I don’t want to make this blog the A Voice for Men Show, but that little hangout of angry dudes has really been outdoing itself in recent days. Take site founder and chief egomaniac Paul Elam’s post the other day reading the riot act to another Men’s Rights activist for being a homophobic asshole.
Specifically, an Australian bloke named Chris Key, whom Elam describes as “a true misogynist, homophobe and all around asshole who claims to be an MRA.”
Regular readers of this blog may recall Key from a visit he paid to the comments section here recently, lambasting “feminazi dykes and cunts — as well as the mangina losers who were sniffing around for a sympathy fuck” for, among other things, for using “foul, aggressive language.” Yes, there is a teensy bit of irony there.
[Let me just put a trigger warning here for the violently homophobic language in the next couple of quotes from Key.]
Key is indeed a pretty foul excuse for a human being. On his site, Men’s Rights Online, his avatar is an animated gif of a boot, captioned “these boots were made for kicking feminists in the cunt.” In addition to kicking virtual feminists he devotes much of his attention to attacking “fags” and “dykes.” In one recent thread in the subforum devoted to “The Militant Fag/Dyke Agenda,” he offered this bit of wisdom:
I think the death penalty should be assigned to all persons who practice faggotry and dykism. The people who practice that lifestyle are destroying society.
The law system might have decriminalised faggotry, but nature hasn’t. HIV is a stark reminder that nature does not tolerate faggotry
In another comment he went even further. You might ask: how is it possible to go further than that? Here’s how. Responding to another commenter who had suggested that “fags are better off nailed to a fence post,” Key added:
Only problem with nailing fags to a fence post is it might allow one of their contagious diseases to infect a normal Human. The best thing the government can do is kill them and burn their carcasses. Society needs to be protected from these monsters.
Shortly after his visit to Man Boobz, Key stopped in to visit with his comrades over in the comments section of AVFM, where he aroused Elam’s ire by calling one of AVFM’s female followers a “fag enabler.”
And so Elam, who seems to think he’s the Emperor of MRALand, has declared him persona non grata in the Men’s Rights movement.
But that’s a good thing, right? I mean, Key is such a noxious shit he should probably be thrown out of any movement he’s a part of, right? (Except perhaps organizations promoting gay-bashing and “cunt-kicking” in Eastern Australia.) Haven’t I been arguing since, like, forever that Men’s Rightsers who need to get rid of the real haters?
Well, yes. It’s just that there is a eensy weensy teensy tiny bit of hypocrisy in Elam’s moralizing. Because A Voice for Men, in addition to being a misogynist cesspool, is itself overflowing with homophobia and transphobia, much of it coming from Elam himself. Elam’s description of Key as “a true misogynist, homophobe and all around asshole” is a perfect description of himself as well.
Consider: The site’s slur of choice for men who aren’t raging misogynists is, you may recall, “mangina,” an insult that pulls off a veritable trifecta of bigotry, being homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic all at once. It’s telling that Elam et al can’t really think of a worse insult than to suggest that men they don’t like are effeminate not-quite-men with feminized genitalia. (Elam says he’s been trying to move away from this term, which I guess he thinks is too obvious in its bigotry, but you’d hardly know it from looking at the number of articles featuring the slur on his site.)
As for homophobia, you may recall the bizarre “humorous” post in which he imagined me and a rather outspoken YouTube critic of MRAs having sex:
I am not in the least bit homophobic, but if Hannibal Barca ever takes refuge in the loving arms of David Futrelle, I might have to reconsider. I will spare you any attempts to construct a visual. I’m heartless at times, but not sadistic. …
[I]f Barca and Futrelle took their shirts off and kissed, would it be lesbian porn? Sorry, I should have issued a trigger warning.
Yeah, that’s not in the least bit homophobic.
But Elam’s homophobia towards gay men (or straight men he wants to insult by calling them gay and/or lesbian) seems to be somewhat tempered, as homophobia goes, largely because gay men are, in fact, men. Indeed, while Elam’s ideas about gay men and gay activism are all kinds of fucked up, the main reason for this seems to be his intense misogyny rather than a hatred of gay male sexuality. Several gay men write for the site.
AVFM is a bit less friendly towards lesbians – who are, as you know, not only gay but women.
For months, AVFM featured a lesbian-bashing video by far-right YouTube jackass Bernard Chapin in its sidebar, with this description, presumably written by Elam:
Bernard’s on a roll here with this one. And you will be rolling to [sic] as he delivers another thorough fisking, Inferno style.
Fun fact: Chapin’s favorite term for lesbians is “lesbobo,” with one more “bo” than the standard slur “lesbo.”
Elam is now involved in some sort of feud with Chapin, and the video is down. Elam apparently loved Chapin’s anti-“lesbobo” videos, but didn’t like him criticizing AVFM, or imitating him in one of his trademark unfunny funny voices.
And then of course was this little bit of “humor” from regular commenter Andybob, which Elam decided was so brilliant it needed to be immortalized in a post:
Lesbians barged into gay men’s spaces in droves jabbing their stubby fingers at everyone. Predictably, they proceeded to boss everyone around, making the gay rights movement about them. Note that homosexuality was a criminal offence for MEN ONLY. Lesbianism was never against the law. They had jackshit to whinge about, but they made gay rights about them anyway, and used it as a propaganda vehicle to support feminism.
Notice that GLTT became LGTT? How’s that for petty entitlement? Gay men should have fought back, but, to our everlasting shame, we didn’t. The only gay men who remained in GLTT were slimy political types seeking personal aggrandizement, zeta poodle carriers and moronic party boys who don’t give a shit about anything except the pattern on the umbrella in their drinks. Of course, the MSM focus entirely on this noisy, spangled disco version of real gay men like me: men who know exactly how greedy, relentless and downright shady those lezziefems are and don’t trust them one iota.
Yep, that’s right, Andybob is a gay man who hates lesbians and, it seems, most other gay men.
If you search through the AVFM archives, you will find lesbians appearing in its posts largely as negative examples – allies of evil feminists, perpetrators of domestic violence, destroyers of the family. In some cases, as in this post from YouTube MRA Barbarossaaaa, lesbian-bashing is basically the cherry on top of the misogyny pie:
Sure, not all women are fat lesbian man haters that pen scum manifestos on their free time. However, how many women have trapped men via child support and alimony; a form of legalized slavery?
But in other case lesbians are a main course. Take this, from a contributor known only as Dusty:
Feminists are on a campaign against heterosexuality, because they see it as the core value of the patriarchy. Not only do they constantly attack heterosexuality in the media and the classroom, but they constantly exalt homosexuality- particularly lesbianism. Most feminists are lesbians, so by pushing lesbianism onto heterosexual women, feminists simultaneously discourage marriage and open more avenues for female companionship. They praise male homosexuality, because they see it as a subversion of patriarchal, white, heterosexual, male values (whatever those are). Homosexuals are seen as a safe alternative to threatening, violent, predatory, heterosexual men, and are thus “honorary women.” Here, feminists prey on the occasional alienation that gay men feel at the hands of heterosexual men who have been raised to think that homosexuality is immoral or even pathological. However, this support is only in theory, and feminist love is entirely conditional. If a homosexual chooses to live his life as a proud man rather than a feminist lapdog, feminists have no use for him and quietly reject him.
Well, that’s a clusterfuck of terrible right there.
As bad as all this is, it really doesn’t hold a candle to Elam’s virulent transphobia, most evident in his bizarre attack against sociologist and Men’s Studies scholar Raewyn Connell, a trans woman. In a long and bizarre rant posted on Men’s News Daily, which he used to edit, Elam attacked Connell for having “the masculinity cut from his body like a malignant tumor.”
Demonstrating both hatred and ignorance, Elam suggested that Connell’s very existence as a trans woman
calls on us at the very least to question the objectivity of her work, as well as the motivations behind it.
Is it possible that an individual so hated the sex they were born with that it sparked a life long academic quest to deconstruct it into something that did not disgust them? Is it possible that the fruits of those efforts were easily embraced by others who may have had issues of their own with traditional masculinity? Not intellectual issues, but intrapersonal ones. …
One thing is certain. Raewyn Connell’s view of masculinity is not a product of scholarly pursuit, but of mental illness; a pathological hatred of a particular sex, in this case male. And when that is true of the preeminent authority in a field of study with such far reaching sociological ramifications, then it is time to make a change.
Let us hope that the idea of male studies cannot be cut off as easily as an unwanted penis.
So, yeah. If Elam really wants to free the good ship Men’s Rights Movement of bigotry, he should probably throw himself and his fellow AVFM sailors overboard immediately.
@Kitteh: Thank you! ^.^
I wonder how Paul would react to a coning…
“Evil misandrists! There where 400 of them with soft-serves and switchblades! Ready to cut me and cover me and Ice-cream!”
*AVFM explodes into argument over whether MacDonalds is part of the feminist hivemind.*
LOL oops *were.
“MacDonalds is part of the feminist hivemind”
Clearly it is! Don’t you know that overweight women are MISANDRY!! (As are not-overweight women who ignore them) — and clearly any negative health results of McD’s (on men) are MISANDRY!!
…I kind of miss the days of Steele claiming everything was MISANDRY, it was pretty funny.
“Ready to cut me and cover me and Ice-cream!” +1 internet
Now, onto the troll (scroll up a bit CatBeast) —
“Anyone one who actually knows me knows that I don’t discriminate against gays or lesbians just because I use those terms for people that irritate me. Your looking for anything you can to demonize these people and you can blow it out your ass…..Fagg.”
Translation — “I don’t actively discriminate against GLBT people, I just use slurs that are commonly used against them to refer to people I don’t like!”
Let me break this down for you jonatma. First of, fag/lesbo/etc have traditionally been used to insult gays and lesbians (and bisexuals to a certain degree) — in less GLBT friendly times and places, this marked them (us) for retaliation by those who do actively discriminate. Further, using such slurs to label something/someone as undesirable implies that you find undesirable the group that the slur refers to.
An example you might understand better — your nym includes 420, I’ll take this to assume you smoke less than legal substances, for the sake of argument, we’ll assume that you smoke enough to be called a pothead, and you consider this to be an insult. For that matter, let’s assume that pothead is an insult that’s been used to fire people (which it probably has been) and that certain people who actively discriminate against people who smoke pot will verbally or physically harass anyone they, or others, have labelled as a pothead, correclty or not. In this hypothetical world, how would you, an actual pothead, feel if people regularly tossed around pothead as an insult for anyone they didn’t like?
Assuming you’re not to stoned to get the point of that drawn out analogy, you’d probably be annoyed, or possibly pissed off, or, potentially, too afraid of the consequences of reacting negatively to say anything about it.
In other things, goddamned is it windy, despite having my windows closed my plants are waving in the breeze and my fish are freaking the fuck out…though watching a cory swim in zig zags is pretty funny…
Y U SO WEIRD WEATHER? Is it because the world is ending?!
I love MRA grammar. MRammar?
I’m back! And I may be a culinary genius.
Those are adorable, katz! Did the kiddo like them?
I forgot to mention this at the time, but I saw the most adorable way of presenting curry and rice, might be worth a try for kids. Obviously you’d need sticky rice to get it to work.
http://piximus.net/fun/shiba-inu-plump-booty-curry
… Crap. Sorry!
Falconer — the error didn’t really affect the general logic of your post, I just wanted to make the correction/Dx in question clear to those who don’t have a DSM handy.
I’m not sure the kiddo was actually able to identify them, but he liked the olives.
They turned out great, katz!
Is “Hannibal Barca” some kind of codeword? I can’t find anything on him on a cursory google search.
Holy shit! I had no idea my fingers were stubby. I’ve even been an amateur hand model before. Now I will have to rethink every single concept I previously held dear. Thanks, AVfM, for opening my eyes. To the ugliness of my hands, or something.
Hannibal Barca = Hannibal who fought Rome in the Punic wars and famously took an army with elephants over the Alps. I think “Barca” means Lightning; it was a nickname.
LOL and I just realised Kakanian’s question was from when the thread was live. Oh well.
/necro pedant
@McKenzie:
Re.: Football
Some people’s confidence in their interests is so low, and/or they know that they have paid so high a price pursuing them, that any suggestion that those interests are not worthwhile seems threatening. When that enforcing that interest jibes with gender-norming, getting deputised into the (in this case) Masculinity Police adds an additional thrill….