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.
@ LBT
That’s a BIG part of why I’ve been avoiding this conversation. I mean, I’m queer, but I’m also super privileged in all kinds of ways and I’ve been lucky enough never to have the fact that I’m queer cause me any real problems, plus I’m cis, so it’s entirely possible that there was stuff in that conversation that I wasn’t getting or wasn’t seeing even though it was obvious to other people. Which is why I don’t want to say “well the people who were feeling discriminated against were just wrong”, whereas in the atheists versus all Catholics are asshole situation I feel a lot more qualified to say, nope, you guys are wrong about this.
I just followed the link LBT left about Kladle’s asshat comments, and I’m glad I did, ‘cos that’s where CreativeWritingStudent (another person I miss) made zir immortal comment about why Owly hadn’t been around since the election:
Also, as someone who uses MBZ pretty much to have an outlet for my inner drama llama (chewing on trolls can be VERY cathartic), I still don’t feel that bad about the eldertrolls being gone. Not like there’s a lack of dicks on the Internet.
re “The Great Divorce”
At core it was a turf battle. Some of it was about who got to gatekeep who was/wasn’t friendly to LGBT/poor/POC/Feminism.
Some of it was people who’d had toes stepped (largely related to religion) stomping on people with their understanding of that religion meant about everyone who was in certain categories of theist.
And some of it was personal; largely because not everyone who was told they were a bad feminist, or a bigot, or a homophobe, or an apologist for gay bashing, etc. was willing to say, “oh yes, you are right, I am a bad person; because you disagree with me, even when you are factually incorrect.
And there was a lot of bad blood floating around, because even when it was happening, people weren’t willing to talk about it.
From my POV the catalyst was my discovering I’d been banned from the secret room. I thought it was a glitch, so I (after a few days of it) pinged someone, and was told I’d been excluded because I made someone else uncomfortable.
But who it was, I wasn’t told. What it was that caused it, I wasn’t told. I still have to make inferences, because (While I am pretty sure, from here, who it was, and why) the apparent cause of my being declared unsafe was some weeks before the complaint was lodged.
The upshot of that is (because there were public, in threads, rows on the subject) I was accused of being a homophobic, transphobic, bigot, and apologist for active discrimination.
When that came to the fore (as opposed to being a whispering campaign in the dark corners), the consensus seems to have been that “you aren’t pure enough to be an ally” wasn’t a thing we wanted to have as policy (even, perhaps especially, if unspoken) and a number of people left. Some in a huff, some in a “more sorrow than anger”, some in the cause of mental refresh (and some of them came back; as they had said they might).
Some left because the sense of comity had been broken.
A lot of second guessing, and fear of bad blood was in the atmosphere. I can’t speak to anyone else, but wondering who might think me a nasty, evil person, etc. made me wary of trying to be in touch with some people whom I had no good reason to think thought I was an unreformed bigot (and most of those questions have resolved themselves).
It has had the effect of making some topics (esp. as relates to religion) a bit less freely talked about. On the other hand, it looked as if the trend the people who were most vocal wanted was the radical anti-theist view, were religion is the evil holding back the world of peace and light (which is the chronic subtext in much of Pharynglula’s comments section which makes me feel uncomfortable as a regular there; that and one of the people most vocal here being a vocal regular there).
I still get the occaisonal, functionally anonymous comment to my other blogs telling me what worthless human being I am. It’s background noise. It’s not death threats, and they don’t have the courage to make themselves known (not even to the standard of affiliation; I can make inferences, but not be certain).
katz: What happened was that DSC (who was a law student) made a false claim about DADT (that it allowed for dishonorable discharges). I corrected it, with some pissy snark (see above re threads more than a year before that, where DSC had basically said, “yes, I don’t have the context for that, I can’t read the original text, and you are still wrong; that was when I stopped having a whole lot of respect for zir method of argument, and giving little credence to unsourced claims).
I did say that the sodomy statute, because of DADT, was mostly used against straight soldiers; in messy breakups.
At which point all hell broke loose; I said some really sharp, even nasty, things; and quit that thread. To this day I’ve not gone back to see it.
The eldertrolls are a rhetorical device for me. “Where are the great trolls of yore?” shouldn’t be taken to mean I actually want them back! ::shudder::
“Hey, some binary trans people handle misgendering better than others. I can deal with being misgendered, but I NEEDED surgery for my peace of mind. Trans issues aren’t as simple as that. Pretending they are is just foolishness.”
Yeah, I get that now (though it is sorta nice to hear from someone who’s met me in person and has a better idea what I mean)…but like I said, I was still shaking off the mothballs.
And this is reason #302 I love my pharm student, ze was the first non-binary person I’d met and effectively ended my decades long “boy? Or girl? But no…but then again…no…argh make up your mind Argenti!”…oh hey, I don’t have to!!
They locked you out of the secret room???
Reason enough to be glad it died, if it was being used against people that way.
Cassandra: 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?
Well, to be fair, the comments at which people were offended were all public. The assumption was everyone else would be just as offended, so the “back-channel” conversations were just clarifying how evil it all was.
Now, some of those comments (the one’s which set things up) were in a thread more than a year before the thread which blew up, which was a couple of months before the pressure to “change the landscape” happned.
In effect what was happening was a bit of a coup d’etat, to take the right to police comments from Dave, and hand it over to a Committee of Safety.
And my perspective on that was, and remains now, that even if that’s true I still don’t see how being a jerk to individual theists helps. Is it supposed to make them become atheists? Because it doesn’t.
Pecunium — as I said then, it mostly died after you left. Well, after VoIP and I got called a few things for saying that what they thought you said wasn’t what you said (what ever happened to VoIP anyways?)
Also *pokes him with a stick* email me next time I disappear! Or you have SRS BSNS…or bangos ^.^
——
But yeah, if they hadn’t hated me before that, my attempts to defuse that mess left me on their bigot list. And, frankly, between pecunium and them? Do I even need to say who I prefer?
…even if he does hate mangos ^.^ (hey, that rhymes with banjos! …and I need to check banjo the clown…and goddamn hypomanic brain slow the fuck down!)
Also, I’d add that we seem to have a broader conflict between radicals of all stripes and more mainstream member of whatever groups, illustrated by the argument we were all having with Black Bloc in this thread. What to do about that I’m not sure. I don’t want radicals to feel excluded, but at the same time, the general feeling is that most of the commentariat is less radical, and so I’m not sure there’s any way of getting around the fact that they won’t always feel like their solutions to things that we all think are problems are regarded as good or valid by other commenters.
Not Duelling Mangos! 😯
So I’m not just glomming onto a useful excuse label then? This is very reassuring. (I have less than a year of embracing the term(s) under my belt, and there have been moments of “u sure ur not jus’ pretendin’, me?”)
@LBT
Dun worry, you’re not alone. I was actually on a bit of a hiatus from the interwebz at that time so I was actually in the dark for a while because when I came back I noticed that a lot of the regulars weren’t around, but I didn’t realise that it was a conscious split until someone mentioned an exodus and made me do a double take.
RE: rehashing this, I really think it’s something that we need to do because a. there’s been some eggshell stepping because we’re all trying not to bring it up and b. it wasn’t just regulars that had been vocal multiple times about finding this community problematic, it was also people like Viscaria and red_locker who always seemed pretty happy here, so it’s always kinda weighed in the back of my mind as to whether we’re just glossing over things or not
@Viscaria
I can’t speak for everyone obviously (although all the posts should tell you that I probably could :P), but I was really sad when I found out that you were one of the people that had left, and I was ecstatic the day you came back. Also, if you feel that any of the dynamics that made you leave still exist on the blog, please let us know, because a lot of people that I respect (you included) felt that there was a problem and I don’t want to dismiss that as unimportant.
Is the radical vs not radical that much of a problem? We don’t spend a lot of time arguing about political solutions to things anyway; it’s more about the mockery and the kitties. I’d be interested to hear what Ally thinks on that, but I doubt she’ll get involved in this thread, for various reasons.
BlackBloc was just being weird and douchey and precious, so I’m not giving any weight to what he thinks about Evul Libruls oppressing him. He did something close to a “Well I was going to be an ally against misogyny but you’re all Red baiters, so now I won’t!” thing during that assplosion.
There was an argument not long ago where NatFantastic felt like she was being ganged up on, I think, that was about her being more on the radical end than most of the other commenters here. I definitely don’t want her feeling like she’s being driven out.
Argh, yes, my bad, I’d forgotten that. (Crappy short term memory, how I love thee.) Ditto not wanting thenat not feeling driven out.
I think the solution(s) to that one depend on what sort of radical // what the question is, and how it’s being handled. Like, there may be an argument to be had whether that chant was effective, but there was no fucking point in bringing up previous discussion of the hammer and sickle as a way to shut down all criticism.
Is it better to have them standing in solidarity with a less than targeted chant? Perhaps. Is it in anyway red baiting to question that? Nope.
My point here is that once it devolves to yes it is, no it isn’t…there’s no hope for a meeting of minds. Perhaps the “solution” here is pick your battles. Or as pecunium would (and probably has since I’m being slow) say/said — is this the hill you’re willing to die on?
But really my worry about the great exodus remains that we don’t seem to have in any way resolved the fact that the people who felt most aggrieved, and who started the exodus, were both trans or genderqueer, and felt like that was part of why they were in conflict with other people. From my perspective it’s easy to go, well, they were wrong and both of those people were jerks, but again, I’m neither trans nor genderqueer so I still worry that I might be missing something obvious about the build-up to that conflict. Does that make sense? It’s not that I miss those particular people, it’s that I wonder if there was something they were seeing and I wasn’t because I had my privilege blinders on. Which is why the fact that Ami left with them has left me with some lingering misgivings, and why I wish that LBT and Argenti had been part of the secret room so we could see their perspective on all this with that information added.
Did I miss that? What was that about?
@Cassandra
But I don’t think that’s a problem as long as we aren’t dicks to each other about it. This space isn’t particularly radical, and it doesn’t take too long to glom onto that fact, so I don’t think that the more radical members should be surprised that the majority of commenters won’t necessarily be all that enthused about radical solutions. By the same token though, the radical members of our community are usually quick to identify themselves as such, and it’s up to the rest of us to respect that their POVs will tend to be more radical than ours, and to keep that in perspective when responding to them. I personally feel that, as a community we’re pretty good about checking other members when they start getting dickish, and about apologising to people when we realise that we’re hurting them. I feel like that’s the best you can do when trying to maintain a community this diverse, while still making it a safe space to exchange ideas with each other.
Cassandra — let’s put it this way — they declared pecunium unsafe. He’s one of the very few people I feel safe relaxing around in person.
So no, I don’t know why they made that declaration, but I have serious trouble imagining it was valid.
But I was probably part of the problem by them, given the epic flounce included how people were willing to side with the oppressor 🙄
Again, I think I’d be a lot less worried about this if it wasn’t for the fact that Ami left with them, and hinted that there was stuff the rest of us might not be seeing that was part of her reason for leaving. DSC and Rutee I can write off as just being conflict-prone people with an axe to grind about the religion issue, but Ami, nope.
I’m not saying that I’m right to be worried, just that I am.
Cassandra, I think it’s down to the individual. Like I said, they didn’t sp[eak for everyone; yes, some people left in solidarity with them; others left for other reasons. They were determined to be assholes and see themselves as martyrs at the same time, and I really think it has as much to do with the assholishness as anything else, because they displayed it all the bloody time. The fact that plenty of trans* and genderqueer people disagree strongly (is vehemently too strong a word?) with their pronouncements and queer policing says it all, for me.
@Cassandra
I know I’ve never felt unwelcome here. I came out to you all as agendered on my first comment on this site. The first reply I got was that I probably shouldn’t be open about that with the guy I was talking about (my occasionally mentioned MRAcquaintance) and the second was asking what pronouns I preferred, which is the first time it had occurred to me that I even had options about that.
Maybe things have changed, and maybe it was less than perfect at the time you’re talking about, but I really don’t think there’s any obvious negativity toward the non-binary here now.
Couldn’t speak to trans* though… at least I don’t think so… I’m actually still not sure if genderqueer is a subset of trans* or they’re subtly different things. Does trans* require something to transition to?