So, hoping to find out any more information I could about those threats the A Voice for Men gang has apparently been getting lately, I forced myself to listen to 45 minutes worth of a regular AVFM YouTube show with the highly ironic name Intelligence Report. The topic of the show was ostensibly the “Death Threats in Detroit.” But somehow, AVFM’s Paul Elam, Dean Esmay and Tara Palmatier managed to reveal much less about this subject than they did about their own obsessions and insecurities.
At one point in their rambling conversation they began talking about how unfair it was that the Southern Poverty Law Center had profiled the AVFM gang as a bunch of woman-haters, when really the SPLC should be putting mean feminists on their Hatewatch list instead. And somehow this segued into a discussion of gendered slurs against women, and why it was just fine to use them, so long as you didn’t use them to refer to every single woman on planet earth.
And yes, I’ve saved a sound clip of this edifying discussion for you. You’re welcome!
Oh, just a little FYI, when Pauly says they never ever ever ever use the words “cunt” or “bitch” to describe women as a group — as if using those words is totally fine otherwise — he’s lying. At least when it comes to “cunt.”
With “bitch,” well, they’re awfully fond of the word, but technically I can’t recall a writer there calling literally every single woman on planet earth a bitch. I mean, granted, Elam once wrote an article titled Princess Miserable and the Great American Bitch Machine, in which he suggested that
feminism, consumer products, psychology, media, advertising, politics and social custom [have] all merged into one Great Big Bitch Machine; [and] the modern female psyche is nothing more than a product of that machine
But technically he’s not calling all women bitches there. Just saying that “modern female psyche” is the product of a “Great Big Bitch Machine.”
Not the same thing at all.
@arctic ape
“I’m actually Finnish”
I was wondering about that after the conversation with kittehserf. I made good friends with a Finn in my Japanese class and was lucky enough to be able to organize to go back through Finland on a trip in March, and have some leave so that i could catch up and have a look around. I had a really lovely time. 🙂
So, now, if anyone mentions Finns or Finland, I smile.
When Husband graduated from high school military service was still mandatory on paper, but it was pretty easy to get out of it if you didn’t wanted to. Husband said he couldn’t take the phys test because of having a cold, but said he was really weak with bad stamina (not true, since he played in a handball team back then, but he was very skinny-looking), and the phys test people were like “okay, we’ll just estimate some numbers for you” and wrote down some pretty crap numbers for strength and stamina. He also said to the psych tester that he had all these phobias and was really mentally unstable etc, to the point where the psych tester went “you really, really don’t wanna be in the army, do you?” and he went empathically “NO” and was let off.
A friend of Husband’s claimed he had such an extreme phobia for spiders and other kinds of bugs that he’d be reduced to a nervous wreck if out in the woods, and was let off for that reason. The psych testers obviously realized that lots of people were making shit up, but since they didn’t need that many people anyway, they’d just let the ones off who made it very obvious that they didn’t wanna be there.
My then-boyfriend, however, really was deemed unfit for various reasons… And it pissed him off. Particularly as he had had a worse result on the phys test than a girl who was trying out at the same time (army service was open for girls as well, although it was voluntary for women, mandatory for men). But yeah, he was a fucking idiot.
I remember as well how a friend of mine at the time had a boyfriend who was a professional hockey player, or at least on the verge of going professional – don’t remember precisely, but in any case, he was super-fit and muscular. He didn’t really wanna be in the army, but was too stupid to come up with a mental problem. Instead he pretended in an extremely unconvincing way to be too physically weak. He’d go on an exercise bike which was supposed to test endurance and pretended to be out of breath after thirty seconds, like “*pant pant pant* OOOOH I can’t do this anymore, I am SO tired!” and the testers would be like “um, you’re not, we’re checking your pulse you know” and he’d be “no you guys, I’m really super tired, I swear!”. He’d also pretend that he couldn’t lift anything heavier than like five kilos or so, despite having huge bulging biceps. The testers got pissed off at him, like, okay, they were willing to let people off the hook for fairly unconvincing reasons, but this was just insulting. Eventually, though, they did write down some really crap strength-and-stamina numbers in his phys test and let him off because they couldn’t stand there arguing with him all day, and he was so stubborn.
Other absurd urban legends about the Swedish army, btw, from back in the day with conscription: That there was a special “gay company” at the island of Gotland, where all the gay soldiers were sent.
Was this supposed to be a punishment, or a reward?
AL3H:
Great you had a great time 🙂
Dvärghundspossen:
Finnish conscription is slowly developing in the same direction. Still, over 70 % of men do their military service, and there’s plenty of pretense that every man is needed. (Not a single woman, however, was needed until about 20 years ago.)
Some 5 % of men do “civilian service”, like I did. It was reasonably well accepted at least in my social circle, whereas nobody seriously supported lying about your health. I’m also an extremely poor liar. In my time you didn’t have to any more actively fake principled pacifism to get into civilian service.
There is growing recognition that not every able-bodied guy is worth dragging into the military even for appearance purposes. Especially if they don’t want to serve, and sometimes even if they do.
Still, while our military service is hard enough for the Average Dude, it’s kind of a joke in the context of military training. This is both because training and material resources are stretched thin on large number of dudes, and because you can’t strain non-consenting conscripts too hard in a supposedly civilized country, and because Average Dude is probably poorly motivated and won’t even keep himself physically fit once he’s out of training.
So, in the wank biscuit video, he was shot by an arrow in the end because, um, he needed to come to a bad end?
I sporfled.
Sounds like “too stupid even for the army” was the conclusion.
kittehs: Sounds like “too stupid even for the army” was the conclusion.
IME the army, as a rule, isn’t populated by stupid people.
1) yeah, we had a stable of ableist unicorns, nine I believe it was, and a couple horses and teal deer. And no, David is not allowed to eat them!
2) pecunium — unless they’re a soup sandwich? How’ dr hat wording go? …how’d that…I’m leaving autocorrect’s failure for the lulz.
Also, the other thread, can you post over there that the parent cactus gets a deep watering off to the side of it every couple of months? The way this particular one roots is weird and when I watered it directly it wasn’t putting roots DOWN but OUT. Idfk. In any case the one I’ll be sending LBT should be fine with being plopped on wet soil, stuck in a window and ignored until Halloween.
@Emily: I’m not quite sure, but I think the legend of the gay company at Gotland partly came about as some kind of reassurance for homophobes. Way back (not quite sure how long back – the seventies?) openly gay people weren’t allowed to serve. That rule changed, and then obviously homophobes would be be worried that perhaps they’re gonna have to shower with and sleep in the same room as gay soldiers. And then this story came about that told them don’t worry, they send all the gay soldiers to Gotland.
@ Arctic Ape: In Sweden we had “weaponfree service” for pacifits (completely opting out because you were a pacifist was punishable by jail, but you could do “weaponfree service”). Weaponfree service could be, like, being an army cook or army nurse or something like that. If you did that, though, you had to do more time than regular soldiers – as some kind of punishment for being a pacifist, idk?
When I was a young teen I was pretty active in the local baptist church, and all the men there had done weaponfree service. Afaik that was the thing with baptists everywhere in the country, that they wouldn’t touch guns, because if “thou shalt not kill” then it must also be against God to practice killing (they were also funny in that a lot of them were creationists, but they’d interpret all Bible passages where people are slaughtered in the name of God symbolically). Except for those guys, I actually only know two people who did weaponfree service – two of my old philosophy professors. Although I do know, as I told above, a bunch of people my age who lied their way out of army service, after conscription was coming to an end anyway and the testers didn’t really care much any longer.
Point. I’m thinking more of tropes from WWII and the Goons.
It’s really embarrassing that Tara Palmatier has “Dr” in her name.
Dvärghundspossen:
Finland also had a weaponsfree service option until recently. IIRC, it was scrapped when civilian service had become more mainstream and not something only hardline pacifists would do. Civilian service is entirely separated from military functions*, it’s basically community service plus few weeks of camping in a “training center” doing essentially nothing.
I’m not aware if there was ever a systematic effort to exclude gay men from military. You can apparently get exempted from service if you claim to be super awkward around naked men, whether you’re straight or gay, cis or trans**. There is traditionally a stereotype that men who choose civilian service are gay, because obviously we fail proper masculinity.
* Still not enough for some hardline pacifists who choose prison instead. Jehovah’s Witnesses used to do this consistently enough that they were granted exemption. Ă…land men are also exempt due to demilitarization agreement, which in turn was a condition for Finland keeping Ă…land when Sweden demanded to annex it. Ă…land men can thank Sweden for this agreement 🙂
** Instead of “men” in the context of conscription, I should have used “male-assigned people” for accuracy. As noted above, female-assigned people were excluded from the military until 20 years ago.
Argenti: The army is large enough that there will be some idiots. Also a lot of them are young, and more headstrong than sensible.
The phrase is, “ate up, like a soup-sandwich”.
RE: Dvarghundspossen
When I was a young teen I was pretty active in the local baptist church, and all the men there had done weaponfree service.
QUITE a lot different than our local Southern Baptists, then. They’ve got the reputation of gun nuts, here!
As annoying as I find JWs, I have to admit that they have the courage of their convictions.
Pity that so many of those convictions are odious.
Ate up like a soup sandwich…will devote a brain cell to that, thank you!