Categories
bullying douchebaggery homophobia

>Douchebag Asst. Attorney General who harassed gay student gets the boot

>

Shirvell in action.

Some good, long overdue, news. Andrew Shirvell, the Michigan assistant attorney general who’s been harassing a gay University of Michigan student, has been fired. Some details, from Freep.com:

Shirvell had been criticized for his blog in which he calls Chris Armstrong, the president of the Michigan Student Assembly, a radical homosexual, a Nazi and Satan’s representative on the assembly. Philip Thomas, Shirvell’s attorney, had said his client is expressing his free-speech rights.
The firing was confirmed in a statement this afternoon from AG Mike Cox, who said Shirvell was fired for conduct unbecoming a state employee, especially that of an assistant attorney general.
“To be clear, I refuse to fire anyone for exercising their First Amendment rights, regardless of how popular or unpopular their positions might be. However, Shirvell repeatedly violated office policies, engaged in borderline stalking behavior, and inappropriately used state resources, our investigation showed.”

According to Cox, Shirvell had, among other things:

Showed up at the home of a private citizen three times, including once at 1:30 a.m. … harass[ed] Armstrong’s friends as they were socializing in Ann Arbor … [repeatedly called]  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, Armstrong’s employer, in an attempt … to cause Pelosi to fire Armstrong; Attempt[ed] to “out” Armstrong’s friends as homosexual — several of whom were not gay.

Oh, and he did some of this while at work, Cox says. And apparently lied to the Attorney General during his disciplinary hearing.

CLARIFICATION: Shirvell is not part of the MRM. I am posting about this because gay-bashing is an important men’s issue. See the comment by Sandy below.

Categories
further reading homophobia MRA rape violence against men/women

Further Reading: Prison Rape

From Stop Prisoner Rape (now Just Detention)

Rape in US prisons, jails and other detention facilities is a serious problem, and a disgrace to our country.

Men’s Rights Activists often complain, quite justifiably, about prison rape jokes. Typically, they attribute the double standard towards prison rape jokes as an indication that, as one MRA put it in a recent discussion, “nobody gives a shit about men.” As I’ve pointed out, this explanation doesn’t take us very far, given that women are also raped in prison, and that people make jokes about that too. (Indeed, there is an entire genre of “women in prison” exploitation films that sexualizes this abuse.)

More to the point, most MRAs don’t seem terribly interested in actually attempting to do much about prison rape beyond complaining about obnoxious rape jokes or making rhetorical points about the “disposability” of men. (See below for the few examples of MR blogs I could find that have addressed the issue as more than a bullet point in a laundry list of complaints; I’ve found much more serious discussion of prison rape on feminist blogs.) Anyone who is interested in doing something about it should consider getting in touch with Just Detention, a human rights advocacy group working to stop sexual abuse in detention facilities.

Some basic information about prison rape. I’ve bolded the crucial information.

Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2008-09, by Allen J. Beck, Ph.D., Paige M. Harrison

An estimated 4.4% of prison inmates and 3.1% of jail inmates reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another inmate or facility staff in the past 12 months or since admission to the facility, if less than 12 months. Nationwide, these percentages suggest that approximately 88,500 adults held in prisons and jails at the time of the survey had been sexually victimized.

Female inmates in prison (4.7%) or jail (3.1%) were more than twice as likely as male inmates in prison (1.9%) or jail (1.3%) to report experiencing inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization. … Most victims of staff sexual misconduct were males; most perpetrators were females.

Note: Men make up the overwhelming majority of rape victims in prison — 90 percent — largely because the overwhelming majority of inmates are male. While the number of men raped in prison is appalling, I would like to clear up one Men’s Rights Myth: that the number of men raped inside prison is greater than the number of women raped outside of prison. This is simply false; the numbers aren’t even close: again, while the estimate of the total number of people (male and female) currently being held in prison who have been raped there in the past year is 88,500, estimates of the total number of those raped per year (outside of prison) range from about 200,000 to more than a million (the real number is probably closer to the latter); estimates suggest that anywhere from 86% to 94% of rape victims are female, and that males may make up to 99% of the perpetrators. See here (doc format) for a look at various estimates, and here (pdf) for more details from a large scale survey. As is the case with rapes in general, the vast majority of prison rapes go unreported.

EDITED TO ADD: The information in the previous paragraph is outdated. The Department of Justice has revised upwards its estimate of the number of prisoners (male and female) who are sexually assaulted each year to 216,000. Which means that considerably more men are raped per year than previously thought. There is still no clean and direct way to directly compare rapes of men and women, in prison and out, because the various studies out there use different methodologies and different definitions of sexual assault. Stephanie Zvan drills into the numbers in great detail here; anyone seriously interested in this issue should read her post carefully.

 

Information from Just Detention:

Overview:

Sexual abuse behind bars is a widespread human rights crisis in prisons and jails across the US. Aaccording to the best available research, 20 percent of inmates in men’s prisons are sexually abused at some point during their incarceration. The rate for women’s facilities varies dramatically from one prison to another, with one in four inmates being victimized at the worst institutions.

In a 2007 survey of prisoners across the country, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found that 4.5 percent (or 60,500) of the more than 1.3 million inmates held in federal and state prisons had been sexually abused in the previous year alone. A BJS survey in county jails was just as troubling; nearly 25,000 jail detainees reported having been sexually abused in the past six months.

Unfortunately, the data provided by the still represent only a fraction of the true number of detainees who are victimized, especially of those held in county jails. The number of admissions to local jails over the course of a year is approximately 17 times higher than the nation’s jail population … .

(Source pdf)

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer inmates are the chief target of sexual abuse in prison

Sexual abuse of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) inmates constitutes one of the most rampant and ignored human rights violations in the US today. In a 2007 academic study, funded by the California Department of Corrections and rehabilitation and conducted at six California men’s prisons, 67 percent of inmates who identified as LGBTQ reported having been sexually assaulted by another inmate during their incarceration, a rate that was 15 times higher than for the inmate population overall.

(Source pdf)

Sexual Abuse and STDs:

Sexual violence in detention spreads disease. Prisoner rape victims are highly vulnerable to contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. … In 2004, the HIV prevalence rate inside US prisons was more than four times higher than in society overall. Hepatitis C rates are 8 to 20 times higher in prisons than on the outside … The rates of infection for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis are likewise significantly higher among inmates than in the population at-large.

(Source pdf)

For more information from Just Detention, see here for fact sheets, and here for links to useful articles and studies. 

Human Rights Watch Report: No Escape, Human Rights Watch, 2001.

Prison Rape: A Critical Review of the Literature, National Institute of Justice, 2004.

Cindy Struckman-Johnson and David Struckman-Johnson, Comparison of Sexual Coercion Experiences Reported by Men and Women in Prison, 21 Journal of Interpersonal Violence 1591 (2006)

Cathy Young: Assault Behind Bars

Interesting discussion of prison rape jokes on Reddit.

Some useful blog posts about prison rape, and prison rape jokes:

The Curvature: Prison rape and complacency

Feministe: Prison Rape: Assault shouldn’t be part of the sentence

Sex abuse rampant at youth prisons around the country

An old story: the cruel and unusual punishment of prison rape

Rape isn’t hilarious

Ms Magazine blog: Prison rape: Can it be stopped? 

Equal Writes: Rape in prison is still rape

Stop the prison rape jokes

Alas, a blog: Ezra Klein on Prison Rape

Feminist Critics: Discussion of the Alas, a blog post linked above

Alas, a blog: More on prison rape

Alas, a blog: Blog post round-up: Prison rape (Extensive list of links)

Reason Hit and Run: Mocking prison rape for fun and profit

Men’s Rights blogs on prison rape: 

Human Stupidity: Stop Prison Rape! Legalize Corporal Punishment (Whipping)

Female Offenders: Prison Rape Report

Toy Soldiers: Cost of Prison Rape

Menstuff: Prison Rape

Mens-rights.net: Prison Rape: the challenge of prevention and enforcement (Note that this cut-and-pasted post is illustrated by an animated gif of a pair of boots with the caption: “These boots were made for kicking feminists in the cunt.”)

Categories
feminism masculinity MRA rape violence against men/women

>That’s not funny: Prison rape jokes

>

Looking back through older posts on the OneY subreddit on Reddit, a relatively new and very promising subreddit devoted to men’s issues, I ran across a surprisingly civil and illuminating discussion of prison rape jokes. “Scarletbanner” opened the discussion by asking why there is a double standard with regard to these jokes:

As someone [who’s] majoring in Criminal Justice, I hear comments when the topic of women being raped that it’s “fucked up shit”, yet when the subject turns to prison rape, it’s a massive joke… from derogatory comments regarding sexual preference to “don’t drop the soap”. Between 43,000-140,000+ are raped each year ffs, with men (especially homosexuals) as the largest targeted group…

The typical Men’s Rights take on this is that there’s a double standard “because nobody gives a shit about men,” as EddieVanHelsing put it in a comment there. This explanation doesn’t take us very far, given that women are also raped in prison, and that people make jokes about that too.

Others in the discussion offered more incisive takes on the issue. puffinmuffin pointed out that

the problem is NO ONE CARES about people in jail. No one gives a shit about prisoner’s rights. It really isn’t an issue about raping, it’s an issue about the fucked up system that no one cares enough to fix. Conditions in a lot of jails are downright abhorrent. Unsanitary environments, abuse, horrid bureaucracy … But no one cares. They think, “Oh, well, they’re criminals so they deserve whatever.”

Archythearchivist, a self-described “XX, card carrying, baby eatin’ feminist” suggested that the double standard

is perhaps more indicative of the way that masculinity is viewed. Male rape is funny (to some) because it subverts common narratives of male virility and roles. It’s a “joke” where the main idea is that the world is a certain way, and only certain less masculine men would be raped. … It bases itself on a world that supposedly does not exist, at least not for “real” men. … These jokes should be considered as tasteless and hateful as any other rape joke.

But perhaps the most thoughtful comment came from AlphaCygni, who noted that there had recently been a post on Reddit

from a guy who had been sexually abused in a juvenile detention facility. Apparently there was systematic abuse and rape of young boys within this facility. What struck me the most about the [discussion of this on Reddit] was the number of individuals asking the victim why he didn’t just bite the dicks of his attackers. It was a situation so far out of their mindset, they couldn’t imagine how a person can be made to feel so powerless and scared that their primary focus is on staying alive rather than avoiding emasculation. Rape as a real possibility is something that just never seriously occurs to most men and, since they never think about, they can’t place themselves in the victim’s shoes. …

All that being said, I do know some women who joke about rape. I know a rape victim who makes rape jokes. I know other rape victims who can’t stand them. I think if more people could experience what it’s like to be the object of unwanted, intense, sexual attraction by someone who is more powerful than you, there would be less rape jokes overall except by those who enjoy gallows humor. I think that if more men were allowed to openly share their rape experiences and men were to listen to these poor individuals and try to put themselves in their shoes instead of asking how they could allow such a thing to happen, or discounting their masculinity, prison rape jokes wouldn’t be seen widely as funny.

The whole comment is worth reading; this is only an excerpt.

Prison rape is a disgrace, and jokes about it don’t help. Because most of those in prison are male, it primarily affects men. But women in prison are more than twice as likely to be raped or abused by other inmates than men. And, as Scarletbanner alluded to in the comment that started off the discussion, gays (and transsexuals) face a much higher risk of rape in prison.

I’m preparing a “further reading” post on prison rape, but in the meantime if you’re looking for more information on the subject, I suggest you start with the fact sheets on the web site of Just Detention International, a human rights advocacy group working to stop sexual abuse in detention facilities worldwide; the pictures I used to illustrate this post come from a media campaign by the group.

Categories
funny MRA pics Uncategorized

>Is Autocorrect a Men’s Rights Activist?

>

This pic is from my new favorite site ever (today), Damn You Auto Correct!

Categories
beta males crackpottery douchebaggery further reading idiocy links men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny MRA PUA pussy cartel sex violence against men/women western women suck woman's suffrage

>Further Reading: The Worst of the Men’s Rights Movement

>

From Paul Elam’s site.

Here are links to, and brief excerpts of, some of the worst posts by Men’s Rights activists and/or antifeminists I’ve run across in doing this blog. These are not random comments by random MRAs; they are all by people who have a history in the MRM. In most cases, they are fairly prominent names, at least within the online MRA community. A few of these posts will be familiar to readers of this blog.

Lest anyone accuse me of taking quotes out of context, I urge you to read the originals. As you’ll see, none of these quotes are any more justifiable “in context” than they are here on their own.

If anyone out there has seen worse, please post a URL below. Conversely, if any of these posts have been publicly challenged by others in the MRM, I will happily post links alongside the original.

I am also taking nominations for a follow-up post, The Best of the MRM. Post URLs below.

Let’s start with Paul Elam’s charming “Bash A Violent Bitch Month” Post

The money quote:

In the name of equality and fairness, I am proclaiming October to be Bash a Violent Bitch Month.

I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women – to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.

And then make them clean up the mess.

Immediately after this quote, he claims he’s not “serious” about this, though apparently only because “it isn’t worth the time behind bars or the abuse of anger management training that men must endure if they are uppity enough to defend themselves from female attackers.” My post on the subject is here. Here’s another piece by Elam full of fantasies of violence against women.

Another by Elam: Jury Duty at a Rape Trial? Acquit!

Key quote:

Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.

This post from Roy Den Hollander, a lawyer and Men’s Rights activist best known for suing clubs that have “ladies nights,” suggests that men may have to take up arms to win their, er, struggle:

The future prospect of the Men’s Movement raising enough money to exercise some influence in America is unlikely.  But there is one remaining source of power in which men still have a near monopoly—firearms. 

I wrote about Hollander’s call to arms in If at first you don’t succeed, shoot people.

And speaking of angry men and their guns, here’s a post from Citizen Renegade, a Pick-Up Artist (PUA) site popular with MRAs: Game Can Save Lives It’s about George Sodini, the misogynist killer who gunned down women at a health club a year ago. “Chateau” suggests that all would have been well if Sodini had learned how to be a Pick-Up Artist:

If Sodini had learned game he would have been able to find another woman and gotten laid after his ex dumped him. He wouldn’t have spent the next 20 years steeped in bile and weighed down by his Sisyphian blue balls, dreaming of vengeance. Game could have saved the lives of the women Sodini killed.

Actually, Sodini had taken at least one class from Don Steele, author of “How to Date Young Women for Men Over 35.” The comments to Chateau’s article are scarier than the article itself. For selected examples and commentary, see here.

Another from Citizen Renegade: Owning a Dog is Training for Owning a Woman

[P]roperly owning a dog is excellent training for properly owning a woman. The behavior of dogs and women is eerily similar, and their relation to man testifies to that.

Like dogs, women need to be led. They *want* to be led. In fact, though they will never admit it, women want to be owned by their men.

Other MRAs don’t seem to be much interested in adult women at all. MRA Jay Hammers, a regular contributor to The Spearhead, has taken down his blog, but its worst moments live on in Google’s cache. Perhaps the worst of the worst: Age of Consent is Misandry. Key quotes:

Age of consent laws are designed to punish beta males. A beta male in his 20s, unsuccessful with women his own age who are infused with a sense of feminist entitlement and deride all but the top alpha males who take interest in them, who seeks companionship with a younger, sexually mature female who desires him, should not go to prison for acting on that which is normal male sexuality.

Females generally do not significantly mature mentally past puberty so it should always be illegal for any woman to have sex or it should never be illegal for any woman to have sex. There is no arbitrary age where females suddenly become self-aware, realizing the consequences of their actions, and stop seeking out alpha males. Thus there must not be an arbitrary age of consent for sex.

This post did get some criticism in the MRM. Here’s one discussion.

And here’s Hammers again, accusing other MRAs of being “pansies.” 

One of Hammers’ biggest defenders has been an antifeminist blogger by the nom-de-net of Schopenbecq, who is equally obsessed with the age of consent and what he sees as the superior attractiveness of teen girls. Here’s one of his posts on the subject, which argues:

The age of consent has always been central to feminism. In fact, it has been its primary driving force right from the beginning. The purpose of this website is not to campaign for a reduction in the age of consent from the present feminist age of 16. For one thing, there is little or no chance of that happening in this author’s lifetime. However, I have no shame whatsoever in stating my clear belief that the age of consent ought to be what it still technically is in the majority of major civilised nations – namely, 14.

In this post, he mocks any man who doesn’t think Heather Locklear’s 13-year-old daughter is hotter than Locklear herself:

Results of a poll on Schopenbecq’s site.

Here, he argues that feminism is a “Sexual Trade Union,” and seems to suggest that increasing the age of consent from 12 was bad thing :

Feminism exists as a defender of the selfish sexual and reproductive interests of aging and/or unattractive women. This is its entire raison d’etre, the reason it first came into existence with the social purity movement reformers of the 19th century, led by their harridan battle cry – ‘armed with the ballot the mothers of America will legislate morality’.

And legislate morality these pioneering feminists quickly did, even before they had won the vote. That is, they successfully lobbied for restrictions on prostitution, a rise in the age of consent from 12 to 16, or even 18, and the closing down of saloons where their husbands might mix freely with unattached young women.

More misogyny:

Anglobitch: Women, Self Awareness and the Guillotine of Bitterness

Post-feminist women have been so indoctrinated by specious polemics extolling their (largely imaginary) talents, that they truly believe their ‘achievements’ are somehow self-determined. This is why the loss of their physical charms wreaks such havok on them. Having been nurtured on feminist pipe dreams, the cutting realization that their youthful ‘success’ was entirely due to sexual allure must be galling indeed. … Indeed, the staunch bitterness of middle-aged Anglo-American women can be entirely attributed to this realization:

It wasn’t your ‘talent’ and ‘intelligence’ that men admired: it was your sweet young pussy. That pussy-pass departed with your first wrinkle: live with it, bitch.

Heretical Sex: Never Date Western Women

Big cities like London, New York and Sydney are jam-packed with beautiful foreign girls from Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia. They are sexy, fun, good company and they treat men like human beings. They have not had their minds poisoned by feminist hate-speech. … I urge all Western men to boycott Western Women if they can. Don’t date them, don’t marry them, don’t have children with them. Find yourself a nice foreign girl, and find out what women should be like. If anyone asks you why, tell them it is a protest against feminist ideology. Once enough men start boycotting them, women will turn away from feminism.

Henry Makow has gotten too loopy for most Men’s Rights activists to consider him as one of their own. But he remains one of the internet’s most influential antifeminists. Here are some quotes from his classic in craziness How the Rockefellers Re-Engineered Women.

Feminism is an excellent example of how the Rockefeller mega cartel uses the awesome power of the mass media  (i.e. propaganda.) to control society. … Nicholas Rockefeller told [producer Aaron Russo] that his family foundation created women’s liberation using mass media control as part of a long-term plan to enslave humanity. ….

The hidden goal of feminism is to destroy the family, which interferes with state brainwashing of the young. Side benefits include depopulation and widening the tax base. Displacing men in the role of  providers also destabilizes the family. 

Only satanists would trash motherhood. 

The fellows at the Manhood Academy have also gotten a lot of criticism from MRAs. It’s not altogether clear why, since their ridiculously retrograde views of women are no more ridiculously retrograde than many of those I’ve quoted above. The key Manhood Academy text is a 135-page pdf called The Principles of Social Competence, which is full of stuff like this:

While women and children often lack the capacity to grasp the inner workings of authority, they still have an instinctual, positive response to it. Authority brings chaotic, aimless things, people, events and circumstances into a state of good order. …  Masculinity is properly expressed in the form of authority.

You know what I said above about reading the originals? Don’t bother in this case.

Speaking of women as children, who could forget this classic, from “ramzpaul” on The Spearhead: How Female Suffrage Destroyed Western Civilization, which posited:

Single mothers, rampant divorce, abortion and falling birth rates are part of the cancer that is destroying what is left of Western Civilization. But very few people (even conservatives) fail to realize that the inception of this cancer can be found in the passage of the 19th amendment.

I wrote about the piece, and reactions to it, here.

More Worst Of links to come! The Men’s Rights movement produces fresh awfulness each and every day.

EDIT: Deansdale’s Blog has weighed in on this Worst-of list and is surprisingly positive about the whole thing. Oh, not my post — he hates my post, and me — but the original MRA-n-pals posts. Elam’s “Bash a Violent Bitch” post? “What’s the problem with this article? Nothing, really. … Elam has some insightful observations about the nature of women in our contemporary cultures.” Roissy’s post about misogynist killer George Sodini? “What’s wrong with this article? Nothing.”And RamZpaul’s How Female Suffrage Destroyed Western Civilization? “There are valid arguments supporting his claim. It’s not PC, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically wrong.” 

He even sort-of defends good old Henry Makow and his bizarre conspiracy theoryies:

Actually this is not so crazy. You don’t believe it, that’s fine, but show me why this is soooo unacceptable. He states lots of things: some of them obvious, some of them researchable. But it’s not so radical.

 The only people he doesn’t defend? The Manhood Academy guys. Apparently saying horrible, horrible shit about women is perfectly acceptable in Deansdale’s vision of the MRM, but saying horrible, horrible shit about women while also calling other MRAs “manginas,” as the Manhood Academy guys do, is totally BEYOND THE PALE!!!

Categories
feminism

>Survey says: Feminists not actually man-haters

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Evidently she’s not a feminist.

From a recent paper in Psychology of Women Quarterly titled ARE FEMINISTS MAN HATERS? FEMINISTS’ AND NONFEMINISTS’ ATTITUDES TOWARD MEN:

Despite the popular belief that feminists dislike men, few studies have actually examined the empirical accuracy of this stereotype. The present study examined self-identified feminists’ and nonfeminists’ attitudes toward men. An ethnically diverse sample (N = 488) of college students responded to statements from the Ambivalence toward Men Inventory (AMI; Glick & Fiske, 1999). Contrary to popular beliefs, feminists reported lower levels of hostility toward men than did nonfeminists. The persistence of the myth of the man-hating feminist is explored.

Emphasis mine. Oddly enough, I discovered this paper though a link on the Men’s Rights Subreddit. Here’s a pdf of the study.

Categories
antifeminst women feminism idiocy pics

>One thing we can all agree on …

>

… MRAs and feminists alike, is that this t-shirt, recently discovered at Old Navy, is irritating as fuck, and any (straight) woman who would wear such a thing would be someone to avoid at all costs. Seriously.  (In case you can’t quite make out what’s going on with the graphic, the “o” in “hope” is an engagement ring.)

As one Redditor pointed out in the discussion of the subject in the TwoXChromosomes subreddit, where I found the pic, the only people who could wear the shirt without being complete douchenozzles would be lesbians and gay men, because then it would become a political statement about gay marriage. Actually, come to think of it, I’d have no problem with straight guys wearing it either; that would be kind of hilarious. Or security guards of either sex who happen to be guarding the Hope Diamond. 

I guess basically the only people who shouldn’t wear it are straight women who aren’t guarding the Hope Diamond. Or babies. A baby wearing this shirt would just be really weird.

Categories
evil women feminism homophobia misogyny MRA reactionary bullshit Uncategorized

>Around the world in a Google-Translated daze

>

No girls allowed.

So yesterday I asked the MRA masses to post the names of blogs, websites, online manifestos, etc. that in their opinion represent the best that the Men’s Rights Movement has to offer.

I got a lot of comments, but, er, I didn’t exactly get a ton of suggestions. The first commenter to come through with actual URLs was Yohan, a non-native English speaker who mainly reads non-American sites. He posted three URLs, all to sites not in English.

But hey, we live in a global village, and I’m not going to let a little thing like language get in the way. So I pasted his URLs into Google Translate and took a look.

The first site he mentioned, a German Men’s Rights hub called MANNdat, looked, sadly, almost completely identical to any number of American Men’s Rights sites, from its page on “Feminist Myths” right on down to the obligatory “Woman Behaving Badly” post on its front page

The second URL led to an Austrian site with the translated title “Executioner,” which looked too dour and creepy to me, so I didn’t even bother poking around.

I approached the third site he mentioned with a little bit more optimism. It was Japanese, so I figured the combination of vast cultural differences, gross translation errors, and the natural hilarity of internet antifeminists would lead to pure win, as they say on the internet.

And at first, I did indeed seem to have struck internet gold. I found myself utterly charmed by the site, which is apparently called “Feminist Fantasy,” and which through the magic of Google Translate seemed to be a virtual repository of fantastic Dadaist poetry:

Identity of feminist leadership

America seems to be the queen of quibble.
Around in a thoughtful but very good at sophistry,
In the United States to refrain from the country so fast lady,
I argue that it is no longer anyone to organize a quibble

I can even sort of agree with that. America really is the “queen of quibble.”‘

But, alas, my euphoria was short-lived. As I kept looking around the site I found some things that even Google Translate couldn’t render charming. Like the articles “Sodom, Gomorrah, and the Netherlands” and “Gay marriage is a human misery,” which explains, in Google-translate-speak:

In order to destroy the institution of marriage, the idea of same-sex marriage are pushing a plan to destroy the sanctity of marriage.

So God does not bless same-sex marriage in the Bible the same shape as opposite sex marriage.

Yeah, I don’t need a perfect translation to get the gist of that article. Or this one, which I reproduce in its Google-translated entirety:

American abomination

Abomination ever played the glorious U.S. military in Iraq. Why such a moral collapse happened. Between men and women of loose morals are the leading cause of it. That gender equality and women soldiers of the United States, the relationship between men and women, who had loose sexual relations, she was weakening resistance to an immoral abuse.

Also, female sumo wrestlers? They aren’t having any of that either.

So much for my foray into international antifeminism.

Categories
debate further reading violence against men/women

>Further Reading: Domestic Violence

>

Another addition to my “Further Reading” series. See here for an explanation.

This one is about Domestic Violence.

I’d recommend starting with my debate posts on DV, which offers an extensive list of links to academic and government studies and useful overviews.

For additional reading:

Michael Flood: Claims about husband battering

Men in fathers’ rights groups and men’s rights groups have been claiming very loudly for a while now that domestic violence is a gender-equal or gender-neutral phenomenon – that men and women assault each other at equal rates and with equal effects. They claim that an epidemic of husband-battering is being ignored if not silenced. …

There are four problems with the claims about ‘husband battering’ made by men’s rights advocates. Firstly, they only use these authors’ work selectively, as the authors themselves disagree that women and men are equally the victims of domestic violence. Secondly, they ignore the serious methodological flaws in the Conflict Tactics Scale. Thirdly, they ignore or dismiss a mountain of other evidence which conflicts with their claims. Finally, their strategies in fact are harmful to men themselves, including to male victims of violence.

Michael Flood: Domestic Violence: Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities:

Men’s physical violence against women is accompanied by a range of other coercive and controlling behaviors. Domestic violence is both an expression of men’s power over women and children and a means through which that power is maintained. Men too are subject to domestic violence at the hands of female and male sexual partners, ex-partners, and other family members. Yet there is no ‘gender symmetry’ in domestic violence, there are important differences between men’s and women’s typical patterns of victimization, and domestic violence represents only a small proportion of the violence to which men are subject.

Finally, A Feminism 101 blog: But doesn’t evidence show that women are just as likely to batter their partners as men?

A: No. This is an often repeated claim based on either faulty understanding or outright misrepresentation of a few studies made using the CONFLICT TACTICS SCALE (CTS) or similar self-report surveys. One of the authors of the original study, Richard Gelles, categorically rejects this interpretation of his research. … Women are self-reported to be just as likely to strike their partners as men are, but they are not just as likely to batter their partners as men are. That is a crucial distinction.

Alas, a blog: On “Husband-Battering”; Are Men Equal Victims?

[T]here isn’t sex equality in serious violence. Women are battered by their intimate partners much more often than the reverse. Given the many reasons to doubt the CTS’s accuracy for measuring severe violence in families, the most reasonable conclusion is that the Straus/Gelles studies – at least, as they’re used by men’s rights activists – are inaccurate.

So should the Straus and Gelles studies be rejected entirely? I say no. The evidence weighs strongly against the “equal victimization” hypothesis, but that doesn’t mean the results of CTS-based studies should be thrown out entirely. Although it’s clear the Straus/Gelles work doesn’t accurately measure the most severe instances of intimate violence, the validity of the CTS in measuring what Michael Johnson calls “common couple violence” – minor, sporadic, non-escalating and mutual violence between spouses – has not been disproved.

Department of Justice: Measuring Intimate Partner (Domestic) Violence

A important discussion of the “women commit equal violence” myth:

Are Men and Women Equally as Likely to Be Victims or Offenders?

The National Family Violence Survey (NFVS) found nearly equal rates of assault (11–12 percent) by an intimate partner among both men and women. … NIJ researchers have found, however, that collecting various types of counts from men and women does not yield an accurate understanding of battering and serious injury occurring from intimate partner violence. National surveys supported by NIJ, CDC, and BJS that examine more serious assaults … clearly find more partner abuse by men against women.

For example, NVAWS found that women are significantly more likely than men to report being victims of intimate partner violence whether it is rape, physical assault, or stalking and whether the timeframe is the person’s lifetime or the previous 12 months. [3] NCVS found that about 85 percent of victimizations by intimate partners in 1998 were against women. …

A review of the research found that violence is instrumental in maintaining control and that more than 90 percent of “systematic, persistent, and injurious” violence is perpetrated by men. [8] BJS reports that 30 percent of female homicide victims are murdered by their intimate partners compared with 5 percent of male homicide victims, and that 22 percent of victims of nonfatal intimate partner violence are female but only 3 percent are male. [9]

Domestic violence and gender – An XY collection

Links to an assortment of important and useful studies.The Kimmel paper is especially helpful.

Categories
antifeminism feminism further reading links MRA

>Further Reading: General critiques of the Men’s Rights Movement

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Actual Father’s Rights Demonstrators

This is the first in what will be a series of “Further Reading” posts that will provide links and brief excerpts/summaries of posts, articles and books useful to critics of the Men’s Rights Movement. They will all be permanently listed in my sidebar. I will add more useful links as I run across them.

I’ve also started adding a series of pages that offer information and links rebutting more specific claims typically made by those in the Men’s Rights movement. These will also be permanently listed in my sidebar under the heading “Anti-MRM Info and Resources.”

Here are some useful general critiques of the Men’s Rights Movement:

Kathryn Joyce: “Men’s Rights” Groups Have Become Frighteningly Effective”

These men’s rights activists, or MRAs, have long been written off by domestic-violence advocates as a bombastic and fringe group of angry white men, and for good reason. … But lately they’ve become far more polished and savvy about advancing their views.

A generally useful overview, with one caveat: Joyce considerably understates the amount of domestic violence that is perpetrated by women. See here for my thoughts on the subject.

Jezebel and Salon have pieces commenting on Joyce’s article. Amanda Marcotte offers some blunt opinions on the piece, as well as some reflections on her general experience dealing with MRAs.

Michael Flood: Backlash — Angry men’s movements (pdf)

In general, “men’s rights” is an anti-feminist and sometimes misogynist (woman-hating) backlash. Its analysis is wrong, its strategies are misdirected and sometimes harmful, and ultimately it does not serve men well. There are legitimate aspects to the issues it raises, but they will not be addressed when surrounded by its hostile and sexist agendas. … Feminism is a movement and set of ideas to which many men’s rights men show venomous and semi-hysterical hostility. … Men’s rights men in fact offer a bizarre caricature of feminism, a highly ignorant and selective misrepresentation.

A shorter, non-pdf version of the article.

Michael Flood: How the fathers’ rights movement undermines the protections available to victims of violence and protects the perpetrators of violence

While fathers’ rights groups often claim to speak on behalf of male victims of domestic violence, these efforts undermine the policies and services that would protect and gain justice for these same men.

Fathers’ rights advocates also: Make excuses for perpetrators; Act as direct advocates for perpetrators or alleged perpetrators of violence against women; Use abusive strategies themselves; Work to undermine and harass the services and institutions that work with the victims and survivors of violence.

More pieces by Flood and others on MRAs at XYonline.net.

Hugo Schwyzer: Masculinity and the failure of the Men’s Rights Movement

The problem with the men’s rights movement is that they confuse men’s unhappiness with oppression. They assume that if men were in control, they would be happy, because patriarchal oppressors ought to be happy. Therefore, if a man isn’t happy, he isn’t oppressing. Newsflash, folks: Just because you don’t know you’re privileged doesn’t mean you’re not. Just because there are aspects of your power and privilege that you find alienating and burdensome doesn’t mean that you are any less a beneficiary of an oppressive system!

Other useful pieces:

The use of violence by fathers’ rights activists: A compilation of news reports

Jezebel: Should Feminism Be “About Equality For Males?”

Jezebel: In Canada, Men’s Rights Groups Gain Power And A Blogger Supports “Femicide”

Alas, a blog:  Men’s Rights Activists, Anti-Feminists, And Other Misogynists Comment On George Sodini

Amanda Hess: Can’t Feminists and Anti-Misandrists Just Get Along?

Amanda Marcotte and Alas, a blog on MRAs’ legitimate complaints.

Blogging Molly: The misguided, embarrassing war against feminism rages on