[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:
that s/b I feel like, not I seem like.
Aw, shit, there goes my productivity for the day (nobody tell SSM, OK). Nolan and Esmay are having a slapfight in the comments.
They’re very clearly making a concerted effort to swarm that website, which makes it seem like there is a lot of them. But there aren’t. Whenever they have live events their attendance is laughably small. And in the real world, every single person I’ve talked to about the manosphere didn’t even know it existed. I’ve never met a self-professed “MRA” in real life.
They are dangerous because they are harassing and abusing real women in real life. And, they echo existent sexist beliefs that our society still needs to correct. But, they are a tiny group of people.
I attempted to wade in there, but it was pretty banal. They were about a step above shouting “Nuh-uh!” at some points.
Aaaaand the blockquote monster got me.
Hey, remember how we were talking about cave paintings and discovering the cave painters might not have been male the other day?
Well, guess what? Darned grave-diggers still can’t seem to figure out that they’re carrying preconceptions with them.
Might have to watch. Will have to wrest control of remote from husband. He doesn’t get my sick manosphere fixation. He thinks it is totally bizarre.
But I think I’m just prone to picking up weird fixations. North Korea, ruined buildings in Detroit, fringe economic theories, the attachment parenting scene of the early aughts, the various factions of white supremacy, Micheal and Debi Pearl…!
(Lord, the manosphere thing suddenly makes sense in context, if the underlying reason is still elusive. Maybe the catfights on reality tv just aren’t quite grotesque enough for me.)
Mr. HK is going out of town today, the remote is mine! That has to be some sort of misandry.
Feminists are nothing but remote-stealers.
I wish I didn’t have to work tonight and could watch this. Then again, it’ll probably save my t.v. from having various objects thrown at it.
Stealing the remote is misandry! Don’t you know that’s a phallic symbol extraordinaire? That’s why men have to channel surf so much!
sparky – This explains so much…
I once heard a standup comic’s routine about remote controls, and although he used the old, old men=hunters women=gatherers trope, he actually made it funny. “Stand back, I’m killing channels! I won’t stop until they’re all dead!”
DAMN IT. I was finally able to check if there’s live streaming (because I can’t access the page on my iDevice), and there’s no live streaming in my area. *sad face*
I will make popcorn anyways and prepare for the live thread! *nod*
I also know an MRA in real life. Big fan of Thunderf00t and TheAmazingAtheist, which I think is what lead him to the manosphere. He even posted a link to Karen Straughen yesterday, and got really pissed when I countered and debunked all the points she makes.
He now refuses to debate me on gender issues. 🙂
It is downright sad that there are USian men who think they earned the right to vote by going to war to protect the rights of white male property owners who voted to go to war.
@dan
And for these “reasons” you are
pro-rape?
Dan, short answer: You’re a dumbass. Blaming everything you think is wrong with society on feminism proves you have no fucking idea what feminism even is, and should probably not be smugly posting your non-ideas on a feminist website. Just a thought.
Longer answer: You seem to have internalized a few MRA talking points. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. Maybe you should check somewhere that they haven’t all been debunked already before throwing them around like some nuggets of wisdom? You do realize that this site regularly deals with the MRAs and their ilk and that consequently, the people here may have heard all those shitty arguments before, right?
I don’t have the patience (or the coffee) to go over everything that’s wrong with your post, so I’ll just deal with a specific bit that just so happens to annoy me right now:
The question is all kinds of wrong, and betrays a lot about your confirmation bias and backwards logic. For instance, feminists don’t actually “fight against those who want to end fairness and equality”, because there first has to be fairness and equality to begin with for someone to be able to want to end it. I know the fantasy about us living in an enlightened, fully equal world only occasionally threatened by eeeeebil individuals is really warm and cosy. It is, however, not true.
Ugh. Sorry for the confusing post. I really should get some sleep.
“I don’t have the patience (or the coffee) to go over everything that’s wrong with your post”
I do. And I’m not tired. Or proud. (But if this takes longer than that song I might be bored)
Incel site I presume? In any case, thank you for your opinion, you may go now. (And thank you pecunium for that phrase)
1) file that under “feminism does not disagree”
2) part of why men having sex with girls is seen as worse? Men, particularly teenage boys, are seen as “always up for sex”, whereas women never actually want sex — you need to change that cultural attitude, which *gasp* is a feminist view!
3) you read much MRM? Cuz they don’t word it like that, they word it as those women having a “pussy pass”, blame feminism, and completely ignore that feminists are not actually play with adult women raping boys.
In short, same prison time for the same crime, regardless of genders? Hey that’s feminist! Blaming “the pussy pass” and saying feminists want women to get away with raping boys? Wtf the MRM tends to actually say.
This one is going in chunks.
First, only proven biological parents should pay child support // “best interest of the child” is crap —
Any legal guardian should have that obligation, since a step-parent may well be both providing for the child, and intending to do so despite not being biologically related. Or adoptive parents — not biologically related but still legally obligated to provide for the child and took that burden willingly. Neither sort of parent should be able to just dump the kid because they’re getting divorced, they knew what they were getting into, and kids need to be fed and clothed, etc. Even kids being raised by a non-biological parent.
But if you mean the MRM argument for paternity tests for everyone, it’s a load of crap and a waste of money. You want one, you ask for one, not a hard concept.
Second, paternity fraud —
Fraud is a crime, with a legal definition, one that requires you to knowingly deceive. So if she doesn’t know that the named father isn’t the actual father — the scenario the MRM puts forth, where a slut has sex with multiple men and names the richest as the father — then it isn’t fraud. Full stop. She has to know the named father is not the father for it to be fraud.
Now, if she does know as much, and attempts to collect child support when he doesn’t know he isn’t the father, then yes, that’s a crime and should be treated as such.
Oh fucking boy, this again? FBI puts “unproven” reports at around 6%. Unproven is determined by the local cops, and does not mean false. It includes things like not meeting the legal definition of rape (in that location, might meet the definition in the next state over). Most of reports never result in an arrest in the first place, and for ones where it’ sun founded because what she’s reporting isn’t technically illegal, or there isn’t enough evidence, or the like, it isn’t a false report and thus isn’t a crime.
So lying about rape? Less than 6% of reports. Filing a false report is prosecuted, and, in at least one case I can think of, turned out that her bizarre story was the truth (serial rapist, when caught he had pictures of her and plenty of other victims with very similar stories). So caution is the better bet when it comes to questionable reports. Anyways, prosecuting costs more than simply closing the file, so if no arrest is made and no one is hurt by the false report, why waste the money? Can’t say it’d deter people from filing false reports when the rate is so low in the first place, but with cases of prosecuting legitimate reports as false, might discourage actual victims from filing a report.
Oh, and again, it has to be knowingly false. An accidental misidentification certainly isn’t a false report, nor would be a mentally ill women reporting a hallucination as reality, nor any other case where she wrong but believes herself correct.
So much bullshit, so few words! In short, because the MRM, in practice, does not espouse either fairness or equality. Unless equal suffering counts.
A longer answer — because AVfM listed Ball’s manifesto as activism; because Elam explicitly said that if he were on a jury for a rape case he would never call for a conviction, even if he thought the accused had committed rape; because they claim things like spermjacking and hypergamy are common, and even biologically wired; because they, all too frequently, support domestic violence; because they insult feminist men as being “manginas” (pecunium, autocorrect tried to make that “mango as”…mmm, mangos!); because they say that women are begging to be raped, that they deserve it if they do X, or Y, or Z, or not-X, or not-Y, or not-Z; because they insult women for being X, or not being X — no makeup, doesn’t care about her appearance, makeup, slut who doesn’t put out (also, because they make no sene, how can a slut not put out? Oh, right, because they’re really just whining that she isn’t fucking them); because about a million other reasons that all add up to mean that they do not want equality.
Also, a personal peeve, because they twist statistics, use shitty sources, and seem to eschew proper research design. I have a thing against bad math.
Dude, did you even read the SPLC’s report? If you’re more upset about the SPLC than you are about some of the vile people they covered, you’ve just answered your own question.
Brief convo with my mother about It reminded me of another gem.
The holocaust is the fault of the woman Hitler never spoke to because something something if she’d fucked him he wouldn’t have started WWII. Or something. But it’s her fault. He never spoke to her, but it’s her fault. He was a nice guy until she scorned him. Not that he ever spoke to her.
Yeah, they managed to find a way to blame the holocaust on women and their sexual choices. Or utter lack thereof as he never spoke to her.
But, but, but, PUA Hitler! We saw the artwork!
Oh that’s what it was! Game would’ve prevented WWII. That at least “explains” how it could be her fault when he never said a word to her.
But yes, that PUA hitler drawing was awesome.
It was indeed. 🙂