CLARIFICATION: According to filmmaker Cassie Jaye, Paul Elam says that the tweet I quoted was not his. His exact quote, according to her: “No, it is not my tweet and I did not authorize it, nor does it reflect my feelings.”
I believe that Elam is lying, and will offer my evidence in a post shortly.
UPDATE: And here is that post.
By David Futrelle
Apparently he couldn’t hold it back any longer. Paul Elam, proud founder of the Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men, has insisted over and over again that despite all appearances to the contrary, he’s really not a misogynist — and that all he really wants is true equality between men and women.
So imagine my shock when I saw this pop up on the tweeter earlier today:
I have so many questions. So that whole “slavery” thing was just a little “oopsie” compared to the terrible blunder that was … giving women the same voting rights as men? Apparently so, at least in the fevered brain of one of the most well-known MRAs out there.
Another pressing question: Why can’t Elam learn the difference between a “voting bloc” — that is, “a group of voters that are strongly motivated by a specific common concern or group of concerns” — and a “voting block,” which would the dude pictured below, I guess, if he were in the process of casting a ballot. (Elam has evidently been confused about this distinction for some time.)
I tweeted at Elam’s two best-known sort-of-mainstream supporters — author Warren Farrell and director Cassie Jaye — to see what they thought of Elam’s tweet, but have gotten no response from either one yet. And somehow I doubt I ever will.
EDITED TO ADD: The @MRApsychic Twitter account has now vanished. But it doesn’t say the account was suspended so maybe Elam deleted it? I replaced the embedded tweet with a screenshot and linked to an archived version.
We Hunted the Mammoth is independent and ad-free, and relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
Poor Pitiful Paul.
Heeeey new thread! Its like a new day lol
Women were the voting block that made vaccines part of the norm today. Those selfish assholes, not wanting their children to die of smallpox or measles!!
Yeah! Manly men die of preventable diseases!
I like how in 1919 the men just woke up one day and benevolently gave women the right to vote. Not like they gave them a ton of shit for it or anything. /s
The account itself is a little weird: the bio says “I channel Paul while he sleeps,” and it has a Matrix-esque background. Is this for sure Elam’s actual Twitter account?
I mean, it very well could be; I don’t really follow him. It just seems… off.
When an activist vgroup has “equality”, “justice”, “rights”, “freedom”, etc. in its title, there is a high chance it is actually some sort of collection of bigots whose real goal is to suppress somebody else. Not *always* by any means, but often.
MRAs do want men and women to be equal. It’s just that men are more equal then others in their case :p
@Anonymous
Sure buddy.
Incidentally, about the woman with the “ban white men” sign: people like that do exist, as do Muslims who hold “Islam will dominate the world” signs or students holding “free speech is unsafe” signs.
But did you notice the camera is always *quite close* to these protestors in the photos published in the media?
That is in order to hide the fact that in all these cases, the protest consists of about 15-20 loonies that thousands of women, Muslims, or students (respectively) just ignore.
@Anonymous
First off, that image started as a 4chan hoax.
Second, your anti-Muslim dogwhistle is not welcome here.
Third, unrestricted free speech is, in fact, unsafe, as hate speech is violence. Full stop.
Finally, mind the comments policy. “Loonies” is not appropriate.
Is anyone else starting to get really bored by Anonymous? I’m not saying he’s worthy of the banhammer yet, but could we revive the troll challenges for him or something?
If I went to a demonstration and saw a sign reading No White Men, I would assume that it was either a joke or an extreme opinion that was not shared by many in that crowd — or elsewhere.
But Paul Elam — a sophisticated cultural critic — understood immediately that this woman was just saying what all feminists think. Thanks, Paul, for enlightening us.
Given the considerable overlap between MRA’s and white supremacists, I suspect a lot of them don’t regard slavery as an “oopsie” at all – delve deep enough (or frankly not that deeply) and I suspect most of them regard the “oopsie” as being abolishing it.
As someone who cares about finding the truth, I directly reached out to Paul Elam about this tweet. His response: “No, it is not my tweet and I did not authorize it, nor does it reflect my feelings.” Paul then said he would work to have it removed.
David Futrelle, I look forward to the retractions on this blog post.
@Kat:
Every march I go on*, there are quite a few signs which are jokes. But perhaps protesters should think more about the potential for their signs to be used maliciously against their movement?
* Nowadays, at least. I don’t remember this being a thing back in the 80s, but that could just be selective memory at work.
Democracy was a mistake because people vote in ways I don’t approve of. Why don’t we restrict the vote only to people who agree with me?
But I was not being Islamophobic. My point was precisely the opposite: that the *media reports* are being unfair *to* Muslims (and similarly to women and students) by portraying fringe groups as central.
I am glad to hear the photo is a hoax, but even if it *weren’t* it would still only be one individual, which the so called “men’s rights” groups unfairly show as typical of women.
Wouldn’t democracy be better if only people who agree with me got to vote?
Silly women and minority groups, voting for things that are in their interest! Not like us strong, conservative white men, who know it’s best to vote ourselves into an early grave in support of the ultra-rich.
In all seriousness, I have been wondering lately whether there’s a “paradox of democracy” similar to the “paradox of tolerance.”
For those unfamiliar, the “paradox of tolerance” is the idea that tolerant societies cannot be infinitely tolerant–there are some ideologies they cannot tolerate if they wish to remain tolerant overall.
Maybe there are some people–authoritarians–who shouldn’t be allowed to vote if we want to keep our democracy. Or maybe they just shouldn’t be allowed to hold public office, i.e. be put in a position where their authoritarianism can erode democracy for others.
this post contains sarcasm… your mileage may vary
The entire purpose of representative democracy is to allow spoiled white men to be treated like they were the suburban white kids on the covers of 1960’s-era LIFE Magazines…. Nobody who isn’t actively benefiting from that should be ALLOWED to vote.
…
(content warning for sexual assault, victim-blaming)
I thought the 80’s were the worst decade… goddamn, was I WRONG
https://jezebel.com/man-who-kept-teen-girl-as-sex-slave-in-dog-cage-will-no-1834434251
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/us/new-york-school-bus-driver-rape-plea/index.html
@Anonymous
See, what trolls do is they start with small things that seem logical. For example “some feminists want to ban white men, but it’s in the minority” and then they take that seed of doubt they’ve sewn and they grow it and grow it until they can proclaim something entirely opposite to the truth (“feminists are anti-male!”). Since you’ve consistently shown contempt for us in this comment section there’s no way I’m giving you this bullshit based on a fake photo. You can’t just claim “some” muslims do these things without it being relevant and certainly without any evidence whatsoever. (And no, it wasn’t relevant to the discussion of a fake image of a feminist.)
@Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie
You’ve put it better than I could, and one of the reasons I think knowing history is so important is exactly because otherwise we get dumb white men painting up a false idea of a lost “golden age” where they were treated as kings and everyone else their loyal servants.
And of course they think that it was weak men in power who just gave human rights away to women and minorities, because why would those have had to fight for it when they were really just fine living as servants? Urgh.
But who will make these evaluations? And what gives them (whoever they are) that right? It seems to me that the process of disenfranchising “authoritarians” is itself inevitably a form of authoritarianism.
@Aaron
Bingo. There is no nice comfy and/or righteous way to limit the franchise to the “right” people. The only real solution is to make sure the “right” people (i. e. those who agree with me) exercise their franchise and hope like hell those other people can’t be bothered to vote.
In case I haven’t made it clear in the past, I don’t blame Trump on his voters. I blame him on all those who didn’t want him to be president but couldn’t be bothered to vote.