I don’t know how I missed it, but a couple of weeks back Vice posted a short video about that EARTH-SHATTERINGLY HISTORIC Men’s Rights rally in Toronto that captured the attention of the world a tiny fraction of a percentage of people in the world (including the people at it and readers of this blog) a little over a month ago.
Alas, WordPress won’t let me embed the video here, but you all need to go look at it. Not only does it capture pretty well what a dinky event it was, but it also contains a bunch of mini-interviews with some A Voice for Men folks that are rather revealing.
The most revealing one of the bunch starts about 2:40 into the video, when AVFM’s Suzanne McCarley explains that
Men, as a class, have never ever oppressed women, as a class. Men have always protected and provided for women. And protected them from oppression from others.
From others? What kind of others? Like, space aliens?
Women have never objected to this, and in fact have always been grateful because it’s how they survived. It is only in the last few hundred years when women of privileged class who don’t even know what they’re being protected from feel disadvantaged because they’re not comfortable with the level of protection they have.
Wow. A few hundred years? Sometimes people accuse MRAs of wanting to take us back to the 1950s. McCarley apparently wants to take us back to the 1750s.
They don’t even understand what they’re being protected from.
Wolves? Sharks? Dishpan hands? Space aliens?
They have no concept how dangerous the world is for them but gosh they’re just not happy because, you know, the males in the family tell them what to do and make all the decisions for them and control all the money. That’s not oppression. That’s protection.
Wow. So I guess slaves and prisoners are the most protected classes of all.
It’s what kept our species alive and what built … [she gestures at the park and the buildings around it] this beautiful city.
Wait. I thought Jefferson Starship built this city. On rock ‘n’ roll.
Anyway, there’s also some footage of a speech about the evil oppression of white men given by an unknown speaker at the rally. He also complains that men working for the government are men who’ve had “their things cut off and are toeing the politically correct line.” (Hopefully after the bleeding has stopped.)
There’s an interview with Paul Elam, who for some reason looks like he’s wearing mascara (which I’m pretty sure he isn’t). He delivers this puzzling pronouncement:
Looking at men in government and saying they have all the power is like looking at women in grocery stores and saying they have all the food.
Not only is this way more revealing about gender inequality than Elam may realize, but it’s also a tad ironic, because Elam not that long ago used (unreliable) data about how women “control” most consumer spending — that is, they do most of the shopping — in order to argue (twice!) that women were the ones primarily responsible for destroying the environment.
There are assorted other bits of misinformation and ignorance and just plain old bigotry from the MRAs.
There’s also some commentary from the counterprotesters that made me wince. No, MRAs aren’t all Marc Lepines waiting to happen. They’re shitty enough people as it is; you don’t have to compare them all to a misogynist mass murderer to make your point. And in fact, you undercut yourself with that kind of rhetoric. Focus on what they actually say and do. It’s bad enough.
And the “racist, sexist, anti-gay” chant? Drop that. MRAs are, for the most part, driven by misogyny — not by other bigotries. Yes, some are racist, including one of the speakers featured on this very video, but that’s not the driving force for most of them. Some are homophobic, but that’s not the driving force for most of them. Some are transphobic — including Elam himself — but that’s not a central issue for most of them.
It’s worth pointing out these other bigotries, but to make these issues the centerpiece of your counterprotest is to miss the point — it would be a bit like attacking the Ku Klux Klan as “sexist and racist.” I’m sure plenty of KKKers are sexist as hell, but with the Klan racism really is the main thing; with MRAs, misogyny is.
And in this case it gave AVFM’s Karen Straughan the opportunity to appear (at least for a moment) like a reasonable person by pointing out that she in fact is not straight.
Anyway, watch the video. It’s amazing.
I expect that she’s referring to Abigail Adams – who seems to have been an early feminist. Or maybe she just doesn’t know much history and is confused about exactly when the feminist movement started. Nevertheless, I’d rather make my own decisions about my life, even at the cost of not being “protected” from whatever predators lurk in her fevered imagination, thank you very much.
Good grief. Everything that’s depressing about the MRA movement on show. I wonder what they’re thinking when they accuse feminism of somehow suppressing/causing/obscuring male illnesses, male violence, and male imprisonment. Do they honestly believe that if women all got out of public life those things would magically disappear?
Also interesting that they try to de-legitimise feminism by blaming it on upper class women. I’ve noticed this a lot in manosphere circles – they order society into two main categories. Lower class (which encompasses sluts, single mothers, welfare riders and retail assistants being oppressed by their richer sisters) and upper middle class women who have nannies and cleaners coming out of their wazoos.
This stratification allows them to argue that women fall into two evil camps – slutty single mothers sucking up male taxpayer dollars, and rich women who want even more, more, more for themselves.
Suzanne McCarley doesn’t history too well, huh?
Here comes the MRA gender police again.
“He also complains that men working for the government are men who’ve had “their things cut off and are toeing the politically correct line.”
I’m sure MRAs were outraged at this man shaming discourse! Seriously, they just can’t help themselves to tell other men to ‘man up’ one way or another. It must be hidden feminists forcing them to be the gatekeepers of the mysterious man card.
I felt sorry for the poor dude who kept shaking while he was delivering his speech.
I like how Suz thinks “Patriarchy is a protection racket” would make a great slogan for the MRM.
And I loved Paulie’s Godwinning.
It is comedy gold when one MRA speaker is talking about how men are “more likely to die from cancer” and the MRA behind him is smoking.
@Cloudiah
“We never accused feminists of making lampshades out of human skin”, we just accuse them of having a Nazi-like hate ideology that “leads up to being able to do that”.
That’s perfectly reasonable.
The point about obscuring male illness and sucking up all the resources really irks me. Until fairly recently the only cancers which were targeted with research funding were those that were either not gender specific or which predominantly affected men. Breast cancer was something that women tended to just suffer with and die from until well into the later part of the 20th century because so little was known and the only treatment was radical mastectomy. Look beyond breast cancer and the number of organizations which focus on uterine or ovarian cancers are easily overwhelmed by the number focusing on prostate cancer.
Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading causes of death world wide, and thanks to good research by the American Heart Association we do know that it is may be up to five times more likely to strike men, but since 1982 more women have died from CVD. Why?
Because as with cancer and so many other medical conditions, medicine has consistently divided research subjects into “people” and “women” and sorted anything primarily affecting women to the bottom of the pile. So all the warning signs for heart attack are based on the male experience of CVD. Women are less likely to realize they are having a heart attack, less likely to have medical coverage that would allow them to seek treatment, and less likely to end up with a doctor who knows how to treat the particular needs of women’s CVD as opposed to men’s.
And that doesn’t even begin to consider the particular medical issues which face trans folk, or the incredible societal pressure against seeing that those issues are adequately and sympathetically addressed (funding for organizations that seek to shame trans folk out of their gender identity emphatically does not count).
We have organizations like Susan G. Komen and others not because society privileges women’s experience of illness and health but because for centuries there were “people” who were important to study and “women” who could be interesting as a side curiosity, or something for the “lady doctors” to busy themselves with.
Fuck. That. Shit.
From the article accompanying the video:
I have a problem with this. The MRM seems to be more about hating women and feminists than anything else. They aren’t open to dialogue. And I don’t think all the compassion, therapy and support groups in the world is going to change that.
I do agree with author’s conclusion, though:
@sparky – exactly. What is it, exactly, that they have to say, apart from “We want to be victims, too”?
I love how they put the women they’ve got front and centre, to try and give them legitimacy. Anybody ever remember the suffragettes hiding behind men?
I always want to say to women like Suzanne “Fine, sit down shut up and go pop out babies for your husband then”, TBH. I mean, being as you think that must have been a fantastic lifestyle, why don’t you just get on with it?
I know that’s not really a rational response per se, but women spouting this stuff really bugs me more than Elam, etc, TBH.
I wonder if they’ll ever stop pretending that white men built the entire universe.
I also enjoyed that women saying she isn’t straight and they have gay writers so they obviously can’t be homophobic. Has this woman never heard of a black Republican or Log Cabin Republican?
The smoking MRA is Dean Esmay, by the way.
He was also the one shaking. I would feel bad for him about that — lots of people are terrified of public speaking, and it’s really nothing to be ashamed of — but, you know, he’s kind of a shit.
Worldwide, the majority of smokers are men. Somehow this never seems to get brought up by MRAs when they discuss the gender longevity gap, even though it’s a contributing factor to it. But no, matriarchy. I suspect the average MRA would say that regulating the tobacco industry is a symptom of the (evil) feminization of society.
In another context, on another topic, one might congratulate him for working to overcome his fear of public speaking.
And then you take in the message…
@sparky and @bodycrimes
There is such a no-win mentality in the MRA movement. Men are the natural protectors of women. Women are taking advantage of men by demanding to be taken care of Men are biologically predisposed to have sex with lots of women. Women who have sex with men outside of marriage are sluts.
In my kinder moments I just want to sit them down and say “Put the rhetoric aside. Forget the grans sweeping theories. If I, speaking for women everywhere, had the power to give you ONE thing, what would it be?” An apology? A girlfriend? Better custody agreement? A good job? What one thing would make you happy?
I think it kind of depends. I don’t think that the die-hards at this international rally (LOL) can be helped much, but I think there are a lot of “moderate” (by their standards) MRAs who actually can be helped with compassion, therapy and reasoning.
However, it isn’t anyone else’s responsibility to treat them that way, unless they want to. I didn’t like the protesters at this event for the reasons David lays out (really, guys, have some focus), but their tactics and attitudes were fine. No one is obligated to play nice in the vague hope of converting an MRA. If they want to, fine, but there’s nothing wrong with protesting or mocking. Especially because just reasoning with them likely isn’t going to help; I’ve met plenty of reformed misogynists and it was always direct personal experience with women that changed them, not arguing on the internet or at rallies.
I’m the same way. See also: most “traditional values” female Republican politicians/talking heads. I think their rampant hypocrisy is part of it–it’s okay for them to have jobs (always with their husband’s permission, of course) but somehow my job (which my husband does support, even, and wouldn’t want me to quit–he’s even encouraged me to be a working mother if/when we have kids because he knows I love my work) is not okay? No, sorry, that’s bullshit. And my job doesn’t even take me away from my family as much as a career in politics or public speaking does…
And it just feels like they’re traitors. They clearly get something out of their careers, but they want to deny that to other women? No. Just no. It’s almost worse than a man saying that because women really *should* know better, because they’re women! They know that they’re people, right?!
@AJK – that’s the maddening thing. Look at the women who hang out in the manosphere. Some of them are highly educated. Well guess who fought for them to have that education that they’re wasting on spewing hate? My great-great-aunt went to university at the end of the nineteenth century. She was allowed to study, but she wasn’t allowed to be awarded her degree. Her whole life she was mocked when she said she’d been to university. Literally laughed at. Even her sons didn’t believe her, because she couldn’t produce a degree. After she died, they found the evidence.
Yet I note the manosphere women who have qualifications flaunt them. As hard as they can. But no eddikation for other womenz!
@babsbeaty – an awful lot of men asked would go – I want respect! Wave your magic wand and give me respect!
That seems to be what’s singularly missing in their lives. They feel overlooked and humiliated.
I have never gotten the “Let me, the man, protect you” thing. Mostly of the things men seem to feel they need to protect me from they are as susceptible as I as am. For instance, my boyfriend will always make sure when we crosses the street he is on the side of oncoming traffic. Because his body is made of steel, I guess. I give him a bit of shit about it, and he gives it back, but he still does it. Wild animals, violent crime, things that go bump in the night — we are all just as vulnerable because we are all make of the same skin and bones.
I have made peace with this show of protection, mostly because I know and care about so many really good men who do it — sometimes sheepishly — knowing they are no less in danger from cars, bullets, spiders, whatever is making the noise in the basement, but also owning this was how they were raised to show they care for the women in their lives. I am okay honoring their life experience that way.
The one thing men are consistently effective at protecting women from is other men, if only because some men respect “Leave her alone she’s mine” way more than “Leave me alone.”
Is it terribly cynical that when I hear “men protected women from Others” I think “other men from that other village/land/country who probably have darker skin?”
Yeah, the Toledano’s notion that if only the feminists were nicer to MRAs, then there would barely be any, is pretty fucking ridiculous. For one thing, there already are barely any MRAs, and the kind that are see Paul “freaking begging” Elam as a thinker and a leader. Certainly, it’s silly to suggest that they’re literally all anti-gay or like Marc Lepine (though how far off is that comparison when Elam had a terrorist manifesto on his site under the “activism” tab for years?), but that is emphatically not what polarizes MRAs. What polarizes MRAs is the insecurity of those steeped in hegemonic ideology and privilege, as demonstrated by the dude ranting about how “no white men need apply [nonsense] … even though we built this country [further nonsense]”.
As a side note, one of my favorite twitter accounts is @Vice_Is_Hip. Hilarious.
Just watched the video. Now the French are taking our jobs (or rather men’s jobs)? Man, am I behind the times.
But I am pretty sure you can’t specify which gender/race/nationality you want in an employment ad.
Men have protected women from…what others? Those others were usually…other men. And more often than not, the “protectors” WERE the oppressors.
And now, something to make us feel a little better: