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.
So true, if MRAs weren’t such blatant misogynists they would call out men for testicle-violence-jokes too. I found a video that’s waaaay worse than that Heigl thing.
Warning: contains tasteless 3dgy humor:
Most of the people involved in this video were men. Two women make VERY brief appearances near the end to joke about using the “cock shot” on their boyfriends, uh oh! I’m sure that’s the part that MRAs get the most upset about, because MRAs are an anti-woman hate group.
Also, I liked this Angry Paul-e quote:
Shouldn’t it be misandrist, like misogynist? There’s no such word as “misogynic,” after all.
They can’t even master the use of a word they invented.
…and before someone decides to tell me the history of the word misandry, it doesn’t matter when it was coined, it’s an obvious regendering of misogyny, I get it. It doesn’t make it a real phenomenon. There is no such thing as institutionalized misandry.
Well, you know, MRA grammar. I guess following the same logic misogynist should now be written as “misogynic”?
In the future testicle humor will dominate all media.
http://m.youtube.com/index?desktop_uri=%2F&gl=US#/watch?v=wAg1r6zw7Bg
One of my friends is 18 years old and in high school. She mentioned today that the guys around her tell her they want to rape her, talk about putting roofies in her drink if she came to one of their parties, and how basically all that’s stopping them from raping her is that they have girlfriends. They claim these are jokes.
That’s totally ILLEGAL. And she needs to make recordings of these and report them to the school admin and the police if hasn’t already.
And those aren’t jokes about women as a group broadcast by some public media outlet, they are malicious harassment and intimidation against an individual woman(which is far worse than any sexist joke made by some some public figure).
That’s totally ILLEGAL. And she needs to make recordings of these and report them to the school admin and the police if hasn’t already.
And those aren’t jokes about women as a group broadcast by some public media outlet, they are malicious harassment and intimidation against an individual woman(which is far worse than any sexist joke made by some some public figure). Sorry bout the botched quote attempt in my prior post.
@monsieur sans nom:
The two aren’t completely separate, you know. The culture that accepts “jokes” against a gender in public is the same one that permits more extreme “jokes” made in private. Each is a signal of the other.
This… this made my week!!
I identify as a Christian, but I took Karalora to mean religious and conservative political groups, since she wrote “political Christians”, not just Christians, so I wasn’t offended.
And I personally think KD just want to get more voters. They’re a very small party. Bigoted people who hate trans people are gonna vote for them anyway, even if they change their view on the sterilization laws, since these people have no other option. So KD don’t really have anything to lose voter-wise by changing their mind on this issue, but might possibly win some new votes from people who hitherto thought they were TOO conservative.
Er… apparently the fight goes on. Just RECENTLY it seems like KD turned around AGAIN in this issue, since the big bulk of the party members wasn’t ready to embrace everybody’s equal value although the party leaders finally were, and they have managed to drag along some of the other right wing parties. So now they’re gonna EVALUATE the sterilization law AGAIN before they possibly do something about it, because it’s “so complicated”.
KD politician Maria Hansson Nielsen who is a trans woman is valiantly trying to fight the party on this issue.
At least in two years time there’s an election to the parliament again and we just might get a left-wing government… where everybody’s pro trans rights.
So don’t be too jelous of us here! 🙁
@NWO- There is solid medical evidence for why spaying and neutering your pets is a great idea (both male or female pets):
“There is solid medical evidence regarding the benefits of neutering for both males and females. For the bitch, the most important effect of spaying is protection against mammary cancer, the most common tumor in sexually intact female dogs. The risk to intact bitches of developing this kind of cancer is three to seven times greater than that of neutered bitches. The risk of mammary tumor is lowest for bitches spayed prior to the first heat – a mere 0.5% ; spayed after the first or second season, the risk of mammarycancer rises as high as 26%.
A more obvious benefit of spaying is the prevention of Pyometra, a severe infection of the uterus. Also, risks due to unwanted matings and to pregnancy and whelping are removed.
Benefits of neutering male dogs
Since testicular cancer is second only to skin cancer as the most common cancer in dogs, castration of the male obviously removes this risk as well as risks associated with testicular torsion and infections. As with human males, non-cancerous enlargement of the prostate is a major problem, involving more than 60 percent of the sexually intact male more than five years of age.”
Source: http://www.lgd.org/library/neuter.htm
Something not mentioned here about spaying female animals is that when you don’t spay them, they have a normal period cycle for their species and you have to put diapers on them so they won’t bleed all over the place. Plus a female animal in heat will often act out in very extreme ways to get out and mate with a male. Un-neutered males engage in a lot of negative behaviors, such as dogs that hump legs to assert dominance, or inappropriate urination all over the place to “mark territory”. Animals neutered or spayed before they reach sexual maturity will generally never begin exhibiting these behaviors and are more likely to find a happy home and not end up being euthanized in a shelter or abandoned on the street. Indoor cats tend to live on average a good 10 years longer than outdoor cats as well.
Human women do not go into heat (or “estrus,”) as other female primates do. Another thing that human beings evolved out is the huge red ass swelling that most female primates develop when they are ovulating. One anthropological theory is that because humans walk upright, we lost the reason for estrus swellings, as they interfere with walking upright and generally can’t be seen as well when upright walking is achieved. The other general idea is that humans are much more like bonobos, both males and females have sex for reasons far more varied than simply reproduction and living in small groups (as early humans generally did) that split off as certain members grew into sexual maturity and either joined other groups or had others join, it would keep the genetic variables fairly complex, so needing to know when pregnancy was most optimal was not a priority, especially if all humans in a group protected all children from the group for optimal survival of the species.
*takes off anthropology hat*
Let me guess, NWO is going to respond with “ARGLEBLARGLE PROOF TAT WIMMINZ THEY MAEK MEN RAEP THEM.”
*sigh*
ALSO @ NWO responding to:
“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.”
__________________
I never said that anyone was required to gain the respect of a woman (or women, cuz ya know, we’re all a hive mind, yes?). In fact, you are totally able and welcome to act like a complete jackass to any and all women ever in the whole world! Furthermore, you are FREE to act like a disrespectful jackass to all men and all women and all transpeople and all gender neutral and all living beings on the planet!
The only thing I don’t get is why people who behave in this manner in an unabashed and unashamed sort of way then turn around and bitch and moan and complain and act completely clueless as to why their jackassery is not being accepted or welcomed by the people that they direct said jackassery to!
If you act like a disrespectful jackass to most women, most women will not like it and tell you to fuck off. You have the right to behave how you want to, but you are not owed magical pussy time just because you’re a guy and you showed up in the same location as a bunch of women regardless of your behavior.
You can’t have your misogyny and enjoy the company of women who actually LIKE you as well.
So, honestly, I say this- choose to be a jackass and own your shit, or figure out a way to change your behavior so that you can have a functional interaction with a woman long enough to have consensual sex. You can’t have it both ways.
And, by the way, if you *do* rape a woman because your entitled ass thinks that you are owed sex for simply being in the vicinity of a vagina-ed person, you are a terrible disgusting and pathetic individual who deserves to be locked away until your testicles turn to dust.
@NWO
@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?
I’m not shaming him for jerking off. Masturbation is a good thing. I’m just hoping that he never has sex with a woman because he is a mysoginistic asshole, and no woman deserves a man like that.
NWO is a disturbing and messed up person who seems to think that blaming women for his own problems is a constructive habit and has very closely come to the point of admitting pedophiliac desires in his “little girls walking around like bitches in heat wanting sex because they wore shorts and a tank top” proclamations. He is the epitome of the sort of guy that worried moms teach their little girls to watch out for, to mark as “creepy” and make sure he never gets alone with them in any way.
And then people like himself who act like creepy perverts who appear to think that they are entitled to do horrible sexual things against the wishes of their female victims try and shame women for having (rightly) been squicked the fuck out by his behavior?
All I can say is that you have to own your behavior. I get to choose how I *react* to you, even if you don’t like it. So if you come up to me stroking your crotch and talking about how I “want it” from you, don’t be surprised if you get kneed in the crotch and get the cops called on you for indecent exposure and sexual harassment.
On the other hand, when I’m cuddling up to my husband and obviously into him (kissing, touching, talking sexy to him etc) and he grabs my ass and tells me how sexy I am, chances are, it’s going to make me very, very happy.
Sexual behavior is not consensual just because you desire it. It’s a mutual thing, and I’m tired as hell of these guys who think that they get to be supreme decider of the universe when it comes to sex and then get pissed off when the woman they target disagrees.
If it crosses your mind that your behavior could probably get you arrested or pepper sprayed in the face, it seems like a rather simple solution to NOT BEHAVE IN THAT MANNER. But if you do act badly and you do get pepper sprayed, don’t then bitch about it because you know what the fuck you did and attempt to blame someone for YOUR BAD BEHAVIOR.
Regarding the health benefits of spay vs neuter in dogs it varies greatly between breeds. Some breeds have very low risks of developing mammary gland cancer or pyo in the first place, for instance. Really large breeds have already an increased risk for skeletal cancer, and that risk is further increased by early n/s. Plus more n/s dogs are overweight, which is tied to various health risks… although I’m not sure that this should count, since it’s perfectly POSSIBLE, even though it might be hard in some cases, to keep an n/s dog slim.
Leg humping and stuff can USUALLY be handled by simply, calmly, stopping the dog everytime it tries it… my males wanted to hump stuff when they hit puberty, but we simply stopped them everytime they tried everything, and that desire soon subsided.
Just to balance things out a bit.
I do think it’s a good idea in the USA to encourage early n/s of dogs since you have a large problem with unwanted dogs that end up in shelters. I think it’s less of a good idea here in Sweden where we don’t really have that problem. There is a drawback with early n/s, and that’s the narrowing down of the gene pool. Early n/s means you have to decide once and for all which dogs to breed on when they’re very young, before they’re fully mature physically and psychologically. You might decide that in a certain litter puppy A looks like breeding material and get to keep zir balls/ovaries, while puppies B, C, D, E and F looks like “pet material” and are n/s:ed before they’re one year old. Once the puppies have become two years old it turns out that puppy A has some minor health problem, like zie’s a bit allergic to dust mites, or zie tends to get ear infections, or something like that… Or puppy A has a bit of a phobia, gets scared at sudden loud noises. But, sorry, puppy A is the only one with zir balls/ovaries intact, so if we’re gonna breed a dog in this litter, it HAS to be puppy A and no other.
That was on a side-note though. Just wanted to add a little complication.
I think stopping unwanted spawnings is a good enough reason for spaying and neutering your pets anyway, any health benefits they gain as a result are a bonus. Especially if you have a cat that goes outside on its own.
I say this as the owner of a cat who was dumped just down the road from me (along with some others) likely for that very reason (being an unwanted kitten), and then got pregnant herself while she was roaming around (with a complicated pregnancy as well, so it was a good job she was caught). 🙁
The upside to that story is she’s super duper cute and likes cuddles. 😀
I totally agree, ShadetheDruid. Cats that go outdoors on their on should always be n/s at an early age, otherwise they WILL reproduce.
My boyfriend live tweeted his vasectomy (apparently valium does a pretty good job of removing his inhibitions). That’s really all that needs to be said about which form of sterilization is easiest for the person being sterilized.
Re: neutering and spaying.
I have lost count of the number of animals (cats and dogs) we’ve rescued in the past 19 years — it’s well into the triple digits.
When we find an animal, the first thing we do is take to the vet to check for a chip (if they don’t have a collar w/an ID tag, and only ONE in all those years did, and it was a rabies tag). None of the ones we’ve rescued had chips (we’re in a very poor area). Then, check for health, check for contagious diseases, and spay/neuter, period. (The few times the dog was already neutered or spayed, we were able to find the original owners–I’d say that’s about 2-3% total).
Then we start looking for a home.
A lot of rescue groups spay/neuter first because they found (as we did! in the group we worked with) that even if you give people a coupon for a free spay/neuter, most of the time they’re too lazy to get it done.
I’m talking about pets, not breeders (don’t get me started on breeders and mills and such and the lax regulation in the US), and there’s no complication or debate as far as I can see given the number of animals euthanized every day in the US.
I’d also note that when we rescued pregnant female animals, as long as they weren’t too far along, our vet performed an abortion. He didn’t like it, but he works deep with animal rescue in this very poor area, and it was better not to have more animals in the pool, so to speak.
I’m not as active any more–burnout and total loathing of people–but one nice thing about walking our rescue chocolate lab on campus is meeting people who pet her, and I tell them she’s rescued, and then they tell me about their rescue pet.
Nobody who works in animal rescue has any doubt about the need for spaying and neutering. (And no, there’s no proof that weight gain will occur with it–that comes from feeding the animal too much–by keeping our rescue lab Katie on a diet, she’s lost 19 pounds since January. She had weighted 57 pounds when we turned her over to her new home, and at her age the weight gain to 93 wasn’t because of being spayed).
Ithiliana — I’m wondering it the “they’ll gain weight” might be conflating actual weight with apparent weight — my mother’s cat was spayed really young and has that belly pouch spayed cats sometimes get, she’s still like a 8lb tabby though, she just looks like she’s got a belly on her.
NWO —
The point was please jerk off and leave real women alone — no really, enjoy your hands all you want, get a fleshlight it you want, jut please don’t treat women as if they’re no more sentient than your hands (and please don’t get all TMI and tell us about it).
Nanasha says something about how sterilization affects animals, NWO replies — can’t know how castration affects animals! And then he goes on to tell Wetherby how castration affects animals. At least try to go more than one line before directly contradicting yourself.
You made up numbers, I asked for a citation, I never got it, so I didn’t realize you were waiting for numbers from me. Per the CDC — “Nearly 1 in 5 women in the United States has been raped in her lifetime (18.3%) (Table 2.1).” (pg 18 of the full report). I don’t know the citation on 1 in 4 as that was someone else saying that’s the rate among college grads and me saying the difference could be explained by factors like the amount of booze on college campuses and the general frat boy mentality, you’ll have to take 1 in 4 up with whomever that was, general statistics say 1 in 5.
@Dvärghundspossen
Can I still envy you for socialized healthcare and winning Eurovision?
For the record, I was indeed referring to people who go into politics wearing Christianity as their badge. Not all Christians, and not even all Christians who vote in a way consistent with their personal religious ethics. In the U.S., being a “loud and proud Christian” is pretty much synonymous with being a knee-jerk reactionary.
I found a reference on the Yes Means Yes blog saying one in eight women leaving college say they were sexually assualted; which would indicate it’s a difference in lifetime likelihood. (it appears to be a cite to “See Robin Warshaw’s book, I Never Called It Rape, based on research by Mary Koss.”)
Howard Bannister — yeah, other third variables would obviously include that most college grads are <25, but I'd thought the person who brought that study was had said it was lifetime data, not by graduation. 1 in 4 lifetime with 1 in 8 before graduation makes sense though, considering before graduation can be <1/4th of someone's lifetime (and is usually <1/3rd).
The other thing that occurred to me in trying to track down NWOs numbers was he was comparing reports to campus security to self reports I think, which is wrong for so many reasons, the only one he'll believe being that campus security won’t always take the report. That’s intentionally ignoring all the issues with naming it because that’ll just be false accusations to NWO, in reality land, I know (oh boy do I know, that’s not snark)
*brought that study up had said (or was saying, but not some weird combo of both >.< )
I think the thing about gaining weight in neutered/spayed animals is that the loss of sex hormones reduces the basal metabolic rate (I dunno why, maybe not producing sperm or mature eggs, or not expending energy humping things) So they need a little less food than intact animals, but people feed them the same amount, and most dogs and cats will eat whatever is put in front of them and more, so it’s completely up to the humans to monitor their food.
But in total, that doesn’t seem like something to worry about when altering the pets. In the U.S. there are more than enough dogs and cats to go around, and lots of people having their dog have “just one litter” to “show the kids the miracle of life.” In this context, the only choices are neutering, euthanization, or having a ridiculous number of stray dogs and cats. One of the local feral cat population reduction programs is a catch, spay, and release program, which seems more humane to me than killing them.
It sounds like in Sweden, the people who have pets are more responsible, and only breed their dogs if they are healthy and there are known homes for the puppies. That sounds ideal and is not the case here in the US.
(Just noticed that was a little dog-centric. I have a dog 🙂