Mother Jones posts response letter from Warren Farrell

Submitted by Mastodon on Thu, 2015-01-29 16:53

Warren Farrell submitted a letter to Mother Jones which the moderator published in the comment section. Its has received 364 up-votes which is impressive consider Mother Jones is very much pro-feminist. Excerpt:

'However, as I am sure you know, I am sad that you chose to frame the article with the men's issues movement's participants portrayed as "haters and trolls" who inspire misogynist-motivated real-life killings of women.

An example of an alternative framework is how the Men's Issues conference you attended in Detroit incorporated as keynote speakers a half dozen women--almost half of the keynote speakers. Can you name a single national feminist conference with a half dozen of their keynote speakers being men?

Moreover, many of the women were internationally-respected--women such as Canadian Senator Anne Cools; England's founder of women's shelters, Erin Pizzey; psychologist Helen Smith…. Senator Cools, the leading keynote speaker, aside from being a senior Canadian Senator, is also black. Since when are Senator Cools, Helen Smith, and Erin Pizzey “haters” or “trolls”? Why did you not mention even one of these 
three women?'

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Comments

Letter from Paul Elam posted here. Excerpt:

'The other point of contention is of your reference to the SPLC. A more complete investigation of the facts reveals that Arthur Goldwag, who is not employed by the SPLC, wrote a blog post expressing concerns about alleged misogyny in a long list of websites.

His writing was an opinion piece, and had nothing to do with SPLC’s official Hate Watch, or their directory of identified hate groups. In short, neither AVFM nor any other men’s rights website was even alleged to be part of a hate movement by the SPLC. Anything leading your readers to think otherwise is truly misleading.

In fact, after the online feminist blogging community made extensive use of misrepresenting the meaning of Goldwag’s article, he penned a clarification, as follows:

“It should be mentioned that the SPLC did not label MRAs as members of a hate movement; nor did our article claim that the grievances they air on their websites – false rape accusations, ruinous divorce settlements and the like – are all without merit.”

While Goldwag still voices unambiguous (and I think hyperbolic) criticism of the men’s movement, his words here are not subject to misinterpretation regarding the “hate group” insinuation. It simply never happened.

Finally, I have to echo Warren’s concerns that there appears to be a deliberate omission of the fact that our movement is incredibly diverse, and includes many high-profile women who have been doing groundbreaking work in the area of men’s issues for decades.'

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Submitted by Matt on Fri, 2015-01-30 06:53