A few days before alleged “men’s human rights” website A Voice for Men held its first convention last summer, the site’s founder and head boy Paul Elam put up a post imploring the alleged human rights activists planning to attend the event not to go around calling women bitches and whores and cunts, because the news media would be there, and this might make his little human rights movement look bad.
I’m paraphrasing here; Elam was a teensy bit more euphemistic, telling his followers that anyone caught “trash-talking women, men, making violent statements … anything that can be used against us” would get a very stern talking-to and, if they persisted, would be asked to leave.
Elam’s warning didn’t stick. Indeed, the woman in charge of publicity for the event – you may know her as JudgyBitch or Janet Bloomfield, neither of which is her real name – went on a bit of a Twitter rampage, happily denouncing critics of the group as, yep, “whores.”
As GQ magazine’s long-awaited, finally published account of the conference makes abundantly clear, JB wasn’t the only one who broke Elam’s rule. Elam himself broke it, as did, apparently, almost everyone who came within shouting distance of GQ correspondent Jeff Sharlet, and the infractions went well beyond slurs and “bitch make me a sammich” jokes.
So I present to you The 5 Creepiest Details from GQ’s Account of AVFM’s Conference Last Summer
1) The Men’s Rights Activist who boasted that he would have disowned his daughter if she had pressed charges against the man she said raped her.
Af a convention afterparty, the man in question told this little story to Sharlet, Elam, and a few others:
When one of his daughters came home one night and said she’d been raped, he said, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Sitting with us, he hikes his voice up to a falsetto in imitation: ” ‘Oh, I just got raped.’ ” He laughs. There’s a moment of silence. A bridge too far? “I told her if she pressed charges, I’d disown her.”
Elam, whose attention has drifted, grins through his beard. “That’s good fathering,” he says.
2) The presentation on male suicide in which the presenter referred to a woman’s alleged propensity for “cocoa penis puffs,” by which he evidently meant black penises.
Speaking about male suicide and the troubles faced by returning veterans, conference speaker Terrence Popp asked the men in the room to
“imagine coming back from war to find out your wife, I’m trying to think of a good way to say this, but, uh, you know, went cuckoo for cocoa penis puffs.” I think Popp, who is white, means the wife in question had sex with a black man. “Crazy for some Rice Krispies treats,” he continues, “and a couple Polish sausages thrown in there.”
3) The Men’s Rights Activist/sex offender who thinks the age of consent should be 12, because “I would rather err on the side of 12-year-olds having sex than on the side of ruining men’s lives.”
4) Sage Gerard’s “unconsensual hug.”
GQ’s Sharlet brought his friend Blair along with him to the convention, where the 26-year old evidently attracted a good deal of attention from the men there, receiving, Sharlet says, “several marriage proposals” (presumably unserious) and some hands-on attention from AVFM’s “Collegiate Activism Director” Sage Gerard, including what Blair later described as “the most unconsensual hug I have ever known.”
If Blair’s account of her encounter with Gerard is any indication, the AVFM collegiate organizer has been reading up on pickup artistry; in addition to a good deal of touching – what PUAs call “kino” – he tried to “isolate” her by drawing her away from the crowd to … write a poem. (His idea.)
Here’s how Sharlet, relying on Blair’s notes, described what happened after their awkward hug:
Sage loosens his grip. “I apologize for dragging you away,” he says. “I wasn’t going to feel okay until I talked to you.” He warns her not to send mixed messages. For instance, she shouldn’t put her hand on a man’s knee if she doesn’t want to have sex with him. Sage puts his hand on Blair’s knee. This is not a mixed message, he wants her to understand. She’s here, in the VFW. She’s taken the red pill. She needs another hug. He needs to give it to her.
Blair, I should note, is not the only one to report creepy, predatory behavior on the part of conference attendees.
5) Rape jokes, rape jokes, and more rape jokes.
I’ll just mention this one. When Sharlet arrived at the conference afterparty with Blair, who had successfully managed to escape Gerard’s unconsensual embraces, Elam asked her a question:
“I’m curious,” Elam says. “What did your friends think when you told them you were coming here?”
“To be honest?” Blair asks. Elam nods. She says, “I had friends who said I’d get raped.”
Blink. You can almost see the struggle in Elam’s bones: Play the nice guy? Or the perv? No question. “All right!” he booms, swinging his arms together. “Let’s get started!”
Jazz winces.
“Get the video camera!” Factory yells at his girlfriend, who giggles weakly.
I should be very clear here: At no point does it seem like Elam or Factory is actually going to rape Blair. We know they’re joking. Just a couple of middle-aged guys joking around about rape with a young woman they’ve never met before in a hotel room at one in the morning.
You can read the rest of Sharlet’s account of this groudbreaking human rights conference here. And you should.
@lith
When you call out an MRA, unless your user name clearly identifies you as male, they will always assume you’re a “girl”, and they will always call you “dear”, “sweetheart”, and “honey”. Usually it’s their main/only “argument”.
About non-acting pedophiles, I happen to know two such people personally (one man, one woman). This subject is so difficult to even talk about, because the moment you even hint that being attracted to children might not be an active choice, or that attraction doesn’t necessarily mean action, it’s almost like you’ve just said “hey, maybe Hitler wasn’t ALL bad?” And everything gets muddled up so fast. Several of the commenters here have already stated my opinions on this subject perfectly, but imagine trying to explain these things to someone who isn’t trying to understand? Right wingers already try to conflate LGBT with pedophile, so it’s not like they’re interested in an honest discussion anyway. This is probably the least coherent comment I’ve ever written, but this is something that genuinely weighs me down sometimes. I know that these two people are aware of their problem, and they’ve promised they would never act on their desires. But how can I know that for sure? It’s a constant, nagging worry.
Kind of wish I hadn’t posted that comment.
nellodee: I think you have a point. But my first thought was to be reminded of the First World War, where it was the poor that were conscripted and for the first time the well off saw that the poor had terrible living conditions. They showed up in rags, with lice, skinny bodied. After the war was over PM Lloyd-George ordered the “Homes for Heroes” scheme which was to tear down slums and build nicer homes in their place (unfortunately the new homes weren’t actually well built, and had problems from the get go). But the draft in that case did bring the two sides of the spectrum together and resulted in…some change.
Who knows, bring poor and rich together again in war and there may be some inspired change there as well.
Oh, good catch,nellodee1010! How bad do you have to be to qualify as that group’s missing stair? *shudder*
Re: the draft and national service requirements (please using caution, Teal Deer crossing ahead):
My husband I both served in the U.S. Army (I had an extremely brief enlistment, he was a career soldier). He joined up because his family was poor and the military was the best shot he had at skilled job training and travel. I joined up because I graduated college when the economy was crap (hello, dot-com bubble!) and the military was one of the few places that was hiring. And our experiences were pretty much the norm for most of the people I met during the year and a half I was in; you were either poor and the Army was the best gig you could find, or you were privileged and thought the military would be a good career, or at least good resume padding.
My dad was drafted during the Vietnam War. He was a kid from rural Tennessee who’s dad did shift work at a chemical plant and raised laying hens on the side. When he got to basic training, most of his fellow soldiers were in the same boat. They were lower income and/or minority boys who couldn’t claim a college deferment or find some way around serving. People from higher on the economic ladder definitely went to war during that time, but the draft wasn’t some great social leveler. (Couple of interesting papers here and here discussing the Vietnam war draft and college attendance and minority experiences in the U.S. military).
I know anecdotes =/= data, but I kind of think that’s how things would shake out if we had a national service requirement in the U.S. People without the means to get around it would end up doing their time, people who saw the military as an opportunity would join anyway, and everyone at the top who didn’t want to put on a uniform would find a way to decline. In other words it would be the same as it is now, which is pretty much the same as it was in the 1960’s. But at least people are in the modern-day service are there voluntarily.
TL;DR – Just MO, but I don’t think mandatory service would really do much. With all the privilege that class and money gives you in the U.S., the military with a national service requirement would probably look a lot like it does now, only there would be conscripts who didn’t want to be there instead of volunteers.
@Howard:
As you say it’s literally the opposite of what the MRM say they want. Putting it bluntly they seem to hate that boys and men should have to ‘suffer’ because of women and girls.
They seem to be unable to comprehend that ‘boys will be boys’ is entirely unreasonable and about the most harmful thing ever. It’s carte blanche to do whatever the heck you like because you happen to be born one gender rather than another.
For anyone familiar with Perdido Street Station, to me it’s like the thing with the insect brothers being allowed to crawl all over their sisters or any girl they please
@mildlymagnificent:
I don’t know, I’d feel like I was stringing them along and you know how they get turned on so when they think someone’s a woman and playing not at all interested.
@Charles:
You mean for the same reason they’d find it hard to fact check? 🙂
@M.:
You just reminded me, I heard about this lady from the 12th century on Radio 4 woman’s hour recently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen
I was going to put a short summary here but I would be selling her short by missing things out.
*grumble grumble grumble* history lessons. You’d think women had never done anything of note, ever, beyond that fuss they made when they insisted on the vote for some reason god knows what they thought they were going to do with it etc. Oh, and Boudica for some reason (I’m unclear why you’d miss all the other women out and include this one).
@dhag85:
At the height of the paedophile witch-hunts in the UK a lynch mob attacked a guy for having the temerity to not only be a paedophile but to put up a brass plaque outside his house saying so! Except it said ‘paediatrician’ and was his place of work.
LBT:
Heh. When I was a freshman, one of my professors, seeing I was reading Lolita before class, decided to make this little quip: “Oh! Are you planning to have sex with a professor? Because that’s what she did!” I jut stared at him in shocked disgust, like he’d just suggested that cow pies made delicious desserts.
I loved going to school and learning, but I do not miss academia, either.
@lith
I laugh, but I suppose I should be crying.
Ive read comments from a quiet succesfull youtuber called ‘Sandman’. He claims that some evil femnazis accused him of hate-crime and called the police..and that he almost got into prison. “For noting an old testament” he wrote.
Two other of his viewer made similar experiences….
This sound so believeable….not.
But Its funny how they believe each other lol
Reblogged this on idigadonut.
Er… In my experience, most age of consent laws have exceptions for being within a certain age range of each other, so the law doesn’t prevent or remove agency from girls to be sexual with people of a similar age to her own. Consenting fourteen year olds, for example, can get laid with other fourteen year old all they want without either being considered ‘victims’.
And the law is gender neutral, so it prohibits older women from sleeping with younger boys just as much as it prohibits older men sleeping with younger girls. (Or older people of any gender from sleeping with younger people of any gender, for that matter.) So it would cast any younger boy as a victim just as much as it would cast a younger girl.
Unless you propose that it’s “natural” for a girl’s sexuality to consist of wanting to have sex with men twice her age (but boys/men only ever want people younger than them, of course!), age of consent laws do diddly-squat to infantalize women and do plenty to protect young people of both genders from being coerced, manipulated, or forced into sex.
If they did that, and it wasn’t just a coincidence that they kept showing up, that raises them a tee-tiny notch in my estimation. (But not by much, since they still didn’t confront him and tell him not to creep on others.)
He sure is a determined creeper, though, which makes his crapaganda-stickering of that women’s washroom at his university that much more disgusting. And deserving of more punishment than he’s gotten, too.
… You can’t be fucking serious.
Paedophilia apologia wrapped in a thin layer of feminist language is still paedophilia apologia, and the sexual abuse of children has as much to do with the sexual agency of adult women as this pair of GIFs:
http://31.media.tumblr.com/0e61c64dc2674f709dcdf41fe6a864d3/tumblr_mjmfbi4ofD1r83ei3o1_250.gif
http://i.imgur.com/xR505FA.gif
Well, I’m not comfortable with a rape apologist using Jane Lane as an avatar, so.
What the flipping
Being preyed on by an adult, who can bring their maturity and resources to bear in order to manipulate a young person, is not a choice. Is this rah rah child abuse day? Did you and Atilla get copied on the same evil memo?
Worst. Holiday. Ever.
What strikes me about quartzkitty’s post is that all those issues listed aren’t actually problems with age of consent laws; they’re problems with infantalizing women and slut-shaming.
So, we’re all just imagining the arrests and prosecutions of grown women who statutorily rape the boys they’re teaching, I guess.
… umm…
Age of Consent laws render a child’s sexuality invisible (except not really because romeo and juliet laws). A narrative is created that a child is not capable of making informed choices about sex with an adult. It places responsibility for a sexual interaction between an adult and a child with the adult.
What exactly is wrong with this situation?
And to the extent that “girl and adult man” is viewed as more disgusting and predatory than “boy and adult woman,” that’s completely on the shoulders of a society that says “nice…” in response to the rape of a boy, with adults saying they wish they were so lucky when they were young. It’s on the shoulders of a society that treats a woman who has had sex as being “spoiled,” and who views even child and adult women alike as needing to be protected by paternal figures.
Getting rid of these toxic views towards female sexuality is a good thing, but doing so will not make sex between a girl and a man ok. Quartzkitty’s pointed out a legitimate cause but tied it to a completely bullshit effect.
WHY IS THIS THREAD FULL OF PEDOPHILES??????
WHY IS THIS THREAD FULL OF PEDOPHILES ARGUING THAT THEY AREN’T PEDOPHILES??????