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.
A non-snark diagram :-p
http://oi42.tinypic.com/2py3yxi.jpg
And fuck, that bottom chunk, Menu 2 is two options:
Menu 2a, same as Option 2
Menu 2b, last menu on that page
So, overall options for y’all to fight amongst yourselves over —
1) Option 1 and Option A (excludes all other options)
Option 1 and Option B
2) Menu 1 (same menu on both the serious and humorous sides)
3) Menu 2a (main menu excludes snark drop down, snark includes it)
4) Menu 2b (main excludes snark, snark menu is last option on diagram)
Option 2 and Option B
5) Menu 1 (this’d be odd, it’d put the snark as a drop down menu on the serious side, and exclude it from the menu on the humorous side, I only list it for completeness)
6) Menu 2a (same menu on both the serious and humorous sides)
7) Menu 2b (child snark pages as drop down on serious side, as menu nav on snark side)
————
So, order 1-7 in order of presence, and I’ll do the math for ranked voting (Borda count to be specific)…because I have a thing for averages and a serious hatred for the flat out majority-rules system the US votes by, and it’s voting day here! Thus, in honor of all those Independent, Green Party, etc voters stuck voting for their second choice, I’m doing ranked voting (not that I think we’ll have much of that issue…but it is sorta how Bush got reelected…so yeah, Borda it is)
Btw…that’s basically how I determined outliers on the survey.
Athwyren — uhh…cuz that’s how category pages always work? Go click one, I’ll wait 🙂
You’d give 1 your first choice then.
There is no such thing as a pretty E-R diagram.
Bully. 🙁
My brain is clogged up with unexplained line breaks and “couM”s where “could”s should be. Thinking is haaaard! 😛
Ennehwayz.
1,3,4,7,6,2 (do you actually want us to include 5 in our list of preferences?… I’ll put it last) 5
Chapter 36… going a bit cross-eyed.
Include 5 if you want, but yeah, I except it to mean “I hate everything after this” (FTR, you can just leave them off if you only like some — you want to amend your list?)
Nah, I honestly don’t mind any of those options. I just prefer the first 3-4 of them.
37!
Wow, what a gross meltdown. Especially with the whole, “sure, maybe I left and came back, but you guys are all homophobes and transphobes!”
Also, since I pretty much missed a lot of those fights, am I the only one uncomfortable how it comes up and yet is also sorta hushed up? I keep hearing these little glimpses and shit, and yet nobody will talk about it openly, and it bugs me.
RE: katz
I’m actually kinda on the anarchist side (I see it as something I don’t think would work for our world right now, but I hope that maybe one day, it WILL be doable) but I’ve been lucky, and most of the anarchists I’ve met were actually involved in their communities. They were running the zine library, or internet cafes, or the bike workshops, or distributing food, or doing little educational lectures and skillshares and stuff. They were actually doing bigger things than being a dick on the Internet.
RE: Kittehs
Because tractors are sometimes painted red.
Oh god, I actually have on my computer this awful song called ‘Traktor,’ which is all about how well-built Soviet tractors were. I am not even joking. The first lines are, “Traktor, Traktor/it is big and it is Red/if it hits you you’ll be dead/because it weighs five tons, HEY!”
Athywren — ok
LBT — I think, from private conversations, that part of the silence is fear it’ll explode again, and not wanting to talk about the people who left since they aren’t here to denied themselves (which would make it explode again). Basically, there’s a live landmine in the room and no one is going to be he one to poke it.
@LBT: I must admit to being curious about the fights when they get mentioned. I think I missed a lot of them, or I have a bad memory.
But I gotta be honest: It’s mostly a rubbernecking impulse for me. I don’t need to go gawk at people being ugly.
It is to my benefit, therefore, that they are so damn hard to find that I can’t be arsed to go looking. I think one at least happened on the fora.
Also LOL at the Traktor lyrics.
The trouble is that a lot of it happened in the secret room and we’re not supposed to repeat that stuff publicly.
Yeah, I guess in my case, it’s just sort of frustrating, because it’s been a year now, and it just keeps coming up, but nobody will actually say exactly what happened. I don’t know. It’s just like everyone’s pretending it didn’t happen, when it’s so obvious that uh, yeah, it totally did. (And it was a lot more complicated than anyone will say BUT WE AREN’T GOING TO TALK ABOUT THAT OKAY.)
Just… I don’t know, I find it weird.
Ahhh, okay. Secret room. So we aren’t supposed to talk about it publicly… so it just keeps bubbling up like swamp gas from the depths. Yech.
Wait, I am totally lost.
*what happens when you don’t comment for several days because of homework*
*homework is MISANTHROPY! 😛 *
So, since the topic’s been brought up… is this presumably Tolkienian conflict the reason that the forum’s got so much tumbleweed bouncing through it?
Also, “the first rule of Secret Room…”
That’s cool. It would be nice to see more activists of all stripes doing those sorts of things.
Unrelated: I keep meaning to ask you if you listen to Janelle Monae, since you are interested in robot-human relationships and her albums are about an android who falls in love with a human.
RE: Athywren
I have NO idea.
RE: katz
Unrelated: I keep meaning to ask you if you listen to Janelle Monae,
I haven’t! I have a rough idea who she is, and have heard like one song of hers, but I didn’t know that about her album! Which is it? Maybe I’ll have to check it out…
LBT:
I wanna hear the disco version.
Traktor, Traktor, ploughing furrows in the soil
And good fortune to us all, Hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh, Hey!
Traktor, Traktor, join us for Collectives’ Show
We’ll go dancing ’round the clock, Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah, Hey!
Re: the Great Unspoken, at least one person involved in that is STILL being an arsehole about it elsewhere, and putting their side without anyone they’re accusing getting a chance to speak for themselves. I’ve read the public side of those threads and there was a fuckton of Who’s Queer Enough policing going on, and people being driven off the site who were not the ones making the noise. Frankly I think this site’s a damn sight safer and more welcoming generally than it was then, and I’m a little tired of tip-toeing around that business. Yes, I know some people left in support, or because they too felt the site wasn’t right for them, but they weren’t being arseholes to other people and weren’t, at least publicly, the centre of that storm.
It’s all of them; they’re a series. First is her EP, Metropolis: The Chase Suite, then The Archandroid (which is the best one), and then The Electric Lady. This video is from the EP.
(Remember the days when all music videos were big-budget? I miss that.)
If anyone desperately wants to gaze into the abyss, you can read this thread, which is public, and wherein David gets called a “cis hetero fuckwad.” (I think that’s aimed at David.)
RE the great Manboobz war of the past, those of us who were around at the time but not active on the forums missed a good chunk of it too, and woke up afterwards just as confused about WTF had happened.
::nods:: I’ve read that thread before, as well as the ones on the blog proper. The outrage from someone very good at driving other people off site for Not Being Queer Enough was ironic, to say the least.
And then I have a weird biased view of it for…reasons…I wasn’t around at the time, but was still emailing people, so I got the back end version, and none of what I heard was meant to be made public, so I can’t really help, sorry LBT.
I’m with kitteh though, I’m much more comfortable without…um…certain people being here anymore.
Yeah, I never felt Queer Enough in those days…
In things I will openly discuss, I just got done editing the WP back end so it will let you pick what pronouns you want to have displayed in your author blurb. Defaults to ze / zir / zir’s if blank, and that’s mentioned on the now edited user page.
Less PHP, more CSS >.<