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.
AVFM is perhaps among the least gender-partisan of the men’s rights sites. Elam is quite within reason to kick off the most extremist MRAs. It’s ironic that David routinely criticizes these sites with how many positive up votes the most egregious comments receive, yet when Elam kicks off the worst of these offenders, David criticizes him for that too! You can’t have it both ways David. You can’t condemn a site for the more extremist comments appending to its articles while at the same time condemning the site manager for asserting a less polarized approach to men’s and women’s rights. Make up your mind, dude! I might agree that the ease with which Elam blows a fuse is not a good look, but in principle I don’t have a problem with the way he manages the site.
Things are not quite as simple as men’s rights versus women’s rights. When a flyer states “domestic violence, women are half the problem” the way that I interpret this is that democracy and people’s rights are far more complex than simplistically identifying one party as the victim versus the other party as the oppressor. There’s a whole web of relationships that this comment, for me (I’m not speaking on Elam’s or anyone else’s behalf), factors in… from the types of knuckle-draggers that women choose (refer Roissy for the women-choose-jerks phenomenon) to the way that women raise their children (or don’t raise them, as the case may be). Shock horror! Should women really also be required to take responsibility for their behavior and the choices they make? And then dyed-in-the-wool masculinists want to get in on the same act. For example, builtbro: “How does that in any way help the men who need it in situations of female on male DV?” This sort of comment indicates that perhaps many (most?) MRAs also don’t get it, and I feel compelled to offer them an invitation to go choke on it. The solution to feminism is not more genderism, not genderism morphed into masculism – the solution is not men entering into the same ridiculous, whiney “but I’m a victim too” dynamic. The whole system needs to be scrapped. Humans are over-rated.
I mean, take for example builtbro’s implied objection to any suggestion that “women are complicit in their own abuse in cases of domestic violence”. This is what I mean. Give me a break. We are all complicit, in one way or another, in the situations into which we immerse ourselves of our own volition and then sustain it with our own toxic conduct.
like claire, I have nothing to add, but I too has joined and also made a kitty avatar!
Kitteh!
Quackers, love that avatar! And those emoticons, clairedammit. Cuuuteness, it saves the brain from MRM loserness …
I think it’s hilarious that the post is about PE and we can’t even be bothered to talk about him.
So true! Mr Irrelevant is irrelevant.
I find it hilarious that according to some AVFM followers on the reddit page, apparently being an abrasive asshole to others is how one gets shown the proper respect due to them as men. Apparently they don’t get how the whole ‘respect’ thing works.
Pretend this is a catsowarry, okay?
@red_locker
Tell us more! Or don’t.
P.S. Whenever I see Elam’s fishies shirt I’m tempted to show Man Boobz my ultimate riposte in the form of my lures-and-fishhooks shirt. Partly because the best photo of it has a cassowary in it and I like cassowaries, but mostly because counter-Elam.
Yeah David, we’ve never seen a feminist website arbitrarily ban people for no reason other than polite disagreement.
@lowquacks
“Tell us more! Or don’t.”
Yeah, the latter is a good idea. icycalm followers are just the same brand of pretension in a different color.
Aww, don’t worry, being a bird is perfectly fine. I don’t think a kitty can eat that particular one. 0_0
“I hardly said the word ‘cunt’ at all!”
I think the word you’re looking for is ‘nonchalant’.
Just think about what you’re writing, okay? Think for a minute. If it’s arbitrary, there IS NO REASON. Writing :arbitrarily ban people for no reason other than” makes my head hurt.
Also? David has never banned anyone for polite disagreement. So what’s your point?
For that matter, it takes a hell of an effort for him to ban someone for impolite disagreement.
Yes, exactly!
I think most splits in the feminist sphere go a bit beyond “oh yeah? Well, I’m going to make another site exactly the same, but I’LL be boss, so there!”, too.
@red_locker
I have an enormous tabby who has chased off German shepherds and rottweilers who might try, but yeah, they’re probably the scariest type of bird to have not wanting you around.
I for one welcome our new kitty overlords.
Speaking of bad writing… The LA Times had excerpts from some of the early reviews of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Tell me if any of these descriptions sound familiar.
“Miss Rand writes in the breathless hyperbole of soap opera. Her characters are of billboard size; her situations incredible and illogical; her story is feverishly imaginative.”
“Not in any literary sense a serious novel, it is an earnest one, belligerent and unremitting in its earnestness. It howls in the reader’s ear and beats him about the head in order to secure his attention, and then, when it has him subdued, harangues him for page upon page.”
“Miss Rand is undone by her prolixity and her incontinence. She sets up one of the finest assortments of straw men ever demolished in print, and she cannot refrain from making her points over and over… Altogether this is a strange, overwrought book.”
“Miss Rand’s villains resemble no one I have ever encountered… In her vision of the future, the, the liberals have brought the world to a sorry plight. American is plunged into a catastrophic depression, caused by the government’s infernal meddling with the economy… The last sparks of industrial competence are concentrated in the minds of two dozen … American businessmen, who manage to hold the globe aloft”
“Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term… Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.”
Granted, some of this is probably because she was a woman…
No, polite disagreement doesn’t get you banned. Sock puppeting, harrassing users, and making rape jokes does. Btw, was Tom Martin banned?
I’M A KITTY!
Nope, no other reason for posting. Continue with your regularly scheduled comments.
He was put on moderation because he kept trying to work around the “whore” filter.
He kinda faded out after that.
Granted, some of this is probably because she was a woman…
True, I’m pretty sure the word “shrill” has never been applied to a male author. But if you are going to use that word, Rand is the place to apply it.
Sorry, wrong WordPress. It’s being a bit of a dick tonight.
Any kitties are welcome, Jayem.