Catfight! Histrionic Men’s Rights gooberhead Paul Elam, apparently hungry for attention, has decided to pick a fight with phony feminist and GamerGate den mother Christina Hoff Sommers.
With traffic for A Voice for Men plummeting, and his YouTube videos receiving only a small fraction of the views racked up by the videos in Sommers’ “Factual Feminist” series, Elam must realize that his moment in the spotlight is passing.
And so he’s doing what he always does when he feels challenged: he’s acting like a dick.
In a video posted yesterday, Elam asks the musical question:
Is Christina Hoff Sommers an advocate for the rights of all human beings, including men, or is she just another crypto-misandric privilege-seeking gender parasite using a different twist on sexual politics to ensure that men’s issues and rights are ignored for the benefit of women.
I have to admit that my mind wandered far afield as I listened to the rest of Elam’s 12-minute monologue, but I’m pretty sure he picked door number two there.
Now, there are plenty of legitimate things to criticize Sommers for. Not only is she an antifeminist who calls herself a feminist; she’s also a craven and disingenuous opportunist who’s recently hitched herself to the roving harassment squad that calls itself GamerGate.
But Elam has decided to attack her for … being too feminist.
Yep. I turns out that Elam is one of the very few carbon-based life forms in this sector of the galaxy to actually believe that Sommers, who’s devoted most of her career to bashing feminists, actually is the feminist she pretends to be. Not the “equity” or “freedom feminist” she positions herself as, mind you, but a devious creature
who delivers the gynocentric message with more subtlety and finesse than her associates on Tumblr.
You can practically see the high-five Elam is giving himself in his own mind each time he spouts one of these bon mots.
So what’s Elam’s beef with Sommers based on?
Well, Sommers first started calling herself a feminist back in the 1970s, which Elam seems to think taints her forever with the Mark of Dworkin.
Her other crimes?
She affects a certain concern about women and children in poverty. No, Elam doesn’t point out that the American Enterprise Institute, the think-tank Sommers works for, helped to provide the intellectual cover for policies that have arguably made things worse for the poor; he’s just mad she doesn’t spend all her time talking about homeless men.
But her biggest crime, in Elam’s eyes, is her advocacy of “chivalry,” which to Elam is roughly equivalent in its odiouness to eating babies or not donating money to him.
In Elam’s mind, feminism is basically a modernized version of chivalry, a giant plot to convince men to treat women like angels and give them stuff. As Elam sees it, Sommers is acting as a kind of double agent, warning women that if they don’t curtail their man-hating ways a teensy bit, men “will stop acting like the pack animals we need them to be.”
I look forward to watching both sides in this catfight lose.
@ Jody
This site is a goldmine if you’re looking for cool band names.
@ Alan I did know one horse who had a habit of opening gates on his own (he was very lippy). Of course, he also had a habit of eating things he shouldn’t and giving himself a fine case of colic. (One of the worst afternoons of my life was trying to keep him off the ground and moving until the vet could get there.)
@ vikki p
I’ve had a lot of friends lose horses to colic. It is pretty awful.
Horses can be great escapers though, they can practically teleport. It’s weird how they’ll see a crisp packet and run to the hills but if you’re using a chainsaw they’ll suddenly materialise and stick their nose in your armpit (“Hi. What you doing?”).
@ Alan
It’s the first and hopefully only time I go through that. Terrifying afternoon, and it wasn’t even my horse; I was helping out the friend who’d just inherited him. Luckily he survived that round, and another later on, and died of old age, having had a pretty good life.
They’re like cats in that respect, aren’t they?
@ vikki p
They’re slightly less comfortable when they decide to sit on you.
Have you seen that cartoon with the cat going up to St Peter and getting a card stamped like at Starbucks?
Skiriki, is that an Anita Sarkeesian popcorn GIF, or does the woman in your GIF just look like her? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to-I’m just curious. That’d be really cool if it is!
@Skiriki:
It is indeed. Sarkeesian made a bunch of reaction gifs for people to post in situations like this, because she’s awesome.
Here’s another one, with the great Zoe Quinn:
http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/001/069/92e.gif
Nikki the Bluth Wannabe — yep! Googled for popcorn anita sarkeesian and with an option of ‘gif only’ 🙂
@ Alan
Ooh, no, I hadn’t! That sounds like a great cartoon.
@ vikki p
Let’s see if this works
http://s26.postimg.org/xqlds3u7t/Anita_sigh.gif
That hardly seems fair to the crows. 🙁
Some of them are very polite, nice birds!
You can Google it like Skiriki suggested, or you could just do what I do and bookmark The Feminist Frequency Giphy account. 😉
Pandapool‘s better angels opined:
Well. *scuffs heels diffidently* Perhaps Elam does. *whispers* Or, yanno, Roosh.
While not trying to justify any sort of organized harassment against anybody, I confess to misplacing much of my empathy when karma-like Bad Stuff appears to visit malefactors such as these two, who rarely skip an opportunity to invite it.
Oh, and LindsayIrene my kittehs need to take Advanced Guardcatting lessons from your she-cat. None of them even twitched at Burger’s audible peevishness.
Perhaps they felt they already were protecting me, since one’s snoring on my lap and two others are on duty at my ankles. It may be too much to expect that guardcats should be awake while on duty.
OT: Did we manage to get through Harper Lee’s death without any MRA screeds about how she ruined America?
@Katz: Probs because she made Atticus a huge fucking racist all of a sudden in Go Set a Watchman.
It (sadly) comes as no surprise that FeMRAs and women who associate with MRAs have to be very very careful about what they say and basically tiptoe around, as not to call attention to petty feeeemale problems in the presence of the poor, suffering, oppressed manospherians. If you even so much as say one word about women (besides the totally obvious scientific logically proven facts that they are bitches, sluts, and whoooores!!) or that women also have problems in society, you will get turned on instantly. You have to constantly keep up that “cool girl” persona, and DON’T YOU DARE DEFY ME YOU INFERIOR WOMAN-CREATURE OR I WILL PUT YOU IN YOUR PLACE DAMMIT!!!!! It’s having to walk on eggshells 24/7.
It’s like if a bunch of sharks were hanging out swimming with a human in the ocean, saying things like “You’re not like all those other humans who have those big scary boats, you’re a cool human! We would never eat you, you’re our friend!”
And then the human starts bleeding.
P.S. Also seconding what others have said about harassment. Nobody in this world deserves to be harassed, no matter how horrible they may be. I hope she stays safe. Elam and his flying monkey boys are vicious.
You have to admire the richness of a loser who abandoned his children, lives off a girlfriend, and makes what meager living he does fleecing gullible misogynists, calling a woman a parasite.
@ Alan – Oh, that’s funny. And possibly true.
It’s a bit like watching the GOP primaries, really. It would be nice watching them bash each other… Except that it’s generally bashes of the form: ‘My opponent _claims_ to be a loathsome moral monster… But my fellow Americans, this is easy to claim. They’re lightweights, I tell you. Closet humanitarians, even, I bet. Moment the media’s not looking, I bet they even help out widows and orphans, sponsor needy migrants, or some damned thing! Now, me, I do loathsome _right_!’
And what you just dropped here reads like the verbal equivalent of a diaper full of diarrhea. But what does anyone expect of a dude who calls himself “Jesus” and uses the term “cuck” with no sense of irony whatsoever?
Newbie (I think that’s who asked the question), there’s no possible way that Lindy West’s apologetic troll was Matt Forney.
I take some comfort in the simple knowledge that Elam will never have any self-respect whatsoever.
Does anyone know what happened or is happening with Twitter supposedly bringing in Anita Sarkeesian to run some anti-harassment program? I didn’t expect it to go anywhere, but I hope it does, because Twitter desperately needs to do something and I think Anita would be great for the job.
Christina Hoff Sommers: feminist
Paul Elam: men’s human rights activist
These self-descriptions bring to mind twentieth-century smartypants-poet Dorothy Parker:
Comment
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.
@Alan Robertshaw
I chortled at the cat cartoon.
Congrats on your tech savvy!