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.
@Hellkell: You should look up patronizing and condescension, you do those poorly.
I don’t like it, but I hardly resent it. Resentment means you feel powerless to prevent it and you are forced to suffer because you have no other options. People that are confident and self assured aren’t often filled with resentment because they see the other options and/or make their own options.
There are other options besides dating “traditional” women. A lot of men (MRA’s specifically), don’t see that, hence they get bitter and resentment sets in.
I think the better (and more constructive) position is to empower men and tell them that they do have power in the dating scene. They don’t just have to tolerate or accept certain behavior from the women they date.
I condemn what those Swedish women said. They were wrong to rationalize Elin’s abuse against Tiger Woods.
Well we’ll have to agree to disagree, because I think he’s a hero. He gave his life to save a dozen people, which to me is the epitome of heroism.
The context of the story was a tornado. You said that if he had run outside to save himself, that would have been okay. I said it didn’t make sense because it’s way too dangerous to go outside during a tornado. In this case, yes, it was about tornadoes.
Okay, I watched the video of “The Running of the Brides”. I think you made mountains out of molehills. It was just people acting silly on camera to show they were excited about wedding bargains. It wasn’t a big deal at all.
No it wasn’t. It was mainly how (actively*) diminishing safety for strangers in order to increase your own is morally condemnable.
It’s still written, you can go back and check.
Men, or women, leaving safety to risk themselves for strangers, are worthy of praise**, because they do good to the group.
*or passively, in case where your own safety is not in danger. For example, just letting somebody get assaulted when you have the possibility of safely calling the police or the security is obviously wrong.
**with the exception of situation where your chance of increasing the safety of other are too low. For example, firemen don’t want everybody to jump into fire, because that just make more injured people to get out of the flames. Sadly, wisely judging a dangerous situation is extremely hard.
The more I interact with you, Brandon, the more I feel ready to teach moral to kindergarten children!
And you think this is some necessary service? I mean, there are definitely individual men who, due to their individual problems (e.g. low self esteem, abuse, inability to break off a mutually destructive relationship etc.), need someone to give them that extra push to get out of a fucked up situation. But to think that men as a general group need to learn this is ridiculous because most men (like most women) are able to judge for themselves what they will and will not tolerate, and are more than capable of moving on to the next person when their relationships are lacking. I mean, the only ones I would worry about are those Game idiots that believe that there’s a 99%/1% alpha bullshit, because they are more likely to believe that they can’t get someone else
Oh, snap.
Brandon, you should look up “smart, well-read, and knows how to argue,” because you’re failing at all three.
I see you don’t know what words mean.
Today on Words Mean Shit:
resent [rɪˈzɛnt]
vb
(tr) to feel bitter, indignant, or aggrieved at
Nowhere does it say “feel powerless.”
Brandon, this is hilarious. Your example of women pushing and pulling each other to get dresses involves women dressed in color-coded team t-shirts and carrying signs saying exactly what they’re looking for in a dress. This was obviously an entirely spontaneous expression of women’s unbridled shopping savagery.
But Molly, those women are being so brash and aggressive. Brandon doesn’t like that. They should sit demurely and wait for the right dress to approach them.
Better yet, they shouldn’t want to get married at all, because that is stupid. A contract is all you need.
See, Shadow, you haven’t been learning your Game’s lesson well. Alphas are the 20%, not the 1%. Because 80/20 sounds more like actual data than 99/1. I’m not sure what’s the Omega/Beta ratio though. I’m betting 25/75.
Also? Those women in teams running around a store to find the right dress makes shopping look *fun*. There’s a woman jumping up and down squeeing because she found the right dress!
I thought Alphas were 10s. That would make them the 10%. Unless the attractiveness scale is neither flat nor a bell curve, but actually slanted towards the attractive end?
Apparently those women should be condemned as cowards, for valuing silly dresses above…
Well, not life, since nobody’s dying. Or getting hurt, for that matter. Or even getting, like, offended.
I guess those women should be condemned as cowards for valuing silly dresses above proper decorum.
hmmph
Viscaria: 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.
Nope. From the get-go (on marriage), Brandon’s schtick was obvious. It’s not as if he’s the first person to try that trick. It’s not as if he’s the first person to try it here.
But, with something close to 700 comments he kept hewing to the line that all he’d ever said was the most recent comment he’d made, quotations and context be damned. When pressed to the point a reasonable person would have to concede, if not defeat; at least, error, he just quits, and moves on to the next thread as if the last one never happened.
Then gets upset if anyone should go back and remind him of what he said in other threads.
When you look at cases where people have been crushed by crowds — at soccer matches or concerts or recently at the Love Parade — it’s not really the fault of anyone in the crowd; it’s the fault of those in charge of the venue, for allowing a massive group of people to press forward into a bottleneck or a fence or some other sort of barrier.
The people in the back of the crowd often have no idea that what they’re doing is causing anyone any harm, and the people in the front are unable to move.
In some of the most notorious cases, the crowds were mostly male, FWIW, but that’s not really the point; it’s the dynamics of large groups forced into a space too small for them that is the problem, not gendered behavior.
@kyrie
It’s so sad that that really is how these dunces get conned.