Is there something about Men’s Rights Activists that renders them utterly incapable of admitting a mistake? The other day, I performed a bit of rudimentary factchecking on a collection of allegedly “misandrist” quotes assembled by Jonathan Taylor of A Voice for Male Students.
Among other things. I pointed out that the drastically truncated version of a Marilyn French quote he posted completely misrepresented the actual meaning of what she had said, making it appear that she was charging the majority of men with killing, or beating, or raping women and/or molesting their own daughters:
“As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women. He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women…he can sexually molest his daughters…THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEN IN THE WORLD DO ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE.”
– Dr. Marilyn French, The War Against Women, p. 182, her emphasis.
In fact, she had said something rather different, as I pointed out by quoting the original passage straight from her book:
It wasn’t clear to me if Taylor had been aware that he had drastically misrepresented French, as it appeared that he had simply cut and pasted the quote from another site without actually checking French’s book to see if it was accurate. So it appeared to be sloppiness on his part rather than deliberate deception.
Taylor has now responded to my post with a long and bizarre rant titled “Futrelle & Co. all in a tizzy as AVFMS exposes misandry in academia. AVFMS dissects their “counterarguments.”
He starts off by freely admitting that he misquoted French, but claiming that it doesn’t count as misrepresentation because it didn’t really change the meaning of the quote at all.
That’s right. Instead of acknowledging the misrepresentation, he’s doubling down — even though his explanation is in direct conflict with the evidence that I posted and that he reposts on his own site. He simply redefines reality until the misrepresentation mysteriously vanishes. Here’s his, er, argument:
I copied/pasted the quote from Antimisandry, although I had to find the source page for the book independently. I’ll admit: on this one I didn’t get the full quote and simply took Antimisandry’s reproduction of it. I am happy to amend it (which I have done in the original post).
David Futrelle, editor of the blog Manboobz, thinks this is a gamechanger, that it renders the meaning “completely different.” Not so fast.
He then pastes in my screenshot of the original quote, and my comments pointing out that the longer quote has a completely different meaning than the shorter one.
Then he tries to wave away his mistake with this ingenious bit of sleight-of-hand:
Actually Futrelle, according to Feminist ideology everything Marilyn French listed was a form of violence. Need I remind you what all constitutes “violence” according to Feminist ideology nowadays?
Pay no attention to my giant mistake behind the curtain! Look at THIS instead!
“THIS” being, in this case, a random feminist paper titled Intersecting Inequalities: A Review of Feminist Theories and Debates on Violence against Women and Poverty in Latin America, which suggests at once point that “[e]conomic violence against women occurs when they are denied access to or control over resources, or the right to work and earn income.”
Now, none of this has any relevance whatsoever to the question of whether or not Taylor has misquoted French — which he has — or indeed to what French’s statement actually means. There’s no evidence that French was in any way influenced by the paper Taylor quotes — which would have been a tad difficult, given that it was published 18 years after she wrote The War Against Women.
Apparently Taylor thinks that feminism is some sort of Borglike hive-mind that transcends time and space.
And he apparently thinks that when a famous feminist says that the vast majority of men have probably at least “treat[ed] women disrespectfully” in some way it is the same as if she had accused the vast majority of men of being murderers, rapists, woman-beaters and/or child abusers.
Taylor then takes issue with her references to men “beating down” and “subjugating” women, and indignantly insists that while
I know this may sound like heresy to Feminist and pro-Feminist ears, but the vast majority of men do not abuse women, let alone to an extent that they “subjugate” them.
Taylor has completely misunderstood the basic argument of French’s passage, which is that the majority of men do not have to physically abuse women in order to gain a certain advantage from the fact that other men do. You may disagree with that, but, again, she is not saying that the vast majority of men abuse women; quite the opposite.
Taylor then asserts that the really important thing is that what she’s saying still counts as “misandry.”
So apparently if someone is an evil misandrist, in Taylor’s eyes, you can misquote them all you want, and it doesn’t really matter, because … MISANDRY
Taylor continues on with his fulminations for some time after this, focusing mainly on “rebutting” comments from Man Boobz commenters. He posts an appalling photo of a crowd of white men posing proudly in front of several black men they have lynched, with the caption: “The powerlessness of women: point a finger and kill someone.”
I honestly don’t have the energy or the patience to deal with any more of his sophistry today. I’m not even going to read the whole thing. You can have a go at it if you want, dear readers. Let me know if there’s anything else in it that I need to address.
My plan today, after the nastiness in the post yesterday, was to post a bunch of pictures of my kitties. So, dammit, that’s what I’m going to do. Give me a few minutes, and I’ll put them up in another post.
Thank you, pecunium. I don’t know that much about lynching, so I appreciate it getting cleared up, especially when you have THESE asshats trying to muddy the water and turn it into an *eyeroll* crime against men, rather than fucking racial terrorism.
STAY CLASSY MRM
Lynching is complicated, because a lot of different things are called lynching (which isn’t even getting into the metaphoric abuses of the term).
That makes it really easy for someone who want’s to be an apologist for it, to apply broad terms (say including “miscarriage of justice” lynchings, i.e. where someone is acquitted, and then dragged out of court and strung up, or vigilante lynchings, where someone is caught, red-handed, and killed out of hand, etc.) and so make it seem the Southern lynching culture tied into it.
My views are colored by by having distant relatives (on my second stepfather’s side) who were lynched, so I am perhaps harder lined about dividing the categories, and trying to explicate the ways in which they parallel, without letting them get treated as overlapping.
“Tucked in there”?
Seriously, the quote is up near the top of the page – we can read it for ourselves. It is not tucked in amongst a list of heinous crimes, it is not hidden away.
(and I’ll edit slightly here so it’s easier to make it out – no word changes, just turning it into a bulleted list)
* Simply refuse to hire women in well paid jobs
* Extract as much or more work from women than men but pay them less
* Treat women disrespectfully at work or at home
* Fail to support a child he has engendered
* Demand the woman he lives with wait on him like a servant
* Beat or kill the woman he claims to love
* Rape women, whether mat, acquaintance, or strange
* Rape or sexually molest his daughters, nieces, stephchildren, or the children of a woman he claims to love
(and back to direct quotation)
That’s not “tucked in there,” and it’s not conflating it with rape and murder. It’s actually possible to do the majority of those things without being a rapist or a murderer.
Come on, misrepresenting a quotation is one thing, but misrepresenting it when it’s right there? That’s bizarre. We can see it for ourselves without even the slightest effort on our part. There things work much better when people have to search to correct you. It’s still not perfect, but at least you catch the lazy ones out.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Gogonostop?feature=watch
here is the youtube channel for a voice for male students. there is a wealth of information in these videos
Athywren, you may have a different conception of what “tucked in” means. Let me rephrase: The “disrespectfully” clause is placed (as opposed to tucked) in the midst of a long list of infractions. All of the preceding and following items are far more serious offenses. The “disrespectfully” clause is the ONLY item that even comes close to justifying the idea that the “vast majority of men in the world do one or more of the above” — and even there, you can get to “vast majority” only by indicting every man who has EVER been disrespectful.
If it’s in a YouTube video, it must be true!
Q, Marilyn French wrote that in 1992, after a decade in which women faced a full-scale attack by mostly male politicians. A 1987 survey showed that approximately 80% of women felt they had to fight for their own rights in their own homes (i.e. with their male partners actively resisting them). Time Magazine’s response to this survey was to illustrate their story about it with images of a woman dropping a shark into a man’s bathwater, or another woman wagging a snake-like tongue in a man’s face. This was a time period when divorced men were more likely to pay their car loan payments than they were to meet their child support obligations (even though their child support payments were likely less than their car payments). Only half were making any child support payments at all, and only half of those were paying the full amount. Women were being attacked, again by male politicians, for working, for putting their children in childcare, for delaying childbirth, for not having enough children (unless they were women of color, in which case having children was an “epidemic”). And that’s just in the United States.
You really think that in 1992, during the very time the backlash against feminism was most rampant, the vast majority of men in the world only engaged in a little bit of disrespect against women?
Come on. Try harder. Make your case.
Q You have a vastly different idea of what, “one or more” means.
Do you language?
I sure hope Q isn’t a Star Trek fan.
Yes… as are all the others – every single one of those infractions is placed in the midst of a long list of infractions, except perhaps the first and last of them. And I’d agree that I wouldn’t call that tucking it in, but when you get to the idea that it doesn’t belong in there, even though it does, that’s when it starts to make sense to call it tucking it in. The idea being that you’ve got this list, but you want to extend it’s applicability to the majority of men rather than merely the majority of men, so you take another infraction which doesn’t really belong and you “tuck it in” there, in the middle where nobody will (hopefully) notice.
Now, clearly you’re focussing on the fact that the majority of men do not rape, kill or, I hope, beat women, and that’s fine, but there are other things in that list aside from those and disrespect.
You still have these:
* Simply refuse to hire women in well paid jobs
* Extract as much or more work from women than men but pay them less
* Fail to support a child he has engendered
* Demand the woman he lives with wait on him like a servant
pecunium: I think terrorism was the word I was looking for before. Talking about the Southern US tradition of lynching. When it’s made out to be proof of “female privilege” it misses the whole way it functioned in society. What it functioned to do was to keep “uppity” POC “in their place” (and I’m wincing just typing that in scare quotes right now. From what I was reading, sometimes it was literally just picking a random POC from the street and accusing zir of something.
It occurs to me that the way Taylor talks about not only erases the experiences of WOC (who also got lynched and also got raped and sexually exploited by white men with impunity), but also completely removes white men from the picture, by placing the blame and responsibility for lynching completely at the feet of white women. (Not that white women weren’t racist or didn’t participate).
I remember reading about a black man who was lynched because he asked for a receipt when he paid his utility bill. No white women involved at all.
sparky: It occurs to me that the way Taylor talks about not only erases the experiences of WOC (who also got lynched and also got raped and sexually exploited by white men with impunity), but also completely removes white men from the picture, by placing the blame and responsibility for lynching completely at the feet of white women. (Not that white women weren’t racist or didn’t participate).
Yes. Another thing is the pretense of distance. By implying it was all, “back then” the active agency of the whites is moved back to a time of, “ignorance”. Never mind that it was going on into modern memory, and is still being used to terrorise blacks (where was the school that put nooses on the tree near where they didn’t want the blacks to be; and then ended up getting the black students who protested arrested? That was in the past five years).
By pretending it was about “crime”, or “justice gone awry” the victims are blamed.
“THIS” being, in this case, a random feminist paper titled Intersecting Inequalities: A Review of Feminist Theories and Debates on Violence against Women and Poverty in Latin America, which suggests at once point that “[e]conomic violence against women occurs when they are denied access to or control over resources, or the right to work and earn income.”
Um, yeah, that is economic violence against women. Trapping women so they can’t be independent and are therefore dependent on males is, in fact, a really good definition of economic violence, which inevitably leads to physical violence.
I’m not sure how this work was even located or why it was cited, but all it does is continue to prove the point laid out in a earlier (okay you got us we’re time travelling Borg) work. It’s just weird and kind of literally self defeating, to use information that proves your own theory wrong.
Not that MRAs have ever been accused of genius.
Oh, and also this whole Blaming White Women for Lynching thing: that trope was created by White Men, interested in protecting what they saw as “their” property. In fact, even the famous fictional work “To Kill A Mockingbird” makes it very clear that the white girl who falsely accused the black man of rape was driven to it by her own drunken abusive father to cover up the fact that HE was the one beating and (by implication) raping her. The thing that drove her was a two-fold need to protect herself from the male she was dependent on (protection being a releative thing, obviously), and to protect herself from the disapproval and ostracization of her society, run by, ahem, white men. Ergo, race was the thing that made this OTHER man vulnerable to her accusation, so she used it, but racism did not drive her.
This is not to say that women can’t be racist, it’s simply to point out that even in the few cases where lynchings were supposedly “caused” by an accusation of impropriety, it’s safe to say it was probably WAY more complex than “Racist White Women Caused Lynchings By Saying Magic Words that White Men simply could NOT ignore because White Women Rule the World and White Men are Helpless because Feminism.”
Mayella didn’t accuse Tom at all, did she? I thought her father made the whole story up because he was angry at them and then bullied her into going along with it.
It’s been so long since I read the book… The film definitely implies that Mayella’s father was responsible for beating and probably raping his daughter. (Still, clearly, she is the one ultimately responsible because reasons.)
I don’t recall her being blamed at all. What I got was an indictment of the system which set some people aside as scapegoats.
To be clear, I wasn’t claiming Mayella was blamed in the book/movie, but by MRAs who want to find a female scapegoat for any violent acts committed by men. (Hence, “proxy violence” and the like — a convenient means to avert their eyes from the reality of male violence.)
“Taylor has completely misunderstood the basic argument of French’s passage, which is that the majority of men do not have to physically abuse women in order to gain a certain advantage from the fact that other men do.”
…you appear to have missed the last sentence of the very quote you took an image of and corrected him for misquoting — “The vast majority of men in the world do one or more of the above.”
To which “I know this may sound like heresy to Feminist and pro-Feminist ears, but the vast majority of men do not abuse women, let alone to an extent that they “subjugate” them.” seems to be a reasonable reply, in that he refers to whether or not “the vast majority of men” do these things because the original quote claims that they do.
Shardrach: I know this may sound like heresy to you, but “one or more” means, you know, one or more.
Funny thing about this little exercise, I’d have been less inclined to think y’all weren’t in favor or abuse of women (from the minor to the major) if weren’t that this quotation, of all the mutilated quotations in this, weren’t the one you fixated on.
The urge to deny what is plainly true (that most men, at some point, engage in at least one of these behaviors) being so strong. That you are trying to blow smoke up my ass (as as a man, I can say I have been, at times guilty of some level of violating a couple of those; from expecting a woman to attend to my desires before hers, or a sort of casual disrespect of her ability; because she was female, not male, etc).
Some of that is cultural; and I have to look to see it. Some of it was laziness (mostly of thought). Some was not taking women as people first, and women second; and so pigeonholing them (mostly on the basis of size).
I soothed my pride and ego by saying I was treating them the same way I’d treat a man in similar situations. But I was deluding myself. I tended to figure a small guy knew what he was capable of, and let him ask for help. I respected his self-awareness.
But with women I tended to assume they were prone to overestimating their strength. In essence I was insulting their intelligence. I’ve gotten better at not doing that (and a career in the Army helped. Women there were 1: damned competent, 2: quite willing to make sure asshats who didn’t think they were competent knew where to get off, and 3: willing to ask for help when they needed it.
That there are no jobs in the Army which can be done without help also helped me. It made me more willing to admit to places I wasn’t completely competent to do something solo.
But you, you are insulting everyone’s intelligence (to include your own) by pretending one = many, and that French was saying all men are active abusers. It’s right there in the text, “one, or more”, and (to completely nail one foot to the floor, so you have better leverage when you try to stuff the other down your throat to the hip). If you look again, “the vast majority” is what she says. If you look at a dictionary you will find that , “the vast majority” /= every single one.
If you have problems with English (what with having A Manly Brain™ which requires things to be put into STEM related terms, you could check a text on set theory, which will (again) remind you that “vast majority” /= all (and most would say that 70 percent, or so, is where that sort of qualification starts to take effect).
In short, stop being stupid.
Seriously people, if I say “Traffic infractions include speeding, rolling stops, DUIs, and vehicular homicide; the vast majority of motorists do one or more of these,” I’m not accusing everyone of running over pedestrians.
Why do you hate drivers, katz?
Schadrach seems to have completely misunderstood the basic argument of French’s passage, which is that the majority of men do not have to physically abuse women in order to gain a certain advantage from the fact that other men do.
(Either that, or he thinks that refusing to hire someone is physical abuse…)
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