Search Results for Paul elam
>The Domestic Violence Debate has begun
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EDIT: My first response is up, here.
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, MRA Paul Elam and I are debating Domestic Violence on his web site A Voice for Men. Elam’s first post has just gone up, a wrongheaded and rather underwhelming start to the debate; my response will appear in a day or two. (I will post a pointer here when it does.)
Instead of allowing open debate on his website, Elam generally segregates those he classifies as, er, “feminists and manginas” on a separate page. (I know, right?) But he says he’s suspended that rule for this debate, so I urge anyone here in that particular demographic to go over there and start picking apart his errors. (Paul and I have agreed to keep out of the comments section for the debate.)
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>QuoteOTD: Teh Menz at work
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Another day, another muddled mess of misogynist generalizations completely unsupported by any actual evidence. Today, at A Voice For Men, Theodore Labadie reflects on the Roman Pantheon, and how teh menz made all the cool shit in the world lol, ladies are teh suckkssss! I’m paraphrasing, of course. In his words:
Men do not see the world like women do. The gaze of men projects outward into it; they see it, they take what they need from it, and they remake it anew. The gaze of women falls inward. The world becomes them, it exists for them. And thus, women do not build; they consume. It is not the vicissitudes of society or the education system that makes women like this. It is their nature. And, I hazard a guess … that because of the consumptive nature of women and of men’s desire to give them every comfort and convenience that we are eating ourselves alive.
I wonder, if the genius of men were fully recognized where would we be now?
Gosh, I don’t know. We’d probably all be flying around with jet packs while having sex with sexy sex robots. That’s just a guess, though. But I have a question for Mr. Labadie, and for every MRA who gets vicarious man thrills from stuff other dudes have made: how many Roman Pantheons have you personally built?
Also: it sort of undermines your case for inherent man genius when you use the word “bare” to mean “bear.” Real men proofread.
Program Note: I will be man-debating Paul Elam, the man behind A Voice For Men, on the topic of Domestic Violence, starting tonight on his man-site. I will post links when the posts start going up.
>Famous all over town
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Apparently, they can’t look away. A couple of days after Paul Elam — the MRA elder I am scheduled to debate on the topic of domestic violence later this week — launched a weird tirade against me on his blog, I’m now getting attention (and some traffic) from Ferdinand Bardamu at In Mala Fide, in a post urging MRAs to, er, stop paying attention to me.
As is generally the case with my MRA critics, it’s basically a bunch of empty insults. But as empty insults go, they’re not half bad. He calls me, among other things, a “twerp,” a “feminist quisling,” and “a miserable mediocrity who’s trying to get famous, an ant in our blog ecosphere.” He somehow manages to avoid the term “mangina” altogether.
There is one bit that’s actually obnoxious. In an attempt to explain something he said in a homophobic post of his I quoted last week, he says this:
radical gay activists, in their obnoxious way of shoving their lifestyles in the faces of the heterosexual majority and demonizing them, are poking and prodding an elephant. Elephants are big, heavy and have sharp tusks, and can gore or stomp you to death without breaking a sweat. If gays don’t clean up their act and stop treating straight people with contempt … they could inspire a violent homophobic backlash. Capisce?
Is it just me, or does anyone else suspect that the people given to “warning” gays about a “possible violent homophobic backlash” would be the first to get in line to stomp gays like an elephant in such a backlash?
EDIT: Oops! Speaking of attention, I forgot to add this actual screen capture. Hey, try it yourself.
>Cartoon of the Day: Tied Down
>Remember all those outrageously sexist cartoons that used to fill the pages of our popular periodicals back in the good old days before evil feminism brought its blight upon the world? They’re having a sort of second life on the Internet, and apparently some people still find them hi-larious. I found this is on an Indian Men’s Rights site, which offered this little bit of commentary: “So so so true……………….”
EDIT: Apparently my not thinking that this cartoon is hi-larious makes me the “Cartoon Monitor for the Confederacy of Dunces,” or so says the often inadvertently hi-larious Paul Elam.
>The Surreal Housewife
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One of the things that still surprises me as I traverse the weird online world of anti-feminism is the number of women I’ve run across who think that they have altogether too many rights. I’ve written in the past about women who don’t believe they should have the right to vote. Today, Laura Wood, a proudly retrograde woman who thinks the solution to contemporary “cultural ruin” is for employers to start paying women even less than they do now. According to “Why We Must Discriminate,” a manifesto of sorts on her blog The Thinking Housewife:
Over the last 50 years, America has witnessed the cultural ruin of its women. When women fall, an entire way of life and civilization itself are not far behind. In order to reverse this state of affairs, a profound change in attitudes and prevailing mores is necessary. … First and foremost, we must restore customary economic discrimination in favor of men. America’s businesses and institutions must be free once again to favor men over women in hiring. If they are not, family life will never return to a reasonable state of health; the happiness of women and children will continue to decline; and men will fail to flourish and prosper.
It’s a strange manifesto and a strange blog. Unlike many of the reactionaries I regularly quote on this blog, Wood is not an idiot. Her tone is measured and cautious. If you accept her fairly ludicrous premises — the key ones here being that it would be desirable or even possible to undo decades of economic and cultural history to essentially return to an imaginary, idealized prefeminist world in which men could earn enough to comfortably support a family and women would work primarily for “pin money” — her manifesto almost makes sense. And yet what she is saying is, not to put too fine a point on it, vile.
She is utterly blithe, for example, about the effect her proposal would have on single and divorced women:
Divorced women would still receive the support of their husbands. However, parallel changes in divorce law are necessary to make for less incentive for women to divorce. Women should generally face the loss of child custody and a serious decline in income if they initiate divorce, except in the event of proven malfeasance on the part of the husband. Single women will still be able to find jobs and receive help from fathers and extended family. Most of them will not be rich.
Who needs a man-sized wage when you can just beg dad for cash when the rent comes due?
Wood not only thinks women deserve to be paid less than men for the same work; she’s also wary of women taking on almost any authority at all outside the home. While she’s admits it’s technically possible for women to be, for example, effective drill sergeants, she finds the idea vaguely abhorrent:
When women start barking orders at grown men, the delicate balance of power between the sexes is disturbed. Women are mothers and wives, lovers and friends to men. These roles are damaged by domineering bossiness. Male psychology is radically different from female psychology. After all, mothers are women. There is no more significant fact than that.
There’s more, much more. Troll This Blog has assembled a lengthy list of Wood’s more backwards utterances, from which I drew the example above, including some thoughts on race that would not be out of place at a (very polite) Klan meeting: “Only a society in which white men have been emasculated would see the sort of tolerance for and celebration of intermarriage we are experiencing today.”
Though I found her blog through links on a Men’s Rights blog or two, and her ideology is more or less consistent with some of the more reactionary MRAs out there, Wood is not exactly an MRA herself. Indeed, she has tangled with the Men’s Rights Movement on several occasions — lambasting commenters on The Spearhead for “juvenile” misogyny, and accusing MRA elder Paul Elam of “idiocy and hatred” for his, er, idiotic and hateful statement that if he were on a jury he wouldn’t vote to convict a clearly guilty rapist.
Wood’s enmity towards certain elements of the MRM has been reciprocated. Our good (not) friend at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog recently took on a “mangina” commenter at what he calls “The (Not) Thinking Housewife” for suggesting that the MRM had its roots in “radical homosexuality.”
This is one of those battles, to paraphrase Calvin Trillin, in which I can only hope that both sides suffer a defeat of humiliating proportions.
NOTE: Before any of the anti-feminists who regularly post here accuse me of lacking “substance” because I do not “rebut” Wood’s “arguments” in detail, I request only one thing: find me something solid to rebut. Wood, like many of those I write about, offers a lot of opinions — see the quotes above, and on Troll This Blog, for numerous examples — but almost nothing to actually support those opinions. Find me an example of an argument she has made that is actually supported with actual empirical evidence, with specific citations and/or links to sources, and I’ll have a go at it.
The Top 7 Things I Learned From a Week’s Worth of Comments at A Voice for Men
Let me count the ways
I have a confession to make: I don’t always read the comments on posts by Men’s Rights Activists.
I realize this might come as a shock to some of you. I mean, one of the main, er, critiques I get from MRAs is that I “cherry pick” comments from MRAs to make them look bad — never mind that it is the comments that make them look bad, not me. But the embarrassing fact is that I often don’t read the comments at all.
In my defense, I have a hard enough time making it through the posts themselves. Life is short, and MRAs are long-winded. And by the time I get to the end of a lot of MRA posts, I’ve pretty much lost my patience with their nonsense. The last thing I want to do at that moment is to read the fawning word-vomit of a bunch of irritating fucks whose comments are likely to be as bad or possibly even worse than the original post.
So today I decided to do a sort of penance for my sins — and to actually read through a week’s worth of comments on A Voice for Men to see what I could learn about the world, and (perhaps more to the point) about the sort of people who actually enjoy reading posts on that terrible site.
I tried my best to do this little experiment as scientifically as possible. But I cheated a little. I didn’t read the comments to every post. And I didn’t read every comment on the posts that I did look at. I mean, what the hell. There’s a limit to my masochism. Seriously, you try reading a week’s worth of this shit in one sitting.
Anyway, here are the Top 7 Insights I’ve learned from a week’s worth of comments at AVFM. In choosing the following, I stuck with comments that were either upvoted or unchallenged by the site’s regulars, or both.
Warren Farrell is an Ass, Man
Yep, that’s a butt on the cover. He put a butt on the cover. Men are oppressed by women’s butts.
You may remember the embarrassing spectacle a couple of months back when Warren Farrell asked the readers of A Voice for Men to help him pick out a cover picture for a new ebook version of The Myth of Male Power, the 21-year-old crackpot bestseller that more or less provided the, er, intellectual foundation for today’s Men’s Rights movement.
It wasn’t just embarrassing because AVFM is a noxious hate site that regularly calls women c*nts and whores and helps to organize informal campaigns of harassment directed at individual women. It was also embarrassing because all three of the pictures were sexualized images focusing on specific female body parts. You can guess which three, and you’d be right: tits, ass, and vagina (the latter tastefully covered in a merkin made of moss).
Well, Farrell ended up rejecting all of these images in favor of … a different picture of a woman’s butt. Yep, the screenshot above features the actual cover of the recently released ebook version of The Myth of Male Power. (You can see it in its full sized-glory over on Amazon.)
The implicit message of the cover couldn’t be clearer: men may seem to run the world, but women can control and exploit them through the power of their sexuality. Male power is undercut by … butt power.
Am I reading too much into a cover image? Farrell doesn’t really believe this nonsense, does he?
Well, in the introduction to the ebook, Farrell writes:
In case you’re wondering, “genetic celebrity” is Farrell’s term of art for any attractive woman.
But golly, you say, the fact that a dude feels “powerless” because he can’t have sex with every woman with a nice butt that happens to wander across his field of vision doesn’t actually mean that men are powerless or that male power is a myth. Well, Farrell has an answer to this as well. And by “answer” I mean, well, whatever this is:
Got that? I’m not sure there’s anything there to get; it’s nothing more than hand-waving to distract attention from the nonsensical nature of his previous statements. In case any Men’s Rights activist ever brings Warren Farrell up as an example of a respectable, “academic” MRA, you may wish to point out that almost nothing Farrell writes ever actually makes any fucking sense.
In the book itself, Farrell repeatedly suggested that male power can be undone almost completely by the sexual power of women. In one oft-quoted passage, he wrote about the effect that a “secretary’s miniskirt power, cleavage power and flirtation power” allegedly has on their male bosses. (Myth of Male Power, p. 21)
While that statement has earned a certain notoriety for its sheer ridiculousness, Farrell went further elsewhere in the book, essentially arguing that men are as addicted to female “beauty” as drug addicts are to the drug of their choice — and as helpless.
“Sexually, of course, the sexes aren’t equal,” Farrell wrote. “[M]any men feel ‘under the influence the moment they see a beautiful woman.” (p. 320, emphasis in original.)
This sort of temporary “intoxication,” Farrell argued, leads men into shackling themselves to these temporarily sexy tyrants for the rest of their lives — thus agreeing to support them (he suggested implicitly) even after they get old and ugly. (p. 85.)
In Farrell’s original book, this “argument,” such as it is, was merely one of many that he thought undercut the alleged “myth of male power.” Now, with the butt on the cover, he’s put it front and center. Or, more precisely, rear and center.
Warren Farrell, you’re an ass, man.
Oh, awkward segue here, I just wanted to show off the cover to the new edition of my classic book, The Myth of Human Power.
It will soon be available for one million dollars in cash in unmarked bills, upon delivery of which I will sit down and write it for you. It will probably be pretty short and not very convincing.
How to get upvotes on The Spearhead: Violent rape fantasy edition
So I found this lovely little shoutout in the comments to an inane post by W.F. Price on The Spearhead last week.
Let me just preface it with a big TRIGGER WARNING for its violent rape fantasy.
Ten upvotes. No downvotes.
I guess that’s technically a rape metaphor, but it’s the most graphic rape metaphor I’ve run across in a long time.
If you ever find yourself wondering why the so-called Men’s Rights movement has never done, as far as I can tell, a single fucking thing for male victims of rape — other than rant about it online in an attempt to one-up feminists — I think this comment suggests one highly plausible explanation: because many if not most MRAs don’t actually feel empathy for the vast majority of male rape victims, who are, after all, men in prison raped by other men. They see rape as an appropriate punishment for men they don’t like, and many actually relish the thought of certain men being raped.
Indeed, even the self-described “men’s human rights activists” at A Voice for Men think that rape jokes about men they don’t like are hilarious.
I mean, it goes without saying that MRAs generally have little or no empathy for women who are raped, and indulge in rape jokes about women all the fucking time, but you’d think they’d do a better job of at least pretending to care about raped men.
If you’re interested in an organization that actually does care about victims of rape and other forms of sexual abuse in prison — regardless of the gender of the victim — you may want to check out Just Detention International.
Search Term Extravaganza Part 2: All Your Questions Answered!
The Searchers: Scanning the horizon for signs of “airport lesbians.”
Looking through the search terms people have used to get to my blog, I can’t help but feel a little sad, even a tiny bit guilty.
Clearly the searchers who came to Man Boobz looking for information about “airport lesbians” or “sexual spanking in animal kingdom” or even “all metaphors of bread” were likely to be a bit disappointed when they got here and discovered what the blog was really about. I’ve written about this once before.
But today, as a sort of public service, I’d like to see if I can help out some of the hapless searchers who’ve come to Man Boobz by providing answers to, or at least some sort of opinions about, their more puzzling queries. Just so you know, these are all real. I’ve left out the most perverse ones.
Attention-seeking manosphere guru Roosh V posts article on “Why You Should Beat Your Kids” [UPDATE: Was it plagiarized?]
So it seems that some Men’s Rightsers and manospherians, reveling in the negative attention they’ve managed to get from the mainstream for some of their more reprehensible postings, have decided to up the ante a bit, posting stuff that’s so deliberately over the top in its despicableness that even some of their readers have been taken aback.
A case in point: A paean to child abuse recently posted on Roosh’s Return of Kings blog. (Let me put a big TRIGGER WARNING on all the quotes from it that follow.)
