Yesterday, A Voice for Men published an article so extreme, so hateful, so beyond the pale, that even Paul Elam, the site’s founder, was taken aback by it. Elam, who said he hadn’t read the article before other editors on the site posted it, claimed in a comment that when he finally did read it, it made him literally sick to his stomach.
Today, he took the extraordinary step – for AVFM – of taking down the article and offering an apology for publishing a piece so “counter to every aspect of our mission and values.” (It’s still up, for the time being, in Google cache; the original can also be found here.)
So what did this terrible, terrible article say? Brace yourself.
It said that Emma Watson’s recent United Nations speech on feminism … made some good points.
While the author of the piece, a tech dude turned “dating expert” named Jeb Kinnison, took the standard MRA swipes at the alleged evils of third-wave feminism, he argued that Watson’s version of feminism represented a kind of “equity feminism which is equally concerned with men’s rights.”
Then he described Watson as “very, very smart, and wise beyond her years … .”
I know, I know. Horrifying.
But that wasn’t even the worst part of Kinnison’s piece. In his conclusion, he actually suggested that
The smart and civilized aren’t spending their time nursing grievances based on sex, gender, race, or religion. If only the most intelligent voices were as amplified as the voices of ignorance and hate promoted by the grievance-mongering misandrists of third-wave feminism as well as insecure male misogynists.
Yes, that’s right: An article in AVFM actually acknowledged that some of those in the Men’s Rights ranks might actually be – gasp! – misogynists.
Naturally, such heresy could not stand. In the comments, a fight broke out between those who hated the article, and those who also hated it but felt that criticizing AVFM about anything was terrible and counterproductive and, hey, remember to donate to AVFM during the Fall Fundraiser!
In the former camp, the most outspoken critic was Nick Reading of Men’s Rights Edmonton, posting under the alias Eric Tiberius Duckman, who bluntly warned that
This article is disgraceful. If uncle Jeb here imparts any more of his mangina wisdom on AVFM, I’ll be seriously considering pulling my support and encouraging others to do likewise.
Elam was having none of this – very poor taste, especially during AVFM’s Fall Fundraiser! He responded to Reading’s threats to take his ball and go home with an indignant comment defending the editors who ran Kinnison’s piece and tearing into prodigal Nick:
[O]ur editors did their job and I am 100% supportive of that.
To be even more frank, even less appealing to me than this article is tantrums and ultimatums from readers attempting to exert editorial control by threatening to leave if they see content they don’t like.
Then apparently Elam decided that he didn’t support the editors 100% after all. In another comment, he declared that
This is the most overly generous, myopic interpretation of Watson’s speech I have seen, including feminist websites. It is literally embarrassing in its reductionist dismissal of issues unique to men and boys. …
I could write an entire article on what is wrong with this piece, but I am just too busy right now.
Throwing up.
Once he finished up with this, he took the piece down.
And AVFM’s Fall Fundraiser was saved!
Hey, who remembers John Ashcroft and the Spirit of Justice?
For you young pups, the Spirit of Justice is a statue in the DOJ of a woman with one bare breast and John Ashcroft, attorney general under George Bush and all-around terrible person, prudishly had it hidden behind a curtain.
Queue many jokes, including this parody song that ends with:
“Now when he makes a statement
You can see him on the tube
He has curtained off the statue
But you’ll still see one big boob.”
@katz – yes, I remember that!! Ugh … John freakin’ Ashcroft. Huge topic of conversation my junior year of high school – which was a conservative private school in a very liberal community. Half the class thought he was the greatest attorney general ever, the other half thought he was a terrible person who would do away with all our civil liberties.
Hmmmm, that description reminds me of the Penaten Creme my mom used on me and my sibs when we were in diapers. It’s quite thick and gunky and opaquely yellowish-white, although the most soothing thing in the world for rashes and as a night treatment for inflamed zits (and I used it for that long into adulthood, too). I’d be afraid of getting it on my clothes, though, so that’s a serious drawback. That stuff is hard to wash out. I will scout the foot-care aisles of the local drugstores to see what else they’ve got. If there’s any diabetic foot cream that goes on reasonably invisible, it might just work…and if not, I’ll have to get busy in the kitchen and concoct something.
LBT’s powder suggestion sounds great, though. And cheap, too!
Re: all the (avian) tits and stuff: Here are some nice boobies!
http://blogs.friendlybeings.com/fun/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/boobies-580×464.jpg
And here are some very nice tits:
http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~hart/humor/nice-tits.gif
itsabeast: If “Updates from my boner” isn’t a Tumblr already I’d be very surprised.
“Dark – still so dark… Also I think the zipper hates me.”
Keep the notes from your boner in your pocket is a popular response on Tumblr to unsolicited opinions, though it does not have a tag yet.
Well, hey, good I got that knocked out…
Regarding the assholes making jokes on Fox:
Most people seem to have missed the point.
The two guys were actually publicly humiliating their female co-host live on the air. Putting her in her place. Everyone else just got the shot scatter.
…Jokes that are passive-aggressive bullying are not funny jokes.
I hope that the powder works for you, Bina! I have only heard good things about it from others, never used it myself.
Am I the only one who was relieved that this headline was a joke? Like, who really wants to contemplate the existence of an article so heinously sexist that Paul Elam would pull it?
Welp, I just placed my order for that powder, so here’s hopin’. At any rate, I’ll at least smell nice. Jasmine and vetiver sounds like a lovely combination.
First off, knock of the ableism, spukikitty. You’ve commented and read here long enough to know better.
Second, there are already plenty of other ways of using MRA – Male Rape Apologists, for instance – to show what they’re about.
Third, given that MRAs is the term most people know, it’s a fucking BAD idea to play No True Scotsman and say that AVfMers etc aren’t “real” MRAs. They are. That’s the whole point: the MRM is entirely about male supremacy. Making up another term that nobody outside this blog knows is a great way to play their game for them and let them off the hook for anyone who doesn’t know them.
Also, the GPM as a basis for decent sorts? Maybe years ago, but it got bad enough for Ozymandias to quit writing there.
Didn’t the “Good Men Project” publish Hugo Schwyzer? And didn’t he quit because they weren’t feminist enough?
As for that Fox News guy and “boobs on the ground”, Jon Stewart did a pretty good takedown.
GMP is very hit and miss these days. They’ll come out with something brilliant and then two posts down will be some awful dudebro apologia. I tend to not visit there and work off the assumption that if there’s something worthwhile from there it’ll find its way to me via Twitter, Facebook and sites like here. 🙂
Nuke the site from orbit.
It’s the only way to be sure.
@DJG: Dear. God. I…I am only just envisioning the full spectrum of horror that kind of program could be twisted into in the red states.
I guess that every time I hear a guy talking about how women have smaller brains and are therefor less intelligent as a rule (never mind that it’s cell density that makes all the difference, not size. What is it when men and their obsession with large things?), or talking about how the reason women are weaker than men is because we don’t like physical labor, or hearing a guy call me sexist when I point out that men have more muscle mass as a rule even though I never once expressed that this is a sign of superiority…
Well, I guess I’m just going to have to flip a table and stalk off. And also move to a city as soon as possible because the small town/country Wisconsin life is just sucking the life out of me.
Btw, I totally heard those examples, and many others, spoken out loud in meat space. Anyone who thinks those attitudes exist only in anonymous comment sections are dead wrong.
And now I want to play Dead Space. I love that franchise.
I’m sitting here quietly choking with laughter now …
Yeah, mandatory gender education would probably just turn into mandatory gender misinformation.
Cloudiah: That would be a talgoxe, a blåmes, a svartmes and a stjärtmes from where I’m sitting. 🙂 Guess tit=mes.
Regarding the Good Men Project, actually, lots of people in a Swedish Facebook feminist group shared an article from that site some time ago. It was a father who wrote about how wrong it is for fathers to be all “protective” about their daughters’ virginity and shit, and how fathers ought to recognize their daughters’ right to autonomously decide whether and with whom they wanna have sex. That was a perfectly sensible article, so maybe it’s just a big mix over there.
But I’m not gonna go to a site and read it if they keep mixing some sensible stuff with truly awful stuff. And yeah, Ozy, who by and large was very understanding and soft towards people with MRA leanings (although I overall liked Ozy and thought zie wrote some good stuff, and I think, as said before, that if it feels right for a certain person to be all soft and understanding and keep up a feminist conversation with MRA leaning types that’s their prerogative) eventually upped and left. If I remember correctly it was because of the shitty rape apologia I wrote about above; that shit made zir think that zie’d had enough with that site.
@Lordpabu: Funny thing is, I’ve heard several feminists say that women are probably weaker than men merely because women aren’t encouraged to be as physical as men by today’s society. Which is so weird. If having more testosteron didn’t matter, why do athletes put illegal hormones in their bodies? Are they just completely misinformed? Doesn’t steroids do anything for performance after all?
My PT said that research shows that the average difference in physical strength is bigger between non-athletes than between top athletes, which indicates that social factors play some rule – for instance, loads of women who visit the gym are actually afraid to do serious weight-lifting because they think they’re gonna end up looking “too masculine” if they do, and surely this kind of sexist prejudices play some rule in making women weaker on average. But suggesting that that’s the whole explanation just seems incredibly far-fetched and unscientific.
::nods:: That’s how I was remembering Ozy when zie wrote here, but wasn’t sure if I’d got it right. Yeah, says something if GMP got bad enough for zir to leave.
@Dvärghundspossen:
The point is not that gender could never play a role in the average performance of men or women – the point is that they tell us nothing about the capabilities of individual men or women.
“Speak too directly and you’ll be dismissed as an angry, aggressive, scary bitch. Speak too indirectly and they’ll just ignore what you’re saying, other than the bits that don’t involve them giving up anything that they want or changing their behavior in any way.”
Yes, this. Totally agree. But, in my opinion, the solution should be to stop giving a damn if you sound bitchy angry and aggressive. I think we need to go towards a world where women accept the fact that men might find women bitchy and aggressive, and NOT CARE. If we keep raising women whose first and foremost goal is to be “nice”, we’re screwed.
@Vayit, I get the feeling that you think you’re contradicting me in some way? But you’re not. I totally agree that you shouldn’t, for instance, say that certain jobs are for men only because they’re physically demanding, since there are obviously lots of individual women who are stronger than lots of individual men.
Lordpau said that zie’d heard from sexist men that women are on average weaker than men because women engage in less hard work, and I responded that funnily enough I’ve heard the same claim from some feminists (although put in a different way, like, society represses women into being passive rather than women free-riding on the hard labour of teh menz). I thought it was a bit funny that some sexist men and some feminists make the same incorrect claim, because it’s quite obvious to anyone who knows a little bit about the body that the fact that men on average have more testosteron makes a difference to the average differences in physical strength between men and women. But that’s all.
Yeah, I’m firmly in the “if being openly feminist makes a man think that I’m bitchy, aggressive, or whatever, I don’t give a shit” category, but the thing is a. everyone’s personality is different, and that may not feel right for some people and b. everyone’s situation is different, and I’m very well aware that there’s a whole lot of privilege underlying my ability not to care*. So I think the best thing is to support the women who do want to be outspoken without talking down to the ones who don’t, or blaming them for not doing so when we don’t even necessarily know why they’re not doing so.
*No, MRA dudes, not female privilege, which doesn’t exist. White privilege, assumed to be straight privilege (even though I’m not), education, class, and so on.
And all the MRA’s in MRAville were excited that the Grinch had saved the fundraiser.