A few days before alleged “men’s human rights” website A Voice for Men held its first convention last summer, the site’s founder and head boy Paul Elam put up a post imploring the alleged human rights activists planning to attend the event not to go around calling women bitches and whores and cunts, because the news media would be there, and this might make his little human rights movement look bad.
I’m paraphrasing here; Elam was a teensy bit more euphemistic, telling his followers that anyone caught “trash-talking women, men, making violent statements … anything that can be used against us” would get a very stern talking-to and, if they persisted, would be asked to leave.
Elam’s warning didn’t stick. Indeed, the woman in charge of publicity for the event – you may know her as JudgyBitch or Janet Bloomfield, neither of which is her real name – went on a bit of a Twitter rampage, happily denouncing critics of the group as, yep, “whores.”
As GQ magazine’s long-awaited, finally published account of the conference makes abundantly clear, JB wasn’t the only one who broke Elam’s rule. Elam himself broke it, as did, apparently, almost everyone who came within shouting distance of GQ correspondent Jeff Sharlet, and the infractions went well beyond slurs and “bitch make me a sammich” jokes.
So I present to you The 5 Creepiest Details from GQ’s Account of AVFM’s Conference Last Summer
1) The Men’s Rights Activist who boasted that he would have disowned his daughter if she had pressed charges against the man she said raped her.
Af a convention afterparty, the man in question told this little story to Sharlet, Elam, and a few others:
When one of his daughters came home one night and said she’d been raped, he said, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Sitting with us, he hikes his voice up to a falsetto in imitation: ” ‘Oh, I just got raped.’ ” He laughs. There’s a moment of silence. A bridge too far? “I told her if she pressed charges, I’d disown her.”
Elam, whose attention has drifted, grins through his beard. “That’s good fathering,” he says.
2) The presentation on male suicide in which the presenter referred to a woman’s alleged propensity for “cocoa penis puffs,” by which he evidently meant black penises.
Speaking about male suicide and the troubles faced by returning veterans, conference speaker Terrence Popp asked the men in the room to
“imagine coming back from war to find out your wife, I’m trying to think of a good way to say this, but, uh, you know, went cuckoo for cocoa penis puffs.” I think Popp, who is white, means the wife in question had sex with a black man. “Crazy for some Rice Krispies treats,” he continues, “and a couple Polish sausages thrown in there.”
3) The Men’s Rights Activist/sex offender who thinks the age of consent should be 12, because “I would rather err on the side of 12-year-olds having sex than on the side of ruining men’s lives.”
4) Sage Gerard’s “unconsensual hug.”
GQ’s Sharlet brought his friend Blair along with him to the convention, where the 26-year old evidently attracted a good deal of attention from the men there, receiving, Sharlet says, “several marriage proposals” (presumably unserious) and some hands-on attention from AVFM’s “Collegiate Activism Director” Sage Gerard, including what Blair later described as “the most unconsensual hug I have ever known.”
If Blair’s account of her encounter with Gerard is any indication, the AVFM collegiate organizer has been reading up on pickup artistry; in addition to a good deal of touching – what PUAs call “kino” – he tried to “isolate” her by drawing her away from the crowd to … write a poem. (His idea.)
Here’s how Sharlet, relying on Blair’s notes, described what happened after their awkward hug:
Sage loosens his grip. “I apologize for dragging you away,” he says. “I wasn’t going to feel okay until I talked to you.” He warns her not to send mixed messages. For instance, she shouldn’t put her hand on a man’s knee if she doesn’t want to have sex with him. Sage puts his hand on Blair’s knee. This is not a mixed message, he wants her to understand. She’s here, in the VFW. She’s taken the red pill. She needs another hug. He needs to give it to her.
Blair, I should note, is not the only one to report creepy, predatory behavior on the part of conference attendees.
5) Rape jokes, rape jokes, and more rape jokes.
I’ll just mention this one. When Sharlet arrived at the conference afterparty with Blair, who had successfully managed to escape Gerard’s unconsensual embraces, Elam asked her a question:
“I’m curious,” Elam says. “What did your friends think when you told them you were coming here?”
“To be honest?” Blair asks. Elam nods. She says, “I had friends who said I’d get raped.”
Blink. You can almost see the struggle in Elam’s bones: Play the nice guy? Or the perv? No question. “All right!” he booms, swinging his arms together. “Let’s get started!”
Jazz winces.
“Get the video camera!” Factory yells at his girlfriend, who giggles weakly.
I should be very clear here: At no point does it seem like Elam or Factory is actually going to rape Blair. We know they’re joking. Just a couple of middle-aged guys joking around about rape with a young woman they’ve never met before in a hotel room at one in the morning.
You can read the rest of Sharlet’s account of this groudbreaking human rights conference here. And you should.
If someone’s desire to be the “first” is so great that they’re sexually attracted to an 8 year old, I think we can call them a paedophile.
Bina and freemage: it’s not uncommon for women to be especially attracted to certain ethnic groups, but the fetishization factor isn’t nearly as over-the-top. I’ve actually heard gay men fetishize men of color to a greater extent than straight women (with slang terms like “rice queen” for Asian men, etc.)
@Kakanian: Humbert portrays Lolita as something of a “spoiled brat” archetype and as rather snarky to both him and her mother (SPOILER: did anybody else find it suspicious that Charlotte died right before she would’ve gone to the cops about Humbert? Of a very convenient and coincidentally timed car accident, according to the narrator? Never mind, moving on). Combine that with the fact that (according to Humbert’s narrative of course) she wasn’t a virgin when they first had sex and she supposedly made the moves on him rather than the other way around and BAM, perfect formula for statutory rape apologia and blaming the victim. How do they apply the fact that Humbert’s an unreliable narrator to everything else but this, you mean? No idea. Blaming females for being raped is such an obvious thing to do there’s no need for any further critical thinking, apparently.
One of the most baffling things to me about the MRM is how even when they’re cherry picking examples, they can’t pick good ones. (See “Thelma and Louise.”) Erasure of female-on-male rape victims (of course the MRAs don’t talk about male-on-male rape, even though it’s more common, because they can’t blame women for that) is actually an incredibly legitimate problem, and the feMRAs pick anecdotes from Africa. Seriously. Not even stories from a friend of a friend, stories from a different continent without mentioning concrete details or news sources. I very much believe in trusting people when they say they were raped, but when you’re talking about someone *else* that was raped, in some story you just heard somewhere without saying where:
-a man in Africa raped by his six wives (horrible? Obviously. But since the majority of polygynous societies–I can’t even think of any polyandrous ones–tend to be about male power and status without giving the wives much say in the matter, this is a really awkward example and difficult to believe example of men oppressed by women)
-THE CONGO. I SHIT YOU NOT. The fucking CONGO is a place where men are oppressed by women, who rape and torture men with senseless brutality. I’m speechless. I mean…that’s a legitimate example of a place where men are being raped and horribly tortured and killed, but you realize the majority of that is not by *women*, right?
-a 22-year-old man “nearly gang-raped” by a 16-year-old girls. (note: this is a secondhand account). Um.
I think the really tragic thing is, if I was an observer who wasn’t already aware that female-on-male rape is a very real issue, the fact that this is the best they got would make me assume they were making the whole thing up.
freemage
I remember reading years and years ago stuff reported by men POC who were involved in the 60s civil rights movement. They were a bit put off by the fact that sometimes a white women in the movement, who obviously didn’t apply stereotypes at all, would express disappointment when the POC they slept with turned out to be just a regular guy rather than some miraculous sex machine.
lith
Or you could *not* tell them. Just *ask* whether they’re sure that you’re in the “dear” and “sweetheart” category. What have you said that makes them so certain that they’re right about that?
Sure convenient all their examples are in countries that their target audience may know nothing about or find it hard to fact-check, eh?
@suffrajitsu I was once arguing with a troll who was trying to insist that a certain type of FGM ain’t so bad, it still leaves women with the full ability to orgasm. He linked to a study from Nigeria. Nigeria. Where FGM is commonplace and shows few signs of eradication.
In context, he was complaining that all forms of FGM are illegal whereas circumcision and chemical castration is a horrible brutal mutilation and is yet legal. I disagree with forced circumcision anyway (thank God it’s a rare thing in the UK) but I don’t know a lot about castration. I thought that was reserved for the super dangerous serial sex offenders, if not outright banned via human rights lobbying.
RE: pedophilia/ephebophilia: I’ve seen some studies suggesting that there are people (mostly men) who are sexually attracted to children but aren’t child molesters. It’s easy to see this as a #notallpedophiles thing, but there is a support group called Virtuous Pedophiles advocating therapy and urging members not to molest children (for moral, not legal, reasons) and when Cracked did an article on it, they found some non-offending pedophiles against even drawings of child pornography on the grounds it could encourage molestation. I’m not really sure what to make of it. I do generally believe that people can’t necessarily control what sexually arouses them (i.e., people aroused by dominance/sadism aren’t necessarily bad people).
I do feel like even in the mainstream narrative of male sexuality, infantilization/fetishization of youth is incredibly common. Women dressed up as schoolgirls, sexy Girl Scouts, “Daddy’s girls”, it’s a really, really common and mainstream fetish. I didn’t really realize how weird it was until I read Gloria Steinem’s book about Marilyn Monroe–she remarks on how bizarre it would be if a male actor tried to be sexy by singing a song called “My Heart Belongs to Mommy.”
I meant surgical castration. God dammit I can’t type today.
@suffrajitsu
Well, there’s what Humbert says and the fact that she’s basically a kid right at the start of puberty, where they usually become kinda unbearable. At least to me, she really didn’t seem to act too out of character for somebody here age. The spoiling only happens on his part with an eye towards grooming and later pacifying her, so it’s basically somebody whining that he can’t repeatedly rape her and keep her somewhat not suicidical and permanentely amiciable towards him at the same time.
I can´t remember the details of her alleged sex life previous to the abduction though, but then again, I mostly read it as an example of somebody writing a novel in a language not originally his own.
@sunnysombrera: I’m also personally against circumcision, but it’s incredibly stupid to compare it to female genital mutilation. It’s a safe and medically approved procedure that actually does have some heath benefits (for example, STI and HIV infection rates are lower). It’s not anywhere near as damaging, and I think most studies suggest it actually doesn’t affect pleasure during sex. FGM is much more hazardous, causes lifelong pain for its victims, is usually not medically sound, and is undertaken for an inherently very sexist reason (making it so painful for girls to have sex they won’t cheat on their future husbands). The only sound issue is the boy’s consent, but if you’re going to insist female genital mutilation is okay because orgasm is still possible, then you have to be A-ok with male circumcision as well.
I wasn’t aware castration was still legal in countries that have banned FGM, but I looked it up and turns out, chemical castration isn’t even mutilation. It’s not even sterilization–it uses drugs to lower sex drive by reducing testosterone levels, not by removing the sex organs. It’s even reversible. Apparently surgical castration is still legal, and some states mandate castration for sex offenders to be released, but it’s voluntary and you’re given a choice between chemical and surgical. (I was surprised to hear some people do in fact pick surgical–I guess because it’s more effective?) So again, not a good comparison.
That’s what makes it a double standard: men acting infantile, save for when they were children, is frowned upon heavily and seen as pathetic – yet women are as infantilized into adulthood as they were in childhood, which (weirdly) is seen as attractive by many men and often encouraged.
I always hated the schoolgirl and girl scout chic fetish – I can understand the whole “sexy nurse” thing and even the “sexy librarian” (I do think glasses look fantastic on women, myself) because those are occupations taken up by adults. It doesn’t help that, generation after generation, girls are sexualized earlier and earlier in some way whether it is these little beauty competitions or even stuff like the Bratz and Barbie toys. It seems like boys can be children – though there’s the development of toxic masculinity involved in that – yet girls have these expectations to be attractive to men dropped on them early on.
@Kakanian: I did note that that was all according to Humbert, one of the great textbook examples of an unreliable narrator. I don’t recall the exact details, but he claimed Lolita lost her virginity while away at summer camp to another boy and also experimented with a girl. I personally imagine he either made it up or embellished it to justify his actions– a big thing about him for ‘nymphets’ is how they’re supposedly ‘corrupt’ or ‘demonic’; he keeps insisting he wouldn’t molest an *innocent* child, but it’s okay because he wasn’t her first anyway!
I completely agree with you that it’s incredibly bizarre to simultaneously acknowledge that Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator, which pretty much everyone does, and yet give his account of his statutory rape enough credence to give Lolita the blame, especially since his justifications are pretty by-the-book for sex offenders (“she wanted it!” etc.)
[content warning for child molestation]
@suffrajitsu: “I’ve seen some studies suggesting that there are people (mostly men) who are sexually attracted to children but aren’t child molesters.”
I read a book called “Predators” a while ago and it also pointed out that child molester and paedophile aren’t synonyms. But having stated that a paedophile does not always molest children, the book then went into how some child molesters are psychopaths (molesting children because they get a thrill out of fooling everyone) and some are sadists (sadists as in they are more aroused by purely violent imagery than sexually violent *or* sexual imagery).
It must be a terrible struggle to have a sexual attraction to children, especially if you have no attraction to adults. Unfortunately for every support group for paedophiles that actually helps them to manage their attraction without harming a child, I’m betting there’s an internet forum somewhere telling them that no, they’re perfectly okay, kids are far more mature and resilient than our closed-minded society says they are, and other forms of oozing horribleness.
@Cyberwulf: oh, I completely agree with you. On the one hand, I actually can believe that there are people with sexual desires they can’t control having (key: huge difference between lack of control over *having* certain desires and lack of control over *not acting on* desires). Look at the BDSM scene, which has many strong advocates for informed consent. If there are sexual sadists who get off on people being whipped or in chained and are aggressively anti-rape and anti-domestic violence, I can believe attraction to children doesn’t necessarily mean child molestation, and I would feel sorry for these people.
On the other hand, fucking *8chan* has claimed to be a “support group for pedophiles.” It’s a really thorny question and I imagine a lot of steps that would make it easier for any non-offending pedophiles could make it easier for child molesters as well.
Interestingly, the famous “undetected rapists” study–David Lisak’s survey that found 5% of college men admitted to rape if they didn’t use that word–also found a lot of overlap between sex offenders of all kinds: “Multiple studies have now documented that between 33% and 66% of rapists have also sexually attacked children; that up to 82% of child molesters have also sexually attacked adults; and that between 50% and 66% of incest offenders have also sexually attacked children outside their families.”
http://www.middlebury.edu/media/view/240951/original/
I’ve seen the 5% statistic mentioned a lot on Yes Means Yes and a lot of online circles discussing consent and rape culture, but not as much of his other findings for some reason. I highly recommend reading the whole paper. It’s thorough and informative and pretty eye-opening.
@sunnysombrera: No, no, the vagina is like Play-Doh and bacon.
@suffrajitsu I don’t think he was trying to argue that FGM was okay, he was trying to argue that it wasn’t so bad. As in “why are those feeeemales getting all upset again?” He was trying to play the men-have-it-worse-woe-is-us narrative, by downplaying a problem affecting women and overdramatising a male one. Standard MRA.
Speaking of arguing with a troll, I’m currently engaged in one who is insisting that computer programming has always been a boy’s club. I’ve been busting a gut proving and providing sources that say women were the first programmers as it was seen as women’s work, but he keeps shifting the goalposts and saying men are the founders of the industry because they designed and engineered computers and wrote software for PCs. I keep repeating that the topic is programming and software not engineering, and that men took over during the rise of personal computing whereas women were in programming first. The boy just ain’t listening.
>:(
@Nequam: I’m really glad you linked that article, because another one caught my eye that was posted a few days ago:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2015/02/24/fifty-shades-of-sexual-assault-yall-i-told-you/
So it begins. A young bio-medical engineer beats a girl while she begs for him to stop, he continues, sexually assaults her, she goes to the police, and suddenly, he’s like “I didn’t do anything wrong! We were reenacting 50 Shades of Grey!”
Though, a few people did bring up in the comments that it was odd that the first time this sort of act has gotten national attention is when a guy of middle eastern decent and name got arrested for it. : /
@sunny
No matter how far that guy moves the goalposts, he’s going to run into a woman, even in the world of engineering. The inventor of wireless technology, which later evolved into Bluetooth and wi-fi? Hedy Lamarr. The inventor of networking as we know it, which later evolved into a little thing called the Internet? Radia Perlman. The inventor of the COBOL language and the engineer behind the Mark 1, one of the very first modern computers? Grace Hopper.
That said, you’re being sealioned anyway. =P
@M
I am. But it also isn’t helping that the website keeps sticking my comments in moderation time-out but not his.
On the subject of non-acting pedophiles, I read this article a while ago about a teenager with attraction to children, struggling with his desires in a climate where admitting them to anyone could get him into trouble: https://medium.com/matter/youre-16-youre-a-pedophile-you-dont-want-to-hurt-anyone-what-do-you-do-now-e11ce4b88bdb
@Paradoxical The picture of that young man made my heart hurt. He’s just the kind of cute, geeky guy I got crushes on when I was a teenager, someone I would have trusted–the all-American, boy next door type. It would have been an unthinkable leap for me to think someone like him could beat and rape someone. This is so sad, I hope the young woman has a good support network and heals in time.
@Spindrift
I don’t think it’s logic that’s lost on them. After all, the risk of falsely accusing someone of murder is deemed not to outweigh society’s interest in preventing murder, and many relatively conservative people, in the US, are coming around to the legalization of marijuana because they no longer believe the costs are in the correct balance with the interest society has in keeping people in an acceptable state of sobriety.
No. It isn’t logic they lack, it’s basic humanity. To them, society’s interest in protecting the well-being of females, even children, does not outweigh a man’s life being ruined because he raped a child.
They are sick people, possessed of a base and perverse form of masculinity obsessed with sex, which they see as easier for woman to obtain. So easy is it for women to have sex, and so awesomely important is sex, that this ease invalidates completely all forms of agony for women.
They might say they’re concerned with preventing accusations of false rape, but when a father’s response to his daughter saying she was raped is to call her a liar, and then this is applauded, what is any reasonable person to think?
If what that man said is true, he is literally ruining his daughter’s life, and it’s lauded by these buffoons who believe they’re some pinnacle of masculinity. Even ass-backwards, 50’s style head of the household masculinity places a good deal of importance on protecting daughters from sexual assault.
Who are these rejects? How have any of them managed to procreate?
@portlantonia
Their utter lack of empathy certainly facilitates them believing some truly reprehensible things.
Anyone else see the part where the honey badgers tried to keep Sage and Blair apart/from going off alone?
Even they can’t deny his creep factor.
Oh, about the draft; I’ve been convinced by arguments that say we should have a draft, as in actively draft people, because the way things are now, the poor fight our wars and nobody really even pays attention. Like I’m not even sure how many countries we’re fighting in or who we’re fighting, and I like to think I try to keep up on stuff. There’s just too much to keep track of, and there shouldn’t be that much, but it happens because the people who want us doing military action aren’t really opposed that strongly, because the people who don’t want war just don’t sign up for the military and then they forget about it. If there was a draft, people would care more.
But I haven’t heard any criticisms of that view. What do you guys think?
I don’t think the draft would prevent any superpower politicians from engaging in minor wars, using only career soldiers. Even my (small, drafting, non-NATO) country sent a handful of soldiers to Afghanistan, although technically they were not in combat duty.
Now, if the US managed to eliminate most of its poverty, there would probably be much less supply of volunteer troops and it still wouldn’t be politically as feasible to use conscripted troops in foreign wars. You could also try to get rid of cultural militarism and military industrial connections.
I think having a draft might actually increase cultural militarism, or at least encourage more people to continue into military careers. On the plus side, that might make the military more representative of the society.
Practically speaking, I think the draft in modern western society is a waste of money and people’s time. It’s also arguably a human rights violation, whether it’s gender-neutral or not.
It only makes sense as a recruitment tool, if you *really* need to encourage more people into becoming professional soldiers.
RE: The Age of Consent issue.
I could write an essay on this issue, but I’ll just say that the concept is something I’m not entirely comfortable with, because it’s implementation is often sexist, and is often motivated from a very patriarchal attitude.
Society infantilizes women, and Age of Consent laws are often used to further that infantization.
Female sexuality is routinely erased in American society, and a woman who exercises her sexual agency is considered a slut, a whore, or damaged. We still operate under a Victorian view of women as inherently sexless, putting emphasis and value on the mythical idea of female ‘purity’.
Culture and society in many ways send messages that remove sexual agency from women, and especially adolescent girls, placing it in the hands of males. Whether it be the creepy Evangelical phenomena of ‘Purity Balls’, or sitcoms and drama television programs portraying a father threatening his daughter’s boyfriend, males are constantly portrayed as the gatekeeper’s to a girls’ sexuality, and her own control over her sexual autonomy is removed. An emphasis placed on the concept that a girl only has value in her virginity. Abstinence only education often places sexual access to a girl or woman in the hands of her father or her husband, rather than the girl herself.
As such, Age of Consent laws are often enforced in such a way as to render a girl’s sexuality invisible. A narrative is created that a girl who is sexually active is inherently a victim, possessing no agency of her own, and incapable of making her own choices about sex. Thus, ‘statutory rape’ laws are often enforced more harshly when a girl is the younger partner compared to a boy, and the girl is inherently treated as inherently sexless, incapable of making sexual decisions on her own. It places control of the girl’s decisions completely in the hands of the male partner.
As such, I am not comfortable with Age of Consent laws in practice, because of the implications and motivations they often contain and how they are enforced.