Search Results for spearhead
>Paul Elam’s continuing childish and unethical behavior
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When I agreed to debate Paul Elam on domestic violence on his web site, I clearly underestimated how childish, and unethical, he really is.
After I bowed out of the debate — see the details here – he decided to run the whole thing under a childish, gloating headline, and with an introduction labeling me a “fucking moron.” (EDIT: See here for my posts without Elam’s editorializing.)
Because of this behavior, I requested he either remove the headline and the obnoxious introduction, or remove my contributions to the debate from his web site entirely. After getting no response from him to this, I sent another email telling him to simply take down my writings from his web site.
Legally, he does not own any rights to my writings, and because of his behavior he no longer has my permission to run them. I may pursue legal action.
Paul, unfortunately, has chosen to escalate the situation, by running an even more childish post titled “David Futrelle- Covered in Pin Feathers and Clucking,” in which he writes:
let it be known now that any blogger in the sphere, MRA or otherwise, has my permission to repost this debate in full on their blog or website.
Obviously he has no more right to do this than I have the right to take his car on a joy ride.
He’s also apparently pitched the idea of reposting the whole debate on The Spearhead. While he doesn’t have the right to do this, and I’ve told The Spearhead that they do not have the right to reprint my writings, I might agree to the proposition provided that I’d be guaranteed in writing by The Spearhead that it would run with a neutral headline, that my latest response to Paul’s “final” post would be included, and a few other conditions.
And I would have no problem continuing the debate with Paul on The Spearhead until we each post 5 posts, as per our original agreement, were I to work out the necessary details with The Spearhead and get an agreement in writing. Or we could finish the debate right here.
I stand by everything I wrote in the debate, and have no problem continuing it, provided it be on a venue not controlled by Paul Elam and with some basic rules to guarantee fairness set forth in writing. (Paul would have to agree in writing to run the debate under a neutral headline on his site as well.)
Oh, and one final note: Paul has also removed the links back to here from the original debate, thus breaking still another condition I insisted on in order to participate in the debate in the first place. And he’s banned me from commenting in the comments section under the debate posts.
This is all very stupid and very petty.
Let me offer a challenge to anyone in the MRM whose ethics are more developed than Paul’s: Stand up and object to his illegal and unethical behavior. Were a feminist to pull this sort of thing on an MRA, I would certainly stand up and object to it.
>"Fag bashing," woman-hating, and Men’s Rights myopia
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One of the many failings of the Men’s Rights Movement — and “failing” really isn’t a strong enough word for it — is the way in which it ignores or denies real problems faced by boys and men that don’t fit into its grand conspiracy theory in which all the ills faced by men are caused by evil women or by men corrupted and seduced, personally and/or politically, by said evil women.
One of these problems, and it’s a big one, is the “fag bashing” that’s rampant among boys of high school and college age. The atmosphere of abuse has a tragic effect on gay teenagers, as the recent rash of suicides illustrates all too poignantly. And it also has an enormous effect on boys who aren’t gay but who have their masculinity challenged constantly by other boys.
While the MRM is obsessed with the notion of the smug, castrating (Western) woman, the entitled “princess” who looks down on decent, ordinary “beta” males and Nice Guys in favor of jerky, aggressive alpha males, it pays virtually no attention to the daily nightmares inflicted on boys by other boys (and men by other men) by “fag bashing.”
Again, take the recent gay teen suicides. While they have inspired magazine cover stories and ongoing discussion on feminist blogs, the only MRA blog of any prominence that even mentioned any of the suicides, to the best of my knowledge, was the False Rape Society, which essentially used the suicide of Tyler Clementi as an excuse to bash feminism, as I pointed out in a recent post, and (as cat pointed out in a comment here) to turn the story of “brutality against a gay kid” into one “about how hard it is to be hetero.”
While MRAs hate it if anyone calls them “fags” or otherwise criticizes their masculinity, they routinely deride any men they don’t like as a “manginas,” and various other terms to suggest they are not “real men.” A few MRAs, like the folks at the blog No Ma’am, bash gays and lesbians quite openly; they’ve also, you may recall, labeled me a “poof” (among other things)
One of the smartest takes I’ve seen on the phenomenon of anti-gay bullying comes from male feminist blogger Hugo Schwyzer. In a recent post on “homosociality and homophobia,” he puts the recent suicides in a broader context. Drawing on the research of sociologist C.J. Pascoe, Schwyzer describes the ways in which “fag discourse” permeates American high school:
The discourse manifests itself in the almost incorrigible way in which young men label each other “fags” while seeking to avoid having that label applied to them. According to this discourse, fear of being called out publicly as a “fag” is the primary driving force behind what Pascoe cleverly calls the display of “compulsive heterosexuality.” … Pascoe notes that among young men desperate to establish their masculine bona fides with their peers, what we see in American high schools amounts to compulsive, almost frantic efforts by young men to prove their manhood.
Anyone who has worked with adolescent boys knows how much anxiety many of them feel about their own masculinity. It’s not news to say that our sons, like their fathers before them, often have to endure or participate in physical or at least verbal violence that we tragically and falsely believe is necessary to transition into manhood. … The real stigma in being labeled a “fag” doesn’t lie in the association with homosexuality, but with being seen as feminine.
There’s no easy solution for a problem that is so pervasive, but Schwyzer argues that “perhaps the best way to “inoculate against cruelty”is … to encourage strong non-sexual relationships between boys and girls at every age.” Going back to a review he wrote of Michael Kimmel’s book Guyland, a study of teen boys and young men, Schwyzer notes that
boys who have close female friends are much less likely to exhibit the worst and most destructive tendencies of the Guy Code. After all, the “guy code” is wrapped up in the notion that approval from other men … is the most precious commodity a young man can pursue. Even heterosexual conquest is, ultimately, a means of gaining approval from the guys. Young men who have friends of both sexes are less likely to be held hostage to solely masculine approval; they can receive non-sexual validation from their female friends — and that validation is less likely to be connected to the brutal “sturdy oak” ethos of the Guy Code.
And they are less likely to participate in the relentless onslaught of cruelty towards their gay and lesbian peers.
These are lessons that the Men’s Rights Movement — or whatever rises up to supplant it — will have to learn if it wants to be a movement that really benefits boys and men, straight and gay alike, instead of indulging regressive, self-defeating and often dangerous fantasies of manhood that demonize “fags” and women alike.
>QuoteOTD: Whatever terrible shit men do, it’s all women’s fault. Their sexy fault.
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The quote of the day today is a long and rambling one, so buckle up. It’s from a comment on The Spearhead, by a fellow named Snark, which was enthusiastically highlighted by the Schopenhauer-loving, Age-of-Consent-Law-hating theantifeminist on his creepy blog. The theme of the post? Whatever nasty, violent, bad shit men do is all the fault of hot young women, who control men through the power of their evil sexiness.
Before settling into his argument proper, Snark gets one little point out of the way: he’s not talking about feminists, who are, he says, generally too old, or, if young, too “neurotic and/or ugly” to control men with the promise of sexy sex. No, Snark is talking about hot young women, who control men without having to resort to feminism. Oh, feminism is evil. But pretty girls are evil squared. So let’s begin:
There is a whole different game of misandry being played here. They already hold the power – sexual power – and so have no need to engage in things like feminism. They already have everything feminism could offer them, that is, control over men.
Gynocentrism Theory teaches us that even when those individuals in powerful roles are mostly men, they are doing the bidding of women, not of men en masse; thus the lie is given to Patriarchy Theory, which suggests ridiculously that the few men in power stick up for all the ‘little guys’ out there, against the interests of women.
Gynocentrism Theory then tells us what women – either the non-feminists who sexually control men, or successful feminists – actually do with this power over men. They get men to fight each other. …
Men aren’t naturally violent or aggressive; they simply have the potential to be these things. It is the fact that women reward with sex those who prove themselves to be the most violent and aggressive which makes men act violently and aggressively.
Hmm. So by this logic, then, we can assume that Hitler was just a hapless schmo driven to genocidal fury by thoughts of Eva Braun all tarted-up in a sexy dirndl. Heck, he probably would have spent his whole life painting pictures of butterflies had it not been for all those foxy frauleins. And just imagine how much worse World War II would have been if he’d actually had two balls, instead of just the one! Let’s continue:
The price of a woman’s titillation is an innocent man getting his head smashed in as he walks home. This, just so that the perpetrator can be sexually selected. Woman’s role in the crime is concealed; she didn’t perform the act, after all; she only manipulated the man’s natural stimulus and response system to get him to perform a violent display for her sexual benefit.
Poor men are stuck between their rock-hard dicks and a hard place:
The outcome of all this is that men today are being ground between two millstones: on the one hand, non-feminist women demand that men must act aggressively and violently if they are to be sexually selected; on the other, their feminist sisters demand increasingly brutal punishments for men who act precisely in this way.
Oh, and the way those ladies dress!
[T]oday we are subject to the new phenomena [of] ambient porn, that is, the promise of sexual rewards from desirable young women at every turn. Women who decry pornography do so while dolled up to look like porn stars themselves, and don’t you dare criticise them for it. There is no escaping the pink wurlitzer: male sexuality is provoked everywhere you look, whether in images from your TV screen, or in magazines, adverts at bus stops, billboards, and more pervasively and perversely than all of this, in the flesh, walking around absolutely everywhere from your home to the local store to the place you work. …
The pink wurlitzer? Do you mean … this? Never mind. Onward:
Our sexuality is being forever provoked, taunted, prodded at. All to ensure that we react in that ‘real manly’ way that the young non-feminist women demand, so that we can promptly be caught and brutalised by white knights employed by institutions controlled and run by or for the benefit of feminist women.
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| How Women Rule the Universe |
And what set all this in motion? The bikini? The Wonderbra? Nope:
[T]his was all quite possibly set in stone from the moment women were granted the vote.
The vote! That sexy, sexy right to vote.
Not that this argument, such as it is, deserves a rebuttal, but if men are naturally nonviolent, and women are the cause of their violence, why do gay men get into fights?
>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.
>Quote of the Day: Stupidity Strikes Twice
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They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place. That’s not true. But people like to say it nevertheless. That’s not something anyone would say about stupidity, ever, because stupidity strikes the same places with such monotonous regularity.
And so it is that I can report with pleasure but not much surprise that stupidity — really massive stupidity, in fact — has once again hit the discussion thread on The Spearhead which provided us with our previous incredibly stupid Quote of the Day. This time, a fellow called TFH offers his unique take on rape statistics:
“1 in 4 women on college campuses have been raped”
….and none of those women are ever higher than a 6 in looks. Most are 4s or lower.
Coincidence? I think not.
We never, ever see women who would rate a 7 or higher making a big fuss about ‘rape’, claiming that rape is rampant, etc. EVEN THOUGH THEY WOULD BE THE ONES MORE AT RISK.
This fact reveals the rape industry to be a complete fabrication. A ploy to get attention.
Always ask yourself : Where are the women who are a 7+ in looks, who are sufficiently afraid of rape to bring it up as often as the uggos do?
I should note that in addition to the rest of the stupidity, he’s a little confused as to what the 1-in-4 statistic refers to. The study in question, by Mary Koss, found that 1-in-4 college-age women had been the victim of rape or attempted rape at some point in their lives. (1-in-8 had been raped.) For more on the study upon which this figure is based, take a look at this extremely useful piece on Alas, A Blog, which has a whole category on the site devoted to the study in question, and on the claims of various anti-feminists to have “rebutted” it. Daran of Feminist Critics, a regular commenter on this blog, has also written two very useful posts on the subject as well.
EDIT: Here is another excellent post from Daran taking down Heather MacDonald, one of Koss’ recent critics, as well as two comments here that shed even more light on MacDonald’s flawed arguments. Thanks, Daran!
>Quote of the Day #2: Wham, Bam, No Thank You, Ma’am!
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| Femocracy in action. |
While “mean0dean0” over on Reddit suggests that his fellow men should be hooking up with easily-impressed immigrant chicks, SingleDad on The Spearhead has a somewhat more hardcore strategy for horny hetero men living in the American Femocracy: Have sex only with women who have absolutely no idea who you are or where you live, then flee the country.
I espouse anonymous sex, don’t ever let a woman know your name, city or profession. People say I am extreme but society is run by the femocracy in our country and they want carte blanche to imprison any man at any time that displeases them.
The femocracy has a vested interest in putting any man accused of having heterosexual sex in prison. … This is because they are lesbians and gold diggers who hate men. … So you cannot co-mingle with women in the west. It is a simple as that. …
I recommend mass migration for parents of boys. There is a witch hunt. They want your boys in prison. … I submit that if you don’t leave, like the Jews in Germany, you are putting your son’s at grave risk, or maybe you love your daughters more than your sons.
My plan is to be outta here is less than 5 years. It is the only logical conclusion.
Note: I’ve condensed his post quite a bit. The whole thing is worth reading, as a sort of case study in crazy.
>Quote of the Day: Women’s Suffrage = Lost Faith in Manhood.
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I had no idea that women’s suffrage was still so controversial. Apparently it is, at least to the guys at the Spearhead, and to the blog Full of Grace, Seasoned with Salt. Without further ado, the quote:
Woman Totally Ruining Everything
I should point out that the author of this fine piece of analysis is a woman. Some women are idiots. Into the Enemies List she goes.
>Ain’t That a Shaming Tactic
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There’s something inherently ridiculous about being lambasted for using “shaming tactics” — by someone who has just called you a “mangina.”
A few posts back, as you may recall, I took on an odd little rant on The Spearhead which seemed to suggest that Tea Party nutbag Christine O’Donnell’s 14-year-old comments about the evils of masturbation offered proof of sorts that an evil “pussy cartel” was trying to keep American men from taking matters into their own hands, so to speak. The biggest threat to this diabolical female conspiracy, the author wrote, was “men realizing that their hand will do more for them than a woman will.”
The problem, of course, is that this is completely ridiculous. I myself have had sex on a number of occasions over the years — I mean, with other people — and I have to say that my hand, despite its obvious convenience and considerable dexterity, really cannot compete with, you know, an actual naked lady.
And so I suggested that any man who thought so little of women might have a hard time getting a date. This evidently sent the author of the piece, the man behind the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog, into such a tailspin of shame that he wrote not one but two blog posts about me. In the first, after calling me a mangina, he insisted that he did in fact have a girlfriend. In a comment, I told him I felt sorry for her. And I do. What kind of woman would want to date a man who prefers the company of Susie Palmer and her five friends? So he wrote yet another post, this one spelling out in detail the evil forms of “shaming language” I had used.
Men’s Rights Activists are obsessed with so-called “shaming language.” Or at least they have been since a document called The Catalogue of Anti-Male Shaming Tactics started making its way around the manosphere; it’s been linked to or posted on virtually every MRA blog or forum at least once.
The Catalogue is basically a list of allegedly unfair debating tactics used by those who think that MRAs are full of shit:
Shaming tactics are emotional devices meant to play on a man’s insecurities and shut down debate. They are meant to elicit sympathy for women and to demonize men who ask hard questions.
The list spells out 16 different types of “shaming tactics,” from the “Charge of Irascibility” (“You’re bitter!”), to the “Charge of Fanaticism” and the “Charge of Misogyny.”
And it’s true. People do charge MRAs with all of these things. And a lot of the time, they’re guilty as charged. Some MRAs are bitter. Some MRAs are fanatics. Some MRAs are misogynists.
My most grievous crime? I had used the “Threat of Withheld Affection … The Pink Whip,” in which “the target is admonished that his viewpoints or behavior will cause women to reject him as a mate.” I’ll have to plead guilty on that one, since that’s exactly what I did.
In his second blog post, Pro-Male/Anti-Fem added two more counts to the charges against me: that I had accused him of “Preying On Weak/Damaged/Insecure Women” and “Non-Specific ‘Shameful Behavior.'” I’ll plead guilty on the first count, Your Honor, but innocent on the second: I was pretty specific about what I saw as shameful — his idiotic ideas about the “pussy cartel” and the whole hand-better-than-woman nonsense.
The funny thing about the Catalogue is how deadly seriously so many MRAs take it, and how angry they get whenever one of their opponents, tired of fighting a battle of wits against half-wits, pulls one of the “shaming tactics” out of her or his bag in an effort to bring the fruitless discussion to a close.
The irony, of course (and please forgive me if I shout), is that MRAs USE SHAMING TACTICS THEMSELVES ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Just look at the comments on the post of mine that started this whole kerfuffle, posted, presumably, by MRAs who followed the link from Pro-Male/Anti-Fem’s first post. The bravely anonymous first poster starts off the insult parade by saying “just because you’ve let them cut YOUR dick off doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy ours.” (This is a classic example of what the Catalogue calls the “Charge of Invirility.”) After a few more insult-laden comments, we come to this, from another brave Mr. Anonymous:
You don’t understand. Little Ms. David here is just jealous because men will rather use a Fleshlight than give Little Ms. David’s hungry poophole and mouthpussy the gift of their manly, throbbing love rockets. Awwwww. Men are such pigs. Men are so shallow they can’t understand Little Ms. David needs a Real Man™.
But my favorite? This one:
a dickless wonder’s blog, right here. You’re such a girl, with the nonsensical shaming language.
Yep, the Charge of Invirility again. But even better, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to shout again: HE USES SHAMING LANGUAGE AGAINST ME IN THE VERY SAME SENTENCE IN WHICH HE COMPLAINS ABOUT SHAMING LANGUAGE.
Sadly, our anonymous friend is hardly the first MRA to do exactly this. Take a look at this fine fellow over at (irony alert!) Antimisandry.com:
Whenever they try that crap I tell them, “Your hate speech doesn’t work any more.” … Just side step it and call the cunt what she is, a hate monger. She has no answer for that.
Can anyone really be this un-self-aware?
In all my travels around the angry-manosphere — Charge of Irascibility FTW! — I have run across exactly one intelligent response to the Catalogue from an actual MRA: an essay on The Spearhead by the mysterious Zed, a sort of MRM elder statesman. Rather than simply lament the use of shaming language by the evil fems, Zed urges men to respond in kind, and not just with the standard anti-woman cliches.
The wasps will swoop in and start stinging – “loser, you hate women, you live in your mother’s basement, you must have a small penis” until they land one that hits a sore spot and triggers Chuck’s anger.
The solution? MRA’s need to “start honing our rhetoric of ridicule so we can sting our opponents as deeply as they are trying to sting us.”
I second his emotion. “Dickless wonder?” “Mangina?” “Cunt?” You can do better than that. The “Little Ms. David” guy shows some promise, but he lacks finesse. Study the masters of insult: Oscar Wilde. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Andrea Dworkin.
And quit whining about “shaming language” like a bunch of damn babies.
That’s The Charge of Hypersensitivity, by the way.
>Paul Elam’s Evasive Pseudo-Eloquence
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Edward Bulwer-Lyttonpatron saint of terrible,terrible writers |
There are all kinds of bad writers. Some can’t string simple sentences together; others spew thick clouds of incomprehensible jargon. But in some ways the most annoying bad writers of all are those who are bad writers because they think they are great writers.
Paul Elam is one of those. An influential blogger, at least within the marginal mini-world of the Men’s Rights Movement, Elam writes polemics for The Spearhead and his own web site, A Voice For Men. His topics range from the evils of chivalry to “Death Row and The Pussy Pass.” And they’re full of sentences like this:
[G]ender feminism is not the light of reason, but much more like a burning cross, issuing a grotesque, dystopian glow; a suitable backlight for an Orwellian nightmare.
Or this, from an essay about the dilemmas of young men today:
Yeah, except that the only battlefields most of these guys have seen have been the multiplayer maps of Halo or Modern Warfare 2.
As you may have already gathered, Elam’s flights of literary fancy are invariably hokey and melodramatic. And they’re essentially meaningless. They say absolutely nothing, while giving the impression that they say an awful lot. Indeed, when you try to nail down the meaning of any of his not-so-fine phrases, they simply fall apart.
In the first quote above, he attempts to smoosh together the KKK and the world of George Orwell’s 1984 into some strange symbol of feminist awfulness. Huh? The KKK is a vigilante group; the villain in 1984 was a totalitarian government. They’re both bad, to be sure, but different kinds of bad. Big Brother wasn’t a Grand Kleagle. It’s a sloppy mix of metaphors that represents some pretty sloppy thinking.
So why am I picking on Elam’s writing style? Shouldn’t I be focusing on the substance of his argument? My point is that you can’t separate the two. Elam’s style is designed to conceal his lack of substance.
Ironically, the person who provides the most insight into what Elam is trying to accomplish with his purportedly elevated prose is none other than Orwell. In his classic essay on “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell took a look at some typically terrible political prose of his day. The two qualities that united all his examples in awfulness were a certain “staleness of imagery” and a “lack of precision.” His analysis fits Elam’s essays to a T:
As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
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| George Orwell, being Orwellian |
And why is this? Orwell concluded that the airy abstractions, the mixed metaphors, the grand prefabricated phrases all worked together to conceal the true meanings of what was being said, to offer “a defence of the indefensible,” whether one was a Communist defending the Russian purges or an American politician defending the atom bomb.
With Elam, though, we see something slightly different. He’s not defending the indefensible so much as trying to disguise the sheer insubstantiality of some of his central arguments, which would be simply laughable if he hadn’t gussied them up with ponderously “fancy” prose. Consider this passage, describing Elam’s thoughts after discovering that his spellchecker didn’t recognize the word “misandry”:
A culture that refuses to acknowledge that a perfectly legitimate word exists on paper, is in effect denying its existence to the collective consciousness. … It is like trying to describe a cloud without being able to use the word itself- to a world that does not believe in clouds. We are limited to talking around the subject; we present our meanings in metaphors and similes and anecdotes.
Reduced to its essence, though, Elam’s claim here is simply absurd: Because “misandry” isn’t a common enough term to include in his computer’s dictionary, our culture has no way of expressing the notion that certain people and ideas are man hating.
Really, Paul? We’re “limited to talking around the subject?” I really haven’t noticed much of that. The term “man-hating” gets the idea across fairly bluntly, and has long been popular with a certain sort of man, often in conjunction with words like “bitch,” “cunt,” or “feminazi.”
In the crowd you hang with, I imagine you hear this kind of talk all the time. Surely you’ve noticed it.
Elam doesn’t always write in such a stilted, evasive style. Sometimes he butches it up a bit, launching crude tirades against “mangina morons,” or telling a woman who was sexually harassed as a tween and an early teen that “guess what, cupcake, when you start growing tits, men start looking at them.” In a recent piece about the impending execution of a female murder-plotter with an IQ of 72, he wrote of his desire to “throw some burgers on the grill, crack open a few cold ones, and watch them ice this murdering bitch on pay-per-view.” (This despite the fact that he actually opposes the death penalty.)
Stick with this style, Paul. It may not be pretty, but at least it’s true to your nature. You’re not a grand philosopher; you’re not a literary lion. There is nothing smart or sophisticated about anything you ever write or think. Basically, you’re a dick. So write like one.
>First they came for the Fleshlights
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Q: How many Men’s Rights Activists does it take to screw a Fleshlight?
A: That’s not funny!
So what emotion did you feel when Christine O’Donnell’s bizarre anti-masturbation video first started popping up on cable news and the intertubes? (If you haven’t seen it yet, pop over here and return when you’re done.) Did you feel amused, annoyed, befuddled, perhaps concerned that someone so wacky could possibly be voted into office? Did it make you horny, baby?
For the men’s rights blogger behind the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Tech blog, there was nothing funny about the video. “They’re Afraid of Men Masturbating,” he wrote in a piece also published on the The Spearhead, warning fellow men to beware the dark specter of the mysterious “they” — he never quite specifies who this is — trying to get between men and their hands.
Watch the youtube video and take note of the end. Except for a token guy, it’s a group of women. O’Donnell even says about her presumably future husband masturbating, “If he already knows what pleases him, and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture?” This quote exposes the undercurrent behind anti-masturbation attitudes. It’s not so much anti-masturbation but anti men masturbating. People against masturbation have a fear that men might actually have an alternative to women. …
And how will the evil “they” control men? Not by clamping their hapless partners’ junk in a stylish new CB-6000 Male Chastity Device. Not by drawing litlte moustaches on all the pictures in their porn stashes. But sneakily, insidiously, through “shaming language.” Religious conservatives like O’Donnell will open up their Bibles and start talking about Onan. Others will smirk and call men losers.
“When women use vibrators they are praised for taking control of their sexuality,” he complains. “When a man uses a fleshlight he is attacked for being a loser who can’t get laid.” The ultimate goal? “[T]o protect the pussy cartel from competition” in the form of fleshlights, virtual reality sex, and the comforts of their own hands and a bottle of lotion.
Yes, he did just use the phrase “pussy cartel.”
So, yeah. Here’s the thing. The reason the sex-positive feminists and the Samantha Jones’ of the world describe female masturbation as liberating is because, for many women, masturbation is still a source of deep, deep shame, so much so that many are too skittish or uneasy to even try it. While getting reliable info about sexuality is difficult, most studies of the subject indicate that men masturbate far more than women. (No duh.) One 2007 survey found that 95% of men had masturbated at least once in their lives, while only 71% of women had. More than half of men surveyed had masturbated in the week prior to taking the survey; only 18% of women had. Heck, I jacked it twice while writing this paragraph. I’m not afraid!
And here’s the other thing. When people call you a loser for shacking up with your fleshlight instead of a warm, living, flesh-and-blood woman, they’re not really making fun of the masturbating.
No, they’re making fun of you for being so wholly objectionable to any sane woman that you’re left alone with only your hands and your sex toys. They’re making fun of you for being the sort of person who uses the phrase “pussy cartel.” They’re making fun of you for being such a crazy misogynist creepazoid that you’ve actually managed to convince yourself, at least for the amount of time it takes to write a blog post, that your “hand will do more for [you] than a woman will.”
Is that shaming language? I suppose it it. That blog post was, well, pretty shameful.
EDIT: Some less-than-careful readers of this piece have somehow concluded that it is anti-masturbation, or at least anti-male-masturbation. It is not. Guys, masturbate all you want. In your bedroom, in the living room, in front of your pets, wearing a hat, wearing a dress. I don’t care. Masturbation is healthy, normal, and oftentimes highly entertaining. I have been known to masturbate myself. My critique was not of masturbation but of guys who actually think that Christine O’Donnell’s loopy remarks, which even she is backtracking on, mean that a “pussy cartel” is trying to stop men from touching their wieners.
EDIT 2: The target of this piece offers a response that suggests, among other things, that he really can’t read very well. But he assures us that he actually is getting laid, so yay for him on that.
