This has to be my favorite quote to come out of the whole Occidental College fiasco; it’s staggering in its moral blindness and fanaticism and its complete lack of self-awareness. It also captures well the peculiarly self-defeating quality of so much Men’s Rights rhetoric and, er, “activism.”
![johntheother [-37] -8 points 3 hours ago (11|19) "‘Men’s rights activists’ conspire to cripple college rape reporting system with false reports" GOOD! Go forward, brothers, and fuck their shit up. rape is a crime. If somebody has a report to file of being the victim of this crime - file that report with a POLICE ORGANIZATION, not with some jumped up kangaroo court or administrative star chamber. And when operating in an environment where the star-chamber rules - FTSU with the same fraudulent reports they've tuned their system to process against you. permalink source save give gold hide child comments [–]O-Fortuna 3 points 35 minutes ago (4|0) This came off so silly and juvenile I thought it was one of the troll comments the mods talked about, but you seem to be some kind of widely known mra. In favor of making false reports. Appalling.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/jtoonbrothers.png?resize=535%2C306&ssl=1)
The backstory here: the commenter in question is none other than John “The Other” Hembling, the Number Two (or Three? I can’t tell) boy at A Voice for Men. He’s responding to an article on Raw Story that’s indicative of the incredibly (and justifiably) bad press Reddit MRAs have gotten for spamming Occiental College’s anonymous rape reporting website with false reports of rape, some of which may have named real people at the school as the “perps.”
At this point in the story, even the normally obtuse Men’s Rights Redditors realize they have a disaster on their hands, and are trying to blame anyone else they can.
But Hembling thinks it’s the perfect time to cheer on the false accusers amongst the MRAs.
That’s right: apparently jealous of all the attention Reddit MRAs have gotten for their cloddish “activism,” he’s decided to jump aboard this train — after it’s left the station, derailed, and fallen into a ravine.
That response is classic, too
Have some Mango Splitters
John the Otter has an “article” on AVFM in which he takes a step back and offers some well thought out observations about the whole Occedental College fiasco.
J/K It’s a rambling post in which he says a bunch of offensive, stupid shit.
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/kids-false-reporting-is-bad-mmmkay/
While JtO is not the most articulate writer, I believe his point is that there are two types of false reports and only the first kind is made by non-victims. The second is made by “victims”, brainwashed by feminism and rape hysteria, who cry rape whenever their feelings are hurt.
So, JtO thinks society should be question women who claim to be raped, because rape is now so broadly defined that it goes way beyond traditional, felony “real rape”. That’s actual problem, not the actions of some well-meaning MRA activists.
Don’t strain anything.
JtO links to a photo of a women holding a sign saying “I need feminism because men can still RAPE even without laying a hand on a woman”.
Then he says:
It’s an obviously faked “parody” of the ‘I need feminism…” meme, but he uses it as a prime example of how feminists describe rape culture. That’s a huge scoop of intellectual dishonesty in one sentence.
I have literally never heard of a single feminist saying that regret after sex is the same as non-consent. Never. JtO is one pretentious, disingenuous douchebag.
Also, that picture makes sense. When people talk about “laying a hand” on someone, they often mean physical assault. So that woman is probably just saying that violent, physically aggressive rape isn’t the only kind of rape.
@Ally
I didn’t think about it that way, that she meant the lack of violent force. Good point.
Maybe reading JtO dulled my mental faculties and impaired my empathy. That’s the excuse I’m going with.
@Ally S: “So that woman is probably just saying that violent, physically aggressive rape isn’t the only kind of rape.”
Yeah, rape doesn’t always involve a lot of violence, or even much violence at all; just being coerced counts, too, doesn’t it?
@auggz: No surprises there, unfortunately.
[Content note: rape, violence]
Anyone who thinks that’s false is very much pro-rape. Many rape victims pretend that they are consenting in order to avoid more violence from their perpetrators. It’s a survival tactic, in other words. By MRA reasoning, a man who is being beaten and raped by a female perpetrator is consenting if he pretends to enjoy it. Even in a non-violent rape, the male victim could say yes just to avoid the stigma of being raped by a woman.
Maybe MRAs could say things like “Just because you said yes and people said you were lucky, doesn’t mean it was consensual” instead of their childish, misogynistic whining about posters that stigmatize male rapists. But nope. that would require them to be sincere and actually interested in helping men.
No one…but then again, MRAs never let a little thing like facts get in the way of a cool unicorn story.
@Ally S: Once again, you’ve hit the nail right on the head here.
He forgot mental illness. If depression could make me seriously contemplate lying down on a train track when the freight was coming even though I didn’t want to die, then I’m sure it’s no stretch to surmise that someone else in a state of mental distress could say yes and mean nothing of the sort…
@Bina: I’m sorry to hear about that. Hugs from me, if you want them…..:(
Not caught up, but pecunium that does look a bit like vulva. The infamous vagina dentinata slice mangos! If I see one in person, I’m buying you one. I’m sure you’ll find something to do with it. Maybe I’ll frame it with “Reminder: Argenti is a smartass” ^.^
Thanks, Steve. ‘Twas a long time ago, and I’m twenty years out of that state, hopefully never to go there again. I even live right next to two major rail lines now, and such ideas no longer occur to me. Which is as good of proof of my recovery as I can think of. I do sometimes recall those ideas…and I always shudder.
Thinking back to that time (which I tried so hard to forget, because ugh) just crystallized something for me, not only with regard to the ableism problem (which I’ve put my foot in too, and am now trying to learn, or UNlearn rather, and make amends), but also the sheer icky awfulness of those PUAssholes who deliberately pick on women with eating disorders. They are taking advantage of a mental illness to green-light their rapey behaviors, and they rationalize it with the idea that “she’s just trying to be skinny for Teh Menz”. Just because someone whose illness has approval-seeking as an unfortunate side effect said “yes”, doesn’t mean she meant YES. But they can’t be bothered to understand that not-so-fine distinction. They really do believe that crazy ladies are just inherently hot to trot, when in fact the ladies are not interested in the sex (or the mooks offering it), but rather the validation it has come to represent, in their own disordered thinking.
Count every imaginable zone. Those areas for Adelaide and Melbourne include places/ towns that some residents still gallantly resist calling suburbs – but they are. No idea about getting across Melbourne. Adelaide is basically a narrow string 20 km wide, 90 km long. With a lot of parkland in some parts and considerable bushland in a few others. Which makes providing public transport a bit of a nightmare for such a scattered population – and there’s lots of resistance to infill and high rise housing, especially where it means loss of open space or sports facilities or whatever.
I’ve never done the trip from one side of Melbourne to the other, but from where I live – 56km from the city centre, the outermost suburb going this way – it’s an eighty-minute train trip, including ten-fifteen minutes around the City Loop (three underground stations). Getting home from work takes me a minimum of ninety minutes, because it’s a tram and train trip, plus walking from the station at home. My morning commute’s two and a half hours, but that’s because I include stopping for coffee and spending time in the park with Louis – it’s our only earth-time alone together.
Speaking of travelling, anyone remember we were talking about backpacks and bags recently? I finally found a little daypack for going OS – a PacSafe. Mine’s the plum colour.
Johntheother, the so-called “men’s HUMAN RIGHTS activist” just continues to make an abysmal ass of himself. You’d think Paul Elam would fire him, but no. He agrees. As does Dean Esmay. Instead, Paul says of anyone not liking the spamming to “fuck right off”. I guess that would include other MRAs who protested it.
I wonder if this has thinned the number of drones of his crazed trolling mob. He thinks he’s untouchable, that he, jto, and the rest of the avfm franchise of idiocy have a free pass to undermine safety programs. And it’s Los Angeles, California — not exactly a city of angels and whose officers aren’t all so friendly. The stories we hear… The LAPD have their own anonymous online report form. Women fear reprisal is why they don’t always report. And even if they do report, the perp might be let out in a week, due to a shaky so-called justice system.
These are issues those ignorant MRAs don’t understand. Try and explain it to them and they won’t listen. They’re convinced it’s some feminist conspiracy to demonize men. I don’t see that. It’s just more MRA paranoia and misogyny, blinding all sense of reason.
Yeah, AVFM and its contributors aren’t known for having a decent understanding of feminism, let alone a decent moral compass. But it’s wrong to call them “crazed.” There’s no good reason to compare MRA asshats with mentally ill people, most of whom are neither terrible human beings nor ignorant about feminism.
Besides, one way MRAs and similar folks support power structures is by dismissing all evidence of oppression by men as merely isolated examples of dangerous mentally ill people. In fact, a big part of rape culture is the idea that only sociopaths, psychopaths, etc. can be rapists.
It seems to me that saying MRAs don’t understand these things might be giving them too much benefit of the doubt. Yes, a lof of them are that stupid, or wilfully stupid, but some of them I suspect know perfectly well that they’re contributing to keeping women down, and want it that way. We’ve all said it before: they’re the abusers’ lobby, adovcates for rapists even if they aren’t actually rapists themselves (which, with a lot of them, I’d bet they are).
Ally — Ehh, idk that mentally ill people are less ignorant to feminism than the general population. But MRAs aren’t your standard fare ignorant view of feminism, so idk, maybe what you said is right (my week involved having to navigate a grocery store on Christmas Eve without my anti-anxiety pill cuz I was there to pick it up at the store pharmacy after a bit of a scheduling snafu)
I’ll reset the clock but we’ve made it 24 hours and I get neither a unicorn nor horse. Which puts me at two unicorns and a horse. I’m not sure crazed is all that related, and highly doubt it was meant to be. But since we’re having this discussion, the timer’s reset to 5pm blog time.
Felisha — Elam’s All About Elam song and dance has definitely (intentionally even) thinned the AVfM crowd. He’s more than happy to delete comments and ban people for daring to disagree with him. And then, for extra irony, accuse manboobz of censoring. Real piece of work that one. And JtO, but I end up picturing an otter and laughing (somebody here misread other as otter and the nickname stuck)
OT — goddamnit I have got to get Borg brain bleach scheduled in advance again. Tomorrow will apparently be otters, because my brain is jello and jello brain cannot write coherent things, not even about how fuzzy otters are.
Just like the racists, and the homophobes, and the fundies, the MRAs take their privilege for granted. They see any attempt to level the playing field as unfair, and any removal of undue advantages as discrimination against THEM. Every one of these groups has their own little conspiracy theories of a shadow dictatorship of the oppressed. Be it the PC Brigade or the Gay Agenda or the War on Christmas or the Feminazism, it’s all the same whining deep down.
@Argenti Aertheri
All Elam has done by supporting such motions (though he says one thing on his blog and another on a video, just can’t make up his hypocritical mind) is show the world just what a stupid, paranoid misogynist he is. He doesn’t care about women, doesn’t even care about men. He has no compassion for ANYONE. All he cares about is what he can take from them to feed his condo, and the way he does that is to keep people hateful towards women and feminism. He literally makes a living bashing women and trying to undermine motions to protect them. Now how pathetic is that? VERY much so, if you ask me. There is nothing honorable, brave or masculine about him. He is worse than predators who devour on instinct. He has a choice and chose to be a complete asshole. All the people surrounding him now, even as before, are conforming ass kissers and mindless drones. He pretty much runs his own borg collective.