So I’ve been mostly avoiding writing about the whole Men’s Rights postering controversy in Vancouver, because it’s such a tempest in a teapot. The tl;dr: Some posters got torn down, and some of the people tearing them down yelled at the blabby MRA videoblogger and A Voice for Men second fiddle known as JohnTheOther.
MRAs: Given that virtually none of you have any experience as actual real world activists, you may not be aware of this, but POSTERS GET TORN DOWN. It’s annoying, and I don’t support it myself, but it happens all the time. Sometimes, you may actually run across people tearing down your posters, at which point there is usually some sort of awkward confrontation that may include yelling.
You know what you do when this happens? You put your posters up again. You know what you don’t do? Compare the experience to rape. Because, on the list of the grand injustices of the world, having posters torn down is pretty far down the list, somewhere around “stubbing your toe” and “kitten farts on you.”
In the fast-paced, perpetually busy world of today, we don’t all have time to read every post on A Voice for Men. So here is an edited version of Paul Elam’s latest post, on Rebecca Watson of Skepchick. And whores. And how he personally doesn’t spend all his time claiming to be a victim, even though he totally is one, in case you forgot since the last time he reminded you of that.
Here’s Paul:
Whores … typical whore … Main Street walking, garden variety anybody’s whore … honest whore. … corporate whore … corporate whores … whorish sexual symmetry … stupid whore … stupid whore … whore … lying whore … whore … lying whore … whore … lying whore … corporate whore … a lying whore can also be a corporate whore … whoring for the cause … whore … PZ Myers … stupid, lying whore … not just a lying whore who also happens to be a stupid whore … a different subspecies of whore altogether … stupid, lying whore … whore that rigorously abandons intellect, rationale, evidence, decency and compassion, and also fosters much deserved hostility toward themselves … stupid, lying whore … stupid, lying whore … .
The manly men at A Voice for Men do love their manly music! You may recall the asskickingly asskicking asskickery of “Go My Own Way,” the A Voice for Men anthem, as performed by Jade Michael and the Fuck Their Shit Up Singers Crew. And the “red pill honesty” of Slumberwall’s emo-folk (but totally not wussy) meditation“The Hatred of Women.”
Now, in a post with the dopily macho title “The weekend’s here. Swagger, brothers. Swagger,” AVFM contributor Skeptic presents a new video from his band Dark Star Disco.
No, it doesn’t quite match the terrible grandeur of either of the earlier MRA anthems. The music is utterly unexceptional testosterone-heavy rock-tronica that sounds like it just escaped from the nineties. And it’s 15 minutes long. But Skeptic is quite proud of it, nonetheless. As he describes it, in phrases as clichéd as the song itself:
We are sonically in your face – wall of sound — chainsaw wailing guitar, piercing electro synth and pounding rock rhythms.
Skeptic contributes the guitar – sorry, the “chainsaw wailing guitar” – to the sound. He apparently prefers guitars to women, as they don’t talk back:
I strut on guitar and love it. Nowhere do I feel more alive. Swagger.
I’ve been playing guitar for many years – self-taught. Swagger.
My guitars have helped me cathart during times of feminist insanity more times than I can recall. I truly don’t know how I would have made it this far without playing guitar. For my guitar doesn’t make maddening “man up” BS demands and treat me with misandry as a disposable utility.
The video, even less original, consists of pilfered stock footage of an assortment of putatively manly things, starting with, yes, a missile. (Oh, hello, Dr. Freud1) Let’s let Skeptic describe his creation:
It’s chock full of images men can relate to – a guided missile, eagle and cheetah hunting, jet aircraft and a high powered motorcycle at full throttle, runway dance swagger, military teamwork and bravery, high tech playfulness, raw wilderness, cutting edge scientific research, urban spaces constructed and running at full tilt and moving at a blistering pace into a future city of lights. It’s what men do. It’s cram packed with stuff feminists shit their pants over – unapologetic swaggering masculinity.
I dig it. It’s ballsy.
Just so you know, the “runway dance swagger” in question refers not to a fashion model shaking his or her stuff in a runway show, but to some dude doing a little victory dance on an runway for, like , airplanes.
Of course, Skeptic is making some assumptions here. We don’t actually know the gender of all those flying the planes (or driving the cars, or riding the motorcycle like an asshole) in the video. For the sake of argument, let’s just assume they are all male.
But the cheetah? Either Skeptic thinks all cheetahs are boy cheetahs, or he thinks that girl cheetahs sit on their fat asses eating cheetah bon bons and living off of Cheetalimony. In fact, of course, both male and female cheetahs hunt for their food. That ballsy swaggering masculine cheetah in his video may well be a gal.
If there are any stray misogynists reading this post who are unwilling to accept that female cheetahs can hunt, skip ahead to 1:30 in the video below to see one cheetah mom chase down a gazelle just like the cheetah in Skeptic’s video.
Here, a female cheetah faces down three hyenas to protect her cubs.
In other words, female cheetahs are badasses. So are male cheetahs.
Skeptic is just a plain old jackass.
If any of you actually listened to Dark Star Disco’s little masterpiece, or any of the other songs I linked to above, and need to clear your ears of all that manly man stuff, might I suggest “Crochet,” by Kathleen Hanna’s side project Julie Ruin?
Paul Elam has so far refrained from responding to the halfway-on-the-mark, halfway-completely-ridiculous criticism of the Men’s Rights movement leveled by rapey PUA douchenozzle Roosh that we discussed yesterday. Not even that bit comparing the very serious dudes reading A Voice for Men to silly ladies reading Cosmo was enough to provoke the oh-so-easily provoked Elam. Either he’s gotten very Zen about criticism from PUAs, or he’s spent the last several days punching pillows and muttering under his breath about evil “pussy beggars.”
But some of Elam’s acolytes took it upon themselves to respond for him. My favorite comment is this bait-and-switcher from MrStodern, which starts off with a vaguely reasonable observation before descending into misogynist nonsense.
Apparently feminists love pickup artists, and the only legitimate reason for dudes to have sex with women is to teach them a lesson. Who knew?
Men’s Rights Activists, I hate to have to break the news to you, but Roosh V, the rapey pickup guru I’ve been writing about a lot lately, is very disappointed in you and your so-called activism. In a sort-of followup to a post of his from several years back with the self-explanatory title “Men’s Rights Has Become A Euphemism For Sexual Loser,” Roosh lays into the “manginas” of the Men’s Rights movement, which he says isn’t really worthy of the name.
The biggest problem with MRAs is that they are not activists. They are pamphleteers. … They believe that one-thousand of them typing away and producing ten-thousand blog posts will change society. … [But] their movement hasn’t produced any results, only little online playgrounds where sad boys can sit in the sandbox and helplessly watch girls play with the cocky boys who understand the rules of the game.
It was, perhaps, inevitable, and now it has come to pass: obviously fed up with Men’s Rights Redditors questioning his wisdom (and his tactics, and his general narcissistic assholery) on a fairly regular basis, A Voice for Men Supreme Leader Paul Elam has started up his own Men’s Rights subreddit – r/mensrightsactivists –in which he can summarily ban all ”armchair activists” and “white knights” and “people who disagree with him.” Yep, that’s right: he’s made like a Trotskyist banana, and split.
Elam has long had a fairly strained relationship with Reddit MRAs. If you search through his comment history on Reddit, you can see evidence of numerous meltdowns on his part, which occur fairly regularly whenever anyone challenges him on pretty much anything, even when they are otherwise sympathetic to his views. On his own blog, he responds to such criticism by quickly banning the critics; on Reddit, he has tended to respond with schoolyard insults, digs at the masculinity of his critics, long recitations of his many fine accomplishments as a dedicated armchair activist, and the occasional rape joke.
One of Cliff Pervocracy’s outstanding contributions.
As I noted in my last post, the gang over at A Voice for Men have launched a veritable POSTER REVOLUTION against the evil gynocracy, by which I mean a couple of dudes have designed some posters and a couple other dudes have put some of them up.
Much like the web site they represent, these posters are dumb and ugly and incoherently angry. Feeling generous, some Man Boobzers have designed some more posters for them to use, trying their best to capture the unique qualities that make A Voice for Men posters so, well, special. Cloudiah has collected them together on her hilarious blog Artistry For Feminism. And Kittens. Check them out!
Well,I got carried away there. It’s not literally the whole world. Only a teensy weensy portion of it.
The fellows at A Voice for Men, you see, evidently stung by criticism that they aren’t activists, have begun engaging in real, honest-to-goodness real-world activism, by which I mean that a handful of them, some in Canada and at least one in Australia, have been putting up posters advertising the AVFM website.
In other words, their activism consists of putting up posters for a website whose only activism thus far has consisted of putting up posters for itself.
Well, eventually they’ll get the hang of it, I guess.
Here’s a bit of advice for Men’s Rights redditors and MRAs in general: if you don’t want people to associate the Men’s Rights movement with hatred, you should probably not associate yourselves with hate groups.
Yesterday, a fellow called heiligenschein posted a link in the Men’s Rights subreddit to a relatively new subreddit called simply SPLC, a subreddit set up by enemies of the Southern Poverty Law Center and devoted to, as heiligenschein put it, “compiling the numerous criticisms of the [SPLC].” As he explained in a comment:
It’s a proud day for the dudes over at A Voice for Men, which is celebrating the landing of the Curiousity rover on Mars by giving dudes everywhere serious dude credit for the event, which apparently involved no women at all. Well, maybe a few. But it certainly didn’t involve any of the women in the women’s studies department at Columbia University!
Actually it would be rather difficult for that to be the case. Impossible, really, as there is no women’s studies department at Columbia. Instead, Columbia has an Institute for Research on Women and Gender, an interdisciplinary center that works in cooperation with the Barnard College Women’s Studies department.
In any case, that once sentence is the entire text of the post, which linked to a live feed of the landing.
But to make sure everyone understands the MAN-significance of this MAN-vent, the AVFM dudes promoted it with this MAN-tastic blurb on the front page. (I mean the blurb on the right, of course, celebrating MEN and their UTTER MASTERYof technology. Just ignore that bit on the left about the technical glitches that AVFM has itself been having lately.)
The comments are more or less what we’ve come to expect from the AVFM crowd. I especially liked these two, from a manly fellow calling himself ActaNonVerba.
His followup is a bit Anthony Zarat-esque in its utopian grandeur:
