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.

One of the benefits of running a cult – or so I have heard – is the ability to define reality for your cult followers. The principals at the cultish A Voice for Men do this all the time – pretending, for example, that former AVFM Number Two John Hembling had once faced off against a mob of 20-30 angry feminists brandishing boxcutters when his own video of the event showed him conversing with a handful of peaceful activists. And who can forget their attempts to cast their embarrassingly poorly attended rally on Toronto as a “huge success?”

However successful they are at redefining reality for their cult followers, cult leaders encounter problems when they try to do the same thing for those outside of their sphere of influence.

Take AVFM maximum leader Paul Elam’s continual attempts to recast some of the vilest things he’s written as “satire,” an explanation that only seems to fly amongst MRAs with a large capacity for the willing suspension of disbelief.

Well, now AVFM’s comically inept PR maven Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield has taken on the project of trying to retroactively redefine Elam’s most despicable writings as satire.

In a post on Thought Catalog, Bloomfield argues, as best she can, that Elam’s notorious “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post was not arguing, as it plainly seemed to be, that the best way to stop women from abusing their male partners was to let said male partners beat the shit out of them.

In the piece, you may recall, Elam said this:

In the name of equality and fairness, I am proclaiming October to be Bash a Violent Bitch Month.

I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women – to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.

And then make them clean up the mess.

Now, am I serious about this?

No. Not because it’s wrong. It’s not wrong.

But it isn’t worth the time behind bars or the abuse of anger management training that men must endure if they are uppity enough to defend themselves from female attackers.

There’s no reason whatsoever to believe that any of this is “satirical” or sarcastic or anything other than what it seems on the surface to be: a suggestion that the proper response to violence from women is violence against women – or that this would be the proper response, if this sort of “self-defense” from men didn’t result in jail time or anger management classes.

Indeed, the argument of this piece is entirely in keeping with a short story Elam published around this same time, titled “Anger Management,” that has as its hero a man unfairly punished for breaking his wife’s nose in a fit of righteous rage after she left him for his business partner.

But Bloomfield shamelessly if unconvincingly tries to argue that

What Paul Elam did in his article was engage in satire – he flipped the genders to highlight just how awful it is to hurt another person, and dramatically highlighted our double standards when it comes to who got hurt.

Yep, she’s honestly claiming that’s what he meant when he said beating the shit out of a “violent bitch” is “not wrong” just not “worth the time behind bars or the abuse of anger management training that men must endure if they are uppity enough to defend themselves from female attackers.”

The argument went over well with the small army of misfit misogynists populating the comments section to Bloomfield’s post on Thought Catalog. And perhaps she will see this as a victory.

But if you read the following comments critically, you’ll notice that the commenters — including her fans — aren’t buying the satire argument at all.

Notice the upvotes. This was a popular argument in the comments.

This comment was a response to one of the only feminists who ventured into the fray:

One commenter recalled a famous passage in Shakespeare:

The passage in question in A Merchant of Venice is Shylock’s famous “if you prick us, do we not bleed” speech. You may recall that Shylock used this argument as a justification for revenge, declaring that

[t]he villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

This is Elam’s argument as well.

In other words, none of these commenters — and those who upvoted them — believe that Elam’s post was satirical. None of them see Elam’s argument as being anything other than what it was: a Shylockean paean to righteous “revenge” upon abusive women.

They know he was serious. And they agree with him.

EDITED TO ADD: Bloomfield has responded to this post with a detailed and lucid critique. By which I mean she tweeted this:

https://twitter.com/JudgyBitch1/status/480512762393944064

1) TALK TO THE HAND

What might it mean? “Ha ha girls talk too much, well joke’s on you because I’m GOING MY OWN WAY and later I’ll go home and make a poster about how I imagined I might I totally really did put that bitch in her place.”

I mean, that is what this poster is saying, right? It’s illustrating the notion that men and women should listen to one another by depicting a dude just up and leaving because he’s tired of listening?

How exactly does this advance any “men’s rights” other than the right of men to act like petulant children?

2) BREAKING BADDIE

What might it  mean? Well, the quote itself makes sense. What doesn’t make as much sense is why alleged “human rights activists” would want to publicly identify themselves with a rage-filled amoral meth-maker and murderer who fucks up the lives of everyone around him through his own pigheadedness. I mean, Walter White is not really a good person, when you come right down to it. That made for great television, but as a role model for a “civil rights” movement, no so much.

3) VENUS MAN TRAP

What might it  mean? That the person making it is very, very confused about a lot of things. This one starts off with ridiculously simplistic — and provably incorrect — premises. Men’s attitudes towards marriage haven’t undergone a 180 degree turn since the start of feminism; they weren’t that rosy(as it were) in the prefeminist world, and they aren’t so negative now.

But it’s that final statement that the real puzzler. Feminists aren’t blaming “patriarchy” for men not wanting to get married. That’s completely backwards. Marriage began as a patriarchal institution and is still steeped in patriarchal symbolism. The only thing that this poster makes clear is that the people behind it don’t know anything about feminism, patriarchy, or marriage.

4) HAVE A KNIFE DAY

What might it  mean? That the person making the poster has a very vivid imagination. Once again, the folks at AVFM picture their feminist enemies as violent oppressors. This has zero basis in reality, but makes it all that much easier to justify their antifeminist hatred.  The projection is strong here.

5) SUCK IT UP, BUTTERCUP

What might it  mean? That AVFM’s antifeminists don’t realize that feminists aren’t actually interested in chivalrous providers?

6) WHO’S THE PIG NOW?

What might it  mean? That AVFM meme-maker “John Galt” — clever name, huh? — hates women, fat men, and good graphic design.

7) DUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH BATMAN

What might this mean? That AVFM meme-maker “John Galt” not only thinks he’s an Ayn Randian ubermensch; he also thinks he’s Batman.

Is Christopher Nolan’s Batman really the best role model for an alleged “civil rights” movement? I mean, I suppose he’s a step up from Walter White, but, seriously dudes, maybe try to model yourself on people who don’t solve problems with violence?

8) STUPID PATRIARCHY TRICKS

What might it mean? I have no idea. Seriously, what the hell?

Paul Elam: Anger is “pulsing through my veins like molten lava.”

A student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, says she was attacked and beaten by a strange man after receiving threatening messages about her opposition to a Men’s Rights group on campus. On Thursday, Danielle d’Entremont posted a picture of her bruised face to Facebook along with this explanation:

Just walked out of my house and got attacked by a stranger. I was punched in the face multiple times and lost half my tooth. This was after a few threatening emails regarding my support for feminist activities on campus. I can’t say for sure if the two are connected, however the attacker was a male who knew my name.

The campus Men’s Issues Awareness Society (MIAS) – the group d’Entremont has been fighting – has condemned the attack, as has the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE), which co-sponsored a talk the MIAS put on Thursday. The police are investigating.

Right now, this is pretty much all we know about the story. Not that it this has stopped MRAs from offering their very fervent opinions on the matter.

Before we get to them, here are a few of my own:

If it turns out that the attacker is, as seems likely, a Men’s Rights activist – or some freelance misogynist vaguely associated with that milieu – it will not exactly be a surprise. Feminist activists who challenge Men’s Rights activists – or indeed challenge sexism in any sufficiently public manner – often find themselves the recipients of angry, abusive and threatening messages, sometimes numbering in the hundreds.

While most prominent MRAs are smart enough to avoid making specific threats of physical violence in public, their “activist” campaigns often target individual women, often college students and individual activists rather than women with any real power in society, almost certainly because those with less power are easier to intimidate.

And for all their talk of being the “civil rights movement” of the 21st century, Men’s Rights activists rely on rhetoric steeped in violence and hatred. It wasn’t Martin Luther King who declared of his opponents that “the thought of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.” It was Paul Elam of A Voice for Men, probably the most influential Men’s Rights activist on the scene right now.

I don’t know who attacked d’Entremont. But given the number of threats being made towards feminist activists on a daily basis, it is inevitable that women (and perhaps some men) who’ve publicly opposed the Men’s Rights movement will be the targets of real violence. Inevitable.

And much of the responsibility for this violence will rest with Elam and other Men’s Rights leaders who have deliberately stoked the anger and hatred of their followers and directed much of it at individual female scapegoats. If your favorite slogan is “Fuck Their Shit Up” you can’t pretend you’re an innocent angel when someone inspired by your words actually does Fuck Someone’s Shit Up.

And it doesn’t help when MRAs like Elam try to make violence against women into a kind of joke. Here, at left, is a screenshot from a notorious post by Elam promoting his supposedly “satirical” notion of turning Domestic Violence Awareness Month into Bash a Violent Bitch Month; yes, that picture ran, with that caption, on Elam’s original post. At right, the picture of herself that d’Entremont posted to her Facebook page.

[TRIGGER WARNING for images of violence against women. Post continues after picture.]

.

.

.

Click on image for larger version.

Of course, this isn’t how Elam and his friends see the issue. The moment the story of the attack broke, a special A Voice for Men Flying Squad of commenters descended upon the website of the student newspaper of Queens University to set forth all the reasons they thought d’Entremont was a lying liar. Attila Vinczer, AVFM’s offical “Activism Director,” was especially active:

Yeah, Attila, I’m pretty sure criminal investigations don’t work like that.

Meanwhile, AVFM Contributing Editor Karen “Girl Writes What” Straughan attempted to minimize d’Entremont’s injuries in a rather inventive way:

Other commenters (evidently not affiliated with AVFM) offered variations on “she had it coming to her.”

(These aren’t consecutive comments; they’re separate image files smushed together. I edited out some less interesting bits of the second one.)

But it was Elam himself who launched the most vociferous attack on d’Entremont; indeed, in a long and rage-filled post titled “A whiff of bullshit at Queen’s University,” he declared that the very notion that MRAs might pose a threat to feminist activists to be a “scummy, Futrellian fantasy fiction spin game.”

Huh. I’m pretty sure I didn’t make up the hundreds of abusive and/or threatening messages that a certain red-haired feminist activist received for the crime of yelling at a couple of A Voice for Men dudes on camera once. Or those received by Rebecca Watson for the crime of suggesting that maybe dudes shouldn’t hit on gals who are riding a hotel elevator alone at 4 AM. Or those received by any of countless other women who have found themselves labeled enemy-of-the-week by MRAs, antifeminists, and other misogynistic creeps online.

Oh, and there was that creepy threatening phone message I got at 1:38 AM one December from one of AVFM’s own activists who was too dumb to hide his own identity properly.

But in any case, Elam for some reason has decided that the best way to convince the world that MRAs are reasonable people who would never resort to violence is to declare that he is overcome by his own anger. No, really:

[N]ow I am angry. I am 100% completely, undeniably pissed off bordering on rage. It won’t last, but for the moment it is pulsing through my veins like molten lava.

And what makes him angry? The very thought that someone might assume that a woman who was an active opponent of an Men’s Rights organization might have been targeted because of her activism — and assaulted by an MRA who, like Elam, might have had anger “pulsing through [his] veins like molten lava.”

There’s really not much more to Elam’s post than that. He makes a joke about d’Entremont trolling for “likes” on Facebook for the picture of her beaten face. He demands “proof” and predicts there will be none:

There will never be any evidence that she was attacked by an MHRA. They will probably not catch her supposed “attacker,” and the incident will wind up unresolved because there is no evidence to make a case against anyone, or at the very least not against any MHRA. The story will still get major traction with feminist ideologues, though, who will use it to mischaracterize MHRAs as violent so they can continue to attack the formation of new men’s issues groups.

And then he starts his rant in earnest:

I want to hear a police official say they have reason to believe it was men’s activists, and then share the identity of the person of interest with the public. I want them to make inquiries to this website to look for leads. With all the victim posturing over the years from feminists about AVFM, I have never heard from a single police official. Not once.

I want to know for sure that this woman, who posts this shit to her Facebook page but does not want to be identified, and her friend, who also does not want to be identified, are not both liars.

I want to see, with all the wolf crying that feminists have done about MHRAs, one tiny, even microscopic shred of fucking proof of anything they say.

I want to know if they are more credible than the zombie apocalypse. Rather I should say I would like to see them prove they are for a change.

And if my hunch, check that, experience, is right, and there are lies involved in this case, I want to see those responsible go to jail just as much as I want to see her attacker, if he actually exists, do the same.

Huh. That’s a lot of demands, Paul. I’m pretty sure the police have more pressing priorities in their investigation than mollifying the narcissistic rage of an internet ranter.

But I think we can see what is happening here: Unless the police are able to quickly identify and arrest a man who is clearly associated with a Men’s Rights group for this crime, and unless he is quickly convicted of this crime, MRAs – led by Elam and his followers – are going to declare d’Entremont a “false accuser” if not an outright hoaxer, and target her for further harassment and abuse. All while loudly proclaiming that they are the real victims here. (Never mind that they never apply even a fraction of such skepticism towards the tall tales of feminist oppression told by serial fabricators like John Hembling.)

Elam ends his post with these inspiring words:

Please note: AVfM is in the middle of its Spring Fundraiser. Please help us continue to spread the message. Click here to contribute.

Because A Voice for Men LLC, after all, is a business – albeit one that’s apparently forbidden from conducting business in the state of Texas – and its business is hate.

EDITED TO ADD: John Hembling — AVFM’s “Director, Public Policy” and “Editor at Large” — has weighed in with his own take on the attack, which he has puzzlingly titled “Don’t Bash a Violent Bitch,” helpfully illustrated with a picture of a nerdy fellow brandishing a fist. (Classy!) In it he loudly proclaims to be shocked — shocked! — that anyone could imagine any MRA could be responsible for such a crime, which is totally opposed to everything that the peace-loving Men’s Human Rights Movement stands for.

Then he goes on to argue that “Slugger d’Entremont” (!?) is an “asshole” who probably brought this upon herself by being such an asshole:

I expect that whoever bashed Danielle d’Entremont in the face is somebody she knows, who has been dealing with her for years. Maybe her attempt to silence Professor Fiamengo was what did it, maybe it was something else. The timing of the incident, thus far, does not indicate a connection.

Really? The attack happened the night before Fiamengo’s lecture.

An individual attempting to censor and silence somebody speaking on human rights concerns of any group, men or otherwise, is likely an individual that’s an asshole with a past.

How exactly she is a “violent bitch” he never exactly explains. Perhaps someone else wrote the headline. It’s not like there’s a shortage of “editors” at AVFM eager to blame the victim of this particular crime.

It is very c-worthy.

So the other day, in writing about the shutdown of MGTOWforums.com, I quoted a rather ironic comment from Men’s “Human Rights” Activist Paul Elam about the site, which he denounced as a hive of “self-consuming bitterness” that was essentially

one rolling “cunts and whores” diatribe after another, spiced only with vicious attacks on men who were deemed less than worthy by Nacho Vidal’s standards.

The irony, of course, was that if you replaced “Nacho Vidal’s” name with Elams’s, his statement was in fact also a perfect description of his own site, A Voice for Men.

But I didn’t really have the space to properly document just how pervasive “‘cunts and whores’ diatribes” are on AVFM. So today I’d like to start that process, by looking at some selected examples of times in which contributors to AVFM — not commenters, but actual article writers and in some cases staff members — resorted to the c-word to make their points, whatever the hell those happened to be.

The c-word is remarkably popular on AVFM; going through the site’s archives, I found more than three dozen posts in which it appeared, sometimes by itself, and sometimes as part of a clever new portmanteau word. In one recent post,  for example, Diana Davison and John Hembling declared Canada to be “a first world cuntry.” In another post, alimony became “cuntimony.”

But generally, the word appears in its natural state. While there are a few instances in which the word doesn’t reflect badly on the author — it’s found in a quotation from someone else, for example — it’s generally used straightforwardly as a slur; there’s nothing ironic or “satirical” in its usage. Some of the time it’s directed at specific women; other times at feminists. But it’s often directed at women in general.

The writer most fond of the term, ironically enough, is a woman, Diana Davison, who seems to slip the word into pretty much every post she can figure out how to. Probably her most impressive achievement, at least in terms of c-word usage, is a post titled “It’s a Woman Problem,” which starts out with this little zinger:

Women are facing a very real and grave problem in our culture: They are obnoxious cunts.

Lovely. Later in the post, she informs us that

Men are objects to women by which they gain social status and it is not something men have orchestrated, it is just an easy and convenient measure on “the scale of cunthood.”

In the end, she concludes:

All evidence indicates that Women’s Studies from early childhood education is a great idea. They just need to change the focus from women whining about their victimhood to women learning about how they victimize each other and teaching them to stop being cunts.

In other posts, she derides feminists as “lying, hypocritical cunts,” denounces Betty Friedan as both a “a complete cunt” and a “narcissistic twat,” and declares New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd to be “either lazy, sloppy, dishonest, or a genuine cunt” if not all of these things.

Another A Voice for Men contributor fond of the c-word is August Løvenskiolds. In one melodramatic tirade, he declared:

Women, through their sexual and reproductive capabilities, have always had a vast amount of power and influence over men, but this power cloaks itself in denials and subtleties in order to preserve itself. Cunt-power is cunning but every now and then, it peeks through the veil to expose a fetid maw of endless hunger and hatred.

In a “lighter” piece mocking those concerned about sexual harassment in the tech world he made a joke about how “C++ means “Cunt plus Oral plus Anal”, a brutal evaluation of women’s utility in programming.”

“Cunt” isn’t the only vagina-related insult favored by the writers of AVFM. “Twat” is also popular, particularly with Diana Davison. Paul Elam and  Dr. Tara J. Palmatier both apparently think it’s hilarious to call Twitter “Twatter.”

Of course the person who sets the tone for AVFM is Elam, and he’s not exactly shy about using the c-word himself. In one notorious post he now insists was partially “satire,” he wrote:

[W]omen are often excused from killing someone whom they allege has abused them. They can shoot them in their sleep and walk. Happens all the time. It’ll even get you a spot on Oprah, and cuntists across the cunt-o-sphere will be lionizing you.

And he’s fond of using the term to describe specific women he dislikes. In one post, he declared  actress Katherine Heigl a “misandric cunt;” in another he denounced Good Men Project Publisher and CEO Lisa Hickey as a “disingenuous cunt that makes her living off trying to turn men into lap dogs.”

Elam is well aware that this sort of language offends people and can even alienate many MRAs. But he has regularly defended it on the grounds of, well, I’ll let you try to figure out what he’s saying in this long, profanity laden screed (which, yes, does include the word “cunt”).

But I think my favorite Elam screed involving the c-word has to be the mouth-foamingly angry rant he wrote responding to a Jezebel piece on … a Summer’s Eve commercial featuring Cleopatra. It’s pretty unhinged, even by his standards; you may wish to go read the whole thing.

But here are some excerpts, in which he lectures the Jezebel writer about her proper place in the universe:

See, cupcake, you are not a goddess or any other kind of deity.  You are just a woman, and that smooth spot between your legs? Just a pussy.

As for being the center of civilization; sorry, that spot is still reserved in the real world for those who built it.  That would be men. …

The expectation that you are something more than human generally tends to indicate that you are actually something less.

Imagine a world in which you are just another person and not so easily offended by the sales of pussy soap. Fewer people would have to suffer your droning like a pipe organ about the fact that some advertiser acknowledged that Cleopatra had a cunt …

Pussy is power. Always has been.  Just like the commercial said, men have fought and died for it. And much, much more. The truth about pussy power eviscerates every lie about female powerlessness ever pawned off by feminists on a culture so afraid of that power that it would not even call them on the lies.

So, yeah, Paul: “cunt diatribes,” your site has them. And you write some of angriest of the bunch.

I’ll cover AVFM’s use of the word “whore” in another post.

Mugshots of Freedom Riders arrested for protesting segregation. The Freedom Riders were often attacked by white mobs, with the complicity of the police. Click on image for more info, and more pictures.

On Monday, Martin Luther King Day here in the United States, this was posted in the Men’s Rights subreddit, where, as you can see, it was quite popular with the assembled Men’s Rightsers:

How wrong  is this? Let me count the ways.

1) It’s wrong because Men’s Rights “Activists” aren’t “warriors for peace,” or justice, or even for their own backwards notions of men’s rights. MRAs, like a lot of men insecure about their own worth, love to claim credit for the accomplishments of great men in the past (without accepting any responsibility for the terrible deeds of the terrible men who lived before them).

But even in terms of claiming credit where no credit is due this is especially ridiculous. Aside from a tiny handful of “fathers rights activists,” who’ve bizarrely chosen to try to advance their cause by vandalizing paintings and/or dressing up in superhero costumes and climbing up buildings, and one troubled man who killed himself in hopes that his death would spur other MRAs to acts of terrorism directed at courthouses and police stations, MRAs don’t risk anything with their “activism,” insofar as they engage in anything that can be called activism at all.

There’s nothing heroic, or risky, about posting anonymous rants online about how women are all a bunch of hypergamous bitches, or sending some vague threat to the feminist villain of the day.

Indeed, MRAs face so little risk that some are forced to invent stories of persecution — like John Hembling’s tall tale of being confronted by a mob of boxcutter-wielding feminists, thoroughly discredited by The Daily Beast — in order to cast themselves in the role of the persecuted victim-turned-hero.

2) It’s wrong because the person posting this message, and attempting to suggest some sort of link between the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King and the Men’s Rights movement today, is someone who also posts in the White Rights subreddit, a haven for the same sort of hateful white supremacists who hurled racial epithets — not to mention actual rocks and bottles — at King when he was alive.

When one Redditor pointed this out, and noted (correctly) that numerous white nationalists post in the Men’s Rights subreddit, they were quickly downvoted for their troubles.

The original poster explained that he only posted in White Rights about “real cases of white discrimination.”

Another poster offered an example of what he saw as one such case of “real” anti-white discrimination:

Yeah, that was totally a real thing.

3) It’s wrong because it’s wrong. As in, factually incorrect. Warren Farrell is talking out of his ass, again. Here’s a slightly longer version of his quote, which you can find on his web page. (It’s originally from The Myth of Male Power.)

Men are likely to be not only the warriors of war but also the warriors of peace. Almost all those who risk their lives, are put in jail, or are killed for peace are men. While some of the peace warriors—Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold—are remembered, most are forgotten. Remember Norm Morrison?

Well, no, Warren, I don’t remember Norm Morrison. But I think you’re forgetting a few people too. Like half of the human race.

Women have been involved in peace and social justice movements as long as women have been active in the public sphere. Ever hear of Women Strike for Peace? Code Pink? At every large demonstration I’ve been at that has involved civil disobedience, I’ve seen both men and women arrested, with some of the women old enough to be grandmothers or great-grandmothers. The idea that women don’t put themselves on the line for peace or social justice is patently false.

This is really kind of  basic stuff. But with MRAs, alas, you always need to go back to the basics.

But the post in the Men’s Rights subreddit was all about co-opting the civil rights movement, so today I thought I would remind anyone who might have forgotten — or who never knew — that it wasn’t just men who put themselves at risk in the struggle for civil rights.

You can click on the pictures for more information.

Protesters at a lunch counter sit-in at Woolworths in Jackson, Mississippi, 1963, under assault from a white mob. The protesters were beaten, kicked, and burned with cigarettes. The assault lasted three hours, while police stood by.

Freedom Riders, after their bus was attacked and set aflame by a white supremacist mob near Anniston, Alabama, 1961

Student civil rights protesters blasted with water hose by authorities, Birmingham, Alabama, 1963

Birmingham, 1963

Elizabeth Eckford, who volunteered to be one of the first black students to enter the formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, on the first day of school in 1957

Student arrested for trying to read a book in a “white only” library in Albany, Georgia, 1963.

Police arrest NAACP member Ruth Tinsley for protesting outside a Richmond, Virginia, department store, 1960

Rosa Parks, being fingerprinted after refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, Montgomery, Alabama, 1955. I hope that Warren Farrell has at the very least heard of her.

The diabolical Not Me strikes the Men’s Rights subreddit yet again

Some updates on the Occidental College situation.

First, for those who didn’t see my post yesterday, a quick recap: Yesterday, Men’s Rights Redditors discovered that Occidental College has an online form that allows victims of and witnesses to sexual violence to report the incidents anonymously.

Although the information is being collected to track trends, and no one will be charged with anything as a result of such a report, a number of Men’s Rights subreddit regulars decided it would be a great idea to flood Occidental College with false reports to basically break the system, and they suggested this to much acclaim; others proudly reported that they’d sent in bogus reports.

So what has happened since then? The story has been picked up by a number of sites, including Gawker, Business Insider, RawStory, and LAist. In a followup post, Adam Weinsten of Gawker confirmed that Occidental College had indeed been hit with some 400 bogus rape reports in the past 36 hours — that is, after posts encouraging false reports appeared on 4chan and the Men’s Rights subreddit.

Meanwhile, on the Men’s Rights subreddit, after belatedly realizing that this whole thing makes them look kind of bad, the subreddit’s mods are trying their best to make the whole embarrassing thing go away — and not really doing a great job of it.

The first mod to say anything publicly was sillymod, whose initial reaction to the calls to flood Occidental with false reports of rape was to boldly announce that … the mods really weren’t going to be doing anything about it. In a post titled “With regards to Occidental College’s ‘rape report form,’” Sillymod wrote:

some people are claiming that it violates the Reddit TOS. It is not clear to me that it does, and I have not removed the article yet. But I will assume that Reddit admins will get involved at some point. So be it. At least then we can get a definitive ruling on whether it breaks the TOS.

What leadership! A true profile in courage.

Sillymod went on to note that the headline of the post he wasn’t going to remove was actually completely wrong in implying that people were going to get charged with crimes after being anonymously reported, and then made a few suggestions:

As always, when something gets you outraged – pause, take a few deep breaths, and then think of the most productive action to take. Don’t knee-jerk your response like feminists do. Do you want to be viewed the same as Big Red?

It might seem a tad ironic — or perhaps completely and mind-bogglingly hypocritical — to bring up, as an example of a person behaving badly, a women who was the victim of online MRA vigilantes when trying to cool off the online MRA vigilantes in your own subreddit, but never mind, because a couple of hours later Sillymod returned with a new response to the Occidental College thing.

First, he removed the thread from the subreddit. (Note: removing a thread on Reddit doesn’t make it go away; it just removes it from the subreddit’s index.)

Then, in a new thread entitled “‘Why did sillymod remove the Occidental College post?’ Let me tell you why,” he decided to blame the whole thing on trolls.

So I was reviewing the post and the multitude of reports on it. I noticed a sad trend.

I noticed a lot of very young accounts encouraging bad behaviour, I noticed that the post was made by a self-proclaimed “shitlord”. I noticed that there was a lot of misconception/misinformation about the form in general, whether willfully spread to take advantage of people choosing not to read these things for themselves or not.

In the end, I can’t help but feel that we were trolled, and that is why I removed it.

Sillymod, who apparently doesn’t research anything before posting, added:

Some people have alleged that 4Chan was involved, which would support the idea that we were trolled.

Yeah, the dude who posted the original thread said explicitly he’d found out about it on 4chan, and there are screenshots of the 4chan thread floating around that would take all of 5 minutes to find.

In any case, Sillymod’s “argument” — or, rather, his assertion — that the Men’s Rights subreddit was the victims of “trolls” with “very young accounts encouraging bad behaviour” was quickly shown to be utter nonsense:

In the discussion that followed, a Men’s Rights regular called oneiorosgrip tried to use another specious argument in order to suggest that the whole controversy had been ginned up by evil feminist trolls. All those screenshots showing terrible comments with lots of upvotes? Those comments were, she suggested, upvoted by feminists to make the subreddit look bad:

So what you’re telling me is that initially, just in time for SRS to post it as “evidence” that MRAs were flooding Occidental with false reports, a comment with less than 60 upvotes was the top comment in the sub… and despite the fact that the comments you cite represent less 0.00002% of the sub’s population, you claim that single moment in time proves MRAs flooded occidental with accusations.

Weird, because by the time I discovered the thread, a number of the comments I screenshotted had been up for 15 hours, and one of the worst had a lot more than 60 upvotes.

15 hours is a pretty long “single moment in time.”

But hey, Sillymod and oneiorosgrip have their stories, and they’re sticking with them. Who are you going to believe, them — or your lying eyes?

Men’s Rights Activists: No matter what terrible things they do, it’s always someone else’s fault.

The MensRights mods have begun to try to clean up the mess — or at least remove the evidence of it. They’ve deleted most of the comments I linked to yesterday (Always Be Screenshotting). Has anyone involved in this faced any repercussions beyond having a comment or two deleted? I sent the mods a message to ask if they’d banned any of those who’d made those comments, and Nicemod replied:

I don’t see any reason why we should tell you anything at all.

I’m guessing that means “no.” But I wouldn’t really have to guess if they simply told me. Masters of Public Relations, these guys are not.

There’s more discussion of all this going on in the AgainstMensRights subreddit (which I feel I should mention again is not actually against men’s rights, but against the so-called Men’s Rights movement).

Here’s a discussion of another thread — which I hadn’t seen — in which Men’s Rights redditors talked about spamming Occidental College with false reports of rape. There are screenshots.

Here’s a thread with screenshots featuring our old friend ThePigman, an MRA blogger and long-time contributor to the Men’s Rights subreddit, proudly prooclaiming that he’d submitted a bogus rape report.

And here is a particularly damning screenshot of the entire Men’s Rights Occidental College thread some five hours after it went up. The second comment on the page, then three hours old and with several dozen upvotes, provides two links to lists of names of Occidental College staffers to serve as potential targets of false accusations. (It was later deleted, but SirSkeptic’s original comment was around for me to screenshot it 11 hours later.)

This, sadly, is what Men’s Rights activism looks like.

Oh, and MRB2012 was still posting in the Men’s Rights subreddit as of 5 hours ago, so it looks as though he hasn’t been banned even though he provided his MRA comrades with a specific list of individuals to falsely accuse of rape. And I have no way to check if he has been banned since then because the mods won’t speak to the evil Man Boobz.

Way to go, mods. Great job!

One last thing: Gawker’s followup post included a great quote from Occidental College sociologist Lisa Wade that I think puts the whole espisode in context perfectly:

The men targeting Occidental’s anonymous report form are mad that women are being listened to, that men’s voices are no longer given so much power that they can effectively drown out the voices of women. They’re mad because they’re not the only ones that matter anymore. I get it. To them, it really does feel unfair. Something really is changing. They ARE being demoted — from a superior to an equal — and it feels wrong to them because they’re so used to being privileged …

[The backlash is] a good thing. It means we’re winning the fight. They’re gonna have to get used to it.

I think she’s absolutely right. It’s going to take a few years — well, probably more than a few — and we’re going to see a lot more outbursts like this, but these aren’t the battle cries of a rising “human rights” movement. They’re the tantrums of small subset of the male population that can’t accept that the world has changed.

A vigil to honor the victims of the massacre at the Ecole Polytechnique.

Today is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada, an annual event to honor the victims of mass murderer Marc Lépine, who gunned down fourteen women at the  École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989. Lepine, driven by a poisonous misogynist ideology, specifically targeted women, yelling “I hate feminists” before opening fire on one classroom of female students.

Reading over his suicide-note-cum-manifesto today, I was struck again by how, well, familiar it all sounded. While only a few MRAs have explicitly celebrated Lepine as a hero, his views on women and feminism would not be out of place on most Men’s Rights forums. Here’s Lepine, in his own words. (I’ve broken the wall of text into shorter paragraphs.)

[T]he feminists always have a talent for enraging me.

They want to retain the advantages of being women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventive leave) while trying to grab those of the men. … They are so opportunistic that they neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men throughout the ages. …

Thus, the other day, people were honoring the Canadian men and women who fought at the frontlines during the world wars. How does this sit with the fact that women were not authorized to go to the frontline at the time??? Will we hear of Caesar’s female legions and female galley slaves who of course took up 50 per cent of history’s ranks, although they never existed?

I’ve seen complaints virtually identical to these — I hesitate to call them arguments — reiterated many times over on places like A Voice for Men and the Men’s Rights subreddit.

Speaking of the Men’s Rights subreddit, here’s how the regulars there honored the victims of the massacre today: someone posted a message that today was the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (this is actually a different day, in November), and, well, this is some of what ensued.

MRB2012 gave us the quote in my headline:

7Vega worried that awareness about violence against women was taking up too much of everyone’s time.

And JohnKimble suggested that violence against women is really all their fault anyway.

The greatest human rights movement of the 21st century, folks.

Dean Esmay: You can close your eyes, but it won’t go away.

CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here. I have left the text of this piece as is.

Those who have been following the ongoing saga of man’s rights hate site A Voice for Men’s stumbling attempts to explain away the fraudulent claims — and the blatantly faked screenshot — that they used in order to cover up an embarrassing error in one of their stories may have been wondering how on earth they were going to respond after I confronted them directly with the evidence in the comments section of the blog of AVFM contributor Girl Writes What.

The answer is: with a whole new batch of lies. And they are even more dumbfounding than the last batch.

I had momentarily allowed myself to hope they would rise above their lying nature. Indeed, the last we checked in with them, AVFM founder Paul Elam was admitting that “as much as I hate to say it, Futrelle does have a valid point,” and promising that he would investigate further. Indeed, he promised,

I will address the results of my inquiry in public no matter where they end up.

Instead, Elam has given the man who seems to be at the center of the fraud — “managing editor” Dean Esmay —  free rein to provide yet another completely contradictory, and completely unbelievable, account of the whole thing.

And instead of addressing the fraud in public in a new post, Esmay has attached this new explanation to the bottom of the original post, knowing that this way many fewer people are likely to see it. I’m sure he’d prefer if he could post it at the bottom of a deep well.

Before we get to the latest (and I assume final) round of lies, here a quick recap of this somewhat complicated story, in simplified form. (Skip past the numbered items if you’ve been following the case, or go here, here, and here if you want the gory details and links.)

1) A Voice for Men reposts a blog post by Jason Gregory of American Idiocracy making the bizarre (and false) claim that if you Google the phrase “violence against men,” you get results dealing not with that topic but with “violence against women” instead. As many readers of the article notice, and as I point out in this post, this is not true: the results are overwhelmingly related to violence against men, as you would expect.

2) AVFM managing editor Dean Esmay writes a confusing editor’s note suggesting that before AVFM ran its article on the subject, the results from a Google query for“violence against men” were full of links to pages on “violence against women” but that somehow AVFM’s attention to the topic caused Google to modify its search algorithms so that searching for “violence against men” would return results related to “violence against men.” So even though their article appeared wrong, he claims, they were really right, and they had improved Google’s search returns to boot!

3) He also posts a screenshot, which he indicates was made before AVFM posted its article, and which purports to show search results for the phrase “violence against men,” and which shows numerous search results dealing with “violence against women.”

4) I demonstrate conclusively (in this post) that the screenshot is a blatant fraud, in two ways.

First, I show that the actual search phrase being used was “violence against” not “violence against men,” and that whoever made the screenshot simply typed the word “men” into the search box before making the screenshot in order to make it look like the search was for “violence against men.”

Second, by looking at the news results in the search, I show that it had been made AFTER the AVFM article ran, not before, thus completely undercutting Esmay’s explanation.

5) Esmay announces that he has “found” the evidence that he’d thought he “lost,”  that he will be writing an updated article on the subject with these newly found screenshots, and that “David Futrelle is caught out as a dishonest weasel once again.” He does not say how exactly I am supposed to have lied.

6) As I am banned from posting comments at AVFM, I take my evidence to the comments section of AVFM contributor Girl Writes What’s blog. Amazingly, one AVFM regular actually reads my post and concludes that I’m right. Even more amazingly, Elam shows up, also admits I’m right about something, and promises a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may investigation.

7) Well, so much for that.

And that’s how we got to the steaming pile of lies that Esmay deposited on AVFM yesterday. Let’s go through it paragraph by paragraph; there’s just so much to digest. Brace yourself for some very strange logic, and some very poor writing. And lies, lots of lies.

Esmay starts off by trying his hardest to deflect attention away from both his original mistake — running a post whose central claim is blatantly false — and his later coverup of this mistake through fraud.

His first attempt at misdirection? Mocking me for … pointing out how incompetent and dishonest he is, while half-assedly half-admitting that I sort of nailed him. He goes on about this for three long paragraphs before even getting to his “explanation” for his fraud. Feel free to skim; it’s all pretty much frantic hand-waving on his part.

My thanks to Dave Futrelle of Manboobz. In his increasing efforts to remain relevant, he’s published multiple stories on this one little article already. In a way it’s pretty cool; we need people to hold us to high standards, after all, and even dishonest people can help others to stay honest. Futrelle is holding us to standards as high as the mainstream media, which is pretty awesome, although we want to be held to even higher standards than that. So in that sense, he’s being useful: if we publish something we can’t back up, we need to admit it. Thank you, Dave.

I also want to thank Dave for tacitly admitting we’re as important as a mainstream news organ by giving this much attention to one small story–a small part of a much bigger story of internet censorship, one that I somehow think the Dave Futrelle of the 1990s would have been on our side of.

So I thank Dave Futrelle for helping me catch an error I should have caught in the first place. I also thank him for unwittingly helping expose just how lopsided the content on “violence against women” is versus “violence against men” when you look online, even though men are demonstrably more often the victim of violence than women are.

Finally, Esmay gets to the actual topic at hand. Sort of. (In what follows, I’m going to add some paragraph breaks to Esmay’s walls of text, but this is otherwise unedited.)

The fact is that I did witness the Google behavior I mentioned in Update 2. However, Jason emailed us a screen shot after publication (not before) that has been wrongly declared a forgery. It is not a forgery.

The screenshot he links to here is the same one posted earlier, which I showed conclusively was faked. (I’ve pasted it in again at the end of the post as well.)

It was made after this confusion began, to show us what Jason’s post-publication results looked like and to express Jason’s own confusion privately, to us.

Here Esmay concedes one point: the screenshot was made after the AVFM article ran.

That screenshot shows an artifact caused by Jason’s slow internet connection, his screen shot software, and his browser, which he was able to demonstrate to my satisfaction is in fact a glitch and is not reasonably declared a forgery.

Really? Really?! That’s so amazing I have to read it again:

That screenshot shows an artifact caused by Jason’s slow internet connection, his screen shot software, and his browser, which he was able to demonstrate to my satisfaction is in fact a glitch and is not reasonably declared a forgery.

This is the best you can come up with? It reminds me a bit of those pat explanations Tommy Lee Jones trotted out for the civilians in Men in Black:

All right, Beatrice, there was no alien. The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.

Remember, Esmay is trying to explain away the fact that the phrase “violence against men” appears in the search box in the screenshot, while the search results are clearly for “violence against.”

Any ubergeeks out there can correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m pretty sure there is no “glitch” in the world that would RANDOMLY ADD THE WORD “MEN” TO SEARCH BOXES IN SCREENSHOTS.

And I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing about a “slow internet connection” could possibly explain that either.

And Esmay knows that. He’s simply counting on his readers to never ever check what I actually wrote, and just to assume that I noticed some small glitch in the screenshot and declared it a forgery because of that.

You’ll notice that Esmay never once refers specifically to any of my charges, nor does he link to the posts in which I make them. He is relying on his readers to never wander from the AVFM walled garden to look at my posts.  And the fact is that most of them won’t.

That’s the entirely of his response to my charge of forgery: it was just a “glitch.”

Looking at the screenshot again, I see something that I missed earlier: the letters “Jas” off to the right at the top, which suggests that the file came from someone whose Google account starts with those letters — the most likely culprit being Jason Gregory. So perhaps the fraud originated with Gregory, and Esmay was initially taken in by it.

Of course, they two may have cooked it up together. Or Esmay may have photoshopped the “Jas” onto the screenshot. Or the word “men.”

At this point this doesn’t much matter: however it originated, Esmay has thrown himself fully into perpetuating the fraud.

I rushed when I first saw it to assume it was the pre-publication screen shot when it wasn’t and promised an update on that here.

Yeah, and you also called me a liar, in two separate places.

An editor new to the process here at AVfM rushed in behind me and linked that post-publication screen shot to my words saying “We witnessed this behavior” above, effectively putting words in my mouth. That is bumble #2 and #3 on our part.

I’m sorry. I literally laughed out loud when I read this patent bullshit. So it’s the fault of an (imaginary?) “new” editor, huh? “Rushing in?” The AVFM offices must be a busy, bustling place indeed! Oh, wait, you don’t have offices, do you?

Also, “bumble?” Those aren’t bumbles. This is a Bumble.

Anyway, there seems to be an awful lot of “rushing” going on at A Voice for Men. Evidently they are always on deadline at AVFM, and every split second counts, and there’s no time to check facts or spelling — or even, it seems, to come up with lies that sound even vaguely plausible.

Dave Futrelle has been on the internet long enough to know that search engine results on uncommon phrases (like “violence against men”) can change daily, and that a site as big as A Voice for Men will, in fact, alter search results on Google within hours.

Don’t flatter yourself, guys. And it’s not an uncommon phrase. At all. Searching for the phrase “violence against men”  in quotes brought up more than 2.5 million hits for me. (YMMV, but I’m guessing it’ll be a similarly huge number.) “Violence against marmosets who enjoy soup,” by contrast, is a rare phrase, and I can proudly say that my little blog has had considerable influence over the search results for that phrase. Sorry, I should say “search result.”

He continues on with the Google nonsense:

He also almost certainly knows that companies like Google have huge teams of people who work daily to test and improve results, thus causing search results on uncommon phrases like “violence against men” to change pretty quickly. As the old phrase goes, “the elephant squeezed mightly to give birth to the mouse.”

Is it just me or does that last bit sound really … dirty?

Anyway, Esmay then he tries once again to distract attention from his lies. Aspiring journalists, take note: This is how NOT to handle things when you fuck up.

It’s pathetic, really, to make this much out of this little. But Dave Futrelle has been given this opportunity because I personally failed to take and include a screen shot before publication, I rushed an update, and a green editor added a link she shouldn’t have post-production. It’s a mistake we have discussed among the editorial team and we will not repeat it.

So now the “green editor” is a woman. I should have known.

When in doubt, blame a woman!

It was probably TheWoolyBumblebee, right, using a time machine to do some editing after you fired her, right?

I may still go ahead and publish an article schooling Futrelle’s misguided readers on exactly how things like Google work, although at this point our screwup on this matter has resulted in so much work and so much pointless confusion it may not be worth it.

Yeah, you’re never going to write that article because you want everyone to forget about all this as soon as possible.

I stand by Jason Gregory, but I regret my error in not taking the screen shot before publication.

Well, it doesn’t appear that Jason Gregory — hey you got his name right, for once — stands by you, as he has rewritten the piece on his own blog in a very revealing way. More on this below.

We do not and will never have the screen shot Futrelle demands.

Aw, so when you wrote so definitively in your previous update  — and in your Monday news roundup — that you had “found” the screenshots, plural, and that I was a liar, that was … a lie? Or was it just you just blurting out something that you thought was true without checking? A really long, involved typo? Something a monkey typed on your computer when you weren’t in the room? A glitch caused by Jason’s slow internet connection? Swamp gas reflected the light from Venus?

It would be nice if he would retract the claim of forgery, but that’s up to him; I don’t believe it is one and have ample reason to believe otherwise. We do, however, withdraw this story by Jason because of the lack of an available screen shot to demonstrate the pre-publication search results. This is my screwup ultimately folks. Sorry about that.

Oh, you “withdraw” the story. No harm no foul, right guys!

In the world of journalism, that’s not how it works. In the world of journalism, people get fired over this sort of thing — and worse. Forging evidence is a step below plagiarism. It’s a career-ender.

Obviously, I don’t have definitive proof that Esmay himself forged the screencap — and Jason Gregory could well be the culprit. Or someone else.  But Esmay’s assorted explanations are literally unbelievable; even if you assume he’s the most gullible and incompetent person in the world, and he certainly shows evidence of both gullibility and incompetence, you have to admit that his ever-changing explanations are full of shit.

How many others at A Voice for Men are complicit in this fraud? Like, say, AVFM top banana Elam? For all we know, he may have instigated the whole thing in the first place. If not, and it was Esmay’s baby all along, then Elam is certainly culpable for allowing Esmay to be the one to write the “update” on his own misdeeds. (“I investigated the murder, boss, and I’m innocent!”)

One final thought from Dean:

I’d especially like to thank AVfM regular TallWheel for bringing all this to our attention and not letting us ignore it. –DE

Really, Dean? You didn’t, perhaps, notice that I was writing about you in stories with titles like “Worse than Wrong: A Voice for Men resorts to phony screenshot and outright lying to avoid admitting embarrassing error?” Dude, you MENTIONED ME IN YOUR EDITORS NOTE. And you called me a “liar.” Obviously you were aware of what I was writing.

I think you were forced to react when TallWheel and other AVFMers were forced to confront my evidence publicly in a setting that you and Paul didn’t directly control — that is, the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog.

Gosh, maybe you need to have a talk with her about letting people you don’t like post comments on her blog. Hard to run a cult properly if you don’t have the proper milieu control.

It’s truly comical to see AVFM double and triple down on this nonsensical idea that they were always right and that before their article ran, Google really did return endless “violence against women” search results when you searched for “violence against men.”

Because if you go over to the blog of Jason Gregory, the author of the post in question, you can see that, even if he might have been the original source of the forged screenshot, he’s not pretending that his blog post was right in the first place, and that A Voice for Men magically changed the search results so it appeared wrong. Indeed, he seems to have implicitly (if not explicitly) admitted his gigantic error by replacing the old piece with a rewritten one that makes a very different central claim.

It’s the blog post he should have written in the first place — one that shows that when you search for the phrase “violence against,” (not “violence against men“) it returns lots of results relating to “violence against women” and many fewer relating to “violence against men.” What that means, I don’t know, but at least that claim is true.

I believe that’s the post that he originally meant to write, but that for some reason — innocent or deceptive, I don’t know — he added the word “men” when he wrote the blog post, which made for a more dramatic claim, but one that was proven wrong as soon as anyone tried the search on their own. AVFM reposted his blog post, clearly without checking it, and everything since then has been an attempt to cover up their mistake.

A simple correction would have sufficed. But instead Dean Esmay has shown the world his true character, and so has A Voice for Men.

One little addendum. As I’ve noted in previous stories, Esmay has had some trouble remembering the name of AVFM’s own writer, Jason Gregory, calling him in some instances “Jason Thompson” and in other cases “Joshua Thompson.” Well, yesterday he went and tried to fix his errors — but didn’t quite catch them all.

Seems like Dean himself may be a little green, editing-wise.

Well, nothing to worry about, really, because after this nonsense, there’s no reputable publication in the world that would hire him.

NOTE: For more on A Voice for Men’s ongoing troubles with the truth, see these posts:

Why haven’t Men’s Rights Activists turned on Paul Elam for falsely accusing Arianna Pattek of civil rights violations?

JohntheOther: I totally didn’t lie about Rebecca Watson, Take Two

Reno calls a domestic violence hotline: The MRA Reality Distortion Field in action

A Voice for Men has 99 problems, and the word “bitch” is one

The screenshot at the heart of all this:

Not the bees!

The WoolyBumbleBattle continues.

A couple of weeks back, you may recall, the excitable antifeminist videoblogger who goes by the name of TheWoolyBumblebee got herself kicked out of the A Voice for Men clubhouse after annoying Paul Elam with her incessant (but actually pretty much justified) attacks on libertarians and Men Going Their Own Way.

Naturally, there has been much drama since then.

Elam, doing his best to affect a certain world-weariness about it all, put forth a video offering his take on the subject with the understated title “On Ideologues, Isms and Evangelical Atheists.”

TheWoolyBumblebee — real name Kristina Hansen — has made no attempts to hide her feelings. She’s started a new blog called Menticulture that seems to be devoted entirely to bashing A Voice for Men. And with her husband, she’s produced not one but seven videos lambasting AVFM, ranging in length from 38 seconds to an hour and twenty minutes. The long video, by the way, is a point-by-point response to Elam’s video; a number of the more recent videos are attacks on regular AVFM contributor Karen Straughan, aka Girl Writes What. Hansen’s husband has also done a couple of videos by himself as well.

I’ve actually listened to them all, for better or worse. They’re angry and rambling, and for the most part not worth the effort —  unless you just really love schadenfreude. While some of their criticisms of AVFM are on the mark, the two go off on weird pedantic tangents and seem rather too obsessed with Girl Writes What’s lack of academic credentials. (She was evidently a two-time college dropout.) Hansen’s husband also likes calling people faggots. Lovely.

I had at least hoped for some good inside dirt on AVFM’s main characters, but the Hansens have got very little to tell that isn’t obvious from the outside: John “The Other” Hembling is a liar? Tell me something I don’t know. Elam is a tin-pot tyrant who likes to get his way? Gosh, who could have possibly guessed that?

But I suppose it’s to be expected: these two agree with the irrational antifeminism that’s at the heart of AVFM, so it’s hardly surprising that their critiques don’t go far enough, and that they get bogged down in lots of irrelevant issues.

Still, in a recent post on her blog, Hansen makes her arguments against AVFM a bit more cogently than she does in any of the videos.

After assuring readers that her attacks on A Voice for Men aren’t driven by “vengeance, hurt feelings, or a desire to one-up anyone” — not sure I’m buying all this — she charges the principals at AVFM of letting their ideological predilections get in the way of providing real practical help to men.

I suggested several things we could have done to help men, such as applying for funding for men’s services through VAWA and other Gov’t agencies, and was told that they would never touch government money because … it is against their libertarian principles, and because that is ‘what feminists do’….

I admit feminists have done a lot of harm to men and boys, but they have also done a lot of good for women and it is THAT part which we need to look at and study in order to be able to adequately assist men in any real way. It is called working the system. If you want change, that is where you go to do it, and not by sitting on the sidelines waiting for the government to collapse.

But AVFM, she notes, seems much less interested in making things better for men than in keeping men in a permanent state of rage:

[Elam] keeps men in a state of anger, and hopelessness. He perpetuates the victim narrative and tries to keep you stuck in victim mode. And he is not the only one. The inflammatory rhetoric used by those at AVFM, like John, are carefully written to get you emotionally worked up. I know this to be the case because I was on several SKYPE calls with John when he wrote many of his articles. I know how he does it and why. It’s to keep you in a state of anger and despair. …

Anyone working in the helping professions worth their salt will tell you that the goal of their work is to help their clients free themselves of the need for their help. …  But what Paul, John, Karen, and others at AVFM do, is keep you in a state of constant anger, helplessness, and need. They do not want you to get better. And why would they? … The more you rely on them the more they profit.

I don’t agree with TheWoolyBumbleebee about much, but this is spot on.

She also has some very pointed things to say about AVFM’s attempts to blame the suicide of Earl Silverman, a Canadian activist for male victims of domestic violence, on feminism.

There are men out there at this very moment that are truly hurting and suffering. Let’s start showing them we really care by doing things that make a real difference in their lives. Enough of the useless sitting on the sidelines bitching about how evil women are, how the government needs to collapse, or how the only way to solve things is to opt out. This is why Earl Silverman died. John wants to blame feminism, but the fact is that the men that were close to Earl at the end knew that his despair was borne of the failure of the MRM to actually DO anything.

Again, she has a point. By its own accounts, A Voice for Men raises literally tens of thousands of dollars a year — a considerable portion of which, I imagine, must end up in the pockets of Elam, who seems to have no other visible means of financial support, and/or in the pockets of Hembling, who has recently been promoted to a paid staff position. After Silverman’s death, AVFM raised money to help start an Earl Silverman center — a project now ironically in the hands of Hansen herself. Why couldn’t AVFM have used some of its fundraising ability to help Silverman fund his domestic violence shelter back when he was alive?

In my next post I’ll look at Girl Writes What’s response to all this.