Quote of the Day

[Trigger warning.]

"Critics like Australian sociologist Michael Flood say that men's rights movements reflect the tactics of domestic abusers themselves, minimizing existing violence, calling it mutual, and discrediting victims. MRA groups downplay national abuse rates, just as abusers downplay their personal battery; they wage campaigns dismissing most allegations as false, as abusers claim partners are lying about being hit; and they depict the violence as mutual—part of an epidemic of wife-on-husband abuse—as individual batterers rationalize their behavior by saying that the violence was reciprocal. Additionally, MRA groups' predictions of future violence by fed-up men wronged by the family-law system seem an obvious additional correlation, with the threat of violence seemingly intended to intimidate a community, like a fearful spouse, into compliance. MRA critics say the organizational recapitulation of abusive tactics should be no surprise, considering the wealth of movement leaders with records or accusations of violence, abuse, harassment, or failure to pay child support."—From Kathryn Joyce's "Men's Rights" Groups Have Become Frighteningly Effective. Sent to me by Shaker Timm, who hat tips Slacktivist.

Self-identified MRAs and/or men regurgitating MRA rhetoric are, alongside "pro-life" Christians, my most vicious emailers, who regularly pepper their missives with rape threats and sexually violent imagery. They are little more than a thronging conglomeration of aggressively angry bullies, loosely bound by a collective interest in crushing anyone who poses even the most insignificant threat to their perceived right to male privilege. There is no principle behind the "men's rights" movement, unless one imagines "entitlement to abuse women" to be a principle.