UPDATE 5/16: Perrins has called off his hunger strike. Here’s his explanation.
Dan Perrins, a famously confrontational Canadian Men’s Rights Activist and staunch supporter of A Voice for Men, has launched a hunger strike outside the Queen’s Park Legislative Assembly in Toronto. As of this writing, he’s on his fifth day, taking in, he says, nothing but liquids.
What does he want? Surprisingly, that’s not an easy question to answer. Perrins’ demands are vague and grandiose — and probably impossible for the Ontario government to meet — and he has not set any specific conditions that would need to be met in order for him to end the hunger strike.
This seems, at the very least, reckless. A hunger strike is a very serious thing.
The idea of the hunger strike came to Perrins, as he explained in a video discussion with AVFM head man Paul Elam, while he was in the midst of a 75-mile walk across Ontario that was supposed to raise awareness about male suicide and mental health issues.
Not altogether happy with the diffident reception his walk had gotten from police and government officials in some of the cities he passed through, he decided to launch the hunger strike when he finished up his walk in Toronto. It was clearly not very carefully planned. Neither Perrins nor his supporters at AVFM seem to have consulted medical professionals and (at least at the time of Perrins’ last video update) no one from the group is there to monitor his well-being, which seems to me unconscionable.
And then there is the question of his demands, which even Perrins’ supporters at AVFM have had a hard time figuring out. In a post announcing the start of Perrins’ protest, AVFM’s Dean Esmay wrote that
Dan has already delivered his demands at the footsteps of the Queen’s Park Legislative Assembly, who at first refused to even accept his demands for review. After some discussion they reversed and accepted the documents.
But the document Perrins handed over — or at least the document that Esmay linked to — wasn’t a list of demands. It was a muddled manifesto titled “Men’s Rights March 2013 Internet Statement,” ending with a laundry list of goals for the Men’s Rights movement including “[d]evelopment and availability of a male fertility control device, drug or method that is safe, affordable, effective and reversible” and a call to “[f]oster the emergence of a new cultural narrative where all men and women are encouraged to live their lives as they see fit, without preferential treatment, while also being expected to bear the responsibility for their personal choices.”
Perrins then explained that these were not his demands at all. In a comment left under Esmay’s post, he wrote
Yes, one of his demands is that those who’ve “libelled” MRAs like himself be arrested and brought before a criminal court.
The first demand is not only so vague as to be almost meaningless — what is “full funding,” how quickly would the government need to provide it? But it also would require the government to do several impossible things.
Ontario’s premier Kathleen Wynne — as far as I can figure it, she’s the person Perrins expects to respond to his demands — cannot dramatically alter hundreds of millions of dollars of government spending with some dramatic proclamation in order to appease a man on a hunger strike. Or for any other reason; that’s not how government works.
Even if Wynne could suddenly produce “full funding for men’s DV shelters” out of a hat, where exactly would this money go? Domestic violence shelters don’t grow like flowers after you sprinkle the requisite amount of money on the ground. They have to be built, by devoted activists prepared to raise a lot of the money on their own, and prepared as well to deal with endless obstacles and opposition along the way.
The only reason we have DV shelters at all is because feminist activists built them, starting in a time when there was precisely zero government money to help them and a lot of public hostility towards even the idea of them.
Like a lot of Men’s Rights activists, Perrins seems to want a duplicate version of the network of DV shelters that feminist activists have worked for and fought for over the course of many decades to be simply bestowed upon MRAs by government fiat.
Instead of banding together in a serious attempt to build the DV shelters they think should be theirs by right, MRAs have largely devoted their energy to attacking DV shelters for women — including some that actually offer services and shelter (usually in the form of hotel vouchers) to men. Indeed, in his online discussions with Elam, Perrins seems as angry about the money women’s shelters are getting than he does about the lack of money going to non-existent men’s shelters, complaining several times about what he sees as excessive spending by shelters to provide beds for women.
Frankly, Perrins seems a good deal more invested in his second demand: that those who libel “non-feminists” be arrested and criminally charged.
This is not quite as bizarre a demand as it sounds: in addition to having extremely plaintiff-friendly civil libel laws, Canada also has criminal laws against “defamatory libel.” But, as Ontario’s Law Times reports, “[c]riminal charges for defamatory libel are rare in Canada.”
Further, according to one expert the Law Times spoke to,
[t]he line between what constitutes criminal libel and what constitutes the more commonly used civil libel is often blurred, and there’s doubt as to whether these criminal provisions are constitutional in the face of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms … .
Indeed, the Law Times notes, s. 301 of the Criminal Code — under which “anyone who publishes a defamatory libel is guilty of an indictable offence and can be imprisoned for up to two years” — has already been declared unconstitutional in four Canadian provinces, including Ontario, where Perrins is conducting his hunger strike.
Under section 300 of the Code, Canadians in these provinces can, at least theoretically, still be charged with criminal libel, but only if they know what they are publishing is false.
Perrins, for his part, claims he’s been libelled by Canada’s Sharp magazine, by GQ, and by other publications. He’s evidently angry at Sharp’s Alex Nino Gheciu for saying that
Perrins wrote a hateful missive against [a feminist activist], labelling her “Little Red Frothing Fornication Mouth” and posted her pictures and personal information online.
Well, Perrins did indeed write a hateful AVFM post attacking the activist in question, in which he called her “Little Red Frothing Fornication Mouth.” The post was accompanied by a drawing of the woman. But, as far as I know, Perrins did not himself post her personal information online, though it’s possible, I suppose, that the folks at Sharp know something I don’t.
Perrins seems angrier still at writer Jeff Sharlet, who, in his highly unflattering GQ account of AVFM’s summer 2014 conference, wrote that Perrins claimed to have taken the infamous red pill of Men’s Rightshood on
the day he ended up in jail, after he says he lodged a complaint against his ex, the beginning of a legal battle that led him to a hunger strike. “I should have killed the bitch five years ago,” he tells me. “I’d be out by now.”
Unless Sharlet simply made up the quote, and GQ’s factcheckers let it stand, I’m not exactly sure how this would count as “defamatory libel.” It’s not libellous to quote what someone has said to you.
Sharlet lives in the United States, where Canadian law (as you might imagine) does not apply. But never mind; Perrins (and Elam) want there to be an arrest warrant waiting for him in case he ever crosses the border into Canada.
In one of his discussions with Elam, Perrins also goes on at length, and with considerable anger, about the alleged evils of the Southern Poverty Law Center; Elam reminds him that there isn’t much the Canadian government can do about the American organization either.
It’s not exactly clear to me what Perrins expects the Ontario government to do about any of this alleged libel. The Premier of Ontario cannot order the Canadian police to arrest all of those whom Perrins thinks have defamed him, nor would anyone with any sense want politicians to have this power.
It’s also not clear why Perrins doesn’t simply sue for libel in civil court instead of going on a hunger strike to compel the Ontario government to do things it cannot actually do.
In his discussions with Elam, Perrins talks a lot about how his life isn’t worth any more than that of the Canadian men who commit suicide every day; he also says that if he ends up in the hospital he wants a Do Not Resuscitate order enforced.
It’s hard not to worry that Perrins’ hunger strike — evidently launched without medical consultation and with vague and impossible demands that it’s not clear he’s even presented to government officials — is in fact a form of slow-motion suicide, a bid for Men’s Rights martyrdom.
Those who are encouraging him in this hunger strike are, I think, playing a very dangerous game.
EDIT: I added a reference to the specific section of the criminal code that is still considered constitutional in all Canadian provinces.
EDIT 2: A May 14 post by “Solaris” on AntiMisandry.com, a long-running message board that Perrins now runs, claims these are Perrins’ demands:
Dan has stated that he will end his hunger strike when assurances are made that men in Ontario will receive equal funding for domestic violence shelters as women, and when the Director for Public Prosecutions commits to launching appropriate criminal investigations under Section 300 of the Criminal Code against those libelling MRAs for their support of men’s rights.
Of course, even these slightly more specific demands would be impossible for the Ontario government to fulfill.
Guess what, non-MRAs, aka almost everyone, don’t take GirlWritesWhat’s pet unsubstantiated theories seriously. Hit the library kiddo and learn a few things beyond MRA talking points.
@Rex
You seem to be yet another not-an-MRA-but who hasn’t read the top of the webpage. This site is a mockery site. I was mocking you. Anywhere else and I’d engage with you properly. This doesn’t make me a bad feminist this makes me tired of MRA talking points and all their damn bullshit. You are not the first of your kind to visit here and you won’t be the last. God knows we (including me) have debated and debunked and argued with you not-an-MRA-but MRAs (to no avail, as these encounters ALWAYS end with either a ban or a flounce) and we have seen the same stuff over and over and over again.
Nope, breadwinner is a term tied to capitalism and you used it wrong. Plus, you think humans have been around for a million years and that’s wrong.
Rex, never mind, I reread and your entire argument stems off the idea that women are literally just walking uteruses while men are smart and capable and talented and do ALL the rest of the work, so… feel free to flounce off and be wrong elsewhere.
I don’t see why I’m getting sarcasm about the comments on jewels when it was not I who raised that point. I was responding to one of the points I’ve been asked to contest. So take that up with the OP.
All this teal deer stuff… I actually had to look that up to see what it means. Too long to read, yep as I said, it was long and your welcome to not read it. But its ironic that I got called out for not reading the full article in the original post and then people go an respond to my response without reading the whole thing.
Lastly, why I should go finding citations and links for information on evolution for you all when you can’t even speak like mature civilised adults. We’re talking about differences of opinion here, not World War III. If you want citations, then raise the level of the conversation and I might provide you with some, not that I’m claiming to be a professor of some kind. I was asked to defend my viewpoints and I have done that. If you take issue with the answers your free to do so, but bear in mind, you likewise would need to provide me with data to support your claims and you won’t be able to do that because current stats indicate men are in greater need of help in our society than women, simply looking at the figures on murder and rape (inclusing prison rape) alone.
I’m not gonna respond to anyone else here now as your responses have not been helpful or civil. I’ll wait till Asterose gets back to me since my ‘teal deer’ was aimed at that poster.
These are not facts. You are not being logical, rational, and you’re certainly not well informed.
JFC
“if they slept around, they were not suitable as mothers” That’s Just Science!
Demanding citations is misandry! I won’t bother, but it’s not because they don’t exist, believe you me! They exist! Really! Science totes backs me up! You have to believe that because I say so! Mean fembitches mocking me on a site that mocks misogynists! How rude!
I think this gif sums up the discussion nicely.
http://i.imgur.com/9VV5LB3.gif
You were asked to defend your viewpoints with links and actual evidence and you have done nothing. You can’t excuse yourself away from that responsibility by whining that we’re being mean.
Besides, Rex, you didn’t address the stud about DV shelters for men.
You’d have a tough time selling that claim.
You realize you barely addressed this because you were too busy blathering about your fantasy version of pre-industrial society, when you weren’t complaining about it being too hard for you to get laid even though women everywhere are ruining themselves with slutty behavior.
In fact this is the one time you did address men’s current problems. These two sentences:
You’re probably a MRA but you’re definitely not an activist.
Stud! Omg lol. Stuff, I meant.
Just in case Rex comes back for a peek at our responses: dude, I told you these things always end in a flounce or a ban.
Ah, yes, I remember when my husband won my hand. The time of pon farr was upon us all. Furious primal urges forced Mr. FM into courageous battle with another of my suitors. He emerged victorious from the kal-if-fee, and we returned to Vulcan to consummate our marriage.
Oh, wait, that’s Star Trek, not real life. Carry on.
Wonderful, Flying Mouse 🙂
Oh come on. Most of us have more than 20 years. That’s plenty of time to have far more children than we’d ever dream of being able to support.
This is the most literal embodiment of that Wondermark cartoon I have ever seen.
Hypergamy is not a thing, at least, certainly not on a broad, culture-wide level. Male disposability is also not a thing. If either of them were a thing, it would cancel out the other.
Sure, for the sake of raw repopulation, having lots of women around is crucial for speedily popping out babies, more so than having lots of men around is. But if you have a population that is so destroyed that this becomes a concern, it’s pretty much over, anyway.
If we assume that it’s true that, by the very force of nature itself, men are the ones who Do the Things, and women are the ones who Make the Babies, and then we assume that the men get vastly killed off in wars and mining and mammoth-hunting, then who is going to build and maintain the houses and systems that the women and babies need to survive? Who is going to hunt enough mammoths for everybody? Who is going to defend the group from invaders?
If men are the only ones responsible and/or capable of building and hunting and everything else, then men are absolutely not disposable. If men are not disposable, then male disposability cannot be the reason that men go to war or hunt mammoths or work construction or whatever else.
But if the reason that men do dangerous jobs is because they truly are disposable, then that means women aren’t so helpless after all. It means that they are able to take care of business, innovate, build, and survive without them. But then that breaks the idea that women have to land themselves a well-off man in order to give them a reasonably successful life, which undoes hypergamy.
So in short, male disposability and female hypergamy are mutually exclusive ideas. At best, only one of them is true.
Fortunately for everybody, neither one is.
What is this?
The first sentence isn’t completely wrong, if you apply it to all of the human species as a sort of universal human drive towards cooperative survival.
But the rest of it? Implies that only men have the instinct to obtain food and shelter? Is that what I’m reading? Women are and have always been less capable than men of obtaining food and shelter?
What is hunting? What is gathering? What is farming? What is gardening?
My grandmother lost her husband when my mother was just a baby and even though they lived in abject poverty she managed to feed nine children by hunting, raising yard chickens and gardening… all by herself. The rebel.
I was going to go out into my yard and finish building that retaining wall to I can plant vegetables and then harvest some herbs but I guess I have to wait for my boyfriend to come over and do it for me, cause otherwise I’ll be subverting his instinctual drive to provide for me…
Wait. No. That’s not right.
I’m going to go work outside now.
Oh it does, does it?
Well, FYI, young women typically don’t WANT to have sex with much older men, no matter how well their equipment still supposedly works. Old sperm doesn’t necessarily produce healthy babies either, but that’s not the reason they won’t do it; the real reason is that they don’t want to shag a man who reminds them too much of Dad or Grandpa, and who seems to think he’s entitled to be the sexual boss of them all. And in fact, andropause is a thing, and the super-virile older man of popular myth is more of an exception than the rule. And young women don’t naturally gravitate to him even where he does exist; they whisper amongst themselves to avoid old so-and-so, because he’s a pervert. So no, aging men and their sexuality are not viewed altogether positively, except maybe by the media, who seem to have an active interest in pushing the virile-geezer myth. There is a reason for the phrase “dirty old man”, you know.
Furthermore, what makes you think that menopause is the end of a woman’s sexual appeal and capacity? She’s not just a reproduction machine, you know…menopausal women can, and DO, have sex for its own pleasurable sake. Some have quite a lot of it. And some even do it with younger men, who, mirabile dictu, LIKE older women and don’t see them as mommy figures.
And no, the older ladies don’t all babysit for the sexually “productive” younger women, either. Many actively resent having other people’s kids dumped on them when they’ve got other things to do and places to be, and contributions to make which have nothing to do with “traditional” gender roles. I’m child-free by choice, and I plan on not being anybody’s babysitter, EVER.
Patriarchy is not as ancient as you think; it is, in fact, relatively modern, and tied to modern ideas of property and ownership (i.e., CAPITALISM, as has been pointed out to you above, and which you’re not responding to at all, other than to whine that you’re not being civilly enough engaged — a tired old argument we’ve all seen from umpteen hundred “I’m not an MRA but…” trolls before you.)
In fact, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists are seeing that rigid, reproduction-based sex roles, which you seem to think are bred in the bone, are actually NOT what we’re evolved for. Early humans were much more egalitarian, and a lot of “primitive” tribes share hunter/gatherer duties equally between the sexes. I’m going to guess that the persons who babysat while the hunters and gatherers (of both sexes) were out doing their thing were not necessarily female, or older, but whoever was so inclined, and good at it. Could have been young males just as easily as anyone else. Quite possibly they even rotated these tasks so that no single individual or group was constantly saddled with them. After all, flexibility is an adaptive trait; rigid sex roles certainly aren’t.
Your arse, sir.
My dad gardens but doesn’t hunt. I guess that makes him a woman?
I was going to be sad I slept through a troll but since it was just a boring “I’m not an MRA but here’s some evo psych misogyny.”
Pro tip Rex: only the manosphere uses the word hypergamy. This is not an accepted term in any legit social sciences. If you’re going to pretend to be a neutral intellectual and not an MRA, best not use MRA lingo. Rookie mistake.
If Rex does decide not to stick the flounce because he’s gotten over the shock of being mocked on a mockery site; I have a question for him. If the men are the breadwinners, women provide the womb dynamic is so important to sexual selection, how come we don’t see it across more species. Most of the time, mothers protect and hunt for their young. Elephants live in matriarchal herds and protect their own young for example. Maybe Rex, you don’t have citations showing that Leave it to Beaver is the natural order of things because it isn’t. It’s an artificial dynamic. Women have always worked and contributed to society beyond just squeezing out babies.
Erectile dysfunction strikes middle aged and older men much more frequently. Yet, you never hear evo psych dudebros arguing that this is evidence that young men are more fertile and it’s a bio truth that fertile women should seek young men who have no trouble getting and keeping an erection. I wonder why that it is?
I would like to applaud all the people who delivered fantastic counter-arguments to Rex’s dribble, while I sat and snarked from the sidelines.
(I just couldn’t be asked to deal with him. Not this troll, this time. More fun to point and make fun of him while eating bonbons).
Yeah, women who buy their own jewelry still being needy for men because they didn’t mine the minerals themselves was pretty hilarious. Not as good as directly on the beach! But still damn mockworthy.
I gotta continue the mock. Because I always feel really, really embarrassed for people when they bounce into discussion boards or comment sections and start trying to evopsych. Rex’s post was a prime example of why. All this:
I mean, we learned all of this in SCHOOL. In the UK I covered this in my AS Level. Beginner’s Psychology. For sixteen year-olds. Rex’s attempt to describe gender differences in mate selection is such a simplified version of the evolutionary approach that I don’t think I could cringe through it again. There is nothing substantial or thought-provoking in anything written here. There never is. It’s just … basic. Immature. It’s the equivalent of completing Wii Golf and deciding you’re ready to sign up for the Open Championship. Just awkward for everyone.
And then the lack of fact-checking. Oh god.
– No, Rex. Man/the human race has not been around for millions of years.
– No, Rex, we do not have an increasing female population that is outnumbering men – the world population is roughly equivalent, you’ll be relieved to hear (http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#age).
– No, Rex, looking at the statistics on rape does not suggest that men are in greater need of help then women.
So I’m guessing Rex Duis is either quite young, incredibly inexperienced, or both. In which case here’s a basic ground rule, Rex, a bit of 101 to start you off in the wonderful world of adult debates.
This will be simple. When YOU bring an opinion to the table, the burden to prove this position lies with YOU. It is the right of EVERYONE ELSE to expect you to provide your own evidence to further substantiate YOUR opinion. When you have the cheek to refuse to do so, and when you actually try to set conditions on your providing that evidence at a future point, YOU are the one who comes across as extremely arrogant, naive, and incapable of engaging in a mature debate.
You actually, genuinely refused to provide evidence to substantiate your opinions until people ‘raised the level of the conversation’. And then had the cheek to remind people to provide data to support their claims.
I don’t think you’re ready for this.
@WWTH
While my current abode is not quite DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH, which would be a very very bad idea anyway since this area is somewhat vulnerable to sea flooding, it’s closer than most people’s homes are. So I can, in fact, step out of my house and take a walk DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH whenever I want to.
And I is a woman! :O
Men’s sperm over the age of 30 degenerates and mutates, increasing the possibility of children being born with down syndrome and such.
Here’s some quotes from this article:
There’s even some science showing that women in there 40s are just as fertile as women in their 20s, and that their chance of conceiving increases with a younger male partner, and the possibilty of children being born with autism and down syndrome decreases.
Here’s some more recent articles about the subject:
http://www.paulraeburn.com/articles/the-father-factor-how-dads-age-increases-babys-risk-of-mental-illness/
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/mens-health/older-dads-risk-passing-along-mental-disorders-study-says-n39516
It’s still a pretty new idea that men’s babyjuice gets curdled, but the proof has always been there.