There’s a certain copypasta that gets posted in men’s issues spaces online. I think it might have originally been said by Karen Staughan. You may know the one I’m talking about. If you have it handy, please post it in the comments. I want to go ahead and reiterate it because it’s a very important point about online gender discussions. It bears repeating here as we start off on a new platform:
“I’m a real feminist. I support equality for men, too. Only fake feminists oppose recognizing abuse and laws against men.”
Have you ever posted a comment like this before? Well, I’m glad to know that you support men and boys. We need all the allies we can get. Too many people deny that we even face any gender-based disadvantages, or if we do it’s our all fault, anyway, so it’s on us to address them. It’s hard for guys to find sympathy from either side of the culture war, but especially from the progressive-leftist side. There’s just one problem.
What you say doesn’t matter.
I mean no disrespect, but you are an anonymous commenter on the internet. I have no reason to assume you have actually done anything to confront the anti-male policies or stereotypes that rule our lives. Unless you have “leveraged your privilege to call out” those who stand in the way of progress, your egalitarian ideals mean nothing to me.
First of all, I need you to understand who the “fake feminists” who oppose gender equality are. Quite simply, it’s all of the major feminist organizations. There’s a convenient list of those who proudly stood behind husband-beater Amber Heard: https://amberopenletter.com/ . Despite numerous recordings of Heard admitting to violence against Depp, they backed her. This isn’t the first time feminist organizations have stood behind violent women. Donna Hylton, who participated in the torture and murder of a man and spent 26 years in jail for it, has reinvented herself as a feminist activist and was even a featured speaker at the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, DC.
Not only do feminist organizations support female abusers, they have created and fight to maintain policies which exclude men and boys from being recognized as victims. Many countries and territories around the world legally define rape in such a way that men cannot be victims. When efforts to reform the laws to being gender-neutral started in India, feminists worked to shut them down (https://timesofindia.com/india/Activists-join-chorus-against-gender-neutral-rape-laws/articleshow/18840879.cms)
Aside from laws, feminists have also engineered the standard operating procedure of law enforcement to be biased against men. A framework for understanding interpersonal violence known as the “Duluth Model” was created by feminist Ellen Pence in the 1970’s. It assumes that men are more violent than women, based on stereotypes rather than scientific evidence. The Duluth Model informs the way police in many countries respond to domestic violence calls. This usually involves assuming that in a heterosexual relationship, the man is the aggressor, even in cases where he makes the call to the police to report violence against him.
This bias against men cuts across gender lines. Male feminists like Lundy Bancroft and Chuck Derry have made their careers on perpetuating the view that men are always the aggressors and women are always the victim. Bancroft even goes so far as to say that men who claim to be victims are actually doing it to hide their abuse, and that all men are potential abusers (https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/10/31/lundy-bancroft-anti-vaxxer-who-thinks-all-men-are-abusers-14370)
Feminists fighting to maintain legal inequality is bad enough, but they don’t stop there. Any time an advocate for men and boys makes a speech or starts a new organization, feminists are there to harass and undermine them. Erin Pizzey founded the first domestic violence refuge shelter in 1971. When she turned her attention to creating services for battered men, her feminist colleagues went so far to as threatening to bomb her house. Despite moving away from the UK she is still regularly harassed for her promotion of a gender neutral approach in her services and writings. The experiences of self-described feminist filmmaker Cassie Jaye had a similar experience. She directed an unbiased documentary about the men’s rights movement, and was subsequently shunned by the feminist movement.
Prominent feminist individuals and organizations have demonstrated time and again they oppose equal treatment for men. So that begs the question, who are the “fake feminists”? Does NOW, an organization which platforms abusers and opposes 50/50 child custody laws (https://floridapolitics.com/archives/206474-womens-rights-groups-host-statewide-media-conference-sb-668/), not count as real feminists? Is Hillary Clinton who once called women the primary victims of war, despite them not facing conscription anywhere in the world, not a real feminist? Are the various gender officers in universities around the world setting up kangaroo courts for accused men not real feminists?
It’s time for an uncomfortable realization. When it comes to equality, feminists’ actions speak louder than their words. If you still think the term “feminism” is worth reclaiming at this point, it’s up to you to stand up against the feminist institutions which have created and uphold the treatment of men and boys as second class citizens.
A few more examples of real life feminist actions:
Women’s Aid protest against funding of male services as they see DV as a gendered problem.
Admitting that they’ve applied a ‘strategy of containment’ in regards to male victims of domestic abuse so that DV appears to be a gendered problem. The paper says this was done in order to obtain funding for their organisations.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/72839546.pdf
The women who reviewed and updated the sexual offences act in 2003 stated the following:
“We did consider whether there was evidence that a woman could force a man to penetrate her against his will but, although we found a little anecdotal evidence, we did not discover sufficient to convince us that this was the equivalent of rape.“
“Of all sexual offences, rape is the most serious, the most feared and the most debated.”
This pisses me off. Sexism hurts everyone. Men, women, children, everybody. Femnism shouldn’t be about punishing men, just like mens right shouldn’t be about hurting women. We’re all poeple, and we’re all in this together.
You run into a very serious contradiction in that value
What if fixing something that hurts men, hurts women?
It sounds flippant, but it’s legitimately a problem men have to deal with.
As a recent example, in florida they are finally “ending” permanent alimony, and men now have their “right to retire” considered when adjusting payments.
Many, many, women depend in part or entirely on a man suffering and working on their behalf. If i want to help those men, to the perception of those women, i am harming them.
Even trying to equalize draft legislation in the states is technically “harming women”
So, given just those examples, i’m all for “harming” women, based on how they’ve defined it.
This is it (all credit to Karen Straughan aka u/girlwriteswhat on reddit):
So what you’re saying is that you, a commenter using a username on an internet forum are the true feminist, and the feminists actually responsible for changing the laws, writing the academic theory, teaching the courses, influencing the public policies, and the massive, well-funded feminist organizations with thousands and thousands of members all of whom call themselves feminists… they are not “real feminists”.
That’s not just “no true Scotsman”. That’s delusional self deception.
Listen, if you want to call yourself a feminist, I don’t care. I’ve been investigating feminism for more than 9 years now, and people like you used to piss me off, because to my mind all you were doing was providing cover and ballast for the powerful political and academic feminists you claim are just jerks. And believe me, they ARE jerks. If you knew half of what I know about the things they’ve done under the banner of feminism, maybe you’d stop calling yourself one.
But I want you to know. You don’t matter. You’re not the director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and editor of Ms. Magazine, Katherine Spillar, who said of domestic violence: “Well, that’s just a clean-up word for wife-beating,” and went on to add that regarding male victims of dating violence, “we know it’s not girls beating up boys, it’s boys beating up girls.”
You’re not Jan Reimer, former mayor of Edmonton and long-time head of Alberta’s Network of Women’s Shelters, who just a few years ago refused to appear on a TV program discussing male victims of domestic violence, because for her to even show up and discuss it would lend legitimacy to the idea that they exist.
You’re not Mary P Koss, who describes male victims of female rapists in her academic papers as being not rape victims because they were “ambivalent about their sexual desires” (if you don’t know what that means, it’s that they actually wanted it), and then went on to define them out of the definition of rape in the CDC’s research because it’s inappropriate to consider what happened to them rape.
You’re not the National Organization for Women, and its associated legal foundations, who lobbied to replace the gender neutral federal Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984 with the obscenely gendered Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The passing of that law cut male victims out of support services and legal assistance in more than 60 passages, just because they were male.
You’re not the Florida chapter of the NOW, who successfully lobbied to have Governor Rick Scott veto not one, but two alimony reform bills in the last ten years, bills that had passed both houses with overwhelming bipartisan support, and were supported by more than 70% of the electorate.
You’re not the feminist group in Maryland who convinced every female member of the House on both sides of the aisle to walk off the floor when a shared parenting bill came up for a vote, meaning the quorum could not be met and the bill died then and there.
You’re not the feminists in Canada agitating to remove sexual assault from the normal criminal courts, into quasi-criminal courts of equity where the burden of proof would be lowered, the defendant could be compelled to testify, discovery would go both ways, and defendants would not be entitled to a public defender.
You’re not Professor Elizabeth Sheehy, who wrote a book advocating that women not only have the right to murder their husbands without fear of prosecution if they make a claim of abuse, but that they have the moral responsibility to murder their husbands.
You’re not the feminist legal scholars and advocates who successfully changed rape laws such that a woman’s history of making multiple false allegations of rape can be excluded from evidence at trial because it’s “part of her sexual history.”
You’re not the feminists who splattered the media with the false claim that putting your penis in a passed-out woman’s mouth is “not a crime” in Oklahoma, because the prosecutor was incompetent and charged the defendant under an inappropriate statute (forcible sodomy) and the higher court refused to expand the definition of that statute beyond its intended scope when there was already a perfectly good one (sexual battery) already there. You’re not the idiot feminists lying to the public and potentially putting women in Oklahoma at risk by telling potential offenders there’s a “legal” way to rape them.
And you’re none of the hundreds or thousands of feminist scholars, writers, thinkers, researchers, teachers and philosophers who constructed and propagate the body of bunkum theories upon which all of these atrocities are based.
You’re the true feminist. Some random person on the internet.
I will never not love seeing this response.
I keep it saved for those “no, real feminists!” moments as a particularly effective clap back
I agree!
