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.
Which again circles back to my original issue with the comment Feminist Bees made (well, other than the ableism). Bigotry clusters, we know this, but some bigots like to focus primarily on one particular target, and the MRM is a good example of that. People pointing this out are not claiming that the MRM isn’t also racist and homophobic and fascist in ideology, they’re just pointing out that misogyny is the primary focus for most of them.
(There are a few MRA sites, like The Spearhead, where the misogyny and the racism are more evenly balanced in terms of where the bigotry and hatred are focused.)
BTW anti-French sentiment in Canada is primarily a Western phenomena. I mean, our current party in power more or less arose from a merge from Reform, which was created out of Western resentment towards the idea that the French were taking over Canada (which, in regular right-wing projection, actually meant for once the French were starting not to be second class citizens).
I mean, the Canadian West was basically founded on the brutal takedown of a Metis uprising, led by a Francophone (Louis Riel). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Riel
Tone policing? Pointing out that their chant left out the core of MRM hatred – misogyny – isn’t what I’d call tone policing.
To quote David:
I’m actually not sure… I think noun. It’s something I picked up from a podcast called Nerd Hurdles… pretty sure it’s mostly aimed at cats.
I hear ya Athywren.
From a purely anecdotal perspective, I have a friend who’s big into the MRA (he’s a fan of Thunderf00t, AmazingAtheist, and GirlWritesWhat.)
I’ve had conversations with him about feminism, and at first he was open to my opinions and thoughts. But as we had more conversations, and I continued to pull out statistics and facts, while he only gave hyperbole and anecdotes, he eventually refused to speak to me.
These days I rarely chat with him, but he’s quick to tell others that I’m turning into (or have turned into) a crazy, closed-minded feminist. :/
And, for those who saw the last thread, I’m not referring to “Nate.”
There’s more than one of them? Shit, that can’t be fun.
>>>Pointing out that their chant left out the core of MRM hatred – misogyny
“Racist, SEXIST, anti-gay”.
I’m confused.
“Sexist” really isn’t the right word for the way the MRM talks about women. It’s like calling a hurricane “a bit windy”.
And yes, I call it tone policing, because it’s in line with the Red-baiting David pushed on the Bash Back comrades the last time he talked about that MRA meetup.
That’s nice. Maybe you can help your comrades make better propaganda by divulging what were the much better chants you used the last time you protested an MRA meeting?
I’m not seeing the tone-policing. Now there’s Red baiting? WTF?
LOL
Were you there. Black Bloc? If not, you can kindly stuff the “what have YOU done” derail you’re pulling.
There needs to be a term, like Godwin, for that time in every comment thread when women are told that if we would just be nicer and show some compassion to the abusers they would stop being enormous mendacious disembodied anus…wait. What’s the plural for anus?
Anii? Anuses?
And you can stuff your armchair coaching and tone policing.
What’s a one-word way to express the idea that someone is asking every woman in the world to be their mom?
I’d say if anyone was doing that, it’s you. Don’t you have some art to destroy?
@Cassandra
It is and it isn’t. While a majority of their posts are exactly how you described, they also make plenty of posts about “the ghetto”, affirmative action, the plight of white man, anti-immigration rants etc.
Again, I don’t have any issue with David’s (and everyone else’s) point about the MRM’s driving force being misogyny. However, I do think that MRAs have done enough for us to not have to qualify with “some” when we call the movement out for racism etc., and I felt like THAT part of David’s post WAS dismissive.
@kitteh’s
I understand what you were getting at, and I’m not sure of FeministBee’s background so that’s colouring my reaction a bit. I just feel like comparing it to a WATM is going too far, because it’s akin to saying “shut up about the x-ism, I want to talk about the misogyny” that has been known to happen way too many times. To be clear, I’m not accusing you of this, just trying to explain why I thought the comparison was out of bounds, even though I understand where you’re coming from.
::rolls eyes:: Yeah, BlackBloc, because there are SO many MRM rallies around the world. Pardon me if I’m not stopping in front of every half-dozen badly-dressed dudes I see mouthing off in public on the off-chance that they’re an actual MRM rally.
Any chance you could cut out the derailing asshattery now?
@naltia
I have that exact same friend! Its our dogmatic and ignorant adherence to “facts” and “rationality” that proves that we’re closed minded. 😛
It makes me sad, though… I always thought of him as a skeptic, but I saw him arguing on facebook once. I mean, aside from all the times I’d seen him comment things like, “if gender is a social construct, then homosexuality is a choice.” ¬_¬
The pro-feminist guy linked to a .edu site for a feminist topic… apparently I don’t have the link for that site, at least nowhere easily found. My friend scoffed, because, you know, .edu sites aren’t at all reliable, and posts this to demonstrate this. At this point I had to comment, to ask if he’d bothered to read that site before linking it, since it’s quite clearly an analysis of creationism, rather than propaganda for it. He said he thought the more interesting question was whether the pro-feminist guy had read it.
*sigh* What happened to you, man? You were rational. I saw it. I swear I saw it! 🙁
I’d actually have more of a problem with the chant knowing that it’s a stock piece that they trot out, rather than something context-dependent. In that case, “sexist” is just the second stressed/unstressed sound pairing in the chant. Maybe they are more concerned with the anti-gay part, and I really don’t have a problem with that myself.
Arguing from intersectionality and being, in this case, “what about the poc/gays”? about it though is problematic from my perspective. Yes, most of them are racist. Yes most of them are homophobic. And let’s not even go to their opinions on trans folk. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that what draws MRAs together, what they wring their hands over in their sweaty, cheeto-dusted basement lairs is that women are the problem to all of society’s ills. Sure, those oddly-hued people are problematic, and they disapprove of gays from a number of perspectives, but ask them (no really) and they will sooner or later come down to the fact that it’s feminists who took over society and made it so that non-white people are now 5/5ths of a human and we have all been taken over by the homosexual agenda.
What’s the key to their hate? Women, first and always. And proof of the evil and perfidy of women is that they have demanded more space in society for “deviant” ideas like the equal humanity of all those dangerous “Others.”
David mocked one of the activists from Bash Back because he was wearing a rainbow hammer & sickle shirt, and it was generally a “look at the extremist lefties being as bad as the MRAs” tone in that last post. And now there’s more of this “stay on message, don’t point out the fact that the MRA is not simply a bunch of misogynists but are actually part of a Western fascist movement revival which is bigger than themselves”.
Shadow – gotcha, and actually I think I was too close to the “shut up about X” thing with that comparison, so I apologise for that. I couldn’t think of another term other than WATM, though the balance there is obviously all wrong. FB’s comment just came across as taking the focus off misogyny too much, for me, but I put it badly.
@ Shadow
I’d be fine with calling the MRM as a whole racist, it’s just that the racism isn’t their primary focus. Does that make sense? The same way that most neo-Nazi organizations are deeply sexist, but again, that’s not their primary focus.