By David Futrelle
You may recall the outrage when, back in 2017, Education secretary Betsy “Ten Yachts” DeVos met with members of three fringe Men’s Rights groups — two of which have histories of collaboration with Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men — to hear their propaganda about the alleged epidemic of false rape accusations on America’s college campuses.
Well, it turns out that these groups had much more of direct influence that we even knew on DeVos’s recklessly revised campus rape policies, which survived legal challenges and went into effect last week. According to an article by Hélène Barthélemy in The Nation:
Nearly 3,000 pages of e-mails obtained by the anti-corruption organization Democracy Forward through a Freedom of Information Act request and shared with The Nation reveal that the July 2017 meeting was part of a much deeper collaboration between the DOE and these men’s rights groups. From May to September 2017, the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights partnered with NCFMC [National Coalition for Men Carolinas], FACE [Families Advocating for Campus Equality] and SAVE [Stop Abusive and Violent Environments] to develop regulations on campus sexual assault. E-mails make clear that staffers from these organizations participated in conference calls, offered legal advice, and met with high-level employees at the Department of Education. The DOE even hired the main funder of SAVE to help draft new regulations and teamed up with FACE to try to produce supportive op-eds.
The views of these groups have never been hidden. In public and in e-mails with DOE employees, members of these organizations have demeaned the credibility of young women, ridiculed sexual assault survivors, and pushed junk science on campus rape.
Barthélemy goes into great detail on the extensive cooperation between these groups and the Department of Education and does a deft job uncovering the sheer dishonesty, not to mention misogyny, of many of their claims.
I’d strongly recommend you read the whole piece.
UNRELATED NOTE: Not sure why the site was down for several hours today but we’re back now and, well, I’m still rather peeved by the outage, the second one the site has had recently.
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I wish I could say I was shocked.
@Victorious Parasol
You and me both.
But no, this development is just par for the course with the Trump administration. In fact, it’s slightly less bizarre than Trump gratefully acknowledging QAnon’s endorsement.
QAnon! Which claims that Trump is secretly saving the world from a left-wing conspiracy involving pedophiles and cannibals. This is our new normal.
Re: website matters, would it be possible to move to HTTPS? All the cool kids are doing it ?
You know, I can sort of see where they go for when they trash regulations for money. But here, I have the impression that they are evil because they can.
A friendly reminder that the cruelty is the point.
@Ariblester
WHTM is already available via HTTPS; certificate issued by “Let’s Encrypt” and encrypted with AES 128 bit encryption according to the security information about this page provided by my web browser.
I’ve just read the article.
Candice Jackson, the person at the DoE who ran the Office of Civil Rights, and first set up the meeting with these men’s rights groups, was herself a rape survivor.
Empathy is a quality alien to her, I take it.
Reads the Buzzfeed News article linked in the piece, where she is quoted as saying she is a “libertarian feminist”.
Yup.
I’m not sure how I managed to miss that! My bad.
@Ariblester
I presume that’s the latest update to Camille Paglia’s “egalitarian feminism” or Christina Hoff Sommers’s “factual feminism.” Who wants to bet she’s also trans-exclusionary like Paglia and Sommers?
O/T but relevant to the blog:
Looks like Jordan Peterson isn’t the only person to do an all-meat diet. James Blunt just revealed that he was so insecure in his masculinity in the 1990s that he followed an all meat diet and developed scurvy.
We really need to expand upon the way eating disorders are dealt with and discussed. Not only because scores of women struggle with behaviors and thoughts that are a lot like anorexia and bulimia but don’t quite fit, so they get dumped into the EDNOS bucket and forgotten. But also because a lot of disordered eating in men doesn’t quite look like eating disordered eating in women a lot of the time, so it doesn’t get acknowledged as such. To me, it’s disordered eating when men refuse to properly nourish themselves out of masculinity anxiety.
I agree WWTH.
While that seem impractical to do, I wish doctors were not aware of the gender of their patients. Because there’s a ton of documented cases where doctors let theirs judgements be clouded by gender stereotypes.
@WWTH
What Blunt did could be disordered, but he mentions doing it to annoy women in his classes, so I’m not sure whether that’s a disorder. I agree that we do need to improve discourse and treatment re: eating disorders, but I’m not sure if going all-meat to annoy vegetarian/vegan women qualifies as a disorder so much as just toxic masculinity run amok (which could be a symptom/trigger of a disorder, I don’t know enough about eating disorders to say).
I just now learned of this blog and the important work you all do.
I want to tell you that you are doing a fantastic job and that I am thankful for the efforts you put into combatting the toxicity of “MRAs” and the manosphere.
I am also impressed that there are men that participate in this effort.
Years ago, I came across all these horrific websites and online community that promote this backward, ignorant and deranged misogyny. I am dismayed and frightened so many people feel this way, but also thankful that people like David combat them successfully. At least for now.
Good Job!
Texas QAnon Supporter Used Car to Attack Strangers She Believed Were ‘Pedophiles’
@Nagfljar : doing that much harm to oneself just to spit other might actually be a disorder. Not that all instance of self harm to own the libs are disorders, but some might be.
More to the point, it can be a combination of an existing, possibly low-intensity, eating disorder and of him wanting to be an asshole to vegans. Thoses two hypothesis aren’t exclusives. It could also be that toxic masculinity degraded his relation with food from a bit abnormal to full on disorder.
131 new cases today?! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU
rips hair out
Things will NEVER get back to normal around here if you idiots keep fucking up like that! The schools open in a couple of fucking weeks and there is NO plan to avoid them becoming massive virus factories and distribution centers!
WEAR YOUR FUCKING MASKS!
KEEP YOUR FUCKING DISTANCE!
We HAVE to get rid of this thing by labor day or WE NEVER WILL!
AAAAAAGHH!
My province is FULL OF FUCKING IDIOTS who are going to get themselves, and possibly me, fucking killed!
How do I fix this??? How??? I need influence, and fast!
@Ohlmann
That seems plausible. I’m hesitant to blame it all on eating disorders because that would seem to scapegoat other people with eating disorders, but I can see how that could be a factor.
I understand what you mean. The thing is that untreated disorders is a big problem, for men and women alike. Men with mental issue often either don’t seek help or are told to man up. Women in pain are often told their pain isn’t real and that they exagerate. So it’s worth looking for men that acknowledge having had eating disorders, even if there’s other factors. Stupid, stupid factors.
The exact opposite of what we need is in that article for example :
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/texas-qanon-car-attack-cecilia-fulbright/
Saying that the women have “an history of untreated mental health issue” without saying if it’s an internet diagnosis or a real one and without recontextualizing in in which way thoses unnamed disorders would or would not matter is really asinine.
In the case of Jame Blunt, the contextualization would be that if women can adopt hurtful diets to conform to toxic feminity, men adopting hurtful diet to conform to toxic masculinity could be a reasonable analog. Most importantly, there’s hope to use that example to help or educate people who are hurting.
BYU’s Title 9 office and campus law enforcement are heavily influenced by MRAs, but that’s really not a surprise for a religious college. There’s a heavy assumption at that institution that a raped woman is somehow at fault for being raped, and it’s built into school policy.
I wish the author had given some more evidence for her views of NCFMC, FACE, and SAVE during the first part of the article instead of saving it all for the end, but that’s only a quibble.
As for the changes to the rules;
And HOW exactly does this change protect men from being falsely accused of rape? If a woman wanted to lie about a man raping her because she wanted to ruin him, wouldn’t she now simply lie about being raped while on campus?
That is the whole thing about lying, it’s about making shit up. Is there some magic block that prevents liars from lying about locations? Would this just be one lie too much?
Seems like the only people this change protects is actual rapists. Hmmmmmm.?
I imagine professors were supposed to report “incidents” because they’re not investigators, and nobody should expect them to be. They have a job to do that doesn’t consist of conducting a thorough investigation in order to decide whether or not there even was an “incident”.
MRAs are always saying that men are owed due process. Well women are owed due process as well. Even if the woman is dead, or even if she is not the one making the report of the crime. Criminals are criminal, and investigating them so they can be dealt with appropriately is good for the community.
“Preponderance of evidence”. Oh so it was basically a civil court case, those poor poor oppressed men. /s
Although I have to wonder what the authors means by “take action”. The burden of proof gets heavier as the case moves along, as it frankly should. So what exact action is “take action”?
@Surplus
Sorry to say, but COVID19 is here to stay for the next several years, it’s too widespread to “get rid of” at this point. You can’t control other people. Do everything you can to stay safe, and try to look into getting some therapy over the phones or online to help you deal with it. Even a free chatbot such as WYSA can provide some support, dumb AI that it is. There’s also a lot of stuff on DBT that you can find online, I think some of the mindfullness and stress management stuff may help you out.
Good luck.
The action taken was usually something like separating the perp and the victim so that the victim doesn’t run into the perp in class every day. Many victims report that the “action taken” is pretty weaksauce and they wind up dropping out to avoid the rapist. Occasionally “action” rises to the level of expelling the perp, but that’s pretty unusual. Usually, even under the old rules, the burden of avoiding the perp was on the victim, even in cases where the perp feels entitled to the victim and stalks them across campus.
So they want a “clear and convincing evidence” standard on … telling the perp to take a different section of Biology 201 so that they aren’t in the same class as the victim, generally.
@ moouge
This is an issue that cropped up recently with our own code of conduct.
The general rule is that we are under an obligation to report to the relevant authority any example of misconduct that we become aware of. It’s a disciplinary offence in itself not to.
That did cause a problem in relation to things like assault and harassment. There was an obligation on the victim to report, and also on anyone they told.
But of course some victims didn’t necessarily want to get the authorities involved at that stage, or at all. They might want to keep it to themselves, or maybe just tell a friend or even an authority figure they trust; but not want them take action before or unless they were ready for that.
So now the code has been modified that it’s up to the victim when and if a report should be made, either by themselves or someone they tell.
Of course, that doesn’t negate the obligation for people like heads of chambers or similar to take the required action if a victim asks them to.
@Moogue
Presumably eventually there will be a vaccine, but that’s not going to be ready by Labor Day.