A Voice for Men’s media blitz continues apace. On Sunday, fresh on the heels of his colleague Robert O’Hara’s often cringeworthy Al Jazeera interview, AVFM “managing editor” Dean Esmay appeared on the unfortunately named “Let it Rip,” a news show on the local Fox affiliate in Detroit, to discuss that upcoming “Men’s Issues” conference we’ve been hearing so much about.
The excitable Esmay, wearing a tie at least a foot longer than necessary and facing off against a far more polished Heather Dillaway, a feminist sociologist from Wayne State University, did not exactly dispel the notion that the Men’s Rights movement isn’t ready for its close up just yet.
Esmay robotically rattled off an assortment of the sort of phony “factoids” that go over well only in the echo chambers of the Men’s Rights movement, and responded to questions not with answers but with rapidly regurgitated talking points — at one point declaring, to the bemusement of Prof. Dillaway and the rest, that
Ideological feminism is a multi-billion dollar hate industry funded by lies about rape and domestic violence, and they are the cause of a lot of very civil-rights trashing laws like the Violence Against Women Act even though we know that domestic violence is not a gendered issue.
Yes, he did say “a lot of very civil-rights trashing laws.”
Esmay also set forth a few arguments that he seemed to have made up right there on the spot, and which probably could have used a bit more workshopping. When the female half of Fox News’ tag team of hosts asked him “do you think you’re at a disadvantage because you’re a man,” he replied
I think many men are at a disadvantage specifically for a man. I’m certainly a working-class man. You see me sitting here with a missing tooth cause I can’t afford to fix it. This lady [gesturing at Dillaway] probably makes four times what I do.
Never mind that whatever differences there might be between their salaries have prety much nothing to do with gender and everything to do with class, and education, and probably most of all with the fact that Esmay is working for a dude who’s evidently bogarting all the donations for himself. Never mind that women still earn less than men for the same work. (And yes, MRAs, they do.)
Apparently, as long as there’s any woman in the world who makes more money than Dean Esmay, men are oppressed.
Let’s just call this the Esmay principle.
Anyway, I’m not going to bother to transcribe anything more. The only other memorable remark from Esmay was one he slipped in at the very end, suggesting that A Voice for Men might possibly be pulling out from the Doubletree hotel. What this means for their conference, I don’t know.
Back on A Voice for Men, meanwhile, Esmay was treated as a returning hero for facing down “two raving lunatic feminists and one Purple Poodle” –that last term the AVFMers’ new synonym for the old standby “mangina.”
“Standing O for Dean Esmay,” wrote his boss at AVFM, Paul Elam, in the comments. “Perfect delivery of our message and our attitude. Well done, brother.”
Susie Parker, meanwhile, wrote:
I thought Dean was pretty great. Measured, thoughtful, implacable. Any one of us feel we could have gotten more people on the Titanic lifeboats, but Dean was the man who held his cool and actually did the heroic deed.
I just hope the “people” she imagines Dean helping into the Titanic lifeboats were men! No “women and children first” for the AVFM crowd!
The reviews for Prof. Dillaway were a little less kind.
“[S]tupid ignorant bitch,” wrote one.
“What a self-centered bitch,” another agreed.
Others in the comments, and on the AVFM Forums, described her as a “cunt,” “the jabbering feminist liar,” the “smirking feminit [sic] professor,” and “the feminastie ‘Prof,”’ among other epithets. Indeed, perhaps half a dozen commenters referred to her professorship in derogatory terms, or put the word “professor” in scare quotes.
Some of the commenters were especially galled that Dillaway reacted to some of Esmay’s most ridiculous flights of fancy by … smiling. Several saw this as proof of the depth of her feminist depravity. Mike Buchanan remarked indignantly that
Early on, while you were outlining a number of areas in which men’s and boys’ life outcomes are so poor, the ‘professor’ was smiling through them all. As always, these damnable women don’t even PRETEND to care, so deep is their misandry.
Yeah, that’s not why she was smiling, dude. At that point, I was smiling too. That’s what you do when your opponent in a debate basically soils himself onstage.
Even those who offered – almost invariably mild – critiques of Esmay’s appearance couldn’t bring themselves to say anything positive about his opponent. Wrote PlainOldTruth:
At least we can say Esmay earned his paycheck here. Mopre than you can say fort the Princess Studies professor whose every paycheck represents an act of larceny and fraud: a slap in the face of people who do real work and who, when they teach, teach the truth.
Not that anyone at AVFM would recognize the truth if it came riding in on a Purple Poodle. Indeed, Darryl Jewett managed to win himself more than a dozen upvotes from his comrades for his distinctly revisionist precis of world history:
Throughout history and in every society including all of them today, women are and always have been the most privileged demographic. Where ever and whenever you hear women whining that they are oppressed, men are oppressed far worse. And usually by the women . On average, women consume way more than men and produce far less. To replenish those resources which women consume in great excess, men are sent to fight endless wars and forced to work as slaves long past the time they should be working and can. Children are often used as excuses to force men to work under threat of imprisonment even if they can’t anymore.
The strangest reaction of all, though, came from a commenter called DEDC, who used the occasion as an opportunity to attack, er, me, and to suggest that the real problem was that MRA’s weren’t using the words “bitch” and “cunt” often enough.
No, really.
The whole reason we are a hate site is because fucktards like Futrelle, failed journalist (see Bart Sibrel) that he is, keeps seeding these attacks based on nothing other than that we refer to some women as cunts and bitches (who desperately deserve it). Nobody, not even US, say that calling a man a prick or asshole (gender specific) is misandric just on that basis. The level of projection and hyper-sensitivity and denial are mind-boggling in magnitude. Just look at that entitlement. It shocks us to use these slurs against a woman because they have never really encountered them before.
It is like I say with Islame-O fascists: the answer to their hypersensitivity to jokes or cartoons of their prophet is MORE! It shouldn’t even be a second thought at all to call a female a cunt who IS a cunt.
I’ve rarely seen any group of people so determined to learn less from their mistakes.
—
If you actually managed to sit through more than a minute or two of that TV segment, you deserve a reward. So here’s a video for the song Nunki, by the band Dva, off their album NIPOMO, which I was listening to on repeat while writing this. The animation in the video was all done by children!
Another owl video
http://youtu.be/Ajc6xr6mNeY
A lot of people seem to be having trouble with our tendency to do this.
Pallygirl, Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal) also organized a fundraiser in response to a legal threat. He found out that FunnyJunk had posted a slew of his cartoons without attribution or compensation, and called them out on it on his website. A remarkably obtuse lawyer, Charles Carreon, sent him a letter demanding monies and an apology. Inman posted his letter, and requested that his fans send in donations to a couple of charities instead. The charities got a bucket of money and the lawyer was publicly humiliated. Win/win.
Thanks Robert, I had forgotten all about that. So it is funny that a cartoonist/satirist like Inman is a much, much better fundraiser than AFfM.
And no-one confuses Inman’s actual activism with his comedy, even though his is primarily a comedy site.
And now I feel the need to post this, lyrics NSFW:
http://theoatmeal.com/pterodactyl_video
Kitteh — for sure!
Katz — idk if you’re still following that thread, but I replied to your actual question after I skimmed and put my RP character creation hat on.
For some reason, as I was eating chips with aoili I was just musing over the #noMRA tag and how one of the MRA comments was – you guessed it – a whine about how it’s really easy for females to pick up males.
And instead of just laughing like I normally do, I started mulling over the maths of it (Argenti, jump in, this is a game many of us can play).
Assume a bar/nightclub with 200 people, half of which are females (see, I made the maths easy), and assume only hetereosexual people present and only one-on-one hookups, just to make the assumptions easy.
If half the females “get lucky” that means that half the males “get lucky” too, by definition so no difference.
If a quarter of the females “get lucky” then so do only a quarter of the males, by definition, and so for any other percentages one uses.
The only change comes when we introduce a differing number of females and males.
Say, we change it so that our 200-person-limit club now has 50 females and 150 males.
If half the females “get lucky” then only 25/150 males will also “get lucky” or around 17%. This has nothing to do with females having it easier, and all to do with the relative proportions present.
Because logic dictates, in this type of situation, that there has to be a one-to-one coupling.
Or do the whiney guys think that some males are just magicing into existence to couple with a female so the population of single males stays constant?
Anyhoo, that’s as far as my analysis went.
I’ve trolled Susie Parker a couple times and I just got him to admit that he’s a man. It was so obvious. On top of all the whiny MRA bullshit coming out of his keyboard, real women don’t use their real full name and portrait on the internet like that. I assume an MRA commenter is a man every time I see an alleged woman with her alleged real full name and photo. I haven’t been wrong yet.
Just thought I’d share because this couldn’t be more funny. I’m convinced that there are only, like, 9 MRAs total in the world, but they all have dozens of internet personas to make it look like there’s an army of them.* And there are even more fake MRA woman personas than fake men. They think that women are so stupid that we’ll agree with any other woman on anything. If we hear Dean Esmay say that feminism teaches women to be victims, we disagree. If we hear “Susie Parker” say the same thing we’ll all agree because we’re that shallow. Nice try fuckwads! I fucking got you!
Hey, if the MRHM is such a noble and righteous and totally not embarassing cause, why do you all have to lie and cheat to get your point across?
*My 9 MRA hypothesis also goes to explain why every non-internet real-life MRA function has been a flop. The conference in Detroit was all a hoax. They never intended to have it at all because even MRAs are sharp enough to know that 9 people don’t make a conference.
ooo cool, do you have a snapshot or link to where he admitted it? Because he totes keeps posting like he was a servicewoman and it’s been super annoying.
This gave me the wonderful fantasy that perhaps, just perhaps, the MRM movement is some kind of Soderbegh-esque Ocean’s 11 style caper with some super long game involved.
pallygirl – in that scenario I wouldn’t put it past the sadbonerwhiners to complain that if teh menz were trying to pick up the women, the women would turn them all down – even if it’s the same women who were hooking up with the same dudes in the original!
Of course what the sadbonerwhiners ignore is that they get turned down because their gross creepiness is so bleedin’ obvious. All men are not them, however much they like to pretend they’re Mr Average. They’re more like Mr Below Par.
What kitteh said, basically.
Translated to maths —
Account for “ladies night”, and ladies being more likely to go in groups (I assume?), and call it 150 women to 50 men. All of whom are trying to get some. So that means the guys, if 100% get laid, might have to make 3 approaches, while the third of women who get laid have 3 guys to pick from.
Which, to whiney manchildren, means the women have it easier.
Re: asshole as insult for men only.
I’ve read a book – fiction – wherein a character uses the term “assholette”.
In context, he was describing women engaging in violent crimes. Specifically, assassination.
@Michelle C. Young:
He just had a role in the new X-Men movie. I am not particularly comic-savvy, but my brother is, and said that in the original comic, the character he played is not a little man. Dinklage (of course) did a phenomenal job, and I was ecstatic to discover that the movie made zero short jokes at his expense, not even subtle visual ones. His character was treated with utter seriousness and humanity.
It gave me a tiny bit of hope for better diversity in Hollywood.
*threadrupt*
Wait….what?
Atheists were offended by Maleficence?
I’m atheist and I loooooved it.
I cried at one point.
I usually do.
I’m a soft touch and Disney movies destroy me.
My kids are on a Lilo and Stitch binge and I sit with them murmuring curses at Disney into my soggy handkerchief while my husband laughs at me.
The little girl just loves her space monster so much you guys! *choke sob*
I know that misogynists hated Maleficence , because women were doing things other than singing pretty songs and waiting to be rescued. My guess is that atheist douchebros hated it for the same reason.
Oh, I also started Attack on Titan. Highly recommend.
I haven’t been able to keep up on all the threads so forgive me if this delightful exchange has been pointed out before.
I’m sure the case numbers are as credible as the Doubletree letter.
Do you have a link for that, Auntie?
Thanks for battling trolls valiantly!
@Lea, yeah. “It’s little. And broken. But good. Yeah, still good.” Ow, my feels 🙁
(Also, the dark implications of Lilo’s Pudge-feeding ritual. See, her parents died in a rainstorm, and Pudge controls the weather, so she feeds him sandwished so he won’t kill anyone else she loves…)
I feel you. I still cry at like three points in The Lion King, and I’ve seen it a million times (even made my partner take me to see it on Broadway this spring, for my 30th. It was AMAZEBALLS)
This might sound really weird, but I feel that the word “asshole” is actually a “humanizing” insult for men. That is, when a man is called an asshole, he is being called out for being morally reprehensible, and the implicit standard by which he is judged is gender-neutral. In other words, an assholish man is someone who has moral failings arising from his nature as a human being. But words like “bitch” are inherently dehumanizing towards women and implicitly justify women’s oppression.
@CASSANDRAKITTY
I don’t need to be convinced of anything because i was an adjuster, I would know whether I was at fault or not, motor vehicle law is pretty straightforward. But yeah, I never said or even implied I wouldn’t feel bad about someone getting injured by something I did but was not my fault. In fact, I said I would feel bad, but less bad, and really, that doesn’t make me some horrible person all of the responses made me out to be. I am seriously stumped how people do not understand the nuances of what I am talking about here.
When something horrible happens to someone for reasons that are out of their control (acts of god, etc) I feel all sorts of empathy and sympathy for them. When I do something to someone that might harm them when I did not intend, I accept full responsibility and express sympathy and empathy. If I inadvertently cause harm to someone through their own negligence, yeah, I’m gonna feel less bad about it, because it was out of my control, I could not have prevented it, but THEY did cause it, their own injury. It is completely normal to not feel much sympathy for people that cause their own suffering when it is based on sheer stupidity (which running out into the street is) ever read the Darwin Awards? Please keep in mind that this is the ONLY scenario I am using. I believe most pedestrian fatalities result from someone running out into the street. Again, you are confusing empathy with sympathy and they are not the same thing.
The Halloween scenario is a foolish person jumping out into the street – I wish you could keep that in mind, and I am not at all talking about children running out into the street just to be clear (even though that incident is still not the driver’s fault legally unless they were speeding, intoxicated, etc) but I imagine any driver, myself included, would feel all sortsof horrible for inadvertently hitting a child. People, adults specifically, SHOULD be more responsible for their actions. Part of the problems we have in our country right now is a result of people, everyone, including children, seeming to be immune to taking responsibility for their actions anymore.
@HELLKELL
Not true. Every comment attacked a strawman, every one. I mean come on, I know y’all don’t know me very well, but if you all automatically thought so horribly about me because of my innocuous comment that was clearly begging for clarification BEFORE responding so wtf like, y’all need to look within about that. Because all those responses, they were NOT in response to what I actually said, they were all sorts of fantastical opinions about what I must have meant. I have done nothing to deserve being mocked on this site. It was absurd at best and that is why I wished it to be dropped, thanks.
@ANTHOCEROTOPSIDA
HWHAT?!?!? Susie Parker is a man? But said person kept posting honey badger vids (yech at even the name) in a discussion i had with her/him?, claiming that it showed her on it but I didnt care to watch it, because ugh. Anyway, Kristal Garcia actually does seem to be a real woman, regardless of whether that is her real name, she’s apparently a burlesque entertainer. There’s also GWW, but we all know her. I definitely agree that MRAs use women’s names online most of the time, but there do seem to be a couple who are indeed really women. The two I mention here and typhonblue, Alison Tieman. Other than that, it’s usually pretty obvious that they are men based on the words they use.
@CUPCAKEMIRALDO
Judges get assigned and most do not get a choice, and they rotate. So let’s add don’t know jack about how courts work to the neverending list of MRA i know nothings!
@LEA
I’m atheist and I liked Maleficent too so wha..?!?
@AUNTI ALIAS
I’ve been enjoying your comments on some other sites immensely for the past couple of weeks, so thanks. The whole letter was such tripe – but Americans are high on low information these days. I still find it shocking that MRAs and all over the internet spreading these lies despite the police spokesperson confirming no threats were reported. I need to stop finding this so shocking, for my own peace of mind. Oh, and those report numbers Elam gave? It is probably AVFM making peremptory complaints when they likely have received NO direct threats and they aren’t in Detroit so…..I would love for someone to obtain a copy of those reports, they should be public record.
Sorry…but… How the hell is “asshole” a gendered insult? Or is that guy one of those dudes who think women don’t poo?
@Ellen Rose:
I’m a woman, and I call myself an asshole all the time, as in “Shit! Sorry! I feel like a total asshole now!” But unlike an MRAsshole, I prefer to use the incidence of assholery as a learning experience, so I don’t do it again.
@Michelle: Yeah, that situation sucked rather a lot of ass. It happened about 15 yrs. ago, right while airlines were starting to switch from peanuts to pretzels. At least it got me bumped to first class, as there was no room for an oxygen tank, or a super sweet nurse from Boston who happened to be on the flight and probably saved my life. I used to love flying, too!
As for Peter Dinklage, I’ve finally decided that I should see that X Men movie. I’m not much for superheroes, but getting Sir Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian Mackellan, totally buff and badass (and not hosting the Tonys at all) Hugh Jackman, more or less naked and blue Jennifer Lawrence, and Peter Dinklage all in one place at once with awesome GC cannot be resisted.
TIL that being a claims adjuster means that it’s OK not to care about other people being physically injured as long as they did something “wrong”.
(Also that people really like to rant when they get called out for having said something disturbing, but I knew that already.)
Even if you hate the rest of the film or if, for instance, it pisses you off that Shadowcat isn’t the one going back, but just the one doing spookyhands over Wolverine as he goes back, it’s worth seeing the whole movie for one scene. Pretty sure you’ll know what I mean when you see it. :3
The rest of the movie is brilliant (except for Shadowcat/Wolverine annoyance) though, so it’s more like double worth it.
but if you all automatically thought so horribly about me because of my innocuous comment that was clearly begging for clarification BEFORE responding so wtf like, y’all need to look within about that.
Yeah, no. If this many people had a problem understanding you, the onus is on you to communicate clearly.
You’re not getting mockery, BTW. You’re getting a great big WTF is wrong with you.
Oh, poo. That first part is enhancedvibes.
Good thing they’re not good vibes, because that’s the exact opposite of what I got from their comment.