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.
@Ugh
I love dead philosophers in Heaven.
@pillowinhell:
Honestly? I just ignore about 3/4ths of every sentence. Then I get at the actual “meangingful” content. It involves a lot of backtracking to figure out exactly how the hell he came to the conclusion he did. Oh, you made a vague reference to the word “art” being used as praise. That’s how you got to “art == good.”
Still wrong.
Did he flunk out of Eng Lit 101 and this is his revenge?
A female teacher told him he couldn’t be a writer, so he wrote a massive wall of text and is now selling it for $40 to his acolytes.
You can tell the sky is sad when it’s raining. I thought everybody knew that.
I just thought of a great quote that unfortunately does not have any context.
“Language is a tool used for purposes other than masturbation.” -Kirbywarp
Feel free to use. ^_^ (though with my luck somebody else already thought of it)
Better:
“Language is not just a masturbatory aid.” -Kirbywarp
More to the point, I think.
With regards to Alex Kierkegaard’s essay, I got through the first few paragraphs.
And then there was this:
I’m not sure how a woman looking for a boyfriend online is a such a travesty. I’m not sure why someone posting a picture of themselves using a Wii Fit board is so awful. And I have absolutely no clue as to why either of these things might be deserving of the Caps Lock of Rage.
I also don’t know when the last time I heard someone use the word “strumpet” without so much as a hint of irony.
But strumpets! With hairdos!
I don’t have a hairdo and I don’t know what it takes to qualify as a strumpet in Alex Kierkegaard’s book. I don’t care. That phrase is just so beautiful. I want it printed on a business card: Anathema, strumpet with a hairdo.
“It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out, redditors will be torn between their love for free speech, and their hatred of women.”
That’s what I was thinking
Ananthema that would be an awesome business card!!!
…I want a business card like that…
*refuses to be assimilated into the cat avatar collective*
Mostly because I have no account.
… hairdos?
… hairdos?
… hairdos?!
Do they expect… hairdos? do they expect female games writes to be bald or something? How do you not have a hairdo? …
…
…hairdo?
Roosh has a new post on his blog titled “The Men’s Rights Movement is Dead.” Interesting how fast the cookie crumbles. I can’t link to it but maybe someone else can.
OMG Ugh, that Dead Philosophers page is hysterical!
I have a hairdo but I’ve never jumped up and down on a whatsit board. Does that make me half a strumpet? ( A strump?) And is a strumpet worse than being crumpet?
Mmmm, crumpets with butter and honey and tea …
drst, creating a Gravatar account is momentary. Having a catvatar is eternal.
That’s true. I watched a documentary about the Phelps family called Fall from Grace. Fred Phelps used to be physically violent towards his wife and children. He decided that was wrong, though, so he began abusing other people through the courts. He got disbarred, and now he directs all of his rage towards LGBT people with his pickets and protests. One of his estranged daughters described him as a rageaholic, and he’s convinced most of his family to obey him without question. One of his sons has vowed to continue on in his footsteps someday when Fred Phelps dies.
Like others said, though, some of their pickets really have nothing to do with gay rights, but they’ll come up with strange excuses of why they think it does. Their protest in Joplin really made no sense. What would a tornado have to do with gay marriage? It seems to me they just saw a lot of people in grief and figured we’d be easy targets for their abuse. I’m just glad the counter protest was peaceful, and that we didn’t give them as much attention as they wanted. It’s hard but people shouldn’t sink down to their level.
That being said, I didn’t feel sorry for them a year ago when some truckers and bikers blocked them from coming into Joplin to protest the memorial one week after the tornado. That was such a chaotic time and the police were already overwhelmed with security for the President and everything. We really didn’t need them coming in and making things worse. Nobody hurt them or anything. They just made a physical barrier to keep them out of the city.
So, back on topic (or not…honestly, icycalm and Paul Elam are both competing for “Biggest Pretentious Trainwreck”), anyone else notice how…sparse the comments are in the posts highlighted here? I mean, sure, there are large comment threads about either something innocuous (done by a woman), or something shitty (done by a woman), whenever those occur…but bad media representation? Apparently, there are only a few who would care so much as to take a stab at Elam for his behavior. Everything else seems to be silence.
I mean, yeah, there ARE more than few angry comments at Elam, but it’s like some folks are either indifferent (read: supporting him in e-mail), or they’re just like Buttman, going off about how they “have” to be asshats because they perceive someone else being that way.
…
Ah
…
Er…
…
*flails in frustration”
I googled it. Top result was for a blog called “Sexy Videogameland.” So that explains a lot.
I don’t even need to google the words or be a big gamer to recognize that the fantasy genre has been pretty much defined by Tolkein, and every fantasy world seems to include elves and orcs and so on. So I can see how the phrase could mean that.
Hilarious how he’s comparing blogs to published magazines in the 80s though, and how terrible of a person he is. That sentence, of all things, strikes him as “obviously uneducated?” Really?
Also lulz at the outrage against “painfully juvenile pretentiousness.” Projection levels are skyrocketing, captain! I don’t think my irony meter can take much more!
On icycalm’s essay on emergent game behavior, he says this in regards to a quote by Jean Baudrillard:
How does someone miss the point so badly? And then he writes an enormous screed about how emergent game behavior doesn’t exist.
Do people really pay money to read his dross?
http://www.rooshv.com/the-mens-rights-movement-is-dead
Wait am I missing something?
Careful, kirbywarp, you might make your blood boil reading that crap.
…then again, shit, you went through Steele. This is NOTHING, right?
@Anathema
I actually have ponify set to filter the word whores as strumpets.
“Do people really pay money to read his dross?”
Well, like I said, the guy has followers. I’ve seen them in the wild…and they’re just as pretentious and bigoted as him. All of them.
Yo, aworldanon, you may want to de-ponify things when you quote them.
@Snowy
One of the comments on that post was:
And I could only think of how sad that was.