Feminists often complain, with considerable justification, that Men’s Rights Activists try to turn every conversation about women’s issues into a game of “what about the men?” You’re talking about female rape victims — well, what about the male rape victims?
The trouble with this strategy, from the point of view of the Men’s Rights Activists anyway, is that this little “gotcha” is much less of a “gotcha” then they’d like it to be.
In the case of rape, for example, feminists are well aware that men are raped as well: the “Don’t Be That Guy” ad campaign, which sent so many MRAs into hysterics, focused on male victims as well as female ones. The emergency room rape advocate organization that a friend of mine volunteers for provides advocacy for victims regardless of gender.
So many MRAs have started playing another game: trying to twist the conversation around in order to cast women as the villains. Rape is a bit tough for them here, since the overwhelming majority of rapists are male. So MRAs talk about the alleged epidemic of female false accusers instead. Or they change the topic entirely and make dead baby jokes (see my post yesterday).
Recently, MRAs have tried a new strategy, seizing on data from The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, a massive study conducted in 2010 under the aegis of the Centers for Disease Control, to claim that “40% of rapists are women.”
Well, this is depressing. The Raw Story is reporting that
An Ohio University sophomore has deactivated her social media accounts and is afraid to leave her house after she was falsely identified as the woman who reported she’d been raped in an incident captured on cell phone video by a passerby.
The student, Rachel Cassidy, now falsely accused of being a false rape accuser, has had her personal information — not just her name but her address, the name of her sorority, her social media accounts, even her Pinterest page — listed on a Men’s Rights site called Crimes Against Fathers. (I won’t link to it.)
The man behind Crimes Against Fathers? None other than the notorious Men’s Rights extremist and crackpot Peter Andrew Nolan — or, as he prefers to be known, for reasons I don’t fully understand, Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c) . Apparently taking inspiration from Paul Elam’s Register-Her.com, Nolan’s site does what Register-Her only threatened to do: it actually releases the personal information of those it identifies as “Man-Hating Women.” He will even add names of women you don’t like to the list for a fee of $70 (Australian).
So far the site has several hundred women listed, most of them apparently women who have run afoul of Nolan or his most active lieutenant on the site, the pseudonymous “John Rambo” of “Boycott American Women” fame, either online or in real life. In most cases, luckily, the amount of personal information given out is relatively scanty and the number of people who’ve actually viewed the posts (which is listed on the site) has been small.
That’s not the case with Cassidy, whose life Nolan and “Rambo” have set out to ruin as thoroughly as they can. In addition to her personal information, the site has also dug up an assortment of pictures of her scraped from various sites on the internet.
And, unwilling to believe that she is not the woman in the video — and a false accuser of rape — the two have taken aim at those who’ve stepped forward to defend Cassidy. They’ve posted the personal information of Jenny Hall-Jones, the Dean of Students at Ohio University, for the “crime” of publicly saying that Cassidy is not the woman in the video, as well as several other women who’ve come out in support of Cassidy.
On Crimes Against Fathers, “Rambo” writes
[C]onsidering that women will always try to cover for their fellow women, and will NEVER hold their fellow women accountable, there is a very strong possibility that Jenny [Hall-Jones] is LYING and that Rachel Cassidy IS the girl in that video. This means that Jenny Hall-Jones is a CRIMINAL because she is covering up for the CRIME of making a false rape accusation. Therefore, she is a criminal and needs to be publicly exposed as such.
Neither “Rambo” nor Nolan has leveled similar accusations against Ohio University president Roderick McDavis, a man, though he too has said that the woman in the video is not Cassidy.
Men’s Rights activists like to say that Nolan isn’t really one of them. If this is the case, they should be willing to stand up and denounce his reprehensible actions, and the very idea of his Crimes Against Fathers “Man-Hating Women” directory.
EDITED TO ADD: I should note that Nolan’s site also has a “Name and Shame the IgnorMANuses” forum directed at alleged man-hating men, including Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad) and Nacho Vidal (the pseudonymous dude behind MGTOWforums.com). The list is considerably smaller than that of the Man-Hating Women directory, and none of the entries I saw listed any personal information that went much beyond links to Facebook pages.
Paul Elam in a web-only clip from the 20/20 segment that never ran on television.
Paul Elam, the founder and primary animating force behind the website A Voice for Men, is probably, for better or worse, the most influential figure in the Men’s Rights movement (or, as he prefers to call it, the Men’s Human Rights Movement).
Elam is also a fierce misogynist with a penchant for angry, violent rhetoric full of only-slightly veiled threats. But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps the best way to get to know Mr. Elam is through his own words.
So here are some of Elam’s thoughts on a variety of issues, taken from postings on his own website. I have linked each quote back to its source on A Voice for Men.
Matt Forney is desperate for attention; it’s as glaringly obvious as the giant MATT FORNEY that adorns the top of his blog, creatively named MATT FORNEY. And like some caricature of an emo teen “acting out,” the misogynistic manosphere blogger has decided that any attention — even bad attention — is better than no attention.
And so, perhaps at least dimly aware that his ideas are and his prose are both too lackluster to command much attention on their own, he seems to be trying to rile up as much of the internet as possible with posts that are deliberately designed to offend liberals and feminists and pretty much anyone who is not a woman-hating douchebag. He had a minor hit a this spring with a post entitled Why Fat Girls Don’t Deserve to Be Loved, which did in fact live up — that is, down — to its title.
Pity the poor Men’s Rights activists. The real civil rights movements that MRAs like to compare their, er, “struggle” to may have faced many obstacles that MRAs haven’t — from legal prohibitions on voting to fire bombings and assassinations — but at least they haven’t had a hard time explaining just what it was, and is, that they’re seeking redress for.
When Martin Luther King so famously dreamt of a world in which “my four little children will … not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” he was not only speaking eloquently; he was expressing an idea that was, well, pretty easy to understand.
So the self-described “human rights activists” at A Voice for Men have found three more women to harass. Here’s the story, which for many of you will have a depressingly familiar ring:
Members of Men’s Rights Edmonton, a small group that is for all intents and purposes a local chapter of A Voice for Men, has been putting up pictures targeting Lise Gotell, the chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta. The pictures, which seem inspired by “Wanted” posters of yore, feature a large portrait of Gotell and the caption:
No, I think Roosh V has you beat in that category.
The Pax Dickinson Crisis seems to have abated somewhat, with postings on the #standwithpax hashtag on Twitter slowing to a trickle and the production of manosphere rants on the subject more or less grinding to a halt, at least for the moment.
But there is one manosphere ideologue who hasn’t given up the fight for injustice, and that’s the despicable “game” guru Roosh Valizadeh, who seems to have embarked on a crusade to ruin the life and career of the Valleywag/Gawker writer who first brought Dickinson’s terrible tweets to the attention of the wider world.
He explained his strategy, which he suggests will work on all liberal writers who might criticize men for racism or misogyny:
Unless she’s applying for a position at Jezebel, no respectable company will touch a toxic individual who has been linked to racism. They don’t want anyone who may cause controversy for them, and behind rape, nothing says controversy like race. …
It’s a slow-burn attack that will effectively punish these writers and scare their co-workers , whose income is low enough that they need to depend on corporate employment indefinitely, unless one day they get an original thought and can stay away from their iPhone long enough to write a book. It won’t work on the big liberal writers like Jessica Valenti or Naomi Wolf, since any attention they get just helps them sell more books, but it does work on the young girl out of college trying to win feminist brownie points by denouncing a man for being “creepy” based on a bad joke.
And then he compared it with something he seems to have a certain amount of experience with:
Having your name destroyed on Google is the internet version of getting raped.
Lovely.
There are more than a few practical problems with Roosh’s little plan, the most notable being that if some hypothetical hiring manager comes across Roosh’s attack on Tiku — or on any writer he’s tried to tar — all this manager will have to do is spend a minute skimming Roosh’s post to see that the charge is bullshit and that Roosh is himself a raving bigot.
And Roosh, if you’re trying to smear someone, it’s generally not good form to announce this plan publicly in a post that at times reads like the monologue of some cartoon supervillain.
In his piece, Roosh notes that “[n]ot long ago, Buzzfeed insinuated I was a rapist.” Well, it did more than that: It quoted Roosh admitting quite frankly that he’d had sex with a woman who was too intoxicated to consent.
I thought, in the interests of openness, it would be worth quoting that passage from Roosh — it’s in his e-book Bang Iceland — once again. Heck, I’ll even give the bit Buzzfeed quoted a little more context. I’ll let you decide if Roosh is a rapist or not.
I hooked her arm and off we went. The best thing that possibly could have happened was a “failed” afterparty. There had to be a moment when she realized that all her friends are gone and the only reasonable option left was to go home with a strange man she had just met.
While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated.
I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do. If a girl is willing to walk home with me, she’s going to get the dick no matter how much she has drunk. I’ll protect myself by using a condom (most of the time), but I know that when it comes to sex, one ounce of hesitation or a feeling of morality will get me nothing.
Emphasis mine.
At this point even Pax Dickinson may want to distance himself from this creep.
Paul Elam: If he hears any more about rape culture, he might possibly lose it.
You might not think that student orientation events would be an appropriate venue for chants celebrating the rape of underage girls. But such chants have apparently been something of a tradition at not one but two Canadian schools — and possibly more? Last week, a scandal erupted at the University of British Columbia after word got out that an orientation event at its Saunder School of Business had included a chant on this particular theme, led by orientation leaders from the Commerce Undergraduate Society.
Y-O-U-N-G at UBC, we like ’em young, Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for go to jail.
Meanwhile, in Halifax, someone made a video — and posted it to YouTube — of student orientation leaders at Saint Mary’s University chanting a nearly identical chant.
Naturally, noted, er, human rights activist Paul Elam of A Voice for Men felt compelled to weigh in on the issue. He started off by expressing his deep disgust … with having to hear anything about the issue at all:
I swear if I read one more outraged “report” — aka feverish, paranoid rant — that twists something stupid into “evidence” of a “rape culture,” I am going to just lose it.
Yes, how outrageous that a chant joking about raping underage girls at an official school orientation event could possibly be construed as contributing in any way to rape culture! So sorry that your delicate sensitivities were offended, Paul.
After some more predictable histrionics on this “hyper-hipster-hysteria” from Mr. Elam, he got to his main point: blaming feminists for the rape chants.
No, really.
I am an older guy. I find it interesting, given that I came from a more “patriarchal” generation, that something like this when I was 18 would have been unthinkable. Why? Because other men, especially older ones, would have pulled those young people aside and said, “Hey, we don’t do that around here.” That would have been that, as they say, if it had even happened in the first place.
We can thank feminists for this. Through policy and governance they have eroded positive male role models, and male authority, right out of the culture. After feminist undermining of the family, removing fathers from the lives of children and demonizing male heroes, we have a population of young people, especially young men, growing more socially feral with each new generation.
And now what do we see? Feminists running around everywhere telling men they need to tell each other, “Don’t rape. Don’t abuse women. Don’t this. Don’t that.” …
You can’t assault the identity of half the human race, marginalize and disempower them, which is exactly what feminism has done, and expect anything in return but what you are getting.
When is a false rape accusation not a false rape accusation? When it’s leveled against a feminist man.
That, in any case, is the logic behind an appalling post on A Voice for Men attempting to smear a male feminist blogger named Jason Thibeault, who posts on FreeThoughtBlogs as Lousy Canuck, by proclaiming him a rapist.
The post is a typical bit of AVFM “satire” — that is, sophistry — arguing that “by his own feminist standards” Thibeault is a rapist … because he was once accused of rape by a girlfriend, as he wrote about in a recent post. And since feminists believe that ALL accusations of rape are true, AVFM’s Birric Forcella argues, Thibeault is thus a “confessed rapist.”
Obviously, this argument is ludicrous on its face. Feminists don’t believe that all accusations of rape are automatically true. And Thibeault, for his part, says that he was falsely accused.
This doesn’t stop AVFM from giving their piece the frankly libelous headline: “FreeThoughtBlogs’ Jason Thibeault, confessed rapist.”
AVFM may defend its post as “satire” — they have a rather expansive definition of the word — but that headline is pure libel. It’s false — and would be so even if the accusations of rape were true, as Thibeault (who’s responded to the AVFM post here) maintains his innocence.
And AVFM’s intent is clearly malicious. In the first comment to the piece, AVFM founder and publisher Paul Elam declares frankly, and revealingly, “Karma is a BITCH.”
Thibeault’s real crime, in AVFM’s eyes, is that he has publicly supported women who have come forward in recent weeks to accuse prominent skeptic writer Michael Shermer of rape and sexual assault.
And so they have responded by making what is an unequivocally false accusation against him in a headline on their site.
Of course, this isn’t the first time A Voice for Men has falsely accused someone of something based on bad evidence or no evidence at all.
In April of this year, Elam (along with a number of other MRAs and an assortment of White Supremacists as well) worked himself into an uproar over a blog post from an alleged feminist allegedly working in a college admission office who claimed she was routinely trashing applications from white males.
Though even the most rudimentary amount of fact-checking would have revealed that the woman they blamed for the blog had nothing to do with it, she had her contact information posted online by MRAs and others, leaving her open to harassment and widespread vilification. Elam contributed to the hubbub by posting a vituperative post identifying the wrong woman by name — and only after being called on his mistake by numerous other MRAs did his finally retract the post.
You can read about the whole appalling affair here.
And at one point, either lying outright or misled by a troll, he put forth the absurd conspiracy theory that I was somehow responsible for an appalling Reddit forum known as the Beatingwomen subreddit.
In his post on the subject, he claimed to have “intel” from two separate sources that “confirm[ed]” my involvement in the subreddit — he provided none of this evidence — and promised that “further word” on the subject would be forthcoming.
Of course, this evidence never materialized — because it was fraudulent and/or imaginary. Elam dropped the subject. I had and have no connection to the subreddit.
And not long ago, AVFM’s Dean Esmay very publicly accused its former Canadian News Director Kristina Mendez (AKA TheWoolyBumblebee) of (maybe, possibly) running off with the money she collected for a center devoted to the memory of Earl Silverman, a Canadian MRA who committed suicide partially out of frustration over the difficulties he had in funding the DV shelter for men he ran out of his home. The folks at AVFM have admitted quite plainly that they have no evidence of wrongdoing here.
Apparently, AVFM’s strategy is to prove that false accusations are common by making as many of them as they possibly can.
Dan Perrins has launched an international boycott of Jamaica. Mighty white of you, Dan!
So the other day, Canadian Men’s Rights activist and all-around crank Dan Perrins apparently noticed for the first time that gay men face massive bigotry in Jamaica. He reported his findings in a post on A Voice for Men:
Right now in Jamaica lesbian sex is legal while male homosexual sex acts can get you up to 10 years in prison at hard labor.
In other words, homosexual women are accepted as a normal part of society. Homosexual men are criminals, for just existing.
