It was, perhaps, inevitable, and now it has come to pass: obviously fed up with Men’s Rights Redditors questioning his wisdom (and his tactics, and his general narcissistic assholery) on a fairly regular basis, A Voice for Men Supreme Leader Paul Elam has started up his own Men’s Rights subreddit – r/mensrightsactivists –in which he can summarily ban all ”armchair activists” and “white knights” and “people who disagree with him.” Yep, that’s right: he’s made like a Trotskyist banana, and split.
Elam has long had a fairly strained relationship with Reddit MRAs. If you search through his comment history on Reddit, you can see evidence of numerous meltdowns on his part, which occur fairly regularly whenever anyone challenges him on pretty much anything, even when they are otherwise sympathetic to his views. On his own blog, he responds to such criticism by quickly banning the critics; on Reddit, he has tended to respond with schoolyard insults, digs at the masculinity of his critics, long recitations of his many fine accomplishments as a dedicated armchair activist, and the occasional rape joke.
Clearly the final straw for Elam was the reception given to a post of his on the poster controversy I wrote about here. Some samples from the discussion. Builtbro offers a substantive critique of Elam’s badly worded posters:
HolyCounsel is a bit more blunt:
And then there’s this edifying exchange:
The massive numbers of upvotes for Elam’s critics and downvotes for his, er, rebuttals seem to be at least partially the result of an invasion from r/SubredditDrama. Still, Elam seems to take each and every downvote personally, so the 238 net downvotes on his “Kleenex” comment must have stung.
In his new subreddit, threads like these clearly won’t be allowed to happen. As Elam explains in his less-than-welcoming “Welcome” message to new visitors:
While dissenters and the blue pill public will be welcome to post links and comment, trolls and other annoyances will be summarily booted with pleasure. This is an MRA dominated zone.
A couple of things to consider: Dissent, especially that which serves to further the improvement of the men’s movement, is welcome and appreciated. But if you want to post here, as a supposed MRA, telling others what is wrong with their work, you better have some MRA credentials.
Inactive, armchair quarterbacks, are not allowed here, unless their posts reflect genuine concern for improving and supporting the MRM and respect for those actually doing the work. If you want to ask questions so that you can learn, that is fine. But if you want to question, just so you can tear down, and you are not an MRA, then it will be adios for you. I’d sooner give a feminist the floor than a back seat driver.
R/mensrightsactivists: Come for the Elam-approved opinions, stay for the bans! Indeed, Elam devotes as much space in his “welcome” message to explaining whom he’ll ban as he does to actually spelling out what the subreddit will ostensibly do differently than good old r/mensrights.
Of course, this is not the first time that some angry MRA or two has decided to start another Men’s Rights subreddit designed to appeal to more, well, belligerent MRAs. Reddit already boasts an assortment of such subreddits, all of them fairly sparsely populated, including Rights4Men, Male Studies, and FeMRAs, a more obnoxious alternative to the already sparsely populated LadyMRAs. There’s even another subreddit devoted to MRA activism; it goes by the name of, well, MRAactivism. (There may be several more, but I can’t remember what they’re called.)
The Men’s Rights subreddit has nearly 45,000 subscribers; Elam’s new subreddit currently has 49, which is no doubt why he continues to post links to his blog in the original Men’s Rights subreddit. Whether Elam’s new subreddit succeeds and splits the MRM in two, or dies an inglorious death, one thing is sure: there will be plenty of new material for me here at Man Boobz.
“I love how by now, the working MRA definition of “free speech” is:
“I get to say hateful crap and everyone has to treat it like it’s an actual political position. If I advocate rape, noone can call me creepy or rapey. If I post things in a public forum, noone can downvote it. If I post homophobic slurs on someone’s website, they can’t ban me.”
If you’re referring to me, that’s pretty much filled with straw.
“Keep fucking that chicken” is a rape joke now? Do you MRAs have a compulsion to trivialize rape, no matter what?
In this conversation, you have:
1. Objected to David banning somebody for homophobic slurs against another user
2. Objected to people downvoting the posts of hate groups.
I didn’t even have to press older comments this time.
Attention all MRAs: “Strawman” does not mean “an argument against a person’s stated position.”
You also have insisted multiple times over the last week that your hate is an actual political position. If you had said something about calling MRAs creepy and rapey, you would be four for four.
I was going to say that DLZ is off to whine about being banned by the mean meanies, but behold! Some guy is here to do it for him.
That seems more common lately, this affected outrage over moderation and bans on feminist sites (despite the fact that most MRA sites will ban for far less). I think at least part of it is that there’s a common MRA tactic of trying to overrun places where they don’t like the tone of the conversation (see r/feminism, r/2x and just about every hapless news site that gets linked from r/MR or AVfM). Strong moderation policies prevent them from doing that, and so they come and complain about how ‘unfair’ it is that they don’t get to control the conversation.
Of course the moderation policy here is so lenient that none of that really applies. And still we get complaints about not giving the people who just come here to be nasty a chance.
@Dan
Well, the primary idea of their movement is that men should be allowed to abuse women and children without suffering any consequences, so it makes sense that they would also feel entitled to make internet personal attacks without consequence.
In some guy’s case, though, I think he has gotten it into his head that if he can catch us on semantic or blog policy errors, that would change the fact that he’s in a hate movement.
Note to some guy: it wouldn’t.
I like how if people upvote stuff on Reddit, they’re expressing their opinions as a matter of course, but if people downvote it, they’re a “brigade” and this is evil and wrong.
(I dunno about you guys, but I don’t even bother to downvote MRA crap on MRA subreddits. I’d be there all day, and I don’t care that much about your Internet Points. Probably the downvotes are coming from other MRAs considering all the intra-MRM shit Elam has been stirring.)