Tempest in a Bee Cup: TheWoolyBumblebee expelled from A Voice for Men for making angry men even angrier

More drama at A Voice for Men! Kristina Hansen — the excitable FeMRA videoblogger better known as TheWoolybumblebee — has been tossed off the good ship AVFM by Master and Commander Paul Elam for what he calls her “constant public conflicts with elements of our community.”

You can hear her side of the case in the video below. She claims to be shocked — shocked! — to find that Elam expected his contributors to toe his ideological line. And even more shocked to find him making generalizations about women — something, Ms.Bumblebee claims, that makes him no better than the feminists he criticizes!

Yeah, the trouble with ex-AVFMers is that they were dunderheaded enough to have signed up as AVFMers in the first place. (When we last met her here on Man Boobz she was returning a pair of misandric pants to the store, outraged that a tiny portion of the profits would go to help girls facing oppression in the developing world.)

Before you watch the whole video, though — it’s 14 minutes long — you might want some of the backstory. It’s long and messy, too, but I’ll try to keep it  as brief as I can.

First, I should probably note the irony in Elam’s explanation for her dismissal, given that Elam himself is well-known for his own “constant public conflicts” with others in the Men’s Rights movement and the manosphere in general, having launched very public attacks on various others in the past — most notably on Pickup artists — and responding with intemperate anger towards pretty much everyone who even mildly disagrees with him about anything in public.

Heck, at one point he got so annoyed by people disagreeing with him on the Men’s Rights subreddit that he tried to set up his own Men’s Rights Activists subreddit where he could ban the people he disliked; it never took off and he abandoned it.

Elam’s pink-slipping of Ms. Bumblebee is doubly ironic, because one of the issues she’s been involved in “constant public conflicts” about has been MGTOW. (She’s not a fan.)

You might think that wouldn’t be a problem, as A Voice for Men has not exactly been on the best of terms with a big chunk of the MGTOW community for some time. The regulars on MGTOWforums, the biggest MGTOW hub, regularly refer to AVFM as “A Voice for Manginas” and worse; they’re especially offended that Elam lets women — sorry, “cunts” — post there. Elam has responded by denouncing the “MGTOW Forum Fuckwits.” The war of not-so-nice words seems never-ending; for some recent examples on MGTOWforums here and here — and in AVFM’s own forum here.

But Elam apparently still thinks he can somehow charm those MGTOWers who don’t already hate his guts, and he’s been making some efforts to get their attention lately — a fact that has not escaped his non-fans over on MGTOWforums, who have been decidedly unimpressed with his efforts so far.

So Elam was none too happy when Ms. Bumblebee started making videos attacking MGTOWers head on — videos which caused a little firestorm of controvery in the MGTOW world and got MGTOWers even madder at AVFM for putting up with such an evil “wench.”

Ms. Bumblebee has also been saying less than kind things about libertarianism for months on her blog, on YouTube, and on Twitter, where she bluntly declared it a “a cancer within the MRM.”

Turns out that was a bit of a faux pas. Though AVFM pretends to be “apolitical,” and has a few people associated with it who consider themselves liberal, most of the “big names” there  — not just Elam but John “the Other” Hembling, and Karen (GirlWritesWhat) Straughan — pretty obviously lean libertarian.

Indeed, in a not-very-friendly comment on Reddit about Ms. Bumblebee’s departure from AVFM, Straughan suggests that she’s essentially a “a child …  having a tantrum,” who doesn’t appreciate that the Men’s Rights movement is all about “free thinkers and John Galts.” (Yeah, she really did say that.)

She also accuses Ms. B of not reading enough E Belfort Bax — which is, I have to admit, the first time I’ve ever seen anyone accused of that particular crime in a political debate.

In case you’re not yourself a Baxhead, he was an opponent of women’s suffrage perhaps best known for his 1913 essay “The Fraud of Feminism,” a rather obscure piece of writing that’s having a sort of revival amongst a certain segment of the Men’s Rights movement. Indeed, A Voice for Men recently reprinted a portion of Bax’s essay with a glowing and altogether uncritical introduction by Elam himself.

It’s actually rather revealing. A Voice for Men is happy to republish the work of a long dead author who thought that women should be denied the right to vote. But a live woman who doesn’t agree with Elam about libertarianism or MGTOWers — over the side she goes!

Here’s her video. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, you could just skip ahead to 5:20 to hear her express her astonishment that Elam would make sweeping generalizations about all women (say it ain’t so!), or to about 7:50 where she sets forth her basic complaint about AVFM and the way she says she was treated by Elam et al.

If you only have a couple of minutes, or limited patience for YouTube videos, at least listen to the excerpts of the testy phone conversation with Elam in which she officially learned she was no longer a part of AVFM; they start at about 10:40.

Ms. B has labeled this video Part 1. I don’t know how many more parts are coming. But I’ll certainly be watching.

For the masochists among you, Elam has put up the entire conversation he had with Ms. B — it’s half an hour long, and I listened to the whole damn thing.  I assume he thinks it makes him look better and her look worse, but, you know, it really, really doesn’t. Unless you’re really into patronizing mansplaining and apologias for angry misogyny amongst MRAs and MGTOWers. He concludes by throwing a little fit and hanging up. Or maybe she hangs up. I can’t tell.

Ms. B., when she can get a word in edgewise, makes a lot of very good points in the call, bluntly and directly calling him on his some of his bullshit; it’s only when she starts going on about the evils of feminism that I remember how warped her worldview really is.

Alongside the video, Elam also posted the email he sent Ms. B dismissing her from AVFM, which confirms that he was indeed pissed off by what he calls her “divisive conduct” towards MGTOWers and all those John Galts of the MRM.