Slop.
That’s what it has been my misfortune to read as yet another self-identifying “reporter” attempts to hitch his wagon to the populist, psuedo-human-rights-watchdog organization called the Southern Poverty Law Center; those rent-seeking lawyers whose shoddy semi-journalism and lack of due diligence earns a daily increasing tide of public rebuke.
Kyle Bachan, writing for the Canadian edition of the Huffington Post, attempts to take the moral high ground in his recent article addressing growth in the men’s movement. Unfortunately, like lesser commentators preceding him, the reporter shapes his published impression with persistent omissions. Bachan begins by noting the success of “The Innocence Project,” which works to exonerate the wrongly convicted. While the Innocence Project is a just and commendable endeavor – it is unconnected to the men’s rights movement (MRM). Bachan also mentions “Just Detention International” whose mandate is to end prison rape. It is also is not part of the MRM, although it shares overlapping goals. However, as Bachan’s article was published directly following the Southern Poverty Law Center’s ill-researched and clumsy attempt to raise funds, he cannot be unaware of the work of the False Rape Society (FRS), which aggregates mainstream reporting of false rape accusations. Bachan’s omission of mention of the work of the FRS is his work’s gauge.
Bachan makes his purpose clear with the statement, given its own paragraph to stand it apart from the rest of the text:
These emblems of progress represent all the good the MRM could accomplish if it wasn’t stymied by one simple premise — MRM doesn’t want to work with feminist groups
There are layers of deception and misdirection in the claim that we do not want to work with feminist groups, but all well-crafted falsehoods are salted with the truth.
Bachan omits the reasons for the reluctance to work with feminist groups, and that omission is central to understanding the movement itself.
In November of 2011, A Voice for Men – the largest online publication devoted to the MRM, ran a series of articles addressing the published intentions of a collection of self-identified feminists.
Setting aside whether these feminist academicians, social workers, child care professionals, lawyers and novelists had the means, their goals included promoting and organizing a campaign for the eugenic extermination of men. These activists also advocate a systematic denial of the human rights of men and boys, sex selective abortion, and the calculated abuse of male children with the intention of developmentally crippling them.
These were, and are, the publicly admitted goals of the bloggers and commentators on a site called radfemhub, whose members are known to be established professionals in the fields of education, law, community organization, publishing and child care. This gang of would-be murderers, despite repeated coverage by AVFM, was omitted by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate organization, while this site; AVfM, somehow merited mention as such.
Obviously, not all feminist organizations are so nakedly murderous in their published rhetoric. However, much of feminist reaction to MRM concerns over male suicide rates, homelessness, mistreatment by family courts, medical research, unequal criminal sentencing and so on is marked by avoidance, personal attack, threats, accusations, or simply ignored. Anyone with a passing acquaintance of MRM rhetoric will already know this.
A summary of this, published on AVfM as “Where is The Counter Argument?” and permanently listed in the site’s recommended reading, addresses the problem.
So, as Kyle Bachan noted, the men’s movement is reluctant to cooperate with feminist organizations. The reason strategically omitted is that these organizations persistently attempt to censor, silence, vilify, accuse, threaten, and deny the rights of men whose major offense is to claim their own humanity.
Again, not all feminist organizations are as pro-violence as Radfemhub. Most, like the eponymous National Organization for Women (N.O.W.), pursue the advancement of women, falling down only where their address of women’s victimization omits the equivalent or greater damage borne by men. Almost all public campaigns to relieve violence against women fail to address the persistent fact that violent criminal victimization has always, and continues to, land predominantly on men. Kyle Bachan mentions this complaint in his own article, illustrating his own omissions are not all due to ignorance.
Bachan also correctly states that “Ask any feminist and they’ll be sure to tell you that the fight for equality includes men,” although he fails to mention the difference between public utterance, principally affecting the perceptions of listeners, and activism that impacts public life, policy and law. The unfortunate reality is that what feminist organizations say, and what they do, are usually at significant odds.
Bachan also makes a selective note of the recent re-definition of rape by the FBI, achieved by a decade of canvassing by led by the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. Magazine. In the new definition, rape’s scope expanded to include sex while intoxicated. Bachan however omits to mention the political utility of such a change; that nonviolent, indeed consensual sexual encounters now criminalized by drunkenness will inflate the statistics which for the present show rape and sexual assault as the lowest occurrence category of violent crime tracked by the FBI.
Bachan also omits to mention the absurdly illogical double standard that deciding to operate a motor vehicle while intoxicated remains an act of adult volition, while deciding to participate in sex in the same condition is now defined as being victimized by a criminal sexual assault.
Further omitted in the crowing claim that, Hooray, men can now be counted as victims, is the fact that the updated definition carefully excludes the possibility of rape of a man by a woman. In Israel, when human rights activists attempted to include female-on-male rape in that state’s definition of the crime, feminists there marched in protest. Bachan omits to mention that, too.
Bachan’s failure is not limited to omission. He also represents a picture at odds with a world where feminist organizations advocating murder are not listed as hate groups, but those opposing murder are so listed. According to the Huffington Post reporter:
[W]hereas feminism has evolved to embrace the fight for the rights of all genders, races, and sexualities.
Where is a feminist organization seeking sexual equality in criminal sentencing? – as presently males are sentenced far more harshly in criminal courts [1][2].
Why, in the endless repetition of the increasingly false narrative of lifetime earnings imbalance is the predominance of 93% male workplace deaths ignored by feminists? [3][4]
Where are the feminists acting to address the issue that after 40 years of education systems being retooled to promote women’s opportunities – the system now produces over 60% female graduates. Feminists are discussing this issue, but rather than as a problem of inequality, their tone is one of triumphalism.[5][6]
Certainly, there are individual feminists whose personal activism is not the ongoing legal disenfranchisement of men, but where is there an organization, identifying as feminist, addressing any issue regularly raised within men’s rights groups?
Nowhere, which is why, in a climate of puerile accusation, censorship, and open contempt of the human rights of men by feminist organizations, the MRM is unwilling to work with them. But our HuffPo reporter, Mr. Bachan, omits to mention those minor details.
He would have his readers believe that non co-operation with feminists is equivalent to denial of women’s human rights. Aside from being untrue, it’s a cheap and convenient out.
Bachan also mentions Violence Against Women Act, and characterizes opposition to it as misogyny or acceptance of violence, but omits any mention or exploration of the ideological bias on which that law is built; namely the Duluth Model of domestic violence which states unequivocally that partner violence is exclusively male on female, and considers patriarchal oppression of all women by all men as the only source of that violence.
This conception is completely at odds with the majority of reputable research on domestic violence [7][8][9][10][11][12], which indicates reciprocity of abuse, and that women in violent relationships are “as violent or more violent than their male spouses or partners”[7].
VAWA provides the basis for sexual profiling – using the predominant aggressor doctrine [13]. This is an arrest procedure reduced to the simplistic view that men are bigger and stronger, and therefore guilty. This cultivates a law enforcement climate of policing by script, removing the judgement and discretion of police when dealing with DV situations more complex than the simplistic Only Men are Perpetrators Doctrine.
VAWA also provides incentives to frivolous prosecutions, rewarding prosecutors for robotically painting many men in non-abusive, non-violent disputes as violent criminals. However, these unimportant details are omitted by Bachan, because in the simplified world of his narrative – opposition to this corrupt law is exactly the same as promotion of actual violence against women.
The HuffPo reporter also employs quotation marks to suggest that the organization RADAR, whose mandate is accuracy of reporting of domestic abuse, ever, at any time suggested by statement or omission: “If we can’t have something that benefits us, then no one can”.
I was not aware that journalists could fabricate quotes and retain any semblance of professional credibility.
Bachan also mentions a survey [14], paid for by the Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters (which includes conclusions but no methodology and no data on sample size) to decry the apparent attitude of “us versus them,” within the men’s movement. For a real world example of this atavistic tribalism, readers are encouraged to read the summary of the Duluth Model website.
Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs creates innovative community-wide interventions to end violence against women and help men who batter to change.
If domestic violence actually conformed to this simplistic and false narrative, the phrases partner violence and domestic abuse would not exist, and we would all still use the obsolete distillation of anti-male hate contained in the phrase “wife beating.”
Unfortunately for these dishonest ideologues, the research refutes this black-and white narrative of universal male predation on women. If we’re honest, we recognize that “282 scholarly investigations: 218 empirical studies and 64 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners”.
In spite of this the domestic violence grievance industry pursues a public narrative in which all significant DV is male-on-female, because this is what resonates with our primitive desire to protect women and disregard men. This is what makes the DV industry money. But according to Bachan, it is the men’s movement indulging in an “us versus them” ideology. In 2010 Christina Hoff Sommers described the persistence of the grievance industry’s mythology in the following terms:
We’re not talking about a few errors. We’re not talking about occasional lapses. We’re talking about a body of egregiously false information at the heart of the domestic violence movement. False claims are pervasive. False claims are not the exception, they are the rule.
Bachan further clouds the issue by directly conflating feminism – which is an ideology, with women, a subset of the human race.
The question then, that feminists are likely to ask about MRM, is whether the movement is even looking for equality or if the whole thing is simply a guise to facilitate misogynistic tendencies. Judging from the anti-woman/anti-feminist sentiments that seem to entrench the most popular MRM online hangouts.
This accusation of misogyny is the sloppiest and oldest straw-man argument made to silence men speaking up on behalf of their own humanity. It’s the slipshod pretence that opposition to an ideology is equivalent to hatred of women. Identification of a biological demographic with a mythology of innate victimhood does not serve the human rights of that group. In fact, it denies the self-determination and adult volition of individuals within that group, which is one of the sole indicators of their status as equals.
Kyle Bachan’s article is not just slop, it’s execrable slop.
Sources
[1] http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/37/3/419.abstract
[2] http://works.bepress.com/gang_lee/5/
[3] http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfch0004.pdf
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_safety
[5] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
[6] http://scribe.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/watch-hannas-fabulous-end-men-ted-talk
[7] http://csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
[8] Headey, B., Scott, D., & de Vaus, D. (1999). Domestic violence in Australia: Are Women and Men Equally Violent? Australian Social Monitor 2:57-62
[9] Dutton D. G. (2007). Female Intimate Partner Violence and Developmental Trajectories of Abusive Families. International Journal of Men’s Health, 6, 54-71 [7] Archer J (2000). Sex Differences in Physically Aggressive Acts between Heterosexual Partners: A Meta-Analytic Review. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 651-680
[10] http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/facts/1-20/2006/3%20crime%20victimisation.aspx
[11] http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf
[12] http://fathersforlife.org/pizzey/genderless.htm
[13] http://www.saveservices.org/downloads/Predominant-Aggressor-Policies
