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.
I can appreciate and understand your policy David. I think all blogs and all comment sections have their own dynamics and their own purpose.
One thing I’ve always wanted to do with my blog is provide a forum where people from across the gender politics spectrum, including many with whom I profoundly disagree, can debate issues with me and with each other. Often it ends messily, it is quite true. But other times we’ve ended up having some genuinely constructive debates. If people don’t think the quid pro quo is worth it, that’s fine, there are a million other gender blogs where people can find their preference.
Just for the record, marinerachel and others – I despise the label ‘equalist’ and never use it, or anything similar, and have blogged as to why. In a nutshell, it papers over structural inequalities and institutional oppression, and buys into the garbage that if we’d only all treat everyone equally, social and cultural oppression would disappear.
You must be mixing me up with someone else.
emilygoddess
Oh heavens. It was a joke.
It’s meant to be a joke.
Har, har…..
The gender politics spectrum, Ally? Is that like the race politics spectrum? Would you think that giving racists a chance to question the humanity of people of color led to constructive debate? You may indeed mean well, but what you are doing isn’t smart, fair and balanced or edgy, it’s just pandering to the bigots and providing them with one more space in which to lie, practice rape apology and regurgitate evo psyche, anti-feminist crap.
I was reading right along there and then suddenly I was asleep.
Alice’s poster is better than everything that AvF(H)M has ever put out (granted, that isn’t saying much on their part, but I still think that poster is awesome)!
I’m not on tumblr at all are assertations of “cisphobia” really a common thing there? I don’t even understand how that works. In what possible way are we oppressed and marginalized for being cis? I’m assuming it has something to do with people not wanting to getting called out and corrected for mislabeling?
On the subject of labeling, do people think it’s OK to label somebody an MRA even if doesn’t label himself that. I think that there are lot of MRA trolls out there who go incognito in comments sections because MRAs are so hated and they want to paint their positions as something reasonable that lots of non-MRAs agree with. Therefore, if somebody is spewing all the MRA talking points I will not hesitate to call that person an MRA.
Generally, I will refer to people as whatever label they wish to claim because it isn’t up to me to somebody else who they are or aren’t. But do I really need to be sensitive to someone who is saying bigoted things? I think not.
What you’re doing is demanding minorities sit around with bigots and have a nice chat over tea and crumpets about whether they’re truly human.
Sorry, Ally, but there’s wasn’t much of a tone indication in your comment, I don’t know you from Adam, and this blog gets a lot of people’s dander up. Sue me.
THANK YOU, AMEN, AND FUCKIN’ A RIGHT.
I smell more than a whiff of disingenuous trying to have it both ways on that blog.
Sorry my post is a mess. I forgot to proofread. 🙁
Nope. They’ve pretty much forfeited the right to have their feels coddled.
So very much behind, and so very much not playing with the (probably banned by now) dictionary troll. But that copy pasta about the word for a pregnant fish? Afaik there isn’t one. I use gravid, but that’s medical speak and in no way fish specific (also applies to fish with eggs, which is useful since I have no livebearers)
In any case I have never, not once, heard the recently modded word be applied to fish.
/fish aside
I was gonna wade in again on why language issues *are* important battles because of the way that language structures thought and expectations, and because insisting on purging slurs from public discourse is an important tool for ensuring the equal dignity of folks in public spaces, but I see that we’ve beaten that one pretty well this go around.
Well, except to respond to Felicia’s comment
by noting that it is difficult to claim the high ground if you are down in the pit slinging muck about. Insults are okay by me, and I have a particular love for “asshole” lately, having read Geoffrey Nunberg’s book, but slurs are just not. It’s hard for me to argue that one slur’s history (an abelist slur against the mentally ill, for example) sets it out of bounds while another is perfectly fine. It feels like a failure to be a good ally, if all I am concerned with are the slurs that affect me directly, instead of recognizing the problematic aspects of all identity-based slurs.
It also feels a little sloppy to argue that it’s okay to use an otherwise verboten term because you are using it to refer to horrible people (as Toots argued that the use of t*** couldn’t possibly be a gendered slur because zie was using it to refer to both a man and a woman). We don’t edit those words out of our vocabulary because we are drawing the line between who is and who is not deserving of an insult, we do so because the words themselves construct insults which rely for their force on a judgement of difference or deviance from a very tightly constrained norm as automatically and irredeemably bad.
I will note that I’ve found myself running into this particular issue with much more frequency out in meatspace lately, not sure why or what that signifies.
Seconding titianblue on the value and pleasure of digressiveness, though! I confess to having a passionate fascination with language and politics that makes stuff like this catnip for me!
So, that bill in Arizona is going to Jan Brewer’s desk for her signature or veto. I know this is all reactionary bullshit and signals the fact that the tide is really turning when it comes to LGBT rights, but the fact that six states are trying to pass laws that legalize discrimination against a specific group of people really makes me sad and angry.
Oh, and tumblr, like twitter but more so, seems to have developed into the a reservoir for the great steaming cesspool of the collective id in a way that makes me gag on a pretty regular basis
When I was at school we were told that the word “twit” means a pregnant salmon. However, as fish aren’t mammals, they don’t actually get pregnant – eggs are fertilised externally – so I can’t really see how that could be true.
I’m British, and I’m also a linguist who has researched the metaphor of insult, just to flash my credentials. The t-word of which SirToots was so enamoured certainly has the same denotation in British English as the c-word does: the female genitals. As an insult it doesn’t have exactly the same connotations: being called a c- suggests someone thoroughly obnoxious and nasty, whereas a t- implies more of a pathetically useless idiot, perhaps by assimilation to twit – but it’s definitely a gendered insult. Both are a notch or two worse than an equivalent insult from the male anatomy: a d-word is milder than a t- and a c- is lots worse than either.
The earliest example of the t- word I know off the top of my head is in an anonymous poem of the 17th century about someone who believes he’s going to be promoted to Cardinal – “the talk’d of his having a Cardinal’s hat, but they’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s t-” (which led Robert Browning 200 years later to believe the word meant a kind of headgear worn by medieval nuns, resulting in a poem which is never anthologised). The c-word is much older.
I do love the “get your behind out of our punchbowl” analogy. Cries of “but where I come from, buttocks enhance the convivial punch!” are not going to charm the partygoers.
Ohai, bluecat! Can I ask you a question as a British linguist? Is the word ‘cock’ considered as bad as an insult/interjection in England as it seems to be elsewhere? I hear James May use it quite a bit when I am streaming the beeb, while it always seems to get bleeped if I’m watching or listening to a different channel on this side of the pond.
Off to google to find that poem.
Bluecat — some fish do bear live young, mollies being the most commonly kept as pets (or maybe platies, idk). Neither salmon nor goldfish are livebearers though.
I’d be happy to talk fish reproduction all day 🙂
On topic — I think I get how they can use “don’t be that feminist” without knowing that they’re implying they don’t hate all feminists. These are the same fools who think “don’t be that guy” means all men are rapists.
As far as language goes, plenty of people over here seem to honestly not release that spaz is an insult specific to medical conditions and not akin to, idk, space cadet (is that one used against people with ADHD? It seems it could be, but idk if it is…) But I too like the “punch bowl” rule.
Cisphobia may be best displayed, in its absurdity, by the bug’s meltdown about how she’s not cis, she’s normal. (If you want to google, the bug = C*thy Br*nn*n, vowels removed because she googles herself and has no problem dox’ing trans people, they’re a e a so insert and google if you’re feeling so inclined)
This is the kind of detail I read this blog for. XD
Another THANK YOU from me.
Yeah, I don’t want there to be any places where my very humanity is up for debate. What a terrible fascist I must be.
It’s nice to have feelings validated.
If MRAs were just fucking wrong I’d understand listening to their position (and telling them they’re wrong and why.) They’re not though. They’re misogynists. As much as they are indeed wrong they’re also hateful shits. I’m not going to entertain the thoughts or feelings of people who advocate an entire ethos that is both based on nonsense and deems me less human than themselves. No. I’m every bit as human as they. They do not have a monopoly on decency or competence or intelligence or any of the other things they claim to possess in spades but not women. I should not have to fucking argue the position that I’ as much a person as anyone else.
I read the entire lot of comments and wow, just wow, at the now-banned troll. I got the impression that zie was using the “argument” of “proving zie’s point” to post longer and longer screeds which amounted to digging a deeper and deeper hole. That’s the logic level of a 3-year-old who uses a “naughty” word, gets told off, and then keeps saying the “naughty” word in order to get attention. It’s a sad day on manboobz when the trolls can be bested by toddlers.
On the idea about letting two sides debate misogyny in comments. This isn’t a good idea, because there are two sides, the “generally* decent human being side” (i.e. not misogynists) and the “women are the devil incarnate” side (i.e. misogynists). In order for a debate to have a positive outcome, one hopes that people will shift from one side to the other. It is *not a good thing* if non-misogynists become misogynists (one possible outcome). It would be *a good thing* if misogynists became non-misogynists, but this is incredibly unlikely to occur in a non/lightly moderated blog where the misogynists are there to troll.
Which leads me to my question: what is the point (i.e. outcome one wishes to achieve) of allowing misogyny “debates” in blogs?
*it is possible for a non-misogynist to be an arsehole in other areas, as we are all aware.
You get to maintain the carefully crafted illusion that you are somehow enlightened and above it all.
Plus you get to make it clear that it’s somehow “fair” and “equal” that some people have to defend their humanity and basic rights all the time, so you can support the status quo while all the while making sure you’re looking very “equalitarian”.
Plus, of course, the misogynists just LOVE having yet another place to spew their hatred.