A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam duped by obviously fake article on satirical website

How gullible is Paul Elam, grand pooh-bah of A Voice for Men? Well, he just wrote an frothingly angry denunciation of a Canadian business school dean based on an obviously phony story on a satirical website called The Syrup Trap. A website that declares at the top of the page that it is “Canada’s favourite humour magazine.” A website whose logo is a cartoon beaver with a plastic cup on its head.

The backstory: Several months back, you may recall, several Canadian schools got into hot water when it got out that students in charge of organzing freshman orientation events were welcoming in new students with horrific chants full of rape jokes. One of these schools was the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.

Appalled by this, the dean of the business school, Robert Helsey, pledged $250,000 towards sexual assault counseling and education. But there was a catch: $200,000 of that sum would have to be approved via student referendum.

Last week, students overwhelmingly voted down the referendum.

Let’s let the writer of the satirical story, a journalist and humor writer named Jonny Wakefield, explain what happened next:

Dean Helsley made a public statement on the vote, which despite all the manager-academic speak, contained something resembling barely concealed rage.

Wouldn’t it be funny to see what he’s actually thinking?

So I wrote up a FAKE letter from Mr. Helsley to the student body, in which he lays down the law. We posted it to the humour blog the Syrup Trap, which, to be fair, has confused people in the past. Like when a post had people convinced J.K. Rowling was buying a campus library and turning it into the Chamber of Secrets.

In the FAKE letter to students, the FAKE Helsley FAKELY announced he was FAKELY firing the entire student body:

When your boss tells you to do something, it is in the company’s best interest that you do that thing to the best of your ability. Because it is in the company’s best interest that this thing be done, it is in your best interest as well.

Sometimes, the things I tell you to do may sound like suggestions. Sometimes I might say, “It would be great if you could complete x task within a given time period.”

But funding this counselling position to make up for joking about rape, while there is a sexual predator at large on campus?

That wasn’t a suggestion. …

Going back to Sauder as business analogy: you are all fired. All of you.

Enjoy the rest of your week. You have two days to clear out your belongings.

Oh, aside from the thing at the top of the page saying the site was a humor site, and the cartoon beaver, another little tipoff that this article was HUMOR and not REALITY is the fact that deans cannot actually fire the entire student body.

But none of these little tipoffs were enough to tip off Mr. Elam, who launched into a full-scale assault on the dean in a posting called “Dean Robert Helsley, asshole.” AVFM has since taken the post down, but happily for us students of MRA delusion and gullibility it has been captured forever by the Internet Wayback Machine.  (Make sure you go the the November 5th capture of the page; the Nov. 6th capture of the page will get you a blank page, as they had deleted it by then.) Note: The Wayback machine is having some technical difficulties, so if you can’t get through here’s the Google Cache.)

Here’s Elam, laying down the smackdown for Helsley’s imaginary crimes. Sorry, for Helsly’s imaginary crimes: in keeping with AVFM’s tradition of not ever checking anything before publishing it, Elam even spells the guy’s name wrong in his tirade over the fake article in a satirical publication.

Dean Helsly wanted to blow a quarter of a million dollars of student’s money to allay his personal embarrassment over a fucking frosh chant that got too much media attention, and when they said no he resorted to bullying and public humiliation.

Doesn’t he know that no means no?

The students voiced their will through a democratic process, and Helsly reacted by letting them know that if he could he would retaliate against them for those votes; that he would, in fact, crush them.

I understand that Helsly is embarrassed. After all, in Rape Hysteria Culture a frosh week chant can go places no sane person could actually predict. But what is really interesting is that while Helsly is obviously uncomfortable seeing his name anywhere near the antics of some unruly freshman, he obviously has no concern whatsoever revealing himself publicly and proudly as indifferent to the collective will of his students, pettily resentful of the democratic process and thuggishly willing to play dictator, collective will and democracy be damned.

I’m a little confused as to what exactly Elam thinks Fake Helsley — sorry, Helsly –was going to do to “retaliate” against these students, given that deans cannot, you know, actually fire the entire student body.

Or does Elam think that in our evil Feminazi Gynocracy that’s just how things work? I guess when you devote your life to fighting imaginary enemies anything is possible.

Hint for you, Robert. Even bosses can be fired; especially the arrogant asshole type bosses who mistake their organizations as an instrument of personal vanity and who mistake tyranny for leadership skills.

Why is Elam writing about himself here?

Oh, wait — that’s supposed to be about Helsley?

Oh, and a special note to Sauder students. If you think feminism is a movement for social justice, think again. Feminism is the establishment now. It is the man. And the man just crapped all over you.

Well, not exactly. One man just crapped himself, all over his own website.

And I thought Elam was supposed to be the expert on satire.

The Syrup Trap has posted a clarification of their original story.

Thanks to pretendent on AgainstMensRights for alerting me to this lovely story.