Oh, people. I would really like to take a little vacation from all the A Voice for Men posts, but as it turns out I have found the most A-Voice-for-Menny AVFM thread ever, and I must share it with you.
Ok, so a couple of days ago, AVFM’s Dear Leader Paul Elam posted an uncharacteristically brief video titled “A 41 second lesson for Adam Serwer and the mainstream media.” It consisted of a 41-second snippet of Elam’s phone interview with Buzzfeed’s Adam Serwer, one of the authors of that scathing expose of Elam, in which Elam boasts to Serwer about how much traffic AVFM gets every time there is a news article reporting what an utterly terrible person he is. (I’m loosely paraphrasing here; as far as I can tell, Elam is not actually aware he is a terrible person.)
A few of the AVFM regulars sprinkled some comments below Elam’s offering when he put it up on AVFM, and there are some utter gems amongst them, demonstrating some of the ways that AVFMers try to magically stave off the collective realization that the reason virtually every real journalist who has ever written about them thinks they’re terrible is that they are indeed terrible.
One commenter gamely repeated a familiar truism that is not actually true:
Then a self-described Man Going His Own Way suggested that Serwer is not a real man at all:
AVFM’s “Activism Director” then stepped up with a colorful comment that, among other things, cleverly transformed “Serwer” into “Sewer”:
Vinczer was evidently so proud of the phrase “axe-grinding bandwagon” that he decided to paste it, and some further thoughts on the subject, over an old cheesecake picture of a woman grinding an axe. (See above.) Unfortunately, she is not actually seated upon a bandwagon, so I cannot award Mr. Vinczer full credit for his efforts here.
But my favorite comment of the bunch came from AVFM’s “managing editor” and “director of operations” and “possible buyer of fake Twitter followers,” Dean Esmay.
I can see that some of you are a little baffled, possibly because Serwer, who is both Jewish and a feminist, has never given any indication that he hates either Jews or women.
But Esmay, like many in the Men’s Rights community, seems to be fond of an argumentative trope that most of us outgrow in childhood: the old “I know you are but what am I?” ruse.
If you call an MRA a sexist, chances are good that he (or in some cases she) will call YOU a sexist — because, say, your insistence that rapists should be vigorously prosecuted is said to somehow infantalize women.
Or something like that; the details aren’t any more important to the MRAs making these accusations than they were to your jerky sibling when you were both kids. What’s important is that this little rhetorical maneuver puts you on the defensive.
But if AVFMers don’t have any good reason to say that Serwer hates Jews and/or women, they have come up with an excuse: Buzzfeed chose to illustrate Serwer and Katie Baker’s piece on Elam with a caricature of Elam modeled after a famous poster of Rosie the Riveter.
And so, apparently because the caricature of Elam was mildly unflattering and slightly exaggerated the size of his nose, the great minds at AVFM decided that it was equivalent to the viciously anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews featured in Nazi propaganda. And also somehow demeaning to women. It doesn’t make much sense to me.
Here’s how one AVFM fan tried to explain the accusation on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/tigerclaud/status/563888703026634752
Oddly, I don’t recall Esmay, a fervent supporter of #GamerGate, ever taking fellow #GamerGaters to task for literally repurposing neo-Nazi propaganda in their attacks on Anita Sarkeesian.
The “I know you are but what am I” attack can be confusing even to MRAs. Pity poor Suzy McCarley, AVFM’s “assistant managing editor” and head comment moderator, who, in her response to Esmay’s question, tried to attack Serwer as an anti-Semite who’s simultaneously sexist towards both women and men.
So Serwer hates Jews more than women, because half of all Jews are women, whom he hates, and the other half are men, whom he also hates, but possibly more than he hates women.
Driversuz, be careful: you might sprain something.
@toujoursgai: is your nym from Archie & Mehitabel? “There’s a dance in the old dame yet!”
@tcwill00: Yes! Yes, it is. 🙂
Parks & Recreation just did a Men’s Right’s parody, and it was delightful.
I will miss that show.
This season of Parks and Rec has been pretty great all around. If the latest episode mocks MRA’s, then I extra can’t wait for it to be posted online.
David, even for the regular standard of funny and witty, this post was really witty and funny.
Thank you!
Also as a jewish woman, I find the reaction of AVFMers to an unflattering picture of their leader hilarious.
Parks and recreation? What episode is it I want to see it
I’m behind on Parks and Recreation but it’s a great show. Did Ron Swanson become an MRA?
I love that conservatives don’t realize he’s a satirical character and Nick Offerman isn’t like that in real life. Reactionaries never get what is or isn’t satire.
Falconer
My favorite rendition is the 1985 Stratford Festival one. I posted a clip from it earlier. Their Poo-Bah was hilarious, and easily my favorite. Stratford Festival has also done some others, I think. I’ve only seen their Mikado and Iolanthe (which was also good).
Opera Australia did a more recent rendition earlier, and while I wasn’t a fan of the costumes, I did enjoy the way they modernized some of the songs. “I’ve Got a Little List” was pretty good in that one.
I’ve been compelled to stop lurking in order to make a point about the 50 Shades of Grey thing. (Also hello, this site and the awesome comments have been part of my morning routine for months, I’ll help myself to a welcome pack and my favourite —-ing scent of —-ing scented candle is —-ing cherry.)
I spend far more time than is healthy reading detective novels and watching crime dramas. I do this for fun, as escapist fantasy. It does not indicate any underlying desire to witness, perpetrate, fall victim to, investigate or in fact be on the same planet as a murder. To suggest that my choice of reading matter may be indicative of criminal tendencies would, I think, be considered absurd by most people. So why in the name of Nancy Drew is the popularity of a particular “romance” “novel” assumed to reveal anything about its readers’ real desires? Ok, so MRAs like to see women as impressionable, easily-read infants but they’re not the only ones drawing some sort of wider meaning from the phenomenon.
Short version: What we fantasise about and what we actually want are not always the same but this is all too easily disregarded when discussing people’s sexual preferences.
Alan — yes, Livia, thank you!!
Fruitloopsie — isn’t Bates Motel based (absurdly) loosely on Gacy?
And I’m pretty sure the Wests were partners.
Sleep, blessed sleep. I’m going to get some while Darwin isn’t endeavoring to ruin the last shreds of my sanity. You’d think a tortoise would be a quiet pet right? Watch out for glass, the noise of shell on glass, over, and over, and over again… *deafens self*
I badically got through the morning praising my noise ça calling headphones. (Ok autocorrect, I got a vowel wrong in “canceling” and you decided I must want two words in different languages? See how I’m not using the French keyboard layout? Yeah, that generally means I’m not typing in French!)
@fruitloopsie
No, Bloody Mary was an English queen who ordered the slaughter of either Catholics or Protestants (I forget which). Elizabeth Bathory was rumored to have bathed in the blood of her victims, but she wasn’t formally charged with that. She was convicted of torturing and murdering hundreds of girls and young women, though.
Grand Pooh-Brah is good. Grand Poo-Flinger is another one, since AVFM often remind me of those monkeys that fling their shit at one another.
I thought Bloody Mary was queen Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_and_Hare_murders
There’s this delightful duo, who were allegedly significantly assisted by women.
The Parks & Recreation episode was called ‘Pie-Mary;’ Season 7, episode 9. It was a brief MRA spoofing, but it hit the spot. Ben is running for Congress and Leslie was asked to bake in the ‘Pie-Mary,’ where candidates’ wives compete in a bake-off. Ben decides to do it himself as a sort of protest for such a dated and misogynistic idea, and the local MRA chapter comes out to protest Leslie for ‘forcing’ him to bake for him. Quote highlights from the MRAs include “Men have had a very rough go of it… just recently!” and “Geez, can we have one conversation about feminism in which men are in charge?”
Such a good show.
Bloody Mary was a Catholic Queen who attempted to undo the English Reformation by ordering the deaths Protestants, however she’s known as “Bloody Mary” due to her miscarriges. She was to be succeeded by Elizabeth I.
I love history.
Argenti Aertheri
“Fruitloopsie — isn’t Bates Motel based (absurdly) loosely on Gacy?”
I don’t know much about the Pyscho movie, bates motel or anything like that all I saw was a meme with him in it basically saying that if he never been with his mother he wouldn’t have killed people. I guess it goes with their whole hate with single mothers? I don’t know but like you said that it’s really bizarre that the creator would create memes around fictional characters and somehow compare them to the real world.
Childrenofthebroccoli and WWTH
Thanks for the info, I just did some research so there are a few stories of where Bloody Mary came from and I did see Queen Mary and I did read about Elizabeth torturing and killing women and girls. Now it’s time for brain bleach
http://fireburst.weebly.com/uploads/2/6/9/2/26928049/8628417_orig.jpg
http://rs2img.memecdn.com/Not-sure-if-foam–or-cat_o_123873.jpg
theomegaconstant
Thanks
Dreadnought
Thanks
“I love history”
Always cool to learn something every now and then
So in Gamergate drama:
The head of Baphomet (basically Gamergate’s black hat team, much as they may deny it) seems to have sold SSNs… on Baphomet… including one of a sitting US judge… and also linked to child porn. Then he–also on Baphomet–announced he was going to China.
On the board that has been on the news as a font of doxing, swatting, and other cyber-crimes. Think the FBI doesn’t have someone monitoring it?
These people are not even very competent at being the bad guys, huh?
Isn’t the Bates Motel from Psycho? That would predate Gacy by quite a bit if so.
I think Bates was based on Gein, not Gacy. ^^; Well, at least the Psycho version of Bates, I didn’t even know there was a TV show.
I recognize Attila L. Vinczer from the comments section of the Buzzfeed profile, being laughably full of himself as he claimed he spoke three languages by the age of nine and learns a new word every day. I wanted to pat him on the head, he was so precious. So that guy is AVFM’s activism director? It’s not surprising that this is AVFM’s idea of human rights activism.
Dean Esmay and Judy Bloomfield were also all over the comments section. I had a grand time watching Bloomfield get her lies about Jessica Valenti thrown in her face, and still insist those were accurate, word-for-word quotes. The sitcom writes itself with these people.
Bates Motel is based on Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho, which in turn was based on a book (but the movie of course is the iconic one). The movie came out in 1960 but I think I know who you’re talking about: not Gacy, but Ed Gein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Gein The author of the original novel acknowledged that Norman Bates was inspired by Gein (who incidentally, also inspired both Leatherface and Buffalo Bill)
This is going to be an interesting thread for the MRA trolls to stumble into, heh. *grins*
Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho also wrote a cool short story called Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper. It has a great twist ending. Highly recommended.