[dropcap]I[/dropcap] frequently get asked, and a lot more lately than usual, why AVfM finds it necessary to employ what is often a hostile tone toward feminists and their supporters. It is actually a fair question, and one that deserves a fair and honest answer if we expect to give any rational person the opportunity to understand the mission here and why we are on it.
I usually answer it with pretty much stock information; stuff about Thomas James Ball and the way the media ignored his political self-immolation over the family courts. I tell people about Vladek Filler and the way his open persecution by corrupt state functionaries is continuing with the assistance of a fully complicit media in the state of Maine – despite being publicly exposed for what they are doing.
I talk about denial and the need to shake people out of it, and I have shown more examples than I can remember of how it is an egregious mistake to assume that we are just dealing with a difference in philosophy or simple conflicting worldviews when it comes to MRAs facing off with feminists.
Allow me to give you one more.
Recently we published the sad announcement released by NCFM that we lost Patricia Overberg, a lifelong advocate for men and women who suffered abuse in their homes. The brief article was not political, though it did mention that she had been targeted by members of the domestic violence industry in her area for persecution because she reacted to the plight of abused men by doing what she could to provide them services.
As usual, I posted the article to reddit/mensrights, and as expected it drew a lot of attention, getting, at this point, 148 net up votes from readers in that forum. The comments placed on the article were thoughtful and sensitive, as is befitting the recent death of an individual who dedicated her life to providing help to anyone she could that suffered abuse in the home.
[box type=”download” icon=”none”]The article has also been down voted, so far, 53 times.[/box]
That is 53 people, or about 25% of the voters in a men’s rights forum, that down voted a simple tribute to a departed advocate, clearly on the grounds that she chose to help men, too; 53 people whose derelict brand of humanity represents the voice of feminism in modern culture; 53 pieces of garbage with no discernable reason to any longer be viewed as human beings.
This isn’t new and it isn’t a fluke. The National Organization of Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) filed an amicus brief, I think it was in 2005, to prevent shelters who were practicing discrimination from being mandated to offer services to men who were victimized by violent women. The members of that organization are not some band of errant “redditors,” but a group of supposed academicians whose expertise allegedly lies in the area of domestic violence.
Their intent was to send seriously abused men and their children packing into the streets rather than allow any domestic abuse agency to lift a finger to help them. Their actions are part of a pattern that is no longer just a pattern but the status quo. And it got that way because we have been playing kissy face with bigots and hate mongers for far too long.
You know what, people? I am sick and fucking tired of this shit. I am sick and fucking tired of what amounts to people asking me to sit down at a table with klansmen and have a nice, congenial discussion on race relations and lynching. This is precisely what some people, conscious of it or not, are asking me to do.
[quote style=”boxed” float=”left”] I am sick and fucking tired of what amounts to people asking me to sit down at a table with klansmen and have a nice, congenial discussion on race relations and lynching.[/quote] Right now we have people like Jessica Valenti and David Futrelle out there pathologizing any reaction to their violently hateful agenda, drawing parallels between psychotic mass murderers and MRAs; arguing that the former is somehow a product of the latter. All while they defend policies that result in self-immolation, other forms of suicide, the loss of human rights and systematic, widespread child abuse.
Yes, child abuse. Children who are robbed of their fathers by the courts, and sometimes later with handguns, or gasoline and matches, are abuse victims. Children in the care of abused fathers that have nowhere to turn are destined for rejection and destructive neglect before the first call for help is made. And the likes of Futrelle, Valenti, NOMAS, Kellett, the 53 scumbags on reddit and the perhaps 53 million other scumbags they represent are part and parcel to that abuse every bit as much as people like Casey Anthony.
So should I be nice to these people? Sure, and right after I am nice to them we will all sit down and discuss the positive aspects of Nazi Germany – there were some, you know? And then we’ll cull through the information on lynching blacks and find a couple of them that actually did rape white women so we can explore the whole matter as an attempt at “alternative” justice that perhaps was a tad over-zealous. Perhaps we can have a round table discussion on whether Katherine Becker coldly premeditated the sexual mutilation of her husband, or whether she was just trying to write a script for a sitcom. There should be room for all views, right?
And we can all lift our fucking pinkies when we sip our lattes and feel really great about ourselves for keeping it civilized and above the fray. And then…
AND. FUCKING. THEN…
We can watch the next man light himself on fire in front of an American family court, and tell ourselves, as the father of another child gets reduced to a pile of stinking, charred flesh, that we really must discuss this some more; reasonably, calmly, nicely, futilely. We must all seek to make ourselves feel good about how we handle things, even it it means we do absolutely nothing about the problem.
Or, we can treat these vermin as they deserve to be treated. Well, not as they deserve, because if these people actually got what they deserved the problem would be solved, but at the expense of the very values and principles we are trying to promote. I don’t pretend to know the absolute answer to the problem here. Perhaps it is above the head of any one person. But what I do know is that in the future, as perhaps more people encourage me to opt for nice guy activism, the only response I will give them is a link to this page.
