[EDIT: The 20/20 story has been postponed] So the Men’s Rightsers are already up in arms about the upcoming 20/20 story on the Manosphere — which, to remind everyone, is showing today, that is, Friday, October 18 at 10 PM EST on ABC. So far I’ve run across angry posts about it on A Voice for Men (naturally), the Men’s Rights subreddit, Rex Patriarch, Stares at the World and Captain Capitalism. Heck, the good Captain even made a rambling 30-minute video on the subject; skip forward ten minutes to hear his misogynistic tirade against the two women who wrote the brief teaser piece now up on the ABC website, complete with “funny” voices. He even calls them “twats.”
But so far the most interesting response comes from W. F. Price of The Spearhead, who uses the occasion to launch an attack on … Paul Elam. Yep. It’s a Manosphere He-Man-Cat-Fight.
Price notes that he too had been contacted some time back by ABC, but that he’d dragged his feet about getting back to them, “[p]artly because I was busy with family at the time … and partly because I don’t trust TV reporters.” But Elam, as we know, responded a bit differently. As Price puts it:
Paul, on the other hand, apparently thought that he’d get a fair shake. In addition to flying out to New York for an interview (I hope he didn’t pay for the airfare), he even invited the TV people into his home. Naturally, it didn’t go so well. How could he have thought it would?
Mee-ow!
Well, it seems he thought throwing the “man-o-sphere” under the bus was the ticket to respectability.
Ah, and now we get to why Price is pissed. Elam, as longtime readers of this blog are well aware, is a bit of a control freak. He wants A Voice for Men not only to be the center of the Man-o-verse; he wants it to be the Man-o-verse. So he rebranded his version of the Men’s Rights movement as the Men’s Human Rights Movement, or MHRM, and wants to pretend that it’s the only game in town. And he’s made a point of trying to disassociate himself from the “manosphere” as well, by which he seems to have meant the right-leaning, often game-centric portion of the more broadly defined manosphere.
It’s a bit silly, since A Voice for Men is deeply entangled in the manosphere. Elam shares most of his ideology with his fellow manospherians. Most of his audience comes from the manosphere. His site wouldn’t exist without it.
And, as Price reminds us, Elam helped to build up the audience for his budding blog by writing posts for The Spearhead, which is very much a part of the manosphere.
I’ll admit that I’m kind of angry about this, but sometimes you have to sit back and look at the situation objectively. I’ve known from the beginning that Paul wanted to do his own thing. I supported it for a while, giving him a platform on The Spearhead when his site was fairly obscure. …
Mee-ow!
I disagreed with a lot of the thrust of AVfM, but I kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t happy about some of the insults he flung around and some of the targets he chose, but still I kept my peace. When he went after Jack Donovan – an interesting and intelligent guy who is, objectively speaking, a better writer than Paul – on my own site, I was pretty pissed off, but practiced discretion anyway.
Mee-ow!
Granted, it isn’t hard to be a better writer than Elam, but that’s not something he hears very often from anyone on his side of the barricades.
Some guys started to call bullshit a while ago. Rob Fedders, never one to shy away from speaking his mind, ripped into Paul on a few occasions. Bernard Chapin chimed in with some critique starting last year.
For more on Elam’s contretemps with Chapin, see here.
Despite seeing some potential problems developing, and fully realizing that Paul intended to be the pre-eminent leader in the MRM (I was actually a bit relieved by this — I’ve never been comfortable with the “MRA” label), I figured we could all just “go our own way,” but Paul’s reaction to the predictable beating he’s taken at the hands of ABC has left me skeptical.
Uh oh! Is Price going to directly challenge the Man Who Would Be Men’s Human Rights King?
If he can’t even understand that he’s not going to be handled with kid gloves by the mainstream media, and then attempts to throw the blame for that on the manosphere that he clearly benefited from and, more importantly, deliberately used to his advantage, the guy’s got limited utility.
I don’t often agree with W.F. Price about anything, but he’s making a lot of sense here. By which I mean: MEEE-OW!
So, Paul, if you end up looking like a chump on 20-20, don’t think you can make it all better by blaming the rest of us. That’s known as “shitty leadership.” I’d also throw in the terms “ingratitude” and “poor judgment.”
For God’s sake, you thought you’d mosey on into New York and be treated as an “equal” by these people?
Have you learned nothing?
This is the stupidity of the “MHRM” in a nutshell.
The gauntlet has been thrown down. By which I mean:
I actually (sometimes) enjoy asking them directly which of their “rights” the evil feminists have stolen from them.
And never, never getting a straight answer!
The right to special privileges bitches are now entitled to. HOW RUDE!
Okay, my point has already been made. You people are not for equality or fairness.
Only biological parents should be subjected to child support.
Based on your logic about the small percentage of people who file false rape charges, people like James Holmes should not be prosecuted, due to the fact mass shootings of random people rarely happen. Oh, the war on terror is also out of line, because a 9/11 style attack only happened once.
Yep, this site is just as retarded as the sick freaks on sites that encourage men to rape women.
Oh, how is asking for people who file false rape charges to be prosecuted make me “pro rape”?
20/20 probably postponed the manosphere segment, because to producers came to their sense and released how ridiculous both sides of the argument are. They did not want to lose ratings, and have the show shutdown for airing some crap that even a teenage troll eating feces while in a chat room would cringe at.
So basically this site believes that is justified for women to get light sentences for molesting young boys, biological parents should not be required to pay child support if another man is around to take care of the child, and people should be allowed to file false rape claims, just because less than 6% of the claims are false.
LMFAO!!
Dan, should we even bother to respond to you, or would you like to continue responding to things no one has said? I don’t think you even need us in order to have whatever conversation you’re having.
OK, with the declaration that one segment that yielded poor ratings would cause 20/20 to have to shut down Dan has finally said something entertaining.
Things Dan may be putting in mouths:
• false rape accusations shouldn’t be illegal
• light sentences for women who abuse boys
• biological parents should be exempt from child support if the mother has a boyfriend
Now, I know I didn’t express any of these sentiments. However, I’ll leave a Sharpie so everyone can check off which points they made. We’ll know those leftover were pulled out of Danny’s rectum.
Dan,dan,dan. Why are you so insistent on declaring yourself ‘winner’ of a debate while nothing happens. You aren’t convincing anyone, or changing anyone’s minds. you’re just boring.
::bzzzz:: Wrong, wanna try again. (Ps: citation?)
“Oh, the war on terror is also out of line, because a 9/11 style attack only happened once.”
I have to run, but I promise a very long reply to that when I get back. And I’m emailing it to Sir Pecunium.
The “war on terror” actually is bullshit, though.
“Oh, the war on terror is also out of line, because a 9/11 style attack only happened once.”
I said I’d get back to that, and here I am!
So then, yep, it’s bullshit. But not for that reason. First, you can’t fight a war on a neuter noun, something I never thought I’d still be saying a decade after it was spawned while I was taking Latin. Second, we had the chance to have bin Laden turned over for trial at The Hague, the entire war could’ve been prevented. Third, we’ve invaded the entire region and just made a bigger mess of things. Fourth, we’ve committed war crimes in the process, and only made ourselves look worse. Four b — torture is always wrong, always. Fifth, Sadam never had WMDs, and we pretty much knew it.
And the biggie, you do not go after an entire region because of a handful of bad apples. And you certainly don’t commit torture to the point I can compare us to Pol Pot and we look worse (supposedly sexual abuse in his prisons got you a cell, we’ve swept it under the rug for as long as that was possible and then ignored how it was more or less sanctioned)
I’m going to assume pecunium is at work, because I’ll let him explain the rest, him having been there and all.
Dan, I know you’re in moderation, but if you’re going to say “so basically” and then make stuff up, it has to be stuff vaguely related to what we were talking about, thus giving the illusion that we might have said that in there somewhere. If we were talking about child abuse, then you could say “so basically you want women to be able to abuse boys” and maybe you’d give someone the impression that someone said something like that in there somewhere. But when we’re talking about MRA infighting, 20/20, and whether Hitler was a pickup artist, then it’s way too obvious that you just made something up without even looking at the rest of the thread.
Oh, he’s in mod? What thread did I miss while out?
RE: Argenti
Oh, claiming all Manboobzers are mentally ill and THAT’S TERRIBLE, lolz.
Yeah I found it, thanks though. Man, he was quite a piece of work last night, I was expecting him to go full meltdown when no one bit his attempts to shame us by calling us crazy.
Yeah, it reminds me of Pervocracy saying you can’t state a fact in a nasty voice and expect it to automatically make you feel bad. Cliff was talking about being called fat, instead of crazy, but still. Same basic principle.
Danny Boy: Oh, how is asking for people who file false rape charges to be prosecuted make me “pro rape”?
Because you don’t insist on the same level of proof to file any other police report. Ergo the effect of your ideal policy is to discourage rape reports, which is to, ispo facto encourage rape.
“Oh, the war on terror is also out of line, because a 9/11 style attack only happened once.”
First factually, logically, and rhetorically correct thing I’ve seen you say.
Pity you misunderstood what you were doing.
Random cute — TEN FRY!!
I have at least ten wee wittle fishies! And they go wiggle over here and wiggle over there and try swimming into the bubbler stream and are getting colors and AWW BABY FISHIES!!
I’m very excited, it’s been over a year since my last batch because my one fertile male died and I finally have another one! (Acquiring males is a bit harder than females because mature males look no different than immature males or females, only the females obtain a distinct mature appearance)
Yay fishies!
@argenti aertheri
D’awww. Congrats on your fishies 😀