Paul Elam, head ranter at A Voice for Men, has a new video out called “You want privilege? You got it!” The thesis: if women really did have the so-called privileges that men have, they’d hate it and want men to take them all back. Because all of these so-called privileges are really giant burdens. Or, as Elam puts it, somewhat more melodramatically, these privileges have “begun to more resemble an anchor around your neck than the helm of a great ship that everyone tells you that you are captaining.”
Here’s the video.
Well, all right, that’s not really Paul Elam. But that little clip does capture pretty well the tone of his latest post, which is indeed about how male privilege is really a terrible burden.
I mean, this is his opener:
I swear by everything holy that the next time I hear some fembot caterwaul about “male privilege,” I am going to find something to break, turn it into shards, and drag the broken pieces across my chest just to distract me from the pain of their increasing stupidity. Just picture me like Martin Sheen, collapsed in a heap of bloody, tearful insanity on the floor of a cheap hotel in Saigon.
Heck, compared to that, Mr. McDuck’s reaction to the news about his “ice cream” was, if anything, rather restrained.
The rest of Elam’s post is, as is typical for him, a rather trite recitation of a number of standard Men’s Rights talking points about male “disposability” written in some of the most ridiculously overblown prose ever seen outside of an Ayn Rand novel.
Elam complains that he hasn’t seen much benefit from his privileges:
Mind you I still don’t know what that privilege is. One time when I was young and very poor I was late on my light bill. I showed the electric company my balls, but they cut my power off anyway. …
Yeah, as someone who’s also had his power cut off, I’m pretty sure they do that with everyone. I’m also pretty sure that no feminist has ever or will ever argue that male privilege means you won’t get your power cut off for nonpayment.
Here’s Elam addressing women as if they’ve traded place with men:
With your privilege comes the right to work on crab boats, drive trucks, work on electric lines, walk into burning buildings and sink into the bowels of the earth digging out coal and other things people find useful.
Apparently having greater occupational choices is scary and bad.
When a ship goes down, or any other life threatening disaster strikes, you have two choices. Be a real woman and die, or treat your life like it has value and have the world shit on you as a coward who refused to perish on cue. There is also the possibility of third option, either die from the disaster so that men can live, or have another woman blow a fucking hole in your face with a pistol because you tried to save yourself.
Yeah, I believe we may have addressed this earlier. Oh, but there’s more:
Like noticing the emperor has no clothes, it may hit you one day when you decide not to offer your seat to a man; when the stares at you from all around seem to come down people’s noses. …
You must learn not to say a word. Not to anyone else, not even to yourself. You must learn to see flames, coal dust, icy saltwater, death and sacrifice for the trappings of power that the world around you thinks them to be.
Says a dude typing out his manifestos on an expensive laptop he conned nagged his followers into buying for him.
And you must be willing to hang your head in shame over that power, even as the world chews you up, spits you out, and gets ready to take its turn with your daughter.
Elam’s rousing conclusion:
So, that is it, ladies. You want my privilege, it is yours. I will gladly hand it over to you this very minute. I am just waiting for you to meet the pre-requisites of disposibilty and an utter lack of self-value. I am waiting for you to woman up to the job, take off your fucking make up and be ready to bleed, blah blah blah look at me I’m mad!
I paraphrased a little at the end there. But, yes, the world champion at seeing male “disposability” everywhere did in fact misspell the word “disposability.” That was all him. And so, believe it or not, is the following:
I, like a Jew gone weary of being called a chosen one, am completely ready for anyone else, and in particular, you, to be chosen.
Personally, I have had about all the privilege I can stand.
Yep. He went there.
Also, I don’t know if you all knew this, but when women serve in the military these days it’s “like a day care camp for them.”
Also, not to pat myself on the back or anything, but my headline is much better than his. Maybe he should get me to write all the headlines on A Voice for Angry Duck Plutocrats Men.
Discuss.
How would this work in practice? Either you’re setting up a trust fund they can only get to at age 18 (lots of help when they need diapers today) or you’re… having social services dole the money out cent by cent so that if a mother, say, buys food for herself and the child to share, she only gets 50% out of the child support fund, I guess? That kind of thing?
Boy, that wouldn’t be expensive and obnoxious at all.
And like it matters to the guys anyway. $250 a month is out of your pocket regardless of whether she spends it on manicures or formula. Who cares? If the child isn’t well taken care of, that’s a CPS matter; if they are, well, the fact that the mother is spending money on herself doesn’t mean it costs you any more.
“Feminism is designed to pass resources from men to women. It does that through child support and alimony.”
(A) queer people exist, which make this factually incorrect
(B) feminism is not in charge of collecting child support or alimony
(C) Sometimes, people don’t want to pay child support – these people are NOT forced to have children. In the event that something happens and they have children anyway,, then children cannot be ethically penalized
“In order to obtain a given standard of living or financial security, men will have to earn more money and hence take on jobs they normally would not.”
(A) For what it’s worth, the poverty line in my state for a family of four is below the average cost of one year of undergraduate university life.
(B) If I’ve interpreted this incorrectly feel free to explain in-dept, but this statement looks like men will *have* to take jobs they don’t like, but *only* if they have children… why this is not correct should be self-evident.
“If a man pays child support, put some of that into a fund so it actually goes to the kid, etc.”
As opposed to all of those women who take child support payments and do… what with them, exactly?
Maybe it’s just because the laws in my state are different, but idk where some people get their ideas about alimony and child support.
@Unimaginative
“I grew up in Fort McMurray, home of the dirty, dirty tarsand mines, and worked at one of the mines for 10 years. All of my siblings still work for mines. About half of the haul truck drivers in all of the mines are women. I don’t know the exact percentage, but huge number of the engineers, chemists, technicians, and technologists are women. There are lots of female welders, electricians, heavy equipment technicians, blasters, and trades of every kind. It’s really no big deal.”
Your name is perfect considering the total lack of imagination going into your comment. Being a working man I can say with complete self assurance I’ve met precisely 1 female electrician. And I’ve met 100s if not a 1000 over the years. Been all over the country on all kindsa jobs and you are full of manure. Welders, heavy equipment techs, blasters and trades of every kind, I’ve met zero women doing those jobs. I’ve been to every state except alaska and hawaii. Is that where they all work?
I deal with truck drivers all the time, I’ve met zero women truck drivers and I’ve met thousands of them. As far as the ebgineers, chemists and so forth. Big Daddy does demand those quota’s, doesn’t he? I see it in every damned plant I go to. Every now and then they venture out into the dirty factory where the mooks slave away. They get the cushy middle management jobs and the human resource jobs, (a make believe profession to fill a quota). Spread you propaganda on the disney channel.
Speaking of the disney channel, ever watch it. Usually it’s a bunch of little girls in short, tight, colorful clothing hitting and belittling boys. Followed by an uproarious laugh track while the boys meekly cower before their superiors. Teach em young, that’s the motto. Feminist TV.
I would assume most women who get child support payments put the money in their bank account and can’t really say “which” money they’re spending on any given transaction, anyway. If someone gets child support (but also has other income, because come on, $250 a month, you’d have to) and gets a manicure, saying she’s getting the manicure with the child support money is kind of goofy.
Obviously she’s spending some money on the kid, almost certainly more than $250 a month (and if she isn’t, that’s a CPS matter), and whether any specific transaction is using her money or the child support money is impossible and unnecessary to separate.
Child support should go directly to the 1-year-old, who can buy his own diapers!
Yeah, I think it’s really disingenuous to suggest that men are the only ones who have to take terrible jobs to support their families. Women could just as well suggest that they “had to” become sex workers just because that’s a job many people think of as low and demeaning (THOUGH I SHOULD HASTEN TO NOTE that plenty of people do sex work because they choose to!). No gender, however, has the monopoly on work sucking. Work often sucks. Representatives of every gender sometimes have few options available to them due to location, education, or ability.
And considering how often MRAs whine about men being pushed into physically dangerous jobs, go ahead and look at how the military is handled. Men can’t say women should “have to” be in dangerous and thankless situations like infantry grunt work and then also say women can’t do it because they’re not as well suited for it.
As some other commenters have noted, women absolutely do take physically demanding and dangerous jobs, but unlike men, authority figures (up to and including those in the government) often decree that they are not allowed to occupy positions men can occupy (e.g., no women in combat in the infantry, officially–though they go unofficially into combat on the front lines consistently without getting the sort of pay you’re supposed to get for that). For every type of job that men are socially encouraged to do which is dirty, demeaning, and difficult, there are women who put themselves in the position to do it as well. Not to mention men less often become low-paid “cleaning ladies” and lots of other chump change female-dominated positions. We all have our dirty, dangerous, unpleasant jobs.
This moderation crap is really annoying, Dave. My knees are a tad beat up from a lifetime of manual labor, so kneeling before the altar of womanhood wouldn’t be condusive to my good health. Don’t fret though ladies, being a man, I’ll die long before I collect social security or use up too much of your health insurance.
About the whole alimony thing.
Childcare is a valuable service. If you were hiring a live-in nanny, you’d be paying her quite a few thousand a year as well as room and board.
Cooking is also valuable. A live-in chef would be probably even more expensive, and of course they’d want you to cover all the expenses of their ingredients and tools as well.
Cleaning is also valuable. A live-in maid: not cheap either.
If a woman provides these services for you, she is not “not working.” She’s working for you. Which means that you owe her. Which means that when you stop sharing assets, her portion of the assets isn’t a theft or a gift or a luxury. It’s money that she earned, and compared to buying those services any other way, dude, you got a bargain.
You’re right, Cliff Pervocracy. My mom and dad are divorced, and my mom often expressed frustration over how rarely it was recognized that her child-rearing, cleaning, and cooking were WORK. My mother also worked sometimes at traditional jobs, but the child-rearing, cleaning, and cooking were always her domain no matter what. In their case, their marriage was pretty happy and cooperative throughout my childhood; they understood that THEY were running a household and raising a family. Spouses who are “only” taking care of the house, cooking the meals, and raising the children are not freeloading. The children the working spouse is “providing for” are also being “provided for” by the main caretaker.
My grandfather was mostly a house husband for my father and his older sister, by the way. My grandmother was a successful singer and had a number of Broadway tours throughout her younger years. This meant that my grandfather did his job of raising the children and feeding them, and keeping the house. He only worked on Sundays, and he took the kids with him. My grandmother would have had to pay for those services had she had no husband.
@ideologuereview “Feminism is designed to pass resources from men to women. It does that through child support and alimony.”
Always with the child support and alimony! You know, if you’re so against women seeking child support and alimony, perhaps having equal access to high paying jobs may diminish that a bit.
Yet you think the privilege of having those opportunities amounts to a burden. Please, burden me! I want your privilege! It’ll help us both!
@ideologuereview also! Feminism is not about taking hard earned money from men to give to women. Feminism is about the right to have equal access to the job so women can make their own hard earned money – in a nutshell, it’s about equality, not free rides.
Feminists want EQUALITY – which means equal opportunities for men and women, which is why they are proponents for stay-at-home dads and other non-traditional or parochial forms of organizing a household. Which by extension would make child support and alimony claims more equal (custody, child support and alimony would be awarded to both sexes and less disproportionately to women.)
You can’t speak from both sides of your mouth! Do you want women to succeed and do well financially or don’t you? If we have EQUAL opportunities, then there are fewer disproportionate amounts of women seeking alimony.
@Cliff Pervocracy
“If a woman provides these services for you, she is not “not working.” She’s working for you. Which means that you owe her. Which means that when you stop sharing assets, her portion of the assets isn’t a theft or a gift or a luxury. It’s money that she earned, and compared to buying those services any other way, dude, you got a bargain.”
Yes, I’ve seen the break down of the supposed cost of the cleaning/cooking/laundry thingy. Of course it’s total crap. I think the last, “estimate” for the last study put it at around 135K a year for a woman’s domestic work. If you minused the child care it came out to around 80K. Which means every single person does around 80K of work at their home or apartment.
If it’s such a bargain, why doesn’t everyone have someone cook and clean and do their laundry? Probably because so few of us make 80K a year. If it’s this fantastic bargain, I’ll gladly cook, clean and do the laundry for anyone of you for a mere 75K a year. Any takers?
Since everyone who is on their own does all these things in their spare time, (it really takes very little time or effort). The value for those tasks is minimal to non-existant.
Even with a child, whose usually tossed out the door at the age of five into preschool, it’s not hard at all, nor is it time consuming. If it was this massively time consuming job, no one who had a child could ever work at any other job. It wouldn’t be possible to both work and keep a house, let alone a child. Since that’s what lot’s of people do, all those tasks you claim are so difficult, expensive and time consuming are somehow done in everyones spare time.
How can something done in a persons spare time, which is far less then even a part time job be considered this monsterously hard and invaluable, time consuming job? The answer of course is, it’s not.
I just let through a bunch of comments from NWO; scroll up to see them. (They’re all on this page of comments.)
Don’t you live alone, slaveboy? What the fuck would you know about cleaning up after a family?
NWOslave. Adding geography to the vast breadth of things you apparently know shit about. Canada isn’t a part of the US. It’s actually a whole separate country.
I’m sure it’s theoretically possible that you’ve worked everywhere in the world and not run into a female tradesperson, but it’s more likely that they saw you coming and went out of their way to avoid you.
You have never worked in Fort McMurray, obviously. If you had, you wouldn’t whine so much about working long hours at hard jobs, and make ridiculous statements about women not being able to do either, because in the dirty, dirty tarsand mines, EVERYBODY does precisely that, including several thousand women. For which they get paid at the same rate as men, because no company is going to waste resources setting up separate pay schedules based on gender.
Wow. One misogynist asshole has only ever met one female electrician, therefore thousands of female professionals don’t exist. What a fuckwad you are.
NWOSLAVE…yeah sorry but I call Bullshit on YOU! housework and childcare take up quite a bit of time…and since you are single with no children you have no right to even comment on how long it takes to do these things
BTW I have a friend who is a trucker and he says he has met many many women truckers….of course there are more men but yes women truckers are not even really that rare…also the freaking show Ice Road Truckers has two women on the show. Also I have met a few Cable ladies and female electricians…THEY EXIST! So do female mechanics! BTW I got in n arguement with a troll on the imdb IR Truckers board who was like Women should stay out of mens jobs!!! and this women need to stop acting like men trope is all over imdb…soooooo maybe thats one reason why there aren’t too many women doing those jobs
also love how you are trying to make everyone feel sorry for you
If being put in moderation is sooo tiring like manual labor why do you still post here and other feminist sites?
heh yeah being on moderation=oppression!!!!eleventy!! and just like doing manuel labor
NWO, you exquisite shithead, Unimaginative is from Canada. You know that communist space north of us?
If you don’t like moderation, maybe you shouldn’t be such a snarling, evil, wrong assbag. Give you enough slack and you get nasty.
LOL “assbag”
Stealing.
And I thought my personal inventions “pervalope” and “penis kitten” were inventive. . . .
I like “pervalope.” definition, please?
About what it sounds like. A pervert, except the kind that isn’t at all skillful or subtle at what he does. A pervert who delivers pervish comments so ham-fistedly that you wonder whether you are talking to a parody of a person.
a.k.a. about 20% of the guys who try to talk to me on OKCupid.
Hey slavey, up here in Canada, we even have women who serve on the frontlines in places like Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers! And they take the same risks and get paid the same money!
Geography and politics dude, learn some. Also, if you paid more attention to what women are doing than you do to their tits you might realize that women are in the same jobs as men.
swankivy, thanks. I was picturing perverts bounding across the digital plains like antelope. I was kinda right.
pillowinhell, if the info doesn’t come from a 1911 Britannica, NWO is impervious to it.
You know, that’s exactly the mental image I had. And you know, the 1911 brittanica would be an excellent place to start at least. I’m sure they have a decent map showing the Canadian border for starters.