So Susan Morris, the Conference Manager for A Voice for Men’s allegedly upcoming “Men’s Issues” conference this year. has posted a rather puzzling statement attempting to answer questions she’s been getting from AVFM readers “concerning there being fewer speakers on the programme this year and the ticket price being higher.”
Morris — described on the site as “a British woman, an experienced general and event manager in public service” — assures potential conference goers that, “contrary to the headline which I saw somewhere, the ticket price has not been set at $649!”
And that’s true. If you go to the conference’s website, you can see that, in fact, full price tickets to the event are only $645.
That is FOUR WHOLE DOLLARS LESS than the amount reported by the scurrilous press. And … by Morris herself, later in her post.
But hey, she suggests, only suckers will be paying the full $649.
The Early Bird Discount ensures that if you purchase your ticket by the 30th of April, you will only pay $399. Buy it between 1 May and 30 June and you’ll still get it at a good discount, at the price of $449. The price will increase in $50 steps until it gets to the buy-at-the-door price of $649 and we expect very few, if any, to do so. In fact, that price has been set to deter people from doing so, so that they don’t hold up those people who have been entered into the pre-registration system and only need to book in.
Morris also insists that
Contrary to the efforts made by our detractors to blacken our name, the ticket price is not aimed at making a profit but breaking even would be nice.
Yeah, it’s not like AVFM founder and chief donation-receiver Paul Elam ever said that he hoped to make some actual profit from the conference. You know, except for that time he said he “hope[d] to make some actual profit” from the conference.
So what’s to blame for the higher price? Apparently, it’s largely due to, er, time-traveling protesters from Detroit?
Last year, you may recall, a group of Detroit-area activists held a protest several weeks before AFVM’s conference was scheduled to happen in that city. There were no protesters at the event itself.
This year, the conference is being held in Elam’s hometown of Houston. But evidently — at least in the fevered imaginations of AVFM’s brain trust — that won’t stop last year’s protesters from driving 1300 miles from Detroit to Houston to protest this year’s event. At least that’s what Morris seems to be suggesting:
The protesters from last year have already vowed to shut us down this year and though we know they will not achieve their aim, they will still be protesting (as is their right, of course). Security and safety of our attendees, speakers and volunteer staff will always be of prime importance and so, to avoid a repeat of last year’s emergency appeal for funding, we have built into the costs additional but reasonable security cover.
Aside from “security cover” from time-travelling protesters, what will attendees get for their $649 — sorry, $645 — that no one is really expected to pay?
Fewer speakers!
“Last year,” Morris writes
in our naivety and enthusiasm, we overbooked the number of speakers for the two day event. During the conference it became clear that the programme was too full and did not allow sufficient time for decent length talks followed by full question and answer sessions. This year we have arranged ten speakers.
Greater punctuality!
And this year we will ensure that we start each session on time.
Longer lunch breaks! And afternoon breaks!
We have extended the afternoon break and the lunch time and we will be opening the doors each day at 8am. So, provided you arrive early, you will have over eight hours across the two days to mingle with other attendees and to network. And that’s not including the time spent at the evening events, socialising and networking with other like-minded people over dinner or pizza.
Dinner is an additional $20; Pizza is $15. But the time you spend eating is ABSOLUTELY FREE.
A larger number of unpaid staffers than you would think would be even remotely necessary for an event of its size!
Another factor which people tend to forget is the cost of flying in the speakers and volunteer staff and accommodating them all. Between speakers, panel discussion members and staff, we’ll have some forty five people there.
Free taxi service!
We’re arranging an optional taxi service to collect you from your hotel and take you to the venue and then to return you afterwards.
Wait, scratch that, the Taxi service will cost you an additional $15!
But talking to the cabbie is INCLUDED IN YOUR TICKET PRICE.
And finally, FREE ACCESS to an actual BRITISH WOMAN — namely conference manager Susan Morris herself.
I shall be flying in to Houston from the UK. It will be my first flight, a long one around ten hours and I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. But the end result will be worth it. I am looking forward to meeting as many of you as I can.
Because why not fly your conference manager all the way from the UK at the conference-goers’ expense? Sure, makes perfect sense!
I wonder if a single person has bought a ticket for the conference yet.
*over time the wife stops talking to her husband and *STARTS internalizing her disappointment and anger
Ugh, this is killing me. Some PEOPLE are better communicators, cleaners, more intuitive than other PEOPLE. I’m sick of hearing than I am cleaner or have magic intuitive spidey senses because I’m a woman. I’m nothing like that! My husband is not a man cave dwelling tool banging oaf either. If you had to stereotypically define us, IM the guy in this relationship. My lack of organizational skills and sloppy ways drive him nuts. I forget everything he tells me so he thinks I’m not listening. He micromanages the kids outfits because I could give 2 shits what they wear most of the time. He has “feelings” about people and he’s usually right – like he’s psychic, it’s creepy. Every time I hear one of my friends bellyache about their husbands I realize they’re describing me and everything that drives my husband nuts. I also installed all the ceiling fixtures in our house. He’s very manly and I’m very girly, but our personalities are just unique, like everyone else’s. I’m not from Neptune or whatever.
Sorry about the nuts comments. Just re read and saw it.
Seriously, nagging might make your SO do the thing you want this one time. It won’t make zir change zir general pattern of behavior. So if you follow that advice, you’re looking forward to an exhausting life of having to constantly, repeatedly ask zir to do the basic things zie ought to be doing of zir own volition, while zie gets more and more annoyed at you for constantly nagging zir to do something that zie doesn’t feel like zie should have to do.
Re: Walk away wife syndrome. I’m sure that one of the husband’s reactions will be along the lines of “why are you leaving? I’M happy!”
I didn’t see the movie, but from what I’ve read “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” started with this. When the man asks why she’s not willing to work things out, she reminds him of all the actual working-it-out she’s tried, and how completely he failed to cooperate.
Threadruption!
Kate,
If you’re husband is an insensitive asshole, that’s your problem. It’s not my problem. That’s not a problem for all of womankind to adjust to. Men are not born with an inability to hear female voices and take to heart what they say. You’re husband may indeed (and I hope he does not) ignore you or steam roll over you, disrespect your opinions and boundaries etc. If he does, it isn’t because he’s a man. It’s because he’s a selfish, sexist, douche. Stop telling women to be doormats. Stop making excuses for why women should tolerate being treated as less than by their male partners. It’s pathetic.
You can live that way if you like, but I don’t have to respect that choice. You’re trying to drag other women down with you. Just stop.
Hubby and I married young and as kids from dysfunctional homes we had no idea what normal couples did. It slowly dawned on us that we might not even be suited for marriage, let alone marriage to one another. We did therapy a couple times and even lived separately for short stents rather than live together and say things we’d regret. We were deeply in love, but we we’re accidentally pushing eachother’s buttons right and left. We wanted too much, too fast. We thought we could do it all and our relationship would just naturally stay awesome. We had no idea how little we actually knew about communicating or relationships. Our expectations met up with reality like a very surprised looking sperm whale and the surface of an alien planet. You know the saying, “I didn’t take you to raise”? Well, we did.
So, I am a big supporter of couples who want to weather storms together. I’m not a supporter of sexist bullshit that tells a woman it is her job to pick up the relationship slack.
There is no reason for a woman to have to wipe up a man’s spit if he can wipe it up himself. There may well come a time when I’m wiping Hubby’s ass for him. I’d do that and whatever else I could for him, should he truly need it done. Until that fateful day, I expect him to manage himself and his bodily fluids.
FFS. He’s a man, not a pet. Dogs can’t figure out how to mop up their own slobber. Men can.
Seriously, $650, I could go to Anthrocon for the next 12 years at that price.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-women-see-differently-science-health-vision-sex/
2012. Well, there it is.
I get your good intentions, Kate (at least I believe that they are such), but, honestly, it is impossible for me to take anything you say seriously, since I remember that:
1. you’ve wooed and married one of the worst — vilest and most vocal (and unrepentant) in his vileness — misogynists known on the internets and beyond, a man of a particularly repulsive character and reputation to match;
and
2. you yourself are known for spouting highly questionable views (e.g., your repeated and tearful condemnations of “miscegenation” resulting from interracial marriage).
I suspect at least some of the negative reactions from others here are similarly grounded.
I also suspect you do not realize how revolting misogyny and racism are to, you know, normal people (for lack of a better term to designate non-misogynist non-redpillians), and how that revulsion colors people’s perception of you and your current husband.
It is beyond bizarre, really, that you would come to this particular forum (of all places!) to dispense marriage and relationship advice (of all things). It’s kinda like Eva Braun* showing up at a meeting of a Jewish organization to lecture the participants on how to forge positive neighborly relations.
*With apologies to Godwin.
I read that article, and didn’t see where it said that men can’t see dirty mirrors, so I went to the journal articles (there are actually two) behind the NatGeo writeup.
Here’s what both articles have to say about the study methodology:
So, in other words, absolutely zero effort was made to universalize this study. All participants come from an American college and high school, and are probably mostly Americans, who were brought up in American culture, eating American food, subject to American gender pressures, watching American TV, and everything in between.
However, that limitation aside, the journal articles also have a puzzling lack of “men just literally don’t see dirty mirrors” assertions. It’s almost like what you’re trying to claim is total bullshit, and you’re pulling authoritative-sounding backup out of your ass in the hope that nobody will go and read the source material and discover that it’s a non sequitur.
@PoM
Oooooh! THAT’S what the article was suppose to be proof of? Because I thought it was just some nitpicking about the differences in sexes or something to prove that men and women are just too fundamentally different because some women are better pointing out shades of colors than others.
Plus, I’m sure there’s an even newer study that disproves the shit out of that anyway because that’s how science works.
How can you know how an individual perceives colour?
That’s a Philosophy 101 point.. What do I actually perceive,say. green, to look like in my head? Is it the same as what you ‘see’? etc
In fact, there is a theory that some people may in effect see things in ‘negative’ compared to others. It wouldn’t matter to the individual because they’d still receive all the same visual info, but how would we prove it anyway?
A very good question. Let’s ask the color study:
The answer is, they showed people a flash of light of a known wavelength and then asked them estimate which numbers they should plug into the Windows Paint color editor to reproduce that color.
For reals.
@PoM
That’s the science, yes, but if you spent your whole life knowing that this color is blue, but this other person sees it as you would see red, how would you really know what anyone sees?
The black that you see for the font could be what I consider yellow or even a color I couldn’t possibly imagine. Perhaps that’s why we have all our own favorite color? My favorite color is orange, this other person’s favorite color could be blue, but maybe if I looked through their eyes, what they see as blue is what I consider orange?
Then there’s how we perceive each other. Maybe how I see hairless apes is different from what you see? Maybe when you look at Brad Pitt, you see something I would consider to be a lizard person? Maybe what I see is what looks like a bird to you?
THESE ARE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS.
That’s exactly the point: the “science” is stupid. There is no way whatsoever to demonstrate any kind of difference in color perception in this manner. When you filter an objective stimulus through a completely subjective mental framework, there’s no way at all to tease apart someone who sees “green” as bluish from someone who sees “green” as yellowish. They are seeing the same color and giving it the same name, because they’ve been taught that this color is called “green,” and the actual mental experience they have of that color doesn’t matter to the end result and cannot be captured.
That’s why it’s important that these people come from a largely uniform background. The names we give to colors and the way we learn how to perceive visual stimuli come from cultural forces. A lot of developmental biology is environmental/cultural in nature. Just as an example, the rate of tooth crowding varies between cultures, because it is influenced by a person’s diet as a child. The rate of myopia varies between cultures, and at this point nobody really knows why but they know it isn’t genetic so it must be environmental in some way.
Since most everyone in this study is subject to the same developmental environment and the same cultural forces, and it has a big glaring flaw like trying to figure out if the color green is perceptually the same for me as it is for you, I would say that the “sex difference” they are finding is probably more cultural in natural than biological. I would need to see this study replicated in other environments, at a minimum, to think differently.
In school biology class one of the girls noted that her regular body temperature is about 1 C lower than what’s considered “normal” for humans. Several of us were mildly impressed (it was a school for geeks) but one guy actually asked her, “Does it feel…different?”
@PoM
It’s kinda like that one Native American tribe I can’t think of the name off hand having the same name for both the color blue and green, but the white people studying their culture thought that the Native Americans couldn’t see the difference between blue and green and it wasn’t until some of the tribe people learned English that they were like, “No, you stupid fucks, we can see that green and blue are different, we just call them this because who the fuck cares it’s none of your business?” And those white guys sure had egg on their face.
Also, is this blue or green?
http://www.colorcombos.com/images/colors/027878.png
*runs for the hills behind a bunker*
I can actually think of a protocol that would compensate for all the problems listed here, one that the study didn’t use. If it is true that, biologically, boys and men see colors skewed more toward yellow, and girls and women see colors skewed more toward blue, it should be possible to discover this by asking people to compare two colors.
Let’s say you show someone a color that is almost entirely yellow with a tiny speck of blue. Then you show someone a color that is almost entirely yellow with a slightly bigger speck of blue. If you present these colors so that they are far away from each other and cannot be directly compared (maybe someone has to turn completely around to see the other one, so that both are not in the visual field at the same time) and asked people which was the more green sample, that should be able to capture biological differences. Men should be able to make this distinction more easily when the green is almost completely blue with just a speck of yellow, and women should be able to do it when the green is almost completely yellow with just a speck of blue. I mean, if women really are more sensitive to blue, biologically, they should be able to discern much finer gradations of blue.
It would be similar to how we test people for colorblindness.
The other study, the one that reported the ability of men vs women to determine motion and contrast, made no effort whatsoever to control the data for literally anything. They didn’t even ask the participants if they’d ever played, or tried to play, a sport that would require them to learn how to visually track small moving objects. This methodology is like testing blood serum levels of lead in young children, noticing that black children are more likely to have higher blood lead levels than white children, and saying that black people are more likely to absorb lead because BIOLOGY.
@PoM
Seriously, is it blue or green?
(The answer is green.)
Banana Jackie Cake of the really really long name:
Nah, it’s totes teal.
@contrapangloss
Pine green.
It’s obviously black and gold.
Which of these two colors has more blue in it? I’ll even let you view them both on your screen at the same time.
http://imgur.com/EEZxbdp
Is it this one?
http://imgur.com/Q12MkFv
Or this one?
If women are biologically more likely to be able to see blue, you female readers should have no trouble with it. Right?
They just look like different hues to me, but the bottom looks slightly more bluish.