Southern Poverty Law Center berichtet über internationale Männerkonferenz

Kurioserweise in seiner Rubrik Hatewatch berichtet inzwischen auch das linke Southern Poverty Law Center über die erste internationale Konferenz der Männerrechtsbewegung. Nachdem das SPLC den Maskulismus in der Vergangenheit sehr kritisch begleitete, waren viele von uns auf einen harte Polemik vorbereitet; entstanden ist stattdessen ein sachlicher Artikel. Ein Auszug:

Elam e-mailed ticket holders to warn them that anyone "trash-talking women [or] making violent statements, even jokingly" would be summarily expelled. The movement’s enemies, he said, "will be looking for anything they can to hurt us with. They will be listening, eavesdropping, and if they can, gathering things to harm us with." Perhaps for that reason, the decibel level was a little lower than it usually is at the website A Voice for Men. I didn’t hear any pejoratives for women.

Surprisingly, some of the speakers at the conference hardly even alluded to feminism. Fred Jones, a lawyer and life coach (whose uncle and law client was the Second Amendment hero Otis W. McDonald) gave an inspirational speech about how he gained sole custody of his children and raised them to adulthood. Tom Golden spoke about the non-verbal ways that men process grief.

Tatsächlich? Glaubt man amerikanischen Leitmedien war die Konferenz eine einzige große Attacke auf den Feminismus. Zutreffender ist wohl, dass es auf der Konferenz AUCH Feminismuskritik gab:

The Canadian Senator Anne Cools, who opened the conference, spoke at great length about how feminism has hijacked Canada’s family courts, quoting Blackstone on women’s rights, the song "Frankie and Johnnie" and even Euripides to give lie to the supposed feminist myth that women were historically oppressed. Frankie and Medea, she implied, both gave as good as they got. Erin Pizzey, the well-known novelist, ex-feminist, and founder of Chiswick Women’s Aid, one of the first women’s shelters, indicted the movement she had once helped lead as a radical Marxist plot to turn women against men, destroy families, and create a billion dollar social welfare industry.

(... ) Tara Palmatier, a psychologist, noted that she was both the third speaker and the third woman to speak. "My, aren’t we an interesting group of misogynists," she quipped. Thanks to feminism, she said, women are suffering from narcissistic personality disorders at astoundingly high rates. Feminists, in her description, are indistinguishable from the Kardashians and other reality TV stars, in that they are all about unearned entitlement. In the world that feminism has remade, men are shamed and women are shameless. The Canadian newspaper columnist Barbara Kay also spoke about misandry in the media, deconstructing TV commercials and women’s magazines for messages that disparaged men and traditional families.

(...) After a fulsome introduction by Warren Farrell, who praised him for owning his anger and drawing on its power to heal, Paul Elam spoke quite movingly about his blue collar roots. He started A Voice for Men when he was a trucker, he said, writing his posts from a laptop in the cab of his semi at night. He shared a haunting memory of his Uncle Walter, who was a ghostly presence in his own home before he passed away—a frightening harbinger of what Elam might have become himself, he said, had he not reclaimed his manhood.

Elam used his time at the podium to fan a little faux controversy too. Lee DeVito, a writer for the Detroit Metro Times, had posted a semi-tongue-in-cheek piece ("I Was Molested at the Mens Rights Conference") about a strange man who petted his arm and made incoherent small talk while he was attending yesterday’s press conference. "I realized this is the kind of creepy shit women deal with … everywhere … every day," he said.

In Elam’s telling, DeVito claimed that he’d really been molested. He choked up a little as he recounted how he’d been compelled to ask the offender to leave, even though he was clearly harmless, emotionally ill, and badly in need of succoring. "I look forward to the time," he said, "when we can have a conference when there might be some help here for him."

Elam’s implication was that the libel against the arm-petter was just the latest in the long line of male-demonizing lies told by feminists and their enablers against long-suffering men. But there was another inference too, that struck me as surprisingly candid—that some men’s rights activists are as off-putting as they are because they are so broken.