A Voice for Men’s media blitz continues apace. On Sunday, fresh on the heels of his colleague Robert O’Hara’s often cringeworthy Al Jazeera interview, AVFM “managing editor” Dean Esmay appeared on the unfortunately named “Let it Rip,” a news show on the local Fox affiliate in Detroit, to discuss that upcoming “Men’s Issues” conference we’ve been hearing so much about.
The excitable Esmay, wearing a tie at least a foot longer than necessary and facing off against a far more polished Heather Dillaway, a feminist sociologist from Wayne State University, did not exactly dispel the notion that the Men’s Rights movement isn’t ready for its close up just yet.
Esmay robotically rattled off an assortment of the sort of phony “factoids” that go over well only in the echo chambers of the Men’s Rights movement, and responded to questions not with answers but with rapidly regurgitated talking points — at one point declaring, to the bemusement of Prof. Dillaway and the rest, that
Ideological feminism is a multi-billion dollar hate industry funded by lies about rape and domestic violence, and they are the cause of a lot of very civil-rights trashing laws like the Violence Against Women Act even though we know that domestic violence is not a gendered issue.
Yes, he did say “a lot of very civil-rights trashing laws.”
Esmay also set forth a few arguments that he seemed to have made up right there on the spot, and which probably could have used a bit more workshopping. When the female half of Fox News’ tag team of hosts asked him “do you think you’re at a disadvantage because you’re a man,” he replied
I think many men are at a disadvantage specifically for a man. I’m certainly a working-class man. You see me sitting here with a missing tooth cause I can’t afford to fix it. This lady [gesturing at Dillaway] probably makes four times what I do.
Never mind that whatever differences there might be between their salaries have prety much nothing to do with gender and everything to do with class, and education, and probably most of all with the fact that Esmay is working for a dude who’s evidently bogarting all the donations for himself. Never mind that women still earn less than men for the same work. (And yes, MRAs, they do.)
Apparently, as long as there’s any woman in the world who makes more money than Dean Esmay, men are oppressed.
Let’s just call this the Esmay principle.
Anyway, I’m not going to bother to transcribe anything more. The only other memorable remark from Esmay was one he slipped in at the very end, suggesting that A Voice for Men might possibly be pulling out from the Doubletree hotel. What this means for their conference, I don’t know.
Back on A Voice for Men, meanwhile, Esmay was treated as a returning hero for facing down “two raving lunatic feminists and one Purple Poodle” –that last term the AVFMers’ new synonym for the old standby “mangina.”
“Standing O for Dean Esmay,” wrote his boss at AVFM, Paul Elam, in the comments. “Perfect delivery of our message and our attitude. Well done, brother.”
Susie Parker, meanwhile, wrote:
I thought Dean was pretty great. Measured, thoughtful, implacable. Any one of us feel we could have gotten more people on the Titanic lifeboats, but Dean was the man who held his cool and actually did the heroic deed.
I just hope the “people” she imagines Dean helping into the Titanic lifeboats were men! No “women and children first” for the AVFM crowd!
The reviews for Prof. Dillaway were a little less kind.
“[S]tupid ignorant bitch,” wrote one.
“What a self-centered bitch,” another agreed.
Others in the comments, and on the AVFM Forums, described her as a “cunt,” “the jabbering feminist liar,” the “smirking feminit [sic] professor,” and “the feminastie ‘Prof,”’ among other epithets. Indeed, perhaps half a dozen commenters referred to her professorship in derogatory terms, or put the word “professor” in scare quotes.
Some of the commenters were especially galled that Dillaway reacted to some of Esmay’s most ridiculous flights of fancy by … smiling. Several saw this as proof of the depth of her feminist depravity. Mike Buchanan remarked indignantly that
Early on, while you were outlining a number of areas in which men’s and boys’ life outcomes are so poor, the ‘professor’ was smiling through them all. As always, these damnable women don’t even PRETEND to care, so deep is their misandry.
Yeah, that’s not why she was smiling, dude. At that point, I was smiling too. That’s what you do when your opponent in a debate basically soils himself onstage.
Even those who offered – almost invariably mild – critiques of Esmay’s appearance couldn’t bring themselves to say anything positive about his opponent. Wrote PlainOldTruth:
At least we can say Esmay earned his paycheck here. Mopre than you can say fort the Princess Studies professor whose every paycheck represents an act of larceny and fraud: a slap in the face of people who do real work and who, when they teach, teach the truth.
Not that anyone at AVFM would recognize the truth if it came riding in on a Purple Poodle. Indeed, Darryl Jewett managed to win himself more than a dozen upvotes from his comrades for his distinctly revisionist precis of world history:
Throughout history and in every society including all of them today, women are and always have been the most privileged demographic. Where ever and whenever you hear women whining that they are oppressed, men are oppressed far worse. And usually by the women . On average, women consume way more than men and produce far less. To replenish those resources which women consume in great excess, men are sent to fight endless wars and forced to work as slaves long past the time they should be working and can. Children are often used as excuses to force men to work under threat of imprisonment even if they can’t anymore.
The strangest reaction of all, though, came from a commenter called DEDC, who used the occasion as an opportunity to attack, er, me, and to suggest that the real problem was that MRA’s weren’t using the words “bitch” and “cunt” often enough.
No, really.
The whole reason we are a hate site is because fucktards like Futrelle, failed journalist (see Bart Sibrel) that he is, keeps seeding these attacks based on nothing other than that we refer to some women as cunts and bitches (who desperately deserve it). Nobody, not even US, say that calling a man a prick or asshole (gender specific) is misandric just on that basis. The level of projection and hyper-sensitivity and denial are mind-boggling in magnitude. Just look at that entitlement. It shocks us to use these slurs against a woman because they have never really encountered them before.
It is like I say with Islame-O fascists: the answer to their hypersensitivity to jokes or cartoons of their prophet is MORE! It shouldn’t even be a second thought at all to call a female a cunt who IS a cunt.
I’ve rarely seen any group of people so determined to learn less from their mistakes.
—
If you actually managed to sit through more than a minute or two of that TV segment, you deserve a reward. So here’s a video for the song Nunki, by the band Dva, off their album NIPOMO, which I was listening to on repeat while writing this. The animation in the video was all done by children!
Well, I just called Dean a fatty and made fun of his tie again in a comment on Reddit. But here’s the thing: he’s the managing editor of a site that fat shames all the time, and which has attacked me personally for my weight I don’t know how many times. I sort of feel that unless he actually does something about the fat-shaming on AVFM that I, as a fatty, have the right to call him a fatty any time I want? Maybe that’s not right, but he’s such a shit.
Also, it’s been like a decade since I wore a tie, and I’m pretty sure I could get the length at least in the ballpark of right. I’m pretty sure Dean has SEEN men wearing ties before.
Given that he’s also spread nasty lies about me on Twitter and in posts on AVFM, and that he works for a hate site that harasses and threatens women, I sort of feel that I have no obligation to be civil with him at all.
That said, I still wouldn’t mock the tooth thing. I know someone who had a tooth pulled b/c he couldn’t afford to have it dealt with properly. He didn’t blame it all on a random feminist professor though.
And I wouldn’t call him a fatty in a post here.
What David said.
When these douchecanoes stop doing actual body-shaming (or trying it, at least) and stop trying to micro-manage how women should look, then maybe I won’t be inclined to laugh at their failings with ties and the like, and their sheer hypocrisy. I don’t give a shit what their body shapes are, but I don’t give ’em a pass when they are not in any of the categories that make people actually unable to groom or present themselves. He’s not poor, he’s not homeless. Those are things that deprive people of choice; he isn’t deprived to that extent at all. He’s a supposed professional, appearing on television. He’s just too fucking lazy and entitled to bother. Can you imagine the response from his little dudebro buddies if a woman dressed in equivalent fashion, especially if she dared appear on television while fat?
It’s kind of like when you’re a liberal in the US during an election cycle. People are always saying that we shouldn’t sink to their level (the Tea Party or other such cretins), but sometimes being able to make fun of them is the only thing keeping me from ripping out all my hair.
We were discussing fallacies in another thread. The two wrongs make a right is a fallacy. I go back to what katz said:
I’m not actually trying to accomplish anything except mocking them on a mockery blog. I’m laughing at their hypocrisy and incompetence.
pallygirl, it is not random though. These people are actively assholish toward other people about their appearance. I would say it’s more like a taste of their own medicine. Which might not be the most productive thing in the world, but it isn’t wrong either.
I typically have no interest in mocking the physical appearance of any denizens of the Manosphere, but Deano’s tie cries out for it. Like Roosh’s infamous stringy hair chicken prep photo, the tie is riveting in it’s wrongness. It was like a foot and a half too long. He couldn’t do a worse job putting on that tie without tying it around a different body part. The longest tie in the world is too hilarious a thing for me to not really, really enjoy David’s jokes about it.
FWIW, I don’t want to make “no mocking clothing” a rule or anything, it’s just my personal preference.
David, do you have any quick evidence to disprove Esmay’s claim that people who threaten violence against women aren’t allowed on the AVfM site?
Thank you wild conspiracy theory Mountain Man, I’m glad we learned… something I’m not quite sure.
Oh, yeah, get proper fitting ties before presenting yourself and your movement on national television.
wait……. does he think only men have assholes
What’s the deal with MRA females? Why do they want to be cunt bitches? Is it because of the Bible?!
Are “C**t bitches” related to “Beezie beatches”?
But seriously, fuck off, necro troll.
@Caligula:
– No one here calls women “females” in a serious manner, regardless of their affiliation.
– No one here calls women “c*nts” or “bitches”, regardless of their affiliation.
– No one here believes it’s fair to blame Christianity for this, as some of our regular posters here manage to be Christian and not be misogynist assholes.
If you’re going to come in here and attempt to “agree” with us (trolling or not), the least you can do is learn the fucking lingo and not be a fucking misogynist yourself.
Oh, and not necro old threads.