Paul Elam may have sort of abandoned his Men’s Rights lady hatin’ website A Voice for Men — he announced his retirement from the Men’s Rights movement back in March — but his longtime fans will certainly be relieved to hear that he has not given up the lady hatin’ that made him the internet-famous man he is today.
But now he’s working some racism into the mix.
On his An Ear for Men YouTube channel, Elam seems to be setting himself up as a sort of Mr. Lonelyhearts for lady’ hatin men, providing tips on how to “screen out loser women,” how to deal with “problem women — we used to call them ‘bitches,'” and how to get rage-spittle out of your beard.
Ok, I made that last one up.
In his latest video, Elam has decided to take on yet another kind of problem women — SPOILER ALERT: Asian women — warning Western men of the dangers of “shopping in Asia or some other country [sic]” for the supposedly more subservient “women we used to call Oriental till the PC police decided that, too, was an insult.”
Elam warns his viewers that any Oriental Asian woman “willing to leave her homeland to marry a guy she met on the internet” might just possibly have motives other than love.
To illustrate this point, Elam pastes in that famous clip from Full Metal Jacket in which a Vietnamese sex worker promises two American servicemen that she will “love you long time.”
Which brings us to this POP QUIZ
[os-widget path=”/davidfutrelle/pop-quiz” of=”davidfutrelle” width=”500″]
But the dangers of Asian women aren’t confined to those conniving young women just off the boat from Asialand. For there are Asians who live in the United States as well, and if you go for one of those you might end up with … brace yourself … MARGARET CHO.
Or you might get your dick lopped off.
No, seriously. Elam literally warns men considering “going Asian” that they might end up with someone like “feminist idiot and unfunny comedian Margaret Cho,” or “Twitter fembot Suey Park,” or even Catherine Kieu Becker, a California woman, originally from Vietnam, now serving life in prison for cutting off her estranged husband’s penis.
Apparently Elam thinks the best way to keep American men from fetishizing Asian women is to convince them that the Asian (or Asian-American) gal of their dreams might literally lop off their dick or — possibly even worse — tell them a feminist joke.
But I can’t completely hate Elam’s video. I mean, sure, it’s a racist, misogynistic mess, and Elam’s gleeful grin makes my skin crawl. But if it convinces even one of his fans to leave Asian women alone, it may actually do the world a teensy tiny little bit of good.
Ugh…”Oriental”. That word drives me crazy because of the number of times I’ve told by some well-meaning, but clueless, person about how the word, in and of itself, should “greatly offend me”.
Nope. Sorry. Oriental, from the Latin for “east”, is not in and of itself a disparagement unless applied to people. Oriental to describe…Things? OK. People? Absolutely not. That’s why I’m more offended at “Asian-American”* than “oriental rug”.
I think it’s important to make that distinction concerning the usage in order to focus on eliminating unconscious and outdated -ist terms that are actually -ist terms. Otherwise a blanket “that’s an -ist word” without consideration of context or usage empowers the rhetoric of disingenuous bigots – it ends up on Reddit with “durr Thinks the Orient Express is Racist” posted over a stock photo.
Here, this jerk is obviously using it as such – a disparagement – so, not OK.
EDIT: *I’m Korean-American – people make the distinction when they refer to Francis Ford Coppola as an Italian-American and not a European-America, but seem to think it’s OK to forego that nicety and just lump us all together. The underlying “I can tell white people apart, but not Asians” is pretty insulting (to me).
I fully support Paul Elam convincing other MRAs that some category of women will chop off their precious, precious penii.
The only improvement I can suggest would be for him to expand that warning to cover all categories of women.
Stay away from women, MRAs! They will only harm you! Stay far, far, far away from all of them!
@ColeYote Ah yes, Kai En Tai’s feud with Val Venis. Yet another shitty Attitude Era angle brought to you by everyone’s favorite creative director. And you left out the part where earlier in the story Yamaguchi-san was going to spank his wife with a big wooden paddle on live TV until Venis did a run-in! Wasn’t he supposed to be the heel here? After all, he’s the one who’s stealing another man’s wife.
Naw!! Really?? Gosh, how can a woman who abandons everything and everyone she knows for a guy 30 years her senior, who came to her country to “shop” for a Steptford Wife, be motivated by anything other than love? Shocking! Women really are cold-hearted bitches, aren’t they?
1)Oriental means Eastern. Of course, since it’s a Eurocentric term, East meant everything that side of ‘Christendom’. Arabia, Persia, India, China, what have you. Exclusively referring to Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc. people as Oriental is a misuse of the term
2)The use of the term Oriental has been considered ‘problematic’ since the 70s. “We” also used to have prominent Klansmen in Congress back then. Maybe those aren’t the days, to which a lot of us want to return
3)Even so, if you’re using Oriental and Asian as synonyms anyway, what’s the problem? I mean, it would only matter if the whole point was to insult a whole group of peop- oh… Ohhh…
ETA:minotaur’s point noted. I hate African American, as well
@Kivutar
They basically seem to want to have their cake and eat it, too. I honestly don’t think them to have thought the logistics through.
With people who go on and on about how everything was better before feminism/PC culture/PoC/gay people/you-get-the-idea ruined it, I always like to ask which period exactly (and in which country/area) they consider to be the heyday of their anti-feminist etc. golden age.
Most of the time, they either cannot to name a specific period that was the (at least mostly, let’s not be overly demanding here) unsullied era before it was ruined by their boogieman or they name a period that bears almost no resemblance to the ideal society they claim existed.
QFT.
And this very discussion has led to searching for a term for the nostalgia of an “era” that you didn’t experience or didn’t exist. I think we settled on “fauxstalgia”?
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with an appreciation for an aesthetic of an “era”. For instance, I love the way 1950’s America looked (thanks Fallout!), but that doesn’t mean I want to go back to a time where racism and sexism was rampant, communism made everyone paranoid, and only upper-middle class white families could get by on a single paycheck. I just like their advertisements, diners, and fashion, all of which can be replicated in the modern day.
@Zero
Preach!
@feartheminotaur
“The underlying “I can tell white people apart, but not Asians” is pretty insulting (to me).”
People are refusing to refer to you as Korean-American when asked to? That’s terrible.
African-American makes a bit more sense than Asian-American, because Americans who are descended from slaves might not know exactly what part of Africa their ancestors were from. I agree that it frequently gets misapplied, though.
http://i.imgur.com/PoZDErq.jpg
I’ve seen that picture before and I still can’t tell if there’s a duplicate!
…Yes, there is a high likelihood that when you offer financial security in exchange for sex and companionship, the women who take you up on it… will be sex workers? Because you’re asking for sex work?? I’m not sure what you were expecting???
You still do, Paul. The PC police have not arrested you yet.
“Like, wow, Michael Cera sure has been in a lot of things after Juno: Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, Adventureland, Zombieland, Scott Pilgrim, The Social Network–”
http://i2.wp.com/okmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/2011__02__jesse_eisenberg_michael_cera_feb7newsne-300×219.jpg
Oh…oh…
I love how MRA’s act like feminists are making a mountain out of a molehill when thousands of women are murdered by intimate partners or aggressive harassers every year. But if there’s one or two isolated cases where a guy gets his dick chopped off over a span of DECADES, suddenly it’s a crisis and totally okay to extrapolate to an entire gender or ethnic group.
In other racist news: George Zimmerman is trying to auction off the gun he used to shoot Trayvon Martin as a “piece of American history” and tried to lie and say that the Smithsonian wanted it and the Smithsonian responded with “We never said that, and we don’t want it.”
Oh, and he wants to use the money generated from the sale to “end [Black Lives Matter] violence against law enforcement officers”.
http://i1010.photobucket.com/albums/af230/shadow5001/barney-punches-wall.gif
I play an MMO which is often criticized by players who reminisce about how the game was so much better back in the “golden days”
When asked, they usually refer to the ’04-’06 era. Which is funny because I was playing the game back then, and during that time players would constantly reminisce about how the game was so much better back in the “golden days”.
In real life, media pundits who reminisce about the golden days mostly mean “my childhood”. Because of course when you’re sheltered from the bad shit of the world, it’s almost like those problems doesn’t exist.
@happy cat
She gets so many vile comments in her videos. Ugh. Her entire youtube channel might as well be “Lewis’s law in action”
Side note: I have a really hard time telling people apart in general, and it’s much much worse when everyone is in the same race, age and gender bracket.
I really, really wish TV shows would get more diverse, I really can’t tell all these white dudes with similar haircuts apart. Seriously.
🙁
I hate watch the Bachelor/ette and until they get down to the last few contestants, I can never tell who is who. Generically attractive twenty something white people are pretty interchangeable. Some of them have light hair and some dark hair, that’s about it on differences.
In fairness: While in college, I went on a trip to China with a bunch of other students. Part of the group included two siblings from Korea, one Korean-American girl, and one girl from Peru.
The entire time we were there, people assumed that the siblings were from Japan (followed by vehement denial on their part) and that the Korean-American girl was native Chinese (she was even stopped several times at check points while the rest of us were allowed through).
The Peruvian girl?
Tibetan.
Even in Tibet.
Hell, my background’s mostly northern European with a smattering of American Indian, and I’ve had multiple Korean grandmas pushing Bible pamphlets assume that I was 1/4 Korean or something (I assume “quarter” because I have blue/green eyes but they spoke to me in Korean and then were mortified when I looked back at them cluelessly) and Russians, Uruguayans, and Mexicans* allll begin talking to me in their native tongues because they’ve assumed that I was from their respective countries. (I live in a diverse area.)
I’ll call anyone whatever they’d like to be called, but guessing ethnicity’s not a game I’ll play.
*Yes, specifically Mexican. When I marveled at the uptick in rando guys yelling at me in Spanish, a Hispanic friend of mine explained that I really resembled some actress who’d gained prominence on some TV show in Mexico at the time (the early 2000s).
I had real trouble with Inception.
http://static.srcdn.com/slir/w570-h330-q90-c570:330/wp-content/uploads/inception-2-sequel-cast.jpg
@childrenofthebroccoli
Totally valid. I’d still rather not be referred to as such. Now, I’m about to go off. Not at you, just in general
Hey, people! How about you don’t ‘trace my roots’ for me. I don’t know where in Africa my ancestors lived, and guess what, neither do you. Ya don’t get to fill in the blanks with ‘somewhere in one of those 40 countries encompassing nearly 9mil square miles. Close enough.’ 2nd largest continent, most ethnically diverse, but since I’m darker than the majority here, I’m vaguely (subsaharan) African. Cos West Indian, Bajan, Trini, or just American isn’t racist enough. Grr!
@PI
I have words to say about that shit. Few of those words are nice, or indeed welcome on this blog
@PI
The site pulled that auction down, one small good thing for this world.
@OoglyBoggles: Yeah, that’s one good thing, but he’s also trying other sites as well, and as far as I’m aware, no one’s taking it.
Maybe this’ll help get it through his head that no, not everyone thinks like he does, and yes, we all think he’s a fucking murderer.
@feartheminotaur
I generally use ‘Asian American’ when I’m, e.g. discussing racism, as it is common that the racist structures in question do not distinguish the actual ethnicity of the target; that is to say that, as I understand it, the systemic problems faced by Korean-Americans are fairly similar to those faced by, e.g. Chinese Americans. If I’m talking about a particular individual, however, I will generally describe their ethnicity as specifically as I know it.
@Jarnsaxa
Right. Sometimes I can’t tell when they’re the same either; recently while watching a movie, I turned to Partner and asked “Who are these jerks then?” “They’re the same jerks who were in the last scene, but they’ve changed clothes.” “Oh.”