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.
Now Nightcrap is referencing There’s Something About Mary?
This guy is comedy and pop culture gold.
Alcohol is also a way to store calories in non-perishable form. Beer serves many purposes, is what I’m saying.
@Checkmate
To be fair, I stole my OC’s attributes from Tali’Zorah Nar Rayya and Samus Aran, so if they stole my OC it’s alright, I guess.
Her skintight suit? Zero Suit Samus.
She also wears a Space Hijab like Tali’Zorah (a helmet that vaguely resembles a Hijab).
The hijab thing is due to the fact that in her original form as a small filly she wore an actual hijab. I attested this to the fact that the Zebras in her old homeland wore Arabic-inspired clothes; dishdashas and hijabis being the de facto stype.
I think because I posted a Cameron Diaz gif, the troll decided, a page later to reference the scene in There’s Something About Mary where she gets semen in her hair through some sort of wacky plot contrivance and mistakes it for hair gel.
The reference doesn’t have a point other than the troll trying really hard to creep us out.
Or he’s trying to counter Alan’s challenge to his fragile masculinity.
Or both.
Agree on the 13-year-old estimate. The braggadocio has that sort of beaujolais flavor to it. I don’t like beaujolais.
Ouch! I keep cutting myself on all these edges!
I’m sure the alcohol-as-lube thing was meant to be a date rape “Joke,” but the only thing it makes me think is “AAAAAGH.”
@ Fran, I always figured the same for zebra clothing, although I’ve never played one. I just have too much fun being the emotionless party pooper.
@ Everyone in the alcohol talk, don’t forget that for the longest time ship’s rations were watered down alcohol, since it didn’t go stale and it warded off bugs better than straight water. Hell, that’s why the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock; they ran out of booze on the ships.
http://new2.fjcdn.com/comments/5406512+_da4162e95c874b18a3cc3c5530cdb2df.png
Why do they always end up falling for WWTH?
@ yourgreatestnightmare
Sorry, it may be you missed my earlier post. I’m even more curious now. You see you’re attempting something fairly standard. You’ve been intimidated by the women here. So now you’re trying to intimidate them. Over stepping boundaries with crude sexual imagery is a popular method (maybe you should have gone with the classic “I can smell your cunt”?). Sadly, it’s often successful. However I think you might be playing at the wrong audience here.
I am genuinely curious. If you did provoke a negative reaction, would that dispel some of your fear? Like finding the weak spot on an end of level boss?
If the response goes the other way and the women just laugh more what will be your next step? I’m guessing something along the lines of pretending you’ve had your fun and you can leave whilst trying to maintain some sense of dignity. We see that a lot in physical violence. The retreat combined with excuse (“lucky for you I’m on bail” sort of thing) is a common face saving exercise.
Does this resonate? If I’ve got you wrong then please don’t hesitate to correct me.
Honestly, my translator has just been turning the troll’s statements into [Indistinct gibberish. Humans shouldn’t even be able to make these sounds, yet it almost seems like there’s words in there.]
So, y’all are doing way better than me.
@Vis (autocorrect makes you God. Use your powers for good…)
Catchphrases, muffuga!
Honestly, prolly woulda said some shit by now, but I’ve only read 1 of his posts all the way thru. Skipped most of em, so I didn’t really get to see his ‘jive talk’
@Fran
Space hijab, and to tie in with the hubbub about the Wondie movie
On alcohol:
Wow. So much stuff I never knew. Now I can…sort of…maybe…almost…not forgive, but at least a little understand why our culture is so fucking focused on alcohol.
@Axecalibur:
Is that literally Wonder Woman respecting local traditions as she saves lives in different parts of the world?
@Checkmate
Well, for a while Zebras were basically the black people of the FiMworld.
People drew them as black people, whereas normal ponies are usually drawn as white people (this has changed recently, I’ve seen some pictures of Twilight and Cel and Flurry Heart as little black girls)…the show had strictly white people voicing normal ponies, whereas the one character voiced by a black woman was a Zebra, and I am black, therefore my personal signature OC is a Zebra.
I know other black bronies and pegasisters who buck this trend and just have normal ponies or dragons or griffons as their OC, but I’m annoyingly pro-black and have to stamp it into everything I do, so yeah.
Recently, for the FiM movie, they brought in a black woman to voice a sea pony, so it seems like the show creators want to undo this whole paradigm that only Zebras are equivalent to black people.
ETA:
@Axe
That’s just lovely. I like this a lot, thank you.
Also:
Kinda like my OC if she were drawn as a human.
She has to be played by Lupita Nyongo, though.
@Lea
“You are drunk, right? That’s why you write that way?”
Ahhhh. A fellow clairvoyant. I sensed a future for you and I earlier. I dismissed my earlier senses as a blip, but now, I see you were the one all along. It involves you submitting to my superior powers. The bending of your will to my masculine demands. You kowtowing to my every manly whim. You see it, don’t you…me ruling over you and you fixing me sandwiches between rough sex? It’s all so clear to me now. I own you. You’re my sandwich/sex slave. You will fix my sandwiches, gleefully, for I will get you drunk and screw your brains out, after which you’ll experience a weird sort of Stockholm syndrome. Yes…Yes. You’ll have my babies whether you like it or not. Tis how humanity has survived all these tens of thousands of years. In another day, not that long ago, I’d have simply bat you on the head and dragged you into my cave. Thank goodness I created the modern club I named alcohol. Were it not for that, most women would have bumpy heads.
Troll translation:
“I am trying to freak you out. Are you scared yet? Are you? I hope you are! I can do this all night because nothing happens in my life!”
@ Fran, I’ve seen that before. I haven’t actually gotten too far into the fandom or fan art and tend to stay away from that stuff, but it makes sense that they’re trying to buck the trend (pun intended). And don’t worry, I can totally understand being annoyingly pro-black. I’m annoyingly pro-mental illness awareness. X3
Edit: By “that,” I mean the black bronies and pegasisters using regular pony OCs. My Ex who introduced me to the fandom used a regular unicorn.
@ Naughtforthewall, the hell are you talking about? I think you actually are broken, cause now you’re just speaking gibberish, except to one thing; glad to know that, for such a good guy who never says anything wrong, rape jokes are fine.
I find it pretty hilarious that every time we mock him for trying too hard, his response is to try even harder.
If he had a lick of sense, he’d change tactics but I guess he’s a one trick trolly.
Shorter troll: I declare victory!
Best gibberish translation I came across:
I’ve been with deep recognize the women. And jumped instead shark. Yeah. The shark. Yeah. The DSM-V. I’ll to regret a heroin asylum
Sounds a bit like a Trump “stream-of-unconsciousness” speech.
@ Checkmate:
Great avatar!
@ SFHC:
Are you using any addons in your settlement building? After significantly boosting the placed item limits, I turned Sanctuary Hills into an enormous concrete bunker (quite lavish and posh inside though, because if you don’t take proper care of your settlers, they won’t
worship you as their Divine Dictatorbe happy). Raiders aren’t a problem given there’s only one entrance and it’s a long meandering gauntlet of doom with raised turrets raining down fiery death onanyone who approachesdefinitely only raiders. Yup. Just them.😛
FO4 is a great bit of escapism in these troubled times, moreso now than when it came out.
@ NobodyThinksYou’reTheirGreatestAnything:
Look, your delusions of godhood aren’t impressive. Either you’re pretending about them, or you really believe them, and neither one will convince anyone or earn you respect or make your posts less boring. You aren’t that you aren’t, pumpkin.
I’m guessing you’re a white male, age 18-20, undereducated, confused, and badly overcompensating. You surely come across as more callow than that, but I’m guessing that’s more an indication of lack of intelligence than lack of age.
Your mockery lacks the wit, insight, or maturity to really score the points you seem to be striving to earn in whatever imaginary contest you’re engaging in with yourself. I mean, a decent troll can get by with any one of those three things. You’re not a decent troll though.
You’re not dominating anyone or anything here. You’re not scaring anyone. You’re not impressing anyone. All you’re earning is casual disdain.
Run along now. Or don’t! Nobody cares.
Ok, this is getting not good now. Anyone else feeling little bit uncomfortable by this? I mean, he obviously fucking moron but still nasty language and image here.
I do find his Penthouse Forum fantasies to be completely hilarious. https://media.tenor.co/images/7086ffc0f93229c7767bbf5f861c6b96/raw
@Valentine
I do feel uncomfortable. I think it’s past time he was banned. But I’m unsure of the mechanism to make it happen.
@Fran
Well, obviously. Picture perfect casting 🙂
@PropaneNightmares
This is WHTM. ASSTR is thataway =>
@Valentine
Very. But it’s also morbidly hilarious watching him writhe. Banhammer is totes an option tho
@ valentine
I suspect our new friend is angling for a ban. That allows him to claim victory. “They couldn’t handle me” sort of thing. That will engender a small feeling of power that might mitigate the fear a bit.
@ yourgreatestnightmare
I’d hate to be doing you an injustice here. Like I say, please don’t hesitate to put me right if I’ve misjudged you.