Wednesday, February 16, 2011

William Quincy Belle - Excellent Overview of "The Riverview Center" Controversy

For those who do not follow such squabbles, The Riverview Center offered a Bingo card for Super Bowl viewers to track instances in commercials where negative images about women, with spaces such as “Woman Portrayed as Stupid,” “Man Abusing Woman,” and “Woman as Sex Object.”

The advertisement and the Bingo card sent people to their website, whereupon they found a year-old commercial created by Josh Jasper, the president and chief executive officer of Riverview Center, in which a young boy is shown while a voice-over speaks:
"He’s tough. He’s strong. He’s aggressive. He’s powerful. And he raped his girlfriend. But he wasn’t always this way. What are you teaching your son? Redefine what it means to be a man because ending sexual violence begins with him."

Naturally, this sent the men's rights activists into a tizzy, accusing the ad of being an example of blatant misandry, when all it really says is that violence (against women, in particular) is a learned behavior, not an inborn trait that all men have.

Since, it went viral, the men's rights, men's studies, and feminist blogs have all been going nuts - including threats by Paul Elam to destroy Jasper's life (he has asked his followers to dig up an information they can find: "any embarrassing, disgraceful detail of this misandric lowlifes life, and use it to cripple his ability to continue with this kind of evil."

There have also been physical threats of violence - because, you know, the best way to stop violence is with more violence, right?

Anyway, I don't have the time to give you the whole ugly story, so fortunately, William Quincy Belle has done the work for us, presenting all sides of the issue and seeming to me to come down on the more sane side of the issue (an issue where sanity seems to be in short supply).

Check it out: Men aren't violent and I'll kill you if you disagree


1 comment:

Sage said...

Thanks. I'll check this out.