Feminism did not kill Earl Silverman. Feminists are so completely sure of this that one of them, Mary Elizabeth Williams, over at salon.com, penned an article establishing feminism’s complete lack of culpability — in the title.
Feminism Didn’t Kill Men’s Rights Advocate Earl Silverman.
There you go. And it has to be true because feminists are working on men’s issues, too. Right?
We have been hearing for months now, since the MHRM has found some legs, that men have nothing to worry about; that feminists have our backs, really, really. We just need to help them dismantle patriarchy; help them reengineer men into non-raping, non-violent, non-patriarchal non-entities and our problems as sometimes suffering human beings will be addressed. We need to be patient, some say (and be willing to be humiliated). Others take the more direct approach and say we need to just shut the fuck up.
And if we would do those things, either be patient or shut the fuck up, then those equity valuing social saints we call feminists will make sure it is a better society for all, including men and boys.
I suppose that’s why after twenty years of dedicated research, meticulous documentation and tenacious, relentless pursuit for support for a single men’s shelter, from a feminist dominated domestic violence apparatus in Canada, Earl Silverman found himself marginalized, ignored and utterly, completely hopeless.
I suppose that is why he found himself hanging by the neck, dead, after reportedly having written a suicide note saying that he hoped his untimely death would help draw attention to the problems that 20 years of his heartfelt work could not.
In all candor, I do not find Williams’ article to be particularly surprising. In fact, if someone would have asked, I would have said you could set your watch the moment Earl was declared dead and counted ticks aloud until some feminist, on some feminist website wrote an article directed at a feminist audience assuring them that it was not their fault.
I would have predicted the article would find that in no way did feminist driven policies ignoring and burying the reality of male victimization and female perpetration have anything to do with this man’s despondency, much less his death. And I would have stated for sure that the writer would have made the case that a man who fought desperately and futilely for the humanity of men was in no way driven to the brink and over it by a culture and a feminist establishment that just did not give a damn.
I was not surprised that Williams stood on Earl’s carcass, cherry picking one highly biased source of domestic violence statistics (which were also conflated with sexual assault) to make him look dishonest and/or uninformed, while ignoring the massive body of evidence that demonstrates he was right on the money; that men are just about as likely as women to be the victims of domestic violence.
I was not even bothered by the fact that even if we accepted Williams’ single, slanted source for statistics that it does not explain the failure to have a single shelter for men in a country that is literally crawling with them for women.
I am not shocked, or even disappointed, that she took a cheap stab at MHRAs, linking to an episode of AVFM Radio and cherry picking quotes from callers, many of whom were overcome with shock and grief from the very recent news of Earl’s suicide.
I could have easily predicted that she would fail to mention the twenty years Earl Silverman spent being ridiculed and rejected by a feminist establishment that controls the DV service purse strings and has no intention whatsoever of seeing men and their children find help when their lives have been put in turmoil by violent women.
I am not even taken aback by the smarmy, phony pretense to compassion for Earl Silverman’s death that Williams performed as well as a former stripper in a B movie from the 1950’s.
No, none of this is surprising at all, especially the fact that a feminist would quickly come out and declare with a smug air of moral superiority that feminism had nothing to do with his death. I find that Williams’ take on all of this is only par for the course for an ideology of depraved indifference and solipsism practiced on a level that defies articulation.
But where I do, must, take a step back and reel in disgust is in Williams’ offering of an explanation for Earl Silverman’s demise.
This is the closing paragraph of Williams’ article, in its entirety:
But feminism wasn’t the cause of Silverman’s death. Instead, his story seems to be that of a man whose demons had long plagued him. Last month, as he prepared to shutter his shelter, he said that when he’d left his marriage two decades earlier, he was frustrated not merely by the lack of services for men, but the default narrative of male-as-abuser. “When I went into the community looking for some support services, I couldn’t find any,” he said. “There were a lot for women, and the only programs for men were for anger management. As a victim, I was re-victimized by having these services telling me that I wasn’t a victim, but I was a perpetrator … I basically tried to commit suicide,” he said, “because I couldn’t do anything.”
And in this, William sinks to a level that I had not even thought possible. She takes the words of Earl, as he recounts the despair of being a victim in a world that insisted, at the behest of feminists, that he could only be regarded as a perpetrator. She takes his deep pain of unthinkable betrayal, from twenty years past, and uses it to make him look like he was a fucking write-off before any of this came to be.
She essentially tells us how feminism did, in fact, kill Earl Silverman, while deflecting the blame to him as just another man with “demons.” Yes, he did have demons. He had demons that had “long plagued him,” just as Williams said. The only thing she forgot the mention is that the demons were her and those of her repugnant ilk.
