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!
A nearf or men? Are those my only two choices? Depends on the nearf, I guess. Is it house-trained?
Anyway, I know how to improve that “meme” to make sense. Put parental figures surrounding the girl and transfer her thought bubble to them.
Full disclosure: my mom and dad both had fulfilling dream careers… and the whole goddamn town was trying to get her to marry him, despite the fact that she seemingly could not stand his person.
I can’t exactly complain, being the end result of that mess, but the meme is utter shite.
@Alan Robertshaw
Yes, and when the media finally caught up with how insulting (and incorrect) that was, they started referring to him as the first official British astronaut. Which was hardly any better, but did let me speculate as to whether she wasn’t officially British (has Yorkshire seceded?) or not officially an astronaut (did she sneak on by hiding in a suitcase and stowing away?).
The wonders of the casually misogynist mind!
ETA It occurred to not one of them to refer to him as Britain’s first male astronaut, which would have had the decency of being correct and hilariously subversively feminist at the same time.
(young boy gazing wistfully into the distance)
“Sponge off wife/girlfriend. Rant on computer about gold-digging women. Neglect personal hygiene. Poop out intact peanuts.”
Keep livin’ the dream, Paulie.
(Seriously, these MRAs can’t make up their minds whether their own wretched lives are meant to be cautionary tales, or inspirational guideposts for impressionable young men. I’m betting it’s some combination of “misery loves company” and something something fools and money. Every dollar that goes to wife & kids & other constructive goals is a dollar that doesn’t go to Paul. Remove the competition, destroy young men’s’ urge to invest in people other than themselves, and cha-ching!)
I hate the assumption that only boys dream about being an astronaut. Being an astronaut was my dream when I was a girl. One of my first words was ‘moon’ and I was gazing at the night sky before I even knew what an astronaut was.
Very few people of any gender or marital status ever get to fulfill this dream though.
Also, the supportive astronaut’s wife is a big cultural trope. Did Elam really not know this? Hasn’t he at least seen Apollo 13?
Oh, an the only adventurer I’ve ever met was Ann Bancroft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Bancroft
First woman to trek to the north pole. She’s also a lesbian, so I guess that’s double the misandry!
@Virgin Mary, that is terrible. And sadly, everyone knows a woman who is in similar straits, I’ll bet. So much is lost to sexism that it’s not even funny.
@ Lea:
Right?
And even more stupidly hilarious, his “women dream of marriage and use it to kill boys’ dreams” bullshit meme directly contradicts the “white nationalist”/Nazi/proudboy/insert bigot group name here shibboleth that they “venerate the housewife”, or that they’re “protecting our women” with all their Nazi bang-bang guns (or in the case of Based Shitman, rather appropriately, a closet rod). Hey Paulie and all you other tin-pot “nationalists”, you can’t tell women they belong married and at home, AND still get to piss on them for marrying and staying home!
@ weatherwax
The Yorkshire Post dealt the matter in typically parochial style:
http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/lift-off-as-tim-peake-follows-yorkshire-pioneer-into-space-1-7625606
(Yorkshire does have a larger population and bigger economy than Scotland, but I suspect if we ever go down the independence route it’ll involve some sort of Anschluss on the rest of the country)
I’ve worked with engineers and scientists for about 30 years. By far the most successful ones are the successfully partnered ones. Predominantly cis het men married to cis het women, across all colors and cultures of people.
So yeah, somehow women are holding men back from their successful dreams. It’s you, Paulie, it really is you holding yourself back from being a decent human.
But I thought women were stealing all the jobs! I thought all I was supposed to do was want to marry and have babies!
Its almost like you have a terrible world-view with contrasting views that can’t be brought together, so you just yell gibberish into the air and hope that even a small amount sticks.
I never dreamed of being an astronaut, but I also never dreamed of getting married and having kids.
I didn’t really think about the future much beyond “I hope I will be safe and peaceful, and have enough funds to take care of myself”. I had a – fraught childhood.
My son, though, has daydreamed about being married and having children since he was 3 or 4 years old. Even now he often talks about it with me.
Of course he has other dreams, too.
I’m old enough to remember that for many years women were not encouraged to have any dreams at all outside marriage and family.
So is he under the impression that no male astronauts, professional athletes, inventors/entrepreneurs, or uh…adventurers are married? Because this seems like a very easy thing to fact-check. Especially when it comes to astronauts and athletes, who all have Wikipedia pages.
Or is he under the impression that he, personally, would have been able to achieve one of those careers if it hadn’t been for his ex-wife? Because in that case, LOL. He lives off scamming fellow men out of their money for ‘donations’ and ‘therapy’ instead of working, in what world would he be willing to put in the time and work to be successful at any of those careers?
Married men enjoy better health. it has been long known and continually studied:
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/marriage-and-mens-health
Married men who have a career suffer no hit to their income and men are not held back because they have children – in fact it can help them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/a-child-helps-your-career-if-youre-a-man.html
@ preuxfox
Did a bit of digging around. Can’t find any breakdowns of figures, but quite a few articles suggesting marriage is pretty common for astronauts (there’s at least one astronaut couple). I don’t have the maths or sociological skills to judge whether astronauts marry more or less than the general population. Interesting BBC feature though that suggests, at least in the early days, there was pressure on astronauts to be married. So it certainly wasn’t a career impediment back then at least.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7085003.stm
Don’t worry, Pauly, I’m sure you’ll be around to see Julie Payette sworn in as Governor General of Canada (speaking of astronauts).
Can’t wait! She’s gonna be great!
@Gussie: I just saw this today too! How cool!!
(The following should be taken with a grain of salt – i am not a sociologist!)
That’s the primary action of the Old Boys Club at work, really. As you accrue things-to-raise-in-status, you’re entitled to more rewards from your social group. A spouse, a child – they’re status-raising relationships. Single men are allowed to be single while they’re young, but failing to collect those status-tokens indicates a lower status than those who do.
Women disrupt this arrangement because they are the status-tokens, so the men in the Old Boys Club need to reduce the status of a woman in the club, to maintain the value of their own tokens. Gay men do the same by eliminating the value of those tokens. At best, women and gay men in an Old Boys’ Club group (incredibly common) can aspire to equal status to single men, but they have to constantly fight to maintain that position.
They like to think that they’re super-rational objective science-mans, but really it’s all just a thin veil over ancient instinctual patterns. Doesn’t surprise me that they’d require astronauts to be married back in the day. They’ll say things like “It shows they have emotional maturity and a reason to come home!”, as if unmarried people wouldn’t have those things. Rationalization for maintaining the psychologically reassuring structure of the Old Boys’ Club, nothing more.
ahmigah Julie Payette will be GG?!?!
I complain about our government sometimes, because oh boy do they get things wrong a lot, but they sure do get some things right too. She’s a great choice!
It is pretty badass. Just reviewing her Wiki page, she went to my alma mater for her Masters (Skule represent, yo!), she obtained her commercial pilot’s license and logged 1300 flight hours(!), including on the CT-114 Tutor (the Snowbirds Acrobatic Team fly those) in preparation for her time in space, and spent 25.5 days in space on two missions to the ISS.
She’s more than earned a trip to Rideau Hall.
I’m not surprised. They’re very public figures, especially back then, and there’s a lot of expectation for ‘official’ public figures to be married and the head of a nuclear family. I feel like an unmarried candidate for presidency would face a lot of pressure, too, for example.
(ETA that was meant to be @Alan Robertshaw, oops!)
Today in White House communications director tweets:
Scaramucci complains at FBI and JusticeDepartment that a publicly available financial disclosure document was leaked.
Senate votes at 2:15 about a “single payer” amendment sponsored by a Republican who doesn’t support Single Payer, in hopes of making Democrats in jeopardy of losing seats in red states vote for it and “prove” they’re in favor of it. It’s a political stunt amendment, as the Republicans say they don’t want it. Sanders says he won’t vote for it, but who knows what will actually happen if it proceeds to the floor.
It’s a duplicate of an amendment proposed in the House by a Democrat. I think it’d be wonderful if it did happen to pass, providing a Republican “own goal” of epic proportions.
I may have done this analysis wrong.
ETA: Ah, the nuclear family, where if everyone gets together, and hugs really tight, the house explodes in a mushroom cloud! (sorry, politics is making me a bit odder than usual)
Yay for female astronauts!
And Scaramucci has deleted the tweet in question. Such transparent! Very oops!
Quoting for posterity:
In light of the leak of my financial disclosure info which is a felony. I will be contacting @FBI and the @TheJusticeDept #swamp @Reince45 10:41 PM 26 Jul 17
I applied to be an astronaut years ago, to go up to the Mir space station. It was a 6-page application form and took ages to fill in. Then a month later they replied (paraphrasing here) “We’ve had 13,000 applicants and we don’t want you. P.S. Wanna buy a T shirt?”
I didn’t buy the T short, although now I rather wish I had.
Helen Sharman got the job (she was much better qualified). So yes, I got annoyed at all the media calling Tim Peake the first British astronaut.
On the subject of women doing nothing for civilization – can you imagine how far we’d get if nobody taught kids to speak? Who mostly does that?
It would have been nice if Tim Peake had thought fast enough to correct the error himself, as Andy Murray did not long ago.
And yes, one of the reasons that men have an advantage career-wise is that most of them have a wife to handle the Second Shift stuff, so they can focus all their time and energy on their job.
Women have done far more than that throughout history. I still find myself watching the two seasons of Worst Jobs In History hosted by the ever-awesome Sir Tony Robinson. Women (and children) fit into a lot of the more obscure, but vital jobs that made “civilization” what it was.
Buttwhistlers like Elam seem to have this mental picture of women just lazing around the house while the men are out working some kind of skilled trade (or being rugged manly military men). It’s a very narrow and paternalistic view of history born out of a number of things, from Victorian era romanticism to the Ozzie and Harriet nuclear family bullshit, but if that wasn’t bad enough, their conception of “civilization” seems to be limited to the greatest works of human achievement, as if there weren’t people conducting the day-to-day upkeep that made society run. Bootblackers, cooks, farmers, sanitation workers, matchmakers, fullers, dyers, charcoal makers, tanners… these are just some of the unsung jobs and women are at every level of these. A working class woman even a century ago couldn’t just sit on her ass, particularly if she was a member of a poor family, and often she had a hazardous job like being a fishwife (which risked being labelled a scold) or making matches (and developing phossy jaw). Women’s boxing matches date back to Georgian times and they were bloody affairs.
I’d pay cash money to watch Elam take on one of those boxers. I don’t care how tall he is; they fought bare-knuckle and didn’t pull punches.
My most unrealistic youthful dream was to someday be married and live in a house with my husband and kids.
In the United States in the 1970s, that counted as VERY unrealistic, but I lived long enough for it to come true.
Our sons were familiar with some other families growing up; Darlene and her daughter, Cynthia and her daughter, and Joe and his sons. Mothers with sons and fathers with daughters must have seemed quite exotic to them.
I still remember being at the park when a very little boy needed to use the toilet and his mom took him into the women’s restroom. Our younger son was astonished – he’d never seen it happen before.
On the subject of Helen Sharman, I think a lot of the reason people tend to forget her 1991 voyage to Mir is because it was on Mir (which wasn’t exactly the rock star that the International Space Station is), and because it was as a private citizen. Tim Peake’s career received attention because he happened to be the first British astronaut for the ESA and not as a private citizen or working for NASA as an American citizen like Michael Foale (who also happened to be on Mir when Spektr was depressurized). Prior to Peake’s selection, the United Kingdom government’s official position was that it was not participating in manned spaceflight.
Helen Sharman unfortunately shares the same fate as female cosmonauts who came after Valentina Tereshkova, whom also tend to be forgotten in spite of their contributions; like Svetlana Savitskaya being the first woman to EVA and first human to weld things in the freaking vacuum of space.