Paul Elam, head misogynist at A Voice for Men, is mad at the ladies again, his wrath provoked this time by an overheard conversation in a local coffeeshop between two women talking about recycling, and how the world would be a greener place if women were in charge.
Elam seems to take deep personal offense at any suggestion that men aren’t the absolute best at every single fucking thing, so he quickly scurried off to his computer to bash out a 1500-word screed that began with him insulting the women as bobbleheaded “latte lappers who were more likely than not completely clueless about how a single thing on the planet with a moving part works,” moved into high gear with some not altogether wrong (if rather trite and woman-blamey) critiques of the diamond and fur industries, and wound up with a stern warning that WOMEN ARE DESTROY9ING THE EARTH WITH ALL THEIR SPENDY SPENDING!!1!!!
So let’s just skip ahead to that part, shall we?
Take it away, Paul:
The thing that drives the bulk of pollution, wars, white collar criminality, cruelty to animals, human slavery and the like is consumerism. Consumerism, especially the market of unnecessary, embarrassingly vain and useless goods, is a woman’s world. It is primarily the consumption of fashion, via cosmetics, plastic surgery, excessive clothing, jewelry and other vanity items. Women drive a world of pain and damage to the planet. And men, to their shame, do the heavy lifting to get it done.
Ah, damn you ladies! God damn you all to hell!
The so-called Planet of the Apes was Earth all along!
Oh, wait. Sorry. SPOILER ALERT.
But Paul, don’t men buy a lot of expensive useless crap, too?
I mean, I just did about a minute of Googling and found a goddamn fishing rod that’ll set you back $4600.
I cannot think of a single item consumed by men en masse, with high social acceptance, that does not also have utilitarian value. e.g. leather items come from food source animals.
Oh, I see. You can use a $4600 fishing rod to catch $4600 fish. My bad.
Essentially it is not that much different from Native Americans using buffalo hide as well as the meat.
Yeah, he really did just say that.
And many of the things men do consume that might appear on the surface to be excessive are things that women size up and measure them by in the process of sexual selection.
Ah, and these men are utterly helpless before these greedy, earth-destroying women and their evil feminine allure.
Most money is still earned by men.
This is true. In part because of that whole wage gap thing you MRAs don’t believe in.
Most money is actually spent by and on women, mostly on consequence-ridden products whose only use is to bolster their egos. That is about as green as a fucking oil spill.
The sex driving the world’s ridiculous over consumption, and therefore decimation of everything, is not men. In fact, women’s level of over consumption is so outrageous that they cannot even maintain it with their own resources. It takes both sexes to feed the excessive appetite of the one.
Ah, but that’s not quite true. Or really true at all. For one thing, while women may spend more than men, that’s in part because women still tend to do more of the shopping for things like, you know, groceries. They’re not spending all this money on themselves.
And women may not really be spending as much as you think. It’s often said that women are responsible for about 80% of consumer spending. But if you ever start trying to track down the source of that oft-quoted statistic, as I did while writing this post, you’ll discover that … there really doesn’t seem to be one. It’s one of these things that’s assumed to be true simply because it’s repeated so often – especially by people claiming to know how to market to women. The Wall Street Journal’s Carl Bialik looked into this 80% claim last year and found that
In addition to having murky origins, the number appears to be wrong. Several recent surveys suggest that men have nearly equal say on spending, and that when men and women live together, both participate in spending decisions. In a survey conducted last year of nearly 4,000 Americans 16 and older by Futures Co., a London consulting firm, just 37% of women said they have primary responsibility for shopping decisions in their household, while 85% said they have primary or shared responsibility. The respective figures for men were similar: 31% and 84%.
Let’s return from the land of reality to plunge again into the tempestuous torrent of Paul Elam’s testosterone tantrum. (See! I can write as crappily as Paul Elam if I really try!)
If we wanted to save the environment, be less cruel to animals, have less wars, less slavery and less forced labor of children then the best first step we can take is to start raising girls to get over their vanity and their entitlement. We would also do well to teach our boys to assist in the process.
Elam followed up this soul-stirring call to SAVE TEH PLANET with a post castigating male truck drivers for being too nice to lady truck drivers. No, really.
If you’re interested in learning more about saving our green planet, and even if you’re not, I suggest you take a look at the trailer for the excellent if unclassifiable Korean film called, naturally, Save the Green Planet.
I guess I should’ve specified that the above comment was in response to the “scented candles = misandry” post above. Because there could be NSFW and NSFM (Not Safe For Mind) implications considering where the comment is currently located.
Sports cars, boats, jets — a bunch of things that pollute far more than the face cream industry. But how clever he is to catch that with a claim that men only grudgingly fuck up the planet with their Hummers because women force them to. But no, it’s not like misogynists’ endless whining about how women over 25 don’t deserve to live, being so gross and old, has ever sent a woman running to buy Creme de la Mer.
BIOT – don’t spoil it, I cracked up reading your comment! 😀 😀 😀
Four word refutation: video games and porn.
o.O … *sprints to door and locks deadbolt*
You don’t think the boners can open windows, do you? No fingers, after all. *hides under blankets*
Boners = velociraptors?
@titianblue, your hopes have been answered…
Truck balls.
Checkmate, Paul Elam.
jurassic Pork?
Colour me sceptical on the foreskin face cream thing.
Oh, rats, blockquote fail!
In my house that I share with three guys, there are: four laptops, one desktop computer, two X-Boxes, a PS3, three wide-screen TVs, and literally hundreds of games and DVDs and Blu-Rays.
I own exactly one of those things.
Men truly do hunt the buffalo. Or something
Elam’s Rationalization Hamster must be really tired right now. Here, let me pitch in so it can rest:
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3ryz6t/
Okay, this is OT, but I wanted to hear your take on this: I just read Mill’s “the Subjection of Women”. They claim that the origin of the patriarchy simply lies in the fact that men on average are physically stronger than women, and once upon a time it was pretty much accepted that might is right and the strong can therefore oppress the weak as they see fit. Then various norms and rationalisations were invented to defend patriarchy after people had stopped openly supporting the “might is right” idea. And then the patriarchy turned out to be a terribly stubborn institution for a whole variety of listed reasons.
Anyway, this theory can be contrasted with one I’ve seen in socialist media several times, which is that patriarchy is the fault of agriculture, and before agriculture there was perfect gender equality. I’ve seen three arguments presented for that view, which are
1. If you talk to hunter-gatherer people of today, they say that the genders have equal worth, although different roles.
2. Women’s work was and is important in hunter-gatherer societies, and therefore women had high status.
3. Before agriculture, people worshipped goddesses that we’ve found statues of.
I’m not an expert, so for all I know it COULD be the case that there were perfect gender equality before the invention of agriculture, but I don’t think arguments 1-3 does anything to prove this, because
1. all patriarchal societies say this
2. Have there ever been a society were women’s work WASN’T important; where women were worthless loads sitting on their arses all day (I mean in the real world, outside of MRM fantasies)?
3. This much I know from a couple of semesters of religion studies; there have been many patriarchal societies that worshipped strong female goddesses. The relationship between how one view goddesses and how women of flesh and blood are treated isn’t as straightforward as one might believe.
So I feel more convinced by the physical-strength theory, at least for the time being. I’m perfectly willing to change my mind if someone comes up with better arguments for the blame-agriculture-argument.
What do you think?
I kind of agree with Elam. I just got back from picking up some groceries at WalMart (the only place around here to get organic milk) and most of the store is taken up with utterly useless shit that women buy.
Why are there so many different colors and sizes of towels, for example? Who fucking cares? Women’s clothing? Why is there so much of it? The men’s clothing section is MAYBE a quarter of the size of the women’s. The shampoo aisle has 200 varieties for women and 4 for men. And the scented candles really are fucking ridiculous. Who buys that shit?
Oh wait. I know. Women.
Yeah sure, leather is mainly a byproduct of the meat industry, but there are animals who are only killed for their skin and their meat ends up as carcass meal or pet food, especially when they are used for luxury or high quality goods ( I once saw shoes that were made out of horse butt leather and you could only get one pair of shoes out of one horse – those were men’s shoes btw). And leather also neds tanning which involves chemicals that are bad for both workers and the environment.
Also the last time I checked the meat industry was responsible for a lot of pollution and destruction of nature. And what is the manly man food number one? Meat.
Again, in the ‘what the ever-loving f***?’ department. Please do not click that link if you are triggered by MRAs discussing rape fantasies and evo psych.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought shampoo was unisex? Unless there’s some “Miss Staci’s Vulva Hair Conditioner” in stock somewhere. My dad buys Fructis Length & Strength in bulk. Should he stop?
Judgybitch: Instead of worrying about what other women are buying, I suggest you direct your attention to your own sins. By your own confession, you have “your” room in your husband’s house. In that room, there’s women’s shit, like pillows. Time for you to lose all that. Pillows are misandry and so is your room. Burn that shit today, and then fall down on your knees and beg your husband for forgiveness for ever buying them in the first place.
Also, I sure do hope you are using old-fashioned rags for your period, and wash them using soap that you make yourself. Anything else would be misandry.
DvarDvärghundspossen: I’ve read lots of that, and a lot of it strikes me as wishful thinking, and a bit of Just-So Story blaming of modern society for the ills of the world/naturalistic fallacy (the idea that hunter-gatherers are “in a state of nature” and so are egalitarian in ways we who are,”insulated” from nature aren’t.
Also, the “Venus” statues, are statues. We have no idea what they are. They could have been idle whittling, as much as they might have been idol whittling. It’s also hard to say, “religion was female focused before agriculture”, when almost all religious groups have a pantheon; and the various hunter-gatherer societies we do have details for aren’t all that “women worshipping” in the deities they do have.
I lay that to the anthropologists (and non-anthropologists) who make such theories living inside a primarily monotheistic paradigm, which makes them think in terms of less than pantheistic gods. Esp. because a lot of the gods we do have evidence for (esp. the minor cult-figures) are/were very local. Some of them (kobolds, brownies, imps, nymphs, dryads, etc.) were really local… like, “this house/that tree” local.
That there were large cultic centers (such as those in Scandanavia, or Carthage, or Rome), gets mapped to the present ideas of large cultic centers (like Rome, Akshardham, Mecca, Meoto Iwa, etc) and so the idea that there was some sort of widespread orthodoxy gets projected back to the past.
I’m willing to accept that an agrarian/pastoral, as opposed to a hunting gathering, society is likely to have more division of labor, and a subsequent hogging of resources; and show more patriarchal structures, but it’s not a given of “agriculture” esp. as the examples I can think of which appear to be “matriarchal” (algonquin/iroquois tribes in the Northeastern US/Southeastern Canada), were mixed hunting/gathering/agricutlure groups. The Ohlone of the SF Bay were also a bit more egalitarian, but in neither case was the equality total; each group had it’s spheres of influence, and some were male, some were female.
Politics were incredibly complex; so much so that the Europeans were so lost they caused all sorts of troubles because they assumed the way things worked, “back home” was as least as sophisticated as Native Ways. This wasn’t true. The colonists often knew this, but the governors weren’t, and all sorts of stuff was screwed up as a result.
But I digress.
I’ve been to a Walmart too. I’ve seen lots of things like Riding Mowers, and Electric Chain Saws, and rifles, and XBoxen, and Baseball Bats, and Footballs, and fishing poles, and tents, and cheap beer, and premade pizzas, and stuff, that men buy.
And (this will shock you…) I saw men buying scented candles. Men who appeared to be single.
Also, judgybitch, I realize for a woman to get an education is misandry, but do study a bit of economics. Pretty please? Buying stuff is what keeps economy going. Those scented fucking candles keep a lot of people employed and making money. Many of those people are men. I am certain you are convinced — without a doubt — that every chemist or engineer involved in making scented candles is a man. Therefore, when you scream that women shouldn’t buy scented candles, you are, in fact, demanding for all those men involved in making the product to lose their jobs. Shame on you! How dare you demand that women deprive men of their livelihood by not buying products that men make and sell? Misandrist bitch.
What exactly do rape fantasies have to do with men’s rights, is that not their focus?
Will the next NAACP meeting discuss the topic of white women that like to role play as the mistress of the manor and her sexy slave manservant?
Why are there so many different types and brands of video game consoles, for example? Who fucking cares? Computers? Sports cars? Big Mouth Billy Bass plaques? Truck nuts? Action figures? Comic books? Pool tables? Weirdly specific tools? Lawnmowers that you can ride around in and waste gas? Who buys that shit?
Oh wait. I know. Men.
FTFY, JB.