By David Futrelle
I thought I’d ease myself back into posting with a little note on a fellow we haven’t heard from in some time: Paul Elam, the celebrated founder of hate site A Voice for Men.
Elam, who announced his official “retirement” as a Men’s Rights Activist last year (it didn’t take), now presents himself as a men’s therapist of sorts, and an advocate for men’s mental health, despite having no professional training as a therapist and despite his support for Republican efforts to destroy Obamacare, which would of course deprive tens of millions of Americans (half of them, you know, men) of mental health coverage.
But the reason for this post today is the Tweet below, which was brought to my attention by the excellent @TakeDownMRAs on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/890172845770362882
So is Elam trying, somewhat belatedly, to glom onto the Alt Right, the reactionary movement that has largely left Elam’s favorite reactionary movement, the Men’s Rights movement, in the dust? I mean, he doesn’t explicitly say he’s a white nationalist here, but he’s dogwhistling so loudly that you don’t have to be a dog to hear which way the whistle blows.
Elam has recently offered other, well, hints that he is broadly sympathetic to the Alt Right. He’s retweeted promo materials for an upcoming “Make Men Great Again” event headlined by prominent “Alt Lite” dudes Joe Biggs and Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman. Biggs, a former InfoWars “reporter” and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist, regularly jokes about date rape and punching “trannys.” The Based Stickman, meanwhile, won fame in Alt Lite and Alt Right circles for, well, hitting leftists with a stick.
And Elam continues to retweet Indian “Men’s Rights” activist Amartya Talukdar, a Holocaust denier and literal Hitler fan (who also happens to be a plagiarist and marital rape apologist). (See here for my posts on this lovely fellow, who used to be a regular contributor to AVFM, and Elam’s unwillingness to break with him.)
He also recently posted this weirdly racialized, or perhaps simply racist, meme:
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/883394561862623232
I feel so bad for all those poor white boys whose dreams are being destroyed by black women! Or I would, were I a white supremacist.
Still, despite Elam’s earnestly expressed White Pride. he does continue to show some sympathy for individual black men:
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/878370502854692865
And despite the Alt Right dogwhistling, Elam’s central focus remains the steadfast advocacy for men he’s long been known for:
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/875529332256624647
Good old Paul Elam, forever and always a huge piece of shit!
Oh i just seen that cleon asked same question like me ? and Wwth answer! This is fucking stupid word to mean cool or badass. Why use this one? I dont understand why they selected this one.
High class tweet Eram!
Whoops, l and r got swapped on my keyboald, you know what I mean.
Look, I for one am of the opinion that the very best thing about Elam is that pic and his hair on it.
Of course that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he obviously stole the whole “look puzzled at the drunk friend taking your picture on a windy beach” shtick from me.
No thanks, Paulie. But since you’re so obsessed with coprophagia, and you obviously got no nutriment out of the nuts the first time ’round, I suggest YOU do it.
I assumed at first glance that both the children were girls, so it took me a second to understand the point. Upon understanding it, there is still so terribly much wrong with it:
Girls have no higher ambition than marrying rich and having children? I teach school. It is a very rare young woman these days who doesn’t dream of other things instead of, or in addition to, those.
Boys would achieve their dreams, except they get married instead? BS. Men don’t not become astronauts because they crumble and marry. Most astronauts are married men. (There was a cute picture of a NASA guy going around social media recently, cleaning his living room. He’d told his wife he missed vacuum, and she handed him the vacuum cleaner. The MRAs would die.)
Most boys don’t become astronauts or inventors or sports stars because most people don’t make it to rarified heights in different high-profile fields. That’s why they are, you know, rarified. Most children dream big, and most adults are a bit ordinary. That may be awful to think of, but them’s the facts.
And the race thing, I dunno.
Also, Paulie sure has aligned himself with some choice specimens. Based Shitman, for example, has a petty criminal record a mile long. Is this the kind of Big Dreamer that Paulie has in mind when he’s so busy slamming girls for dreaming of maybe one day getting married?
PS: Based Shitman is apparently married. I feel sorry for his wife.
Also, the number of young men I have taught who dream of someday marrying Beyonce suggests that dreams of rich hot people changing your life is not exactly limited to the female sex.
Things the girls I grew up with dreamed of :
Being a musician. (she’s in some rather prestigious orchestra now and is absolutely friggin stellar at it, but she’s married to a woman who undoubtedly held her back and prevented her from achiev… oh, wait.)
Rugby. (she’s a trainer now)
Writing. (that’s two novels published so far)
Sailing on a big boat. (I haven’t heard from her in a decade, so I dunno – probably just means she’s on said boat though ?)
Advocating for LGBT rights. (she’s achieved that as well as my undying platonic love)
Martial arts. (Alan, I wish I could introduce you, she could do things which I’m pretty sure defy earthly physics – and devised a system specifically meant for women’s defense when she was fourteen)
Folks, don’t look now, but I think Elam’s full of shit.
Um, should someone tell him…?
@Podkayne Lives,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SSDsgBKdCAQ
https://youtu.be/SSDsgBKdCAQ
(See if I got this to embed correctly.)
ETA: one of those links should work.
To me, Elam’s hair doesn’t look “unkempt” so much as “carefully cultivated old man fluff”. That’s basically how Albert Einstein created the “scientist hair” meme.
Aside from the hair style, Elam looks disturbingly like my father, a great person.
Also, LOL at Elam trying to court respect from alt-right by defending white nationalism with grade school level word games.
I’m white. I’m Finnish. Therefore I can’t help being a White Finn*.
*Old political term for the rightwing side of Finland’s 1918 civil war.
“…but don’t you dare suggest that I’m calling myself a white nationalist.”
On the plausible deniability scale, this rates barely above Davis Aurini. Elam needs to work on his dog whistles.
@EJ
No wait, he used two sentences to get that message across. Like, two different sentences, even including proper punctuation ! No way those pesky libruls will see through it.
That’s about twice as much subtlety as his usual stuff.
Elam’s making progress. Give it another decade, and he might start sounding even smarter than Alex Jones.
Nice set of pubes he has there.
O/T – does anyone remember the first punitive law Hitler created to oppress the jews? I think it was to ban them from the military wasn’t it?
It really gets me in the Godwins that does.
@ misophistry
Not quite the first, but one of the early ones.
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/mobile/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007459
*Peeks in to see how the manosphere is doing*
Ah, Paul Elam. Still irrelevant, still as desperate to be seen as relevant as before. Oh, Paul. Fuck you.
Btw, I’m kinda disappointed that my browser spellcheck still doesn’t recognize “manosphere”.
I saw a post on AWfM a while ago about how awesome Trump is, written by Lame Paul.
Don’t worry about Godwin’s Law. The clause that says you’ve automatically lost the argument is null and void until the impeachment or resignation, whichever comes first.
I find that meme actually very upsetting. My mum was of the generation which believed that a woman’s place was in the home, and that she wasn’t expected to do anything other than marry well and keep house. She excelled at English at school, and went to grammar school, where she was picked out by a teacher to do secretarial training for a posh company. She did the first few levels, but when she has to go on an advanced course, it got expensive, and her father went ballistic and refused to pay for her to go. After that, she just did some temping and eventually married my father who was a company director, twenty years her senior. She was encouraged by her family to marry him, and it looked “ok”, she’d married up, but he really only wanted her as a housewife and skivvy, he had other women (and a man!) and treated her worse than a dog. He died in 1998, but Mum suffers from anxiety and depression, and now has Parkinson’s disease as well.
I’ve seen someone’s dreams trampled on, and it’s the women who get it worse because they are socially and historically conditioned to accept it.
I’m sorry to hear about your mum, Virgin Mary. That’s awful.
This is the only person I’ve ever met who really wanted to be an astronaut:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Meir
Re: Astronauts
This is sort of appropriate for a blog about feminism.
When Tim Peake went into space he was acclaimed as the UK’s first astronaut. But the thing is he wasn’t. That was actually Helen Sharman.
The most bizarre thing was one of the TV news companies actually sent Helen to interview him.
“Now Helen, you’re with Britain’s first astronaut…”
The look on her face.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/tim-peake-isnt-the-first-brit-in-space—dont-forget-ballsy-york/
(Not just using that link because it points out she’s from Yorkshire, honest)
@Virgin Mary that’s horrible, I’m sorry to hear that. I hope your mom gets the proper care that she needs.
My mom went through some hardships as well. She used to play handball in highschool and was pretty good at it. The national handball team’s coach noticed her during a visit to the local handball matches and wanted to recruit her to play for the team. My grandparents didn’t let her though so her sports career was thrown into the trashcan.
She then tried to become a veterinarian, her second dreamjob, but she didn’t have enough money to continue the studies and my grandparents weren’t willing to give her money so that dream also got crushed. The money that she earned by working part time was barely enough to pay for her rent and food so she had no other option than to end the studies, student loans didn’t exist at the time.
My grandparents then pushed her to marry since she was getting closer to her thirties but the marriage only lasted for 4/5 years. She divorced my father because he took all of their savings, wasted them on illegal gambling and wasted his salary as well. He also loaned money from plenty of other people and stole from our neighbours. Eventually he got caught and ended up in jail. That’s when my mom decided to divorce him, realizing he was only putting her in trouble.
Me and her had to live in poverty for many years after that. Things are better now though, she is a successful chef and her clients love her. ?
He’s telling white men who never realized their boyhood dreams to blame women and black people.
That is a strategy that usually works If you want to separate bitter white dudes from their money. I’ll give Paul this much, he’s dedicated to chasing that dollar. There’s no low he won’t sink to to get his hands on other people’s cash. He’ll happily kiss Nazi ass if he thinks it will get him paid.