If you’re a regular, or semi-regular, or even just an occasional reader of this blog, you need to stop reading this post right now and read Buzzfeed’s astonishing expose of A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam instead.
SPOILER ALERT: He’s an even bigger hypocrite than you think he is.
Here’s the link. Right here. Click on it now. Click. Now. Click.
If you need a bit more convincing: Buzzfeed’s long and meticulous examination of alleged “men’s human rights” activist Elam, written by Adam Serwer and Katie Baker, delves deep into Paul’s often sordid personal history, including his drug use, his numerous failed marriages, and the alternately depressing and infuriating story of the daughter he abandoned, who forgave and reunited with him as an adult, and who is now estranged from him again.
As Serwer and Baker make clear, the story of Elam’s life makes many of his most fervent claims about alleged female irresponsibility and the evils of the family court system seem a tad, well, ironic. As the two note, Elam.
preaches the gospel that men’s failures and disappointments are not due to personal shortcomings or lapsed responsibility, but rather institutionalized feminism and a family court system rigged against dutiful fathers, as well as a world gripped by “misandry,” or the hatred of men.
But his own story, to put it as gently as possible, does not exactly support this particular narrative. Serwer and Baker note that
interviews with Elam’s ex-wives and daughter and newly uncovered court records shed light on a man who, they told BuzzFeed News, has depended on and emotionally abused the women in his own life.
For example, although Elam compares the family court system’s treatment of fathers to Jim Crow, he abandoned his biological children not once but twice. Although Elam says that “fathers are forced to pay child support like it was mafia protection money,” he accused his first wife of lying about being raped so he could relinquish his parental rights and avoid paying child support.
His ex-wife [Susan] and his daughter said he has only been able to make A Voice for Men his full-time job because of the women who have supported him throughout his life. …
“He sits there taking all these people’s money and all he’s doing is sucking them dry,” said Susan. “That’s what he’s done all his life — to say it’s the woman’s fault, and not make men look at their own mistakes.”
Seriously, go read it. Here’s the link again.
We’ll talk more when you’re done.
proxieme sez:
My dad—who was old enough to be drafted—did that. He wasn’t being wholly dishonest, since he is bi. Apparently he had to really play up a certain stereotype for it to work, though.
From what I was told, they REALLY don’t want suicidal solders, likely because of the risk of them getting their fellow soldiers killed. I don’t know if that was just at boot camp // basic or in general though.
I imagine the bar for “nope, don’t want to deal with you” is lower during peacetime though, don’t need ’em so why put up with ’em?
I’ve been in (five years enlisted) but at lot later than the 70s. The post-Nam military was kind of legendary while I was in for being full of fuckups and for having very lax discipline. Things that were unthinkable to me, like smoking a joint in the barracks or showing up drunk to work with little more than a wink and a nod from the sergeant, were nostalgia staples from the last of those old-timers. They felt like those were the good old days. Plus, they said, you could still tell off-color/racist jokes at work with impunity, whereas by the early 2000s that was grounds for at least having your ‘nads symbolically fried, if you weren’t smart about it.
When I was in, you could get a “general” discharge (sort of between “honorable” and “dishonorable”) esp. if you got kicked out during initial training for basically just not cutting the mustard.
You can still get discharged for mental health, though there are hoops to jump and a lot depends on your chain of command, who you know, how good you are at working the system, and what kinds of collateral damage you may have caused in the run-up to official discharge.
How exactly any of this worked then or in Elam’s case, I can’t say. It doesn’t seem impossible to me he could have completed an enlistment before 21 w/o getting kicked out if he went in right out of high school. I’d have to see his papers to know for sure.
I was enlisted in the USAF from 79 till 87. I think you could still get a two year enlistment in the army back then. Every other branch was four I think.
We had two girls wash out in basic. One was pregnant, the other was a discipline matter. The pregnant one was rather upset about her discharge and the other was relieved as hell. The easiest way out was to say you were gay though.
I think this is a pretty good overview of the different types of US military discharges. I actually did not know there were five freakin’ categories. http://www.forthoodsentinel.com/story.php?id=8539
A soldier being dishonorably discharged looks like this, right?
@katz Basically, but with reams of paperwork showering down on both parties. 😀
I saw this screencap of something on Facebook where someone who said they were a transgender communist asked if they could join the army via their Facebook page.
Apparently, being a communist is a-okay, being transgender is not.
@ paradoxical Ha, that sounds about right.
@ceebarks and Hambeast
He wouldn’t have been in the Reserves after two years?
Lets see if I can guess the five discharges… honorable, less than honorable, dishonorable, medical and general? Katz you have permission to email pecunium with directions to shame me if I’m wrong.
Poop, it’s medical reasons with whatever level honors huh? And I forgot about bad conduct discharges. Great, Katz just tell him my punishment can’t be more than one mushroom ok? (They’re to me what mangos are to him)
Oh divines, Katz!
This was in the recommended videos at the end of that link, and it’s hilarious:
@ Argenti Aertheri, pretty close. Per the article I linked they are “Honorable; General, Under Honorable Conditions; Under Other than Honorable Conditions; Bad Conduct; and Dishonorable.” Oh, and Wikipedia does list “entry level separation” as a type of administrative discharge, which doesn’t characterize their service one way or the other, kind of a “this never happened” annulment, just as you were saying. That does seem to ring a bell.
(I used to have to memorize this stuff for promotion boards but I’ve clearly long since taken a brain dump in favor of more interesting trivia.)
A. Noyd: I don’t know. Just not enough info to go on here, I think?
Entry level separation being for people who leave in their first 180 days. I wish we could edit posts sometimes.
That’s it, I’m never enlisting. I couldn’t handle the paperwork.
I could handle shooting people, but oh lordy the paperwork! XD
I guess that explains how pecunium can handle retail during the holidays though.
Ceebarks — that must be it, yeah. And just Argenti is fine btw, less typing = more good.
Aw, the paperwork’s not that bad ’til you hit mid-career or so. I mostly loved my stint (the last year was tough– personal problems at an overseas post, and I was all of 21 at the time.)
Husband stayed in for 21 yrs though, and just retired last summer. Whenever he had soldiers there was always ONE guy. I don’t know how that is so, and husband is super-mellow and not the authoritarian type at all, but there always seemed to be ONE person who would just have crisis after crisis. One crisis would bleed into the next in a surreal time-sucking tangle of Rube Goldberg-esque WTFery. You wondered if it weren’t some kind of performance art that you just weren’t sophisticated enough to get.
Meantime, the other nine guys were either just goin’ to work and minding their own business, or totally lost in the shuffle.
It’s making me laugh to think of Elam as The One Guy. lol
Yeah, I forgot to add that if he was an 11B (infantry) the enlistment can be short. I can’t speak with authority on the 70s, but was as low as 2 years in the 90s.
cee – Ha. Yeah, I can totally see Elam being a Blue Falcon.
Oh yeah, forgot about the reserve thing. The Army was kind of an enigma to us zoomies. Testing positive for drugs was also a quick discharge although I never heard of anyone getting tested in basic (not that it didn’t happen, I’m sure.)
I’m also a retail wage slave and I’d rather spend the holiday season in basic training! I could still do DOD paperwork all day, and I used to be training NCO as well as doing the classified file destruction.
Here’s what I don’t understand though. Why would you put your child in a situation where “thrashing and hitting” is even possible? You can’t “thrash” if you’re not being restrained. We’re talking about a 13 year old and a condition that probably didn’t pose any significant threat of death or serious injury. There’s no acceptable solution which would require a parent to even be within arms reach.
Reblogged this on Dreams of the Shining Horizon and commented:
This contains useful information.
Tl;dr Paul’s response to the article:
Everything was somebody else’s fault.
Signing away rights is a big deal in my world. It’s not something that’s done lightly. I can’t imagine the circumstance that would prompt susan and her family to take that course of action.