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.
To be serious for a minute, there is a germ of truth in what PaulE is saying: rampant consumerism is a bad thing.
But there are so many more things — even leaving aside the rampant misogyny — wrong with PaulE’s analysis:
All of us currently live in a global system that is completely organized around and dependent on massive consumption of fossil fuels and chemicals (global agribusiness, anyone?). People(not just women) in developed nations are consuming energy, water, land and other resources at an unsustainable rate. Some of that consumption comes down to individual choice (buying a flashy new car/iPad or purchasing Oprah’s super-special foreskin cream VS. buying used clothing, giving up meat); most is really beyond the realm of individual choice (again, global agribusiness! militarism!).
We need to produce things & consume them to live. Therefore we need a sustainable means of production that meets actual human needs. We need the infrastructure that supports people in making sustainable choices — we can’t just say people should drive less; we need to build decent public transportation systems that get people where they need to go. We need to stop unnecessary military interventions, forgive the debts of developing nations, wean industries away from fossil fuels.
PaulE gets his hate on, but nothing he says would lead to any meaningful change in the very situation he says concerns him. If every single pampered Western woman stopped buying shoes and face creams, that would barely make a dent. The problem is systemic.
Paul E. is a blooming idiot. So is SmuggyBitch.
/lefty ranting
You realize that the amount of resources used are the same no matter what color the towels are, right?
OMG? Are you fucking serious?!? Natural cotten towels are the same process as Blue Unicorn with Pink Wings towels?
Holy shit, you know nothing about textile manufacturing.
judgyasshole, you know you can just use regular quotation marks if you’re too lazy to figure out how to do blockquotes, right? Here, this is what quotation marks look like: “”
Also, are you aware of the existence of natural dyes?
Idiot.
Citation needed for the cost being so high that the entire planet is being ruined by someone having a throw pillow and a pleasant smelling candle.
On a item by item basis, throw pillows and candles are actually more environmentally sound as throw pillows can be made from things like feathers (from a plucked bird being prepared for eating) and as candles can be made from left over petroleum products that otherwise would go to waste.
She can’t spell “cotton,” yet we know nothing? OK.
Are we to understand that Elam had a giant slurp from the delicious chum bucket of outrage because two women were in a public coffee shop talking about the advantages of recycling and had the temerity to aver that men are doing a shitty job running the planet? Srsly?
Most of the waste of resources involved in an operation like Walmart isn’t in the manufacturing, it’s in transporting the goods to their destination, disposing of the goods that don’t sell, etc.
Are you capable of looking at any issue from a nuanced perspective?
Also – quotation marks or blockquotes. Pick one. “Neither” is not acceptable.
thebewilderness: I don’t believe that conversation PaulE overheard ever actually, honest-to-god took place.
(There’s something extra lulzy about watching some rant about environmental costs and not bother to include the environmental costs of the distribution process. Maybe she doesn’t believe in climate change?)
Woah, a 4600$ fishing rod?
I am curious about the search terms you used, I want to make a list of ridiculously expensive things people fail to avoid buying for some reason.
It is easy enough to find examples for this already, but I still would like to know.
Fishing is a sport, so all that expensive gear is so they can catch torture an release the fish. No food involved.
Thanks, hellkell, I sometimes forget he prefers fantasy to reality.
cloudiah: but, but… if we acknowledge that overconsumption is a systemic problem, it’ll be harder to use it as an excuse to feel superior to people! Terrible people who buy wasteful things like dyed fabrics!
Judgybitch, go take this quiz and tell us how many earths you consume: http://www.myfootprint.org/
I scored 3.02. I’ll bet you can’t answer the quiz honestly and score lower than me.
I know I’m doing this in the wrong thread, but this isn’t good enough for the poster thread.
I’m now picturing SmugBitch sitting in her beige house, feeling all proud of herself for not indulging in any of those wasteful colorful textiles, while consuming more resources in a month than most villages in poorer countries consume in a year. And that’s if she doesn’t fly anywhere.
I forgot! [cloudiah revises rant.] “The world is going to hell in a hand basket because some people buy dyed towels with appliques! If only that practice would stop, we would have an ecological utopia where men and women would live in peace & prosperity forever — as long as those terrible wimmenz would stop mouthing off and insisting men leave the toilet seat down, amirite?”
Also, the energy that it takes to run our homes is not in any way a contributor to environmental issues. It would be misandry to suggest such a thing, because the men on the porch must be supplied with cold beer as soon as they think about maybe wanting some.
Hahaha, take the smug pill. That’s perfect.
One of the (many, many) things that is stupid about Elam’s argument is that he’s assuming that the women he (allegedly) overheard don’t do anything for the environment besides talk based on them drinking coffee and driving an SUV. I don’t see any correlation of type of coffee with environmentalism, let alone causation. I drink a latte every morning. They might sound la-de-da to Elam, but it’s coffee with milk in it! It’s the most basic coffee you can get!
Elam just sees what he wants to see. He has confirmation bias gone wild (dvd out soon!) and leaps to conclusions like he’s training for the conclusion leaping olympics.
Mr. HK’s brother sent us island-style applique towels from Hawaii. They look handmade, and they are hideous.
You have quite the imagination there.
And no, they’re not hideous because they’re hand appliqued, not at all. They’re purple and beige, that’s where the ugly comes in.
Oh David, fishing, even with $4,600 fishing tackle, relates to provider skills. Hunting the woolly mammoth was a provider skill. Collecting shiny trinkets ‘n’ stuff relates only to self-indulgence.
In anticipation of predictable retorts along the lines of “but men don’t have to hunt any more”, my response would be that men continue to have to apprehend and understand a world that is hostile to men. So no, the basic elements of hunting (e.g., hunting for the truth of things) continue to be integral to the male condition. Hunting is about strategy and getting into the heads of your quarry, whereas shiny stuff and the self-indulgence that it relates to is all about me, me, me, I, me, want, give me, me and only me.
We can certainly all agree that a fat, lazy, office-bound slob using $4,600 fishing tackle to catch an itty-bitty sardine is also a form of materialistic indulgence, but its appeal lies in the primal motivations of men that it taps into. Collecting shiny stuff to wear and to adorn does nothing of the sort.
Chuckeedee, how the fuck is catch and release being a provider? Did you strain anything with that reach?
Oy! I’m using 2.25 earths. This is very not good.