Last week I wrote about the fondness of a certain Men’s Rights website for a certain four-letter word starting with the letter c. This week they’ve topped themselves — with a postering campaign based on the c-word.
Yep: A Voice for Men has thrown its support behind a postering campaign with the slogan: “Having a vagina is no excuse for being a C*NT.”
They don’t use an asterisk.
The postering campaign, spearheaded by a Youtube antifeminist calling himself Bane666au, feature what purport to be real quotes from feminists alongside not-exactly-subtle stock photos depicting comically angry women. For example:
I’m the one who blurred out the c-word; they left it intact. Other alleged feminist quotes include:
If a woman has drunk any amount of alcohol, she can’t consent to sex.
Nothing gives me more pleasure than the suffering of men.
Historically, women have been oppressed worse than black slaves.
That last one is a tad ironic. Not just because it’s a bit odd to contrast “women” and “black slaves” when half of all black slaves were women and girls. And not just because I never hear feminists making this claim. No, it’s a tad ironic because AVFM is constantly comparing men to slaves and suggesting that men are being “enslaved” by everything from child support payments to the women they date.
But I digress. You may wonder where exactly all these alleged quotes come from. In the comments to his AVFM post promoting the postering campaign, AVFM’s Dean Esmay blithely assures readers that “most or all” of the sources of the quotes can be found “right at the end of the video.”
This is not — how should I put it? — true. In fact, the percentage of quotations accurately sourced at the end of the video is a lot closer to “none” than to “most.” Bane666au, for his part, only claims that “all comments are based on actual comments I’ve seen or heard from self proclaimed feminists.”
Apparently he has an extremely loose definition of “based on” because only a couple of the actual quotes from Tumblr feminists he includes at the end of his video bear much resemblance to his, er, paraphrases.
Many of the alleged “hateful” quotes are obvious jokes, taken completely out of context, taking aim at popular perceptions of feminists. Here’s one screenshot from his video (with the name of the poster blurred out):
So who is the terrible misandrist who posted this terrible thing? I went and looked at her Tumblr. It consists of a lot of arty photos of her, mixed with pictures of favorite bands, some of her own artwork — and various pictures of various boyfriends, all evidently remembered with much fondness. On Valentine’s Day she posted some Valentine’s Day cards she designed and drew, inspired by The Smiths and Fleetwood Mac. She’s an excellent artist. There was no hatred to be found there.
And it’s a little hard to see how anyone but a misogynist who has named himself after a Batman villain could possibly interpret this comment, from another Tumblr feminist, as “misandry.”
And speaking of reasonable statements interpreted as misandry, here’s my favorite poster in Bane666‘s batch of posters:
Now, I hope I don’t shock anyone here by saying it, but the wage gap is real. There’s some debate over the size of it, and to what degree it is appropriate to attribute the gap to women’s “choices” rather than discrimination. But it exists. Even the study most cited by those who like to downplay the gap, a 2009 Labor Department report prepared by the CONSAD Research Corp., found a roughly 5-7% wage gap that couldn’t be explained away by women’s “choices.” (See here for more.)
But MRAs have convinced themselves that the gender wage gap is a “myth.” Having failed to win over the rest of the world to this incorrect belief through the power of simple repetition, the folks at AVFM have evidently decided to move on to gendered slurs.
It will be interesting to see how this works out for them.
wordsp1nner – I’m aware. I might have misread the comment, my bad.
::waves:: Hi Alice, lovely to see you again!
Lewis’s Law? ::has mental image of Kevin Whately, is confused::
Hey kittehs! I have just one thing to say: homework sucks BALLS. *nod*
Wow, if these are the “incriminating” quotes they’re using for these posters (which look like they were slapped together in MSpaint, by the by), they’re going to have a hard time getting anyone on their side, even people who aren’t very knowledgeable about feminism. Barring the “men are scum”-type quotes, the quotes they are using are so innocuous (or even reasonable) that no-one is going to have any idea what the posters mean. When they portray an angry women saying that there’s a wage gap as “that” feminist, how do they expect people to get angry enough to side with them, or even know what “that” is referring to? Someone who’s concerned about economic inequality? Golly, how threatening.
TRUTH.
Oh my giddy aunt. Sirtooting!
Is the quintessential “feminist who gets up everyone’s noses” by writing walls’o’text, again and again and again … and interminably again – (half of which are blighted by being in bold font for most of the unreadable paragraphs) – at Ally Fogg’s blog. One very mild example http://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2014/02/14/some-important-findings-from-the-ons-crime-stats-intimate-sexual-violence/#comment-42616
And is part of the reason why the comment sections there go haywire. There are a couple of manosphere regulars who are beyond irritating but the whole thing really goes to hell in a handbasket <completely when sirtooting joins in.
Get out the fainting couch.
I’m sure you’ll all faint more safely and gracefully as you clutch your pearls when I tell you that upthread is not the first time the graceless, charmless fool has used the “missing brain cell” line. http://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2014/02/03/abuse-is-not-a-team-game/#comment-39879
FWIW, I’m another Brit who can confirm that ‘tw@t’has the same issues around being a gendered slur here as it does in the US.
So even if Sirtooting did somehow have the right to dictate which form of language is used on Manboobz, s/he is wrong to claim that BrEng is different re the use of that word.
PS Is ‘spaz’ still acceptable in USEng?
Spaz? Is the abbreviated form of spastic. So, no. It’s just another pejorative ableist term in the same family as lame and ‘tard and their other ugly friends.
Glad to hear it. A few years back I came across otherwise progressive Americans using ‘spaz out’ quite unselfconsciously and they told me it was not seen as problematic over there. Perhaps they were talking out their arses.
@ kittehserf:
Lewis’s Law is: The comments on any article about Feminism justify Feminism.
So I see a sort of connection to that law, even though it’s an anti-feminist post rather than a full-on article.
@ mildlymagnificent:
Thanks for informing me of the ableism in the word “spaz.” I haven’t used it anywhere yet, but I just thought it meant something like “goof.” I used to think it indicated silliness rather than a defect of any kind.
*poster
Wow, I seem to be misspelling people’s names all month, lol. Yes, Laci not Luci. I looked up her website and somehow registered it wrong. I’ve being busy doing other things lately that my mind is in two places at once.
Anyway. I’m a little disturbed by all this talk about what words to use to describe foolish MRAs. I took a lot of heat in the reddit ‘againstmensrights’ for calling typhonblue an idiot. It felt like I was in a room full of her fans, not pro-feminists, more concerned about protecting the dignity of misogynists than exposing them.
Then recently, on this blog, people got mad at me and then lashed at me for using the ‘p’ word to joke about a hairless cat.
I’m not trying to over-step David’s authority here, I saw what he wrote about sirtooting’s word. It’s just I wish forums like this would stay focused on the important issues and the misogyny we’re exposing rather than fighting each other about how we criticize anti-fems. I’m not trying to justify ‘sirtooting’s use of the word >t**t< (I don't even know his history here) it's just that in going through these comments I see more talk about that than I do about David's article. This is the kind of stuff that makes MRAs happy, to see how some of you are more concerned about how to properly address their hive queen than the article — as I'm sure they'll see it that way.
Though, yes, I agree with David it's time to let this go. It's just I wonder how often this is going to happen again.
Ah, so Ally Fogg’s blog is the current kinda-feminist space (other than Jezebel) that tolerates MRA verbal wanking of the “but wait, are we sure women are people?” variety. That’s where all the usual suspects went!
It would be hilarious if all the “feminists” there were Poes and it was just a bunch of angry misogynists arguing with each other.
Thank you for your concern about everyone else’s tone, Felisha. I’m sure it will be treated with exactly the seriousness it deserves.
http://s1245.photobucket.com/user/capnben1/media/Untitled_zpsf4715131.png.html
Sorta. Ally’s very fond of a “light hand” with moderation. He’s had to institute some rules about personal insults and that no one’s allowed to “judge” another on the basis of any (presumed) feminist or MRA allegiance. There were some epic meltdowns before that, but he seems to think that giving sirtooting and a few other blowhards free rein is a good thing, on the “principle” that the least possible moderation is desirable in and of itself. I find it really stifling. The all feminists are horrible (and just like sirtooting) crowd seem to think that I and all other feminists are obliged to disavow those blatherings rather than make our own points. Gets a bit tedious.
Yeah, a policy of very light moderation rarely ends well. It always seems to be read as an open door policy for people just like our friend who’s so fond of tooting above.
Can’t say I’m down with the not judging people on their political allegiances thing either. Your politics do say something about who you are. There are certain political movements that are flat-out incompatible with being a decent human being.
Pregnant goldfish? Goldfish? When did that happen? When I was a child, the rumour was that the T word came from the Arabic for pregnant camel.
And Toots, I’m British. You are talking out of your ass. Good riddance.
See UKIP’s position on the causes of flooding, etc.
Cassandra, yes, because Ally Fogg tolerates MRAs, people from the Slime Pit, and other unsavoury commenters on his blog at FTB, in practice I never read the comments. There might be a rearguard of reasonable commenters there fighting the good fight, but I don’t have the spoons to waste on unending battling against the shitlords if the blogowner isn’t going to give a damn about the incivility of those commenters.
@ Xanthe
I can’t help feeling that, if Ally was as supportive of women as he wants everyone to think he is, he would stop framing misogyny as an opinion that reasonable people can hold and that feminists should be willing to debate on its merits.
Basically, the way he sells himself? I’m not buying it.
Oh, and calling someone a pregnant camel/goldfish as an insult? Still a (cis)gendered slur!
So what MRAs have are slurs and lies that don’t do anything to mask their misogyny. That’s their movement? That’s how they further their “cause”? What a sad, shitty bunch of useless haters. If I tried to mock them with a parody of their posters I could not make them look more foolish and more pointless than they already do…and this is their idea of a phenomenal attempt to promote themselves. At least their impotent rage is good for a laugh.
Keep “promoting” yourselves, Misogynist Rape Advocates. Keep letting your true colors shine through for everyone to see. Your lack of self awareness is priceless.
First of all, hi Xanthë! I know you’ve been here a few times lately but I haven’t had a chance to say hello. 🙂
Second of all, @Felisha: you are missing an important detail when you say this:
We are not concerned about being too harsh towards anti-feminists. We care about the people who get the blowback. In the case of gendered slurs, you’re supporting sexist attitudes. There are ways to criticize people you don’t like without simultaneously striking out at women everywhere.
Yep, I stopped reading Ally’s blog for the reasons others have listed above.