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.
2nd Wave feminism also gave us rape crisis centers and hotlines, domestic violence shelters, and the right to own property and have bank accounts/credit cards in our own names without a male guarantor. Huh, I wonder why screeching misogynist ragemonkeys might have a bit of a grudge against the women who created all of that?
As long as feminists see no problem with boys being burned to death but are outraged at girls being kidnapped by the same people,there will always be people ready to call out the feminists for the hate filled animals they truly prove themselves to be.
And dude, we’re like onto 3rd wave feminism and beyond. That’s because feminism is an actual human rights movement, that listens to criticism and (too slowly for some of us, but still) changes for the better.
Try to keep up.
This is just fucking stupid. I purchased a shiny new vibrator today. I got home about an hour ago and I’ve spent the whole time reading comments from Stoopid McShitforbrains. Where are my priorities?
I’m going to take that thing for a spin. It will probably make reading this nonsense easier.
Argenti: You also passed a link to the Paul R. Amato’s brief on interpreting divorce statistics. Mr. Amato does make some salient points about the possible dangers in the way divorce statistics are interpreted. Probably the most interesting point is that the divorces in a given year do not reflect the changes in demographics from the time a marriage is codified to the divorce decree. However, Mr. Amato fails to adequately explain how using the population of married women as his baseline corrects for this. Some of his points are less well received. Mr. Amato suggests that the CDC method of tabulating divorce rates tends to include too many non-married populations like children. I am not sure that over a long enough timeline this is true or significant. The CDC also includes non-married populations in the calculation of marriage rates so these populations should tend to cancel out. He does mention that not all states report marriage and divorce statistics. However, he gives lip service to the fact that it is only a few states and the sample size is obviously statistically significant. If shifting demographics of non-married populations had a major impact, we would expect to see some unexplained variance in the divorce rate over time. Looking at the CDC numbers from 2000-2011 the rate remains constant right around 50%. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm. Mr. Amato does herald a call to examine computation methods. He does not provide adequate information in his brief to explain the high variance in his conclusions or to take them at face value. The independently published divorce rate statistics for Nebraska are 50% for first marriages and 60% for second marriages.
Weirdwoodtreehugger: You posit from the Massachusetts Gender Bias Study that there is equity in child custody outcomes pursuant to a divorce. This study was conducted through a series of survey questions presented to a panel of judges. Dr. William Fabricius of the University of Arizona conducted a similar study of 30 judges in Arizona. While he found that most judges answered with gender neutrality, there was material bias found among some in favor of women. He also covered Stamps, 2002 in his literary review indicating that material bias did exist in Southern States. Certainly the existence and intensity of this problem varies by region. A recent review of divorce case outcomes in the State of Nebraska indicated that mother’s received sole custody 64.3% of the time and father 15.3% of the time. Over 40% of the cases were contested. Even within the State, outcomes varied by region with fathers receiving custody 0% of the time in at least one county.
I did not catch the handle of the person who posted about child rearing outcomes for same sex couples. This is a salient point. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently did a review on this and found that from the studies conducted the outcomes were similar for lesbian and heterosexual populations. Not as much was known about gay men due to a lack of investigation, but preliminary studies indicated parity as well. It should be noted that this is just one review and they did fail to address control methods for certain factors like adoption rates between the three populations. There were other points of note like the assertion that lesbian couples while more nurturing than heterosexual couples also had much higher separation rates. However, it does bring to light important questions about the true value of gender roles in childrearing. The distinction is important because it has bearing on the “best interest of the child” custody standard use in most states. In any case, the study maintained preference for two parent families over single parent families as healthy for children. Aside from the obvious civil rights ramification, gay marriage could be a great thing for heterosexual fathers seeking parity in custody proceedings.
From my view point parity does not exist in child custody in a lot of areas. It is hard to know how far reaching this is because frankly we aren’t looking as hard as we could and there is a lot of special interest data out there which is hard to identify and ferret through. Having a gender centric narrative about this is dangerous because there is too much at risk for the individual stakeholders (back to my original thesis that a men’s rights group is a good thing). It needs to be a balanced conversation. This is certainly not the only issue affecting men, but it is where I would like to start (maybe we can talk about circumcision next). So here are my questions to a female centric audience. Do you think there is parity in child custody outcomes? Do you think fathers are important? What do you think a father should do when he wants to be involved with his child(ren) and the mother does not want this? I welcome your responses.
Also getting pretty tired of the radical feminist = asshole trope around here. Guess what? You’re talking to one right now.
(The radfems – eeevil stuff is extra funny when the people doing it quote Audre Lorde.)
I don’t question that when people speak disparagingly of radical feminists they are referring to very unpleasant people but people who do that don’t realise that there are radical feminists who don’t represent the unpleasantness they’re railing against. It’s this awful conundrum where, yeah, the people being complained about ARE awful but the people being complained about AREN’T radical feminism. They’re just a circle of individuals who fall under the radfem label but share various ideas that are unique to their circle and differentiate them from general radical feminism.
What? There’s no radfem hivemind either?
Marinerachel: Go enjoy your new toy!
While radical feminism in general has always been transmisogynistic, the origin of transmisogyny (what you haphazardly term “the anti-trans movement”) is patriarchy. You don’t seem to know much about transmisogyny at all, which isn’t surprising since you refer to men and women as “the sexes” (which shows that you uncritically accept the category of biological sex).
You’re part of the problem, and you most likely aren’t a trans woman either, so please just GTFO. We don’t need anymore reactionary idiots appropriating our discourses.
When my great grandmother was born, women could not vote. She was a ruined woman, because she had been raped and the first man who wanted to marry her was a financially stable older man. It was marry him or be disowned. She was slapped around by her own mother on her wedding day for protesting the wedding one final time.
When my grandmother was young and newly divorced from her husband, she could not get child support and could not get a loan without a man to sign for her. Her father was dead, her brother abroad and her husband off with his mistress. So she could not get a car, thus could not get to work, thus could not feed, house or clothe her two children. At that time workplace sexual harassment was the norm.
When my mother was a teen she could not get an abortion without parental consent and was forced to carry to term a pregnancy she did not want and marry a boy who was also still in high school. The school kicked her out when she began to show, even though she was an honor roll student who had previously earned (but now had to turn down) a scholarship. My father was allowed to stay in school. My mother had to finish school in a special class, hidden from the sight of “decent” people. The marriage lasted 4 years, the resentment of one another, a lifetime.
My daughters and I get to live in a very different world thanks to the hard work of feminists who came before us. Yet, there were and are people who resent our rights being acknowledged. They want us to have to live with the same inequality as the generations that came before us. The backlash against women seeking equality has always been and is still ongoing. It does not mean that we should not have our rights acknowledged and protected or that we’ve “gone too far”. It means there are still bigoted assholes who prefer the days when women were kept “in their place”. Fuck that and fuck them. We’re never going back. I don’t care what it takes, my kids and their kids will not be subjected to that.
So here is my question to the moderator and anyone else for self-examination. Is this a serious blog that you think matters? I levied an intentionally controversial remark in my first post to see what would happen. The behavior was highly rewarded. The post landed immediately and was received with more responses than any other on this thread. Most were not worth commenting on, but some were excellent. By my third post, I confined myself to bland data mining and prefaced opinion. These posts were blocked at first then delayed by moderation to limit detection. Was this because they did not reward the site by inciting controversy? The hyperbolic tactics of a Voice for Men that you seem to loath may be in full throw here. The men’s conference promoted these tactics as efficacious and even structural to information age debate. While I do not find this particularly constructive or appealing, I thought I would go on a female centric website and try them out. I am open to new ideas (even ones that I do not like) and I wanted to see for myself. Unfortunately, you seem to give credence to their model. So back to the original point…are you trying to affect informed change through open discourse or attempting to codify opinions that you like to hear through brow beating and censorship? If the latter is true, is that not the making of a hate group and how would you condemn others for doing the same? How do you think this might influence my future behavior?
Justin, you’re jumping to all sorts of conclusions.
You were put on moderation because some of the commenters here were troubled by the victimn-blaming stuff in your first comment. I didn’t put you on moderation until I was contacted by commenters.
Before I put you on moderation, the spam filter (which I have no control over) grabbed that one long comment you tried to post multiple times. I’m not sure why the spam filter grabbed it; glancing at it it doesn;t look like it had too many links, which is often why the spam filter grabs things.
I let though your later comments becuse they didn’t contain anything inflammatory.
People may not have answered because, I dunno, maybe they were sick of dealing with you, in part b/c it’s clear that you aren’t arguing in good faith? (Something you’ve now affirmed with your latest comment.)Or because it’s now the middle of the night for most readers of this blog? Because your points aren’t that interesting? I don’t know.
But if you think you’ve carried out some sort of scientific “experiment” with us, uh, you really haven’t. All you’ve proved is that you can piss people off by making inflammatory statements. That’s really not a great insight.
Did you read the whole thread? This has been addressed. The facts show that there is no bias against fathers in family courts. But apparently your feelings invalidate facts in your “point of view”
Are you fucking kidding me? You got put in moderation because someone complained about you. Because your rape apologia caused harm. There are rape survivors who comment/read here and it is really disgusting of you to make a rape apologia comment for a social experiment you wanted to try for funzies.
You’re an asshole and if you are here in good faith (although we all know you aren’t) you’d apologize profusely.
I levied an intentionally controversial remark in my first post to see what would happen.
What happens is that you were trolling, and got caught.
You said women were the cause of rape. Sorry, but that’s not merely, “controversial”, it’s abusive. It’s a strong indica (from years of experience with others who use the same style and tone; sorry cupcake, but you aren’t special), that you are willing to engage in abusive behavior. It’s a moderate indica of a willingness to engage in targetted abuse
Because we value this as place we can interact with each other, and those who wish to argue (as you are) for the POV of misogynists, without undue stress, or actual psychological harm, it has been decided that those who engage in that sort of abusive rhetoric will be moderated, so as to prevent them from having an unfettered ability to inflict willful harm.
You made your bed, you get to lie in it.
If someone shows their ass in their first comment why would people bother to keep talking to them? Justin is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.
@farkennel: Don’t you find it sorta strange that MRAs hem and haw about how the media and feminists and everyone else are “only focusing on the girls getting kidnapped when the same people are BURNING THE BOYS” yet…you don’t see them trying to alert the presses? Or get some petitions or protests going? Or donate to charities? Or anything even remotely resembling help? That it just seemed like MRAs are using the deaths of those boys to smear the people they perceive as enemies further?
I find it hard to believe that feminists don’t care about those boys dying because pretty much any decent human being would care about those boys, those girls, ALL OF THOSE PEOPLE dying. They got the word out about those girls…if you’re so dang certain that those feminists aren’t doing anything to help those boys, then maybe instead of whining about it on the internet you should actually HELP. That’d probably make you the only MRA to have actually done something about it. If there’s anything more sickening than the implication that there weren’t feminists helping those boys out, it’s the implication that MRAs are genuinely aware of true, actual, unadulterated 100% for real mistreatment of men and boys, but DO NOT CARE to actually do anything constructive about it.
Are you SURE that you’re not a hate filled animal? I’m sure you’re an animal at least, all humans are animals. We just don’t like to admit it for some reason.
No.
Justin’s hypothesis, confirmed: TROLLING WORKS.
Good Grief, I guess Justin felt his mind-numbing obtuse walls of text weren’t confusing enough so he’s responded to several posts in the Pizzey thread here.
@Justin
I swear on all that’s holy that if start a discussion on circumcision next I will, in emails and comments, beg, grovel and beseech David to ban you and may even circulate a petition or two. I’ve done that with zero trolls before you but I find you impossibly irritating, your horrific writing style, shitball statistics and insufferable bad faith arguments make no positive contribution and are driving me batty. The line is drawn here. This far, no further.
Translation: I deliberately behaved like an asshole, and people duly called me an asshole.
Can you get a grant for this kind of groundbreaking sociological research?
Actually, when it comes to deliberately posting victim-blaming rape apologetics in an avowedly feminist and anti-misogynist space, “asshole” is a fairly considerable understatement.
@Justin
Almost everything you wrote here is torturous and borderline gibberish, but you are pummeling the English language in the post containing these three sentences. Put down the thesaurus and slowly back away.
I’m hoping you will go fuck yourself and leave.