Sworebytheprecious, a regular in the AgainstMensRights subreddit, is trying to raise money so she can get to Detroit to report on that A Voice for Men conference you might have heard about. And you can help!
Here’s her pitch, from her GoFundMe page:
Lissie (akaSworebythePrecious) wants to get to Detroit to report on the convention held by A Voice for Men and Paul Elam. She also wants to start up a website for Project Dark Horse. Who wants to help?
Our goal is $1000. We’ll be posting receipts. We want to rent a car, get a room, and get a plane ticket. I also want to talk to some of the protesters who were bothered last Saturday.
So far she’s raised a little over $200, but I’m sure we can help her raise a lot more than that. If she goes over $1000, the money will go to charity or to help build a website for Project Dark Horse, dedicated to exposing the bullshit of the Men’s Rights movement in general and AVFM in particular. More details on Dark Horse here, and on her fundraiser here on the GoFundMe page.
Yeah, um, maaayyyybe we’re being unfair to Shane, but you won’t call him out on being unfair to us by condescending to us and assuming his just-found-out-about-the-manosphere ass knows more about it than we do just because? On a site that’s literally about mocking that exact subject, and in what’s rather more our space than his space, since I don’t recall seeing him here before?
Dude comes in here to mansplain MRAs to the regulars, I don’t care if anyone’s “a little unfair” in telling him he’s unwelcome to behave that way here.
my apologies, lea, i guess my humor was a little to dry in regards to shane.
@auntie yes, he did. to his credit i still contend Esmay is the only person on staff who isn’t completely devoid of self awareness and humor.
Sworebytheprecious, but what business does JudgyBitch have to call the shots?
Dean has a slight edge over the rest of them but he’s still promoting hatred. He also made a despicable accusation about David recently.
On a lighter note, from r/MensRights where they posted about you attending:
Ha!
Unless it’s a White Walker apocalypse and then they’ll only want the boys.
Yes, but what colour jelly beanie are the meaniest?
I wouldn’t go so far as to distrust all men (or people in general) with eye contact issues since that’s a common trait of people on the autism spectrum and many anxiety disorders (which is not to say I think Paul Elam fits either; not being a psychologist, he comes across to me as narcissistic or even anti-social). I’m on the high end of the spectrum and I find looking at people’s faces in general to bring overwhelming feelings of being judged. It along with monotone, stilted speaking leads to problems with people thinking of me as unsettling before they get a chance to know me.
Something that I think warrants investigation is the question of “how many MRAs might have untreated autism spectrum disorder?” It’s certainly something that fits with the Nice Guy™ mythology since the tortured “logic” of “insert X niceness, receive Y sex and affection” is something that fits with a high-logic, low-social brain and is the kind of thing I’ve thought about as a teenager. It’s a delicate subject since it can easily lead into coming across as excusing their behavior or reducing people to a set of symptoms (a constant problem I see in discussions of mental illness).
If you want to look at that, you have to include the “being a misogynistic piece of shit”, which isn’t associated with autism, Asperger’s or any other condition. Given it’s been proven that the “But men don’t understand body language, waaaah!” and “Men don’t understand a soft no, waaaah!” bullshit is lying, that harassers and predators understand it all perfectly well but choose to ignore it, the whole idea of including looking at autism is not only ableist, it’s a huge red herring.
Also MRAs are the opposite of high-logic. They can’t logic to save themselves.
Let’s not conflate autism spectrum disorders with being an MRA. I haven’t met any people with autism spectrum disorders who are arseholes. Believing in MRA tropes is not a defining symptom of any of these conditions.
You may find that some people with autism spectrum disorders have some MRA beliefs, but that will be correlational and not causal. So fuck off with the “MRAs are that way because they’re not mentally ‘normal'” BS. Armchair pop psychology diagnosis is BS.
I think the “insert X niceness, receive Y sex and affection” concept is something that men are socialized to believe. It’s also not exclusive to MRAs at all. The same thinking is prevalent in films and television, and is kind of a cultural norm at this point. The transactional aspect of it could be ascribed to high-logic reasoning, but the idea as a whole is pretty deeply rooted in social history.
I side-eye the idea that looking on human socialising, let alone sexual intimacy, as transactional is logical at all. If anything it sounds more like straw-Vulcan stuff for those who’ve had a DIY basic-decency-and-empathy bypass. If that were logic, then logic could go take a running jump.
True. Then again, it’s difficult for me to untether the concepts of “logic” and “social” because they occur together for me. I was trying to address possibilities of the “high-logic, low-social” thinking that Alex M referenced. But my understanding of ASD is limited.
I really hate this new trend of blaming assholism on autism.
My knowledge of ASD is very limited too, but it’s what WWTH just said: there’s a trend of blaming assholism on it, and that sucks all round. There’s no way to do what Alex M mentioned without it being simultaneously ableist and implicitly giving assholes another get-out-of-jail-free card.
I should also mention that this “high logic” stuff gets my hackles up, because while it has little enough to do with logic in any formal sense, it has everything to do with mansplaining, men deriding and dismissing women’s opinions about anything as “too emotional”, and all the fucking shit misogynists go in for. I loathe people doing that.
I agree.. I didn’t mean to endorse blaming misogyny on autism, at all. I apologize if I came off that way.
Nah, it was what Alex said earlier. I am just so tired of people with clearly no psychological/ psychiatric training coming in and diagnosing people. Basically: unless you can see the person to assess them, you can’t diagnose. And that is also a point about people (including psychologists and psychiatrists) who “diagnose” the mental health conditions of historic people. There are now academic papers published on how this is a bad thing.
No need for apologieds, bunnybunny, you didn’t come off that way at all. Like pallygirl said, it flows from what Alex M said, and my hackles-up comment was more of a “this stuff always gets me” thing – though I’m sorry I didn’t make that clear!
::ears prick up::
Do you know of any available to read online? My second-most-loathed-writer is one who shat all over Louis and the Cardinal with her Freudian victim-blaming routine. I’d dearly love to see papers shredding that sort of shit.
Does anyone know how I can privately contact Swore? I really need to get into contact with her!
Anon, you can message her privately on reddit, though you have to sign up for an account to do that.
Of course. And they’ll probably give the excuse that threats were made.
After years and years downplaying every threat a feminist ever got, they’re sure making hay of threats now. .
Hi David, thanks for the information. Unfortunately, I prefer not to go through reddit for various reasons. I hope she’ll see this and comment with some other way!
Anon: you can also message her through the fundraiser website.
I can’t find the one I was looking for on psychological conditions, but here are two on medical conditions that seem to be full-text accessible:
http://www.peh-med.com/content/9/1/10
and
http://pmr.cuni.cz/Data/Files/PragueMedicalReport/pmr_110_2009_02/pmr2009a0016.pdf
Besides the fact that most psychiatric/psychological disorders are quite modern, and the terms cannot be back-translated to the language of historical figures, there is also the issue of:
– need to establish that symptom duration is correct
– need to ensure that alternative diagnoses are discounted (not bloody possible to do when your “patient” is long dead)
Standard clinical practice is also that the clinician needs to interact with the client. Obviously, this is not possible for deceased persons of interest.
There are also the following cultural influences:
– writings that are pro- the person will have suppressed negative behaviours whereas writings that are anti- the person will emphasize them, and may also suggest ones that didn’t actually occur
– there is evidence that psychiatric disorders are strongly influenced by current cultural mores, for example catatonic schizophrenia was one of the more common schizophrenias observed in women in the 19th century and there are clinicians now who have never seen this, also hysteria was a common diagnosis for women (with consequent uterus removal as the cure). Given this, and that few mental conditions were even recognised in the late 19th century, it is surely unwise to diagnose a 20th/21st century disorder onto a long-dead person.
– timing of onset is not well known for many people. Age at first onset is an important marker for some conditions, and this information is likely not well recorded in the historical record.
In conclusion, any psychiatric/psychological diagnosis given to a historical figure is heavily suspect. As is any medical diagnosis (try linking diagnoses based on the four humours to current diseases).