The emphasis was not on closing down porn shops. I did not suggest that. It was, as I said, a 'Reclaim the Night' march. It just happened to pass the shop I was working in.
The group did not show up specifically at the shop I worked in, they were just marching past it.
You have said nothing about the violence of the act nor of the significance of the media choosing to ignore it. That was the main point of my post !
The salient point of my story was that none of the women in the march, nor the media, showed any concern that I could have been burned alive in the shop. Once it was established that I was not an anti-feminist stereotype who could be lambasted on the radio, they simply left.
This story is about the mood of the time, and the extreme positions which were taken by many feminists and their supporters in the media.
And it is one, solitary, specific example, as others have pointed out since my absence. I can concur that setting your shop on fire was terrible, but you never explained how this specific example in your country applied to a general narrative about feminism, or even the take-back-the-night marches....which for that matter, I don't recall reading anything like this in my country when these marches were common.
You also didn't mention the problems of violence....especially the threats and attacks on women who had to be out in public spaces, especially during late hours. You left the impression that because one bad thing happened to you long, long ago, you have no sympathy or appreciation for the hazards, and limits on personal freedom of movement, that many women(especially low income working women) face just because they have to be out in a public space.
I could write a book on that subject. In 1999 I was in an Anglicare social welfare agency in Tasmania, seeking work. On the walls were maybe a dozen posters about domestic violence. None of them mentioned abusive women. I had experienced a relationship with a woman prone to violent abusive behaviour, and was all too well aware that such women are never mentioned in relation to domestic violence.I have also known several other men who were in similar positions.
I notice that men in misogynistic cultures complain about women being nasty, treacherous, deceitful etc.. It's as if they expect that women who have grown up and come of age in a culture that gives them half the value of men, should be happy, well-adjusted and have a positive attitude about men.
As for your African example -- does that even compare with what African women and girls are going through in the Congo or many other war zones? A matter of scale applies where we're talking about male violence vs. female violence. And for what it's worth, there is one violent thing that men do that no cultural anthropologist has observed from women: using rape and aggravated sexual violence as a tool of revenge and intimidation. There have been guerilla movements where women have picked up guns and taken an active role: the long-running war in Eritrea would be an example; also the so-called Maoist guerillas in central India, who are fighting off rapacious developers from exploiting what's left of India's natural forests...and yet there is not one reported incidence of a gang of female combatants using rape in places they have occupied. That tells us a little about basic differences between male and female, and what the predilection towards violence and sadism is.
In Australia, and probably in America, the police do not take reports of abusive females seriously. Men who report such behaviour are ridiculed and considered liars without any investigation of the facts. On the other hand, if any woman contacts the police and claims a man is violent, or even just that she feels threatened, the man will be treated like a criminal and receive abusive treatment from the police.
I realise that if a man is violent to a woman, his superior physical strength means that she is likely to be badly hurt. I also realise that the police have to deal with some very disturbing stuff, and simply don't want to take the chance of allowing a woman to be hurt. That is understandable.
Well that's a relief! Because I don't see many MRA's acknowledge these facts in the first place. This is a point I first came across a few years ago by some so called men's rights activists. They claimed statistical evidence for charges that women cause almost as much domestic violence as men. But, garbage-in, garbage-out as they say! A closer look at their statistics revealed that they did not place any weight on the scale of violence in the police reports. A woman could be mad at her husband and slap him, and the husband could have responded by knocking her out cold. The lame, ticking the boxes method of analysis of the mens rights group would call that a 50-50.
It's no surprise that most civilized nations, including where I live, have changed their approach regarding domestic violence over the last 40 years. At one time...and this is what conservatives are trying to bring back...the police would make a judgment of whether the wife "deserved it," and refrain from pressing charges unless he left her with serious, visible bodily injuries. And because largely male police forces all over the developed world appeared to be siding with the husband the majority of times, and leading to negligent examples where women died after police were called and refused to press charges...the legislation had to be drafted along the lines of the police assuming that the husband was the aggressor, even if he clearly was not! And for what it's worth, even with the opening premise based on the assumption that the man is the likely hostile aggressor, from my own personal example, police who are called out to deal with such situations can make a proper assessment very quickly when they arrive on the scene. I had a live-in girlfriend many years ago before I got married...who had mental problems that I was not previously aware of, and called the police when we were having a heated argument. Even though the law had already been drafted to put the scrutiny on me, the three police officers (including a female) quickly assessed that there was no evidence that I had committed an assault, and that she was incoherent, and started asking questions like they suspected she was using drugs or had some psychological issues. So, I have a hard time taking the hard luck story from men who claim to have been persecuted by a system that favours the women in such situations. Even today, with the theoretical advantage for protecting women, there are still many times more women than men who end up in hospital because of domestic violence or even murdered in the worst examples.
But, my biggest objection to "Men's Rights" complaints about feminism all over the internet....and especially on Youtube, is that it is an agglomeration of tactics and skewed evidence designed to attack the rights and freedoms that women won after a long, difficult struggle.
Nevertheless, feminism, despite its positive value, is also responsible for enduring negative stereotyping of men, and whitewashing the fact of abusive women.
Are racial civil rights movements also guilty of stereotyping whites? If so, I'll get over it, and I would appreciate if others would too, because the harms caused by discrimination have to be placed in the context of which groups in a society have power, and which ones are disadvantaged.
