The evolution of Male Chauvinist Pig to SPERM

Content note: explicit discussion of violence against women, violent misogyny and rape culture.

They call themselves "men's rights activists," and we've let them get away with it.  They have been clever, using language of "rights" and liberal ideas of equality, all the while demonising women and reinforcing sexist oppression.  A Voice for Men, Masculinist Evolution New Zealand (MENZ), the New Zealand Equality Education Foundation and the Union of Fathers have stolen liberatory language while they work on restoring men to their rightful place as top of the heap.

It's about time feminists called this out.  Second wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s called sexists male chauvinist pigs.  They didn't let MCPs define the terms.

This international "men's rights" movement includes "activists" celebrating domestic violence murders as men fighting back.

Then there is A Voice for Men and their take on fathering daughters:

The night winds on, with discussion of rape and the smothering of penises, the sorrows of false accusations and the narcissism of young girls. A sore point for Factory, who has two daughters, who, like young women everywhere, he says, compete for the most exaggerated rape claim. It is, he says, a status thing. When one of his daughters came home one night and said she’d been raped, he said, "Are you fucking kidding me?" Sitting with us, he hikes his voice up to a falsetto in imitation: " ’Oh, I just got raped.’ " He laughs. There’s a moment of silence. A bridge too far? "I told her if she pressed charges, I’d disown her."

Elam, whose attention has drifted, grins through his beard. "That’s good fathering," he says."

Here in New Zealand MENZ help men to avoid protection orders for domestic violence and tell you what to do if you're accused of rape.  The face of MENZ is John Potter, convicted child sexual abuser.  Posts and comments on the page are Misogyny 101.

Let's call these male chauvinist pigs, with all-new equality lingo, what they are.  Sexist Protectors of Extra Rights for Men.   

SPERMs have many concerns, what with all the feminism.  Recently they got worried about Mad Max and Hollywood being unfair on men.  I'm just going to leave this here, thanks Human Rights Commission.

Increasingly though, the focus of SPERMs is domestic and sexual violence.  They argue men are just as likely to be victims as women, and women are just as likely to be perpetrators as men. 

This argument is well-advanced in Aotearoa, and while MENZ and John Potter may seem fringe, SPERM academics like David Fergusson and MSD's new Chief Science Advisor Richie Poulton who focus on undermining "ideological" approaches to gendered violence, do not.  Nor do the regular deluge of emails from other SPERMs to policy analysts inside government.

Fergusson and Poulton have been arguing for years - with super approving commentary at MENZ and elsewhere - that women are as violent as men, based on research which uses the Conflict Tactics Scale.  I stab you, you push me away, we've been equally violent.  The CTS has been heavily critiqued for missing self-defense, not addressing context like whether or not you're afraid, and not measuring sexual violence in relationships.

Fergusson and Poulton can't explain the gender differences in hospital admissions, rates of seeking protection orders, rates of reporting to the Police, numbers of families in Refuges.  Even they haven't been able to pretend sexual violence is gender neutral.

I do not wish to pretend that men never experience domestic or sexual violence.  There's good evidence that boys are targeted for sexual abuse at previously unsuspected rates,  if not at the same rates as girls.  And with emerging data showing high rates of victimisation for trans* and intersex people, acknowledging diverse experiences of violence is vital.  

But saying violence is always an awful thing - whatever your gender identity - is not the same as pretending it happens at the same rates across gender.  SPERMs are not happy with acknowledging male victims exist; they need them to exist equally with female victims.  And they need female perpetrators to exist equally with male perpetrators.  Contrary to evidence.

New Zealand's Family Violence Death Review from 2013 tells us that in 55 cases of violence which led to death:

• 51 deaths were of female victims of men's violence; 1 death was of a male victim of women's violence; 3 deaths were new male partners killed by ex-male partners
• 53 murders were committed by abusive men; 2 murders were committed by abusive women, one of a male partner, one of a female partner

It will be very interesting to see whether Richie Poulton's ideological influence at MSD leads to a degendering of domestic and sexual violence.  Will he try to further SPERM positions like encouraging female victims into counselling with men using violence and removing state supports for women leaving violent relationships?  How will funding for groups working with male survivors increase?

One area he's likely to attack - because SPERMs hate it - is the White Ribbon Campaign, which focuses on ending men's violence towards women.  White Ribbon commemorates 14 murders by a male engineering student who killed women on a course he missed out on in Montreal in 1991.  Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Trust, Family First and MENZ all come out swinging on this one, pretty much every year.  They actively campaign to stop others participating - one comment on the MENZ link above explains how they stopped New Zealand Courts displaying any White Ribbon materials.  They argue the White Ribbon campaign should be about male victims too, despite how insulting that would be to the 14 murdered women the campaign honours.

One final note.  I've trained close to 50 sexual violence prevention practitioners in New Zealand over the last few years, with nearly an even gender split.  The vast majority of the men doing that work understand gendered dynamics well, and are constantly looking for new ways to encourage other men to behave in respectful, playful and equity based ways when they are sexual with other people, and to intervene if they see men around them supporting violence.

Just one SPERM in that time is probably pretty good going, though I still worry about the damage he may be doing with the young people he works with.   Our training included how to facilitate a session on "Blurred Lines" to encourage conversation about gender norms.  The vicious misogyny of this song, when you actually read the lyrics, is difficult to miss.  The SPERM was most concerned about these lyrics:

"So, hit me up when you pass through
I'll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two"

He was worried that young men who don't have big enough penises to "tear asses in two" would not feel masculine enough.  This SPERM was thinking like a rapist.

"Men's rights activists" are not fighting for rights and equality.  I'm sick of being polite about them, using their language and having to re-prove, over and over again, that sexist oppression exists.  Sexist Protectors of Extra Rights for Men want to always be the centre of attention, setting all the rules, having all their needs met, being the only voices heard.  Enough.  Let's take it back.

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For the first time, I am closing comments on a post.  I've been the target of SPERMs in New Zealand before, and while I can't control what they write about me on their own sites, I'm choosing not to allow that here, for this post.  Apologies to all our fabulous readers who would no doubt enjoy discussing and debating the issues above.

Don't Judge by this

Well knock me down with a feather but Stuff have produced an irresponsible, unbalanced article about women and the justice system.  In a profile on Family Court Principal Judge Peter Boshier leaving that role and moving to the Law Commission, the reporter picks out a story from Judge Boshier of how tough the Family Court is to work in.

It's a story about a mother "lying" about sexual abuse; "turning her son against his father" and Judge Boshier awarding sole custody to the father, reluctantly, but because he knew it was best for the son.

Is this case the real outline of what happened in that family?  Who knows? 

I can't even begin to tell you how many women and children I've worked with for whom trying to talk about sexual abuse has been near impossible.  Near top of the list would be the woman who was concerned about her children in the care of her ex-partner, a dentist.  She had seen him drug his dental patients in order to sexually assault them, so had a laboratory run blood tests for her children after a visit with their father.  The tests confirmed the presence of drugs.  Of course, that wasn't considered "evidence" in the Family Court, because there was no proof the father had administered the drugs and the children were both young and in one case, learning disabled, so their views did not count.  After a year and a half in court, she won sole custody, when the court appointed psychologist finally stopped blaming her for the fact her children were absolutely terrified of their father.  Last time I saw her, she was still picking up the pieces.

So excuse my scepticism of Judge Boshier's understanding of this case - I'm just aware of how many times the Family Court gets it wrong, particularly in terms of sexual abuse. 

Actually though, what bothers me most about this article is not whether or not that particular story is accurate.  It's the fact that in eight years worth of Family Court chiefdom, the story Judge Boshier has chosen to tell, or that Stuff have chosen to report on, is so wildly misrepresentative of what happens in Family Court.

This is the kind of reporting which reinforces ideas that sexual abuse is made up, and women lie.  We lie.  We cannot be trusted. 

I get that reporting on the soul-destroying slew of misery that is the Family Court - violence perpetrated within families mostly by men who may well not want to live with the consequences of what that has done to their relationships with their ex-partners and children - is not sexy.  Or, when violence is not a factor in relationship breakdown, trying to decide how to resolve custody to ensure children have all they need to flourish.  Also, not sexy.

That's why when the Family Court was opened to the media at the beginning of Judge Boshier's tenure, the actual reporting of cases did not increase.  Because despite the claims of Men's Rights groups in the 1990s, the Family Court isn't a haven of militant feminazis.  From one of the reporters in this research:

This sense of unease is evident in others, such as Martin van Beynen of The Press: “An hour in Family Court in Christchurch and I already have pages of misery, dysfunction and dislocation in my notebook.”

Back to the wild misrepresentation from Stuff and Judge Boshier.  Men's Rights groups have campaigned outside judges and lawyer's houses, parliament and courts for a number of years.  Their central argument is that the Family Court is tough on them because it stops them seeing their children for unfair reasons like domestic violence:

More specifically, before 2004, men’s groups contended that the Family Court operated to disadvantage fathers after a separation, especially regarding custody of the children. The regulation of domestic violence was also seen by these groups as a particular feature of gender bias perpetrated by the Family Court. They argued that the Domestic Violence Act 1995 “isolat[es] children from loving fathers because the child is automatically included in the order.”

It's been a very effective argument.  The climate created by Men's Rights groups has put the Family Court under pressure when this so-called "gender bias" - the idea that it might not be ideal for men who use violence towards women and children at home to automatically have access to parenting - is actually just good, clean, proven-by-research how-we-bring-up-healthy-children stuff.

How effective it's been can be seen in a number of research papers produced over the years exploring mothers experiences of the Family Court by Auckland academics.  Their research shows that mothers have pressure put on them because "shared care is inevitable"; that even when the custody situation appears to be just being used to provoke further torment (he doesn't turn up), Courts continue to insist on shared care; that children's wants and needs are frequently assumed to have been manipulated by mothers when those wants and needs include less contact with a father who has been violent or neglectful.

The single most salient point in this for me is that in all the years of working with women who have experienced domestic violence, I've only known a handful of women who didn't want their children to have some kind of relationship or regular contact with the children's father.  The vast majority of the women wanted their children's father to parent well - because parenting alone is hard work.  Yet for many of those mums, that's not what has been on offer.  It's a flaming shame that Stuff and Judge Boshier are contributing to public misinformation.  I bet the Men's Rights groups will be posting this up with glee.