A couple of days ago, Men’s Rights rageoholic Paul Elam angrily denounced journalist Tory Shepherd as a liar for saying that his A Voice for Men website “regularly calls women ‘bitches and whores,’ which it does not.”
Now, anyone who has actually read his website for any length of time knows this is patently false. As if to underscore just how baldly Elam was lying in his post three days ago, the site today ran a post attacking her with this headline:
Apparently, the new line at AVFM is that they don’t call ALL women bitches and whores, at least not on a regular basis, so that’s practically the same as calling no women bitches and whores. Shepherd, in a column yesterday, quoted this rather tortuous, but revealing, explanation from AVFM “managing editor” Dean Esmay:
We do not regularly call women as a class whores or c**ts… we will on occasion call a woman, like Tory Shepherd or a man like (University of Wollongong lecturer) Michael Flood a whore, a c**t, or a bitch… yes, we use heated rhetoric.
Ah, well, then that’s perfectly fine!
I do have to applaud AVFM for its brilliantly counterintuitive PR strategy here. Just a few days after learning that the proposed Male Studies initiative at the University of South Australia may be dead in the water — except for a couple of courses about men’s health — in part because two of the proposed lecturers have connections with the misogynist extremists at AVFM, AVFM is doing everything in its power to live up to its reputation as a haven for misogynist extremists.
All this said, I remain a bit confused about exactly what has happened with the Male Studies initiative at UniSA.
The school, for its part, says that only two courses on men’s health were ever approved. According to the school, the other proposed courses were rejected in 2012.
But the point man at UniSA for the Male Studies initiative, an associate professor at the school’s Centre for Rural Health and Community Development named Gary Misan, seems to have been laboring under the impression that the school was going to go forward with more than one course, describing himself on his official web page as “program co-ordinator for a new suite of courses in Male Studies at UniSA, the first of which will be offered in 2014.”
Roy Den Hollander, one of the controversial lecturers with ties to AVFM (he’s written for them), was also under the impression that his course was going forward, and has apparently been preparing for it. According to Shepherd, who spoke to him after the controversy broke,
US “anti-feminist” lawyer Roy Den Hollander said yesterday that he was preparing a course that looked at how the law favours females when it comes to employment, crime, domestic relations, property, divorce and illegitimate children.
“The course is really looking back at 200 or 300 years of history and how the law treated guys and girls – and it treated girls more favourably than guys and it still does, maybe even more so.
Mr Den Hollander also stood by his claim that men’s remaining source of power was “firearms”. Asked whether he thought that was “extreme”, he said that it was true that it was “really the only area that they control in society now”.
Miles Groth, the Wagner College psychology professor (and sometime AVFM contributor) who seems to have developed the courses, also seemed to have thought that they had been approved — and then cancelled. On his Facebook page, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, he complained that “[t]wo years of preparation and the support of the university from the start now seem to be jeopardy because of unnamed critics making erroneous accusations.”
And AVFM itself trumpeted the alleged Male Studies program in December as “[t]he Biggest Single Advance for Men and Boys in 2013,” declaring unequivocally that
the first degree program in MALE STUDIES begins in 2014. It is supported by the University of South Australia and will be available to students worldwide.
According to the male studies folks, in other words, there was a male studies program approved and ready to go, but after word got out that some of the principals were tied to AVFM, the program was unceremoniously dumped.
But according to the school, there was no male studies program to begin with, just a couple of men’s health courses.
So either all these male studies people are completely delusional, or they may have taken some vague encouragement from school officials as a promise, or the school isn’t telling the whole truth.
I suppose we’ll find out.
NOTE: Just a note on the derogatory language discussed above. There actually isn’t anything wrong with sex workers. The term “whore” is really only problematic when used as a slur.
I’m not bashing anyone with B.A.s, it’s just that MRAs berate any non-STEM field. It’s just ironic that their preferred degree would not be a STEM at all and would be the most useless degree on the planet. Given how much they trash talk psychology and how it’s not a “real science,” I consider my B.S. in psychology, a small victory.
@words1nner:
My dad has a B.A. in molecular biology and he graduated from Northwestern. I guess it just depends on the school.
wordsp1nner, I wasn’t sure…sometime sarcasm doesn’t translate well, and end up ruffling feathers.
Do the MRA’s realize that the film industry back then and now is mostly run by males?
Wordsp1nner, not quite but in middle school we did do a musical short featuring the original song Enkidu, sung to the tune of Lollypop Lollypop. “Enkidu, Enkidu, oh baby Enkidu” was how the chorus went. Sadly I don’t remember the rest of the lyrics.
Fun bits from Judgy Bitch’s “Michael Flood is a cheap lying whore. So is Tory Shepard.”
JB argues that proposed Aussie Male Studies course are non-feminist, not anti-feminist, but bases her whole argument on a course outline that she only provides a very dead link for.
According to her, the course outline doesn’t involve feminism at all, which means “feminists are losing control of the narrative”. This enrages feminists, who’s all-out assault is revealed via four online article links: a blog reposted on Jezabel in 2010, a Frisky blog post from Jan 2011, a dead link to an Aussie site and, finally, an Aussie news article that is actually about the controversy JB is writing about.
So that’s two articles, if you count Shepard’s (which JB oddly doesn’t link to), from mainstream Aussie news sites, both deemed feminist because they were written by females. It’s a veritable witch hunt!
JB is very into this false equivalency.
She goes on forever about the meanie-pants slurs slung around Jezebel, but since it’s an fluffy entertainment site which deliberately does not call itself feminist, it’s an exceptionally irrelevant point. I’m guessing some writers from Jezebel, Deadspin and the rest of the Gawker infotainment empire get speaking gigs and some may even have an academic background, but they aren’t filling their CVs with links to their Miley Cyrus twerking articles.
David has already pointed out that Shepard correctly states SPLC identified AVFM a “hate site”. JB quotes Shepard saying it’s a “hate site”, then accuses her of lying by debunking something Shepard did not say. Not much of a gotcha.
She admits Shepard is telling the truth when she points out that Elem and Hollander are shitbags, but that’s just “cherry picking… appalling quotes”. JB brushes aside how the appalling quotes come from AFVM by pointing to something goofy Lindsey West said in Jezebel. For good measure she quotes a Kate Harding’s Jezabel post from 2012, because why not?
I don’t read much JB, does she always try to negate and excuse AVFM’s and MRM’s awful behavior with random Evil Jezebel Feminist Quotes? Is this a standard defense she utilizes in all facets in her life? IRS audits, traffic court and the like?
She thinks Dr Groth’s full quote about date rape seminars sounds less appalling than Shepard’s truncated version. She is wrong.
She tries to defend Hollender’s goofball anti-ladies night crusade by comparing it to “1950s” Jim Crow laws, throwing in a Thurgood Marshall quote for good measure.
Is still over the top, wildly offensive and incredibly stupid. FYI, JB.
I’ll quote this for hilarity.
I’m guessing Shepard does know that. Everyone associated with AVFM? Not so much.
It takes forever to get to Dr. Flood’s whoredom.
JB counters Flood by listing AVFM’s Alexa rating, which apparently proves how super duper popular the website is worldwide. That in no way establishes Male Studies’s academic credentials, but whatever.
Dr Flood also complains about Male Studies being anti-Feminist, which, as JB points out, means he doesn’t care about men and boys in any capacity. How this makes him a cheap lying whore remains hazy.
JB does totally win the internet by linking this bit to a You Tube video of Feminist War Criminal “Big Red”.
JB, that’s super funny and in no way makes you seem pathetically out of touch with everyone except your fellow AVFM cronies.
wordspinner, “My term for this is unisex = male.”
Exactly
leftwingfox, yeah, it *should* be, but then again unisex medicine *should* include women. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with raising awareness about men’s specific needs, the problem is that women’s *basic* needs are still unmet.
Wow, sorry about the length of my post, but every paragraph in JB’s endless post pours more disingenuous bullshit on the unsuspecting world.
Some folks on Reddit think men don’t have a gender.
Brooked, no apology necessary!
Also, JB tries to suggest that Groth isn’t REALLY arguing what he seems to be arguing in that paragraph, but if you go look at the post it’s from, it’s abundantly clear from it that he absolutely is arguing that.
cloudiah, that’s hilarious. I love that the only person talking sense in that discussion is downvoted and derided. Gender is for SISSIES!
cloudiah, I know that social and biological sciences of gender have offended some ( the old days and it was so simple back then group: Men hunted mammoth and women raised the kids, then we moved out of caves…), and have freed others to finally feel comfortable in their own skins. But.. Isn’t gender the way to differentiating between, masculinity and femininity? This is not my realm so I might be wrong.
@justabrowngirl
Gender refers to the categories, man, woman, and so on. Basically it’s about identity. What denotes masculinity and femininity are gender expression and gender roles. And sex, which is often confused with gender, is essentially a set of biological characteristics (such as hormones, genitalia, and chromosomes) associated with gender. I hope that makes sense.
Check out that photo. Nope, no gendered insults over THERE!
Ally S, thanks for the reply. What I got from your post is that gendr can be physical, biological, mental and behavioral characteristics pertaining to one’s identity. Or am I off base.
Oops, I meant gender.
Now I kind of what gendr to be something cool. The name of a trans-focused tumblr?
wordsp1nner, that will be a badass (lol).
I see a new MRA hero coming, this time from Dunedin… A guy went to the house of his estranged wife and killed their two kids and himself. He’d broken two restraining orders previously. Kind of tempted to see if he hung around any of the sites profiled on here, but it’s too depressing.
http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/auckland/news/nbcri/1758294628-three-bodies-found-in-dunedin-house
I can’t believe someone with a position at a university actually referred to men and women as “guys and girls.”
I still can’t believe he’s an attorney. Don’t attorneys have to, y’know, study legal history?
One more point, then I’m going to let Judgy Bitch’s rantings and ravings alone.
JB is also shameless in her attempt to gloss over the National Coalition For Men’s awfulness.
It doesn’t matter what dear old Greg says, Shepard was clearly discussing NCFM’s stance on those issues and got her info straight from their website.
http://ncfm.org/2009/01/issues/false-accusations/
http://ncfm.org/2009/01/issues/domestic-violence/
Greg is shilling for an organization who’s activism includes this infamous press release.
http://ncfm.org/2009/11/action/ncfm-news-release-calling-on-fair-coverage-of-rihannabrown/
JB lies throughout the article and yet still can’t convincingly argue that Shepard or Flood lied even once.
This whole horseshit “takedown” bugs the hell out of me. Shepard’s article is an example of above average professional journalism, which is something the AVFM numb nuts are not even remotely capable of producing.
@justabrowngirl
A little off base, but you’re getting there. 🙂 Gender (also known as gender identity) is basically about whether you identify as a man, woman, etc. For instance, I’m a transgender woman, which means that even though I was assigned the male sex at birth, I consider myself to be a woman, not a man.
An example of gender expression is a woman wearing a frilly dress to express her femininity. Or a man growing a beard to look more masculine. Gender expression is why tomboys (girls who have masculine behavior) exist and why feminine men exist.
And gender roles are basically a result of certain rules being imposed on men and women. For instance, women are often encouraged to raise kids while the men are encouraged to earn a living to support their families. And it also has to do with expectations; for instance, a woman who is sexually active is going to face more hatred than a man who is sexually active.
Who’s awake? You gotta come over to the Dalrock thread; there’s a fucking hilarious troll there.
Reblogged this on iheariseeilearn.
The correct terminology is, of course, “guys and dolls.”
@weeboy: yes, I read that on Stuff this morning. Those poor children and their poor mother.
@Mnemosyne:
Except that when you do mathematics/computer science you need to have an excellent handle on logic, especially sequential logic, or your program will produce the wrong output. You can be syntatically correct, but have things looped or calculated incorrectly. So to me it’s laughable that they hold STEM in such esteem as not many of them would pass a single paper. And at my university: quite a few postgraduates in STEM are female now. Not sure of the percentage but I see a lot of female names/faces. Including those studying in hard calculus areas (not my cup of tea).