Yesterday, the official Subway Twitter account posted a carefully worded statement declaring the actions of the sandwich chain’s now infamous former spokesman Jared Fogle as “inexcusable,” and noting that the company had already severed ties with him.
It’s certainly no surprise that Subway wants to have nothing to do with Fogle, who “has agreed to plead guilty to one count of traveling to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor and one count of distribution and receipt of child pornography,” as CBSNews reports.
What was a little surprising was seeing some who responded to Subway’s tweet actually defending Fogle. And while some of the “defenders” were almost certainly trolls, Fogle’s most vociferous defender was completely sincere — and a self-described Men’s Rights activist.
The first to respond to Subway’s Tweet, he declared:
So who is this Holocaust21? On his website — it seems pretty clear he’s a “he” — he claims to stand for “Men’s Rights, Youth Rights, Sexual Rights.”
The “men’s right,” that is, to have sex with girls as young as 12. He thinks age of consent laws are a plot against men and that “feminist inspired paedohysteria, sexual offence & child protection legislation is leading to a holocaust of men.”
In a seemingly neverending stream of combative tweets, he has defended Fogle as “a good chap,” declared that there is “absolutely nothing wrong with banging teenage girls” and told one critic of his views that “[y]ou’re just jealous that #JaredFogle isn’t interested in fat old hags like you.”
As he sees it, he explained over the course of two Tweets,
Age of consent laws just make it easy to convict innocent ppl, to exert rigid social control on normal behaviours
Here are some of his other thoughts:
While Holocaust21 is clearly on the fringes of the Men’s Rights movement, he’s not the only MRA obsessed with the alleged evils of the age of consent; the blogs Human Stupidity and The Antifeminist have staked out similar positions.
Tom Martin, one of the best-known MRAs in the UK, has argued that child prostitutes “exploit” pedophiles for money, and Judgy Bitch, A Voice for Men’s “social media director,” has described the teenage victims of the late Jimmy Savile, British “entertainer” and pedophile, as the real abusers.
You may also recall the gentleman who showed up at AVFM’s conference last year to support his pet project of lowering the age of consent to age 12. After first suggesting that the man, a registered sex offender named Albert Calabrese, was a plant sent to the conference by their enemies, the powers that be at AVFM relented, with head AVFMer Paul Elam suggesting that he wanted to run a video by Calebrese on the site.
And so it is not altogether shocking that Holocaust21’s blogroll includes not only Human Stupidity and The Antifeminist but Judgy Bitch and A Voice for Men. And that, if you look through his followers on Twitter, you will find a number of MRAs amongst them, including such familiar names as Tom Martin, Elvind Burge, former AVFM radio host Jack Barnes, as well as Mina Smith, the antifeminist sea lion who so tediously “debated” me the other day. (It’s a small world after all.)
Looking through Holocaust21’s timeline over the past few days, I see that he’s retweeted Roosh V, #GamerGate’s pet “journalist” Milo Yiannopoulos, and an anti-Semitic caricature of Anita Sarkeesian.
It’s a really small world.
Will any other MRAs embrace Fogle as a Men’s Rights martyr? I guess we’ll see.
I didn’t expect much out of someone who calls himself Holocaust, but that was still incredibly disgusting. I was still playing with dolls at 12. Anyone who thinks 12 year olds can consent to sex with an adult is just… I don’t even have words.
But even leaving that aside, the porn Fogle had featured some kids as young as 6 so the evo psych crap about young girls who are just in puberty being the best breeding candidates, as wrong and stupid as it is, doesn’t even apply. Also, some of the victims in his porn were boys. So that’s some poor men’s rightsing. I’m going to go barf now. Bye.
@ yutolia
In a way that 15 year old girl does have the one power they don’t have. It’s a power they resent her having and their frustration at not having that power is what drives their obsession and hatred.
That power is the right of the 15 year old girl to make her own decisions.
If the MRAs have any goal at all beyond terrorising women for its own sake, their goal can be encapsulated in one statement: “The removal of any form of autonomy for women”
Everything else flows from that.
I see Holocaust21 is using the Reddit tactic of “Fucking 12-year olds used to be A-OK!” Is there any source that debunks this stupid argument?
@ Magic
They probably can point to various historical and even contemporary jurisdictions where the age of consent is as young as 12; but the inherent problems in appealing to history or even other nations should be obvious.
When people raise the “Romeo and Juliet were only 12” argument you can also remind them how well that turned out.
H21 calls the police who enforce statutory rape laws “predatory”, that’s rich. That’s like sleazy loan companies calling poor people predatory.
I’m surprised the word “ephebophile” never made an appearance.
While the legal age at which marriages could be consummated used to be 12, the average age of marriage, even during the high Middle Ages, does not appear to have been lower than 17, and this was based on an analysis of aristocratic couples. Peasants typically married later than aristocrats for economic reasons, including parents’ need to retain their children’s labor and the lack of incentive to marry as early as aristocrats did. Furthermore, most young brides wed comparatively young men. Marriages with significant age gaps were likely to be political and remain childless due to the husband’s old age. Finally, even girls who married as young as twelve don’t seem to have consummated their marriages immediately. The case of Margaret Beaufort, who marrie at 12 and gave birth at 13, is a rare one. Few aristocratic brides, even those who married at 12, gave birth before the age of 16.
http://madeofwynn.net/2013/09/23/misuse-of-the-word-medieval-part-13-most-girls-married-old-guys/
@ alaisvex
I suspect a lot of MRAs also don’t understand the historical difference between betrothal and marriage.
That one always appalls/amuses me, simply because they never understand that if you’re actually making that distinction, it’s the ‘ephebophiles’ who are the more morally/ethically reprehensible. (Pedophiles are people with an illness, who should be able to seek counseling on how to live a life in a way that they DON’T end up in a situation where they are tempted to act on their impulses. An ephebophile, OTOH, is deliberately choosing to target post-pubescent, underage girls because he thinks they will be more easily controlled and manipulated. I can pity a pedophile, even as I want him to be guided into an isolated lifestyle–enforced, if he’s ever actually committed an offense, but a grown man who just seeks to exploit naivete and inexperience is nothing but a predator, and should be locked up without remorse.)
I’m pretty sure you could end that sentence with virtually anything and end up with an accurate assessment.
If it’s not modern, white, male, and western, it’s not evidence that MRAs are considering.
Ugh this is really gross. I Hate this guy almost as much as Roosh. Defending pedophilla? really? is there no low you won’t stoop to?
Also I should note he brings up the idea of thoughtcrime. Why do so many MRA’s bring up 1984 without having read it? “academic glasses” thoughtcrime is what it sounds like. you are being punished for our thoughts. Fogle took action both with the sex with children and with the buying of porn. If he merely had creepy thoughts about minors that would be thought crime, but we don’t lock people up for having creepy thoughts. “takes off academic glasses.” Also seriously fuck you man.
@Fnoicby, here you go. I had to take a few days’ break because I was getting emotionally exhausted (and not just by that topic). Check back on Saturday night, when I post my Wankers of the Week list (bringing it back by popular demand) — I think you’ll see some familiar names on it!
Oh, that we could build an island made of Lego and maroon these guys on it!
Zeb,
I really hate the argument that consuming child porn is not child abuse because they’re just looking, not touching. I’ve heard it a few times before. If there was no demand for child porn, no one would make it. So anyone who does watch it is culpable. It’s not a thought crime.
weirwoodtreehugger: I was not suggesting it was. I mention in my post that he took action by buying the porn.
Thanks Bina!
It’s hard not to get emotional about some of these topics. Looking forward to the wankers 😉
Swashbuckling? Does he roll with a cutlass and a flintlock pistol too?
@ WWTH & Zeb
In England both child pornography featuring real victims and ‘pseudo’ imagery (i.e. CGI, cartoons, drawings etc) all equally illegal.
I don’t have a problem with that but do you have any thoughts?
I still don’t think even the illegality of pseudo pics amounts to ‘thought crime’. You can still think all the awful thoughts you want; but actually expressing those thoughts is, in our view, an action.
Isn’t part of the MRA (largely imaginary) platform that boys suffer a lot of sexual abuse at the hands of grown women? And that those women should be punished?
So, why are they not advocating for the “sexual freedom” of 12 year old boys? Or is a 12 year old boy a victim, and a 12 year old girl is just unavailable to their boners as part of the evil feminist plot?
@Alan: absolutely true. It’s the one power they can’t have, and as mostly super privileged white men, that one privilege they can’t have drives them insane.
@ alaisvex
Yes, it’s always worth noting that men among the medieval aristocracy often married heiresses young, because it was important for them to get access to their lands de jure uxoris as soon as possible, but they weren’t stupid about consummating the marriage before it was safe for the woman to have a child. The overwhelming majority of marriages bore no children until the wife was through puberty, whatever the husband’s situation, and most of that majority saw the wife treated very well until that point, as opposed to being treated as worthless for not being able to make babies yet. For example, Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, married his wife Beatrice of Burgundy when he was in his mid-thirties and she was twelve or thirteen, but they did not have a child together until she was at least eighteen, even though that meant waiting until he was past forty, and in the meantime he was said to have spoiled her rotten and asked nothing of her whatsoever. Prosopographical studies of well-documented medieval counties, like Theodore Evergates’ The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, show this to have been the norm when there was a large gap in age, rather than just the sentimental act of a few powerful men.
So yeah, MRA dudes always focus on “the way things used to be,” but they’d be just as much creepy weirdos in the Middle Ages as today. Raping little girls has always been raping little girls. I’ve got nothing for them but disgust and horror.
Alan Robertshaw: I would agree that pseudo picks are not thought crime. I have heard a couple of arguments in my criminology class that CGI or cartoons might give pedophiles some type of release and prevent them from doing real harm, but i feel that pornography often makes people more willing to except certain poisonous ideas about sex, so I’m a bit worried about this making people more wiling to except there messed up ideas about young children.
Sorry, Zeb Barryman. I wasn’t trying to say I thought you were defending him. I was just trying to expand on your. I was speed posting on my break and didn’t properly clarify.
@raysa:
MRAs are a reactionary group. You can find all sorts under their banner, and those sorts will be accepted so long as they find some way to attack feminism. Who cares if their beliefs aren’t consistent? They aren’t there to advocate positively for things, unless it serves the purpose of attacking feminism somehow.
Sort of it is? But mostly they only seem to bring it up when they’re trying to shut down conversations about men who abuse children.