You may recall a fellow name Albert Calabrese from Jeff Sharlet’s brilliant GQ article about A Voice for Men’s conference last summer. You may not remember the name, but you may recall one important fact about him: He thinks the age of consent should be lowered to twelve years. “I would rather err on the side of 12-year-olds having sex,” he told Sharlet, “than on the side of ruining men’s lives.”
Calabrese, a former substitute teacher, has made his own “errors,” having won himself a spot on the sex offender registry in Fayetteville, Arkansas for “Unlawful Sexual Conduct With A Minor.”
There’s no question that Calabrese is a real person; a quick Google search will turn up the basic facts of his case, as well as a mugshot that is obviously of the same person whose photograph appears at the start of Sharlet’s piece.
But when Sharlet’s piece came out, with Calebrese’s picture at the top, angry AVFMers cried foul, with some insinuating that he was a sort of double-agent ephebophile hired by GQ to make the Men’s Rights movement look bad.
In an angry and often incoherent post attacking Sharlet, AVFM’s “Collegiate Activism Director” Sage Gerard (aka Victor Zen) declared:
The funny bit about the pedo is that Jeff in reality “found” him and put him in a car with the Honey Badgers to agitate them. Jeff was also seen ushering Pedobear around, and they rarely separated. AVfM will have a story on Jeff’s odd use of the (guy possibly paid to act like a) pedophile later.
In a comment to Gerard’s post, AVFM “managing editor” Dean Esmay claimed that he had some sort of smoking gun:
By the way Jeff–and I know you’re reading this–let’s be real clear, we got the real story now on your little stunt with Pedobear Calzone. Expect to read about it soon. …
Also, would you like to come clean publicly now with how you met the Pedobear that none of us had heard of until you ran your sweaty-palmed “report” for GQ? Or do I have to just publish what we know now for sure saying you had no comment?
Needless to say, the promised story about “Pedobear Calzone” never appeared.
What did appear — and which I only recently discovered — was a video from Calebrese himself, giving his side of the story and, by the way, confirming the key points Sharlet made about him. Including the bit about 12-year-olds.
Faced with the video, AVFMers have not only abandoned their conspiracy theories about him — they’re considering welcoming him aboard.
In a comment on Calebrese’s video on YouTube, Esmay noted that he felt a bit ambivalent about Pedobear Calzone Calebrese:
I have extremely mixed reactions here; as a victim of childhood sexual abuse, I do believe in forgiveness and yet your position is extreme. I’m conflicted in knowing how to react to you.
If you’re wondering why Esmay would even consider “forgiving” an admitted perpetrator of sexual abuse he had been denouncing as a phony only a few days earlier, well, here’s a bit more of Esmay’s comment:
That said, one thing is perfectly obvious: you were used and Sharlet was not honest at all. He had a bad used car salesman ooze to him, and the article just confirmed that.
An enemy of Jeff Sharlet is my friend?
AVFM head boy Paul Elam, meanwhile, felt no inner conflict:
Apparently, in Elam’s eyes, “writing unflattering things about AVFM” is a less-forgivable crime than “Unlawful Sexual Conduct With A Minor.”
I see the Dean & Paul are still up to the same old tricks. No wonder no one really takes them seriously anymore outside their little circle.
The sick sickness of these people, and I use that term loosely, is beyond sickening. That’s all I can say.
So their complaint is that a reporter accurately noted this person’s presence at the conference? And their reaction is to give him a bigger platform?
O…k…
Um, you know, maybe instead of siding with a PEDOPHILE, they could side with someone who was arrested for pissing in public since you can be put on a sex offender’s list for pissing in public. Which is stupid because they’re just pissing in public. Gross, but has nothing to do with being sexually offensive. (Unless they’re peeing on people, I guess.)
But they’re siding with a PEDOPHILE to try to prove their point.
A PEDOPHILE.
A CONFIRMED PEDOPHILE.
The. Absolute. FUCK. IS. WRONG. WITH. YOU. PEOPLE?!
Yeah, this guy is actually an argument for why we SHOULD have sex-offender registries (which I agree are generally problematic and lead to a mob mentality against people who once had sex in a car or suchlike).
How is leching after 12-year-olds ephebo- instead of pedo- ? A good percentage of them aren’t even into puberty yet.
“Collegiate Activism Director”, is that his real title? Cos, you know, it spells out ‘cad’. Just noting that.
It is pretty funny in a horrible way that their reaction to the story was “Sharlet found ONE WEIRDO at our conference (assuming he wasn’t a false flag weirdo to be begin with) and dragged him around and stuck him in everyone’s face even though we are totally appalled by horrible people like that and it’s so unfair that Sharlet treated him like one of us” … and a few weeks later, they’re trying to recruit the guy to be a poster boy. That doesn’t make the “Honey Badgers” uncomfortable?
After embracing a rapist who proposes legalizing rape, perhaps embracing a pedophile who campaigns against sex offender registries didn’t strain their Overton window too much.
Hmmm.
FIFY.
Considering how many MRAs would rather err on the side of ruining the current and future lives of women than wind up sex offender registries themselves for rape, it actually doesn’t surprise me that they would support this individual.
I wish I could say I was surprised by this, but as usual, MRA’s operate on the principle that a (white cis het) man’s right to do anything he damn well pleases trumps the rights of everyone else to be free from abuse.
AVFM on forgiveness, you hate women? All your past sins are forgiven, welcome aboard whoever the hell you are!
They’re welcoming that guy? The pedo teacher?
Of course they are.
The idea that he believes making sexual abuse of minors the functional equivalent of ‘male sexuality’ will persuade people is more than I can accept. For an adult to desire sexual contact with a twelve year old child is wrong.
I despise that that even needs to be said.
Being a child abuser is better than being someone who wrote a piece about AVFM that was something other than an uncritical puff piece. Wow. That’s so very human rightsy of them!
Raping kids is hunky dory I see.
I would have thought it was the whole raping kids thing that ruined lives but now I know it’s actually THE REGISTRY. What a revelation.
Those Guys are just soooo f….ed in their heads…
And yet again, MRMers prove that the only thing they give a shit about is that they just want to do what they want and be as horrible as they want without consequence.
All Elam’s said is “well, I don’t agree with everything he has to say (but I’m not going to specify what I agree with and what I don’t), but I’m going to allow him to come and represent us, even though we claimed he was a plant by that Jeff Shartlet jerk a few months ago!”
In other words: I don’t give a shit that this guy is a pedophile, I’d rather err on the side of men not going to jail for abusing children.
I read a study, I can’t remember by who, which looked at sex offence convictions that resulted with someone being put on the sex offender registry, and they couldn’t find anyone that was put on the list just for public urination. Does that actually happen? I think it’s more of a stupid TV plot cop-out, for when they need to make a character a sex offender, but also still be sympathetic to the audience.
Well, Elam is the dude who thinks beating the shit out of raped children is good parenting, so it’s no surprise that he’d align himself with such a knob.
Anything for attention, right Paul? How would your former cellmates feel if they knew you were friends with child molesters? Though, I suspect you were far less vocal on the subject then, self-serving enabler of child rapists.
I’m fucking done.
@tesformes
In 13 states, you can be put on a registry for public urination, or at least in California.
Oh, gods, how fucking disgusting. When I was twelve, one of these pervs tried to grab me off the damn street. When I didn’t go, he waited at the next stop sign and started jerking off in front of me. Would this jackass have preferred to ‘err on the side of caution’ then? Maybe I was a prepubescent minx, leading an innocent man around by his dick! Maybe I got off on… No, fuck this. I was a KID. The man who did that to me is a disgusting waste of oxygen which should never step on anything but legos. And anyone who defends what he did is an ambulatory wankstain who deserves worse.
So sex offender registries are bad, but Paul Elam’s ‘Register Her’ website was a totally legit way to alert society about the dangers of female criminals and rom com actresses?
Come on, Dean Esmay – follow your gut on this one. You know this is not fucking ok.
Puts the repeated call for “men’s rights” and “female accountability” from these people in perfect perspective, doesn’t it?
Next up: The 12-year-old that this guy raped appears on Register-Her.com.
Betcha.