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.
weirwoodtreehugger: Oh that’s fine then. I agree with your overall point.
Well, plenty of pirates were on board with rape, so it wouldn’t surprise me.
Though, Ching Shih would have seen him gutted for it.
This gets into lots of weird and tricksy areas of the law, especially when talking about American law, since we also have the First Amendment. Once you’re no longer talking about the actual exploitation of literal children, it becomes much more difficult to draw a hard line in a legal sense. That does need to be emphasized, because it’s perfectly reasonable to draw a personal line saying that I, as a human being, do not approve of sexual imagery of even fictional children, and feel that individuals who do deserve to be ostracized.
Hello, kirbywarp and viscaria!
And thanks for the response.
@Alan and others:
Urk… On the one hand, rape porn exists. I feel like that can also promote poisonous ideas about sex… especially since it seems like nearly all mainstream porn nowadays contains elements of rape. Yet, it seems like something that theoretically could be ok as a fantasy-only, as long as the consumers otherwise were well versed in consent.
On the other hand, pseudo pics of child porn seems worse to me, because even though it is also rape, it’s rape of a particularly vulnerable class of people, and one that really… really shouldn’t be viewed in a sexual manner. It seems like it’d be much easier for a consumer of psuedo pics to act out then for a consumer of adult rape porn.
Then again… I don’t have quite a strong a visceral reaction to something like pesudo pics of beastiality, despite animals also being vulnerable.
I dunno… I’m leaning towards the idea that in our current porn climate, we can’t really talk about things theoretically. When nearly all mainstream porn has elements of rape, and nearly all hentai has elements of rape and child porn, you can’t really talk about how a particular type of porn would work with people who are otherwise well-informed about sex and consent.
I’m kinda coming to the conclusion that it’d be best to take a hard stance on pornography, outlawing a lot of stuff that could conceivably be allowable (if not acceptable), until society changes and develops healthier attitudes. Then maybe things that should only ever be fantasy would be more likely to stay that way.
Fuck this guy. Urgh!!
I wasn’t playing with dolls at 12, I was smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. At 13 I was smoking weed and at 14 I was on much harder drugs. An abusive childhood plus poor mental health led me to a lifestyle that was extremely easy for predators to exploit. I can tell you now that a 14 year old in a crack house is going to get abused by scumbags like the guy writing those tweets.
So just fuck him and his shitty views.
Actually Juliet was 13 and Romeo was 17.
Let’s see… Me at 12? My stuffed animals and I were off exploring alien planets under the command of Captain Kirk. No idea what sex even was, and the only guys in my life (other than Daddy) were Link, Mario and Luigi.
@: Pandapool
Well, they seem to shift around a bit depending on which version you use of Bandello, Brooke or Shakespeare. Seems to be anything from 12 to 21 for either of them.
West Side Story is the best version though.
Which makes it even worse, imo.
Though, any time someone tries to romanticize it and say that they want a relationship like that, I kindly say to them “What, you want a relationship that only lasts for a few days and kills six people, including yourselves?”.
Lets not forget that Romeo only met Juliet because he was stalking her cousin.
Cerberus:
Hey, even the skunks don’t want to be associated with those stinkers.
That’s why I correct it.
Why do people always miss the fact that Romeo and Juliet is about how feuds are stupid and vengeance destroys you and yours as much as it does your enemy? It’s very clearly outlined in the closing speech. There never was a tale of more woe. Do you even Shakespeare, bro?
@Alan
Ha!
MRAs are all about all the power, all for themselves. As a group, I don’t think that there’s any age that they would think of as too young. They believe that they deserve all sexual access to all girls (and possibly boys) of all ages. They believe that they deserve all sexual access to all women. They want to be free to hit or kill any other living being. They’d like no consequences. They’d like no criticism.
And they’d like all this power, all for themselves, because they don’t know how–and don’t want to learn how–to get along with others.
Me at 12 was thinking that the adult world was so much BS that I wanted to be a cat. I went more than a little overboard on acting out on that fantasy – one time I was caught on all fours, lapping milk from a bowl, while naked (because cats don’t wear clothing). That was… embarrassing, to say the least.
I’m leaning that way myself.
Several years ago, here in Canada, there was a freeze-peach case concerning a guy named Robin Sharpe (feel free to google if you hadn’t heard of him), who won the right to keep his home-made boy-rape-porn on the grounds that it was all fiction, and its illustrations all hand-drawn. I wasn’t cool with the outcome of that; I figured it was only a matter of time before he, or someone he traded the vile stuff with, would be caught abusing a real kid, based on the “fantasy” material he’d been reading. Same goes for the child-sized sex dolls being allegedly sold in China. How long before somebody who owns one gets tired of that and starts acting it out on real kids, who really get hurt, show real fear, and die for real?
The problem with certain fantasies is that sooner or later, the fantasist will become jaded with them and want to act them out in the flesh. One of the scary facts about sexual predators and serial killers is how many of them “graduated” to real rape and murder from early exposure to sadistic porn. Eventually they got bored with that and wanted something with real blood and suffering involved. Making that material unavailable to them might seem cruel to some, and like “depriving them of a safety valve” to others, but maybe it’s better that future guys never get a taste for it in the first place. Because if what I’ve been seeing holds true, then there really is no such thing as a “safety valve” for sexual sadists (and I don’t mean the BDSM kind) who get off on the unmitigated suffering of a victim. These are the kind of people who don’t reach true satisfaction until they’re doing actual damage.
Hey WWTH, wanna hear a joke about Sodium Hypobromite?
Well, there’s a correlation/causation factor there. Presumably people who are turned on by violence would look for violent porn and would also be more likely to be violent in real life. It’s difficult to know whether violent porn makes them more likely to be violent, unless you do a study of people who weren’t into that previously, which would be hella unethical.
What it does suggest, though, is that the “harmless outlet” logic is weak, and that having a way to indulge their desires without hurting anyone doesn’t do much to prevent them from causing real-world harm.
…Sorry, Bina, I just reread your post and realized you were basically saying the same thing.
Not a problem!
I do phone sex for a living, and I often wonder what the right response is to guys who want to do fantasies where I roleplay an underage girl. Luckily, it’s a moot point because the site I work through doesn’t allow it, but I still mull it over. I wonder if I would be normalizing those acts in that guy’s mind, but I also wonder if I might be keeping those guys from getting off in predatory ways at that moment. Thoughts?
Viscaria: I’d simplify it even further – MRAs apparently want the right to do whatever they want without any negative consequences. Or in other words, they want to never have to grow up and behave as adult human beings.
Re: the Shakespeare subthread – one thing which was said elsewhere (a piece of fanfic, to be exact) was that Romeo and Juliet can actually be seen as a failure of authority. Prince Paris of Verona had the power to haul the Montagues and the Capulets before him and order to feuding to cease, and he never bothered to exercise it. So the deaths of both Romeo and Juliet can be seen to be a direct consequence of his inaction.