Is AVFM, the hate site we all love to hate, melting down before our eyes? Consider.
1) Men Going Their Own Way are Going Their Own Way, Far Away, From Paul Elam
AVFM’s head cheese Paul Elam has long fantasized about becoming King of the MGTOWs, which would help him build up his Flying Monkey army and turn Men Going Their Own Way into Money Going Into Paul Elam’s Pockets. In doing so, he seems to have alienated virtually all of those who consider themselves MGTOWs.
That hasn’t stopped him from trying to annex MGTOWland, or reveling in the setbacks of MGTOWers who haven’t pledged their love to Paul. The AVFM/MGTOW war has even had its own “Mission Accomplished” moment: a 2013 post by Elam’s partner-in-MGTOW Peter Wright declaring that “AVfM is indisputably MGTOW-central.”
The current round in the ongoing AVFM/MGTOW slapfight started with the publication of an e-book on MGTOW by Elam and Wright that was not exactlly well-received by MGTOWers. It didn’t help that the misogynistic and astoundingly un-self-aware Elam made a video labeling his MGTOW enemies misogynistic “PigTOWs.” I mean, they are misogynistic PigTOWs, but insulting those you hope to turn into supporters isn’t exactly a great PR move.
MGTOWers are also angry that Elam has promoted a stay-at-home mother, the woman who calls herself “Janet Bloomfield” and “Judgy Bitch,” into AVFM’s main PR person. Former AVFMers John “The Other” Hembling and Diana Davison are now enthusiastically supporting the anti-Elam MGTOW army, and the online sniping between AVFM and its enemies has reached a new low, with AVFMers apparently passing around nude pictures of Davison and Elam describing Hembling, his former number two at AVFM, as
the one guy at AVFM who was one blowjob away from turning mangina when the Queen of Auschwitz showed up to swallow.
Yeah, I’m not sure why Elam is calling Davison “the Queen of Auschwitz” either — because she’s skinny? — but I don’t think it’s meant as a compliment.
Apparently, the things MGTOWers and AVFMers are saying about each other in private are even worse, though I can scarcely imagine how. As AVFM ally Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan said in a YouTube comment of her own,
There are things going on in private chats and other places outside the public eye that would make you puke.
Yikes.
2) AVFM is alienating former supporters — and may even be driving off one of the biggest celebrities of the Men’s Rights movement, the aforementioned Karen “GirlWritesWhat.”
The latest Men’s Rightser to desert AVFM? YouTuber Natasha Douglas (a.k.a. Nurdy Dee, a.k.a. Nurdy Dancing), who says she’s gotten tired of the giant “clusterfuck” that AVFM has become. While she’s not exactly a major figure in the Men’s Rights Movement, AVFM has quietly moved a rather appalling video of hers, in which she argues that calling a man a misogynist is the equivalent of calling someone the n-word, off of its featured spot on AVFM’s front page, where it had been perched for what seemed like forever.
More significantly, Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan, AVFM’s star “Honey Badger,” has been offering some rather blunt critiques of Elam et al, and suggesting that she could easily walk away from the site. GWW, a popular YouTube blabber with more than 91,000 subscribers, noted in one Youtube comment (to the video here) that she’s become “sick to death of the poo-flinging going on between AVFM and MGTOW.”
While still publicly a supporter of AVFM, she’s talking a lot like someone with one foot out the door:
I’m still on the masthead, as far as I know, but I don’t do a whole lot for AVFM, and never have. I’m not even a member of their forums. I have no editorial control. I get no money from it. I haven’t contributed an article in ages, and anything of mine on the site is essentially grabbed from my YT channel or my blog. My opinions are my own. I’m willing to bet that I could cut them loose without suffering any real loss.
Why don’t I? Because my name can help them. …
[P]lease don’t think I answer to AVFM, that I care about what AVFM thinks of me, or that AVFM tells me what to do. They don’t. They could all drop dead tomorrow and I’d keep doing what I’m doing.
3) Money troubles: AVFM’s donors seem ever more reluctant to keep sending money to a site that seems incapable of accomplish much of anything beyond providing a platform for a bunch of misogynistic malcontents to shout into the wind.
This may be the real killer. AVFM appears to be having more and more trouble raising the exorbitant amounts of money that Elam claims the site needs to operate, and his fundraising appeals are growing ever more desperate.
At the moment they’re halfway through a two-week long (!!) fund drive, and their little fundraising thermometer is indicating some pretty chilly air:
The fact that they are even running a fund drive with such an, er, ambitious goal is a sign that AVFM’s “new approach” to financing its existence is failing miserably.
In January, after what seems to have been the site’s most difficult fundraiser yet, Elam told his readers that “we need a way to finance our move ahead without coming to you every three months and putting it all on your shoulders,” promising his long-suffering donors “a drastic decrease quarterly in fundraising goals.”
His latest quarterly fundraising goal? Exactly the same as his last one.
Apparently Elam’s other projected “revenue streams” — advertising, his “publishing house,” “e-stores,” and even web hosting services — have not even amounted to a little trickle.
I am shocked — shocked! — that AVFM’s little “publishing house” has not managed to make millions off of two collections of century-old public domain writings by anti-suffrage socialist E. Belfort Bax and a book about MGTOW that virtually everyone in that little community hates.
In his current fundraising appeal, Elam explains that he’s trying to turn AVFM into a for-profit LLC, claiming that
the expense of pulling this together was considerable, given the rates of attorneys and CPAs. And that is not even close to all of the expenses.
For our upcoming publishing house, Zeta Press, we have had to engage attorneys to develop editor’s and author’s contracts and invest in the web development and ecommerce necessary to make that a reality.
How much does it cost to prepare an author contract for a terrible e-book that will sell 8 copies?
In his January post, Elam also suggested that the site’s upcoming conference could make some sweet, sweet cash. Today, he’s singing a rather different tune, declaring that planning for the conference has been
so financially consuming that the LLC’s needs preclude me from AVFM personal income for the foreseeable future. That means I have to work at something else for personal income.
To accomplish this I will be offering online coaching services to men only for a limited amount of hours a week in order to keep food on the table.
Yes, really. I suggest that we start calling him “Coach.”
I will be including one hour per week of pro bono work for those who cannot pay.
What a generous soul! And I will match his offer: Give me $20,000 a quarter and I’ll talk to someone for an hour for free.
In any case, the future of AVFM isn’t looking too bright at the moment. Change “countdown” to “meltdown,” and “Venus” to “Uranus” in the following song and you have the perfect theme song for AVFM today.
I’m not sure why this video is labeled “the worst cover ever” of “The Final Countdown,” as it is clearly the BEST.
Oh, noes… Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people. Heartbreaking, I’m sure. 🙂 🙂 🙂
I’d offer some words of approval for those that are in the process of departing from the AVFM sinking ship but considering they had no problem benefiting from its sleazy practices when things were going well?
I have nothing positive to say about them.
Oh, I am doing the happy, happy joy, joy dance right about now… 🙂 🙂
It could not happen to a more deserving bunch of…um…whatever…
If I was a more cynical person, I might be inclined to think that all of this Manosphere/MGTOW stuff was just a racket that some opportunists are using as a scheme to turn other people’s hate and ignorance into cash.
It takes far less to afford a website than Elam pretends. But even if he couldn’t afford his site, he wouldn’t just shut up.
So what will the future look like? A very lonely, angrier-than-ever Coach Elam blogging to a significantly smaller audience? Pretending he’s still relevant?
I hope so.
Great article, but gonna nitpick and say this is the best cover of “the final countdown” 🙂
BTW, the notion of Elam trying to smear anyone by calling them “misogynist” makes me LOL — and almost as much as the notion of Elam being a “coach” to people or any sentient beings… though, actually, the latter is horrifying.
Is she Jewish? The only thing MRAs love as much as hurling around sexist slurs is hurling around antisemitic slurs. (Then again, with MRAs, whether or not she’s Jewish probably doesn’t matter.)
This coming from Karen Straughan? As in; “GirlWritesWhat” Karen Straughan? She – the woman who puts out youtube content so grotesque and hateful that any normal person may suddenly find themselves fighting their gag reflex – claims this?
…
The idea both intrigues and horrifies me.
@theomegaconstant –
Noooo! What on earth would lead you to think Elam et al would be just a bunch of snake-oil-selling grifters riding the Cash Carousel to gravy train land?!?!
Just look at all the good works that Elam is… um, just look at all the advoca-… er, just look at how much it costs to sit around bitching in front of the computer!
If and when this does break down I’m not sure it will be all that relevant. Yeah AVFM was supposedly the biggest according to Lam Lam, but he tried to constrain all the wackos (even though he is one) for publicity purposes (poor job). And after that all we’ll get are a proliferation of nutjob on tap. Lots of them. That being said when it does break down all of a sudden we’ll see them pointing fingers at each other blaming them for the breakdown. One has to wonder if that fraud GWW will see men in a new light though. Bloomfield on the other hand will never change.
Why are all the anti-women-women stay at home mothers who hate working mothers? And they claim to be on the left and not actually conservative?
There are some big flat rocks I do not want to pick up.
Vanir, I concur with your statement. How bad could it be? It makes me think of the boilerplate prose in some Lovecraft pastiches – like “the vile revelations and insane heresies poured forth like a torrent of evil sickness”.
If there’s a better German word than “Schadenfreud” then I’ve never heard it.
Um, no. That would be the equivalent of calling a sheet-wearing KKKer a cracker, actually.
As for the rest: Snurks and happydances all around! My day, it is MADE.
I can maybe understand being so sad/lonely/angry that you’d visit AVfM. But who the fuck would every give them money? Seriously, it’s mind-boggling that they’ve raised even $5k.
The only time MRAs/MGTOW are any fun to me is when they’re cannibalizing their movement with their sharp little teeth.
This last week was fun. Paul Elam went after prominent MGTOWs RBK, Stardusk, and Barbarossa (“Fucking pussies and liars, all three of them…Fucking bunch of chickenshit, screen-named clowns crowing about MGTOW while John and Yoko Fucking Ono take over their show.”) Barbarossa called him on it and Elam unleashed his patented anti-feminist rage on him, calling him “dickless” and “moron”, and “the dude grasping for straws about shit you don’t understand”, and a “a garden variety chump… fucking blue pill”.
Elam smeared Diana Davison and John Hembling like you said and also said “DD (not talking about her chest) is just a personality disordered cunt who whores herself figuratively, not for money but for control over other people. She doesn’t even have the integrity to be a whore.” He also said “JTO’s common law wife [is] walking him like a
dog”. About his former female staffer WBB, who presented a video showing that she is not, he just keeps repeating “…she was a theif (sic).” About former AVFM staffer Nurdy Dancing, Suzanne McCarley accused her of repeating words Davison put in her mouth.
MGTOW responded rather harshly, hehe.
I’d rather be on the broken end of a bungee cord than be a woman who gets mixed up with AVFM. I’m talking about WBB, NurdyD, Davison, Straughan ( getting her ass kicked in the same thread), and soon to come, McCarley and the mommyblogger Judgybitch, who are now degraded as people and hopelessly compromised as online personalities.
Without women, AVFM will wizen up like a prune.
(Dr. T will stay to the bitter end though.)
Even with them, it’s looking pretty dehydrated, heh heh. But oh, the delicious irony. Goes great with MGTOW tears!
“To accomplish this I will be offering online coaching services to men only for a limited amount of hours a week in order to keep food on the table.”
What could he possibly be coaching them to do?
Also, the superfluous “only” in that sentence and “amount of hours” instead of “number of hours” get a supercilious internet brow raise from me. Hmph.
Thank goodness for some good news.
The taste is bittersweet. That AVFM itself is dying is sweet, but sadly, what goes for AVFM does not necessarily go for the manosphere bowel movement as a whole–and the Gamergate fiasco last year was a fine recruitment drive for the Redpill Right, and neoreactionaries, and neo-Nazis.
“Set up a google alert for news articles about women and do thirty reps of angry comment posting!”
“Uh, coach, shouldn’t I be working on my resume or dealing with my…”
“NO! Your life can’t be better until women’s lives are worse! Drop and give me twenty incomprehensible memes! Do it maggot! 110%!”
Ah the manosphere circular firing squad reassembles once again!
Judas: I must disagree. There can never be a better German word than “Gummi”. It makes me giggle every time X)
OH NO! Paul might have to *work*! Heavens!
What is a PigTOW? Pig Their Own Way? Pi Going Their Own Way? Something else? I know I’m being literal and they are probably just being assholes without caring whether their insult acronym actually stands for something, but still……