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 ālatte lappers who were more likely than not completely clueless about how a single thing on the planet with a moving part works,ā 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 womanās 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, donāt 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 thatāll 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 themĀ 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 donāt 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 worldās ridiculous over consumption, and therefore decimation of everything, is not men. In fact, womenās 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 thatās not quite true. Or really true at all. For one thing, while women may spend more than men, thatās in part because women still tend to do more of the shopping for things like, you know, groceries. Theyāre not spending all this money on themselves.
And women may not really be spending as much as you think. Itās 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, youāll discover that ā¦ there really doesn’t seem to be one. Itās one of these things thatās assumed to be true simply because itās repeated so often ā especially by people claiming to know how to market to women. The Wall Street Journalās 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%.
Letās return from the land of reality to plunge again into the tempestuous torrent of Paul Elamās 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 youāre 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.
Back in the day, women sought out the ripest berries by sniffing for them. That is why we are hardwired to like things to smell nice. Men sought out the wooly mammoth by smelling for its poop. That’s why they hate it when things smell nice, and prefer it if everything smells like poop. (You can’t argue with science!)
Women also had to sit for hours on hard rocks, grinding grains. That is why we like a nice throw pillow. IT’S IN OUR LADY BRAINZ.
The MRA candle rants always crack me up, in part because my husband loves scented fucking candles. And he’s a macho dude! He just likes things to smell like pie.
Anyway, how are candles not utilitarian and primal and stuff? They’re portable fire! And they’re useful in a power outage, even the scented fucking ones.
If Elam honestly can’t think of any non-utilitarian things men like to own, he has got to be the worst gifter on Earth. Unless he gives everyone on his holiday list a steak, which would actually be pretty good.
I remain skeptical that teenage boys need help finding porn on the Internet.
Also also – there’s a reason women buy more clothes than men (other than social conditioning): Women’s clothing is of vastly inferior quality than men’s. You have all this flimsy crap which you’re supposed to layer, so you have to buy three things to be as warm as one mens jumper, and it’s less durable because women aren’t supposed to DO anything in their clothing, and the fashions and colours change all the time…
The only bonus with women’s clothes is there are more colours. Guys stuff only seems to come in blue, grey, black, white and that horrible muddy red colour.
I just think it would be awkward as hell. I accept that my older relatives may look at porn and erotica. I don’t want to know which sites they go on. You’d spend the entire time thinking “Dad’s probably jerked off to this…”
“Have lots of poop and poop-scented items that look like they were designed by and for men.”
I wonder how narrow Elam’s definition of utilitarian is? I mean, does he stand outside art galleries screaming about the waste of resources, or do they get a pass because it’s Manly Menz Achievements on display? I suspect it’s a case of anything used by/liked by men is utilitarian, and anything used by/liked by women (even if it’s the same thing) is frivolous and useless.
Think of the keystrokes he’d save if he just typed “I hate women” instead of all this jabber.
So my wife-choking, beer-guzzling, gun-toting father loves scented candles.
I guess my whole life has been a lie.
@Shaenon: Hell, you don’t even need to try to find porn on the internet, surf for a bit and it’ll find you.
I’m imagining a dad trying to show his son porn sites, but his son keeps having to explain to him how to use the computer, and all the sites he looks up the kid’s already seen. You know, like when your parents discover memes.
The music really makes this:
@katz: Yeah, I can totally picture the kid being like, “Uh, Dad? If you don’t remember the url or the website name you can just go to the bookmarks menu. It’ll jog your memory.'”
“Dad, this stuff is way too vanilla. There’s no tentacles…”
Actually, while taking a shower I thought of a list of things my father owns that are completely frivolous:
1) multiple pieces of exercise equipment that he never uses because he just goes to the gym instead
2) four shotguns and one pistol that he has never used once in the entirety of my twenty-three years of life (before anyone cries “self defense in case of burglars” you do not need four guns for that)
3) two cellphones
4) multiple towels in separate colors
5) enough clothes to fill an entire dresser and half of a walk in closet
6) enough shoes to fill up one half of the space under a king-sized bed
7) a grill that is used once a year at most
He also left his desk job for a job that has him driving all over the country every week, so think of all that gas he chose to use up.
So, MRAs, is my dad secretly a woman or what?
My family (myself included) runs at 3.84 Earths. š
We are computed to be at 3.21 earths.
Mind, we don’t wash the car. I also wonder what happens if the oddities of our income were to be factored according to the differences in the types of work we do; that and one of us is very well compensated.
He’s also required to travel a lot for business.
I know my personal footprint dropped a lot when I left the army. I did a LOT less travel in a year… about 60,000 miles a year less.
It seems odd that the travel one does on public transport is included that way. I mean, it’d be running whether or not I used it, and surely it’s better than adding to the road traffic. (I don’t understand statistics or figures at all, I hasten to add.)
When I first took the quiz a few years ago, a bunch of us analyzed it and decided that it makes a lot of assumptions in order to keep it relatively short. It hits the high points, but that’s all. I think the point is that nearly everyone in the west consumes too much. (Although I’m impressed with thebewilderness’s 2.25.)
I’m still waiting for The Royal Smugness herself to report her score.
chuckeedee said:
Chuckeedee, do NOT google bower birds. I mean it, don’t. Your head will asplode. Also, ignore magpies. They are all like ‘me, me, me, chirp, me, want’ and such.
Question for JudgyBitch – if I buy my scented candles at the farmer’s market from a local beekeeper who makes candles (along with seriously awesome foreskin-free facecream), am I still destroying the world? *crosses fingers*
Also – heyyyy, hating on meat-eaters! No fair. Some of us go out of our way to buy from local farmers who pasture their animals (though I’ve heard this is not as widely available in the US, where I do not live). I’d smugly put my locally raised pastured chicken thighs up against your average soy burger anytime.*
*That sounded dirty.
Not sure if feeling aroused or hungry.
I have a Cavallini calendar in my office with lots of pictures of trains and airplanes. Is it okay for me to enjoy those images? Or am I impermissibly intruding onto holy male territory? Whatever the case, the creation and mass-production of this calendar did not do any less damage to the environment than the other, more girly Cavallini calendar that was on the stand the day I bought mine, the one with pictures of flowers from vintage botany textbooks.
Also, my mother designed industrial equipment and cars. She also taught people (including men, the horror!) how to design those things. I have another relative who spent her whole life designing cars, including GMC trucks. Both she and my mother have lots of female friends who similarly design cars. So I guess cars are now tainted, and Judgybitch better take down and burn those pictures of cars immediately. And then apologize to her menfolk for unwittingly subjecting them to something that’s been profaned by women’s involvement.
I never really liked soy burgers. Pea burgers on the other hand, those are fantastic.
@Tracy Bradley: I am a meat-eater myself. But the sheer scale of meat consumption and the industrialization of making meat products in the Western world is completely unsustainable. A good way to reduce one’s environmental impact is to, for one, buy from local butchers and farmers as you do, and also to simply eat less meat. There is certainly no reason to eat it at every meal or even every day.
I had a vegan chicken burger at a place in California last summer that was actually pretty good. I looked it up when I got home, and they have a proprietary process for turning bean curd skin into a patty with a pretty close taste and texture to a chicken patty (not a breaded chunk of meat, but a patty made of ground meat, then breaded). FULL of chemicals. I think the Hutterite chickens in my freezer are probably much less resource-intensive.
Why do female MRAs always say “single” as if it’s an insult? It always reminds me of my co-worker telling me that her niece was getting married to a TOTAL asshole because she was 24, and afraid of becoming a spinster. At 24. Gah.
Hmm, single, happy, not suppressing my interests or identity in order to be with somebody I don’t actually like. Not spending all my time, energy, and money on somebody else’s hobbies, interests, or bad decisions. Not being raped and beaten on a daily basis and being brainwashed into thinking that it’s only because he loves me, and I just need to try a little harder.
Yeah, being single is just hell.
I’m casting a serious side-eye at that quiz. It varies between asking really specific questions, and really vague ones, like the exact mileage for every form of transportation but then just having you choose a type of car rather than letting you put in your fuel efficiency. And, yeah, makes a lot of assumptions.