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’m really not comfortable with the way this is being framed as poor innocent Felisha being ganged up on for no good reason. If there hadn’t already been two rounds of offensive language and then doubling down on the supposed right to use that language this thread wouldn’t have played out the way it did. This isn’t a case of someone being called on something and moving on, it’s a case of a pattern of refusing to do so that has been noted and has irritated some people.
Seconded. I mean yes, I’m glad to have the note David put up about commenting, but Felisha started and persisted with this immediately, then threw in all her No True Feminist nonsense.
LBT, check with your local fire station and a senior center if there is one in your area. They usually have plenty of that sort of thing to loan out or just plain give away. They are both excellent resource for temp or permanently disabled people. I don’t know where you live so it may not be the case there but it very much is the case hereabouts.
That’s impressive – I had no idea fire stations do that.
They are multi service places here because they are the medical first responders too. You can get your blood pressure cuff calibrated, wheel chairs, crutches, or get clothes and stuff when the house burned down.
Cassandra, I’m certainly not denying that she’s said some obnoxious stuff, but looking through past comments I don’t see two rounds of offensive comments and then doubling down; I just see one. I see the “pussy” joke and its aftermath and then another time where she complained about that incident. Have I missed something?
Here’s the comment where she returns to it:
http://manboobz.com/2014/02/20/a-voice-for-men-takes-on-feminist-rhymes-with-bunts-with-new-poster-campaign/comment-page-2/#comment-427682
And, yeah, it’s a bit obnoxious.
In the future, I really want to cut this sort of thing off before it starts by simply saying, no, you’re not allowed to discuss this, you have to stop using the word. And if you don’t move on you go on moderation.
But that rule wasn’t in effect when she made that comment.
With regard to this thread I guess my feeling was that her original comments in this thread weren’t obnoxious; they were on topic, why not just roll with it?
Uh, this thread started with Felisha defending/trying to save El Deano, and it was pointed out that he’s a big boy and has made his lifestyle choice.
Why you’re framing this as us not letting go of Felisha’s word usage, I’m not sure, David.
If you want to defend this particular “feminist” rock on.
Thanks, the bewilderness! Roomie’s mom is a nurse who apparently has way too much old medical equipment, but if that doesn’t pan out, maybe I’ll give that a shot. Right now I just have a pair of old wooden armpit crutches, and they definitely do the job, but I’d really like a forearm pair. I think they’d be more comfortable.
I’m only crashed out like this once a month or two, but not gonna lie, when I’m crashed out, they make me feel a lot more secure.
@ David
From my perspective Felisha has been antagonistic from the get-go, to the point where some people thought she was trolling. If you’re seeing her behavior as reasonable if a bit obnoxious, and the resulting snark as unreasonable, then I’m honestly kind of baffled.
I don’t think she is a troll, but she has been acting like one, which is why some people have been treating her like one.
I’m glad for the policy change, so thanks David.
I also think Felisha has been kind of an ass. I would be the first to say we should forgive her and move on if she had apologized but she hasn’t apologized, or made an attempt to understand the criticisms — and has even kind of doubled down. My reaction has been to ignore her, but I’m not going to fault people for other responses. Maybe we shouldn’t all pile on, but I think it’s kind of a natural reaction to being in a troll-rich environment.
But that’s all I’ll say, and I’m happy to drop it. I definitely don’t want this place to bring you (David) more stress, since dealing with bigoted chucklefucks who say all kinds of hateful things about you must be stressful enough.
Hey, SQUIRREL — look over here! Could I interest you in writing about this little MRA annex, where they’re (***TW***) upvoting marital rape?
Hellkell, I[m not defending her comments in other threads, but her original comments in THIS thread — before the “meltdown” — were fine.
She *didn’t* defend Dean. She said that a year ago she thought he might have some human left in him, and that she thought she might be able to convince him to stop being an MRA, but that now he seems to have gone over completely or almost completely to AVFM bullshit.
This is what she said:
The rest of that comment was her going through what Dean said in his open letter and pointing out where he was completely wrong.
I agree with you (and with her current stance) that Dean is hopeless. And I don’t think most MRAs are worth arguing with, but, you know, sometimes when one of them doesn’t seem completely fanatical I try to reason with them. Certainly people here kept talking to MRAL for precisely that reason. It turned out to be kind of pointless, but I don’t think that impulse is necessarily bad.
These are her other comments:
Again, I’m not seeing this as a defense of Dean. Saying “I didn’t see him as completely awful a year ago but now he is” doesn’t seem like a defense.
And then there was this:
I really don’t see this as defending Dean or absolving him for his choices either. Maybe the bit about him being “naive,” but given the rest of what she’s said about him I don’t really think she’s portraying him as much of an innocent. Hell, I also think he seems naive about all sorts of things; he basically seems to operate at a very childlike level. I don’t think that absolves him of anything.
Felisha even seems to be suggesting he’s going along with Elam’s lies for the money, which really doesn’t sound like much of a defense to me.
I think part of the problem is that Dean is just a very puzzling person, and it’s hard to describe exactly why. Elam is a lot easier to understand.
Anyway, those were her only comments in the thread prior to her “childish” comment. There was another commenter in the thread — Anenome — that said soemthing about Dean “overcoming some poersonal difficulties” but that wasn’t her.
You have every right not to like her.
But in this case I think she got criticized for comments that wouldn’t have even gotten a second glance if they’d come from anyone but her.
Reading through those quotes again I guess the whole “brainwashed” formulation does make it sound as though Dean is somehow passive in all this. And that’s obviously a problematic way of looking at this. Dean isn’t Patty Hearst; he’s an adult and not under any duress and he chooses to believe this crap (and of course he believed all sorts of crap before AVFM).
::boggles slightly::
Well, this has become the All About Felisha thread, hasn’t it?
People side-eye comments that might seem innocuous if they were coming from someone else because they’re coming from someone who’s just been a jerk in a different thread all the time. I’m not seeing why in this specific case that’s suddenly a problem?
(And yeah, not really that innocuous anyway if you look closely.)
I don’t think that’s the case. If we heard those comments from someone we knew to be a persistent troll, then we would react the same way. That’s because Felisha’s behavior has been overwhelmingly trollish, and so she is likely to be called out even in unrelated contexts.
Countless times I have seen a known troll say something reasonable yet still shot down by the MBZ community due to hir profile as a troll. And very few people called us out for being cold to such trolls. For example, I once saw Eurosabra make one comment that wasn’t misogynistic or even overtly unreasonable (as far as I can remember), yet people still jumped down his throat (and rightfully so) due to his history of being trollish and creepy.
Ally – exactly. Trolls can occasionally make reasonable comments, but their known history isn’t suddenly going to disappear because of that.
And non-trolls get called out all the time for saying stupid shit. We’ve had massive arguments here among regulars (no, I’m not referring to That Incident) and not had the person who was saying the wrong thing getting this don’t-be-nasty treatment.
Felisha’s been full of it since day one. She established herself as a virtual troll (no pun intended) when she doubled down and doubled down and doubled down over a simple request not to use that word. She’s sitting in the punch bowl and lecturing people who ask her to get out of it. Why should she get soft treatment for that?
I remember when I first came here and out of the blue someone called me a TERF, which was totally uncalled for. It was literally a one liner to me when my comment iirc had nothing to do with any of it. I’ve always liked this site and enjoy everyones input about the greatest human rights movement of the 21st century :snicker:
I was angry that this one person just singled me out and afaik they never came back to the site and isn’t a regular commenter.
So I felt attacked too because I’ve been accused of that so many times and it’s just plain wrong. So I wrote a long comment back because I was at my wits end at being called a horrible name which doesn’t apply to me. Just because I’m a radical feminist doesn’t mean I have any issues with transfolk. The main reason I call myself a radical feminist is due to my views on the sex industry and reproductive rights. I’m a huge fan of Gail Dines.
David stepped in that time for me tho and it was dropped.
I’m not sure but I’ll ask: Felisha, are you the same Felisha1111 from Youtube? (i may have gotten the numbers a bit wrong but there’s lots of 1’s in the handle.)
If that is the same person then my experience of Felisha has been completely positive.
I never tried to talk to Dean but as David said he sometimes looks cockeyed at Elam and you sit there wondering if the wheels are turning. Then he blathers on about not having male privilege in a predominately African American neighbourhood and you say to yourself: ‘Those wheels are turning alright, just backwards.’
It wasn’t BlackBloc was it, House Mouse Queen? He had a meltdown where he accused a longtime member of being a TERF simply ‘cos she’s a second-wave feminist.
@House Mouse Queen
Completely OT, but I thought I’d let you know that I’m a trans woman and I find myself in agreement with a lot of radical feminism. A radical feminist analysis of patriarchy is entirely possible without transmisogyny and – in my view – can only be severely hindered by transmisogyny.
kittehserf, I disagree, she got out of the punch bowl, and was talking about Esmay in this thread. Nothing in the comments of hers I quoted was trollish.
If you want to say, hey, framing it as brainwashing gives Esmay too much credit, that’s fine. If you dislike her, that’s fine.
But she’s not a troll. Yes, she got pissy when people told her not to use the word “pussy” in a joke.
But in this thread she showed up and made reasonable, on topic comments that were not trollish in the slightest. You may not agree with them. But, really, can we not move on? Argue with her if you want. But if a bunch of people start calling her a troll every time she says anything, what sort of discussion is that?
Oh hey, here’s an opportunity to say something that’s been bothering me. Radfems? Not all bad people. Often rather excellent people, actually. Radical feminism – the movement that brought you domestic violence shelters and rape crisis hotlines! It really bothers me to see the entire legacy of that movement being written off because some (not all) radfems have issues with people who’re trans. It also often seems like there’s a bit of ageism going on there, a bit of it not being cool to be a radfem. All of which makes me feel depressed, because for those of us who’re 40 and under, we owe a lot to the radical feminists who came before us, and persuading different generations of women not to trust each other is one of the ways that patriarchy keeps itself in power.
@cassandrakitty
Many of my friends from Tumblr are radical feminist trans women and they are awesome. In fact, if it weren’t for their help escaping from my dad would be much more difficult. I don’t know if you remember the library book incident I talked about a while ago*, but a radfem trans woman of color checked out the book from the library upon my request just so my dad would stop pestering me about the book.
As a trans a woman, I think the main reason many liberal feminists are averse to radical feminism altogether is that they think that the transmisogyny of radical feminists is rooted in the notion that gender is entirely a social construct. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Even as a trans woman I believe that sex and gender are social constructs – it’s just that I don’t consider trans identities to be any more or less legitimate than cis identities.
*long story short: I couldn’t rent any books at my campus library because I wasn’t enrolled in any courses, and if my dad forced me to get the book he would quickly realize that I wasn’t in any courses and perhaps I would face some abusive punishment from him for not being in school.
Eh, David, you’re talking about this at least as much as anyone else, now.
She went on a rant about the original matter in this thread when people disagreed about Esmay.
She’s also been setting off my something wrong here feeling that she’s not a good-faith poster since that first rant. Call it trolling or not, it fits my definition well enough. Coming in with her nonsense about who’s a Real Activist and still yapping about the very idea of being asked not to use a word – yeah, right, that’s going to impress everyone.
I do think that the question of gender as a social construct and how exactly that’s interpreted is potential source of strife between radfems and trans women, and women-only spaces and what exactly that means is another one. The fact that that’s come to be interpreted by a lot of people who don’t actually know much about radical feminism as “radfems are big bad meanies who want to hurt trans women and therefore they have nothing of value to offer” is really sad. All the different forms of feminism are interwoven, and all of them have value. Most people end up taking the bits that work for them from each type of feminism and making their own customized hybrid, and that’s a strength, not a weakness.
It’s just funny for me, because I see people using “radfem” as an insult on here all the time, and yet I also say things that are 100% founded in radfem theory all the time, and people agree with them.
Same here. I have said many things about transmisogyny that are totally rooted in trans radfem theory yet eagerly accepted and agreed on.
In fact, I actually recommend that people here read old radical feminist texts. Despite being transmisogynistic, classist and racist, they provide many valuable analyses of patriarchy and misogyny. It’s a case of taking the good and leaving the bad. As long as one recognizes the problematic aspects, one can read even something like Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin and gain valuable insights regarding rape culture.