In the wake of the Portland train stabbings that left two men dead and one seriously wounded after they tried to stop a white supremacist from harassing several women, Paul Elam — still probably the best-known Men’s Rights Activist online — posted a tweet that spoke volumes — not about the incident itself, but about the utter moral bankruptcy of the Men’s Rights movement.
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/868917239143178240
When other Tweeters objected, Elam doubled down and began spewing insults — aimed not just at his critics but at the murdered men themselves.
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/869066210964631552
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/869068999577006080
In one tweet, he suggested that the victims themselves were the cause of the violence that left them dead.
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/869064408252772354
In his capacity as a leader of what is essentially a hate movement, Elam has said many terrible things over the years — from his post suggesting that women who go home with men without wanting to have sex with them are “damn near demanding” to be raped” to a short story offering an apologia for — indeed, a glorification of — domestic abuse. These tweets, I think, rank up there with his most reprehensible writings, for two main reasons.
First, as many observers have noted, it was not “chivalry” that killed these men. It was an angry and hateful man with a knife who was harassing women on a train.
Elam thinks it unfair that the tenets of chivalry call upon men to protect women — why should men have to serve as unpaid bodyguards for women, he has often asked? What he doesn’t like to talk about is that these volunteer bodyguards aren’t protecting women from bears — there aren’t a lot of those in my neighborhood — but in the overwhelming majority of cases from other men.
There are a lot of problematic things about “white knights,” as Elam insists upon calling them, but the plain fact is that the “good men” that Elam castigates as terminally stupid would be out of a job if there weren’t so many bad men around harassing and abusing women.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, Elam is essentially declaring war on the very thing that sets us apart from brute nature — our ability to feel empathy for others, including people unlike ourselves. A man standing up for a woman who’s being harassed may or may not be engaging in an act of chivalry but it is certainly an act of altruism and basic human solidarity. It’s driven by the same empathetic and altruistic impulse that led so many non-Muslims here in the US to rush to their nearest airports to protest Trump’s Muslim ban.
This sort of cross-cultural solidarity is pretty much the only thing that can save our country from the hatred and meanness that is Trumpism. We need more empathy, not less.
Elam would rather we raise our sons not to feel this sort of empathy towards women. That’s bad enough. But he’s not the only MRA with an empathy problem. And it isn’t confined to his feelings about women.
It’s not just that MRAs are indifferent towards, if not actively hostile, towards women; they lack empathy towards boys and men as well. Indeed, in one notorious post (archived here; I wrote about it here), Elam literally told the “troubled men” who have turned to A Voice For Men for help to ““go fucking bother someone else with your problems” if they weren’t donating money to his site, which is to say him, as he keeps the donations for himself.
Even though he seems to have taken in literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations over the years, he’s never bothered to even try to set up, say, a hotline for men. Instead, he’s set himself up as a sort of ersatz internet therapist for men — he has no actual training as a therapist — literally charging the “troubled men” he claims to be an advocate for $90 an hour to talk to him on Skype.
But he’s not the only MRA who combines a hatred for women with an utter lack of interest in doing anything altruistic for their fellow men.
In the first few years of second wave feminism in the late 60s and early 70s, feminist activists set up shelters and women’s centers and countless other entities designed to benefit women in desperate need of help. In the seven years I’ve been covering the Men;s Rights movement, MRAs haven’t even set up a single hotline, much less a functional men’s shelter. The only notable MRA, er, victory? Being so obnoxious they’ve convinced numerous media sites to shut down their formerly MRA-infested comments sections.
It’s no wonder MRAs feel such hostility towards real heroes. They’re only heroes in their own minds.
*looks at video game soundtrack stuff*… *looks at Wonder Woman stuff*… *desperately tries to not babble about Fallout 4 again*… *fails*
So hey, did anyone know that Lynda Carter can fucking sing? Because Lynda Carter can fucking sing.
@Falconer & Alan:
Sportsball culture in general just kinda eludes me. It’s the one thing that I dislike about going to visit family for the holidays, because they always have a football game on the TV and I just can’t relate with that.
@SFHC:
Hey, it’s doubly relevant!
David Futrelle,
You would think that even someone like Paul Elam would realize how bad it makes him look for him to say things like.
Wow, what a wonderful amount of excellent content to comment on! 🙂
@Alan Thanks for that legal link.
Kittehs!!!!!!
Music!!!!
New people!!!!! [Welcome!!]
*whew* Ok, let’s see if I can actually remember what musical tastes I had through the years….
Background: I sang, and learned piano and trombone in my misspent youth. So….
I’ll skip what I was exposed to in my childhood as it wasn’t actually MY choice. 🙂 So first thing as a teenager I got really heavily into top 40 stuff (that was about 1977-1980, so lots of disco. LOL!) Of course, 1977 was SW year so mainlining (i.e. listening over and over and over and….) the orchestral soundtracks was pretty common.
Once I got to university (music school) I was exposed to so much! European art music of all forms, and took a liking to anything with brass instruments, plus medieval music (which very few of my classmates could stand LOL!). Went through a phase of listening to piano concertos. Also got into lots of alternative/punk/new wave.
After uni, things happened and I gave up playing my horn for a long time. Got into Wicca and sort of through that into english/irish/scottish folk music, especially ‘interminable ballads’. [Loreena McKennitt, Sileas, Enya, Silly Wizard, Pentangle, Leahy, Dust Rhinos, Mary Jane Lamond, The Chieftains, and Clannad were favourites.]
When I moved here and picked up my horn again I was back into concert band and jazz. Got tired of that after some years and got into R&B/soul. Then discovered Romany music from around the world, and focussed on eastern european ‘fanfare’ (wind group) music (ex. Fanfare Ciocarlia, Lemon Bucket Orkestra, etc.).
Also liked various international bits including the Matrix soundtracks, Pentatonix, Alsarah & the Nubatones, Khaled, Too Many Zooz, and many, many more.
@SFHC;
Wonder Woman got some PIPES!!!
And now I love Lynda Carter even more than I already did.
Which was lots.
@SFHC, Lynda Carter as in Wonder Woman?
I need to hear me more Fallout 4 radio channels. I got so bored hearing the same dozen tracks over and over again in FO3 and New Vegas that I wasn’t even bothering with FO4’s radio, except to track down signals.HOLY CRAP this is the woman singing in the bar in Goodneighbor, isn’t it? No wonder she’s not on the radio.
@Falconer;
From Fallout4 wiki:
Okay, I have to confess my undying love for all things Lynda Carter.
A month or so ago, my friend posted this video and I unabashedly love it. You have to at least tune in to 2:34 for her “KISS” tribute where she sports the most glorious Bob Mackie creation ever Bob Mackied.
Lynda Carter’s Rock N Roll Fantasy 1980.
I did not know Carter was doing this stuff! After Wonder Woman, I remember her from the “B” movie “Bobbi Jo and the Outlaw”, which gave “B” movies a bad name, then I lost track of her. The Tina Turner trib was great, she doesn’t quite have the stage presence of Tina, but then, who does!?
While the topic is music, I figured I’d chip my two cents in. Thinking back about music, how I got into it and when I did certainly mirrors my personality and how it’s evolved.
When I was a toddler, there were always these earworms that my parents would play, songs with catchy choruses that I would never know the title of until much later, but once I did, it informed my early music tastes. Every trip to visit my grandparents featured “West End Girls” and “The Heart of the Matter”, but “We Will Rock You”, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” and “More Than A Feeling” quickly established my love of Queen, Chicago and Boston respectively. Of course, I heard the contemporary stuff on the radio, but grunge hit the air hard when I was in first grade and I couldn’t exactly relate to teen angst at 6.
My father’s an electrical engineer and maintains amps, radios and turntables as his hobby, so his record collection got a lot of play when we were over at his place following my parent’s amicable split. The Who’s Tommy had a huge influence on me and it was the first album I ever owned on cassette. I listened to that tape repeatedly, getting the occasional novelty album that was popular around school (every body remembers “Lump”, right?)
But it was Oasis that was the first band I really got into. “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova” got huge radio play in Canada, so when I got my first CD player as a gift, that was the first CD that I actually owned. A year later, Big Shiny Tunes 2 was all over my senior school and it opened me up to a lot of post-grunge Canadian artists, particularly Matthew Good and Sam Roberts, but also Sloan, Big Wreck and yes, even Nickelback (but that didn’t last longer than 2001 once I realized every tune was “How You Remind Me”). It was also around that time that I started getting more into funk and disco, particularly Earth, Wind and Fire and Kool & The Gang. Daft Punk’s Discovery came out around that time as well, so “One More Time” got a lot of play.
BTS would be my new music staple until I was introduced to The Tragically Hip by a coworker of mine, and I was hooked. I started looking for more local artists to follow and by the time I got to university, 102.1 The Edge was playing a lot of indie stuff, so I got into Death From Above 1979 (and Jesse F. Keeler’s other project MSTRKRFT), Stars, Metric and to some extent Arcade Fire.
Recent years have had me exploring more electronic acts like Deadmau5 and Ladytron, but my iPod is loaded with plenty of 70s and 80s rock acts, including Heart, Fleetwood Mac (and tons of Stevie Nicks), Zeppelin, Queen, Speedwagon, Donna Summer just to name a few.
So yeah… a little eclectic, plenty of Canadiana in there. Listen to Gord Downie’s Secret Path album, it’s achingly beautiful. It does have me wondering though… if you were to take the average Manospherian music list, how many female artists or bands fronted by women would you come up with? How many non-white artists for that matter? Cuz seriously, Buffy Sainte-Marie for the win.
@Gussie Jives, are you… are you me? Your musical taste and history is weirdly similar to my own, including the Queen and Boston influences from engineer parents. My music collection is dominated by Canadiana. I’m literally listening to Day For Night right now.
@Weird Eddie,
Lynda Carter is my new favorite.
Also, GOG has just put up Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Oblivion (for half off ($10 each) for now).
Excuse me, I have to go put my head between my knees.
I don’t know why, but I really like this picture. There’s just something so ‘sweet’ about it.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/10/21/23/39975DC500000578-3860924-A_pin_for_Diane_Prince_It_appeared_as_if_the_newcomer_was_puttin-a-11_1477088068533.jpg
Here’s something to save for when I realize I haven’t checked in at the Mammoth for weeks because I’ve been head down in Oblivion, and there are a whole crop of new faces.
And I might as well admit it, I grew up listening to my parents’ LPs and their tastes heavily influenced my tastes. The Beatles, The Doors, Bob Dylan, The Band, Paul Simon, and the folk-rock stylings of June Tabor and Matty Prior. Randy Newman and Tom Waits in my teens. “Weird Al” Yankovic just about when he did The Saga Continues.
Since then, I tend towards the nerdier stuff? They Might Be Giants, OK Go, Jonathan Coulton, Cake. But also anything Top-40 that catches my fancy, so I have a smattering of other artists who have that one track I love.
I always knew Lynda Carter could sing; I had just forgotten that…
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! ?
Also, that Adler letter was glorious. I wonder why the letter writer thought it’d be a great thing to send a page out of their little Manospherian Handbook to the Mayor in the first place.
ETA: oooh, I LOVE They Might Be Giants!
Gussie, thank you for informing me that DFA1979 and MSTRKRFT are related. I had absolutely no idea, but it makes some kind of weird sense.
Also, I didn’t realize there were so many Austin Mammotheers! We should form a club. We can play/mock Bethesda games and lament traffic, tourists, transplants, and Trumpists.
Knights Of The Old Republic… from a long time ago, when people couldn’t jump.
@Alan: What’s the picture from?
@ Rhuu
It’s when Gal Gadot and Lynda Carter were at the UN after Wonder Woman became a UN Ambassador.
@Viscaria
Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. Between a pair of Boomer parents raising a kid in the late 80s early 90s, and Canadian radio being what it was, I imagine that a lot of my schoolyard chums had similar music diets, so if you’re my age, there’s undoubtedly quite a bit of overlap.
Day For Night is easily one of my fave Hip albums. In Between Evolution was brand new the year I got into them (even saw ’em at the Molson Amphitheater Canada Day 2004), but my fondness remains with their first few albums up to Trouble At The Henhouse, which had a few solid singles but the rest of the album rubbed me the wrong way. Phantom Power battles Fully Completely for my fave of their collection though.
I always knew Lynda Carter could sing; heck, one of the episodes of the 1970s Wonder Woman TV show (called ‘Amazon Hot Wax’) had Diana Prince breaking into the music industry as they were tracking down an extortion ring and a missing producer.
The two songs that Lynda Carter performed on that episode were actually co-written by her as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_(Lynda_Carter_album)
Toto, I get the feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore…
Oh, the song above:
To all you people discussing Lynda Carter,
I hope you realize you’re only allowed to do that if you’re on of our male commenters.
Chessman helpfully informed me the other day that Wonder Woman only has male fans. So I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to discuss her or Carter if you’re a feeeemaaaale. Probably not allowed to discuss her if you’re non-binary either. I’ll have to check back with Chessman on that. He might rule that you don’t exist though. So beware.