Quiz: What makes an MRA maddest? (Pussy-begging A Voice for Men edition.)

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?

1. “[F]eminists only support the rights of women who agree with them, and have no qualms throwing disagreeing women under the bus.”
2.  “[T]he idea that women are hurt more than men by being abused is a load of crap.”
3. “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.