MRAs seem to think that they can spin their way out of pretty much anything. And on the internet, particularly in their own little echo chamber, they can kind of get away with it. It’s when they venture out into the real world that they run into some trouble.
Take, for example, the mad spinning that accompanied the implosion of the Canadian Association for Equality’s “E Day” concert scheduled for last weekend. CAFE, you may recall, is a Canadian Men’s Rights group that’s probably most famous for organizing a series of talks by Men’s Rights-friendly folks on Canadian campuses that, well, caused a tiny bit of a stir.
Oh, sorry. The group says that even though its “focus is currently on men and boys … [W]e do not consider ourselves a Men’s Rights Group.”
Anyway, so this non-Men’s Rights group decided to hold a concert on Toronto Island celebrating “Equality Day,” a holiday they made up just for the occasion. They found a venue, got some sponsors and even managed to convince a bunch of bands to sign on.
Everything was ready to go until a few days before the concert was scheduled to happen, when some of the people who had been roped into the event discovered just what they had gotten themselves involved with.
A headline from the Huffington Post sums up what happened next with admirable succinctness:
The exodus from E-Day kicked off after a post appeared on the lefty Canadian news site Rabble.ca pointing out what CAFE was really about. Musicians and sponsors quickly distanced themselves from the event, and CAFE lost its venue as well.
CAFE’s response to all this? A press release stating:
CAFE received overwhelming support from musicians, sponsors and the general public for Equality Day. After several months of productive collaboration, the original venue Artscape Gibralter-Point cancelled the use of their location after receiving a small number of misinformed complaints.
That’s a rather … odd way to describe what happened. According to a good number of those who had originally signed on for the concert, it was CAFE that was actively spreading misinformation about their own event and hiding its Men’s Rights agenda.
The musical group Giraffe posted a statement on Facebook saying:
We feel that we were not fully informed about what it was that is being supported here, and also that calling it a festival that celebrates “equality” as opposed to “men’s equality” was intentionally misleading to us in it’s effort to entice us to play this show.
Hogtown Brewers, one of the sponsors, offered a similar explanation for why they pulled out. “We’re kinda surprised that an event that built itself on being for equality turned out to be anything but that,” the president of the company told the The Star. “The minute that it came to our attention that it wasn’t a concert in line with our values, we moved to remove our support. We regret any involvement.”
Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Artscape, the venue that was to have originally held the event, told The Globe and Mail that
[t]he premise of the event as it was given to us was a fair and equitable event that was family-friendly and a lovely music festival. It has since turned political and we anticipated that there could be health and safety concerns as well.
Perhaps the most amazing revelation: Jagermeister, which had been listed as a sponsor on CAFE’s publicity materials, said it had never agreed to be part of the event in the first place:
Thanks @amirightfolks for bringing this to our attention. We did not approve a sponsorship to this festival nor approve the use of our logo.
— Jägermeister Canada (@jagermeisterCA) May 30, 2014
CAFE’s creative, er, spinning continued in an interview the group’s outreach director Denise Fong gave to NowToronto. I’m not even going to summarize this one. Go read it.
A scaled down E-Day celebration of sorts did go ahead last weekend. It consisted of some CAFE volunteers standing on a corner handing out pamphlets and talking to passersby about their support of “boys, men and families.” (That’s a strangely limited notion of equality, huh?)
In their press release last week, CAFE announced that
Equality Day musical activities will be postponed to next Sunday, June 8. Details to be announced.
So far no details have been announced. But, hey, they’ve still got a couple of days to go.
On a totally unrelated note, I will be holding “E-Kwalitee Day” in my apartment sometime this afternoon. I am proud to announce that I have managed to book some outstanding musical acts for this extravaganza. They don’t know it yet, but I have written their names down in my appointment book.
Here’s the headliner:
I support kittens, cats and families. Ask me why!
How are these guys not in jail!?
http://www.quickmeme.com/Dafuq-little-girl
Ayup. Given people would have been knee-deep in bullshit, that’d be a given.
Delighted to hear these clowns had another FAIL when people found out their real agenda.
This CAFE makes Starbucks’ dregs taste good.
From the HuffPo article:
Another MRA piece of shit. Pretending he’d heard nothing about the murders? Pretending he thought it must be about a divorce (with the heavy implication that of course men are driven to murder if women dare divorce them)?
Legos all the way for that scumbag.
They need more attention, more publicity and press. More people need to hear their loathsome ideas.
Sorry, David, I can’t give you full credit for making this article of yours so extremely funny, because the subject-matter is already inherently hilarious.
The best part of this for me thus far has been watching certain people who have denied ties to the MRM get busted being active in this “Equality Day” debacle.
Good times.
http://quizzicalllama.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/good-times.gif
I love how it was Steph Guthrie who started all of this because I know how much MRAs hate her guts. They got burned big time.
Aww, what a pity.
Right about now I’m guessing that CAFE is getting a message like this one from Jagermeister’s lawyers:
“Step away from the logo.”
Karen Straughan is positively apoplectic in the comments of that NowToronto article. She keeps calling people sh1tbags.
Okay, so (against my own usual advice) I went and read some of the comments for that interview piece. And there’s the usual stuff, but John the Otter showed up with this gem (in response to someone challenging them on what the MRM actually does for men):
Um…
But, hey, yeah. It’s feminists who are keeping those boys down and not encouraging them to get the educations that can lead to good, well paying careers. What feminists do is encourage girls to see that the possibility of a better life is worth working for. And the leaders of the MRM wants to tell boys that it’s gonna be hard and expensive, so never mind homework or anything like that, just go ahead and play some more video games. And at the same time they want to have an (endless) whinge about how girls do so much better than boys at finishing college and getting advanced degrees, and that totally proves misandry!!!
So if men’s rights people are discouraging men (don’t think that males is the right term here) from entering college, and this discouragement is having an effect, it is entirely disingenious to then turn around and complain that too many women are graduating.
Colour me surprised.
So they put Jägermeister’s logo on their publicity materials as a sponsor without Jägermeister’s knowledge or consent.
Why do they keep doing this? They’re going to get sued some day.
Not that I’m particularly worried about an MRA organization get sued, it’s just, stupidity beyond belief.
Aren’t these the same people who used the Bryony House logo and a police department logo on their posters without their knowledge and consent?
And it will be proof of the feminazi conspiracy, of course.
I think that was Men’s Rights Edmonton.
Yes, and to be very, VERY clear, CAFE and AvfM are not, I repeat, NOT in any way affiliated. In any way. Ahem.
auggzillary and emilygoddess: Oh yeah, now I remember Paul Elam saying, “your consent is not required.”
All these organizations are starting to blend together.
David, I’m glad you wrote this and added it to the archives for future reference.
It was Men’s Rights Halifax that ripped off the police and Byrony House logos for their Don’t Be That Baby Dumper/Child Abuser/Sex Worker posters. Same shit, different pile.
In a country with a fraction of the U.S. population, I just can’t understand why there is a disproportionate amount of MRM “activism” in Canada.
None of these MRAs, PUAs, CAFEs, want to be shown as associates of each other. I keep thinking of the People’s Front of Judea vs the Judean People’s Front. They all speak the same language and sing the same song. They just disagree on a verse here or there.
The AVFM crew has been heavily brigading comments to everything tangentially related. Nice to see them being forced to show their hand I stead of faux a reasonableness.
Yeah, currently the spin AVfM is pushing in the comments is that the police are lying that no threats have been reported, and that its typical for hotels and the police to out and out lie to prospective guests and reporters who call for quotes to put in their articles.
MRAs (CAFE or whatever) don’t care about consent? SHOCKING. /s
Jagermeister should sue them. Expect a donation page targeted at feminists to pay the legal fees.
Of course they are.
Because the police are known to care so much about progressives and are clearly willing to lie to cover for them if they go all domestic terroristy.
*eyeroll*
It’s pretty pathetic. I mean, I strongly disagree with TERFs but that doesn’t make them not feminists. You can disagree with a part of a movement while still acknowledging that is a part of that movement. In fact, to do anything else is disingenuous.
YES. Thank you for pointing that out, context aside.
The way the’ve been “hiding” Justin Trottier’s role at CAFE has been absolutely hilarious:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2014/06/equality-for/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2014/06/the-hitchcock-moment/
@Auntie Alias
Right?! I think maybe it’s because we endlessly compare ourselves to the US, and because we are, in some ways, slightly more progressive, reactionaries see it as an example of feminism gone much too far.