Uh oh! Dean Esmay of A Voice for Men is outraged by the latest terrible calumny besmirching the good name of the Men’s Rights movement. That Big Lie? That Men’s Rights Activists are boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road.
As Esmay puts it, in his characteristically overheated prose, the very notion that there is such a boycott
is a completely fabricated story by a handful of elitists abusing their power in the media–and betraying their fellow journalists while doing it.
Using his powerful internet detective skills, Esmay has managed to track down “the source of the lie,” which, as he sees it, “appears to have originated from a discredited hate-blogger named David Futrelle … .”
I’ve left off the rest of his sentence, as it is straight-up libel. Well, so is the bit about me being a “discredited hate-blogger,” and the part about the “lie” originating with me. I will give him credit for managing to spell my name correctly.
I’ll cop to the fact that my post on a would-be boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road set off an avalanche of articles on the subject. The Mary Sue, I believe, was the first to pick up the story, and was quickly followed by a few others. And then other writers piggybacked off of them. For better or worse, that’s how it works in online journalism these days.
But if Esmay is looking for the source of the incorrect notion that self-described Men’s Rights activists were behind the “boycott,” well, he’s not going to find it in my post, which contained no mention of Men’s Right Activists at all.
Yep, I reported the 100% true fact that a Youtube bloviater named Aaron Clarey had written a post on Return of Kings urging men, in his words, to “not only REFUSE to see the movie, but spread the word to as many men as possible.” I described his readers on Return of Kings as misogynists, not MRAs, though clearly there is a massive overlap between those two groups.
The idea that this was specifically a Men’s Rights crusade was, to be sure, a bit of sloppiness on the part of the journalists writing about it, who are not quite as familiar as some of us are with all the different varieties of woman-hating shitheads there are in the “manosphere” — especially since their belief systems overlap considerably. As I noted in a previous post on this subject, writing about Esmay’s accusations against a writer for the Huffington Post,
It’s true that the HuffPo writer, in the original version of her piece, wrongly described the MRA-adjacent Return of Kings — which has urged a
boymancott of Mad Max Fury Road — as a Men’s Rights site proper. There are in fact some differences between ROK and AVFM. For example, while AVFM writers have declared women to be “obnoxious cunts,” who control men with their vaginas, ROK writers have suggested that women are actually depraved, disloyal sheep.
You can almost forgive journalists for getting a bit mixed up.
Meanwhile, it’s clear that some MRAs, including some associated with AVFM, have views on the movie that bear a striking similarity to those of Mr. Clarey and his comrades at ROK. It was an AVFM staffer, not Aaron Clarey, who posted this meme on AVFM’s Facebook page. (It’s since been removed, possibly because it contradicts the narrative that Esmay is now promoting.)
And if you want many other example of MRAs saying they won’t go to see the film because feminism, you’ll find more than a few in this thread on the Men’s Rights subreddit. Oh, and in this thread (archived here) on … the official AVFM Forum.
Yes, that’s right: there are MRAs talking about boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road on AVFM’s own official forum. One declares himself “a (former) Mad Max fan,” another writes “going to skip this one. Mad Max is now dead to me.” “I’m out,” adds a third.
But Esmay seems to think that there is some vast conspiracy afoot, writing that
we are really serious with this question: was anyone paid to put this fake story in the press? If so, who was paid and who did the paying?
Don’t be silly. No money changes hands. At least no human money. We do it under direct orders from our feline overlordsladies.
But as long as we’re asking questions I have one for Mr. Esmay: Are you ever going to do anything about the Holocaust denier and Hitler fan you’ve published many times on AVFM?
Apparently, to Dean Esmay at least, posting that Mad Max: Fury Road is being boycotted by MRAs, when most of the boycotters are in fact merely MRA-adjacent, is a greater crime against truth than denying the Holocaust.
Um yeeaaaah, during that time in the US, there was zero competition from other countries because their economies were in shambles after the second world war.
Not to mention that the US also had much stronger unions than it does now.
Re: “elitist”-
Makes me think of a line from Carnivalé:
– “I swear, sheriff, our operation has gone 100% legit.”
– “Well now, I don’t think I’ve ever heard an honest man use the word ‘legit’.”
@davidknewton
Unless you were angling for a non-paying job at AVfM, I don’t get how Dean could in any way hinder your career.
@Orion:
“Elitist” has a real meaning in politics, when contrasted against “populist”; for example when speaking of the Republican hopefuls for the US 2016 Presidenct, one can describe Chris Christie as being “more elitist” and Ted Cruz as being “more populist.” Notice that neither term is usually used as a compliment.
Much of the time, though, I suspect you’re right: it’s just used as an anti-intellectual dog whistle.
@EJ (The Other One)
Plus, it makes very little sense that this particular blog should be described as “elitist.” The tone is casual, not academic. Same thing with a good deal of The Mary Sue and the Huffington Post. It sounds like they just wanted to throw around a vaguely negative-sounding word.
If they think this blog really is ‘elitist’, it implies they think it’s populated by people of a higher standard who aren’t letting them in… :X
@WWTH
Hah, yet another reason why George Carlin is awesome!
“Not to mention that the US also had much stronger unions than it does now.”
I didn’t know that part. What happened to the unions? All I do know is nowadays large corporations are very anti-union.
The Taft – Hartley act from the late 40s hamstrung unions with all sorts of new rules. Then Ronald Reagan aggressively went after them. Then came all the trade agreements that caused union jobs to be outsourced. Then states became “right to work.”
“With the rise of gynocentrism and leisure culture, the harsh penalties for violating the andromarriage laws began to erode – as our preferences for expanding the purview of women increased we became less willing to hold women to any standards or responsibilities. We now see women as lifelong children: too weak, frail, stupid and mercurial to be trusted with adult responsibility when it comes to adhering to the strict requirements of an andromarriage contract. Western countries now look on places that stone adulterers as barbaric even though we were killing them ourselves not that long ago. A woman stoned to death is a woman held to adult standards that feminists now reject.”
http://www.donotlink.com/f7n3
You might need to read the whole article in order to understand this paragraph in context, but anyway, am I going crazy or is this guy on AVfM saying that stoning women to death for adultery is totally acceptable and somehow an indicator of “female accountability”? The fuck?
Sorry for going off topic, I just had to show you this.
Dean’s Twitter feed is certainly lively.
Actually all the media read the ROK article that called for the boycott and quoted directly from that.
Our Feminist dollars at work.
Horribly mundane?
Are they seriously trying to start another “gate” about this?
katz, yep. the AVFM twitter squad is tweeting up a storm about it.
re dean’s tweets: thanks for posting them, brooked; he’s got me blocked.weird how dean never contacts me to ask questions/check facts before he posts false crap about me.
Obviously you’re terrifying, David…
I love it. I see they’re already forming up their story: “It’s about accuracy in media reporting about blogs!”
Alright, the purple prose, misused words and call for mass murder are all standard fare, but what in the almighty flying Space Pope* is “Andromarriage”?
*Sounds way too much like “Android marriage” for me to not make the obvious Futurama reference.
Fascinating. Male accountability is having to pay child support, female accountability is about being stoned to death?
Now what was that quote about men fearing women will laugh at them, again…?
Andro means male, so actually what that person is saying is male marriage, as in marriage between males. Perhaps they actually meant andro-centric marriage? Either way the mistake is hilarious.
@Hypatia
That article has to be one of the most egregious example of an Manospherian pretending to be an all-knowing sociologist who can expound at length on all social behavior throughout time. And without providing citations, natch.
He doesn’t realize that by cobbling together his limited historical knowledge and his many preconceptions to make the broadest of broad generalizations, without any research or study, he’s producing empty pseudo-scholarly twaddle. He’s a textbook pompous ass.
Brooked – Show me a manospherian spouting a theory who doesn’t fit that description and I’ll show you…someone who probably forged or very selectively quoted source material.
He’s cataloged and named five types of marriages by analyzing the role of marriage in every culture throughout human history.
Biomarriage – the first, pre-society pair bonds.
Andromarriage – the legal codification of biomarriage that includes contractual obligations for both men and women.
Phallomarriage – the religious co-option of andromarriage to serve the divine.
Gynomarriage – the current version of andromarriage with no benefits or protections for men’s interests.
Egalmarriage – an egalitarian form of marriage we have yet to create.
Yes, androcentric is what he meant. This is what it is:
“To maximize the effectiveness of biomarriage at producing viable offspring, over time, certain details of biomarriage were codified into religious and civil law, including: sexual fidelity (especially in women, to protect fatherhood), durability (to protect women and motherhood), and presumptive consent to sex (to maximize fertility and protect both father/mother from spurious rape allegations). This new form of marriage was androcentric – based primarily on the needs of men to guarantee fatherhood – so I’ll call it “andromarriage.”
But wait, I’ve seen articles and comments from the MRAs saying that women are not opressed even in muslim countries, which are also gynocentric of course (according to them), however, if stoning women to death is how you deal with infidelity in androcentric marriage, are they admitting that society in muslim countries indeed is androcentric and patriarchal? Am I seeing a narrative crumbling down here?
“Right to work” is a lot older than Reagan’s presidency. I remember doing the newspaper cuttings when I worked in the union office in the 70s and that was one of the selecting criteria – picking up on the ‘right to work’ language in articles about Australian unions and/or employment practices.
And who woulda thunk it! It goes right back to racism-slavery-Jim Crow. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-ugly-racial-history-of-right-to-work
MRAs are just another group of useful idiots to the one percent.
I just saw How I Live Now and for god sake put a damn TW up for movies involving rape, people!!!! The actual rape wasn’t shown, just the complete anguish and pain of the victim in a hopeless situation that likely ended in her death. Thank fucking god we have movie heroes like Charlese theron’s character that actually portray a post apocalyptic scenario where women are active in their survival and the survival of others, and actually show resistance to these mythical bands of rape happy men who seem to step out of the shadows whenever the military are too busy to keep an eye on them. I am enjoying a night of shell shock after that. Saoirse Ronan is the best.
I love how many of the posts on that reddit are about how impossible to please feminists are…as they complain about the action in a multi-million dollar actionstravaganza not being manly enough, and the film is buried in spectacular critical acclaim from feminists and everyone else.
..I don’t think WE are the difficult ones, mate.