By David Futrelle
Remember this guy? Once upon a time, Paul Elam, founder of the misogynistic hate site A Voice for Men and once one of the world’s more (in)famous Men’s Rights activists, was a mainstay in the virtual pages of We Hunted the Mammoth.
Then the Men’s Rights movement in general, and Elam in particular, was upstaged by even more reprehensible misogynist movements from Gamergate to the alt-right. In 2016, having trouble raising money to keep his site and himself going, Elam naturally declared victory and announced he was retiring from the Men’s Rights activism industry.
In 2017, he unretired, but he’s never regained his former, er, glory. Still, he soldiers on. He continues to post videos on YouTube on his A Near for Men An Ear for Men channel. He offers $120 an hour “consulting” services via Skype to men on such subjects as “relationship issues” (he has no training as a therapist), “divorce strategies” (he’s not a lawyer) and “diabetes management” (he’s not a doctor). And he continues to share his “Red Pill” wisdom on Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which he’s returned to on a new account despite being permabanned some time ago.
So why am I even bringing him up? Well, I ran across this recent, uh, insight from him and I thought I should share it with you.
MRAs claim to care about abused men, but don’t actually do anything to help them in any tangible way, like setting up hotlines or shelters. (The only shelter for men in the US was set up by a feminist Domestic Violence organization that MRAs once tried to defund.) Instead, MRAs post shit like this, conflating actual abusive behavior by women with, well, women expecting to be treated with a modicum of consideration by their male partners.
But of course “wisdom” like this resonates with Elam’s remaining fans.
A veritable Algonquin Round Table here, huh?
I scrolled back a little on his Twitter, and found a couple more #RedPillRelationships pearls from ol’ Paul:
So thoughtful, so wise!
In case you’re wondering — I was — Elam’s A Voice for Men continues, though it’s not altogether clear who’s involved in running it these days. It squeezes out a few articles a week, which seem to consist of turgid exegeses of “gynocentrism” alternating with the sort of outrage-bait AVFM used to be semi-famous for.
Paul himself contributes from time to time. In February, for example, he wrote a 64-word post titled “A message to Democrats from Paul Elam and A Voice for Men” in which he declared that anyone voting for a Democrat is
literally voting for the murder of children. Given that, it is the editorial position of A Voice for Men that you should have been aborted, you degenerate Nazi fuck.
Other recent posts on the site have included such gems as:
And then there are all of … these.
I have no idea what’s going on with these, or why there are so many of them, but I don’t care enough to read any of them to find out.
So, big congratulations to Paul Elam and to A Voice for Men for continuing to exist, I guess, despite there being no real need for either or you.
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GEE WHIZ WHAT AN ALLY
The repellent Tory MP Philip Davies is speaking at a US men’s rights conference where Paul Elam is also booked They eserve one another
And meanwhile, as @John displays what a fine human being he is, the TERFs are at it again.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/apr/26/london-porn-festival-protests
I paticularly like this bit:
So basically, “We’re transphobic, but we didn’t say so, so you don’t get to point out we are.”
Wait I glossed over this.
What exactly are you saying here? Because it sure seems like you are saying “if I ‘bond’ (and by that I mean marry into/be common law with) a young family, they might expect me to continue fulfilling the role I have adopted.”
Like, if you marry the woman, there are legal consequences that say you have to still parent the kids?
WHY do MRAs always go “Whatever, who cares about the kids (biological, step-kids, adopted kids, whatever)!!! I know they think of me as an important figure in their life, but w/e, amirite boys?????”
Why do they hate kids so much? Do they not remember being a kid? And having people who are important to them?
Because this –
Is only applicable if you have some sort of *legal status* for them to enforce. So, either you are married, or are common law. If you are common law, WHY would you want to throw those children away???
And re: this –
YES. Stop chasing younger women. If the women are running away, meaning you now need to ‘chase’ them… They are not interested. You are old.
Do you want to go out with someone *your* parents age? Probably not! Why would these ‘younger women’ want to go out with you?
In short, Grow up! Stop chasing younger women.
(The settle down is optional, you do you. Not everyone needs to have a family, and if you really can’t see yourself being a continued presence in the lives of kids who might start to rely on you, you definitely shouldn’t settle down with a woman with kids.)
I want to give John a little bit of credit, to be fair, because I actually think there are a host of reasons why they call it “hen-pecked.” Here is a sampling:
1) Because it evokes an image of small, ineffectual creatures annoying you for no real reason, which is exactly how many people view women.
2) Because it gives us a fun shorthand to use when mocking men for consulting with their wives or helping their wives with literally anything. What, is she the boss of you? You’re supposed to be the boss! Ha ha ha ha ha
3) Because we don’t think of women’s concerns and desires as valid.
@Viscaria
4) Because the image is always of a single rooster with a harem of hens, and isn’t that what all men dream of? Except the joke’s on Chads of that sort, because hurrhurrhurr, women sure are a pain, aren’t they, imagine what having a lot of them around would be like.
The trouble with these responses to Elam’s work is that they ignore a lot of the politics and realities of relationships. I personally don’t date. I haven’t found it particularly wonderful. I don’t do hook ups because I find them immoral. So, what did I find when I dated? Well, to be honest, I found women sizing me up for my income. I have been asked several times at the very beginning of relationships or dates how much money I make. My response now would be: “Not the right amount for you.” When I was considering asking someone to marry me, I asked her about her views about signing a prenup. She said, “I would only ask for what’s fair.” Out she went. Besides being cheated on by women who don’t see anything particularly wrong with their behavior, I also found that women wanted me to put their careers ahead of my own. I almost destroyed my own career trying to help a partner start hers. I’ve also found a fair amount of borderline personality disorder floating around. I seriously dated a borderline with children, tried to help her with her issues, and helped her kids to the tune of 30 grand. All of that money went down the drain. And, yes, I tried to cater to her sexual needs while not getting my own met. All told, I have found contemporary relationships pretty destructive for men. These relationships could offer children, but with the way the family courts work, you might not be able to transmit your values to them. So, what’s the point? I’m going to start a foundation and transmit my values and my name that way. I don’t do relationships anymore. I could change my mind someday.
What’s fascinating about all of this is that people seem upset by the notion that withholding sex might be abusive. If a male ever withheld money, he would be called cheap or abusive. It’s kind of a double standard. My position is that nobody owes anybody anything.
I’m not particularly angry (how can you be angry at the weather or the landscape not allowing you to perform some activity; it is what it is), but I don’t think the combination of third wave feminism and anti-male sentiment bodes well for contemporary relationships. That’s not anger; it’s just a risk-return assessment of the current dating/relationship scene.
What is this I don’t even
Kupo,
Who knows? It could mean marrying someone with grandchildren so that he gets the fun of being a grandparent without the responsibility of being a parent. I’ve often said I don’t want to be a parent but do want to be a grandparent because I like children in small doses when I can give them back to their parents.
However, this does not fit in with his chasing younger women mission.
…I don’t understand why men can’t just simply say “Marriage and kids aren’t my thing” and leave it at that, without having to invoke paranoid fantasies of an oppressive military-bridal complex trying to trick men (but not women, somehow) into a lifetime of indentured servitude. People who fall in love and start families aren’t dupes.
Weird how MRAs never focus on all the legal and financial benefits that marriage brings, like tax advantages and lower insurance rates. That would spoil the narrative, I guess.
@John
So you haven’t had the self-awareness to notice, but “nagging” is a pretty natural response to having your life tied to someone who keeps ignoring your needs. What you see as a nuisance, to women is a necessary and exhausting chore of reasserting our existence as human beings every time a man’s mind wanders off and he forgets it.
It took me a long time to appreciate this, but once seen it’s something you can’t unsee. How my father would procrastinate, put things off that the family needed in favor of things that were fun for him. How he’d forget things, be careless, expect others to fix his mistakes – but shout at us if we made mistakes ourselves. I didn’t appreciate the need for my mom asking him a second time if he’d turned the stove off – until the day I came out of the shower and saw that he’d left a pot of water boiling on the stove, the flame fully on, and then gone outside and forgotten all about it. The water was almost all boiled away. I was bullshit, but he acted like I was hysterical; he didn’t care. It wasn’t a big deal to him.
This forgetfulness and lack of caring is the mark of social privilege. Only the very privileged can afford to forget, and to not care, and still survive. My father does not have Alzheimer’s; he simply has never needed to remember everything, because the women in his life would do it for him. Patriarchy infantilizes cis men, and you guys mostly never even notice it.
Think about that for a while. And then think for a while longer about why your mind goes to thoughts of violence as a response. You are hitting like 95/100 red flags for still being abusive, matey; you need to start coming clean to yourself about things.
@Rabid Rabbit
I dig how, despite being supposedly against porn, they have internalized exactly the porn industry’s narrative about trans women. Like, the idea that being trans is a porn thing is not just ahistorical, it’s the kind of conclusion a cis person would come to by watching a lot of shitty industry porn and thinking it was realistic.
The hypocrisy is just mindblowing.
[Edit: okay brain, they/them pronouns are rad but please don’t use them for hypothetical cis men, thx.]
@Cyborgette
Exactly this. It’s the mental load.
https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/
@kupo
Ugh yes, that, thanks. It’s extra fun these days to look back at how clueless I was, and could afford to be, when I had even the most half-assed protection of living as male.
Me in 2009: “I, uh, don’t see why people should be paid to be homemakers? That, like, isn’t a job?”
Me in 2019: “The government should pay homemakers handsomely for doing a very important job, and incidentally I would be very very happy if I could get paid to do housework for my roomies who work full-time.”
Came here via Mr Elam himself. What a cracking read for a Saturday morning!!
I have a proposal. You don’t tell me how to live, think and treat women, and I don’t tell you that you’re wrong.
???
@Cyborgette
I’m reminded of a great-uncle of mine who was a Catholic priest in Quebec, and grew up while the church still had a stranglehold on the province. At noon exactly, he would sit down and expect his lunch to appear before him. This was due to the good services of his housekeeper. One day, while staying at the family cottage, he went to get something out of the fridge and knocked out the milk. He gazed at it, said “Oops. The milk fell,” and walked away.
It’s one of the things about privilege, just how hard it can be to grasp it and, if you’re one of the non-privileged, to see how hard it is to grasp for the privileged. There’s a really interesting observation in the book I’m reading about the Southern slave-owning class: the authors point out that from our vantage point, when we look at the slave-owners, all we can see is slavery — and quite right too. But that falsifies our view of them, because we assume that they saw everything through the lens of slavery too — that everything they ever did, said, thought, was consciously inflected by the knowledge of slavery. But that’s just not how it was. Why would it be, if you’re used to slavery? How often do you think about that everything that goes into getting you electricity when you turn on the light? When you put out the trash, how often do you think about the people who pick it up? When you buy a new shirt — well, yes, maybe you worry that it was made in Bangladesh, but do you really think about the person who placed the shirt on the shelf, the truck driver who got it to the store, the person who packed it and put it in the truck, the person who made it, the people who gathered the material? Of course not — frankly, life would be impossible if you did think about absolutely everybody. Most often, the shirt’s just there, and you’re fine with that. The best one can do is find some guarantees that all the various people in the supply chain aren’t being treated completely like crap. But even that has to be pointed out to you. The essence of privilege is the things you just don’t think about — and sometimes, that involves things you ought to have checked on. It’s the fascinating thing that a lot of the slave-owners had loads of genuinely admirable qualities. There was just this weird disconnect that kept them from realizing that slavery was horrific — and in return, now we look at them, and that taints everything. And they’d probably be horrified, because it just never occurred to them, and we think it should have.
As for whether “homemaker” is a job or not: If it wasn’t, people wouldn’t hire maids and nurses. Though the tendency to hire illegal immigrants at slave wages still shows how little it’s actually valued.
And as for the radfems vs. the extremely queer-friendly porn festival: I also really “like” this quote from the radfems:
Alright, fine, I’m a straight cis male, but: How the hell is feminism not about individualistic wishes and desires?!? How the hell does “liberating all women from the oppression of males” not imply liberating women to indulge in their individualistic wishes and desires?!? Not to mention what if the woman’s being tied to a bed by another woman, or if it’s a man being tied to a bed by a woman… (Leaving trans people out of this argument, since we know what they think about them…)
Still, at least they have the courage of their convictions:
As opposed to, say, the various people involved in the festival and the various filmmakers who didn’t hide their names.
Christ. I’m really not sure why this is disgusting me so much, but it really is.
@Rabid Rabbit:
I sometimes wonder if our descendants will look at us in exactly that way. “You left all those lights on, in all those huge empty skyscrapers, night after night, after hours when no-one was using them. Even after the science was in about climate change. Did you ever think about what you were doing? How it would affect us?”
@Surplus
Well, I think the answer to that last question is pretty obviously “no.” Most of the time we can’t even think about what we’re doing to ourselves/other people alive right now, so what hope is there of us thinking about future generations?
Well, no.
I believe that everything that they ever did, said, thought (as adults anyway) was UNconsciously inflected by their role in an enslavement-based society.
Certainly there would have been many things also consciously inflected by that reality, but most of it would be UNconscious. The choice to cut firewood or order someone else to cut it might be unconsciously influenced by their slavemaster role most of the time, but it’s also possible that an individual who owned slaves also would sometimes take an axe and hack bits of wood to small pieces because it served some purpose beyond mere functional acquisition of firewood. Someone who liked to get out of the house & stretch their muscles might choose to do it a few times a year, and when that happened they might consciously reject the choice to order a slave to do the work.
But when they think about the architecture that they like, it’s very likely that architecture they perceive as associated with slave houses would be unconsciously devalued. When they think about what physical features are attractive to them, unconscious bias almost certainly creeps in. There would be so many facets of life influenced by the slave-owning role that it’s hard to imagine which facets would not be perceived differently between slave owners and slaves.
Considering that you probably think that treating women like shit is fine and dandy, I think I’m gonna just go ahead and tell you not to do that and just risk the prospect of you telling me that I’m wrong.
I have a feeling that you aren’t any better than the hundreds of other trolls we’ve chewed up on this site. So go ahead, try explaining why we’re wrong. It’ll be fun!
Um, you came here, slappy.
If you receive a red pill vaccination, are you then immune to the red pill?
Viscaria: How I wish that were true.
1. Live your life in such a way that you don’t need to barge onto feminist sites and issue silly demands.
2. Think about how you come across to others.
3. Treat women with kindness and respect.
You turn now. Tell us why these are wrong.
Actually, we do get to tell you how to treat us.
Holy heck, did y’all see doug’s post above??
We have:
-women are money grubbers!
-women are crazy (mind the comments policy, doug!)
-women withhold sex, which is exactly equivalent to men withholding money
-women cheat, and see no problem with it.
-women expect doug to put their career above my own (the horror!!!! Imagine, one gender consistently prioritising their career advancement above all else? This sort of thing could start a movement!)
-family courts are stacked against men (while somewhat true, there was also bemoaning of the financial help he gave a woman that he was dating and her kids. Without knowing more, i’m going to guess that part of this 30k went to things like food and rent. Or maybe just bonbons? Also who is pushing for changes in who should be seen as the automatic primary care givers in relationships? Hint: no red pills there.)
-women are inscrutable forces of nature!
Takeaways for doug: paragraphs, my dude.