A student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, says she was attacked and beaten by a strange man after receiving threatening messages about her opposition to a Men’s Rights group on campus. On Thursday, Danielle d’Entremont posted a picture of her bruised face to Facebook along with this explanation:
Just walked out of my house and got attacked by a stranger. I was punched in the face multiple times and lost half my tooth. This was after a few threatening emails regarding my support for feminist activities on campus. I can’t say for sure if the two are connected, however the attacker was a male who knew my name.
The campus Men’s Issues Awareness Society (MIAS) – the group d’Entremont has been fighting – has condemned the attack, as has the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE), which co-sponsored a talk the MIAS put on Thursday. The police are investigating.
Right now, this is pretty much all we know about the story. Not that it this has stopped MRAs from offering their very fervent opinions on the matter.
Before we get to them, here are a few of my own:
If it turns out that the attacker is, as seems likely, a Men’s Rights activist – or some freelance misogynist vaguely associated with that milieu – it will not exactly be a surprise. Feminist activists who challenge Men’s Rights activists – or indeed challenge sexism in any sufficiently public manner – often find themselves the recipients of angry, abusive and threatening messages, sometimes numbering in the hundreds.
While most prominent MRAs are smart enough to avoid making specific threats of physical violence in public, their “activist” campaigns often target individual women, often college students and individual activists rather than women with any real power in society, almost certainly because those with less power are easier to intimidate.
And for all their talk of being the “civil rights movement” of the 21st century, Men’s Rights activists rely on rhetoric steeped in violence and hatred. It wasn’t Martin Luther King who declared of his opponents that “the thought of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.” It was Paul Elam of A Voice for Men, probably the most influential Men’s Rights activist on the scene right now.
I don’t know who attacked d’Entremont. But given the number of threats being made towards feminist activists on a daily basis, it is inevitable that women (and perhaps some men) who’ve publicly opposed the Men’s Rights movement will be the targets of real violence. Inevitable.
And much of the responsibility for this violence will rest with Elam and other Men’s Rights leaders who have deliberately stoked the anger and hatred of their followers and directed much of it at individual female scapegoats. If your favorite slogan is “Fuck Their Shit Up” you can’t pretend you’re an innocent angel when someone inspired by your words actually does Fuck Someone’s Shit Up.
And it doesn’t help when MRAs like Elam try to make violence against women into a kind of joke. Here, at left, is a screenshot from a notorious post by Elam promoting his supposedly “satirical” notion of turning Domestic Violence Awareness Month into Bash a Violent Bitch Month; yes, that picture ran, with that caption, on Elam’s original post. At right, the picture of herself that d’Entremont posted to her Facebook page.
[TRIGGER WARNING for images of violence against women. Post continues after picture.]
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Of course, this isn’t how Elam and his friends see the issue. The moment the story of the attack broke, a special A Voice for Men Flying Squad of commenters descended upon the website of the student newspaper of Queens University to set forth all the reasons they thought d’Entremont was a lying liar. Attila Vinczer, AVFM’s offical “Activism Director,” was especially active:
Yeah, Attila, I’m pretty sure criminal investigations don’t work like that.
Meanwhile, AVFM Contributing Editor Karen “Girl Writes What” Straughan attempted to minimize d’Entremont’s injuries in a rather inventive way:
Other commenters (evidently not affiliated with AVFM) offered variations on “she had it coming to her.”
(These aren’t consecutive comments; they’re separate image files smushed together. I edited out some less interesting bits of the second one.)
But it was Elam himself who launched the most vociferous attack on d’Entremont; indeed, in a long and rage-filled post titled “A whiff of bullshit at Queen’s University,” he declared that the very notion that MRAs might pose a threat to feminist activists to be a “scummy, Futrellian fantasy fiction spin game.”
Huh. I’m pretty sure I didn’t make up the hundreds of abusive and/or threatening messages that a certain red-haired feminist activist received for the crime of yelling at a couple of A Voice for Men dudes on camera once. Or those received by Rebecca Watson for the crime of suggesting that maybe dudes shouldn’t hit on gals who are riding a hotel elevator alone at 4 AM. Or those received by any of countless other women who have found themselves labeled enemy-of-the-week by MRAs, antifeminists, and other misogynistic creeps online.
Oh, and there was that creepy threatening phone message I got at 1:38 AM one December from one of AVFM’s own activists who was too dumb to hide his own identity properly.
But in any case, Elam for some reason has decided that the best way to convince the world that MRAs are reasonable people who would never resort to violence is to declare that he is overcome by his own anger. No, really:
[N]ow I am angry. I am 100% completely, undeniably pissed off bordering on rage. It won’t last, but for the moment it is pulsing through my veins like molten lava.
And what makes him angry? The very thought that someone might assume that a woman who was an active opponent of an Men’s Rights organization might have been targeted because of her activism — and assaulted by an MRA who, like Elam, might have had anger “pulsing through [his] veins like molten lava.”
There’s really not much more to Elam’s post than that. He makes a joke about d’Entremont trolling for “likes” on Facebook for the picture of her beaten face. He demands “proof” and predicts there will be none:
There will never be any evidence that she was attacked by an MHRA. They will probably not catch her supposed “attacker,” and the incident will wind up unresolved because there is no evidence to make a case against anyone, or at the very least not against any MHRA. The story will still get major traction with feminist ideologues, though, who will use it to mischaracterize MHRAs as violent so they can continue to attack the formation of new men’s issues groups.
And then he starts his rant in earnest:
I want to hear a police official say they have reason to believe it was men’s activists, and then share the identity of the person of interest with the public. I want them to make inquiries to this website to look for leads. With all the victim posturing over the years from feminists about AVFM, I have never heard from a single police official. Not once.
I want to know for sure that this woman, who posts this shit to her Facebook page but does not want to be identified, and her friend, who also does not want to be identified, are not both liars.
I want to see, with all the wolf crying that feminists have done about MHRAs, one tiny, even microscopic shred of fucking proof of anything they say.
I want to know if they are more credible than the zombie apocalypse. Rather I should say I would like to see them prove they are for a change.
And if my hunch, check that, experience, is right, and there are lies involved in this case, I want to see those responsible go to jail just as much as I want to see her attacker, if he actually exists, do the same.
Huh. That’s a lot of demands, Paul. I’m pretty sure the police have more pressing priorities in their investigation than mollifying the narcissistic rage of an internet ranter.
But I think we can see what is happening here: Unless the police are able to quickly identify and arrest a man who is clearly associated with a Men’s Rights group for this crime, and unless he is quickly convicted of this crime, MRAs – led by Elam and his followers – are going to declare d’Entremont a “false accuser” if not an outright hoaxer, and target her for further harassment and abuse. All while loudly proclaiming that they are the real victims here. (Never mind that they never apply even a fraction of such skepticism towards the tall tales of feminist oppression told by serial fabricators like John Hembling.)
Elam ends his post with these inspiring words:
Please note: AVfM is in the middle of its Spring Fundraiser. Please help us continue to spread the message. Click here to contribute.
Because A Voice for Men LLC, after all, is a business – albeit one that’s apparently forbidden from conducting business in the state of Texas – and its business is hate.
EDITED TO ADD: John Hembling — AVFM’s “Director, Public Policy” and “Editor at Large” — has weighed in with his own take on the attack, which he has puzzlingly titled “Don’t Bash a Violent Bitch,” helpfully illustrated with a picture of a nerdy fellow brandishing a fist. (Classy!) In it he loudly proclaims to be shocked — shocked! — that anyone could imagine any MRA could be responsible for such a crime, which is totally opposed to everything that the peace-loving Men’s Human Rights Movement stands for.
Then he goes on to argue that “Slugger d’Entremont” (!?) is an “asshole” who probably brought this upon herself by being such an asshole:
I expect that whoever bashed Danielle d’Entremont in the face is somebody she knows, who has been dealing with her for years. Maybe her attempt to silence Professor Fiamengo was what did it, maybe it was something else. The timing of the incident, thus far, does not indicate a connection.
Really? The attack happened the night before Fiamengo’s lecture.
An individual attempting to censor and silence somebody speaking on human rights concerns of any group, men or otherwise, is likely an individual that’s an asshole with a past.
How exactly she is a “violent bitch” he never exactly explains. Perhaps someone else wrote the headline. It’s not like there’s a shortage of “editors” at AVFM eager to blame the victim of this particular crime.
WordPress has been up to its old tricks again. A few of the threads are doing that now.
Samantha – I smiled reading your description of how it felt to be giving birth. That’s a straight smile for your joy in it, and an ironic one for me, ‘cos I’d be the opposite. If I were a mother goddess, having to birth creation, I’d make Yahweh look like the sweetest, most tolerant deity ever. 😉
RE: birth
Heh. Kinda wish the creation of new system members was such an awe-inspiring experience. Unfortunately, it’s painful, soul-crushing, often associated with a deep sense of personal violation. And considering how hard it was for me to even get health insurance sorted, the idea of being pregnant to me is economic devastation and ruin. Screw giving birth to reality HOW WOULD I EAT?
RE: grumpycatisagirl
I don’t know what makes me faceplam more: that this list is so pathetically short or that it has Helen of Troy on it.
Also, last I checked, a good number of those women rulers had huge fights over the validity of their ascension. Elizabeth was kept in a tower through her childhood due to Mary’s reign, Cleopatra had to fight off at least one sister, a brother, and the fucking Romans, and also… CLEOPATRA LOST. Her empire was taken from her and she had to commit suicide before the age of forty! The Romans WON.
In my house we refer to that as being en-catted. It is a valid reason for the other person to bring you things rather than you getting up.
Eh, no, not her childhood. The ups and downs there were due to her father, and she wasn’t imprisoned in the Tower except briefly, as an adult. She was twenty when Mary ascended the throne. But yeah, she had plenty of trouble being accepted; much of Europe saw her as a bastard with no claim, and to most Catholics she was a heretic, as well. Her own ministers were dead keen to get her married and breeding, partly to fend off the Stuarts’ succession and partly because it was UNNACHRAL for a woman not to be owned by a man … though they had plenty of angst about who they’d end up with as king if Elizabeth ever did marry, and the consequences. They sure didn’t want a repeat of Phillip II as king of England, but went into conniptions at the thought of Robert Dudley or any other Englishman getting that uppity.
Kim – it’s like that in our house too. We really should call it being enfribbed. Mornings, Fribs sits on Mum’s lap. Evenings, she sits on mine. In between times she either alternates (if we’re in the lounge) or sleeps or complains, loudly, about the lackalaps.
Well, Cleopatra took sides in a Roman Civil War. It’s not so much that she lost “to the Romans”, but more to Octavian. In a fight in which *she* decided to meddle in.
As for Mary and Elizabeth, they were only considered as queens because, well, there was no real male alternative at all! Had there been, they wouldn’t have become reigning queens. That’s the point: People like Cleopatra, Mary and Elizabeth were exceptions. If there were an equivalent list to that ridiculous list, which listed all equivalent male rulers, well… if there is a maximum size for posts here, that list would break it several times over. Exceptions do not statistically make the rule!
Cleopatra had precious little choice about that. Her country was going to be invaded one way or another and she was trying to keep control of it.
Of course Mary and Elizabeth, and Mary Stuart, were only queens because of lack of male heirs. That’s how primogeniture worked (and still does: our fucking stupid Parliament, alone of all the Commonwealth, is sitting on its hands about passing the changes to UK law to make it first-born, not first-male-born, heir to the throne).
Yeah, of course. And male-preference primogeniture was still better in that regard than Salic Law, or the ultra-Salic French variant of it. But that was my point: That was one in fact one way women were excluded from power, contrary to what the authors of that ridiculous list claim.
As for Cleopatra, Egypt already was a Roman vassal, so it is likely it eventually would have been fully absorbed. But the war in which it was actually conquered was one where Cleopatra chose to take sides in. And she did try to win power in Rome via her relationships with Caeasar and Marc Anthony. Of course, that is what rulers of the times did, trying to win power, nothing despicable about that, and Cleopatra actually used a fairly clever and nonviolent way…
I hadn’t seen that before, no…but wow, all that sure sounds familiar. And yup, I’ve known more than a few very under-age girls who got picked on, quite knowingly, by much older guys. None dare call it rape, but when she’s too young to consent, even if she looks and acts older and tries to make out that she is…it’s rape. Not “a girl growing up fast”. RAPE.
Heh. I should put my specs on: I read that as Mac Anthony for a moment. Romans in tartan!
Katz! You just about killed me. Luckily, no one noticed me turning beet-red from trying not to laugh.
Bwhahahahaha!
Cliff hangers are Eeeeevile. They are both evil, and vile, simultaneously, with a bit of a diabolical ring to them. There’s nothing worse than getting a recently published 500 page book for some light reading… and then finding out it’s part one of a trilogy, when you’re one page 495 and THINGS ARE STILL HAPPENING!!!!!
And then it just leaves you, with the hero/heroine/herobeing hanging to a cliff, and refuses to reassure you that everything will be alright and ARGH!
Scheherazade is awesome. Pretty song, too: that violin solo is amazing.
On to biology discussion, because biology-nerd!
Biologically speaking, a theoretical cloned mammoth zygote implanted into a receptive elephant would be a mammoth. Genetically, it would stay a mammoth. Overall, everything would be mammoth-y and wonderful. However, there may be some features of the phenotype may be different, due to environmental factors.
There’s not really an abundance of research on environmental effects on embryonic development in mammals… well, there is… but not really of this specific nature. However, we know that incubation temperature determines sex in some reptiles! 🙂
It’d be really, really unlikely for there to be enough of these factors to make it an ‘elephant’, though. Like, pretty much a zero probability.
There might be other problems with using a non-mammoth host-mom. For instance, implantation might be rejected, the zygote might spontaneously abort due to different requirements, so on, so forth.
Getting a baby mammoth would be really unlikely, but not because of contagious elephant-womb-elephant-ness.
Then, once we got a cute baby mammoth, there’d be no way to know if behaviors the youngling developed were learned from the host parent, or features of it’s own innate mammothy-ness. Well, unless they were outrageously non-elephanty. Then we know it probably wasn’t learned, but it could still just be something particular to that mammoth’s genes (or possibly an environmentally induced development disorder).
Biology: Fun, way-the-hoot complicated (yet fundamentally really simple), and sort of messy.
Totally not holding out hopes for an external womb any time soon. There are so many crazy nutritional, hormonal, and other crazy cascades that happen naturally, that the programming would have to be mind-boggling… for the most part, we still don’t even get how it all works.
I was so glad to see you re-considering your previous assessment of *it was’nt so bad*.
Abuse is abuse, and the sooner we stop rationalizing for and excusing the abusers, the sooner we will find ways to both protect and encourage ourselves.
And I, too, would LOVE a DeLorean…time-traveling or not!
You know, you reminded me of something I wanted to bring up.
Have you noticed that we not rationalize/excuse abuse, we tend not to fight back? Why is that? I was thinking back over some of the abuse/rape in my life and realized that I held back on screaming, hitting, kicking…I think women have been so enculterated to NOT fight and to be horrified at the idea of hurting someone else, that we actually leave ourselves vulnerable to worse, even deadly, abuse.
I have thought about this for a long time…
Samantha – so true about not fighting back. There’s also the lack of any training in how to fight or defend ourselves, the constant subtext that we haven’t the strength or capability for it, and the message that if we try, we’ll only enrage the attacker more (like all attacks involve overt rage) and “make” him hurt us more.
Wow. I just read that. Thank you. I wish every 12 year old girl would read that.
I remember making a very deliberate decision not to speak up, because I knew it would cause huge upset in my family. I decided at that age that maintaining the peace in the family was more important than my feelings of betrayal and outrage and humiliation (and it was about 20 years before I could label those feelings).
Anecdote from when I was a baby feminist a million years ago: An older woman I worked with was talking about how women are expected to be alert and responsible for their own safety, but also polite and kind and charming.
I can still remember the look on the face of one of my older, male co-workers when he got that his teenage daughter would get on to an elevator alone with a creepy man in spite of her misgivings, because she wouldn’t want to be rude to him.
Thanks, sparky, and AWWWWWW….That is one SERIOUSLY cute kitty!
Another day made by cuteness. 🙂
Hehehehe…Actually, and this is something I hardly ever talk about, my sister was unable to have kids and for a while I seriously though about having one for her. Only problem was that she developed a very serious form of MS, and it eventually killed her, so I did not do it.
Sigh.
Y’know something? On my blog, I called that Nice Girl Training…where we’re so afraid to be thought of as Not Nice that we can’t even properly defend ourselves anymore, because we’re taught so much to identify with the viewpoint of our abusers that we end up with Stockholm Syndrome. We can’t cuss because it’s not “ladylike”, so we can’t cuss somebody out (FUCK THAT NOISE!). We can’t fight because girls aren’t supposed to, so we can’t fend off an attacker. We can’t be rude and impolite, so we can’t even make excuses and get away before something gross happens to us. Something that our intuitions are telling us is going to happen if we don’t get away NOW.
In self-defence class I finally learned to overcome my Nice Girl Training and break boards which took twice as much force to break as a human collarbone. If a guy’s collarbone is broken, it doesn’t matter how big and muscular he is, he’s gonna lose the use of that arm. And we learned, too, how to YELL, which guys don’t expect because Nice Girls don’t yell. Oh yeah, and how to see trouble coming and step out of its way, even if it inconveniences another person. How effective was this training? Well, when a man twice my size got all up in my business, I used my Dirty Look to get him to step back…and he did, apologizing. He didn’t realize he was in my personal space, but I did, and I asserted it. I also did the same one night, ironically on my way back to my apartment from self-defence class, when a creepy little man tried to engage me in an unwanted conversation on the subway platform…and when the train arrived, tried to follow me onto a car. I dodged past him just before the doors closed, and got on the next train instead.
And of course, talking back on the Internet is something l also had to learn, but now that I no longer bother being nice to trolls, I get far fewer of them on my blog. Or anywhere else I go. So yeah…dropping the Nice Girl bullshit works!
RE: Kittehs
Eh, no, not her childhood. The ups and downs there were due to her father, and she wasn’t imprisoned in the Tower except briefly, as an adult.
D’oh! I even intended to ask you to double-check me, since you’re way more knowledgeable about royal history than me. Serves me right. Sorry about that; don’t listen to me, Bobozers!
RE: Octo
Well, Cleopatra took sides in a Roman Civil War. It’s not so much that she lost “to the Romans”, but more to Octavian. In a fight in which *she* decided to meddle in.
I was under the impression that the Romans had their eye on conquering Egypt for a while, due to its wealth, so not meddling wasn’t really an option. They were going to come for her anyway, seeing as they were conquering all over the place, and she was just trying to back the right horse at the right time. It didn’t work, of course, but she apparently did better than anyone expected. I mean, the whole stupid reason she started going after Caesar in the first place was that her brother (who’d kicked her out of the palace) had invited him in. So Cleopatra snuck into the palace (which her brother was in!) and talked Caesar into supporting HER instead. That wasn’t really a situation where she could’ve just not been involved.
Hey, I took that self-defence class too! It was called Wen-Do, I think, in about 1990. Holy cow, it was SO GOOD for my confidence and self-esteem and general sense of safety.
I remember telling my brother afterward that on my first try I didn’t break the board because I was aiming AT the board. The second try I aimed BEHIND the board and blasted right through it.
My brother replied, “Yeah, if you want to break a guy’s nose in a fight, you have to aim for the back of his skull.”
Which is why I don’t really hang out with my brother socially. Not my scene.
kittehserf, you said it. And fear of “enraging the attacker” only leaves us helpless and him more powerful! And when you add the hostility of many courtrooms and police into the mix….GAH!
I did aikido for a little while, four years back or so. Unfortunately, then I tore cartilage in my knee and had to quit. 🙁 I was quite enjoying that, though, it was really helpful to overcome some of my touch issues with strangers.
Bina, I am reminded of the STUPID-ass books we were given in home-ec class and earlier, back in the late 1950’s and into the ’60’s. Do you remember Dear Abby and her sister, Ann Landers? They were advice columnists across the US. Well, one or both of them wrote books for girls, on how to be ladies and get the guy.
Well, their advice included:
1) When you go out with a boy, never talk about yourself. Boys find girls who listen to them with rapt attention to be the ones they want to take home to mom and dad.
2) When out with a boy, NEVER eat more than a small salad. He will think you are a pig if you eat more and will not call again.
3) Remember – girls are the keepers of morality. It is up to the girl to see that the boy remains clean, moral and pure.
4) When you marry, make sure that no matter how hard your day is, when He comes home you must always look your best. Wear high heels, have your hair up in an attractive manner, wear a nice dress and pearls. Remember that he works hard all day and that there are women at his work. If he has to come home to a tired woman, he will start coming home late.
Just a taste of what we got. Real training for the real world, huh? ARGH!!!!!!!!!