A Dose of Stupid v89

It happens every day. In fact, it is pretty hard to avoid it. There are some things that can only be understood with a slap on the forehead. Things so mind-boggling that one wonders how humans managed to evolve thumbs while being this mentally inept. Case in point:

This thing about male victims

What happens when one is a radical feminist and reads an article showing that men experience more domestic violence than one assumes? Does one challenge those radical feminist views? Does one rethink her understanding of domestic violence? Or does one try to disprove the statistics by playing semantics?

Karen Ingala Smith decided to go the latter route. She attempted to dismiss the finding of the British Crime Survey, a survey that showed a higher than expected rate of domestic violence against men. She got the ultimate smackdown from one of the professionals cited in the above article, but that did not deter Smith. She chose instead to list her problem with the notion that one in three domestic violence victims is male.

Let us break down her arguments point by point:

Male rape victims in Uganda speak out

I have written before about rape against men in war-torn African countries. Despite the seriousness of the issue, few human rights organizations pay any attention to male rape survivors. Few countries have support services for them, the cultural attitude towards male survivors is highly negative, and the international opinion is that war-time rape is something only men do to only women.

However, there is an effort to change that perception in Uganda:

There remains no reliable statistics indicating how widespread the crime of rape is in Africa’s conflict areas. A non-government organization providing legal aid to asylum seekers and refugees in Uganda is spearheading a project to reach out to men who have been raped.

Chris Dolan, director of the Refugee Law Project, explained the numbers of men experiencing rape are much higher than anticipated.

“We started talking to a handful of male survivors from one of the settlements and they started to meet up and now they have close to 60 members – all within the space of just three months,” Dolan told DW.

Those 60 men are not the only male survivors. They are simply the ones willing to attend the support group. Many more men do not want to go to the group, likely because of situations like this:

Bulletin Board v191

Boy Scouts agree to release ‘perversion files’ — The Boy Scouts of America said Thursday it will release to attorneys 10 years of confidential files it uses to keep pedophile suspects from becoming troop leaders or volunteers. The decision comes after the 4th Court of Appeals in San Antonio denied an appeal from the BSA to keep the files sealed. “Youth protection is of paramount importance to the Boy Scouts of America,” BSA spokesman Deron Smith said in an email. “We are thankful the court reviewed this matter and will comply with its order.”

Discrimination against men? — Recent Virgin airlines passenger, John McGirr claims Virgin airlines treated him like a sexual predator on a flight to Sydney. He claims a flight attendant asked him to move saying he was not allowed to sit next to children because he was male. According to Mr McGirr the flight attendant walked up the aisle and tried to find a female to swap seats with him. “By that time, people had looked around and it was like I’d done something wrong, (I felt) defenceless.

Ex-Scout leader admits sexual abuse of boys — Henry Calder, 60, who had been in a position of responsibility in the Scout Association for about 40 years, had taken videos between 1982 and 1991 at camps organised by the movement. He had also been an employee in the finance department at East Dunbartonshire Council until his retirement in 2010. Calder, of Kirkintilloch, was arrested in a raid organised under the auspices of Operation Alba, which targeted people who downloaded child pornography on the internet.

Jodi Arias convicted of first-degree murder

On May 8, 2013, a jury convicted Jodi Arias of one count of first-degree murder against Travis Alexander. Arias stabbed Alexander 29 times, slit his throat, and shot him in the face.

The conviction ended a five-year wait for justice for the Alexander family. Arias played everyone, starting with the family. Initially, Arias pretended to know nothing about the crime. She called Alexander’s phone and left him an email shortly after she killed him. She wrote about his death in her diary. She even went to his funeral.

There was some concern that Arias might walk. Arias is impressively manipulative. Specifically, she is passive aggressive. Her ability to play the victim is so developed that she conned two experts into believing her story. Arias also appears to be a sociopath. She seems to lack any empathy for anyone, and appears to always look for the best angle to control someone. When that does not work, she plays the passive aggressive card, presenting herself as a victim to try to win the person over. She tried this at trial on prosecutor Juan Martinez only to have him throw it back in her face.

That alone would have been enough to ensure a conviction because while Arias is quite manipulative, she is not great at it. She is good, but her style takes time. She is not good at conning people on the fly, and when she tries, her lies are obvious.

However, the details of the case were the most damning.

You’re Not Helping v.16

Here is a thought: if you present the concept of “Ask the Feminist” and someone asks said feminist a question, it would make more sense to actually post the person’s question than leave it sitting in moderation.

I do understand that The Good Men Project is a feminist space only interested in non-critical, positive discussions about feminism and feminist theories about masculinity. That will naturally preclude non-feminists from the discussion. However, most men are not feminists. If one wishes to have an open discussion about men and masculinity, one needs to include non-feminist voices.

I do not follow GMP enough to know exactly what goes on there, so I had no idea that GMP started an “Ask the Feminist” thread in which people could pose questions to HeatherN and she would answer them. I happened upon the second set of answers through a Google Alert. I skimmed the original post, but read the comments. There was an exchange between Mike L and Heather that caught my attention:

#killallmen

When feminists ask why people think they hate all men, one need only point them to the recent Twitter hashtag #killallmen.

None of the tweets surprise me. Many feminists have a long history of making nasty, hate-filled comments without any prompt. Just ask the red head from the Toronto men’s rights event.

Likewise, I am not surprised by feminists supporting, excusing, and minimizing the hashtag. After all, this is same mentality that prompted scores of feminists to spend hours flaming the #INeedMasculismBecause hashtag.

The hastag simply shows what many people have seen before: plenty of feminists harbor a deep hatred of men, and despite frequent feminist protests to the contrary, it appears many feminists either turn a blind eye to it or tacitly support it.

Certainly all feminists do not think that way, yet after the hashtag trending, I could not find much feminist criticism of it, despite that so many of them supported it.

Here is a thought: if after fifty years in the mainstream people still think your movement hates another group of people, it is time to consider the very real probability that they are right. That is the only way to explain how a hastag like #killallmen could trend for so long and yet no feminists seems to acknowledge it even happened.

Zimbabwe Police Concerned About Rape Against Males

Recently, two women and one man allegedly kidnapped and raped a 25-year-old soldier. They reportedly held him for four days, sexually assaulting him multiple times:

Assistant police spokesman Assistant Inspector Muzondiwa Clean told the NewsDay news organisation that at around midnight on April 1, the soldier willingly accepted a lift into Mutare in a Mercedes Benz vehicle from the Birchenough Bridge business centre. [...] The soldier was allegedly threatened with a knife by the driver when he asked to be dropped off instead of travelling for food, and one of the female passengers blindfolded him shortly afterwards. Assistant Inspector Clean said the soldier was then taken to a house in an unknown location, where he was stripped naked and robbed of his mobile phone and $35. he solider claims he was sexually abused by the women on numerous occasions at the house, before the group drove him into the remote Dangamvura Mountains.

Afterward, the group stoned him, resulting in an injury to his foot. The soldier eventually made his way to the police and reported the incident.