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.
Lol David! Yeah we have some fine accents up here! Try listening to Newfies (or any east coaster) when their in their cups! Between the cadence, word usage and vowel changes, conversations at a ciedhl (I don’t think I spelled that right) are pretty interesting. Especially when they decide to have some fun with you because they know you can’t keep up with the lingo.
What’s interesting is some of the new england? accents. Canadians can’t hear the difference, but Americans can. What Canadian pick up on is the seemingly anachronistic word usage that occasionally pops up.
What I want to know is who decided that the accent closest to the border would be standard english for the north american continent? Because if I have an accent that differs from what’s on tv, I don’t hear it.
@Holly Pervocracy:
I didn’t know you Arted! Looks great to me!
I Art a bit myself but my anatomy’s never been great.
Here in Tennessee it’s pronounced “vore dyer” as well.
Also I’ve sometimes had to request that the clerk of the court produce a subpoena “duke us teak um.”
I’m no lawyer
but I do look like onebut I work for one.The RP, for the US was the area just a bit south of cleveland, ca. 1930. One of the virtues for it is that it’s a sort of bland version of all the regional accents. Like “Parisian” French (which didn’t become the official dialect for France until after the revolution) everyone can understand it.
My mother was a Westinghouse Science Talent Search finalist (just failed to make the cut.. shortly before they expanded the cut), and she recalls being in DC for the competition, and having to translate for people from Brooklyn, and people from Savannah.
In much the same way I’ve never had trouble with American regional accents when I was in the Army.
More amusing, she was at a party at Duquesne, and a linguistics professor told her where she lived, to within a sq. mile, because he was studying the minor dialects of Cleveland.
Its amazing the amount of history you can learn just by checking out your own accent. Not to mention how certain accents acquired their socioeconomic status and whatnot.
A small mischievous part of me wonders what would have happened if I told the two white and southern boys that that their english was terrible so I couldn’t understand them. Because of course, I don’t have an accent so long as I stay within canadian borders.
XD
@pillowinhell
if they had a drawl that thick, they’d probably just laugh and lay the ‘southern gentleman’ act on thick. dudes like that are conditioned for that kind of thing. it’s equal parts obnoxious and adorable.
I get the same reaction from folks out on the east coast. So long as they can get some good natured teasing of you in return.
Strangely, I often get told I sound like an American…don’t know how that works, seeing as I come from a working class family that’s never been outside of Ontario.
I think the Scots have all you guys beat in terms of accents, given that Trainspotting was released in the US with subtitles. It’s in English, people!
Scottish is easy compared to one guy I work with who’s from outside Dallas. The man sounds like he’s talking through marbles and should come with subtitles. I cringe when he calls.
uh, i’ll introduce you to some north georgians, and then you can tell me your scottish friends have cornered the market on incomprehensibility
while we’re talking about regional pronunciations- every american here whos ever bought vidalia onions, that refers to the part of georgia where they come from, and you’re probably saying it wrong. it’s not vi-dal-yah, it’s vah-dayhl-yuh, or if youre from there, more like v’dayuh.
Granted that the Southern tendency to just drop letters can be confusing, but clearly you guys have never met anyone from Strathclyde. When I used to go home to Scotland to visit as a kid my parents would have to translate what relatives were saying for me, so it was like live subtitles courtesy of Mom.
I think the Scots have all you guys beat in terms of accents, given that Trainspotting was released in the US with subtitles. It’s in English, people!
I think Glaswegian specifically wins the incomprehensible accent contest. One of my good friends is Scottish (from Edinburgh) and even she says that half the time she can’t understand what the hell anyone from Glasgow is saying.
(I quite like Scottish accents, though. I may not be able to understand a lot of what people are saying, but they sound awesome while they’re saying whatever it is!)
I grew up in South Florida. Some of my friends when I was younger had pronounced Spanish accents despite not knowing a word of Spanish.
Actually the UK is a treasure trove of difficult to understand accents. There was this one guy from Yorkshire that I used to run into all the time in London. Lovely guy, but I felt bad about having to make him repeat himself so much.
I’m from an area called Northern Appalachia, and some people back home have very thick northern Appalachian accents (which is very similar but a bit different than southern Appalachian ones).
The guy at about 2:25 sounds almost exactly like my mom’s boyfriend, they guy at about 5:27 sounds a bit like my sister’s boyfriend. And I know people who sound like the guy at about 5:00 in…There’s a bit less scotts-irish derived words and a bit more german where I’m from, but it’s close.
Though years of college in upstate NY have made it so that I generally don’t have too much of it, unless I’ve been back visiting recently or slip on certain words or phrases. People from NY tend to ask if I’m southern at that point, but southerners generally guess Kentucky or West Virginia, rather than Pennsylvania. Though I grew up closer to West Virginia than to any major city, so that’s not too surprising.
They didn’t pick up any through osmosis? I thought all Floridian kids got that (along with a basic knowledge/appreciation of Jimmy Buffet).
If you want to get really specific, I have a very typical central-west-coast-of-Florida accent: two parts US-RP, one part US-southern, one part Canada-RP.
Leely: I mean, okay, beyond your basic “donde esta el bano?”s and “hijo de puta”s. They’re not fluent, is my point. 🙂
And I have a “plastic ear”. If I leave the US I start to pick up vowel shift, and an overpronunciation (based on my norm) of my consonants. If I’m spending time with people who have a heavy non-english accent, I will be assumed to not be from the US, when I’m in the US.
Some of that might be because I speak two non-english languages, and can pronounce several more; as well as a few english dialects, which aren’t my own.
I am pretty good at faking a non-english base language (and can fake a few non-US accents well enough to fool USians).
But I really like language.
Mutual intelligibility is–supposedly–what madial what is spoken in two communities dialects of the same language instead of two separate languages. In practice, it doesn’t really work out that way. Lots of speakers of English A have no idea what speakers of English B are trying to convey. And then you get into a situation where English B speakers have mutual intelligibility with both English A and English C speakers, but A and C don’t understand each other at all, and then what have you got?
Very few Canadians actually say “aboot”, you know. It’s just that the Oo in the ah-oo diphthong is more closed, so it *sounds* a bit like aboot to the Yankee ear XD
My dad comes from a German-speaking rural Alberta family, though they mostly spoke English by the time he was born (understandably, as he was born just before the outbreak of WWII). At that time the school system favoured British idioms and pronunciations, so he has a generic Western Canadian accent peppered with incongruities like pronouncing schedule as “ahedule” and Tuesday as “Chewsday”.
He also uses adorable minced oaths like “Cripes!”
Also in case anyone is wondering, no baby yet. Dammit.
Er, “shedule”.
Can’t blame that one on autocorrect.
Hope baby comes soon! Though I suspect we’ll be seeing a bit less of you after that ;).
Watched Dr Who “Daleks in Manhattan” last night. Did those actors do a good New York accent? It sounded pretty crook to me, but I’ve never heard the real thing. 🙂