Search Results for AVFM
The Vaginal Tingles of Feral Women: A selection of the worst comments on my YouTube videos so far
The reviews are in! (Note: This is not an actual video. Don’t click on it and expect it to play.)
As most regular readers already know, I’ve been putting up a new series of videos on YouTube, featuring animated versions of some of YouTube’s most notable woman-haters. Naturally, these videos have attracted some of the worst commenters on YouTube. For now, I’ve decided to keep the comments there more or less unmoderated, while recommending that those who want to have a conversation that doesn’t involve horrible YouTube commenters come here.
Partly that’s because I don’t have the energy to properly moderate the YouTube comments. And partly it’s because I want to see just how awful they’ll get, to see what MRAs and MGTOWs and others from their general neighborhood will say when there’s no one looking over their shoulder – whether that person is someone like me, or some MRA moderator weeding out the worst remarks so that their movement won’t look bad. (Or at least any worse than it already does.)
So far the results have been instructive. I’ve gotten a lot of supportive comments, and even some reasonably thoughtful ones from some critics. But I’ve also gotten abusive comments and weird misogynistic manifestos.
Here are some of my favorites from the latter two categories.
And yes, I’m putting a TRIGGER WARNING on what follows. Lots of talk about rape, in particular.
With A Voice for Men’s conference over, Paul Elam has found a new woman to hate.
Paul Elam: Voice of reason in the gender debate?
You’ll all be glad to hear that Paul Elam has returned to normal. Well, normal for him.
After several days of doing his best impression of someone who isn’t a rage-filled attention misogynist, he’s back to his old woman-bashing self. You’ll also be happy to learn that he’s found a brand new woman to hate: Time reporter Jessica Roy, who is apparently quite stinky.
I’ve heard rumors that most females are stinky, actually.
Roy, who is covering the conference for Time, hasn’t even published her account yet. Her crimes so far? She tweeted some appalling quotes from some of the talks at the conference and made clear that she was not having a good time amongst the assembled assholes human rights activists. A selection:
Antifeminist DV guru Erin Pizzey: “If you are not in fear of your life, you are not suffering [from Domestic Violence].”
AVFM lifetime achievement award winner Erin Pizzey
At A Voice for Men’s conference yesterday, antifeminist crusader Erin Pizzey was given “a special award for her tireless work with ALL the victims of domestic violence.” Due to the amazing public relations work of AVFM’s spokeswoman for the conference, I don’t know what the award was called, so let’s just assume it was the World’s Greatest Erin Pizzey Award.
Whatever the award was called, the notion that Pizzey works, tirelessly or otherwise, on behalf of “ALL the victims of domestic violence” is demonstrably false. Indeed, she has argued vociferously against extending DV protection to all victims.
In an op-ed she wrote for The Daily Mail in 2011, Pizzey declared herself “horrified” that the British government would consider extending domestic violence protection to those subjected to “emotional bullying and ‘coercive control’” as well as actual physical abuse.
Her “argument” may be triggering for abuse survivors, so I’m putting all of her quotes below the jump.
If you missed me on Al Jazeera America, they’re rerunning the show today at 12:30 PM ET
Your Martin Luther King impression just isn’t cutting it, dude.
The human rights visionary looked down at what he had just written and smiled. Would these be the words he was remembered for?
Thomas Jefferson had that line about all men being created equal. It was bullshit, of course, but people ate that crap up. Martin Luther King had that thing about his kids not being judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. That was pretty good, he had to admit. People love cute stories about kids.
Gandhi had that thing, how did it go? That thing about everyone laughing at you, and fighting, and then you win something? That wasn’t quite it, but Gandhi was kind of a wuss, anyway. Would people even remember that dopey skinny dude in a diaper in a hundred years?
He chuckled quietly to himself.
They would certainly remember him, he thought. And they would remember the words he had tapped out on his laptop shortly before midnight that fateful summer night, on the eve of the historic conference that would, he knew, change the world forever.
One day, he was sure, these three sentences – well, two sentences and a sentence fragment, to be more precise – would be etched in stone.
He reached down, and clicked “Tweet.”
So anyway, just a reminder: if you missed me on Al Jazeera America’s The Stream on Tuesday, facing off against AVFM’s Robert O’Hara, they’re rerunning the show today at 12:30 PM ET.
It’s only on TV, though, not online. Click here to see if you get Al Jazeera America on your TV provider.
Spinning out of control: Janet Bloomfield takes A Voice for Men’s reality-distortion field on the road
One of the benefits of running a cult – or so I have heard – is the ability to define reality for your cult followers. The principals at the cultish A Voice for Men do this all the time – pretending, for example, that former AVFM Number Two John Hembling had once faced off against a mob of 20-30 angry feminists brandishing boxcutters when his own video of the event showed him conversing with a handful of peaceful activists. And who can forget their attempts to cast their embarrassingly poorly attended rally on Toronto as a “huge success?”
However successful they are at redefining reality for their cult followers, cult leaders encounter problems when they try to do the same thing for those outside of their sphere of influence.
Take AVFM maximum leader Paul Elam’s continual attempts to recast some of the vilest things he’s written as “satire,” an explanation that only seems to fly amongst MRAs with a large capacity for the willing suspension of disbelief.
Well, now AVFM’s comically inept PR maven Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield has taken on the project of trying to retroactively redefine Elam’s most despicable writings as satire.
Paul Elam to A Voice for Men conference goers: Don’t say terrible things about women in public, because someone might hear you
Let’s say, hypothetically, that you run a site that appeals to raving misogynists given to launching into violent anti-woman rants at the drop of a hat. And let’s just say that you have gone to great trouble to organize a conference that is designed to play down the fact that a significant amount of your fanbase is made up of raving misogynists given to launching into violent anti-woman rants at the drop of a hat.
Well, you probably shouldn’t post a public announcement warning the raving misogynists who will be attending your conference to refrain from launching into violent anti-woman rants at the drop of a hat because someone might hear them. Because the fact that you feel it necessary to issue such a warning is kind of a giant clue that a significant number of the conference attendees are raving misogynists given to launching into anti-woman rants at the drop of a hat.
I bring this up because Paul Elam posted just such a warning on his site last night in a post that he labeled “Important Message for AVFM Conference Ticket Holders.”
Feminist-hating lawyer Roy Den Hollander sues “modern-day, book-burning, Bacchae reporters from down-under” on broomsticks for allegedly losing him a teaching gig
Roy Den Hollander: Are we lawyer or are we dancer?
The other day I suggested that perhaps it was unfair to the Men’s Rights movement to allow them to handle their own public relations, given how terrible they are at it. Today I wonder if the same principle might also apply to MRAs trying to handle their own lawyering.
A case in point: the lawsuit that antifeminist lawyer, “Ladies Night” hater and hip-hop dance enthusiat Roy Den Hollander has just brought against Australian journalist Tory Shepherd, who wrote about the involvement of Den Hollander and others with links to “men’s rights extremists” in a proposed set of “male studies” courses at the University of South Australia.
It’s still not clear to me if these courses had ever been formally approved – the university says they weren’t – but Den Hollander thinks that Shepherd and another Australian reporter got them cancelled by writing about them. And so he figures that they should compensate him for losing him his teaching gig.
You may vaguely remember all of this. A Voice for Men, heavily involved in the courses, famously denounced Shepherd as a “whore” shortly after AVFM’s Paul Elam indignantly called her a liar for suggesting that A Voice for Men regularly calls women whores. (Which of course it does; Elam himself used the word “whore” 28 times in a single post about Skepchick’s Rebecca Watson.)
Anyhoo, so Den Hollander, acting as his own lawyer, has served Shepherd with the lawsuit. And it’s a doozy of a document, at least going by the excerpts Shepherd posted in a column Wednesday.
Somehow we doubt that this lawsuit is going to enhance Den Hollander’s reputation as a fair-minded analyst of gender relations.
Here are some of the best bits, as presented by Shepherd in her column as “some lessons from Mr Den Hollander, who will not be paid to give lessons at UniSA.”
Lesson 1: How to censor a journalist by accusing them of censorship.
“Two modern-day, book-burning, Bacchae reporters from down-under authored and published false and misleading information concerning Plaintiff (Den Hollander) with the intent and result of harming his economic interests and interfering with a prospective economic advantage by causing the University of SA to incinerate the section of a proposed male studies course that Plaintiff would have taught,” he writes. But wait.
Lesson 2: How to personally attack a journalist by accusing them of personal attacks.
“The two reporters, Tory Shepherd, AKA “Tory the Torch” for The Advertiser and Amy McNeilage, AKA “Amy McNeuter” for The Sydney Morning Herald, used their power as reporters to do what weak-minded ideologues have done throughout history — employ personal attacks to prevent the spread of knowledge and ideas that they disagreed with.”
Lesson 3: How to prove you are not an extremist by sounding like an extremist.
“If these two feminist book-burners had not jumped on their broomsticks and scared the bejesus out of the administrators of the University of SA, students there would have had an opportunity to acquire information and consider views not available anywhere else in higher education.”
Yeah, I’m sure that sort of thing is going to go over great in court.
Elsewhere in his lawsuit, Den Hollander denounces “yellow, female-dog-in-heat reporting,” takes a swipe at “girlie-guys,” and offers this intriguing take on Australian military history:
Thank goodness for Australians that Tory was not around for Australia’s battle against the Japanese. Her anti-gun advocacy for men might have even resulted in her and Amy ending up as Japanese “comfort girls.”
The case does at least promise to be highly entertaining, so I guess we have to give Den Hollander credit for that.
Woah, what’s this? Is A Voice for Men engaging in honest self-criticism?
This could come in handy.
I was skimming through the A Voice for Men forum the other day and was stunned to find, hidden away amongst the other posts in the “rants” section, an absolutely blistering critique of AVFM itself:
Master bullshit artists, adept at stirring up drama and scapegoating, shifting all blame and accountability onto convenient disliked targets. … Used to getting what they want, having little to no accountability … and covertly aggressively lashing out at those who dare not worship them, being the one to start it, and repeatedly. Using an arsenal of social weapons at their disposal at anyone who gets in their way: accusations of [misandry], ad hominem attacks, constant contempt … public humiliation, playing on prejudices and hatred to turn people against their targets … going on the assault at others’ self-image, reputation and credibility over the pettiest of motives, the most outrageously falsely perceived slights, with calculated Machiavellian cunning towards their pettiest of aims.
Nailed it, huh?
Ok. SPOILER ALERT. I kind of lied. This comment wasn’t aimed at AVFM. It was aimed at “bitches.”
Here’s the opening wall-of-text paragraph that I left out:
I think manipulative, catty, conniving, calculating females are pure evil. Applying indirect, covert aggression as a power play, manipulating men to get in their good graces and climb up the pecking order, before aggressively attacking those who don’t “fit in” for their own sadistic pleasure, to aggrandise their own ego and to raise their own status. Playing the victim to stir white knights to go on the attack at their target, when they are the aggressor. Having utter contempt and disdain for anyone they sleep with. Expecting males to be Teflon and always shifting the blame when anyone else gets hurt – it’s always the other person’s fault for being hurtable, for not being Teflon – they always have zero accountability for any harm caused, deny any role in it, and tell themselves it’s not them to feel good and look good. Deluding people, by putting on a cute demeanour, that “she wouldn’t do that”. Using charm to beguile, while calculatingly lashing out at anyone who dares to reveal their true colours or who even sees through their mask at what they really are. Totally void of empathy or sympathy, while putting it on purely fakely to gain an advantage.
And here’s the bit I quoted at the start, though this time I’ve put all the bits I carefully reworded or ellipsed away the first time through back in again; they’re in bold.
Master bullshit artists, adept at stirring up drama and scapegoating, shifting all blame and accountability onto convenient disliked targets. Seeing their own cuntish wiles as meritous. Used to getting what they want, having little to no accountability, being placed on a pedestal and feeling they belong there, sneering down their noses in contempt at those who respect them (the latter being pawns in their power play), and covertly aggressively lashing out at those who dare not worship them, being the one to start it, and repeatedly. Using an arsenal of social weapons at their disposal at anyone who gets in their way: accusations of misogyny, ad hominem attacks, constant contempt and a complete disregard for other people’s boundaries, malicious back-talk, public humiliation, playing on prejudices and hatred to turn people against their targets, an opportunistic use of political correctness, going on the assault at others’ self-image, reputation and credibility over the pettiest of motives, the most outrageously falsely perceived slights, with calculated Machiavellian cunning towards their pettiest of aims.
Yeah, it sounds a lot more AVFMish that way.
Even after four years of reading this bullshit, I’m a bit amazed at just how much of MRA, er, philosophy seems to be little more than projection.
Elliot Rodger and Me: The anatomy of a “Honey Badger” smear campaign
I have a new theory that I think might help to explain why so many Men’s Rights Activists are so obsessed with false accusations of rape. It’s simple: They are so used to making false accusations themselves, about pretty much everything, that it’s hard for them to conceive of someone making an accusation that is actually true.
Naturally, as a critic of the Men’s Rights movement I’m a fairly reliable target for these false charges, and rarely does a day go by in which I don’t learn some new, terrible, and wholly imaginary thing I’m alleged to have said or done. Hell, these days I can barely make it through a Twitter conversation with A Voice for Men’s Dean Esmay without him spouting some grotesque falsehood about me.
The latest accusation from the A Voice for Men crowd – or at least from AVFM’s so-called Honey Badger Brigade – is that all the media talk about Elliot Rodger being an MRA was my fault. Or, as “Honey Badger” Alison Tieman put it in a tweet that she sent to an assortment of media outlets that had written about Rodger and the MRAs,
Fundraiser to send Sworebytheprecious to Detroit to report on you-know-what
Not literally a dark horse, but close enough.
Sworebytheprecious, a regular in the AgainstMensRights subreddit, is trying to raise money so she can get to Detroit to report on that A Voice for Men conference you might have heard about. And you can help!
Here’s her pitch, from her GoFundMe page:
Lissie (akaSworebythePrecious) wants to get to Detroit to report on the convention held by A Voice for Men and Paul Elam. She also wants to start up a website for Project Dark Horse. Who wants to help?
Our goal is $1000. We’ll be posting receipts. We want to rent a car, get a room, and get a plane ticket. I also want to talk to some of the protesters who were bothered last Saturday.
So far she’s raised a little over $200, but I’m sure we can help her raise a lot more than that. If she goes over $1000, the money will go to charity or to help build a website for Project Dark Horse, dedicated to exposing the bullshit of the Men’s Rights movement in general and AVFM in particular. More details on Dark Horse here, and on her fundraiser here on the GoFundMe page.
