I’ve found the worst take on the Bill Cosby verdict. Thanks, Paul Elam of A Voice for Men!

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By David Futrelle

I don’t check Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men all that often these days — the world has largely moved on from it and so have I — but I stopped by there yesterday while working on my post about the odious Don Blankenship, and happened to notice that the one and only Paul Elam had weighed in on the Cosby GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY verdict in a post whose title declared bluntly that “we’re all Bill Cosby now.”

As I am definitely not Bill Cosby, and neither is anyone else I know, I decided to force myself to read it. And it was somehow even more ridiculous and offensive than its headline. So much so that even though the news cycle has moved on from the Cosby verdict it’s still worth a detailed examination.

Elam begins with some snark aimed at Cosby’s many accusers:

The #MeToo and #TimesUp crowd is jumping for joy, and undoubtedly a slew of Cosby’s alleged victims are lining up to take aim at pillaging his estate. I can just see them all, jumping up and down like first-graders at the ice cream truck, screaming Me too! Me too!

Elam, the king of projection, assumes that everyone else is as much of a grifter as he is

Gynotrads, too, will be getting their jollies; basking in what they imagine is schadenfreude as Dr. Huxtable is tossed into a small cage to live what will undoubtedly be a much shorter version of what remains of his life.

Apparently “gynotrads” are traditionalists who believe that not every rape accusation is false. As for the rest of the sentence, Elam seems to be confusing the fictional Dr. Huxtable — “America’s Dad” —  with the calculating predator who played him.

Elam goes on to suggest that the only people who think Cosby is really guilty are “those dumb enough to be blue pill; people whose thinking is guided by hash tags and other popular slogans of sexual politics.” Which means that America is pretty much overflowing with said “blue pill” people; a new Economist/YouGov poll found that 57% agreed with the guilty verdict, with only 12% disagreeing.

Turns out that Elam isn’t a big fan of Bill Cosby, not because of the drugging and raping — which he doesn’t think happened — but because Cosby apparently loved women too much.

I am not exactly bleeding sympathy for old Bill. Whether he committed actual sexual assault aside, it is clear that over decades of life he was a completely dedicated pussy hound; a gynocentrist of the first order, driven to arrange his life around women.

Well, driven to arrange his life around DRUGGING AND RAPING WOMEN (allegedly, except for the three counts on which he has been found guilty in a court of law and all the other ones I’m pretty fucking sure happened).

That alone is begging for problems, never mind the abandonment of self and values that come with the territory. Guilty or innocent of the criminal charges, Cosby’s own petard blew up in his face.

Apparently whether or not Cosby DRUGGED AND RAPED DOZENS OF WOMEN isn’t important; as Elam sees it, the real problem is that Huxtable Cosby spent too much time with the evil lady creatures.

And of course, that ought to make any man with a bit of common sense take notice. There but for a streak of dumb luck go a lot of good men.

Hey fellas! I’ve found that one good way to avoid having 60 women accuse you of drugging and raping them over the course of many decades is to NOT drug or rape 60 or more women over the course of many decades. YMMV.

Apparently forgetting that Cosby was found guilty of drugging and raping Andrea Constand  in 2004, Elam then takes us on an extended detour into the

1970’s drug culture, the very environment from which so many allegations sprang; allegations from a slew of women who are bound by two common denominators. Accusations against Bill Cosby and the expiration of their sexual use-by dates.

Creepy old dude who is definitely not aging like fine wine accuses women of approximately his own age of not being sexy enough to meet his exacting standards.

After relating a 70s drug party anecdote that is honestly too boring for me to even summarize, much less quote, Elam offers up these bits of stale, er, wisdom:

I used a lot of drugs. I wasn’t what you call a big-time dealer, though I often did buy drugs in some quantity and sold enough to friends to help defray the cost.

And one thing was certain. Whenever I was flush with drugs, I also had women around me.

I’m sure you had a lot of men around you, too, dude. People who have drugs tend to be popular with people who want or need drugs. That’s kind of how addictive drugs work.

Money and fame both have the same effect. The more you have, the more women flock to you. That was true in the 1970s and it is true today. Resources attracts women like moths to a flame.

Yes, that’s right, Paul, all women are money-grubbing gold-diggers.

You can #MeToo and #TimesUp all day every day but it won’t change the fact that access to resources and power through men is the primary attractor for women. How much action would ugly ass Mick Jagger have seen in his life if he was a cab driver?

Not that I wanted to spend any part of my day defending Mick Fucking Jagger, but he probably would have done fine. If “resources” were all there was to it, there would be as many young women with posters of Jeff Bezos on their wall today as there were with posters of Mick Jagger back in the 1960s and 1970s. Hell, back in the day there were probably as many straight guys with Mick Jagger posters as there were straight girls. It might have had something to do with his charisma onstage, or possibly even the music he made with the Rolling Stones (which, many decades ago, actually didn’t suck).

Speaking of classic cock rock, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Elam wearing Led Zepplin t-shirts. Is he attracted by Robert Plant’s … resources?

And of course, that makes me think about Bill Cosby in the 1970s. Rich, famous, powerful and undoubtedly with access to plenty of drugs. I was a 20-year-old nobody in 1977, and as long as I had drugs I had all the tail I could handle.

I really don’t want to think too much about the possible similarities between Elam and Cosby.

So, I am sitting here wondering just why Cosby was reduced to doping women, slipping them drugs so they’d lose control and he could access them sexually.

Perhaps because he was (is?) a sick, sadistic fuck who got off on that shit?

Oh, but wait. That isn’t what happened. At least not for the three counts of sexual assault for which he was convicted. In reading through accuser Andrea Constand’s account, she didn’t even allege that he slipped her drugs without her knowledge. She alleged that Cosby gave her three pills and some wine, telling her they were just pills that would relax her. …

A grown woman went alone at night to Bill Cosby’s residence after he had twice attempted to have sex with her, took the drugs that he offered without knowing what they were or even asking, had sex, and then sold that story as a rape.

That’s not exactly what happened, according to the story Constand told to the jury, and which the jury concluded was true beyond a reasonable doubt. Her story is that of a young woman who trusted Cosby — and had that trust brutally violated by him. Here’s how Vox described the story she told — and. be warned, I’m including the graphic details here.

Constand said she considered Cosby, then in his 60s, a mentor. In January 2004 at Cosby’s home, she said, he gave her three blue pills that he told her would help to relieve stress. She took them and became unfocused and confused. She said she passed out on the couch.

“I felt Mr. Cosby on the couch behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breasts being touched,” Constand testified. She said she was too weak to fight Cosby off: “I wanted it to stop,” she said. “I couldn’t say anything. I was trying to get my hands to move, my legs to move, and the message just wasn’t getting there.”

The jury also heard from five other women who said Cosby did much the same to them. Vox again:

The five women, often defiant in the face of sometimes brutal cross-examination, presented a powerful case. Their stories echoed Constand’s own account of confusion, paralysis, and shame as they realized they had been violated. “Here was America’s Dad on top of me,” Janice Dickinson, a former supermodel who said Cosby drugged and raped her in 1982 in Lake Tahoe, said in court, describing her shock during the assault.

Those five accusers and Constand herself withstood the torrent of questions and recriminations from the defense. Some women admitted to confusion about what happened to them decades ago, and that they spent years grappling with their encounters with Cosby. Yet all were adamant about their allegations: They were drugged, they were assaulted, and Cosby did it.

But of course that’s not how Elam sees it. He doesn’t see the betrayal of trust. He blames all of Cosby’s accusers for being gullible fools who — get this! — didn’t automatically assume that a famous man who at the time was almost universally beloved was actually planning to rape them.

It doesn’t cross their minds that the rich, powerful man handing them drugs late at night; men who’ve already established sexual interest, might still have sex in mind.

Poor darling. I am sure she thought Cosby invited her up for a bible study and some Jell-O.

This is in many ways the most insidious part of Elam’s, er, argument — and what makes it a true rape apologia. Even if we were to accept Elam’s premises here — that these women were either gullible idiots or scheming gold-diggers — that still doesn’t make it ok to rape them. Gullibility isn’t consent.

MRAs, including Elam, are forever accusing feminists of painting all men as rapists, which feminists don’t actually do. But here he is attacking women for NOT assuming that the guy widely seen as “America’s Dad” was secretly planning to drug and rape them. And suggesting that this “gullibility” means that whatever this man decided to do to them wasn’t rape.

Elam follows up this bit of rape apologia by referring to Cosby’s accusers collectively as a bunch of “coke whores.”

You may now have a clearer idea as to why the Southern Poverty Law Center recently classified Elam’s AVFM as a “hate group.”

Then we’re back to the 1970s.

No wonder they say we live in a rape culture. At least half the sex between all westerners in the 1970’s was rape, apparently, thanks to retroactive definitions and hashtag movements.

No, not half, but I’m guessing that quite a lot of sex in the 70s would indeed be classified (correctly) as rape today. Guys got away with a lot of sleazy and coercive shit back in those days — especially when they had some sort of power or authority or advantage over the women who were the targets of their lusts. Guys like celebrities, bosses, even small-time drug dealers.

Consensual partying and sex, sends a man to prison decades later, because rape, my friends, is whatever women want it to be.

Bullshit. The law defines rape carefully — and having “sex” with someone who is passed out or so incapacitated they can’t push you away is very clearly rape.

And it’s why they are pushing so hard now for an end to the statute of limitations on sexual assaults. Feminists want to go after any man, and the more powerful the better, at any time, for any reason, and completely crucify him. Not just in the court of public opinion, but in courts of law. Gents, we’re all Bill Cosby now.

If by that last bit Elam means that any man can be instantly brought low by the mere word of a vindictive women, or a bunch of them, not even Bill Cosby is Bill Cosby now. People ignored numerous accusations against Cosby for many years. It wasn’t until 60 — 60! — women came forward that prosecutors were able to get one conviction on three charges. Cosby won’t ever face criminal trial, much less punishment, for any of the other crimes against women he’s been accused of.

Neither will the vast majority of other rapists, whether their crimes happened in the drug scene of the 1970s or last night in the marital bed. Many of the other famous men whose sordid histories have been revealed by #MeToo accusers may never spend a day in criminal court, much less a day in prison.

We do indeed live in a rape culture, and people like Elam are a big part of the reason why.