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.
Yet another troll fails at figuring out what satire is. Nice try, Owly, and be sure to play next time on “What’s That Literary Device?”
Or maybe it is satire, I haven’t watched the video in a while—I just wanted an excuse to pitch my game show idea.
PS Owly: if a man were saying the same things, re-gendered, and it were biting satire, then we would call it biting satire.
I love how he throws out sexual harassment lawsuits. It’s adorable when he thinks he knows what he’s talking about.
Dvärghundspossen — gender reassignment in English, except many people still call is sex reassignment, I believe the former is preferred though. And it looks like Sweden has a proposal in the works to change that (and remove privacy protection if I’m reading this chart right) — in the US it varies by state >.< (see wiki for that chart).
LBT — MA requirements on name change and gender marker change. Short version is the former is easy, the latter requires a doctor’s note “attesting to the gender that you consider yourself to be”, proof of GRS not required technically (and name changes are usually easy, so yeah, take that “easy” with some salt).
More misandry from Funny or Die, that notorious radical feminist web site. In this video, a woman threatens to bite a man’s nose off! Re-gender that, and you’d have feminazi lawyers all over you with their sexual harassment lawsuits.
Thanks Argenti, you learn something new every day.
In Sweden it’s common for people to talk about “könsbyte”, which literally translates as “sex change” (or possibly “gender change”), but trans people will point out that you don’t CHANGE sex/gender. Hormone therapy and surgery only serves to adjust the body so that it better matches the mind; thereby the preferred “könskorrigering”, which literally translates as “sex correction” or possibly “gender correction”.
I didn’t see anything on the chart about sterilization, though. One could have some sex reassignement surgery without sterilization – for instance, an FTM could remove his breasts and even make some kind of genital surgery while leaving the ovaries intact. That’s still illegal in Sweden.
Or rather, the procedure I described isn’t illegal to go through, but that person would still legally be a woman.
“I didn’t see anything on the chart about sterilization, though.” — no, you’re right that it’s reassignment not sterilization, but it was all I could find quickly (Sweden’s current legal fight was clogging my results actually!)
“Thanks Argenti, you learn something new every day.” — unless you’re NWO XD (not a problem though) — the idea behind “gender correction” seems similar too, correcting the body to match what it should.
RE: Argenti
Considering our unorthodox situation, I have no interest at this time in changing our gender marker. If I could just get rid of the damn thing entirely, that’d be best, but alas, it’s not a choice, and both F and M are too limited. (Unless we decide to claim M stands for ‘multiple.’)
I’ve been intending to change our name for over six months now, but the money and time involved have kept pushing it to the backburner, and it looks like that will remain the case for quite some time now. : Oh well, nobody uses our legal name these days except for doctors and government people.
LBT — understood on the unorthodox nature of your situation, there’s a form for if you can’t afford the name change (and I think any sort of public benefit, eg food stamps, would qualify you) — those links are in detail directions, not just legallese, if you were interested (if not, ignore me!)
uh, no, that’s not what sexual harassment is, duder. your video sounds like protected speech to me, though, so if you want to make it, go ahead. totally your right. but it would involve you get off your ass and doing something instead of just complaining, something we all know youre not capable of.
Wow, Dvärghundspossen, where can we Americans get some political Christians like the ones you have? In the U.S., the people who base their politics on “Christian values” just get more and more conservative and authoritarian every year.
@Jessay: And no doubt lawyers are crawling from the woodwork to sue those men!
*crickets*
No, they’re not?
Huh, funny, NWO assured me they would be.
Could he be……………………wronger than a very wrong thing?
Pig biting mad, HAH!
What about tortoise (misandry) BITING?
Female tortoise bites mate!
http://www.themarysue.com/tortoise-divorce/
People, come on. It’s well-known that whenever a man posts an obnoxious video on the Internet, he gets sued into the poorhouse. That’s why you never see obnoxious videos on the Internet.
That needs to go in the Book of Learnin’ — “It’s well-known that whenever a man posts an obnoxious video on the Internet, he gets sued into the poorhouse. That’s why you never see obnoxious videos on the Internet.”
“Could he be……………………wronger than a very wrong thing?” — fractally wrong, he is just as wrong no matter what view you take
>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.
We actually demand of our customers to treat our books better than that.
Um, some of us feminists know quite a bit about the cultures where FGM happens, seeing as there are feminists IN those cultures. Also for someone who isn’t, I have this amazing ability to care about more than one thing at the same time! Someone put me in a museum!
Dude, if you seriously think removing a woman’s clitoris with a dirty or rusted implement isn’t fucking dangerous as hell, I have a bridge in New York to sell you.
meddling in cultures of which they know nothing about.
The author of this mangled phrase should stop meddling in languages “of which they know nothing about”.
Seriously keeping a running tab of hypocrisies. When it’s convenient to them, they want us to not care about the suffering of women in the US and other first world countries because there are women in other countries who are REALLY suffering. But when we mention caring about them too and how the stuff they’re laughing about it really being forced upon women in some countries it’s “MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS!”
MRAs, always the winners because they say they are.
Karalora: Wow, Dvärghundspossen, where can we Americans get some political Christians like the ones you have? In the U.S., the people who base their politics on “Christian values” just get more and more conservative and authoritarian every year.
That’s not really true. There are lots of Christians who aren’t like that (Quakers come immediately to mind). They just happen to not be as loud, or trumpeted by the media.
@Cliff Pervocracy
“That Heigl video and that one time Sharon Osbourne was on the Talk seem to compose about 65% of all Atrocities Against Men.”
Is that an official feminist percentage? Feminists are known for their statistical accuracy.
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@ragefromthebasement
“I hope that as long as you live your semen sees nothing but your crusty old sheets and the back of your hand.”
I thought shaming for jerking off was a feminist no-no?
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@Nanasha
“Seriously, the most important thing a person can do for their pets (female or male) is to sterilize them. They live longer, happier lives.”
Can women feel the instincts and thoughts of animals?
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@Wetherby
“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.”
And we have the declaration of a feminist man enlightening the masses to this wholly erroneous assumption, so it must be true.
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@ragefromthebasement
“Yep. As someone else here said already, MRAs view their inability to get laid as discrimination, bigotry, or misandry.”
Perhaps these backward men just need to brush up on their entertainment value to women? Nothing says a man is worthy of acceptance on a societal basis like a woman graciously allowing a man the privilege of pleasing her. He is now worthy to exist due to her generosity.
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@Nanasha
“his qualities such as hard working/cooperative nature/kindness are generally valued more than his looks because men are considered people.”
Working hard for women, deferring to women and always being kind to women reguardless of the treatment recieved will earn a man the respect of women. A mans options seem endless.
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@lauralot89
“Thrill as NWO cannot find any examples of such an occurrence to support his argument!”
Any sexual harassment case is whatever any woman feels at any moment in time.
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@Tulgey Logger
“PS Owly: if a man were saying the same things, re-gendered, and it were biting satire, then we would call it biting satire.”
Well let’s see, a man gets on a video and says, “I hate ovaries. There’s nothing I’d like more than to shove a knife up a womans vagina and slice out every damn ovary. Is it still satire? Women do love their privilege of never being held accountable for anything they say while demanding complete respect from men.
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@Argenti Aertheri
“Could he be……………………wronger than a very wrong thing?” — fractally wrong, he is just as wrong no matter what view you take”
Still waiting for the 1 in 4 stat you told me you’d come up with. I got like 1 in 800 by being monsterously generous. I gave you the official links for berkeley’s number of assaults and enrollment numbers. Do prove me wrong again. Won’t you?
Some of us do actually believe that God teaches us to, you know, love other people and stuff.
I don’t think she meant christians in general being like that I think she meant political conservative christians who try to enforce christianity in the laws and on everyone else. Though I have no idea how the conservatives there sounded more reasonable than the ones here, going along with forced sterilization just because some other group wanted that does not sound very ideal at all.
NWO said:
“Why is it that whatever happens to fall from a woman’s mouth, in this case cutting off a mans balls, is considered biting satire? Yet those same words regendered coming from a man would be considered sexual harrassment? Lawyers would be crawling out of the woodwork to sue the pants off the guy.”
I don’t consider castration jokes to be funny and they’re certainly in very bad taste, but while men make rape jokes some women are likely to respond in kind. If men don’t want women to make castration jokes I would suggest that they would be more receptive if men stopped making rape jokes. Also: men sometimes make dumb castration jokes too.
My respect for the MRAs falls on a daily basis. Maybe they can’t calm down until they’re, well, smarter. Ignorance of the most basic facts sends them off on wild and crazy tangents that end in mouth-froth. From our Internet neighbor The Spearhead comes this gem:
“The fact is that patriarchy works, and always has. It’s the reason the Catholic Church, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and, yes, even Buddhism (the Dalai Lama is not a feminist; there are no female lamas) are still around.”
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2012/06/11/feminists-frothing-over-vatican-crackdown/
No female lamas? Ever? http://www.innerasiaresearch.org/woman%20lama/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jul/06/religion-buddhism-dalai-lama-tibet
http://mindbuddhanews.blogspot.com/2007/09/tibetan-foremost-female-lama-peek-into.html
http://www.diamondway-buddhism.org/default.asp?col=01&t=faq_d.htm
And let’s let the Dalai Lama speak for himself concernng his beliefs and attitudes about women: http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/1921522-will-the-next-dalai-lama-be-female
http://www.progressive.org/mag_intv0106
http://isikkim.com/2011-06-my-incarnation-could-even-be-a-little-girl-hh-dalai-lama-238/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Buddhism#The_Dalai_Lama
It’s one thing to be ignorant due to forces beyond a person’s control. It’s another to recruit ignorance as a footsoldier to hateful screeds.