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.
wordsp1nner:
Wow… That optical illusion with the checker pattern… Amazing! I couldn’t believe those two squares were the same shade. I REFUSED! I figured there was an illusion, but the pic was an exaggeration or something. So I copied the image and cut out everything but those two squares. Same shade. So cool! I even switched the two in the image and they were indistinguishable (other than the letter). Neato.
I can’t see black on that dress at all. I mean, look at the top of the dress! It’s so light! If the white/blue part is blue, then it is the lightest blue in the world.
It looks like white and gold in shadow to me, which makes things look bluish, so my brain autocorrects it back to white. Same reason I say gold instead of tan or brown.
The checkerboard shadow illusion thing is intense, it’s one of those things that are so strong you can’t “unsee” it even if you know exactly what’s going on. Your brain just refuses.
skiriki | February 27, 2015 at 12:21 am
This is the kind of shit that makes me hesitant to play with other people. Manbabies screeching about witch hunting someone who they think isn’t really playing because they’re “too good”, and getting someone’s career and reputation so smeared because they jump a hate-fuled hype train that the target of their harassment just says “fuck it, I’m out”, and then the manbabies sit around and crow about how they won, or proceed to smear them further because “BUT WE HAVE PROOFS”.
Then in the same breath they say it’s their hobbies of gaming that makes women not like them. Yeah, sure.
On a lighter note, I did just discover a wonderful new comic I’d like to get into from Dark Horse called Lady Killer.
https://www.darkhorse.com/Comics/26-351/Lady-Killer-1
And a friend of mine bought me a game to play on my YouTube that looks like Deviantart had a terrifying love affair with a knock-off Vocaloid, RPG Maker, and the Unity engine. I’m still on the fence about dropping acid being involved. It’s supposed to be a “Manga Horror” game, and I’ve seen someone else play it.
And it has multiplayer somehow. A horror game with text-based elements somehow has multiplayer because of course it does.
I can’t tell if creators were serious or not. Or if they started out serious, found out that people didn’t like their game, then decided if their game was going to be terrible, they were going to make it as terrible as absolutely possible.
Still, they seem like responsible, driven developers. I haven’t seen anything bad from them, so let’s hope they continue with their game development skills.
These guys are their own worst enemies. Seriously. They disgrace themselves every time they open their mouths.
My favorite bit from the comments I read was from Vinczer.
“My business friends”. heh.
There’s a bit of difference between telling friends not to buy GQ, which is doable, and getting major companies like Calvin Klein and Movado to stop buying ad space in the biggest English language men’s magazine, which is comically impossible. Good ole Attila is an endless fount of meaningless posturing.
So, let’s imagine you’re Avfm. A mainstream media organisation gets in touch. They want to report on you. You say okay. They report that your “organisation’ is full of incoherent hateful nonsense, no activism and very strange people. You react angrily, admonishing them.with several articles and hundreds of comments, which keep followers busy but makes you look far worse.
Then you do it again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
Every single mainstream media article portrays you negatively. Eventually, the negative media profile inspires other media outlets go investigate you personally. The investigation turns up hypocrisy and a very distasteful personal life.
You write several articles admonishing the jourbalist and your followers brigade the mainstream article. This makes you look worse.
Another mainstream feature appears, it portrays you personally and your organisation and event very negatively and makes your followers look very weird and unpleasant.
You writ articles admonishing them and your followers brigade the article, making you and your followers appear very bad.
What’s that common definition of insanity again?
What do you do the next time the mainstream media get in touch?
How does an adult not know slugs aren’t amphibians? What’s next, are bees birds?
I think we can add slugs to the growing list of misandric lifeforms, they’re hermaphrodites and many of them apparently chew off their mate’s penis to untangle themselves after mating. Slug penes are the disposable slug sex organ!
Put me with the people who saw the dress as black/blue when first skimming past it, but then as gold/white on second inspection.
Someone – not me, because I don’t know how to do these things – needs to create an Attila Vinzcer Comment Generator. With it, anyone can rebut people on the internet in Attila’s idiosyncratic pseudo-intellectual word salad style.
First, to get the dress out of the way—the first photo I saw of it *definitely* looked white and gold to me, to the point where I was confused that there was any argument. But now I can see the blue and black, and it’s actually harder to see the white and gold anymore.
Secondly, the thing I can’t get over is that the GQ article specifically states that Blair was there with her boyfriend. So not only were these guys creeping her despite the presence of a reporter, they were creeping on her despite the fact that she was already partnered.
Step 1: Complain about evil women and their conniving, cuckolding ways.
Step 2: Hit on some other dude’s girlfriend.
Self awareness, once again, = 0.
(I feel pretty safe assuming that the MRA’s weren’t thinking of mutually-agreed polyamory with step 2.)
@skiriki:
When women are assumed to be cheating if they’re any good it’s just so hard to imagine why she’d not want to stream or meet offline. I’m sure there’s no alternative explanation for why she doesn’t do it. /sarcasm.
I mean heck, perhaps she’s just shy – it’s not like she’d be the first person to get into computers for that exact reason.
Somebody needs to explain how gold can be black. I’m confused.
I was watching an old Star Trek episode, Skin of Evil, last night, and there was one line of dialogue that I thought summed up MRAs perfectly: “And here you are. Feeding on your own loneliness. Consumed by your own pain. Believing your own lies.”
I can’t see black either, only gold.
I feel like women are that dress. MRAs look at women and see cartoon evil, false rape accusations, slutty behavior, golddigging, and oppressive sexy butts that deny them sex and secretly run the world. I look at women and see humans. I just can’t see the black, no matter how hard I try.
It makes it a little hard to have rational discussions with them.
The dress – perhaps I saw it on a different gamma setting but controversially I saw blue and green.
I’m actually more curious about why this has ‘broken the internet’, it’s funny how something like that catches the imagination.
Back on topic:
teal dear version:
What I’m getting is – they liked Sharlet and Blair, they talked with them, they regret doing so and in order to save face are now claiming they didn’t like them and spotted them for what they really were straight away. Only that makes them look all the worse.
long version:
The Blair thing, and all the rubbish they say:
1. She was there as eye candy.
2. She was there as a distraction.
3. They spotted she was there as a distraction and subsequently ignored her/sent her away.
4. She was a honey trap.
5. She wasn’t a sufficiently good honey trap so they didn’t fall for it.
6. She was telling rape jokes and making rape references.
7. She was flirting and leading them on.
Seems to cover most of it.
So in reality (most likely, based on the article and from prior experience of the reality distortion field around MRM material):
1. She was there and a woman.
2. She was there out of curiosity and/or to write about it herself.
3. They said awful things in front of her – if they spotted she was a distraction and were careful around her just imagine how it would have gone down if they hadn’t.
4. She was a woman.
5. She wasn’t a ’10’ but they still said awful things in front of her. See 3.
6. I’m guessing having been warned about rape she might have it on her mind but that her making rape jokes probably isn’t true.
7. She was a woman.
Also they hated Sharlet from the moment he walked in, he was like a slug and repellent. So they said lots of awful things in front of him anyway, imagine how it would have been if they’d actually trusted him.
That argument is always fun, because either you liked the guy, trusted him and said bad things in front of him because of that; or you didn’t trust him, disliked him and could have said a lot worse.
Admitting you liked someone who subsequently hurt you somehow doesn’t seem that big of a deal to me, and probably says a lot about how these guys see things.
Wow, I’m sorry, somehow that didn’t look quite as big in the comment box as it does now I’ve posted.
@dhag85 and @Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
I see drastically different colors depending on how much of the photo I see. Does this help?
So this:
http://i.imgur.com/WET3Fwm.png
Totally white and gold. This was the first thumbnail I saw, and I had no idea how anyone could read the trim as being black.
But this:
http://i.imgur.com/nyDhof4.png?1
…Yeah, it looks blue and black to me. And it kinda made me mad when it did.
Both are from exactly the same photo; all I did was crop.
@Ghost Robot:
Oooh, interesting. I’ll have a think.
Ooh, the dress is both Blue and Black OR White and Gold, depending on how I tilt the screen of my laptop – it’s a white-balance illusion.
Also, aside from all the victim-blaming creep-tacular skeeviness of AVFM… By calling their in-house publisher “Zeta Press”, isn’t Elam trading on the coveted “victim status” that he accuses every woman of doing? Like literally claiming to be of an inferior, put-upon identity group for financial gain, despite not being oppressed in the slightest?
If the manosphere keeps projecting so hard, perhaps it will act as a beacon visible to space beings who will see them as hostiles, travel to Earth and zap them all with ray-guns.
@Kootiepatra:
Hahaha – I look at both of those and they’re identical to me. Perhaps I’ve just spent too long adjusting white balance on photos.
@Ghost Robot:
The major downside is having to actively seek out his wisdom. I didn’t need quotes around ‘wisdom’ there did I? You can tell that’s sarcasm without them? I often assume if it’s really obvious I’m being sarcastic that I don’t need to point it out or sound sarcastic, but it doesn’t always work.
The people who made the dress are enjoying the free publicity, but they have stated on their website that it is blue and black material. Sorry white and golders. 🙁
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2662256/thumbs/o-THE-DRESS-570.jpg?1
I see blue and black in THIS picture of the dress, except for the top left corner where it is white and gold again. (WTF eyes?)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/27/the-dress_n_6766774.html?utm_source=xojane.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=pubexchange
I still have no idea how I managed to get gold out of black. I can understand getting black out of gold under certain lighting, but…oh, how can I trust anything again?? *rocks back and forth in a corner*
@Kootiepatra
Like lith says, there’s zero difference in color between those two pics. And the gold is nowhere near black. I just don’t get it. 🙂
I see violet blue and brown.
Isn’t stuff like that cool?
Every time I read stuff like this, I fear that their quieter like minded drones my worm his way into political office.
That said, have some humor:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/25/8106759/revenge-porn-operator-issues-google-dmca-takedown
@lith,
Yes. I don’t speak WTF, and don’t want to learn.