Is Men's Rights hate site A Voice for Men melting down before our eyes?

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.