So I found the “meme” below on the A Voice for Men Facebook page. It purports to show what the Men’s Rights movement is really about:
“Not what you were told to believe, huh?” the AVFM Facebook page administrator asks in a comment below it.
Well, no, it wasn’t.
Trouble is, the person who told me that the “Men’s Human Rights Movement” isn’t about any of these things was, well, AVFM founder and CEO Paul Elam.
Yep, in an AVFM post earlier this year — as I noted at the time — Elam went on at some length about the various issues the MHRM is doing nothing about, on purpose.
“So, what is this thing we call the Men’s Human Rights Movement (MHRM)?” Elam began.
Well, I can best start by telling you what it is not, from my own personal point of view. It is not about passing a Violence Against Men Act or any other form of government reliance on justice and personal liberty. … There are no plans to form a committee for research for testicular cancer or to build a men’s shelter. AVFM does not have a program to reform family courts. …
Neither I nor AVFM has a legislative agenda, nor any politicians to endorse, nor lobbying to accomplish because none of that is of any value in a society that still refuses to accept reality.
Emphasis mine.
As for the issues listed on AVFM’s mission statement, which include numerous items mentioned on the “meme” above, as well as an assortment of other allegedly “humanist” reforms, including “mandatory on demand” paternity testing, abolishing the Violence Against Women Act and “dispens[ing] with child support except in special circumstances?”
Well, as Paul Elam sees it, actually doing anything about any of these things is not Paul Elam’s job. Nor that of any Men’s Rightser.
Sure, if you look at our mission statement you will see many items that will require political and judicial remedy to ultimately accomplish. That, however is not our job at AVFM to accomplish directly.
So if that’s what the Men’s Rights movement doesn’t do, what exactly does it do? Elam is equally blunt:
You want to know what this movement is about? It is very, very simple in my opinion. The MHRM I envision is about one simple thing. Talking without fear or capitulation.
Seriously. That is it. It is about nothing more than people talking to each other, openly and freely, in a world that does not want them to.
I’ve helpfully modified the AVFM meme above so that it more accurately represents the official AVFM position on doing things.
Feel free to use this if you’d like, guys!
Or the one I did at the top of the page, if you’d prefer.
wordsp1nner-That’s what I was thinking, too. It would be difficult to claim child support if she is refusing to get a paternity test done and refusing to name him on the birth certificate as the child’s father. I think the courts would find it suspicious and either order a DNA test to be done, or refuse to grant her child support. Anyway, best wishes to you and your brother, Paradoxical. Stay strong! <3
@Paradoxical
My advice, talk to a lawyer who specializes in the field. Laws are going to differ state to state, and while all the advice here is good; your brother needs someone familiar with the laws in his home state.
Notice, lurking MRAs that commenters are not automatically taking the side of the feeemale because feminists are all conspiring to deprive fathers of parental rights. We tend to take the side of the person not being an asshole and it just so happens you MRAs tend to be assholes!
I think this post is really unfair to AVfM, just click on their “Activism” tag, which lists “posters” and “facts”.
POSTERS:
I don’t think I have to explain why posters are central to activism, even if they offer simplistic factoids that aren’t actually true, such as “90% of the homeless are men”*.
*They are conflating the “chronic homeless”, who are 67-80% male, with the total homeless population, even though the chronic homeless make up 15% of the total homeless population. You can get the correct stats from government reports or non-profit groups that actually raise money in order to change public policy, as well as work with and help the homeless.
http://www.endhomelessness.org/pages/snapshot_of_homelessness
http://homeless.samhsa.gov/ResourceFiles/hrc_factsheet.pdf
FACTS:
Hey, AVfM has sort of updated their previously terrible fact page, by outsourcing it to “Cultural Misandry.com”, which I believe is
a noted think tanka guy named Donovan.“Rape Law and Policies” Section
1) “April 4th “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the OCR”
Citation: FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) fact sheet [An sort of acceptable source, but FIRE is a heavily Koch funded conservative Libertarian foundation that has defended Universities and professors being criticized for receiving Koch money.]**
Second Citation: a short Wall Street Journal editorial written by a Prof from Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institute.
2) “Federal Rule of Evidence 413 allows rape defendants’ prior sexual assault misconduct to be admitted as evidence in federal rape trials.”
Citation: An 1995 American Criminal Law Review article that is excerpted, but not available, which discusses the rule a year after the legislation passed.
Second Citation: An article from the Fall 2012 issue of the Columbia Undergraduate Law Review, which is actually a paper by a Rutgers senior written for a college class.
3) “Military charges more men with bogus rape claims to show that it takes sexual assault seriously.”
Citation: Link doesn’t work, but it’s a 2011 article from “The Island Packet, [a] newspaper in Hilton Head & Beaufort, SC [that] is proud to offer you local news coverage online.”
4) “Rape Shield Law – prevents the alleged victim of a sexual assault from having her past sexual behavior an issue in court. Cathy Young, writing for reason magazine, highlights the problems of such a law.”
Citation: a short 2002 Reason article that mostly discusses one 1998 case, then briefly two cases, from 1989 and 1993.
“False Rape” section
1) “The infamous Eugene Kanin study [from 1994] found a 41% false rape figure in a small metropolitan community. A follow up study, found 50% of rape allegations in college to be false. Among the false charges, 53% of the women admitted they filed the false claim as an alibi.”
Citation: http://falserapearchives.blogspot.com/2009/06/archives-of-sexual-behavior-feb-1994.html
Second Citation: http://www.archive.org/details/FalseRapeAllegations
2) “US Air force study confirms 60% of rapes to be false, a full 27% of the allegations were confirmed to be false because the woman admitted to making them up.”
Citation: Believe Her! The Woman Never Lies Myth (1994)
http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume6/j6_2_4.htm
First, these stats from cited article weakly extrapolated from a 1985 study have been debunked pretty handily in “Rape and False Reports”, by Matt Atkinson.
http://www.ncdsv.org/images/OCADVSA_RapeAndFalseReports_2010.pdf
It’s no wonder AVfM loves this 20 year old article as it denounces a veritable parade of lying victims: false accusations of rape, sexual harassment, child sex abuse and recovered memories, capped off with a lengthy guessing game about the motivations of accusers.
[Note: They’re quoting the “abstract” not the conclusion.]
Here’s how this “Forensic website” describes itself on it’s home page:
It was founded by the controversial Ralph Underwager, who was quoted saying this in the LA Times.***
Yikes.
TL;DR AVfM’s “fact” page still sucks and the few citations they offer are generally dated and pathetic. I’ve wasted enough time on it, but later sources cited include The Daily Mail, Fox News, World Net Daily, Washington Times, falserape.net, ageofconsent.com(!) and People magazine. And several dead links.
**https://www.americanprogressaction.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2011/04/pdf/koch_brothers.pdf
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/koch-brothers-web-influence
https://www.thefire.org/not-just-florida-state/
https://www.thefire.org/judge-halts-politically-motivated-foia-request-conservative-professor/
***http://articles.latimes.com/1985-02-11/news/mn-4295_1_false-accusation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Underwager
http://www.ipt-forensics.com/
@WWTH
I’d like to add, no shit, Sherlock. Not to you specifically, but you know what I mean.
Yes, lurking MRAs. Everyone is expressing well wishes to the father of the child. We want what’s best for the child and we take the side of the person who is the most suitable parent. Even if *GASP* that person is the father. This is because we actually believe that fathers have parental rights, too!
Pandapool- Yeah. It should be a real ‘LIKE DUH!’ moment for them. But MRAs are so willfully ignorant about this.
Paul Elam is coming to Toronto. All Canadians on this site should protest to their MPs and Customs and Immigration Dept. Letting this hate monger here to spread his poison is just wrong
For some reason, The Beatles’ “Revolution” is on heavy rotation in my head right now.
@pandapool & misseb47
I suppose we could hope for a road to Damascus conversion or two. I doubt it’ll happen, but hey, stranger things…
Petition time! Post links, anybody, if you got one…
We’re brilliant artists, but no one except us is brilliant enough to appreciate our art, so we protest this by not making art! (But seriously, if a society refuses to accept the ‘realities of male issues’, doesn’t that make it exponentially more important to work to address and support those issues?)
Thanks for all your support and advice, guys! I’m not that well-versed in the situation, I’ll admit, but my brother is very happy about this child, and if it turns out to be his, he’d do the best he can to father it, mother be damned.
so, basically, they are like “we defend men’s human rights, but we wont ctually do anything about it, because we shouldn’t have to (because we are men and better than anyone else and deserve to be spoon feeded until our lives end)?”
@PI – I don’t know what your brother’s situation is money-wise, but university legal clinics can be a decent first option just to get the lay of the land and first consults can often be free. He needs to lawyer up pretty quick, even if it then goes to mediation or she decides to play like a grown-up parent and no lawyers are needed down the road. Seeking legal advice isn’t adversarial in and of itself, but it can feel like it is.
Visitation issues can often suck whether you’re the custodial parent on non-custodial. If the non-custodial parent just doesn’t show up, not much you can do. If custodial parent makes things difficult, a little bit more you can do, but not much in the moment.
@PI -I’ll echo everyone else’s well-wishes +
* Get some legal advice, even if it’s just an initial consult with University Services.
* She most likely has 0 standing to demand child support without (1) marriage (many states assume paternity if married, some do with commonly marriage) (2) a paternity test (3) his name on the birth certificate.
If things do go to the courts, he NEEDS to show up. That’s one of the main ways people get screwed – they don’t show up out of protest or b/c of logistical challenges.
Judges don’t like that.
And I hope that she grows up and starts acting in the best interests of the child*. Playing games is not cool.
* I’m going to assume that you’re giving an accurate representation of events. I’ve seen some non-custodial parents – male and female – moan and yell that the custodial parent’s playing games, etc, when it’s really that the non-custodial parent’s a raging, inconsistent douchebag whose actions are downright harmful to the kid(s). My BIL’s going through that right now. After years of going in amd out of the courts, his daughter’s finally gotten to the point that she’s told him – and his lawyer – that she doesn’t want to have to live with Mommy because she’s scary. My husband’s watched her beat her dog to the point that it collapsed with a seizure of some sort, so I believe it.
After having written that, I realize that you may be wondering how she had joint custody in the first place:
My BIL has a felony conviction on his record. When he was an emancipated teen, he loaned his truck to some friends who he knew were going to use it to use it to pick up drugs. Well, they did that and then also committed armed robbery. That – and his license plate number – was caught on tape.
When he was inevitably arrested, he admitted that he knew about the drugs but not about the robbery.
Knowing that any crime was going to be committed is apparently legally lime knowing all crimes were going to be committed, so -bingbamboom- armed robbery.
It also probably didn’t help matters that he’s like 6’5″, built like a gladiator (especially after prison), and has worked as a bouncer (as you do with a felony conviction under your belt) and his ex is teeny tiny and relatively helpless looking, so when their daughter started showing up with bruises it took quite a bit to convince the court that it wasn’t him doing the bruising.
(Note to lurking MRAs: The fact that he is obviously physically powerful and hence assumed to be capable of abuse and she was assumed to be relatively powerless and therefore not is actually an example of institutional patriarchy at play.)
*big sigh*
Please excuse the myriad silly autocorrects in those two posts.
I severely dislike my phone.
I find it ridiculous we’re now addressing lurking MRAs. Of course, I guess they’re stupid enough to think we all hate men and shit, I guess we’d have to spell it out for
bigboyroxanneJCthem.I’ll be sitting over here, taking notes. : 3
Thanks for all your help guys. I really appreciate it, and I’m sure my brother would too.
I probably do it more than I should because I (perhaps in an act of unbridled, foolish optimism) think that at least 1/3 of the guys who are flirting with the manosphere are operating:
* With a warped understanding of feminism.
* From a place of defensiveness and hurt (and perhaps with some of the myopia of youth*) reinforced by a toxic echochamber.
*That’s not to say that all young people are myopic or sheltered, but that a certain degree of that is understandable with a lack of exposure to the world…it becomes considerably less understandable as people age.
Heck, I’d absorbed a pretty negative view from popular culture of feminism and a severe misunderstanding of many of its basic assumptions until I took the time to actually explore it, and that didn’t happen until I was older than I’d like to admit.
Once you have been the custodial parent it is likely you will stay the custodial parent. It happens to people who hand their kids over to their parents or co-parent to go away to school rehab, etc. Commonwealth laws in KY give you 6 months to get your kid back before they start considering the primary caregiver the legal guardian.
They also insist on the mother naming a father because the state ain’t picking up the check if a dad won’t pay child support. She can always claim she doesn’t know who he is, but if a man shows up saying he’s been told he’s the dad, I’m fairly sure the court is going to have a paternity test. Because again they do not want to pay for your babies. Still, child support and visitation are not linked. That protects men who don’t pay child support from not being able to have some participation in the raising of their children. The states takes care of itself first and the kids next. The parents come third.
IN KY a husband is considered the father of his wife’s child unless he protests. This protects him form raising a kid only to have his rights removed if the mom was wrong or dishonest with him. It can also keep him from paying child support for a child that is not biologically related to him should he choose not to do so. Then she has to have a paternity test.
I know a couple who kept the wife’s pregnancy a secret until after the divorce because they knew it was not her husband’s and they didn’t want to risk miscarriage by amniocentesis. They both had babies on the way from outside their marriage and wanted the divorce over asap.
I also know a biodad who gave up half his weekends so that his son’s stepfather could have contact with his stepson after he was divorced from the boy’s mom. In such a case, the step parent has no rights. It was a sad situation and the boy was lucky to have two dads who cared enough about him to work together. The mom was not a fit parent imo.
There are issues that need to be addressed in family court. but feminism is not the cause of those issues.
What I meant by the first sentence, PI is that he should fight hard now. Waiting will only hurt his chances. Lawyer up and good luck!
@Lea
Does KY mean Kentucky? Are you in Kentucky?
They aren’t just talking, they are also doxxing and harassing women and girls, they are trolling websites and using every kind of verbal abuse possible to convince people how wrong feminists are.
If all they were doing was sitting around talking, there wouldn’t be a backlash against them. They are engaging in relational aggression, because going through legal ways of changing how society works requires them getting up off their duffs and doing something other than be an asshole.
Also, they engage in hate speech against women and feminists, and that is most certainly political in nature.