Search Results for AVFM
Quiz: What makes an MRA maddest? (Pussy-begging A Voice for Men edition.)
Pussy begging at its worst
Several days ago, angry-MRA-dude hub A Voice for Men ran a guest post from someone identified only as Phil in Utah entitled “How I became an MRA: Domestic violence advocacy.” After Phil’s post in question drew some criticism from some of the AVfM regulars who didn’t see it as radical enough, site founder and head cheese Paul Elam felt it necessary to take Phil to task for one of the statements he made in the post.
So let’s have a quick quiz. Here are three quotes taken from Phil in Utah’s post. Which of them is the one that drew Elam’s ire?
- “[F]eminists only support the rights of women who agree with them, and have no qualms throwing disagreeing women under the bus.”
- “[T]he idea that women are hurt more than men by being abused is a load of crap.”
- “I still believe that men who brutalize women are the scum of the Earth.”
ANSWER: Did you guess #1? Wrong. While this statement isn’t actually true, Elam didn’t object to it. How about #2? While this statement is also untrue – numerous studies show that women are far more likely to be seriously injured by domestic violence than men – Elam didn’t object to it either. Nope. He objected to statement #3. That is:
I still believe that men who brutalize women are the scum of the Earth.
How could any decent human being possibly object to this? Here’s Elam explanation:
I admit I flinched a little when I read this. Clearly these are words rooted in old world sexist notions about violence; that somehow men who brutalize women are worse than women who brutalize men. It is old programming that tends to swim around in the unconscious even after the first few rounds of red pills.
Now, I should note that Phil didn’t actually say, or imply, that “men who brutalize women are worse than women who brutalize men.” Indeed, he spent most of the essay arguing that DV against men needed to be taken more seriously. If anything, he minimized violence against women, by denying the fact that women are indeed more likely to be seriously injured by their male partners than male partners are to be seriously injured by women.
Evidently, for Elam and others on AVfM, straightforward expressions of enmity against men who brutalize women are a form of “latent misandry.”
But we’re only just getting started here. As it turns out, Elam was less troubled by Phil’s “misandry” than he was by some of the nastier attacks on Phil and other
new MRA’s who are ‘getting it’ but have not had the time or opportunity to fully refine their understanding of the modern zeitgeist.
Indeed, one commenter had even gone so far as to call poor Phil “pussy-footed.” And yet another called him a “mangina/white knight.” This, Elam announced, would not do!
MRA’s name calling and shaming other MRA’s is not constructive. It is petty alpha-gaming … .
In other words, it’s the sort of thing that guys do to try to impress the chicks. And that’s bad.
[A] significant part of the dynamics that hinder progress in the MRM is the innate friction between men which is driven by an undercurrent of sexual competition. Our unfortunate programming is to apply downward pressure on each other in order to vie for sexual selection.
On MRA blogs, this is often described with the scientific term “pussy begging.” Elam continued:
Feminism is an outgrowth of chivalry. It is dependent on male sexual competition to thrive. In short, misandry, feminism, the stinking lot of it, is a human problem rooted in men’s mindless competition for women. We don’t get out of that competition by simply rejecting women or Going Our Own Way. We get out of it by identifying and respectfully challenging the elements of that competition when they prove dysfunctional, as in going after MRA’s for blood any time we imagine they are not 100% on message. This conduct, when distilled down to its essence, is just a tell-tale artifact of pussy-centric masculinity.
So, in other words, MRAs who call other MRAs pussy-begging manginas are themselves … pussy-begging manginas.
Such is MRA logic.
On A Voice for Men, rape jokes about men are hilarious, so long as they’re about some dude you don’t like.
How seriously does Paul Elam, head cheese of A Voice for Men, take the issue of rape? So seriously that he has proudly declared that
Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.
It’s in bold in the original, too. Evidently, the best way to fight against false accusations is to let the guilty free.
Recently, Elam has started a whole campaign, complete with its own little acronym and everything, to encourage others to follow his lead. In one recent post, he even seems to be suggesting (in a wink-wink-nod-nod sort of way) that his followers should lie about their beliefs in order to get on juries, just so they can Fuck Their Shit Up and, as he put it in a one word comment advertising the post on Reddit, “nullify.”
Now, in his original post on rape, it seemed to be pretty clear that his ire was aroused specifically by the specter of evil women lying about being raped by men. As he put it, justifying his decision to acquit the guilty,
Women lie about being raped, judicial politicians make careers off of putting away sexual offenders, and a brainwashed public cheers it all on. That so many of the men caught up in this are innocent doesn’t stop the grinding wheels of all this injustice for even a moment.
But before we conclude that Elam’s stance on rape is simply misogynist, I point you to a new post that suggests that he takes the rape of men just as (not) seriously as he takes the rape of women – to the point that he thinks it’s hilarious to make jokes about raping men. Announcing a radio show devoted to further discussion of his surreal atheist post from earlier this week, he says this about one famously feminist atheist activist who is also a dude:
Hopefully, before we are done [with the radio show], MRA’s of differing views will find more common ground, and PZ Myers will be limping to the drug store for some KY Jelly.
I guess on AVfM, making a rape joke about about a man is just peachy, so long as the man in question is someone you don’t like.
Stay classy, Paul!
(Thanks to Xanthe for alerting me to Elam’s most recent post.)
“The dried-up vagina is a tool of the state, and population control.”
Marriage: Not an effective form of birth control.
When we first met Spearhead commenter Rmaxd, he was raving about how our technological society had rendered women obsolete. He’s back, this time taking on, well, women again, and welfare, and declining birth rates, and, well, it’s all a little bit hard to follow.
Let’s start with Rmaxd’s basic premises:
Women are serially monogamous or hypergamous & are infertile for the majority of their lives
While men are polygamous, & FERTILE for the majority of their lives
Marriage has always been used as the earliest form of birth contraception, limit the amount of children a fertile male can have, by forced mating with a single infertile woman for the rest of his life.
We are off to a bad start here. Is there anything in all that that’s correct? Among other things: marriage is most decidedly not a particularly effective form of birth control. (The show Eight is Enough was based on a real family, and I suspect we’ve all met people with enough siblings to fill a bus.) But let’s continue; Rmaxd is on a roll:
As the government can no longer force this sort of mating on infertile womens, especially in the lower moronic, under educated peasantry states,
As women want alphas,
Obviously sluts & whores, are simply mimicing infertile women, as only infertile dried up vaginas, can afford to sleep around with hundreds of men
This is why we have sluts & promiscuity, marketted to young girls today, imitate infertile women, imitate their habits, destroy your fertility, destroy your youth
A childhood of std’s & yeast infections
Yeah, I’m not even going to try to parse all that.
In any case, as Rmaxd argues, these “infertile” ladies somehow still manage to pop out a few kids when they’re young, and the evil welfare state rewards them for it:
It’s essentially birth control by sponsoring infertile women, most women have a couple of kids, basically enough to live off the welfare & free housing
As we all know, single mothers live lives of untold luxury and indolence.
What we have here is essentially welfare for infertile women, as they’re no longer able to siphon cash from enslaving men into walking wallets & their magical vagina’s a pit of std’s & warts
In the past, you see, women could enslave men by marrying them. Now they can’t get dudes to stick around, so instead they enslave men by not marrying them, raising their kids on their own with the help of welfare money. It’s all very devious.
Rmaxd would prefer that the welfare money go to the fathers:
If we had welfare for men who had kids, with different women, we would have a healthy birth rate, instead of the declining birth rate we have now … this is all about rewarding & protecting a womans sexuality over a mans sexuality
It all leads to what Rmaxd calls:
The new another dark age of female fanatical male hate,
sponsored & policed by the church of radical feminist mangina, & government
The dried up vagina, as a tool of the state & population control
This barely coherent spew of woman-hatred – and it’s even less comprehensible without my edits and annotations – still managed to draw a few upvotes from the regulars, proving that internet misogynists will upvote pretty much anything so long as it contains the requisite level of anti-woman vitriol.
In case you’re feeling especially bored this lazy Sunday, the whole Spearhead thread is a trainwreck of misogyny and racism – including some fairly obnoxious discussions of black “Welfare Queens” and Mexican immigrants from a fellow called Keyster. Does that (fake) name sound familiar? You may know him as a fairly regular contributor to A Voice for Men and the producer of the AVfM internet radio show.
Feminist koalas, and other grave injustices faced by men
MRAs: Just like Martin Luther King. Wait, not Martin Luther King. I'm thinking of someone else entirely. I'm not sure why I said Martin Luther King. I mean, that's ridiculous.
I’ve been following the Men’s Rights Movement for some time, and I’ve never been quite sure exactly what the major injustices faced by men are. I haven’t really noticed much to speak of in my own life, but evidently there are some and they are really, really bad.
Luckily, in recent days A Voice for Men has begun to clarify the issue for me. For example, AVfM Radio’s new theme song points out two of the worst injustices of all:
- Men having to hold doors open for ladies.
- Ladies wanting to marry us.
But these are not the only important men’s issues out there. In a recent post titled “A hard rains gonna fall: how hard is up to you” (clearly a reference to the famous song by Carly Simon), AVfM head dude Paul Elam spells out the most important issues of all in a set of bullet points. To save the beleaguered men of the world some important man-time I will summarize them for you here. Bullet-time!
- Thomas Ball’s suicide isn’t mentioned on Wikipedia because feminism.
- The Obama administration urged colleges to use the same standard of proof used in most non-criminal cases in their non-criminal disciplinary proceedings dealing with rape cases. Because feminism.
- Australia. Something about Australia. Ok, here’s the deal: Australia is very, very far away from me, like literally on the other side of the planet, and my eyes sometimes glaze over when reading about it. I’m sure whatever Elam is mad about is really bad. It might involve Koalas. Feminist Koalas. But that’s just speculation on my part.
- In India, where women are routinely harassed in public and groped on train cars, there are a tiny number of women-only train cars set up to cut down on the groping.
- In Sweden, a small group of feminists did a theatrical production based on/dealing with the writings of Valarie Solanas. It was performed in some schools.
- “Men constitute the lion’s share of combat deaths[11], workplace deaths[12], suicide deaths[13], and are afflicted with almost every known human malady and disease more frequently and more severely than women.” Obviously, the feminists are to blame, for their staunch opposition to women serving in the armed forces, and for their secret program of giving men girl germs.
- There are agencies dealing with women’s health issues. Clearly, men need to have just as many of their own agencies to deal with such male health issues as not being pregnant.
I hope my summary of these issues has been fair. As Elam has pointed out on a number of occasions, I am fat, so really nothing I do or say has any value. Plus, of course, I am a mangina. Just, you know, FYI.
In any case, these injustices have Elam plenty mad:
I am truly curious as to what festering, morally atrophied deviation of humanity could look at anything approaching this level of discrimination and suffering without becoming angry.
So mad that his metaphors all get up in each other’s business:
Whether it becomes a wave of social change, or a violent tempest of indignation and fury, the pendulum will continue to swing.
So there you have it. Naturally, Elam’s readers are grateful for his efforts to bring justice to the world by yelling about it online and trying to get people really, really mad at certain specific ladies without explicitly advocating violence against them. That’s pretty much how Martin Luther King did it, only with fewer references to “bitches” and “cunts” and not so many threaty remarks.
As Alfred E puts it:
Well said Mr Elam. May the harpies finally get a clue about their complete lack of compassion for men and boys all the while living in a gold box carted around by the prince.
Justice and compassion for all, except you harpies in your gold boxes! And also the rest of the bitches, cunts and manginas.
NOTE: That bit about Carly Simon above was a joke. Obviously the song in question was written by The Bangles.
Does A Voice for Men really think that firebombing is a form of non-violence?
Reading through some comments on Men’s Rights hub A Voice for Men the other day, I ran across a fairly bloodthirsty contribution from an MRA with the charming nickname Brutal Antipathy, suggesting that the Occupy Wall Street protesters needed a bit of what he called “the ol’ Tienanmen Square treatment.”
Mr. Antipathy’s rhetorical outburst struck me as fairly typical of the tough-guy rhetoric that the site’s regulars love to indulge in — though usually the targets of the rhetoric are feminists, not Occupy Wall Street activists.
So I was a bit surprised to see site founder Paul Elam respond with this:
It seems a little odd for Elam to claim to be shocked — shocked! — to find such rhetoric on his site. Elam, after all, seems to positively revel in making his own vaguely threatening pronouncements towards his ideological enemies.
In a recent fundraising appeal, for example, Elam let out all the stops:
We now have a team of individuals that goes beyond what we advertise on our pages, and we are gearing up to add a new doomsday prophesy to 2012. Let’s put it this way: The fembots better hope the Mayan’s were right about next year, because they would rather deal with that than the things we are cooking up. …
Progress for men will not be gained by debate, reason or typical channels of grievance available to segments of the population that the world actually gives a damn about. The progress we need will only be realized by inflicting enough pain on the agents of hate, in public view, that it literally shocks society out of its current coma.
Elam is purposefully vague about just what he means by “inflicting pain,” but it is hard not to read this comment as a threat of something dire.
Others on the site are similarly fond of this sort of vague, threatening language. MRA blogger Fidelbogen, recently brought on board as a contributor to AVfM, let loose in a recent comment on those who think MRAs should tone down their rhetoric towards feminists and other enemies:
Apparently, Elam believes that the deliberate vagueness of these kinds of threats makes them shining examples of Gandhian non-violence — or at least that it gives the site the requisite “plausible deniability” if — when? — someone actually moves beyond the threats to actual violence.
It’s ok, evidently, to talk about “inflicting pain” on your enemies, so long as you don’t specify just how. It’s ok to boast about frightening your enemies, to muse about “stalking” individual feminists, to post their personal information online, and so on and so on.
Heck, apparently it’s not even a problem if someone, using the personal information provided on the site, actually tracks down individuals targeted by Elam and pals and quite literally kills them. As AVfM managing editor John the Other put it in a recent post (which I wrote about here):
And what if they get killed David? What if rather than be arrested – as promoters of hate, and public advocates of murder, what if these depraved and murderous female supremacists come to harm at the hands of a citizen. If that happens, it will mean that a society’s system of law, designed to prevent hate organizations, and to allow redress of grievance through non violent due process is gone, wiped out by your ideology of violence and hate.
Nonetheless, JtO, like Elam, insists that “I do not and will not lend myself to the support of violence, or indeed, of murder.”
But all this dancing around the issue of violence is rather a moot point, given the one rather striking exception that Elam has allowed to his “no explicit advocacy of violence” rule.
And that is the terrorist manifesto he’s been hosting on his site since last summer.
I’m referring, of course, to the lengthy manifesto written by Tom Ball, a man who burned himself to death on the steps of a courthouse in Keane, New Hampshire last summer in a protest against what he saw as unfair treatment in family court.
Ball has been hailed as a hero in numerous articles on AVfM, and he is mentioned in an “invocation” in the new theme song for AVfM Radio.
The manifesto is posted on AVfM — in its “activism” category.
What sort of “activism” did Ball advocate? Hint: It involves Molotov cocktails, and government buildings.
In his words (emphasis mine):
So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses. … [T]he dirty deeds are being carried out by our local police, prosecutors and judges. These are the people we pay good money to protect us and our families. And what do we get for our tax money? Collaborators who are no different than the Vichy of France or the Quislings of Norway during the Second World War. All because they go along to get along. They are an embarrassment, the whole lot of them. And they need to be held accountable. So burn them out. …
There is no evidence that the police, courts, or government is planning to do anything different in the immediate future. And they will not do anything different until we make it so uncomfortable that they must change. Bureaucracy at its worst. So burn them out. This is too important to be using that touchy- feeling coaching that is so popular with business these days. You need to flatten them, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to be taught never to replace the rule of law. BURN-THEM-OUT!
Most of the police stations built in New England over the last 20 years are stone or brick. Fortunately, the roofs are still wood. The advantage of fire on the roof is that it is above the sprinklers. But even the sprinklers going off work to our advantage. There is no way they can work in a building with six inches of water. And I am certain we will disrupt their momentum once they start working out of a FEMA
At this point the AVfM editors cut Ball off in mid-sentence, and insert this “Editor’s note”:
Editor’s note:
Several paragraphs in this copy of Mr Ball’s original letter have been omitted. The omitted paragraphs contained detailed instructions on the manufacture and use of simple incendiary devices.
If you are really interested in seeing the omitted sections, you can find the complete manifesto elsewhere in the Mansophere.
Ball was quite serious about all this, and hoped that his self-immolation would inspire other “activists” to “manufacture and use” his favored sort of “simple incendiary devices,” as the AVfM editors gingerly put it. Ball himself was a bit more blunt:
I only managed to get the main door of the Cheshire County Courthouse in Keene, NH. I would appreciate it if some of you boys would finish the job for me. They harmed my children. The place is evil. So take it out. …
And bring a can of spray paint to these fires. Paint the word COLLABORATORS ( two L’s with an S on the end) on the building before you burn it.
Ball frankly acknowledged that if others followed his suggestions, people would die:
There will be some casualties in this war. Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.
How does Ball’s explicit advocacy of terrorist acts directed at government buildings, acts that if carried out would almost inevitably mean the deaths of people within those buildings, square with Elam’s purported no-advocacy-of-violence policy for his website?
You’ll have to ask him. I have no fucking clue.
The All-Singing, All-Dancing Men’s Rights Movement
Not a picture of Jade Michael and the FTSU Crew
The Men’s Rights Movement now has a theme song! A couple of talented young men calling themselves Jade Michael and the FTSU Singers Crew have put together a catchy little grunge rock number they call Go My Own Way, which will now serve as the opening music for the A Voice for Men internet radio show.
As AVfM head cheese Paul Elam puts it, straining his prose-generating abilities to the breaking point as he attempts to find words eloquent enough to describe this new musical masterpiece:
Jade Michael, artist, professional musician and MRA, founder of Artistry Against Misandry, has taken his talent hammer and given it a mighty swing to our benefit. He has forged, in the fires of his own passion, the new theme song for AVfM Radio, titled Go My Own Way. It is not to be confused with the similarly titled offering from Fleetwood Mac, Go Your Own Way. No, not in the least. Jade, with his band, Jade Michael and the FTSU Crew, have produced a veritable anthem for the red pill crowd. It is replete with a great, purist rock sound, a touch of humor, attitude, and a ton of gut level, red pill honesty. Pay close attention to the end for the invocation of Thomas James Ball.
Without further ado, here’s the song:
You can find the full lyrics on YouTube and on AVfM. But I thought I’d share a few of my favorite bits.
The song starts off by addressing one of the most savage injustices faced by men today: evil ladies who expect men to hold doors open for them.
And we’re through with holding doors
Entitlements abound
You say that we still hold you down
And you cop that attitude
No remorse or gratitude
Seriously, ladies, would it hurt you to say “thank you” once in a while, to the men who literally enable you to walk through walls, by holding open the doors you would otherwise be unable to open? To paraphrase Barbie: Doors are hard!
Then there’s this bit:
You’re obsessed with my ability
I won’t be your utility
I’ll never carry you
And I sure won’t marry you
Women around the world, consider what you’re losing here: no longer can you expect to marry guys who hate you so much they made a song about how they won’t hold doors open for you!
And let’s not forget:
Cos’ the time has come to fuck your shit up
The time has come to fuck your shit up
The time has come to fuck your shit up
Perhaps I’m missing some of the subtleties here, but this sort of suggests to me that Jade and the Gang are not so much Men Going Their Own Way as they are Men Still Hanging Around Acting Like Assholes — not MGTOW but MSHAALA.
I appreciate the efforts of Jade Michael and the MSHAALA, but I can’t really help but think of this little song-and-dance number, from the excellent Belgian horror film Calviare (The Ordeal), as the Men’s Rights movement’s unofficial anthem.
In case you’re wondering, this scene makes a little bit more sense in the context of the movie itself. A little bit. It’s actually quite a brilliant little film with some interesting gender stuff going on in it, if you can deal with fairly violent horror films. But, oh my lord, TRIGGER WARNINGS for pretty much every trigger there is.
NOTE: In case you’re wondering about the song’s reference to Thomas Ball: Ball burned himself to death outside a courthouse in Keane, New Hampshire last year in a protest against what he saw as unfair treatment in family court. He hoped that his suicide would inspire other men to start firebombing courthouses and police stations. (This wasn’t mere rhetoric; in the lengthy manifesto he left behind he provided tips on how to make effective Molotov cocktails.) Naturally, many in the MRM have hailed him as a martyr for Men’s Rights.
MRA: Men have it great, and that pisses me off! Also, women are as dumb as baboons.
Typical females! Sitting on their giant red asses while men do all the work!
Men’s Rights Activists generally like to pretend that the world is some kind of feministy dystopian hellscape for men. No so the gentle MRA philosopher who calls himself Cooter Bee. In a recent post on A Voice for Men, he admits frankly that
In absolute terms, men have never had it better. Our lives are longer than ever before. Especially in the western world, we are not nearly as plagued by violence and disease as our grandfathers. Never in history have we had as much economic opportunity or as much latitude to choose our own careers and our ultimate station in life.
Well golly. Sounds like life is pretty good for us dudes.
We are clearly neglected and abused relative to women, but is that really a legitimate comparison? Is that any more meaningful than measuring how we are doing compared to squirrels or dolphins? There are a few men who do cross-over and become women but I never heard of even one who did it to gain access to all the goodies that go with being an entitlement skank. I know of few men who would be anything else despite the supposed unfairness.
So what is the beef? Could it be that even though men are doing better than ever that the level of ingratitude is also disproportionately high?
Uh oh. Do I smell some “we hunted the mammoth to feed you” coming up?
Let’s face it. Men are and always have been where it’s at when it comes to sustaining this world. In former days, men used to get some credit for it. Not now. Scorn, vitriol and blame are the thanks we get for making this world livable. Biting the hand that feeds you was always a no-no. Perhaps that’s what eats me.
Hmm. Given that most women work, and that women make up roughly half the work force, it seems to me that most women are actually feeding themselves. Statistics on all this are readily available.
I am starting to tire of all the stats and data.
Statistics? We don’t need no stinkin’ statistics!
Isn’t the fact that we don’t like what is going on enough reason to change it?
So you’d rather fight against imagined ingratitude than real injustices?
Ironically, after acknowledging that he’s primarily motivated by feelings, not fact, Mr. Bee accuses women of not being able to deal with gender issues rationally:
Talking equity among men is useful because men are capable of equity. Exceptionally few women are capable. Talking about equity to a typical woman is like talking particle physics to a baboon.
We want it the way we want it and so it should be done. No other justification is significant.. We have it good but want it to be better still.
Well, at least he’s being honest about it, I guess.
EDITED TO ADD: The comments on this post on AVfM are, of course, a treat. Here are some choice excerpts from my favorite one, posted by a fella calling himself DruidV:
[D]id any of you ever stop to consider the very first expendables in this gendercidal war against us?
You know, those accomodating Men of the sixties and seventies who were just trying to do the “right” thing. Those Men, who reluctantly but dejectedly gave up their lives and livelihoods so that millions of poor, oppressed wimmin could enter the work force (and completely FUBAR it, btw) in the name of ekwality.
Was there ever any kind of token memorial statue erected by the wimmin, to honor these displaced Men who were forced to hand it all over to their future political enemies? Was there even ONE?
Ever?
My grandFather just happened to be one of these very first Men to be displaced from his job by a woman, at the hands of the government. He never fully recovered from the loss, to be sure. But hey, who gives a shit right? As long as some loud-mouthed, 1960′s hatchett wounds could feel “liberated”, umm sorry-I meant to say “Empowered(tm)”, it made no difference how many Men were sacrificed…
So, yeah, let’s get working on that memorial, folks! I wonder if we could get Maya Lin to design it?
“And what if they get killed?” A Voice for Men as an antifeminist Witchfinder General
So John the Other has responded to my post about A Voice for Men’s “bounty” on the makers of the SCUM video. It’s a fairly unhinged rant, even by his standards. Here’s the money quote:
It’s a bizarre bit of circular logic: if some deranged asshole literally kills one or more of the videomakers, this is proof that the Swedish justice system isn’t working, which therefore justifies the deranged asshole’s actions. So the existence of vigilante violence justifies vigilante violence that justifies vigilante violence.
Since when is making a video a capital crime?
After all this, John rather bizarrely claims that “[u]nlike David Futrelle, I do not and will not lend myself to the support of violence, or indeed, of murder.”
That’s because, according to his daft logic, shooting the videomakers would count as “self defense,” because evidently someone posting a video on YouTube that you don’t like is equivalent to someone coming at you with a knife.
While challenging AVfM’s “bounty” — without actually defending the video in any way — apparently means that I support murder. Go figure.
Vincent Price as the Witchfinder General
But dwelling too much on the specifics of this one case is to miss the larger point. A Voice for Men has essentially set itself up as a sort of antifeminist Witchfinder General. In the 1968 cult film of that name, you may remember, the corrupt Witchfinder tested whether the accused were witches by lowering them into water; those who floated were judged guilty, and burned at the stake. Those who sank were innocent, but dead.
Paul Elam and his sidekick John have a similar approach. They intend to do feminists harm, to “fuck their shit up,” regardless of what they’ve done or said. None of those who have been placed in the Register-Her “registry” as “bigots” deserve to be smeared or harassed (or put on the phony “registry” in the first place). But if you look at what they are ostensibly there for, well, you’ll discover that it matters not at all to Elam whether they sink or float. The point is to harass feminists; almost any excuse will do.
One of those on the “registry,” a radical feminist who posts online as Vliet Tiptree , has indeed said some fairly vile things about the male gender; she is the only one who might conceivably be described as a “bigot.” But others are there on trumped up “charges” based on highly tendentious readings of some of their writing; it’s clear that they’ve been targeted mainly because they have been publicly critical of the men’s rights movement.
Meanwhile, another of the alleged feminist bigots is not a feminist at all, but rather a traditional-minded “mom blogger” who aroused Elam’s fury by saying that she didn’t want male daycare volunteers taking her daughter to the bathroom, and for suggesting (incorrectly) that men make up 99% of abusers. (She has since apologized, but remains on the “registry.”)
And one recent candidate for inclusion, a feminist blogger whom Elam has pledged to “stalk,” seems to have made it on Elam’s naughty list simply because she has helped to highlight how pervasive harassment of women and feminists is online. Complain about harassment; get harassed. But Elam’s “critiques” of her are all suspiciously vague. It’s not clear if he has read even a single one of her blog posts. Nonetheless, he promises her that
by the time we are done you will wax nostalgic over the days when all you had to deal with was someone expressing a desire to fuck you up your shopworn ass.
In a post from some months back, Elam offered a similarly psychosexually charged justification for his campaign to “Fuck Their Shit Up.” Directly addressing the “feminazi scumbags reading this right now,” he declared:
I am not going to stop. You see, I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.
Let’s repeat that last bit for emphasis:
the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.
Does anyone still doubt that the aim of A Voice for Men and Register-Her.com in publishing personal information of their enemies is to intimidate – indeed, to terrorize?
Does anyone still doubt that their campaign is driven by hate?
Does anyone still doubt that they don’t give a shit if their actions cause someone to be physically assaulted or even killed?
Men’s Rights site A Voice for Men offers $1000 “bounty” for personal information on Swedish feminists
A Voice for Men, one of the most influential and popular Men’s Rights websites, is now offering a $1000 “bounty” for anyone able to track down the personal information of several Swedish women involved in a tasteless video advertising a theater production based on Valarie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto. As the anonymous poster calling himself John the Other – the second-in-command at AVfM – put it in a posting yesterday (emphasis in original):
We are asking for the full legal names, home addresses, places of employment, email addresses and contact phone numbers of the women and man who produced and starred in the video described above. We will pay 1000 dollars to any individual who provides and confirms this information, to be paid either directly to themselves or to a charity of their choice.
John explains that this information will be posted on the AVfM-affiliated site Register-Her.com, an “offenders database” that is being used to vilify individual feminists and “Fuck Their Shit Up,” as AVfM head honcho Paul Elam likes to put it. John notes that Regsiter-Her.com also intends to post the “government identification numbers [and] drivers licences” of the women they are able to identify.
John admits plainly that posting such information may put the physical safety of these women at risk from vigilante violence. As he puts it (emphasis mine):
Some individuals may criticize the intent to publish not only names, but also addresses, phone numbers, employers and other personal information – on the grounds that such exposure create a risk of retributive violence against individuals who openly advocate murder based on sex. It is the considered position of the editorial board of AVfM that any such risks are out-weighed by the ongoing hazard to the public of these individuals continuing to operate in anonymity.
The comments posted on the article at AVfM suggest that such “retributive” violence is a real possibility. Indeed, here’s the very first comment (which currently has 17 upvotes from readers of the site):
A commenter called Xnomolos, in another upvoted comment, adds:
i would love to hunt down these women myself.
JinnBottle responds to this comment by advising “all men to start carrying guns.”
The commenters on AVfM have already uncovered the identities of all of the women involved in the video. The blogger Fidelbogen has been the most active internet detective so far.
There is no question that the video itself is offensive, and designed to provoke. You can see it here; I’m not going to embed it on this site. If you don’t want to watch it: it depicts a young woman shooting a man in the head for no reason. Afterwards the woman and her gleeful, giggling accomplices do a victory dance, then lick the blood from the dead man’s head. A message at the end urges viewers to “Do Your Part.”
Every feminist I know who has seen the video has been appalled by it. I’m appalled by it. It’s hateful, and it’s wrong.
But John the Other, and the other commenters on AVfM, claim that it is more than this: that that the video of the staged murder, intended to provide publicity for a theater production based on Solanas’ notorious SCUM manifesto, is quite literally an open call for the murder of men. As John the Other puts it:
Open advocation of murder cannot be allowed in a civil society, without that society devolving into a culture of brutal violence.
Evidently he has no problem with, or has somehow not noticed, the comments on AVfM fantasizing about shooting and killing the women involved in the video.
Is the video a literal call to murder? Is it, as one AVfM commenter puts it, evidence of a “conspiracy to commit mass murder?” No. Violence and murder have been dramatized in the theater since its beginnings. No one accuses Sophocles of advocating fratricide and incest, though both are dealt with in his play Oedipus Rex. No one accuses Shakespeare of advocating mass murder, though many of his most famous plays have body counts that put many horror films to shame.
Does the tag line at the end of the video – “do your part” – transform the video from a depiction of murder into an open call for it? No. The “threat,” such as it is, is vague; it’s not aimed at any specific individuals. It might be seen as akin to someone wearing a t-shirt that says “kill ‘em all, let God sort them out” – tasteless and offensive, but not a literal threat. “Kill ‘Em All” is actually the name of Metallica’s first album. While a lot of people see James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich et al as pompous idiots, they have not been jailed for conspiracy to commit mass murder. That would be ridiculous.
Someone claiming to have been involved in the SCUM-inspired theatrical production in question has posted several detailed comments on AVfM, explaining that those involved in the production are “not out to get you” and that the video itself was “meant as a viral “wtf?!” to give attention to both the questions that it raises and the play itself.”
By contrast, AVfM is targeting specific individuals, and intends to offer information that would allow anyone intent on doing them harm to quite literally track them to their homes and workplaces. Those fantasizing about killing these woman are not simply making a joke along the lines of “women, can’t live with ‘em; can’t kill ‘em.” They are fantasizing about killing real people, and providing would-be evil-doers maps to their doors.
AVfM is an American site, in English; these specific women live in Sweden. While it is a real possibility, it seems unlikely that anyone reading the site will literally find and murder any of those involved in the SCUM production. At least I hope that this does not come to pass.
I don’t believe that either Paul Elam or John the Other literally wants any feminist to be killed. The real intent behind AVfM’s publishing people’s personal information, it seems clear, is to intimidate feminist writers and activists into shutting up, to make clear that if they post something that offends the internet vigilantes at AVfM they will face the possibility of some deranged individual quite literally showing up at their door intent on doing them harm.
Paul Elam and John the Other claim that they’re not advocating violence. But they are playing a dangerous game here. If some deranged individual, inspired by the hyperbolic anti-feminist rhetoric on AVfM, and armed with information provided by “Register-Her.com,” murders or otherwise harms a feminist blogger or activist or video maker, Elam and his enablers will have blood on their hands. As will those MRAs who continue to publicly support and/or link to AVfM and/or Register-Her.com.
This is not the way a legitimate rights group deals with those who disagree with them. This is what hate groups do.
