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.
Oh, and the reason why sperm mutates is because while a woman is born with all the eggs she’ll ever have, men’s testes constantly make sperm, as sperm dies off or is ejactulated. It’s kinda like cloning degeneration in sci fi.
Just thought i’d put that out there since I don’t remember if any of these articles explain that.
Men hit the wall at 30! Hahaha!
When a straight guy who speaks as if he’s never met a woman tells other people how to have successful romantic relationships:
Thank you, Pandapool — I was about to post on that very subject, and now I don’t have to! 🙂
That myth about men increasing in attractiveness and overall awesomeness, as well as retaining their power to sire robust offspring, as they age is one of the many delusions of the redpillians. Why, in Genesis 21:5 it sez that Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.*
They keep telling themselves that to, I guess, make their current situation — which is relationship-less and/or distinctly unhappy — more palatable. “It sucks now, but just you wait till we hit our prime, in our 70’s and 80’s! We’ll be plating HB10s left and right faster than you can say ‘Use your walker’.”
*In fairness, Isaac’s mom, Sarah, was 90 — take that, the redpillians’ sad boners (lol).
@Pandapool:
Here is one that does:
http://genetics.thetech.org/older-dads%E2%80%99-kids-higher-risk-genetic-disease
@edna, didn’t they also live to something like 700, according to the bible? Which would make them both in their early 20’s or the equivalent.
@Misha:
But it’s Teh Science! — or what passes for it among redpillians and which suspiciously looks like their (and/or their boners’, to the extent such a distinction can be made) wish fulfillment.
@isidore13:
Oh, yeah (lol) — and they had hundreds of wives and concubines. Ah, good times — where have they gone?
P.S. If 100 was the equivalent of early 20s, then Abraham clearly did not get the memo, according to Genesis 17:17:
‘Then Abraham bowed down to the ground, but he laughed to himself in disbelief. “How could I become a father at the age of 100?” he thought. “And how can Sarah have a baby when she is ninety years old?”‘
Such Holy and Indisputable Trufs, all of them, in that book.
Oh, I dunno…could it be…a self-serving argument? Backed up by no actual science, but bonerology? (Viagra is Natural Law, you sluts!!!)
And yeah, lots of fertile women also have male partners who are…gasp…YOUNGER! Not for any evol-psych reasons, but just because that was the luck of the draw. They found someone they got on well with, who just happened to be their junior. Human mating patterns, absent interference from patriarchal “tradition”, are actually kind of random, who knew?
MRA Evo Psych enthusiasts have no interest in anything other than the mating practices and always ignore the aftermath. Human offspring are helpless and useless for years and the earliest human communities would have to develop a variety of behaviors to protect their offspring, but I’ve never heard them discuss that.
They also have no interest in things like the development of agriculture or unique cultural practices, because that doesn’t involve their specific fantasies about early man’s competition for fertile young women.
It’s almost as if they don’t have any real interest in cultural or social anthropology and instead want to give an pseudo-scholarly gloss to their endless complaints and/or theories about dating and women’s sexual behavior.
This reads like a parody of sealioning.
LOL, really!
I also remember reading, eons ago, that testosterone and sperm production/quality/motility, etc. are all at their peak when a guy is somewhere around 18 or 19. After that, it slowly but surely drops off. Yet how many women of 35-45 do you see actually chasing after guys that age in a bioclock-induced panic, desperate to spermjack all that young, healthy baby batter before it’s too late? Not so many. After all, they’re under 25, their prefrontal cortices still have some growing to do. They’re technically men, but mentally, they’re still growing boys! So, unless one of them is preternaturally mentally mature, as well as physically, it’s unlikely that he’ll pair off with anyone in a serious way at that age, much less be interested in siring and raising kids. He might be dating and sleeping around within his own age cohort, but that’s about it.
In America, the maximum sperm donor age is 39 (41 in the UK). Even tissue banks recognize that biologically, younger sperm is more ideal for conceiving.
Some serious questions for Rex (if he’s still around to read this):
1. Why does manhood have to be a zero-sum power struggle, where every gain women make is seen as a setback for men?
2. Can there be a positive redefinition of manhood that doesn’t require stuffing women back in the kitchen and nursery, or viewing them as bedpost notches, or other dehumanization tactic?
3. You speak of an identity crisis, in which men no longer have a purpose because the role of breadwinner has been “taken away” by feminists, who have failed to offer any substitute…
3a. Why is it the responsibility of feminists to fill this void?
3b. Why do gender roles have to be rigidly separate? Why can only there only be one breadwinner at a time? (No evo psych or naturalistic fallacies please, we’ve already established that there is no set of gendered behaviors universal to every tribe and culture throughout history)
4. How are vulnerable men helped by taking their donations and getting nothing in return but the whipping up of their resentments through outrageous clickbait articles? What is the end game here? Is it to give men a sense of purpose? Isn’t hatred of a common enemy a pretty bogus and unsustainable way to develop a sense of self-worth?
5. Might it be less than helpful for men who are depressed or recovering from trauma to steep themselves in a culture where emotion and weakness are sneered at for being unmanly?
@Bina:
Bonerology is the only respectable science. Actually, it is the Theory of Everything that describes, explains, and predicts everything that has ever been and shall be, forever and ever, amen.
Seriously, though, the boner bias has been written into science since its beginning, shaping what we see and what we don’t, and how we understand it. Any attempts at pointing it out, much less removing it, will be met with resistance, obviously.
@brooked:
That made me chuckle. Yes, not being ridiculed by the worst — dumbest and vilest — people on the internets and beyond is of primary importance.
All humans have had one society dotcha know.
I’m real sick of this argument that the health care industry and medical research funding is unevenly directed towards women, claims which they prove solely by complaining about breast cancer awareness.
And fuck this guy for suggesting feminists just love men receiving inadequate health care. My Dad almost died because he refused to go a doctor despite my mother’s pleas, not out of stoicism but because he dislikes going to doctors. My uncle’s leukemia was caught extremely early because his girlfriend noticed he seemed to more fatigued usual and made him go to a doctor.
Agreed. Most medical research is done with men as the subjects. Medical research on animals tend to use male subjects too. So actually, medicine is biased towards male bodies and needs.
Yup. And that, in turn, has led to many a scientific boner…of the error kind, not the sexually-aroused-penis kind.
No shit. My grandfather died of metastatic prostate cancer, and personally, this feminist would love to see that disease wiped out for good, preferably with a vaccine. Funding for breast cancer research is NOT taking away from funding for research into prostate or testicular cancers, and fuck any dude who suggests that it is. That argument is as baseless and stupid as those that suggest that AIDS research somehow takes something away from straight people (who, the unspoken subtext goes, “deserve it more”).
Not to mention all the women out there who have ever had to badger their men into getting something seemingly minor looked at and treated before it becomes something major and potentially deadly. As the joke goes:
http://i.imgur.com/gXdTZ1z.jpg
Feminists don’t want to see anyone receiving inadequate health care — we want universal, affordable, single-payer care for ALL, you MRA jackasses!
There’s also the way standard drug doses get calculated based on male subjects, even though women tend to have less body mass and metabolize drugs differently. Women are also more likely to receive a psychosomatic diagnoses for a physical ailment, and have their complaints brushed off.
@Bina
It’s interesting how, nowadays, peak fertility for both men and women is out of sync with the phase(s) of life when people are best equipped financially and emotionally to raise babies. Sure, you can become a parent at 18 or 19, but it’s a hell of a lot easier in your late twenties, thirties, and forties. Social and economic factors count for as much, if not more, than dewy-fresh gametes in successful parenting.
It never occurs to these guys that the peak fertility years they fetishize as an Absolutely Must Have might be as vestigial as an appendix.
@buttercup re: #4
That, honestly, pisses me off so much, that manosphere leaders take financial advantage of vulnerable people the way they do, especially Elam. Most of these guys are basically kids (teenagers, if that reddit survey is anything to go by) who feel lost and angry and don’t know how to deal with strong emotion, looking up to them as leaders and getting hate, vitriol, and lessons in how to be assholes in return for what little wealth they possess.
Don’t take me wrong, please, I don’t so much feel sorry for them as just… especially disgusted by those who take advantage. Sort of like people who buy and sell snake oil, if that makes sense.
Sigh. I hope that all made sense, heh.
I ask this every chance I get. It appears male supremacists believe that when men in power fail them, that it’s the responsibility of women to pick up the slack of what they feel they are entitled to. That women exist for the sole reason to do the dirty work they couldn’t be condescended to do.
Feminists are especially expected to do these things, because feminists have the gall to say that they are human and want to be treated like it. Therefore, if feminists aren’t bending over backwards to immerse herself in the wants of needs of men; that women as a class haven’t “earned” the right to be treated as equals. This precludes the notion that men are automatically to be treated humanely and equally without the need to prove their worth.
Male supremacists are going on about “adult responsibilities” that women supposedly shirk all the while ignoring when women and girls are left to pick up the pieces after disasters, epidemics, unplanned pregnancies, crimes against them, ect. It seems the world is full of adult responsibilities for women but what responsibilities are men expected to shoulder? The MRAs don’t want to be held responsible for abusing women, committing hate speech against women and LGTBQA, they don’t want to pay child support or alimony (even when their ex invested ALL her time into the home, neglecting her own job skills and is now expected to provide for herself and multiple sprogs), they don’t want rapists to be held responsible for raping, and they certainly don’t want men to bear any responsibility in the inequalities present within the American political system even if they fit the description of the majority of legislative power (white, Christian, cisgendered, able bodied, male).
So what are men expected to do – just hold down a job and support himself without drawing the ire of law enforcement. Welp, that’s setting the bar mighty low for men while raising it sky high for women, so it bears asking why MRAs aren’t growing up and taking responsibility for their own problems like they expect women to do.
Yup. Interesting, too, how they routinely undervalue the role that brains and smarts actually play in the whole business. (They really don’t think much of feeeeemales’ brains in general, so what a shocker that is!) Fresher eggs don’t equal higher quality of mothering; a girl who’s just starting to ovulate and menstruate may be more fertile than a woman nearing the end of her menstrual years, but she’s far less prepared to do the actual job of raising that kid. And many teen mothers do, in fact, rely on their own moms — who are often not out of the menstrual woods just yet — to do the real scut-work of raising their babies on top of all the child-care they’re already doing. Because after all, there are educations to complete, jobs and training to get, and children cost a lot to raise — money which a teenager who might, at best, have a part-time minimum-wage job just can’t come up with on her own. And because she won’t always be at home minding bay-bee…at some point in her life, she’s going to need something besides reproductive organs to fall back on.
It’s little wonder, then, that delayed motherhood (which, of course, these guys lament) is such a thing nowadays. And that young, unwed motherhood is actually dropping off, especially where teens get comprehensive sex-ed that includes economic lessons on what having a baby is really like.
I must say that whenever a troll shows up, especially of the “I’m not MRA, but I will regale you with all the MRA talking points anyway” kind, my initial response is to ignore the idiot and wish that everyone would do the same — because they are such a monumental waste of time.
But then I see all the fantastic responses written by the regulars, and I change my mind. Trolls can be useful, in addition to being, um, entertaining (sometimes).
The thing that gets me about the MRA whining about breast cancer research is that breast cancer is extremely taken advantage of. So many companies with their “pink ribbon” products and itty bitty percentage given to Susan G. Komen, which isn’t a charity organization at all when you consider that the CEO makes 600K+ a year.
These guys would love it if the only thing they had to do to be good dads was fuck a busty young woman. That’s pretty much all they’d have to offer their kids IF busty young women wanted anything to do with them. (Which by their the manosphere’s perpetual whining we can tell they do not.) Whatever the laziest, most self serving thing they can think of is, that’s what they’ll pretend they should do. If they parent as badly as they claim they do, I feel sorry for their kids. They’re fathers will be a burden to overcome rather than a supportive and nurturing parent. These men have no clue as to how to raise children. Frankly, I wouldn’t trust one to raise tomatoes.
If ancient father’s had been stupid, selfish, violent horn dogs whose only contribution to his family was to bang as many fertile women as possible, his offspring would not be ahead of the curve when it came to survival. Evolution does not care about you as an individual. We are but tiny cogs on a vast machine. Humanity’s greatest advantages are our ability to communicate, work together, learn and innovate. We build on the knowledge of the people who came before us. We don’t stay static and that is how we have thrived. Being strong has nothing on being a team. Human strength is like many wires wrapping around one another to increase the overall tensile strength. We like the myth of the rugged individual, but that is not how civilizations are made. If a man manages to father 10 kids and none of them survive to adulthood or some survive but they do not have the knowledge and support it takes to raise their offspring to adulthood, his line dies out in the blink of an evolutionary eye. We are not the sort of animal that lays a few hundred eggs and takes off hoping a few of them don’t get eaten. A kid abandoned in the wild does not turn into Tarzan. He turns into lunch.
These men have no idea what it takes to be a good father, much less a great one. Smacking Mom around, raping girls and in general being a belligerent, ignorant, no account who cries that no one will get him off and make him sandwiches is no way to build a strong family bond or ensure the success of his offspring.
It is funny that these assholes try to point to examples in nature to prove feeemales are helpless. Show me a female mammal that just sits around waiting for a male to find her, fuck her and feed her? If ever there was such a beast, it’s been long extinct and for obvious reasons.
People in the Appalachians lived as subsistence farmers, hunters and gatherers for some time. Some still manage to. From what I’ve been told by folks from old Hardshell Baptist families (Yep. They’re still around.) the worst thing you could be called in those communities was a woman beater. You come from a family that killed revenuers? OK. You’re part of the community and you have to feed your family. However, if your family became known for abusing women, you’d be shunned. In small, isolated communities there are precious few secrets. Good luck finding a bride with that sort of stink on your family name. People might not get in “your business”, but they wouldn’t let you make your problems theirs either. People living hand to mouth can’t afford to take that sort of risk.
Or so I have been told. It could be a lot of talk with no truth behind it.