AVFM lifetime achievement award winner Erin Pizzey
At A Voice for Men’s conference yesterday, antifeminist crusader Erin Pizzey was given “a special award for her tireless work with ALL the victims of domestic violence.” Due to the amazing public relations work of AVFM’s spokeswoman for the conference, I don’t know what the award was called, so let’s just assume it was the World’s Greatest Erin Pizzey Award.
Whatever the award was called, the notion that Pizzey works, tirelessly or otherwise, on behalf of “ALL the victims of domestic violence” is demonstrably false. Indeed, she has argued vociferously against extending DV protection to all victims.
In an op-ed she wrote for The Daily Mail in 2011, Pizzey declared herself “horrified” that the British government would consider extending domestic violence protection to those subjected to “emotional bullying and ‘coercive control’” as well as actual physical abuse.
Her “argument” may be triggering for abuse survivors, so I’m putting all of her quotes below the jump.
Oh, in all the excitement I forgot to mention that I was on the radio yesterday, on the show Femisphere on CKUW in Winnipeg. I talked about, well, you know, the stuff I usually talk about.
You can find it archived here; it’s the show for June 26th.
Feel free to ignore the weather report at the start, given that it’s for yesterday, and probably only relevant if you have a time machine and live in the Winnipeg area.
Thanks, Jen, for inviting me! Hope to return at some point.
The capacity crowd at the press conference at the AVFM conference; from Metrotimes.
If anyone feels compelled to discuss the AVFM conference, do it here.
I’ll post links to any articles and blog posts and interesting tweets and pretty much anything of note I see about it; if you run across any, feel free to post them in the comments and I can add them to the post.
Here’s the live audio stream for the conference, which is off the air. And the video stream, which isn’t working at the moment. Apparently they’ve packed up for the day. (Friday, that is.)
There was no protest, as the organizers of the earlier protest called for a boycott
The official twitter hashtag is #icmi14. For some wonderful Janet Bloomfield PR professionalism, see @JudgyBitch1 and @icmi14.
Dean Esmay choosing his words: Sometimes it’s hard to decide whether to go with “hatemongering bigot” or “bigot hatemonger.”
It’s Twitter Thursday here on We Hunted the Mammoth! Which is my way of saying that I spent last night poking around in the Twitterings of some of the A Voice for Men crowd. And I’ve decided that, as much as I enjoy Judgy B’s passive-aggressive evasiveness and schoolyard taunts, I think I like Dean Esmay’s tweets better.
Why? Because he tweets as if at any moment his head might literally explode.
Let’s take a look, shall we, at this selection of tweets from Mr. Esmay I gathered up last night. I have taken the liberty of highlighting some, well, let’s just call them recurring motifs.
Your Martin Luther King impression just isn’t cutting it, dude.
The human rights visionary looked down at what he had just written and smiled. Would these be the words he was remembered for?
Thomas Jefferson had that line about all men being created equal. It was bullshit, of course, but people ate that crap up. Martin Luther King had that thing about his kids not being judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. That was pretty good, he had to admit. People love cute stories about kids.
Gandhi had that thing, how did it go? That thing about everyone laughing at you, and fighting, and then you win something? That wasn’t quite it, but Gandhi was kind of a wuss, anyway. Would people even remember that dopey skinny dude in a diaper in a hundred years?
He chuckled quietly to himself.
They would certainly remember him, he thought. And they would remember the words he had tapped out on his laptop shortly before midnight that fateful summer night, on the eve of the historic conference that would, he knew, change the world forever.
One day, he was sure, these three sentences – well, two sentences and a sentence fragment, to be more precise – would be etched in stone.
So anyway, just a reminder: if you missed me on Al Jazeera America’s The Stream on Tuesday, facing off against AVFM’s Robert O’Hara, they’re rerunning the show today at 12:30 PM ET.
It’s only on TV, though, not online. Click here to see if you get Al Jazeera America on your TV provider.
The June 7th protest. Original photo by Steve Nealing; click on pic for more.
Keep your distance from A Voice for Men’s conference at its new location in St. Clair Shores.
That’s the basic message the organisers of the original June 7th protest against the AVFM conference want to get out to anyone thinking of protesting the conference this Friday and Saturday. In an open letter posted on Amanda Levitt’s Fat Body Politics, the original organizers urge would-be protesters to boycott the conference and stay out of St. Clair Shores.
While the original organizers reaffirm their opposition to the conference and to “the horrific and vile hatred that A Voice for Men spreads on their website,” they are concerned about the safety of anyone who might be considering protesting:
We have had numerous people reach out to us to let us know of the very real danger we could be in by protesting. Due to concerns for physical safety we have decided the best way to oppose the conference that is now going on in St. Clair Shores is to keep our distance. With AVFM’s history of attempting to provoke protestors, harassing individuals by following them to their cars or home, and filming or photographing them in order to release their private information online we don’t feel that protesting at the VFW hall could keep people reasonable safe.
While there may be others who decide to protest the conference, we want to make it perfectly clear that there are real concerns for safety. If you are planning to protest the conference, please make sure the people who are coming are informed enough about the kind of vicious tactics that AVFM has used to derail and trivialize the response to their own ideology.
Be in solidarity with us this weekend as we ensure the safety of our organizers and other protesters by tweeting to #NoMRA about why this conference and the beliefs of AVFM shouldn’t be tolerated.
Emphasis added.
I should say that I agree with this approach: DON’T protest AVFM’s Conference in St. Clair Shores this weekend. Speak out against AVFM’s misogyny, and against its efforts to intimidate its critics — on social media and any other way you can.
But unless you are covering the conference as a journalist, don’t go to St. Clair Shores. Not only do you risk being doxxed and harassed by AVFM and its supporters, but you also will be giving AVFM what it wants: a confrontation, and yet another excuse to play the victim.
Make no mistake: AVFM and its supporters want to see protesters at their conference this weekend. Don’t give them what they want.
You will be far more effective critic of AVFM if, instead of confronting them in person, you speak up online, through letters to the editor, and by spreading the word in other peaceful ways that don’t involve actually going to the conference.
I don’t personally oppose AVFM’s conference taking place, but I think it’s very important to show the world what AVFM, its supporters, and its invited speakers really stand for.
I urge you to do what you can to publicize the video I helped to put together in collaboration with Mancheeze.com that highlights the hatefulness of a number of those scheduled to speak at AVFM’s conference– link to it, embed it on your blog, whatever you can do.
You can also help to spread the word by posting the graphic I’ve pasted in below, after the jump, which collects together the statements quoted in the video. You can click on it for a larger version.
Now it turns out that the group’s application for charitable status may have also contained some, well, let’s just call it misleading information. In March, CAFE was granted charitable status, which came as a bit of a shock to a lot of people, myself included, given the group’s seemingly symbiotic relationship with the distinctly uncharitable Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men.
But will they be able to retain this charitable status? The alternative weekly Now Toronto is reporting that the group’s application for charitable status contains some pretty dubious claims. In its application, CAFE listed several feminist groups and a federal agency
as potential participants in its “regular panel discussion series” on women’s and men’s issues. … There’s just one problem: none of the groups listed has ever been involved with CAFE.
Needless to say, none of these organizations were happy to find out that CAFE had used their name without permission:
The executive directors of Egale and LEAF said they had no knowledge of ever being approached by the organization, and said they would not work with CAFE if they were asked. Before NOW contacted them, neither organization had any knowledge that CAFE had listed them on its application.
A spokesperson for Status of Women Canada, the federal agency, told NOW in an email that none of its representatives had ever been involved in a CAFE event.
And they weren’t the only ones surprised to learn that they’d made unwitting cameo appearances in the group’s application.
The group also claimed it was planning to work with university scholars from women’s studies departments, and specifically named Professor Sarita Srivastava, an associate sociology professor at Queen’s who studies anti-racist challenges to Canadian feminist groups. On its application CAFE said it was “currently” setting up a panel discussion to include Srivastava.
Reached by email, Srivastava told NOW that she was “stunned” to learn her name was on the form … .
Now Toronto details other bits of weirdness about the application; check out its reporting here.
CAFE tried its best to spin its way out of its last PR catastrophe — the collapse of the E-Day concert. Can they spin their way out of this one?
Welcome to the second installment of Misogyny Theater! In other news, I’m enjoying making these videos, and may do a couple more this week.
Today’s thoroughly horrifying monologue stars the megalomaniacal libertarian-MRA philosopher guru Stefan Molyneux, who is, as many of you already know, one of the scheduled speakers at A Voice for Men’s conference in Detroit later this week.
I have taken the liberty of editing out a brief and inconsequential comment from a caller Molyneux had on the phone with him; and adding a few seconds of silence at each end of the clip. The rest is pure, unedited Molyneux.
Oh, ok, I added the Justin Bieber poster and the lamp.
Thanks to YouTuber Tru Shibes for posting a slightly longer excerpt from Molyneux’ 2-hour video; that’s where I got the audio. Tru Shibes has a bunch of videos up featuring some of the worst of Mr. M. And thanks to Mancheeze and Sam Sederfor pointing me to this quote in the first place.
Note: The sound clip of the murmuring crowd in my video came from FreeSFX.co.uk.
Just a quick heads-up: I’ll be appearing on The Stream on Al Jazeera America today at 12:30 PM ET, debating Robert O’Hara of A Voice for Men. We’re in the opening segment of the show, which covers both the Men’s Rights movement and (in a separate segment) the issues of Father’s Rights. Also weighing in on Men’s Rights, the awesome Soraya Chemaly. For the rest of the people on the show, see here.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Al Jazeera archives episodes of its shows, nor does it stream its shows online, so you’ll have to watch this using that “television” thing that used to be such a big deal. The show will be rerun on Thursday, also at 12:30 PM ET.
To find out if your cable/dish company gets Al Jazeera America, go here.
Oh, and I have a favor to ask: if any of you have a way of recording your TV and a way of getting that video into a form that could be, say, emailed to me, could you do that? I would love to have a copy of the show. Thanks!
Welcome to the first episode of Misogyny Theater, our new animated series, bringing you the best of the worst of YouTube misogyny.
In today’s episode, we revisit an old video from John The Other, also known as John Hembling, a fellow most of you already know pretty well. The monologue in this video is an unedited excerpt from a YouTube rant of his, minus some of the distracting background music that was included in the original.
Content Note: The misogyny in this one is pretty bad, even by John the Other standards.
I will try to produce at least one of these a week. There’s plenty of misogyny on YouTube, so it’s doubtful I’ll run out of material any time soon. I will also be doing a series based on Creepy PMs. Big thanks to everyone who’s pointed me to interesting candidates for future videos, as well as to those who’ve volunteered to do voice work or who’ve sent in pictures of their pets. Thanks as well to the anonymous Friend of the Mammoths who put together the snazzy title sequences here.
In my post announcing my video plans last week, I offered some suggestions on how to help; I’m going to write up a most detailed FAQ on this shortly.
John’s original video is no longer up on YouTube, but you can see clips from it — including the portion I used in the video above — in this more recent video from him in which he tries to explain away the horrible things he said. Apparently it was just a big joke! All in good fun!
EDIT: Removed an embedded video that was no longer functioning because it’s been removed from YouTube.
EDIT 2: For a mashup of Hembling’s original video, along with another video of his in which he pointedly refuses to apologize for the original video, see here, courtesy of Mancheeze.
