“Stop Demand”[1] is the name of a project, and a website.
This is nothing new. However it’s a particularly naked element of public hatred in an ongoing and escalating cultural war on the male half of the human race.
You remember men, right? They are the humans who are casually disposed of by every single nation in the world as the violence-dispensing and absorbing tools of foreign policy; the ones who die in every society on earth earlier than their female contemporaries; the humans who commit suicide 4 times more often than women; the human beings comprising the majority of the homeless, and who are 70 to 80 percent of the victims of violent crime; the humans who happen to suffer the vast majority of trauma induced mental illness, and who do all the most dangerous, dirty and deadly jobs in the world, while living under a never-ending narrative vilifying their basic human identity.
You know who I mean now, right? They are the overlords and masters of the world in a system of invisible, immeasurable and never to be questioned doctrine of supremacy. It’s Name-the-problem-men.
This particular example of hatred seeks, apparently, to eradicate male sexuality. You know, the element of basic human identity making your son not your daughter, and making your brother not your sister?
The website for this vile initiative includes a place for masculine self-loathing indoctrinees of our culture’s continued hate-on for men and boys to pledge their allegiance to the ideology of hatred for their own sexual identity.
http://www.stopdemand.org/formwcs0155238/man-up-take-the-pledge.html
The pledge pages includes a 3 item numbered list, along with a heading:
“The Man Up! Pledge is a Declaration by men who…”
1] Acknowledge that sexual violence, sexual exploitation and sexual denigration of women and girls is widespread, shatters lives, does not take place in a vacuum, and is a men’s issue to address and solve.
I acknowledge no such thing, because it is simply not true. Does sexual violence impact women? Of course it does. And is that female-impacting sexual violence a problem to be solved or otherwise reduced? Of – fucking – course it is! However, the premise that women are the only victims – or even that they are the majority of victims of sexual violence – is a knowingly-perpetrated lie.
In the United States in 2010:
There were roughly 84,767 forcible rapes reported to police, outside of prison populations. [2] Following the Bureau of Justice statistics definition of rape, this is almost exclusively female victimizing, as the definition is not “sex by force”, but penetration by force. In fact, the definition appears designed to omit any male-victimizing rape, other than penetration of the victim.
These 85 thousand rapes are counted as the-rapes-happening-within-American society. But there are also a great many male-victimizing rapes outside of prisons as well. How many? Nobody knows, because nobody with influence or access to funding has ever bothered to figure out how many. It’s probably something less than the 85 thousand for female victims. But it’s certainly more than the implied number: zero. I’d guess between 20 to 50 thousand, but of course, that’s a guess. I know it’s more than zero, so for conservatism’s sake, I’ll posit a number per year of male-victimizing rapes.
Lets’s say it’s one per year.
One?! That’s it? I’m outraged by 1?
No, not quite.
In 2010, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 140,000 inmates [in American prisons] had been raped while incarcerated.[3][4]
Prisoners are the most state-controlled population in our entire society and 140 thousand of them every year are raped. Clearly, our system endorses and enables such brutality[5].
Did I say 140 thousand? I meant 140 thousand, and one.
Oh, they’re criminals – and therefore deserve to be raped? Never mind that a vast majority of prison inmates are locked up for non-crimes such use or possession of cannabis; just try, in your head, to contrive a scenario in which some similar number of women and girls should deserve to be raped.
Organizers and participants of the public hate rallies called “slut walks” may claim “women deserve to be raped” is an element of public narrative–but it’s not. Such claims are just victim-posturing lies.
How about men, civilian and military, routinely raped as a tactic of demoralization in war around the world?[6][7][8] United Nations aid agencies specifically exclude them from receiving medical or other help, even when those agencies have funds and systems in place specifically designed to address sexual violence in war zones. Only women qualify. “Aid agencies and human rights defenders at the UN barely acknowledge its possibility.”[9]
How about the boy-trainees of the Taliban, raped as part of their indoctrination? Male homosexuals are routinely murdered by their own governments for their sexuality in Islamist states like Saudi Arabia. How about child and adult male prostitutes in cities like the one I live in? They are targeted by sexual and other violence far more than their female contemporaries, but not regarded by so-called anti-sexual violence programs like the vile and amoral “Stop Demand.”
To be explicitly clear, I don’t simply reject sexual violence against boys or men. Rather, like every other human who can plausibly claim to have a functional moral compass, I reject sexual violence, period. Not just against girls, not just against boys, against anyone. However, I also reject programs like the vomitrocious “Stop Demand” because it actually promotes, by omission of mention, the violence practiced around the world against men and boys. The directors and activists behind “Stop Demand” are not ignorant, nor uneducated. They are pretending. They are cynical profiteers.
Expressio Unius Est Exclusio Alterius:
Latin: the expression of one thing is the exclusion of the other.
http://www.duhaime.org/LegalDictionary/E/ExpressioUniusEstExclusioAlterius.aspx
Item 2 in the pledge list from Stop Demand.
Reject and denounce all forms of sexual violence, sexual exploitation and sexual denigration of women and girls.
No. And furthermore, fuck you. I think I’ve already covered this. In fact, I covered it directly above in the preceding paragraph. In the number 2 list item statement against sexual violence, the inclusion of the limiting clause “of women and girls” is a purposeful and implicit endorsement of sexual violence against anyone outside the category “women and girls”. It’s also a reinforcement of the hateful and populist mythology that male sexuality is predatory, violent, exploitative, and otherwise malevolent.
Am I now going to devote one or more paragraphs to a counter-argument that male sexuality is not the evil portrayed by mainstream feminist ideology? No, I won’t provide any such argument, because I don’t need to.
And the third item in the pledge for quislings? Possibly the most backward and depraved item of the three, reads as follows.
Agree to be proactive – to speak up, to speak out, to assist other men to “connect the dots” between commonly-held attitudes/beliefs/behaviours and harm, and to encourage one another to make better choices.
Oddly, I am, along with other male and female Men’s Human Rights Advocates (MHRAs), doing this already. The disconnect is that in the doctrinaire world of the “Stop Demand” project, this third admonition means buying into self-hatred, and into agreement that male identity, and in particular male sexuality, is a form of toxin. That is the hateful lie, and it’s the tool of induced shame and control leveraged against men and boys by the amoral and sociopathic profiteers behind projects like “Stop Demand”, “Duluth Model”, “White Ribbon Campaign”, “Don’t be that guy” and other poisonous garbage.
The really sick part? That setting aside male victims, human carnage, real harm and real sexual violence against girls and women is the raw marketing material these sociopath rape-profiteers require to justify their continued existence and incomes. When a woman or a girl is raped or suffers actual sexual violence, they make money. So ultimately, that carnage is what they foster more of.
Oh, and the phrase “man up” which appears both in the top-level, and in the secondary headings of the pledge page?
This is what it means. It’s an imperative statement:
Man up.
We recognize you are in pain. We recognize you are wounded, or harmed. Tough shit for you.
Your pain doesn’t matter, and doesn’t count. In fact, we won’t even count you a real man until and unless you just suck it up and get back to being a utility, a doer, a provider or a dispenser for those we’ve decided matter more than you.
It means, my brothers, fuck your humanity. Fuck your dignity as a person, fuck your injury, fuck your grief. Just suck it all up and get back to being a good, disposable utility.
Once understood, I cannot conceive any answer to this message, to man up, other than:
No, and fuck you.
Actually, “no” is not enough. To the purveyors and activists behind the depraved, and the sickening violence and sexual violence profiteering exemplified by projects like Stop Demand: We are coming for predators like you with a bright, illuminating light.
[1] stopdemand.org [do not link]
[2] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/violent-crime/rapemain
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_States
[4] http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html
[5] http://www.justdetention.org/en/factsheets/PREA_Fact_Sheet_FINAL.pdf
[6] http://www.irinnews.org/report/93960/health-rape-as-a-weapon-of-war-against-men
[7] http://iwpr.net/report-news/bosnia-struggle-overcome-male-rape-taboo
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world/africa/05congo.html?_r=0
[9] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-men
