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.
Random thought. You know in my country
neo-Nazis… sorry… deeply concerned radical nationalists insist on using the “Árpádsávos” flag but when called, well, what I called them first, they trot out the “but-its-a-historical-Hungarian-flag!” defense. Yeah. The one last used in WWII, when we were allied with Hitler. Also we have more than a dozen historical flags, it wouldn’t be hard to choose one less ideologically loaded, but nooooo. Eh. Sorry for the kinda sorta off topic.And this is why I run things by you guys!!
I love this idea, and it’s exactly what I meant by combining what gillyrosebee was talking about with my desire to reach people at the protests that might not know where to look for more information.
@Λυνα
I think if the flyer serves more as an ad for an online resource, we can provide the links there.
I also think it would be good to filter things by website. That way, if, for ex, it’s at an AVFM rally, people can see exactly what AVFM in particular is all about, as well as then learning about the rest of the shitosphere.
I’m thinking a flyer with some choice quotes, and then web links in smaller text at the bottom (or underneath each quote, if we’re dividing things up by concept, like here’s the stuff about rape, here’s the yay domestic violence stuff, here’s the “black men are stealing our women” stuff, here’s some stuff showing how PUA intersects with the MRM, and so on).
Also, Λυνα’s post perfectly illustrates that I was right to think that I might just be projecting.my own reactions on to everyone
Actually I think both the PUA meets MRA stuff and the fathers rights stuff need their own flyers, because it’s a little more complicated to refute than, say, the rape and domestic violence cheerleading, where you basically just have to point and go “look at this evil shit these people said”.
Also because more specific MRA events are more likely to have some impact, as opposed to the gathering of the ramblers events like the one in Toronto, where the main impact on any random people wandering by would have been “WTF is this shit and why doesn’t it make any sense”.
Yeah, I don’t see a reason why we couldn’t make a few different types of pamphlets pointing out the various biases and bigotries that the MRM community seems to hold, each including points and quotes from various leaders and spokesmen, and ending with a list of addresses providing the source of the quotes and the websites they’re from.
@Cassandra
I was thinking some choice quotes from the main dudes along with a cite, and then a see more at website
e.g.
“Fucking feminist’s shit up gives me a boner” – Paul Elam, article
Find links to these articles, and more, at manboobzmagazine.com
I just think Author, Article is neater, and easier than asking them to type out the url
And little postcard-sized flyers to hand out at events where specific people are speaking with their greatest hits (Farrell on incest and so on).
“Is Man Boobz: The Magazining going to have a brain bleach/Furrinati section? I could help with that.”
Not only can this exist, but if you want to find a good photo (line art might be better) to use like the mammoth/chicken here, I can have a kitty/puppy/whatever on the Furrinati page 🙂
And fuck JS, but I imagine there may be a plugin for the rotating art like up top here. I’ll add it to my todo list!
“Find links to these articles, and more, at manboobzmagazine.com”
This can also be a thing.
Oh and idk if you guys saw, but I found hosting for the exorbitant price of $4 a month (that is not a typo, I mean 4, as in four)
Actually I’ve heard people say “Those people were holding that rally for actual equal rights and then those protesters showed up and just made asses of themselves.” in reference to Toronto. That’s what frustrates me the most about those protesters; they didn’t actually provide people with information on why the MRAs are bad.
(hoping that I guessed correctly on the code for here)
I have to ask who the people who had that reaction were. Maybe I’m just super lucky in terms of my social circle, but everyone I’ve mentioned that rally to has basically said “LOL WTF”.
What I mean is, there are some demographics in which “Stupid protesters are just making a fuss” is the go-to response, and others in which the phrase “men’s rights rally” will automatically provoke a response of “huh? what rights do men not have?”, so the response is going to be extremely context dependent.
Most people I know are of the (quite obviously wrong) opinion that feminism is completely over and done with and any further injustice that women find is just because they’re looking for it, and to them the idea that feminism has overstepped it’s bounds and has actually begun to oppress men seems completely reasonable. I live in a ludicrously conservative location so that might have something to do with it (I mean, I was once given a religious tract claiming that “god makes people gay because he’s sad that women have rights and wear pants” by the staff at a clinic) But it does seem that there is a large section of the population who would actually buy the nonsense that the MRAs spew.
So if one day all women wore dresses would gay people (none of whom are women in this scenario, I guess) stop existing? Become straight?
But yeah, I think both you and I may have non-representative samples on our hands based on where we live. IRL I don’t know anyone who I could say “feminism has overstepped its bounds” to without them asking me if I was feeling OK and/or laughing at me.
@Cassandra
I’m not that surprised. I mean, the MRM leaders are absolute idiots right now, but should they ever grow even half a brain cell and look to the republicans for ideas, they could conceivably be dangerous. The reason I kept using the examples I did is because, as a POC, I would have been very sympathetic towards someone who came up to me and said “Men are not being given good counsel in family courts” or “Family courts are biased against men” because I already see that kind of bias by the legal system against people in my own community, so it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for my imagination. It’s only thanks to my exposure to the MRM, and the cites and refutations through manboobz that I can see it for the bullshit it is.
That’s part of the reason I’m not all that fussed about trying to turf out the current leaders, actually. Please do continue being incompetent with my blessing, dudes.
The thing that really gets me about the MRM is that the majority of the things they complain about (such as rigid child support laws, alimony, bias against male victims of domestic violence and rape, more support for women in need than men) weren’t put in place by feminists, but by the traditional societal gender biases that were based on how people in an agrarian world viewed as the “natural order”; the same “natural order” that they claim to be in favor of. (They stem from the idea that a man can and should be able to take care of himself while a woman can’t, therefore a man who needs help doesn’t deserve it and that man should be absolutely responsible for his wife and child even if he’s not with them anymore.)
I used to try to point out to them that feminists were potential allies in the fight against laws and cultural assumptions based on gender essentialism, not enemies, but after “no it’s just that feminists hate men FUCK YOU” being yelled at me eleventy billion times in response I gave up.
“god makes people gay because he’s sad that women have rights and wear pants”
Well that’s a prize piece of weirdness. 😯
Though I’m inclined to say, “Gay people and women having rights and wearing pants? Sounds like a win-win situation to me.”
There are pro-feminist men’s rights activists out there, but they generally want nothing to do with the MRM and take pains to try to distance themselves from it.
On the child support issue I wonder if they’ll ever figure out that “I want the legal right to refuse to provide support to my child if I’m mad at its mom” is not exactly the most brilliant marketing move of all time.
Totally OT, how is your nym pronounced, Λυνα? I know it’s not going to be Auva, which is what my brain defaults to.