[quote]Looking at men in government and saying they have all the power is like looking at women in grocery stores and saying they have all the food. ~Jack Kammer [/quote]
Barry Nolan, on Monday, March 26 published an article on Boston Magazine’s online edition issuing a harsh critique of MRAs, declaring that white men rule, and asking a rhetorical question.
“So why do so many of them whine about how tough it is to be a white man?”
I suspect Nolan thought that was a question with no valid answer besides “they’re whiney babies,” but I’d hazard to guess that some reasons men whine about their social station is because of the workplace death rate, dominated by men. According to the US Department of Labor the sexual distribution of individuals killed on the job improved to the benefit of men in 2010. With an improvement of 1 percent, only 92% of those killed on the job in 2010 were men.
We also have the homelessness rate, which is 90% men[1], or the fact that 4 out of 5 suicides are male.[2] It might also be the fact that educational outcomes are dominated by women from high-school to the attainment of advanced degrees, and female favouring affirmative action programs in funding and program access remain. It might also be title IX legislation used to justify the closure of male-preferred extra-curricular programs across the country, It might even be that despite more than a decade after the near universal ban on female genital mutilation in western nations, infant boys are routinely subject to the unnecessary removal of the most sensitive part of their sexual organ with no anesthetic, and those openly complaining are mocked for efforts to protect male infants from this stone age brutalization. These are just a few guesses as to why some men might not feel terribly privileged.
Nolan points to the floor of US congress to prove his case that men rule and thus, being male is an exercise in privilege. What he doesn’t say is that first, those representatives of masculine supremacy are elected by a majority of voters who are female[2][3]. Nolan also indulges himself in repeated commissions of the Apex Fallacy, which is the assignment the characteristics of the highest visibility members of a group to all members of that group. Most senators are male, thus, most males are senators. This works just as well substituting CEOs or other high-profile, high status roles in society. This fallacy deliberately ignores that almost all coal miners, garbage collectors, and day labourers are also male. These are roles at the bottom of social hierarchy and near the top in terms of danger, as well as providing a much larger and more representative sample of the lives of the majority of men. After iterating through instances of the apex fallacy using corporate CEOs and supreme court justices, Nolan manages to avoid considering the entire rest of the world where everyone else lives, and concludes that “by almost any metric, any statistic, it works out to be a pretty deal to be a white male”. Suicide rates, homelessness, death in the workplace notwithstanding, it’s certainly a joy being the only demographic for whom open contempt hatred, and scorn is publicly praiseworthy.
Nolan might not have gotten away with this if he’d singled out men as a sexual demographic, but tossing “white” into the mix and he’s free and clear. The Boston columnist also claims confusion about “why so many white men like me can be found whining”.
In the current and rising proliferation of writing on issues of male human rights, detailing exactly what men’s areas of concern are, repeating and re-iterating issues from biased criminal courts, family courts, health care, access to education, biased hiring practices, public vilification, media mockery, and reproductive rights, just to name a few; Nolan’s claimed incomprehension seems implausible.
According to Nolan, himself a self-admitted white man “the system is so stacked in our favour, it’s almost embarrassing.” However, like every feminist who every screeched “check your privilege” – he somehow forgets to name a single specific instance of male privilege. It’s almost as if he couldn’t think of any, almost, dare I say, that hes repeating a fabricated myth of male privilege, without giving the matter any critical examination at all.
Nolan carries on to decry rising opposition to the Violence Against Woman Act, claiming that this opposition is because the updated VAWA adds protection to lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual individuals.
[Senator] Grassley and the far right don’t want to see it pass in its current form because it extends some of its protections to LGBT victims, Native American victims, and some illegal immigrants. Because of what? Because it should be OK to brutalize them?
The actual reason for the growing opposition to VAWA is that the language would undermine the most basic principal of western justice – lowering the standard of evidence for conviction of a crime. The bill also approaches domestic violence from the philosophical conception of the Duluth Model, in which all violence is a manifestation of patriarchal evil. This model of “understanding” domestic violence disregards the gender symmetry inherent in the problem, disregards causal factors such as poverty, alcohol or drug addiction, psychological disorders, trauma affecting adult behavior and reduces all partner violence to a simplistic and false black and white cartoon where men are predators and women are their victims.
This model disregards female perpetrators by design, which necessarily disregards the men and children that are their victims. This, legitimized by “primary aggressor,” and “mandatory arrest” laws, results in pro-female scripted police work and incentivized prosecutions against men. All of this operates in a framework of irrational laws that inflict lasting damage on families, communities and children.
So no, Mr Nolan, its not protection of individuals practicing alternate sexual lifestyle that fosters opposition to unconstitutional laws.
None of this manages to merit notice in Nolan’s analysis. According to him “The passage of the bill has also been muddied by — well — mud. Stuff crazy people make up and throw out there to make it seem like it’s somehow a radical or controversial idea to try to stop people from beating up women.”
Mud? Crazy people? It certainly would be radical to “stop people from beating up women.” If anybody was trying to stop other people from beating up women, that would be crazy. In fact, anyone openly cultivating violence could easily be called radical. Oddly however, in spite of Barry Nolan’s rhetoric, nobody seriously opposing VAWA’s re-authorization has demonstrated any such sinister agenda, which probably explains why Nolan didn’t even try to offer evidence of the mud and crazy people.
Of course, being a professional writer, Nolan would not expose himself to the deserved scorn following his naked use of ad-hominem or straw-man argument. It seems obvious, since those formal logical fallacies are so easy to spot. The Boston writer reveals himself by next mentioning the recent and hilariously inept attempt by the Southern Poverty Law Center to ride the wave of reactionary vitriol right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh attracted by excoriating a 30 year old feminist with the word slut. The SPLC tried to capitalize on anti-right-wing backlash against Limbaugh by scratching together a list of unrelated websites disapproved-of by left leaning bloggers and authoritarian progressive conformists.
Nolan is of course, late to the party in jumping on the SPLC’s bandwagon, as the slapdash, irresponsible fear-mongering of the SPLC has already been roundly criticized by reason magazine[4], business insider[5], the american spectator[6], Christian Science Monitor[7] and even the Huffington Post[8][9] and World Net Daily[10], who pointed out that according to the SPLC, if you’re not on the political left, you are a hate group.
Reason Magazine’s Mike Riggs[11] posted a comment on twitter stating: he has “zero interest in supporting the SPLC’s shoddy work”.
Undaunted by lack of any cited evidence in his own article, Nolan soldiers on to declare: “One of the things these groups [Men’s Rights Groups] like to do is generate baloney statistics about how men are the “real victims” of domestic violence.” Actually, speaking only for myself, but with awareness of my own small influence in the men’s movement, I happen to prefer locating and citing peer-reviewed research, and reputably sourced statistics in support of my opinions. Such as a growing body of research[12][13][14][15][16][17] indicating that contrary to the popular narrative that domestic violence is sexually directional, men-abusing women, it’s committed more or less equally by women and men, and cannot be rationally addressed by any model ignoring the behavior of half the participants.
This is similar to the logic of fighting a structure fire by pouring water on only the North and East facing walls, but letting the South and West facing walls burn freely. Nolan’s characterization of the evidence-based objection to ideological modelling of DV is that men attempt to claim ownership of victimhood as “the /real victims/ of domestic violence.”
Of course, he has no supporting evidence of this. He doesn’t cite any evidence in refuting this argument, but employs emotional appeal to sweep such arguments aside without examination.
As proof of the impossible insanity of men arguing for their own civil rights, Nolan goes to youtube of all places, citing the video on the satire channel of a user called RamzPaul. In other news, The Onion is a comedy channel, and the FlintStones cartoon series was not a BBC anthropology documentary.
Nolan also repeats the SPLC’s claim of the prevalence of female victimization pulled from a 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, which oddly, the SPLC does not link to. In the report[18] a claimed 86% of the victims of partner violence are female, while 75% of deaths within a domestic violence context are female. What Nolan does not mention – but which seems obvious is that justice department reporting on rates of partner violence victimization is necessarily self-selected data, based on reported incidents involving police or other law enforcement agencies. This is confirmed in the methodology section of the BJS report which neither the SPLC nor Barry Nolan even stirred themselves to link to.[18]
The following paragraphs are copied directly from the methodology section of the BJS report:
“SHR (Supplementary Homicide Reports ) data are based solely on police investigation. Not all law enforcement agencies which report offense information to the FBI also submit supplemental data on murder. At the time of analysis, the most recent SHR data contained information on 12,940 of the 16,204 murders reported in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. To account for the total number of homicides, the SHR data were weighted to match national and State murder estimates prepared by the FBI. All victim-based analyses are adjusted in this manner. “
“The dataset utilized in this report was compiled by James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. The dataset, along with additional details about imputation and estimation procedures, is available from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data.”
“To compare family violence recorded by police to nonfamily violence recorded by police, this report utilizes official police statistics reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2000.”
The rates of victimization by sex and other group identifications within this report quite obviously represents only those incidents reported to police, and which were accepted by responding officers as incidents in the category of domestic victimization. Unconsidered is the known tendency of men to under report domestic violence, and the vast amount of interpersonal violence that does not involve intervention by state functionaries. In some cases, men attempting to seek police intervention in their own defense are arrested, despite being the true victim of violence at the scene. To consider this single study applicable to the general population is absurd.
The grass-roots campaign canvassing the White House to establish a Council on Boys and men states in introduction of their July 2011 Maryland Report:
The most confusing, perplexing, and controversial area in which men’s health needs are overlooked is the issue of male victims of domestic violence. One immediately noticeable trend is the strong tendency to focus solely on female victims and ignore male victims. This tendency is seen repeatedly.
In 2009, Dr. Denise A. Hines of Clark University and Dr. Emily Douglas of Bridgewater State College presented conclusions of their research on partner violence in a lecture called “Men who Sustain Partner Violence and Seek Help: Their Abuse and Help Seeking Experiences and Implications for Prevention.”[18]
Clark and Douglas found that population-based studies indicate 25-50% of all partner victims in a given year are men. These men are generally ashamed to come forward, and expect that they will not be believed. They also feared that they would be accused of being the aggressor if they sought help.
Vivian L. Holley is an attorney has been practicing family law and mediation since 1978. Holley maintains a blog[19] in which she addressed the findings of Clark and Douglas’s research, pointing out that: “Almost all domestic violence shelters and hotlines offer services only to women. Most men were either turned away or referred to batterers programs. […] Ninety-seven percent experienced the local domestic violence agency to be biased against men; 80% did not treat men victims of domestic violence; and 69% suggested the male victim was really the batterer!”
Barry Nolan, just prior to concluding his piece indulges in some direct lying, by declaring: “If you really really don’t want to get beat up, killed, or thrown in jail, my suggestion to you would be to become a white male.” Nolan is indulging in misdirection here. It’s true that caucasian men are subject to lesser violent criminal victimization than black men, but Nolan’s insistence on framing this as a racial issue is deeply dishonest. The men’s movement is not a black versus white movement. White women are victimized by violence at lower rates to white men. Black women are victimized by violence at lower rates than black men. In criminal sentencing the same pattern emerges. Nolan manages to completely avoid the persistent problem of produced violence and criminality within communities and the relationship of that violence to fatherlessness, economic hardship, drug abuse and poor educational opportunities, all of which are functions of domestic policy, driven by what is increasingly obvious as an ideological narrative.[21]
But forget all that. According to Nolan it’s about being white and male. That’s the politically popular narrative, and somebody somewhere is giving Barry a cookie for saying so. Nolan concludes by announcing himself a mangina. Not a word I use, since it conveys appropriate contempt, but lacks explanatory power. In the public discourse of escalating acceptable hatred against men, white or otherwise, Barry Nolan is bending his back to be a good one. A good man, as distinct from bad men who openly complain as their identities are marginalized and their human rights set quietly out of site. The correct term for the good man identity Nolan seeks for himself is not mangina. It is collaborator.
[1] http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/feminist-governance-feminism/feminism-and-the-plague-of-male-homelessness/
[3] http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/Suicide_DataSheet-a.pdf
[2] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/socdemo/voting/publications/p20/2010/tables.html
[3] http://www.eac.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/1972%20-%201996%20Voter%20Registration%20and%20Turnout%20by%20Gender.pdf
[4] http://reason.com/blog/2010/03/03/fearmongering-at-the-splc
[5] http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-09/politics/31138610_1_civil-rights-group-civil-rights-underwater-mortgages
[6]http://spectator.org/blog/2010/03/02/the-great-hate-hype-are-libert
[7] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2011/0223/Annual-report-cites-rise-in-hate-groups-but-some-ask-What-is-hate
[8] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carol-m-swain/guilt-by-association-the_b_316107.html
[9] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/10/roosh-v-splc-misogyny-report_n_1335174.html
[10] http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/if-youre-not-left-wing-youre-a-hate-group/
[11] https://twitter.com/#!/MikeRiggs/status/178173450765082625
[12] http://csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
[13] Headey, B., Scott, D., & de Vaus, D. (1999). Domestic violence in Australia: Are Women and Men Equally Violent? Australian Social Monitor 2:57-62
[14] Dutton D. G. (2007). Female Intimate Partner Violence and Developmental Trajectories of Abusive Families. International Journal of Men’s Health, 6, 54-71
[15] Archer J (2000). Sex Differences in Physically Aggressive Acts between Heterosexual Partners: A Meta-Analytic Review. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 651-680
[16] http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/facts/1-20/2006/3%20crime%20victimisation.aspx
[17] http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf
[18] http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvs02.pdf
[19] http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/dhines/2009_Hawaii_presentation_NIMH_study_emd3.pdf
[20] http://www.vivianholley.com/wordpress/men-too-are-victims-of-domestic-violence
[21] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/24/idUS205013+24-Feb-2012+MW20120224
