Paul Elam of A Voice for Men: In His Own Words

Paul Elam, the founder and primary animating force behind the website A Voice for Men, is probably, for better or worse, the most influential figure in the Men’s Rights movement (or, as he prefers to call it, the Men’s Human Rights Movement).

Elam is also a fierce misogynist with a penchant for angry, violent rhetoric full of only-slightly veiled threats. But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps the best way to get to know Mr. Elam is through his own words.

So here are some of Elam’s thoughts on a variety of issues, taken from postings on his own website.  I have linked each quote back to its source on A Voice for Men.

Paul Elam on Domestic Violence

In the name of equality and fairness, I am proclaiming October to be Bash a Violent Bitch Month.

I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women – to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.

And then make them clean up the mess. …

Now, am I serious about this?

No. Not because it’s wrong. It’s not wrong. Every one should have the right to defend themselves. …

But it isn’t worth the time behind bars or the abuse of anger management training that men must endure if they are uppity enough to defend themselves from female attackers.

Here, courtesy of the Wayback Machine, is the post as it originally appeared on A Voice for Men in 2010, where it was illustrated with a picture of a woman with a black eye, captioned “Maybe she DID have it coming.”

Elam now says this was “satire,” though its hard to see how it is “satire” when he clearly says that he doesn’t think his allegedly “satirical” solution is wrong. When Swift wrote his Modest Proposal he didn’t think that eating babies was actually a good thing; if so, it would not have been a satire.

Paul Elam on Rape

I have ideas about women who spend evenings in bars hustling men for drinks, playing on their sexual desires … And the women who drink and make out, doing everything short of sex with men all evening, and then go to his apartment at 2:00 a.m.. Sometimes both of these women end up being the “victims” of rape.

But are these women asking to get raped?

In the most severe and emphatic terms possible the answer is NO, THEY ARE NOT ASKING TO GET RAPED.

They are freaking begging for it.

Damn near demanding it.

And all the outraged PC demands to get huffy and point out how nothing justifies or excuses rape won’t change the fact that there are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk though life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.

Elam, apparently trying to project a more respectable image, has replaced the original A Voice for Men post containing these passages with a disingenuous disclaimer. But the Internet never forgets. An archived copy of the original post can be found through the Wayback Machine here. The quote is not any better in context.

Paul Elam on Why He Would Vote to Acquit All Rapists

Elam feels that courts are “patently untrustworthy when it comes to the offense of rape” and so, he explained in one post:

Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.

Original post here.

Paul Elam Explains How the Thought of Harming His Critics Sexually Arouses Him

No, I’m not making this up. Here are the strange, threatening remarks he addressed to an opponent of his Register-Her website (on which, more below).

Do you think I am going to stop?

It’s a serious question, because the answer to that question … should inform you of what will work for you or not work for you in dealing with me.

And the answer is, of course, no, I am not going to stop. You see, I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.

Original post here.

Paul Elam on the Necessity of “Inflicting Pain” on Opponents

Progress for men will not be gained by debate, reason or typical channels of grievance available to segments of the population that the world actually gives a damn about. The progress we need will only be realized by inflicting enough pain on the agents of hate, in public view, that it literally shocks society out of its current coma.

You can see this quote in context here.

Paul Elam, the World’s Strangest “Pacifist”

From a post on family courts:

I am a pacifist. I do not advocate violence. But I tell you this. The day I see one of these absolutely incredulous excuses for a judge dragged out of his courtroom into the street, beaten mercilessly, doused with gasoline and set afire by a father who just won’t take another moment of injustice, I will be the first to put on the pages of this website that what happened was a minor tragedy that pales by far in comparison to the systematic brutality and thuggery inflicted daily on American fathers by those courts and their police henchmen.

It would not even so much be a tragedy as the chickens coming home to roost.

You can see the comment in context here.

Paul Elam on Mothers’ Day

To all you mothers of the world, please give your Mother’s Day flowers and give them all generously. Most importantly, give them where they will do the most good. Place a bunch of daffodils at a dumpster near you, perhaps one in which one of you, or one of your kind, has tossed an unwanted baby, leaving it there to slowly die alone in a pile of trash.

Perhaps you could lay a single rose at the base of a bridge that has been used by a mother to throw her baby into an icy river. Perhaps you can lay it there with hands that have beaten or shaken a baby to death. …

Inspired? Good. Now perhaps some of you could place large, colorful arrangements at the abortion centers where women go to have children cut out and laid to rest in those colorful and attractive biohazard containers that are all the rage in the clinics.

He continues on in this vein for some time before getting to this:

This is not a request for some mothers, or a percentage of them, but all of you. In fact, you don’t even have to be a mother. If you have a vagina, the blood of all those children, who are abused far more at the hands of women than men, has stained your skin and caked around the cuticles of your fingers.

And he continues on for several more paragraphs of abuse, until this:

In Daffodils for Dumpsters the gash gets you in, and you don’t really have a choice.

After several more paragraphs of this he makes clear that this time he’s not even claiming he’s writing satire:

Now, do I really mean all this? Yes.

You can read the whole remarkable thing here. He also wrote a similarly unhinged post about Valentines Day, which I wrote about here.

Now, Elam not only says many terrible things; he also does terrible things. Here are a few posts detailing some of these things.

Here’s a post about his website Register-Her, a fake “offenders registry” where feminist writers and activists are vilified alongside female murderers and child abusers, and threatened with the exposure of their personal information, in an attempt to silence them.

Here’s a post about A Voice for Men’s glorification of Thomas Ball, a disturbed man and self-admitted child abuser who set himself on fire on the steps of a courthouse in hopes that his death would inspire Men’s Rights activists to launch a campaign of firebombing attacks against courthouses and police stations.

Despite Elam’s claims of non-violence, A Voice for Men published Ball’s long terrorist manifesto — including his calls for firebombing — on its website, in its “activism” section. It was only after the Boston Marathon bombings that AVFM finally took the manifesto down.

Here’s a post about the time Paul Elam (along with a ragtag team of online misogynists and white supremacists) viciously attacked a young woman as an anti-male, anti-white bigot, resulting in threats directed at her and at her alma mater, Georgetown University. As it turned out, all the attacks on her, from Elam and other, were based on bogus information — as Elam would have known if he had taken ten minutes to fact check his sources.

These quotes, and these articles, are really only the tip of the iceberg. I invite anyone interested in finding out more about what Paul Elam believes to look through my archives at some of my other posts about him, and about A Voice for Men more generally.