Paul Elam, the maximum leader of hate site A Voice for Men, has responded to the first wave of media coverage of his phony White Ribbon site with a truculent little rant.
Salon.com, Thinkprogress.org and the ever intellectually flatulent David Futrelle have rage-written on this issue barely 24 hours after we launched the site.
How does he know about the flatulence? In my defense, I’m still recovering from Dollar Taco Tuesday.
I was also just interviewed by Cosmopolitan Magazine, being asked such incisive questions as, “Do you think it is ever OK to hit a woman?”
I imagine that Cosmo was just trying to get a reaction from him, since it’s fairly well-known, at least among those who follow the Men’s Rights set, that Elam’s answer to the hitting women question is yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Indeed, Elam can barely restrain himself on the subject, having penned a short story, an allegedly “satirical” post and a serious, non-satirical post all laying out his case for punching women, and not only in self-defense.
Elam pauses his rant for a moment to make the whimsical assertion that his phony WhiteRibbon.org site is an “attempt to insert empiricism and genuine expertise into the discussion of violence in the home” before setting forth what he calls “a few facts” that he thinks will answer all questions.
One, White Ribbon Campaign is not trademarked by anyone. Deal with it.
Sorry, Paul. I don’t think this is the get out of jail card you think it is. The real White Ribbon campaign could assert common law trademark rights. It’s been around since 1991.
His other facts are kind of boring, so let’s just move on to the heart of the tantrum:
I have a message for Salon, ThinkProgress, Futrelle and anyone else bashing us for presenting valid research on a very real social problem. It is a message I will not use to sully the pages of WhiteRibbon.org.
This message is this: Go right straight to Hell you gang of bigoted, lying scumbags. That is, if Hell will even have you pieces of shit. …
That’s it. Write motherfuckers. Whine. Complain. Cry in your fucking Cheerios. The only thing you will ever accomplish is helping us spread the truth.
U mad bro?
I think he’s mad.
Oh, and one last thing. Send your lawyers. We will be happy to ride them for a while just for the fun of watching you pay the fucking bill.
Uh, who exactly are you talking to here? I’m pretty sure that neither I nor Salon nor ThinkProgress will be sending any lawyers. Someone else might, though. I guess we’ll have to see how that works out.
P.S. And while we’re talking about the spiteful immaturity of AVFMers, here’s an AVFM post from the YouTuber blabber “Mad Shangi” in which he actually boasts about acting like an obtuse diskhead in an, er, “debate” with me on Twitter.
More proof that it’s pointless to actually try to discuss anything with people who are either terminally thickheaded, or posting in bad faith, or, as seems to be the case with Mr. Shangi, a bit of both.
“The treacherous are ever distrustful.” – Gandalf
I said it on the other thread as well, but the “It’s not my fault, they didn’t protect themselves” attitude is worryingly similar to their attitude to women.
When I eat Mexican I make sure the food is of the highest quality. It has to be to justify the potential suffering one causes after having done so.
A gentlemanfriend of mine though had the AUDACITY to dine at Taco Bell, which doesn’t even taste that great and causes up to a week of suffering for those around the consumer.
@Jenny:
I’m sure you could come up with some bizarre hypothetical (like a small woman highly trained in ninjitsu or something that somehow really wants to attack one specific individual). In any case, Elam’s the type of person that actually spends time trying to think these scenarios and share them publicly. It’s like the people who keep going on about all the guns they have in their apocalypse bunker, or the people who practically salivate while talking about some upcoming race war.
OT:
From a bit cut out of the rant:
Truly, this is a man interested in joining hands with a global charity.
The thing about the whole trademark issue is it doesn’t actually especially matter. It’d be used in assessing damages, and maybe to add an extra charge, but fraud by impersonation is in fact a crime separate from any intellectual property laws
@falconer,
Elam himself is so beyond comprehensibility, we could probably win the Turner prize with him.
I was going to comment about how Elam & Co.’s attempts at basically defrauding a charitable organization lead me to check out whiteribbon.ca, and that it seems like they’re a good bunch, but now all I can think about is tacos. I’m easy to sidetrack that way.
I fucking love tacos.
However, “taco” is one of my least favourite euphemisms for the vulva.
@Jenny – I’ve seen that sort of smug “logic”(TM) put forth by all kinds of unpleasant dudebro’s on the internet. “Equal right and equal lefts” and such garbage. *Even if* you were to take out the size and strength differential, I want to get the message through all of their heads: “This. is. not. how self defense works.”
They are — probably not incapable, but certainly unwilling — to entertain the idea that just because someone hits you, you don’t automatically get to hit them back. You are allowed to do what it takes to *stop* an attacker from harming you. But you do not earn the right to give them retribution in kind.
“She started it” doesn’t justify a thing. “I would do the same thing to a guy” doesn’t justify a thing. “I was really angry” most CERTAINLY doesn’t justify a thing.
I’m pretty sure that anyone who donates to his page, thinking it’s the real White Ribbon Campaign, could sue for fraud. Otherwise what’s to stop me from pretending to be the Tea Party and get all of those donations? (Actually, I wouldn’t try even if that was legal because I’m not a scumbag.) But hopefully, the story broke soon enough that no one will be fooled by him.
He’s saying that to a fucking charity. He’s happy to bleed funds from a charity that serves abuse victims.
How does someone like that live with himself?
I look forward to him getting his comeuppance in a court of law.
I said it before and I’ll say it again. Since when was AVFM such a profitable organization that he could just throw money at lawyers to watch his opponents spend theirs? With all the money-begging he’s done I can’t say I got the sense that he was rolling in the stuff.
First time commenting here but have been lurking for days. Many thanks, folks.
DV survivor and mother of sons here, this MRA stuff is all very new, got here researching gamergate. I was looking at the comment thread at Salon; lots of “the site states it’s AVFM therefore there is no deception, blah blah” by one MRA who has used every deflection strategy in the book in the face of the obvious logic of the situation.
i want to specifically say thanks to David. The links here have provided me with a great way to look at gamergate. My gamer son died over two years ago at 28 but he would have been so freaked out by this stuff. I am on his computer right now, have seen his history and know he was a “good guy” I think a lot about the parents of the kids being affected by social media interactions in general, abuse specifically, both boys and girls. I found a thread on “the sad parents of gamergate” who are trying to have conversations with their adolescent kids about what they are seeing and responding to online around this issue; it is really concerning.
Finally, I’ve looked at many of the tags here and read back through many pages. My very favorite is the 12 steps and the best line is “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”
You know these men have mothers, sisters, daughters, grandmothers – I wonder how they justify their behavior in that context.
As Buffy said, that only works in 6 year old’s court.
I assume this is what Paul Elam says every morning to the avfm staff when he’s going through the days agenda.
Hell yes.
@kirbywarp, @Kootiepatra,
Yeah, I agree with you completely. I’m just saying that even if you gave him the benefit of the doubt, most would have a hard time believing he genuinely felt threatened enough to actually hit her, let alone harder than he ‘needed to’, when he could easily prevent her hitting him without hitting back.
I’ve got to be honest, as someone about as heavy and a couple of inches taller than the hypothetical woman in question, I can’t imagine a situation where I’d be willing to initiate physical violence on someone so much taller and heavier than me even if he did make me mad (or feel threatened) enough to want to, and I suspect a lot of women my size would feel the same reluctance. And since I’m disabled and have osteoporosis, the idea of being hit by someone that size (especially someone also who’s pretty clearly salivating for an excuse to hit a woman) is pretty scary. Someone like that could literally do me serious damage even if he didn’t actively intend to.
I guess he forgot to mention the real white ribbon campaign in his list of writers.
Damn, tiko72, I would totally watch that gritty new Journamalism drama!
Well, to be fair, he did say you were “intellectually flatulent”. I imagine this means that, after appropriate fueling, your rear is capable of a nuanced discourse upon the use of rhythm patterns in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, with appropriate examples given.
Of course, I expect even ordinary flatulence sounds pretty intellectual to Elam.
sorry I was wrong, it was Think Progress.
Tacos are great. If anyone lives in the Twin Cities or is visiting, you have to go to Boca Chica’s Taco House on Wabasha & Caesar Chavez. It’s the best. It doesn’t cost much more than Taco Bell but it’s a million times better. The green chile quesadilla is a thing of beauty I’ve never seen anywhere else. The salsa has the perfect amount of spiciness and contains cilantro. They also put lots of cilantro on their chicken soft tacos.
Sorry. No one cares. I’m obsessed with that place and hungry right now.
I did not know that. And now I do. And now I cannot unknow it.
@kirbywarp @jenny
If Cosmopolitan genuinely did ask Elam the question “Do you think it is ever OK to hit a woman?” (if) then it’s not a well-phrased question, but not for the reasons he thinks. Ok’s ambiguous: it’s easy to come up with hypotheticals in which it’s comprehensible, and even defensible, for a person of any gender to hit another person of any gender, with self-defence being the obvious one. And as kirbywarp suggests in the bit I’ve quoted, there are sporting circumstances in which it is perfectly acceptable for a man to strike a woman, boxing being the one that springs to mind (plenty of female boxers have male sparring partners).
Far more interesting is in what circumstances Elam thinks it’s okay to hit a woman. And given that he’s already on the record on that score, more interesting still would be asking why he feels the need to consider the question at such length. There are circumstances in which I, and I imagine most people, think a person hitting another is defensible, and in none of them is the gender of either person a significant factor. I’m not sure any line of questioning would have received a productive response but if (if) Cosmopolitan did ask Elam this question, I wish they’d asked him a more challenging one instead.