How often has this happened to you? You’re reading a thoughtful blog post or comment from a Men’s Rights Activist and you find yourself thinking:
“Gosh! This post or comment on how women are a bunch of malevolent parasites/men are the real slaves if you think about it/women were never oppressed because they could just get maids to clean the house is so witty and wise. I only wish it were 50 times longer, and that I had to pay money to read it!”
Well, I’ve got good news for you: Now you can!
A Voice for Men, having already given the voiceless male gender a way to express itself online, has now launched A Publishing House for Men to give them a way to express themselves in book form!
Well, e-book form.
A Voice for Men’s new publishing house has just published its first book – well, e-book — a slim volume of thoughts on Men Going Their Own Way, written by Peter Wright of Gynocentrism.com with help from AVFM’s Paul Elam, using some material already published online!
Well, technically speaking, this is a relaunch. AVFM Press originally launched last October with the publication of this same book. But Elam decided to call a do-over. No, really.
On October 25th, you see, a bulletin on AVFM proclaimed that AVFM Press was publishing Go Your Own Way: Understanding MGTOW — an e-book it predicted would be but “the first of what will surely become a lengthy series of ebooks (and some hardcovers as well). … let’s get AVFM Press on the map as the iconic source for true red pill appetites.” (A source for appetites? I thought the source for appetites was an empty stomach?)
One day later, Elam announced that he was recalling the e-book.
What I have discovered … is that there were several procedural, legal, and formatting errors that should have been addressed before launching the book.
I made a whole bushel of lemons, folks, and the fault for that lies squarely on me.
But I do make some pretty good lemonade, which I am in the midst of doing as we speak.
I have pulled the book from Amazon Kindle for the time being, and I am removing purchase links from every place they now exist.
After the deficiencies with the product have been corrected, it will be re-launched at a level of quality that AVFM readers deserve, which is the very best possible. All the other issues will be corrected as well.
Please accept my apologies for the mistakes. This whole process of publishing is quite complicated, actually.
It is, Paul, it is.
Happily, Elam announced, the eager customers who’d hurried to buy a copy of the defective book on its first day of publication would be given a copy of the corrected book when it came out. All twelve of them.
That last bit isn’t a joke; according to Elam himself, there were literally twelve of them – less than half the number of those on AVFM’s masthead.
Elam also decided to call a do-over on AVFM Press itself – or at least its name — declaring that
AVFM Press is actually a working title for our publishing arm and will likely change very soon.
But now all the details have been sorted out, right? Well, mostly.
Yesterday’s big announcement on the launch – the real launch, this time – of AVFM’s new publishing house did not actually provide a name for the venture. At least not one that I could find. On Amazon, the publisher of the revised edition of Go Your Own Way is still listed as AVFM Press.
But never mind, because the book is getting rave reviews on Amazon!
For example, a woman named Suzy McCarley declares that the book “was worth the wait!”
Ok, so McCarley is an AVFM staffer who’s given 5-star reviews to everything she’s reviewed — from self–published books by manosphere blogger Aaron Clarey to Avalon Extra Moisturizing Fragrance Free Conditioner. But not all of the rave reviews are written by AVFM staffers under their own names. For example, a fellow calling himself xtime Past gushes:
There is great content for Men and Women of all ages. Most of red pill are apprehensive in reading this book since Paul Elam is a part of the MHRA arm of the manosphere. The read is great for MGTOW to better understand going their own way.
So I would like to congratulate AVFM’s Possibly Still Unnamed Publishing House for Men Who Don’t Write Good for getting off to such a strong start, at least if you ignore that first start that didn’t go so well.
During AVFM’s last donation drive, Elam declared that:
This year will see AVFM go into commercial ventures that will fund even more activism. I cannot go into any details at this point, but rest assured it is coming, and as with most everything else we have set out to do, we are going to pull it off. This track will ease the pressure on some of our larger donors who have always seen us through donation drives.
AVFM’s Possibly Still Unnamed Publishing House for Men Who Don’t Write Good is the first of these new money-making ventures. Because as everyone knows, a vanity publishing house that so seriously fucks up its first e-book launch that it has to do it over again two months later is pretty much guaranteed to be a massive cash-generating machine.
It kind of needs to be, as AVFM’s last donation drive (which just ended) didn’t do quite as well as Elam had hoped, at least according to this little thermometer graphic posted on AVFM.
I can only assume that authors will be rushing to sign up with AVFM’s Possibly Still Unnamed Publishing House for Men Who Don’t Write Good, so that AVFM’s Possibly Still Unnamed Publishing House for Men Who Don’t Write Good can put its name (which may be changed) on their ebooks – and take a share of the profits, if any, hopefully without introducing too many formatting errors in the process.
No, I can’t see how this could possibly go wrong.
Kudos, Paul!
snicker snicker snicker
I was deriving amusement from listening to Miss Maddie snoring before. Beat that!
PoM, love that L’Oreal gif! 😀
Well. I made it through like a page and a half of comments and then sort of wandered off to rub my face in Momo’s belly because he was all draped across me purring, doing that “daaahling my bones are made of buttah” thing, and…yeah.
Kitties, man.
If we’re making media suggestions, I’ll suggest the latest thing I’ve been voraciously consuming, it’s a web serial (text story) called Worm. It’s set in a very nicely developed superhero-y world, focusing on a girl with some REALLY interesting ways of applying her superpower while everything goes to shit around her.
For extra misandry points, it’s canon that more women get superpowers than men do in this universe, ahaha!
There’s a fair amount of violence and disturbing things that go on, so I’ll put a blanket trigger warning on it. Also, it is long as hell, 1.75 million words. http://parahumans.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/
Oh damn! Now I have been reminded of an online story I loved. But the link to it is on my last computer and I can’t remember the name. It featured this world waging a battle in Hell…
Awwwww!
I think that I shall never see
A poem as pretty as a kitty.
Sorry everyone for leaving before Trolly McTrollerson flounced, but I went out with friends to eat, drink and be merry. It’s my birthday! Yay!
@boringtrollisboring:
Awwww, fuck you. The reason I haven’t been as nasty as I probably should have is that as a male ally, I tend to go too easily into education mode when dealing with sexist men. Sexism doesn’t hurt me personally, so it’s easier for me to deal with sexist shit. My male privilege shields me. See how that works?
As pointed out by a couple of commenters already, you seem to automatically be interpreting my comments more favourably because I identify as a man. Many a person here has said the same things as I have, more eloquently and clearly to boot, yet you ignore them or automatically think of them as man-haters because they haven’t identified as men. Now, why could that be?
Also, I’m a polite idiot who likes to write exhaustingly long teal deers to people who don’t care, so there’s that. I should probably start up a blog of my own one of these days.
Holy pointlessness, Batman. Yes, there are women who are bitter, resentful, and entitled. So what? The thing about gender roles and expectations is that men are excused when they act selfishly, while women get shit for it. I daresay you never write long walls of texts about men acting entitled. Yes, I think nobody should treat others badly. But as long as men can get away with treating women like second-class citizens, I have no problem with women being mean to men.
Anyway, what about the behavior of the woman in your story was “entitled” and showed “the belief that others owe you their time”? That she wanted you to stop bugging her? If you think that’s entitled, but you wanting to keep talking to a person who doesn’t want you around isn’t, that’s your own sexist prejudice talking. The person wanting to disengage from the situation is not entitled, the person insisting on continuing a correspondence even when the other person isn’t interested is.
No, I haven’t been there. And yes, I’m trying to analyze the situation from the point of view of an outsider, since you are clearly not giving us enough information. There are things you’re leaving out. If we accepted your side of the story, we’d have to be very deep in MRA-land, since what you’re essentially saying is “dem b**ches be cray-cray*, am I right?”
So I ask you again: What is the point of sharing that anecdote? What are you hoping to accomplish, if not to argue that it’s unfair that women get to act in a way that doesn’t suit you?
Ah yes, #NotAllMen. Do you actually think I don’t know that not all men are like that? That is irrelevant. Understand that you do not have to fit the model exactly to still hold beliefs and attitudes that excuse the bad treatment of women. As #GamerGate and the whole “keep women out of tech” shit has shown us, nerds and geeks, who are stereotypically not considered masculine, still often hang on tight to toxic masculine beliefs about gender. They may not consider themselves he-men, but they still use sexist language, celebrate sexism in the industry, and generally help to perpetuate a work environment that is unwelcoming to women. Your occupation doesn’t tell who you are.
I’d suggest paying attention to the language men use when there are no women around. I rarely hang out with large male-only groups (over 3 men, including me) because the probability of at least one person in that group to be a misogynist, racist, homophobic bully is so high, and all too often, others in that group start showing disgusting attitudes in his presence. Men tend to bring out the worst in each other when they think no women are listening.
Anyway, pretty much all of my male friends are non-masculine as well. Why? Because it’s the men who identify strongly as masculine men who usually embrace toxic masculinity, i.e. a violent disposition and harmful attitudes towards anything feminine. They’re often bullies and try to be a dominant force in the group. See why I don’t hang out with such people? Could it be that you tend to gravitate towards people you are comfortable hanging out with, so the people in your close circles tell us squat about common attitudes?
TW: Rape apologia
“Rape is considered horrific?” Okay, now I know you’re living in movie fantasy land, where rape is a serious crime only carried out by cackling villains. In reality, where I live, rape is one of the most diminished crimes imaginable. I’ve heard people call rape “just a fuck.” Victims are interrogated, rapists are excused. “Boys will be boys!” “You don’t want to ruin his life, do you?” “Are you sure you didn’t really want it?” “You’re just having regrets.” “But he’s a nice guy, why are you lying?” “What were you doing alone with him, anyway?”
No, the problem with rape culture is that it removes the rapist from the equation. Rape is “something that happens” to women who step out of line (and who don’t, but in a sexist, patriarchal culture, a woman is always guilty). Rapists are seen as a force of nature, not men who want to dominate women. The whole onus is on the victim and what she did wrong. She was wearing the wrong clothes, had been drinking too much, flirting, had had sex with men before, hadn’t had sex with men, hung out with friends, didn’t hang out with friends, was walking, was getting a ride, etc. Women can’t win in rape culture, but men get away with rape all the time. Yet you think it’s unreasonable that women feel threatened by men?
Also no, your interpretation of “moral agency” is that evil is a force that exists outside human culture that individuals “choose” as they would choose whether to wear a white or a gray shirt in the morning. “Evil” is not carried out by “evil people”, but by completely ordinary people who are given social power over another group. Morals are shaped by society, and even if there were Scorpios and Jokers who love evil for evil’s sake running around (highly unlikely in the real world, may I add, people are not cartoon characters), they would be quickly hunted down and prosecuted in a world that didn’t tolerate that behaviour. But rape is tolerated by society, which is why it’s one of the most underreported crimes. Rape is a tool of terror, not a random act done by a random evil person without harmful beliefs about gender and sexuality. The way to diminish rape is to eliminate those beliefs and make society realize how harmful all sexism is to general attitudes.
I think you should really educate yourself on the matter of rape culture. It might open your eyes, though given your current track record, I’m not holding my breath.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. That your problem with Schrödinger’s Rapist is that it has a focus and doesn’t address everything? Do you go around randomly criticizing other terms and concepts, too? Is “disingenuous” problematic because it doesn’t address the level of politeness?
Schrödinger’s Rapist is an extremely useful concept for men who actually want to understand why women might be wary of them. It only bothers men who don’t want there to be discussion about gender issues.
Ah, yes, your famous “black friend.” Women aren’t a monolith, dumbass. Not all women experience the same things. Some are, to some degree, shielded by other forms of privilege, such as class and race. Also, your pretty clear attitude problem might explain why women aren’t comfortable discussing as intimate fears as rape with you.
No, I don’t know enough about the situation, since you’re still withholding details and trying your hardest to make yourself look like an innocent victim. I’m only going by your own words and your attitude on this thread, and that’s telling me quite enough.
Then avoid women. Nobody has a problem with that. In fact, I reckon most women would be happy to be rid of you. The problem with MGTOW is that they’re like children threatening to run away, but never do, since they are actually just hungry for attention. If MGTOW actually went away and did their own thing, nobody would care. And that’s what makes them angry: that women don’t care.
Plus, a whole lot of them are extreme misogynists. And harmful beliefs eventually bring forth harmful behavior. That’s why these kind of men are dangerous.
Re: false rape accusations: As somebody said earlier, a man is in higher statistical danger to get raped than to get falsely accused. That’s how insignificant a problem it is. Not enough to justify perpetuating the belief that women are evil harpies that want to hurt men for the lulz.
In closing, let me just say that debating with you is tiring. You don’t care to educate yourself at all, so it’s clear that you don’t actually care about the subject. You just want to keep bothering people. Your posts are a perfect example of sealioning. From your attitude here, I can gather that you’re a shit-stirrer and a tedious, sexist douchebag. That enough analysis for you?
—————————————————
*Sorry for the ableist slur. I couldn’t think of a way to censor it so that the meaning would still be clear.
Happy Birthday, Anarchonist! 🙂
I’m 67 years old – a real live baby boomer. I can tell you that your relatives recollections are both accurate and completely wrong all in one hit. I don’t recall those fears as particularly prominent either. You know why? Because we took it for granted.
I was taught some things, my friends were taught various other things. Always have a $10 note tucked into your bra (so you’re never dependent on a man for a lift home — girls/ladies never have a car of their own). Never let someone you’ve just met drop you at your real address. Don’t walk alone after dark. Always say this. Never do that. And on, and on, and on, … … … and on and on. We absorbed, followed, ignored, complied with all these various warnings and instructions depending on who we are/were and, often enough, whatever mood we were in at the time.
But we all had a mental map telling us that we were constantly facing danger, of varying severity. We knew that map so well we never had to think about it.
I’m Gen X, and I was always aware of the risks that women face from men just because we’re women. But walking around in a state of constant terror? No, I wasn’t scared, I was pissed off. Which is how someone becomes a feminist rather than becoming friends with whinging sealions.
(Your poor relatives, btw. I’d be tempted to call in sick to Xmas dinner just to avoid you.)
Doesn’t it say something that trolls always get it wrong about the level of awareness, apprehension or fear women may have, but rather than being horrified that (as they claim to believe) women are in constant fear, they’re aggrieved about it. How dare someone be afraid for their safety around Me, who is Nice! How dare someone who has a one in five chance of being raped be wary of the class of people who are the overwhelming majority of rapists! How dare women be aware that most rapists are family, so-called friends, acquaintances, colleagues!
It’s almost like they’re pissed off that we know more about abusers than they want us to.
It’s harder to attack someone if they can see you coming and already aware that keeping their eyes open might be a good idea. It really does seem to be that simple.
Yup. And even in situations when attack isn’t involved, it’s easier to tell entitled pests like this one NO if you’ve managed to put some cracks in the “must be nice to men” socialisation we get.
(If that was a woefully awkward sentence, I blame it on being midnight here, and time for me to go to bed – niters!)
A lot of dudes who don’t think about their ideas very hard, like boringtroll for example, have this idea of rape that can be described as such:
Picture, if you will, a movie in which an upstanding, unmarried, of-course-virgin young woman is isolated against her will and physically overpowered by some man. The man could be a stranger or an acquaintance, but he’s not a suitor and not approved by her family. Her father and brothers find out about this when she comes home, weeping and with her clothes torn and dirty, and bearing physical injuries, and they are outraged, outraged I tell you! Because rape is horrific! And then the rest of the plot of the movie is about how they run down the perpetrator and enact revenge because, for whatever reason, the law isn’t going to provide justice.
Rape is horrific, to these unthinking dudes, because in this scenario it is framed within a moral framework known in some parts of the world as “namus.” This is sometimes translated as “honor” but that’s a very crude way to put it. Namus is a way of conceptualizing the reproductive integrity that a patriarchal society requires to ensure parentage. It’s partially a holdover from bygone days when the exact mechanism by which babies are made wasn’t known – a child’s mother is always known, but the child’s father can’t be unless the mother’s sexual history is restricted to just one man. (Remember, we don’t know how babies are made, only that sex somehow produces them. Many cultures that adhere strongly to the namus framework view a child as being 100% the product of the father, with the mother contributing nothing except incubation services.)
In this context, the rape of a “virtuous” (sexually controlled) woman is a mortal insult to the patrilineage that produced her, and to the patrilineage to which she has been, or would be someday, transferred. A rape constitutes an unapproved insertion of potential paternity. The victim is “sullied” because now the paternity of her children is in doubt forever (because: we don’t know the mechanism of conception). This would obviously be a huge problem if all of a family’s women were subjected to rape, because then the paternity of all the family’s children would be in doubt and the patrilineage might die out. Therefore the menfolk enact a violent revenge, to deter future rapists.
This framework is also the one that leads to victim-blaming, because if a woman in any manner puts her sexual “honor” at risk, then she herself is the one threatening the patrilineages to which she is beholden. Obviously this needs to be deterred as well, so social sanction is applied, up to and including the murder of the woman in question.
Whenever I hear someone like boringtroll blindly repeating rape culture tropes while simultaneously asserting that rape is horrific, I am reminded again that this is precisely the framework that results in honor killings.
That’s true. What’s also true is that claiming that “everyone” thinks that rape is “horrific” is ~othering~ rapists. No one sees in the mirror nor in any of their friends or relatives the warty, leering face and skunk-reeking filth of the slavering raging beast that the “rape is horrific” idea perpetuates. It’s the same mechanism involved in calling Pol Pot and all those other horrible dictators monsters. If they’re a monster they’re not ordinary human beings like the rest of us so we don’t have to worry about our worse impulses.
Facing the fact that women can’t, nor can anyone else, tell who is, who isn’t and who might be a rapist is the truly unthinkable concept for ol’ boring here and all those like him. (Which brings Schrodinger’s rapist back into the discussion all over again.)
Kitteh ans PoM,
Oh yeah. Context definitely matters. Also, I wear purple cat eyes and you don’t see those much around here. Women tend to ask where I got them. I don’t recall a man ever commenting on them. They tend to say something nice about my hair.
People are aggressively friendly here. Not in a smarmy way. Just in a too familiar way. “Baby”, “Sweetie”, “Sis” and “Honey” are also thrown around with abandon. Not too long ago a guy in the supermarket said to me, “Excuse me Baby, which of these sour creams should I buy?” He was genuinely perplexed and meant it in the nicest way possible.
Re: rape culture
The way I like to phrase it is:
Rape culture isn’t saying “He committed rape, therefore he’s a hero.” It’s saying “He’s a hero, therefore what he did can’t be considered rape.” And that’s where Steubenville comes from.
Yes. It’s fine for a woman to have sex with a man who is approved by the patrilineage to which she belongs (which is why spousal rape is NBD to so many horrible men) but any non-approved man is literally The Enemy. Once a woman’s sexual history is muddled in any fashion, the paternity of her children is in eternal question, and that is a direct threat to the survival of the male genetic line that owns her, no different than murdering all of the family’s sons. Only a mortal enemy would do that, not a human being!
This is all very watered-down in Western society, and because we have science that tells us how menstruation and conception are related, and not-very-expensive paternity tests, the link between namus and familial survival has been completely severed. It still has power here. It’s baked into our culture. Boringtroll is perpetuating it right now.
Rape culture is also a notion of black and whiteness when it comes who is a rapist and who isn’t. People don’t judge someone accused of rape by the testimony, or even witness accounts or facts, but by what the guy is like in other areas. “He’s such a nice man, he would never do something like that!” There is this idea that a rapist is easily identifiable, and if he is enough of a “good citizen” in other ways he’s obviously too kind to ever do something a nasty as rape so she must be lying.
But as others have said, rape can be committed by anyone. Ordinary people. A rapist could be a man who works for a children’s charity, volunteers for the homeless and is respectful to every woman he meets in his life (you might even think him a feminist) but behind closed doors he forces himself on his wife.
Anarchonist,
You said it and said it well. *fistbump*
cassandrakitty ,
THIS.
Karalora ,
Precisely.
PoM,
Unless they are raped by their owners. Then it’s fine. :/
Chiming in late here just to laugh at this:
Um, it’s not a riddle. And it’s not a tool, either. Assuming it were, though, I really wish it would slice, dice, mince, mix, hammer nails, drive screws, saw planks, plane doorjambs, sand away the rough spots, AND come with a special fine attachment for buffing one’s genitalia. Otherwise, it ain’t much of a power tool.
Pshaw. That’s not even rape.
Ugh, I think our sealion has popped up in some YouTube comments. Whoever it is is using exactly the same tactics: dodge, derail, deny. Denounce you for saying something you didn’t.
And this one has stooped to the level of saying that if a woman verbally “started the aggression” in a conflict and her male partner kills her (“is driven to murder”) he should receive a lighter jail sentence. What the ever loving fuck.
sunnysombrera,
But, but, but… He’s such a Nice Guy. Why should women be uncomfortable around him?
/sarcasm
… Quite literally, given how vomitously racist MRAs like boringtroll tend to be.