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A Voice for Men’s Threatener-in-Chief Paul Elam demands that feminists pay security costs for his group’s conference
Paul Elam, Man of Peace
Well, you have to admit, he’s got chutzpah.
You may have heard that A Voice for Men is sponsoring what it calls the First International Conference on Men’s Issues later this month in Detroit, featuring such notable celebrity speakers as “internationally recognized writer, lecturer and videographer” Karen “Girl Writes What” Straughan, “former mental health professional” Paul “Boy Yells A Lot” Elam, Warren “Boys Aren’t Hurt By Incest a Lot” Farrell, and, well, a collection of other equally exciting names.
But there have been some doubts about it happening from the start. It took some time for the AVFMers to sell enough tickets to enable them to cover the costs of the event.
And now it the costs of the event are going up further: according to a letter that Elam has posted to his site, the hotel that will be hosting the conference has gotten “numerous calls and threats” of a violent nature because of the conference, and is demanding that AVFM cover the costs of additional security at the event.
So Elam has decided that feminists should pay some of these costs, in order to prove they’re “not like that.”
Is The Mankind Initiative’s #ViolenceIsViolence video a fraud?
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The ManKind Initiative, a UK organization devoted to fighting domestic violence against men, recently put out a video that’s been getting a lot of attention in the media and online, racking up more than six million views on YouTube in a little over a week.
The brief video, titled #ViolenceIsViolence, purports to depict the radically different reactions of bystanders to staged incidents of domestic violence between a couple in a London plaza. When the man was the aggressor, shoving the woman and grabbing her face, bystanders intervened and threatened to call the police. When the woman was the aggressor, the video shows bystanders laughing, and no one does a thing.
The video has been praised by assorted Men’s Rights Activists, naturally enough, but it has also gotten uncritical attention in some prominent media outlets as well, from Marie Claire to the Huffington Post.
There’s just one problem: The video may be a fraud, using deceptive editing to distort incidents that may well have played out quite differently in real life.
Today in Imaginary Feminism: The Slap Circle of Misandry
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Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the neverending struggle against imaginary feminists continues apace. Today, one brand-new Redditor, a self-described former feminist, won himself several dozen upvotes from the regulars by bringing them a literally unbelievable tale of his adventures with a coven of slap-happy feminists.
I stopped calling myself a feminist a few years ago when I went to a meeting and was told “men are inly allowed in this safe space if they participate in a slap circle.”
The idea was that it would be harder for me to intimidate with my six foot stature if all the women had a chance to slap me in the face. I left.
Another guy actually did it.
It’s all true. I WAS THAT GUY.
BUT WHO WAS PHONE?
Actually, no. If this dude’s story is true, I will literally eat my cats.
While most of the Men’s Rightsers commenting in the thread seem to have swallowed this story whole, “slap circles” aren’t actually a thing in feminism.
They are a thing, though, amongst bored and/or drunk young men (and sometimes women) around the world, as countless videos on YouTube can attest.
As as site called Hungry Teen explains, a “Slap Circle” is
A great way to bond with friends, release aggression and stimulate the face. The Slap Circle is a game made for the more hardcore, daring person and can be used as a test for finding the manliest of the group. Although adopting female fighting techniques, the slap circle appeals far more to men. Nothing is required for this game, other than a hand, a face and a set of balls.
All you do, is stand in a circle and slap the person to your right in the face, while waiting for a slap from the person on your left. If you’ve had enough, you step out of the circle and the last two standing fight it out for the winner.
I eagerly await stories in the Men’s Rights subreddit detailing Andrea Dworkin’s demand that all men and boys be forced to take the Cinnamon Challenge and all those insidious mandatory nut shot seminars being forced upon all college students unfortunate enough to be born with a pair of balls.
Thanks to Cloudiah for the heads up, and the good people of the AgainstMensRights subreddit for the Hungry Teen quote.
Men’s Rights Activists respond to the Elliot Rodger murders with a hearty “Nothing to see here! Move along!”
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If anyone was hoping – against their better judgement – that Men’s Rights activists would be inspired by the tragedy in Isla Vista to reconsider any of their beliefs, or even to reflect for a moment on the many striking similarities between passages in Elliot Rodger’s book-length manifesto and comments posted every day by MRAs and others in the manosphere, well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you should not keep that hope alive.
It’s not that they’re not talking about the tragedy. A look through the top 100 posts in the Men’s Rights subreddit, the largest Men’s Rights forum online, reveals that roughly a third of them, including the top stickied post, relate in some way to Elliot Rodger’s rampage and the discussions that have come up online and in the media in its aftermath.
But the message of virtually all of these posts is: “Nothing to see here! Move along!” There are numerous posts expressing outrage that anyone would see any connection between Rodger’s toxic misogyny to the Men’s Rights movement; there are others mocking and attacking the #YesAllWomen hashtag; there’s even one suggesting that Rodger, who wrote about how he longed to watch all the women of the world starve to death in concentration camps, wasn’t actually a misogynist at all.
Take a look. One post, with more than 500 upvotes, complains:
Program note: I’ll be on NPR at 11 AM (Eastern) today, talking about Elliot Rodger and the new misogyny [UPDATE: Archived audio is up!]
Just wanted to let you all know that I will be on NPR today, as part of a special segment on Misogyny And Murder: Unpacking A Killing In California on the show On Point With Tom Ashbrook. For more details and a link to listen to the show online, see here.
I will probably be on in the middle of the show, from about 11:20-11:40.
I’ll put up a link to the archived show when it’s over.
UPDATE: The archived audio is now up, at the same link. And yeah, I was on in the middle. But you should listen to the whole show; Soraya Chemaly in particular is great.
Heartiste takes on an “egotistic, attention starved, solipsistic, passive aggressive, perpetually aggrieved … manlet” who somehow isn’t him.
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.)
Thanks! (And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.) Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
Well, the great minds of the manosphere have been going into overdrive trying to explain away the fact that a man who had a lot in common with them, ideology-wise, murdered six innocent people on Friday as part of a “Day of Retribution” that he had hoped would involve a lot more dead bodies, particularly of the blonde, female variety.
We had noted cultural commenter JudgyBitch (Janet Bloomfield) looking at Elliot Rodger, a man who wrote a 140-page manifesto detailing his hatred of women and girls, a manifesto that contained the following paragraph:
Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy. Women are vicious, evil, barbaric animals, and they need to be treated as such.
.. and which ended with a fantasy of putting all the women in the world in concentration camps and starving them to death, while Rodger took a position in a giant tower built just for him “where I can oversee the entire concentration camp and gleefully watch them all die,” and suggesting that Rodger wasn’t actually a misogynist, because he wasn’t able to get into the sorority and murder all the “blonde sluts” he had hoped to murder and so ended up killing more men than women.
Dr. Helen of PJ Media tries to blame feminists for Elliot Rodger’s rampage. So why did she once glorify an MRA much like Rodger?
Memorial in Santa Barbara
Leave it to Dr. Helen – psychologist, right-wing blogger, friend of A Voice for Men – to come up with what has got to be the most transparent attempt to distract public attention from the obvious parallels between the misogyny of spree killer Elliot Rodgers and the misogyny of the Men’s Rights movement she supports.
In a blog post on PJ Media, she suggests half-seriously that “If Pick-Up Artists Are Guilty,[of inspiring Elliot Rodger] Then So Are the Feminists.”
The good Doctor starts by accusing Slate’s Amanda Hess of blaming pickup artists for Elliot’s rampage. Her proof? Several passages from Hess in which Hess makes very clear that she is not blaming PUAs – or the anti-PUAs at PUAhate — for the deaths in Santa Barbara, or even for Rodger’s misogyny.
For New Readers: An Intro to the Men’s Rights Movement and the New Misogyny
MRAs, always complaining about something.
If you’re one of the new readers who’ve come to this blog in recent days, and you’d like to get up to speed in a hurry on the Men’s Rights movement and all the other sorts of misogynists we discuss on this blog, here are some posts that you may find interesting and useful.
The Mammoth FAQ What I’m trying to do with the blog, as well as an explanation of the name.
White Hot Rage: A piece I did for The American Prospect reviewing Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men and offering a critical overview of the Men’s Rights Movement.
Paul Elam of A Voice for Men: In His Own Words: Some truly reprehensible quotes from the most influential MRA online
Warren Farrell’s notorious comments on date rape: Not any more defensible in context than out of it A closer look at some infamous comments by Warren Farrell, author of The Myth of Male Power and the ideological grandfather of the Men’s Rights Movement
What Men’s Rights guru Warren Farrell actually said about the allegedly positive aspects of incest. A look at an exceedingly disturbing interview Farrell gave about his incest research in the 1970s.
Warren Farrell: Men Are Oppressed by Women’s Butts He actually seems to believe this.
Tell Her That Her Soul Is Dog-Sh*t: Dating advice from A Voice for Men
The Spearhead on the Slutwalks, Again Highlights — that is, lowlights — from a discussion of Slutwalks on the popular reactionary MRA site The Spearhead.
Women! Why must you assault men with your evil sexy outfits?
Attention-seeking manosphere douchebag offers how-to guide for abusive boyfriends
Reno calls a domestic violence hotline: The MRA Reality Distortion Field in action A very revealing example of MRA “activism.”
These are just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. There are roughly 1800 more posts. Try clicking on the categories at the end of each post! Type random anti-woman slurs into the search box to see what comes up! Examples of misogyny amongst MRAs, PUAs, and the various other denizens of the manosphere are so common I could probably put up 20 posts a day without running out of material.
Why Elliot Rodger’s misogyny matters
A chart posted by Elliot Rodger, giving his chilling spin on a manosphere meme depicting supposed female “hypergamy”
When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime.
But when a man filled to overflowing with hatred of women acts upon this hatred and launches a killing spree targeting women, many people find it hard to accept that his violence has anything to do with his misogyny. They’re quick to blame it on practically anything else they can think of – guns, video games, mental illness – though none of these things in themselves would explain why a killer would target women.
In the case of Elliot Rodger, who set out on Friday night aiming, as he put it in a chilling video, to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut” in a popular sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, some Men’s Rights activists and other manospherians are doing their best to convince the world that misogyny had nothing to do with it.
“The battle against feminism is most definitely a white rights issue,” Reddit douchebag explains.
White men: Hot local girls are waiting for you now!
Here’s a horrible comment from Reddit’s always horrible White Rights subreddit that reveals some of the ways that the central ideas and obsessions of the manosphere are oozing their way into the thinking, such as it is, of the racist right. Birds of a feather flock together, and I guess the same is true of hateful shitheads.
What’s interesting to me is how easily Mr. Saturnine83 here is able to take the traditional racist paranoia about white women not popping out enough white babies to keep the white race going and make the whole “problem” about stuck-up ladies who won’t date him decent white men. For those filling out bingo cards, note the references to”disposible” men and “involuntary celibacy.”
Oh, we have no doubt you could go on and on endlessly. Guys like you always can.
If you’re interested in exploring further connections between “Men’s Rights” and “White Rights,” check out the MRMorWhiteRights subreddit, which tracks this stuff in an entertaining way, and which is where I found the link to Saturnine83’s little screed.
