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The ManKind Initiative, a UK organization devoted to fighting domestic violence against men, recently put out a video that’s been getting a lot of attention in the media and online, racking up more than six million views on YouTube in a little over a week.
The brief video, titled #ViolenceIsViolence, purports to depict the radically different reactions of bystanders to staged incidents of domestic violence between a couple in a London plaza. When the man was the aggressor, shoving the woman and grabbing her face, bystanders intervened and threatened to call the police. When the woman was the aggressor, the video shows bystanders laughing, and no one does a thing.
The video has been praised by assorted Men’s Rights Activists, naturally enough, but it has also gotten uncritical attention in some prominent media outlets as well, from Marie Claire to the Huffington Post.
There’s just one problem: The video may be a fraud, using deceptive editing to distort incidents that may well have played out quite differently in real life.
A shot-by-shot analysis of the video from beginning to end reveals that the first “incident” depicted is actually a composite of footage shot of at least two separate incidents, filmed on at least three different times of day and edited together into one narrative.
A careful viewing of the video also reveals that many of the supposed “reaction shots” in the video are not “reaction shots” at all, but shots taken in the same plaza at different times and edited in as if they are happening at the same time as the staged “incidents” depicted.
Moreover, none of the people depicted as laughing at the second incident are shown in the same frame as the fighting couple. There is no evidence that any of them were actually laughing at the woman attacking the man.
The editing tricks used in the video were brought to my attention by a reader who sent me a link to a blog entry by Miguel Lorente Acosta, a Professor of Legal Medicine at the University of Granada in Spain, and a Government Delegate for Gender Violence in Spain’s Ministry of Equality. He goes through the video shot by shot, showing each trick for what it is.
The post in Spanish, and his argument is a little hard to follow through the filter of Google Translate, so I will offer my own analysis of the video below, drawing heavily on his post. (His post is still worth reading, as he covers several examples of deceptive editing I’ve left out.)
I urge you to watch the video above through once, then follow me through the following analysis.
The first “incident” is made up of footage taken at three distinct times, if not more. The proof is in the bench.
In the opening shot of the video, we see an overview of the plaza. We see two people sitting on a bench, a man in black to the left and a woman in white to the right, with a trash can to the right of them. (All of these lefts and rights are relative to us, the viewers.) The trash can has an empty green bag hanging off of it.
As the first incident begins, we see the same bench, only now we see two women sitting where the man was previously sitting. The trash can now has a full bag of trash sitting next to it.
In this shot, showing bystanders intervening in what is portrayed as the same fight, and supposedly depicting a moment in time only about 30 seconds after the previous shot, we see that the two women on the bench have been replaced by two men, one in a suit and the other in a red hoodie. The full trash bag has been removed, and the trash can again has an empty trash bag hanging off of it.
Clearly this portion of the video does not depict a single incident.
What about the reaction shots? The easiest way to tell that the reaction shots in the video did not chronologically follow the shots that they come after in the video is by looking at the shadows. Some of the video was shot when the sky was cloudy and shadows were indistinct. Other shots were taken in direct sunlight. In the video, shots in cloudy weather are followed immediately by shots in roughly the same location where we see bright sunlight and clear shadows.
Here’s one shot, 9 seconds in. Notice the lack of clear shadows; the shadow of the sitting woman is little more than a vague smudge.
Here’s another shot from less than a second later in the same video – the timestamp is still at 9 seconds in. Now the plaza is in direct sunlight and the shadows are sharp and distinct.
If you watch the video carefully, you can see these sorts of discontinuities throughout. It seems highly unlikely that the various reaction shots actually depict reactions to what they appear to be reactions to. Which wouldn’t matter if this were a feature film; that’s standard practice. But this purports to be a depiction of real incidents caught on hidden camera and presented as they happened in real time.
The issue of non-reaction reaction shots is especially important when it comes to the second incident. In the first incident, we see a number of women, and one man, intervening to stop the violence. There is no question that’s what’s going on, because we see them in the same frame as the couple.
In the second incident, none of the supposed laughing onlookers ever appear in the same frame as the fighting couple. We have no proof that their laughter is in fact a reaction to the woman attacking the man. And given the dishonest way that the video is edited overall, I have little faith that they are real reaction shots.
The people who are in frame with the fighting couple are either trying resolutely to ignore the incident – as many of the onlookers also did in the first incident – or are clearly troubled by it.
I noticed one blonde woman who looked at first glance like she might have been laughing, but after pausing the video it became clear that she was actually alarmed and trying to move out of the way.
There is one other thing to note about the two incidents. In the first case, the onlookers didn’t intervene until after the man escalated his aggression by grabbing the woman by her face. In the second video, the screen fades to black shortly after the woman escalates her aggression to a similar level. We don’t know what, if anything, happened after that.
Is it possible that the first part of the video, despite being a composite of several incidents, depicts more or less accurately what happened each time the video makers tried this experiment? Yes. Is it possible that onlookers did indeed laugh as the woman attacked the man? Yes.
But there is only one way for The ManKind Initiative to come clean and clear up any suspicion: they need to post the unedited, time-stamped footage of each of the incidents they filmed from each of their three cameras so we can see how each incident really played out in real time and which, if any, of the alleged reactions were actual reactions.
In addition to the editing tricks mentioned above, we don’t know if the video makers edited out portions of the staged attacks that might have influenced how the bystanders reacted.
The video makers should also post the footage of the incidents that they did not use for the advert, so we can see if reactions to the violence were consistently different when the genders of attackers and victims were switched. Two incidents make up a rather small sample – even if one of these incidents is actually two incidents disguised as one.
Domestic violence against men is a real and serious problem. But you can’t fight it effectively with smoke and mirrors.
Birds with bows and unicorns preparing meals? Aw man, all I’ve got is a cat who likes to bring live wild animals into the house. (and then she gets mad when I let them escape) I’ve tried to teach her how to order a pizza online but she doesn’t get the toppings right…
If I recall correctly (it’s so hard to keep all these idiots straight), this is something that happened at…Feministing? Or Feministe?…that we must also agree with here, because we’re also feminists/SJWs here.
Ah, Tumblr, that noted bastion of advanced, thoughtful SJ discourse. What will you dazzle us with next? A YouTube video?
You’re just talking non sense using big words to sound smart :if you consider that insulting a non mentally disabled person of being stupid is insulting to mentally disabled people you imply that mentally disabled people are stupid.
Try again.
How does this work in real life? If I tell you I had tortellini for lunch, would you demand pics?
I wonder how genius sceptic boy even gets lunch? If he asks what the specials are, how does he know the waiter’s telling the truth? If he orders pizza, how does he know they’ll deliver it? If he reads a train timetable, how can he believe it?
It’s the same as what I asked on RS about Rodger’s manifesto and the denial. Q: how many times must a misogynist say he hates women and intends to kill us before he’s believed? A: Unknown, the figure hasn’t been reached yet.
Anand’s a PoS who reads a site that has “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” and whose owner says he would vote not guilty in a trial of a rapist he knew was guilty, who has said women are begging to be raped, who has said men should slam women’s faces into walls and make them clean their own blood – yet Anand hasn’t decided whether or not AVfM is really misogynistic, and thinks there’s something worth considering about their “perspective”.
Anand is a mealy-mouthed misogynist and less interesting than the moldy fruit I threw out yesterday.
As for the buzzing fly, he should have been banned long since, and I’m frankly baffled why David hasn’t done so.
I’ll clarify. According to the argument, it’s specifically disablist against people with intellectual mental disabilities. So your argument doesn’t apply at all.
And for the record, I didn’t say that I agreed with the argument. It’s almost like people can defend even arguments they don’t necessarily agree with.
Ha! I love when trolls throw this little turd out. Yeah, we just use big words to “sound” smart because the alternative is that you just don’t get what we are saying and that that we make perfect sense, and you can’t have that!
<blockquote? f you consider that insulting a non mentally disabled person of being stupid is insulting to mentally disabled people
and yet . . . that is not what was said. Try again.
Perhaps we should say willfully stupid. Because that sure as hell describes the fuckwitted trolls.
I honestly can’t tell whether Brz thinks stupid is an ableist slur, or whether they think that thinking stupid is an ableist slur is inherently ableist. I’m thinking they are thinking whatever they think we don’t think, at any given instant, so they can feel like a special little sunbeam…
As to the critique of a diverse lexicon: never use a big word when a diminutive one will suffice! No, really!
Anyway, I’m pretty high and being high makes my vocabulary weird from time to time, so I’ll try to state what the argument is in simpler, more general terms:
1. Intelligence is a mental ability
2. Insulting someone* for having a lack of intelligence is prejudiced against people with mental disabilities relating to intelligence
3. Therefore, insulting someone’s intelligence is disablist.
See? Pretty simple.
*Whether they are actually mentally disabled is irrelevant.
And for your argument to be valid, the opposing argument would have to rest on the assumption that “stupid” is disablist against all mentally disabled people because mentally disabled people are necessarily “stupid”. But literally no one makes that argument.
I generally agree, but I just don’t see which words he had issues with tbh
Plus, sometimes there are jargon specific to a discipline so I can see how some feminist writings could seem like gobbledygook to people that don’t have much of a background in it. But, that’s when you keep reading and get out a dictionary and just general try to clarify and you know educate yourself, rather than demand that we talk to him like a small child.
I’ll talk to Brz like a small child. Brz, GO AWAY.
Ah, I learned here that stupid was an ableist slur when Arghenti accused of being of ableist for using this word and provided a 101 link to enlighten me. Oh, I was still pure and innocent at that time.
“Look, asshole, it’s one thing to say you don’t agree with someone’s reasons for being upset, but where do you get off accusing us of not actually caring about this shit? What evidence do you have?”
One year ago, I would have say that you seem to genuely care about this shit but now, after having seeing you throwing the ableist stuff only to attack opponents and “silence” as you say those of your own when they start saying that one mysoginist guy may have some mental issues, after having seen how much you don’t care about people’s boundaries when they don’t think the right way, I really do think that you don’t care about this stuff, or that you care about it as long as you can use it as a hammer to hit opponents and dissent. I especially think this while reading Alinsky.
Wut?
Stop using big words like “dazzle”, Emily. You’re confusing the poor boy.
Brz: If anyone here is bad with boundaries, it’s you. We’ve been telling your fake ass to take a hike for quite a while now.
Are Arghenti and Alinsky friends?
Cupisnique, you have candy floss colored hair! Which is far more interesting than anything Brz has said today, or ever really.
Seconding cassandrakitty. I love that hair color! I don’t think I’m ambitious enough to try it for myself, though.
Oh, and speaking of hair, what are your guys’ thoughts on hot pink highlights in dark (or even black) hair? Sometimes I think it’s a cool idea, but I feel mixed about it overall because it could probably turn out horrible. I also have no fashion sense, so there’s that as well.
I think that looks good. It’s a bit of work to get and maintain, those kinds of colors tend to fade pretty quick.
If you’re willing to put in the maintenance hot pink on black looks great. Plus side is that if black is your natural color it’s only the pink bits that you’ll need to work on/expose to damage.
I’ve wanted to do the hot pink highlights for a while, but my hair isn’t really black. It’s like super dark brown with a slightly reddish tint, especially in sunlight. So if I go with that color combination I might have to dye my hair black as well, which sounds like a ton of work. Maybe they’d look fine on my current hair color but dark brown mixed with pink sounds kind of odd.
With dark brown something a bit more warm toned and darker like wine might be better.
I think he means me, except I was in the camp of not seeing “stupid” as an ableist slur, so I haven’t a clue what the mosquito is going on about this time.
Did we start allowing making sweeping generalizations about the mentally ill while I was on hiatus? Because every fiber of my being says this is BS: