MSNBC reports on the Men’s Rights conference held in Michigan yesterday.
“I call it the evil empire,” Erin Pizzey, the British founder of one of the first domestic violence shelters and a staunch anti-feminist, said Friday, borrowing Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union. “We need to go after them. We cannot allow this to continue. And if we don’t stop it, I don’t see a future for marriage, for love, or for anything.”
Yup. That totally makes sense. Feminism will mean the end for marriage, and love, and everything. Once it has done it’s work, there will be no future for anything. It will be like before the Big Bang.
There are real issues for men, obviously, most or all of them issues that feminists have been pointing out for decades. But…
But those issues got short shrift from most of the speakers on the first full day of the conference Friday, hosted by A Voice For Men, an online hub for men’s rights activists founded by Paul Elam. What animated most of the speakers at the conference was feminism and how it needed to be defeated.
Although generally understood as an ideology of equal rights for women, at the conference such feminists were called “equity feminists,” discussed the way Democrats might refer to “sane conservatives” or Republicans to “good liberals.” In other words, a largely fictional exception whose purpose is merely to define the whole as extreme. Feminists, for many of the speakers, were the enemy.
Heh. Take that, Twitter anti-feminists. The “equity feminism” bullshit isn’t fooling anyone, despite Sommers’s best efforts.
Mike Buchanan, a British men’s activist, warned that feminism was the ideology of “female supremacists, driven by misandry, the hatred of men and boys.” For 30 years, Buchanan said, “feminists have worked through the state to attack many of the pillars of civilized society,” and become “the defining ideology, of the political establishment.”
At the conference, feminism was responsible for turning wives against their husbands, bleeding them dry in divorce proceedings and separating them from their children, levying false accusations of rape and abuse against good men, or creating an ever-present culture of hatred where men are vilified.
Though men’s rights activists who hosted the conference often say sexual assault against men isn’t taken seriously, the audience laughed when speaker Fred Jones mentioned his fears about his son being raped after being arrested in New Orleans.
“He’s kinda small and kinda cute, good looking, you know what I mean?” Jones said. “You know what they do with –” Jones cut himself off. But the audience laughed.
Because prison rape is so hilarious. Ok…
Barbara Kay, a columnist for Canada’s National Post, argued that Santa Barbara shooter Elliott Rodger couldn’t have been driven by hatred of women because “he hated women because they rejected him sexually, but he also hated men because they had access to women.”
Rape on college campuses, she added, was a myth perpetrated by man-haters, and the concept of rape culture, how society can tacitly approve of or rationalize sexual assault, was “baseless moral panic.”
“The vast majority of female students allegedly raped on campus are actually voicing buyer’s remorse from alcohol-fueled promiscuous behavior involving murky lines of consent on both sides,” she said, drawing chuckles from the audience. “It’s true. It’s their get-out-of-guilt-free card, you know like Monopoly.” The chuckles turned to guffaws.
Hawhawhaw. Echoes of “distasteful locker room banter” and all the rest of the phrase book.
Dr. Tara Palmatier, a men’s rights activist who advertises herself as a “shrink for men,” explained that “feminism has evolved from the radical notion that women are people, to the radical notion that women are superior.”
…
Most of the speakers on the first full day of the conference were women, a fact Palmatier noted proudly. ”I am the third presenter to speak at the first annual international men’s human rights conference, and that would be the third woman presenter,” Palmatier said to applause. “My aren’t we an interesting group of misogynists. I hate to tell you guys, but I think we might be doing it wrong.”
I guess she’s never heard of Phyllis Schlafly, or even Michelle Duggar.
Or Debi Pearl. Or Ann Coulter. Or….
What is the origin of their distorted, bizarro view of feminism?
You see, it really isn’t fair for women to demand decent treatment. There’s misandry in the world… almost entirely perpetrated by men against other men (and against ourselves), and based on misogyny. Women insisting that they should be excluded from the hate-fest is almost unbearable for men whose only consolation is “at least I’m not a chick.”
Erin Pizzey is obviously very damaged by childhood trauma. She deserves enormous credit for her work in setting up shelters in the seventies, though. In her case, I’m almost prepared to say that her work has been more important than her opinions.
Pizzey has been doing more harm than good when it comes to DV for quite some time. We Hunted the Mammoth has some more coverage of the conference including quotes from Pizzey about DV that are pretty appalling. Basically she claims anything less than physical violence that leaves someone in fear for their live if not DV. http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/06/28/antifeminist-dv-guru-erin-pizzey-if-you-are-not-in-fear-of-your-life-you-are-not-suffering-from-domestic-violence/
@ 2 Tony
Misogyny. (Just the origin of belief in the “gay agenda” in homophobia.)
“The vast majority of female students allegedly raped on campus are actually voicing buyer’s remorse from alcohol-fueled promiscuous behavior involving murky lines of consent on both sides,”
So instead of just not having sex with that guy again, this hypothetical woman invents a story designed to lead to the incarceration of an innocent man for years or decades and nearly destroy his life? Yeah, that’s why this is misogyny. Taking the view that your average woman is inclined to try to destroy a man’s life so trivially is pretty fucked up.
Saying that “the origin of their distorted, bizarro view of feminism” (@2) is misogyny (@6) seems a bit incomplete. Misogynists could despise feminists for what feminists accurately want, rather than strawmanning them.
But the urge to not just oppose someone you don’t like accurately, but to demonize your opponents seems a staggeringly common trait in our society, if not of humanity itself (I couldn’t claim to know). You’re opponents can’t just be wrong, they must be ridiculously wrong and awful people to boot.
First, feminists fought for legal equality. Anti-feminists opposed that, because women were different! They didn’t need or want the same rights, they needed different rights for their different differences! Now get back in the kitchen.
But, eventually, feminism won some battles, and by and large, equality before the law (at least on paper) has been achieved. And the public opinion, in general, is that this is a good thing. Feminism began to win hearts and minds as well as legal battles.
So, the misogynists respond the same way the racists did, moving the goal posts. Of course women ought to have the same rights as men, say the very same people who opposed that years ago, but what feminists want NOW is ridiculous (in the same way we insisted it was ridiculous before and were wrong, but ignore that).
But, since most of what feminism wants is pretty reasonable stuff, the people who oppose it (misogynists) need to make it coat it in a layer of ‘yuck’, probably even in their own heads. Women don’t want to be harassed? Why, they are against free speech! They’re just jealous of the attention attractive women get and want to deny men their basic biology! Women don’t want to be stereotyped as housewives? They must want men to do all the housework! They must hate families and want to have sex wantonly and never settle down!
When your opponents are reasonable, you have to put a layer of trash on their arguments to oppose them.
FIFY
Because the story where a woman accuses a (innocent) man of rape and he is subsequently prosecuted, tried and sentenced on nothing but her word only exists in the heads of MRAs, while in reality only 3% of all accused rapists ever spend a single day in jail.
+++
The day the feminist conspiracy comes to take my wedding ring, my husband and my children, I’ll renounce feminism and join the MRAs. Until then I’ll simply assume they’re full of shit
suttkus @8:
Your response was a more along the lines of what I was looking for when I asked the question.
At the huge corporation I work for, an alarming number of women have stood up recently to document their cases of being harassed and reporting it to the EEO group without the corporation giving a hoot. One person suggested creating a group for employees to meet and brainstorm solutions (and also, I’m sure, to reassure women that abuse and harassment at work are never okay). The first person to speak up against it was a woman, bleating that women have it easy and it’s MEN who are harassed. Why? Because if they tell a woman they look nice, they’re “screamed at”. Also, they’re “not allowed” to hold doors for women. It was like an anti-feminist Bingo card, the things she came up with.
This says it all.
So close to self-awareness, but they’re actually just a boring (if sometime dangerous) group of misogynists.