So if you’ve ever wondered what sort of activism that Men’s Rights, er, Activists do when they do do activism, take a look at this little ACTION ALERT from A Voice for Men.
You may recall Paul Elam getting all worked up the other day because Facebook, responding to a campaign launched by a coalition of feminist activists and groups, announced it was going to try to do a better job removing “gender-based” hate speech from its site. You know, like this [TRIGGER WARNING] sort of thing.
Naturally, Elam and other MRAs interpreted Facebook’s announcement as the first step in the End of Male Speech on the Internet, or something.
Anyway, now the MRAs are ACTIVATING! AVFM has announced that it’s going after the groups that signed onto the feminist Facebook protest. Because, well, I’m not sure I get why exactly.
Here’s their explanation:
It’s time for action. The AVFM community has scrambled to look beyond the fine print of WAM!’s ultimatum to Facebook and into the signatories. We are finding that some of them are tax-exempt, and even government funded. We now know that government funded institutions have endorsed a harmful double standard that results in the censorship of men.
But, if we discover that even one cent of government money touched WAM!’s campaign, we will be exposing a whole new dimension of hypocrisy.
Uh, ok. I’m just really having a hard time finding the hypocrisy here. If you look at the names of the groups that signed onto the open letter, you’ll find a number of general feminist groups, groups concerned with the representation of women/gender in the media, and groups organized against sexual assault and other forms of violence.
They didn’t sign a petition demanding that all men posting on the internet be banned or, I dunno, kicked in the balls. They signed onto an open letter demanding that Facebook remove
groups, pages and images that explicitly condone or encourage rape or domestic violence or suggest that they are something to laugh or boast about.
That doesn’t seem hypocritical to me. It seems rather in line with what these groups promote.
And the only men who will be censored will be men posting this sort of hateful shit. If women post this sort of shit, they’ll be banned too.
Apparently, AVFM and its “activist” fans are so divorced from reality that they think they’re going to be able to publicly embarrass rape survivor support groups … for standing up against crude, hateful rape jokes on Facebook featuring images of brutalized victims.
Still, at least this sort of surreal, self-defeating activism is better than firebombing courthouses and police stations, as that infamous manifesto posted in AVFM’s activism section so enthusiastically recommends.
EDIT: I forgot the link to the AVFM alert; added it inthe first graf.
