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!
And Dean got the privilege of using the middle arm on the chairs between them.
“Only in MRAland could “asshole” be gendered. I’m guessing he doesn’t understand they come factory installed for everyone.”
Random — not quite everyone, a very small, unfortunate, set of babies need the anal opening repaired/created. Because if a congenital defect could theoretically occur, it probably does, thank you genetics! (Last sentence is sarcasm)
I’m enjoying this new “feminism is a multi-billion dollar hate industry” line. I like how they just keep trotting it out without feeling the slightest need to explain where these billions of dollars are coming from, what they are being spent on and who exactly is profiting from them.
Pallygirl — look at the angle of the chair backs and the hosts’ chairs, that’s not a shared armrest, he’s using hers and his.
By “mean things” the troll meant true things.
Didn’t the Human Centipede have women in it? HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?
@Argenti Aertheri – Ooooh, that is just awful! I’m so glad that we live in a time when such operations are possible, and in a culture where they are available. It’s things like this that really push up the infant mortality rate when good medical care isn’t available. We still have a long way to go with medicine, but I am so grateful for what we have.
Being able to poop and fart – I shall add that to the list of amazing things my body can do, that I should appreciate whenever I feel down about it.
… Maybe my sarcasm-dar is off, today.
I totally thought jayemgriffin was posting facetiously and in good faith, with a whole ‘this is what MRA’s probably think because it’s really, really silly’
My troll-dar might need recalibrating, too.
Actually, contrapangloss, you may be right. My troll-dar might need an oiling too.
It could be a Poe.
What is a Poe, please?
Basically, Poe’s Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_Law
Sometimes people are accused of trolling, when they’re actually being sarcastic and therefore being a Poe.
“Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”
I love when people attribute the wage gap to choices. They are wrong, of course — women are paid less than men of the same race* for the exact same work, but some of the gap can be attributed to what jobs men do vs. what jobs women do and how those jobs are compensated. I just think it’s hilarious that these guys never bother to examine why women choose careers that do not pay as well. Could it have something to do with the fact that as soon as women start doing a certain job in high numbers, that job becomes devalued? Maybe chilly work environments for women entering male-dominated fields plays a role? How about the expectation that women should handle the majority of the unpaid work for the household? Nope! Women hate money. That’s the best explanation.
*Specifying because white women are better paid than men of colour
I know. I am so sorry I forgot to mention the tiny number of babies with this condition.
Yeah, I thought it was a joke about a “professor” vs a professor, too, but I’m sleepy today so idk.
I’m reminded of that guy David wrote (Christopher in Oregon, is it?) about some time ago who thought he was being highly instructive in informing people that women poop.
I read jayemgriffin’s comment as a facetious thing, for what it’s worth. A good reminder to use /s at the end of a sarcastic comment!
Seemed to be a clear lampoon of AVFM’s bizarre attitude to professorships. I actually find it quite hard to read it any other way.
That’s why my wife got out of midwifery and retrained in a less obviously gendered medical field where there was a shortage of skilled staff. NOW she’s earning impressively big bucks (about three to four times as much as I’m bringing in), but she certainly wasn’t for much of her career.
@Viscaria
To add to your list a personal gripe: also that certain high-prestige jobs have policies or cultural expectations that are just more hostile to the realities of being female than they are to those of being male. I’m in academia, and I have encountered, on the whole, more support and encouragement as a female scientist than hostility (I am aware of how lucky this makes me). However, it is still expected that if you are “serious” you will prioritize work over family at least until you are well into your tenure-track job, if not until you actually achieve tenure. This means that taking ANY time off, showing ANY indication at work that you have a family life (such as, you know, needing a few weeks to recover from giving birth and adjust to having a helpless screaming larval human depending on you), regardless of how productive you are, or how little it actually affects your output, indicates a lack of seriousness–you should have waited until you were at a more advanced stage of your career, or figured out a way to work through it (rather easier to manage if the child didn’t come out of your body, and does not continue to depend on your body as a food source). Since that stage is usually achieved when a person is late 30s to mid 40s, this poses a pretty substantial problem for anyone who doesn’t want to forgo/avoid child rearing*, but doesn’t have a female partner to do all of the difficult physical labor involved in making a baby. Pretty much, if you were a “serious” scientist and you wanted a family, you shoulda thought of that ahead of time and been a man.
*BTW, I’m not suggesting that having kids should be the default assumption for women, just that it is a legitimate thing to want, and that just as I completely support those who choose not to parent, I think we ought to actually support people who DO want to, rather than insisting that everyone has to, but hey, you gotta do it alone, we aren’t helping you in any way, it was your CHOICE to have a baby, you deal with it. And stay at home, no babies in restaurants or on an airplanes or in malls or anywhere, ever.
BTW, Hivemind, I’m still waiting for my cut. Mama needs a new pair of frivolous, unnecessary shoes to misander with.
We should send him a pic of my horrendously misaligned teeth, which I have never been able to afford braces for. Also, thanks for the reminder Dean, I need to sign up for what passes for dental insurance at my workplace.
I don’t get why people keep buying this. Or why AVfM keeps claiming it. Are they saying they’re really feminists, and AVfM is their Onion-like take on what MRAs sound like?
They might have some leeway if they were claiming it was hyperbole or that they were being delibarately over the top to make a point, but satire? Nope, not if they really believe it.
Or how they continue to exploit the gap in policing coverage to rape Native American women (tribal police don’t have jurisdiction once the perps leave the reservation, at which point the case gets kicked up to the FBI. You can imagine how urgently the Feds pursue these cases, I’m sure).
This is actually the factoid that made me go from “pro choice because liberal” to adamant, arguing-with-picketers, abortion-loving pro-choice. The state has ZERO RIGHT to force someone to endure ANY condition that can cause such damage and trauma to the body.
Of course they do. You know how much straight dudes love the idea of anal.
Pallygirl, I think they were riffing on the comment upthread about how “professor” must be a different title than professor (no quotes).
This is one of many ways that dudes feel entitled to take up space, especially around women.
I’m pretty sure Argenti was just sharing a fun fact.
I just realized that I went from talking about issues of female biology in my last comment directly to addressing the expectation that women have to be mothers. My language was sloppy, and made a transition between the sections that equated “female” with “woman”. Sorry about that, not all female people are women, not all women are female people, will try to be more precise.
The body language of Esmay was interesting. He was waggling; usually a sign of nervous hostility, couple to eagerness. If I was being asked to consult on this I’d say he had a set list of talking points he’d psyched himself to say, and needed to get them out before 1: he lost track of them and 2: the conversation really got going and he might lose the chance.
The more interesting thing is that, were I grilling him, the rhythm of it (and to some degree the direction) implies a certain level of defensiveness. Usually attributable to someone being less than sincere in their argument, or expecting a significant argument; and so getting ready to engage in an emotional (and somewhat back-footed) rebuttal.
When some really believes something/has a lot faith in their argument, they tend to 1: get a little more centered,and 2: lean forward, with a more centered body. They want you to focus on them.
I suspect he was afraid of the professor getting the chance to rip into some of his claims (which he had the sense to keep from being too concrete; none of this, “only 2 percent of rapes are “real”, and he didn’t slip into [as I thought he might] “regret = rape”). When that stopped seeming likely, his body language calmed down.
It’s also interesting that he never looked at the professor. Were I his debate coach this outing would be getting a long critique and retraining, because someone who is actually on the fence isn’t as likely to think he came off well. If the two sides had been given more equal time… they would be far more likely to come away with less than warm thoughts for the MRM; just because of how stiff he was, even after he relaxed. Not interacting with his opponent makes it look as if he either doesn’t see her as legitimate, or is afraid of her (at a guess, it’s more of the latter than the former, but a fair bit of both).
An audience picks up on that, and it costs people the emotional victory which is more likely to be persuasive of those who are open to persuasion.
Hellkell, that was just my random fact of the day, sorry if it came off as anything else!
Waggling, I’ll need to remember that term, thank you. And yep, the only one who did any signs of interest // engaging was the male host.
Debate team? Oh gods I’d fail his ass so hard. For one, you don’t ramble off your talking points from the get go and then go conspiracy theory when challenged. For two, yes, you look at your opponent, at least sometimes.
As for fear of forgetting his points, surely you saw him counting off black men, gay men, etc on his fingers. But not an overt sort of ONE, TWO, etc, but in his lap, as if to ensure he hit all the points/fingers he was supposed to.
Also, I love discussing body language with you btw.