Is the Men’s Rights Movement a bunch of middle-aged creeps obsessed with the sexuality of women young enough to be their daughters?
Judging from this video, shot at the first A Voice for Men “family reunion,” the answer is “yes.” Also, the Men’s Rights movement is drunk.
In the video, AVFM’s head middle-aged creep Paul Elam, working the camera, introduces his fellow “family members” as the only men in the Men’s Movement “who told Jessica Valenti ‘no’ to a blow job.”
Panning across the almost-all-white faces in the crowd, Elam gleefully shouts:
Hello Jessica! Hello Jessica! Yeeaaaah! Here’s a dick you won’t suck! Oh, there’s another dick you won’t suck! Oh my God there’s just thousands of dicks that don’t want you to suck it! [sic] … No means no, bitch! No means no, bitch!
At this point the entire group starts chanting “no means no.”
Valenti, the founder of Feministing, is a daily columnist for The Guardian and the author of four books. Elam is a middle-aged asshole who for many years has lived off of his girlfriend and/or the donations he’s been able to extract from gullible men.
Elam asks if anyone else has anything they want to say to the feminists of the world, because “this is going on YouTube.”
One gentleman shouts his message: “Go fuck yourself!”
Former AVFM second-in-command Dean Esmay makes an impossible-to-parse comment about “good rape.”
Elam adds his thoughts about another prominent feminist writer:
Hey listen, Amanda Marcotte! Your pussy stinks!
Then he ends the video with this little warning:
Hey, girls, look into your future! A lot more of this shit’s coming, and it ain’t gonna be fun except for us.
The Human Rights Movement of the 21st century, folks!
In the description of the video on YouTube, Elam (presumably sober by this time) makes clear he doesn’t care if anyone thinks the video makes the Men’s Rights movement look bad.
Look, it is just some men having non PC fun. If you find it offensive or a “bad thing” for the men’s movement, you can blow it out your ass.
Given that the so-called Men’s Rights movement is itself a bad thing, I’d like to thank Mr. Elam for once again making my work here easy.
NOTE: You folks might want to save this video, just in case Mr. Elam realizes what an ass he’s making of himself. (If you don’t have the right browser extension to save videos, this website will do it for you.)
EDIT: I just realized what this video reminded me of: The creepy dance sequence from the horror movie Calvaire.
Omg, that video was ridiculous and pathetic.
Well despite the grossness of these individuals Im kind of glad I watched it [or rather as much as I could stomach]. Its clarified what I always suspected about them, and then some…
I will be taking them far less seriously from now on. If that were possible.
Sorry, I should have thanked you David Futrelle for this post – and what appears to be an excellent site.
Oh, and as far as I know Jessica Valenti has never written anything about blowjobs; Paul is just pulling that from his own fevered imagination.
They hate Amanda Marcotte because she writes pretty bluntly from time to time about what creepy assholes mras are
And their hatred of Valenti apparently stems from a video many years ago in which she called MRAs losers or something along those lines. She barely ever writes about them, AFAIK.
I obviously phrased that badly. I guess what I meant was, they display absolutely none of the attributes MRAs love to claim that men have and women don’t — reasoning ability, raw power, charisma, gutsiness, physical presence, ability not to piss their own pants … My dog, on the other hand, is a fine upstanding role model.
And I feel sorry for them because they’re just pathetic. I don’t have to find someone admirable or likable in any way to feel sorry for their obvious misery and inadequacy. That video is just SAD.
First time poster. Hi, all!
I see I didn’t underestimate the quality of men over at AVfM.
Somehow it’s the addition of Sage Gerard that makes this mega-gross for me. Class ought to be in session (unless Elam took a few weeks to upload this) so what is Gerard doing getting wasted with these old dudes?
Give it up Sage. You look like a sad clown.
Correction: I just asked sage about this on Twitter and he graduated in December; According to him with honors. I didn’t ask him in what but wished him mazel.
So I guess sage really doesn’t have anywhere better to be than that brewery.
Thalia
Thanks for clarifying and you really don’t have to feel sorry for them they chose to be this way.
Antisocialite
Hey! Click here and at the top there is a welcome package click on that!
http://artistryforfeminismandkittens.wordpress.com/
Welcome Package direct link. Also, welcome!
I didn’t read the comments, but damn, that is pitiful. She was disappointed to be excluded from a boozy misogynist hatefest by virtue of her sex? If anything, she should be skipping with glee that she dodged a bullet. (Or, more to the point: a whole roomful of leering geezers with brewer’s droop…not that that ever stopped them from assaulting anyone. I wouldn’t put it past any of them to attempt something with a beer bottle.)
And really: There is a limit to wanting to be the “cool” chick in any group of men. It’s called DIGNITY. If they’re all sexually insulting when they’re together and drunk, who the hell would want to be their pet feeeeemale?
Because they all want to silence women with a dick, basically: “Don’t open your mouth to say meaningful things, girlie, my cock ain’t listening. Speaking of my cock, here — make your mouth useful for a change!”
(And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna wash my keyboard down with Lysol. I feel slimy just for having made such a brief excursion into their hivemind.)
“middle-aged creeps obsessed with the sexuality of women young enough to be their daughters?”
ageism at its finest. Because middle aged men cannot be found attractive by other women. You also presume they are too old to be hired and hence should remain without a job. Before you even dare talk about feminism learn not to discriminate against other categories.
Elam continues to make me embarrassed to be born with a Y chromosome
Delavrancea
…um what?
@Fruitloopsie
What I got from that is that it’s ageism to expect middle-aged men to not creep on young women. Not an argument I’ve seen before!
POM
Ah makes sense now, thank you.
I don’t see how it is ageism to point out that anyone attracted to someone half their age to the exclusion of any other age category (especially their own) is a problem. Especially when you consider those men feel they are entitled to a woman half their age. Just because you have an attraction to something doesn’t mean you should act on it or make you entitled to it.
And what are you going on about with the comment about them having jobs? Who said they were too old to work?
They may be middle-aged but they sure sounds like 12 years old boys on youtube!
Seriously, what is it with them repeatedly prooving that the negative prejudices against them are 100% justified? Are they paid to be clowns?
@ Fruitloopsie &POM
Surely though it’s the creeping that’s the issue, not the age difference?
There does seem to be a bit of ageism going on there. Unless you are of the opinion that people shouldn’t date outside certain age ranges in any instance, there was no need to mention age in this case.
@Alan
Yeah, actually the age difference is, itself, a problem.
Age differences are fine when all involved parties are into one another. Age differences are fine when all involved parties are interacting with one another as human beings.
Age differences are not fine when men are obsessed with young women who are not, or at least have given not indication of being, into them. The obsession hinges on assumptions/presumptions/expectations about virginity and reproductive potential, which are intrinsically problematic. These expectations reduce women to sexual objects only, rather than treating them as people who are human beings.
A man who is into women generally, and happens to enter a relationship with a younger woman is not a problem. An older man who is ONLY into younger women and has no interest at all in women his own age is a problem.
We can’t help our sexual attraction to others, but we can sure as shit help whether or not we act on that. Men who are self-aware but who just can’t kick the social conditioning to be attracted to only young women need to keep it to themselves.
@ POM
I understand all the problems with entitlement and objectification; but there does seem to be an assumption that only some preferences are acceptable.
People find all sorts of things attractive. For some of us it might be certain non physical attributes. People might be attracted to intelligence, confidence, shyness, shared interests or whatever. Some people will have physical preferences and some people will have age preferences.
A preference for people of a certain age may be down to physicality or it may be something else; energy, a love of clubbing or whatever.
But even if it’s just a base interest in physical attributes, so long as both partied are up for it, I don’t see it’s anyone else’s business.
It’s true that there has been a double standard here (older guy / younger woman = fine; other way round unusual, just look at films) but that is now changing. A number of my friends are proud ‘cougars’, and good luck to them and if guys are attracted to younger women (and the women are attracted back) then that’s fine too.
So for me it’s the conflation of the entitlement thing (bad) with the age difference thing (nobody’s business).
You can highlight the one without reference to the other.
Um, yeah. Preferences for children, for animals, and for rape are not acceptable. We do, in fact, make that judgment that only some preferences are acceptable.
There is a common thread behind these unacceptable preferences: they are actively harmful to others if a person acts upon them. I have zero moral qualms about putting another preference in the “unacceptable” category on the grounds that it is harmful to innocent others when someone acts upon it.
I reckon you missed this, so I’ll quote myself:
The problem is that older men who make a habit of creeping on younger women and who have no interest in women their own age are not interacting with those women as human beings. There is a universe of difference between a consensual, mutually-attractive may-december (or may-october in some cases) relationship, and the dipshits who are waving their dicks at Jessica Valenti in the video in this post.
Obsessions with youth/virginity/fertility (implicitly linked if not explicitly) are intrinsically problematic as they reduce women to sex objects, with no value except their sexual value. “Cougars” are not the same, for the same reason that a black person saying they don’t like white people is not the same as a white person saying they don’t like black people. An action that is viewed as so unusual it deserves its own special (derogatory) name does not have the same discriminatory weight as one that is so common and so weighted in favor of an already-powerful group.