If you’ve read Jeff Sharlet’s magnificent GQ account of his lost weekend amongst the “Men’s Human Rights Activists” at A Voice for Men’s conference last summer (or my take on it here), you know that some of the creepiest moments his account involved his friend Blair, a twentysomething writer who came along for the ride and ended up, by her account, being groped and propositioned by AVFM’s “director of collegiate activism” Sage Gerard.
Sharlet never mentions Blair’s last name, but Elam outs her in a AVFM post with the lovely title “GQ’s Jeff Sharlet pimps out Blair Braverman for clickbait.”
Braverman, like her friend Sharlet, is a writer. As in, a real writer, someone who’s won awards, whose work has been included in a number of anthologies, and who has a book coming out soon from Ecco/HarperCollins.
Elam must be aware of this – he links to her website, where all of this information is easily found – but for some reason doesn’t mention it. Perhaps because Braverman, less than half his age, is being published by, you know, an actual big-name publishing house, while Elam will never be published by anything more prestigious than Paul Elam Press? (Sorry, Zeta Press. Because Paul is a Zeta male, a term he made up to describe the best kind of male.)
Whatever the reason, Elam is content to portray “pretty young Blair,” whom he refers to repeatedly as a “girl,” as little more than a sort of journalistic honey trap brought to the conference in order to lure the men there into, I guess, acting like the predatory creeps they are?
He also writes that Blair, who trains and races sled dogs, “is into dogs, but I want to make it perfectly clear that I don’t mean that in a sexual way.”
Brilliant, Paul. You’re attempting to rebut a GQ piece that reveals you and your male followers to be a bunch of misogynistic assholes who are constantly saying inappropriately sexual things about (and to) every woman they find attractive … by being a misogynistic asshole saying inappropriately sexual things about a woman you find attractive.
Unexpectedly, Elam’s comrades at AVFM, in their comments on his article, eschew crude sexual comments and focus on substantive points.
Just kidding! They’re worse. Including the women.
Tara Palmatier, a clinical psychologist who has affixed herself firmly to AVFM and who co-hosts a regular Youtube show with Elam, writes of Braverman in something other than clinical terms, describing her as “a disingenuous doe-eyed (one eye slightly smaller than the other and just a smidge crossed) wannabe double agent,” adding:
Yo, MSM, next time you want to employ a “honey trap” to infiltrate the MHRM conference, spring a few more bucks for a more tempting and believable honey trap. Think Julian Assange grade.
AVFM’s “activism director” Attila Vinczer – we’ve met him before – pipes up with a weird and exceedingly creepy, er, appreciation of Braverman that may well make your skin crawl:
I sure recall Blair Braverman joining us in the lobby sporting her dark short shorts, shifting legs crossing one over the other and back again, rosy cheeks, blushing. Flirtatious? Hmmm. What other behaviour should she have had, being warned she would be raped?
One must wonder, just what exactly was their collective intention? Well, judging by the pathetic Jeff Sharlet hack article, it is clear, they were looking for that sizzle. What better plan than bring a young woman, dressed and behaving seductively provocative, to lure some unsuspecting guy like a pretty nerium oleander. We recognized the poison this pretty flower had in store and sent her packing.
Apparently all young women wearing shorts in June, and having legs that occasionally move, are trying to seduce creepy misogynistic assholes twice their age.
Dean Esmay, AVFM’s “managing editor” and “chief operations officer,” adds his two cents:
I remember noticing Blair and thinking she was an eye candy distraction whose job was to flirt with guys, and then thinking “nah don’t be sexist, she’s just nice.”
My bad. She was there specifically to be a distraction
A young woman being a young woman in the presence of Men’s Rights Activists – a clear case of entrapment!
Longtime AVFM regular “Andybob” had some questions.
I wonder how Sharlet prepped Blair Braverman for her role – apart from brushing the dog hairs off her person and instructing her to lose the goats. Did he coach her on how to drop a variety of rape jokes and references into conversations, or did she come up with it all on her own?
I’ve seen no indication that Braverman was prepped, or made any rape jokes, or attended the conference as anything other than a curious (and ultimately quite horrified) visitor. (The bit about goats is a reference to one of the photos AVFM filched from Braverman’s Facebook page and used to illustrate the article.)
GQ’s Sharlet – you know, the actual author of the piece that has the AVFMers so enraged – got some criticism as well. AVFM regular ManWithPlan referred snidely to Sharlet’s alleged “fat rolls.” Palmatier, a bit more creative, wrote that
Sharlet-tan gave me the heebie jeebies from his first cold, slimy amphibian-like approach. (Are slugs amphibians? That’s what he reminded me of.)
Oddly, none of the AVFMers accused Sharlet of trying to seduce them by crossing and uncrossing his legs.
NOTE: Yeah, I used that cartoon once before. But. come on, it’s awesome.
Somehow it does not surprise me that AVFM belongs to the Mike Huckabee School of “a woman existing and being attractive is being ‘pimped out’ by a man.”
They don’t even try to deny any of the horrifying things directly quoted in the piece. Nope. They just rehash the “booth babe” stereotype and throw in the word “clickbait”, which is rapidly going the way of Social Justice Warrior on the scale of “words that used to mean something, but now are just warning bells for assholes.”
On that note…if an Alpha Male is better than a Beta Male, why is a Zeta man the best kind of man?
To be fair, murder does smell like honeysuckle.
The best way to convince people you aren’t rapists or rape apologists is to imply that a woman is inviting rape by wearing shorts.
*rolls eyes*
suffrajitsu | February 26, 2015 at 7:01 pm
Depends on where you hide the bodies I s’ppose.
I was in a play once where two lovely little old ladies killed old homeless drifters with a bit of arsenic after giving them a nice hot meal, and they buried them in a little mock cemetery in the basement. (Arsenic and Old Lace is amazing, bee-tee-dubs).
Then I was in another where bodies were buried under the rosebushes to fertilize the plants. (I can’t remember the name of it, but I played a woman who was a front for an author of romance novels and my character was killed over his inheritance by her partner. I remember I had to fall out of my chair and land on the floor, and I practiced long and hard to not put my hand out to brace my fall, because I was supposed to be dead when I was gently shoved over onto the floor after my heart stopped, due to being given a large dose of a strong paralytic.)
Okay, so MRAs claim that (a) they are the male version of feminists and/or (b) feminists are a hate movement (I swear I’ve seen the same MRAs say both). But can you imagine feminists saying any of this about a good-looking young male reporter who came to cover one of their events? That he’s a trap, sent to make them act bad (which would be his fault anyway) but he also knows nothing because he’s young, good-looking, and a man? Yeah, I can’t either.
But you didn’t.
Even accepting that Blair was just there to be a trap, how trivial is it to avoid that trap? I’m trying to imagine a situation in which a reasonable person would drag someone away into privacy, repeatedly touch them and try to edge closer, push 2 hugs on them, and then warn them *apropos of literally nothing* about sending mixed signals. Nothings coming to mind.
Fact is, even if Blair is just a honey pot, y’all dived in like freaking Winnie the Pooh.
Lea: yet another own goal, for sure. These idiots reveal themselves in as “screaming from the rooftops” a way as one could.
I finally read the gq article today, and I gotta say I was impressed with how sympathetically it was written. Or at least it started out mostly sympathetic to the MRAs. It’s like Sharlet was trying really hard to be neutral but just encountered so much creepiness that he couldn’t help but criticize them.
But hey, you know MRAs. Anything that isn’t glowing praise of them is misandry.
Someone literally had to ask if slugs are amphibians?? AMPHIBIANS! Last I checked, you had to be a vertebrate for that and not, you know, a mollusc. I know most dudebros can’t biology, but seriously. SERIOUSLY. Couldn’t he at least take five seconds to find a wikipedia article to misinterpret? Is that really so hard??
Chronic lurker
Doing actual research is Misandry
Huh. Ok… so. Could someone help me out a bit? Just trying to connect the dots here between “pretty woman” and “creepy rape jokes.” Anyone wanna let me know exactly how one causes the other? Cause I’m pretty sure my own reaction to an attractive woman would not be to make creepy rape jokes.
In fact, if an attractive woman came to a convention of mine and said she was worried she’d get raped, the absolute first thing on my mind would be to get rid of that fear. Not fuel it.
Reading these dudes gives such a clear understanding of how their echo chamber-fueld worldview distorts their perception of reality. They make crude rape jokes and the woman blushes; they are convinced this is arousal (because we all know that feeeeeeemmaaaalllees all secretly fantasize about rape), when in reality it’s just embarassment. They think they were building a rapport, when in reality they were freaking her the fuck out.
kirbywarp | February 26, 2015 at 8:10 pm
Easy. Pretty woman exists within eyesight of MRAs, thus rape jokes have to be made. Lojik.
Every time I think we’ve reached a theoretical maximum of willful self-deception and ignorance, I read another article that mentions Paul Elam.
I don’t even have a good metaphor for the guy and his cronies. They’re not intellectual black holes; the light of knowledge is always escaping them. They’re not a philosophical sloths; they change their underlying justifications for hatred too rapidly. Maybe they’re morally static? Always shifting, but never signifying anything of meaning?
Congrats, MRAs. You defy summation while still being walking stereotypes.
They are the masters of projection. Anything a woman does that isn’t a verified Boner Killer means she wants sex. Playing with her hair, making polite conversation, not slapping you after you pinch her bum, it’s all a green light my friend. Its black and white – women either want sex or they want sex but do something that’s completely offputting. Like texting you on your birthday, short hair, or belly fat.
Wait, do smelly ugly feminists want sex all the time too? I can’t remember the narrative.
I don’t know if you know, but zeta was a code among some folks in the furry culture that they were zooerasts. So…
I think it goes like this; smelly ugly feminists can’t get anyone to have sex with them, so they get sexually frustrated and go around hating the target of their attractions. They claim the mantle of an equality movement, but really do nothing but complaing about how their gender is oppressed, with the ultimate goal of controlling the other gender and getting sex from them.
… What was that about projection again?
@Mewens I imagine them to be a kind of alien slime residue that is constantly changing colour but the substance remains the same. It pops up in places that you semi expect it to be but still don’t want, and it won’t clean off for ages but then suddenly flounces, and then a few days later you find it again sliming all over some report about stats on college rapes, hurgleglurbering about how if women didn’t get drunk they wouldn’t be raped and most of them are liars anyway. It can just about speak English but doesn’t make any sense, little of it actually fits with world reality, and you wonder if it just has too big of an ego to adapt to the new planet and is more intent on trying to make the Earthlings believe what it does, because trying to shift itself from its own perceptions will make it dissipate completely.
Well, to be fair, the “conference” WAS given by A Voice For Bonernotes. And Paulie & Co are well known for their penchant for pestering pretty young women — or, as Paulie likes to call them, “fuckmuffins”. They love to hate these women, because they know damn well that no one’s going to willingly lie down for them to do their thing. And even less do they like to have it pointed out that this is what they do, when they do it. It’s just like the alcoholic who waves a bottle and drunkenly slurs that he never touches the demon rum, nosirree, not clean and sober lily-white him…(hic)…
I just find it hilarious to think that she “trapped” them, when it was THEM doing all the creeping and perving. Hey guys, if you don’t want to be called creeps and perverts, it’s on YOU not to do the creepy-pervy shit. Not on her to stay away and stop tempting you. Personal responsibility, remember?
Elam’s post is one of the least responsy responses I’ve seen him write.
“You said we made rape jokes to a woman who was afraid of getting raped, that’s slander! I mean, yes, it was 1am, and yes, we were in a room, and yes, we made rape jokes. Those were hilarious by the way.
… What, there was supposed to be a ‘but’ in there? Oh, erm… She was too hot, what did she expect? And you were misleading people by saying you didn’t expect us to try to rape her! I mean, wait… hang on… No, we weren’t going to rape her, but you were, hang on… um… She’s into dogs! But totes not in a sexual way.
See what I did there? Saying I didn’t expect something to imply that it would be something to expect? That’s exactly the same as saying you didn’t expect us to rape her in response to us making rape jokes.
Also, you must be a mind reader to claim I was interested in hearing what she said and was happy to see a woman attending. I mean, I was, but you can’t just claim something true about my mental state, that’s hack journalism! It’s not like you can read body language or anything…
… Did I mention she’s into dogs? Cause she’s totally into dogs. She didn’t say those words, I did to be misleading, because that’s what you did. Right.
…
Nailed it.”
That was my entry for the ‘Most Imaginative Metaphor for the Manosphere’ competition.
That’s only for women and manginas, remember? Since everything is women’s fault and manginas only help them.
I’ve run across trolls so noxious and verbose that I posited that they couldn’t actually be humans. Bear with me, but you’ve seen those price bots that sometimes key off each other in strange ways to endlessly inflate prices on Amazon and the like?
Well, imagine if something similar happened to one of these spambots that litter the Web with almost-English. Like, it was programmed to engage, rather than just drop snippets of non sequitur half-gibberish. So, it monitors responses to its postings, and repeats the ones that get the most response. Eventually, it’s posting wall-length screeds about TEH JOOS and FEMINNIIminmzm … er, DEM WIMMINZ.
We could take the theory to the next step: add in some programming to handle moderation, and you’d probably end up with rape apologia and victim blaming, since they’re among the most obnoxious crap that doesn’t get moderated on many sites.
If we didn’t have eyewitnesses to these guys meeting in real life, I’d say that theory’s almost as believable as the mere existence of Paul Elam and his ideology.
“She’s into dogs, but not in a sexual way.”
And he’s into dog-whistling, and that’s why all the dogs in the vicinity suddenly started barking their heads off.
You did, Kirbywarp. You really did.
Off topic, but I thought I might as well share it.
This dress has apparently got the internet up in arms and divided in two as people are arguing that it’s gold and white, while some others are arguing it’s blue and black. A small other percentage are arguing different colours entirely.
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s–5RZtwMnq–/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/gcmrcydrfpdfyamqbp8w.jpg
IT’S WHITE AND GOLD. COME ON NOW.