Snidely Whiplash, actual cartoon villain

“Andy Bob” of A Voice for Men has decided that the recent threats against Anita Sarkeesian are fake because … they’re too melodramatic.

In a rather remarkable bit of logicking titled “Anonymous feminist provides Anita Sarkeesian with a potential new source of revenue,” Andy Bob quotes this line from the threat email:

“Feminists have ruined my life and I will have my revenge, for my sake and the sake of all the others they’ve wronged.”

And adds:

The only thing missing is the swish of “his” cape as he exits, stage left, with his “semi-automatic rifle, multiple pistols, and a collection of pipe bombs” cunningly concealed beneath “his” jauntily angled fedora.

Huh. You may recall that the most famous person to publicly declare that “feminists have ruined my life”– that is, Marc Lepine — followed that declaration with a shooting spree that left 14 women dead.

You may also remember a certain fellow named Elliot Rodger, who announced his shooting spree this spring with a video in which he, for all intents and purposes, did his best impersonation of a comic book supervillain, complete with evil laughs. Railing against the “girls” who committed the horrible injustice of not dating him, he declared in his final video that

I will punish all of you for it. (laughs)

On the day of retribution I am going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB… and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut I see inside there. …

I will take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you.

You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true alpha male. (laughs)

The fact is that mass killers often have grandiose visions of themselves as avenging angels/devils, and see the world in stark black and white terms.

I have no idea if the latest threats against Sarkeesian are “real,” or if they’re the work of some sadistic asshole trying to terrorize her into silence with words, or whether they were written by her cat, but the fact that these words are melodramatic is hardly proof that they weren’t meant sincerely.

The “if it’s melodramatic it’s fake” argument is also a highly, well, ironic one to make in an online publication that’s home to some of the most melodramatic writing this side of a #GamerGate manifesto.

Here, for example, is John Hembling, then the managing editor of AVFM, writing about the efforts of feminists to get Facebook to take down gender-based hate speech (whether directed at women or men):

They are not simply adherents of an ideology of hatred and violence, wrapping itself in the increasingly transparent veneer of false and pious humanism. … They are fascists, and if you support their cause, that of censorship, you may be a fascist as well.

And here is an actual sentence from an AVFM post by August Løvenskiolds:

Cunt-power is cunning but every now and then, it peeks through the veil to expose a fetid maw of endless hunger and hatred.

So, yeah, Men’s Rights activists in general, and AVFMers in particular, are not exactly strangers to melodrama.

But Andy Bob evidently never reads the publication he is writing for, as he goes on to, er, argue:

There is no doubt whatsoever that this email was written by a feminist posing as an MHRA. The entirely fictitious character, who is supposed to have written it, conforms so closely to the feminist mischaracterization of MHRAs as dangerously violent psychopaths who dream of brutally silencing women that it could only have been written by someone whose goal was to maintain and embellish this outrageously slanderous threat narrative.

Yeah, it’s not as if MRAs and #GamerGaters ever present themselves in a menacing manner.

The character created as the author of the email is an artful pastiche of those mythical MHRAs, Elliot Rodger and Marc Lépine, neither of whom had any connection with known MHR organizations, despite fraudulent feminist claims to the contrary. …

The feminist author promises to “write my manifesto in her spilled blood” in order to raise the spectre of Rodger, who wrote a lengthy manifesto that primarily detailed his inability to get laid and revealed that he was the kind of sad and crazy pussy-beggar who would probably have been persona non grata in the MHRM had he ever attempted to gain entry—which he never did.

Given that Lepine lived and died long before there even was an Men’s Rights movement, it seems a bit weird to brag that he wasn’t a member of any “known MHR organizations.”

And while Elliot Rodger didn’t, as far as I know, identify as a Men’s Rights activist, he was a reader of and a commenter on PUAhate, a website connected to regular A Voice for Men contributor Jalon Cain (aka “Aaron Sleazy”), who volunteered as a moderator on the site and promoted it on his own site. Both Lepine and Rodger shared many of the beliefs of the current Men’s Rights movement.

Even more to the point, there’s no logic to Andy Bob’s argument. The fact that neither Lepine nor Rodger were card-carrying MRAs doesn’t prove that the author of the latest threats isn’t an MRA. Nor does it prove that the writer of the threats is a feminist. These are logic fails as big as Paul Elam’s ego.

The “MHRM produces crazed murderers who target women” threat narrative has been so closely observed throughout the text of the email that it could only have been written by someone who assisted in its construction. Two of the reasons why feminists posing as MHRAs are so easy to detect are the style of language they employ and the fact that their purported representation of MHRAs has the unmistakable tone of caricature that frequently devolves into the realm of pantomime.

Well, aside from the fact that the writer actually used a lot of specific phrases that are used often, and in one case almost exclusively, by MRAs.

“Anita Sarkeesian is everything wrong with the feminist woman, and she is going to die screaming like the craven little whore that she is if you let her come to USU.”

Really? And her little dog too?

This statement sounds more like it came from Snow White’s wicked stepmother as she raises a Sarkeesianesque eyebrow in envious rage than a real-life psycho.

Or from Elliot Rodger — who gleefully announced that “I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut” he saw, before attempting to do just that.

There isn’t the slightest hint of articulated performance in the glib and terrifying words of genuinely deranged psychopaths like Elliot Rodger and Marc Lépine.

Apparently Andy Bob never watched Elliot Rodger’s extravagantly melodramatic final video.

The only question that remains is: Who has a history of making death threats via emails to venues hosting talks on potentially contentious issues and has a vested interest in publicly demonizing the MHRM by maintaining a false threat narrative through attempted character assassination and misrepresenting everything we stand for?

Could it be …. Satan?

Well, no. He means AVFM’s version of Satan: Feminists — as the title of his post proclaims even more categorically.

Of course, A Voice for Men has never offered proof that any of the alleged threats made against its conference came from feminists. Or that these threats even existed. Indeed, even while AVFM was raising literally tens of thousands of dollars for “security,” the site’s lawyers were accusing the Doubletree Hilton hotel of faking the threats for money. Indeed, in the comments on AVFM, Andy Bob himself sneered at the Doubletree employee that Elam suggested might have faked the threats. But now Andy Bob has conveniently changed his mind and is presenting the alleged threats against AVFM as real. The irony meter level here is over 9000.

Several of the commenters to Andy Bob’s post go on to accuse … me of writing the threats.

Huh.

Yes, that’s right. He’s claiming that the fact that I analyzed the language of the threat means that I wrote it. And posts this as a comment to an article in which Andy Bob … analyzes the language of the threat.

Andy Bob, for his part, is happy to add to all the insinuations:

I have to admit that this thought crossed my mind. All of the lies about Elliot Rodger being a MHRA link back to David Futrelle as the original source.

Huh. Except that I never said he was an MRA, and in face went out of my way in my writings and media appearances to point out that he wasn’t an MRA — just someone who shared a great number of beliefs with MRAs.

If he is heavily invested enough in publicly demonizing the MHRM to fabricate this kind of obvious fraud (E.R. being a MHRA), it isn’t that much of a stretch for him to go one step further and actually fabricate a fake E.R. clone sending threatening emails to maximize his investment.

The only fraud being perpetuated here is by you, dude. Well, you and the Honey Badgers.

He stops just short of accusing me of literally writing  the threatening email.

Then, I wondered why he would take the risk of exposing his act of terrorism by writing what is, essentially, an account of how he went about doing it. Futrelle is too much of a coward, and not quite stupid enough, to be so obvious about committing such a serious crime.

But then, based on nothing more than his own “feels,” he goes on to accuse me of trying to encourage others to write similar threats:

My guess is that he knows the email is a fraud, thinks it is wonderful, and hopes to encourage others to commit similar frauds by offering instructions on how to accomplish them. After all, who knows better than he just how many loony feminists have access to keyboards? …

Futrelle’s post indicates that he is playing a very dangerous game in which he is dancing closer to the abyss of disrepute than ever before.

Yes, the guy who just wrote a post analyzing the language of the threat is accusing me of “playing a dangerous game” by … analyzing the language of the threat.

It’s only a matter of time before he missteps, and falls in, hopefully taking the perennially smirking, and equally appalling, Sarkeesian with him.

Dream on, dude. I’m not going away. She’s not going away. You’re utterly transparent in your insinuations. You have neither logic nor evidence on your side. All your accusations are nothing but ideologically driven fantasies.

But then again, that’s pretty much all the Men’s Rights movement is.

The threats directed at Anita Sarkeesian are intended to silence women’s voices

Reading through the luridly threatening email that forced Anita Sarkeesian to cancel her talk at Utah State University, originally scheduled for today, I found myself wondering, a bit dumbfounded: just where does this kind of hate come from?

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself again and again in recent days as I contemplate the ongoing fiasco that is GamerGate. How on earth have all these people gotten so angry, so worked up, so willing to dox and harass and threaten women (and some of their male allies) over video games?

How exactly does someone reach a point where it makes sense to them to threaten – and perhaps even to seriously plan – a “Montreal-style Massacre” because they don’t like a few videos pointing out sexism in video games?

Even after years spent tracking and trying to understand the misogynistic online culture that’s given birth to GamerGate, I don’t have an answer. And I’m not sure where to get one.

And so, as a kind of preliminary step towards finding an answer to this question, I thought I would ask a simpler and more empirical question: where does the language of hatred found in the threatening email sent to Utah State officials come from?

It’s easy enough to see where it comes from in a general sense: the author of the email repeats a lot of the standard language of the new misogynists online, castigating “misandrist harpies” and railing against the alleged evils of feminism. But it’s only when you begin looking at the specific and sometimes peculiar phrasings in the email that you really begin to see just how familiar the author is with the misogynist tropes of the manosphere, broadly defined.

I went through the email – the full text of which I found in this Pastebin – cutting and pasting some of its more memorable phrases into Google to see just where – if anywhere – these phrases showed up online. And I found that quite a few of them are phrases that are used almost nowhere else but in the misogynistic subcultures I write about on this blog – specifically, in the Men’s Rights and “Game” subcultures. This is someone, like Elliot Rodger before him, who has been reading if not actively participating in these subcultures.

My first discovery was that the author doesn’t only see Marc Lepine, the antifeminist mass murderer responsible for the Montreal Massacre in 1989, as a “a hero to men everywhere for standing up to the toxic influence of feminism.”

No, the author actually seems to think of himself — and I can only assume the author is male, given his obsessions and the gender breakdown of mass killers –as a latter-day Lepine. When he writes that “[f]eminists have ruined my life,” this is in fact a direct quote from Lepine himself: it’s what he reportedly said before opening fire and gunning down his victims, and a phrase he also included in his own manifesto/suicide note.

Some of the specific phrasings he uses seem to be almost exclusively used by MRAs . He writes, for example, of the “toxic influence of feminism,” a phrase that only turns up 47 results on Google.

If you set aside links to news articles about the threats directed at Sarkeesian, two of the top results are links to the artwork used in a promo video for A Voice for Men’s Honey Badger Brigade. The headline? “The toxic influence of feminism in comic.” The topic of the Honey Badger Radio Show being promoted? The “invasion” of geek culture by “social justice warriors” and feminists. The show is a recent one, from this past August.

Other uses of the phrase “toxic influence of feminism” can be found in two separate posts on an Irish MRA blog called “Not A Feminist,” which links to A Voice for Men, Angry Harry, Shrink4Men and other familiar MRA sites. The phrase also shows up in an essay by Henry Makow, an early MRA-turned-conspiracy theorist; his quote shows up on numerous sites online and accounts for a sizeable number of the results. The phrase appears as well in a debate over Men’s Rights on a site called TheDiscussionist and on several other MRA sites.

It also pops up in a couple of discussions of video games — once on a Grand Theft Auto V forum, and once, chillingly, in a post about Anita Sarkeesian on the Tumblr blog of an 18-year-old German right-winger, attacking her as an “attention whore who does no research, knows jack shit about the subject and [whose work leads] to even more of a toxic influence of feminism on gaming.”

In other words, virtually the only time this phrase seems to have been used in the history of humankind – or at least that portion of history accessible to Google – it’s been used by MRAs and video gamers. Mostly MRAs. This isn’t proof of anything, but I do find myself wondering if the writer of the threat letter might be a fan of the Honey Badgers.

Other phrases the email author uses aren’t quite as unique, but they too seem to be used almost exclusively by Men’s Rightsers – and in some cases their critics as well. “Misandrist harpies” is a surprisingly common phrase amongst angry MRAs and other manospherians; you can find it (naturally) on the openly misogynistic Antimisandrist.com, in the comments on A Voice for Men and Captain Capitalism and on the old school MGTOW site Mirror of the Soul. You can also find feminists ironically appropriating the insult as a label for themselves – including a commenter on the AgainstMensRights subreddit and a few of the regulars on this very blog.

It also makes an appearance in a long tirade about, yes, Anita Sarkeesian in a comment on the site Topless Robot.

The author of the threatening email also refers at one point to feminist “poison.” He may well have picked up this formulation from MRA-adjacent atheist videoblogger Thunderf00t, whose video Why ‘feminism’ poisons EVERYTHING has racked up more than half a million views on YouTube; Thunderf00t, who used to direct most of his ire towards creationists, now devotes most of his videos to attacks on feminist women, with Anita Sarkeesian being a central obsession.

MRAs and PUAs are similarly obsessed with the notion of feminism as a cultural poison. You can find dire warnings about “feminist poison” on in the posts and comments on sites ranging from A Voice for Men to Exposing Feminism to Antimisandry.com. The self-proclaimed “counter-feminist” Fidelbogen is especially fond of the formulation, making it the central theme in a long and turgid manifesto with the title “Feminism Poisons Women.” The tedious MRA troll known, a little misleadingly, as genderneutrallanguage manages to work “poison” into both the title and the subtitle of his blog The Poisoned Well: The Poisonous Language of Feminism.

PUAs, especially those who fetishize the alleged cultural innocence of Asian and Eastern European women, also pontificate regularly about the dangers of the “feminist poison.” I could multiply examples almost endlessly.

In one of the more lurid and disturbing passages in his threat-cum-manifesto, the email author declares that Sarkeesian “is going to die screaming like the craven little whore that she is if you let her come to USU.” Something about the phrasing seemed familiar to me, so I tried searching for “craven little whore.” It appeared only in a tiny handful of discussions, none of which seemed to have anything to do with feminism or Men’s Rights.

But the phrase “whore that she is” is everywhere, it seems. If you eliminate the porn links from the results and narrow things down a little more, you find that the phrase is quite popular amongst PUAs and Red Pillers, who are forever recommending that their compatriots treat whatever woman they’re with “like the whore that she is.” It shows up repeatedly in the comments at Chateau Heartiste and in this post on Captain No-Marriage.

Now, as I said before, none of this is proof of anything, but it is highly suggestive. The email author not only seems to share the general beliefs of Men’s Rightsers and misogynist Manospherians; he also, even in the course of his short email, falls back repeatedly on some very specific phrasings that seem to be native to the misogynistic subcultures of Men’s Rightsers and pickup artists.

I think it’s safe to say that this is a person deeply steeped in this subculture – and frankly, more interested in the antifeminist crusade of the Men’s Rightsers than in video gaming as such.

Indeed, the email author says virtually nothing about video games as such in his little manifesto; he seems to have picked Sarkeesian as his target because, to him, she represents all the evils of feminism in one convenient package. He more or less says this outright, declaring that “I’ve chosen to target … Anita Sarkeesian [because she] is everything wrong with the feminist woman.”

In this, he is following again in the footsteps of Marc Lepine, who targeted female students at the École Polytechnique, killing 14 of them, because they to him seemed to symbolize the feminists who , he wrote in his suicide note “have always ruined my life.”

In its original article reporting on the threats, the Standard Examiner quoted a school official as saying that the authorities had “determined the threat seems to be consistent with ones (Sarkeesian) has received at other places around the nation,” which, as depressing as that statement is, does at least seem to suggest or at least hold out the hope that this threat may have come from a serial threatener, not an actual Utah State student who was, as he threatened, armed and ready to go.

Whether he is a sadistic fantasist or another Lepine in the making, it seems clear that whoever wrote the note is steeped in the Men’s Rights world online. He may or may not identify as an MRA, but he seems to have absorbed much of the ideology, and the hatred, preached and practiced by MRAs on the internet every day.

I’m totally not hypnotizing you.

Is Anita Sarkeesian secretly trying to hypnotize us all with her videos? Like, literally hypnotize us, in the “now you’re a chicken” sense?

That’s the central insinuation of an inadvertently hilarious video by YouTube blabber Jordan Owen, one of the guys behind that Sarkeesian Effect “documentary” that’s allegedly in the process of being made.

Owen’s video isn’t a particularly new one – he put it out in January – but it’s been recently resurrected by the good folks at A Voice for Men, who reposted it earlier this week, saying that it offered “very thoughtful, erudite” criticism of Sarkeesian that’s “particularly enlightening and full of information a lot of people don’t know.”

So that’s a good enough excuse for me to talk about it. Also, did I mention that the video is hilarious?

In the video, a weirdly soft-spoken Owen – he sounds as if he’s recording in the living room of his parents’ house and trying desperately not to wake anyone up – breathlessly announces that he’s going to help to “elucidate” an important piece of information that will fill in a hole in the alleged puzzle that is Anita Sarkeesian.

Owen points out that Sarkeesian apparently once worked for a guy named Bart Baggett, a huckster and self-proclaimed handwriting expert who also dabbles in Neurolinguistic Programing, or NLP, a questionable form of hypnosis based around the idea that you can hypnotize people, possibly against their will, in the course of normal conversation by embedding secret commands into the words you choose.

Ross Jeffries in his glory days

NLP , while largely discredited in scientific circles, has long been popular with pickup artists, who would of course love to be able to hypnotize women into doing their bidding. It was central to the ridiculous “speed seduction” techniques that a guy named Ross Jeffries began teaching in the 1990s.

Jeffries’ most mockable claim: that if a wannabe Casanova works the phrase “below me” into conversation with a Hot Babe, she will subconsciously hear the phrase as a command to “blow me” and will suddenly feel a desire to do just that.

While this particular bit of speed seduction lore has fallen by the wayside due to its sheer and obvious silliness, there’s a lot of NLP still embedded, as it were, in PUA techniques even today.

So what does this have to do with Anita Sarkeesian? Well, according to Owen, the devilish Ms. Sarkeesian is embedding secret hypnotic commands into her fundraising videos in an attempt to control our brains and empty our wallets.

Owen drags out a pdf he found by Baggett called “The Secrets to Creating Chemistry,” which Owen seems to think Sarkeesian is using as her super seekrit mind control manual.

One of Baggett’s techniques, Owen tells us ominously, is something called “Adverb/Adjective Presupposition,” which is basically a trick to supposedly get your listeners to agree with your premises by … using adverbs before verbs and adjectives before nouns. Devious indeed!

Owen quotes one of Baggett’s examples, evidently intended to show how you can successfully use Adverb/Adjective Presupposition to con a Hot Babe into bed with you:

Have you asked yourself if the unlimited potential of our relationship is what is making you so happy?

Another one I found in Baggett’s manual:

Have you naturally discovered how attractive you are becoming?

If even one single woman ever had sex with a guy who said either of these things to her first I will eat my cats. This is why people laugh at NLP.

Owen plays back a sentence from Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter video, which he thinks provide clear evidence that she’s using Baggett’s word voodoo in order to hypnotize us all. Be careful, lest you yourself become hypnotized just by reading this! Here’s Sarkeesian:

Have you ever noticed that, with a few notable exceptions, basically all female characters in video games fall into a small handful of clichés and stereotypes?

Huh. That’s actually tru ….. OH NO I HAVE BEEN HYPNOTIZED!

Owen devotes the rest of his video to uncovering more alleged evidence of Sarkeesian’s alleged use of Baggett’s alleged techniques, winding up with what he describes as “perhaps Anita’s most subtle and insidious use of these techniques” – that is, her alleged use of “embedded language.”

The phrase “embedded language” doesn’t actually mean anything, as fazr as I can tell, and Baggett doesn’t use it in his manual. Owen seems to mean what Baggett calls “magic words” – words intended to get your target all excited about you – and “embedded commands” – secret commands you can work into your conversation.

In any case, Owen posts assorted screenshots of Baggett’s lists of “magic words” and “embedded commands” and then – dun dun DUUUH! – demonstrates that Sarkeesian in fact uses lots of these words in her Kickstarter video!

This would be a smoking gun, except for one little problem: the words on Baggett’s lists are some of the most commonly used words in the English language. It would be pretty much impossible to communicate without them (or their counterparts in other languages).

Here are some the evil “embedded” words Owen finds in Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter video:

Look

Show

Imagine

Talk

Say

Understand

Decide

Some

All

Many

Most

When

After

Was

Ok, ok, I’m going to have to stop for a moment to acknowledge this last one.

JORDAN OWEN LITERALLY THINKS ANITA SARKEESIAN IS TRYING TO HYPNOTIZE US BY USING THE PAST TENSE OF THE VERB “TO BE.”

A few more of the evil voodoo words and phrases she uses:

Through

Down

On

Imagine

“In addition to”

“Have you ever”

I have a question: Have you ever watched a video so incredibly obtuse that you begin to wonder how humankind ever made it out of the caves in the first place?

Because I just did.

Owen ends his video with some comments that are far more manipulative than anything Anita Sarkeesian has ever said probably, ever, in her whole life:

Remember that the techniques Anita used in her video are those of the seduction gurus.

Wait, isn’t that use of the word “remember” an EMBEDDED COMMAND basically ordering us to accept his interpretation of what Sarkeesian was saying?

If you condemn the behavior in the form of men trying to manipulate women into the sack, then you must condemn Anita’s behavior as well because, while she is not a feminist, nor is she a gamer, nor is she a legitimate academic, she is, from a technical standpoint, a pickup artist.

Don’t PRESUPPOSITION me bro!

If Jordan Owen were the main character in Bioshock, I would ask him: Would you kindly develop a tiny shred of self-awareness?

If you’ve played Bioshock, you would know that this was an extremely clever reference to (SPOILER ALERT) a key plot point.

Crap, I inadvertently tried to hypnotize you with PRESUPPOSITIONAL WORD VOODOO in that last sentence.

Sorry! I’ll just stop right now, before I accidentally raise hundreds of thousands of dollars on Kickstarter.

Well, in a second. First, here’s a diagram from Baggett’s manual that I find sort of hilariously baroque:

And here’s Owen’s ridiculous video:

FULL DISCLOSURE: I have not shaved in several days, and I also have some videos up on YouTube (including this one of Owen’s Anton LaVey-looking pal David Aurini), so technically I am also a YouTube Neckbeard.

CREDIT: Thanks to Brooked for the meme graphic up top, and to Hellboy to alerting me to the existence of Owen’s delightful video in the first place.

They do real SO HARD.

The Redditor who goes by the name vlodia has what can only be described as a unique set of interests: Stocks. Diablo. Leaked celebrity nudes. Anonymous browsing. And semen.

And while vlodia seems to keep most of his semen-related inquires confined to porn subreddits like r/tipofmypenis, he recently wandered into the Men’s Rights subreddit to ask about a semen-related quandary more serious than where to find “Videos Featuring A Guy Cumming Really Fast After Blowjob or Handjob?”

In his Men’s Rights posting, vlodia asked the subreddit’s legal whizzes just what a decent regular fella like himself could do to protect against false rape accusations in three distinct scenarios – one involving a girlfriend with a secret “agenda against you,” another involving a spiteful one-night-stand, and one involving an especially devious false accuser that vlodia calls The Semen Thief.

Yeah, let’s just skip ahead to that one.

Scenario 3: “The semen thief” — a woman paid a hooker to seduce a man, specifically instructing her to have sex with condoms, so [the hooker] can bring the semen-filled condom to the woman so she can put some in her vagina as a proof she was raped by this guy. When the woman was examined by a doctor, it was proven your sperm was positively inside her. As it turns out, this woman who is charging you happens to be your acquaintance through work. How can a man fight back against this charge?

The assembled Men’s Rights Redditors generously offered their hard-won wisdom on how best to handle these scenarios.

Thementallyillclam urged vlodia to avoid all contact with women.

Lazlounderhill, by contrast, urged vlodia to avoid all contact with women.

MetaMGTOW suggested a rather inventive strategy to help vlodia avoid all contact with women.

Mtersen, meanwhile, urged vlodia to avoid all contact with women. Or at least all women working at upscale clothing stores. And then to flee the country.

Though I hate fo find myself agreeing with Men’s Rightsers on anything, I too would recommend that vlodia avoid all contact with women.

Longtime observers of A Voice for Men have been wondering for some time why John “The Other” Hembling has vanished from that site. Hembling, once the site’s Editor in Chief and number two figure, was not at AVFM’s much ballyhooed conference this summer, and his name has mysteriously vanished from the masthead. AVFM has not, to the best of my knowledge, ever offered a public explanation for the falling-out with Hembling.

Now, after months of silence on the topic, Hembling is telling his side of the story.

In a video posted yesterday — and embedded at the top of this post —  Hembling claims he was tossed overboard from the good ship AVFM because he was publicly critical of some of AVFM’s staffers and allies – in particular Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield, AVFM’s truth-challenged “social media director,” and Stefan Molyneux, long-winded YouTube “philosopher”and leader of the Cult of Stefan Molyneux.

Hembling starts off the video by challenging the “rumor” that he was kicked out of AVFM because he was planning on showing up to the group’s conference with a giant inflatable penis, a reference to Community Organized Compassion and Kindness — COCK – a group that he started with his girlfriend Diana Davison and which seems to count only the two of them as members. I have no idea if this is a real rumor, a joke, or something he actually was planning. I mean, this is a guy who runs a “human rights” group called COCK. In any case, he insists in the video that he had no such plans.

The real reasons he was “disinvited” from the conference and from AVFM itself? According to Hembling, it’s largely because, he hasn’t been shy about criticizing other AVFMers, as well as various articles on the site, including one from a trans man that Hembling thought was “bullshit,” and published only because AVFM was trying too hard to be inclusive.

But apparently his biggest crime in the eyes of Elam and other AVFMers was his criticism of AVFM PR maven Janet Bloomfield – not for being a liar with a propensity for calling her opponents “whores,” but for being … a stay-at-home mom.

When Hembling joined AVFM, he notes, the site was harshly critical of traditionalist conservatives, seeing the traditional roles of men as providers and women as stay-at-home wives and mothers as offering little more than “slavery” for men.

Indeed, Hembling quotes from one 2011 post by AVFM founder and big kahuna Paul Elam warning of the danger posed to men by, in Elam’s words

‘traditional” woman’… offering fellatio in exchange for indentured servitude, and reveling in her ‘traditional power,’ as a woman. … Traditionalism is the driving force behind male slavery. It is the psychological machine that socializes men into becoming fodder and into becoming lapdogs disguised as guard dogs.

But now, Hembling complains, AVFM has not only abandoned its disdain for traditionalist women, but has also appointed a traditionalist woman – Bloomfield – to serve as its PR representative. (Though Hembling doesn’t mention is, AVFM also brought traditionalist conservative Suzanne Venker to speak at its conference.) And when Hembling brought up this seeming contradiction while he was at AVFM, he says, his “relatively mild critiques” were seen as “blasphemy.”

“What happened, Paul,” Hembling asks. “Did your brains fall out?”

As Hembling sees it, the “final nail in my coffin at AVFM” was his criticism of Molyneux, a woman-hating libertarian “philosopher” with a cult following (literally) on YouTube who was one of the more memorable speakers at AVFM’s conference. (I highlighted some of the horrible things he said in that speech in a Misogyny Theater video here.) Hembling doesn’t specify what exactly he criticized Molyneux for, but insists that it was mild criticism compared to what the “philosopher” hears from others online.

Hembling adds that he also called MRA elder Warren Farrell “Professor Fuzzy Face. I think that might have ruffled some feathers too.”

So are these the real reasons Hembling was exiled from AVFM? Isn’t it possible that he was actually shitcanned because he’s a loose cannon and compulsive liar that no legitimate organization would want to have anything to do with?

He is, of course, all of those things, and if we were dealing with any entity other than AVFM I would assume this was the true explanation. But the plain fact is that AVFM is overflowing with loose cannons and compulsive liars, from the man at the top of the heap down to the footsoldiers in its Twitter army.

And, as hard as it might be to believe anything that someone as habitually truth-challenged as Hembling has to say, his explanation of his fall from grace is completely plausible. Elam is an egotist and an opportunist, and he’s not someone who likes being second-guessed by his followers. To have the ostensible number two at AVFM calling him out publicly for his hypocrisy and poor judgement? Well, I can’t imagine he was terribly happy about that.

Will Elam respond to this video with an “explanation” of his own? I can only hope so.

Janet Bloomfield: Unapologetic asshole. Profile picture for one of her Twitter accounts.

EDIT: Bloomfield says she found the screenshot on Facebook. Details below.

Janet Bloomfield – A Voice for Men’s compulsively lying “social media director” – is at it again.

A couple of months back, Bloomfield – who goes by JudgyBitch1 on Twitter – decided for some reason that she could best serve AVFM’s social media directing needs by straight-up libeling feminist writer Jessica Valenti – by making up inflammatory quotes and attributing them to Valenti in a series of Tweets. She later boasted in on her blog that the quotes – which she admitted she’d conjured out of thin air – had inflamed hatred of Valenti and caused her to catch “a bit of hell.”

Now Bloomfield is pulling the exact same stunt again. This time, her target is feminist cultural critic and #GamerGate bete noire Anita Sarkeesian.

On Saturday, Bloomfield tweeted an obviously doctored “screenshot” of a tweet that Sarkeesian never made.

Screenshot here in case she takes it down or gets tossed off Twitter again; here’s another screenshot including replies from JB’s fans.

How do we know this is fake? Well, whoever made this fake screenshot made one glaringly obvious mistake: this Tweet is way too long to be a real tweet. Twitter, as you probably know, has a strict limit on the number of characters you can use in a Tweet. 140. This fake tweet has 218.

Here’s what happened when I typed the same text into Twitter myself: as you can see, I went over the limit by 78 characters. That’s, uh, a lot.

As you can see, the “Tweet” button is disabled; it’s simply impossible to post Tweets that are too long.

Looking back through Sarkeesian’s Twitter timeline, I found the real Tweet that she posted at 2:32 PM on the 29^th of September.

As you can see, not only does the time match, but the numbers of favorites and retweets is roughly the same as well; there have only been a handful more added since the fake screenshot was made. Whoever made the fake tweet obviously just screenshotted this real tweet and then pasted in new text using the same font used by Twitter.

The sheer incompetence is astounding.

Did Bloomfield make this Tweet herself, or did she simply pass along a fake screenshot she found somewhere else? Well, Google Images couldn’t find any other instances of this fake screenshot on the internet; Bloomfield appears to be the first person to post it. Which suggests that either she or someone she knows made it – or someone else made it and sent it to her, and she posted it on the internet without checking to see if it was real.

Given her proclivity for making up quotes and attributing them to her enemies, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that I think she had something to do with creating the fake screenshot.

EDIT: Bloomfield says she found the screenshot on Facebook, on a page called Feminist Crazy Quotes, where it seems to have first appeared. Here’s her Facebook repost of it. It’s not clear where Feminist Crazy Quotes got it, as I can’t find any other instances of the tweet on the internet using Google Image search. It’s still not clear why the supposed “social media director” of AVFM, a woman who seems to spend half her life on Twitter, would not immediately realize that the Tweet was way too long to be a real Tweet.

If you scroll down through the responses to Bloomfield’s tweet, you’ll notice that Bloomfield’s fans ate this blatant deception right up; inclined to believe the worst about Sarkeesian, they easily convinced themselves that this preposterous, overlong, literally impossible tweet was real. And Bloomfield was in the thick of it, egging on their hate.

When one #GamerGater noted that the quote seemed a bit much, even for the hated Sarkeesian, another commenter pulled out the “radfem” card.

It goes without saying that Sarkeesian is not, in fact, a radical feminist.

When a few other tweeters pointed out the obvious – that Sarkeesian’s alleged tweet was in fact way too long to be a real tweet – Bloonfield fell back on the same “logic” she used when she was called out for making up quotes about Valenti: well, she may not have said this, but doesn’t it sound like something Sarkeesian would say?

No she wouldn’t. She didn’t. If she had, you wouldn’t need to use a fake screenshot to demonize her.

Amazingly, even after the tweet had been revealed to be fake, even after JB was reduced to claiming it was a “Poe” – just as she did with the fake Valenti quotes – the hatefest continued on, with dozens more tweets from JB’s peanut gallery denouncing Sarkeesian for her imaginary racism.

Here are just a few of them:

One more prudent Tweeter suggested that Bloomfield might want to take down the blatantly fake screenshot, if only to protect herself.

Ironically, while going back through Sarkeesian’s timeline to see if I could find the Tweet that was used in the screenshot, I ran across this:

And while most the overwhelming majority of this defamation comes from angry men, some of it comes from angry women – like Janet Bloomfield — who are every bit as dishonest and abusive as their male counterparts.

Stephen Fry

Popular British TV personality Stephen Fry recently complained to BBC’s Newsnight that he thought the Jimmy Savile scandal has led many to unfairly assume the worst about other 70s era disc jockeys and “light comedians.” He went on to say:

If you want to talk about rock stars, do we have to name the rock stars that we think almost certainly had sex with 14-year-old children? But those 14-year-old girls were so proud of it that they now in their 50s wouldn’t for a minute call themselves ‘victims’.

So here’s a little one-question news quiz:

QUESTION: Which of the following comments about Fry and his attitudes toward “historical” pedophilia – sorry, ephebophilia – were downvoted in the Men’s Rights subreddit?

A) I agree with him. It’s probably the one place where I diverge with the MRM. I think the age of consent for both men and women needs to be lower, and accepting the inevitable sexuality of high schoolers would do everyone some good. Equality is my top concern though. If we are jailing men for having consensual sex with 16 year old “girls”, I guess we need to jail women who have sex with 16 year old “boys”. I would prefer to see the insanity end though. I’m not so sold on 14 though. I think every year there is a percentage of people who are ready, and through the puberty years the percentage changes drastically. At 14 it’s probably kind of low. Yet, I have met men and women who gave up virginity at 14 with a positive experience and no regrets. More unbiased research would be nice here.

B) It’s almost like young people can seek out and enjoy sex with older people.

C) I can’t really argue, my parents mention that it was how things were back then, my mum knew a good few ”good girls” who would be playing celebrities for drink/drugs/clothing, it’s only become unacceptable now.

D) Once again i find myself asking why people think so much of Fry’s intellect. He has made some reasonable points in the past, but nothing brilliant — and this one is just plain dumb. And hey, if a woman had said this shit about 14 year old boys this sub would be up in arms! …

BONUS QUESTION: Which popular British rock star sent a roadie to kidnap a 14-year-old girl, informing her “[Name of rock star] told me that he’s going to have you whether you like it or not,” then adopted her as his “girlfriend” and hid her from the public for three years so he wouldn’t get arrested?

.

.

.

ANSWER: The only downvoted answer was D, a comment from ThePigmanAgain.Yes, the guy behind this bizarre and terrible web comic is practically the only voice of wisdom in that thread.  All the other comments above had positive karma at the time I wrote this.

They are truly human rightsing it up over in the Men’s Rights subreddit!

BONUS ANSWER: Jimmy Page. Yeah, that Jimmy Page. Read more of the sordid details here.

I don’t often write about Alison Tieman – the eccentric FeMRA videoblogger known better as Typhon Blue – in large part because, well, have you ever watched one of her videos? Her arguments and assertions bear so little relation to what the rest of us know as reality it’s as if she lives in some weird inverted world of her own making.

It’s rather difficult to address the arguments of someone when virtually everything she says is wrong – logically, historically, morally – in some fundamental way.

But I’m going to have a go at her latest video anyway, because, well, it’s only 4 minutes long, which will make unpacking its fractal wrongness a little less of a daunting task. Also, there’s a kitty in it.

In the video, Tieman, in the guise of “Professor Hamster,” makes the startling claim that Women’s Suffrage was “Feminism’s first act of female supremacy.”

How, you might wonder, does equality at the ballot box count as “female supremacy?”

Well, according to Tieman – one of A Voice for Men’s self-proclaimed Honey Badgers – it’s because women (at least in the US) don’t have to register for the draft.

This is an old argument of hers, based on the strange belief that voting rights for men in the United States are contingent on them signing up for selective service, something that’s not, you know, true. She seems to be confusing the United States with the fictional universe of Starship Troopers, in which “Service Guarantees Citizenship.”

In any case, because suffragettes didn’t demand to be drafted when they demanded the vote their demand, Tieman concludes that they weren’t seeking equality but supremacy.

Never mind that at the time the notion of women being drafted would have struck the general public as absurd.

Never mind that when draft registration was being considered for reinstatement in 1981, the National Organization for Women sued to have registration expanded to women as well, because not requiring women to register would relegate them “to second-class citizenship by exclusion from a fundamental obligation of citizenship,” as the New York Times summarized their position.

Ultimately, over NOW’s objections, the Supreme Court ruled that registration could be restricted to men only. The all-male Supreme Court; the court didn’t get its first female Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, until later that year.

For all of the hullabaloo, the requirement that men register for the draft is an essentially meaningless “obligation.” The draft is a dead issue in the US, about as likely to be revived as Jarts.

Tieman goes on to note that “female suffrage enabled women to vote for wars that only men had to fight in.” In fact, as anyone who’s paid any attention to real world politics knows well, women are consistently less likely than men to support war.

Tieman’s arguments about women’s suffrage are just bizarre. It’s when she starts talking about the civil rights movement that she moves beyond bizarre to offensive.

Throughout the video, she contrasts what she sees as the good and humble civil rights movement with the “privileged” and “entitled” suffragettes; it’s a strange and backwards argument, at odds with historical reality, and one that insults not only the suffragettes but our greatest civil rights heroes as well. “During the civil rights movement,” she proclaims,

black moderates believed that black people needed to EARN their civil rights. Extremists at the time believed that blacks people should receive their rights by virtue of being human beings. …

Minorities felt they had to earn their rights and often had to make enormous sacrifices in war prior to even having their requests for rights considered reasonable. Women felt they were simply owed. …

Minorities approached suffrage from the usual mentality of people who are actually oppressed: We have to earn everything, including citizenship rights. Whereas women approached the issue of suffrage from a mentality of privilege and entitlement: We are owed our rights.

Where even to start with this jumble of wrongness?

Let’s start with her most basic misapprehension, that human rights are something that have to be earned. In fact, the basic premise of human rights is that we have certain rights because we are human beings. This isn’t entitlement or extremism; it is the fundamental basis of democracy.

You would think that someone who calls herself a Men’s Human Rights Activist would have a better understanding of the rudiments of  human rights.

In the Declaration of Independence, you may recall, Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed “that all men are … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” He didn’t say they had to earn these rights; he said that they were born with them.

Granted, it took quite some time before this sentiment applied not only to white men but also to women and African-Americans, but this had nothing to do with anyone “earning” rights; it had to do with the fact that some human beings were seen as more human than others.

When Martin Luther King made his case for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, he harked back explicitly to Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence. In his most famous speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963, he declared

In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. …

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

This was not the first time he had made this argument. In a 1957 speech also delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he declared that

The denial of this sacred right [to vote] is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic traditions and its is democracy turned upside down.

So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind — it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact — I can only submit to the edict of others.

It’s our humanity, not a signature on a selective service registration form, that entitles all of us to the right to vote.

If the Men’s Rights Movement wants to campaign to end selective service registration, go for it. Just don’t pretend that this has anything to do with the right to vote. Or that demanding basic human rights is a sign of “entitlement,” much less “female supremacy.”

Also, maybe lose the stupid hat?

Below, a song that kept popping into my head as I tried to make sense of Tieman’s most peculiar views. Well, the chorus anyway; the rest of the lyrics don’t really fit.

That doesn’t even make a tiny bit of sense.

The unquestioned king of A Voice for Men’s crew of meme-makers is the mysterious fellow known only as John Galt. Galt, whose contributions are often chosen as AVFM’s “meme of the week” and posted to AVFM’s Facebook page, is truly the meme-maker AVFM deserves — a graphic designer whose graphically challenged photoshopped masterpieces are as baffling as they are offensive.

I highlighted several of his, er, designs in my recent post on Inexplicable AVFM Memes. Today, I’d like to delve further into the photoshop disasters that fill his own Facebook page, some of them official AVFM memes and others posted under his own fake name.

But first, a little introduction to Mr. Galt, as found on his blog.

I live and work in the UK, am a physically fit man in his mid thirties currently studying Computer Science and Mathematics. … I, like most men I know have dated on and off for the past 20 years or so and from my experiences I have come to realize as, no doubt many of you have that there is a deep sickness in our society in regards to how men are treated. …

With a 50 billion dollar divorce industry, sex sold as some sort of priceless resource and victim hood sold to a nanny state as the only valid form of currency it is evident that Men must protect their independence and freedom more vigilantly than ever.

The price, for failing to see what is essentially a fairy tale lie is higher than it has ever been. That price is paid to governments and businesses who profit from the misery of destroyed families, men and women with tax rates and laws that only ever increase. It is paid to greedy women and feminists who demand one sided equality while forcing men to shoulder responsibilities with none of the inherent rights associated with

Sorry, I nodded off for a second.

These fascist lies permeate everywhere from the destruction of Masculine Roles to the ignorance of sex differences in medic

Oh fucking hell he goes on like this for several hundred more words. You can go read it if you like.

Anyway, he ends with a question:

What are you going to do about it?.

Longtime readers of this blog will no doubt notice that Mr. Galt ends his sentence with a new variation on the famous MRA two-dot ellipsis, which I think we can call the Galtian MRA Question Period.

Galt has answered his own Question Period with an ever-growing collection of terrible, terrible memes. So let’s take a look!

There’s this inexplicable homage to a 24-year-old song by MC Hammer.

“It” hate your guts? And why is she on a scooter?

And this conspiratorial take on “the pill.”

Huh. Yet Galt thinks a male pill WILL bring sexual liberation … to men.

Apparently feminism was writing nursery rhymes in the early 19th century:

What does this soft-porn pic have to do with feminism or nursery rhymes?

Hey ladies! Get on the feminist gravy train!

One … MILLION dollars!

Apparently feminists want everyone to live in tents, which supposedly look like … vaginas?

“Enginuity?” Apparently spellchecking is for manginas.

Apparently the true cause of erectile dysfunction is … nagging?

Er, this meme is aimed at women. So why did you use a picture of a Viagra float at a Pride Parade?

I’m not sure what’s the most offensive thing about this one — the comparision of feminism to a nuclear weapon or Mr. Galt’s egregious typo.

There are only 13 words in this poster. And one of them is misspelled.

Ok, then.

Honestly, I don’t think Mr. Galt needs a Men’s Rights movement to solve his problems. I think he might just need to hire a dominatrix. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I’ve just scratched the surface of Mr. Galt’s graphic work. I may have to return to him in a future post.

Classic WTF-ery from AVFM’s Facebook page

More brilliant public relations work by the AVFM crew.

The top “meme,” posted on AVFM’s Facebook page, isn’t inexplicable in itself — I assume someone said to the meme-maker that by “criticizing” women he was doing the same thing feminists were doing by criticizing men, and this was meant as an enormous insult? It’s just inexplicable as a way to, you know, reach out to a broader audience beyond misogynist douchebags who think that the idea of ironing a woman in lingerie is inherently hilarious. But I guess that’s not really AVFM’s aim, is it?

Another one from the AVFM Facebook page:

More of AVFM’s meme magic

Ah yes, I remember the chants at the last feminist demonstration I went to.

What do we want!?

Childsupprtagencies’protecting’childrendivorcecourtspolicearrests cheaperworkforcecontrolofeducationworkerprisonsdisposablesoldiers!

When do we want it?

Now?

Let’s just finish off this edition of inexplicable AVFM memes with this lovely submission from the AVFM forums, which is ostensibly about child abuse.

AVFM, proving critics of the Men’s Rights movement right pretty much every time they post a meme!