Men’s Rights Activists love to “warn” women that they may soon face a day of reckoning if they don’t shape up and start acting the way MRAs think they should. Don’t make men angry, they say; you wouldn’t like us when we’re angry!
Still, most MRAs making these “predictions” at least make a token effort to pretend to be horrified at the notion of men rising up to wreak vengeance upon uppity women. This isn’t what we want, they assure women; it’s just what will happen if you continue to “provoke” men with your bad behavior.
Other MRAs find it impossible to contain their glee; like doomsday preppers with well-stocked bunkers and enough ammo to kill every living thing within a 500 mile radius, they can’t wait for the end of the world.
Peter Andrew Nolan is one of these other MRAs. And he’s started to celebrate a little bit early.
In a series of recent blog posts and Tweets, Nolan has heralded a number of murders of women at the hands of their exes in his native Australia as portents of a new age of antifeminist retribution. (Click on screenshots below to see archived versions of these Tweets.)
I’m sure actress Denise Richards was delighted to find the above in her Twitter notifications, sent as a reply to a Tweet of hers wishing her father a happy Father’s Day.
Several feminists who ended up in a discussion with him on Twitter were treated to the following.
As Nolan sees it, the murder of women in Australia and Ireland is now perfectly legal, as he has officially declared war upon both countries.
Nolan thinks politicians and police officers are also legitimate targets in his “war.”
And he assures us this “war” will continue until he is properly compensated for whatever terrible injustices he thinks have been done to him.
Now, Nolan’s “legal” claims are of course ludicrous, and he is obviously in no position to “release” any murderers of women in either Ireland or Australia.
But as bizarre as his arguments are, Nolan is no troll; as longtime readers of this blog know all too well, he’s deadly serious about all of this.
The man who used to call himself Peter-Andrew: Nolan©, but who now prefers to call himself Joschua-Brandon: Boehm©, is a follower of the exceedingly strange and dangerous Sovereign Citizen movement. He thinks the odd punctuation he’s added to his various names actually means something important, and he does indeed believe that he is at war with Ireland and Australia, that murdering women is legal in both countries, and that he has the right to enforce these claims of his as best he can.
Happily, he is not actually in either of these countries — last I heard, he’s in Germany, and as I understand it, he is barred from entering Ireland and possibly Australia as well. At least according to the laws that the rest of the world follows.
This isn’t the first time Nolan has justified or indeed celebrated violence against women. His declarations of “war” are not new. He’s offered some (barely) qualified praise for far-right mass murderer Anders Breivik, and at one point he warned any women thinking of commenting on his laughable Facebook ripoff MAN-BOOK that he just might just kill them for it.
But these recent Tweets are pretty brazen, even by his standards. He is clearly a threat to women, as well as to politicians and government employees regardless of gender.
H/T — @TheFirstPaige
NOTE TO COMMENTERS: Please avoid describing Nolan as “crazy,” or attempting to diagnose his mental health. Mental illness doesn’t cause hate. And please refrain from violent language, even when it is clearly metaphorical.
You left out half the story. There was a protracted fight, and there were feminists with power on both sides. This is not even a remotely controversial assertion if your are familiar with the history. Ti-Grace Atkinson was President of the most powerful chapter of NOW when she enthusiastically promoted Valerie Solanas’s manifesto, which you correctly call an “absurd fantasy.” But it was an absurd fantasy that had a rapt audience among self-identified feminists. It was an absurd fantasy that was published, reprinted, featured in feminist anthologies and reviewed by respected academics in major publications. Your rejection of it does not change this history.
Uh, this was my original point. Feminism took years to cast off advocates of violence and relegate them to the fringe. But at least Betty Friedan was there, fighting. The MRM worries me because it has no Friedan, or anyone even close. But they are just as angry as 1968 feminists, and just as eager to take action. And lots of them have much better weapons than Solanas managed to buy on the streets of New York.
weirwoodtreehugger,
You seriously don’t recognize the MRM as meeting the minimum definition of a social movement?
Thanks for that. It explains a lot.
I can’t even with you, Kerlyssa. Why do you have such a fucking axe to grind here?
Do you know that when “violence committed by the mentally ill” is tabulated, self-harm is typically included? In fact, unless a statistic explicitly states that it does NOT include self-harm, and only includes harm against others, you can bet your last dollar that suicides and other forms of self-harm are baked into that number.
Fuck the hell off. You are rolling in so much shit I had to double-check the cat box to make sure I’d cleaned it out this morning.
Is it supposed to be a bad thing that I don’t think yelling at women on the internet is a legit social movement?
The internet can be a useful tool for activists, but if a movement doesn’t consist of any actual activism outside of twitter, reddit, and comment sections, I don’t see how that constitutes a social movement. They don’t try to effect legislation or elections. They haven’t organized any campaigns to get any businesses to behave better. They’ve done nothing and don’t intend on ever doing anything.
@The Mad Cow:
Why did feminists support it? Could you answer that? And why did other feminists not support it?
Why was it reprinted in anthologies? What did academics claim about it in their reviews?
Because after an extremely brief history listen from Wikipedia, I’m seeing this whole paragraph as one big sleight-of-hand. You claim that feminists supported a manifesto that used violent rhetoric, and that therefore they are the same as modern MRAs that support manifestos that use violent rhetoric, but neglect the actual content of that support, which to me pretty much ignores any calls for violence and instead focuses on the criticism of patriarchal systems.
Meanwhile it’s incredibly easy to find modern MRAs that are completely in line with the rhetoric, violence and all. The violence is practically fundamental to some of their fantasies, and pervasive all throughout the manosphere.
Seems like a pretty extreme response to not being able to get laid.
Policy of Madness: Mostly because it’s a giant fucking hassle to be expected to engage with delusions as if they weren’t delusional.
Weirwood: Even if I was willing to attempt it, and it wasn’t license loss worthy levels of unprofessional, why would anyone attempt to make a medical diagnosis over the internet? I can say that the behavior exhibited appears delusional, and indicates mental illness(assuming he’s not just trolling), but I am not attempting to treat this illness. I am commenting on it in regards to safety and legal issues. I wouldn’t _diagnosis_ the specific illnesses of someone appearing to suffer a psychotic break in real life, I would react to the symptoms I see. Picking a specific diagnosis would depend on far more information than I have- which does not negate the information I do have, namely, the person’s communications over the internet.
Citation?
Also: I don’t think that “someone wants something” is enough to qualify a group of people as a social movement. The MRAs are not trying to achieve a goal unless you count “harassing women” and “writing angry stuff on the internet”. Hell, most of the time they are whining on and on about imaginary things like all/most rape accusations being false, the courts oppressing men, women using their evilz ass powerz against them and whatnot.
kirbywarp,
There has been an enormous amount of critical attention paid to the SCUM Manifesto. No, I cannot provide a comprehensive analysis of all of the angles that all of the critics took.
In the paragraph you accuse of “slight-of-hand” I am responding to the suggestion by a commenter that the reaction from feminists in 1968 was simply to glance at the manifesto, cast it aside and never look at it again. This is simply not true. Both Valerie Solanas and her manifesto were taken quite seriously by enough feminists to cause protracted battles within the feminist movement, especially in New York. When the president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women champions your cause, I think it’s fair to say that you have a strong voice in the conversation. To my knowledge there is zero dispute that Ti-Grace Atkinson passionately defended Solanas, to the point of conflict, or that Atkinson had support for her advocacy in the feminist community. It was a serious fight that she lost and was part of her eventual marginalization. (Atkinson’s famous quote: “Sisterhood is powerful. It kills. Mostly sisters.”)
If you look exclusively at more recent reactions to Solanas, the criticism is heavily tilted toward looking at the manifesto as a mere curiosity or a Swiftian satire. (Solanas herself offered contradictory interpretations, one time saying it was serious, and another saying it was satire.) Today, the manifesto is considered more as a literary document than a political one. But at the time of original publication, that was decidedly not the case. Many feminists seriously considered the manifesto as pointing the way. And others saw it, rightly, as a threat to the future of feminism.
And, yes, some critics did and do take the “Solanas had some good ideas” approach, ignoring the whole genocide thing and focusing on structural criticism. It is not hard to imagine the reactions today to an MRA saying “Elliot Rodger had some good ideas” and trying to make a case that you could ignore the whole killing part and just focus on the other stuff he said. That a critic could compartmentalize murder in this way would, I think, be presented as a flaw.
Mad Cow,
No, MRM is not a social movement anymore than the KKK is a social movement. Why are you pretending MRAs have done something about circumcision, which they have not? How is feminism opposed to that? It isn’t. forced circumcision is a patriarchal tradition forced and boys by men, not by women. MRM is not about men’s rights. It is about promoting rape, abuse, murder and harassment of women. It’s a hate group with no ties to civil rights activism whatsoever. Why are MRAs like you always such liars? Why the red herrings? Why can;t you own what you are? It’s almost like you have the good sense to be ashamed.
You truly should be. Instead of coming here to decry Nolan, you are defending the movement that agrees with him while spouting dishonest anti-feminist blather.
Just fuck off.
Fuck off. Nobody here is requiring you to engage with anything. This is a mission you took upon yourself, and any “hassle” you are experiencing is self-inflicted.
You receive zero pity from me. Crawl back into your ableist hole and stay there.
There is so much of it that you can’t provide any evidence at all. Aren’t you just precious?
You make a claim, you provide evidence supporting that claim.
This thread is no about you and how much you hate feminism. No, you are not a feminist scholar. No, feminism and MRM are not in any way shape or form alike. Yes, you are full to the brim with shit.
POM,
Liars calling us deluded. I guess they think we’ve never heard of gaslighting. Why is it the least rational people always think they are the arbiters of all logix? Mad Cow has alot more in common with Colon Nolan that xe’d like us to be able to spot.
@Lea
I’m just in love with people coming onto a website that nobody forced them to visit and shouldering the incredible burden of making us see The Error Of Our Ways, and teaching us that Mad People Really Should Be Feared. You know, like society never does that, and like it’s perfectly okay that mad people who aren’t violent (which is the vast majority) become collateral damage in the quest to other and explain violence in a way that allows the sane to reassure themselves that they are totally not at all like that spree killer over there! It’s fine to throw mad people under the bus so a sane person can feel better about themselves.
Yeah, I absolutely adore that, and can’t get enough of it.
I have to admit that I find it surprising that some commenters here are so ignorant of the history of feminism, the goals of the MRM, and how to use Google. I would have expected at least minimal knowledge of all three.
I suppose the easily answerable questions on the order of “Did any feminists really take Solanas seriously?” could just be reflexive deployment of the “raising the bar” fallacy to reject inconvenient ideas. But on the chance they are not…
Did Ti-Grace Atkinson, president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, champion Valerie Solanas and her manifesto? YES. To the point of fighting with the NOW board over it and personally distributing copies of the SCUM Manifesto. “Atkinson goes on to say that she took it upon herself to personally type up, print, collate and staple seventy sets of the Manifesto herself.”
Was there really a split within NOW over the SCUM Manifesto? According to professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, Dr. Breanne Fahs, who researched Solanas for a decade, yes:
Does the Men’s Rights Movement have goals? According to AVFM, yes (first five of a loooong list):
Whether AVFM is actually useful in achieving those goals is separate from the question of whether these goals are stated.
Is Google hard to use? No. Except in those cases where you don’t want answers to your questions. It can be challenging in that way.
Kerlyssa,
Do you have any self awareness at all? Of course you can’t diagnose someone on the internet. That was our whole point! So why are you so eager to call people with abhorrent views crazy and why are you so insistent that mentally ill people are dangerous?
I’m still struggling to understand what your point is other than arguing against straw men.
Lea,
Is it your experience that MRAs relate stories in which Betty Friedan is the hero? Or express fear that MRAs have guns?
I try to stay away from name-calling and insults (not to say that I always succeed), but that shouldn’t be taken as a sign that I think the MRM is a force for good. I’d ask that you read my comments again and see if you can’t imagine they are written by a feminist who sees the MRM as a threat to society and takes the MRM seriously for that reason.
Not all feminists take a slash-and-burn approach. Some of us think before we type.
Just because AVFM has stated goals, doesn’t mean it’s a social movement. Paul Elam himself stated that they do not do activism and don’t plan to.
weirwood: You can’t give a specific medical diagnosis because part of diagnosing is observation by the one making the diagnosis. I am not limited to making a medical diagnosis before judging someone’s behavior.
As for why I am posting, I get annoyed when people try to coopt science, be it medical science or statistics in general, into their ideological dogpile. I don’t care much if some random internet poster flails about swearing at me and calling me names, but it annoys me when they try and pass off their ideology as fact via statistical sleight of hand. I know my own character, but others may not realize that the science babble is incorrect.
Much the same reason I post in threads about vaccines- not because I always disagree with with the anti vaxxers aim(though I virtually always do), but because they lie about the science, and are spreading misinformation.
TL:DR, if people want to make it so you can’t mention mental illness in comments, I’d prefer they do it some other way than misleadingly quoting statistics to imply that the mentally ill commit violence at equal or lower rates than the non mentally ill.
Policy of Madness:
That is your is your response to what I wrote, sure. Might feel good to flex those outrage muscles. Isn’t what I’m writing, though. Personally, I’m not keen on fighting ableism via deception. All it takes is a fact checker to lose more ground than you gained. Seen it in plenty other advocacy areas than ‘madness’. Somehow, I doubt this is about advocacy for you, though, so much as carving out a niche for yourself, so w/e gets those endorphins flowing.
Show me some statistics that do not include violence against self. Because Kirbywarp did provide that, by restricting the sample to criminals, and the stats came out that there is effectively no difference in rates of violence against others by the mentally ill.
Your crusade to ensure that people fear and stigmatize the mad, and ensure that mad people continue to be treated like shit, and ensue that the mad remain adverse to seeking treatment for fear of having their lives ruined by people like you, is both cruel and misplaced. You are cruel.
You fucking earned them by spreading misleading statistics and then gaslighting everyone about it.
Get off your goddamned high horse and save your condescension. All you’re doing is making a fool of yourself.
“Exasperated” and “Tired of this shit” isn’t the same thing as “Outraged.”
I read his links. I then recapped them. They did not say less than or equal to. Perhaps you could point at where in the links they said this?
20% and 18% are effectively the same. Do you really want to argue that a 2% variance is a huge correlation that requires the stigmatization of 18% of the population? 2% is a big fucking deal in machining, but not so much in social sciences. “Statistically significant” does not actually mean the same thing as “significant.”