Well, the AVFM conference is over. I thought I’d post links to some of the media coverage today. I’m not sure Paul Elam and co have quite attained the level of respectability they were going for with the conference. It probably didn’t help that their PR gal, Janet Bloomfield, kept posting about “whores” and then, during the final panel discussion, delivered a passionate defense of “doxxing.”
Anyway, here’s the press coverage today:
Men’s rights conference takes aim at feminism, by Adam Serwer, MSNBC.
Serwer presented a sardonic take on the conference, full of revealingly awful details. Some highlights:
What animated most of the speakers at the conference was feminism and how it needed to be defeated. …
At the conference, feminism was responsible for turning wives against their husbands, bleeding them dry in divorce proceedings and separating them from their children, levying false accusations of rape and abuse against good men, or creating an ever-present culture of hatred where men are vilified.
Though men’s rights activists who hosted the conference often say sexual assault against men isn’t taken seriously, the audience laughed when speaker Fred Jones mentioned his fears about his son being raped after being arrested in New Orleans.
“He’s kinda small and kinda cute, good looking, you know what I mean?” Jones said. “You know what they do with –” Jones cut himself off. But the audience laughed.
Barbara Kay, a columnist for Canada’s National Post, argued that … [r]ape on college campuses … was a myth perpetrated by man-haters …
“The vast majority of female students allegedly raped on campus are actually voicing buyer’s remorse from alcohol-fueled promiscuous behavior involving murky lines of consent on both sides,” she said, drawing chuckles from the audience. “It’s true. It’s their get-out-of-guilt-free card, you know like Monopoly.” The chuckles turned to guffaws.
The First International Conference on Men’s Issues: Day 1, by Arthur Goldwag, Hatewatch
On the SPLC’s Hatewatch blog, Goldwag — who wrote that famous SPLC takedown of the Men’s Rights movement — delivered up a surporisingly straightforward account of the first day of the conference. Some highlights:
A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam warned attendees to keep low profiles, lest they be harassed by protesters, and made much of the police presence he had secured. There were indeed uniformed policemen on site, and quite a few black-shirted security guards. There were camera crews from Vice and a number of reporters. But the only sounds to be heard outside the VFW Hall were chirping birds and the hum of passing traffic—there wasn’t a protestor in sight. I counted between 150 and 200 people in the hall. …
The Canadian Senator Anne Cools, who opened the conference, spoke at great length about how feminism has hijacked Canada’s family courts, quoting Blackstone on women’s rights, the song “Frankie and Johnnie” and even Euripides to give lie to the supposed feminist myth that women were historically oppressed. Frankie and Medea, she implied, both gave as good as they got. Erin Pizzey, the well-known novelist, ex-feminist, and founder of Chiswick Women’s Aid, one of the first women’s shelters, indicted the movement she had once helped lead as a radical Marxist plot to turn women against men, destroy families, and create a billion dollar social welfare industry.
My Experience at the First International Men’s Conference So Far, by Helen Smith, PJ Media
And then there was “Dr. Helen,” writing on her blog on the right-wing website PJ Media. Dr. H, one of the speakers at the AVFM conference, described her time amongst the MRAs as “quite a delight.” Indeed, her account was so chipper I found myself wondering if she had even attended the same conference as Serwer and Goldwag — or the conference I watched several hours of online.
The crowd of what looked to be about two or three hundred people were diverse and ranged from all ages to all ethnic backgrounds. There were more men there but almost as many women it seemed! … I was in awe and amazed at the great group of intellectual speakers and the audience who asked questions that were critically thought out and challenging.
Yeah, definitely a different conference.
She did have one worry, though: that other people were there to report on the conference besides her.
My only concern with the conference was the media that was present. It seemed that reporters from Time, MSNBC, GQ, and Vice.com were there. I got an uneasy feeling about a few of them though I suppose their stories could go either way, though I think I know which way to bet. There were a couple of women from Vice.com that we sat with at an appreciation dinner for speakers who seemed very nice but frankly, a bit clueless.
I’m guessing those women from Vice.com are a lot less “clueless” than Dr. H thinks.
See the AgainstMensRights subreddit for more discussions of the conference. I borrowed the pic for this post from here.
Re the marriage and divorce data, there have been huge societal attitudinal changes over time, such as:
– females having access to higher pay and greater variety of jobs
– females being able to stay employed in public sector jobs after marriage (the rule used to be that only one partner could be employed, and that would be the male)
– females becoming better educated (secondary school as well as post-school)
– the introduction of single parent benefits (I think early 1970s for NZ, YMMV)
– a greater acceptance of cohabitation, which in part has led to a higher proportion of out of wedlock births (I wish that term would go, it’s such a pearl-clutching one)
– there’s also structural changes in the population such as the proportion contributions from ethnic groups, who may have difference cultural/religious beliefs that relate to marriage (an obvious one being arranged marriages)
The HUGE difference too has been the introduction of no-fault divorce. Prior to that, where there were irreconcilable differences, there were instances when one partner would lie about having an affair so that a judge (yes, it used to be up to a judge, at least in NZ) would grant the divorce. As you can imagine, there were a lot of unhappy people in marriages who couldn’t get divorced because neither wanted to lie about being the one at fault.
Ergo: there is likely to be a selection bias difference between people getting married now and people getting married in decades past. For example, I would expect that moderately-to-strongly religious people would be marrying at higher rates than other groups.
Therefore, comparisons of divorce rates over time are a flawed measure because it’s not comparing apples with apples.
Conclusion: looking at divorce rates over time tells us nothing other than what the divorce rates are.
No offense to anyone who love stats, and the like but honestly fuck the stats. Stats in my view mean nothing in these philosophical (might i add possible spiritual.) matters.even if there where stats compiled by the most misogynist statistician in the world that proved every MRA talking point was bullshit. MRA’s (in fact any hate group) still would not understand why they can be the pieces of trash they are. or switch it around lets say the MRA stats were right and so what? it would not change my views on anything I would still be fighting for equality for everyone. For me this is where the waters get deep. in the end the only way to solve issues like this is to stop using the thing in your head and start using the one in your chest. sorry to get all preachy but i needed to say it.
Nope. Trying to get loving parents more involved is a good thing. Pretending that “getting fathers more involved” is always a good thing ignores the cases where fathers are abusive, refuse to be involved, etc. All feminists argue for is that women and children should be protected from abusive partners/fathers, which argues against some kind of blanket presumption that the father’s involvement is always a good thing.
But that is the rankest misandry, I know. Which is why MRAs regularly make fun of “the best interests of the child” as being somehow part of the feminist master plan. (Which it is, and that’s actually a good thing.)
I haven’t been reading Justin, because he’s an ass. I think I’ll go back to not reading him.
@Ken: well, statistics are important in the (feminist) sense that they tell us whether gender equality exists or not. How can one know there is inequality, or equality for that matter, if we don’t know the numbers? How can we tell if things are improving, or getting worse, over time without numbers? Proportions of females going into higher education, the female vs. male proportions in poverty post-divorce, gender pay gap, etc.
Back to the idea of fatherless households having worse outcomes for male children, what about households where the two parents are partnered but the father goes away a lot. (I know that mothers are also away for these reasons, but I’m focussing only on the fathers as that is the argument.) Like:
– whether the father is in the military and is posted away. That happened to me a lot as I had a father in the navy and he was away for 6 months at a time on naval postings.
– fathers in the merchant navy
– fathers who are in jobs where they need to work away from home for extended periods of time, such as those who work on oil platforms, who have to do field work, travelling salespeople
– fathers who work in a different place than where the household residence is, so live somewhere else during the week and come home for the weekend
– fathers who are jailed, and the relationship is sustained over that time and the parties are back together once the father leaves jail
Fathered households includes all these types of households, as well as the one where the father comes home each day. If having an absent father is the issue, then one would expect to see that these uncommon types of fathered households having negative outcomes for children. I haven’t noticed, for example, that military brats like me have poorer outcomes.
@pallygirl
Well I understand what you mean. I would point out that while i agree stats.can help us understand these ideas they can never point out true equality. even if the numbers are 50/50 on thing like college graduates, enroll, pay rate,ect. it tells us nothing about the underlying feeling, attitudes and thoughts that lead to those numbers being unequal or hopefully one day equal. so until we fix or understand those untangle things the person being made into the “other” for whatever reason will never be truly equal
Justin: pecunium: To answer you. I am interested in all the facets of the question you presented regarding custodial parity. I was also interested in which facets you would tackle. I did not want to lead the witness. Please feel free to address any or all that you like.
Non-responsive.
One, you didn’t say you were interested in any aspects of the discussion. You posed an unanswerable yes or no question as if it were relevant; having loaded it with connotative language (female centric audience) implying there is a “correct” answer, and that the people here were going to get it wrong.
As to the “leading the witness” aspect of things, you failed. Yes no question do lead the witness. They are useful in a courtroom because individual lawyers aren’t interested in getting the truth, but in painting a picture which favors their client. As such the desire is to limit the response. so as to avoid introducing facts which run counter to the narrative interpretation beneficial to the story the attorney is trying to tell.
Futhermore how a yes/no pair is presented will influence the answer (your was worded in a way which, had the interogotory been face to face, would tend to garner a yes response).
The question is still not able to be answered, as you have still failed to define your terms. which imlplies you aren’t asking in good faith. Reading your other comments/replies (even without your admission of trolling) makes this more apparent; which means any question you ask, which doesn’t have defined terms is probably being presented in such a way as to allow you to use it to declaim a lack of understanding/concern for something “important” or just an out right hostility to the male race.
Please feel free to address the reasons you 1: chose to engage classic trolling, 2: thought you were entitled to continue without let or hindrance, and 3: having admitted to doing a hurtful thing, knowingly; and with intent, you were surprised enough to attempt to shame people into allowing you to have the unfettered ability to do it again?
Having done that, feel free to explain why we should give a shit what you think; in light of your cavalier treatment of facts, asshole nature and inability to break comments into coherent elements; esp. in light of the less than coherent content.
@Ken: thanks for the response. Yes, stats are just one piece of information, we also need an idea of “what should be” (philosophy/ideology) and also qualitative information – talking to people about their barriers, goals, and so forth.
The stats tell us what is and what was, they don’t tell us why, or even whether the numbers or trends are important. 🙂
Hooray for multidisciplinary practices!
“but I am not convinced that this is the best place to start for policy makers.”
…um, what? No, really, regardless what the divorce rate is, how you define that, etc, what do policy makers have to do with this?
“With regard to the fatherlessness data. I was not suggesting that these outcomes are deterministic, neither is the website. The presentation is certainly a little agenda based.”
Just a little, yeah. Or maybe they biased those stats as much as possible without breaking them completely. You clearly grasp stats, so you must get the difference between “X% of Y group are Z” and “of group Y, X% are Z, which is a Q fold risk” — the former is a scare tactic, and bad math. Anyone looking at “[large number]% of [bad thing] can be contributed to fatherlessness” isn’t going to ask “but what’s the absolute risk increase?”. Even for pushing your agenda it’s a shitty way to do math since sure, it might outrage, but if they mentally flip it to “[large number]% of fatherless kids are [bad thing]”, they’re gonna go “common sense says no” and cease listening entirely.
“They are trying to get fathers more involved, which is a good thing.”
Which is why something more like “if you stay in your kid’s life, your kid has 1/X the risk of Y” is better than scare tactics and misleading data.
“From this view point, whether or not other factors play in is not immediately important to their goal. Certainly some factors like single parenting and poverty are coupled.”
Um, if the goal here involves policy makers? Then yeah, these things matter. If poor people are more likely to be single parents, then decreasing the number of people living in poverty would decrease the number of single parent households, and all the bad outcomes correlated with that.
cloudiah,
Fascinating and disturbing. Thank you.
Anybody want to take a ride on my teal deer?
I looked it up and there is alot of misinformation floating around among the inactivist crowd, (Thanks also for that word. I am stealing it.) but fibroblasts themselves are really neat.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibroblast
The company that makes the infamous cream is called SkinMedica. Here’s the product:http://www.skinmedica.com/skin-care-products/tns-essential-serum
They do use fibroblasts, but they are lab grown from 20 yr old donated (by the parents, not the baby. So, still not cool.) foreskin, not from freshly purchased from hospitals, sold without our knowledge foreskins. According to the labs that sell fibroblasts for research etc, they only accepted the single foreskin used to make the fibroblasts with full and informed consent.
Any connective tissue will do to make fibroblasts, but new baby tissue is best and foreskins are the only parts we routinely remove from new babies. Rather than throw them out, they used them to heal people.
To be continued…
Teal Dear, Part II
Then a shifty cosmetic company decided to use the fibroblasts to sell their worthless crap in a jar.
According to this article: http://www.sdcitybeat.com/sandiego/article-7356-the-$140-million-foreskin.html
Protein rich culture? So, collagen.
That’s not going to do anything to make your wrinkles disappear.
http://www.yourbeautyadvisor.com/2012/10/skin-myths-debunked-collagen-and-elastin/
So, the cream is just cream and in no way special. This super expensive cream may as well be mayonnaise.
So, no. hospitals are not selling babies’ foreskins to cosmetic companies, nor are actual foreskins in the product. The product doesn’t do anything special. It’s a scam. Also, the parents who donated that foreskin thought it was going to be used to heal people in need, not fleece rich people. So, yeah, not ethical.
I can find no reputable sources showing that hospitals can sell human remains or pieces parts of living people without consent. That’s crapola. Foreskins do not appear to be in demand.
When my husband worked in a surgery, even small parts like toes went to the morgue. A foreskin might just be chucked in a bio-hazard bag and disposed of like bio-hazards are but it would not be squirreled away in secret to be sold to a lab. That’s not legal.
Ken L
You find facts get in the way of your armchair philosophizing?
Statistics can inform us of so much, not everything, but alot. Why would you discount them as meaningless? Really? “Fuck stats”?
You prefer ignorance and conjecture?
I’m not the only one who’s just scrolling happily past Justin’s teal deers, right?
@cassandra: I’m with you, my eyes are glazing over.
Nope.
I gave up after he said that he’d “levied” a remark.
and the levy was dry?
@cassandrakitty
You wouldn’t scroll past Justin’s mutilated “fatherlessness data” if you thought fathers were important. Whatever, typical female centric website commentator.
But if he really cared he’d make the effort to present his ideas in a more digestible format, wouldn’t he? Tsk tsk, Justin.
May I start the counting game until the trolls go away or I’ll just start it if it just makes anyone feel better… 1
And also..
Lea
“But last night an MRA in the comments over at Motor City Muckraker was claiming that women are responsible for infant circumcision because baby foreskins were sold to cosmetic companies to make wrinkle creams for women.”
http://m.quickmeme.com/meme/3q1dkb
Not often I get one who actually understands some level of stats, so I’m sorta enjoying this. I’d enjoy it more if he’d acknowledge that using misleading data to advance your agenda is bad form.
Because I can, let me display, with an ice cream example:
Facts here —
Ice cream flavors are chocolate and “everything else”
Rainbow sprinkles are gross and bad
40% of people prefer chocolate ice cream
10% of the total population likes the sprinkles
So, if you read “80% of people who like rainbow sprinkles like chocolate ice cream” (a), you’re gonna assuming that chocolate ice cream makes people like shitty things. Or you’re gonna go “no way does anyone like those things that much”.
But if you read “people who eat chocolate ice cream are four times as likely to eat rainbow sprinkles” (b), no chance of that “no way…” chiming in.
Now how about “8% of people eat chocolate ice cream and rainbow sprinkles” (c)?
Or “twice as many chocolate ice cream fans eat rainbow sprinkles than you’d expect if chocolate ice cream didn’t make them taste better” (d)?
Now, idk which would be better between b and d, b is assuming that the rate at which non-chocolate fans eat rainbow sprinkles is the expected rate for all of society, d is assuming that the observed rate — 10% of people like rainbow sprinkles — is the expected rate. A though? Definitely misleading, and c is absolute risk, which is kinda useless when making a point about relative risk. Otoh, if you want to increase rainbow sprinkle sales, then any of them, combined with the absolute rate of eating them being 10%, would tell you to target chocolate ice cream fans. Of you’re trying to prove that chocolate ice cream increases the liking of sprinkles? C.
And now my sleeping pill is kicking in, g’night guys!
2, night, and people who prefer chocolate flavoured ice cream are in the wrong. 🙂
If Justin’s so concerned with fatherlessness, he probably shouldn’t be defending the MRM. Sure, when a man has a sob story about being denied custody the MRAs will take his side. Even if said father was abusive or neglectful and denied custody for good reason.
However, the MRAs also worry about spermjacking all the time and believe they should have the right to abandon their children, leaving them wait for it… fatherless! The MRM is not a good movement if your goal is more fathers involved in their children’s lives.
Also, despite the recent “Farrell knows famous people!” Lennon anecdote, I can’t imagine most MRAs being all that supportive of men who want to be the primary caregiver to their children. They’re too prone to shaming any man who isn’t Manly McMachoBalls enough.
Nope – he’s a pompous blowhard who badly needs a copy-editor. I bet he really rates himself as both a thinker and a writer, but the evidence is overwhelmingly against him.
And if he isn’t an actual rape apologist, he’s someone who has no problem with posting blatant rape apologetics in an attempt to be “controversial”, regardless of whether it’s an appropriate space or whether there may be triggering side-effects on the readers. Gosh, he’s so edgy.