Not that long ago, an 18-year-old student named Carly, appalled by the rampant misogyny on display at A Voice for Men, sent a critical but thoughtful email to a number of the men associated with the site challenging them to rise above their hatred of women.
AVFM “Managing Editor” Dean Esmay decided to take her email as an opportunity to reach out to all the Carlys out there in the world in an attempt to win them over to AVFM’s peculiar brand of “human rights activism,” penning what he called an
open letter … not just to you, but to any young woman who has an open mind and is willing to be challenged on her prejudices.
Naturally, given that Men’s Rights Activists are some of the most verbose douchebags in history, it was long as hell — some 3000 words. But Esmay’s diplomatically worded attempt at outreach didn’t go quite as well as he might have hoped. Carly responded with a note saying that his open letter had merely
reinforced everything I believe. It seems we are at a stalemate, you will never agree with me, and I will never agree with you.
So where might poor Dean Esmay might have gone wrong in his attempt to win Carly’s heart and mind?
Let’s start here, with 5 Arguments Least Likely To Convince A Young Woman That A Voice for Men Isn’t a Woman-Hating Piece of Shit Hate Site, in the form of direct quotes from The Esmay himself. Since Esmay is so long-winded, I’ve highlighted some of my favorite bits in bold.
1)“[Y]ou’re 18, and so, not to put too fine a point on it, you are still a young skull full of mush.”
2) “[M]en have few to no voices speaking about issues that are specific to men, or defending men as a group, in this society. Until very recently in history men never have had such a voice. Because pretty much all civilizations for the last few thousand years have prioritized the needs and desires of women over those of men. For hundreds, even thousands, of years.
3)“If you believe men have silenced women for thousands of years … you believe something that just not true. … Furthermore, if you believe that, what you have to believe is that Asian men have been oppressing Asian women for thousands of years, black men have been oppressing black women for thousands of years, European men, Australasian men, and so on, have all been oppressing their women for thousands of years. And those weak women could do nothing about it. So what you believe here isn’t just wrong, it’s racist.”
4) “For most of history, being female was a privilege. It carried certain special rights that only applied to women, and special responsibilities that only applied to women, and through most of history, being male was a burden, a burden which carried certain rights that only applied to men, and those rights were there mostly so they could discharge their duties to women properly.”
5) “[Y]ou may occasionally see angry remarks or articles on this site. What I would hope you would do with that, when you do see it, is contemplate that there is a difference between righteous anger at real injustice, and what you seem to have misinterpreted as hate.”
The funniest thing about Esmay’s “open letter” is that this bizarre crackpottery, easily seen through by anyone with any knowledge of history or sociology or, hell, the real world, is his attempt to sound as reasonable as possible. He’s reined in the wild conspiratorial ranting he often indulges in when arguing with ideological foes; he’s avoided the misogynistic slurs (cunt, bitch, whore) favored by other AVFMers like Paul Elam and Diana Davison. And this is the best he can manage.
The Men’s “Human Rights” Movement isn’t ready for its close-up. And I suspect that it never will be.
EDITED TO ADD: A commenter has pointed out another quote I should have included as well. So here is BONUS EXTRA LEAST CONVINCING DEAN ESMAY ARGUMENT NUMBER SIX:
6) “The truth is, the most privileged class of people in the whole wide world are young women living in places like the US, UK, Canada, etc.–and if you want to be treated like an equal, you should not flinch or cry like a little girl if someone tells you that.“
How dare you accuse us of sexism, you spoiled little girl!
I believe RationalWiki calls it “crank magnetism”.
I checked out the “Facts” page that Deano urges Carly to check out and it’s not her skull that full of mush.
Nope, not true and poorly worded to boot.
Still a problem, but things have changed somewhat in the last 40 years.
This is a gross misreprestation of the link.
The article they link to, which discusses several Bureau of Justice reports, says “Allen J. Beck, the senior BJS statistician who has been the lead author on all of these studies, tells us the new findings indicate that nearly 200,000 people were sexually abused in American detention facilities in 2011”.
1) The BoJ study “define(s) sexual victimization under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, BJS uses uniform definitions that classify each sexual act by the perpetrator who carried it out (i.e., inmate or staff ) and the type of act.”
“Inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization involves sexual contact with a victim without his or her consent or with a victim who cannot consent or refuse.” [This includes “less serious victimizations” such as “intentional touching”.]
“Staff-on-inmate sexual victimization includes both consensual and nonconsensual acts perpetrated on an inmate by staff.” [This includes voyeurism, threats and verbal sexual harassment.]
2) That 200,000 figure includes female victims. Whoops.
Their non-argument that “men are the overwhelming majority of rape victim” dies a thousand deaths here. As you can see these two paragraphs are completely unrelated.
Also, the authors so brutally misrepresent “United Nations statistical report” they are deliberately dishonest and/or semi-literate.
1)The link is not to a UN statistical report, it’s to a website called NationMaster.com, which uses a variety of sources for statistics.
2)The top of the page they link to says “According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) Statistics website , there were 247,730 victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault in the United States in 2002. Approximately 87,000 of these were victims of completed rape.” That’s one country, FYI.
3) The page doesn’t list an actual total number of reported rapes, it lists countries’ rape statistics as:
Totals (Number of sexual assaults recorded by police in that country per 100,000 population)
Per capita (expressed per 1,000 population)
3) Rape is very under-reported or barely reported by many countries, so France comes in 1st
with 10,277 reported rapes per 100,000, while India comes in 100th with 1.7 reported rapes per 100,000.
The article points out the obvious, “crime statistics are often better indicators of prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence.”
4) I’d just like to reiterate that these assholes are arguing that women don’t make up the majority of rape victims globally. They write that “more than 250,000 cases of male-female rape or attempted rape were recorded by police” by 65 countries, which is grotesquely low considering how France, a country with 62 million people, had over 10k reported rapes per 100,000.
They also link to the Hines article that h5n6q is so madly in love with in the CDC thread. Quelle surprise.
He crows about AVFM’s “primary references” page which is brutally weak, but I’m too tired to pointing out the many, many things they do wrong.
You experience women having their own opinions as “abuse”? Wow, you’re thin-skinned, ignorant, and privileged. Try visiting a shelter sometime and talk to some actual domestic abuse survivors. Talk to real-life victims of rape, sharia law, and war crimes. Talk to women who’ve been disfigured for life, doxxed, and mutilated because they dared to transgress the gender boundaries decreed for them by men.
Oh, but we’re the “abusers”. STOP THE INTERNET, EVERYONE. SOMEONE DISAGREED WITH A MAN. IT’S WORSE THAN AUSCHWITZ.
It must be hard for you to leave the house each day. Someone might have a contrary viewpoint and put you in the hospital.
Nobody called you. You’re the one who came in here uninvited, snivelling about meanies and abusers.
Check out this jaw-dropping paragraph.
“Although you are female, and so you are privileged in this area: men who try to talk about these things are usually personally attacked, and I would expect a boy taking classes with you to get a flunking grade just for having the audacity to present some of this information, at least if he did not come to conclusions that pleased his teachers. Because he’s a boy, and boys aren’t allowed to speak in ways that might upset women or which speak unapologetically about where men get the short end of the stick. But, because you are a girl, maybe you could help shine a light in the darkness and put the truth out there in the face of what are verifiable lies. I hope you’ll think about doing so, anyway.”
Yup, all teachers are staunch feminists who coddle girls and fail boys who won’t toe the party line. That’s a global phenomenon, no doubt.
Whoops, Ninja’d again. I see that Nemo already pointed out the ‘feminist teacher war on boys’ paragraph.
Sleepy Time.
Well, our little upthread troll pretty much disproves that with his rant about how women speaking up and not wanting to be abused are…..abusers. Any time a woman fails to show proper deference towards men, the MRM is all over her in the most vicious and appalling fashion.
Good night, Brooked, and thanks for debunking the “Facts” page so thoroughly!
Oh dear.
Do they ever read the studies they cite?
Watch out – we’ve got a badass here!
Sigh.
1. To the MRA troll. Not sure what “abuse” you see here. I see a deconstructing of false ideology & a love for kitties. But hey. I’m just a brainwashed woman (how you don’t see that as sexist I’ll never understand. Guess it’s hard to see when your head up your bum).
2. I was on reddit (because I like to make myself blind with rage and attempt to burn the entire internet) – the MRA manipulation of rape stats is outstanding. They compared the number of rapes of women per year to the number of rapes if men over their lifetime & said that both genders experience rape at the same rates. What. The. Hell. Is their calculator broken?
And yes Mr “I’m better than you little girl” letter writer, a boy *would* fail a gender studies class if he uses your false facts to write an essay. Because nobody passes any uni class with a essay written with false facts. Nobody.
That is one creepy picture of Dean Esmay.
You’re right. O_O Ew.
I am a little in awe of Esmay’s ability to cram so much wrong into one piece if writing, though.
To that MRA troll who called us abusers:
Can you please find a quote in this thread from someone who
a) Used abusive language
b) Advocated or apologized for female abusers
No? I didn’t think so. Bonus question: Do you care about female abusers when her victim is a woman?
I’m sure that troll was just here to shake off a dingleberry from his MRA asshole and will not answer the questions.
Weirwoodtreehugger,
I think by female abusers the troll meant “those who abuse women”. See, since there are some women who also think women are awful, horrible, no good, critters disagreeing with that notion = abusing women. It was a hashtag used by the misogynists suffering from Watson Derangement Syndrome at one point. They were the same people who thought harassment policies at conventions were just evil and that being banned from someone else’s blog was censoring freeze peach. In other words, it’s a term used by misogynist dipshits.
Oh my god, the “what you believe here isn’t just wrong, it’s racist” part. xD
Kind of reminds me of the whole general MRA idea of “Feminists support what every woman does ever, because they’re women.”
I’m still waiting for the day one of these guys even remotely understands an “ism”.
Check out Undercover Evolutionary Agent being all “you can’t fire me, I quit!” when nobody even called him in for an interview.
Totes not surprised that Mr. Esmay is a creationist, AIDS and climate change denialist anti-science boob. Mr. Elam’s hiring policies aren’t very tight.
Last I checked, Manboobz wasn’t just women either! Turns out lots of fellas are upset by misogyny. Surprise! Lots of the grossest, saddest misogynists I’ve met are women.
How has anyone here engaged in “female abuse”, BTDubz?
Oh my god. There are no words.
@Undercover Evolutionary Agent
Kitt33, is that you?
I hereby declare Dean Esmay to be guilty of crimes against History.
He will be arrested and then confined to a Women’s Studies Department and forced to read works by female Historians for the rest of his life. His diet will consist solely of quiche, salad and other silly girly foods. Periodically he will be forced to listen to lectures on Women’s and Gender history.
Is “Undercover Evolutionary Agent” just a pretentious way of saying “Disguised Mutation”? Not all mutations are beneficial or adaptive.
Or is he trying to tell us he reads too much Timothy Leary?
I love the “brain full of mush” reference. If you’re going to the affect the role of the wise, logical debater, you might want to avoid referencing a fairly obscure show that probably hasn’t been widely syndicated for 20 years, i.e. before the person you’re talking to was born. Especially if that reference can come off as really insulting out of context.