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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.
In Elam’s world, women’s consent doesn’t matter if a man wants to have sex, right? Ugh. What a selfish dork.
Misogynists are the biggest misandrists
As the trial went on, I wondered about the neocon misogynists. They wouldn’t want to throw support to an African American man, yet, the hatred of women was so strong in them. Which side would win? Did a typical neocon misogynist have a little Hate Women angel on one shoulder, and a No, Hate Black People devil on the other? Or was the Hate Women the devil and the Hate Black People the angel?
Paul Elam cleared some things up, indeed.
I remember when the atheist/skeptic community blew up after Rebecca Watson talked about a man in an elevator asking her to his hotel room at 4am. Her story wasn’t about possible rape, but that did come up at the time with the phrase “Schrodinger’s Rapist” being coined, describing how women don’t know if a man is going to be a rapist until it’s too late and so often we need to be extra careful. The men who were enraged over a mild “don’t do that” completely lost it at this point.
Here we see how much bullshit those enraged men were spewing and how women are in a can’t win situation. Won’t be alone with a man you don’t know? Misandry! Got raped because you were alone with a man you don’t know? It’s your fault, you should have known better.
_____________________________________________________________
For more fun reading on Elevatorgate, you can start here…
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2011/07/06/two-atheists-get-in-an-elevator/
And then follow up here…
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/?s=rebecca+watson
As usual, Elam’s only concern is with himself and his fear-mongering.
He’s got no empathy for others, and only cares about people who will put up with this bullshit he’s peddling and who might consider paying for it.
Which is rather telling, considering how he attempts to sloppily paint Cosby’s accusers of being cons just jumping for a chance to get some of his “estate”.
I know this is the most minor of all the misrepresentations Paul Elam is offering, but even disregarding the fact that normal human beings often fancy each other, I can’t parse him thinking Mick Jagger was too ugly to get laid without money?
Jagger was famously beautiful as a young man. Checking back at the old photos he looks like a Caravaggio painting even drunk or tired. What does a man have to look like before Elam will even consider that women might be actually physically attracted to him?
And what about Hannibal Buress? He’s the one who brought the Cosby rapes back into the spotlight to make the recent trial possible. Does Elam mention him? Is he unimportant, because he’s African American? Is he a mangina, too pussy-focused?
Seems there are still many questions for Elam to answer. There’s surely still a need for screed.
@Mogwitch:
I wonder whether people think of celebrities as having been always and forever remaining the age they were when they first noticed them. It would explain why some of these guys still use Brad Pitt as their go-to shorthand for “hot young guy,” whereas Jagger, being from an earlier generation, is fixed in their mind as a Rock Grandpa.
Paul Elam
A guy could be so physically attractive as to make statues spontaneously squirt, and physical attraction still wouldn’t be the reason for women to be attracted to him. Nope, it’d be because of the money he makes as a professional model.
@Moon_custafer
That makes more and is more generous than the other theories I had come up with.
A. Paul Elam is both very straight and solipsistic. He doesn’t see any men as sexually attractive so doesn’t believe women do.
B. Most of the manosphere insist alpha males should look like enormous hulking muscle mountains. Being incredibly limited (and solipsistic) they can’t adjust to living in a world in which people find Chris Hemsworth, Benedict Cumberbatch AND the nerdy office colleague attractive.
Eddie and Jesalin trump those too.
For Paul Elam’s consideration, I can hand someone a video documenting my agreement to be murdered, and if that person does murder me, it will still be murder, and he or she will go to jail, because my suicidal actions do not absolve his or her homicidal actions.
Similarly, even if a gold-digging woman voluntarily takes drugs that make her insensate, and a man whose gold she coveted then has sex with her, it will still be rape and he will go to jail, because the choice to take drugs is not the choice to have sex.
Super simple this. My choice is not the same as someone else’s choice. One of my choices is not the same as a completely different one of my choices.
I remember when the Cosby accusations finally made the mainstream press a few years ago. Dudes in comment sections everywhere were outraged that other people believed his accusers. We’re not supposed to believe rape accusations until a man has been convicted in a court of law for them. I hear that over and over again. Every time a man who’s a public figure is accused of rape or harassment.
So now, Cosby has been convicted. By rape apologist’s own logic, we should now be allowed to call him a rapist.
I’m shocked! So terribly shocked that even after the conviction happened, rape apologists all over the internet still think Cosby isn’t actually a rapist.
On the drugs thing, I don’t have experience with illegal narcotics of the highly addictive variety, but I did use to smoke cigarettes. About 90% of the strangers who came up to me in the street to ask me to give them a cigarette were men. Just saying.
well, if there’s anything you can say about Elam it’s this: he’s a reliable source of Worst Takes™.
*sigh* So many hideous words when it’s really as simple has respecting your sexual partners…..
Every Elam post looks the this to me:
“Act eb ceulso, zaxat vaxakos vo zint axafuk Firr Cesfupp din zo 1520s. List, baxameus, dewolbur pi ucteuftodrupp um axaccopt te pronkupp eb wrugs. Pum waxas pit 70-yoaxal-erd jefedupp din 1522, pi axas reck axas Pum whaxad wrugs Pum whaxad axarr zo taxair Pum ceurd whaxactro.”
He makes my eyes glaze over in boredom with his tedious prose.
@PeeVee the Tired
I don’t even read it. Just what David has to say about it. You get the gist, it’s funnier, and it preserves brain cells.
Rabid Rabbit,
Yep. I learned to really just read David’s take on it, and if he says something that piques my curiosity, I’ll go back and read Elam’s actual words…I really have no patience for over-flowery purple prose, anymore. ?
Paul Elam knows what he did. He knows that his victims know what he did. And he’s scared that they’re coming for him.
Good.
So Elam now claims to have been a dealer and hints that he probably raped women by spiking their drinks or the equivalent.
I’m shocked he still has the capacity to shock me.
Lots of yuck, but this is telling:
“Use” indeed. Ugh.
Great post, David. I always enjoy it when you not only skewer the ostensible target, but also the wider underlying attitudes.
Doesn’t Elam live with a woman? How much more time did Cosby spend with women that he spent “excessive” time around women as compared to Elam? What, did Elam’s girlfriend kick him out?
@Katherine
Neocons love Cosby because they like to think he tells the “truth” about African Americans and their saggy pants.
@DawnPuritySeeker
I dunno about him living with a woman, but iirc he does collect alimony from an ex-wife whom he abused and who during their marriage worked to support him while he sat around doing nothing productive or worthwhile.
Well, if Elam is Cosby, now, should not he be sent to jail ?