So A Voice for Men has finally responded to Jaclyn Friedman’s masterful takedown of the Men’s Rights movement:
No, sorry, my mistake. AVFM didn’t respond to her article by farting. It responded with an article accusing her of farting. No, really.
In an article with the fart-referencing title “Gone with Jaclyn’s wind,” AVFM “Honey Badger” Diana Davison tries to rebut Friedman with some really, really strained fart metaphors:
In Jaclyn’s habitat, there is a foul and ominous odour beneath the sheets. Since, according to her, the MHRM are all dogs, it is easiest just to blame the stench on them.
Ho ho!
Davison then takes the argument underground:
There are many canards in the coal mine of Jaclyn’s article about the MHRM that quite quickly die of gas.
Wait, so now Jaclyn is farting carbon monoxide?
And one more toot:
The next trouser trumpet is her insistence that the MHRM is an attack of men against women … .
The fart metaphors, strained though they are, turn out to be the most coherent parts of Davison’s little rant. As far as I can figure it, her main complaints about Friedman’s piece are that:
- Friedman calls the Manosphere the Manosphere, even though there are a handful of women involved in it.
- Friedman “silenced” her by not linking to Davison’s last dumb piece about her in AVFM, and by (gasp!) blocking her on Twitter.
- Friedman doesn’t enjoy it when AVFM commenters make rape jokes about her.
Speaking of commenters, the comments to Davison’s article are of course a joy to behold.
Paul Elam gets “firsties” with a long comment lauding Davison and further attacking Friedman. Elam picks up on the whole fart thing, describing Friedman as an “orally flatulent windbag” before launching into his version of their encounter in New York during the filming of the 20/20 piece which could eventually air sometime this millennium.
His biggest complaint about her? That she (allegedly) told him to shut his fucking piehole — not in those words, of course — and nobody puts Pauley in a corner tells Pauly to shut his fucking piehole
Before you read this, I encourage you to reacquaint yourself (if necessary) with the psychological concept of projection. And to remember that Elam is very fond of telling other people to shut up. He’s quick to banhammer dissenters in his comments section, quick to toss AVFM contributors overboard when they disagree with him, and one time he actually tried to start up his own version of a Men’s Rights subreddit where he could ban whoever he wanted.
Anyhoo, with that in mind, let’s read what he had to say about Friedman:
I tell you one thing for sure, what I saw of her emotionally shined through the brightest at one particular moment. She had said about three times that the conversation we were having was over. And then of course she re-engaged in that conversation repeatedly.
The last time she said it was over, she tried to issue it like an edict…”I said this conversation is over!”
I told her that she did not instruct me to do anything.
And that is when I saw it. Pure, raw hatred on her face. She did her best to stare a hole in me, and she had the look of someone who was quite used to doing that sort of thing and having it work.
After all her histrionic bullshit about me inspiring mass murder and poor widdle defenseless wimmins having to turn to the FBI and go into some sort of rape culture protection program because of the things I had written, the thing that got her the most, that really tuned on the faucets of anger, was that she could not tell me to shut up and have me comply — or even give a fuck.
I would bet the farm that moment was her in a nutshell.
And it fits. With all the bragging she has done about her big old smelly electronic clit and how she and her friends have bullied their non compliant sisters to the sidelines; with her crusade to censor people at facebook; her blocking Diana Davison on twitter for daring to stand up as a woman who opposed her sick ideology, the true Jacklyn Friedman, the personality disordered control freak with a huge chip on her shoulder, didn’t care about any goddam cause.
She just wants to tell people what to do.
Fuck that and fuck you, Jacklyn Friedman. If someone told you that you ever had a prayer of running shit in the MHRM, they lied to you.
Oh boy. Where to even start with this feast of revealing bullshittery? Perhaps the massive projection about the “pure raw hatred on her face” and Friedman “having the look of someone who was quite used to doing that sort of thing and having it work?”
Here’s a screenshot from a video of Elam’s in which he discussed this very encounter with Friedman. What word would you use to describe that look? (Hint: The word I would use starts with H and ends with E and is “hate.”)
And then that bit about Friedman wanting to “run shit in the MHRM?” Woah. I’m pretty sure she’d rather chew her own toes off than hang out with you guys for any length of time, even if she were running the show.
Somehow I think Paul’s anger on this point is directed at, well, every other MRA who might possibly challenge HIS supreme authority in “running shit” in the “MHRM.”
And, oh, that bit about Friedman’s “smelly electronic clit?” Smelly clit?! Uh, how do I put this delicately? When there is an odor issue in that, er, general area of a cis woman, the clit is not actually the source of it. Paul, you’ve been married, what, four times? Do you somehow still not have a basic understanding of the standard-issue cis lady bits?
And now I’ve got an image stuck in my head of Elam’s hatey face in the general vicinity of some poor woman’s vagina, and I’ve officially ruined my lunch.
I’m not going to bother with the rest of the comments. It’s AVFM. There are rape jokes. There are fat jokes. There are multiple uses of the word “cunt.”
What a magnificent “Human Rights Movement” we have here.
Me three. If I was going to attend an event where he’d be speaking I’d be tempted to wear a giant cross AND a huge pair of Hand of Fatima earrings, just to annoy him.
It’s more than privilege for Dawkins (and for the 90% of the online Skeptic community that also sucks). It’s creating a division between Us and Them, where Us = People Who Use Reason and Them = People Who Are Enemies Of Reason.
Not only is it exactly dehumanization, it’s also a recipe for false confidence and a smug belief in one’s own invulnerability to bias. If you’re by deifnition one of the Reasonable People, then how can any thoughts that pop into your head be anything other than the truth? And if what you say angers your enemies, then that’s even more evidence, because by definition Those People are wrong about everything.
Now, of course, I’ve met many charming and rational atheists! But let’s just say the venn diagram between them and people involved in the online Skeptic Community is, uh, not one where the circles overlap very much.
There is an interesting disconnect between atheists you meet in meatspace, who’re mostly pretty calm and reasonable people, and the kind of poo-flinging howler monkey behavior that seems to be the norm in parts of the online skeptic community.
Didn’t you know? If you haven’t been raped, that means you’re a rapist! True MRA logic, hard at work there.
Of course, the point is that being imprisoned is objectively worse than being raped, because of how rape is quick and has no lasting effects – true story! (Not a true story.)
I was appreciating this comment right up until that last sentence. You’re using “delusional” in a very odd way indeed. Someone is delusional if zie believes something that’s clearly contradicted by reality, not if they just happen to be wrong about something. People online think I’m male all the time (I’m female), but it would be silly to say “you’re delusional if you think I’m male,” because they had no way of knowing one way or another and it’s a perfectly reasonable guess.
So it’s nonsense to say “you’re delusional if you’re wrong;” the fact that you need to include a qualifier as to whether they’re right or not indicates that there’s actually insufficient evidence to know, so they’re obviously not believing something false in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
Unless you’re just using “delusional” to mean “wrong,” but you know perfectly well that it has pejorative connotations, so using that would put you smack in the same category as Dawkins, as someone who uses inflammatory and demeaning terms to discount religious people.
Oh, well phew, we’ll finally have hard data proving that people think the Kafka-esque nightmare of being imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit would be unpleasant!
This will mean that being raped can’t possibly be unpleasant, because only one thing in the entire universe can feel bad.
I’m starting to think that it’s a core misogynist belief that caring about more than one thing is like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time – sure, some people can do it, but it’s unfair to expect most people to be able to!
Katz: It’s an astoundingly shitty application of utilitarianism. If you say, “Given a choice of being raped or going to prison for some length of time, I would choose to be raped rather than go to jail for 1 year,” then they turn around and argue that rape itself should only be punished by one year in jail, since they’re both “just as bad”, making it ‘fair’.
Of course, this falls into the Not Even Wrong category. Even if we accept their shitty overall logic, the proper formula for determining what the punishment for rape would be should be, “Odds of getting convicted for rape * number of years imprisoned = too long for typical rapist to assume the risk”. Ie, it’s a deterrent formulation, not a ‘fairness’ formulation.
Note that for deterrent purposes, if you raise the odds of getting convicted, you can actually afford to make the penalty less, and still have the same deterrent effect.
Let’s say we live in an otherwise dystopian, 1984-ish society of perpetual surveillance. Any action taken will be spotted immediately, and punishment for rulebreakers is therefore assured. In that society, a single year of hard time might actually deter the vast majority of would-be rapists, who simply would be unwilling to shed a year of their life for… whatever the hell it is they get out of rape there’s some holes even I won’t go down thanks.
However, in our society, where the odds of a rapist (and particularly, of an acquaintance-rapist) getting punished are so small, you need the imprisonment factor to be much, much larger.
Avoided the blockquote monster but then the italics got me good.
@Katz
Fair point there. I was too busy picking at the underlying assumption that all theists are definitely wrong to notice the importance of the words being used – obviously being wrong is not all that’s needed to be considered delusional.
The point I was trying to make is that, if they’re right about a god existing, then they can’t be delusional (on that particular topic) but instead I put it the other way, and used a psychological term to demean the majority of living people.
I’m sorry… I really am working on cutting the ableism out of my language, I swear.
Athywren: Thanks, I appreciate that. You are usually super considerate about that sort of stuff.
The utilitarian logic only makes any kind of sense if you assume that nobody deserves any kind of punishment. They’re acting like punishing people for crimes they commit is exactly the same as some kind of Omelas-like arrangement where we randomly imprison innocent people and somehow then rapes magically don’t happen.
katz: Exactly–crimes should be punished with enough severity to deter the criminal, not to make some sort of artificial ‘balance’ for the victim.
I’m pretty sure that expecting men to care about anything at all is MISAAAAAANDRY.
@Freemage
Or, even if we decided to try something besides a deterrence model of justice system, at least some kind of ‘protection for the rest of society’ factor in there. Because that’s something we ought to be thinking about too.
Athywren — re: religion as abuse
I’d classify the sort of thing you seem to mean as emotional abuse, which, being neither “better” nor “worse” than sexual abuse, solves this problem completely, no?
(I can’t look at quote marks and question marks without triple checking currently, WP’s comments.php is fucking with my brain!)
@Argenti
Yes. That’s pretty much my position – it’s all abuse, it’s all bad, and it all needs to stop. I was just trying to argue that what Dawkins said wasn’t necessarily complete shit… even if he is getting good at that. I do seem to remember him clarifying it, so that his argument was essentially just “really bad abuse is worse than mild abuse.” But I might have imagined that…
I should probably clarify – I don’t think all religious upbringing is abuse, just the tormenty stuff.
HB: Oh, absolutely. I don’t like payback models, but I’m all about deterrence and prevention. So, yes, I feel that pederasts, who have VERY high recidivism rates, should be kept in some form of institutionalized setting pretty much permanently. This doesn’t have to be ‘prison’, exactly–I’d like to see a lot of people, not just pederasts, placed in therapeutic settings where they might be able to get some degree of relief from their personal demons. Unfortunately, we’re still caught in the trend where sticking them all in a big concrete warehouse for a few years and expecting them to become more socialized is somehow expected to work.
Really bad abuse is worse than mild abuse? Wow, that’s so profound! Well done, Mr Dawkins.
I wonder if it’s occurred to him that someone could argue that their abusive religious upbringing wasn’t that bad a thing because they haven’t suffered any lasting harm in exactly the same way he tried to argue that child abuse isn’t that big a deal because it happened to him and he doesn’t feel like it did him any real harm.
The oppression olympics aspect is part of why that was so annoying: You couldn’t possibly just say “abuse is bad,” no, if you’re going to talk about abuse you must talk about which types of abuse are worse than others (presumably so you can tell people who suffered less-bad abuse to STFU).
Also, there’s a sneaky element of ‘sexual abuse as it happened to me wasn’t a big deal (so it shouldn’t be a big deal to anybody else, just get OVER it).’ The second half is rarely said out loud; and if you give him a charitable reading it tends to disappear.
The problem is that with everything else he says and does (“Dear Muslima”) it’s really hard to give him a charitable reading.
Given his frequent moments of misogyny I kind of wondered if part of his point was that he and his classmates just got over it because they were boys, unlike those whining women.
Which if true would once again prove that misogynists are far more of a danger to the wellbeing of male victims than feminists could ever be.
Fair points there… even assuming he really did make that clarification, that’s still a fairly pointless and unhelpful statement. I guess I was too busy thinking about how religion doesn’t excuse abuse to notice how asinine the whole thing was. And, yeah… “Dear Muslima.” Because the correct response to any attempt to discuss serious problems in our society is “first world problems.” Offensive both because those problems are serious ones, but also because it assumes that people in the rest of the world don’t have all the same petty insignificant problems that we do, on top of their own serious ones.
the first 5 mins of Up are some of the best movies ever. and i can totally pat my head and rub my stomach, or vice versa if that’s what it is… *T3s is making SittieKitty a loopykitty so hopefully this made sense*