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.
Hey, I think I’m one of the sycophants mentioned in the first post.
And, um, kitteh, Katz, Cassandra, LBT, y’all have my email if you want to take this to private spaces.
Probably no need to beat about the bush: It was Darksidecat. Zie was an asshole. Zie was an asshole in almost every way it’s possible to be an asshole and zie loudly and adamantly defended zir right to be an asshole.
There were other obnoxious people like Blackbloc, but they would have been a very minor problem if it hadn’t been for Darksidecat.
Something from the public threads here: attacking people for asexuality and identity and essentially doing a “not welcome in the treehouse” was as assholish as anything else I’ve seen from non-trolls on this site.
Well, since that’s been said…
Yeah, that. So much that. So very much.
Though, DSC’s assholery is part of how pecunium and I became friendly, so I guess some good came out of it. (This is, btw, why I think I’m one of those “sycophants” — defending pecunium’s pedantry against cries of homophobia)
There was this weird undertone that in order to be genderqueer by them I was going to have to disclose what’s in my pants. Idk how to explain it, but I was really irked about the claims that non-cis people are excluded when the only people I felt were policing me were the ones making the claims.
Link?
Rutee was second only to Darksidecat and is still being an asshole about the whole thing elsewhere. Yeah, not sorry either of them’s gone.
I think you just summed DSC up perfectly, katz.
…and the mac just crashed. Guess I won’t be doing any more coding right now!
What link, Argenti? The blog thread? No idea, it’s months and months since I read it.
Your mac needs kitties inside it to make it work proper!
One of the weirdest things about that whole mess was that at around the time it happened, both before and afterwards, there were occasionally comments that suggested that everyone else should know what the conflict was about in terms of specifics, but some of it apparently happened in a secret (members only I guess?) room. So how would anyone without access to that room have known what happened there? I found that part particularly odd and a bit frustrating. Like “you should be angry at person X because you should know what zie said” and, um, how, if you don’t even have access to the space where it was said?
That is weird.
Maybe True Allies are supposed to be mind-readers?
But then I thought that sort of thing was Unacceptable Woo … /snark
Ugh, I remember that.
Pecunium was arguing about DADT and was talking about how the laws also got applied to things like pedophilia, IIRC, and through the world’s worst game of telephone, that turned into “Pecunium thinks homosexuality and pedophilia are the same thing” and then anyone who tried to point out “he didn’t say anything like that” got a bunch of “Why are you defending a homophobe, YOU HOMOPHOBE!”
Defenses were actually made of assuming that if you mention two things in the same sentence, you’re saying they’re the same.
I’m not fond of whole secret room concept in general, though, so that may be influencing my perspective.
RE: Kittehs
I wanna hear the disco version.
The band put it up for free, so you can listen to the full song. I warn you, though, it’s REALLY bad, and in very bad taste. I’m embarrassed that I have it. (Then again, I also listen to Super 8 Cum Slut, so yeah.)
“One thousand years past the decline
Of Marxism — you’re tractor’s fine!
Sky blue pain with pinstripe line
Prevents against decay — HEY!”
RE: CassandraSays
woke up afterwards just as confused about WTF had happened.
Okay, as long as I know it’s not just me who’s badly confused, that makes me feel better. I guess I just felt like I was the only non-newbie not in the loop, and I was overreacting to that feeling.
RE: katz
Ooooooh. *goes to watch the vid* Damn, but Ms. Monae is a classy person. She makes me think of X-men’s Storm in her mohawk days.
By which I mean, if people want to talk to some others about stuff that they don’t want to share with everyone, why not use email? That seems less weird than making a secret room that not everyone is allowed to enter, and then getting annoyed when people don’t understand what happened in the secret room that they’re supposed to be angry with someone about.
For me, of course, it was the asshole atheist thing. Darksidecat adamantly believed that, since atheists are a marginalized group in society as a whole, that gave zir the right to mock and insult anyone who had religious beliefs. Of course you weren’t allowed to complain or disagree, because you were “tone trolling.”
Afaik, the secret room was a long standing thing on the forum, meant to serve as the open threads do, but with the ability to truly enforce the no trolls allowed rule. You needed permission to even read it, making it, in theory, a safe space to talk about things you didn’t want the likes of Owly to see. In practice…clearly it went to hell.
Katz — that thread really was something wasn’t it? Like, dude, I am bi, my last relationship was another genderqueer person, I’m fairly sure I can tell homophobia from pedantry!
Ah yes. And my dear Mr. Mango was de facto supporting all the evils of the Catholic Church (all of it, from homophobia to pedophilia…which may explain that conflation) by merely being Catholic.
That part is why, uh, I guess I can say it as he’s alluded to it…it’s why he tends to stay out of religion discussions now.
And the asshole atheist bit is definitely why so many of us noptopus when religion comes up.
I don’t think I was considered queer enough either. Oh well (shrugs).
Part of what bugged me was that “Goodbye, Cruel Forum/Blog” posts feel a bit wanky in general. I dunno, maybe I have a weird attitude towards this stuff, but if I’m sick and tired of a space and find that I don’t like a lot of the people there I just leave, and come back later to see if things have improved. I used to be on Jezebel all the time but didn’t like the new comment system, and felt like it changed the overall dynamic to one where trolls got too much airtime, so I left, but I didn’t make it big dramatic comment before doing so, I just left. And still occasionally check in to see if it might be worth going back at some point.
@ Argenti
IIRC I was apparently supporting the Catholic Church’s homophobia by not wanting to call everyone Catholic an asshole.
Yeah, the professional Asshole Atheism is another reason I’m bloody glad they’re gone. They were assholish even by Pharyngula standards – and Rutee’s the reason I’m not going to that site anymore, though it’s more like the term Argenti uses about you do not go for my friends. (Yeah, I’m calling you lot my friends! ::blows raspberry::) Zie about the Great War pretty well every fucking time MB is mentioned.
It was one of those things that sounded like a good idea, but didn’t work in practice. So there’s a private room and long-time regulars are grandfathered in and from then on you vote to let new people in. So far, fine.
But what do you do if you want to get rid of someone? Can just one person get someone else permanently kicked out? How do you discuss it when the person you’re discussing is in the secret room? What do you do if there are two people who are mutually uncomfortable with each other and each want a place away from the other? And so on.
Yeah, I could see it making sense on a blog like this when, uh, for example, I went and disappeared for months, but what I should’ve done was a simple “real life is killing my mental health, I’ll be back when I can”. Or, as some in that thread did, a simple “I won’t be around anymore either”.
Makes sense to tell people you’re friendly with how to contact you when you leave the group, but beyond that? Idfk.
“Zie rants about” that was supposed to be, dunno where the “rants” went!
The other problem with a secret room concept is that it needs moderators, and when the moderators are the ones who leave the site, what happens then? I applied to use the room soon after I started commenting (ie. long before I heard about this) but never heard back about it.