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.
Here in the US it’s usually different. For one thing they are on sex crime registries. Also, Fogle is looking at jail time. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/19/reportssubway-spokesman-jared-fogle-to-accept-plea-deal-on-kiddie-porn-charges/
God his twitter name is Holocaust_21! Fuck. He’s just 6edgy12me.
I seem to recall that the primary motivation for marrying off girls that young was to cement alliances. It was a political marriage, and a duty.
Like how in Brave there’s going to be a war if Merida doesn’t get betrothed (although they don’t explain what the other two lairds are gonna do when their sons don’t get picked).
http://i.imgur.com/6kxUukK.gif
I, personally, wouldn’t be comfortable with it, but I’ll accept that I’m not an expert in ethics.
If paedophiles want to interact on the phone with people pretending to be underage girls I’d prefer they did it with FBI agents.
Ugh. So a man is convicted of child porn possession and sexually exploiting young teenagers, and someone comes along saying, “Hey, the age of consent should be 12!”
Besides the fact that it’s an especially gross response to a story like this, it’s also wrong that onset of puberty = sexual maturity. It takes several years for humans to become (physically) sexually mature. (Plus I think the average age of first menstruation is closer to 13 than 12.)
Then there’s also the case of societal power. Older teenagers might be physically mature, but they’re still not adults. In Canadian law, it’s illegal for someone to have sex with a child under 16 if the other party is more than 5 years older, but I’m wondering if it might make sense to extend this to 16-17 year olds, maybe with a larger age gap?
(On a lighter note, it seems a bit strange to me that the drinking age in the US is still 21. 21! My dad, a former US citizen, suggested it makes for fewer car accidents, and maybe so, but I’m rather curious about the historical reasons. it seems a weird fit with the American emphasis on personal freedom – an emphasis that has both its good and bad points, but anyway.)
I don’t know exactly, but I’ve heard that the age was set at 21 because bones don’t become fully developed until around 20-21 for most people, and at some point in US history (post-prohibition?) the Federal government withheld funds from states which refused to raise the age to 21. I could probably research that but I’m too lazy right now.
@ Snowberry
In England the minimum drinking legal drinking age is 5. You have to be at least 16 (and normally 18) to buy alcohol though.
That’s often more honoured in the breach though. The first time I bought beer in a pub was on a school cycling trip when I was 14. It was the teacher who sent me to the bar. My bones seem fine. 🙂
Assuming that it’s the actual reason, never said it was a good one. A lot of the US policies which were enacted in the early to mid 20th century were based on medical quackery and junk science.
Took the words right out of my mouth! I first learned what sexual harassment was at the ripe old age of 10. No sooner had my nipples grown out of the little-kid mosquito-bite stage than I was suddenly fending off creepy looks from much older men. And when I got hips, suddenly I was getting icky commentary on my “wiggle”. Do I miss THAT shit? Hell to the NOPE. I’m glad to be “invisible” to those guys, because ugh, who’d want THEM? Even women their own age are repulsed, not envious or wistful, when we see them gawping at girls they know full well are too young for them or anyone. And with two nieces now at that stage of their development, I’ve shifted into protective-aunt mode. And I’m more than prepared to go medieval on the ass of anyone who goes after them.
I think it was in the 70s that states changed the drinking age. The federal government threatened to withhold highway funds. Of course, binge drinking rates in colleges have increased since then, so I don’t think making the drinking age 21 is at all effective. It just makes drinking more attractive to make it so forbidden.
I think there’s definitely something in the ‘forbidden fruit’ theory. Drinking was no big deal when I was growing up; so there was never any allure.
I also think ‘the continental model’ as it’s sometimes called means younger people get a staged introduction to drinking and learn how to behave. We would be allowed beer and cider at kids’ parties but we knew that if we blew it we wouldn’t be getting another one, so there was a sense of self discipline.
Similarly, underage drinking in pubs meant you knew you had to behave ‘like an adult’ if you wanted the landlord to turn a blind eye or for the police to ignore you.
By the time we were ‘legal’ we could pretty much take it or leave it when it came to alcohol.
Originally, most nations and states write their statutory rape laws while ignoring that sort of power-imbalance, so you end up with lots of strangeness like you highlight. Some states in the U.S., at least, have begun a bit more gradiated model, usually called “Romeo & Juliet” laws. The laws typically forbid sex with anyone under a specific age (typically somewhere from 16-18), UNLESS the older person is within a set age (typically 2 years) of the younger. So yes, a 15 and 14 year-old can be a couple without either getting arrested, but that 33-year-old is going to jail if he tries something with either of them. This prevents a lot of absurdities.
Mra; thinks grown men should have sex with 12-15 year old girls
Finds out that 12-15 year old gurls have sex ; what a slut! She is way too young for that!
I don’t want to talk about pedophiles, so
I’m not sure that’s fair to the prince? He shows up at the beginning and tells everyone to stop fighting or he’ll execute them. The next fight we see is the one where Tybalt kills Mercutio and Romeo kills Tybalt. Then Romeo flees the city. I assumed that this was because the prince was going to execute him.
When I was a teenager, my mom said “Look, if you’re going to try drugs or alcohol, at least do it in the house where I can keep an eye on you and call paramedics if needed.”
And, me being the kind of teenager I was, thought to myself “Well, what’s the fucking point if my mom’s not going to be mad at me?”
And I only underage drank once, and it was when I was eighteen and I didn’t have that much. (It’s also where I met one of my exes, and we dated for five years, so there’s that.)
Even if it were commonplace in medieval times for men to have sex with 12 year old girls, that doesn’t make it a good idea. We did all kinds of stupid shit in the history of humanity. We executed people horribly for heresy, thought that heredity is a good way to choose a leader, and believed bathing is unhealthy or immoral. We now know a lot more about human development and know that sexual relationships between young teenagers and adults are a bad idea and ripe with abusive potential.
IANAM, but I would guess that the kind of wealthy and aristocratic adult men who were betrothed or even married to young women in Medieval times to make alliances would have been able to get sex from a professional of some kind, so they wouldn’t have to have sex with the 12-year-old girl to get sex.
Co-signing this. Unlike most of my classmates, who grew up prohibited from drinking and therefore were knocked unconscious by a whiff of a bartender’s beer-soaked rag while still underage (and on a fake ID), I grew up getting introduced to it in gradual stages by my German immigrant folks. A sip of wine in the orange juice on Sunday at 8, a sip of dad’s beer foam at 10, etc.; as a teenager, I got to have a glass of champagne on New Year’s Eve with the grownups, and drink fruit punch (with booze-soaked strawberries!) at Xmas. I never did see what all the fuss was about, and I never did get drunk. Never felt the slightest interest in it. I learned to regard alcohol as just a civilized finishing touch on a meal, and that one should never drink on an empty stomach unless one wanted to lose it all and then some in a most undignified way.
I was so amused at the idiots everyone made of themselves at uni, when they all got legless on Purple Jesus during Frosh Week (the drinking age here in Ontario is 19, which is also the average age of most university frosh of my day.) I think I may have visited each of the three campus pubs precisely once in my entire four years there, and never gotten bombed in any of them. The forbidden-fruit allure was never there for me, so I had no problem abstaining.
Also, having been inculcated with much better tastes in alcohol by said parents, I hated cheap beer and Purple Jesus both, and refused to touch either. That also helped.
Actually, he thinks she’s a slut because she’s doing it with a boy her own age (or close to it), instead of a Sophisticated Older Man™ like him. Or because she refuses to do it with anyone, recognizing (wisely, and ironically, maturely) that she’s not ready for that.
Basically, any woman or girl who doesn’t have sex with these yutzes is a slut, in their eyes.
Reminds me of this great argument against people dropping “What would the founding fathers think?!” argument for social justice issues:
https://twitter.com/skullmandible/status/266008322791071745
eeeeps.
@Bina
Mark me down as another one who never had alcohol be given the ‘forbidden fruit’ allure. My parents offered me sips of all kinds of things, beer, wine, coolers, etc over the years when I was a young teen. I found all of it to taste incredibly gross. Probably because I was 12 at the time, but the ‘gross’ association has stayed with me. Alcohol has this icky aftertaste for me that just kills any enjoyment I have of the drink. (And you have no idea how many people have told me that I just need to try [insert drink here] and it won’t be gross. No. All of them taste awful to me. The only alcohol that didn’t was ammaretto, and now that’s too sickly sweet for me to like, either.)
In short, I grew up to be a teetotaller.
Same boat as Bina and Catalpa. I do drink and the very few times I’ve gotten drunk (on accident because I’m a lightweight and don’t drink often enough to know my limits really or build up a tolerance) I’ve HATED SO FUCKING MUCH I NEVER WANT TO BE DRUNK AGAIN FUCK IT.
Ha, ha, same! My dad did the same thing. Of course, he also taught me early on about anti-rape strategies… and by early, I mean I was seven and a half. When we did our wrestling matches in the yard, he told me where to hit guys if they attacked me and how to seize the smallest finger if someone grabs me ’cause that’s the weakest finger. I dunno, growing up for me, I never had a desire to drink a lot. I have champagne on New Year’s, but anti-depressants keep me from drinking lots and I hate how floaty alcohol makes you feel. Never seemed that appealing. Same for marijuana. My friends smoked it a lot, some still do. I could never stand the stench (and I’m from Colorado).