Tag feminist rhetoric

What Feminist Writer Sandra Newman Gets Right about False Accusation and Why That Disarms Her Contention That It “Almost Never [Has] Serious Consequences”

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In a recent Quartz.com article titled, “What kind of person makes false rape accusations?” (commented on here), novelist Sandra Newman answers that, among others, people with (Cluster B) personality disorders do (sociopaths, narcissists, histrionics, and borderlines), which is true. People who exhibit the traits associated with these disorders, whether clinically or subclinically, are identified in the law as “high-conflict people.” Court process perfectly syncs with their drive to blame, and they may lie without compunction.

Here’s the problem: While psychological motives may be discerned in major criminal investigations, they are never detected in any “lesser” type of prosecution, particularly in civil court. “Investigators” like Ms. Newman, whose agenda is clearly to challenge the notion that false rape accusations are a serious matter, must discredit that notion while relying on the legitimacy of “lesser” so-called “epidemic” violations like stalking and domestic violence, which may also be alleged (and to a much greater extent) by high-conflict litigants. No one can know what quotient of violence hysteria is based on lies or distortions, and the Sandra Newmans out there have no interest in dispelling that hysteria or promoting a balanced perspective. Sympathy for “the adversary” is unthinkable.

The goal is to emphasize the victimization of women and to dismiss the victimization of the falsely accused (who include women, which is a fact that’s also ignored).

The title of Pulitzer-prize-winning columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz’s book, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times, characterizes (false) accusation much more squarely, that is, damningly.

Here are some stories about false accusation and its effects:

Ms. Newman has elsewhere acknowledged what she thinks of liars and expressed how she feels society should regard them:

Yet the thrust of her Quartz arguments is not that liars are monstrous and should be stopped. It’s that lying, even about rape and even to people with guns and gavels, is unworthy of remark, because it “almost never [has] serious consequences.”

Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*The link on Ms. Newman’s Twitter remark is broken because her account has been suspended since the publication of this post.

Feminist Writer Emily Lindin Explains How “Innocent Men Losing Their Jobs over False Sexual Assault/Harassment Allegations” Isn’t a Matter for Concern

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Feminists manage to reap the best of both worlds. They enjoy the insulated life of the nursery but are patted on the heads and told what big girls they are. They purport to understand life’s grim realities better than anyone and arrogate to themselves the right to nominate which of them most urgently deserves attention. And they are parentally indulged.

Consequent fact: You can’t persuade feminists of anything they don’t want to believe. On the upside, though, you don’t have to prove to other grownups that feminists’ positions are vicious. You only have to quote them.

This sequence of “tweets” was brought to my attention by Dorothy Cummings McLean in an article that I chanced upon while dealing with the aftermath of 12 years of false allegations (including of sexual harassment), the effects of which are only comprehensible to adults who have also experienced them.

Emily Lindin, the author of the tweets, writes for Teen Vogue, a magazine whose title verbalizes the essence of contemporary feminism, a movement sustained by social media, where playground popularity determines value.

Here are Ms. Lindin’s Teen Vogue writing credits with some emphases added:

  • “Rob Kardashian Slut-Shamed Blac Chyna — and the Internet’s Response Is Part of the Problem”
  • “What You Need to Know Before Sending a Nude Photo”
  • “How to Get Your Parents to Stop Slut Shaming You”
  • “Slut-Shaming Actually Makes Life Worse for Straight Guys, Too”
  • “6 Ways You May Be Slut Shaming Without Realizing It”
  • “Why Sexist Dress Codes Suck for Everyone”
  • “How to Say ‘No’ in the Middle of a Hookup Without Feeling Awkward About It”
  • “How I Learned the Definition of ‘Slut’”
  • “Why You Should Stop ‘Playing Hard to Get’ and Start Masturbating”
  • “If You’ve Ever Ordered Pizza, Then You Already Understand What Consent Is”

Ms. Lindin writes in the magazine’s “Wellness” section—or did: Her last byline is dated July 5.

Assigned the same job, I would probably have encouraged today’s youth to read more (books, I guess I have to add). Being slutty is bound to be more fun, or at least less challenging, but there are some rewards to cultivating the mind. I’ll try to demonstrate some.

Ms. Lindin “identifies” as a member of an oppressed class. Oppressed is a word that means held down or held back by abuse of power or authority…such as men and women are who are falsely accused and arbitrarily vilified by the state.

Being able to discern contradictions in what people argue—and being outraged by them—is a hallmark of intelligence, and an instruction to a young woman that a feminist might have given when I was a child is this: “Intelligence is sexy.” (Such a feminist might even have counseled: “Self-reliance is sexy.”)

There’s probably a fossil exhibit about feminists like this in the Museum of Natural History.

Ms. Lindin, who was evidently never steered toward a library, insists that “false allegations very rarely happen.” Actually, false allegations never “happen”; false allegations are made, typically (but not always) by lying women. How often is unquantifiable but certainly a lot more frequently than “very rarely,” a judgment Ms. Lindin probably copped secondhand from another feminist source. On Twitter, maybe.

Consider the wording here: “The benefit of all of us getting to finally tell the truth + the impact on victims FAR outweigh the loss of any one man’s reputation.” A trained mind might pause and wonder: Who are “all of us”? And: A man whose reputation is ruined by lies isn’t a victim? And: What do you mean “one man”?

The face of “patriarchy”

Feminism purports to advocate for equality, which would make “us” inclusive of “innocent men losing their jobs over false…allegations.” The feminist “us” clearly means girls only, and the exigency of their “truth” makes all other truths insignificant. It makes all other people (one or 100 million) insignificant. A trained mind might observe that in a democracy, where “all…are created equal,” value judgments about who should be thrown under the bus have no place. No citizen is more important than any other, nor any class of citizens more important than any other.

Self-contradictory rhetoric like Ms. Lindin’s works, because it is supported by power and has been for a long time. It has determined, and it continues to determine, what lawmakers’ priorities should be, how statutes are shaped and sharpened, and how they’re applied by our courts, the Constitution be damned. So who are the oppressors really? The “patriarchy” that Ms. Lindin would have her “followers” believe is being undone went out with the fedora. The members of today’s “patriarchy” wear bras—or maybe they don’t, for which omission they absolutely should not be slut-shamed.

The hit to “some innocent men’s reputations” by lying women is a price Ms. Lindin says she, for one, is “willing to pay.”

At a cost to her and her family (and Tweetmates) of exactly nada.

Copyright © 2018 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

ManBoobz and Subreddits: Why Your Abuse by the Justice System Is Less Important than a Communal Toilet

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“Man Boobz has a contingent of MRA commentors, but he has never (to his knowledge) changed any of their minds.”

—Kate Donovan, TeenSkepchick.org

Even at the risk of giving the impression that what the epigraph means is worth understanding, I’ll interpret: ManBoobz.com is the domain name of a website that mocks “MRAs” or “Men’s Rights activists.” (The grammar of the quoted writer, Kate Donovan, also humorously suggests “Man Boobz” is a nickname of the website’s author, David Futrelle—which, admittedly, is why I lifted the sentence.)

If you’re like me, you’ll be filing this information under the mental tab WHATEVER. So why do I bring this up?

In recent weeks, I’ve corresponded with and written about

This is besides digesting copious nauseating and desolate reports of abuse compounded by legal fraud submitted by both men and women. A respondent the other day, for example, reported she’d been chronically forced to have sex and was then issued a restraining order petitioned by her rapist, who endeavors to expel her from the life of an older woman she nurses, an older woman she loves and thinks of as her “grandmother.” The man has also cost the girl work by telling people she’s crazy. He’s apparently concerned she might pose a risk to his inheriting the older woman’s estate…besides concerned she might expose him as a rapist.

Dilettante demagogue Dave Futrelle has “document[ed] and mock[ed]” male complaints of injustice since 2010. Today a fulltime heckler, he supports himself and his cats with advertising revenues and online donations from feminist fans.

In writing about the black dad who now has an “18%” share in the lives of his two infant boys (“who go insane when I have to drop them back to their mother”), I was moved to criticize the rhetoric of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which represents itself as a civil rights advocacy group. The SPLC publishes a page called, “Misogyny: The Sites,” that suggests opposition to feminist-inspired legal travesties (for instance, the restraining order) is motivated by hatred of women, and on this page it refers approvingly to ManBoobz.com, the site introduced above.

The domain name ManBoobz.com leads to the blog We Hunted the Mammoth, whose title is apparently a lampoon of the titles of “MRM” (Men’s Rights Movement) blogs like Return of Kings. “We Hunted the Mammoth” is meant to suggest the Men’s Rights people are Neanderthals. Yuk-yuk.

If you’re a parent who’s missing his or her children, an abused (former) spouse or boy- or girlfriend who’s now homeless or living “like a hamster” consequent to misapplications of the law, or a senior who’s been bullied into cowering behind his or her blinds, this post is to make you aware of the trash talk that has cost you what you valued most; that talk is what informs pop culture sentiment and diverts awareness from your torment.

The anti-MRM crowd—of whom David Futrelle, author of We Hunted the Mammoth, is apparently a bellwether—represents the complaints of men/fathers to be unprovoked hate rhetoric (and anyone, man or woman, whose complaints are identified as corresponding to MRM complaints is simply lumped in). Calling complaints of state-sanctioned abuses “misogynist” makes them easy to dismiss. The conclusion that complaints are “misogynist” is plainly superficial but not unpredictably embraced by feminist partisans.

Here’s a snippet from a recent post on We Hunted the Mammoth (selected because I don’t have the stomach to stick my hand all the way into the bowl):

Men’s Rights Redditors agree: it’s tough to be a man. Well, a cis man, in any case. And those silly trans people are making it worse.

On the Men’s Rights subreddit, one concerned fellow has discovered a possibly insurmountable obstacle standing in the way of true gender equality: A “Women’s Room” at the University of Queensland that, as a sign on its door notes, is open to “trans*, intersex and genderqueer people as well as cis-females.” The horror!

The post concerns a sign on the door of a University of Queensland toilet. That’s right: a toilet.

(Apparently chemical prefixes are now used to distinguish different “gender types.” A “cis” is what most of us would naïvely call a heterosexual man or woman.)

Here’s an excerpt from another post:

Yep, I reported the 100% true fact that a Youtube bloviater named Aaron Clarey had written a post on Return of Kings urging men, in his words, to “not only REFUSE to see the movie, but spread the word to as many men as possible.” I described his readers on Return of Kings as misogynists, not MRAs, though clearly there is a massive overlap between those two groups.

The idea that this was specifically a Men’s Rights crusade was, to be sure, a bit of sloppiness on the part of the journalists writing about it, who are not quite as familiar as some of us are with all the different varieties of woman-hating shitheads there are in the “manosphere”—especially since their belief systems overlap considerably. As I noted in a previous post on this subject, writing about Esmay’s accusations against a writer for the Huffington Post,

It’s true that the HuffPo writer, in the original version of her piece, wrongly described the MRA-adjacent Return of Kings—which has urged a boymancott of Mad Max Fury Road—as a Men’s Rights site proper. There are in fact some differences between ROK and AVFM. For example, while AVFM writers have declared women to be “obnoxious cunts,” who control men with their vaginas, ROK writers have suggested that women are actually depraved, disloyal sheep.

You can almost forgive journalists for getting a bit mixed up.

The post has something to do with a recent movie (Mad Max: Fury Road). As of this composition, it’s been tweeted 27 times and circulated on Facebook 98 times. It was more popular than the toilet post…maybe because it has dirty words in it.

The writing is virtually indecipherable to outsiders but communicates the nature and maturity of the “discourse” (i.e., teenage). This sniping has “evolved” (or escalated unchecked by the reproofs of grownups) to the stage that it has its own jargon and insider acronyms.

Noteworthy is that Mr. Futrelle’s tirades are in each instance against a single person: “one concerned fellow” and “a YouTube bloviator.” Whether these two men represent the “Men’s Rights Movement” is clearly questionable. Here, incidentally, is a clipping that shows topics surveyed on the Men’s Rights “subreddit” (r/MensRights) that Mr. Futrelle criticizes, topics that paint a different picture from the one his writing does.

Among the members of this so-called collective of haters who posted yesterday are a “self-reflective feminist,” a defender of an elderly man with dementia who was reportedly assaulted, and a father who alleges he was falsely accused of child abuse.

Issues these posts purport to concern seem no less worthy than those feminists raise. Mr. Futrelle nevertheless categorically calls contributors a “hate group,” as does the Southern Poverty Law Center. Ms. Donovan, the girl or woman quoted in the epigraph, offers this interpretation:

MRA stands (loosely, and inaccurately) for the Men’s Rights Activists. More correctly, the MRA movement has enveloped a terrifying sector of the population that feels women and particularly feminists are devoted to squashing the given rights of men in every way. This ranges from belief that women deserve abuse to abusing evolutionary psychology to claim that women are just genetically inferior and will remain that way.

While you, the reader of this post, perhaps sit huddled in a dark corner wondering at the maliciousness of Fate, wondering whether your estranged child or children are safe, wondering if you’ll ever vigorously embrace life again—this is how your pain is perceived (or at least represented) by the feminist “smart set,” which celebrates specialized toilets and mocks you as a “misogynist” and a crybaby.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*Consider this woman’s post to the “subreddit” r/AskFeminists: “Why do Feminists hate ‘MRAs’ and portray them poorly?”