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 did offer to carry my Lenin bust around attached to my bag if it would make Black Bloc feel better.
I was never very comfortable with calling people comrades, even when I considered them (in any meaningful sense of the word) comrades. And too often it is used the way titles are in the British Parliament, positively dripping with sarcastic anger. “Perhaps the comrade from Detroit has forgotten about the lessons of the [insert obscure political event here]”
For a while I had a cool picture of Lenin sitting with a kitten in his lap that I wanted to make into a t-shirt, but I lost it the last time I moved.
@Cloudiah
Here are some pictures:
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/8d/94/d9/8d94d96b9431cdfb0cf583b707075351.jpg
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/21/b4/24/21b4243b2f6450fd39489510a235b2ab.jpg
Yeah, I might have been more comfortable with the word if I didn’t associate it with reading about the “trials” during the Cultural Revolution and the way it was used there.
(Please tell me that we aren’t going to have to have an argument about whether or not the Cultural Revolution was a bad thing.)
@neuroticbeagle, It’s the 2nd one, but I got it by taking a good quality scan of a good reproduction in a book so it was less grainy. I wish I could remember the book!
p.s. And it was sweet of you to dig that up, and thanks.
To be honest, I used to be fine with the word “comrade” because I saw it being used in anarchist circles, but I’ve never actually used it for anyone and now I think that its associations are problematic.
When I think of the word “comrade” it’s usually as heard in a British workplace in the first half of last century, or out here maybe. That’s its benign sense, anyway.
Yeah, same here.
Also, I am a nasty person. I enjoyed that meltdown. It was like feeding the trolls till they burst.
Prolly all comes from being a fascist.
Brooked — don’t worry, I wouldn’t mind a version of him I could carry around. Partly for why you want one, partly because he’s good for my mental health.
And I don’t think he’ll mind being compared to fungus, not after calling me defective for the face I made at the smell of truffle jelly.
I have some truffle oil that is lovely in a finished dish, but to sniff it right in the bottle? Smells like melting plastic to me.
In random things, getting a footer to have a dynamic height and stick to the bottom of the page is harder than it sounds, and I just finished doing it.
Also, menu bar is sorted.
Now I need typography (ick), format links, spiff up the little area listing tags and such, sidebar formatting, and then the formatting for ALL THE HTML TAGS…then we’re in business to the point we need to decide if we’re seriously doing this and I need to go spend the amazingly expensive $4 a month on server space.
P.S. I whip out CSS, particularly when writing in dreamweaver which autocompletes elements and attributes. (I refuse to acknowledge their preview function, but I’m lazy and can’t spell so the autocomplete is nice)
So a week until it’s “done”, two until I’m done futzing with the finer points.
Whoops, I forgot the jQuery touches, make that three weeks. Which sounds about right, themes take me a month usually, cuz I’m a hair of a perfectionist about my code.
I’m a proud mainstream liberal who thinks anarchism and communism and anarcho-communism* are all hopelessly overoptimistic at best and bald excuses to smash stuff at worst, so I suppose I’m red-baiting by definition, aren’t I?
I’ve been seeing more anarchist folks advocating senseless destruction these days, particularly the insurrectionist ones. It’s pretty disheartening.
Bound to be, katz, bound to be.
You’re also against destroying art that happens to be of people you disapprove of, so there’s another strike against you.
Ally, you are literally the coolest anarchist-type I know. I hope you will be a good influence on them.
Seconding that!
And art of old-timey agricultural equipment. And telephone poles.
I’m hopeless, really.
That’s actual telephone poles, not art of telephone poles. Art depicting telephone poles is fair game. As long as there are no hay wains in it.
Eh, there are plenty of anarchist folks who are against senseless destruction. I’m not too unique in that regard. =P But thank you (and you too, kitteh).
Or tractors. Because tractors are sometimes painted red.
Core HTML tags slightly more than half done! Just have tables and definition lists left.
Typography is mostly done. Need to format comments and the sidebar, the comments form is a pain in the ass, what you see here is nothing like the bland inanity that WP outputs. Sidebar should be fairly simple though.
Tag/category block has been spiffed, need to do the author line on pages since that differs, but that’s a 5 min job.
And then I give myself a JS induced headache.
You are one of the least nasty people here. Unless you have secretly trained the kitties to attack people on command- wait, what am I saying? Kitties don’t do command. Let me rephrase- Unless you have secretly trained the kitties to attack people whenever they feel like it.