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.
Does Elam specify the gender of the victim or the assailants that he wants to acquit?
For example, does he believe that the rapers of men in prison should be acquitted? And of children?
Interestingly enough for a guy who’s supposed to be all about men’s rights, Elam doesn’t seem to care that men can be raped too. I guess he figures that male rape victims are acceptable collateral damage in his war against women.
NO GUYS, ITS THE RAPE CULTURES! I’M FUCKING SERIOUS!
Hide yo wife, hide yo keeeeds! Dey rapin’ errybody up in hurr!
Hit the fucking deck! The rape cultures are sending out rape torpedos!
Still trying to prove there’s no rape culture by making light of rape? You don’t have to keep it up, we understood the first time..
DLZ, fuck you. Seriously, fuck the fucking fuck off. This summer, after three years of campaigning for the funds to do it, a Detroit prosecutor has discovered 20 serial rapists and one serial murder by processing only 1,000 of the 11,000 untested rape kits in her city. That’s right — a serial killer who went on to kill five women because he wasn’t caught when his first rape was never properly investigated. That’s how rape is treated in this country. It is ignored. It isn’t even investigated. We would rather have serial killers slaughtering people than spend the money even processing a rape kit.
So again, GO FUCK YOURSELF and take your bullshit with you.
[applause]
And, it’s even worse than I thought. They found 20 serial rapists and 1 serial killer out of just over 150 of the 11,000 kits. Their federal grant is only enough to process around 1500 of the 11,000 untested kits. So, out of less than 200 reported rapes in just one large city, 20 were committed by men who raped multiple women, and one was committed by a man who went on to kill five women.
Rape is not a problem! I will prove this by making jokes about rape!
Seriously DLZ (you dumbshit troll), you’re only proving our point for us.
DLZ is banned for rape jokes, racism and homophobia. Good work, DLZ!
Thanks David, he was pretty over the top.
David,
I only went over the last three pages of comments, and found DLZ’s remarks on two of them. His offenses hardly seem worth banning, at least not in a post in which you complain that Paul Elam has this horrible new sub-reddit so he can ban people.
Somewhat interestingly, cloudiah also made a rape joke:
“Keep fucking that chicken, DLZ.”
Bye cloudiah, I felt you were one of the more interesting commentators, too.
Not a rape joke, a reference.
some guy, let me know when Elam stops banning people who disagree with him, and starts banning people for rape jokes, homophobia and racism, and I will offer him sincere praise.
Of course, if he were to do that, he’s have to start with himself, since he’s made homophobic remarks and rape jokes on reddit and on AVFM.
Some guy does not realize that he’s far more likely to be banned eventually than Cloudiah ever will be.
But that’s my point, cloudiah made a rape joke, no ban there. DLZ said you lost to Elam, I have no idea, and frankly don’t care, and he seems to be gone.
And I apologize to everyone, seriously, in my very brief review, of the past two pages, I didn’t see any homophobia or racism from DLZ (I could easily have missed it.)
Also ShadeTheDruid, just because cloudiah made a familiar rape joke doesn’t make it less of a rape joke.
Anyway, David, there is a post at http://www.reddit.com/r/mensrightsactivists/ claiming that this blog, your blog, is the source of a downvote brigade that is hiding their posts.
There seems little to no evidence of that, but you may wish to take the opportunity to remind your readers that you do not condone such attacks on anyone, and that in the interest of free and open dialogue, even with people you disagree with, you want no part of your blog to be associated with such disruptive behavior.
I guess some guy feels that DLZ’s rape jokes and homophobic slurs were adding a valuable perspective to the conversation. Never mind that David’s commenting policy is one of the most lenient you’ll find on the web, as evidenced by the fact that some guy still hasn’t been banned for being unbearably tedious.
Do you have to work at being this terrible a writer or does it just come naturally?
Are “it’s not fair” trolls a recognized type? You know, those who just hang around in order to latch onto any perceived disparity?
Earth to some guy: This is David’s blog. He can ban one person for being a dipshit and keep another for being awesome, it’s entirely his prerogative.
Right, because no one else in the entire interwebs could ever find any of the shit that goes on there offensive.
It’s on the spooge thread.
it wasnt a rape joke you drooling moron
btw at this point you really should probably consider a name change to ‘some guy obsessed with you shtick’ for accuracy’s sake
A website that exposes hate groups leads people to downvote the posts of hate groups?
I am SHOCKED. SHOCKED!
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.
Anything less is an attack on my human rights.”
Well that’s hardly different from all the other claims MRAs make, so hey, don’t let that stop you.
Thank you Ugh for the pointer.