So I Lied…

S

I took a gander at Manboobz’ article on “apexuality” and confirmed to myself that doing so was exactly as pointless as I thought it would be.

He essentially restates my argument and calls it “loopy”.

But here’s the thing. Patriarchy theory asserts, fundamentally, that men share a positive identity. Not just that men are in power, but that they share a positive, loving relationship with other men that would result in them benefiting other men with that power.

Where’s the evidence that this is so? If you’re going to assert something as a fundamental fact, you should have some evidence for its existence. And since feminism bills itself as “science” rather then belief, one would assume this evidence is a result of careful study into male identity and what it’s actually based on.

I have yet to see any evidence that male-bodied individuals in power share a positive social identity with male-bodied individuals not in power.

Do they campaign on platforms to benefit the male bodied? Do they promote the issues of the male bodied? Do they do anything other then shaming the male bodied into conforming to sets of behaviour that apexuals find useful?

Hell, you could say the relationship between the male-bodied and the label “man” is akin to the relationship between pigs and the label “pork”.

And as for the commentator who said, sarcastically, “that’s why male politicians are so concerned about trans women.”

Well, you know what they say about homophobes…

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<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="3004 http://www.genderratic.com/?p=2456">179 comments</span>

  • This whole thing is folowing the same arc as Creationism. It started back in the Reformation as new mechanistic modes of thought took hold. That menat that everything had to be seen as objective fact or as falsehood. Since people in those days were not willing to cut and paste with the Bible, because they hadn’t done the textual analysis yet anyway but mainly because they had no body of information to replace it with WRT the natural world, they took it for a science text – quite in opposition to the pirpose of the writers of those texts over 1,000 years.

    That boxed them in, and then when the physical evidence supporting genetics and biology and paleontology and geology started coming in, and it all fit together in such a way as to deny it you practically ahve to deny gravity, they just doubled down. It was really a form of balsphemy, and the Roman Chruch repudiate literalism a hundred years ago.

    Oh, and now Pat robertson rejects the 6,000 year dat for the Creation anyway, says it’s not Biblical, which it isn’t

    So that’s how this is going to work out with feminism. It started with some liberal arts and literature students, and their academinc style clearly reflects this. They saw early oin that were making factual claims, so they started initing they were doing scientific work, in that ordeer and with about that much basis. So when people began to see the man behind the curtain, they started scamming up statistics and studies to support their contentions. It is all starting to come apart, and it is ripping thier worldview apart.

    So expect some angst and anger from them.

  • What is this manboobz thing? The writer seems like a sycophant to me, too busy getting high fives by yes (wo)men to actually truly challenge his own world view. Patriarchy theory is a joke, a poorly written, poorly demonstrated one at that. Patriarchy hypothesis, or patriarchy conjecture, or even “upper-middle class white woman conspiracy theory” all seem more accurate.

  • I went to that thread and tried to get some clarification about “Patriarchy” theory.

    As expected, I mostly got personal attacks or moved goalposts. One poster did at least make an argument (that I don’t know for sure if I could refute it or not) about how “stop-loss” in the military (which I mentioned as a sort of back door draft since they were doing their normal poo-pooing of the fact that the all male draft is still on the books) mostly affected women, since it mostly concerned specialty type MOS’s. I found this remarkably hard to research on the net for whatever reason. I suppose I should have hung out at some military message boards or something. Regardless, that was the only argument I got. When I asked for specific examples of modern US laws that advantage men at the expense of women short of the exclusion of women from direct combat (which is rather laughable as an example, but whatever), they couldn’t come up with any, instead relying on things such as “coverture” from the 19th century or things that happen in other countries.

    But most of them just insulted me, which is really what Manboobz is noted for. If you aren’t one of the “cool kids” and you make arguments they don’t like they will insult you – over, and over, and over again.

  • At best, men in small groups can share a light-hearted camraderie that develops over time and out of shared goals – but this is based on trust earned through competence, hard work and continued success rather than some nebulous “positive identity”. Upon meeting an unknown male for the first time, it can take months or years before this camraderie overcomes initial suspicion, if it ever does.

    That is why men vet each other through sports (or sports fandom), shared hobbies, or other social artifice, and even then, this vetting leads to rivalry as often as friendship. I even know men who detest sports but follow them anyway for the ingratiating effects they can have in building tenuous male relationships.

    Contrast this with intrafemale friendships – which can appear and vanish with blinding speed compared to intramale.

    From a male perspective, the idea of a global patriarchy is so silly as to be ludicrous – men historically slaughter each other by the billions because we like each other through our “positive identities”? What the fuck?

    Anyone who has ever noted women goading men into fighting each other – and also noted the glee and squeals of delight from women when these fights commence – know that the “patriarchy” is just another construct of women attempting to manipulate men – a stealthy “matriarchy”, if you will, whereby women use men as their proxies to work, fight, and do all the dangerous stuff that women would rather not do.

    Th goal of this manipulation is the protection and provisioning of…men? Huh? Of course not – the goal of women’s manipulations of men is the protection and provisioning of WOMEN.

    From this Matriarchy theory we can make several testable predictions – here are three examples:

    Prediction 1: women will relentlessly tend to violate and take over male-only or male-majority spaces to further their manipulation and control over men. Boardrooms and online video games come to mind here.

    Prediction 2: women’s obsession with controlling men means thye will tend to pursue and engage disinterested men (like MGTOWs) that they less completely control and discard / disrespect women’s sycophants, beta orbiters and manginas (that they more completely control).

    Prediction 3: men will rarely violate and never take over female-only spaces (like, say, female sports such as Women’s Tennis, the WNBA or the Lingerie Football League – there aren’t even any male cheerleaders in these organizations, and no male desire to take them over, despite the obvious attractions of Lingerie Football.)

    Now what, one might ask, are the competing, testable predictions of feminists’ Patriarchy theory?

    1. Men baaaaad / women good. (This is neither testable nor really a prediction).

    2. Men baaaaad / so, social justice demands that women need to be equal to baaaaaad men. (This is a policy statement, not a prediction. It does have the advantage of being completely incoherent, of course.).

    3. Like all enslaved groups, women lead shorter and unhappier lives than their male masters. (Finally! A Prediction! A patently false one, of course).

  • Typhon’s very right that not all males share a positive bond with each other as men.

    I would argue, however, this is due to the hierarchical nature of ‘traditional’ machoness. I wrote in my article “Separating The ‘Men’ From The ‘Boys’; Male Hierarchy and the Oppression of Men” that traditional concepts of masculinity by definition have an underclass of “not real men,” of “boys” who haven’t “proven” themselves (or who won’t/don’t care and live outside the hierarchy).

    Males who ARE “real men” socially don’t share a solidarity-as-men with those who AREN’T.

    Indeed, it is a cruel irony that traditional masculinity UNDERMINES male solidarity, by demanding men prove their manhood by subjugating and emasculating each other.

  • Well my friends and I have lived in cultures where 2nd class citizenship is actually demonstrable.

    When I read feminist literature or the conjecture by various proponents of patriarchy theory I EXPECT certain conditions to be met; For instance I expect women to have lower life expectancies, to be sent to war first (as meat-shields), to be almost invisible in terms of citizenship, to not be able to marry “upward”. I expect them to not be the ‘owners’ of children, to be the LAST to inherit property, to be the LEAST educated, to be completely ignored or even harassed or mistreated by law enforcement (Sean Bell treatment – shot 50 times treatment), to have little to NO political involvement and to live in constant squalor. Basically to be ACTUAL second class citizens…

    Instead I hear bullshit about not having as much heroines in comic books and video games, or about being desired for their bodies and not their ‘brains’. About some wage gap (not with most men) but upper-middle class and above; They rarely work any of the dreg jobs such as sanitation, mining, offshore drilling or manual labour and their military participation could be described as miniscule. Has there actually been any studies to if ANY of this has anything to do with the CHOICES these women make?

  • Nice post Ogun. The reality of male to male competition is clear. The reality of men at the top not helping other men is also clear. Why would they try to assist their competitors? I had never heard the claim that patriarchy involves a positive, loving relationship with other men that would result in them benefiting other men with that power. That is simply laughable. The more the theoretical underpinnings of feminists become exposed the more they look like ignorant, self serving, whiners. Isn’t that what they accuse men of being? LOL

  • @ Hackberry

    “I had never heard the claim that patriarchy involves a positive, loving relationship with other men that would result in them benefiting other men with that power. ”

    Well… it sort of follows from asserting the idea that men in power benefit men as a group.

    The male-bodied in power would have to share at least some positive relationship with the male-bodied not in power. A positive shared identity would be one.

    But I don’t see it. You could say that apexuals have glowing things to say about the word “man” but the word “man”, in their opinion, does not include any male-bodied individual that does not provide on-going benefit to themselves and society.

    It’s like saying butchers are pro pig. Nope. They’re pro pork. Whether or not butchers are pro-pig depends on how much you think pigs are served by earning the label “pork.”

    (It seems if you’re a conservative, a pig only exists to become pork so a pig is well benefitted by fulfilling his destiny.)

  • @ operator

    “What does “apexual” mean?”

    Someone who takes their gender identity from their position in a hierarchy. It can be a business, military or moral hierarchy but it’s essentially along the lines of “if I don’t attain X I’m not a man*.”

    *Excluding adult psychological maturity that should be required of both sexes.

  • Certain feminist theorists (Kate Millett and Adrienne Rich for instance) did not posit patriarchy as men helping each other, but as being in fierce competition with each other (with women as one of those “things” they compete over). Granted, their theory did not “triumph” in the women’s studies wars, and they are rarely quoted now. But some few feminists did discuss this.

    Yet another commenter: Indeed, it is a cruel irony that traditional masculinity UNDERMINES male solidarity, by demanding men prove their manhood by subjugating and emasculating each other.

    In deconstructing the work of Jean Genet, Millett said the existence of the “female role” in all-male prisons, proved that this role would exist in patriarchy even if there were no women to play it.

  • @ Daisy

    “In deconstructing the work of Jean Genet, Millett said the existence of the “female role” in all-male prisons, proved that this role would exist in patriarchy even if there were no women to play it.”

    But it’s not precisely the “female role” because the male-bodied in it are not afforded any of the protections vulnerable females are.

    In fact I would say the essence of calling it the “female role” is to highlight the absurdity of a man being able to become something he patently is not. It’s a way of emphasizing his lack of status by comparing it to someone with status.

    It’s like mocking a peasant’s aires by saying he’s a “King”.

  • TB: But it’s not precisely the “female role” because the male-bodied in it are not afforded any of the protections vulnerable females are.

    I am skeptical all women get these ‘protections’. I would say women of the lower classes don’t rate the protections. (Although I would agree it has historically been a protection against state execution, unless your name is Rosenberg.)

    In addition, I was sorta-kinda quoting Genet (Millett’s inspiration for a chapter in her book “Sexual Politics”), who referred to himself in the feminine. His prison memoirs tended to use this language to refer to himself and other gay men… possibly because he was writing about stuff nobody had yet written about openly? I was thinking specifically of Our Lady of the Flowers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_the_Flowers

  • @ Daisy

    I read an updated report on prison life a while back.

    Now gay inmates who willingly take the passive role in anal sex are referred to as “fishes” and have a higher standing then heterosexual inmates who are forced into the passive role. Apparently because there have been stories about Fishes killing other inmates in jealous rages.

    Prison culture is an interesting microcosm.

    ” I would say women of the lower classes don’t rate the protections.”

    I think they rate some. Not as much as women of the higher classes, of course.

    But to get an idea. In the 18th century the rate of convictions for alleged rapes of lower class women was around 45% (which is close to what it is today for all cases of reported rape and equal to the conviction rate for most violent crimes.) Whereas the conviction rate for alleged rapes of upper class women was 85-90%.

    How many of those 85-90% were false rape accusations? Who knows. But it seems to me that if in todays society with(presumably) a more accurate and fair justice system and a conviction rate of 45%… A lot of innocent men were hung back then.

    If an upper class woman falsely accused a lower class man of rape, he was likely fucked with those odds.

    And so it goes.

  • TB: If an upper class woman falsely accused a lower class man of rape, he was likely fucked with those odds.

    Didya ever read “Light in August”? If you can take Faulkner (and I know some people can’t), give it a shot.

    TB: Whereas the conviction rate for alleged rapes of upper class women was 85-90%.

    It is interesting that Lizzie Borden was likely acquitted because of her class, as well as gender (the combination of the two). Also, the status of “old maid”–in 1892, it signaled a life without any “passions”–especially in women.
    Gory murder was simply “unthinkable” for a lady. Florence King wrote one of the definitive pieces on Borden for the (conservative) National Review: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/211803/lizzie-border-wasp/florence-king#
    I just love the way she calls out, “Oh, Mrs. Churchill, do come over. Someone has killed Father.”… well gee, I guess so.

    They simply could not wrap their heads around it. Unthinkable. And so she walked.

  • Ogun, you are just the gift that keeps on giving. Excellent post.

    “Well my friends and I have lived in cultures where 2nd class citizenship is actually demonstrable.”

    “Have lived” – past? Not present tnse? So you’ve left the US?

  • “His prison memoirs tended to use this language to refer to himself and other gay men… possibly because he was writing about stuff nobody had yet written about openly?”

    Daisy, it could well be that. It could aslo just be customary. That kind of thing was a gay thing in past generations.It seems ot have died out to the pont that using that trope of gay men calling themselves girls and referring to “she” is used to denote an old queen.

  • Clarence,

    “I went to that thread and tried to get some clarification about “Patriarchy” theory.”

    The strength of oyur stomach lining continues to impress me.

    “As expected, I mostly got personal attacks or moved goalposts. One poster did at least make an argument (that I don’t know for sure if I could refute it or not) about how “stop-loss” in the military (which I mentioned as a sort of back door draft since they were doing their normal poo-pooing of the fact that the all male draft is still on the books) mostly affected women, since it mostly concerned specialty type MOS’s.”

    That exposes that person’s ignorance. Women aren’t concentrated in “specialty MOSs” whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean.

    “I found this remarkably hard to research on the net for whatever reason.”

    “I suppose I should have hung out at some military message boards or something.
    Regardless, that was the only argument I got. When I asked for specific examples of modern US laws that advantage men at the expense of women short of the exclusion of women from direct combat (which is rather laughable as an example, but whatever), they couldn’t come up with any, instead relying on things such as “coverture” from the 19th century or things that happen in other countries.”

    “Coverture” was a legal doctrine that obligated husband to cover debts their wives created, whether they even knew of these debts or not. How that disadvantaged women rather than men I cannot understand unles it was spun as some kind of low-rating of women. how typical! Equating some intangible harm to women to a tangible harm to men. There’s enough actual grief women have to deal with in society, even if not restricted to women and therefore not suitably whinable, that we should be concentrating on.

  • Clarence,

    “I went to that thread and tried to get some clarification about “Patriarchy” theory.”

    The strength of your stomach lining continues to impress me.

    “As expected, I mostly got personal attacks or moved goalposts. One poster did at least make an argument (that I don’t know for sure if I could refute it or not) about how “stop-loss” in the military (which I mentioned as a sort of back door draft since they were doing their normal poo-pooing of the fact that the all male draft is still on the books) mostly affected women, since it mostly concerned specialty type MOS’s.”

    That exposes that person’s ignorance. Women aren’t concentrated in “specialty MOSs” whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean.

    “I found this remarkably hard to research on the net for whatever reason.”

    “I suppose I should have hung out at some military message boards or something.
    Regardless, that was the only argument I got. When I asked for specific examples of modern US laws that advantage men at the expense of women short of the exclusion of women from direct combat (which is rather laughable as an example, but whatever), they couldn’t come up with any, instead relying on things such as “coverture” from the 19th century or things that happen in other countries.”

    “Coverture” was a legal doctrine that obligated husband to cover debts their wives created, whether they even knew of these debts or not. How that disadvantaged women rather than men I cannot understand unles it was spun as some kind of low-rating of women. how typical! Equating some intangible harm to women to a tangible harm to men. There’s enough actual grief women have to deal with in society, even if not restricted to women and therefore not suitably whinable, that we should be concentrating on.

  • I can think of one serious spot of contention where women have less rights than men…

    on a hot summer day, I can take my shirt off at the beach, at a park…

    a woman can do that at a few places, maybe in more tolerant cities like San Francisco or a few obscure beaches or lakes.

    So, yes I support “top freedom” for women and full nudity for both genders at specifically designated areas such as beaches or parks…

  • SWAB:
    Despite my lust for seeing “hawt” 16 plus boobies everywhere and my fear and quaking at seeing Brunhilda the Green Witch sharing the same, I am not sure this is that much of an issue. Women can dress as skimpy as any man who ever lived so long as they still have the actual nipples covered. It’s not like they are in the corsets (you should check into this. Layers and layers of clothing… absolutely horrid most days, I’m sure) and etc that ladies in the past were expected to wear.

    Still, that IS a point. Ironically, I don’t recall them ever bringing THAT up. Too much “objectification” of women with the “male gaze” I suppose.

  • Daisy and Typhon,

    Just following up on the themes of your post. I agree with Typhon; a “prison bitch” isn’t exactly sitting in the “female” role per se. Sure, women suffer a lot under our gender system (duh), but the system does build in some (admittedly patronizing) protections, i.e. the victimhood that comes with moral patiency.

    A man that’s a “prison bitch” (or similar status) doesn’t get these protections. They get all the drawbacks and none of the advantages.

    As I see it, the status of “failed man” or “socially emasculated male” is kind of treated as a third gender. They are the “boys,” the “not real men.” “Boys” are not “women” under our society’s gender system.

    At least from my perspective (self-pimping: I fully outline this in my reddit article “Male Heirarchy and the Oppression of Men” on /r/Masculism), our traditional gender roles were based on the social functions men and women had to serve back in the hunter-gatherer days. Women had to bear children, men had to hunter-gatherer. Women’s “function” was far more biologically innate than men’s “function.” As such, womanhood was seen as innate in the female body but manhood was socially earned and had to be proven through repeated agency. The result is the Subject-Object distinction that Typhon quite correctly identifies as the basic underpinning of the male and female gender roles.

    Femaleness (biologically), thus, has some sort of innate worth by traditional standards. Maleness (biologically) does not; the worth of any male must be proven and demonstrated before he “becomes” an official man (socially).

    So, if anything, what we get is three ‘genders.’ There’s “REAL MEN” (or what Typhon would call the Apexual), “not real men”/”socially emasculated”/”boys”, and there are females/women/girls (since the vast majority of young females grow up to be childbearing, girls just ‘become’ women).

  • Hugo Schwyzer wrote a few years back about an article by a woman who recounted her experience being topless in Central Park in New York City after that was legalized. It was noted that she experienced more comments and looks from other women than from men. When that was pointed out to Hugo he replied that the women had no choice but to police that woman and that they were made to do so by men.

  • Clarence:

    Women can dress as skimpy as any man who ever lived so long as they still have the actual nipples covered.

    Not only that, but everyday, normal, not-trying-to-be-sexy women’s clothes accentuate their bodies far more than men’s do – and more voices are raised in disgust to a normal-figured (i.e. not gym-ripped, but not overweight) man in speedos than to a normal-figured woman in a bikini. Similar for a man with a hairy back vs a woman with hairy legs or armpits. As an overweight man, I do not feel comfortable taking my top off in public and usually feel too self-conscious to go swimming. The ideal male body presented in the media is one that cannot be achieved without endless gym work. If feminists think body-image anxiety affects only women, it’s only because they never try to put themselves in our shoes.

  • Clarence: Ironically, I don’t recall them ever bringing THAT up. Too much “objectification” of women with the “male gaze” I suppose.

    (sigh) One of my most popular posts, Clarence: http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com/2009/07/women-should-have-right-to-be-shirtless.html

    The troll deleted all his comments, sorry about that. But he argued that too many hard-ons would be the result. It was priceless. You can read the funny replies to him, though.

  • Women can dress as skimpy as any man who ever lived so long as they still have the actual nipples covered.

    Those tops are often uncomfortable. It isn’t the same as nudity. You are always looking down to make sure the nipples are covered, and sometimes they aren’t… so why not just show everything? Would ruin the sacred “mystery” I guess.

    Clarence, why ‘quake’ at the Green Witches’ boobs? The rest of us have to look at the Green Warlocks’ boobs now. Believe me, it can be just as disturbing.

    But you know, other people’s appearance isn’t about me.

  • Patrick: The ideal male body presented in the media is one that cannot be achieved without endless gym work. If feminists think body-image anxiety affects only women, it’s only because they never try to put themselves in our shoes.

    You need to move down south, Patrick. Lots of guys over in Pickens County, never heard of a gym. (Actually, I can hear the local country music radio hosts reply to that one: “Hey now, I HEARD of one, sure!”)

    Seriously, though. It’s become a whole proud-redneck thing to show your big beer belly on purpose, get it tattooed, etc.

  • Gingko,

    As far as I know, coverture also held that the husband could beat and rape his wife. It was the legal expression of the patriarchal idea: that a man must be head of the household, ruling over the wife, unmarried sisters, children, and originally slaves. It would have implied that the husband was responsible for debts, for the same reasons it implied that the wife required her husband’s permission to work, travel, or sign contracts.

  • Daisy:
    Well, with toplessness being legal for both sexes, we’d each have to look at the bodies of people (even if just a glance) that we didn’t like.

    Marja:
    Unless you are going waaaaaay back ( I’m not that familiar with coverture statutes but I am about domestic violence laws) it’s doubtful that coverture ever allowed a man to “beat” his wife. The feminist “rule of thumb” shibboleth has been dissected many times, I’ve also linked to a website that has newspaper articles and such about men being flogged, imprisoned, or otherwise punished for beating women in the 19th century and part of the 20th. No, it doesn’t seem to have been strictly legal to beat your wife in English common law, though sometimes punishments might be rather lenient or nonexistent if said beating was in the form of a spanking and not “roughing her up”, though that wasn’t always the case either, and I’m sure often varied by the social class of the woman involved. But othertimes men would be beaten or even killed by their neighbors if they were accused of what we’d call domestic violence. But more to the point, I simply think more domestic violence happened in the past (before the 20th century) because of the mostly rural nature of the American populace. When your nearest neighbor is a few miles out, abusers (both male and female) can do pretty much what they want up to murder.

  • Here in NY women can go topless anywhere a man can. Women can also breastfeed anywhere a child is allowed to be.

    Speaking of men in speedo’s I like those Southern Comfort commercials with that older man walking around the beach in a speedo.

  • Clarence,

    “Women can dress as skimpy as any man who ever lived so long as they still have the actual nipples covered.”

    I actually believe “full nudity” can be more modest than skimpy clothing…

    http://wickedweasel.com/en-us/shop/bikinis/buy/484-M18-313

    http://tataterrace.blogspot.com/2012/10/nude-beach-even-dozen-photos.html?zx=d8d42ed9a6341e67

    A florescent thong “covering” all the “naughty bits” highlights them more than full nudity….

    hahaha, do I have to put the NSFW warning or will that just cause more clicks…

  • “Well, with toplessness being legal for both sexes, we’d each have to look at the bodies of people (even if just a glance) that we didn’t like.”

    Clarence, don’t ever go to a nude beach, you will be in tears…

  • “Speaking of men in speedo’s I like those Southern Comfort commercials with that older man walking around the beach in a speedo.”

    I’ve never understood speedo’s…

    I think the only guys I’ve seen wearing them were gay guys who wanted to show off, almost seems like a Push up” bra for men…

    I like loose swimwear, or, much better if I have the option being naked…

  • I think the only guys I’ve seen wearing them were gay guys who wanted to show off, almost seems like a Push up” bra for men…(SWAB)

    I see you havnt met very many Quebecois men. 😉

  • @ Marja

    ” coverture also held that the husband could beat and rape his wife”

    No. No. No.

    Please read “Blackwell’s Commentaries on the Laws of England”. Yes there were serious issues with coverture in the context of our current understanding but, no, men were not allowed to rape or beat their wives with impunity.

    Neither were wives their husbands for that matter(although I have my doubts about the enforcement of prohibitions against female-on-male DV and rape personally.)

    Now, if you go back to English Common law, men could “chastise” their wives if their wives engaged in illegal behaviour. But seeing that as a “benefit” is bizarre. It’s like seeing an executioner exacting punishment in his role as executioner as a “benefit”.

    Having to beat your spouse because you’re responsible for their punishment if they break the law sounds like a fucking nightmare to me.

  • Oh, man, those mankini style swimming trunks are the only option for a self respecting man in Brazil. Maybe not all of Brazil, but at least Rio. Although I believe the local term for a woman’s swimsuit is “dental floss”, so that is just part of the culture down there.

  • Stoner:
    Thank you for those links.
    Now if you don’t mind, I have to go do some research on them and it might take me awhile 😉

  • SWAB,

    Those people are awesome. They basically go around supporting the drive to find evidence to clear people of false convictions. I believe they generally look for cases where there was little to no physical evidence, where the “perpetrator’s” confession is the only thing that secured a conviction, etc.

    On a related note, I once saw a feminist thread relating to false accusations and their supposed non-existence, and a comment from there was along the lines of: show me one example where a man was convicted of rape on the woman’s testimony alone”. You don’t have to look very hard through their list to find those kinds of cases:

    http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Alan_G_Northrop.php

    (Note that because both Mr. Northrop and his “accomplice” Mr. Davis were white, this is not an example of institutionalized racism)

  • SWAB, Damien Echols spoke highly of them… they were very helpful in trying to get the West Memphis Three released. In the end, they had to take an Alford plea… that is where you plead guilty, but you are innocent, and they free you (?) I still don’t really get it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alford_plea

    The main thing: the West Memphis 3 can not sue the state of Arkansas for imprisoning them for half of their lives. The Alford plea makes that impossible. Technically, their conviction remains on the books and they are still (legally) regarded as felons.

  • “Neither were wives their husbands for that matter(although I have my doubts about the enforcement of prohibitions against female-on-male DV and rape personally.) ”

    This should dispel your doubt, TB. Not only were wivees entitled to beta that and abuse thir husbands, their husbands were punished if they did.
    http://hetpat.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/tyrones-21st-century-skimmington-ride/

    Of course if one is an utterly shamless ideological hack, one can spin this punishment of a man for failing to assert his authority as an expression of the man’s domnance over the woman, and so it was really the woamn who was being oppressed – she abusese him, he gets punished prety brutally for it, but she’s really the one being oppressed.

  • Daisy,

    An Alford plea basically says, I’m not guilty, but I will plead guilty so as to avoid a criminal trial in which it is likely that I will be found guilty. It was originally entered because you couldn’t get the death penalty at the time in the state in question if you plead guilty.

    Alford basically wanted a retrial later on (I believe the chance of the death penalty was much less at the later time), and said his guilty plea shouldn’t count. It went to the supreme court and they said, no, you did plead guilty, even if you still think you are innocent.

    Without researching, I believe it is likely that The West Memphis 3 plead guilty as part of a plea bargain, which involved their sentences being changed to the exact amount of time they had already served in jail, thus allowing them to go free, but as convicted felons.

    Take a look at the innocence project, and take a look at what proportion of freed people come from the south or Texas. Perhaps that is because a number of reasons, but I don’t think any of them justify it.

  • ES:
    As can be seen on any one of several blogs (the best being Grits for Breakfast) the Texas criminal justice system is a politicized mess, that has almost certainly executed quite a few innocent people and whose leaders (from the Governor on down) mostly refuse to reform it.

  • So, if I’m not mistaken again, coverture was an eighteenth-century project to change marriage laws and marriage practices to conform to certain people’s patriarchal ideals, it never worked, it involved pressure to try to force husbands to rule their wives, and it hurt both wives and husbands?

    So, now I’m wondering *where* and *why* did people come up with this awful idea? Certainly the experience of a few precursors to coverture and/or aspects of coverture should have warned against trying to add to the mess and systematize the mess and impose the mess on everyone except the queen? In later Roman law, although marriage sub manu might be similar to coverture, wasn’t marriage sine manu the norm? In insular Celtic [sic] law, I believe there was also a degree of independence. In Germanic law, I believe there are both matrilineal and in the west patrilineal elements, and the matrilineal elements are incompatible with coverture into the husband’s family. In Christianity, there were and are strong calls for equality in any marriage.

  • @ Marja

    If by “patriarchal ideals” you mean holding a man responsible for the choices and actions of an adult that he had no actual ability to control(the “law is an ass” according to Dickens after all) then, yeah.

    IMHO, expecting person A to take responsibility and be punished for the actions of person B is not exactly a good place for person A to be.

    Also, Common law prior to Coverture both held a man responsible for the criminal behaviour of his wife and gave him the ability to punish her for it.

    The big innovation of Coverture was to hold a man responsible for the criminal behavior of his wife and give him no ability to punish her for it.

    YAY FOR TEAM MAN!

  • So, now I’m wondering *where* and *why* did people come up with this awful idea?

    Good question. My answer, from an economics perspective, is this: the industrial revolution, rapid urbanization, and the ensuing changes to the division of labor and wealth.

    One of the big questions of the 18th century was how to manage an ever-changing, ever-growing population of complete strangers. On the one hand traditional, large extended families and village life were coming to an end, but on the other hand most people had no bank accounts, no credit ratings, no social security numbers, and few if any other public records. So how could you trust anyone to do the right thing? How do you keep people from starving in the streets? Back then it wasn’t uncommon for destitute mothers to leave dead babies laying in the street.

    So they did the same exact thing that micro-lending does today, something that Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Yunus They relied on the relationships between people themselves to hold one another accountable for their actions in society. And marriage was the most obvious choice. It was the most readily accessible feature of society which could be used to ensure that individuals where legally responsible for each other as well as to businesses and to the state. It was the easiest one to establish decent records for, as well as having obvious features such as two people living together.

    So it was easy – if a woman who had no money stole from a store – just go after her husband. If a woman is starving in the street – go after the husband. If women weren’t tough enough to survive the type of jails that men were sent to at the time – then make the husbands do it. And presto, that takes care of 50% of the population.

    The other thing it did is allow society to easily control men. There was another social project in the 18th and 19th century – pushing men to get married. Have you ever noticed how married men tend to work harder and switch jobs less often? Well so did they. They also noticed that they didn’t go on strike quite as much – that after a few weeks of having babies crying mouths to feed at home, the married men would give up their strike and the factory would win. So there was actually a big push by the wealthy capitalist to get workers to marry – they conspired with church leaders to push the idea in church and they would even plaster pro-marriage posters around the factory floor, the way modern-day employers hang “motivational” posters to this day.

    From a gender perspective, coverture failed. But from a social perspective, the industrial revolution was built on top of social policies just like it. I’d say it was actually extremely successful, just not in the way that our modern society would have liked.

  • The big innovation of Coverture was to hold a man responsible for the criminal behavior of his wife and give him no ability to punish her for it.

    And it was devilishly cunning. Because the only thing hapless husbands had left was to bribe their wives not to commit any crimes. And that’s how it all began…

  • Clarence,
    “After a few wonderful kisses, there’s a slap. And this isn’t a playful slap, so that means the man was assaulted. Note the reaction of the newspeople.”

    And there’s the problem. The woman who committed the assault could be dealt with appropriately if those newswhores weren’t the voices od society’s reaction. That one women was a one off, and she had a good right to be upset. the other women were better sports, but that’s a personal choice. the difference was society’s acceptance of a violence double standard.

    I really do think you can teach a spouse to be a tyrant and a victim can teach someone how to be an abuser.

    Marja, your comment is going to make an excellent bleg. You really do know how to get to the meat of a question.

  • Ginkgo, she might have had a right to be upset, but in the adult world, when people get upset, they use big kid words. Can’t believe she, as an assumed college student, felt that it’s okay to haul off and bitch slap somebody who has their eyes closed waiting for a kiss. And then run away like “oh my god, he’s gonna come after me”.

    That video pissed me off.

    Although I have a friend who is a Utah alumnus who would laugh his ass off that this was happening at BYU.

  • how much you wanna bet the lady that slapped him was a Womyn’s Studies Major?

    oh, well, at least she won’t be able to get her loans discharged in BK, maybe she’ll ask if being indoctrinated by Hugo Skeezer was worth it…

  • there was this awful video awhile back where the scumbags on The Young turks were making fun of a phone call of a man who was being assaulted by his wife…

    it was pretty horrible…

  • http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/12/18/why-progressive-mens-movements-are-bound-to-fail/

    hahahaha, when feminists dismantle selective service, then we can talk. m’kay, but til then I ain’t gonna have nothing to do with a movement that see’s the SCUM Manefesto as “ironic critical theory” and thinks I’m automatically Schridingers rapist whilst going out of it’s way to defend Hugo Skeezer….

    she’s still kotowing to the line of womyn’s problems are more important and if you7 don’t agree, you are a subhuman, misogynist Nice Guy ™ who deserves to live 7 years less and statistically speaking probably will….

  • @DaisyDeadhead

    “I wrote about A Voice For Men’s stalking campaign.”

    It’s not a stalking campaign.

    In fact the “you are fucking scum girl” committed assault according to Canadian law. If she was a man she would be arrested and her name would be in the paper. And if she was a he she’d be far more likely to be subject to retributive violence.

    It’s more likely someone will attempt to beat up or kill a men’s rights activist before one of those girls even gets a hairy eyeball.

    How is the human race going to get anywhere if women are not held accountable for their actions? No one has called for violence. No one is publishing their home addresses. All that’s being done is putting names to actions.

  • That’s correct, Typhon.
    Really, Daisy, I can’t believe you are such a shrinking violet.
    If it was home addresses or bank accounts or stalking family members or something that would be one thing. Instead it’s merely attaching names and public statements to public actions. I fail to see an issue here.

  • Oh, did I notice that Daisy in her article also basically accused them of ageism?

    Maybe she should accuse the wider society of ageism since Register.Her is an incomplete repository, hardly ever updated until recently that mostly draws from pop feminist figures and popular culture and most of the women that get big attention in those venues are rather young, though I should point out that Sharon Osbourne is on Register-her, and she is ..what…sixty?
    And if you see the video of this protest, I don’t think a single protester OR attendee was over 30. Maybe some of the cops. Just how are they supposed to find older women in that protest to put there if the women in the protest are mostly young teachers, professional agitators, or students?

    In short, I think Daisy’s critique falls flat.

  • Here’s the comment I left over at Daisy’s blog:

    Let me say up front that I’m not sure I agree with the tactic that AVFM is taking… but I’m not sure I disagree with it either.

    First of all, Daisy, i don’t think I agree with your characterization of what the protester did in that video as “silly.” had the genders of that particular confrontation (Getting in that guy’s face, screaming at him, following him, trying to get in his way) been reversed, I have no doubt in my mind the protester would have been arrested. But, because she’s a woman confronting a man, she’s just “silly.” No. I don’t accept that.

    Secondly, the guys at AVFM have, to my knowledge, revealed no information that she herself has not already put in public on the internet. They haven’t published her address, phone number, or place of employment, (again, to my knowledge.) Only pointed to information that she herself posted. Nobody forced her to post that stuff on the internet, and actions have consequences.

    Do I wish they hadn’t done this? Somewhat, if for no other reason than to “be the bigger person” but at the same time, I’m frankly rather sick of women being able to spew hate for half the human race and have it just be written off as “silly and fun LOL!”

  • amazing article here:

    Erin: “That’s absolutely right. I was at a luncheon for Women of the Year at the Savoy, and there was all this shouting. I had to get through the pickets. And the funniest one was “Pizzey is the pits!” But they also had the ones, “all men are rapists” “all men are bastards” and I went down to the police and said, “Look, if this was men, you’d arrest them all.” And there’s a great big copper and I said, “Why aren’t you arresting them?” He said, “Well it’s women,” and there’s a terrified look on his face. And I had to have a police escort all around England.”

    http://deanesmay.com/2012/12/19/refuting-40-years-of-lies-about-violence/

  • “And there’s a great big copper ”
    I love when (other) English people get their speaking words written out. It’s just really really obvious.

  • Thanks to Typhon and Dungone for the very interesting information on Coverture. Very helpful and makes a great deal of sense as opposed to the feminist one-sided ideologically marinated dribble about coverture.

  • I’m wholeheartedly on AVFM’s side on this one. The hate and dishonesty in feminist campaigns needs to be seen for what it is, and the people who propagate such hate and dishonesty should have to own what they’ve done. And frankly, I’m still feminist enough to be aghast at all the “but she’s just a silly little girl” excuse-making. If you’re going to claim to be a silly little girl when it comes to being held responsible for your actions, you can’t claim to be an adult when it comes to things like voting rights.

  • @Patrick Brown:

    I’m still feminist enough to be aghast at all the “but she’s just a silly little girl” excuse-making.

    Same here. It reminds me of Bill Burr’s standup routine when he says, “There are no feminists in a house fire.” If someone’s going to engage in, or approve of, the kind of “activism” that involves verbally and/or physically assaulting people, blocking their paths and getting in their way, screaming about how they’re future rapists, they can’t then tie their hair up into little pigtails and claim “but I’m just a silly little girl” to duck out when the social ramifications of those actions start to pop up.

    There is, and should be, only a small expectation of privacy in public spaces; that is to say, people shouldn’t be following someone around just because they leave the house. However, it ends there. If one is going to go to a public place, stage a public protest and publicly act like this girl did, one should expect there to be a reasonable chance that he or she’d be made public: identified, with a name out there attached to those actions.

  • @ Hackberry

    “Very helpful and makes a great deal of sense as opposed to the feminist one-sided ideologically marinated dribble about coverture.”

    It was not one-sided in the least. In fact you could argue that Blackstone was right when he said the law held women above men… if you are of the opinion that keeping women safe from the consequences of their own actions and not allowing women a sense of agency and accountability is a good thing.

    In other words if you value women’s bodies over their character.

  • @ Daisy

    I’d also think you’d be pro-men’s rights since men’s rights activists are very much about judging women based on their character.

    A woman’s body will age like cheese(men’s too for the most part but that’s not the point) but her character can age like wine.

  • Clarence: Really, Daisy, I can’t believe you are such a shrinking violet.

    I do believe this marks the first time I have been called this. First time for everything, I guess..

    This is what gave me pause… From AVFM: [young woman’s name] apparently had a twitter account (which comes up on a Google of her name), which has now been shut down. But there appear to be traces of her in multiple net locations. This should be quite enough for our rainbow coalition of agents to do their work.

    And we will continue to do ours to bring all of this to the light of public attention, including her listing on Register-her.com.

    1) What is “their work” that they refer to? And why are they not elaborating on that? If its nothing, it certainly doesn’t sound like nothing. It sounds like a direct threat.

    2) Why is this girl being listed on Register-her? I thought that was for false rape/domestic abuse allegations? Is it now devolved into just a hit list for whoever pisses them off? If so, the whole issue of the false allegations will no longer be taken seriously, and nobody will take Register-her seriously.

    3) Speaking of their “rainbow agents” carrying out the dirty work: I don’t like seeing men being “used” by AVFM, who may well bear the brunt of police action. I just read that book about “Anonymous” by Parmy Olsen, and I saw how that happened to several young men who had been assured nobody could trace them if they helped attack the Church of Scientology, for instance. They believed, and they went to jail.

    Just for starters, those are my issues, and they are genuine.

    Patrick, some people really are silly girls (I didn’t say “little”–you did) and not to be taken seriously. This is a total strategic error… but these MRAs will find out soon enough when nobody listens to them any more. Stalking is stalking, and it is wrong.

    I am surprised that those of you who often talk about having been bullied, somehow have no problem when other people you don’t like are similarly bullied… but then that is often how it works, I have noticed. Most bullies learn to bully by being bullied themselves. When does it stop?

    Typhon, I been doing activism since (scratches head)… can’t remember. At least as long as Warren Farrell. And I know political errors when I see them. God knows, I have made them myself. I once thought it was okay to print something that should never have been printed. I am too ashamed to even tell you what it was, but I voted with the faction that made it possible. I lived with the consequences of that, and I am hear to tell the tale. Take my word for it, this is a mistake. And if they get by with this one, they will be emboldened to take it further. How far will it go? I hope they get a grip, and stop this juvenile bullshit now. Some girl screaming incomprehensibly is no comparison to false rape allegations… why put these on the same level by printing her name in the same place? Do you see how it cheapens the issues and makes it look like just a buncha schoolboys?

    Wrong. Mistake… and as I said… Patrick and TB, perhaps you do not know the atmosphere in the USA right now, after Sandy Hook/Adam Lanza, but this could not have been done at a WORSE time.

  • I wrote about A Voice For Men’s stalking campaign.

    If A Voice For Men were DAISY: I’m surprised that the “you are fucking scum girl” girl don’t out herself! Because only a MONSTER or a FAKE would have us try to believe that she is a FEMINIST without providing her name, Facebook page, photograph, place of employment, copies of college degrees, military discharge papers, and medical records. Only a FAKE good-for-nothing feminist WANNABE and an UGLY MONSTER would ever go to a protest and assault members of the public without giving us all of her info so we could track her. Did Andrea Dworkin block her Facebook page when people pointed out her bigotry? Hell no! So UNLESS the “you are fucking scum girl” provides us with all her personal data, she is UGLY.

  • Jared: Your acvivism, our bullying, eh Daisy?

    What exactly is the ‘activism’? What is the “work” they refer to? I would like a description… you all seem to have access to some information I don’t have. You are assuring me it is some harmless Halloween pranks? Who told you this?

    Like what?

    If it was ME (and it was, remember, when Bob Jones University went after me earlier this year), I would file a police report, just in case. I fully expected them to take a shot at me.. “we gonna get you” is pretty direct, after all, and “we got her” sounds equally bad. Nebulous threats are much worse than specific ones.

    What exactly is going to happen to this person that makes it “activism” rather than terrorism? I called it terrorism when Bob Jones University androids went after me, and this sounds exactly the same. And you know, they saw it as MY fault: I yelled about them too–I broadcast their dirty rapist laundry all over the upstate. They saw me the same way, and they felt totally justified in threatening me. What exactly is the difference in this case?

    Has any nebulous, shadowy group ever come after YOU? If so, maybe you’d feel differently.

  • Dungeon: Did Andrea Dworkin block her Facebook page when people pointed out her bigotry?

    She died before there was a Facebook, you dumb ass.

    Adults only, as I said. Not children with um, no timelines. Run along, sweetheart. Lunch is ready.

  • Typhon Blue: No one has called for violence. No one is publishing their home addresses. All that’s being done is putting names to actions.

    What exactly is “the work” the “rainbow agents” are going to carry out? What do they refer to, in that case? Because you seem to know more than I do about what they are threatening to do as “work”–perhaps they should add a description of their intentions? Because it sounds deliberately left open/mysterious just to freak her out, which was what was also done to me. (By the way, Bob Jones University androids DID follow me to the radio station. They made good on their threats to clock me and just stopped short of actual trespassing.)

  • Clarence: Sharon Osbourne is on Register-her

    When did Sharon Osbourne make a false rape allegation? I must have missed this one.

    So Register-her has already degenerated from a righteous cause to redress real injustice, to just another random hit-site listing mouthy women the MRAs dislike? Ah, I didn’t know this. Thanks for letting me know, I guess we can start ignoring it now.

    Too bad, though. I thought they initially had a good point.

    Damn… This reminds me of when feminism went from printing the names of real rapists, sex criminals and wife-beaters to complaining about Mick Jagger and sitcoms. Ah, Deja Vu all over again.

  • @Daisy

    “What exactly is “the work” the “rainbow agents” are going to carry out?”

    Er… identifying the people involved in the protest and connecting their public statements/actions to their publicly available names?

    If you can criticize anything, it’s the theatricality they’re investing in this relatively trivial action.

  • @ Daisy

    “And I know political errors when I see them.”

    What you understand is activism for a group that already had society’s ear when it came to compassion. In that situation members of that group can engage in domestic terrorism without any consequences.

    This is different. This is more like the Quakers taking on slavery two hundred and fifty years before it was abolished.

    That’s the timeline we’re looking at here; basically constructing a completely different society in which men are treated with compassion and women’s actions have equal consequence.

    Appealing to the masses is pointless; it’s pretty much down to metastasizing within society itself and that won’t happen by watering down the message.

    All I can say is that I hope this go around we learn something and make it the last. Probably not though.

  • Then maybe they shouldn’t use biker language for carrying out hits? “agents” who “do their work”? Somebody has been watching too much “Sons of Anarchy”…

    I wonder if the women being dogged think its trivial.

    I found being followed for a week less than trivial, but thats me.

  • TB: This is different. This is more like the Quakers taking on slavery two hundred and fifty years before it was abolished.

    Did you really just compare the MRM to Abolitionism? Oh dear God.

    I hardly know what to say.

    Not. The. Same.

    Really, its not.

  • @ Daisy

    It’s okay. I know it’s not the same. At least not at this point in history.

    What’s really interesting is that every word we’re writing is going to be set down for our descendants to see and puzzle over.

    Hello. Yep. I knew.

  • @Daisy

    “I wonder if the women being dogged think its trivial.”

    Jeeze, how could I have overlooked this.

    How about the _men_ who were harassed, assaulted and prevented from exercising their right to free speech(and freedom of movement) by these women for doing nothing at all?

  • @Typhonblue

    “I wonder if the women being dogged think its trivial.”

    Jeeze, how could I have overlooked this.

    How about the _men_ who were harassed, assaulted and prevented from exercising their right to free speech(and freedom of movement) by these women for doing nothing at all?

    If, as you say, “the ‘you are fucking scum girl’ committed assault according to Canadian law,” then whether she feels “dogged” about it is completely irrelevant. “Don’t make me face the consequences of my actions because I might feel bad if you do” is not a valid defense for an adult.

  • People who live in Canada and Oregon really don’t know, do they? It would take a great deal more than that NOT TO GET LAUGHED AT by Southern law enforcement. I guess I don’t know how to put it any other way. Well, maybe not just the south… Have you ever seen the Jerry Springer show? (He was the MAYOR of CINCINNATI, you know.) Screaming one millimeter from someone’s face is all perfectly legal around here.

    I found them silly, ridiculous college girls and not to be taken seriously…. and for the record, what is the problem with Farrell? What did he do to piss them off so much? As I just said in comments on my own blog, I didn’t get the memo.

    And I linked to video footage of myself in a real riot, just so yall would know the difference.

    People (men) are being lethally injected and there are fiscal cliff/social security negotiations and three wars to stop and… wait, not in Canada. I guess this is what radicals have to do to feel important in a liberal place like Canada. Why waste one’s time yelling over some guy who is 69 years old, unless he is, you know, a war criminal or something? Its not like Warren Farrell is Henry Kissinger, after all.

    I can’t take them seriously in the first place, so I guess that is part of the problem.

    JDC: “Don’t make me face the consequences of my actions because I might feel bad if you do” is not a valid defense for an adult.

    Do you think Bob Jones University androids should have followed me all over three counties for a week? Because they did. Is that what you mean about me facing the consequences of my actions? Because I did that, I faced em down. But I also armed myself, and I am still armed. Is that legal to do in Canada?

    What ‘consequences’? Being followed and harassed? Vigilante justice? I am curious about exactly what consequences you mean. We have a justice system to avoid going back to the wild west/vigilante justice, but when it fails, then people arm themselves… but are you permitted to do that in Canada?

    Do you understand that the stakes go up, once we reach that point? Arming oneself means you have to be committed to carrying that out to the end result. I really would rather not… but I am not stupid either. I am dealing with highly-emotional cult members from a school founded by kkk-rednecks. I have to look out for myself.

    It is my understanding that this is not a possibility in Canada, and that only law enforcement is armed? Makes her something of a sitting duck, doesn’t it?

  • She died before there was a Facebook, you dumb ass.

    @Daisy, it was a carefully crafted parody of you, so at best you’ve just insulted yourself.

  • @ Daisy

    If you’re being stalked, I would suggest you call the police but I don’t know if that would sound condescending.

    Incidentally, if male disposability is ever successfully challenged cults will find it a lot harder to recruit mooks willing to die and commit violence for them with the promise of earning some sort of worth.

    And if you’re going to hold us to the same standard of risk-assessment as you are, how about you hold those young women?

    “I wish you would get raped! Someone should punch you! You deserve to be hit!” are not threats or dogging. They’re passive aggressive “evil eye” meaningless bullcrap.

    “I’m hitting you with my thoughts and my ill will! Ooooooh, I bet you’re feeling the sting now!”

  • Dungeon: @Daisy, it was a carefully crafted parody of you, so at best you’ve just insulted yourself.

    (sigh)

    For a big badass Marine who has drank coffee next to piles of corpses without pause, Semper Fi out the ass, the proud son of brave Solidarity-spies against the USSR, an ‘award winning playwright’ and economist and six-figure-earning programmer and expert on absolutely everything who has banged hundreds of super-models and who has lived in every state of the union and abroad too (ad nauseum)… you seem awfully focused on lil inconsequential, unimportant ME –you know? I just find it… well, peculiar.

    As a proud apexual, on top of the world looking down on creation, not sure why you care about the men’s movement at all, frankly. Another of those wacky little mysteries, I guess. You should be working to preserve the status quo that has you made you the roaring success you are. Instead, you seem bloody furious all the time. (What’s up with that?)

    Wait, I know, you care about all those “little people” right? All the lowly unsuccessful men who can only **dream** of being what you are. What a good person! I’ll bet if I just chant your name over and over, I can purify my karma and avoid being reborn in the lower realms, right? Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that DUNGONE is Lord, Amen!

    Instead of yammering, insulting, and derailing, how about you write some more “award winning” stories for us? You are outliving your usefulness to me. I want more tall tales to forward to my email list. If pallid impersonations of me are the best you can offer, I’d say you are slipping badly.

    Now, as I said, run along. Or print something funny about your wonderfulness. I confess, I have become addicted to your biographical accounts. They are almost as good as the Real Housewives.

    Merry Christmas! Give my regards to President Obama, Adele, Tyra Banks, Richard Dawkins, and whoever else you are partying with this year. I can’t wait to hear all about it. The rest of us pale in comparison to your bright shining star.

  • TB: Incidentally, if male disposability is ever successfully challenged cults will find it a lot harder to recruit mooks willing to die and commit violence for them with the promise of earning some sort of worth.

    Very true. I am on a list with ex-Bob Jones people. They find it very hard to adjust to leaving the cult … a lot is that they were given that “head of the family” thing as a ‘sop’–a sort of reward for good behavior, and they believed it. They didn’t realize it was conditional on staying in the cult until they leave. When they DO leave, they do not know how to be egalitarian with women .. they were totally in charge of their homes, but of course– at the same time– their every move was supervised by the cult. It is a perfect example of getting to be a “boss” and yet, they were not allowed to do anything. Since their livelihood was often bound up with the cult and their jobs were with the church-affiliates, leaving often puts their whole lives into financial jeopardy. (Their college degrees are unaccredited and not worth anything outside the IFB cult; they end up getting jobs inside the IFB system since that is the only place that will hire them.)

    The paradox is fascinating to me, but it IS simultaneously extremely damaging to them.

    And for so many, breaking away is just out of the question. .

  • Why were you even on manboobz? It’s a complete waste of time talking to extreme groups like that. They were the ones who performed the “research” the SPLC used when identifying the MRM as a hate group.

  • @Houlihan

    I kept getting people telling me “manboobz talked about you! manboobz talked about you!”

    I was weak, I gave in. I thought there would be some sort of substance and there wasn’t. It was like going to a creationist blog with a guy saying “Energy equals matter? Loopy!” I don’t even think he understood what I was trying to get across.

  • SWAB, thank you! Finally! Yes, good reading.

    A lot of the OP’s statements about “ego investment” echo ideas by the late Christopher Lasch, whom I would recommend you read further if you are interested in that, specifically “The Culture of Narcissism”… Lasch was the REAL “first man awake”–unless you count Timothy Leary, LOL.

    I will always credit Farrell for his kind letter to me, when I was still a kid and surrounded by sexist louts. He took time and actually tried to explain their behavior to me (and largely succeeded), and as I said in my post, it meant a whole lot to me at the time. He made perfect sense. I still don’t see why they dislike him so much… lots of his ideas were obviously built on certain 2nd Wave feminists he associated with, like Kate Millett. (I think she may actually have been on that Phil Donahue show with him, can’t remember.) The whole “success object” concept was very popular in the Second Wave, and now seems to have been dropped down the memory hole.

    I seem to recall that Farrell got conflated with some genuinely offensive people like Stephen Goldberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inevitability_of_Patriarchy) and wacky-assed George Gilder. In fact I seem to remember a Newsweek article that mentioned them all in the same paragraph, which I thought was really wrong and unfair. Guilt by association. I think the feminist ire likely started there.

    It still doesn’t explain the hysteria, because it is ALL OUT OF PROPORTION to reality, but it does help a little bit. I still see Farrell as an old-school feminist, even if he would not use that word… and for sure, those girls in Toronto certainly would not. It is feminism that changed, not us… shades of Norma Desmond, LOL.. WE ARE BIG, it was feminism that got small, ROFL. But seriously.

  • Quite the kerfuffle here over mr. farrell. I dont know about you guys but its pretty obvious to me that both sides enjoy bullying. I have a sneaky suspicion that both sides have lots of experience with it. Both from getting and giving. 🙁
    You know the old saying, “Misery loves company”

  • @titfortat: Meh, as far as I’m concerned they’re just taking the “acceptable privilege” and making it unacceptable the same way all the currently unacceptables got their. Name and shame.

  • Guh, “prejudice” not privilege. Just finished my office break-up drinks. Merry Christmas to all!

  • Dungeon [sic] blah blah blah

    OT: For anyone interested in where my handle comes from, it’s from something we used to say to one of our Company Gunnery Sergeant in the Marines. He was a very proud redneck and he used to give us orders with, “Get ‘er done!!!” So as a joke we’d follow up with, “I dungone it, Gunny!”

  • @Titfortat

    I dont know about you guys but its pretty obvious to me that both sides enjoy bullying. I have a sneaky suspicion that both sides have lots of experience with it. Both from getting and giving. 🙁

    I agree that it often does seem that way. However, in this case, not so much. If a high school bully were to scream obscenities at people, follow them around, block their path, etc., I don’t think very many people would call it bullying if the bully’s name, and his actions, were made known, and he was shamed at his school for it, especially if the school administration turned a blind eye to it. Of course, shaming a bully at high school is unlikely to have much effect because the bullied kids are often not popular, bullies sometimes are, and most kids can’t be bothered to give a rip, but that’s neither here nor there.

    Obviously, this case isn’t just high school bullying. It’s an adult woman harassing, trying to intimidate, and, if Typhon is correct, assaulting people in public, attempting to shame others and have them ostracized by society using the dogma and implied force of an entire, relatively popular, movement, not just one kid attacking another or menacing and threatening him with a swirly or embarrassment (though those things are horrible in their own right). Showing the same public she’s using to try to ostracize people what her tactics are (harassment, intimidation and assault) and giving a name to her face just isn’t equivalent to the bullying she’s doing.

    If knowing that she harasses, intimidates and assaults people in public makes some people shy away from her, say some unkind words to her and/or causes people to decide against giving her certain jobs or academic opportunities, that’s the pits for her, but is perfectly acceptable (if people take it too far and perpetrate assault on her or engage in other illegal activity relative to her, obviously that’s not okay). It’s neither bullying nor vigilantism; people have every right to know and decide whether they want to work with, associate with or appreciate someone who will engage in assault, in public, for whatever reason. Assault is not something one gets to do and pretend it’s political “speech” that should be protected. If one engages in that kind of activity and doesn’t like it when someone shows an unedited video of what he or she actually did*, then the lesson is don’t assault people, not “cry because you feel uncomfortable under the oncoming scrutiny. ‘How dare they?!'”

    Now, if she were just peacefully protesting, being a vitriolic, rancid misandrist online or stating her hateful philosophy or something like that without trying to intimidate/harass/assault people, putting her name out there probably isn’t the right thing to do (though I suppose that could be argued. I just wouldn’t do it). Similarly, if this was some person or group online stating she harassed/intimidated/assaulted people and there was no video or other evidence of it occurring, I’d also think it inappropriate.

  • @JDC

    I didnt say it was necessarily the equivalent in this case. But make no mistake, both sides use similar tactics. I know bullying, intimately, this I feel is the same shit different stink variety.

  • I also have experience of bullying, and I know very well how standing up to bullies is usually shamed and punished more severely than the bullying itself. And if the bully being stood up to is female, then it’s damsel in distress and crocodile tears all the way. Tough shit.

  • I agree that it often does seem that way. However, in this case, not so much.

    @JDCryan, they are making hay over it because of the meme they themselves spread that the MRM is a hateful neo-nazy/KKK styled white supremacist group and, therefore, they spread fear-mongering about how “dangerous” it is to release the identities of it’s detractors. But the only evidence they have for this… are the baseless accusations of the people whose identities they’re trying to protect. So on a very profound level, they actually have to agree with them. That it’s all some sort of terrorist rape culture, that these poor dears who spittle in men’s faces on their way to a university event are weak little darlings who need to be protected from the bad bad men. It’s a ghastly circular argument that just caves in on itself.

    On top of that, this is a deliberate strategy to induce cognitive dissonance. All the backlash that’s being registered against the release will go on the public record and will be used as fodder to shove right back at the very same exact people when they themselves return to doxxing members of the MRM who dare to speak out against feminism. Remember, contributors to A Voice For Men and other prominent MRM activists have been rather savagely attacked through doxxing campaigns. Especially the women who support men’s rights. It is with a full knowledge of this that AVfM has decided to give them a little tiny taste of their own tactics. And now we have the crying and whining of feminist detractors to shove back in their face the next time they decide to doxx and harass anyone who points out the hypocrisy of the anti-male movement.

  • @dungone

    The MRM isnt a monolith and truth be told there are several crazy fuckers who identify quite nicely as such. The same holds true for feminism, no doubt.

    @Patrick

    When I stood up to the bullies was the day I stop being bullied. No one dared shame me or attempt to bully me again. They knew better. Funny thing about violence, it can be a very effective means of shutting people up. That crazy chick in the Vid knew it and so do some of the boys over at Avfm.

  • The MRM isnt a monolith and truth be told there are several crazy fuckers who identify quite nicely as such. The same holds true for feminism, no doubt.

    I don’t share your sentiment, which I find to be an equivocation and not really true. I refuse to use the “isn’t a monolith” argument to detract from the MRM even as it is used to shelter feminism. If you’re going to use the “not a monolith” argument then you should use it correctly – that the MRM is beyond reproach and thus there’s nothing bad that you can ever say about it – just like feminists do.

    The fact is, however, that MRM don’t mince words about who they do or don’t support. They are NOT a “not a monolith” collective. They are far more individualistic and not the sort of collectivist “big tent” ideologues that feminists are. They have far more credibility when they say “I believe in X and disagree with that other guy who says Y.” They don’t trot out bullshit “Well he’s not really mainstream…” rationalizations after they themselves just got out of a sycophantic lecture/book signing/college major that was all about that other guy. That’s the true face of the “not a monolith” argument.

    So let’s get real. We aren’t talking about some extremist right winger who wants to appropriate the MRM, or an activist who makes do as a strange bedfellow to such persons. We’re talking about fair-minded college students who were, for instance, concerned about their friends’ suicides, who wanted to attend a talk by Warren Farrel. Where exactly is the line of reasoning that feminists can use to rationalize their hate-filled attack on that? They can’t really even go for guilt by association on that one. For all intents and purposes whatever bad people there exist in the world had nothing to do with that event or the people behind it.

  • @titfortat, to add, the “not a monolith” argument is nothing more than a slightly modified No True Scotsman fallacy. Instead of referring to “no true feminist” as an indivisible individual, they speak of feminists as if they were ruled by a multitude of voices in their heads, telling them what to do. “No true feminist voice in her head would tell her to say something that bigoted… but I agree with all of the true feminist voices in her head… ergo, she’s good feminist.” So… lesbian separatists? Good feminist. Andrea Dworkin? Good feminist. There’s always the, “well, it was necessary and proper at the time” rationalization. We can just ignore their bigotry because the means justify our ends when we’re studying feminist theory.

  • @Dungone

    My issue with the individuals of your MRM is that some of them are not so, well, rational. Just like some of those individuals who like to call themselves feminists. Personally I think people who like to label themselves from either side are all a little fucked up. Its just that some are more fucked up than others. Where do you fit in on that sliding scale?

  • My issue with the individuals of your MRM is that some of them are not so, well, rational.

    Which ones, and by whose assessment?

    Personally I think people who like to label themselves from either side are all a little fucked up

    Oh… by that standard. Okay, then yes.

    If it weren’t for the fact that there are people who are overtly against men’s rights, then the vast majority of the people who label themselves as such would find no reason to do so. It’s no more fucked up than labeling the first person to arrive to help at the scene of an accident a “first responder.”

  • “When did Sharon Osbourne make a false rape allegation? I must have missed this one.
    So Register-her has already degenerated from a righteous cause to redress real injustice, to just another random hit-site listing mouthy women the MRAs dislike?”

    No. Register-her.com is for listing not only false rape accusers but anti-male bigot. The standards are pretty clear and unsubjective. Sharon Osbourne’s behavior around the business with Catherine Kieu mutilating her sleeping husband very clearly meets thsoe standards.

    Scum Girl meets the standards too.

  • Dungone

    Of course the assessments will always be my own. I may use information from others but ultimately it will be my call, rightly or wrongly. My take is it would be so much simpler and less dogmatic if we just called it, well, people’s rights. Now I know the squeaky wheel gets the grease but Im thinking maybe the car just needs an alignment. ;P

  • You know, the more I think about AVFM’s actions, the more I’m beginning to agree with it. Usually I’d be pretty cautious about employing such tactics.

    However, as I’ve sat back and continued to see no sign of the media accepting the fact that girls and women can hurt boys and men (no articles, no studies, nada) while my Speak To Me play struggles to find a foothold long after its airing date in the mainstream and I feel like I’m the only damn person willing to point this out, then there comes a time when being patient just doesn’t cut it anymore. Time for action, I say.

    And that’s why I endorse AVFM’s tactics. Keep in mind, no personal information has been posted online of this woman (address, phone number, connections). Only what she made available (twitter account, etc).

    Sorry to say this, Daisy, but I’m fed up and if it takes identifying people like this to show how girls and women are capable of nasty deeds, so be it.

    This isn’t even close to doxxing. Information posted on this woman was readily available by her. No personal information either.

    Be that as it may, I’m sick and tired.

    Sick and tired of dealing with the reailty that HARDLY ANYONE will take their blinders off and look at the fact that girls and women are capable of hurting boys and men!

    Sick and tired of seeing instances in stories, movies, etc where the female protagonist can slap around the male protagonist with impunity wheras if it were the other way around, feminists groups would cry foul!

    Sick and tired of people ignoring it, invalidating it, mocking it.

    But most of all, I’m sick and tired of being constantly reminded that my experience has no place in society.

    This woman acted like a nasty bully and her type should face the consequences of their actions. Period. No more of this “I’m a woman, treat me lightly” crap. No more of the “Women and girls are daintly saints that wouldn’t hurt a fly” crap either.

  • Eagle: This woman acted like a nasty bully and her type should face the consequences of their actions. Period. No more of this “I’m a woman, treat me lightly” crap. No more of the “Women and girls are daintly saints that wouldn’t hurt a fly” crap either.

    Excuse me, but I have never said EITHER ONE of these things, and never would. Please do not put words in my mouth. This is not my sentiment, and I have never said that.

    I am still wondering what this “work” is that will be “carried out”. AVFM has already named her and attached a photo, stated where she attends school, and identified her as the woman in the video. So what else is left to be done? AVFM has already done that work, so when they say FURTHER “work” will be done, what “work” do they refer to? Why does this “work” require a league of “rainbow agents”? If outing her is the thing, as I am informed here, its already been done in the OP, so what FURTHER work is going to be done? Please be specific.

    If *I* am asking that question, rest assured, I am not the only one. It is the great unanswered question in the post. If you can’t answer it, expect someone else to… and all sorts of nefarious things will be assigned to the rainbow agents that THEY DIDN’T DO. You know that, right? Nature abhors a vacuum, and if you can’t define the “work”, feminists will, and it will be ugly, so be prepared.

    As I said to TB upthread, I engaged in similar (possibly worse) behavior once. I certainly understand how good it feels to be all indignant and go after the perps. But strategically, this is a huge mistake, and I SEE THAT NOW. I could have written every single “Woo hoo! Go get em!” post on this page, defending my actions at the time. (As a famous misogynist once correctly stated, there is none righteous, no, not one) I was carried away in the moment and in emotion. But in retrospect, I see it was a MAJOR ERROR. This is allowing emotions to govern your activism. It is singling people out, when you might well discover this person is certifiable and they might commit suicide… and THEN how will you feel when you are blamed for that? When this girl has have a random traffic accident/hit-and-run and MRAs are blamed, how will you feel about that? What if perchance she IS beaten up (at any time, for the rest of her life) by someone who has no idea what MRAs are? They will claim that as the reason, even if it happens 10 yrs from now. You know that, right?

    There are unforeseen consequences to attacks on individuals, and you are about to find out what they are. If not now, the next time you do it.

    It is interesting that all of you vociferously criticize feminism, and I try to relate how certain errors came about, how things came to the point they are now. I try to relate the ERRORS, in short… and you all listen to me when I say it about feminism, but not when I make the connection/analogy to the MRM.

    THIS WAS ONE SUCH ERROR: going after individuals. Mistake. Wrong. Makes you look crazy and imbalanced. There are unforeseen consequences, far into the future, that you cannot imagine now. DO NOT DO IT.

    But of course, you will all get it right, where we got it wrong, yes? Of course you will.

    Don’t say you weren’t warned.

    Dungone: they are making hay over it because of the meme they themselves spread that the MRM is a hateful neo-nazy/KKK styled white supremacist group and, therefore, they spread fear-mongering about how “dangerous” it is to release the identities of it’s detractors

    If you understand this, then you should understand how this type of behavior fulfills their expectations/ongoing-narrative handily. You are walking right into it.

    Because this characterization is incorrect, you think you should not have to address it. But you do. THIS IS the characterization of your movement that you have to deal with in the mass media, in the body politic. Going after individuals is EXACTLY what they expect you to do…. and this is why you should not do it.

    Your actions will be defined the way the mass media decides to define it, not the way YOU define it. You get that, right?

    Well, apparently not. Carry on.

    Deja Vu all over again. (sigh)

  • Actually, Daisy, I suspect most of your worries are useless.
    Not only was the MRM already defined, in advance, in a way the second wavers never were, but the MRM seems to be gaining supporters despite “tactics” such as these.

    And really, that’s all that matters.
    P.S. The “agents” are undercover which is why they have pseudonyms.
    As for the “more” activism, I suspect that means more names and, for the people already involved, such things as discretely letting employers and such know. Regardless of how non-violent and legal whatever the agents do really is, it’s going to be spun by the manboobzers, so at this point I don’t really care so long as they keep it to publically available information and stick to non-violence.

  • Clarence: but the MRM seems to be gaining supporters despite “tactics” such as these.

    Right….. but do you WANT the kinds of supporters these particular tactics will attract? That is another strategic question at this juncture.

    Its early; you still have the power to shape your movement. However, after a certain critical mass point, that won’t be possible. You will be stuck with people you don’t like, that may do more harm than good in the long run. Some people will leave, some more will arrive. Carefully consider who you want those people to be.

    Please think it over, before you decide I don’t know what I’m talking about. Not that I expect you to reach a different conclusion. Right now, its all too exciting to give in to second thoughts. Certainly, I understand.

    Clarence: so at this point I don’t really care so long as they keep it to publically available information and stick to non-violence.

    Its usually crackpot-factions and fellow-travelers/dilettantes who decide to break away and do something insane/dangerous that the ‘mainstream’ of the movement would disapprove of. (And you can count on the mass media not making any distinction between the mainstream MRM its breakaway factions… or isolated weirdos.) This comes with the critical mass thing, I mentioned above. After a point, the movement becomes large, chaotic and unwieldy, and the freak shows come out of the woodwork. This happens with every social movement; left and right alike. I can think of NO exceptions.

    You don’t want to attract the nuts, is the thing, the way the environmentalists ignored the Earth-Firsters and made excuses for them in the beginning… the way the Tea Partiers did not bother to de-emphasize the birthers and racists. Thus, when the freak-shows finally do their damage, they will point to AVFM and say “they inspired me”… and good luck explaining what your words meant, at that point.

    Been there, done that. A few times. (In fact, I am still explaining that stuff HERE, aren’t I? What our original intentions were, not the unforeseen outcomes.)

    I won’t continue arguing the point, since you all seem to have your minds all made up. Again, Deja Vu, it is dizzying.

    I need a break, I’m off to burn a yule log and eat pumpkin pie with the Wiccans. Peace out.

  • Its early; you still have the power to shape your movement. (Daisy)

    Too late, anything attributed to MRM or MRA is tainted(on line at least). I say this because whenever I agreed with or disagreed with certain positions the familiar slander was to call me an MRA. At the time I didnt even know what the f… those individuals were talking about, I get it now. Ironic considering I dont align with either side. Side note, when I presented non palatable stuff to Avfm I was quickly shouted down as a feminist or mangina. Go figure, but , you know………….Bullies typical act in a similar fashion.

  • I’m sorry, but can we NOT make this about daisy?

    The endless list of retorts may appear to newer readers as rather boring and/or asinine.

    @Gingko = I’ve never lived in the U.S. I have only lived in West Africa (Nigeria & Sierra Leone), St. Vincent (Caribbean) Germany and England (Europe). Comparisons come aplenty with this much cultural capital. Most of my friends are either Arab, Indian or some variation of African disaspora so their approach to gender is much more ‘randomized’.

  • @titfortat, do you honestly believe that people were unable to hear you and what you were saying as an individual because of some bad bad thing that some bad bad man said and that it forever caused others to go apeshit and have mental meltdowns?

  • I’m just sick and tired, that’s all.

    There was news coverage of that gang-rape in India. Six men taking an innocent man and woman, stripping them, killing them. But not before raping the woman.

    I forsee that the focus on the woman’s rape is going to drown out the fact that a man also suffered and died.

    And from on-the-street interviews from women in India, one of them said “They literally rape me with their eyes”.

    This just tells me I’m going to be wormfood before anyone even bothers to include men like me and how we deserve to be heard alongside female survivors of whatever abuse they incurred.

    My patience is being tested.

    So understand why I endorse what A Voice For Men did. I’ll be in a casket by the time anyone bothers giving my story legitmacy anyway.

  • I will simply say that any unidirectional feminist who has a problem with taking reciepts of this nature should be roughly as horrified at what happened with that reddit guy who’s name I can’t be bothered to look up.

  • @ Valerie

    The guy who was “outed” doing something creepy and unsavoury but legal and non-violent lost his job and has probably been opened up to retributive violence.

    @ Eagle

    That situation is appalling. I overheard a segment in which some talking head said “90% of the violence is directed at women” about an incident in which a woman was raped and a man died (did he get raped too? We’ll never know because no one looks for signs of rape in male corpses).

    90% of the violence directed at women? Why not make it 100% lady? After all the violence directed towards men doesn’t seem to count for shit.

    @ Daisy

    Whether or not you believe my theories about submission as a form of emotional dominance, the truth is giving men an identity as “head of the household” forces them to relinquish society’s responsibility to give a shit about them. And they will find they are simply a figurehead in charge of shepherding the person the rest of their society actually gives two shits about.

    It’s really a situation of extreme helplessness and subjugation; a slave’s position hidden behind a fancy title. That these men are often raised to believe constitutes their only worth.

    Now here’s the thing. The way you challenge these kinds of institutions–fundamentalists–isn’t by making the men in them feel powerful. The identity as powerful only helps sell them to new male adherents. The way to challenge these kinds of institutions is to point out the utter and complete helplessness of the men in them.

    That’s why feminism will never be able to challenge fundamentalism; and traditionalists are starting to wake up and shit their pants over the men’s rights movement(and attempt to co-opt it at the edges.)

  • Eagle35 on December 22, 2012 at 6:31 pm said:

    “I’m just sick and tired, that’s all.

    There was news coverage of that gang-rape in India. Six men taking an innocent man and woman, stripping them, killing them. But not before raping the woman.

    I forsee that the focus on the woman’s rape is going to drown out the fact that a man also suffered and died.

    And from on-the-street interviews from women in India, one of them said “They literally rape me with their eyes”.

    Hi Eagle, did the man die in the end? From what I can see he was less severely injured than the woman. If you have a source saying otherwise, I’d be very interested to read it.

    This story did grab my attention too though – for essentially the same reasons you mention. It’s good (obviously) that people have compassion for the woman involved but the man is hardly mentioned in news reports, despite also having been kidnapped, stripped, and beaten. Sky news in Britain
    claims that “National crime records [in India] show that 228,650 of the total 256,329 violent crimes recorded last year were against women.” I find these statistics hard to believe, given that in most other countries men suffer violent attacks too.

  • “The endless list of retorts may appear to newer readers as rather boring and/or asinine.”

    Hear, hear, HEAR!

  • Ogun,
    “@Gingko = I’ve never lived in the U.S. I have only lived in West Africa (Nigeria & Sierra Leone), St. Vincent (Caribbean) Germany and England (Europe). Comparisons come aplenty with this much cultural capital. Most of my friends are either Arab, Indian or some variation of African disaspora so their approach to gender is much more ‘randomized’.”

    when people say gender is constructed, this is what I take it to mean. A lot of the problematic aspects of gender we discuss are culture-specific. Chivalry as is pertains to gender is specifically Western European. It may resemble other constructs in other cultures, and there may be some universal thee, but we haven’t gotten to the point in the investigtion of gender to say that with any certainty.

  • TB: That’s why feminism will never be able to challenge fundamentalism; and traditionalists are starting to wake up and shit their pants over the men’s rights movement(and attempt to co-opt it at the edges.)

    Interesting.

    As I see it, the problem is that fundamentalists believe “men’s rights” ARE the traditionalists (specifically–when they hear the term “men’s rights”, that’s what they take it to mean: going back to daddy as proper *head* of household, as the Bible states he oughtta be)… and therefore think they know all about men’s rights already. (NOTE: I used to believe this of the MRM, too, until I decided to study further.) Fundies take feminism as the radical position, since it seems to make their women uncontrollable and uppity; the women get jobs, get their tubes tied, start wearing pants, read what they want, etc (I can point you to a hundred blogs, if you need further evidence of this viewpoint.) Thus, feminism has been officially blamed for the ‘breakup of the family’–since the women stop obeying the “head of household”. Phyllis Schlafly and the Eagle Forum started this line on the political front, during the anti-ERA campaign in the 70s. It was then theoretically solidified and gussied up by neocon women like Midge Decter and Kathryn Jean Lopez, and then spread through the American Religious Right.

    The task for the MRM will be to delineate the difference between their views and the trads. So far, since so much of the MRM seems contemptuous of religion and/or uneducated about fundamentalism, they have not been able to do this.

    If they ever managed to crack this coalition, success is theirs.

    Can the MRM put aside their middle class educated snobbery (which often manifests in a very arrogant type of atheism) and make a coalition with the working-class men (often southern) burned by fundamentalism, but most of whom still remain some kind of Christian? Stay tuned!

  • SensitiveThug: “Hi Eagle, did the man die in the end? From what I can see he was less severely injured than the woman. If you have a source saying otherwise, I’d be very interested to read it.”

    http://www.ukmalayalee.com/world-news/news.php?id=MTU0Mg==

    Both her and the male friend were beaten and thrown out of the bus. Yet, now that she was raped, it’s like the man only gets a brief mention while the rape drowns him out.

    This is what I’m talking about. I’m sickened by the rape but also sickened at the fact the media has decided to up play the rape to the point of drowning out what happened to the male friend.

    What is it going to take to get these clowns giving equal coverage here?

  • Then again, I looked further and found they do give him some coverage. But, as I predict, the rape is going to drown out everything. Watch the “Rape only happens to women” brigade come out with weapons drawn.

  • Hi Eagle, thanks. I agree with you. I heard about this story of course, but it wasn’t until you mentioned it that I even realised a man had been involved too. I also think there are many terrible things happening around the world and when men are the victims, there seems less fuss made about it. Perhaps there is something men’s rights activists could do, in terms of protesting more etc?

    DaisyDeadhead on December 23, 2012 at 12:03 pm said:

    “As I see it, the problem is that fundamentalists believe “men’s rights” ARE the traditionalists (specifically–when they hear the term “men’s rights”, that’s what they take it to mean: going back to daddy as proper *head* of household, as the Bible states he oughtta be)… and therefore think they know all about men’s rights already. (NOTE: I used to believe this of the MRM, too, until I decided to study further.)”

    Interesting for me to hear a very American perspective! Here in Britain, we don’t really have fundamentalists so much. But it’s true that we do have traditionalists and they do tend to see the MRM as “on their side” – unfortunately, in my opinion.

    And yes, feminists tend to presume this is true as well. I’ve always assumed feminists take this view because it’s what they want to believe, but perhaps I’m wrong?

  • And yes, feminists tend to presume this is true as well. I’ve always assumed feminists take this view because it’s what they want to believe, but perhaps I’m wrong?

    Feminists and traditionalists in the US are two sides of the same coin, like Christians and Satanic worshippers. Christians, likewise, like to insinuate that atheists are secretly Satanic worshippers. It’s the same old story or projection and demagoguery. I heard a joke recently about an atheist MRA who is confused about whether he is supposed to eat kittens and rape babies or eat babies and herd kittens.

  • SensitiveThug: “Hi Eagle, thanks. I agree with you. I heard about this story of course, but it wasn’t until you mentioned it that I even realised a man had been involved too. I also think there are many terrible things happening around the world and when men are the victims, there seems less fuss made about it. Perhaps there is something men’s rights activists could do, in terms of protesting more etc?”

    They are. The problem is, hardly anyone is willing to listen at best. At worst, Men’s Rights Activists face an uphill battle where these reactions occure when even the slightest hint of men’s issues is mentioned:

    1) Men run the world.

    2) Men’s Rights are misogynist wife-beaters who want to roll back gender issues to the dark ages (which makes me laugh since there is an influential feminist strand that IS DOING THE SAME THING!)

    3) Women have it worse

    I empathise with Men’s Rights Advocates. They have to hear this day in and day out. Even the more eglitarian Men’s Rights Advocates are growing tried of this ignorance repeated ad nauseum when evidence of the issues men face is shoved in their skeptic’s faces.

    While I don’t consider myself a Men’s Rights Advocate, they were the ones that welcomed my issues of trauma from both genders where that insidious gynocentric feminist strand shoved me away (and which is also why I’m hesitant to call myself a feminist. Those feminists that shoved me away are still a part of the big tent. I don’t want to come within thirty yards of them so I’m staying away from the tent so to speak.)

    There were also egiltarian feminists, like the ones at Feminist Critics that provide a place of support. But, again, they aren’t considred feminists from these gynocentric clowns.

    See what I mean? Picture me talking to an eglitarian feminist in the big tent. Now, within walking distance, there are gynocentrics yelling and jeering at the same time, heckling the “Priveledged white man” daring to hijack feminism.

    I don’t need that shit. Excuse my language.

  • @titfortat, you asked, “Not sure I get what youre saying??” Earlier you said, “the familiar slander was to call me an MRA.” What I’m getting at is that it’s a bullshit ad-hominem cop-out when they do that. It’s got nothing to do with what any MRA ever did. Actually, it’s just another form in which their bigotry manifests itself.

  • @Typhon

    That was my point. If they’re outraged at AVFM outing a thug, then their response to violentacrez shouldn’t be “He deserves to lose his job and be a pariah forever.”

  • “You know, the more I think about AVFM’s actions, the more I’m beginning to agree with it. Usually I’d be pretty cautious about employing such tactics.

    However, as I’ve sat back and continued to see no sign of the media accepting the fact that girls and women can hurt boys and men (no articles, no studies, nada) while my Speak To Me play struggles to find a foothold long after its airing date in the mainstream and I feel like I’m the only damn person willing to point this out, then there comes a time when being patient just doesn’t cut it anymore. Time for action, I say.”

    Increasing numbers of men are agreeing with you. I was reading on manboobz about this MRA, Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Tech, who proposed a “grandchildren strike”. That is not having children so that their feminist mothers don’t have grandchildren. It got pilloried at manboobz, but that’s no surprise. They can’t see how its an interesting version of the Cloward-Piven Strategy especially since a lot of men will end up being part of the grandchildren strike by default.

    What the grandchildren strike shows is that it isn’t just the media that’s the problem. It’s our mothers as well. Knowing that, MRAs should start taking radical action.

  • “What the grandchildren strike shows is that it isn’t just the media that’s the problem. It’s our mothers as well. Knowing that, MRAs should start taking radical action.”

    my mom got really upset when I said that I don’t want to have kids.

    anyways it’s pretty funny how all these members of a movement who think a womyn’s right to murder a choice, um, I mean have an abortion is sacrosanct–look how they go batshit mad when guys talk about MGTOW or their own reproductive rights.

    PMAFT’s language was pretty harsh but I “get” the bigger point he is making.

  • SWAB: anyways it’s pretty funny how all these members of a movement who think a womyn’s right to murder a choice

    What sentences would you impose on women who get abortions? Would you prefer to put them into the general prison population with the other murderers?

    Would you prefer harsher sentences for later trimesters?

    There would be millions of new prisoners, so lots more prisons would need to be built; where do you propose to get the money for all that?

    In your ideal world, would men who encourage women to get abortions, be tried for conspiracy to commit murder? (Or do you propose no blame for men at all?)

    Would the abortionist/doctors also face sentences, or just the women who procure abortions?

    Always interested in the right-to-lifers who call abortion murder, since I was Catholic for a long time and talked with *lots* of them. I noticed they were usually unprepared for me to take them seriously, and usually could not answer these questions, although some are always ready to give women the death penalty.

    On the other hand, if you aren’t willing to issue punishment, you probably don’t really believe abortion is murder. But I hope you understand that dramatic language like that will unnecessarily offend people who have chosen abortion, both men and women, whom you probably don’t mean to offend. (or maybe you do?)

    Just my two cents, as always…

  • “On the other hand, if you aren’t willing to issue punishment, you probably don’t really believe abortion is murder.”

    I can absolutely believe abortion is murder and have no cognitive dissonance over it…

    If someone comes at you with a knife and in defending yourself, they wind up dead, you have still murdered them. You might hopefully be free of all criminal charges and your actions might not be considered unethical. I think even most Christians think abortion is acceptable when the mother’s life is at risk. Also, what’s that condition where the baby is born without a brain? Most people seem to think that is an acceptable case to murder the fetus. Yeah, I said murder a fetus, not terminate a pregnancy.

    I can even think up an MRAish argument for keeping abortion legal. If access to abortion becomes more and more restricted and only cases of rape and threats to the mother’s health are where abortions are preformed legally, then there will be more false rape accusations. IE a couple has a one night stand consensually, the woman finds she is pregnant and has no desire to keep the baby. She cries rape to get an abortion and the guy get’s thrown in the slammer. Two ruined lives–and to spell it out, it’s not the womyn’s life I was referring to as ruined. I know, I just violated the Schwyzer/Marcotte/Futrelle law of physics by calling the man and the baby victim’s and not the “empowered womyn” teh victim ™ . I must be evillle-666, m/ let’s listen to Slayer and drop some acid 😉

    I don’t think I’ve ever advocated rolling back Rowe vs. Wade–but if you quote mine far enough, I might’ve said that somewhere and forgotten. I doubt it though.

    Don’t like my lingo, tough. I’m not gonna let feminists or conservatives control the debate on everything….

    “Now Watergate does not bother me,

    Does your conscience bother you, tell the truth?”

    Daisy, I’m sure your familiar with that hippy dippy song being a Southerner and a Rocker….

  • In regards to that woman dying from her rape in hospital:

    Cue “Women have it worse” trope to dominate all discussion in the media in three…two…one.

    In other words, that man who was also violently assaulted and thrown off the bus with her might as well have not existed at this point.

  • I checked out the comments below.

    Predicable. Calls of castration and hanging of the rapers.

    I’ll bet if it were a male victim of a female gang that died in the hospital, these commentators would find some way to excuse their actions.

  • @Eagle, not to mention the police officer who has now died from injuries inflicted by the mob protesting the against the attack…

    http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2012/12/2012122555939943310.html

    On a related note, this figure “National figures show that 228,650 of the 256,329 violent crimes recorded last year were against women” keeps cropping up. Does anyone find these proportions even remotley plausible? I mean, a country with the population and poverty level of India only had 27,679 violent crimes comitted against men? And bucked the global trend of the majority of violence occuring between men, to boot?!

  • @ Jared

    “On a related note, this figure “National figures show that 228,650 of the 256,329 violent crimes recorded last year were against women” keeps cropping up.”

    I highly doubt it since men die from violence 5 times more often then women.

    Although the issue may be in the world “recorded”. That actually may be accurate.

    228,650 women felt empowered to report violence against them. 27,679 men felt empowered to report violent crimes against them. Out of… quick sloppy math here… 1.25 million men subject to violence.

  • SWAB,
    “If someone comes at you with a knife and in defending yourself, they wind up dead, you have still murdered them.”

    No, this is not murder. It is homicicde, but not all homicides are murder. All murders are homicides, not all homicides are murdered.

    Without any facts other than you provide in that hypotheitcal, most jurisdictions would not consider that murder.

  • @Ginkgo:

    No, this is not murder. It is homicicde, but not all homicides are murder. All murders are homicides, not all homicides are murdered.

    I think many people don’t realize that “murder” is a legal term describing premeditated, unlawful killing. When someone says “abortion is murder,” for example, what they really mean is “abortion should be considered murder in my society because I think it’s horrible.”

  • SWAB, you didn’t answer any of my direct questions. Not a single one. See what I mean? This is standard prolife dodging. I am really, really tired of it.

    Just answer my questions. One by one:

    So women go to jail and men don’t? Yes or no.

    Doctors go to jail? For how long?

    Where do you get the money for all the new prisons? We are talking bazillions of dollars here.

    Do the men who encourage women to get abortions go to jail too? Men who give women the money, for instance? What sentence do they get?

    Just answer. Not a bunch of fantasy crap about knives blah blah blah, but the questions I asked you. You say its a crime, but I guess you don’t want to talk about the punishment? Because I am talking about the actual results of turning something into a crime, which is to say, punishment in the penal system. Otherwise, you just seem to be venting and talking out of your ass.

    You are a mens’ rights guy, and you think it will be **only** women who are punished? HAHAAHAA!!!!! Are you even listening to yourself???

    If you can’t discuss the actual societal outcome/results of making your beliefs into LAW, like most pro lifers from the pope on down, you are therefore FULL OF SHIT.

  • “I think many people don’t realize that “murder” is a legal term describing premeditated, unlawful killing. When someone says “abortion is murder,” for example, what they really mean is “abortion should be considered murder in my society because I think it’s horrible.””

    this is getting closer to it….

    I can believe that the wars we are in are immoral… a soldier decides to enlist and while on duty murders people. Maybe there is a politically correct term like “collateral damage” but I don’t need to use that for this example. Said soldier will not spend a single day in jail and many will even call him a hero…

    now if you have any ability to understand nuance or as you love to insult everyone else-then you’ll see my point of why I don’t support the pro-choicers and why I think feminism is a hate movement….

    It has nothing to do with throwing people in jail even if I think those people and feminists in general are reprehensible assholes….

  • “Where do you get the money for all the new prisons? We are talking bazillions of dollars here”

    well, I never suggested it, but if you must-you’d get allot of empty spots in jail if you got all the innocent men who are in jail out….

    if that didn’t open enough seats then you could go to non violent drug offenders…

  • @SWAB:

    as you love to insult everyone else

    Quiet, you yeasty canoodle-failer.

    a soldier decides to enlist and while on duty murders people. Maybe there is a politically correct term like “collateral damage” but I don’t need to use that for this example. Said soldier will not spend a single day in jail and many will even call him a hero…

    The word you’re looking for is “kills,” though it’s not really a “PC” term, whatever that means. It’s just not an unnecessarily loaded one. “Collateral damage” is incidental, usually unintentional or unavoidable, but the individual victims of collateral damage are never premeditated. Murder is unsanctioned killing in a military context, I think, and carries quite stiff penalties, though some more military oriented person may be able to explicate further.

    you’ll see my point of why I don’t support the pro-choicers

    I don’t, but I haven’t been paying attention to the thread and wouldn’t presume to. I just jumped (lightly skipped? Cavorted? it wasn’t especially profound or important enough to be a jump) in to clarify the term murder, not to question or find out about your position on abortion, so your particular McGoo here is safe (or not safe, however you want it to be).

    As an aside, I consider myself minimally pro-choice. I don’t have a dog in the fight (as children aren’t be born from the mouths or anuses of men), don’t give a rip about fetuses (or gestational humans or whatever people are calling them these days) unless someone specifically asks me to care about their own particular fetus, and wouldn’t bother, or feel comfortable, telling anyone not to have an abortion if that’s what they decided was best for them and their moral standards.

    If someone wants to be against abortion, well, whatever. If that’s what their morality says, have at it, though it seems like it will be an inherently unpopular opinion at least until long term, reversible male contraception becomes widespread and cheap (and even then…)

  • Daisy,
    in Germany the law considers abortion to be unlawful and yet it is possible for a woman to abort without being legally prosecuted for it.
    Daisy:

    If you can’t discuss the actual societal outcome/results of making your beliefs into LAW, like most pro lifers from the pope on down, you are therefore FULL OF SHIT.

    You seem to be confused by the fact, that many people don’t want the state to enforce their values, because it would mean enforce their values through the use and threat of violence. It is easy to see why this is a no-go for many Christians or liberals.

  • Jupp: You seem to be confused by the fact, that many people don’t want the state to enforce their values, because it would mean enforce their values through the use and threat of violence. It is easy to see why this is a no-go for many Christians or liberals.

    You seem to be confused by the fact that I am here at Ground Zero of the conservative Tea Party movement in the USA, and I argue with pro-life zealots all the time. (Even MORE often when I was an active, practicing Catholic.) Our (nonwhite, female, Republican) governor does not believe in abortion even in the cases of rape and incest and wants to roll back Roe v Wade forever. This, in effect, would make abortion a criminal act. There is no getting around that. It WAS a criminal act before 1973 (except in NY, HI and a few other liberated areas), full stop.

    What I find interesting is that people like SWAB do not seem to realize that **male doctors** were frequently jailed also, since there were usually multiple charges against them, vs women with only one charge. (NOTE: women seeking abortions were usually only jailed if prostitutes or poor; no small number, but middle class white women were usually put in psych wards or handed over to nuns, who forced pregnancy/childbirth and then adopted the babies out.)

    I am talking about the pro-life movement in the USA, which has propagated the ‘facts’ that make SWAB anti-abortion, whether he realizes it or not. These are the people I deal with personally, here in upstate SC, and their representatives: Lindsey Graham, Jim DeMint, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Trey Gowdy, Bob Jones III, etc. They are running the joint, and have done as much as they can to make abortion illegal and failing that, to make it extremely difficult and/or expensive to obtain. As a result, there are countless legal road blocks in this state, such as mandatory bullshit Christian “counseling” (“fetal heart beats at blah blah days! Praise the Lord!”… etc), 24-hr (or longer) waiting periods during which they show women ultrasounds of their fetuses, etc etc etc. (The idea is if you make women wait, while working on them psychologically, they will cave and not get an abortion. They have adoptive families standing by, literally on call.)

    If SWAB or anyone else simply announces “abortion is wrong” or “abortion is icky” and is not interesting in making it illegal, then 1) why SAY it? Just to shame people? You intend to do nothing about it, so what purpose does the sermon serve? 2) I don’t care, as long as women have rights, think what you like. I don’t like cocaine, porn or gambling, but seriously, it is none of my business and I wouldn’t make it illegal or confiscate it. Such ridiculous and ineffective moralism is repugnant to me.

    However, it DOES strengthen the conservative pro-life movement every time you agree with them. THEY see it as a win and are further emboldened to yell at women entering abortion clinics (that’s what they call “sidewalk counseling”–in case you didn’t know). They see this as political empowerment. They see themselves as representing YOU. The question is therefore also: do you want to associate yourself with the pro-life movement and politicians? Because when you mouth their opinions, you do just that.

    SWAB calls feminists a hate movement, but we have never shot a doctor in church. Or in his own home, or in his own parking lot. THAT is a hate movement, and he is freely using their talking points.

    I guess some hate movements are more acceptable to him than others.

  • Daisy:
    Even as someone on the front lines your understanding of the abortion issue seems to be a bit simplistic. I say this as someone who fully supports Roe Versus Wade. Where you go wrong is when you can’t see how someone who isn’t right-wing or particularly religious could have any reason to be morally chary of abortion. Short of downright atheists , I dare say most people would have a problem if abortion was offered with no restrictions whatsoever as to time and method. Like I said, I support Roe V Wade (right of privacy, bodily integrity, lack of ‘scientific’ consensus on when life begins) and yet even I would rather no abortion ever took place, short of mom’s life being endangered. Course I don’t just support Roe V Wade but I support contraception for both men and women, too.

    As for feminism being a hate movement, I say you look at their laws (passed and proposed) and their rhetoric and they are every bit as hateful (and even more dangerous – what with their meddling with the justice system to do things such as eliminating mens rea for certain crimes, the fact that radicals mostly control the ‘shelter’ movement etc) as the few – and yes, it’s been very FEW – nutty Christians who’ve killed the occasional abortion doctor. Authoritarians come from both the left and right but everyone notes the more loud and violent ones rather than the quiet and entrenched ones. Then there’s the rather few nutty ones who (to mirror the opposite of the extreme anti-abortion religious fringe who seem to worship the fetus/baby) seem to worship abortion and want to brag about how they ended a potential human life. In both the extremes I see both the woman and her potential baby being dehumanized and used as pawns in a larger political/philosophical battle. And of course I must mention that while the woman’s ability to control her own reproduction at any stage of the pregnancy is wildly supported by most of the “pro choice” feminists, men’s ability to have some say as to whether they want to be fathers doesn’t register with them at all.

    In short, I don’t mind helping you against some of those nutty religious politicians in your State about this particular issue, but abortion -while being a right that I think is vital to both women AND the Constitution – isn’t something that I’m happy about.

  • “Where you go wrong is when you can’t see how someone who isn’t right-wing or particularly religious could have any reason to be morally chary of abortion.”

    nailed it on the fucking head….

    Daisy might as well say “You’re either with us or against us.”

    and forced into that dicotomy-I’ll pick anti-feminism….

  • Clarence: I say this as someone who fully supports Roe Versus Wade.

    That’s all I care about, Clarence. Really, that’s the bottom line.

    I was mostly influenced on this issue by my mother and her experience with illegal abortion.

    Where you go wrong is when you can’t see how someone who isn’t right-wing or particularly religious could have any reason to be morally chary of abortion.

    You would be mistaken… I have never had an abortion and would never have one, as I don’t believe in eating animals either. I think even eating little tiny shrimps is wrong. And whenever I SAY so , I mean to shame people for it. When I pointedly don’t say so, like at the party I just left, I do not mean to shame people for it. That is what I was asking SWAB, his purpose in the preaching. I am coming at this as an activist… I weigh my actions (i.e. preaching about the shrimps) very carefully. I am wondering what his motivation in his moralism is… there is a time and place for the sermon, and I just wondered, does he say this anti-abortion stuff all the time, or does he limit it? Does he get in people’s face over it, or just opine here on blogs? He offends more people than he realizes. Broadcasting something (and not knowing who will read it) reaches more people than a one-to-one, heart-to-heart conversation. Etc.

    SWAB didn’t seem to care if he offended anyone, and as one who also didn’t used to care, I was actually trying to teach him the value of caution when you mean to shame people. It can backfire and hurt people you love. Learn to aim well, because as the MRAs well know, shame is a weapon.

    FTR, once again: I have never had an abortion and would never have one, as I don’t believe in eating animals. I do consider it the same thing… this comparison upsets absolutely everyone (both the pro lifers and vegetarians) when I say this… I was kicked off a pro-choice Facebook thread over the weekend for making this comparison, LOL. (Only the Buddhists understand what I am saying.) But I meant it: lower animal forms and fetuses probably feel the same amount of pain, and I find it a good comparison. I mean it. It is very serious to me. But just as we can’t force people to stop eating meat, we can’t legally force people not to have abortions. I feel the damage from such force would be far worse than what we are trying to prevent. If the pro-life movement wants to extend to supports to pregnant women, I say, go for it… but they seem patently unable to do this without recriminations and judgement. But changing hearts and minds is preferable to forcing our will on others through state power and punishments.

    As for the hate movement thing… I am simply not part of a hate movement, and I am not a hateful person. People who know me in real life would laugh at you for saying this. I am welcome among most activists in the state, including among many libertarians and centrists, and I am most assuredly not considered a member of hate movement. Let’s look at what people actually DO, and not just a bunch of high minded concepts, okay? Just because I say I am feminist I magically make myself part of a “hate movement”? My real life actions have nothing to do with it? My history of activism has nothing to do with anything? This is Tumblr logic (which incidentally I am getting ready to post on my blog about) and not real life. Most people do not even know what “mens rea” means. There is no Planned Parenthood clinic in my county anywhere (we are working on it), and the few shelters for women are run by churches, who keep the men apart or out altogether. I do not live in a progressive area. It **does** matter where you are and what you do. I am in a conservative area, where feminism is still quite necessary. Maybe in the big cities, its all quite passe, but not here. I realized, one reason why I don’t like the AVFM people is that arrogant big-city vibe they put out, how (as I wrote on my blog) soy-lattes are just so PASSE and YESTERDAY, and I am still trying to find a decent one, you know?

    Hope that made sense.

    In both the extremes I see both the woman and her potential baby being dehumanized and used as pawns in a larger political/philosophical battle.

    I do agree, and yeah, I hate seeing animals sentimentalized also. And sorry if it offends you that I do see “life” as one continuum, and animal rights make me think of human rights and vice versa.

    men’s ability to have some say as to whether they want to be fathers doesn’t register with them at all.

    I totally agree. I have become much more committed to this idea than ever. I am still unclear what the objections are… can you point me to some definitive feminist statement against the idea?

    I recently had a Facebook argument that convinced me even further… interesting that it was Christians arguing against it and not feminists. Not sure I got that one, but they didn’t like it at all!

  • FTR, this atheist (full on atheist, no less) is against abortion but also pro-choice. This is not a complex position to hold, and in fact it can be (and is) broken down into a silly bumper sticker slogan…”pro-child, pro-choice”.

  • @Daisy and some other peeps

    One question for you guys. After watching a MMA fight or a Football game you see many of the athletes smile and embrace each other when it is done. Regardless of hard they tried kicking the snot out of each other there are no hard feelings. Unfortunately for some though, there is an anger or hatred that continues on once the battle is done. When it comes to blogging, which group do you guys fall into.

    Happy New Year
    (maybe we can all meet for a pint in the future)

    🙂 🙂

  • The question of whether feminism is a “hate movement”… It would be an exaggeration to say that feminism is based on hate, although that element does exist and is not insignificant. I would say, however, that a large majority of feminist thought, rhetoric and activism is based on prejudice against men – just about every feminist explanation for male behaviour assumes the worst imaginable motivation, and as recent spree shootings demonstrate, feminists leap first to maleness as an explanation of evil. As a man, supporting feminism is rather like staying in an abusive relationship, where you’re constantly in the doghouse and in the wrong whatever you do (from the Good Men Project to mainstream feminism), and occasionally she’ll go at you with a kitchen knife (Marcotte to the radfems).

    Daisy, I agree you’re not a hateful person, but feminism is feminists in aggregate, and your presence in the movement can only go so far to cancel out those feminists who are hateful.

    Anyway, happy 2013 everyone.

  • Tit for Tat: Regardless of hard they tried kicking the snot out of each other there are no hard feelings. Unfortunately for some though, there is an anger or hatred that continues on once the battle is done. When it comes to blogging, which group do you guys fall into.

    Ever see this? If you’d rather not watch it all, just fast-forward to about 5:45 to get the gist of it– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSuhxFo76o But its best if you watch the whole thing for maximum impact.

    I just love it. 🙂

  • *Side Note*

    I just finished watching an older movie called Mystic River. If you want a clear example of what feminists like to call the “Patriarchy” but should be called the “Kyricarchy” watch the last 10-15 minutes. Riveting and very illuminating in regards to actual power dynamics.

  • Tit,
    “One question for you guys. After watching a MMA fight or a Football game you see many of the athletes smile and embrace each other when it is done. Regardless of hard they tried kicking the snot out of each other there are no hard feelings. Unfortunately for some though, there is an anger or hatred that continues on once the battle is done. When it comes to blogging, which group do you guys fall into.”

    This reminds me of something I noticed at a military museum we have here on a major Amy base down the road. The place is a tangle of stuff, with not much interpretive explanation provided, because, hey, the visitors are all expected to know all that background already. In amongst all the other stuff there’s a mannequin dressed in a WWII Japanese uniform. It’s just in there with all the other mannequins in various uniforms – Civil War Union uniforms, WWI, all that stuff – just anohter one of the guys. Remember that for the US the war with Jaan was an existential struggle, much more significant that the war in Europe (something I find almost no European uinderstands). But there he is, one of the guys.

    People had the same experience when meeting Warsaw Pact soldiers, at all grades really. Basically it’s because you can shoot at the other guy perfectly well without having to believe he’s evil, without hating him. Ideology matters only insofar as it infomrs his tactical doctrine, if at all. But basically he harder you try to kill the other guy, the more you respect him. Or something. Anyway, rancor doesn’t really come into, and can in fact be dangerous if it leads you to ignore useful inofmration about him.

    Ideologues don’t operate on that level, not at all. This is the main reason that clinging to dearly held beliefs and never compromising on core prionciples eventually always are an obstacle to truly frutiful dialog.

  • “This reminds me of something I noticed at a military museum we have here on a major Amy base down the road. The place is a tangle of stuff, with not much interpretive explanation provided, because, hey, the visitors are all expected to know all that background already. In amongst all the other stuff there’s a mannequin dressed in a WWII Japanese uniform. It’s just in there with all the other mannequins in various uniforms – Civil War Union uniforms, WWI, all that stuff – just anohter one of the guys. Remember that for the US the war with Jaan was an existential struggle, much more significant that the war in Europe (something I find almost no European uinderstands). But there he is, one of the guys.”

    Most people represent the things from their point of view,including war.When I was in WWII museum the most common uniforms were that of partisans.The second most common uniforms were that of ustaše(1) and german nazis.I don’t think I so uniforms of british,american or any other WWII uniform(I an not 100% sure it was some time since I was there). One of the reasons (at list the reasons that I notest) is that people have this mentaley”when they newer made effort to understand me,what shud I make effort to understand them.Spread that acrosnations and we have a lot ignorant people.And to be honest ,I meth a lot of westerners who know nothing beyond what hapend in poland,in regard to eastern europe.

    (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e

    Sorry for going on topic.

  • I am someone who would not have abortions personally,but I also think I have no right to force my opinion on others.My problem with some of the prolafers is that they don’t want to salve the problem the right way.Blue promoting sex education and birth control.Instead they want to bully people in to there audiology.

  • “Most people represent the things from their point of view,including war.When I was in WWII museum the most common uniforms were that of partisans.The second most common uniforms were that of ustaše(1) and german nazis.I don’t think I so uniforms of british,american or any other WWII uniform(I an not 100% sure it was some time since I was there).”

    Well that makes perfect sense in a WWII museum in Serbia or Croatia. American uniforms were really not part of that history, or not relevant to it.

    “One of the reasons (at list the reasons that I notest) is that people have this mentaley”when they newer made effort to understand me,what shud I make effort to understand them.Spread that acrosnations and we have a lot ignorant people.”

    Ignorant, yes, and also doomed to lose wars. That is not a useful mentality. “Know the enemy, know yourself; a hundred battles without defeat.”

    You don’t learn about your enemy as a gesture of equality and parity and mutual admiration.

By Alison Tieman

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