Author Archives: David Futrelle
A Voice for Men Gets Stung, or TheWoolyBumblebee’s Revenge
Not the bees!
The WoolyBumbleBattle continues.
A couple of weeks back, you may recall, the excitable antifeminist videoblogger who goes by the name of TheWoolyBumblebee got herself kicked out of the A Voice for Men clubhouse after annoying Paul Elam with her incessant (but actually pretty much justified) attacks on libertarians and Men Going Their Own Way.
Naturally, there has been much drama since then.
Keep digging: A Voice for Men ready to triple down on dishonesty in order to cover up mistake? [CORRECTED]
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
So the other day I showed you all in detail how someone at men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men fabricated evidence — in the form of a faked screenshot — in order to cover up an embarrassing mistake on their part. The person responsible for the fabrication appeared to be AVFM’s so-called “managing editor” Dean Esmay.
Well, now it appears that they’re going to triple down on their dishonesty and concoct more screenshots. In a “news roundup” from Esmay today I found this remarkable passage:
And going back to the story with the error I found a new “editorial note” from Esmay:
I can’t wait to see what on earth they’ve come up with this time. I encourage readers to take screenshots of all this in case AVFM decides to do any retroactive ninja editing as part of its plan to pretend it was right all along.
Meanwhile,those of you who have been following this story may be wondering: who is this Joshua Thompson? Well, it appears that AVFM — or at least Dean Esmay — can’t even get the name of the post’s author right. That’s right, AVFM’s MANAGING EDITOR can’t get the name of one of AVFM’S OWN WRITERS RIGHT.
The author was first identified on AVFM as Jason Gregory — and if you look at the bio for Jason Gregory on any of the other articles he’s written for AVFM, like this one, it points to American Idiocracy, the blog where the problematic Facebook post originally ran. (It’s now been replaced, on his blog, anyway, by a completely rewritten version.)
At some point, apparently by accident, AVFM changed the byline of the author to Jason Thompson, who appears to be someone else who wrote something for AVFM a long time ago. And now Dean Esmay is calling him Joshua Thompson.
Or maybe Joshua Thompson is his real name, and Jason Gregory was his pen name, and Esmay has accidentally doxxed his own writer. Who knows?
I suspect we have not yet plumbed the depths of AVFM’s dishonesty –or incompetence.
Women Laughing Alone At Tom Martin (and his video project about “gold-digging women”)
Gold digger, 1933 model
This won’t be news to a lot of you — I’m a little late getting to it — but our old pal Tom Martin, the repulsive British MRA celebrity, is actually going ahead with the somewhat baffling video “women and comedy” project he was babbling about in the comments here many months ago, when he was still allowed to comment here. Well, “actually going ahead with it” this August if he can get anyone else to agree to work for him for free minimum wage.
The documentary project is called “Laughing with Women” and, Martin explains, it will “investigat[e] if gold-digging impairs women’s joke-making ability, and if, when women reject gold-digging in all its forms, they can become instantly funnier.”
Worse than Wrong: A Voice for Men resorts to phony screenshot and outright lying to avoid admitting embarrassing error [CORRECTED]
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here. I have left the text of this piece as is.
When reputable publications, online or off, make a mistake, the editors grit their teeth, swallow their embarrassment, and run a correction. [EDIT: I've even got a little one at the end of this post!]
Men’s Rights hate hub A Voice for Men has somewhat more lax standards than reputable publications, or even not-so-reputable publications, and generally prefers to deal with its errors by pretending they never happened. But sometimes the errors are so obvious, even to their own somewhat credulous readers, that they have to acknowledge them in some form.
In the case of one egregious recent error AVFM has tried something a bit more audacious: resorting to a phony screenshot and outright lies in an attempt to prove that they were right all along.
Sorry, dudes, but you’re not going to get away with it. You guys are so grossly incompetent you can’t even lie convincingly.
Red Pillers: Hey Ladies! That visceral disgust you feel in our presence means you want us. Bad.
Ladies love men in groups.
What do women want? Dudes. In groups. Especially dudes who hate them.
That, in any case, seems to be the conclusion drawn by a blogger who calls himself Hipster Racist, and who seems to be a white supremacist of some kind. Anyway, he’s written a little post about the rise of Reddit’s Red and Blue Pill Subreddits and how they illustrate the Mannerbund Effect, a theory that helps to explain just why it is that the ladies allegedly like getting up in men’s business so much.
Men’s Rights Redditor: “By giving women the right to vote without being subject to conscription, feminism has brought on wars, killing, concentration camps, starvations and endless cruelties.”
Evil womens voting for starvations.
So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars are engaging in a bit of self-reflection. Well, that may be a bit of a generous description on my part. They’re discussing the question “Are we fanatics?” Not surprisingly, they conclude that they aren’t.
Wrong Again: Comically inept A Voice for Men makes bizarre, bogus claims about “violence against men” search engine results
A Voice for Men has a little Google Challenge for its readers, and I’m going to invite you to take part in it as well. In the midst of yet another post trying to gin up outrage over Facebook’s banning of violent rape memes and other such repugnant shit, new AVFM contributor and “former feminist” Jason Gregory sets forth this challenge, which he originally posted on his blog several weeks ago:
Let’s talk about sex! (With the icky, icky dudes of The Spearhead)
Those sneaky, sexy ladies, always up to something!
So over on The Spearhead, the fellas are discussing journalist Daniel Bergner’s sexy new sex book What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire. It’s a book that challenges many conventional wisdoms, both scientific and popular, about sexuality and, as Salon puts it, portrays female sexuality as essentially “base, animalistic and ravenous.”
“Agent Orange” Addresses the Men’s Rights Movement in Possibly the Most Unintentionally Hilarious Video Ever [UPDATE: Transcript!]
I know. It’s an MRA. It’s nine minutes long. But seriously, just watch it. You won’t regret it.
And, no, it’s not a parody.
Killing an ex-wife: A Men’s Right?
Evidently it is, at least according to these Men’s Rights Redditors and the people who upvoted them:
Oh, I know, they were JOKING. Pretty hilarious joke there, fellas!
I’ve got a few more based on the same formula:
How many [insert name of group you don't like] does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
It only takes one to “accidentally” electrocute themselves doing this routine household chore, if you catch my drift, nudge nudge.
–
Why did the chicken cross the road?
I don’t know but it would be a shame if he didn’t make it all the way across if you know what I mean.
–
Knock knock
Who’s there?
It would be a shame if the person you let in the door were to murder your family, hint hint.
Yeah, those really aren’t jokes, per se, are they?
Thanks to Cloudiah for pointing me to this lovely little Men’s Rights subreddit exchange.
