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.
Argenti: The best example I can fine is here, in a discussion of, Authorised Tortures at Making Light, (from 2006). It’s a thread of moderate length, and there is a comment I made when i was cold with fury, and hot with rage.
I won’t say which one, because you sort of need context for it, and I am not sure how well it stands out from the other comments I made, if one doesn’t read those other comments.
Argenti: One of the clubs I was in organized counter protests against the recruiters (seriously pecunium, a decade ago we’d have hated each other)
Nah. One, I was too busy, two, I recall those sorts of events. They made me sad, (at most) not angry.
True Story: my fiancée (former, the good one) is a Quaker. She had a war protest hat. She was wearing it while visiting me at Walter Reed. A Seargent First Class (significant rank) came up to me, to tell me (since I was obviously in the military, and also obviously with her) that she ought to take it off.
I, with all due respect, told him it was her right to protest, and I wasn’t in any position to tell her what to do.
So no, I wouldn’t have hated you.
Λυνα 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.
That’s the way to do it, “More about Lyndon LaRouche/The MRM/Republican Party” as a header for the table, and then literature (with citations of findable sources for the information).
kitteh: In other words, the century-old Americanism has naff all to do with the British word for cigarettes. That f** comes from f** end, the worn-out end of something, originally in the sense of a frayed end of rope.
Hrmn… there might be a non-obvious linguistic relationship (irrelevant to the origin of usage).
“Fagging” in British schools is probably from the word, “fatigues” as a term for chores/duties (esp. in institutional settings, like boarding schools/militaries). So something “fatigued” is “fagged out”, and so the rope-end become the cigarette (mostly, I suspect because a frayed end of rope looks a lot like the butt-end of a cigarette)/
Wow. I’m off trying to write for the evening and y’all have a trollsplosion.
For the record, I’m a third wave feminist and an academic and I pretty much agree feministbees was full of crap. I’ve never known anyone on this site to ignore or deny the importance of intersectionality (at least none of the regulars) but zie was having a completely different conversation than you all were. It sounded a lot like someone new to either feminism or intersectionality who argues it constantly without knowing much about the nuances. Anyway.
Here, have a doggie:
http://fyeahenglishbulldogs.tumblr.com/post/65720845723
I have to say I was sort of surprised by the way feministbees got angry. In some ways it was familiar, as I saw zir engaqing with an MRM (some fool standing for parliament), and the dogged determination was similar; though the target was more obviously wrong.
The sense of it is much as with drst, someone who has a grasp of the concept, but not a good sense of depth, and wants to make the world perfect RIGHT FUCKING NOW!.
Which is well and good, but not doable, and sometimes we have to fight the battles we can win (or at least arrange to not lose) and yes, there is a time and a place for ontological perfection, and a place to know when the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Λυνα “god makes people gay because he’s sad that women have rights and wear pants”
How does this work? God does what… make men so stupid they get confused and want to fuck men, because they are attracted to people who wear pants?
What it basically said was that because women work outside of the home, cut their hair, wear pants and makeup, have abortions, and aren’t universally subservient to men, god punishes them by creating gay men (lesbians don’t seem to exist in their worldview). I’ve been trying to find that tract like all day so I could pull a direct quote from it, but it appears I’ve misplaced it.
@Argenti Aertheri
Very sorry for how my “other people have problems” came out. It was late and I was getting riled.
I am very sorry for what you are going through. I know there is no way one person can judge how hard another’s struggles are.
That whole “natural disasters are punishment by God” has always baffled me. My vague understanding is that: a) god is responsible for everything that is created, said, or done, and b) god gave humans free will, because otherwise eternal punishment or reward is meaningless.
So if someone is born gay, god made them that way, so why dump a hurricane onto other people for being in proximity? If someone chooses to be gay, then god allows that via free will, and they’ll be rewarded/punished eternally after death, so why dump a hurricane onto other people for being in proximity?
@LBT
“I once came down from my room to find nobody in the house, just the words ‘DO NOT GO OUTSIDE’ written on the communal whiteboard. I STILL think it’s the best opening for a horror story ever.”
I am taking part in NaNoWriMo (should be writing right now in fact) and am totally gonna steal that image for my crappy novel. Don’t even try to stop me. I don’t know how or when I am gonna use it ….oops, nope … it just came to me. Ehhhxcellent (cue Mr Burns voice).
Thanks!
I got a bit bogged down with the cluster-shit storm the thread became for a while, but I do have some thoughts on “counter protesting.” There have been some good ideas so far and if someone has already said this forgive me. I started skimming a while ago.
A few years ago there was a KKK rally here at the state capitol. They announced their intentions early and several local and not so local groups were trying to find the best was to respond. Word went out to no engage directly, not confront, not try to shout down but to — well I think of it as offering the alternative. Celebrate diversity if you want the text book term.
So day of the rally, there were about 30 angry, red faced guys, a few women and one or two children standing on the capitol steps raging into mega phones about …..something….I am not sure if anyone heard them. There were bands and food stalls and dance troupes and jugglers. Local groups and organizations were giving away information about their services and issues. People were tossing Frisbees and playing with dogs. Families with little kids and old folks and young adults were all just hanging out. A couple thousand people showed up for the “counter protest.”
The visual it gave to the media was amazing! It wasn’t two angry groups of people shouting at each other. It was one really big group having fun and celebrating each other with music and food and one angry group that for some reason seemed to be against music and food and having fun.
I am not sure what the online version would be. I am not even sure if online is the right forum for that kind of interaction. But I wonder what would happen if a group of feminists showed up at an MRA rally with food, music, information on services for men who have been victims of sexual or domestic assault, legal resource for fathers who are having custody issues.
The point would not to engage the speakers or even the hard core people in the crowd, but to show the fringes and the passersby the alternative.
re God/Punishment of Nations.
In the OT God has chosen the tribes of Israel to be His Chosen People (this is a mixed blessing).
In exchange for obeying Him, and following His commandments, He will see to it they are, “blessed” and have a nation, and enjoy a place among other nations.
But, to keep this favor (since they are a small group, even with all “twelve” tribes) they have to obey. If they don’t His favor will be reduced, and the riches which come of obedience will be withdrawn.
Slip ahead a bit. The Jews have been 1: subjugated, 2: reclaimed their nation, subjugated again, 4: reclaimed their nation, 5: been subjugated yet again; and this time ejected from their nation and driven to the ends of the earth.
6 In the meanwhile a Jewish sect has been taken over by Greeks, and claims the mantle of being Chosen; it ends up becoming the dominant religion in Europe. A group of schismatics from one of the major subsets of the religion moves to “The New World” to set up “A Shining City on a Hill”, and presumes the mantle of, “The Chosen People”.
As such, they have to adhere to what this subcult of the greater Christian Faith presents as, “God’s Will”, or face his wrath.
It’s Hubris, all the way down.
Pecunium — I’ll get to that thread once I have coffee in me, you talking (or ranting) about torture always interests me anyways, so I probably will read all of it (also, uh, Making Light is like, my favorite example of web design just not managing to work, sorting out why it bugs me is a good idea)
And I sorta know military ranks btw, kudos for not just saying “yes sir”. And, eh, I wasn’t exactly anti-military, just fucking livid about the war…never fucking thought I’d still be ranting about how you can’t fight a war against a neuter noun a decade later…but you know all this already.
Babsbeaty — no worries, as kitteh’s noted, I was leaking my cranky all over the place. You get a welcome package yet? I’ll have one for you in a second 🙂
One Welcome Package!
I missed this entire thing because I was at a Janelle Monáe concert. I rather think I had a better evening.
Wow. Just caught up with all this. I can’t possibly address everything here, but a few thoughts.
I agree that my post was a bit glib about MRA racism/homophobia/transphobia; obviously it’s more than incidental to the movement, which basically takes the complaints of white, straight, cis men and pretends that they’re universal complaints and evidence of oppression.
But again, to say that is not to say that all of these bigotries have equal weight in motivating MRAs. MRAs are utterly obsessed with woman-hatred; its what drives most of them. It’s what they talk about constantly. Misogyny is to the MRM what racism is to the Klan,
And that’s why I wince when I see protesters showing up with a stock chant, and a stock analysis of the group they’re confronting, that puts the issue of misogyny second in a list of concerns, and downplays it even further by calling it sexism. Hell, they didn’t; even modify their stock chant enough to put “sexism” first in the list.
It makes the whole protest a bit surreal, and as various people here have said, it allows the MRAs to define the debate on their terms.
You wouldn’t show up to counterprotest the Klan chanting “Sexist, racist, anti-gay, KKK, go away.” People would look at you like you’d wandered in from another planet — even though, yes, a properly intersectional examination of Klan ideology would show that sexism and homophobia are elements of its glorification of “traiditional” white society.
So why on earth would anyone think that “Racist, sexist, antii-gay; MRA go away” was the best way to confront MRAs?
Also, the “go away” part of the chant just sounds childish. I’m sorry. Unless you’ve got a crowd of thousands, chants don’t really come across all that well on Youtube, which is where most people are going to see these sorts of protests, and this one was an especially poor choice both because it seemed oddly generic and misdirected and because it seemed childish.
On the hammer and sickle and redbaiting. Personally, I’m not a fan of Stalinism or of a symbol which for most people is a symbol of oppression. I honestly don’t understand what the protesters were trying to say by using it — there was some suggestion they were doing so critically or ironically — but almost everyone who sees this symbol is going to think of a brutal, failed totalitarian system. Whatever else that is, that’s bad PR.
If criticising Stalinism or the wisdom of people using symbols associated with Stalinism is “redbaiting” then I guess I’m a redbaiter. But of course by that logic many famous “reds” would also be redbaiters.
My concern here is to figure out how to effectively counter MRAs, and I don’t think this counterprotest was very effective in that regard. Happily, though, the MRAs made themselves look so terrible that the counterproductive things done by the counterprotesters didn’t really make much of a difference. But we can’t always count on that. Which is why we need to discuss what sorts of strategies are most effective in countering MRAs in a day and age when most protests are going to be seen mainly on youtube.
On ways to effectively counterprotest, I really like the example babsbeaty gave.
Yeah, Babsbeaty’s “but we have food!” is a surefire way to get people who could care less about the protest to come hang out and thus diminish the reach of the MRM protestors. I like it.
I like that idea. Take away their ability to influence people by showing them as the angry ranting egotists that they are, and contrast that against the whole community of people who have a better alternative to offer.
RE David’s point about the chant being childish, yeah. The first thing it reminded me of was the old children’s song “rain, rain, go away”, which doesn’t exactly say serious political protest or political group people should be worried about.
I like that example, babsbeaty! Imagine a feminist group organising a counter-protest like that when MRAs were *cough* rallying *cough*. All the MRA ranting about how evil women are and how oppressed men are and how men aren’t allowed to
ownlook after their kids … and meanwhile feminists of all genders and their kids are having fun and pointing and laughing.Sort of Manboobz: The Meatspace. Food! Fun! Pets! Mockery!
Good lord. Kittehs, that would be The Most Fun Convention Evah. Manboobzcon. I’d totally go.
We could have giant screens with pics of cats/dogs/birds/fish/ferrets/rats/cute creatures generally showing on them!
At Manboobzcon we’ll have about 50 different food offerings, covering foods from every continent, lots of good booze, and great music. At MRAathon they’ll have a six-pack of bad beer, stale crackers, mouldy cheese, and all the free rants you can bear to listen to.
Plus, we’ll have a petting zoo and cosplay.