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.
brooked, I’m with you on banning and even petitions to that effect if this imbecile tries that topic.
Can we fine him $50 for each act of aggression towards the English language?
Seconded. My internal copy-editor was writhing in agony at every painful syllable.
And I’d have thought the definition of “a hate group” is a group that indiscriminately expresses hatred for people, usually on the basis of something they cannot control. As opposed to expressing specific dislike for an individual rape apologist who by his own admission has deliberately attempted to rile the commentariat here.
You don’t even get that reaction by posting something controversial – you get it by deliberately and cynically trying to push people’s buttons before doing them the courtesy of letting them get to know you first. In other words, behaving like an asshole.
So how is calling out an asshole for being an asshole equivalent to “a hate group”?
I want to smack him in the face with that thesaurus like a knight challenging someone to a duel.
Because you hurt their fee-fees. Duh.
Of course. How unobservant of me. I do apologise.
It’s always amusing to me to see how antifeminists/MRAs actually seem to think that feminists don’t critique and analyse their own movement; that feminist positions have grown and changed over time. It’s like they feel that they need to teach us about the “evil” the feminists did, as we are all just misguided children. How we need their wisdom…
Who gives a flying fuck? (Hint for Justin: no one).
Well you know that those feeeeeeeemales can’t do any activism themselves! They just need a man to guide them!
The fact that they’re seeking to reverse the gains for women’s rights in the past century or two is just coincidence!
[/sarcasm]
titanblue – wait, is that quote suggesting that it’s our fault because they misbehaved?
Wow, way to weasel out of responsibility. And they say the MRM is about making sure people take responsibility for their own actions. *eye roll*
ok, why is my wordpress dashboard now displaying everything in turkish? not comments or posts but all the settings, etc.
Hey, Justin. Read this.
The Economist’s style guide’s entry on jargon.
… and it’s back to normal. Weird
Justin’s first post was so appalling on so many levels that it was hard to wrap my brain around the wrongness. How about this charming sentence:
“Do a lot of raping”? JFC. I see what you did there, you smug little shit. You did a fine job of portraying feminists as mouthy man-haters who accuse all men of being rapist while pretending to be sympathetic to rape victims. The ban hammer can’t come down soon enough, IMO.
I got that too.
Tuhaf.
David – could have been worse, could have been
SpanishRussian.Is Spanish the one that uses that funny alphabet?
I believe Spanish is a crazy moon language.
(That’s a Tick cartoon reference and probably isn’t true.)
I believe Spanish and Russian have the same alphabet.
(That’s a joke. Reference to a legendary early troll.)
Turkish is pretty weird though, at least to an English speaker like me.
Oh, look, Justin came back. I couldn’t make my way through his new batch of blather, except to see that he tried to justify triggering a bunch of rape and abuse survivors by classifying it as a social experiment. Sure thing, exploit those human emotions for all their worth. If only we could all be as highly rational as you, Justin. Vulcan-like you are (if Vulcans were deliberate jerks who liked to stir the pot, that is).
Oh, look, he admitted that he pulled all of his damning statistics off the first link that comes up when you google “statistics fatherless children.” I found that when I double-checked his facts yesterday. It’s a blog. Which is exactly what he said that we feminists could not use for a source and still maintain intellectual integrity. I thought, he must have found these somewhere else. He is rational, he must have something to back this up, and my mortal mind and inferior computer skills just aren’t hacking it. But nope, here it is. Got ’em from a blog. Didn’t check the source materials, didn’t even bother to link it in the original “challenge.” Just copy-pasted and called the rest of us lazy. Double standard, what’s that?
And you wonder why no one else will pick up your gauntlet, Justin?
Gah! “for all their” = “for all they’re”
I’m very disappointed in myself, that one is a particular pet peeve of mine. 🙁
Love the smell of assfax in the morning.
So Justin thought he was in moderation because he was too boring in the posts after his “successful” one? Did he not read the responses up to the point someone said they emailed David? And i wasted time responding to him. Blah.
… It smells like… idiocy.
Second wave feminism also gave us gender-neutral job listings, put names to phenomena like marital rape, date rape and the glass ceiling, shone a light on women’s unpaid domestic labor, and fought for access to birth control and safe abortions. The second wave is the reason no one questioned me for going to college, forming my own career, living with a man I’m not married to, using birth control, or knowing the names of my sex organs and how they even work.
As for there being no backlash against the first wave: fucking LOL. Did you know the standard complaints about pants-wearing, castrating, ugly feminist harpies date back to the push for voting rights?
Don’t talk about shit you don’t even understand.
Which manosphere guru fed you that line? ‘Cause that’s a lot of bullshit and I doubt you came up with it on your own.
Allow me to answer that question with another question: how the hell does any of this “create rapists”?
This is not a debate blog. This is anot an educational blog. This is a mockery blog. Congrats on wasting so much time trying to “prove” something we all freely admit.
You hurt people. On purpose. And consider their pain a “reward”. I don’t even have words for how fucking appalling you are, but I hope you get banned for this.
t’s cute that you think you’re some kind of intellectual giant challenging people’s worldviews with your rehashed arguments, but no. You were on moderation because of the aforementioned hurting people. You’re not a threat, you’re just an asshole.
We didn’t ask or agree to be part of your ~social experiment~, assface, and you’re responsible for your own goddamn behavior.