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.
Cassandra – it just links back to zir post on the previous page here, the one that got modded.
I’m not sure it really changes anything.
cloudiah – Stalinist-style art or Uncle Joe as Santa? Scary either way.
>>>I think you’ll find that the Reformers were actually concerned not about the French getting all uppity, but that all the political power was in the East (due to population density).
Yeah, because of us damned Frogs and our Ottawa sycophants.
@ Hellkell
I have far more interesting things to do, like watching the cat snore.
Black Bloc: no one was attacking you or anyone else for being a Communist. Unless you consider valid criticisms of a symbol to be an attack.
BlackBloc, how can you type with your head so far up your arse?
Who here is having a go at anyone for being a communist? WTF has that to do with pointing out that certain symbols are problematic, to say the least?
hellkell – ooh, I missed the bonus scold, I think my eyes had glazed a bit by then.
I would be disturbed to find Stalin in MY photoframes. D: DO NOT WANT.
@Kitteh’s
I appreciate that. I understand what you meant, and I agree with you to an extent. I just think that if FeministBee, falls into one of those other categories, then it’s insensitive to ask her to decouple the -ism from the misogyny.
@Cassandra
Yep, completely agree with that.
Re: focusing on the misogyny. I personally feel like there’s value to pointing out the racism and homophobia of the MRM because it creates dissention and prevents them from unifying other misogynists under a single banner (even though they’ve managed to do that well enough by themselves so far). OTOH, I’m nowhere near as experienced as a lot of you guys when it comes to activism, so this is a very lay POV.
(Also, just as a general rule, I don’t follow links here unless they’re either pointing to a site I know or from a commenter who I trust, ever since I followed a random link and it made my anti-virus freak out.)
Cassandra: yes, that’s definitely a productive use of time.
I don’t send out Christmas cards because I’m lazy. I always think about it, but by the time I do, it’s too late.
I’m with Shadow on this one. I… really don’t feel comfortable minimizing the MRM’s other bigotry. Misogyny might be their big connecting factor, but I feel like feminism is known for stomping on other stuff to focus on misogyny alone, and I feel that oversimplifies things.
Okay fine, and you’ll have it from me whenever you want.
But we were not talking about the whole seething mess, we were talking about one particular tendril of it. And no matter how important it is (and it is, vitally so) to understand the intersectional nature of institutionalized oppression, arguing against homophobia with MRAs is like trying to treat tuberculosis with aspirin. They will only trot out their (single?) lesbian to argue how they couldn’t possibly be anti-gay because, hey, some of their best content providers are gay. And meanwhile all the discussion is about identity (and at the edifying level of “Nuh uh!” “Yuh huh!”), rather than the bogus basis and bigoted effect of their rhetoric.
They chose the terms you are arguing on? You lost.
>>>Who here is having a go at anyone for being a communist? WTF has that to do with pointing out that certain symbols are problematic, to say the least?
These are literally two following sentences, one after the other. Have you no self-awareness?
@ Shadow
Now that I agree with. There are a lot of different pieces to the MRM that could conceivably be driven apart because their secondary focal points don’t match up, and doing so isn’t a bad idea.
OTOH, it’s not like they’re very effective at getting anything done even without fighting among themselves, so…
@CassandraSays
“I don’t follow links here unless they’re either pointing to a site I know”
The link is to manboobz.com… Do you not know the site you are on?
and there’s that damn blockquote monster nibbling on my toes again.
@ hellkell
Ecards! They can save you from a lot of grief when you remember on the 23rd that you haven’t sent cards to people who will soon be emailing you to complain about not getting one.
Is this really the stone you wanna throw right now after you performance in this thread?
Ooh, yes, that was quite the ticking-off at the end. DEMANDING things now!
Shadow – good points. Not that I think racism or homophobia are going to put off a lot of misogynists; it’s like Straughan, they seem quite capable of internalising those bigotries, or overlooking them, to focus on their hatred of women.
@Hauptsatz, it was a blind link, not one that showed where led, so haul back on the sarcasm a bit: it makes you look like a flaming assh*le
@ Haupsatz
Do you usually follow links that aren’t arranged in such a way that you know in advance what they’re pointing to? Not very good internet security protocol, that.
If you argue people should not fly the Confederate flag, you’re attacking Neo-Confederates or people who have the beliefs represented by that flag. With reason. Because it’s a symbol for Neo-Confederates and people who want to bring back Jim Crow and so forth.
When you’re attacking the hammer & sickle you’re attacking Communists, because it’s a symbol of communism. It’s not freaking rocket science.
Considering that the org is call MENS rights asshats it seems to me that we should take their word as well as their behavior that misogynyRthem. It would be disrespectful if we did not.
So, is criticism of leftists/anarchists who aren’t Stalinists for using symbols that are associated in most people’s minds with Stalinism also red baiting?
I guess I’m from a branch of the left that is both a little more self-critical than BlackBloc is used to, and that is also much more willing to consider constructive criticism from others on the left. It doesn’t bother me.
Kittehs, it was Stalinist-style art; no Stalin involved.
Statements like this make the Sweeping Generalisation Panda very upset.