Menslib talking bollocks about false accusations

Cyb3rd31ic_Citiz3n · 2021-12-03T11:23:24+00:00

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CranverrySweet · 2021-12-03T17:14:45+00:00

Sort by controversial and one of the first comments is the story of the guy whose cousin killed himself over a false accusation.

That should tell you the kind of victim-silencing that subreddit partakes in.

TEL-CFC_boi · 2021-12-03T13:12:12+00:00

There's a TV show on Netflix called Criminal: United Kingdom. S02E02 deals with a case where a man is accused of rape, and the episode is an interrogation of him, and they debate whether the accusation is false. I would recommend giving that a watch. While it is fictional, it shows how the police are actively out to get him (despite innocent until proven guilty) and makes a point that even if he doesn't get charged, the accusation will never leave him

Sef-Efrica · 2021-12-03T10:29:43+00:00

It's like their view on being ok with false accusations against men are inverted from the traditional liberal view of being against the death penalty:

namely that it's known that as many as 5% of men sentenced to death in America were deceicively innocent. I'd much rather let 10 guilty men live than kill one innocent.

It's almost like they are ok with the collateral damage of sending 1/10 innocent men to jail, because they lose all scope of justice once sex crimes are involved.

a-man-from-earth · 2021-12-03T10:00:20+00:00

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DekajaSukunda · 2021-12-03T15:33:58+00:00

Statistically speaking femicide is not very common either. Are women delusional for fearing that?

Also race, gnder, class, etc. Dont exist in a vacuum. A false rape accusation against a black man is about this blackness as much as it is his maleness. Would it happen to a white man? Less likely. A black woman? Less likely...if at all? Do women ever get falsely accused of sexual crimes?

MensLib is trash. I normally like checking the original threads when I see posts like this but I won't bother now. That place is so depressing.

BloodRedCobra · 2021-12-03T13:26:11+00:00

They also don't talk about how courts prioritize getting a conviction- including falsifying evidence and even lying to the victim to get one like with Broadwater. Imagine being falsely imprisoned for a rape you didn't commit, and now also imagine being the victim realizing your rapist walked away scot-free. It doesn't necessarily have to be the woman doing the false imprisonment...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/nyregion/alice-sebold-rape-case.html

Douglas0327 · 2021-12-03T10:20:08+00:00

It's a feminist sub so won't publish anything that is critical of feminist ideology - basically they believe men deserve trickle down equality once women's issues are sorted, which of course will never happen. The funniest thing about that sub is that men sacrificing themselves for women is exactly the sort of gender stereotype feminsim is supposed to be fighthing. It's beyond parody.

superzepto · 2021-12-03T14:53:45+00:00

I hate that that post frames the issue as being about men's reputations VS women's safety. It's such a shitty straw man argument. Men lose their livelihoods and means of providing for their families (which primarily includes women and children), and men spend decades in prison for a crime they never committed. Just look at the Alice Sebold case. Yes women's safety is at stake, but men's livelihoods and liberties are too. And even when it is a man's reputation that gets damaged, that black cloud can follow him for years with no hope of clearing his name. Not taking both of those sides into account leads people to believe that feminism isn't the egalitarian movement it claims to be, and I think that's a fair deduction given the current rhetoric. Feminism should be egalitarian with a focus on women's issues the same way that men's rights advocacy should be egalitarian with a focus on men's issues, but both need to take into account the broader picture or they both fall into chaos.

Algoresball · 2021-12-03T18:40:08+00:00

I got banned for that sub by suggesting that an 11 year boy with mental health issues wasn’t “toxic masculinity” and that he didn’t need to be told that it’s okay to wear pink and lectured to about sexual assault

I’d love to hear them explain to men who spent most of their lives in jail over false accusations how it’s not a big deal

MelissaMiranti · 2021-12-03T21:41:49+00:00

Which means out of all the women you meet you have a 0.005% chance of being falsely charged of rape.

I just wanted to quote this part, which means that for every 20,000 meetings between individual men and women, there is a false charge of rape in a court of law at a minimum, assuming all of the numbers are correct. Given the hundreds of millions of people in the country that (most) of those stats were taken from, that's quite a lot of false charges. Think of how many people you've met in your life. Is it 500? 1000? 10,000?

And why does it matter how common or uncommon false charges are? The relative rarity of an event does not matter to the person it's happening to. And aid should not be provided to only the most common of disasters, nor should justice require a certain number of instances to be carried out properly. The subject of rarity only makes sense when you're trying to reassure someone that it will or won't happen to them, specifically. Yet the post denigrates possible consequences for people who do falsely accuse, and it denigrates those who care. That means the aim for talking about the rarity is not to reassure, but instead to downplay the issue as a whole. That is unacceptable.

Zinziberruderalis · 2021-12-03T21:03:22+00:00

Most false accusations don't go to trial, so basing your counts on trials will result in a large under count.

LokisDawn · 2021-12-03T11:55:43+00:00

Is feminism about taking agency away from women now?

Yes?

bkrugby78 · 2021-12-03T12:00:05+00:00

It was just over a year ago that I got banned from that place for...being a member of a sub that regularly made fun of it. Not for anything I posted, just simply being a member.

This does not surprise me in the least, but then again, I don't go looking for this kind of stuff either. I simply deleted the thought of Men's Fib from my brain and instead look at other content on here.

PlagueDoctorMars · 2021-12-03T10:18:04+00:00

If they think they're really doing anything good on men's behalf with that little circle jerk sub, they're only fooling themselves.

a-man-from-earth · 2021-12-03T10:23:58+00:00

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austin101123 · 2021-12-03T16:17:19+00:00

That post only really counts ones reported to police, erasing social effects of reports to individuals, social media, and employers, and threat of reports. Not just for rape but assault and harassment too, can be damaging.

comfy_cure · 2021-12-03T17:23:25+00:00

In my case a false accusation was used to cover up sexual assault, domestic violence injuries, to renege out of domestic agreements, and to bar my speech so that I couldn't say anything about it. It's been awkward and embarrassing to be on both sides of the situation, both falsely accused and victim. Often I've found that either side can't empathize with the other because of a superficial resemblance to their problem and I think it's a real tragedy.

AnnonymousXXX · 2021-12-04T15:35:55+00:00

Triskellatri said, "The argument is against there being a pandemic of false accusations, not that the results of a false accusation are negligible."

As usual, feminists move the goal post for how many false accusations have to happen in order for it to be a serious problem.

In their logic, murder should be legal just because not everybody is a murderer.

WeEatBabies · 2021-12-03T12:14:25+00:00

5 to 10% that we know of :
95% of convicted people take plea bargains : https://bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/media/document/PleaBargainingResearchSummary.pdf

And even if it's just 5%, it is still an astronomical number, we are jailing innocents so that feminist can get their revenge when they get dumped.

SuspicousEggSmell · 2021-12-03T18:33:52+00:00

I have no real statistics, but the amount of stories I’ve read where a guy was coerced into sex, or didn’t call the cops for something because they were threatened with being reported for rape makes me wonder

gaelorian · 2021-12-03T14:17:17+00:00

Menslib commenters are allowed to talk about men’s issues the way prisoners are allowed to exercise. Sure, there’s a gym but if you even think of doing any exercise they disagree with you’re put back in your cell.

Cfox006 · 2021-12-03T15:30:31+00:00

Menslib is so eye roll worthy. It’s the epitome of a dude pretending to care about equality while putting himself down to try and let girls know he supports women like it’s a personality trait.

I also will never understand NEEDING to write a post about defending false accusations? Like do they realize it IS a problem and that they’re basically saying individual men’s lives are no concern to them? Like the act of false accusations being an actual thing in our society alone and being taken seriously is in and of itself discrimination and blatant sexism because these accusation will only ever be believed if it’s a woman doing them?

BCRE8TVE · 2021-12-03T20:08:57+00:00

Is feminism about taking agency away from women now?

Always has been. Can't be held accountable for anything if it's never your fault, and incredibly useful to always redirect the blame for anything and everything, including women's own choices, back onto men.

RoryTate · 2021-12-04T14:55:13+00:00

What should also be mentioned are all of the police reports that are marked "Closed as informational report" in the detailed data of those academic studies on rape accusations. What this means is basically that the accuser misapplied the laws, and no criminal act occurred, so the police just close the file as "informational". Those were found to be around 1 in 5 (this could be higher, as it was a small sample size of several hundred IIRC) reports in one of the most well known studies I read. This is the Aziz Ansari situation, where the woman believes that even a small level of mental discomfort or uncertainty – unspoken and not clearly communicated – is enough to meet the legal criteria for rape. And this despite the fact that – if you really consider the words in Aziz's accuser's post that "sometime later his pants were down" (this is not a direct quote, but it is close enough from what I recall of her text) – she was likely the one who pulled down his pants to perform oral sex on him. Yet she felt the need to obfuscate that fact, and wrote everything in a wierd detached manner where inanimate objects move of their own volition, likely because she was desperately trying to make it seem like she had zero agency in anything that happened, which is ridiculous when the situation involves a conscious, adult human being in possession of all of their faculties.

If police reports are judged to be false accusations of this type at around a 1 in 5 or a 1 in 4 rate, then it is obvious that for social media accusations – or indeed, any case where objective legal processes are not involved, such as on university campuses – the probability is even higher. Victimhood status is a valuable currency, and what better way to get revenge on someone you hate without any effort or consequences on your part?

This whole "it's a minor worry"/"you're more likely to get hit by lightning" dismissal really comes down to the empathy gap. People just don't care what happens to men. Yet I have been absolutely destroyed by a false accusation myself (and I know many others who experienced similar attacks), even after I proved by her own words that she was just making stuff up to get me in trouble. In the end, it was still easier for my employer to get rid of me than to fix all the damage she had done with my staff and coworkers. This kind of violence is more common than people think, and I honestly wonder if it's actually the case that the majority of men have been a victim of a false accusation of some type over the course of their lifetime, but they just never know it. It may never be said directly, but it is there in the suddenly cold shoulder from friends, the sidelong stares from people at work, the distancing by family, but they never know exactly why those things are happening to them. I only found out because I spent days looking into it, and using every means at my disposal to understand what was happening to me.

ThrowAway640KB · 2021-12-04T03:55:56+00:00

As expected they led with the statistic that about 5-10% of cases are found to be a false accusation regarding sexual assault.

Those same sources can also be turned on their heads to “prove” that only 5-10% of rapes are real, and that the rest are bullshit.

Reality is somewhere in the middle.

Rapes happen, but also completely false accusations were no intercourse ever took place. As well as fully consensual sex where the woman regrets it afterwards.

Punder_man · 2021-12-04T06:58:50+00:00

So, I have to wonder.. Would their opinions change if they found themselves in the headlights of a false accusation?

Or would they willing fall upon the proverbial sword and understand that it's obviously not a false accusation and thus it must be due to their own shitty behavior?

My money is on them being hypocrites and shouting until they are blue in the face on how they are 'innocent'

TheEzypzy · 2021-12-03T15:52:14+00:00

I like menslib a lot of the time but yeah that thread was really off-putting. I didn't like how they completely ignored that people can and often are falsely accused without an official police report. If the accuser knows it's false, why would they go to the police?

I also thought that person in the comments that said "99+% of rapes are unreported" was pretty wacky. That is a bold claim.

TheGreatUsername · 2021-12-03T16:21:19+00:00

I just told a guy that it was "sickening" that he believed in guilty until proven innocent (after he outright stated that he would support knowingly imprisoning innocent people if it made prosecuting the guilty easier) and got my comment removed for it. When I asked modmail, they told me to go read the comment. The same one I linked in my modmail message to ask for clarification... yeah... He also complained about me downvoting said comment. A moderator...

They just assumed my apology to be in bad faith (there was nothing about it that was or that would imply that other than mod discretion/arbitration) and muted me. So much for "presumption of good faith" (quoting directly from the mod reply to my removed comment btw) lmao.

Zinziberruderalis · 2021-12-03T20:57:32+00:00

Is feminism about taking agency away from women now?

Why would they want it? it just means you can be held responsible.

International_Crew89 · 2021-12-04T20:50:08+00:00

"Is feminism about taking away female agency now?" I've gathered that at least during the advent of '3d wave' feminism (if not the whole entire time) the tactic became "promote the idea of women having greater agency in the future, but ALWAYS downplay the idea women have currently any agency when criticism (even productive) of women's actions comes into play" - Basically a bait and switch. It's just my anecdotal opinion, but it's always felt like this during my interactions with feminists.

Mahameghabahana · 2021-12-05T09:15:49+00:00

Menslibs is to femenists is what Vichy France was to Germany during WW2. A puppet subreddit. They don't want to look the world through a different lense and use toxic masculinity for everything that men faces while claiming women have it worst( it doesn't matter if that's the case or not, you are fighting for men's rights). They think the femenist philosophy as a concrete fact and MRAs as just incels who don't care about men or are just using them.

Petsweaters · 2021-12-05T17:27:19+00:00

That sub is women fantasizing about the kind of men they want to be surrounded by, but also wouldn't date

mamba_gal_33 · 2021-12-04T18:36:09+00:00

The mods won't approve my comment on the post, I imagine because I'm being critical of the way this issue was presented. Here's a copy of what I was trying to post:

So, I have disagreements on how this was presented. Some things are... presented in a way that I don't think should represent this subreddit. But anyways, if we can't critique this then what's the point of posting it.

I'll say upfront: the major point of this post seems to be "false accusations are not something men need to live in fear of", and I wholeheartedly agree with that. So for the rest of this, just try to keep that in mind. I think what has been written is great on that subject.

Here's the text behind my first disagreement:

1/6 of women claim to have experienced sexual assault, followed by 1/3 reporting the assault to police, then worst case scenario 1/10 are false. Out of those false rape accusations 9/50 name a suspect, out of false rape accusations that accuse someone 15/100 get an arrest and, out of those who are arrested for a rape they didn't do ONLY 1/3 have charges placed against them.

So 1/6 x 1/3 x 1/10 x 9/50 x 15/100 x 1/3 = 0.00005

Which means out of all the women you meet you have a 0.005% chance of being falsely charged of rape.

We are not statisticians. We are not data scientists. Well, maybe some of us are, but there was no study that produces the end number that you've presented here. I'm extremely hesitant to link multiple studies with multiple numbers to come up with one "end all be all" risk for false accusations, even if it is simply to illustrate a point. If we are going to present statistics then we should do it correctly and realize when they are limited.

To me this ultimately proves why these issues come up in manosphere groups more often then male sexual assault. Because its being used as a weapon to try to push society and law to a more regressive state then before. MRAs are a Regressive Wolf in a Progressive Sheep clothing. They don't really care about victims of false allegations. Instead, it's a means to justify "Moving the burden of proof to a reasonable level" that makes it impossible for many legitimate victims to seek justice.

I have a couple issues here. One is blankly saying that MRAs don't really care about victims of false allegations. I've been in MRA spaces in the past and that's simply not true. These people actually care about victims, but they are drawing the wrong conclusions about what those victims represent. It's a common refrain to imply that those who disagree with us "don't actually care" about people they claim to, but all that ends up doing is removing the possibility we can reach them because now we've argued that they are incapable of empathy. It's an important distinction.

My second disagreement with the above is the "moving the burden of proof to a reasonable level". Someone already wrote a comment addressing that a high level of proof is necessary for our legal system. I think the spirit behind this statement is "believe women", but as written it can be easily misconstrued for someone who doesn't have the political education to back up the nuance.

Now for the last one:

That's why MRA subreddits and Reddit as a whole underreports on male victims of rape. Because admitting that rape of men is a common thing only helps prove that rape in general is a very common affair and that the 1 in 6 statistic was right the whole time. Saying that rape is a real problem in western society forces them to stop ignoring it.

This one, to me, sounds incredibly out of place and ill-informed. Again, I've hung out in MRA spaces in the past for a few years and not one single instance I've seen a self-proclaimed MRA attempt to erase or underreport male victims of rape. In fact, I've seen the complete opposite - there's a lot of debate over how victimized men actually are, and how the statistics often don't properly address male victims. Admittedly, I often see radicals take an extreme bent and try to argue in bad faith that "men are actually the only true victims here", but as far as the claim being made here I simply have not seen it happen.

Additionally, I have some issues with the tone of what's been written here. Again, I agree with the principle of "men shouldn't be living in fear of being falsely accused", but it's lacking in other ways. It massively glances over the question of "what happens if you're falsely accused?" and instead only gives some statistics saying the chance of you being jailed is slim to none. It's an odd coupling between "these things are rare" to "if this happens to you, there's nothing to worry about" and that's concerning. Maybe adding in that question broadens the scope too much, but knowing there are people here who will read this and have been falsely accused to varying degrees of consequence, it felt like it should have been addressed.

And lastly, I think it's also missing a section on fear. I've been in relationships with less than stable partners and there was one where the relationship began deteriorating and I feared being falsely accused. At that point I knew I stood a good chance of fighting it if something were to go down (thankfully it didn't), but the existential fear of "what if?" can absolutely put you in a hole even if you know all of these statistics. What if the police don't believe me? What if my professors don't believe me? What if my friends believe her version of the story? Are they bad friends if they distance themselves from me? And you think back on every possible situation to see if you did anything wrong and let me tell you, people are absolutely imperfect. Did I flirt too sexually with her? What about that time we had sex and only afterwards she said she didn't like the fuzzy handcuffs, is that going to come back to bite me? It gets in your head and it's so easy to imagine scenarios that could be misconstrued or make you out to be the bad guy. I didn't fear going to jail, but I did fear having uncertainty over my head. The fear is massive, it's existential. And I think at the point where you realize someone has the means and motive to potentially falsely accuse you that this fear is natural.

Maybe I'm beating that dead horse too much. But it seems like sometimes we want to write off that fear as unnatural when instead it's mainly unproductive. It gets really close to telling people "well, just don't feel that way". Again, I agree with the base point of this post, and that men don't need to live in fear of this. I also agree that more than that issue, the issues of rape and sexual assault need even more attention, and I've been absolutely lacking in my response to those here. But I can't, after some reflection on some of the things here, leave them without being addressed since I think we can greatly benefit our community if we dug into this post a bit more.

RepulsiveArugula19 · 2021-12-04T00:57:41+00:00

Their current top post is about how false accusations basically aren’t a huge deal, and don’t happen that often so don’t worry about it.

Figures. In regards to racism, they will proclaim false accusations from white women that have sent black men to jail. This is the thought that entered my mind when reading this. I will now continue reading the post.

And after the initial post, the top comment can be summed up as; false rape accusations are about racism anyway, it’s not misandry, and it’s also not the woman’s fault it’s usually another man’s fault.

Hmm, no surprise.

Riganthor · 2021-12-04T09:13:49+00:00

My uncle was falsly accused by his ex that he raped his daughter. He was found to be innocent and his daughter lived with him and barely talked to her mum

Shinlo28 · 2021-12-03T21:43:52+00:00

Karen's Lib strikes again.

SpanishM · 2021-12-03T16:09:16+00:00

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Quit_social_media · 2021-12-06T22:12:03+00:00

There are bubbles or fluctuations within increased/decreased chances of being falsely accused of a crime to consider as well.

What most people forget when they dismiss chances of false allegations are places where they are far more common. Secure psychiatric hospitals are rife full of mentally unwell people, and there were one or two that I remember you had to be very very careful around. It was practically expected that your turn to be falsely accused every two years or so it was treated as such a normal thing. I mean literally I think one patient had probably made about 60 accusations against various staff (especially ones she hated). It's exhausting doing all the paperwork and the police were truly fed up having their time wasted, but investigations have to be done. Of course it's that or otherwise it's the "boy that cried wolf situation". Did make me wonder how it plays into official figures, skewing them somewhat, because I guess none of them can be proved either way.

Moreover, there are more awkward situations that don't even involve police, authority investigations, or even reporting. I remember at one if my first jobs, I once jogged to freezer, lifted, stacked them, and carried couple heavy boxes of frozen goods, and was shuffling back to my station as fast as possible, to not get in trouble by my supervisor for leaving my post long (my supply aid was missing and I needed restock immediately). Literally stacked nearly twice my height so I couldn't see where I was going on front of me. I could know where I was going by memorising my route and looking side to side for guidance. Quite a journey. zipping back and forth through corridors and such. Almost at my station, and a female colleague stepped aside and angsy told me to stop following her. I was stunned. I dropped the boxes in disbelief and just stood there dumbfounded for a few moments. I'm guessing she didn't say anything to bosses. But being confronted like that really took me back because I literally never knew she was around. I never really remember interracting or noticing her much at work. Whether I was unwittingly following her quickly with the stack of boxes in front I'll never know, because I couldn't see in front of me. But the experience really upset me. Looking back, she was quite unhinged based of her other behaviours. But it still wasn't right. It didn't even have to involve anyone else to have a direct impact on my mood that day.

EmergencySyrup7605 · 2021-12-26T18:09:06+00:00

Such a loser ass, miserable ass sub. Oh and I’m definitely taking about this sub

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