Search Results for AVFM
Belated Award Ceremony for that “Design a Commemorative Plate for A Voice for Men” contest with REAL PRIZE
As you can tell, I too am a graphics wiz!
Hey, remember that contest we had in which we designed commemorative plates for A Voice for Men? Well, TA DA! Today I announce the winner! Who will win an actual real you-can-put-liquids-in-it coffee mug with the words “MALE TEARS” on it.
First let me say that there were many, many fine entries, all of them living up to the incredibly high standards set by Men’s Rights graphic artists.
But I can only award the prize to one person, because those are the rules I made up for the contest, so without further ado, the MALE TEARS mug goes to … drumroll … Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby III, for his highly conceptual commemorative plate honoring A Voice for Men’s commemorative coin, which is what inspired this whole contest in the first place:
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.
A Voice for Men’s Attila Vinczer is trying to “dox” me. It’s not going well for him so far.
Not Attila Vinczer
This morning I found a strange message in my notifications on Twitter:
Mr. Vinczer followed up this perplexing tweet with a bunch more insinuating that I’m a “hack,” a “pathological liar,” a “criminal,” and so on — as well as some links to what he apparently sees as “dirt” about me. (More on the latter in a moment.)
Apparently Vinczer — the “Activia Director” for men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men and the son of the genius who designed that AVFM commemorative coin — was stung by my gentle criticism of his father’s coin-designing skills.
So he has decided to dox me, apparently going as far as hiring a private detective to look into my allegedly sordid life.
So far his doxing of me is not going very well, in that the “dirt” he has dug up about me is either wildly inaccurate, not particularly “infamous”– or not information about me, specifically, at all.
Contest time! Design a commemorative plate for A Voice for Men! Actual prize will be awarded.
Can you fill in that white space with some crap?
A couple of days ago, we did our best to figure out what was going on with the strongly vaginal imagery of A Voice for Men’s newly issued commemorative coins, designed by a “a world class jeweler and minter, widely recognized as a master artisan in his trade,” who also happens to be the father of A Voice for Men’s “Activia Director” Attila Vinczer.
The commemorative coins were such a lovely gift to all of us who enjoy laughing at MRAs that a friend of this blog suggested to me that we should return the favor by designing a commemorative plate for AVFM. This generous soul also pledged to provide a prize for the winner: an authentic “male tears” coffee mug.
So let’s see what you’ve got! You can use the carefully prepared commemorative plate template I pasted in above, or make one of your own. The more perplexing, the better!
If you need some inspiration, let me remind you again what the official AVFM commemorative coin looks like:
Who designed A Voice for Men’s new commemorative coins, Judy Chicago?
![Screen Shot 2014-07-11 at Fri, [Jul 11], 14 6](http://manboobz.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/screen-shot-2014-07-11-at-fri-jul-11-14-6.png)
This is a picture of A Voice for Men’s new commemorative coin. No, really, they have a commemorative coin. It was designed by Peter Vinczer, father of A Voice for Men’s Attila Vinczer, possibly — I suspect — with the help of Judy Chicago. The coins cost $58.88, and will be issued in a first edition of 10,000.
In the comments to AVFM’s announcement, six people have proudly announced that they’ve purchased a coin. So get yours quickly, because there are only 9,994 left before the first edition runs out!
The only real question is what exactly is being depicted on the coin:
Is it:
1) An otter in a manhole
2) A man levitating a carrot over a milkshake
3) A vagina
4) A vagina
5) Come on, it’s obviously a vagina
ANSWER: I have no fucking clue. Seriously, I’ve been staring at this for like ten minutes and I have no idea what on earth this could be. What is the round thing? Why is there a tiny hand? If that thing above the circle thing is a raindrop or a teardrop or whatever, why is it upside-down? Why would AVFM issue a goddamn commemorative coin in the first place.
I do know one thing, though: If you can afford to waste $$58.88 on this piece of crap, you are not oppressed in any way. And you should probably have your right to vote stripped from you.
Just kidding about that last bit. You should still be allowed to vote even if you buy vagina coins from a dude named Attila.
How to Lose a Debate in 45 Minutes: Paul Elam fumbles his debate with Matt Binder
So, that happened.
The debate between Matt Binder (from the Majority Report) and Paul Elam (from A Pile of Money for Paul Elam) went off yesterday. I can’t say it went off without a hitch, because it was actually quite hitch-full. Indeed, it was kind of a disaster — at least for one Paul Elam.
Paul’s the one who wanted the debate. He chose the topic, he chose the format, he controlled the venue. And he lost the debate rather spectacularly, grimly reading a succession of prepared statements while Binder shot down his arguments with common-sensical one-lines and raised issues that Elam didn’t or couldn’t address.
Binder rattled Elam early by presenting him with an unattributed quote that sounded virtually identical to Elliot Rodger’s misogynistic rants and which Elam dismissed as something that no MRA would ever say; Binder then revealed that it was a quote from Stefan Molyneux, the MRA “philosopher” who was one of the featured speakers at AVFM’s recent conference. (Indeed, it was a quote that I highlighted in my first Misogyny Theater videos on Mr. M.)
Dean Esmay’s Secret Plan to Fight Sexism by Calling Everyone a Whore
Let’s say that you’re the “Managing Editor” of a website known far and wide for calling women “whores,” as well as an assortment of other 4- and 5-letter words generally considered crude sexist slurs. Let’s just say that you had a convention, and that during this convention your official spokeswoman went on a bit of a name calling rampage on Twitter, repeatedly attacking a woman who had tried to report on said convention as an “attention whore,” a “fame whore,” and a “little whore,” and offering similar “whore”-based assessments to other critics of the site.
And let’s just say that despite all this you also had a desire to convince the world that your site was not actually the misogynistic cesspit that it so obviously is. Would you:
1) Apologize for using the words “whore” and “bitch” and “c*nt” and other similar sexist epithets against women.
2) In your capacity as editor, quietly remove the word “whore” (and “bitch” and “c*nt”) from future postings on the site, and tell your PR maven to maybe come up with a less misogynistic insult of choice.
3) Start calling men whores so that no one can accuse you of hating women because, see we use “whore” to refer to men too!
The answer, of course, is 3 — at least if you’re Dean Esmay, “Managing Editor” of A Voice for Men. In a recent comment thread on AVFM, he declared:
![Screen Shot 2014-07-08 at Tue, [Jul 8], 14 5](https://manboobz.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/screen-shot-2014-07-08-at-tue-jul-8-14-5.png)
CONFIDENTIAL TO D— E—-: No one is buying your bullshit. Also, if you want to try to convince the world that you’re a Friend of Sex Workers, you should probably stop using the word “whore” as an insult for women or men.
Paul Elam: All Your Donations Are Belong to Me
Paul Elam, in his hovel.
Heh. I’m on my annual semi-vacation this week, and was planning on keeping my postings here fairly light. But the news waits for no one. And by “news” I mean the daily parade of ridiculousness coming from the Men’s “Human Rights” camp. So here’s a quick report on the latest bit of high irony involving A Voice for Men.
Well, I was wrong. I’ve often noted that the Men’s Rights movement in general, and A Voice for Men in particular, doesn’t actually provide any real help for any real men. Sure, as far as I can tell, precisely zero of the hundreds of thousands of dollars A Voice for Men has raised from donors over the years has gone into providing actual services for men — say, funding a hotline for troubled men or some other practical program that doesn’t primarily involve yelling at women online. But never let it be said that none of this money gods to help men.
Because, it turns out, that money has been going to help men. Or at least that subset of men that consists of one Paul Elam of Houston Texas.
After being pressed for details about A Voice for Men’s finances by anonymous commenters on Reddit, a certain Twitterer named @DavidFutrelle and a journalist from MSNBC, Elam has finally fessed up and admitted that all the money donated to his website goes directly to him. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Elam had to say in a post from yesterday:
Defenders of A Voice for Men tell Time magazine reporter “we have to SCARE you into listening,” you “stinky … human monkey.”
The High Council of Feminism holds a meeting.
Jessica Roy, a reporter for Time magazine covering A Voice for Men’s recent :”Men’s Issues” conference in Detroit, found herself the target of a vitriolic tirade from AVFM maximum leader Paul Elam before she even sat down to write her account of her time amongst the MRAs.
Elam, evidently incensed about a handful of sarcastic remarks that Roy tweeted during the conference, denounced her as, among other things, a “hack,” “a liar and bigot” and a practitioner of “journalistic scumtardery,” whatever that is. Commenters on A Voice for Men happily joined in the hate, denouncing her as an “airhead,” a “disgrace and a liar,” “lil’ miss hair-o’or-her-eyes,” and a “little asshole [who] will look like a right nazi in five-to-ten years time.” Amazingly, no one pulled out the c-word. Evidently AVFMers are still on their best behavior.
Roy’s “What I Learned as a Woman at a Men’s Rights Conference” appeared on Time.com on Wednesday. Far from the hack job Elam and pals were predicting, her piece turned out to be a long, thoughtful and nuanced account that, while skeptical of AVFM and its brand of hateful nonsense, displayed considerable sympathy for some of the troubled men she met at the conference, men who could benefit from a movement that truly tried to offer solutions for men in difficulty instead of encouraging them to scapegoat feminists and women.
Reflecting on her discussions with several conference attendees, Roy wrote,
