A reader sent me an article about men’s rights groups that was published yesterday in “Double X,” one of the countless feminist blogs that infest the internet. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother commenting on an article written in some obscure femzine, but evidently the author managed to get some statements from a couple of guys who are pretty high up in the fathers’ and men’s rights movement.
The article has all the usual scare-mongering, insinuations that men who fight for justice are “abusers,” and quotes from manginas who are in on the feminist racket. Discredited DV statistics are held to be canon, and MRA tactics equated with DV, etc. As a divorced man who went through a custody dispute, I know that it is very easy to be labeled a “perpetrator” or “abuser” without having broken any laws at all – even without being arrested and/or charged with anything – so I’m familiar with the technique, but it still gets my blood pressure up when I see it. Here’s an example from the article just to illustrate the point:
In this, critics like Australian sociologist Michael Flood say that men’s rights movements reflect the tactics of domestic abusers themselves, minimizing existing violence, calling it mutual, and discrediting victims. MRA groups downplay national abuse rates, just as abusers downplay their personal battery; they wage campaigns dismissing most allegations as false, as abusers claim partners are lying about being hit; and they depict the violence as mutual—part of an epidemic of wife-on-husband abuse—as individual batterers rationalize their behavior by saying that the violence was reciprocal. Additionally, MRA groups’ predictions of future violence by fed-up men wronged by the family-law system seem an obvious additional correlation, with the threat of violence seemingly intended to intimidate a community, like a fearful spouse, into compliance.
Does Australia have a real problem with greasy academics like this Flood fellow? Certainly seems that way.
Anyway, back to the main reason I am commenting on this article, its author, Kathryn Joyce, who is apparently a hardcore feminist, contacted Glenn Sacks, who runs the excellent Fathers & Families organization along with a radio show and his eponymous blog. Sacks is a polished, media-savvy guy, and I greatly appreciate his efforts to change things for the better. In fact, if anyone is going to talk to feminists, I’d prefer that he be the one to handle this unpleasant business.
However, I’d like to point out that Joyce spun his statements to indicate that Sacks calls people who are upset about what is happening to men “idiots” and suggests that they are dangerous. This is why I would counsel men to not even bother speaking as authorities on men’s issues with feminists at all. I seriously doubt Sacks intentionally said these things, but that’s what the woman is going to work into her piece — truth and context be damned. Actually, his very act of giving her the time of day lends some legitimacy to her article that – considering her typical abuse of statistics and underhanded insinuations – it doesn’t deserve.
Another thing to consider is that giving Ms. Joyce some of his time is something men couldn’t expect from feminist women in a similar position to Glenn. If I, for example, tried to contact Gloria Allred, saying that I write for a men’s rights magazine, does anyone believe that she would bother to get back to me? I don’t. So I don’t think feminists like Ms. Joyce should be extended a courtesy that men cannot currently expect. There’s no reciprocity, so why give them anything for free? I support Glenn doing a paid interview with these people, but he shouldn’t make their job easier by providing them with free statements they can and will twist any which way they want.
