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.
Ninja’d on the riding lawnmowers. (BTW, I know women like some of those things too, just going by stereotypes.)
Oh, Self-RighteousBitch went to Walmart? How fascinating. Maybe if she’d bought herself a nice candle it might have improved her sour disposition.
@Pecunium: Thanks for an interesting response. And I think you’re right about wishful thinking about the lovable state of nature hunter-gatherers live in… When reading your response I just remembered that I actually read an article about this in a socialist magazine that explicitly stated that it’s great news that people had such gender equality in the past, since this shows that gender equality is POSSIBLE.
Eh… So let’s assume for the sake of argument that gender equality or lack thereof depends on the economic structure of the society one lives in. And let’s further assume that there were gender equality before agriculture, and then patriarchy was somehow caused by agriculture. How does this say anything about the possibility of gender equality in the MODERN world, which is pretty different from a hunter-gatherer society?
Or, to switch things around: Let’s suppose again that gender equality or lack thereof depends on the economic structure of the society one lives in, but that ALL societies so far have been patriarchal. Doesn’t prove that gender equality is impossible to achieve in the future. We seem to have come a long way towards it so far.
@CassandraSays: That, or a nice, thick broom.
He should see my husband’s DVD collection, comic book collection, and action figure collection.
And women will stop spending money on beauty when men stop valuing it.
I love how hard JudgyBitch tries to make sure that every single post she makes has a zinger at the end.
I imagine her folding her arms and nodding smugly down her nose at you, like, “think about it. That’s right.”
TW: Rape, rape apology
Appleeye, a rape apologist might well use women’s rape fantasies as a justification for rape. “She fantasised about it so she wanted it”.
As someone said on Shakesville, noone tells shooting victims that because they enjoyed shoot’em up games & films, it was their own fault and they wanted to be shot really.
When these discussions arise, I always like to add that men’s “toys” — cars, electronic gadgets, tools, lawn mowers, hunting and camping gear, etc. — cost A LOT more than most women’s “toys”, even luxury ones. A new Corvette costs around $95,000. Assuming the average cost of a pair of women’s shoes made by a top designer is about $550, a woman would have to buy herself roughly 172 pairs in order to offset a Corvette purchase by her husband. And how many fucking scented candles would I have to buy to come anywhere near the cost of furnishing and equipping a “man cave”? How many bottles of shampoo would equal the cost of a pool table? Or a hunting trip 10 states away?
Higgledy Piggeldy
Elam thinks feminists
buy scented candles
and various crap.
Doesn’t realize that his
“antimisandry”
guys all buy truck nuts.
Oh, Paul, shut your trap.
OK, I think limmericks are easier.
Yeah, Double Dactyls are brutal cuz you’ve got to be really tight with the scansion. You can fudge limericks a bit.
No, you guys, buying things like cars, comics, computers, action figures, tools, and lawnmowers is GREAT for the economy and for the environment! Provided, of course, that you are a man buying them. The second a woman buys any of that shit, the last Truffula tree falls! KEEP THEIR CURSED LADY HANDS OUT OF THE MARKET!
I just can’t get over MRA’s prescription for a better economy: have people spend as little as possible. Less consumer spending!! That ought-ta do it. I wish just one of them would tell me where they think the money that women spend on scented candles is going. Like, do they believe it evaporates into thin air? That it doesn’t pass to other people? It’s like they take stupid pills or something.
I think it’s a combo of the might makes right and agriculture. Prior to agriculture men may have used their greater strength to bully those physically weaker but there would have been a bit less incentive to institutional patriarchy. Once you settle down into an agricultural society and inheritance of land/goods becomes more important (not much of that in migratory hunter/gatherer societies where you need to carry everything) you want to make sure you are keeping everything in the family. The obvious way to do that is guarantee parentage and women already know their child is theirs so you have to guarantee fatherhood and in a less kind era you get patriarchal oppression of women.
Never been a fan of double dactyls; their rules feel too arbitrary (and now a nonsense phrase! And now a long word!).
Because I have a frivolous mind, I can’t help wondering what Mr Elam was drinking in that coffee shop. Not latte presumably, given his scorn for latte drinkers? Or was that the problem? Is women drinking latte misandry cos it’s a dude’s drink?
Can’t believe it was caramel macchiatto either. Enquiring minds need to know!
That certinaly makes the topic on point for the abuser’s lobby.
Nobody is really this stupid, right?
My dad collects G-scale model train sets. My mom collects tea pots from thrift shops.
Anecdata FTW.
Let’s see, other masculine coded items, golf clubs, ATVs, video games, paintball guns, airsoft guns, drum sets, electric guitars, amplifiers, boats, sporting equipment… Nope, nothing there non-utilitarian. Certainly nothing nearly as unnecessary or expensive as colored towels or scented candles.
Nobinayamu: Reads satirical to me so I’m guessing no. However with MRAs you never know.
I think the MRA argument about rape fantasies is that the idea of “rape culture” is all a fantasy dreamed up by women who love rape fantasies. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this argued on AVFM and possibly the old False Rape Society. And Girl Writes What, possibly.
No, Judgy Bitch seems to be utterly sincere, unless her blog is all an elaborate hoax as well.
Guitars! What is it with guys and acquiring rock instruments that they don’t play? My husband has a guitar, an acoustic bass, and a keyboard, none of which he ever plays, ever. (The trumpet, however, is mine.)
(And of course I’m sure instrument hoarding is not a male-only thing. Sure happens to my dude friends, though.)
So you’re saying the MRA’s argument is that women have rape fantasies therefore women’s ultimate fantasy must be that the whole world is full of rape and sexual harrassment. And so women dreamed up rape culture as the ultimate sexual fantasy.
Somebody post kitties please, before my brain is corroded.
My grandparents got married in 1952 and raised their seven kids in Ricky Ricardo’s Father Knows Beaver Cleaver Best days. I STILL hear stories about how their kids used to demand to know why the family didn’t have [insert thing their friends had], and their parents would respond, “because we don’t have any debt like [inserts friends’ parents] have.”
So apparently consumer debt was also a thing in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was sufficiently common to make the preceding generation in my family the “odd ones out” because their parents had none.
(Also, a car loan the size of a mortgage payment would be a loan for, like, $750. Maybe more depending on the size of your house. I’m sure there are people who would need to borrow $750 to be able to buy a car, but they’re definitely not buying a luxury item!)
Different colored towels make perfect sense if more than one person shares the same bathroom. Just like different colored or patterned luggage makes it easier to pick yours out at the airport. My lime green suitcase ain’t going going home with anybody else.
I wish power tools came in more color varieties. I want a set of green glow-in-the-dark tools.