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 don’t think counter-protests accomplish anything other than making it clear that an opposition exists. In terms of actually arguing against what the people holding the initial protest are about, well, one of the reasons the Vice article seemed so silly was that “you’re wrong”, “no you are!”, “no, it’s you!” is pretty much how these things tend to go. When does arguing at a protest ever lead to reasoned debate and changed opinions?
@gillyrosebee
I don’t disagree at all with what you said, I think we’re just looking at reaching different groups of people. I say we combine forces, and then take over the world.
@Cassandra
Personally, I don’t think we were ever really on different pages (at least, I never felt we were). The only point of “contention” (quotes because I’ve been teasing out my position over the course of this conversation and never felt like you were wrong so much as I was running things by you guys), was whether the “racist” and “anti-gay” chants were actually that detrimental.
Well, it’s an online marketplace, and I have to figure out how to cancel the order and tell her why without causing an explosion – I’m only just starting to build my reputation.
And with that, I think I must sign off. Evie has taken to wandering forlornly around the hallway and yelling, since I’m not yet in bed. Cat grouchiness consequences!
Wait… I thought we already had?!?!? Isn’t why the world is plagued with hard chairs, spanx and SCENTED FUCKING CANDLES?
I wouldn’t have said detrimental so much as off-topic. That they were cookie-cutter chants doesn’t help.
Niters, gillyrosebee – apologise to your Feline Overlord for us ebil humans keeping you out of bed.
I’d have thought reselling a product as her own was a breach of ownership rights or copyright or something, but I know zip about this, that’s just an impression.
Completely OT, sorry.
gillyrosebee, Argenti.
A couple of months ago, a stray we’d been feeding suddenly had weird floppy ears, we thought she’d been in a fight. Luckily she’d started coming in the house by then and trusted us enough so Mr M took her to the vets.
Long story short (ish):
They found out she had an ectopic pregnancy that nearly went to term, she got blood clots as a result that travelled to the extremities which are apparently mainly harmless. Unfortunately in Izzy’s case the blood clots settled in her ears and tail, thereby cutting off the blood flow.
This meant we’ve had six weeks of finding ears occasionally discarded and used as play toys. Just the other week, an inch and a half of her tail fell off when her fat brother Solomon sat on her tail and she stood up quickly. (Right when I was emailing Kitteh 🙂 )
Anyway, vet removed the babies, which had mummified, in an op that should have taken twenty minutes but instead took an hour and a half, she nearly died and had A LOT of stitches.
But now she is the subject of lectures at the local Uni, and a paper is going to be written about her.
She might not be in grumpycat’s league, but I think, for a cat, Izzy is pretty famous.
Sorry, hope this all makes sense, bit tired now.
@ Shadow
Part of the issue here, I think, is that the format of a protest and counter-protest doesn’t exactly encourage nuance. I’m still trying to figure out what an effective way to intervene in meatspace MRA events would be, when you can’t just direct people to things that MRAs have said about the same subjects the way you can online. I think it would depend a lot on the specifics – who are they speaking to, what are they trying to convince those people of, in what ways are the ideas they’re trying to sell against the best interests of the people being spoken to (at which point a lot of the intersectional stuff comes in). The counter-arguments that would work best at, say, a F4J event in the UK where you’d mostly be speaking to journalists might be different to the counter-arguments you’d want to present to, say, a crowd of random interested students at a college speaking event.
Feline lithopedions?!?
Damn, your poor cat really managed to hit the bad luck there, unless that’s far more common in cats than humans, that’s a rare one.
Yup, she’s a medical bloody miracle, and lovely. 🙂
@Cassandra
All fair points, and as I said before I have practically nil experience in organizing protests, so I’m speaking only from my experience of attending and witnessing protests. I definitely agree with you and gillyrosebee that attempting to create a dialogue or do point-by-point refutations is not liable to be successful at a counter-protest. To me, it seems like the best you can get out of a situation like that is to make the casual observer think “Maybe there’s more to this issue and this group than what they claim”. I just feel like, if I had been there as an uninformed observer, having an organized group of people shouting “racist, sexist, anti-gay” at these dudes would make me scrutinize them and their message moreso than if it had just been a bunch of dudes talking about how family courts tend to be biased against men, or that false accusations are a real problem and we need to make sure that police are extra careful when they prosecute people for rape, or that false accusations need to have stricter penalties (especially since those kinds of myths are out there beyond the manosphere, so I would have been quick to swallow it). Again though, I’m not speaking from anywhere near the amount of experience you guys are, so I may well just be projecting my own reactions on to everyone else.
I would probably set up a booth nearby with printed versions of some of the various speakers’ more hate-filled contributions to the web so that people would be given a more honest point of reference on their stance, or heckle them and derail their speeches with questions about their bigotry rather than just trying to drown out the rally, which really just made the protesters look like a left wing westboro, and is probably why they were accused of being just as bad as the MRM radicals by many of the uninformed people who happened to see the event.
I also feel like I’d think counter-protests were more useful if the actual protest was likely to sway public opinion in any way, which in the case of the one in Toronto it wasn’t. I’m a lot more worried about F4J because they have a clearer agenda that on the surface sounds quite reasonable (or would if they didn’t keep associating it with stupid things like climbing Buckingham Palace in a superhero costumer). Not a bad idea to use the completely pointless, poorly attended protests as an opportunity to practice for use against better organized events, though.
So, it’s been years, and was a different format, but I graduated in 2003 — right as we went to war (go America! :rolls: )
One of the clubs I was in organized counter protests against the recruiters (seriously pecunium, a decade ago we’d have hated each other) — but it wasn’t trying to yell over each other, we had a table set up next to theirs and leaflets and such. So we could, and did, refute them point by point.
What I’m getting here is that maybe the way to point people to “look what they say when no one is looking” is printed material of some sort — leaflets, quotes on signs, something like that’s particularly because they do manage to sound reasonable when speaking in public and thus could suck in vulnerable people who really do want solutions to legit problems.
And my father tried to make me sign up btw, cuz I’m smart and computers and I’d get a safe intelligence job (hey pecunium, your job was totally safe right? *sigh*)…like that was ever gonna happen. That whole red baiting thing earlier? I spent awhile there being called a commie traitor on a regular basis, somehow, I’m just not seeing “maybe that chant wasn’t the best idea” as anti-communist.
A summary of this thread:
http://24.media.tumblr.com/e1600cedd77dd2de082697eacd4234a7/tumblr_mrtjp6ThVs1rikfino2_250.gif
http://24.media.tumblr.com/38ef145f7497ec8c27a424eb6b687dff/tumblr_mrtjp6ThVs1rikfino3_400.gif
My reactions:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/eaedb463388945db1942d6b859afb0d7/tumblr_mrtjp6ThVs1rikfino7_400.gif
http://24.media.tumblr.com/242ce97e6302a883d9d54ad76b96a3b6/tumblr_mrtjp6ThVs1rikfino10_400.gif
And I was totally ninja’ed!
Sorry, bit of a general one I wrote earlier.
I’m really dosed right now, and really need to go to bed. But I think @feministbees is just like YOYO was on that other thread.
Some people seem to think that they are the first to think a thought and that people who disagree with them just need more education.
I’m willing to bet that most feminists here are intersectional and that most feminists here have read the books. (Not just the wiki pages.)
Yes it is very worthwhile to examine the issues, but a counter protest at an MRM ‘event’ is not the whole of feminism. In this case it is useful to be clear and to the point. Misogyny is the wellspring of MRA hate, it is important to get that out there.
Most people have already thought about what feministbees was saying and have still reached the conclusion that a more focused approach at the protest would have been more helpful.
If I were to protest at the banning of headscarves in France for Muslim ladies, no matter how intersectional their feminism, I doubt they would appreciate my sign declaring the French government ignorant in the face of my disability.
They would quite rightly want me to wear a headscarf and wave placards decrying Islamophobia.
The whole way through feministbees lecture all I was seeing was my favourite scene in Good Will Hunting. (feministbees is the entitled student.)
http://youtu.be/VmRe_fK7pbw
Hope that makes sense, really must sleep now, nighty, night everyone, don’t let the bed bugs bite.
If we’re going to refer people at meatspace events to stuff that’s online as an illustration of what the MRM is about, The Spearhead would be a really good place to start, along with Elam’s rant about the idea of hurting feminists giving him an erection, and JtO’s “I won’t help rape victims” video. Or set up a page that’s a sort of Greatest Hits of the MRM, with the comment about cutting out the voiceboxes of little girls, various comments about beating women being a good thing, some of the comments about women loving “thugs”, and so on. We could call it “Welcome to the Men’s Rights Movement”.
That’s one way to keep a cat away from the fish! (Note, goldfish do not go in goldfish bowls, the only fish those are suitable for are bettas)
There’s a lobster hat on the downstairs tank because, for some weird reason, the cat is terrified of it. Hat stays on tank, cat stays away from tank, everyone wins.
…you know, Man Boobz: The Magazining?
There’ santo herThere’s another idea for a chunk of it eh?Or set it up like this.
What they say in public…….
What they say when they don’t think people are watching……
“Hat stays on tank, cat stays away from tank, everyone wins.”
Well, the fish wins anyway. Not sure the cat would consider that ‘winning’.
Ophelia wins again! (and sleep well)
I love the Flailing At Foot kitty. Yup, that’s just what it was like.
Plus Shark Balloon, lol!
Sleep well, all! I have a new template of the Sir in progress and then it’s watching TV and knitting.
Is Man Boobz: The Magazining going to have a brain bleach/Furrinati section? I could help with that.
@Cassandra
Really anything that actually refutes or shows bigotry in their agenda, or shows that it’s based not on empowering or helping men, but rather attacking the rights of women and pushing retrograde gender-roles on society would be better at providing opposition than just yelling really loudly. Even if what you shout is true people aren’t going to appreciate the format that you’re sharing that information in, and it’s just going to make you look bad by comparison, particularly when the opposition remains collected and even toned for the most part.
You also need to provide proof or give your statements some kind of weight, otherwise it’s just going to be assumed that you’re making things up to make the person sound bad. Especially when you’re accusing them of things like racism, sexism, and homophobia; those points are so often used in debates to make the other side look bad that people tend to just regard them as ad-hominem insults if they aren’t given anything to back them up.
That was the real problem with the way the counter-protest there was organized. It really just came across as a general copy+paste protest with no real thought put in and nothing really linking it to the actual event. Like, “Why should we listen to these counter-protesters? They’re just here because they want attention.”