Over on A Voice for Men, noted human rights advocate Paul Elam has responded to criticism from a fellow antifeminist internet warrior in his typically logical, understated manner. Some highlights:
He’s whining, about jack shit, on behalf of a misandric cunt. …
Matt Forney just jerked off all over his bed sheets. And now it appears he is standing there like a virtual ‘tard, grinning about it and drooling.
At issue? Mr. Forney wrote a post some months back critical of the faux “offenders registry” called Register-Her, a pet project of A Voice for Men’s JohnTheOther in which female “bigots” – that is, feminists – are “registered” as “offenders” alongside female criminals. (Forney’s post originally appeared on the thankfully now-defunct blog In Mala Fide, but Elam only discovered it after Forney posted it on his own blog.)
In particular, Forney disagreed with Elam’s decision to “register” actress Katherine Heigl as a “bigot” after she made a Funny or Die PSA about spaying dogs and cats. The problem, for Elam and crew? That in the video she pretended to be a crazed testicle-hater obsessed with cutting off all balls, including those of human males. The AVFM crowd whipped themselves into a frenzy over this one, with Elam’s Number One Stooge JohnTheOther writing, in all seriousness:
Katherine Heigl’s supposedly humorous claim; that her advocacy of neutering pets is an outlet for her desire to chop human male’s balls off shouldn’t be taken out of context. The context being that she’s a creature of hollywood who lives in california – the same state which earlier this year saw Katherine Becker cut her husband’s penis off for the “offense” of wanting a divorce. …
We know it’s a joke. That’s the point. It’s both shocking, and plausibly deniable. It also wouldn’t be funny to most people if there was not an element of truth in it. Heigl’s “joke” included the word “yet”. This is an obvious nod to her awareness of increasing cultural acceptance of male-targeted violence and mutilation.
No, I have no fucking clue what on earth he means by that bit about the word “yet.” He goes on:
Male targeting violence persists and escalates because in the unconscious reptile corner of men’s minds, they think nodding along with whatever vile , violent, murderous shit the nearest vacuous barbie utters in her you-go-girl bubble of social enablement might get him approved for access to the magic vagina.
Like Elam, JohnTheOther apparently writes all his posts for AVFM with steam literally coming out of his ears.
Here’s the video in question. (Sorry, it won’t embed.) As you can see, the real butt of the joke is Heigl herself, and more generally narcissistic celebs who glom onto fashionable causes for all the wrong reasons. It’s not really a castration joke; it’s an actress making fun of her own reputation for narcissism. (And the video is also a serious attempt to raise awareness about the need to spay and neuter pets.)
Forney, in the blog post that roused Elam’s incredibly easy-to-rouse fury, suggested that AVFM’s claimed outrage about Heigl’s video was both silly and a bit unconvincing:
Were you honestly offended? Did that video get you mad? It didn’t get me mad. I thought it was stupid and unfunny, but aside from that, I don’t care about it. After watching it, I just shrugged my shoulders and closed the tab.
Forney went on to suggest that any MRAs who were offended by the video were, well, basically a bunch of “phony pussies,” a virtual mirror-image of the Politically Correct:
In trying to gin up indignation over Heigl’s ball-cutting comments, Register-Her.com and the MRM are seeking to perpetuate our politically correct regime, not burn it to the ground and piss on its ashes. …
The men’s rights movement wants men to keep picking at their scabs, to wallow in self-pity for all eternity. That’s not a satisfying goal for me, or countless other men who want to rise out of the mud. Until MRAs address this issue, their movement will be stuck in neutral, regardless of their occasional victories.
Yes, that’s right. A dude posting on In Mala Fide — which was known for its blatant misogyny and its proud racism, among other terrible things — is the closest we’ve got to a “voice of reason” in this particular debate.
Elam, an MRA scab-picker extraordinaire, lashed out in barely coherent rage to Forney’s charges:
[T]his kind of chicken-shit nit picking by a supposed sympathizer is far more pathetic that the Heigl video could have ever hoped to be.
Why would the Heigl video hope to be pathetic? Also, how exactly can a video hope?
I write people like you off all the time. But then you have the gumption to parrot a bunch of keyboard courage about crushing your enemies? And you make fun of guys who get fucked over by the system? What a laugh. I don’t mean what you said, but you, personally.
You may be every bit as brave as your words. I doubt it, but I don’t know. What I do know is that your article is a misandric piece of shit. Based on your rhetoric, though, I would lay dollars to doughnuts you have never crushed so much as a Dixie Cup at a water cooler. Your kind of man never does.
Says the man whose entire life is devoted to bashing out angry internet screeds, and whose only known attempt at real-world organizing collapsed before it really even began.
You just shit on those out there taking the hits and doing the work, likely because you lack the conviction to stick your neck out for anything really important to anyone but yourself.
Personally, I would not talk to MRA’s about picking scabs until you quit being one.
I’m not sure if Elam is calling Forney a “scab” as a sort of random insult referring back to his mention of scabs, or if Elam thinks that Forney is a “scab” violating some imaginary MRA “sex strike” – or “cock blockade” – by not hating on the ladies every second of every day. I’m guessing it’s the latter, because Elam really is that delusional.
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EDITED TO ADD: Matt Forney has responded to Elam’s little tantrum here. At the end, he says this:
And since I can’t end this post without mentioning that David Futrelle has (reluctantly) defended me on this issue, mainly because Elam’s neckbeard fans are going to brandish Futrelle’s article as proof that I’m an evil crypto-feminist racist mangina, let me just say that Futrelle is an even more pathetic bitch than Elam, and I don’t want his support.
Don’t worry, lil dude. I don’t actually support you. I simply agree with you on a couple of points: that Elam is a total drama king, and that anyone who believes (or purports to believe) that Heigl’s video is something to get ENRAGED about is a twit.
re Antz: I didn’t realise that Ghegis Khan spoke English: to make that quotation.
I wonder if it wasn’t someone attributing a desire of their to him, so they wouldn’t get called a douchenozzle.
Cliff:
Don’t forget the time all the women in Sweden rose up and committed genocide against the male race. Or whatever the hell that was.
I think you guys are forgetting about the chronic lack of sex on demand faced by today’s men.
Nanasha:
But at least you get that this isn’t Heigl’s coded announcement of a plan to castrate actual men. Because you’re not an MRA.
I saw listed somewhere on AVFM a bunch of grievances they had against women and one of them literally said, “Women control access to sex”. They are beyond parody at this point.
y’know, there’s nothing in the heigl video that’s even half this lurid, so it’s kind of telling that you had to add that in
Probably because the actual equivalent would be women getting hysterectomies, which is something that happens in the real world and isn’t considered especially scary. I guess it’d be disturbing if a crazed woman-hating guy ran around threatening to surgically remove people’s ovaries, though.
Can you imagine Michael Douglas , giving Catherine Zeta Jone her ovaries back in a jar to have a night out with the girls, or a list of the “cons” of ovaries , would that pass as humour.
I wouldn’t compare this one with circumcision, personally. From what I hear, American attitutdes to circumcision are pretty damn bad (I’m British, it’s pretty much just a Jewish thing over here AFAIK), but it isn’t castration by any stretch of the imagination.
(Castration probably does happen- I have vague memories of hearing about it being done to defeated enemies, though the only ones I can specifically remember are implications that that might be what was done to King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, which I’d say is a bit too long ago to be campaigning against.)
No one is advocating or even suggesting we castrate men. MRAs should focus their energy on ending male circumcision if they’re so concerned with bodily integrity.
I know it’s not technically about testicles, but it is related:
Hmm.
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3po06i/
Seeing the way MRAs talk about rape, I REALLY don`t want to hear what Elam has to say about circumcision. .
He has a daughter?! Fucking scary. And sad.
Things are bad only when they happen to them.
Um, coerced sterlization of poor women, women of color, queer women, and women with disabilities has been done in the US, in fairly high numbers, until fairly recently (and you still see not uncommon claims of lack of consent for women with disabilities). The US eugenics programs, which were implimented on the state level as an official matter by state agencies (not to mention doctors who did these things outside of official agencies) were targeted primarily at women. The number of men sterilized was above zero (almost exclusively men of color and queer men), but the women by far predominate (queer women were often grouped with mentally ill women whoe were subjected as well as other disabled women, poor women, women of color, and those who were more than one of the above). Native American women on some reservations were hit particularly hard as well. Some state governments ran official eugenics programs into the 1980s.
“Women control access to sex.”
Hey, guys? You do realize that you control access to your own sex, right?
@darksidecat- The flipside of forced female sterilization is the fact that many women who are adamantly childfree and do not want to have children for the duration of their fertile lives are practically forbidden from getting any sort of permanent sterilization. Before a certain point in our history, women who WANTED sterilization had to get the permission of a husband, which is total bullshit (and I hear that there are some places that still need a husband to sign and acknowledge that he’s ok with it if she’s married before she can do it).
As was talked about recently on Tiger Beatdown (see here: http://tigerbeatdown.com/2012/06/04/4656/), there’s still a lot tied up in what people consider a “woman” in fertility. A lot of people consider women to be “inferior” or “less of a woman” if they are infertile, and the stigma is much more pronounced if she actually chose to get surgically sterilized.
Since this is my second and last pregnancy, I’m considering getting sterilized after this, but there’s a lot less in my way of getting sterilized if I so choose to do it simply because I *do* have children of my own. Of course, vasectomies are often much less invasive and have far fewer complications than female sterilization methods, but more men are hesitant to get them than women, even when they are finished having children.
Honestly, I think I will probably go with another Mirena IUD after this pregnancy because the localized hormones in the IUD help my PCOS hormonal issues without the negative effects that birth control pills seem to have on my body (they give me high blood pressure).
*sigh* I wish people would just be cool with respecting other people’s bodily integrity already.
Has no one give Another MRA an anatomy lesson yet?
Start with wiki if you want this more in depth, but to keep this simple, before about 9 weeks gestational age all fetuses have the same reproductive organs. From those structures will arise ovaries/testicles, clitoris/penis, and labia/scrotum — those are your matched pairs for comparison (wiki even has a chart of this).
The female equivilant of male circumcision (foreskin removal) would be removing the clitoral hood, not removal of the clitoris itself (that’d be the equivilant to penectomy, which is basically only done in cancer patients, ie to save the man’s life).
As far a neutering animals goes, female animals generally have the ovaries and uterus removed, males animals generally have the testis removed, but it varies by species, animal size, veterinarian doing the surgery, etc.
If it comes up, in humans voluntary sterilization is done by severing tubal connections, the vas deferens in men (and others with those), and the fallopian tubes in women (and others with those) — the former is a safer surgery because of anatomy, not cutting in abdominal muscles is safer than cutting into them (that’s ignoring that a vasectomy can be done under local instead of general anesthesia and general has its own set of risks).
chuckeedee — you aren’t helping any with comments like “rusted or dirty implement in a tribal jungle setting” — yes the instruments used are often not medical grade, but sometimes they are medical grade, that doesn’t change the risks associated with childbirth later on. And “tribal jungle setting”? Have a map of where FGM occurs and a map of climate zone in Africa.
(While FGM does occur outside Africa, it isn’t exactly easy to read a map of global climate zones.)
Oh, that penectomy link is NSFW, sorry about that!
“Women control access to sex.”
This is a bad thing, for a woman to have control over her own vagina? Men complain that women can laid whenever they want while men can’t. I really don’t give a shit if this is the case. MRAs need to get over the notion that women “owe” men sex. We aren’t property to be accessed.
A woman owns her own body. And despite what our friend Barbarosaa says, ownership of said body does not pass from father to husband. Somehow these men aren’t getting enough (or any) sex, and they think male control of vaginas is the answer. Ugh, vagina isn’t a resource to be rationed out like gasoline. It doesn’t occur to them that women are people, or maybe they just don’t care.
@Nanasha, privileged women had it better on that front too. Poor women and women of color made up far more of the deaths pre-Roe. In 1972, 64% of women who died from botched illegal abortions were women of color.
http://www.aclufl.org/take_action/download_resources/info_papers/15.cfm
Marginalized women got hit harder on both the forced birth and coercive sterilization fronts.
Yeah, voluntary sterilization isn’t the same ballpark as coerced, but the history of coerced sterilization and the history of forced birth often both disproportionately affected marginalized women.
I had a vasectomy because my wife was having serious difficulty finding a reliable contraceptive that didn’t have unwanted hormonal side-effects. It wasn’t a tough decision – as she pointed out, she’d undergone significantly invasive surgery in order to give birth to one of our kids, and getting her sterilized would involve yet more, whereas a vasectomy is a far more straightforward operation.
And aside from the few days I spent recovering, it genuinely made no difference at all to my sex drive either physically or mentally – but I think this is the psychological block that many men have: although it’s not castration in any meaningful sense of the term, there’s a widespread if wholly erroneous assumption that it must be “emasculating” in some way. Even though once you’re certain that you don’t want any more kids the benefits massively outweigh the drawbacks (which essentially amount to a brief period of post-surgery discomfort).
Indeed, I’m surprised vasectomies aren’t more fashionable amongst MRAs, given their irrationally pathological fear of spermjacking and other nefarious female-led activities.
darksidecat — from what I know of the issues women face getting voluntarily sterilized I would guess that privileged women have an advantage there too — they can seek other doctors more easily if told no by one. Plus things like the time off work to heal and the cost of voluntary procedures and the like. It’s still a different ballpark (or an entirely different game) but I’d doubt it’s really equally hard across all women.
The part about having to be sure you really want to be sterilized applies to men as well, the FWB intends to get himself a vasectomy for his 30th birthday — once he’s old enough medicine won’t argue that he can’t possibly be sure he doesn’t want kids — it’s probably not as hard for men to get sterilized voluntarily as for women to, but it’s not exactly a matter of just asking for it either.
Also, a citation regarding forced sterilization of Native American women — “Native Americans accused the Indian Health Service of sterilizing at least 25 percent of Native American women who were between the ages of fifteen and forty-four during the 1970s.”
I had a compulsory counseling session, though as a fortysomething father of two it was obviously easier to convince the doctor that I was serious than it would have been if I’d been twenty years younger and childless.
My husband says that he’d like to get a vasectomy, but sterilization procedures can sometimes only be partially covered (or not covered at all) by insurance, so we’d still have to figure out the costs involved. Whereas my Mirena IUD was covered 100% by my insurance last time and I only had to pay a copay for the office visit to have it installed. The only annoying thing is that the IUD strings are like FUCKING FISHING LINE and can “poke” the guy during sex. I had my strings cut REALLY short so I ended up having to get a local anesthetic when I wanted the IUD removed so that we could try to conceive baby #2 because the strings were so far up there that the doctor couldn’t find them easily (although I checked them all the time by just bearing down and poking my finger up my cervix area which, while uncomfortable, was not impossible).
*grumble grumble* and as for MRAs complaining about not having sex, I’m currently stuck not having been able to have sex for what feels like FOREVER. My husband does not seem to want to initiate sex (probably because he’s on graveyard shift and he’s like a zombie all the time), and when I initiate sex, it just feels like he’s pushing himself into it for me and I don’t like that. So I’m all bloaty and pregnant and feel utterly ugly, and even though my husband is still affectionate and huggy and kissy and stuff, I’d really like to just get down and have some good ol’ fashioned consensual fucking. But since I realize what he’s going through, I’m not going to push him, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s this thing called “masturbation” that is perfectly fun to do in the meanwhile.
Seriously, you’d think these guys were afraid to touch their own cocks, yet they want everyone else to worship them.
“Seriously, you’d think these guys were afraid to touch their own cocks, yet they want everyone else to worship them.”
Yep. As someone else here said already, MRAs view their inability to get laid as discrimination, bigotry, or misandry. Somehow, women controlling their own sexuality is unfair to them, therefore it must be stopped. I’ve seen a lot of MRAs reflect on this idea. They would like women to be like library books, you can take one home, use her as you wish, then return her when you’re done. It’s so despicable.