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.

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.

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.]

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.

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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.

Ce n’est pas un gâteau: archived tweet from Janet Bloomfield to a half-dozen prominent feminists.

So our old dear friend Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield — you know, the A Voice for Men PR gal best known for her habit of calling people “whores,” including the underage victims of the late, disgraced British “entertainer” Jimmy Savile —  has been suspended from Twitter, for reasons unknown.

Bloomfield, for her part, is suggesting that it might have to do with some cakes she was baking. No, really:

So it seems that my account on Twitter has been suspended. I find that odd since most of my most recent tweets have been about baking a wedding cake. Not exactly controversial. I suspect some sort of automatic response was triggered when a lot of people simultaneously reported me for abuse but I have no idea.

Naturally, Bloomfield’s comrades at A Voice for Men have spun this as “Judgy Bitch was censored for a cake!”

And in her most recent post, Bloomfield seems to have decided to go with this “explanation” as well.

Yeah, somehow I don’t think that was it.

Let me offer an alternate hypothesis: Bloomfield was suspended for sending threatening and harassing Tweets to assorted feminists on Twitter and/or for spamming Twitter with graphic images of a baby boy being circumcised.

Now, this is just a hypothesis, but I do have some evidence that seems to back it up.

While Bloomfield’s “JudgyBitch1” account on Twitter is suspended, as a helpful reader pointed out to me, you can still see some of the pictures she’s posted to Twitter in an archive over on Twicsy.com.

If you go there you’ll see a mixture of pics and broken pic icons. The pics that remain seem to be pics that she’s retweeted; the others are ones she tweeted directly, and most link back to her suspended account.

But there’s an interesting thing about these broken pic icons: if you click on them, some of them will actually load.

So what does a little bit of clicking reveal?

Well, in addition to a few pics of the cakes she’s been baking, we find pics featuring threatening language and imagery directed at feminists. Like the one I posted above.

We also find a graphic picture of a boy being circumcised, which she reposted several times, and which I imagine violates all sorts of Twitter rules.

Most of her pics, alas, won’t load. But somehow I suspect we’d find a few more like these in the bunch.

And if it’s not always clear what photos she posted, it is clear that she has her own little army of followers who are happy to spam feminists with these pics. Here’s a link to an old post of hers archived on Topsy showing various JudgyBitch fans all sending Jessica Valenti the same hostile message and the same (now deleted) pic. Somehow I suspect it wasn’t a picture of a cake.

Here are other harassing tweets sent by Bloomfield to Valenti, most of them retweeted by her fans:

• A sexually harassing reference to oral sex
• A misleading misquotation of Valenti, pasted onto an unflattering picture of her, that completely distorts the meaning of what she really wrote. As you may recall, Bloomfield has a history of fabricating quotes out of thin air and claiming they came from Valenti.
• More tweets directed at Valenti that offer up alleged quotations of hers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

These are just in the past ten days.

Going through these pics not only suggests that AVFMers are being dishonest in how they’re trying to spin Bloomfield’s Twitter suspension; it also reveals a lot about the workings of the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine, Twitter edition.

Consider this tweet I ran across, which tries to equate feminist writer Jessica Valenti’s “male tears” t-shirt with beheadings carried out by Islamic terrorists.

The original Tweeter, a reactionary antifeminist living in Canada, is clearly a reader of A Voice for Men and assorted alt-right racist websites. If you scroll down through his Twitter timeline, you’ll see that he retweets AVFMers like Paul Elam and Dan Perrins, as well as “dark enlightenment” Twitter accounts like the explicitly racist “hbd chick.” And as you can see, he included JudgyBitch1 in the list of recipients for his tweet.

The AVFMers also pay attention to him; if you look at the archive of this tweet on Topsy, you can see that Elam retweeted his graphic comparison of Valenti to a terrorist, as did AVFM fans Markis One and Cora Newbold. One of his other retweeters is a big fan of Roosh and a regular retweeter of assorted other “dark enlightenment” assholes.

[EDIT: AndrewV691 is perhaps better known, at least in Skeptic circles, as AndrewV69, a prolific contributor to the SlymePit, an online forum largely devoted to attacking feminist skeptics on FreeThoughtBlogs and elsewhere, where he has offered his considered opinion on topics such as "Ophelia Benson is a complete fuckwit!" Needless to say, his Twitter avatar is not actually a picture of him; it's of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.]

Now, MRAs like to pretend that they have no connection with the alt-right – that is, racist – assholes who populate much of the “manosphere.” In reality, MRAs and “manosphereians” intermix freely, and there are more than a few who are both MRAs and racist right-wingers.

It’s not just that these people share remarkably similar ideologies, similar obsessions, similar buzzwords, and similar misogynistic attitudes towards women. They also work together in a de facto alliance to harass feminists online.

In other words, MRAs and manospherians are both heavily implicated in what I call the Greater Internet Harasssment Machine. Indeed, as we can see from the above, notable MRA figures like Elam and Bloomfield are themselves part of the Harassment Machine.

Whatever it was that got JudgyBitch1’s Twitter account suspended almost certainly had nothing to do with cake.

Anita Sarkeesian, still standing

On Monday, Anita Sarkeesian posted the latest installment of her Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games series on YouTube, a half-hour examination of the ways in which video game makers use sexualized violence against women as a cheap way to spice up their narratives and appeal to straight male gamers.

Her tone was measured, her analysis clear and logical and supported by dozens of clips from a wide assortment of games.

Late Tuesday night, this happened:

That’s right: Sarkeesian was forced to leave her home due to violent threats against her and her family … because she made a YouTube video analyzing violence against women in video games.

She then posted some of the threats she had gotten from a Twitter account set up specifically to harass and threaten her and her family. [TRIGGER WARNING for graphic rape and death threats.]

For a larger version of the screenshot, see here.

Sarkeesian has also been tweeting some of the other threats she gets on a daily basis from anonymous gamers who are incensed that a woman has anything critical to say about their precious video games.

“Go ahead, screen capture this and tweet it you piece of shit” ummm… ok. I’m not afraid of strawman "rebuttals". http://t.co/8B74uYJOOU—
Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) August 27, 2014

You’ll notice that several of these threatening comments mention videos by Thunderf00t, a “skeptic” videoblogger best known, at least in the corner of the internet I write about, for a series of videos in which he viciously attacks some of the women who’ve drawn the most internet hate from angry misogynists – from skeptics like Rebecca Watson and Melody Hensley to video game maker Zoe Quinn and video game critic Sarkeesian.

Thunderf00t’s attacks have won him kudos from assorted Men’s Rights activists, from the regulars on the Men’s Rights subreddit to A Voice for Men “operations manager” Dean Esmay, who has praised his videos and urged other MRAs to subscribe to them.

In other words, the harassment of feminist women on the internet is directly linked to antifeminist propagandists like Thunderf00t – and his MRA fans and enablers.

The constant, vicious, personal attacks on Sarkeesian you see not only in video game circles but from Men’s Rights Activists – on Reddit, on A Voice for Men, on YouTube, and so on – have helped to create a hostile environment in which critiques of sexism in games result in real-world death and rape threats against women. This has an undeniably chilling effect on the free speech of women. That in fact is the intent of the harassers.

Margaret Atwood once famously observed that

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

I think we need an internet corollary to Atwood’s observation:

Men posting on the internet are afraid that women will block them. Women are afraid that men will treat them like Anita Sarkeesian.

Thing is, Sarkeesian keeps moving forward, diligently researching and putting forth the videos she promised she would. All the huffing and puffing of her critics and attackers hasn’t shut her up. Each new video she puts out is a testament to her courage and her perseverance. Each new video is a blow against those who would shut women up. Each new video helps to inspire others who’ve gotten similar threats to continue speaking up and speaking out.

Supporting Sarkeesian helps to support every woman who wants to be able to speak out online without fear of violent threats. There’s no better proof of this than how angry the biggest misogynistic bullies get whenever feminists and other people of good conscience rally around her. The bullies are still angry about the money she raised via kickstarter, money that has enabled her to bring a new professionalism to her videos.

Hell, AVFM Bully-in-chief Paul Elam is still so angry about this that he’s already accusing her of “damseling for dollars,” collecting “gash-cash” because of these latest Twitter threats. Indeed, in a post that’s a lot more revealing than he intends it to be, he complains bitterly that she’s getting bigger donations than he is:

I am jealous. I have had half the major media in a couple of countries disingenuously and maliciously demonize me. Even after forcing some retractions I bet I got more threats than Sarkeesian.

My reward? Jack shit.

Maybe it was because I didn’t swoon hard enough or treat the threats like they were tickets to Disneyworld.

Oh, don’t be modest, Paul. You take in tens of thousands every year by pretending to be some sort of human rights generalissimo. You raked in $35,000 this summer by trumpeting “threats” that you were saying privately were phony.

While Elam “damsels” and fumes, Sarkeesian simply goes about doing the job she set out to do. Each video she puts out is yet another “fuck you” to her haters, and they know it.

U mad bros?

Here’s the video that caused all the stir. It’s well worth watching. CONTENT WARNING: Graphic violence against women.

Kumar’s Twitter account, with roughly 1600 followers including numerous well-known names in the MRM, looks to be the official account for the Men’s Rights Movement group on Facebook, a public group that boasts some 14,000 members, among them AVFM’s Paul Elam and British MRA/child prostitution apologist Tom Martin.

The link in his tweet is to a story that details the charges against War Machine, as well as his hyperbolic MRA-eqsue views, so there’s no question that Kumar knows just who he’s endorsing here.

The “hero” the Men’s Rights movement deserves?

If the Men’s Rights movement is looking for a celebrity endorser, I think I’ve found just the guy for them: the mixed martial arts fighter, and erstwhile porn actor, War Machine, currently sitting in jail on charges of brutally beating and attempting to kill his ex-girlfriend, porn star Christy Mack.

Men’s Rights activists should be able to look past these criminal charges; after all, as they remind us all the time, women are forever falsely accusing innocent men of all sorts of terrible things.

And in so many ways War Machine is perfect for them. An MMA fighter, he’s already only one letter away from being an MRA. A misogynistic asshole with rage issues, he’ll have no trouble fitting in with the Men’s Rights crowd. And, especialy important for a movement that has a lot of trouble getting any good PR, he’s a bit more comfortable on camera than the Paul Elams and Dean Esmays of the world, with experience on television  (on the reality show The Ultimate Fighter: Team Hughes vs. Team Serra), and in seven films (albeit pornographic ones).

Best of all: he’ll need no ideological education from what A Voice for Men likes to call Fuck Shit Up University. War Machine – real name Jonathan Koppenhaver – is already an outspoken proponent of many of the Men’s Rights Movement’s core beliefs.

Consider these selections from a little Men’s Rights manifesto War Machine wrote a few years ago during a previous stint behind bars, serving time for felony assault after two bloody bar fights. His rant, which a friend posted to the internet, would fit right in with the sort of stuff we’ve seen regularly posted on the Men’s Rights subreddit, or The Spearhead, or A Voice for Men. I’ve bolded some of the Men’s Rightsiest bits:

The oppression of MEN is worse than oppression of Jews in Nazi germany, worse than the slavery of Blacks in early America…

There has always been the oppressor and always the oppressed. Before, it was blatant … NOW the oppressor has learned to disguise his evil. You can see man, but you can not see MEN. How easy it is to oppress a minority that is invisible to the eye! How genius of the oppressor! And what a better target too! …

Men challenge injustice from Government, MEN fight for their Constitutional rights, that are slowly being taken away every year. …

And they don’t just oppress us by making more laws and taking away more freedom, they are far more clever than that! Ask yourself what your REAL dream was?? If you gave up on this dream, why? Because of the brainwashing of the Government, that’s why! They taught you to “play it safe.” They told us a responsible man has ONE wife, a house, good credit, good job, and kids. How are you supposed to chase your dreams while maintaining all of that!?

Men are supposed to take risks and be aggressive! What accomplishments have ever come of a man scared to risk it all!? None!? Where would the world be? Still ‘flat!’ Still ‘Earth at the center of the universe!’

If any of you have your Men’s Rights Bingo cards out, I’m guessing you might already be close to scoring a bingo. We’ve got a comparison to slavery that could have come straight from the pages of A Voice for Men, a marriage-is-death-to-male-dreams rant that could have been borrowed from any MGTOW forum, and an evo-psych-esque argument that men are the true risk-takers and the world’s real innovators.

And I don’t think War Machine would have much trouble with Paul Elam’s “Bash a Violent Bitch Month,” either.

[I]t’s Christmas day and I’m laying in my bunk wondering “Why in the hell do American men get married!?” … If your wife is being a bitch you can’t slap her, if your wife is yelling at you, God forbid you yell back … Next thing you know it will be illegal to fuck your wife! LMAO! Maybe then, MEN in this country will get the fucking hint and MOVE! This country forces you to be a bitch!

In another online posting, War Machine touched on another Men’s Rights hobbyhorse, the notion that the justice system is stacked against men:

[L]ook at the prisons, they are FULL of MEN, not women. Are men “evil” and women not? Or do the laws target and attempt to restrict NATURAL MEN’S BEHAVIOR? How many of the HEROES in American history would avoid prison if they lived today? Davey Crockett? Thomas Jefferson? David Bowie? General Grant & General Lee? Shit, George Washington. … Laws target MEN and men’s behavior. Women want to bitch and cry about their rights and equality… LMAO! MEN are the ones locked away like animals, while women run free!

Someone might have to explain to War Machine that David Bowie is not actually a famous American HERO but a famously androgynous British musician who once recorded an album called “Heroes.” (Mr. Machine may be thinking of James Bowie, a well-known 19th century American frontiersman and slave trader, and the guy the Bowie Knife is named after.)

But other than that, he seems ready to go.

There is, of course, that whole attempted murder charge to deal with.

It’s true the Men’s Rights Movement has had few problems in the past rallying behind men with histories of violence. But War Machine might be a harder sell as a Men’s Rights hero. His alleged attack on Mack left her with a cracked rib, a ruptured liver, numerous broken bones, missing teeth and her eyes swollen shut.  (See here for photos of her injuries; obviously this link is NSFW and could be triggering.)

While Mr. Machine denies attacking Mack, he joked to a TV host last year that if she were to leave him “I would just kill her” and get a tattoo saying “Rest In Peace” above the tattoo of her name he has on his neck.

And several hours after allegedly trying to murder her, War Machine tweeted this lovely message about his ex:

War Machine does seem to be at a low point in his life. Even aside from the charges he faces, and the time he seems likely to serve, his career in porn is almost certainly over. The “Alpha Male” clothing line he helped start wants nothing to do with him. Nobody but the prison system seems to want this guy.

In other words: Men’s Rights activists, this is your chance! War Machine may not be the, er, hero you want. But he’s certainly the hero you deserve.

Goodnight, Paul! You can buy your own Misogyny Bunch pillow for only $19.19 at A Voice for Men’s Red Pill store.

Let me take a moment to ignore my regular readers and speak directly to the Men’s Rights Activists who might be reading this blog. I suspect there are a few.

What I would like to talk to you about it ironic humor. Because, here’s the thing, sometimes people say things they don’t actually believe in order to make a little fun at the way other people see them.

When a feminist writer posts a picture of herself wearing a shirt that says “I bathe in male tears,” noting that the picture is directed at the haters who leave nasty comments on everything she writes, she is not actually announcing that she, literally or metaphorically, bathes in male tears. Nor is she saying anything about the vast, overwhelming majority of men. She is saying “fuck you, I’m on vacation” to a small subset of men. That is, those who leave nasty comments on everything she writes. You know, like she explicitly stated she was doing.

I point out what seems to me patently obvious because so many men in the so-called Men’s Rights movement continue to pretend that somehow Jessica Valenti has launched a war against all the good and honest men of the world by wearing a t-shirt that she knew might annoy a teensy tiny fraction of the douchiest of men. And when people point out that she was making an ironic joke, these dudes react as though they’ve never heard of ironic humor.

This isn’t the first time MRAs seem to have had trouble getting ironic humor. In 2012, A Voice for Men launched a campaign of defamation against a college student inspired in large part by a joke she made on Twitter declaring that her political position was “kill all men hail satan.”  AVFM’s Paul Elam presented this as proof that the young woman “hate[s] men [and] want[s] them dead or silenced or marginalized or ignored.” Not as the joke it obviously was.

But the thing is, MRAs do know what ironic humor is. Because they indulge in it themselves, all the time.

Over on AVFM, for example, the regulars jokingly refer to themselves as “kitten eaters,” presumably in an attempt to mock what they think people like me think of them.

Now, as you all presumably have figured out, I happen to be a giant fan of cats young and old, regardless of their beliefs. But I don’t for a second think that the assholes at A Voice for Men, despite being some of the worst human beings I’ve ever encountered, actually eat kittens.

I recognize that they are making a joke, albeit a poor one. Because, here’s the thing: I live in the real world, and I can distinguish between things meant seriously and things meant as a joke.

And I think most of those who continue to rail against Valenti and her eeeeevil t-shirt can tell the difference, too. They just choose not to, because they’re not looking for a reason to attack Valenti. They’re looking for an excuse.

Now, is it possible that things meant as ironic jokes can sometimes contain a kernel of truth? Well, yes, but there is no evidence that this is the case with Valenti. There’s no evidence at all that she hates men. None. Zero. Sure, she admits to being less than fond of a few men who are assholes, but that’s because they’re assholes, not because they’re men.

Indeed, in one recent column, she wrote this:

I have the most amazing men in my life. My father, who bought me chemistry sets and robots for every tea set or doll. My husband, an incredible feminist who is an equal partner in parenting and the home. My male friends, who believe that gender justice is important and worth fighting for. I don’t have a hard time finding these amazing men because – shockingly – most men are pretty cool guys.

In another recent column, she stood up for male victim of sexual blackmail online, reminding her readers that “it’s still revenge porn when the victim is a man and the picture is of his penis.”

I know, you can just SMELL THE HATRED there.

But there are some people, I will admit, who don’t do quite so well with their attempts at ironic humor. Ironically, the first people who come to mind are amongst those who profess to be the most shocked, shocked by Valenti’s t-shirt. I speak, of course, of the Misogyny Bunch over at A Voice for Men.

That picture at the top of this post? I didn’t photoshop it. Nor did I come up with that little nickname. They did. Indeed, on their online store, AVFM sells not only pillows but t-shirts, mugs, tote bags and even playing cards emblazoned with the catchphrase. No, really:

Yes, that’s right, the guys (and gals) who are railing against Valenti’s allegedly misandrous t-shirt sell not only t-shirts but also playing cards declaring themselves misogynists.

This shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, given that the head of this little bunch, Paul Elam, posted on YouTube for years as The Happy Misogynist; he posts under his own name now, but TheHappyMisogynist is still part of the URL.

Oh, but it’s an ironic joke! They’re not really misogynists!

Well, except that they kinda are. Well, more than kinda. Unlike in the case of Valenti, there is ample evidence of real, honest-to-goodness hatred coming from this bunch. Ironically, the shirts they intend as ironic jokes aren’t ironic at all.

Proof? Look at my archives. (Well, skip those posts at the top about commemorative plates and coins.) Look at this collection of quotes from Elam – or maybe just the story he published, or the posts he’s written, offering justifications for men to beat their partners. Go to A Voice for Men and type in your favorite anti-woman slur and see just how many articles have featured those slurs, almost always in highly unironic ways. Oh, ok, I’ll do it for you: Bitch, Slut, Slattern, Whore, C*nt. My favorite one in that last group starts off memorably:

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

Needless to say, there is no asterisk in the original.

While Valenti describes “most men” as “pretty cool guys,” Elam once suggested that

feminism, consumer products, psychology, media, advertising, politics and social custom [have] all merged into one Great Big Bitch Machine … [T]he modern female psyche is nothing more than a product of that machine … .

Last Father’s Day, Valenti wrote proudly about her feminist father. One recent Mothers Day, Elam suggested that mothers should

Place a bunch of daffodils at a dumpster near you, perhaps one in which one of you, or one of your kind, has tossed an unwanted baby, leaving it there to slowly die alone in a pile of trash.

Perhaps you could lay a single rose at the base of a bridge that has been used by a mother to throw her baby into an icy river. Perhaps you can lay it there with hands that have beaten or shaken a baby to death.

You get the idea.

There’s nothing ironic, or even particularly happy, about this man’s “happy misogyny.”

Irony, you’re doing it wrong.

Should these books be required reading for MRAs?

Attention tiny ladies! Paul Elam wants you to know that if you attack him, he will totally punch you right back. And not in a satirical way, either. With his actual, non-satirical fists.

A Voice for Men’s maximum leader has long insisted that his notorious “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post was nothing more than misunderstood “satire.” That is, when he argued that men who are abused by women would be totally justified if they “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,” this was somehow a “Juvenalian” satire of some sort. There’s a famous quote from The Princess Bride that might be appropriate here.

Well, now Mr. Elam has announced to the world that every month is a potential “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” for him. Even if the “Violent Bitch” in question is less than half his size. In a post that he insists is super serious, he writes:

I want to offer a few words on this subject, and this time not in satire. I want to convey as honestly as possible, how I feel on the subject of violence between the sexes, from one man’s point of view.

I am 6’8” tall and 285 pounds. If a woman five feet tall and 110 pounds soaking wet hits me, I am going to hit her back.

Now, Elam does stop short of saying he would “beat the living shit” out of this hypothetical tiny woman, but, you know, in the heat of battle with someone less than half his size, he suggests that he might not be able to control his non-satirical fists:

I would do my best to return the violence proportionally, to just use enough force to stop the attack, but I can make no guarantees. Depending on the suddenness of the attack, the level of fear or threat I might feel, the impulse to self-defend in measured amounts is difficult, if not impossible to predict with any accuracy.

So, if there are any tiny ladies out there who might be considering jumping in a pool and then punching Paul Elam, I would suggest you not do that. Of course, I would suggest you not do that even if he weren’t going to hit back, because hitting people is generally a very bad thing.

Don’t worry, dudes – tiny or otherwise – Elam would totally punch you too!

It is the same reaction I would have to a man. No more and no less. The only way to prevent this and the consequences that may result is for people to keep their hands off me.

Presumably this would also apply to bears, giant squids, killer robots and anyone or anything else that tried to put its hands or paws or tentacles on him.

Now, if someone less than half my size were to attack me, and the situation weren’t life-threatening, I might, you know, back off and call the police instead. But apparently, this isn’t an option for men, because we’re all slaves, or something:

Most people who frequent this site know that men who call for help from police when being assaulted by female intimate partners are likely to be arrested for their troubles. … [T]here are prosecutors that will happily give the victim a criminal record and make them pay dearly for having been attacked.

This idea is completely insane on its face. Not only that, it is the closest thing we have today to the mentality of slave owners who could flog their slaves because they were property.

Never mind that women, who make up the vast majority of the victims of severe domestic violence, make up 20% of those arrested for DV. Never mind that even where there are mandatory arrest laws in effect, police still need probable or reasonable cause to show that domestic violence occurred – like physical evidence of injuries – before arresting a suspect. Never mind that even in states with “dual arrrest” policies, only about half of all domestic violence calls result in any arrests.

And never mind that if you use disproportionate force against someone less than half your size – as Elam suggests he very well might do – you deserve to go to jail, and for more than a night. “Beating the living shit” out of someone much smaller than you isn’t actually self-defense at all. It’s beating the living shit out of someone much smaller than you.

Now, Elam isn’t the only Men’s Rights Activist who seems to spend a lot of time imagining scenarios in which it would be ok for them to hit women. It’s a subject that comes up on the Men’s Rights subreddit all the time; the misogynistic douchebags who populate Reddit’s Videos subreddit are if anything even worse. And don’t ever do a Google image search for “equal rights equal lefts” unless you want to be really depressed.

The Men’s Rights movement: bravely fighting for the right of men to punch women half their size.