The "Men's Rights Movement"

(Yes, this is really their graphic!)

While the NCFM does have some worthy causes-such as fighting male stereotypes in the media and conscription-their history of advancing misogyny (i.e. criticizing Rhianna for defending herself when she was getting the shit beat out of her) suggests that they are less interested in preventing violence against men than they are in preserving the patriarchy.

But it goes much further than that, as a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center explains:



After 10 years of custody battles, court-ordered counseling and imminent imprisonment for non-payment of child support, Thomas James Ball, a leader of the Worcester branch of the Massachusetts-based Fatherhood Coalition, had reached his limit. On June 15, 2011, he doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire just outside the Cheshire County, N.H., Courthouse. He was dead within minutes. In a lengthy “Last Statement,” which arrived posthumously at the Keene Sentinel, Tom Ball told his story. All he had done, he said, was smack his 4-year-old daughter and bloody her mouth after she licked his hand as he was putting her to bed. Feminist-crafted anti-domestic violence legislation did the rest. “Twenty-five years ago,” he wrote, “the federal government declared war on men. It is time to see how committed they are to their cause. It is time, boys, to give them a taste of war.” Calling for all-out insurrection, he offered tips on making Molotov cocktails and urged his readers to use them against courthouses and police stations. “There will be some casualties in this war,” he predicted. “Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.” For people who associate the men’s and fathers’ rights movements with New Age drum circles in the woods, the ferocity of Ball’s rhetoric, the horror of his act, and, in particular, the widespread and blatantly misogynistic reaction to it may come as something of a revelation. When the feminist Amanda Marcotte, a bête noire of the men’s rights movement, remarked that “setting yourself on fire is an extremely effective tool if your goal is to make your ex-wife’s life a living hell,” a poster at the blog Misandry.com went ballistic. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” he raged. “She is evil and such a vile evil that she is a disease that needs to be cut out of the human [consciousness] just like the rest of the femanazi ass harpies.”

One needn't look any further than the NCFM's own T-shirts to see exactly how they feel about feminists:

[SPLC report cont.]

The men’s movement also includes mail-order-bride shoppers, unregenerate batterers and wannabe pickup artists who are eager to learn the secrets of “game”—the psychological tricks that supposedly make it easy to seduce women. George Sodini, who confided his seething rage at women to his blog before shooting 12 women, three of them fatally, was one of the latter. Before his 2009 murder spree at a Pittsburgh-area gym, he was a student — though clearly not a very apt one — of R. Don Steele, the author of How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. “I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me over an 18 or 25-year period,” Sodini wrote with the kind of pathos presumably typical of Steele’s readers.

Indeed, as Right Wing Watch reported yesterday , the anti-VAWA coalition includes Timothy Johnson, a convicted wife batterer, and Philip Cook, the director of Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE), on whose site the letter is hosted. SAVE is the organization that succesfully lobbied House Republicans to roll back protections for immigrant victims of domestic violence under VAWA. As Laura Bassett reported last week at the Huffington Post, SAVE’s treasurer Natasha Spivack is the founder of a Russian Mail order bride service , and "has a major financial interest in reducing immigrant protections".

[SPLC report cont.]

Threats & Abuse One kind of abuse that is undeniable is the vilification of individual women on certain men’s group websites. The best example of that may be Register-Her, a registry of women who “have caused significant harm to innocent individuals either by the direct action of crimes like rape, assault, child molestation and murder, or by the false accusation of crimes against others.” The site was set up by Paul Elam, the blogger behind A Voice for Men, less than two weeks after Ball’s suicide. “If Mary Jane Rottencrotch decides to falsely accuse her husband of domestic violence in order to get the upper hand in a divorce,” Elam boasted on his Internet radio show, “we can publish all her personal information on the website, including her name, address, phone number … even her routes to and from work.” Under a headline reading, “Why are these women not in prison?” the site features photos and information about some 250 alleged malefactors, including notorious women like Lorena Bobbitt and Tonya Harding, although Elam hasn’t made good on his threat to publish home addresses or phone numbers. Many of those listed received prison sentences for various crimes, but large numbers were acquitted in court, while others were never accused of any lawbreaking. A well-known feminist, for example, is listed for “anti-male bigotry,” which is compared to racism. Elam’s site can be frightening to its targets. In one case, he offered a cash reward to the first reader to ferret out a pseudonymous feminist blogger’s real name. In another, Elam singled out a part-time blogger at ChicagoNow who describes herself as a “vegetarian park activist with two baby girls.” The woman’s mistake was to write about her discomfort with male adults helping female toddlers in the bathroom at her daughter’s preschool. The blogger conceded that she was being sexist, but wrote that “I’d rather be wrong than find out if I’m right.” After the woman was listed, she was widely attacked on men’s movement sites. “I don’t always use the word ‘cunt’ to describe a woman,” one poster raged, “but when I do it’s because of reasons like these.” Shocked, the “Mommy blogger” took down her original post and apologized for her “demonization of men.”

As a feminist blogger I've been on the receiving end of this kind of treatment before. After making a blog posting in which I commented on a high-profile rape case, the link to my blog was cross-posted on a "Men's Rights" forum. Next thing I knew, I found myself inundated with misogynistic comments from men outraged that I spoke about rape. One commenter superimposed a picture of my head onto the body of a woman in a violent and degrading porn pose. Another called my then-18 month old daughter "a worthless cum dumpster just like her mother". This is not at all uncommon for female bloggers-La Femnista has written about this in her post They'd like to rape, kill and urinate on you. My experience was so traumatizing that I stopped blogging completely for almost 2 years.

As you can see, the National Coalition for Men is affiliated with Voices For Men-They link to them on their website:

Voices for Men has released their own statement in supportof the Cantor/Adams version of VAWA, as has the aforementioned mail-order bride affiliated group SAVE

I encourage you to read the entire article, as well as their follow up. It's scary.

Misleading Statistics

•[V]iolence that is instrumental in the maintenance of control – the more systematic, persistent, and injurious type of violence -- is overwhelmingly perpetuated by men, with rates captured by crime victimizations studies. Over 90% of this violence is perpetuated by men.(Male Victims of Domestic Violence: A Substantive and Methodological Research Review, 2001) •Women accounted for 85% of the victims of intimate partner violence, men for approximately 15%. (Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief, Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2001, February 2003) •On average, more than three women and one man are murdered by their intimate partners in this country every day. In 2000, 1,247 women were killed by an intimate partner. The same year, 440 men were killed by an intimate partner. Intimate partner homicides accounted for 30% of the murders of women and 5% percent of the murders of men.(Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief, Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2001, February 2003. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Intimate Partner Violence in the U.S. 1993-2004, 2006.) •85% of domestic violence victims are women. (Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief, Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2001, February 2003) •One in 6 women and 1 in 33 men have experienced an attempted or completed rape. (U.S. Department of Justice, “Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women,” November 1998)

Above all, the hallmark cause of the "Men's Rights Movement" is perpetuating the idea that gender-based violence is a myth. In other words- men are abused by women as frequently as or even more often than women are abused by men. The NCFM website is riddled with statistics from flawed studies, or cherry picked data taken completely out of context, claiming this as fact. In reality, empirical data shows that men are exponentially more likely to be aggressors, and women victims:This is not to say that men cannot be battered or raped, or that they are not deserving of protection and safety from abuse. But to suggest that they are victims of institutionalized opression, sexism and gender-based violence in the same way that women are is simply ludicrous.

Furthermore, a majority of their efforts seems to be aimed at discrediting victims of rape and domestic violence. Their page on false allegations, for example, has the absurd claim that 50% of rape accusations are false. In reality, every empirical study has shown that number to be less than 10%.

Despite their glaring inaccuracies and clear anti-woman bias, they were successful in convincing the house to strip protections for immigrant women in the House Version of the bill. They were able to do this despite no evidence that such a problem exists in the first place. And Republicans (as well as 6 democrats) listened to them-despite the fact that stripping these protections put women in serious jeopardy and will almost certainly end up costing lives. As Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calif.) said. "This bill is outright dangerous."

Bottom line-next time you hear a Republican try to claim "There's no such thing as a war on Womenz!" tell them to stick this in their pipe and smoke it.



(Please see the diary I posted earlier today for Action Steps, and sign my petition at Change.org to get the Senate version of VAWA passed!)