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.
Oh dear, that is pretty sad
Wait, with regards to Roosh, the MRM and Paul Elam sort of going separate ways, does this mean we’re going to have some kind of manosphere civil war on our hands? Eris be praised.
@Myoo:
That is simultaneously hilarious and completely expected.
@red_locker:
It’s not too bad, though I’m starting to run out of interesting stuff. Get past the amusement at the horrendous grammar and idiocy masqurading as intelligence… there’s not much content to critique. How much can you say about someone who equates “vroom vroom vroom fun! dis iz a good gamez!” and “Its playability hinges squarely and mundanely on just how gamelike it is” because the writer is a woman.
Yes…the MRM is dead, aborted before it had a chance. Seriously, his whole (and strangely readable) post boils down to ” I’m a MAN cause I get laid, not like those cry babies over there”
With allies like this…what need is there for feminists to notice? Oh yes. Bemusement.
@red_locker
Well, A Voice For Men gets donations so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it just astonishes me that people are willing to give money to these things, I mean, the writing alone is just so pretentious and devoid of meaning.
…
This whole section is just amazing. Just amazing. I don’t want to quote it, but at Katz’s link towards the middle of the entry we get a section starting with “here’s a small selection of choice quotes from her blog followed by my incredulous, exasperated replies:”
Absolutely no quote strikes me as uninformed, even without context. Every response is just arglebargling with a pitifully shallow and quite frankly incorrect point.
It’s amazing.
Even if I created the account? NO CATS.
(I, erm, don’t really like cats. *hides*)
Yay! Feminist cat-cult officially joined. Where the cool-aid at?
My god. How can he maintain his pompous intellectual grandeur when his responses to well written soundbytes are furious, jouvenile raging? How is this even possible?
(the quotes are quotes, the capslocks are him)
I just can’t help but O_______________________________________________O
By “trolling,” I assume he means the classic “he disagrees with me, therefore, he’s trolling” mindset.
And here he is seeming to advocate outright to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen…
Never knew that war is waged by the penis. The More You Know™
All wars are waged by the penis, after all, the penis hunted the mighty mammoth for you.
People are starting to sound like they need cheering up, so I offer you a video of a cat that’s really determined to get all of the treats.
@CassandraSays:
My god. This reminds me of so many times when my dog would frantically hold on to socks as we try to wrestle them away. Brava. ^_^
But the real WTF isn’t in his “articles,” it’s how he acts in discussion, how he runs the forums (he goes through and manually edits everyone’s posts for grammar), and how he flips out when anyone disagrees with him:
Yeesh, even TracyMorganFreeman is calling Elam out now? You have to be pretty fucking vile for that to happen.
Maybe this split will finally carve a much-needed rift in the MRM?
I need to go to bed soon, but I’ll say this. Said in a different way, icycalm might occasionally make valid points. But those valid points are heavily doused in “AND YOU ARE AN IDIOT FOR BELIEVING OTHERWISE GOD WHY IS EVERYONE BUT ME SO STUPID?!?” and mixed up with demonstrably false points (not to mention rampant sexism and horrid sentence structure).
And with that, and with a determined kitty to lull me to sleep, I bid you all a good night. ^_^
That is one scary cat! And looking soooo … well, not innocent at the end, there, but definitely “What’s all the fuss about?”
and I just happen to be watching it earlier…
I was like what the hell I am bored why not! It’s wayyy darker than I expected. o_o
@CassandraSays
Is it bad that I was kind of hoping for the cat to win on account of it would have made for a more amusing video?
@katz:
Yet again I am completely unsurprised and vaguely horrified. And baffled how he uses the phrase “bludgeoning you to death” to signify beating you in a debate. I must assume that is what he’s doing, for fear that he means the phrase literally. And that is too much disturbing for me to handle.
@aworld
Nope. That cat deserved to win.
Ok… *now* cat-cult is joined. Sweet ^__^
“…I am a machine that makes dust. This is what I do — that is my calling in this life.”
Such a small life.
I have nothing to add to the discussion, but rjjspesh reminded me – there are kitty emoticons! So here are some more.
:3 X3 =+= =^.^= =^_^= =^w^= ,,,^.^,,,~ =^_^= >’ . ‘< (='.'=)