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 think the wedding dresses thing has to do with when stores carrying expensive, designer dresses will have a day or a weekend every year where they sell off their sample dresses as-is for much less than a new gown would cost. From what I understand, these sales are pretty busy, but they’re not the kicking, scratching, oh-look-women-are-so-shallow-they’re-fighting-over-dresses-lolz mess that people will make them out to be.
Lauralot, I picture his imagination as a vast Sahara littered with oases of total fucking bullshit that he regurgitates on cue.
Hellkell – Oh. I suspect you’re giving him too much credit, though, and he’s just trying to think of the most obnoxiously womanish things a bunch of women might buy.
He also seems to be under the impression that the Wal-Mart stampedes weren’t massively condemned by everyone who heard about them. If there was a media outlet or even a commenter out there anywhere saying “these deaths were very tragic, but hey, I understand that shoppers gotta shop, can’t really blame ’em!”, I sure as hell never saw it.
Brandon, I know it’s hard for a sociopath like you to understand, but some of us consider the wellbeing of people other than ourselves to be important and to be an important part of decisions in crisis situations.
No one supported domestic violence against men here, certainly. Where did you see feminists support domestic violence against Tiger Woods?
Holly, I never saw that either. “Consumers gonna consume, two dead. Here’s Ted with the weather.” Never happened.
The things I’m getting from Brandon’s comments are:
1. Men only worked themselves to death in the past because of women.
2. Women are taking over everything, including high-powered positions requiring 50-hour workweeks.
3. Brandon feels that women are stupid for working 50 hour work weeks
4. Brandon says that men now feel snubbed because they’re no longer “needed” to work themselves to death for 50 hours a week.
Wait, what? Why do men feel snubbed for not having to work so hard anymore? Like, shouldn’t you be happy about this?
Hellkell – I think what he’s angry about is that the women involved in the stampedes weren’t specifically condemned for being terrible evil women. Or something?
DSC – I tend to think a real sociopath would have long ago given up and gone “fine, don’t believe I’m a sociopath, see if I care.” Brandon cares so much about convincing us he doesn’t care.
Brandon’s argument is just another version of Owlslave’s “women will kill everyone just because they want more dresses and accessories”, only he has better spelling.
The thing is, Brandon, you wouldn’t have this “The men are all withdrawing from this because you don’t *need* us!” attitude if you didn’t, like, actually care.
Some more things I’ve learned from the thread.
1. Brandon thinks people who die to save others are not role models. They give up their lives frivolously.
2. Brandon says it’s okay for people to look up to the Joplin Pizza Hut manager as a hero. Please pretend he never made the first statement that men like him are not role models.
3. It is okay for people to run outside to save themselves during tornadoes. Pretend that makes sense, even though the National Weather Service advises the exact opposite.
4. He thinks women trample each other to death for wedding dresses. LOL women and their dresses, amirite?
5. He blames feminists for the jokes people made about Elin’s attack on Tiger Woods, even though I gave him a link from feministing condemning the attack and the jokes.
See, this precisely why you’re full of shit, Brandon. You construct arguments based on shit you made up. You just told of room full of feminists that have in fact condemned domestic violence against men on many occasions that feminists don’t condemn domestic violence against men.
Or is this one those things that’s just like, generally true, y’know? No need to examine it or present evidence or anything. Clearly the mark of a bold an independent thinker.
Actually, this Brandon argument is reminding me more of Fight Club. Brandon is just one bad relationship away from living in an abandoned house and peeing in the shrimp bisque just to escape women and their savage hunts for wedding dresses!
The thing is, Brandon espouses a lot of ideas that I, too support. He’s about working for himself, having non-traditional relationships, and seems to think birth control is a good idea.
The thing is, the reasons he has for supporting all these things is really whack. He works for himself and has a non-traditional relationship involving birth control because he thinks a woman just wants to force him to work 50-hour weeks in order for her to have a house and a baby and a wedding dress.
With allies like Brandon, who needs enemies?
It’s the Brandon Show, with the amazing Moving Goalposts.
http://i1074.photobucket.com/albums/w408/myoomyoo/dancinggoalpost2.gif
Myoo, your dancing goalposts are great!
Brandon, there are a couple problems with your constant goalpost-shifting. The first one — and really, this should be obvious to you — is that you’re doing it in print. In a real-life conversation, your words disappear as soon as you say them, so you might be able to convince your listening audience that you never made the original claim that they thought you had. But here, the words are preserved. We can just scroll up, find them, and reference them. You can’t just pretend it never happened.
The other problem is that you do this every single time you post here. The moment I see you making any sort of outlandish claim, I immediately assume that when you’re challenged on it, you’re going to back down to a more moderate one and pretend that’s what you were arguing all along. I’m on the lookout for it, and so is everyone else. There’s some slim chance that you might have slipped something by us at some point, but not anymore.
Well yes, that is how you all get off the ship-you follow the directions of the crew to get off the ship in an orderly fashion because otherwise no one might get off.
Also stop conflating women as a whole with feminists. Not all women are feminists so when someone thinks “right on” to some celebrity woman hitting her cheating spouse, it does not mean she is a feminist. It means she is a jerk.
There was a segment on The Smoking Gun’s World’s Dumbest that involved a bunch of women fighting over various different wedding accoutrements but no one died. Perhaps this is what he was thinking about?
The fights got pretty vicious so maybe he though someone died. Or maybe he is an idiot. The world already knows.
Why would anyone actually get physically violent over a delicate and expensive item? If you try to yank it out of someone else’s hands, the most likely outcome is that you’ll damage it and then no one will get a wedding dress.
Crowd hysteria whipped up by the TV producers in that one bit with the women battling over things in a giant wedding cake at one point.
No. Because I wasn’t there and didn’t read detailed account from survivors. But that’s totally beyond the point.
Pushing people, making them fall – even not out of the boat – in the context of a catastrophe evacuation put their life in danger. They might hit their head, be stepped on, make more people panic, separate children or other weak persons from parents or family. Since I’m not a professional, I don’t know everything that could happen, but that seem to be a good few examples.
Evacuating in order and calm maximize the number of saved lived;
Let me sum that up: case with more dead people: bad. What you need to understand is that society is not just an aggregate of egoistical individuals. (Anyway, why don’t you like that word? In your case, that’s not an insult but an objective qualifier) Society, as a group, want to survive. Therefore society looks up and thanks individuals that save people by taking risks and down to those who risks people life in the hope of increasing their personal odds. (I say hope, because, see above, creating panic might well increase the danger for you.)
Several noticed it already, but I can’t resist:
And he would not be a coward if he hadn’t done anything. It would be neutral. He would have been a coward he he had actively engendered a person in order to assure his own safety.
You’ll notice (or not, probably) that nobody here is claiming women should have evacuated first.
The thing that got to me about Brandon’s backpedaling is that he did it within the same page of this thread, so it was very blatant.
I still can’t get over him saying “if he had just stayed outside and watched the destruction happen”. It proves to me he was not paying any attention to what I said, because how could you escape the destruction of a tornado by going outside? That’s probably the most dangerous thing you could do. He must have missed that I was discussing a tornado, and so he assumed I was talking about a fire, where you can save yourself by running outside.
@Kendra: Ya, and there were Swedish women (gasp…some even feminists!) praising Elin for attacking Tiger based on the rationalization that “he deserved it” for “hurting her”.
1) Yes.
2) I personally wouldn’t see him as a hero, but I don’t have the right to tell others who they can or can’t praise.
3) This really isn’t about tornados, but men leaving safety to risk themselves for strangers.
4) Trample might be too strong of a word. But they do push and pull one another to get to the dresses. (See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mbuXAg6tu8 and other Related Videos).
5) One link to a feminist blog condemning the behavior does not absolve everyone else. By that logic, I can post to http://www.glennsacks.com/confronting_women_bashing.htm and that would absolve all MRA’s of vile speech.
@Bostonian: And the Manboobz commenters are just a small sampling of feminists. They do not represent the majority of feminists. There are like 50 femmies that consistently post here, hardly a proper sample size with 6 billion people in the world (or 300 million just for the US).
@Molly:
1) I wouldn’t say “only”, but men in the past were pushed and incentivized by society to provide for women.
2) Women aren’t really “taking over everything”. They are just becoming a larger part of the labor force.
3) I have no problem with women or men working 50 hours a week. It isn’t my life, so what you do with it is fine by me. The point I was trying to make was that a group of men are leaving the “provider” role behind and only working enough to live simply.
4) I don’t think most men feel snubbed because women are working more. I think a lot of men feel resentment for a lot of women’s desire to earn the same but still hang on to traditional dating mores because they are “romantic”. It isn’t the working that is the issue, its that a lot of women aren’t accepting more equality based dating norms.
Brandon, why do you bother? You must love having your ass handed to you.
“Trampled might be too strong a word…” You used it, however. You do know that words have meaning, don’t you?
In regards to #4 on your response to Molly, I think YOU resent that, but instead you’re trying to qualify that by “a lot of men” with jackshit to back it up. What’s wrong, doesn’t Ashley go dutch?
in regards to #4 on your response to Molly, I think YOU resent that, but instead you’re trying to qualify that by “a lot of men” with jackshit to back it up.
that pattern is, like, 80% of all arguments brandon tries to make and he still hasnt figured out that everyone can see through it.
And you’re complaining about this to… a bunch of feminists. Okay.