A Voice for Men is banning commenters who challenge Amartya Talukdar’s marital rape apologia

Rape survivor advocate Nayreen Daruwalla speaks to Indian women. Click on pic to see her on CNN

So I was wondering if any of A Voice for Men’s readers had spoken up in the comments there about a rather sensitive subject: the fact that the supposed “human rights” site recently published a post that was not only 1) an apologia for marital rape but also, 2) written by a Holocaust denier and Hitler fan.

When I took at look at the comments there this morning, the answer was (of course) no: there was no mention of AVFM contributor Amartya Talukdar’s numerous Tweets describing the Holocaust as a hoax, Hitler as a great man, and Hillary Clinton as a “Jewess.”

Instead, I found that those who challenged Talukdar’s post (archived here) — which defended the Indian government’s refusal to see marital rape as rape — got harsh rebukes from other AVFM commenters and the site’s moderators, who went so far as to actually ban two commenters unhappy with Talukdar’s rape apologia.

No, really.

Take a look at the response one Donald J. Kingsbury got when he challenged Talukdar’s post.

It didn’t take long for Kingsbury’s prediction to come true.

This is what happens if you challenge the consensus at AVFM. Even if what you are challenging is an article by a Holocaust denier arguing that marital rape doesn’t exist because “marriage is consent.”

One commenter was unhappy with Grumpy Old Man’s response:

His candid comment earned him this rebuke from AVFM’s top mod:

Never mind that the article in question defended the “right” of men to sex-on-demand from their wives by lamenting that if women in India were allowed to say no to their husbands, these poor fellows might have to resort to masturbation. Because in Talukdar’s view, evidently, it’s better for men to rape their wives than for them to be “forced” to masturbate.

There’s a lot more terribleness in the comments there, but to me the worst comes from a regular AVFM commenter who calls himself Shrek6, who has evidently convinced himself that “rape is not that bad a crime against a woman or human being.”

“A woman or human being.” That’s actually what he wrote.

Heck, he explains in another comment, vaginas are tough, so most women don’t really suffer all that much from rape. As he sees it, most women can get over rape pretty easily if they can be convinced to forgive their rapists.

No, that’s what he really thinks:

These two comments are considered acceptable discourse at AVFM. Comments bluntly challenging an apologia for marital rape aren’t.