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.
Yeah, I remember that thread with a certainly fond head-banging hate.
More to the point, Captain Awkward had a really good thread recently on more or less the same subject.
http://captainawkward.com/2012/08/07/322-323-my-friend-group-has-a-case-of-the-creepy-dude-how-do-we-clear-that-up/
Notice the boyfriend of the second woman. He won’t stop hanging around with the creeper/rapist… and says sarcastically, “what do you want me to do, beat him up over something that happened a year and a half ago?”
Yeah. Because violence solves soooo many problems.
And if you have the option do nothing or beat up a freind, guess which way that actually comes out? (in both cases the circle of friends freeze out the women, not the offenders)
But that’s a male-privileged view; just beat them up, problem solved!
Yeah, no.
No, that’s actually just regular, old rape. The real kind.
Wait… you’d have sex with someone who was too drunk to notice? Why would you do that? Seriously, what would motivate you to do this?
Further, if you get really drunk, does that mean someone can stick their penis (or something else) in you and it’s not rape? Does it still count if the intoxicant isn’t all alcohol but maybe something else, like a combination of alcohol and MDMA or GHB? I mean, they still wouldn’t notice at the time.
If you think the person you’re about to have sex with might change their mind, maybe you should just … (wait for it!) … not have sex with them!
You’re not good at sarcasm. It comes off like bullying.
Woohoo! Didn’t work on the initial post. 🙂
Yep. It’s telling that rape is the only crime where people think these excuses matter.
It’s still theft if the boyfriend steals his girlfriend’s car.
It’s still theft if someone is offered to “test drive” a new car, and heads to another country in it.
It’s still theft if someone refuses to return the car leased or lent to them.
It’s still theft if you take a car, just because the company claims to be “giving them away” in a promotion.
It’s still theft if it’s parked in the wrong neighbourhood, if the door was left open, or was given to a thief pretending to be a parking valet.
It’s still theft if you’re too drunk to understand the “designated driver” was offering to buy your car for five bucks.
And if a person tried to justify any of these, you’d probably be very suspicious of their motives when it came to your car.
Meow? Oh, man, kitties. Yay! See, now as a kitty, I don’t have to feel glum about not being counted as human by lots of obnoxious politicians.
/feline disdain_on
The original is definitely better in some respects, but I always thought the ending was kind of dumb. And in that respect it looks even worse when compared to Brotherhood.
And seconding Baccano!, it’s one of the best shows in years.
Meow test?
Besides, this is one reason I hate those stupid Millenium (girl with the dragoon tattoo plus sequels) books that everyone else in this country (and quite a few Americans as well) seem to adore so much. Stieg Larsson seems to have believed that “patriarchy” and “rape culture” means “there are many moustache-twirling misogynistic villains in society”. How on Earth can people think these books are FEMINIST? I mean, that’s NOT how feminism understands patriarchy and rape culture, very much not.
Plus the male main character is so obviously based on the author and all women are dying to sleep with him, plus the female main character is described as having a beautiful face and magically being SUPER-duper-ultra-thin despite eating fast food all day (because it’s terrible when women are fat, but it’s also terrible if they’re vain enough to diet), and he doesn’t know how psychiatry works in Sweden (you can only take control of a person’s money against zir will if zie is very much insane and displays said insanity by wasting all her money away on weird stuff – this is VERY RARE and NEVER happens to anybody who is obviously sane enough to live in zir own apartment and keep a job). But the biggest problem probably is that all rapists are twirling their moustaches like that.
I agree that the final bit of the ending is pretty stupid, but I liked the overall climax better. (Rot13’d for spoilers.) Zhfgnat’f svtug jvgu Oenqyrl sryg zber grafr, gb zr, naq gur birenyy gurzrf bs erfcbafvovyvgl naq crefbany pubvpr jrer, V sryg, orggre rzcunfvmrq va gur svefg frevrf, jvgu vgf rkcynangvba sbe gur Ubzhaphyv.
Nyfb, gur svtug jvgu Sngure ng gur raq bs Oebgureubbq sryg nagv-pyvznpgvp gb zr. But your mileage may vary.
Well, yeah. It’s the old ‘I have discovered racism and sexism! Quick, it is very important that I, a white man, explain it to you! Also, sometimes people with alternative sexualities are oppressed… I, a straight white man, am the best person to explain this!!”
But, uh, those books were kind of important to helping open my eyes up to the world when I was going through a period of questioning my unthinking right-wing religious upbringing.
So even though I’ve seen their feet of clay, I’ll always kind of be a little grateful to the spirit of Stieg Larsson.
Dvarg: That was my exact reaction! I wrote a blog post about it.
If you portray rapists as total psychopaths who kidnap women and mutilate them, then you’re portraying milder forms of sexual abuse/violence against women as not being a problem, or else only being a problem because they’re a sign that the guy might later kidnap and mutilate you. And if he doesn’t, then he wasn’t really a rapist.
Gametime: Finally I get to use that Rot13 addon I installed like a million years ago! Pity I have no clue what the hell any of it means, even in English, but hey. 😛
Dvärghundspossen, I thought those books were so overrated. Anyone who’s read a bit of fan fiction knows that Blomkvist is a blatant Mary Sue, and Lisbeth is a total Manic Pixie Dream Girl. They are both so thinly written that they come across as cartoon characters. And then to top it all off, it’s all rape all the time. I admit, I only read the first one. I’ve been assured by friends that the second and third books do not feature so much rape, but I just can’t.
Blomkvist is definitely an idealized author avatar, and the books DEFINITELY can be criticized in the way their rape scenes are handled, but I don’t understand how Lisbeth is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s not really quirky, and if anything Blomkvist is the one who changes her perspective, rather than the other way around.
Unless I’m misunderstanding what the phrase means, it doesn’t seem to fit.
this is totally fair in regards to sexism idk about racism. larsson was a long time investigative reporter on the swedish right wing and white power movements and had to live semi-undercover for a large part of his life because of threats against him, so i feel like he kinda earned his bona fides on that point
Conversation I had with my husband:
ME: And he has sex with every woman between the ages of 18 and 50!
HIM: Well, in the movie, he’s played by Daniel Craig.
ME: …Actually, it makes perfect sense then.
i listened to the millenium trilogy while i was doing spring cleaning which is probably for the best because i dont think i would have made it through all three of the books but it was good as a distraction
I could be misappropriating the term, but to me the Manic Pixie Dream Girl character is the enigmatic muse meant to capture the male gaze. She isn’t even really there for the main character of the fictional work — she is there for the male audience of the fictional work. She inspires action, lust, etc. but all the while, she is not a fully fleshed character in her own right. She might as well be the object of a painting or a sculpture. And in modern work, she tends to be spritely, with zany hair and fashion.
Hmm, yes. Some of that is my residual frustration from just watching a bunch of movies about racism and then noticing after the fact that they were all directed by white men. (most of them notably without such credentials as Larsson had)
Regardless of his credentials, he’s still a white guy, so he’s still acting authoritative about something that he’s only studied and other people have actually experienced. (Not that one can never write about oppression of another demographic, but the more one casts oneself as the arbiter of knowledge on the subject, the more you’re on weak ground.)
@blitzgal–one of the best parts of the two sequels is that she does get fleshed out a lot more, becomes more a real character, even at times the main viewpoint character, stealing that role more and more from the dude. (as it should be)
MPDG is a really specific classification, so I wouldn’t apply it to Salander, but you’re absolutely right about the othering: Blomkvist is “normal” in every respect (middle-aged, middle-class, dresses normally, etc); Salander is “weird” in every respect.
From a literary perspective, I think the problem with Blomkvist and Salander is simply that they didn’t need two protagonists! The only reason they both need to exist is so one can rescue the other at the end; pawn that duty off on someone else (there are several possibilities) and you could use a single protagonist and simplify the narrative immensely.
@katz
that’s all true, yeah. i mean, to be honest i don’t really recall how much was ‘let me tell you what it’s like to experience racism’ vs. ‘let me tell you what these assholes are like’.
Brotherhood took me a little time to get used to, largely because I preferred the deliberate pacing and direction of the original to that of Brotherhood. The episode where the two series part ways finally also seemed like it was trying too hard to deliberately distance itself from the original.
While I found the darker themes of the first series more captivating, I think Brotherhood ultimately works a better as a whole. The original went to such a dark place that reaching for anything resembling a happy ending was bound to feel like a stretch.
What term is there to denote a character who only exists to spur on the protagonist? She isn’t a person in her own right — she is only there to inspire the main male character(s) to action, and most likely to be viewed as an object of lust for both the male character and the male audience. In the past, I’ve used the term “muse” but that doesn’t really fit, either. Plot device is another term, but there should be something that specifically calls out the gendering of this particular….well, plot device.
@katz, Sharc: I remember the ‘let me tell you what these assholes are like’ part–mostly because that was where the writing really shone. He understood those guys better than he understood his protagonists, I think.
I said a minute ago that Lisbeth steals the story, making it her own, and I dropped in (as it should be). Then I realized any troll would immediately say I’m saying all stories should be about the women in them, not about the dudes.
I am, of course, commenting on the fact that the second two books are about Lisbeth’s story, about her past, her trials. Where the first one really was about the dude, his past, his trials. They really are very separate that way.