Why We Don't See Eye to Eye (Part II)--Feminist Bloggers on the Duke Case
June 29th, 2007 by Glenn Sacks, MA for Fathers & Families
Background: From time to time I ponder why there is such a divide between the feminist movement and the men's and fathers' movement. I wish this divide didn't exist, or at least that it were smaller. Yet sometimes I read things which make me believe that the divide will never be breached. One example is Why We Don't See Eye to Eye (Part I). Another is below.
In the blog entry Progress continues on the march to legalize rape (6/18/07) on the feminist blog Reclusive Leftist, blogger "Violet Socks" discusses the aftermath of the Duke "rape" case. The blog-- www.reclusiveleftist.com --is a fairly prominent one, so I don't think I can be accused of picking obscure extremists to make a point. Reclusive Leftist writes:
"Top story today: Duke terrorists are now actually being rewarded with an undisclosed sum — millions of dollars? Who the fuck knows? The message is clear: You can terrorize some woman all you want, call her a nigger and threaten to shove a broomstick up her and knock her around and probably rape her, and here’s what you win:
"Adoring national media attention
"The fervid devotion of millions of moist-palmed dudes who totally sympathize with how unfair it is to get nailed just for terrorizing some stupid bitch
"The profound satisfaction of seeing the woman you terrorized dragged through the mud, publicly hounded, and even threatened with legal action for committing the GINORMOUS [gigantic and enormous] crime of actually reporting her assault.
"Millions of dollars in prize money from your university to make you feel better about the terrible ordeal you’ve been through.
"Any questions about why every single athletic team in this country now has carte blanche to rape and torture any woman they get their nasty goddamn hands on?
"Throw up, throw up, throw up."
The full post can be seen at Progress continues on the march to legalize rape. Sigh...
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June 29th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
I agree that it is difficult for a reasonable person to fathom how blind, raging hatred can develop to the point where innocence is of no relevance; where membership in the hated class is enough of a reason to advocate the most extreme punishments; where accusations are sufficient to condemn, whether they be true or not. Not all feminists are quite so full of hate and vitriol as this one, but many are. And many more give their assent to this type of evil by their silence.
I, too wish for a meeting of the minds, Glenn, and I really tried to achieve such with them on various feminist blogs for a time, but had to give it up. The viciousness directed my way wore me down after a while. The antidote to violence, according to Gandhi, is peace. These sad persons will not be silenced with hatred aimed back at them. It will come via standing firm for principles, with integrity, maintaining the moral high ground until it's clear to all that we are standing in exactly that place. It will take some time. Keep leading the way, Glenn.
June 29th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
I'm glad you don't see eye to eye with female supremacists. Just like the Civil Rights movement fought against the KKK, so we must fight against the supremacist movement today.
There is no space for understanding when the other side has a blind hatred towards your kind.
June 29th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
Wow... that blog is a real eye-opener. I know you said it was not a fringe blog, but it is hard to believe that a large chunks of society follow this type of thinking. Most news outlets agree that if anyone is a 'Duke Terrorist,' it would be Nifong, a raging prosecutor gone amok. Is there any way to make a fair comparison of readership, or thought leadership (maybe how many times it is cited on NOW or mainstream outlets), to other outlets? What does "fairly prominent" mean?
June 29th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
The site of Dr. Violet Socks is evidence of a persistent ideological divide all right. Men's rights activists will have to rely on the political process to resolve, however temporarily, their differences with ideological feminism. I do not believe that a meeting of the minds is possible.
Beyond the question of guilt or innocence, I would say that anyone who hires strippers should expect the consequences to include false accusation of rape, loss of reputation and astronomical legal expense. That's the cost of doing business with strippers.
June 29th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
Correct me if I am wrong. Piecing together the “facts,” we have this:
Two strippers showed up, both impaired but one totally zonked.
After a few minutes (at best) into the act, people started filing out as it was too disgusting to watch her.
After most left, the remaining few started booing and heckling her. She bolted to the bathroom and locked the door.
The guys tried to get her to come out and leave the premises, including slipping hundred-dollar bills under the door.
She finally came out, no one laid a hand on her, and she left, after stumbling around the front yard, waking the neighbors.
Despite them wanting her out of there, did anyone attack her? Anyone go for a cheap feel-up? Anyone attempt any kind of sex act? NOPE. “Classy guys” comes to mind here, although that's an oxymoron to those with malfunctioning brains.
How many WOMEN, knowing the facts, would vote “They should have broken down the door, beat the crap out of her, and dumped her at the curb?
She told the bouncer where she regularly strips that “I’m going to get me some money from some of them white guys.”
They did a rape kit and found recent DNA from 4 males, which is not really relevant, except that she is probably making very good money as a whore (feminists prefer to call it “working in the sex industry”) yet the scholars at Duke started a scholarship fund for her! She probably laughed like hell over that!
Meantime, the parents of the 3 she falsely accused spent MILLIONS to block this miscarriage of justice.
This case legalizes rape!?! NOPE.
It DOES do some things, however: It highlights the rampant FALSE rape reporting going on, combined with the total lack of any penalty for doing so. The HUGE cost to a man and his family defending such FALSE charges is also highlighted. The total arrogance of the Duke University administration and professors can also be seen. The incredibly, criminally poor performance of the police department and prosecutor’s office must also be acknowledged. The press? They claim they just shovel it; they don’t make it.
DanH
June 29th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
knock her around and probably rape her...
Now you can convict a man for having probably committed a crime?
June 29th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Legal reform to address false accusation will mostly benefit persons who do nothing to increase the odds that they will be falsely accused, but who are falsely accused anyway. Hiring strippers is a luxury that increases the odds of such things as false accusation, malicious prosecution, loss of reputation and substantial legal expense. That needs to be taken into consideration when entering into a decision to hire strippers. That doesn't make the lacrosse players guilty of crimes they did not commit.
June 29th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Uh- she DOES realize that one of the accused has photographic evidence that he was in a different part of town at the time the supposed terrorism was said to take place, right?
RIGHT?
(Crickets chirping)
June 29th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Aw, c'mon, how can you take this woman seriously? The "About Dr. Socks" is just plain sophomoric, "what's a godbag?" has me wanting to offer "fembag" for the mix and the comments policy clearly reveals her lack of self-analysis. And the choice of photograph? Ew.
June 29th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
LOL.....agreed JD.
June 30th, 2007 at 4:29 am
To me, what is most important is the silence of the overwhelming majority of feminists in the face of such hatred. As long as feminists remain silent in the face of violent hatred of men we will have an unbridgeable divide. As long as the massive majority of people in our culture remain silent in the face of such hatred we will have more and ever more innocent men being irreparably harmed for the joy & profit of the feminist hate mongers.
June 30th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Carey Roberts has a nice article covering the non-aftermath of the Duke case.
It's one thing when some nut on the internet does some "creative" thinking, but it is scary when you realize that the staff at a major US University has a similar mental disfunction and no one seems to care.
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/070625
June 30th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Well, I'm a woman and a classic feminist and people like this PISS ME OFF.
Does she not know, or understand, that historically the idea that accusations of rape originated solely from revenge and/or greed were used to shut women up who truly were raped? Does she not get how dangerous it is to excuse false accusations of rape? Does she not see that somewhere down the line, a woman with other issues is going to be raped by a powerful guy, and people in the system are going to think "Nifong" and be reluctant to do something about it? (I'm not saying this because I think that "all men are rapists," or any idiocy like that - I'm saying it because people in society with wealth and power have, throughout history, sometimes abused that power. Sometimes they do so by driving men out of business, sometimes they do it through other means. It has happened before, and it will happen again...but assuming that it will ALWAYS be the case is as stupid as assuming that it's NEVER the case.) False rape accusations are bad for men, but they're also bad for women. How can someone who claims to be a "feminist" not see this?
To put this in terms that a real feminist should understand: Does this blogger really, REALLY think the (African-American) stripper at the heart of this case was well-served by the (white) male prosecutor who exploited her case and threw justice out the window in order to get re-elected? And she's directing her anger at the college kids who did nothing more than hire a freakin' stripper? This is reminding me of how so-called feminists contorted themselves to excuse Bill Clinton and excoriate Monica way back when. This is a case where a certain man's privilege ran amuck - Nifong's. All of these so-called "feminists" who are letting him off the hook should be ashamed.
June 30th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Er, jw, do you mean like the slightly embarrassed silence the typical men's rights advocate has towards some of the blatantly misogynistic stuff out there on the internet? Don't get me wrong, all I'm saying is we've got our lunatic fringe too, and many feminists out there think it's representative of the rest of us. Extremism promotes extremism, on both sides. Socks is just a jumped up little twit who's, briefly, got exactly what she wanted: our attention. I suggest we stop pandering to her, right now, and concentrate on more important things.
Marion, I will never, ever call myself a feminist again, but I agree with you. It is a fundamentally immature approach to any moral issue to declare someone the good guy and someone else the bad guy and not brook any disagreement. The only result can be that someone will get hurt.
June 30th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Marion, don't say 'feminists', these people are feminists in every sense of the word. If you immediately declare that somebody is no longer part of a group the moment they do anything wrong you are avoiding the issue. For example, when Glenn wrote about MRAs glorifying darren mack's murder of his wife and a judge, he criticised them fully. He did not deny that they really believed in men's rights, of course they did, but they were wrong. Just as the pope who ordered the inquisition was still a Christian, this woman is still a feminist, end of story. Feminism is not defined by what YOU believe.
July 1st, 2007 at 8:41 am
I read the blog a couple of days ago and she did not get any real sympathy for her point of view. The majority of the responses were essentially "Youre Crazy". Violet is a perfect example of why the system is what it is today. The left is usually wanting something to rant about and someone to blame for it. Shes hung up on the fact that the Duke Lacrosse team is a bunch of white males with silver spoons who "terrorized" a black women. No mention is even given of Nifong other then he "served her interests".
I agree with a previous poster who stated she was seeking attention. Im a network admin by trade and most of the people I have run into who blog like that are so miserbale in their own lives that they feel they need to spead that misery around to others. No matter who it hurts.
July 1st, 2007 at 1:11 pm
She doesn't like criticism either - anything straying 'off message' gets deleted pretty quickly.
July 1st, 2007 at 9:14 pm
I kept a copy of the critical comments before Dr. Violet Socks deleted them. By sheer coincidence i had a browser tab open with the soon-to-be marginalized comments; I saved those when I opened another tab and found that Dr Socks had superciliously deleted them. Google's cache doesn't contain the deleted comments. (Obviously I have too much time on my hands.)
July 1st, 2007 at 11:06 pm
The more I look into this issue, the more I find "feminism" to be a tough nut to crack. There are some (perhaps many?) - those I refer to as orthodox feminists - that seem to have a strict set of rules and are more "man-bashing" in their approach to arguments. Effectively, they never move beyond what is between ones legs, and they will never waver outside their rules. Whether they realize it or not, many of these rules were created years ago and a lot has changed since that time..Anyone that wavers from these rules is branded an anti-feminist. While many of these feminists see themselves as leftist - in reality they have gone so far left that they popped up on the ultra-conservative right. They are the very things the profess to hate: they are sexist bigots.
To Marion's credit, there is another type of feminist: the truly liberal feminist. This feminist that is open minded, able to adapt, and able to empathize with people in the men's movement. In conversations with these more enlightened feminists, a lot of common ground can be found. There will be disagreements, but mutual respect will usually rule the day.
So I used to say that I am a feminist, but I think I would say I am simply the other side of the same coin: a masculinist. I believe in equal rights (and equal responsibilities) between the genders, but I view the world from a male point of view with male sensitivities, and with male needs. I accept that those of us that share this view will not agree 100% of the time with liberal feminists - but often these feminists can accept that too. I find these feminists to be excellent allies and none of my "feminist-bashing" statements are ever directed towards them.
There is a good discussion on "masculinism" on Wikipedia. From what I have seen on this site, there are a ton of "Conservative Masculinists" and a ton of "Liberal Masculinists" - which one are you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculinism
Of course this begs the question: can one be a liberal feminist and a liberal masculinist at the same time?
July 1st, 2007 at 11:12 pm
If you don't or won't drink her Kool-aide, your post is dumped post haste.
Glenn, I pray the divide is wider than the Grand Canyon with people spewing such frothed-up venom.
DanH
July 2nd, 2007 at 3:48 am
Feminists like this are the best thing that ever happened to the anti-feminist movement. While people who read this blog may be used to her type of ranting, the general public sees this as extremist nonsense, and it serves to discredit all feminists. This can be compared to the way a lot of black activists got discredited when African-American Studies folks started deliberately putting forth nonsense about how Greek mythology was stolen from Africa, etc.
Anyway, here is my suggestion: If all men are really potential rapists, let's pass a law to castrate all men and save their sperm in case they want kids. I'll bet we can get this author to agree with some variation of that. After she agrees, we'll start the process with her brother or father or son.
July 4th, 2007 at 9:08 am
The rabid prosecutor Nifong is typical of the prosecutors in many courtrooms when a male has been accused of any crime against a female.
When I refused to accept a guilty plea when falsely accused of domestic violence, the prosecutor told me she would make my life Hell and drag the hearings out as long as possible, and would make sure I didn't see my child for a very long time, unless I accepted a guilty plea. She informed me she knew how to manipulate the jury so that I'd be found guilty even if I was innocent.
I was refused a trial and did go through Hell for 4 years before they finally had to dismiss the case. They destroyed my life and there's nothing I can do about it.
I don't have the money or publicity the Duke boys have in order to bring a lawsuit, but I'm glad they found some justice.
October 20th, 2008 at 11:53 am
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December 21st, 2008 at 3:40 am
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February 4th, 2009 at 11:46 am
[...] ANSWER: The best anti-feminist sites I know of -: http://www.the-niceguy.com/forum/index.p... http://www.glennsacks.com/blog/index.php... Excellent Youtube series by Warren Farrell : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFtGwBsKg... [...]
August 6th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Понравилась статья.Буду следить за комментами....
September 15th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Ну прямо в точку, что ещё можно сказать. Только не могу понять, куда пропал автор?
September 15th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Неплохая информация подобрана сдесь, стараются люди, так держать!
September 16th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Автор явно умеет привлечь посетителей на сайт). Пишет очень понятно и интересно. Огромное человеческое спасибо
September 17th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Dad poisoned the minds of his children with his irresponsible television viewing choices.
Among other things.
Dad is liked, so expect the intent was not there. However, I suspect the same cannot be said for his wife.
Case in point:::Neighbor's driveway sidewalk chalk art consisted of a girl's name, a smiley face, other innocent, child-like offerings.
In our driveway our kids drew body outlines, like those one would find at a murder scene.
And all his son spoke of was guns, hunting and killing.
The father's irresponsibility was manifested in how the son spoke when he was younger. Just ask his former teachers.