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A Voice for Men vs the Table of Misandry. Also: MAN BOOBZ SLIGHTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS ART CONTEST

It's coming for you! RUN!
It’s coming for you! RUN!

Those of you who have been waiting with bated breath to hear what the “editors” of our favorite men’s rights hate site, A Voice for Men, think of the Occidental College fiasco can now unbate their breath, as AVFM head boy Paul Elam has stepped forward to explain it all to us in a post that contains quite possibly the most ridiculous two sentences ever written about higher education:

The modern academic climate in the United States can be likened to a table that rests on four legs. Those legs are rape hysteria, demonization of men, fraudulent academic feminism and the continual erosion of due process for men and other Constitutional principles.

Yep, an actual adult human being sat down and typed those sentences out, looked at them and said, yep, that looks good to me, and then posted them on his website.

In honor of these two sentences, I would like to announce the HISTORIC MAN BOOBZ SLIGHTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS 2013 TABLE OF MISANDRY ART CONTEST.

Your challenge: Draw a picture of that table, and post it in the comments below.

I will post the best pictures, and possibly also the worst, in a followup post.

Nothing else in Elam’s post quite lives up to the GIANT TABLE OF ACADEMIC MISANDRY, but there is some other bullshit worth mentioning.

Elam makes a big point of saying that

AVFM was not engaged in this particular event, nor do we officially endorse what happened. We do not denounce it, either.

The event in question, in case you haven’t been following the controversy, involved a bunch of idiot MRAs and other misogynists from the Men’s Rights subeddit and 4chan flooding Occidental College’s anonymous rape reporting website with false reports of rape in order to break the system;  the school ended up having to sort through at least 400 such reports.

After Elam lays out his “official” position of neutrality on the “event” he goes on to say that because Occidental’s rape reporting system sits atop his metaphorical TABLE OF MISANDRY

it not only should be a target, it necessarily will be because a long-due backlash against the processes that put it there is emerging from many corners of society. That backlash is 100% justified. Indeed, that backlash can perhaps be seen as proof that we may have reason to hope for society yet.

Yeah, that kind of, sort of, just a teensy bit, sounds like an endorsement of the false reports.

As did the comment from AVFM “Editor-in-Chief” John “The Other” Hembling the other day, in which he wrote of the MRAs spamming Occidental:

GOOD! Go forward, brothers, and fuck their shit up.

And apparently Hembling took his own words to heart; the teaser for his own post on the subject at AVFM — which can currently be seen at the top of this page — declares that he was one of those who had trolled Occidental with fake reports.

So AVFM doesn’t endorse the false allegations, but it sees the backlash of which it is a part as a sign that there might be hope for humanity after all.

And AVFM didn’t engage in posting false allegations — oh, except for its Editor-in-Chief, whose participation in the trolling AVFM trumpeted on its front page.

Good job, guys.

There’s a lot more bullshit in the post, but it’s the night before the night before Christmas, and I’ve had enough of MRAs for now.

Happy holidays. May yours be MRA-free!

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moldybrehd
10 years ago

Way way way OT, but I saw this and thought of all of you.

Mwahahahaha. And a happy christmas adam to you all!

melody
melody
10 years ago

I want to make art.
But I have to go to sleep now. I work in 6 hours.
And I have a double tomorrow.
So, when will I have time.

Magpie
Magpie
10 years ago

Merry Christmas manboobzers. Santa* gave us the present we had all been wanting – a cool change and gentle rain all day.

*or Huey?

kittehserf
10 years ago

Merry Christmas (what’s left of it), Magpie!

Hope Huey sends ‘er down here, too. Still going to be hot tomorrow, blech.

Magpie
Magpie
10 years ago

Hope you had a good one kittehserf. We were down your way a couple of weeks ago, but we shot through the day it was going to reach 40 degrees.

It was really nice to see the parks green and the fountains running in Melbourne, last time we came it was drought.

kittehserf
10 years ago

You’ve been to Melbourne again? Cool!

This was the quietest Christmas I’ve had in years, in every sense – not even the usual kids with noisy toys playing in the street. We had cold chicken for dinner, ‘cos heating up the house with the oven seemed like a bad idea, and my sister rang from stinkinghotQueensland and we nattered about stuff. I’ve sent her a link to the Stack the Cats game to see if she loses hours of her life playing it like I do. She hasn’t played a video game (outside of Solitare) since Pacman. 🙂

How was your Christmas?

scarlettpipstrelle
scarlettpipstrelle
10 years ago

A shadow has been cast on my Christmas by the MRAers. Just go to any article about the 3 year old killed by his dad for spite after a divorce, and check the comments section. If anyone needs any more proof that the radical MRA movement is morally in the wrong, and should be scrubbed with disinfectant, look no further. But don’t look if you have a hard time with toxic irrationality.

scarlettpipstrelle
scarlettpipstrelle
10 years ago

They are mostly trying to claim that a) his wife must’ve been some sort of evil troublemaker, and b) the courts were so nasty to the dad that he just couldn’t help himself. As if his reaction was understandable. I saw one commenter claim that the dad’s homicide was justifiable because it saved the son from suffering as a result of being raised by an evil feminist mother in an evil feminist society. He likened our society to Nazi Germany, claiming that a parent would be correct to kill their children before the Nazis could capture and torture the child.

Howard Bannister
10 years ago

Merry Christmas/celebration of choice, Manboobzers!

I’ve been scarce lately, with major projects going on. Work, home, the volunteering… all at once, great fun. Now things have eased up a little, so I’m going to get another cat.

Yesssss… moar cats.

scarlettpipstrelle
scarlettpipstrelle
10 years ago

We had some of this in a local case too. The father lost joint custody after hiding the toddler son from his mom for 9 months. Then he burst into her house, tazed her, took his son, and with the help of his misogynistic dad, headed for Canada. When the story broke, the MRAers were out in force, claiming that she must’ve provoked it, was no angel, and that this was an example of unfair divorce laws hurting dads and sons. But in my state, you start out with joint legal custody and free visitation by default – you have to be a problem or cause trouble to lose it. According to the MRAs, dads can never be jerks, it’s always the mom’s fault, whatever the dad does – she caused it.

serrana
serrana
10 years ago

Hey Howard, good to see you! I’m glad it was only business (busyness?) keeping you away.

scarlettpipstrelle
scarlettpipstrelle
10 years ago

The MRA twisted thinking in these cases is so depressing.

emilygoddess
emilygoddess
10 years ago

If a man doesn’t want to be a father, he should have the right to force mom to abort, or at least to a “paper abortion”. If he does want to be a father, he should get to be so regardless of his behavior or parenting ability, and mom should just fuck off and leave them alone. Notice how the kid’s needs are never mentioned?

Anyone else want brain bleach? Here’s a TV commercial that ran in central Maine for almost 20 years. When I was a kid, it was as much as Christmas tradition as those Frosty and Rudolph movies.

gillyrosebee
gillyrosebee
10 years ago

Thanks, emilygoddess, I really needed that. I’m out of things to keep me busy and the news has been a constant onslaught of awful lately.

scarlettpipstrelle
scarlettpipstrelle
10 years ago

Thanks, I needed that.

CassandraSays
10 years ago

Women have to earn decent treatment by being angelic and perfect, whereas men deserve it automatically. Also ugh on that story about the guy who killed his son, not reading that on Xmas Day.

Kittens frolicking under a tree is much more seasonally appropriate.

gillyrosebee
gillyrosebee
10 years ago

I really want to know where (and most importantly when) people are being told that all women are perfect angels. I know there was the whole ‘angel in the house’ separate spheres idea in the late 19th century (explicitly a backlash to more women wanting to move out of the house and into higher education and the workplace) which got a boost again in the 1950s (again as an explicit counter movement to try to shove women back into the house after they’d spent the war as a vital part of the workforce) but other than that I must have missed it.

I took an anthropology course once where the professor (an emeritus the university was having a hard time getting out the door) seemed to take great pleasure in relating (to a class composed almost entirely of women) the results of his career’s work proving that women were just as likely to participate in acts of genocide and ethnic conflict as men. I remember being flabbergasted that he expected it to be news that women were, wait for it (and seriously, you are not going to believe this!!)… people!

CassandraSays
10 years ago

There seem to be a lot of men tilting at that particular windmill.

Yeva
10 years ago

Their table doesn’t have a leg to stand on! *badumtchsh*

emilygoddess
emilygoddess
10 years ago

I’ve seen some mutterings about how “the world would be more peaceful if women ran it”, etc, but I feel like it was more of a second wave thing, and I don’t think it was very common among feminists even then. I mean, it’s pretty gender essentialist and ciscentric. But somehow it got out into the mainstream, and people latched onto it because it “proves” that feminists are either female supremacists or just unrealistic (as if women could ever be better than men). If someone like Gilly’s professor can prove that women are just as bad as men, then we’ll have to accept that the status quo is just fine, or something. Or maybe he just liked proving that women are terrible, and would make an excellent MRA.

CassandraSays
10 years ago

Yep, that’s classic First Wave. Even the people making that argument didn’t necessarily believe it, it was a political strategy designed to play on the prejudices of the time.

kittehserf
10 years ago

Hi Howard, good to see you!

MOAR KITTIES, yay!

Robert Ramirez
10 years ago

I pretty much arrived at my pro-feminism from the second wave. By reading Robin Morgan and Andrea Dworkwin I kinda discovered that I was very much pro-feminist. As to the this myth that the world would be more peaceful if women ran it, it kinda goes against that anarchist strain of the Second Wave. The world would be more peaceful if we all cooperated together, without trying to dominate. Domination was a theme that the Second Wave tried to address and it is domination that is still an issue.

And Happy Holidays everyone.

cloudiah
10 years ago

Hope everyone had a nice day, and/or a nice holiday if it’s something they celebrate. I’m waiting for my sister to deliver my holiday dinner of an egg salad sandwich on rye, since we’re still hanging out at the hospital and delis are one of the few things open. But tomorrow we’re getting a full xmas feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy and stuffing delivered to us at the hospital so yay. We even decorated my mom’s room (but they made us take down the lights, buggrit)!