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.

Bye!

Speaking of harassers, as I was in the previous post, everyone’s favorite PR maven and serial libeller,  Janet “Judgy Bitch” Bloomfield, has been suspended from Twitter — this time, one hopes, for good, as she’s a prime example of someone using Twitter as a “hate amplifier,” which she has stoked in the past with deliberate and malicious libel. She also made a second account to get around her previous suspension, which one would think would in itself  be enough of a TOS violation to justify permanent suspension. The real question isn’t why she was suspended; it’s why she wasn’t suspended for good a long time ago.

EDIT: Removed portions of this post so as not to further inflame the situation.

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.

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!

Emma Watson: The woman who nearly destroyed A Voice for Men

Yesterday, A Voice for Men published an article so extreme, so hateful, so beyond the pale, that even Paul Elam, the site’s founder, was taken aback by it. Elam, who said he hadn’t read the article before other editors on the site posted it, claimed in a comment that when he finally did read it, it made him literally sick to his stomach.

Today, he took the extraordinary step – for AVFM – of taking down the article and offering an apology for publishing a piece so “counter to every aspect of our mission and values.” (It’s still up, for the time being, in Google cache; the original can also be found here.)

So what did this terrible, terrible article say? Brace yourself.

It said that Emma Watson’s recent United Nations speech on feminism … made some good points.

While the author of the piece, a tech dude turned “dating expert” named Jeb Kinnison, took the standard MRA swipes at the alleged evils of third-wave feminism, he argued that Watson’s version of feminism represented a kind of “equity feminism which is equally concerned with men’s rights.”

Then he described Watson as “very, very smart, and wise beyond her years … .”

I know, I know. Horrifying.

But that wasn’t even the worst part of Kinnison’s piece. In his conclusion, he actually suggested that

The smart and civilized aren’t spending their time nursing grievances based on sex, gender, race, or religion. If only the most intelligent voices were as amplified as the voices of ignorance and hate promoted by the grievance-mongering misandrists of third-wave feminism as well as insecure male misogynists.

Yes, that’s right: An article in AVFM actually acknowledged that some of those in the Men’s Rights ranks might actually be – gasp! – misogynists.

Naturally, such heresy could not stand. In the comments, a fight broke out between those who hated the article, and those who also hated it but felt that criticizing AVFM about anything was terrible and counterproductive and, hey, remember to donate to AVFM during the Fall Fundraiser!

In the former camp, the most outspoken critic was Nick Reading of Men’s Rights Edmonton, posting under the alias Eric Tiberius Duckman, who bluntly warned that

This article is disgraceful. If uncle Jeb here imparts any more of his mangina wisdom on AVFM, I’ll be seriously considering pulling my support and encouraging others to do likewise.

Elam was having none of this – very poor taste, especially during AVFM’s Fall Fundraiser! He responded to Reading’s threats to take his ball and go home with an indignant comment defending the editors who ran Kinnison’s piece and tearing into prodigal Nick:

[O]ur editors did their job and I am 100% supportive of that.

To be even more frank, even less appealing to me than this article is tantrums and ultimatums from readers attempting to exert editorial control by threatening to leave if they see content they don’t like.

Then apparently Elam decided that he didn’t support the editors 100% after all. In another comment, he declared that

This is the most overly generous, myopic interpretation of Watson’s speech I have seen, including feminist websites. It is literally embarrassing in its reductionist dismissal of issues unique to men and boys. …

I could write an entire article on what is wrong with this piece, but I am just too busy right now.

Throwing up.

Once he finished up with this, he took the piece down.

And AVFM’s Fall Fundraiser was saved!

Feminists made me a misogynist: from Masculinist India

Congratulations, A Voice for Men. You are having an impact upon the world.

Or at least upon one organization in India, a truly reprehensible group called Masculinist India, which has adopted the histrionic rhetorical style, and even some of the specific arguments, advanced by AVFM and other North American Men’s Rights groups for a series of graphically challenged “masculinist” memes posted on Facebook and on the group’s web page. Masculinist India has even adopted AVFM’s preferred nomenclature, describing its members as “Men’s Human Rights Activists.” They are of course the complete opposite of “human rights” activists, campaigning instead against basic rights for women.

The influence of AVFM and other Western Men’s Rightsers can been seen again and again in Masculinist India’s posts and memes, which have all the sophistication and subtlety of Chick Tracts.

The “feminists made me a misogynist” logic of the meme above, for example, echoes the argument made in “Hate Bounces,” an influential MRA screed by MRA/MGTOW elder “Zed,” and by countless other MRAs including former AVFM Number Two John Hembling.

Other memes borrow not only the arguments of Western MRAs but recycle the same tired stock photos, like the angry woman in this meme, a favorite amongst Western MRAs.

Masculinist India’s graphics-makers are as obsessed with this “argument” as is AVFM’s Paul Elam.

And they share AVFM’s fondness for threatening rhetoric — in this case complete with violent imagery.

And while AVFM’s Elam argues that men serving on juries should vote to acquit all men charged with rape, even if they’re obviously guilty, in order to protest an allegedly “misandrist” court system, the Masculinist India crew celebrates a court decision allowing married men to rape their wives with impunity. The following meme appears on their website under the taunting headline “Know Your Role, Girls.”  [TRIGGER WARNING for rape apologism, offensive imagery.]

.

.

.

I don’t even want to know why they chose bloody fingers for this graphic.

This meme, meanwhile, suggests that it’s an injustice that men are not allowed to forbid their wives from wearing blue jeans.

Human rights: You’re doing it wrong.

Unfortunately, Masculinist India is not some obscure little group with no influence in the world. Its Facebook page has nearly twenty thousand “likes” — several thousand more, that is, than that of AVFM itself.

Apparently in India as well as the United States there is a market for this brand of hatred.

NOTE: Thanks to Cloudiah for bringing these memes to my attention.

Actual “meme” found on the A Voice for Men Forums

I found this “meme” on the A Voice for Men Forums, and it was too special not to share.

The AVFM “Graphics and Art” forum is kind of a gold mine for baffling and terrible “memes,” terribly drawn comics, and “graphics” that aren’t really graphics at all — like, for example, these graphically challenged entries:

Dude, if you’re going to try to pass off a giant mess of words as a “graphic,” you could at least take ten seconds to proofread your, er, work.

This similarly verbose entry at least technically qualifies as a comic. The speakers are supposed to represent AVFM’s “Honey Badgers” facing off against some eeeevil feminists.

Some contributors to the “graphics” forum don’t even bother to make graphics themselves, hoping that others will be inspired to transform their ideas into brilliant works of art.

Alas, no one there has yet managed to turn this idea into a comic:

Cartoon idea – “the inevitable fate of Male Feminists”

Here’s my idea for a new cartoon (sorry, but I can’t draw for shit):

So you’ve got Michael Kimmel, PZ Myers, and David Futrelle, standing around talking together, each depicted with a human head on a praying mantis’s body. And the Kimmel mantis is saying something like, “Gosh, I think we’ve finally proven how valuable we are to the movement [Feminism]“.

You also notice a human head tucked in the corner of the room they’re standing in – it’s Hugo Schwyzer, with X’s drawn over his eyes.

And as they’re talking, you see another head roll in from the hallway, through an open door behind them. This time it’s Charles Clymer, and he appears to be freshly decapitated.

I would draw this myself, but, you know, I haven’t quite perfected my Michael Kimmel caricature.

Hat of choice for the discerning Men’s Rights Activist

Men’s Rights Activists have become known, not without reason, as belligerent assholes whose main forms of “activism” consist of harassment and threats.

One bold Men’s Rights Redditor known as El Rellok thinks he’s come up with a way to counteract this perception and deliver a powerful men’s-rightsty message at the same time.

He wants MRAs to send feminists … pictures of bloody feathers. No, really.

Now, to most people, getting a bloody feather in your email inbox would seem to be the digital equivalent of having a bloody horse’s head left in your bed. But in El Rellok’s world it is a rational and reasonable way to express “outrage” at feminist evil, and anyone who might possibly think otherwise is by definition unreasonable.

Let’s let him explain, because I certainly can’t explain how sending pictures of bloody feathers to someone you hate could be construed as anything but threatening:

The idea that men are violent, rather then the primary victims of violence, is being used to discredit men’s issues.

Well, actually, what’s being used to discredit the so-called Men’s Rights Movement is the simple fact that its members don’t seem to know how to engage in any kind of “activism” besides harassing individual women.

It is glaringly obvious that we need a method of clearly expressing unbounded outrage that cannot be construed as a threat by any reasonable person.

I don’t know that expressing “unbounded outrage” is really the most important goal for any activist movement, but the part about saying things that aren’t threatening sounds good to me.

Gentlemen (and ladies) i propose The Red Feather Campaign.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, why a feather?

None here should be unfamiliar with the “white feather girls”.[1] , one of the most craven and deplorable pro war campaigns in human history.

In case you aren’t completely up-to-date with all Men;s Rights hobbyhorses, he’s referring to the Order of the White Feather. Founded in Britain at the start of World War I, this was a group of women that hoped to shame men into enlisting by presenting them with white feathers, a symbol of cowardice.

Though the White Feather campaign happened literally a hundred years ago, at a time when the general public in Britain and elsewhere was rabidly pro-war, and thought it hardly won universal support from the suffragettes of the day, MRAs like El Rellok have turned it into a symbol of the intrinsic evil that lurks in the hearts of feminists today.

The white feather campaign was about mens obligation to sacrifice to women, a socially imposed gender role. Feminists, while declaring their total reprobation for all gendered roles, continue to demand that men sacrifice for women by ceding anything described as privilege, regardless of whether the “Privilege” is earned, a “Privilege” at all, or whether a society without the thing described as a “Privilege” can be understood as just ….

Sorry, I nodded off in the middle of that. He finally gets to the point:

SO, I propose we return to them their feathers covered in the blood of the men mercilessly and ruinously sacrificed to their agenda.

Well, he doesn’t mean this literally – he means PICTURES of feathers that look like they’re covered in blood – but we’ll get to that in a minute.

We make this present with the following message.

“This blood is not your blood. To think it is, is a refraction only of your narcissism. This is the blood of men, sacrificed to females, by females, for generation upon generation. When you speak of sacrifice, before our eyes flash visions of bayonets, within our nostrils the waft of trenches, our ears recall the scream of artillery coming to shred our bodies. That is what sacrifice means to men; agony, suffering, death. This feather is a reminder of your inhumanity towards men, your lack of compassion and understanding, and your hypocrisy in declaring gender roles obsolete while commanding men to fulfill the most destructive of all gender roles, the gender who gets sacrificed.”

I dunno about you, but this is creepy as fuck. And more than a little threatening.

Why this tactic? First, the consistent theme seen presented by SJW/feminists is that men are “Violent oppressors who refuse to compromise.” This meme makes clear that it is not us being oppressive, and that the compromise being asked is not just.

Yeah, sending women pictures of bloody feathers accompanied by an over-the-top mini-manifesto charging them with narcissism and cruelty and blaming them for all the death and misery of war (and who knows what else) is definitely going to convince the world that you’re not violent creeps.

By turning the oppression meme around upon the feminists, it creates equal footing in the debate space.

Yes, that’s right, he thinks the way to win the debate is to quite literally argue “nuh-uh, you are!”

Second, it supplants the current “MRA send death threats” meme. MRA’s do not send death threats, MRA’s send pictures of blood covered feathers.

I’m sorry, what?

MRA’s do not send death threats, MRA’s send pictures of blood covered feathers.

That’s what I thought you said. You people really don’t understand how PR works, do you?

If your message does not include said feather, that was not an MRA, as anyone who understands the MRA position would understand the symbolism and necessity of the red feather campaign.

Yes, that’s right, a woman getting El Rellok’s unhinged message along with a picture of a feather drenched in blood is going to say, ah, yes, this isn’t a threat. This is a Men’s Rights meme, and a perfectly rational conversation-starter on the important topic of why women deserve blame for all the wars in the world because a small number of women in Britain in World War I handed out feathers to men who weren’t enlisted.

Third, it allows us to fracture the feminist movement and more clearly identify those feminists who actually want equality and are just being blind, from those feminists who are actually misanderist (i use that term hesitantly, but as i have not had time to create a new term to describe my view of this branch of feminism, so it is necessary). If we can separate the equality feminists from the misandarists, then we can actually start working with reasonable people to begin wide scale social reform on gender issues.

Trust me, any woman who sees your message as anything but the unhinged rantings of a possibly dangerous crackpot is not any kind of feminist.

Depending upon the response I get here, the above shall be sent to AVFM with a proposal for a “Feather Drive” asking submissions of drawings of bloody feathers we can then use.

This, El Rellok’s concluding sentence, is also the first sentence of his that makes any kind of sense. This sounds right up A Voice for Men’s alley.

In a followup comment, directed at MRAs who weren’t completely convinced that sending pics of bloody feathers is the best way forward for the troubled Men’s Rights Movement, he added:

OK, There are multiple people Doxxing and sending threats to feminists (and others). We need a way to signify that this IS NOT US. We need a way to signify this IS NOT US while still sending a reply of some form. Sending death threats is not useful, and no, sending a picture of a feather with a message clearly stating it is about mens sacrafice is a threat only to people who would percieve any responce at all to be a threat. So unless you are saying we just need to grovel before our new feminist over lords, tell me what the hell else we do. DO you understand the concept that feminism is not simply going to go away if you ignore them? We need a symbol representing male disposability, to counter arguements that we are privilege defending mysoginists. And it needs to be a historically poinant one, or its not going to stick.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Also, have you ever heard of spellcheck?