Several days ago, angry-MRA-dude hub A Voice for Men ran a guest post from someone identified only as Phil in Utah entitled “How I became an MRA: Domestic violence advocacy.” After Phil’s post in question drew some criticism from some of the AVfM regulars who didn’t see it as radical enough, site founder and head cheese Paul Elam felt it necessary to take Phil to task for one of the statements he made in the post.
So let’s have a quick quiz. Here are three quotes taken from Phil in Utah’s post. Which of them is the one that drew Elam’s ire?
- “[F]eminists only support the rights of women who agree with them, and have no qualms throwing disagreeing women under the bus.”
- “[T]he idea that women are hurt more than men by being abused is a load of crap.”
- “I still believe that men who brutalize women are the scum of the Earth.”
ANSWER: Did you guess #1? Wrong. While this statement isn’t actually true, Elam didn’t object to it. How about #2? While this statement is also untrue – numerous studies show that women are far more likely to be seriously injured by domestic violence than men – Elam didn’t object to it either. Nope. He objected to statement #3. That is:
I still believe that men who brutalize women are the scum of the Earth.
How could any decent human being possibly object to this? Here’s Elam explanation:
I admit I flinched a little when I read this. Clearly these are words rooted in old world sexist notions about violence; that somehow men who brutalize women are worse than women who brutalize men. It is old programming that tends to swim around in the unconscious even after the first few rounds of red pills.
Now, I should note that Phil didn’t actually say, or imply, that “men who brutalize women are worse than women who brutalize men.” Indeed, he spent most of the essay arguing that DV against men needed to be taken more seriously. If anything, he minimized violence against women, by denying the fact that women are indeed more likely to be seriously injured by their male partners than male partners are to be seriously injured by women.
Evidently, for Elam and others on AVfM, straightforward expressions of enmity against men who brutalize women are a form of “latent misandry.”
But we’re only just getting started here. As it turns out, Elam was less troubled by Phil’s “misandry” than he was by some of the nastier attacks on Phil and other
new MRA’s who are ‘getting it’ but have not had the time or opportunity to fully refine their understanding of the modern zeitgeist.
Indeed, one commenter had even gone so far as to call poor Phil “pussy-footed.” And yet another called him a “mangina/white knight.” This, Elam announced, would not do!
MRA’s name calling and shaming other MRA’s is not constructive. It is petty alpha-gaming … .
In other words, it’s the sort of thing that guys do to try to impress the chicks. And that’s bad.
[A] significant part of the dynamics that hinder progress in the MRM is the innate friction between men which is driven by an undercurrent of sexual competition. Our unfortunate programming is to apply downward pressure on each other in order to vie for sexual selection.
On MRA blogs, this is often described with the scientific term “pussy begging.” Elam continued:
Feminism is an outgrowth of chivalry. It is dependent on male sexual competition to thrive. In short, misandry, feminism, the stinking lot of it, is a human problem rooted in men’s mindless competition for women. We don’t get out of that competition by simply rejecting women or Going Our Own Way. We get out of it by identifying and respectfully challenging the elements of that competition when they prove dysfunctional, as in going after MRA’s for blood any time we imagine they are not 100% on message. This conduct, when distilled down to its essence, is just a tell-tale artifact of pussy-centric masculinity.
So, in other words, MRAs who call other MRAs pussy-begging manginas are themselves … pussy-begging manginas.
Such is MRA logic.
I see that Brandon doesn’t understand the Herbivore phenomenon. Those men don’t hate women – they hate the salaryman role that’s been contructed for men in Japanese society (which btw is much harsher than the societal expectations placed on men here in many ways, thus the intensity of the reaction against it). The Herbivores don’t put the blame for that on random women, they put it where it belongs – on the culture as a whole*. They’re rejecting a social role that they don’t want, that’s for sure (and I don’t blame them – the traditional salaryman role sucks), but they’re not MRAs. We’ve been over this before. I’ve encountered herbivore men – they tend to be rather nice people, and they often have lots of female friends. Stop trying to appropriate a social movement that you don’t understand from a culture that you know nothing about.
(Also I wonder if he’s encountered their counterparts, the Carnivore Girls, who would probably scare the shit out of him. And again, it’s not about grr men we hate them, it’s about a reaction to societal roles overall.)
* Admittedly most articles in the Western press aren’t helping, since they’re trying to interpet the herbivore thing through a Western lens. It doesn’t really make any sense unless you understand just how rigid traditional social expectations for men are in Japan, or how the 20-year recession is playing into all of this.
Watch thos goalposts dance! Altruism is praised by society because it’s admirable. Lack of altruism is just sort of neutral, neither praiseworthy or worthy of condemnation most of the time. Actively doing stuff that endangers the survival of others is condemned, as it should be. This is not a complicated concept.
@Bostonian: No, they are most likely doing something risky and dangerous. Rushing to someones aid does not inherently make you good or bad.
I don’t expect them to get praised nor should they be called things like cowards or “not real men”. It should have been looked at in a neutral perspective: That a group of people where scrambling to save their lives and nothing else.
They aren’t “doing evil”…they are trying to save themselves. Apparently “doing evil” now means to fighting to save yourself from dying.
@Cassandra: Regardless of why they are doing what they are doing…they still share certain attributes of MRA’s. Mainly not going out of their way to initiate conversation with women.
Also, I am not saying that “herbivores” are MRA’s, I am just saying they share a few behaviors. I was more concerned with the actual behavior and not the motive behind it.
Lastly, I spent some time in Tokyo and take an interest in the rigidity of Japanese culture (Honne and Tatemae, Uchi-Soto and Nihonrinjin just to name a few of the biggies). While I may have never fully experienced that rigidity as a gaijin, I was able to observe it.
I remain confused what bit of “a simple, minimalist life” Brandon thinks I’d be upset about. Good! As an anti-consumerist, as an environmentalist, as a person who has read the statistics on what makes people happy, that is EXACTLY what I want. I mean, I don’t even have any particular objections to people doing what makes them happy and not being all concerned with social change! Social change is important but it’s not for everyone. 🙂
@Cassandra: I can’t think of a time where I was “scared shitless” by a woman. Brash and aggressive women get ignored by me, but I am hardly scared of them. They just aren’t fun to be around and tend to be argumentative. Traits I do not admire in men or women.
@Ozy: I didn’t think you would be upset about anything. I just think you missed the main points of the article. The article wasn’t about working long hours.
Is he still talking? Is the new thing going to be just popping in every now and then and dragging old and finished conversations back up rather than constantly posting on everything as he did before?
How perfectly tedious.
Yeah, he’s still at it, now with bonus appropriation.
Motivations are important, Brandon. If you want to be a slacker, that’s cool, but stop dragging the herbivores into it. They really don’t share your underlying feelings or thought processes at all.
“Brash and aggressive women get ignored by me, but I am hardly scared of them. They just aren’t fun to be around and tend to be argumentative. Traits I do not admire in men or women.”
Except in yourself, of course, where being argumentative is your main personality characteristic. Even sock-Ashley said so!
So endangering others is good? I say no to that. Endangering others is still wrong, and yes, evil.
*yawns*
How many people give a flying fuck if Brandon goes his own way to a minimalist lifestyle?
*peers around*
I thought so.
None of us care–in fact, some of us are doing all sorts of things that are not expected of us by traditional social gender roles–so why keep arguing about this “omg men aren’t going to do what YOU FEMINISTS WIMMINZ expect, we’re so brave and radical.”
There are people who regularly post over here who are going much more against traditional heternormative patriarchal gender roles than you can even imagine.
I don’t need men for anything, and expect them to return the favor of the lack of attention.
You, however, can just fuck off.
Brandon: I didn’t read the article! I was talking about the bit you said right here where you were all “we’re not working fifty hour weeks to get girlfriends anymore” as if we would have objections to that. Great! Thank feminism for it. 🙂
Can he go super-minimalist and give away his computer? And not have a smartphone, since they’re not strictly necessary? That would be one way to get rid of him.
But seriously, it’s weird that he expects us to care and to oppose his decision. Why would we? He seems to be buying in to the MGTOW idea that by doing so he’s somehow wounding All Women.
Ithiliana: Like me! I’m a poly queer nonbinary person who keeps dating people who are broke! I am, like, super-defiant. 🙂
Right now my super-defiant ass is going to take itself over to gaming night to play some Betrayal at the House of the Hill. And yes, that is misandry.
So…I don’t have sex or interest in women (or men for that matter) and I focus more on friends and family than relationships. And I’m quite literally a herbivore (I haven’t eaten meat since August).
I guess that makes me an MRA, somehow.
Well, this is BrandonWorld, in which there’s no need to use logic.
Also, the idea that those guys are like MRAs because they don’t pursue relationships with women is pretty funny. Most MRAs do seem to pursue relationships with women. Hell, even some MGTOW talk about dating (granted that this is completely illogical, but still, they do). Granted, they tend to pursue relationships with women while ranting about how evil women are (another way in which they’re not like the Herbivore Men at all), but still, they are in fact still pursuing women for the most part.
Brandon is selfish and doesn’t understand other cultures. In other news, water is wet.
Did you go to Japan for the anime, kind of like Thailand for the beaches? I bet you were there for about a week and now think you’re an expert.
For someone who doesn’t like being argumentative, you sure spend a lot of time arguing. Well, trying to, anyway.
Don’t you better things to do with sock-Ash than come here, toolshed?
GET HER!!!
Lauralot, you can’t be an MRA because you’re not an illogical whiny asshole.
ozy: Betrayal at House on the Hill is AWESOME! Where’d you score a copy? It’s hard to find.
You know Brandon’s theory about how not pursuing women makes a man an MRA? In that context, please explain Roissy.
Doesn’t not pursuing women make one more of an MGTOW?
Not according to Brandon! Poor dear can’t even keep his own movement straight, no wonder he’s so lost when talking about feminism.
TBH, when I see his posts, my eyes start roll so hard, it makes them hard to read.
He’s got his head so far up his ass, not only about feminism, but life in general, it’s a wonder he can type stuff with which to bore the snot out of me.
Really though, if you don’t give a shit and want a simple life, that to me is more GYOW. Of course, you can always fire up the snitmobile and burn rubber all over the internet blaming women for why you’re GYOW. That strikes me as a complete waste of time when you can just go, but I’m weird that way.
So Brandon, why did you quote that paragraph?
If you have reservations about the conclusions you have the ability to explain them.
Not only did you not do that when you made the original comment, you have chosen to refrain from so doing in two subsequent comments.
One can only assume you do in fact agree with it, wholeheartedly.
And you’ve still not explained why you chose to misquote, and misrepresent Fatman.