Here’s a meme posted recently to A Voice for Men’s Facebook page. I know, a graphic suggesting that any man who enters into a relationship with a woman is bound to end up “miserable, or divorced and broke” is pretty darn misogynistic.
The creator of this graphic, who has imaginatively picked “John Galt” as his pseudonym, explained his thinking thusly in several comments on the Facebook page:
In making it I was in fact thinking of the Nash Equilibrium in Game Theory, popularized by Russell Crowe in the Movie ‘A beautiful mind’. In a society where the hypergamous instincts of many women are driven to cruel extremes by feminism It is ever more relevant to highlight to men that being shamed or encouraged to compete for something that is repeatedly demonstrated as worthless is not only important but very healthy. …
[I]t is in fact Marriage I had in mind but these days cohabitation is the same as marriage under the law. Effectively it is impossible for men to trust even a purportedly good woman simply because of the law, but then it is up to women to change that – all we can do is defend our own freedoms and rights and that is what is most important to me. Of course competing for the right to be treated like garbage is the main point and intentions mean nothing without actions…for men that action must needs be self interest first – ironically the one thing we have been trained and bred to ignore.
So, yeah, in addition to being nearly incoherent, this is pretty much misogyny turned up to 11.
But I think we can do better. Let’s consider this graphic a challenge. I invite any readers here who have graphic talent — and those completely lacking graphic talent whatsoever — to come up with a fake AVFM meme that’s MORE misogynistic than this. BONUS POINTS if you can incorporate an actual quote from an AVFMer in the graphic.
To inspire you, here are some completely unrelated gifs of tiny animals being adorable. (I found them all here.)
Jessica Roy, a reporter for Time magazine covering A Voice for Men’s recent :”Men’s Issues” conference in Detroit, found herself the target of a vitriolic tirade from AVFM maximum leader Paul Elam before she even sat down to write her account of her time amongst the MRAs.
Elam, evidently incensed about a handful of sarcastic remarks that Roy tweeted during the conference, denounced her as, among other things, a “hack,” “a liar and bigot” and a practitioner of “journalistic scumtardery,” whatever that is. Commenters on A Voice for Men happily joined in the hate, denouncing her as an “airhead,” a “disgrace and a liar,” “lil’ miss hair-o’or-her-eyes,” and a “little asshole [who] will look like a right nazi in five-to-ten years time.” Amazingly, no one pulled out the c-word. Evidently AVFMers are still on their best behavior.
Roy’s “What I Learned as a Woman at a Men’s Rights Conference” appeared on Time.com on Wednesday. Far from the hack job Elam and pals were predicting, her piece turned out to be a long, thoughtful and nuanced account that, while skeptical of AVFM and its brand of hateful nonsense, displayed considerable sympathy for some of the troubled men she met at the conference, men who could benefit from a movement that truly tried to offer solutions for men in difficulty instead of encouraging them to scapegoat feminists and women.
Reflecting on her discussions with several conference attendees, Roy wrote,
Roy Den Hollander: Are we lawyer or are we dancer?
The other day I suggested that perhaps it was unfair to the Men’s Rights movement to allow them to handle their own public relations, given how terrible they are at it. Today I wonder if the same principle might also apply to MRAs trying to handle their own lawyering.
A case in point: the lawsuit that antifeminist lawyer, “Ladies Night” hater and hip-hop dance enthusiat Roy Den Hollander has just brought against Australian journalist Tory Shepherd, who wrote about the involvement of Den Hollander and others with links to “men’s rights extremists” in a proposed set of “male studies” courses at the University of South Australia.
It’s still not clear to me if these courses had ever been formally approved – the university says they weren’t – but Den Hollander thinks that Shepherd and another Australian reporter got them cancelled by writing about them. And so he figures that they should compensate him for losing him his teaching gig.
You may vaguely remember all of this. A Voice for Men, heavily involved in the courses, famously denounced Shepherd as a “whore” shortly after AVFM’s Paul Elam indignantly called her a liar for suggesting that A Voice for Men regularly calls women whores. (Which of course it does; Elam himself used the word “whore” 28 times in a single post about Skepchick’s Rebecca Watson.)
Anyhoo, so Den Hollander, acting as his own lawyer, has served Shepherd with the lawsuit. And it’s a doozy of a document, at least going by the excerpts Shepherd posted in a column Wednesday.
Somehow we doubt that this lawsuit is going to enhance Den Hollander’s reputation as a fair-minded analyst of gender relations.
Here are some of the best bits, as presented by Shepherd in her column as “some lessons from Mr Den Hollander, who will not be paid to give lessons at UniSA.”
Lesson 1: How to censor a journalist by accusing them of censorship.
“Two modern-day, book-burning, Bacchae reporters from down-under authored and published false and misleading information concerning Plaintiff (Den Hollander) with the intent and result of harming his economic interests and interfering with a prospective economic advantage by causing the University of SA to incinerate the section of a proposed male studies course that Plaintiff would have taught,” he writes. But wait.
Lesson 2: How to personally attack a journalist by accusing them of personal attacks.
“The two reporters, Tory Shepherd, AKA “Tory the Torch” for The Advertiser and Amy McNeilage, AKA “Amy McNeuter” for The Sydney Morning Herald, used their power as reporters to do what weak-minded ideologues have done throughout history — employ personal attacks to prevent the spread of knowledge and ideas that they disagreed with.”
Lesson 3: How to prove you are not an extremist by sounding like an extremist.
“If these two feminist book-burners had not jumped on their broomsticks and scared the bejesus out of the administrators of the University of SA, students there would have had an opportunity to acquire information and consider views not available anywhere else in higher education.”
Yeah, I’m sure that sort of thing is going to go over great in court.
Elsewhere in his lawsuit, Den Hollander denounces “yellow, female-dog-in-heat reporting,” takes a swipe at “girlie-guys,” and offers this intriguing take on Australian military history:
Thank goodness for Australians that Tory was not around for Australia’s battle against the Japanese. Her anti-gun advocacy for men might have even resulted in her and Amy ending up as Japanese “comfort girls.”
The case does at least promise to be highly entertaining, so I guess we have to give Den Hollander credit for that.
So A Voice for Men, having lost or abandoned the original venue for their “Men’s Issues” conference in Detroit, has announced its new location: A VFW post some 18 miles away from the original hotel where, presumably, most of the conference’s attendees will be staying.
According to Paul Elam, they made the move in large part to spare conference-goers the terrible inconvenience of having to watch the no-doubt riveting presentations from an “overflow room.”
No, really.
In a post last night, Elam declared that all the media attention given to the conference
A Voice for Men’s media blitz continues apace. On Sunday, fresh on the heels of his colleague Robert O’Hara’s often cringeworthy Al Jazeera interview, AVFM “managing editor” Dean Esmay appeared on the unfortunately named “Let it Rip,” a news show on the local Fox affiliate in Detroit, to discuss that upcoming “Men’s Issues” conference we’ve been hearing so much about.
The excitable Esmay, wearing a tie at least a foot longer than necessary and facing off against a far more polished Heather Dillaway, a feminist sociologist from Wayne State University, did not exactly dispel the notion that the Men’s Rights movement isn’t ready for its close up just yet.
Esmay robotically rattled off an assortment of the sort of phony “factoids” that go over well only in the echo chambers of the Men’s Rights movement, and responded to questions not with answers but with rapidly regurgitated talking points — at one point declaring, to the bemusement of Prof. Dillaway and the rest, that
So, hoping to find out any more information I could about those threats the A Voice for Men gang has apparently been getting lately, I forced myself to listen to 45 minutes worth of a regular AVFM YouTube show with the highly ironic name Intelligence Report. The topic of the show was ostensibly the “Death Threats in Detroit.” But somehow, AVFM’s Paul Elam, Dean Esmay and Tara Palmatier managed to reveal much less about this subject than they did about their own obsessions and insecurities.
At one point in their rambling conversation they began talking about how unfair it was that the Southern Poverty Law Center had profiled the AVFM gang as a bunch of woman-haters, when really the SPLC should be putting mean feminists on their Hatewatch list instead. And somehow this segued into a discussion of gendered slurs against women, and why it was just fine to use them, so long as you didn’t use them to refer to every single woman on planet earth.
And yes, I’ve saved a sound clip of this edifying discussion for you. You’re welcome!
Oh, just a little FYI, when Pauly says they never ever ever ever use the words “cunt” or “bitch” to describe women as a group — as if using those words is totally fine otherwise — he’s lying. At least when it comes to “cunt.”
feminism, consumer products, psychology, media, advertising, politics and social custom [have] all merged into one Great Big Bitch Machine; [and] the modern female psyche is nothing more than a product of that machine
But technically he’s not calling all women bitches there. Just saying that “modern female psyche” is the product of a “Great Big Bitch Machine.”
Apparently worried that the world might forget what a thoroughly reprehensible human being he is, fantasy author and freelance bigot Vox Day (Theodore Beale) has decided to bring up the issue of marital rape again – in order to assert, as he has many times in the past, that marital rape doesn’t actually exist.
In a post yesterday on his blog Vox Populi, Beale notes with obvious pleasure that an Indian judge recently ruled that marital sex, “even if forcible, is not rape,” thus upholding a section of the Indian Penal Code that refuses to acknowledge marital rape as rape.
Beale crows:
Some of my dimmer critics have attempted to make a meal out of my factual statement: a man cannot rape his wife. But that is not only a fact, it is the explicit law in the greater part of the world, just as it is part of the English Common Law. …
The fact that some of the lawless governments in the decadent, demographically dying West presently call some forms of sex between a husband and wife “rape” does not transform marital sex into rape any more than a law that declared all vaginal intercourse to be rape would make it so.
Unfortunately for Beale, simply declaring that the world is on his side on this one does not make it so. It not simply a handful of “ lawless governments in the decadent, demographically dying West” that see marital rape for what it is. The United Nations has recognized marital rape as a human rights violation for more than two decades. And the world is coming around to this point of view.
While (as of 2011) only 52 countries had laws specifically criminalizing marital rape, many others don’t have a “marital rape” exemption to their rape laws, meaning that in more than 100 countries marital rape can be prosecuted. And that number will inevitably grow.
Here’s a map from Wikipedia showing the countries (in red) in which marital rape is illegal. The countries in black allow marital rape. In the other countries, it’s a bit more complicated. (See here for the details.)
From Wikipedia.
But for now, at least, Beale is happy for another chance to explain the toxic “logic” behind his assertion that “marital rape” is impossible.
Anyone with a basic grasp of logic who thinks about the subject of “marital rape” for more than ten seconds will quickly realize that marriage grants consent on an ongoing basis. This has to be the case, otherwise every time one partner wakes the other up in an intimate manner or has sex with an inebriated spouse, rape has been committed.
Now, by Beale’s logic, a husband is entitled to force his wife to have sex over her screaming objections. Since “consent is ongoing,” in Beale’s version of marriage, a woman could say no or even fight back against her husband’s advances, but none of this would count as non-consent because once a woman is married there is no such thing.
But of course Beale doesn’t want to have to defend what is obviously – at least to anyone with any humanity – violent rape. So he tries instead to restrict the debate to the seemingly innocuous practice of “wake-up sex.” After all, what guy doesn’t want to be woken up with a blow job?
But even this example isn’t as persuasive as he thinks it is. Some people like to be woken up in an “intimate manner,” at least some of the time; some don’t, and you don’t get to override their desire not to be sexually manhandled in their sleep just because you’re married to them. And while drunk sex is not necessarily rape, marriage doesn’t give you the right to force sex on a partner who is intoxicated to the point of incapacity.
And for those who wish to argue that consent can be withdrawn, there is a word for withdrawing consent in a marriage. That word is “divorce”.
No, that word is “no.” There is no such thing as ongoing consent to sex. The fact that you are married to someone doesn’t give you the right to have sex with them whenever and wherever you want, whether they want to or not, any more than the fact that someone is a professional boxer gives you the right to punch them in the head any time you feel like it.
The concept of marital rape is not merely an oxymoron, it is an attack on the institution of marriage, on the concept of objective law, and indeed, on the core foundation of human civilization itself.
No, Mr. Beale, you having the right to do whatever you want to with your dick is not the basis of civilization itself. Civilization, in fact, is built in part on the repression of some of our darkest desires. Part of growing up is reconciling ourselves to the sad fact that we can’t just do whatever the hell we want to all the time; Freud described this as putting behind the “pleasure principle” of infancy and early childhood for the “reality principle” that governs the more mature mind.
Beale seems to be driven not only by a desire for instant sexual gratification, whenever and wherever he wants, but also by a certain degree of sexual insecurity. In a previous post on the subject, he wrote:
If a woman believes in the concept of marital rape, absolutely do not marry her! It would make no sense whatsoever to marry a woman who believes that being married to her grants her husband no more sexual privilege than the next unemployed musician who happens to catch her eye.
Beale seems to think that if married women are allowed to say no to their husbands, they’ll desert these poor beta schlubs en masse in favor of scruffy alphas with guitars. At the root of all his arguments against the idea of marital rape is an obvious terror of unrestricted female choice.
In a way Beale’s petulant, self-serving defenses of marital rape serve a positive function, in that they help to remind us how abhorrent the practice is and how nonsensical the “arguments” in favor of allowing it really are.
Every time he opens his mouth on the subject, he helps to strengthen the growing consensus against marital rape.
W.F. Price (not pictured) believes the best way to prevent domestic violence is to put men in charge of households, and to keep police out
W. F. Price of The Spearhead isn’t very happy about my recent suggestion that the Men’s Rights movement encourages abusive ways of thinking towards women. It’s a strange claim for him to make, coming as it is from a guy who presides over one of the most notorious outposts of vicious, virulent misogyny in the Men’s Rights universe. Even stranger is his claim that by opposing violence against women and children I am therefore … supporting policies that lead to more violence against women and children.
It’s going to take a little while to work our way through his convoluted argument. So let’s start at the beginning. Here’s the quote of mine he objects to, from my post the other day about Lundy Bancroft:
No, this is real. I didn’t make it up. I just blurred out the c-word.
Last week I wrote about the fondness of a certain Men’s Rights website for a certain four-letter word starting with the letter c. This week they’ve topped themselves — with a postering campaign based on the c-word.
Yep: A Voice for Men has thrown its support behind a postering campaign with the slogan: “Having a vagina is no excuse for being a C*NT.”
They don’t use an asterisk.
The postering campaign, spearheaded by a Youtube antifeminist calling himself Bane666au, feature what purport to be real quotes from feminists alongside not-exactly-subtle stock photos depicting comically angry women. For example:
Not the model for a happy and successful relationship
Apparently hoping to gin up another flood of hate-traffic to his blog, the attention-seeking human stain whose name rhymes with Batt Gorney has posted what is essentially a how-to guide for would-be abusive boyfriends under the charming title “How to Crush a Girl’s Self-Esteem.”
“Gorney” has conveniently arranged his suggestions into a numbered list, so let’s proceed through them one by one. (If you’re triggered by explicit discussions of psychological and physical abuse, please stop reading now.)
