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.
@Axe
Yo, yo–Propane Nightmares is a fucking good song and does NOT deserve to be associated with this jackass! (In fact, I was listening to it just recently.)
Then again, his default name is far closer to a song from the Undertale OST. (Which is also a good song that doesn’t deserve to be associated with ‘im.)
@Your Woooooooorst Nightmare, Guise
…What crack are you smoking?
*also, i am still genderqueer*
*notice me, baka*
*wanna watch ya split*
I am man and i from odessa and fuck you don’t fucking know anything about me. You fucking child and need to keep your hands in your pocket and off your keyboards. Stop this bullshit you doing and grow up. And you think death worst of all things that will happen to someone? Fuck there is proof of your ignorance right there…
Fuck i miss part about suicide. Spoken like true ignorant fuckkng moron.
And @PoM yeah i dont even know where arlington is exactly…
Here’s our boy impressing his friends:
http://www.totalprosports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/lionel-messi-playing-with-himself.gif
@Francesca
There have literally been a dozen people, in real life, who’ve wanted to get with me since I came out. Turns out not needing to lie anymore helps a lot.
Then there’s you and Dalillama. And some other interwebs people. I was totally lonely before, but I’m pretty sure that was me being trapped in lies and shit.
@Bina
You are much more comprehensive than I. I was taking it down to one sentence as a way to display my disdain for nobodysnightmare.
Trollmare thinks Valentine is an American college student and a young woman?
Cute.
I have never seen someone who was so fucking dumb as Trollmare.
Oh, wait, yeah, I have, sorry. 4chan and Reddit and a bunch of fanfiction websites.
Shorter Troll: I failed reading comprehension. In fact I barely read the site at all before I started posting.
@Valentine: I was waiting in hope for the troll to make that mistake, and that ridiculous rant of …mare was very fun to read. Your response was wonderful.
ETA: @Checkmate below Yep. I’ve been there (Arlington Cemetery) Lee’s house was still there. Cemetery was definitely put there on purpose, to keep Lee from returning to the House.
@Valentine Arlington is actually one of the biggest middle fingers to people in the Alt-Right, who worship it and hate it. It’s a military cemetery at Arlington House, which iirc was Robert E Lee’s house during our Civil War.
@WWTH:
That’s his go-to fapping fantasy. And pretty much the commonest, booooooringest porno trope ever.
@Checkmate
This seems like a perfectly appropriate moment to lose your temper, fam *hugs or smiles or whatever comforting gesture you prefer*
And entirely beside the point, but Валенти́н is a boy’s name. Doubt he thinks it’s a big deal tho 🙂
I dunno if anyone’s brought this up yet, so… can anybody else just never take someone seriously when they can’t/won’t even cuss properly? I mean if you can make your point without doing it then so much the better, but if the best you got is that watered down “bishes” garbage, then just do yourself a favor and sit it out completely. Either call me a bitch properly, or get directly out of my face.
Now i can change my name to Valentina ? strange how he not know, what about Saint Valentine?
Seems like there is nothing in this guy brain to say there can be men and also others who not female here on this website. And also non American too. Now its very clear how narrow is his mind. He must be young guy i think and little bit stupid ?
Thanks checkmate, but i dont know enough American history to understand why that is ‘a middle finger’ to AltRight…sorry(((
This is all the little rapey creep is doing:
http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs13/i/2009/121/d/6/Monkey_Poo_for_you_pt1_by_Jays_Doodles.jpg
DMW:
It outs him as being very young.
I think he assumed Valentine = Valentine’s day and only girly girls like Valentine’s day, therefore Valentine = female name.
On the plus side, I think the troll might’ve no homo’d his way on out of here after making that mistake. Homophobia and misogyny so often go together and accidentally creeping on a man completely broke his already cracked and fragile masculinity.
@Troubelle
It’s a fuckin great song!
Goosebumps, everytime…
OK, replace that pun with… Nightmare on Underwhelmed Street ?
I want to learn why it is, too! *sits down for nonfiction storytime*
Wwth – that true. I forgot about how this guy would think that maybe. Because all women want is things. In america Valentine’s day is a day of things! So maybe one woman made this her name because she love things too much)))
Funny he afraid now to see i am male ? even online men-with-men scarey for him!
@Axe
Dude. If my vocal chords weren’t shot right now (damn you, summer sickness!), I’d be singin’ it.
I’ve outlined a concept for a game I want to make in the future, and if I can get the rights…I really want to include Propane Nightmares in a particular sequence towards the end of the primary plotline.
Well, more like a brass-focus cover. Precise genre TBA, but imagine that instead of synths and such, the horns at the start (and end) persisted through the song.
iunno
But yes, that’s an appropriate substitution.
Mostly cause a ton of alt-right people, particularly neo-confederates, have trouble balancing that it’s an American soldier graveyard, meaning Union, and Robert E Lee’s ex house. So on the one hand, they tend to worship the idea of the military, and find it difficult to criticize a military graveyard. On the other hand, they find it repulsive that one of their hero’s homes is used as a graveyard for “enemy soldiers of the North.”
Many many years ago…some say billions of years ago…there was a Big Bang. Now, I took that as a Gigantic Orgy, but of course, I was wrong. Sounded really fun until the learning aspect kicked in. Not a very good student, obviously. But then, I learned that we’re a single solar system, in a galaxy potentially filled with trillions of other solar systems, all a part of a super cluster of galaxies, all interconnected by mysterious webs, forming what we know to be our universe. Then…then…the theory arose that we might be a part of interconnected universes (multiverses). Of course, that promoted me to jack off to visions of my clairvoyant twin, someone I like to refer to as Princess Lea. In mind mind, it all seemed a bunch of sperm chasing eggs about the multiverses. Mmmm. Eggs. Sperm. I feel you with me right now, Lea. I’m stroking as I write. Pretty stiff and long…convo, right? Oh yeah. You and I. We’re connected. I have this thing called ‘sexual lubricant’ I feel we should share.
And so…fast forward lots of years…and MAN invented fire and the wheel. Fast forward a tad bit more and MAN invented the agricultural era. See, back then, women didn’t demand the ‘right’ to enter the ‘workforce’. Back then, jobs were extremely long, low paid, life shortening, life threatening and generally only fit for ‘masculine men’. But then…but then…came the industrial era, which MEN of course also created. Towards the latter half, when enough men had died making things safe from broken nails and mussed hair, women demanded their place in the ‘workforce’. Now…we’re all apart of the ‘information age’, which MEN also created. Isn’t that nice? Men are sweet that way. In the information age, women demand quotas only in the most powerful, most prestigious, most lucrative positions – leaving the dirty, life threatening, life shortening, low paid, extremely laborious jobs to little brown and black men, imported for slave labor. Gee. I wonder why they didn’t ‘demand’ this access till now? It’s surely a mystery. Those foxy little bishes. Always up to no good. You with me still, Princess Lea? You make me so horny.
Isn’t it strange that women stayed kept whilst men built the nation but then sought to ‘culturally appropriate’ the spoils of ‘toxic masculinity’ for themselves once the coast was clear? Dang, bishes. No wonder you’re seen as the weaker sex. Men have an implicit right to your goods.
@Valentine
The Confederacy is the name for the states that were in rebellion during the American Civil War. The Union is the name for the states that remained in the United States. Robert E. Lee was the leader of the Confederate army, but the Union controlled the land in the end and buried a bunch of honored Union dead in Lee’s back yard, on purpose.
@ Policy, thanks for explaining it better than I did. /) Sometimes I forget to mention stuff like that.
This picture from PV reminds me of the year we had “monkeys” in our haunted house, throwing banana scented plastic poo at guests. This was in one of our “Circus” years, and things clearly “went horribly wrong” very soon after that. It’s interesting how many people are so afraid of clowns.
OK, my take on the “middle finger to the alt-right” that is Arlington Cemetery. Alt-right would probably have been in favor of slavery, they are certainly racist enough in general. General Lee led the Confederate Army. Some alt-right like his ideas. Civil War dead from both sides are buried in that Cemetery, and Lee never really got to enjoy his old home ever again. It’s also a stark reminder that the South lost the “War of Northern Aggression” (which some alt-rightists still call the Civil War). Lee would never have allowed a big cemetery on the grounds of his mansion if he had won. Many alt-right do live in Southern States, some still seem to think the Civil War isn’t over.
And the PRATT’s back. Misspelling Leia, even.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7bgLkdEFAE
left without further comment.
@Nobody’s Greatest Anything:
You still here? You should know that women not only invented beer, we also invented AGRICULTURE. Which was an absolute must in order to assure a steady supply of grain.
I sure hope you’re not into food and drink, because we invented it…BISH.