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 found a cool picture to change my catqavar. Still kitty themed, though.
I just do what Cloudiah does, cuz she’s kewl.
I’m turning into my Grandma. She always says Atavar instead of Avatar.
Manginas don’t have balls. Duh. I thought every good MRA knew that.
Ha ha, if only you knew — I am the opposite of kewl! But I still have a catvatar, it’s just a different catvatar. It’s a huckster kitty trying to sell you patent medicine. Don’t listen to huckster kitty! Huckster kitty is like the Roosh of medicine!
..catqavar..
My brain misread that as “catguava”, so I started imagining some sort of weird cat-fruit hybrid.
I guess I’m late to the party, but these kitties are so cute I just had to try it.
Damnit. I tried to find a picture of a guava that was cat-shaped, and failed. I did find alot of guava, though.
OMG, the kitty avatars make this thread awesome. Discussions of literature and anime in between milk lickings and catnip naps. 8O!!!
I think the whole “starts all innocent then gets dark as anything” thing is so archetypally Japanese. My favorite example is Princess Tutu, which starts as cute girl in a ballet outfit magical girl shiny, then gets dark, then gets REALLY dark, then goes OMG deep questions of fate vs. choice wtf??? then ends on kinda cute and sweet.
Fruits Basket does a similar thing, but the manga makes it more gradual (in the anime it’s THREE EPISODES OF DESPAIR) and the underlying theme of inclusion and exclusion is so awesome.
I just want to submit some photographic evidence that at one point yesterday the Recent Comments section was all kittehs.
I am made of squee and purr.
@ShadetheDruid
XD I was going to link to the alot post when I saw what you wrote and then I saw it was an actual alot made of guava.
Well I kept my snowflake intact because I knew the craze would be over eventually :'(
Snowy, you may use any kind of avatar you like 🙂
I will switch back to chimaera in a day or two.
Wait, I think I get it. None of you actually read the debate, did you? You just read Davie’s follow up, in which he proclaimed to be the champion of love and justice.
Ha, hahaha… I forgot who I was dealing with, here. My apologies.
You guys go on back to trying to convince yourselves of “rape culture” and the like.
But.. what the fuck? I think I hear something… OH SHIT YOU GUYS! ITS RAPE CULTURE! SHE’S HERE TO RAPE US AND MAKE IT A NORMAL PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE! RUUUUUUUN!
Is this a sample of the brilliant debate-winning rhetoric?
Weak sauce, DLZ. You may want to bring your A game next time. Rape jokes are soooooo last year.
Keep fucking that chicken, DLZ.
“Rape culture! What rape culture? Now observe as I joke about and disdain the idea that rape is a problem!”
/self-demonstrating-troll
self-demonstrating troll may take the prize for “most useless machine ever” away from this:
@DLZ
I don’t think you do get it.
Paul Elam has asked his followers to pardon rapists even if they were guilty.
So yes, apparently he does want to make rape part of everyday life.
If the debate didn’t contain the words by Elam saying “Actually, maybe we should legally punish people for rape,” he already lost. Because he is the only one in the conversation who thinks rape should be legally permissible.
It’s kind of like claiming that the KKK won a debate. They’re so obviously in the wrong that to even use the word “debate” is a charitable framing of “talking about reality to someone who thinks half the human race is garbage.”
I hope you realize that, in a debate with an abuser lobbyist, pretty much any normal person would be the champion of love and justice.
Yeah, I don’t even care if Paul Elam scored more Internet Points or whatever, he believes rape should be de facto legal. That’s sort of an automatic loss. I don’t care if David’s arguments were crayon scrawlings of “NO U RONG NO,” David still wins because he doesn’t believe rape should be legal.
Which debate is this, anyway? I remember one formal debate, but I certainly don’t recall Elam winning it.
I do remember him bending the rules every time it suited him, though, which is a neat encapsulation of his attitude towards most other things.
It’s no surprise that a group of people who view their lives as a movie (red pill/matrix) are narcissistic. Elam isn’t very good at being narcissistic, though, so I don’t think his little cult is going to go very far.