Oh, people. I would really like to take a little vacation from all the A Voice for Men posts, but as it turns out I have found the most A-Voice-for-Menny AVFM thread ever, and I must share it with you.
Ok, so a couple of days ago, AVFM’s Dear Leader Paul Elam posted an uncharacteristically brief video titled “A 41 second lesson for Adam Serwer and the mainstream media.” It consisted of a 41-second snippet of Elam’s phone interview with Buzzfeed’s Adam Serwer, one of the authors of that scathing expose of Elam, in which Elam boasts to Serwer about how much traffic AVFM gets every time there is a news article reporting what an utterly terrible person he is. (I’m loosely paraphrasing here; as far as I can tell, Elam is not actually aware he is a terrible person.)
A few of the AVFM regulars sprinkled some comments below Elam’s offering when he put it up on AVFM, and there are some utter gems amongst them, demonstrating some of the ways that AVFMers try to magically stave off the collective realization that the reason virtually every real journalist who has ever written about them thinks they’re terrible is that they are indeed terrible.
One commenter gamely repeated a familiar truism that is not actually true:
Then a self-described Man Going His Own Way suggested that Serwer is not a real man at all:
AVFM’s “Activism Director” then stepped up with a colorful comment that, among other things, cleverly transformed “Serwer” into “Sewer”:
Vinczer was evidently so proud of the phrase “axe-grinding bandwagon” that he decided to paste it, and some further thoughts on the subject, over an old cheesecake picture of a woman grinding an axe. (See above.) Unfortunately, she is not actually seated upon a bandwagon, so I cannot award Mr. Vinczer full credit for his efforts here.
But my favorite comment of the bunch came from AVFM’s “managing editor” and “director of operations” and “possible buyer of fake Twitter followers,” Dean Esmay.
I can see that some of you are a little baffled, possibly because Serwer, who is both Jewish and a feminist, has never given any indication that he hates either Jews or women.
But Esmay, like many in the Men’s Rights community, seems to be fond of an argumentative trope that most of us outgrow in childhood: the old “I know you are but what am I?” ruse.
If you call an MRA a sexist, chances are good that he (or in some cases she) will call YOU a sexist — because, say, your insistence that rapists should be vigorously prosecuted is said to somehow infantalize women.
Or something like that; the details aren’t any more important to the MRAs making these accusations than they were to your jerky sibling when you were both kids. What’s important is that this little rhetorical maneuver puts you on the defensive.
But if AVFMers don’t have any good reason to say that Serwer hates Jews and/or women, they have come up with an excuse: Buzzfeed chose to illustrate Serwer and Katie Baker’s piece on Elam with a caricature of Elam modeled after a famous poster of Rosie the Riveter.
And so, apparently because the caricature of Elam was mildly unflattering and slightly exaggerated the size of his nose, the great minds at AVFM decided that it was equivalent to the viciously anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews featured in Nazi propaganda. And also somehow demeaning to women. It doesn’t make much sense to me.
Here’s how one AVFM fan tried to explain the accusation on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/tigerclaud/status/563888703026634752
Oddly, I don’t recall Esmay, a fervent supporter of #GamerGate, ever taking fellow #GamerGaters to task for literally repurposing neo-Nazi propaganda in their attacks on Anita Sarkeesian.
The “I know you are but what am I” attack can be confusing even to MRAs. Pity poor Suzy McCarley, AVFM’s “assistant managing editor” and head comment moderator, who, in her response to Esmay’s question, tried to attack Serwer as an anti-Semite who’s simultaneously sexist towards both women and men.
So Serwer hates Jews more than women, because half of all Jews are women, whom he hates, and the other half are men, whom he also hates, but possibly more than he hates women.
Driversuz, be careful: you might sprain something.
That ax meme… thing makes no damn sense. Is the ‘artist’ actually trying to make a point, or is it supposed to be word salad?
@M: heh. I still have something of a teenage crush on Anthony Perkins’ portrayal of Norman Bates. *whistles innocently* But funnily enough, it’s “normal” Norman’s shyness and sweetness that got 15-year-old me, not the killing people part. Wonder what MRA types will make of that.
Incidentally, since wordsp1nner brought up Gamergate, Hitchcock’s Psycho is, like, #1 on my list of media that I totally love and enjoy while fully acknowledging the problematic parts. (The whole 1960s psychology of the “schizogenic mother” being a particularly insidious example.)
weirwood: Robert Bloch wrote lots of fun short stories, many of which feel like they would’ve been in EC Comics had the time been right (they were coming out in the ‘zines around the time Tales From the Crypt et al were on the stands).
He was really into Jack the Ripper too– along with “Yours Truly” he wrote the Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold” (the “Redjac” one) and “A Toy For Juliette” (which ended up in Dangerous Visions and spurred Harlan Ellison to write “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World”).
Livia Drusilla Augusta was most certainly never convicted of murder, and while implied to be something of a Machiavellian schemer by Tacitus was lauded by Cassius Dio as a wise and benevolent co-ruler with Augustus. No ancient source accuses her of any serious misdeeds (granted, one might just shy away from doing so to the matriarch of the ruling family of the empire). Robert Graves’ portrayal of her in I, Claudius is heavily fictionalized.
@tcwill00 “The Penzance movie with Kevin Kline and Angela Lansbury is a good one, too.”
If you liked the movie, there’s videos of the stage performance they based the film on on youtube. They have Patricia Routledge playing Ruth instead of Angela Lansbury, think I prefer her in the part.
A little while ago there was an image that floated to the front page of imgur—it was a screencap of someone’s Tumblr, who was musing on the unfairness that only girls had princess stories as a kid. No, seriously. This was sad for boys, because that meant that boys had no stories of someone being so taken with them, just for their beauty, that they would move heaven and earth to be with them. Where are all the stories about the lovely prince, hmmm?
I decided not to bother with the obvious WTFness of that, and simply commented something like, “Well, but you guys got all the cowboys, space explorers, major superheroes, biggest sports stars, knights, soldiers, kings, etc., so I think on the balance, y’all did okay.”
An (I’m guessing) MRA commented back at me, “Yeah, but we had to write all of those stories ourselves.”
“…uh, you do realize that men wrote all of the Disney princess movies, too, right?” I replied, foolishly thinking that this would highlight how entirely male-dominated Hollywood writing is, and how therefore, of course men wrote all of those male protagonists.
But nope. “That’s my point,” he exclaimed, before very creepily comparing it to the inability to get off to porn that he drew himself.
So yeah, to this guy, not only is it deeply unfair that girls got princess stories and boys didn’t, but the comparable bucketloads of male protagonists count less because women didn’t write them.
There is literally no winning. Zero. The goalposts have been moved to a different dimension.
@Kootiepatra: funny you mention that, cuz look what came out just yesterday: http://variety.com/2015/film/news/women-lead-roles-in-movies-study-hunger-games-gone-girl-1201429016/
The 30% of speaking characters number has been stagnant for a long time, but the percentage of female protagonists went down from 15% in 2013 to 12%. TWELVE PERCENT.
This is why I automatically tune out people who say men have it just as bad in terms of representation. Not that it wouldn’t be great to have conversations about portrayals of men or masculinity in media, but seriously. Just as bad, my ass.
Ganymede. Tithonus. Endymion.
Mind you, only one of those had an unqualified happy ending, and I suspect these guys would be all NO HOMO about it.
May I add Patroclo in the Hiliad. Achylles, upon learning of his beloved’s death, went down with such a fury on the enemy warriors that they ran away and locked themselves within the city walls, terrified (leaving Hector to fight Achylles by himself in a duel). Boy I love my classics!
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think of “Disney princess” as a particularly feminist aspiration. I know a lot of little girls are into that whole sparkly dress and tiara scene, but it’s not very attainable in adulthood, is it? There are at most a few hundred marriageable princes around, and most royal families don’t look very Disney up close. (Though the Saudi royal family probably has an actual evil vizier, so there’s that). Ok, you could settle for metaphorical princesshood, being pampered and adored, but that’s pretty constraining, and tends not to go well in the long term.
Miyazaki princesses are preferable, I think. Less bling, more arse-kicking and flying.
We probably could use more narratives about men who don’t conform to traditional ideals of masculinity. But atm women’s representation, both in quantity and quality, is just so much worse that they can’t really be considered equal problems.
@Moggie “Miyazaki princesses are preferable, I think. Less bling, more arse-kicking and flying.”
I love Nausicaa, she’s my favorite princess.
Ohhhh, Miyazaki!
I discovered Miyazaki’s work when my oldest was young. (Well, I watched “Grave of the Fireflies as a young college student ???? )
His movies quickly became a part of our library.
We have DVDs, we have Blu-Rays, and now we’re building a digital library.
I know in the US that means that Disney’s getting all of our money, but my girls know he films.
Here’s my eldest a few years ago as Mononoke:
http://imgur.com/KPKyNPq
(She’s the only one who’s seen it…it’s pretty violent.)
That year, our middle kiddo was Toph:
http://imgur.com/zYqV4qw
This year, they were Zita the Spacegirl, an Woodland Elven Scout (the bow’s kind of lame, but my eldest is twitchy and she wasn’t going to be given sharp points to carry around small children), and Daniel Tiger.
http://imgur.com/XRjkdKP
Re: Representation: We’ve looked to animation for alternative representations of masculinity.
Here, Miyazaki also seems to deliver pretty well, but I’d also point to the Avatar (animated) series. Heck, one of Aang’s conflicts is that he’s not “aggressive enough” to fit what he thinks the Avatar should be.
In fairness, Nequam, none of those myths have been made into prominent movies. On the other hand, I feel like there are definitely urban fantasy books in this mold. Hell, even the katniss/peeta arc is sort of a reverse princess arc. I mean, it’s a princess arc in that it’s not a princess arc at all because Hunger Games messes with tropes constantly and refuses to give you what you want or expect, but that’s the basic model.
Growing up I read a lot of YA fantasy from Tamora Pierce and Mercedes Lackey. I don’t remember a masculine princess arc, but trickster’s choice has an adorable offbeat magic dream guy, and Arrows Flight has the wrong, but temptingly beautiful guy.
I think the real trouble for tumblr dude is that although there *are* stories about women fighting for the men they love, those stories tend to be… about women! And therefore, he won’t read them. It’s not impossible to write it the other way around. Feminist writers have been going back to classic princess tales to look at the woman’s perspective, so you could definitely write a story about a man who is frequently made powerless and who can only escape victimization by appealing for help from the women who lust after him or need to control his sexuality, but that’s naturally going to be a niche taste. Even then, I hear that Y the Last Man might qualify.
–Orion, Wordsmith & Whitesmith
@Kootiepatra:
I like the subtle claim there that – being a man and the writers being men too – somehow he had more to do with the creation of it than you did. Or anything at all to do with it.
Presumably you and the rest of woman-kind were too busy messing about with laundry or something, which you wouldn’t have been if you’d just gosh-darn chosen to be born male.
@suffrajitsu:
I was watching Toy Story 3 the other day and suddenly realised that any character that had no particular reason to be one gender or the other was male. Searching for discussions on it I repeatedly saw the excuse that most of Pixar is male so of course they can’t write female characters because they can’t imagine being one. Like they aren’t a whole bunch of bigger issues all by themselves.
@Nequam:
Don’t forget Narcissus! 🙂
Now there’s a story about someone falling in love with a man for nothing more than his beauty.
Also Adonis and Hyacinthus. Greek myths in general show that having the gods fall in love with you may not be the best thing.
The pro-Elam comments at Buzzfeed all read in a very similar way (tortured logic, strawman arguments, a snidely aggressive tone) that is very cult-ish in tone. Hell, the way Elam favours those who feed his ego and viciously attacks those who criticise him – while encouraging his minions to follow suit – IS classic cult leader behaviour.
A bit off topic, but by God if only #GamerGate had this kid’s dad.
Hey, I found some not-awful news:
Guides launch new badge for feminism – http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/11/girlguiding-launches-badge-for-global-gender-equality
Naturally, the comments are mostly saying “women-only groups shouldn’t discuss gender stuff”. One day I’ll learn to resist the “Discussion” link. Today is not that day.
TV is so much better than movies when it comes to having female characters.
Re the Elam = Dear Leader discussion, I agree with the point made by the commenter (can’t remember who said it, sorry!), but at the same time I also agree with Ghost Robot in that I can find very few people for whom the Dear Leader label would be more suited than for Elam. With him, it seems to be literally “agree with every single word that I say, or be my enemy forever”.
@lith: “I was watching Toy Story 3 the other day and suddenly realised that any character that had no particular reason to be one gender or the other was male. Searching for discussions on it I repeatedly saw the excuse that most of Pixar is male so of course they can’t write female characters because they can’t imagine being one. Like they aren’t a whole bunch of bigger issues all by themselves.”
They are aware of that, which is why they made “Brave”.