So it turns out that I’m not the only one who is thoroughly underwhelmed by A Voice for Men’s lineup of conference speakers for their upcoming International Conference on Men’s Issues, By Which They Mean How Men Are Oppressed By Women’s Sexy Butts.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, some of the regulars are complaining that AVFM is delivering much less than it did last year, for a much higher price — with ticket prices running a steep $650, currently discounted to the high. high price of $399.
Yep, attendees of the conference will be paying as much as $650 just to get in to the event, not counting the cost of airfare, hotels, or even food at the conference itself.
They could easily end up paying more than $1000 for the privilege of watching Elam and a bunch of his AVFM cronies blather on about the same crap they blather on about in countless hour-long videos available for free on YouTube. The only “big name” in the mix is Warren Farrell, whose fame as a Men’s Rights advocate peaked maybe twenty years ago.
As fundude1 put it:
The lineup looks terrible with just Elam, Golden, Palmitier and Farrell.
Both Golden and Palmitier really bring nothing to the table. They are both psychologists (like Elam and Farrell) and are UNKNOWN.
Is it churlish of me to point out that neither Elam or Farrell are actually psychologists?
There is no diversity at ALL among the people in terms of academic backgrounds, general popularity, etc.
Last year’s conference had a much more broad array of characters that had FAR more popularity in general.
Fundude1’s outrage meter went further into the red after he discovered how much the whole thing was going to cost.
But he wasn’t the only one upset by the underwhelming lineup and overwhelming cost.
To take just one example: therock6658, a Men’s Rights subreddit regular with considerable sympathy for AVFM, wrote a long and mournful comment lamenting “the fact that AVFM is … half-assing this whole event.”
I hate to say this but I was looking forward to this announcement for months when Elam stated that he was going to put the tickets on sale for the second of April, but once they went on sale and I looked at the roster, it ultimately turned me off to the entire men’s rights movement.
Yep, that’s right: AVFM has bungled their conference so badly he’s reconsidering his support for the entire Men’s Rights movement.
Considering the price, he added, “it just does not look good for the outcome of this particular conference.” Nope.
As for the lineup, he complained, it
does indeed bother me as much as it does everyone else. It’s mostly people from AVFM and not enough people from external sources. 10 speakers present as opposed to the 14 from last year plus everyone involved in the panel discussions. …
I really hope that this is more due to budgeting more than anything else because I would hate to learn that this is really due to greed or anything like that. Yes, I do feel that donations to AVFM have been going down as of late and perhaps that’s the big reason why this conference shrank from last year.
Given that AVFM’s last fundraiser brought in less than half of what Elam had been demanding, I’d say that was a safe bet.
Also, you may recall that at the start of the year, Elam announced that he “hope[d] to make some actual profit” from this year’s conference.
Apparently Elam never took economics in college, because then he might have realized that you can’t simply make more money by jacking your prices as high as you want; if your prices are too steep, no one will buy what you’re selling.
But hey, as Elam apparently explained to therock6658, having fewer speakers means “more time for attendees to socialize with the presenters, etc.”
WIN A DATE WITH PAUL ELAM
Actually, that’s not quite right: PAY THROUGH THE NOSE FOR THE CHANCE TO MAYBE TALK TO PAUL ELAM
I actually pretty much have a good mind to make my own anti-feminist conference myself and do twice as much in 1 day than AVFM is trying to do in 3.
You know, I do too.
I think it’s fair to say that there’s a good chance AVFM’s conference won’t happen at all.
I looked at the ticket prices David reported and just blinked.
Seriously? I just spent 4 days at a convention with multiple tracks of programming, dozens of guest speakers, an art show, a dealers room full of shiny, dances and concerts every night and the freakin’ Iron Throne sitting in a roped off spot available for all comers to sit upon while their friends took pictures. Entry cost us 45$ each in advance or 70$ at the door. Hotel was @110$ a night. Spousal Unit paid for display space in the art show but made back his fee plus in sales.
The price Paul’s smells of a con man cleaning up before fleeing town
Honestly, I can barely cook but at least I know it. These guys need to get themselves a crockpot and some sort of “Cooking for Dummies” textbook. Yikes.
“I want a girl/ Just like the girl/ Who married dear old [grand]dad.”
The trouble is, these guys were raised on an assumption that there would always be a woman to take care of them the way Mommy did. I feel a bit sorry for them — it is difficult to have been raised to fit into a social role that is no longer viable. But at a certain point you have to decide whether you’d rather adapt to the world as it is or sit on your butt and complain about it all.
As to the conference, when have we ever seen any reason to believe that anything run by the AVfM crowd would be anything other than a clusterfuck? It’s probably just as well that they don’t actually do anything real; about men’s issues — they’d just snafu that too.
Sn0rkmaiden – the idea of someone being kicked out of the BNP for being TOO obnoxious is a real mind-stretcher for me. Then again, isn’t that how UKIP got started?*
*Joke.
http://weknowgifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/i-understood-that-reference.gif
I’m also going to nth the idea for a virtual feminist conference that focuses on men’s issues, and I really love the idea of focusing on men who do art in traditionally “feminine” crafts. :D
I even imagine that our entrance fee would be cheaper by a long shot, and, if it is indeed virtual, it wouldn’t cost anything for people to go.
We could call it MammothCon, or Fem(inists) for Men or something. : P
And by “cost anything for people to go”, I meant like in hotel, food, and travel fees. : P
I guess I shouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Paul Elam to learn that he can’t organize cons. Conventions, I should say; he’s got plenty of practice with confidence games.
Waaaay off-topic, but if anyone’s interested I can confirm from personal experience just now that Skyrim giants still launch the player character into orbit if they kill em. I remember we thought maybe that had been patched out. My character got hit with a club, and suddenly I’m playing Kerbala Space Program. Unlike the times I’ve gotten kicked, I think I actually started to come down before the game reloaded.
@Falconer: You might be interested in this.
“Army of Children” more like “Village of the Damned,” amirite
@Alan
As far as I know there’s no umbrella movement for men’s issues. However there are a lot of people, men and women, working on individual issues that disproportionately affect men. Just Detention, the anti-prison-rape organization, comes to mind. There are male domestic violence survivor and sexual violence survivor activists, violence prevention activists and more.
Ironically, the actual activists for male issues are feminists, or close allies who go out of their way to acknowledge their debt to feminism. These activists also make it very clear that they are in no way affiliated with the MRA.
Here’s gender violence prevention activist and my huge intellectual crush Jackson Katz, for instance, starting off his TED talk discussing the influence of feminism on him and other male activists. (This begins about 30 seconds in, so it’s practically the opening.) 4:27 in he acknowledges the work of feminist linguist Julia Penelope before using it to illustrate a point, and he even mentions elsewhere how unfair it is that he’s going to get credit for these concepts and messages which originated with women.
Wouldn’t he amazing to have at our dream conference? *sigh*
@Sarity
These organized efforts don’t want the self-styled MRM anywhere near them either, so it works out. If anything I’m pretty sure the MRM make these actual men’s activists’ work harder by tainting the entire idea, drawing away attention and support etc.
I really want our conference to happen, if only to watch MRAs’ heads explode at the idea of their nemeses doing actual men’s activism. Who knows, maybe it’ll even galvanize/shame them into doing real work for men. I know, unlikely, but still.
Well, no clue what the cost is but the American Men’s Studies Association has a conference every year. http://mensstudies.org/?page_id=14
Some of the resources they list on their website: American Assembly for Men in Nursing; Men’s Health Network; South Asian Network to Address Masculinities; etc. Imagine they get damn good speakers. They also grant scholarships.
Of course, all of this would make no sense for an anti-feminist conference, as it’s all to academic and focused on actually creating positive change in the world as opposed to just ranting about how super-yucky feminists are. *eye roll*
An online summit would make way more sense, as the overhead is much less for organizers, and total costs much lower for attendees. It’s not that difficult to have live-streamed sessions ppl can attend, with a chat for questions, and then to make recordings available so ppl can watch at their leisure. I mean, it’s kinda standard. I’ve been to several, and they’re handy (and informative, if done well with good presenters)
I just don’t understand what the takeaway is for attendees. I get the takeaway for Paulie (cha ching) but not for anyone else. It’s not enough to offer a ‘watch us complain about the same things you already read on our blogs’ conference, you’ve gotta have something more going on.
As Paulie has said (emphasis mine):
His wording is instructive – people ‘believe’ he’s doing good things for men/against feminists with their money, and he has no obligation to demonstrate that or show any evidence. I think people are believing it less and less, and seeing that he’s not championing a cause so much as solely attempting to profit from it.
Lol – I emphasized ‘believe’ in the blockquote, forgetting that blockquotes here are all
.
Lol, I was literally just running from a giant in skyrim, thinking about this.
Oh man, I need to budget money out of one of my upcoming paychecks to buy kerbal space program. I watched someone playing it and now I can’t stop thinking about it.
Wait you mean a group of people who tries to control and exploit others is having internal discord because some members are trying to control and exploit others?
Fems for teh menz XD
I think the plan is to make the conference so expensive and unappealing that only journalists and feminist infiltrators bankrolled by the Gynarchy will show up. Then, bam!, Paul has their money and they don’t have any material for their
accurate relating of MRA’s words and actions at the conferencecherry picked yellow journalistic hit pieces.“Is it churlish of me to point out that neither Elam or Farrell are actually psychologists?”
Maybe they meant psychoPATHS.
If someone was to set up a ‘rival’ men’s rights site that was genuinely interested in helping men do you think people would sign up? Then if it partnered with related feminist groups fighting for the same/similar cause?
When I wrote the first question I was genuinely curious as to whether these misguided individuals could be brought into the fold (the group of people not being dicks) – then I wrote the second and realised I already had the answer. They really do hate women, don’t they?
Someone fundraise a funeral for AVFM, it’s on the verge of keeling over!
Regarding the price, $650 wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility for a professional or academic conference. It’s a little bit more than (say) the American Library Association conference, or The Amazing Meeting.
Of course the differences there are 1) an academic conference has hundreds of speakers and 2) an academic conference has speakers who know what they’re talking about, but the price point might be Elam making a deliberate attempt to fake respectability.
@sn0rkmaiden:
From the Claire Khaw thread:
Yes, yes, that’s the phrase. I’m always amused when people get phrases like this wrong but this is just so… really? Those are the two alternative things we can do together?
On the subject of a Mammotheer conference. I think a really interesting panel could be on domestic violence shelters for men featuring both people with experience starting/running shelters for women and experts who can speak to the different needs a men’s DV shelter would have. The focus could be on empowering attendees to use the information to support/start men’s shelters within their own communities.
@sn0rkmaiden:
More on topic:
Yeah, she’s a bit, wow. And I thought the honey badgers were woman hating. Except by her own admission she’s more manly than most men – doesn’t that go against her philosophy of men and women conforming to gender stereotypes?
I am SO up for Mammothcon!! As long as there was enough notice for me to save up for plane tickets it could be anywhere in the world 😀