Well, almost.
TLDR;
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Kate Harding, a feminist contributor at Jezebel has stated the following.
- Jezebel contributor Kate Harding has admitted the major issues addressed by the men’s rights movement are legitimate and correct;
- Jezebel contributor Kate Harding is pretending that feminism has not opposed the human rights issues of the MRM she now acknowledges as legitimate;
- Kate Harding of Jezebel admits that the MRM is a strictly nonviolent movement;
- Jezebel contributor Kate Harding has attempted to claim that she, and feminists in general are responsible for the current successes of the MRM in mainstreaming many of this movement’s issues, including father’s rights, reciprocity in DV, the invisibility of violence against men, etc;
- Kate Harding, and likely the editors of Jezebel are also evidently frightened by their loss of the feminist monopoly on public gender discourse, as evidenced by a public temper tantrum laced with repetitions of: “Fuck you MRAs”.
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Feminists are now claiming credit for MRA successes. Kate Harding, a commentator on Jezebel.com, has a few warm words for all of us in the men’s rights movement.
Fuck you, she says.
She gives herself an out, wrapping her diatribe in plausible deniability by announcing that it is the site’s “first annual week of desperate emotional cleansing and unhinged psychic purging.”
If Harding needs to practice some necessary mental hygiene, (she does) I’d much prefer it not be attached to the human rights movement of which I am a part.
However, putting aside the excuses for incoherence, the first paragraph of Harding’s absurd rant encapsulates an emerging change in feminist tactics.
Fuck you, first of all, for making it nearly impossible for decent men struggling with abusive partners or unfair custody arrangements to get the help they need and deserve. You have forever tainted those issues with your rage-filled, obsessively anti-woman horseshit, to the point where it’s become difficult for any rational, compassionate person to trust a man who claims he’s been screwed over in family court or abused by a female partner, even if he has.
Kate Harding is trying to position feminism as the driver behind the accomplishments of the men’s rights movement,such as bringing to public notice the anti-father bias in the family courts. According to Harding, we are screwing up the noble efforts of feminists to bring attention to men’s issues.
You read that right, the feminists have figured out they are losing ground rapidly. In response, they are trying to put themselves in front of the parade. They are literally switching sides, and hoping nobody notices.
I suppose we should invite Kate Harding to join the AVFM’s and the NCFM’s Judicial Activism Committee. Perhaps she can help us in the disbarment of the next corrupt family court prosecutor.
Hi Carletta.
I couldn’t make this stuff up, and no, AVfM has not recently partnered with The Onion.
According to Harding:
That’s the thing, MRAs. By and large, American feminists are really into equality, involved fathers, justice for all, dismantling bullshit gender roles, and helping folks leave dangerous relationships. We would be the natural allies of MRAs, if MRAs were sincerely committed to the causes with which they claim to be chiefly concerned.
Silly me, and here I was thinking that feminists opposed the decades of struggle of men’s and fathers rights activists for legal recognition and equality under the law.
Oh, wait, they do.
Quoting Gloria Woods of the Michigan chapter of NOW:
Michigan NOW opposes forced joint custody for many reasons: it is unworkable for uncooperative parents; it is dangerous for women and their children who are trying to leave or have left violent husbands/fathers; it ignores the diverse, complicated needs of divorced families; and it is likely to have serious, unintended consequences on child support.[3]
In other words, fathers gaining shared custody might impact the amount of money divorcing wives can shake them down for. Stop the bad menz!
But surely, the feminist position of the 1990’s was just a blip in an otherwise egalitarian movement, right?
Barry Nolan, a Boston columnist and feminist wrote this earlier in 2012:
Angry, radical men’s groups believe males are being victimized by out-of-control judges and politicians. They’re wrong and they’re dangerous and they need to be stopped.[1]
According to Nolan, we’re wrong, dangerous, and we need to be stopped. Mary Kellett, the Ellsworth County Assistant D.A. recently recommended for suspension by the Maine Overseers of the Bar probably thinks so too, as does her boss, Carletta Bassano.
Contrasting Mr. Nolan’s idiotic lies, a small detour into another oppositional ideologue’s attack on the MRM is worth revisiting.
It should be mentioned that the SPLC did not label MRAs as members of a hate movement; nor did our article claim that the grievances they air on their websites – false rape accusations, ruinous divorce settlements and the like – are all without merit.[2]
That’s what Arthur Goldwag of the SPLC admitted in the middle of his backpedaling after publicly crapping the bed in an inept attempt to paint AVFM as a hate organization. I don’t know if the SPLC is still publicly partnered with radicalhub – where Pam O’Shaughnessy’s 4000 word cheerleading for male exterminating eugenics is still proudly hosted.
But according to Kate Harding of Jezebel, “By and large, American feminists are really into equality.”
Of course they are. And now that we’re winning, Kate and her comrades would like to quietly change their stripes to match ours, and pretend our fight was theirs all along.
Of course, in her enthusiasm to type the phrase “fuck you” as many times as possible, Harding makes a huge number of concessions, not just admitting most of the broad arguments made by the MRM are entirely legitimate, but actually trying to claim support for them.
You’re a bit late to the party Kate, but come on in, put your beer in the fridge.
Unfortunately, although conceding the legitimacy of the arguments of this movement, she’s not quite ready to let go of her feminist tendencies to field straw man arguments; to mischaracterize and attribute sinister motives to MRAs. In fact, although seeming to position herself to claim credit for successes of MRAs, she takes several paragraphs to outright lie, presenting feminist-distorted versions of many issues discussed in the men’s rights movement.
Harding claims that addressing the male half of victims of domestic violence, or the substantial fraction of sexual assault and rape impacting males constitutes “trying to make it all about [men]”.
Considering that feminists discussing violence seem incapable of doing so without the limiting clause “against women”, the accusation “Fuck you for showing up every time women speak, especially about rape and abuse, and trying to make it all about you,” seems more like projection than observation. In addition – the mention of “every time women speak” is a well-worn rhetorical trick. It is the conflation of feminism (an ideology) and women (a group of people).
Apparently, Kate Harding is not aware that these two things are not interchangeable, and that a growing number of the women she attempts to lay claim to are rejecting her violent, hateful ideology of gender. In fact, a growing number of women are MRAs.
Harding also characterizes any mention of the feminist hero Marc Lepine not conforming to feminist narrative as “derailing”. Unfortunately, Lepine committed his public muder-suicide 23 years ago in the Canadian province of Quebec, due at least in part to his own dysfunctional and abusive upbringing.
Hanging his behavior on the door of every male human being is an act of nearly transcendent dishonesty and depravity, and attributing his actions to men, or to the MRM is frankly craven. Pointing this out, or pointing out any of the relevant details of Gamil Garbi’s life which influenced that unfortunate outcome is “derailing” according to Harding.
Any examination straying from approved, sanitized, women-are-victims-men-are-evil standard narrative, that’s not allowed.
She also demonstrates difficulty with her reading comprehension. MRAs, according to Kate Harding, want a cookie for not killing anyone. While it’s heartening to see she finally grasps the fundamental ethic of nonviolence of the MRM, we don’t want cookies, we want the basic human rights which women in the 21st century take for granted. Equal provision as victims of violence, basic reproductive rights, the restoration of presumption of innocence in the courts, recognition as human beings apart from male utility as providers of labor and money for other people’s benefit, and as designated sponges for and dispensers of violence. Those things are not a cookie, Kate.
However, in spite of her many lies, and her tendency to impute motive, Harding is at least mouthing the words of agreement with many of the issues of the MRM.
Unfortunately, she disappoints in her claims that the violent and hateful screaming abuse at the November 16 U of T event have now received death threats. This is a case of the Jezebel who cried wolf.
To understand the “cried wolf” reference, a little back story is necessary.
In the summer of this 2012, I was personally invited by email to participate in a debate, proposed and organized by Jessica Mason-Paull on the topic of “has feminism gone too far?”
I Accepted immediately, but within 24 hours, Mason-Paull had cancelled the event, after receiving death threats for daring to propose such a blasphemous topic.
Jezebel published that those threats had been from MRAs after it was already published by feminist blogs in Vancouver that they had made those threats themselves, posing as MRAs, to silence and intimidate Mason-Paull (and to silence others).
Harding, now writing for Jezebel claims: “Fuck you for making rape and death threats against young women who dared to protest a speaking engagement.”
Do I believe there’s internet trash talking from uninformed bystanders? Certainly.
Do I accept the claim that a Men’s Rights Activist is making death threats? No, because it’s nonsense. In fact, it’s such obvious nonsense I wonder that Kate Harding is not embarrassed by her own much recycled damselling.
In addition, Kate’s claims about Dr Warren Farrell – as an advocate of incest are simple lies. Farrel did 7 years of research on that topic, and one of his most surprising findings was that in some cases, sexual contact between parents and children were seen by those children as positive. He was as shocked and surprised as anyone else, and he documented those findings in the neutral language of a professional scholar. He certainly did not advocate any such contact, nor did he claim “little girls would enjoy being raped by their fathers.”
The sordid characterization of such claim reflects the leanings of Harding, and of the source she cited, notably not the published work of Dr. Farrell.
Strangely, Harding precedes each item in a long list of well-documented problems addressed by MRAs with it’s own “fuck you”. Despite her article’s early acknowledgement of the legitimacy of many of the causes of the MRM, she lists many more, pretending they are fictional. Almost as-if she’s providing an invitation for a MRA to cite examples of each item she pretends doesn’t exist. I suppose, under the editorial guidelines of Jezebel, she can’t just come right out and advocate the MRA position directly.
For example:
Fuck all of you for doing your very best to propagate myths that make it harder for women to be safe—that we’re a bunch of lying temptresses who bang hapless men and file bogus rape charges for the lulz
Yeah, that never happens.
UConn Student Accepted Into Program After False Rape Complaint
http://articles.courant.com/2012-12-12/news/hc-storrs-uconn-false-rape-complaint-1213-2-20121212_1_university-of-connecticut-police-false-statement-warrant-states
Lynette Lee Filed False Rape Claim Over Bad Sex: Cops
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/04/lynette-lee-false-rape-claim-bad-sex_n_2238263.html
Cornell attempted rape claim a lie, police say–but not sure if they’ll charge woman who made the false report
http://cornellsun.com/section/news/content/2012/09/27/female-reports-attempted-rape-near-engineering-quad
Woman who falsely claimed she was raped by three men because she regretted having sex with them jailed for two years
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2204712/Woman-falsely-claimed-raped-men-regretted-having-sex-jailed-years.html
Harding continues:
…or that we get into perfectly even fights with our hardworking, loving husbands, then call the cops and have them arrested because we’re spiteful bitches.
I don’t know whether Harding or anyone else is a spiteful bitch or not. But her disposition, bitchy or otherwise, is irrelevant when considering human behavior across a wide culture.
Almost all domestic violence programs, including that informing the procedural guidelines for police responding to domestic disputes uses the Duluth Model as a theoretical foundation. The Duluth model is a pseudo-academic item of feminist fantasy, dressed up in scholarly language, but claiming that all violence is male, even female perpetrated violence. The result of this being that in many cases where men are the victims of domestic violence, or if they are accused of participating in DV – they are arrested based on profiling by an anti male ideology, and not based on evidence or traditional police work.
For Kate Harding to paint over this is simply absurd. She is a joke.
She doesn’t come right out and use the word “Sammich” but she comes close.
According to Harding:
[MRAs] are chiefly concerned with one thing, and one thing only: Putting feminists in their place. Which is in the kitchen at best and in the ground at worst, if you ask these unapologetically misogynistic bags of rot.
Sadly, she appears to have grown so careless that she’s gotten sloppy. We (apparently) want to put feminists in the kitchen?
“..Putting feminists in their place. Which is in the kitchen at best..”
I thought the standard lie was that we want to put /women/ back in the kitchen? Feminists and woman aren’t the same thing, after all. One word refers to the followers of an ideology, the other identifies people by sex. I certainly don’t want Ideologues in my kitchen, or anywhere else in my home. And If we really did hate women as much as it’s claimed, how would that work with keeping them in our kitchens? If I hated some group, wouldn’t I want to keep them away from me?
But she’s not done yet. If not in the kitchen, we want to put “them” (feminists? Women?) in the ground.
Ooh that sounds scary and dangerous, but didn’t Harding come right out and admit earlier in the very same article that MRAs are explicitly opposed to violence? Well, not quite, but she came close, saying “because you […] want a fucking cookie for not killing anyone.”
As before, it’s not a cookie we want. But public recognition as a strictly non violent human rights movement is progress, now that Kate Harding has acknowledged it, albeit grudgingly.
And in an article with entirely too much nonsense to parse it all, I’ll skip to one other item of note.
Your feminist enemies don’t hate men; we only hate men who proudly stand up for the rights of abusers, rapists, and deadbeat dads.
This claim illustrates something truly sinister in feminist rhetoric and thinking. The idea that an individual accused of a crime is simply guilty by virtue of the accusation. That’s the word “rapist” in Harding’s piece, accused, therefore a rapist. Oh yeah, and what about female rapists? While we don’t think kindly of them, they’re still humans with rights.
Similarly, “deadbeat dads” is another vicious item of invective too often applied to men punished and maligned not because they are irresponsible shirkers but because they have been stripped of their incomes, homes and children and encumbered with an onus to pay exceeding their income.
And yes, we even stand firmly on a principled defence of the rights of abusers. ‡‡ Like the young woman who screamed “fucking scum” at a man attempting to discover answers to why his two friends had commuted suicide. It is her right to broadcast her opinion to the world, and we may criticize her, we would never consider silencing her – or denying any human right to anyone.
Finally, according to Harding:
The simple fact is, most men don’t beat, rape, or resent caring for their own children, and thus have no need for the kind of support and “activism” you specialize in.
Actually, this reality, admitted by Harding – that most men are decent human beings – informs the urgency and the need for what we do. There aren’t many of us (MRAs), but that’s changing rapidly, and we will not stop. Especially since it’s obvious now who is winning: the side actually arguing for human rights. Even feminists like Kate Harding are now trying to switch sides.
And obviously, if Miss Harding would like to publicly and clearly adopt a position in favor of the issues she’s admitted, the real concerns of this movement, (reform in the family court, in government or education) she’s welcome to contact this site’s editorial board as a prospective contributor.
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Summary:
- Prominent feminists are now aware of the growing success of this human rights movement, and publicly recognize the legitimacy of the core issues of the MRM;
- These feminists are now scrambling to pretend that they, and their movement have not opposed these human rights issues;
- In fact, feminists are now likely to claim that the successes of the MRM, which we achieved despite continuous and relentless opposition from feminists and their organizations – feminists are now pretending these were their fights all along;
- Feminists – including Kate harding of jezebel are now pretending that the MRAs who achieved the small successes towards human rights for men and boys are (according to feminists) /hindering/ the brave, noble and egalitarian feminists pretending now, to have always supported these issues they now publicly recognize as real;
- Although feminists are now pretending to have been on the side of human rights all along, they’re as yet unable to stop lying about MRAs, and falsely attributing a motive of evil to us. Baby steps for them, baby steps;
- Kate Harding is invited to contribute as an author at AVfM.
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‡‡ the double dagger symbol denotes a quote-mining opportunity, allowing an easy point of reference for partial citations and mis-representation of intent by critics or oppositional writers .
[1] http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/2012/08/angry-men-feminist-agenda/
[2] http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2012/05/15/intelligence-report-article-provokes-outrage-among-mens-rights-activists/
[3] http://now.org/nnt/03-97/father.html
