Search Results for A voice for men
Paul Elam of A Voice for Men: In His Own Words
Paul Elam in a web-only clip from the 20/20 segment that never ran on television.
Paul Elam, the founder and primary animating force behind the website A Voice for Men, is probably, for better or worse, the most influential figure in the Men’s Rights movement (or, as he prefers to call it, the Men’s Human Rights Movement).
Elam is also a fierce misogynist with a penchant for angry, violent rhetoric full of only-slightly veiled threats. But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps the best way to get to know Mr. Elam is through his own words.
So here are some of Elam’s thoughts on a variety of issues, taken from postings on his own website. I have linked each quote back to its source on A Voice for Men.
Deprived of new women to hate in Toronto, A Voice for Menners resort to rape jokes, gay bashing
Nick Reading and Dean Esmay amongst the counterprotesters
Pity the poor MRAs who travelled hundreds — if not thousands — of miles to AVFM’s big weekend in Toronto hoping for a confrontation with the evil feminazis that never happened. They wanted footage of angry women they could watch again and again on YouTube. They wanted new names and faces to put up on Register-Her. In short, they wanted new women to hate.
But alas, the feminists, for the most part, stayed home. And the ones who showed up were mostly dudes, from the LBGT activist group BashBack. Making things even worse, they didn’t block any doors or try to crash AVFM’s rally. What they did, mostly, was chant things the MRAs didn’t like.
Confused losers at A Voice for Men congratulate themselves on their COLOSSAL SUCCESS in Toronto
Derek Zoolander: Also a little delusional sometimes
So over on A Voice for Men, the regulars are all congratulating one another for their grand victory in Toronto. In AVFM’s official post on Saturday’s tiny “rally,” incongruously titled “Historic MHRA rally in Toronto huge success,” Elam — who in photographs of the events looked rather befuddled by it all — declared that the day had been magical for him:
“This was one of the greatest things I have ever done in my life,” said Elam. “Meeting all of these people and talking to a crowd that was five times bigger than the opposition was a remarkable event.”
Given that most of the opposition made a clear decision to ignore the AVFM/CAFE rally and lecture — much to the obvious disappointment of many MRAs who were there in Toronto or watching on the sidelines on the Internet — this was not much of an accomplishment.
For A Voice for Men, and its Edmonton offshoot, terrifying women is a form of “human rights activism.”
Men’s Rights Edmonton activist at work
So the self-described “human rights activists” at A Voice for Men have found three more women to harass. Here’s the story, which for many of you will have a depressingly familiar ring:
Members of Men’s Rights Edmonton, a small group that is for all intents and purposes a local chapter of A Voice for Men, has been putting up pictures targeting Lise Gotell, the chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta. The pictures, which seem inspired by “Wanted” posters of yore, feature a large portrait of Gotell and the caption:
A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam blames rape chants at Canadian schools on feminism
Paul Elam: If he hears any more about rape culture, he might possibly lose it.
You might not think that student orientation events would be an appropriate venue for chants celebrating the rape of underage girls. But such chants have apparently been something of a tradition at not one but two Canadian schools — and possibly more? Last week, a scandal erupted at the University of British Columbia after word got out that an orientation event at its Saunder School of Business had included a chant on this particular theme, led by orientation leaders from the Commerce Undergraduate Society.
According to one woman who disgustedly live-tweeted the event, it went something like this:
Y-O-U-N-G at UBC, we like ‘em young, Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for go to jail.
Meanwhile, in Halifax, someone made a video — and posted it to YouTube — of student orientation leaders at Saint Mary’s University chanting a nearly identical chant.
Naturally, noted, er, human rights activist Paul Elam of A Voice for Men felt compelled to weigh in on the issue. He started off by expressing his deep disgust … with having to hear anything about the issue at all:
I swear if I read one more outraged “report” — aka feverish, paranoid rant — that twists something stupid into “evidence” of a “rape culture,” I am going to just lose it.
Yes, how outrageous that a chant joking about raping underage girls at an official school orientation event could possibly be construed as contributing in any way to rape culture! So sorry that your delicate sensitivities were offended, Paul.
After some more predictable histrionics on this “hyper-hipster-hysteria” from Mr. Elam, he got to his main point: blaming feminists for the rape chants.
No, really.
I am an older guy. I find it interesting, given that I came from a more “patriarchal” generation, that something like this when I was 18 would have been unthinkable. Why? Because other men, especially older ones, would have pulled those young people aside and said, “Hey, we don’t do that around here.” That would have been that, as they say, if it had even happened in the first place.
We can thank feminists for this. Through policy and governance they have eroded positive male role models, and male authority, right out of the culture. After feminist undermining of the family, removing fathers from the lives of children and demonizing male heroes, we have a population of young people, especially young men, growing more socially feral with each new generation.
And now what do we see? Feminists running around everywhere telling men they need to tell each other, “Don’t rape. Don’t abuse women. Don’t this. Don’t that.” …
You can’t assault the identity of half the human race, marginalize and disempower them, which is exactly what feminism has done, and expect anything in return but what you are getting.
In other words: You gals asked for it.
Paul Elam, you are rape culture.
A Voice for Men falsely accuses a male feminist blogger of being a “confessed rapist,” because “karma is a BITCH.”
A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam: Serial False Accuser
When is a false rape accusation not a false rape accusation? When it’s leveled against a feminist man.
That, in any case, is the logic behind an appalling post on A Voice for Men attempting to smear a male feminist blogger named Jason Thibeault, who posts on FreeThoughtBlogs as Lousy Canuck, by proclaiming him a rapist.
The post is a typical bit of AVFM “satire” — that is, sophistry — arguing that “by his own feminist standards” Thibeault is a rapist … because he was once accused of rape by a girlfriend, as he wrote about in a recent post. And since feminists believe that ALL accusations of rape are true, AVFM’s Birric Forcella argues, Thibeault is thus a “confessed rapist.”
Obviously, this argument is ludicrous on its face. Feminists don’t believe that all accusations of rape are automatically true. And Thibeault, for his part, says that he was falsely accused.
This doesn’t stop AVFM from giving their piece the frankly libelous headline: “FreeThoughtBlogs’ Jason Thibeault, confessed rapist.”
AVFM may defend its post as “satire” — they have a rather expansive definition of the word — but that headline is pure libel. It’s false — and would be so even if the accusations of rape were true, as Thibeault (who’s responded to the AVFM post here) maintains his innocence.
And AVFM’s intent is clearly malicious. In the first comment to the piece, AVFM founder and publisher Paul Elam declares frankly, and revealingly, “Karma is a BITCH.”
Thibeault’s real crime, in AVFM’s eyes, is that he has publicly supported women who have come forward in recent weeks to accuse prominent skeptic writer Michael Shermer of rape and sexual assault.
And so they have responded by making what is an unequivocally false accusation against him in a headline on their site.
Of course, this isn’t the first time A Voice for Men has falsely accused someone of something based on bad evidence or no evidence at all.
In April of this year, Elam (along with a number of other MRAs and an assortment of White Supremacists as well) worked himself into an uproar over a blog post from an alleged feminist allegedly working in a college admission office who claimed she was routinely trashing applications from white males.
Though even the most rudimentary amount of fact-checking would have revealed that the woman they blamed for the blog had nothing to do with it, she had her contact information posted online by MRAs and others, leaving her open to harassment and widespread vilification. Elam contributed to the hubbub by posting a vituperative post identifying the wrong woman by name — and only after being called on his mistake by numerous other MRAs did his finally retract the post.
You can read about the whole appalling affair here.
Elam has also made false accusations against little old me. In yet another case of libel-by-headline, he accused Jessica Valenti and me of being “child abusers” … because we’re feminists. (Seriously, that was the entire basis of his accusation.)
And at one point, either lying outright or misled by a troll, he put forth the absurd conspiracy theory that I was somehow responsible for an appalling Reddit forum known as the Beatingwomen subreddit.
In his post on the subject, he claimed to have “intel” from two separate sources that “confirm[ed]” my involvement in the subreddit — he provided none of this evidence — and promised that “further word” on the subject would be forthcoming.
Of course, this evidence never materialized — because it was fraudulent and/or imaginary. Elam dropped the subject. I had and have no connection to the subreddit.
And not long ago, AVFM’s Dean Esmay very publicly accused its former Canadian News Director Kristina Mendez (AKA TheWoolyBumblebee) of (maybe, possibly) running off with the money she collected for a center devoted to the memory of Earl Silverman, a Canadian MRA who committed suicide partially out of frustration over the difficulties he had in funding the DV shelter for men he ran out of his home. The folks at AVFM have admitted quite plainly that they have no evidence of wrongdoing here.
Apparently, AVFM’s strategy is to prove that false accusations are common by making as many of them as they possibly can.
EDIT: Added the bit about Valenti and me.
A Voice for Men’s Dan Perrins: Great White Hope for Jamaica’s Gay Men?
Dan Perrins has launched an international boycott of Jamaica. Mighty white of you, Dan!
So the other day, Canadian Men’s Rights activist and all-around crank Dan Perrins apparently noticed for the first time that gay men face massive bigotry in Jamaica. He reported his findings in a post on A Voice for Men:
Right now in Jamaica lesbian sex is legal while male homosexual sex acts can get you up to 10 years in prison at hard labor.
In other words, homosexual women are accepted as a normal part of society. Homosexual men are criminals, for just existing.
Wait, what?
A Voice for Men UK: All Women Are Homophobic (If We Can Just Make Up Our Own Definitions for Words)
You keep using that word. I’m not even going to bother with the rest of this quote.
If you ever need proof that Men’s Rights Activists live in a world of their own, check out this, er, argument, found in a posting on A Voice for Men UK, the official British franchise of the American hate site we know so well :
All women are homophobic.
Whether the men being prejudiced against are gay or not is kind of beside the point – after all, ‘homo’ = man, ‘phobia’ = fear, therefore: ‘homophobia’ = Fear of Man – but, if you want to quibble over Greek & Latin etymology, perhaps we can at least agree on this: all women, to a greater or lesser extent, display the ‘symptoms’ we attribute to said condition: overt caution, fear &/or disdain of men.
Yep, that’s right. In order to find an excuse to call women “homophobic,” they’ve invented an entirely new definition for the word not based in any way on the actual etymology of the word “homophobia” (which is of course derived from “homosexual”) but on something they’ve just made up.
By this logic, the word “homosexual” would not mean “of, relating to, or characterized by a tendency to direct sexual desire toward another of the same sex” but rather “man sexual.” If we take this to mean “attracted to men,” this would suggest that all straight women with sex drives would therefore be homosexual as well. Brilliant, A Voice for Men UK.
The author of the post then uses this weird logic to make excuses for actual homophobia among straight men:
Female ‘homophobia’ is so normalized in our society that treating every man you meet like ‘Schrödinger’s Rapist’ is considered an ordinary, common sense fact of life – just so long as you are a woman. But if a man feels at all uncomfortable around another man sexually, he is presently branded an evil bigot for behaving the way all women do at all times.
A Voice for Men: they reject your reality, and substitute nonsensical unreality that allows them to say bad things about women.
Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men finds a woman to blame for Trayvon Martin’s death
Rachel Jeantel, Men’s Rights scapegoat
Well, it took them a little while, but the folks at Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men have finally figured out an angle on the Trayvon Martin case. According to regular AVFM contributor August Løvenskiolds, the whole thing can be blamed on a woman — specifically, Rachel Jeantel, the friend of Trayvon Martin who was on the phone with him just before he was killed.
According to Løvenskiolds, who seems to know more about what happened that night than it is in fact possible for him to know,
During a post-trial interview with Piers Morgan on CNN, Rachel Jeantel, the reluctant phone witness who was talking to Martin just before Martin assaulted Zimmerman, finally revealed that she had warned Martin that Zimmerman might be gay, or even, a gay rapist preparing to approach Martin.
This isn’t news; Jeantel said in her testimony that she told Martin she was afraid the man following him might be a rapist. But Løvenskiolds moves quickly from “sworn testim0ny” to “making shit up.”
Martin freaked out over the idea that Zimmerman might have sexual designs on him or his family, and this seems to have precipitated the attack on Zimmerman – which, of course, would make the attack a violation of Zimmerman’s human rights as a (purportedly) gay man, and make Jeantel the proxy instigator of the attack.
Yes, that’s right, the whole thing was “violence by proxy” instigated by an evil homophobic woman.
Would you like some armchair psychoanalysis to go with your unfounded speculation?
So, Trayvon Martin was killed in the act of gay-bashing (in Jeantel’s and his own minds, anyway). The fury of Martin’s sudden turnabout attack is now explicable (he had been avoiding being followed up to the point of the introduction of the gay rapist idea) and it indicates the degree of Martin’s revulsion that he went from flight to fight mode in so short a time.
And this of course makes it all All About The Menz Rights.
The men’s human rights issues related to a woman (Jeantel) being held blameless for using gay/rape threats to precipitate man-on-man violence ought to be obvious.
It’s always a woman’s fault, isn’t it?
Elsewhere in the post, Løvenskiolds seriously suggests that when a police dispatcher told Zimmerman that “we don’t need you” to follow Martin, that was Super Seekret Man Code for “we actually DO need you to follow him.” No, really.
Such negative suggestions are as clear to savvy men as this: “Honey, you don’t need to buy me roses for Valentine’s Day” – meaning, of course, “if you know what is good for you, I’d better get flowers AND chocolate AND jewelry AND a nice dinner AND…”
The fact that the dispatcher further expected Zimmerman to meet with officers – drafting Zimmerman into the militia, as it were – made it clear to Zimmerman that his continued pursuit of Martin was expected by the police as well.
The societal expectation of militia service by all able-bodied adult males is certainly a men’s human rights issue and an indication of inequality between the genders that needs to be redressed.
MRAs may not be good at much, but they’ve got mental gymnastics down to a science.
EDIT: I added a graf after the first quote from Løvenskiolds clarifying that Jeantel says she did in fact tell Martin that she thought Zimmerman might be a rapist.
The “Don’t Be That Girl” Poster Controversy in Edmonton, and A Voice for Men’s History of Rape Apologia
Two of the Don’t Be that Girl posters
I‘ve been traveling, so I’m a bit late getting to the whole “Don’t Be That Girl” poster controversy in Edmonton. For those of you who don’t already know all about it: A group called Men’s Rights Edmonton, closely associated with our favorite Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men, has been putting up some pretty obnoxious posters parodying an anti-rape poster campaign called “Don’t Be That Guy,” turning the anti-date rape message into one that targets alleged false accusers of rape.
