their hourly rates must be really high.
Although, hmm. In the UK you could still call a person who has a lot of money and lives in a huge house working class, if that’s the class they were born into, but their huge house will look very different to the huge house that someone who’s upper class lives in. They will also probably have a nicer car (that’s less likely to be covered in dog hair).
Class is complicated.