Author Archives: David Futrelle
Mark Minter takes on Marriage, Mangina Manservants and America’s Matriarchal Infrastructure
Mark Minter’s worst nightmare
Today I’m feeling lazy, so I’m just going to pass along some thoughts from Mark Minter, a fellow best known, insofar as he is known, for leaving melodramatic manospherian manifestos – look, three “m’s” in a row! — in other people’s comments sections. I’ve written about him before – twice! — and he’s recently returned to his old habit of leaving his droppings in the comments here.
Why haven’t Men’s Rights Activists turned on Paul Elam for falsely accusing Arianna Pattek of civil rights violations? [UPDATE: Elam retraction]
Graphic from SAVE Services, whose press releases regularly run on A Voice for Men. Why doesn’t this policy apply to Paul Elam?
UPDATE: Elam has retracted his original story. See the end of this post for more details.
Men’s Rights Activists often insist that false accusations of rape are literally as bad as rape itself, and that false accusers of rape should spend as much time in prison as actual rapists.
Presumably they feel the same way about false accusers of other crimes, from murder to check kiting.
So in the wake of Paul Elam’s reckless false accusations against recent Georgetown graduate Arianna Pattek, one would expect other MRAs to rise up en masse to demand that Elam turn himself in.
Elam, you may recall, accused Pattek of serious violations of civil rights laws, claiming that she, as an employee of Georgetown’s admissions office, showed clear bias against white men. Indeed, Elam didn’t even qualify his accusations with an “alleged,” as journalists routinely do when writing about those accused but not convicted of crimes. Here’s what he wrote about her:
A Voice for Men attacks a male activist — with a rape joke reference
John Hembling (John The Other) evidently has rape on the brain.
In an apparent attempt to prove that they’re not misogynists, the folks at A Voice for Men have decided to take a temporary break from their practice of vilifying individual female activists to vilify a male activist – University of Toronto Student Union VP for University Affairs Munib Sajjad.
As far as I can tell, the folks at A Voice for Men decided to target Sajjad, perversely, because he told Toronto’s CityNews that he was afraid he was “going to be targeted” after announcing publicly that he thought a campus Men’s Rights group should be banned. The A Voice for Men post about Sajjad is a typically long-winded, and largely content-free, rant from the excitable John Hembling (“John The Other”).
But what’s more disturbing than Hembling’s empty bloviating on Sajjad is the way A Voice for Men has framed the attack. “Munib Sajjad, it’s your turn in the barrel,” the headline declares, and Hembling repeats the phrase “your turn in the barrel” in the post itself.
I wasn’t familiar with this phrase, so I looked it up, and found that it derives from a rape joke. Here’s the definition of the term, from Urban Dictionary:
To say someone is “in the barrel” or “taking a turn in the barrel” means it’s their turn to do an unpleasant task or to suffer an unpleasant experience.
Click on the “definition” link above to see the gang rape joke it’s derived from.
Rape jokes aimed at men — even men you don’t like — are certainly a, well, counterintuitive way of showing “compassion for boys and men,” as the A Voice for Men slogan has it.
EDITED TO ADD: Looking again at Hembling’s piece, I realize I hadn’t noticed his, er, argument that the term “mansplaining” — which I find useful from time to time — is somehow equivalent to the incredibly offensive term “[racial slur redacted]splaining,” which Hembling has just made up. (The slur in question starts with an “n.” You can figure it out.) This is ridiculous on its face, not to mention that it’s frankly racist not only to compare the alleged oppressions of men — who are not systematically oppressed — with those of black people — who are — but also to use a racial slur in doing so. Of course this isn’t the first time that A Voice for Men has used the n-word in an attempt to suggest that men, collectively, have it as bad as a historically disadvantaged and still systematically oppressed group.
Rape jokes and racial slurs: A Voice for Men has it all!
Lazy Libel 2: Georgetown prof debunks the alleged Arianna Pattek conspiracy. And more on Stormfront
Men’s Rights Activists have a lot more in common with white supremacists than they’d like to admit.
Just a quick update on the case of Arianna Pattek, the recent Georgetown graduate targeted for harassment by A Voice for Men and others, including the white supremacists at Stormfront. As I pointed out in an earlier piece, the “detective work” that led A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam and the other Pattek-bashers to target her was incredibly inept and sloppy, and it’s clear beyond any possible doubt that she has nothing whatsoever to do with the misandrist blog they accused her of writing, which increasingly obviously seems to be an utter hoax.
Screencap of the Day: The MensRightsWiki “Activism” Page
Impressive! Here’s the link. Maybe they’ll eventually fill this blank page with inspiring tales of harassing women, including women they’ve mistakenly targeted because MRAs, on the exceedingly rare occaisions they try to be activists, are the most inept and gullible activists the world has ever seen.
And while we’re at it, here’s the Wiki’s ethics page.
Wow! Instead of nothing, this time they have a list of nothings.
Thanks to Reddit’s veduualdha and StephenMurphy for pointing out these links in r/againstmensrights.
Lazy Libel: A Voice for Men “doxes” an alleged misandrist blogger — and ID’s the wrong woman [UPDATE2 w/ Georgetown response, notes from neo-Nazis]
A Voice for Men: The Gang that Couldn’t Dox Straight
As I finished up my last post about Men’s Rights Redditors attempting to dox a so-called “conservative feminist” blogger who had confessed to trashing male applications when working in a university admissions office, I saw that A Voice for Men has run a post by Paul Elam identifying someone they’ve convinced themselves is the blogger, apparently using the information dug up by the Reddit doxers.
Their alleged culprit? “Arianna Pattek, a Georgetown grad student.” Other Men’s Rightsers have taken up the case, and the Conspiracy Subreddit is all aflutter about a post identifying her by name.
They’ve got the wrong person.
Drama! Men’s Rights Reddit threatened with shutdown after two of its mods are caught helping doxers
Earlier this week, as you may recall, Men’s Rights Redditors pretended they were shocked – shocked! – that anyone might think that MRAs had anything to do with the doxing and harassment of that red-haired Canadian activist we’ve been discussing. Couldn’t be them! Had to be … trolls!
Then on Wednesday the Men’s Rights Redditors found a blog post by a woman claiming to be a “conservative feminist” with a recently minted doctorate who was working in her alma mater’s admissions office — and, she claimed, rejecting out of hand all the applications that she thought were “dripping with white male privilege.”
A 12-Step program to help A Voice for Men cure its addiction to hate
I’m pretty sure these guys thought they were some sort of human rights movement too.
Asha James – otherwise known as TyphonBlue – has taken issue with something I wrote about A Voice for Men, the hate site she has chosen to affiliate herself with. In my post detailing the hundreds of horrendous and disgusting threats and abusive comments one Canadian feminist has received after she appeared in a YouTube video that was heavily promoted on A Voice for Men and other Men’s Rights sites, I wrote that AVFM had only distanced itself in a “superficial way from some of the harassment it has played a central role in unleashing.”
So who exactly has been harassing that red-haired Canadian feminist? A not-quite-scientific survey
MRAs rarely let facts get in the way of their tantrums
So the Men’s Rights subreddit has temporarily relaxed its policy of not allowing links to the terrible cesspool of lies that is Man Boobz to allow this post attacking me for detailing the disgusting threats and harassment a certain Canadian feminist activist has faced in recent days.
Most of the commenters flatly ignored the evidence of doxing and harassment that I included in my post — if they even bothered to read it — and simply invented their own story of what had happened. Instead of denouncing those who left death threats, they attacked me and the activist in question. And blamed all the ugliness on “trolls.”
Cat break
Photographer: Mark Hartman
After yesterday’s post, and the awful events in Boston, I think we’re probably all in need of some kitties. I am, anyway. So here we go.
