Tag MRAs

If a Man Who Complains of Procedural Abuse is an “MRA,” What Do You Call a Woman Who Complains of Procedural Abuse?

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It isn’t just the men disparaged as “MRAs” (men’s rights activists) who denounce the injustice of feminist-inspired “women’s law.” Women also lose their homes, their families, their dignity, and their lives to misapplications of restraining order and domestic violence statutes. Unlike the men whose lot they share, these women aren’t distinguished with a label.

I propose the acronym “BRA,” which could stand for any of the following:

  • Beleaguered rights activist;
  • Baffled, boggled, buffaloed, or bewildered rights activist; or
  • Buggered rights activist.

The latter of these, especially, would evoke the same mockery shown the men’s rights activist to whom “MRA” is applied like a markdown sticker.

Make no mistake: Women who complain of procedural abuses are no less ignored than the men who do. They’re not saying anything anyone wants to hear—not the ACLU nor the Southern Poverty Law Center nor battered women’s advocates nor feminists in general. They’re misfits, and they’re accordingly denied status. No one dares contradict them, because that might sound misogynist. So they’re just disregarded.

Here are some different proposals for what BRA might represent: bypassed rights activist, betrayed rights activist…or balanced rights activist.

You want the straight dope about false accusation and the need for procedural reform? Ask the ex-wife who’s had her child taken from her, ask the disabled girl who’s been accused of domestic violence and cries herself to sleep every night, ask the mom who can’t attend her child’s school functions or keep a job, ask the ex-girlfriend who was nearly parked on the curb, or ask the professional woman who’s been denied protection against a brute and then framed.

But only ask if you can tolerate an inconvenient truth.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*A woman is the best rights activist, and more women’s voices should be heard in coordinated public protest.

What Makes Someone an “MRA”? Why Are Those Guys So ANGRY?

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Both questions in the title have a common answer, which I’ll illustrate by allegory.

When I was about 20, I worked next to the residence of an aged woman who kept a Rottweiler on a chain in her yard. The dog lived on the tie-out all hours of the day and probably had all of his life.

After I’d observed his situation for months and saw it never changed, I determined to offer to fence in the woman’s property for her. Our business had some unused rolls of chain link that wouldn’t be missed.

I knocked on the woman’s door and explained my interest. She said she’d come out and talk to me. While I waited, the dog approached. I knelt down to greet him. He lunged at my face, tore my nose, and then clamped down on the arm I raised protectively, crushing my radial nerve. I kicked him off and drove myself to the emergency room. If he hadn’t been on a chain, it would have been an ambulance transporting me there. It would still be eight or 10 months before I recovered the use of my left hand, brief as the attack was.

The dog had been mistreated, and he was insane. When I returned to Tucson after leaving for a time to rehabilitate, I learned he’d mauled two little girls and was destroyed. (I passed the woman on the road not long after. She smiled and waggled her fingers at me, and then scowled when I stared at her coldly.)

Question: Who was to blame?

People are no different from dogs. If you force them to live with undeserved privations, whether cruelly or just irrationally, they lose it. This is the answer to the questions in the title.

Calling male victims of abuse, abuse that has its roots in gender dogma, “crazy”—as the man does whose writings I panned in the last post—isn’t necessarily wrong. But driving people crazy and then blaming them for it does kind of make you a monster.

If I then call you a monster, does that mean I’m insensitive? The conclusion is ridiculous.

Consider this story of female violence that was submitted to the blog yesterday:

Hi, I just wanted to share my story for all the other guys who have been victims of vengeful women. I have had two restraining orders placed on me now. The second one is pending…. The first one was dismissed because it was a lie. The girl used it to kick me out of our apartment and to punish me. That was in 2004.

It has caught up with me since then.

In 2010, a guy who was jealous and wanted my girl used his private investigator credentials to pull my records. He found the [dismissed] restraining order and told my girl, who promptly left me.

I am currently married to a woman who has been hitting me, shoving me, knocking me over, and physically keeping me trapped in my own apartment. After having enough, I told her that I wanted a divorce and to go live her life (but really I love her and don’t want to leave her).

She left the next day and then called me a few days later and said she was going to come home. We argued and I yelled that if she attacked me again, I’d call the police immediately. That night when I came home, there were three police cruisers there (mind you, this is three days after the incident). The police escorted her along with my parents to help her get her stuff from the apartment. […]

My mother is a drama queen and always has been. She gets in fights with people in public and was kicked out of her family for spreading lies about them. When my wife asked to be taken home (she was staying with my parents whom she promised never to talk to), my mother told her about the restraining order I had over 10 years ago. I’m sure my mother embellished as she always does. She frightened Diana, and my mother called the cops.

That Monday, my mother brought her to the courthouse to file the restraining order. Diana did not stop her, and Diana even called me, and I heard this new tone in her voice, a tone of righteousness, like she was talking to a child she was about to punish. […] The next day, the police were beating down my door and served me the notice (that’s today).

I have no doubt that I will win this case, but just as the last case caught up with me…how do I explain two cases? This may ruin my reputation for life. I mean surely if you’ve had two cases brought against you, you did something wrong. You must be guilty, right? But I’m not. The first case actually brought on the second case, and in both cases it was the women who were hitting me, not me hitting them or even threatening them. […]

This man says he was battered by two women who petitioned restraining orders against him as a further form of assault (a power play). “They do it because they’re emotional disasters and want to punish,” he offers. He’s right. The system panders to impulse (and often rewards it).

Now consider that the blogger, Tom Boggioni a.k.a.“TBOGG,” criticized in the last post for a 2014 commentary on “MRAs” published on RawStory.com, popped out a piece two days ago telling men they should never strike a woman—as if anyone who would strike a woman will have some sort of moral awakening because Tom pronounced he shouldn’t. Please. (If pieces like his do more than make their male authors look good to their female audience members, it’s lost on me. They pander, and feminists eat it up.)

A man like the one in the account above, who has tolerated violence from women without raising his hand even in self-defense, has been punished for his tolerance by having cops pound on his door and being dragged into court to stand accused. He’s been represented as an abuser—to compound the indignities of being battered—and the implications of the representation are alone enough to damage him…indefinitely. (The first order against the man, which cost him a relationship, was thrown out of court. Note: Even when the court acknowledges allegations are groundless…it doesn’t matter, because the damning implications are preserved. Only one state in the nation, Tennessee, has a law on the books that enables a dismissed restraining order to be expunged.)

Will the guy in the story become the “embittered, divorced white man with anger issues” that TBOGG and his fellows mock? Who knows?

But would you blame him if he did? More significantly, if you did blame him, who would the real monster be?

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*What writers who contemn MRA rhetoric seem to miss is that it’s not violent. It may be unsavory—it may be downright nasty—but its aggressiveness is passive. If the authors of MRA rhetoric (or what’s held up as exemplifying MRA rhetoric) were actually the violent bullies that many of them have probably been represented to be in courtrooms, is this the form their anger would assume…words? Put another way, what form would their anger take if they weren’t the violent bullies that many of them have probably been represented to be? That’s right…words.

Why I Think TBOGG Is a DBAG: A Few Words in Defense of “Restraining-Order-Americans” (and PETA)

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I’ve developed a keen loathing for pandering, puddle duck critics of men’s rights activists who can inspire half a million “likes” with a spatchcocked propaganda piece that features a misspelling in its first sentence and refers to John Donne as “a wanker.”

A quasi-intelligible graffito like Tom Boggioni’s “You too can talk like an embittered divorced white man with anger issues. Learn how now!” confirms what another literary giant once wrote: If you want to persuade, don’t invest your faith in the right argument, but in the right word, because the power of noise will always trump the power of sense.

Tom (a.k.a. TBOGG) could probably have just typed “wanker” over and over and earned the same number of plaudits from his audience of clapping seals.

His commentary, constituted of a few scurrilous lines of his own intermingled with some scurrilous quotations from others, is apparently meant to be a conclusive refutation of men’s complaints of institutionalized discrimination and abuse.

North Carolinian Neil Shelton has been denied contact with his children for over three years. He has also been jailed based on a hoax apparently concocted by his (now ex-)wife’s divorce lawyer, who is also a (female) member of the state House of Representatives.

This rhetorical sparring between chauvinists on either “side” (of what exactly, I’m not sure) is nothing more than a flaming oil slick on a sea of torment. State-sponsored abuses of men (and women) are widespread, and most victims are not hip to the pop-culture pidgin of Tom’s crowd and their opposite numbers. They’re missing their lives, their kids, and their peace of mind. The homeless guy who used to be a businessman and father couldn’t give a rip about cutesy coinages.

If polemics like Tom’s can be said to have an argument, it’s this: Manifestations of masculine anger and contempt must be unjust, because if men had a just reason to be angry and contemptuous, they wouldn’t be angry and contemptuous.

You can call the argument absurd, or you can call it stupid. Absurd or stupid, however, are the only alternatives. (A corollary of the argument seems to be that if mistreated men coolly and reasonably stated their objections, they should have every expectation that injustice would be righted—promptly and with ardent protestations of apology. It’s also absurd…or stupid. Take your pick.)

The beef against PETA—another of Tom’s targets—like the beef against “restraining-order-Americans,” seems to run like this: If you want to register your moral outrage, you should be polite about it. Like, we can totally see how it might suck to be deprived of liberty, stuck in a cage, and made the plaything of some creatures with clipboards instead of souls, but if you want us to take an urgent interest, you should make the problem easier for us to ignore.

Copyright © 2015 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?”