Category Archives: victim blaming
National Review writer: Men and “husky” boys could have prevented the Newtown school shootings
It’s always a little distressing to see manosphere-style dumbassery outside the manosphere. Today’s offender: Charlotte Allen at National Review Online, explaining how the deaths in Newtown are the result of the school’s “feminized setting.” Had the school been filled with manly men (and manly boys), Adam Lanza could have been stopped in his tracks!
No, really, that’s what she says. Except that what she wrote is somehow even more egregious than my sarcastic summary. Read for yourself:
Kate Harding Tells Men’s Rights Activists to Go Fuck Themselves
You all need to go read Kate Harding’s bracing (and given all the recent doxxing bullshit, spectacularly well-timed) Jezebel piece titled “Fuck You, Men’s Rights Activists.” Here’s a sample:
Fuck you, first of all, for making it nearly impossible for decent men struggling with abusive partners or unfair custody arrangements to get the help they need and deserve. You have forever tainted those issues with your rage-filled, obsessively anti-woman horseshit, to the point where it’s become difficult for any rational, compassionate person to trust a man who claims he’s been screwed over in family court or abused by a female partner, even if he has. …
Fuck you for showing up every time women speak, especially about rape and abuse, and trying to make it all about you. Fuck you for derailing threads about the victims of Marc Lépine, a man who screamed about his hatred for feminists as he murdered fourteen women and injured many others, because you also hate feminists and want a fucking cookie for not killing anyone. Fuck you for making rape and death threats against young women who dared to protest a speaking engagement by a man who thinks little girls would enjoy being raped by their fathers if it weren’t for society telling them it’s dirty. Fuck you for whining about how unfair it is that women might wonder if you’re a rapist when you approach them out of nowhere, while completely ignoring how unfair it is that women feel the need to be on guard all the time in public. Or that if we relax and behave normally—drinking, dancing, dressing however we want—you will be the first motherfuckers in line to blame us for getting ourselves raped.
And it keeps going from there.
Thank you Kate, for putting it so well.
What Men’s Rights guru Warren Farrell actually said about the allegedly positive aspects of incest. (Note: it’s even more repugnant than that sounds.)
So there has been a great deal of controversy surrounding the recent talk that old school Men’s Rights guru Warren Farrell gave at the University of Toronto. Protesters troubled by Farrell’s repugnant views on incest and date rape, among other things, blocked the entrance to the building holding the talk; police broke up the blockade. You can find various videos of what went down on YouTube. I’m not going to try to sort out all the various claims and counterclaims about what happened.
I personally don’t approve of blocking people from giving talks, even if their ideas are repugnant. But I certainly do approve of holding people responsible for what they say, and Farrell – in addition to being wrong about nearly every aspect of relations between men and women – has said some truly awful things over the years.
Exhibit A: A notorious interview he gave Penthouse magazine in the 1970s in which he discussed a book he was researching about incest, tetatively titled The Last Taboo: The Three Faces of Incest.
Let me put a giant TRIGGER WARNING here for disturbing discussion of incest and child sexual abuse.
Spearheader: The real victims of predatory female teachers are the guys “hot teachers” AREN’T having sex with
Men’s Rights activists are constantly posting links to stories of women committing horrible crimes – what some have taken to calling “women behaving badly” (WBB) stories – and almost reveling in the fact that, yes, some women do indeed do horrible shit.
MRAs are particularly obsessed with stories of female high school teachers preying on their underage students. While this partly reflects the general MRA obsession with badly behaving women, MRAs do actually make a legitimate point here: while most people understand that female victims of predatory male teachers are indeed victims, quite a few people regard male victims of attractive female teachers as “lucky” boys who get to live out the schoolboy fantasy of having sex with a “hot teacher.”
Arizona Judge to sexual abuse victim: “I hope you look at what you’ve been through and try to take something positive out of it. …You learned a lesson about friendship and you learned a lesson about vulnerability.”
In keeping with the “women who hate women” theme we sort of had going last week, let’s take a quick look at Arizona Judge Jacqueline Hatch. Judge Hatch, you see, presided over a recent case involving a Flagstaff, Arizona police officer who was found guilty of sexually abusing a woman in a bar. According to the Arizona Daily Sun,
Prosecutors contended that he drank eight beers and then drove himself to the Green Room, where he flashed his badge in an attempt to get into a concert for free. While inside, he walked up behind the victim, who was a friend of a friend, put his hand up her skirt and then ran his fingers across her genitals.
When bouncers threw him out, Evans told them he was a cop and they would be arrested.
The cop faced up to two years in jail for his assault. But Hatch apparently felt the officer, who’d lost his job and served four whole days in jail, had already been punished enough for his crime, and let him off with two years of probation.
Father Benedict Groeschel: In “a lot of the cases [of sexual abuse by priests] the youngster is the seducer.” Friars: He didn’t mean to blame the victims.
It’s victim-blaming at its worst. Last week, Father Benedict Groeschel, a fairly prominent religious figure who is, among other things, the director of the Office for Spiritual Development for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, said some utterly appalling things about the victims of sexual abuse by priests.
In an interview with the National Catholic Register, Groeschel declared that some of the victims were likely “seducers,” and expressed sympathy for ”poor” Jerry Sandusky, and suggested that abusers “on their first offense … should not go to jail because their intention was not committing a crime.”
After the comments spurred outrage, the NC Register took down the interview. Here are the relevant sections, which I found reposted by an appalled columnist on the right-wing RenewAmerica site. The whole thing is awful; I’ve highlighted some of the worst parts.