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When anonymous threats are not-so anonymous
When feminists are besieged with threatening messages after being targeted by Men’s Rights Activists, MRAs sometimes ask how we know for sure that the messages (or at least a good portion of them) are being sent by MRAs. And the answer is that, in most cases, we don’t, at least not beyond a reasonable doubt, because most people sending threatening messages have the good sense to do so anonymously.
So it is possible, at least theoretically, that when, say, a feminist blogger gets threatening messages shortly after MRAs start posting nasty things about her on their blogs and in their various forums, it is not MRAs sending the messages but angry ornithologists who, for no reason whatsoever, collectively decided to pick on a feminist blogger that day. Seems unlikely, but it’s possible.
Other times, though, we do know who is sending the threats, because, conveniently enough, they do so under their own name or using their MRA identity online.
That was the case, you might recall, when Australian MRA and fanatical A Voice for Men supporter Frank James Spencer, also known as KARMA MRA MGTOW, left me a creepy, vaguely threatening voicemail message one night at 1:38 AM. That was the case with many of those posting threatening YouTube comments about a certain inadvertently famous Canadian feminist.
And that was the case last night when a longtime MRA known as Masculist Man tried to post a threatening message in the comments to a post of mine about a threatening comment directed at me on The Spearhead. The Spearhead comment, you may remember, involved a weird and elaborate anal rape fantasy. I noted in my post that the comment had gotten 10 upvotes, no downvotes.
Masculist Man added his two cents (click for larger version):
He’s probably right about the 500 upvotes. Apparently rape threats are a form of Human Rights activism.
I wrote about a ranty blog post of Mr. Man’s some time ago, and he’s written several posts about me, or at least about someone he calls Dave Fooltrelle. I let him comment here for a time as well. He was always obnoxious, though never quite this obnoxious.
Mr. Man’s blog is called, creatively, Men’s Rights Blog. In addition to the aforementioned ranty post, it features a cartoony avatar of himself wearing a fedora and brandishing a sword, with the caption “I’ll cut ya.” As part of his “activism,” he’s put up a page of anti-feminist “memes,” many based on photos of real feminists, including me. The blog has been around since 2007.
In his profile on Blogger, he declares
I’ve been a masculist for over 20 years and have been very activist,both on and offline. I’ve debated phonies and feminists and have prevailed over both.
He lists Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power as one of his favorite books, and Neil LaBute’s misogynistic fantasy In The Company of Men as one of his favorite films.
And if you follow the link to Mr. Man’s Facebook page, you can take a look at his small collection of Facebook friends, including AVFM’s Paul Elam and MRA lawyer Roy Den Hollander, as well as the groups he supports, including the National Coalition for Men, the Men’s Human Rights Movement Facebook group, and assorted anti-VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) groups.
So, yeah, I think it’s safe to say that this threatening comment came from an MRA.
How Melody Hensley is putting the bullies to shame
Yesterday, a message arrived in my email inbox with the title “Are you happy to die a virgin,” a somewhat unusual question, I felt, not just because of its faulty premise but also because of its lack of the conventional question mark at the end. The email itself was equally blunt and illiterate:
You sound like a 40 y/o FAT VIRGIN living in a basement rotting away. Is manboobz.com your way of hide behind your own internal issues u refuse to face? Father issues???
Ah, here’s where the missing question mark went, along with some friends.
The sender appended a photo of an extremely obese Asian man at least 20 years my junior, mostly if not completely nude, along with the question (and I quote verbatim) “This this photo you??”
MRAs post secret recording of non-secret event, confuse feminism with the complete opposite of feminism
Secret Squirrel: Much better at this than MRAs
If you’re a feminist holding an event, and you don’t want to have recordings of that event posted online without your permission by MRAs, it looks like your only option is to ban anyone and everyone associated with A Voice for Men from the premises. AVFM “activism director” Attila Vinczer has made that very clear.
Earlier this month, you see, Jaclyn Friedman – feminist writer, speaker, founder of Women, Action & The Media (WAM!) – gave a talk at Queens University in Kingston, Canada, followed by a panel discussion.
A number of Men’s Rights Activists associated with everyone’s favorite hate site A Voice for Men showed up with cameras and other recording devices, as they do.
8 Men’s Rights Memes From A Voice for Men That Make No Damn Sense
Yesterday, we looked at 6 memes from A Voice for Men’s “meme team” and decoded what they really meant. Today, some memes from AVFM’s Pinterest page that are a bit harder to decode, because they really make no sense at all. I’ll do my best to try to sort them out.
1) TALK TO THE HAND
What might it mean? “Ha ha girls talk too much, well joke’s on you because I’m GOING MY OWN WAY and later I’ll go home and make a poster about how I imagined I might I totally really did put that bitch in her place.”
I mean, that is what this poster is saying, right? It’s illustrating the notion that men and women should listen to one another by depicting a dude just up and leaving because he’s tired of listening?
How exactly does this advance any “men’s rights” other than the right of men to act like petulant children?
6 Memes from A Voice for Men, and What They Really Mean
Memes, memes everywhere, and not a drop of sense.
A Voice for Men seems to have gone a bit meme-crazy. The site’s official Pinterest page, which seems to be fairly new, is loaded up with 374 memes on such subjects as Sexual Politics, False Accusations, MGTOW, and of course Feminism.
It’s not clear how many of these memes were created by the AVFM “Meme Team” and how many were simply grabbed from the internet. But a number of the memes are emblazoned with the A Voice for Men name and/or logo, so I think it’s fair to say that these, at least, are “official” AVFM memes.
Going through these memes, one thing about them becomes clear very quickly: most of them seem to convey messages that are often considerably different than those their creators seem to have intended.
So here, without further ado, here are 6 AVFM memes and what they really mean.
Phyllis Schlafly channels the manosphere with a column about female “hypergamy.”
The world’s most eligible bachelor?
Professional antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly – perhaps best known for her fervent opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment – seems to have been channeling the manosphere in a column she published yesterday on the issue of “paycheck fairness.” Turns out she thinks such fairness is actually a bad idea, because ladies love marrying rich guys more than they love earning money.
According to Schlafly, equal pay messes with the fundamental female desire for “hypergamy” – that favorite manosphere buzzword – and undermines marriage:
[H]ypergamy … means that women typically choose a mate (husband or boyfriend) who earns more than she does. Men don’t have the same preference for a higher-earning mate.
While women prefer to HAVE a higher-earning partner, men generally prefer to BE the higher-earning partner in a relationship. This simple but profound difference between the sexes has powerful consequences for the so-called pay gap.
Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.
Indeed, Schlafly argues, women love marrying men who earn more than them so much that when the pay gap is eliminated some of them just won’t marry at all. Which is apparently the end of the world, or something.
The pay gap between men and women is not all bad because it helps to promote and sustain marriages. …
In two segments of our population, the pay gap has virtually ceased to exist. In the African-American community and in the millennial generation (ages 18 to 32), women earn about the same as men, if not more.
It just so happens that those are the two segments of our population in which the rate of marriage has fallen the most. Fifty years ago, about 80 percent of Americans were married by age 30; today, less than 50 percent are.
So it’s not enough that most people end up getting married; civilization will crumble if more than half of them don’t marry before the age of 30!
And so, she suggests, if American women knew what was good for them they would be begging for employers pay them even less, relative to men.
The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.
Hmm. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that Schlafly – a best-selling author and popular speaker on the right – didn’t send back any of her royalties or speaking fees so that she would feel more like a woman and her late husband would feel like more of a man, and I doubt she’s doing so now, as a widow. She’s also been unmarried for more than twenty years. Coincidence?
NOTE TO MEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISTS: When you find yourself agreeing with Phyllis Schlafly on pretty much anything (beyond, say, the existence of gravity, the need for human beings to breathe air, and other widely accepted beliefs of this sort), this is an indication that perhaps your movement isn’t the progressive, egalitarian movement that you like to pretend that it is, and that in fact it is sort of the opposite.
That said, I should also note that Schlafly’s notion of “hypergamy,” while sexist and silly, is decidedly less obnoxious than the version peddled by PUAs and websites like A Voice for Men — congrats, Men’s Human Rights Activists, you’re actually worse than Phyllis Schlafly!
She just uses the term to indicate a desire to marry up. For many manospherians, by contrast, “hypergamy” doesn’t just mean marrying up; it means that women are fickle, unfaithful monsters who love nothing better than cuckolding beta males in order to jump into bed with whatever alpha male wanders into their field of vision. (I’m guessing Schlafly hasn’t actually been going through the archives at AVFM or Chateau Heartiste looking for column ideas.) While many MRAs love to complain about hypergamy, many of them also seem to think that it’s unfair that “beta” males with good jobs aren’t automatically entitled to hot wives.
In case anyone is wondering, the actual definition of the word “hypergamy” involves none of that. According to Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, the word means “marriage to a person of a social status higher than one’s own; orig., esp. in India, the custom of allowing a woman to marry only into her own or a higher social group.”
That’s it. It refers to the fact of marrying up, not to the desire to marry up, much less to the alleged desire of all twentysomething women to ride the Alpha Asshole Cock Carousel. The manosphere’s new and not-so-improved definition came from a white nationalist named F. Roger Devlin.
ANOTHER NOTE: Big thanks to the people who emailed me about this story. If you ever see something you think would make for a good Man Boobz post, send me an email at futrelle [at] manboobz.com. I get a lot of ideas from tips!
It’s “Get On Your Knees and Thank a White Man Day” in the Men’s Rights subreddit [UPDATED]
King Leopold of Belgium brought the gift of death to ten million Africans
NOTE TO AVFM READERS: See UPDATE 2 at bottom of post.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, a dude named unkleman wants us all to remember the debt of gratitude we owe to the white men of the world:
This message went over pretty well with the overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly self-pitying and self-congratulatory and maybe just an eensy teensy weensy bit racist demo in the Men’s Rights subreddit. I guess it pays to know your audience!
Men’s Rights and White Supremacy: two … tastes that go together.
Thanks to the folks in the AgainstMensRights subreddit for pointing me to this lovely comment.
UPDATE: Apparently, Unkleman’s comment was meant as sarcasm. That is, while he seems to think that his version of history is accurate, he thinks that the notion that individual white people today deserve credit for things other white people did in the past is stupid.
Interestingly, when he pointed out that this was what he actually meant, he got downvoted below zero, a stark contrast to the reception his original comment got. Take a look:
![ishm 5 points 1 day ago (10|5) I am in agreement with the majority of your statement! But the "owe to white men" stanza going on for a multitude of sentences triggered negative feelings in me. I do not believe we "owe it to white men", yet I would be much more complacent with "we should appreciate the MEN and WOMEN who discovered them". Owe should be excluded as there was no damned contract signed. Minorities and other whites do not owe anything to whites who discovered various technologies. Appreciate is the word you meant I hope. permalink save parent report give gold reply [–]unkleman -1 points 1 day ago (4|5) Yeah, it was entirely meant to stir negative feelings and the premise is ridiculous. It is just the other side of the coin of the thought process for people who use such excuses to be "politically correct" racists and meant to show that their justifications should lead to a reverse conclusion. If I actually believed I am owed kudos for racial reasons, one should assume that I literally have nothing else going for me in life and that would be sad.](http://manboobz.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/unkle2.png?w=604)
Evidently, the Men’s Rightsers liked his comment much better when they thought he totally meant it.
UPDATE 2: Evidently my point in posting a picture of King Leopold of Belguim was a bit too subtle for the not-so-great minds at A Voice for Men to understand. So here is the point, in plain English: If you’re going to talk about all the good things done by white men in history, which have been considerable, you should also be prepared to talk about the bad things they have done, which have also been considerable. Since the fellow I quoted gave examples of the good things he sees as white male accomplishments, I thought I would provide an example of a white man who was not such a good fellow as a counterexample. I hope this helps!
Men’s Rights Poetry Corner: “Feminists Killed Kurt Cobain.”
Kurt Cobain, RIP
Yesterday, several days after the twentieth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, A Voice for Men took a moment to honor the brilliant musician who tragically ended his life at the age of only 27.
Well, not exactly. What they actually did was run a terrible poem using the anniversary of Cobain’s death as an excuse to launch an extended attack on the supposed evils of feminism.
Here’s the opening:
Feminists killed Kurt Cobain
Men my age are all the same
They hate themselves & feel ashamed
For what they are & cannot change
It gets worse. The poem, written by a YouTube MRA calling himself Laudanum Byron, continues on for another 104 lines after this. Only 13 refer to Cobain, and five of these are simply repetitions of the opening accusation: “feminists killed Kurt Cobain.”
The rest of the poem consists of an assortment of Men’s Rights talking points sketched out in the most melodramatic manner possible.
Men chastised, demonized,
Healthy males pathologized
A man is just a dirty ape
Longing, lust, desire: all rape
Your body is a loaded gun
And all that it has done is wrong
Like all too many MRAs, Mr. Byron lets his anger at women get the better of his logic. In the following lines, for example, he lashes out at women both for living off of the earnings of men — and for earning money of their own.
Now the girls get told get what you can
After all, he’s just a man
You’re right to think it’s right to take
Yes you go girl, you make him pay
The girls get taught they must get on
Like work empowered anyone:
To sell your life for dollar bills
Taking calls & stacking shelves
In offices & factories
Fulfilment sought in drudgery
Mr. Byron – no relation, one presumes, to the actual Byron – seems to have only a rudimentary notion of what a poem actually is. While most, though not all, of his lines scan, he has persistent troubles with the concept of rhyme, with his aabb and aabbcc rhyme schemes dominated by half-rhymes and quarter-rhymes and, well, the words have some similar sounds in them.
“Bills” and “shelves” don’t rhyme, or half-rhyme, despite both ending in the letter “s.” “Take” and “pay” aren’t even remotely close.
Admittedly, “chivalry” is a tough one to rhyme. But surely one can do better than “steeds.”
White knights, on their hobbled steeds
Still cling to laws of chivalry
Passed over by the queens they save
A joke to all the other slaves
When he pulls off an actual rhyme, it comes a surprise:
All of us the sons of Cain
Feminists killed Kurt Cobain.
But while we’re on the topic, it’s worth pointing out that feminists and/or feminism did not actually kill Kurt Cobain. (Nor did anyone else; the conspiracy theories suggesting he was murdered don’t make a lot of sense.)
Byron’s only “evidence” linking feminism to the suicide?
He screamed onstage & pierced his flesh
Put on make-up, wore a dress
Look, nobody knows for sure the reason or reasons Cobain took his own life, but he was a troubled man with a history of suicide attempts. He suffered from depression and from a painful, persistent stomach ailment. He was addicted to heroin. And as his suicide note made clear, he found the fame he had achieved to be something of an intolerable burden; he felt like a fake. Like a lot of suicides, Cobain’s could be seen as psychologically overdetermined; it could have been caused by any or all of these things.
Using his suicide to score cheap rhetorical points against feminism is not only dishonest but highly disrespectful to his memory.
To top off this gigantic platter of disrespect, whoever wrote the headline on AVFM didn’t even bother to spell Cobain’s first name correctly. It’s Kurt, with a K.
Below, “Byron’s” own reading of his poem. If you can’t bear listening to it — I only made it a couple of stanzas in before I had to shut it off — you can make your way to AVFM, or to YouTube, to read the rest. I feel safe in saying that Kurt, who considered himself a feminist, would have hated it, and A Voice for Men as well.
I created Paul Elam, and now I need your help to rein him in
The jig is up. I and my collaborators have kept it secret for a long time now, but for reasons I will explain in a moment, I feel I need to come clean about this now, before it is too late:
I created Paul Elam.
That is: “Paul Elam” is a character created and developed by me and my friend Paul Henderson, an amazing improvisatory actor who has taken on the task of playing “Elam” in YouTube Videos, radio shows, and on a few occasions in the real world as well.
I first came up with the character of “Paul Elam” — “Elam” is just “male” spelled backwards — some seven years ago after reading Warren Farrell’s Myth of Male Power and wondering what an updated version of Farrell would look like today as a YouTube ranter. I brought the idea to my friend Paul Henderson, a feminist comedian who was already doing an “angry white man” character in his comedy act.
After a bit of workshopping, we created “Paul Elam” and his “Happy Misogynist” YouTube channel. I wrote the scripts, and Henderson read them out. As time went on and as Henderson got more into his new alter ego, he began adding bits of dialogue of his own. Sometimes when he got too deep into his character of “Paul Elam” he started to scare me a little.
After some success on YouTube and at Men’s News Daily, we decided to set up A Voice for Men. Shortly afterwards I set up Man Boobz, mainly as a way to promote AVFM and generate traffic for “Elam’s” site.
Since then, things have just snowballed. Henderson put me in touch with an amazing group of Canadian improv comedians called the Pouteenagers and the characters of Girl Writes What, John The Other, Typhon Blue, and DannyBoy were born.
Not all of those at AVFM are in on the gag. Dean Esmay for example, is completely sincere, as are most of the recent additions to the AVFM roster.
Up until about a month ago, the whole “Paul Elam”/A Voice for Men project seemed to be going swimmingly, generating buzz — and even a good deal of cash, much of which we have been donating to an assortment of feminist charities.
We kept piling absurdity on absurdity — like adding “human” to “men’s rights activist” to become “men’s human rights activist” — but no one ever guessed that it was all an elaborate prank! We were prepared to let the whole thing run for at least another year, getting sillier and sillier, before fessing up in a joint press conference with me and “Elam.”
But something terrible seems to have happened to my old friend Paul Henderson. After 7 years of playing “Paul Elam,” he seems to have become lost in the character he and I have created. Paul Henderson, in other words, has become Paul Elam.
He used to joke with April Fulieu, our makeup wiz, about how horrified he was each time he looked in the mirror and saw “Elam” staring back at him. But after we shot the last video with him he refused to let April take the makeup off, and when she went to tell me about this he fled out the back door of the studio.
We haven’t heard from him since. At least not as Paul Henderson.
I’m not sure what to do. He’s changed all the passwords on the AVFM server, so I can’t shut it down from my end, and I haven’t been able to contact any of the Pouteenagers either. I worry they too may have gone over to the dark side as well.
I can only hope that by posting this I can give him the wake-up call he needs – or at least arouse enough suspicion that the “sincere” AVFMers will confront him and possibly jar him back to reality.
He’ll deny it all, of course.
But at some point his fake beard will fall off.
That’s what I’m counting on, really.
After a feminist activist at Queen’s University reports being attacked, possibly by an MRA, the king of “fuck their shit up” responds with angry denial
Paul Elam: Anger is “pulsing through my veins like molten lava.”
A student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, says she was attacked and beaten by a strange man after receiving threatening messages about her opposition to a Men’s Rights group on campus. On Thursday, Danielle d’Entremont posted a picture of her bruised face to Facebook along with this explanation:
Just walked out of my house and got attacked by a stranger. I was punched in the face multiple times and lost half my tooth. This was after a few threatening emails regarding my support for feminist activities on campus. I can’t say for sure if the two are connected, however the attacker was a male who knew my name.
The campus Men’s Issues Awareness Society (MIAS) – the group d’Entremont has been fighting – has condemned the attack, as has the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE), which co-sponsored a talk the MIAS put on Thursday. The police are investigating.
Right now, this is pretty much all we know about the story. Not that it this has stopped MRAs from offering their very fervent opinions on the matter.
Before we get to them, here are a few of my own:
