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CDC: MRA claims that “40% of rapists are women” are based on bad math and misuse of our data
Feminists often complain, with considerable justification, that Men’s Rights Activists try to turn every conversation about women’s issues into a game of “what about the men?” You’re talking about female rape victims — well, what about the male rape victims?
The trouble with this strategy, from the point of view of the Men’s Rights Activists anyway, is that this little “gotcha” is much less of a “gotcha” then they’d like it to be.
In the case of rape, for example, feminists are well aware that men are raped as well: the “Don’t Be That Guy” ad campaign, which sent so many MRAs into hysterics, focused on male victims as well as female ones. The emergency room rape advocate organization that a friend of mine volunteers for provides advocacy for victims regardless of gender.
So many MRAs have started playing another game: trying to twist the conversation around in order to cast women as the villains. Rape is a bit tough for them here, since the overwhelming majority of rapists are male. So MRAs talk about the alleged epidemic of female false accusers instead. Or they change the topic entirely and make dead baby jokes (see my post yesterday).
Recently, MRAs have tried a new strategy, seizing on data from The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, a massive study conducted in 2010 under the aegis of the Centers for Disease Control, to claim that “40% of rapists are women.”
At A Voice for Men, dead baby jokes are a form of “men’s human rights activism.”
Men’s Rights “humor” at its finest.
The self-described ‘Men’s Human Rights Activists” at A Voice for Men have shown time and time again that they have approximately zero interest in actually promoting human rights, but would rather devote their time (and the more than $100,000 the site collects in donations annually) to attacking feminists and women in general.
The latest bit of evidence? The “meme” above, designed not to actually raise awareness of child abandonment but as a sort of “gotcha” aimed at one of their favorite targets, the “Don’t Be That Guy” anti-rape campaign that has been credited with significantly bringing down the incidence of rape in at least one major Canadian city.
AVFM’s Paul Elam introduces the “meme” with this little bit of vitriol:
Men’s Rights Redditor: When the feminist utopia comes, male feminists “will possibly [be] used for breeding and then fed to sharks.”
At least let me be eaten by one of these.
Today I learned something from the Men’s Rights subreddit that’s, honestly, a little disturbing. In a topic with the title David Futrelle seriously needs help, I found the following exchange:
![EvilPundit 7 points 2 days ago* (10|3) Like Hugo Schwyzer, Futrelle is exploiting his position as the feminists' "trusty". He's a man who can be counted on to dish up dirt against other men, so he gets quoted by feminist media, invited to parties with the right people, and so on. He probably thinks they're his friends, but wait until he steps just one millimetre out of line ... permalink source save give gold hide child comments [–]Alisdair_ 0 points 2 days ago (8|8) I think it foreshadows what will happen if feminists get their way with the human race. When feminist utopia comes and men are living in slums outside of the city walls the men who just pillage and slaughter other men will be lauded and taken in to be treated very warmly, possibly used for breeding and then fed to sharks. Some even outright say these things, but you see most of their actions foreshadow the same kinds of wishes.](http://manboobz.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/partiesbreedingsharks.png?w=604)
Ulp! I just signed up for the parties and the breeding. I didn’t know about the sharks.
Elsewhere in the thread, Alisdair writes of me:
I get the feeling that this is just one of those guys, frequently held in high esteem with the feminists, who basically want every man out there cuckolded. With the alpha cock and all of that.
He’s pretty much nailed it. Here’s my to-do list for today.
- Write blog post
- Candy Crush (9 hours)
- Play fetch with cats (4 hours)
- Clean litter box
- Get every man cuckolded (with the alpha cock)
- Go to grocery store
One down, five to go!
Redditor fights Jaclyn Friedman’s accusations of Men’s Rights misogyny with … more misogyny
Proper credentials are very important in internet arguments
Well, so far this is my favorite response to Jaclyn Friedman’s American Prospect piece on the Men’s Rightsers and that woman-hating problem of theirs. Because what better way to refute charges of misogyny than by declaring derisively that you “can usually spot whether or not a woman wrote a piece by the first few sentences?”
Let’s let rjworks13 explain just why Friedman lacks the intellectual heft to be taken seriously by serious men with credentials — sorry, CREDENTIALS — like him:
Oh boy.
I have to say that very favorite sentence of all in this wondrous bit of HeManWomanHatersplaining is this one, if it can even be called a sentence:
CREDENTIALS: I’m a long-time trained technical and creative writer from male-based military training and put to use over 20 years.
Oy. I can only assume from the evidence of this, er, sentence, that as a technical writer his job is to make sure that instruction manuals are as unreadable as possible. And that his “creative” writing most likely consists of many volumes of self-published Gorean porn.
If you want to compare Jaclyn Friedman’s CREDENTIALS with his, you can always go to her Wikipedia entry. I looked around a bit for rjworks13’s Wikipedia entry, but he doesn’t seem to have one.
rjworks13 was evidently so proud of this bit of writing of his that he deleted it. Luckily, I grabbed a screenshot beforehand. ABS: Always Be Screenshotting.
PS What’s “indifference propaganda?”
A Voice for Men’s head boys reach new heights of narcissistic delusion
They’re so happy!
Let’s say — speaking hypothetically here — that you’re the head of what is probably the most prominent Men’s Rights website. A major national publication has just done a piece on the MRM. While sympathetic towards many of the issues MRAs sometimes talk about, the piece highlights the misogyny within the movement — focusing particularly on some of the hateful stuff that regularly appears on your website.
The piece also contains an extended profile of your site’s “Editor In Chief,” which portrays him as someone who, while having a certain charisma, is an angry, paranoid fanatic and a compulsive liar. The piece ends by suggesting that “radicals” like those on your website are doing your movement more harm than good, and notes that those who are doing the real work of helping men in need don’t want anything to do with the Men’s Rights movement.
Well, if you’re Paul Elam of A Voice for Men, you celebrate, because in the midst of all this, the author of the piece calls you “the closest thing the movement has to a rock star.” No, really.
Those interested in the psychology of narcissistic self-delusion may wish to set aside some time to watch the video below, in which the three dudes at the top of the A Voice for Men masthead — Paul Elam, John Hembling, and Dean Esmay — discuss R. Tod Kelly’s recent piece about the Men’s Rights movement.
I took the time to watch the whole thing the other night — well, to listen to it while playing Candy Crush, to be completely honest — and it is filled with astonishing moments. For those who don’t have the time or psychic energy to listen to the whole thing, I will provide some details below.
The tone of the video is, overall, one of jocularity; three very self-satisfied guys basking in self-praise and talking shit about women they hate.
The two most revealing moments come relatively early on in the more than hour-long video; if you watch nothing else in this video, make sure to watch these.
At 9:25 Dean brings up Kelly’s characterization of Elam as a “rock star.” (Technically, Kelly called him “the closest thing to a rock star” in the MRM, but let’s not split hairs.) Elam responds with some of the least convincing false modesty I think I’ve ever seen; it’s clear he’s pleased as punch. Just watch it.
Several minutes later, starting at about 12:22, the gang moves on to Kelly’s characterization of Hembling as a “superstar.” (Technically, Kelly said that Hembling was “well on his way to being [the MRM’s] first superstar,” but what’s a little hyperbole amongst friends?) Like Elam, Hembling affects a certain false modesty, pretending to be oh-shucks embarrassed by the attention, but he too is bursting with pride.
At one point he makes a reference to a famous line from Monty Python’s Life of Brian — “He’s not the messiah! He’s a very naughty boy!” — suggesting that he may have convinced himself that Kelly has proclaimed him not just a superstar but Jesus Christ Superstar.
Hembling — who is the A Voice for Menner that Kelly portrayed as a fanatic who seems to have more than a little bit of trouble with the truth — never really addresses Kelly’s accounts of some of his most dubious claims — his story of being confronted by a mob of boxcutter-weilding feminists, which seems to have been a largely peaceful encounter with a tiny handful of activists who did nothing more threatening than taking down some posters; and his story of intervening to stop a rape in progress, which appears to be a complete fabrication.
But, at about 23 minutes into the discussion, he does address — sort of — an infamous old video of his in which he declared that “I … don’t give a fuck about rape victims any more.” Hembling’s explanation is a little less than coherent, and seems to consist of three main assertions.
- He did it a long time ago, when he had very few subscribers, and when he didn’t even really think of himself as a Men’s Rights activist, no wait, he probably did think of himself that way.
- It was “hyperbolic parody” — a rather strange way to describe an angry video that contains not one element of parody at all.
- Evil feminists goaded him into it by calling him a rape apologist.
Despite all this, he doesn’t really renounce or apologize for the video.
Elam, for his part, seems to think that Hembling is being much too apologetic. At about 27:30 he jumps into the discussion, defending Hembling’s video.“We’re not the world’s unpaid bodyguards,” he declares. After mocking 20/20 correspondent Elizabeth Vargas for telling him that she would intervene if she saw a rape in progress, he announces:
I don’t find it particularly hyperbolic for a man to say I’m not going to give a damn about female rape victims any more. They have tons of money, of law enforcement, of special programs funded by government, of social consciousness; schools have Take Back the Night rallies, everything you can possibly think of …
I stand behind John for making that video. I don’t know if I would take it down. I don’t blame him for doing it.
At about 35 minutes into the video, the three move on to talking about some of the women that internet misogynists — some of them Men’s Rights activists, many of them not — have targeted for harassment in recent years, most notably Anita Sarkeesian, known for her videos critiquing sexist tropes in the video games, and feminist “skepchick” Rebecca Watson, who’s been harassed for several years for the crime of once complaining about a dude who propositioned her in an elevator at 4 AM. .
The Daily Beast article touched briefly on the harassment directed at Watson, and AVFM’s contribution to the hostile climate she faced and still faces online; as Kelly points out, Elam described her as a “lying whore” and Hembling made several distinctly misleading videos about her. And while Kelly didn’t mention Sarkeesian, she is apparently going to be a central focus of the upcoming 20/20 story about the Manosphere.
The three AVFMers spout such a bunch of malignant nonsense on the topic of these women and the harassment they have faced that I feel it necessary to quote them at length.
At about 37 minutes in, the three are discussing Sarkeesian when one of them — my notes aren’t clear — brings up a favorite anti-Sarkeesian talking point: that she went onto 4chan to publicize her videos. At this point an indignant Dean Esmay launches into a rant:
Anyone who knows anything about 4chan knows that the whole culture on 4chan is that people love insulting each other, and insulting everything in the popular culture, and you win on 4chan by being the most offensive person. So just by going on 4chan you’re looking for that. You are asking for it. … And I don’t mean that in the “she was asking for it” [sense] but she was!
Aside from the victim blaming, there is one other big problem with this argument: it doesn’t seem to be, you know, true. When I looked into this claim, the only “evidence” I could find was this thread on 4chan in which someone using the name of Anita Sarkeesian promotes her Kickstarter. But this “Anita Sarkeesian” explicitly says that they’re NOT actually Sarkeesian, and throughout the comments they refer to her in third person.
Back to the AVFM video, where Esmay is continuing his rant:
Esmay: And furthermore Anita Sarkeesian had a long history of closing comments on her videos so that no one who wanted to argue with her could rebut her, but amazingly when she started the kickstarter campaign she opened the gates and allowed all the commentary.
Elam: Just a coinicidence, I’m sure, Dean.
Esmay: Just a coinicidence. So anybody who ever had any anger at her suddenly had an outlet. She created a damsel in distress situation for herself.
That’s right. Closing her comments was an act of evil manipulation, leading to pent-up angry dude anger. And opening the comments up was an act of manipulation, by giving the angry dudes an outlet. Because clearly she wanted nothing more than to be harassed endlessly by angry dudes on the internet. Because women totally love that shit.
“But in any case,” Esmay asks,”is there a shred of evidence that that was mostly Men’s Rights Advocatists?”
Yes, he really says “advocatists.”
I don’t know about the “mostly, but there’s certainly plenty of hints that suggest MRAs were pretty heavily involved in the anti-Sarkeesian harassment. Like, for example, the fact that there have been 70 posts about Sarkeesian posted to the Men’s Rights subreddit, many of them receiving hundreds of upvotes and inspiring hundreds of comments of which most can be assumed to be hostile, at least based on the rather large sampling of them I’ve read over the months. And AVFM, while not quite this active on the anti-Sarkeesian front, did run as assortment of its own posts on the subject, with titles like “Anita Sarkeesian and the feminist war on facts” (a bit ironic, that) and “Anita Sarkeesian: still a moneygrubbing liar” (some irony there too, huh?).
Elam, for his part, claims there’s “no shred of evidence” that any of the “supposed threats” that Sarkeesian, Watson, or a particular red-haired Canadian activist AVFM has been fixated on came from MRAs. Well, given that a lot of these sorts of threats are, you know, anonymous, that is a little hard to prove, though when I looked at people making nasty and threatening remarks about the red-haired activist on YouTube I found that (at least in the cases of those I was able to find out any information about them) a significant minority of them seemed to be MRAs or at least regular readers of MRA and/or manosphere blogs — and/or to be fans of the misogynistic asshole who calls himself the Amazing Atheist, a noxious YouTube personality that A Voice for Men has celebrated and linked to on more than a few occasions.
And then there‘s Elam‘s characterization of Watson as a “lying whore,” a characterization he is more than happy to repeat several times on the video.
At about 41 minutes in, Hembling then tells an assortment of untruths about the now infamous elevatorgate incident that led to years of harassment directed at Watson. Having just had some of his most famous untruths publicly exposed to a national audience, you would think Hembling might want to be a bit more careful about his factchecking. Nope.
Hembling: There was a convention in Ireland I believe, where late at night in the hotel convention center she got on an elevator after being in the bar quite late and someone from the convention approached her in the elevator and said “I think you’re very interesting and attractive and would you like to come and have coffee in my room, which is obviously code for let’s get naked and hump.
[At this point Elam lets out a cackle[
Hembling: Obviously he was drunk, possibly blind drunk.
Elam: [Laughs uproariously] It was Irish coffee.
Hembling: Watson then went online and did a video admonishing the male members of the atheist community, of which she was a part, “guys don’t do that,” and characterized this conversation in the elevator as if it was some sort of great, terrible, frightening threat, and crafted her victimhood out of that, and essentially used that story to launch a professional speaking career on the atheist circuit.
Cool story, except for the fact that Watson actually did none of those things beyond the bit about saying “guys, don’t do that.” Here’s a transcript of what she actually did say, which I found here in about 30 seconds by typing the words “rebecca watson transcript elevatorgete video” — typo and all — into a very helpful internet site you may have heard of called Google. Watson was mentioning how much she had enjoyed talking to everyone after her presentation at the conference
except for the one man who, um, didn’t really grasp, I think, what I was saying on the panel…? Because, um, at the bar later that night—actually, at four in the morning—um, we were at the hotel bar, 4am, I said, you know, “I’ve had enough, guys, I’m exhausted, going to bed,” uh, so I walked to the elevator, and a man got on the elevator with me, and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more; would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?”
Um. Just a word to the wise here, guys: Uhhhh, don’t do that. Um, you know. [laughs] Uh, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4am, in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and—don’t invite me back to your hotel room, right after I’ve finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.
That’s it. Being propositioned by a guy alone in an elevator at 4 AM made her feel “incredibly uncomfortable.” No elevation of the proposition into a “great, terrible, frightening threat.” No elaborate narrative of victimhood. Just her saying: hey, this makes me uncomfortable. The reaction to these remarks are what caused the Elevatorgate shitstorm, which is evidently still ongoing, as evidenced by Mr. Hembling’s desire to retell the — false — narrative of the evil Watson.
Indeed, Hembling actually thinks that the incident never happened, because Watson never named the dude. And so Watson’s seemingly innocent remarks, at the end of an informal, unscripted video, were apparently part of her secret master plan to take over the atheist universe.
It’s just a story to further this narrative of victimhood that Watson used to launch this speaking career and make herself supposedly famous and important.
Projection ain’t just something they do in movie theaters.
Enjoy your time in the limelight, fellas! You’re really, truly not doing yourself or your ostensible movement any favors. Maybe someday you will realize this. But probably not.
Men’s Rights website falsely accuses Ohio University student of being a false rape accuser
Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c): False accuser
Well, this is depressing. The Raw Story is reporting that
An Ohio University sophomore has deactivated her social media accounts and is afraid to leave her house after she was falsely identified as the woman who reported she’d been raped in an incident captured on cell phone video by a passerby.
The student, Rachel Cassidy, now falsely accused of being a false rape accuser, has had her personal information — not just her name but her address, the name of her sorority, her social media accounts, even her Pinterest page — listed on a Men’s Rights site called Crimes Against Fathers. (I won’t link to it.)
The man behind Crimes Against Fathers? None other than the notorious Men’s Rights extremist and crackpot Peter Andrew Nolan — or, as he prefers to be known, for reasons I don’t fully understand, Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c) . Apparently taking inspiration from Paul Elam’s Register-Her.com, Nolan’s site does what Register-Her only threatened to do: it actually releases the personal information of those it identifies as “Man-Hating Women.” He will even add names of women you don’t like to the list for a fee of $70 (Australian).
So far the site has several hundred women listed, most of them apparently women who have run afoul of Nolan or his most active lieutenant on the site, the pseudonymous “John Rambo” of “Boycott American Women” fame, either online or in real life. In most cases, luckily, the amount of personal information given out is relatively scanty and the number of people who’ve actually viewed the posts (which is listed on the site) has been small.
That’s not the case with Cassidy, whose life Nolan and “Rambo” have set out to ruin as thoroughly as they can. In addition to her personal information, the site has also dug up an assortment of pictures of her scraped from various sites on the internet.
And, unwilling to believe that she is not the woman in the video — and a false accuser of rape — the two have taken aim at those who’ve stepped forward to defend Cassidy. They’ve posted the personal information of Jenny Hall-Jones, the Dean of Students at Ohio University, for the “crime” of publicly saying that Cassidy is not the woman in the video, as well as several other women who’ve come out in support of Cassidy.
On Crimes Against Fathers, “Rambo” writes
[C]onsidering that women will always try to cover for their fellow women, and will NEVER hold their fellow women accountable, there is a very strong possibility that Jenny [Hall-Jones] is LYING and that Rachel Cassidy IS the girl in that video. This means that Jenny Hall-Jones is a CRIMINAL because she is covering up for the CRIME of making a false rape accusation. Therefore, she is a criminal and needs to be publicly exposed as such.
Neither “Rambo” nor Nolan has leveled similar accusations against Ohio University president Roderick McDavis, a man, though he too has said that the woman in the video is not Cassidy.
Men’s Rights activists like to say that Nolan isn’t really one of them. If this is the case, they should be willing to stand up and denounce his reprehensible actions, and the very idea of his Crimes Against Fathers “Man-Hating Women” directory.
EDITED TO ADD: I should note that Nolan’s site also has a “Name and Shame the IgnorMANuses” forum directed at alleged man-hating men, including Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad) and Nacho Vidal (the pseudonymous dude behind MGTOWforums.com). The list is considerably smaller than that of the Man-Hating Women directory, and none of the entries I saw listed any personal information that went much beyond links to Facebook pages.
A Voice for Men’s DriverSuz: “Male care and compassion for women is why women don’t live in barns and pens with the cows, pigs and chickens.”
So I’ve been skimming through the mass of comments that the Daily Beast piece on the Men’s Rightsers now has trailing in its wake. So far I think this is my favorite exchange.
Yep, that’s DriverSuz — aka Suzanne McCarley, “Senior Editor” of A Voice for Men.
And yep, that’s Angry Harry, the fellow that many MRAs call “the father of the men’s rights movement.”
Some critics of this blog complain whenever I quote some crackpot commenter rather than one of the “big names” in the Men’s Rights movement. Sometimes, it turns out, the crackpot commenters ARE the “big names” in the Men’s Rights movement.
The Daily Beast takes on the Men’s Rights movement — and takes down A Voice for Men’s John Hembling
John Hembling, possibly lying about something
The bad publicity bonanza for Men’s Rights activists continues — and it couldn’t happen to a worse group of people.
Yesterday, the Daily Beast published a long-awaited piece on the Men’s Rights movement, and it’s a doozy. If you’re a regular reader of this site, trust me, you’ll want to read the whole thing, like now. The piece, by R. Tod Kelly, is long — some 6000 words — but worth it.
It’s mostly on the money, but with a few notable flaws.
Here’s what it gets right:
1) It captures the pervasive misogyny of the Men’s Rights movement in general, and of A Voice for Men in particular.
2) In an extended section, it profiles AVFM’s John Hembling, and tears apart some of his most blatant lies — including the now legendary box-cutter incident, in which Hembling claims to have stared down a mob of 20-30 feminists brandishing boxcutters.
As Kelly notes:
Vancouver police records show that there was indeed an altercation in September of 2012 between Hembling and others seeking to tear down men’s rights posters. However, according to the police, Hembling was arguing with two or three people, not being accosted by a “mob” of any size. When questioned by the authorities, neither Hembling nor witnesses mentioned seeing any weapons. …
Curiously enough, Hembling actually videotaped the events and had his AV4M Radio partner Karen Straughan post it online. The discussion with the police has been conveniently edited out, but the rest of the video clearly matches police records and not Hembling’s story. There are only a few young men taking down Hembling’s posters, and the video shows them choosing to ignore him except when he engages them in conversation. One of the men is seen using a box cutter to take down the flyers, but at no time does he use it as a weapon, raise his voice, or threaten Hembling in any way.
Kelly found some troubling, er, discrepancies in another story told by Hembling. Kelly writes:
According to Hembling, sometime around 1995 he was on his way home at 2:00 am after working a night shift when he came upon [a sexual] assault in progress. He says he used his steel-toed boots as weapons to chase off the perpetrator. When the victim was too distraught to speak with him, Hembling says he contacted the police, waited until they arrived, and then quietly left without speaking to them. He says they later tracked him down at his home, where he gave a statement.
It’s hard to know whether this event actually occurred or not. There is no record—at least, not in the Vancouver police files—of Hembling being a material witness to a rape, and police blotters from that time period do not show a crime that matches Hembling’s description. However, this does not necessarily mean the event did not occur. Vancouver police did not fully computerize their data until 2002, and it is possible the police never reported the incident. Hembling claims the incident took place at a specific hospital, where he says he worked as a contractor for 18 months. The address he gives, however, is for a different hospital in a completely different part of the city. This raises the curious question of whether Hembling forget the name of the hospital he contracted with for 18 months, or whether he forget what part of the city he worked in for that same period of time. The real truth of the matter is anyone’s guess, because Hembling wouldn’t comment to The Beast on that or any other matter.
In other words: Cool story, bro.
3) Another thing the story gets right: it makes clear just how little the Men’s Rights movement does to actually help men — and how in many ways it can actually be terribly damaging to men who need real help. As Kelly writes,
the movement’s radicals might … do … immediate damage to those who most desperately need the MRM to succeed.
“When we talk about recovery from trauma and abuse, there were two things that helped me,” says Chris Anderson, executive director of the male-victim advocacy group Male Survivor and a sexual abuse survivor himself. “The first was realizing that I’m not alone; the second was hearing that recovery was possible.” Anderson is quick to dissociate himself from the men’s rights movement: “In [the MRM] people get that first message, that they’re not alone. I don’t know that they ever get the second message. And when they don’t get that second message, it turns into an endless feedback loop and eventually they say, ‘Oh my God, all of society is f**ked.’”
Indeed, Kelly writes:
It is telling to note that of the professional male-victim advocacy organizations I spoke with, every single one specifically asked that I not allow readers to think they were in any way related to the MRM.
But there are also some things that I think the article gets wrong.
1) I think it gives Men’s Rights activists way too much credit for their supposed good intentions. While there are some MRAs who do seem to be motivated at least in part by a sincere desire to help men, most of the MRAs I’ve encountered in the 3 years of doing this blog have clearly been motivated primarily by anger and hatred of feminists — and women in general. They don’t really seem to give a shit about doing anything to actually improve the lives of men — and the paucity of their accomplishments reflects this. In its relatively brief lifespan, AVFM has raised many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Has it set up any shelters or hotlines or helplines for men? Not a one.
2) It wildly exaggerates the importance of Hembling to the MRM – especially ironic given that Hembling has been more or less AWOL in recent months, producing only a few short videos and one article for AVFM.
3) It paints a picture of The Spearhead’s WF Price as a Men’s Rights “moderate.” Really? While it’s true that Price is not an AVFM-style hothead given to rants about “fucking your shit up,” his views are anything but moderate. This is a guy who thinks higher education is wasted on women, who blames the epidemic of rape in the armed forces on women, who celebrated one Mothers Day with a vicious transphobic rant, who once used the tragic death of a woman who’d just graduated from college to argue that “after 25, women are just wasting time.” He published posts on why women’s suffrage is a bad idea. Plus, have you met his commenters?
I was, however, kind of amazed to learn that Price is married … and to a feminist. No, really.
4) The article, while solidly researched, contains some small errors and simplifications that will no doubt give MRAs and others the excuse they need to dismiss the whole thing. Kelly refers to Reddit subreddits as Reddit “threads!” He refers to Matt Forney as an MRA! Oh no!
Still, whatever its flaws, this is an important piece, and one that tells a lot of truth about the Men’s Rights movement. Again — go read it!
Manosphere Cat Fight Highlights: The Aftermath (Of Nothing Happening)
The He-Man Manosphere Cat Fight Continues! The long-awaited 20/20 story on the Manosphere did not, alas, run as scheduled last night — it’s been postponed until who knows when — but the Men’s Rightsy infighting it inspired continues!
Yesterday, you may recall, the Spearhead’s WF Price called out A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam for his alleged naiveté in going on the show in the first place, and for generally being a shitty backstabbing narcissistic asshole — all fair enough criticisms.
Well now Elam and his AVFM attack squad have responded to Price’s attack in the comments on the Spearhead– as various Spearhead readers have stepped forward to offer their own thoughts on Elam, many of them even less flattering than Price’s screed.
Paul Elam of A Voice for Men: In His Own Words
Paul Elam in a web-only clip from the 20/20 segment that never ran on television.
Paul Elam, the founder and primary animating force behind the website A Voice for Men, is probably, for better or worse, the most influential figure in the Men’s Rights movement (or, as he prefers to call it, the Men’s Human Rights Movement).
Elam is also a fierce misogynist with a penchant for angry, violent rhetoric full of only-slightly veiled threats. But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps the best way to get to know Mr. Elam is through his own words.
So here are some of Elam’s thoughts on a variety of issues, taken from postings on his own website. I have linked each quote back to its source on A Voice for Men.
