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.
MRAS want to punish all women and girls and be worshipped by other men.
http://www.thirtysomethinglondon.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/bd68c4849ab6b0816587720cf2bb2d30.521x385x1.jpg
The Simpsons used to be so good.
To be fair to the prince, in the very first scene he does order them to knock it off and threatens to execute anyone who disobeys. But he doesn’t follow through with it.
@katz
Yeah, and Mercutio and Tybalt killed each other anyway.
lmao the MRM is basically NAMBLA except its members are galvanized by misogyny
aahahahahaha if there was ever any doubt in your mind that these people have even the SLIGHTEST shred of credibility I hope now, you see, that they’re all completely horrible, disgusting monsters who are opposed to the very idea of any kind of intellectual honesty.
that these people aren’t credible*
I’m high.
So they basically defend any white man accused of any crime against a woman or girl? OK then.
So does “JudgyBitch” have kids? I hope not if she’s actually supporting guys who want to lower the age of consent because they’re into children.
@msexceptiontotherule
Last I heard she had two boys but I don’t really care to check.
http://notcisjustwoman.tumblr.com/post/98109416359/top-mra-paul-elam-bottom-serial-killer-charles
That’s just great (/s) – Is it wrong to hope that despite any of her efforts, somehow those boys turn out to be well-adjusted, non-misogynist, decent and productive members of society?
Are they going to defend Josef Fritzl?
@msexceptiontotherule
I think we all hope that.
Pedophilia isn’t an illness; it’s an inappropriate desire which can never be expressed in action because it’s a crime to have sex with anyone without their consent, and children can’t consent. The best thing we can do is to offer pedophiles counseling and other treatments to prevent them from offending, and there are a whole lot of them who don’t want to offend, who really don’t want to hurt children. But the laws in the U.S. make that nearly impossible when mental health professionals are required by law to report to legal authorities any self-identifying pedophile–even those who’ve never offended and are proactively seeking help so that they remain non-offenders–and the individual can get caught up in the criminal justice system, despite never having committed a crime, and have their entire lives turned upside-down.
MRAs who want to have sex with post-pubescent girls and teenage women and who think they should be permitted to aren’t pedophiles; they’re men who aren’t sexually comfortable with adult women.
On the topic of medieval sexual norms and Margaret Beaufort, most of her contemporaries were APPALLED at her pregnancy, and she was not expected to survive the childbirth being, yanno, STILL A KID. Which people at the time KNEW. Her husband would have caught holy hell for it if he hadn’t up and died of disease before the birth. Furthermore, although she remarried twice, she never had another child, and writers at the time assumed it was due to the trauma from bearing a child much much too young.
Yeah, IANAM (I am not a medievalist) but to my understanding, even when it was an accepted practice to marry off shockingly young girls, the husband would usually be seriously looked down on if she turned up pregnant before she was considered old enough to be an adult.
@scribbles
I think you were right the first time, in that none of these people have even the slightest shred of credibility.
@ Binjabreel
Yeah, medieval people, even lords and ladies, definitely weren’t as dense as MRA dudes pretend that they were.
Childbearing was already a risky business in the Middle Ages, given all the impediments of society and technology, and no nobleman who valued his inheritance and his family connections would risk them just to bone down with his child bride. The advantages of betrothing and marrying young were getting kinship alliances hammered out as soon as possible and maybe having some say in the upbringing of a future spouse, not culturally licit pedophilia. Even as early as the ninth or tenth century, various doctors of the Church were quite clear that consent was not something that children were able to give (hence the rite of confirmation) and therefore that betrothal was an agreement between two families, not between the future husband and wife.
That’s not to say that what we would consider statutory rape didn’t happen, but it was nowhere near condoned.
Also that’s all rich people; the vast majority of the population didn’t have any incentive to marry young. Here’s an article with some numbers suggesting that (in England and America at least) marriage age has been pretty steady for the past 400 years: https://historymyths.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/myth-136-women-married-very-young-in-the-olden-days/
I actually WAS a medievalist before I became an RN :-p the average age of marriage during most of the middle ages and renaissance was more like early 20s 🙂
• I always find it tiresome when some group declares some minor inconvenience to them to be A Holocaust Against _____. What? I can’t smoke wherever I like? It’s a holocaust against smokers! I can’t have sex with people who don’t/can’t consent? It’s a holocaust against mens! I can’t drive 100 mph through residential zones?!? It’s a holocaust against drivers!!!
My grandparents had to flee their country in the middle of the night leaving nearly all their possessions behind without knowing whether they’d ever be able to return and they were lucky enough to escape – many didn’t and were systematically murdered in what was an actual holocaust.
• There’s real discussion to be had about the sex rights of teens and age of consent but “lower the age of consent to 12” or “do away with age of consent laws altogether” isn’t a useful or insightful input into that debate. (Here in DK, age of consent is 15. There’s a huge power difference between, say, a 33 year-old and a 14 year-old but it wouldn’t be that much lower between a 33 year-old and a 15-year old. Yet sex between the 33 year-old and the 15 year-old is perfectly legal. And sex between a 14 year-old and a 15 year-old peer is rape.)
And, of course, I kind of doubt these guys are really concerned with the sex rights of teens (especially teenage girls). I suspect what they’re really after is their “right” to bang teens without meaningful consent.
I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating… MRA’s do appear to be disproportionately preoccupied with girls under 16. In the early days of me finding out about the New Misogyny (around 2008) I found Angry Harry’s blog, and the number of posts about teenage girls was striking/ worrying. There was even a poll, and Angry Harry’s visitors (don’t know how many as the poll was % only) were as likely (5%) to desire a girls under 13 as a woman over 28. That was really depressing .
As a ‘fat old hag’, previously a highly desirable teen (according to the level of attention I got from sleazebags from the age of 12) I feel well placed to point out that NO, our objections to old men, indeed any age of man trying to access a teen girl for sex are not about bitterness, but from a genuine fear for our daughters (nieces, siblings, granddaughters etc) because I know EXACTLY what it is like to have men 3 and 4 times my age telling me what they think they are entitled to from me.
Paedophiles HATE feminists because one of the achievements of feminism has been to develop child protection policies, which have often led to changes in laws around sexual abuse of minors. If a paedophile hates me I know that I am on the right side!
BTW – if you try to find the poll and posts on Angry Harry’s blog now they appear to have been deleted, for *some* reason!
I work in computer support, and we had a visit from an authority as part of a process to help train us as to what we needed to do should we do tech support on a machine that was being used for porn. We were told that far and away the people most likely to be doing this in the workplace, especially the illegal child porn material, were the high-ranking men. It’s like there isn’t enough oxygen at the top and their brains fuzz out or something. They can get absolutely delusional about their status and the inability of any mere mortal to call them to account, we were told.
scarlettpipstrelle – I don’t know if they ARE deluded about their status. If caught they are unlikely to receive more than a slap on the wrist – certainly here in the UK men accessing child porn are often high status, and do not get much in the way of punishment. Apparently the damage to their reputation and career is considered to be enough, but as people around them often support them I don’t think these guys suffer much in the way of consequences at all.