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.
Terrible person wrote terrible trilogy about terrible relationship between a terrible rich person and a terribly foolish person, and now other terrible people think that it somehow reflects What Women Really Want.
I can’t even.
http://i58.tinypic.com/bh0o74.jpg
Ah, yes. Autism woo. At least most alternative medicines aren’t likely to do much damage (except inasmuch as people ignore effective scientific medicine) but that bleach shit… damn. And it isn’t like most woo, where adults chose to use it on themselves–no, adults are subjecting their non-consenting children to it.
On Fifty Shades… my opinion is that it became a Thing, and then it became the erotica you could buy as a physical edition in small-town Eastern Washington bookstores. Some women checked it out, and found it scratched in itch they hadn’t been able to get at before (hint: the internet is your friend) and then others read it to see what all the fuss was about.
And then everyone who was into erotica was like, “WTF you reading this shit for?” Its problematic as hell (not unusual, but what gets me is the fact that it isn’t presented as mere wank fantasy, and it is really misogynistic even outside the abusive relationship) and badly written.
I like writing stories and I have low confidence in myself to publish them but when I see books like Twilight and 50 shades of grey I suddenly think ‘wow if these are published then I should be able to publish mine too’
Minor correction: Terrible person wrote terrible fanfiction about terrible trilogy about etc.
@sunnysombrera:
Ghost in the Shell – for the character of the main character anyway and that noone makes a big deal out of her behaviour, obviously her usual outfit is… well I saw it on a cosplayer once and it looks even more indecent on a real person. Sadly lacks many other female characters and most of them are stereotypical.
I’ve thought about who my favourite female Pixar character is – the girl at the beginning of Up. She just seems really interesting, it’s a shame she’s a woman in the fridge for the main character and dies in the first few minutes to progress his story.
Fruitloopsie:
Nausicaa is awesomely weird, but IMO not as visually impressive as the later works.
If you really want your mind blown, read the original Nausicaa Manga, also by Hayao Miyazaki. Read it to the end solution.
I love Castle in the Sky, My neighbor Totoro, Porco Rosso, Spirited Away and most of all Princess Mononoke.
I guess the best thing we can get out of 50 Shades is a fire the lights inside thousands of aspiring writers, making them swear, “Even I can do better than this shit!”
^ AND SHE MAKES ME WEEP.
Seriously, my family won’t watch Up with me anymore.
http://imgur.com/MYmKGUC
From your phrasing, I’m going to guess that he eventually moved on along the trail.
*mutters to self*
To a book…
*shakes head*
@proxieme:
I thought she made everyone weep. Certainly does me, though to be fair I’m prone to that in any film with even slightly emotional content.
re: the costumes: Thanks, guys ????
I know they’re not “good” – I’m pretty bad at domestic stuff in general and awful at sewing AND the first set was made when I had a 3-month-old (I’m pretty sure it’s mostly fabric tape and safety pins), but my kiddos wanted to dress as their favorite characters and they weren’t outfits I could buy (well, maybe on Etsy, but $$).
I’ve begun taping a picture of who they’re supposed to be on the back of their candy containers. People thought that my middle kiddo
Ugh. Accidentally hit “post comment”.
Everyone thought that my middle was a particularly bad rendition of Syndrome (from The Incredibles).
In response, she’d whip around her pumpkin and explain her favorite graphic novel.
It was pretty awesome.
@lith – It didn’t really phase me before I was married to the Mr.
I mean, it was impactful, but it was part of a character arc.
I brought the movie over to my Grandmother’s to watch with her during a weekend visit/dinner. Towards the end of that sequence, I heard a crying, accusatory voice, “You didn’t tell me it was a sad movie!”
Whoops.
(Background: She and my Grandfather met when they were both 16 – she was working at a soda shop and he was…well, a punk with a Harley, just too young to have been in WWII.
They married when they were both 18 – he apparently only graduated High School because she said that she wouldn’t marry someone without a diploma – and stayed married, happily bit as slightly cantankerous equals, until he died in the mid-90s.)
(So jerk move on my part.)
It is a very unusual beginning to a children’s film, that’s for sure!
Oh god dammit, I forgot about the unnecessary nudity in Elfed Lied. Especially the opening credits. And the occasional boob angles (a frame drawn as if the camera is under her armpit – her breast takes up about a third of the shot). And a few scenes that are just why. Most of the female characters are well rounded but on that front I’m seeing my favourite manga/anime fall apart in terms of female representation. Gah.
At least it passes the Bechdel test several times. With four out of five characters being women how could it not…
Anyway Cardcaptor Sakura holds a high bar. And Haibane Renmei, Shakugan No Shana too, albeit Shana’s character is a bit clichéd.
@ParadoxicalIntention
Thanks for the welcome, and general words of agreement to everything else you said. My comment was mostly a flaily-armed howl against simplistic discussions of how people interact with culture, and the comments here are always reassuring.
I haven’t watched much Sailor Moon, but the reissue is as good an excuse as any.
Trigun is old, but wonderful. There’s an argument to be made that Meryl and Millie are the protagonists, for all that Vash is the superhero.
Kill la Kill looks like it might be good, on the surface, in that the person out to avenge a death is a woman, and the person she’s striving to defeat is a woman, but by god are there a lot of boobs.
“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.”
Very true. Ever try to ask MRAs why the US has never had a woman president? It’s a question I posted somewhere on YouTube and the answer fucking astounded me: It’s because of women! Yes, since women make up the single largest group of voters, it’s they who decide that one of their own should not be President of the United States and HOW DARE I CALL THEM INCOMPETENT VOTERS!! They pretty heavily implied I was sexist for even asking the question.
@Nick Anderson
Yeah! Why don’t women just vote for the female candidate? So, not Obama.. and, uhh, not Romney. So… ummm. Well I’m sure that argument makes sense somehow in the end, right? :p
In my experience, they haven’t really thought this through. Much like they haven’t thought anything else through ever.
The Green party candidate, Jill Stein was a woman. I almost voted for her. Obama won my state by about 10 points so I regret not voting for her now. Not because she’s a woman but because the party’s politics are more in line with mine than the Democrat’s are.
@wwth
I get that, and I know about Jill Stein, but I highly doubt a Green Party candidate will be the first woman president anyway.
Either way, the MRA “argument” requires all women to vote only based on the candidate’s gender, which is obviously so stupid it’s hard to know where to begin in countering it.
Check out avoiceformen.com’s Alexa rankings.
There appear to be around three times as many women viewing that site as men. Morbid curiosity, maybe? Or perhaps it’s guys “borrowing” their female coworkers/classmates’ laptops in order to visit the site because they’re too embarrassed to do so on their own computers. It’s bizarre.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/avoiceformen.com
“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.”
Very true. Ever try to ask MRAs why the US has never had a woman president? It’s a question I posted somewhere on YouTube and the answer fucking astounded me: It’s because of women! Yes, since women make up the single largest group of voters, it’s they who decide that one of their own should not be President of the United States and HOW DARE I CALL THEM INCOMPETENT VOTERS!! They pretty heavily implied I was sexist for even asking the question.
This strikes me as an odd claim. I suspect most MHRAs will reasonably attribute the lack of a female President to a variety of factors. As someone who might identify without a lot of stretching as an MHRA or socialist libertarian or small-government progressive I suspect that nonetheless you and I would agree on a good half-dozen of those causes, disagree on the relative importance of half a dozen more, and disagree wildly on several others. Probably better, though, to actually have that conversation rather than demonize the entirety of the opposition.
I also suspect that MHRAs put far more stock in what an officeholder does than in his / her gender, leaving the question of the importance of that conversation open to question. They might prefer to ask, “Why did white women vote against Obama 56 to 43?” They also might consider the question of a woman President less important than the problem that regardless of whether Obama or Hilary won the 2008 nomination or whether Hilary or Bush win the 2016 election, the overwhelming majority of men and boys (less so, women) will receive no meaningful representation by the office of the President.
In any case, I don’t know if this thread is still open or what the moderation policies are, so I’ll stop here. Cheers.
Did you… not read the part you quoted where they said they did have that discussion and that that (the lack of female Presidents being women’s fault) was what was said?
What the fuck is a socialist libertarian? Isn’t that the very definition of an oxymoron?