A Voice for Men calls Tory Shepherd a liar for saying it calls women “whores.” Then it calls her a “whore.”

A couple of days ago, Men’s Rights rageoholic Paul Elam angrily denounced journalist Tory Shepherd as a liar for saying that his A Voice for Men website “regularly calls women ‘bitches and whores,’ which it does not.”

Now, anyone who has actually read his website for any length of time knows this is patently false. As if to underscore just how baldly Elam was lying in his post three days ago, the site today ran a post attacking her with this headline:

Apparently, the new line at AVFM is that they don’t call ALL women bitches and whores, at least not on a regular basis, so that’s practically the same as calling no women bitches and whores. Shepherd, in a column yesterday, quoted this rather tortuous, but revealing, explanation from AVFM “managing editor” Dean Esmay:

We do not regularly call women as a class whores or c**ts… we will on occasion call a woman, like Tory Shepherd or a man like (University of Wollongong lecturer) Michael Flood a whore, a c**t, or a bitch… yes, we use heated rhetoric.

Ah, well, then that’s perfectly fine!

I do have to applaud AVFM for its brilliantly counterintuitive PR strategy here. Just a few days after learning that the proposed Male Studies initiative at the University of South Australia may be dead in the water — except for a couple of courses about men’s health — in part because two of the proposed lecturers have connections with the misogynist extremists at AVFM, AVFM is doing everything in its power to live up to its reputation as a haven for misogynist extremists.

All this said, I remain a bit confused about exactly what has happened with the Male Studies initiative at UniSA.

The school, for its part, says that only two courses on men’s health were ever approved. According to the school, the other proposed courses were rejected in 2012.

But the point man at UniSA for the Male Studies initiative, an associate professor at the school’s Centre for Rural Health and Community Development named Gary Misan, seems to have been laboring under the impression that the school was going to go forward with more than one course, describing himself on his official web page as “program co-ordinator for a new suite of courses in Male Studies at UniSA, the first of which will be offered in 2014.”

Roy Den Hollander, one of the controversial lecturers with ties to AVFM (he’s written for them), was also under the impression that his course was going forward, and has apparently been preparing for it. According to Shepherd, who spoke to him after the controversy broke,

US “anti-feminist” lawyer Roy Den Hollander said yesterday that he was preparing a course that looked at how the law favours females when it comes to employment, crime, domestic relations, property, divorce and illegitimate children.

“The course is really looking back at 200 or 300 years of history and how the law treated guys and girls – and it treated girls more favourably than guys and it still does, maybe even more so.

Mr Den Hollander also stood by his claim that men’s remaining source of power was “firearms”. Asked whether he thought that was “extreme”, he said that it was true that it was “really the only area that they control in society now”.

Miles Groth, the Wagner College psychology professor (and sometime AVFM contributor) who seems to have developed the courses, also seemed to have thought that they had been approved — and then cancelled. On his Facebook page, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, he complained that “[t]wo years of preparation and the support of the university from the start now seem to be jeopardy because of unnamed critics making erroneous accusations.”

And AVFM itself trumpeted the alleged Male Studies program in December as “[t]he Biggest Single Advance for Men and Boys in 2013,” declaring unequivocally that

the first degree program in MALE STUDIES begins in 2014. It is supported by the University of South Australia and will be available to students worldwide.

According to the male studies folks, in other words, there was a male studies program approved and ready to go, but after word got out that some of the principals were tied to AVFM, the program was unceremoniously dumped.

But according to the school, there was no male studies program to begin with, just a couple of men’s health courses.

So either all these male studies people are completely delusional, or they may have taken some vague encouragement from school officials as a promise, or the school isn’t telling the whole truth.

I suppose we’ll find out.

NOTE: Just a note on the derogatory language discussed above. There actually isn’t anything wrong with sex workers. The term “whore” is really only problematic when used as a slur.