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!
Again, see “they have to have done something pretty bad”, depending on what you mean by “taunt” and how badly they’re hurt.
But yeah, the reason I at least reacted the way I did to the “lol I no curr if your leg gets broken if you were being a careless pedestrian” comment was that I tend to perceive people who think that way as potentially being a danger to the people around them. Which zie will no doubt react to with yet another rant about how I’m stupid/can’t read/whatever.
The reason this came across so frighteningly to me–especially since it’s a claims adjuster–is because it suggests a constant mental calculus of the absolute limit of legally acceptable behavior, like zie’s always working out how much (or little) zie can get away with before it becomes zir fault.
Whereas a more normal attitude is to not want bad things to happen to anyone, to do your best to avert harm whether it’s your duty to or not, and to not really think about whose fault it is in the moment it’s happening.
To have that attitude at work would make sense, because for insurance purposes it often is necessary to assign blame. Carrying that attitude over to one’s day to day life, however, is a problem.
But yeah, irl, especially if it’s an in the moment reaction? Red flag. There are lots of jobs where people have to kind of turn off some of their emotional reactions while at work. You’re supposed to pick them up again at the door on your way out at the end of the day.
(BTW, enhancedvibes? Ranting at me and declaring that the conversation is over because you say it is won’t make me shut up, and I doubt that will work on anyone else here either.)
I’d expect to be horrified if I were driving and hit someone, regardless of whose fault it was.
Plus as someone said above – broken leg, oh yes, such a simple fracture, heals up quickly, nice and clean.
Except not. Lifelong complications, what are they?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_fracture#Complications
Not to mention life-threatening conditions that can arise from crush injuries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartment_syndrome
So yeah, a mere broken leg, oh, not gonna feel too bad about that … that person could be facing a death sentence.
More like starting up the “dance, monkey, dance” theme music.
Routine infant circumcision is stupid and a violation of bodily autonomy. You don’t snip off bits of healthy tissue prophylactically when there’s a lower risk, more effective option available. Those would be safe sex and proper hygiene. How about we just be less prudish and teach our kids how to wash their genitals and, when they’re older, about safe sex? Because that’s risk-free and more effective. Doesn’t involve any non-consensual procedures either.
The legislation in place limiting circumcision in some countries is the shits. Religious reasons and “BUT HIV TRANSMISSION” are still accepted as good enough to justify male neonatal non-therapeutic circumcision in these countries. That’s garbage.
In BC, it’s just harder to access. Our public healthcare system won’t cover it. It can’t be performed in our hospitals. Most doctors won’t perform it because they know it’s stupid and wrong. There are a few left who do though and it’s well within their rights to perform male neonatal non-therapeutic circumcision. That’s not acceptable. It’s very wrong, actually.
So, how am I at fault for it? How is feminism? And can we goddamn well stop making every discussion of female genital mutilation about dude problems? Yes, male neonatal non-therapeutic circumcision is mutilation. It should be illegal under all circumstances. Stop fucking dismissing the experiences of women and girls who had their genitals mutilated though. The degree to which harm occurs as a result of FGM as practiced today is FAR greater than that of MGM as practiced today. They’re both genital mutilation trends that need addressing. They’re very different though, done for very different reasons under very different circumstances with very different outcomes and therefore effective advocacy against them needs to be separate. They need to be addressed differently because they are very different.
Yes, there are cases in which FGM does far less harm than MGM. They are however highly unusual. That does not make male neonatal non-therapeutic circumcision remotely OK. It isn’t. It does mean more people are suffering and dying from one than the other though. Of course the cause that’s doing greater harm and causing more death receives more attention. Of course the cause that isn’t a normalised practice in the Western world amongst white people gets more press. That doesn’t mean white guys are oppressed and, if it does, it’s by other white guys. People performing circumcisions in North America are overwhelmingly white guys at the behest of parents, one of whom is very likely a man and it’s legal because a bunch of white guy legislators don’t care to tackle it.
Go scream at the people perpetuating male neonatal non-therapeutic circumcision. Don’t fucking silence people who speak out against FMG as if it’s some kind of shouting contest and the winner is the louder one. Stop blaming people who probably disagree with it for not dedicating enough of their time to the issue. I welcome and encourage you to do exactly what FGM eradicationists have. We’re not silencing you. We support you in this particular endeavor. I’m sorry you feel we don’t spend enough time on the issue, You can’t expect advocates to tackle every fucking issue though. There are only 24 hours in the day. You need to step up and do your part too.
This is why I’ve disassociated from intactivism. I remember a time when it was a bunch of moms opposing the procedure on it’s own characteristics. Now it’s angry white men playing in the oppression Olympics, trying to control women by shaming them for having priorities that aren’t first and foremost teh poor menz and dismissing the experiences of women and girls who have undergone FGM because don’t you fucking dare address a women’s issue prior to this generally much less harmful men’s issue! Now it’s about blaming and controlling female people. It’s not about protecting male people.
@ Kittehs
That was the one genuinely funny moment thus far in this conversation. Oh, you consider “the question asked and answered”, do you? Well then, I guess that’s us told, and the only remaining question is how one fits an ego that size through the door when one has to go from one room to another.
I wonder if egos look like pannier skirts, so you have to go sideways, or balloons, so they squish and are in danger of bursting? The former would be prettier but the latter seems more likely.
marinerachel – ::applauds::
If they’re more like pannier skirts it would explain why sometimes people seem to get stuck and are unable to budge from their ego-driven position. It’s not their fault, they’re just stuck in the doorway and need someone to push them through to the other side.
With a sledgehammer? Or assist them through with a suppository?
If they just turn sideways, they can probably get through … it’s getting them to turn that’s the trick.
“If you’d just turn a bit maybe you would be able to…”
“You are all bastard people who are stupid and can’t read and also you’re misinterpreting me on purpose just because you’re mean and cliquey and fuck you I’m leaving! Until tomorrow’s repeat performance.”
XD
I shouldn’t have mentioned panniers: now I’m seeing Baldrick in a farthingale.
TW: death of a furry, suicides.
A few years ago, a ran over a grey squirrel. It ran across the road and under my car & there was nothing I could do. I know that grey squirrels are basically tree rats with fluffy tails. I know it was totally not my fault. I still had to pull off the road for some minutes & have a weep about it because I felt guilty as shit and hated that my driving down the road meant I had killed the poor thing. Over a suicidal bloody tree rat squirrel!
So I’m betting that most drivers who hit a pedastrian, regardless of the pedestrian’s age or of the relative legalities, feel guilty and run over the incident a gazillion times, willing things to be different and wanting not to have caused, however unintentionally, pain to another person. That guilt may manifest itself in cursing out the pedestrian for being so fucking stupid (assuming they were) but it’ll still be guilt, earned or not. Why else do you think train drivers are so traumatised when they hit suicides? Because if you are a decent human being, it bloody hurts to have hurt another human being.
So I’m assuming that was your job talking and you not thinking about what you were really saying, @enhancedvibes. And that you would feel as shitty as anyone else if it really happened. Might be worth saying that, apologising for getting all defensive and upsetting people, and then maybe moving on.
TW part 2
When I lived in London a friend of mine was dating a guy who worked as a driver on the tube (subway, for non-Brits). One day when he was at work someone committed suicide by jumping in front of his train. They jumped at the very last minute, and he wasn’t able to stop in time. It was really clearly suicide rather than an accident. He still ended up in therapy, and eventually quit his job because he just couldn’t handle the idea of it ever happening again. He knew, rationally, that the person had wanted to kill themselves and that it wasn’t really his fault, but it didn’t help. The guilt still gnawed at him.
I’m pretty sure that’s how most people would react, or at least the ones who I’d want to voluntarily associate with.
And then there are the situations where there’s no reasonable safe option for pedestrians. There’s a parking lot near us – supermarket, liquor store, restaurant, strip of assorted small places – that is divided more or less in two by a sort of interior road with no crosswalks. One must walk all the way to one side or the other or rely on the non-assholery of strangers. It is rather odd, considering that there’s a couple of stores on an island in the middle of one section that one might reasonably want to go to, and the only safe way to do so is to go all around by a ridiculously circuitous route. I do not in general get the feeling that the designers of parking lots understand that some people do their shopping on foot.
Then there are roads on which pedestrians are allowed, but with no sidewalks; no sidewalks on one side of a road; no crosswalks even at intersections with lights; pedestrian lights that don’t, for some reason, work on Sunday mornings; pedestrian lights that assume one is capable of a sprint; crosswalks mysteriously absent from one side of an intersection; sidewalks with a guardrail between the inner side of the sidewalk and the pond it borders but not between the pedestrians and the cars; sidewalks next to unusable in winter because all the businesses along that street remove the snow in front and then pile it up on the sides, leaving gigantic mountains of snow separating sections of usable sidewalk. I enjoy walking even in cold weather but it becomes dangerous bordering on impossible here during the winter, even though there is technically a good sidewalk to either side of the main street, if one could find it.
I admit I get rather irritated at the idea that pedestrians merrily fling themselves out in front of cars just for funsies, and I do not understand why it is considered reasonable to expect people on foot to take ridiculously circuitous routes to reach their theoretically-safe crosswalks rather than expecting drivers to take enough care not to hit the person who is crossing, carefully, to the bus stop on the other side of the street that for some reason does not have a crosswalk to it.
Ledasmom, so many of those situations sound like where I live (apart from the snow). Eight lanes of traffic, and the lights will leave you stuck in the centre strip, which is anything but safe. No footpaths (very much a thing in my suburb: the street I live in has none). No crossing anywhere near the railway station. And fucking car parks! Even the idea that people have to w a l k from the supermarket to the car with a trolley full of groceries (and often enough with kids in tow) doesn’t seem to occur to whoever designs these things.
On the train drivers – yes, it’s absolutely the same here, of course: so many end up leaving the job because they’re traumatised from hitting people, whether it’s accidents or suicides. One thing I know: if the time ever comes when I need to end my life here, that isn’t how I’d do it, because I wouldn’t want to do that to a train driver.
Oh, yes, on the no reasonable safe option.
At my university, the main bio/chem lab building was on the opposite side of the highway, on a BLIND CURVE!!!! Nearest crosswalk paths would mean a detour of a good mile, and the a long hike right next to the gaurdrail, instead of the sidewalk, because the sidewalk was on the wrong side!
Most of us ended up darting across the road before the curve, then cautiously walking next to the really unreasuringly dented guardrail…
Yay small campuses! And playing real life frogger!
So much this! I live in a pretty pedestrian friendly neighborhood. But I’ve had lots of jobs in the suburbs or had to go to suburban locations where the bus doesn’t go all the way. It is not designed to be safe for walking at all. There are lights that don’t stay green long enough to cross and you have to rely on drivers seeing that you’re still in the intersection and not running you over. When stoplights are a mile apart, sometimes it makes more sense to jaywalk.
I think maybe that’s why it seems so cold to me too. My taunting animals example above isn’t equivalent IMO because it isn’t a necessary risk to take and it’s cruel as well being stupid. However, when walking you take calculated risks and make those decisions quickly. Anyone can make a bad choice or not see the car coming. It doesn’t make the pedestrian a bad person. I have seen pedestrians wander into traffic without a care in the world so I’m not claiming it doesn’t happen or that we don’t have a duty to be careful while walking. But there are plenty of situations in which taking a risk makes sense.
Also like I said above, all my close calls happen when I am crossing legally. A certain segment of the driving population resents the hell out of pedestrians and it’s terrifying. People seem to care more about shaving 30 seconds off their commute than they care about human life.
Last time I had a close call crossing the street, I was in the crosswalk crossing at the light. A driver, looking and finding no opposing traffic, turned and was heading right towards me at speed. I had to suddenly accelerate, slipped and fell on the pavement.
Fortunately, the driver saw the fall and stopped. Otherwise, he could have driven straight over me. Probably not a good outcome.
I don’t like to think of the claims adjuster thinking, “stupid pedestrian, why was he in the path of an oncoming car? I have no sympathy,” and proceeding accordingly.
From the adjuster’s POV, the upside was I probably would not have done much damage to the car.
@ Robert
Judging by what we’ve seen so far they’d probably be trying to figure out whether or not their client could bill you for denting the bumper.
Yep, everyone of my close calls has either been some ass not comprehending that you don’t go cutting through the aisles in parking lots without looking (or at all, but come on, stop and look at least), or in a crosswalk and legal right on red but oh, wtf are you doing in the crosswalk?
There are places in Pittsburgh I’d cross against the light because it was fucking safer. Side roads with long lights f’ex, wait for it to turn and you’ve got all the people turning, go against it and you might have one car to avoid.
Never, ever, play frogger with Pittsburgh busses though, the drivers will stop, the busses…don’t risk it. And no, I never made a habit out of playing frogger with cars, but I grew up in “cross one land at a time on a state highway” New England, the idea of traffic stopping when I tried that…took me a bit to stop doing it since it clearly confused Pittsburgh drivers (yep, it is not uncommon to see people standing on dividing lines up here, not even medians, that makes sense, but literally playing frogger when traffic isn’t busy, or they’re getting to a bus)
I have two kids; the first is somewhat ADHD, the second – much more so. I have had sixteen years of parking-lot related terror, especially when they were small. There’s nowhere you can walk that cars can’t go, and small children just aren’t visible to people backing out of parking spaces. I used to hang on to their hands very hard. We had to have a talk with younger son recently, who – at twelve – ran diagonally across a major intersection without having the walk light. In Massachusetts! I covered my eyes, because I swear I thought he was dead right there, and have given up even the safest jaywalking in his presence.
I think people who don’t walk much – I regularly do a nearly four-mile down-and-back to the grocery store, mostly uphill on the way back with groceries – don’t realize that what seems like a short distance to a crosswalk really isn’t when you’ve gone three miles in the heat and have even five pounds on your back. And I do drive – I prefer to walk, but I do drive – and I try very hard to remember when driving what it’s like for pedestrians.
There was an article in the Boston Globe a few years back, where they found that the majority of our train and subway drivers will have this happen to them over the course of their career. They talked a lot about the toll it takes on those drivers and yeah: PTSD, depression, guilt, obsessing about what they could have done differently…the whole nine yards.