So Mr. Paul Elam was apparently so offended by this video from Jay Smooth defending Anita Sarkeesian and her Tropes Vs Women video project against its many misogynistic detractors that he sat down and wrote out a carefully reasoned rebuttal of all of Mr. Smooth’s points.
Nah, I’m kidding. He wrote a snide couple of paragraphs calling Smooth a “leftist scumbucket,” and a “chickenshit feminist quisling,” and invited his readers to jump in with their own dopey insults. And they did. Some highlights (that is, lowlights):
I showed Paul’s comment to an MRA friend, and he said, “dude, you have to stop talking to me. I don’t exist! I’m no more real than Paul Elam’s ‘gay friend.'”
Andybob added this to the debate:
Yes, that’s right, he’s saying Smooth is being a “fag” in order to score with women. Clearly we have a brilliant mind at work here.
Several comments later, Iron John, a man apparently oblivious to irony, weighed in with this gem:
I’m pretty sure you don’t get to complain about “comment mining” for homophobia when 1) you’re the guy behind the site and 2) you’re one of the ones shouting “fag.”
Notice that Zorro’s original comment got an equal number of upvotes and downvotes. Then Elam jumped in to give the homophobia his seal of approval. After that, it was nothing but upvotes for those using or approving of the homophobic slur.
Calling a dude a “fag” on the internet: Men’s Rights Activism at its finest!
If you want even more proof that the denizens of A Voice for Men live in Imaginary Backwards Land, let me draw your attention to a recent posting from FeMRA TyphonBlue and JohnTheOther. The post’s bland title, Men, and patriarchy in the church, belies the loopiness of this particular bit of theological argument, the aim of which is to prove that Christianity is and always has been about hating dudes.
Oh, sure, TB and JTO note, it might look like Christianity in its various forms has been a tad dude-centric. I mean, it’s based on the teachings of a dude. And there’s that whole “God the Father” thing. Oh, and Christian religious institutions have been almost always headed up by dudes. There has yet to be a Popette.
But apparently to assume that the people running something actually run that something is to indulge in what MRAs like to call “the frontman fallacy,” by which they mean that even though it looks like men run most things in the world it’s really the sneaky ladies who call the shots, somehow. TB/JTO, citing the aforementioned faux “fallacy,” ask:
Because Christianity has a male priesthood, is headed by a man and uses masculine language to refer to the God and humanity’s savior, does it necessarily follow that Christianity is male favoring?
Bravely, the two decide not to go with the correct answer here, which is of course “yes.” Instead, they say no. And why is this? Because Jesus didn’t go around boning the ladies.
Seriously. That’s their main argument:
[Christ] had no sexual life. This absence leaves no spiritual connection between the masculine body and the divine.
The Christ is sexless; presumptively masculine, but never actually engaging in any activity unique to his masculine body. …
The implicit stricture of making the female body the vessel of Holy Spirit while offering no corresponding connection between the divine and the male body creates a spiritual caste system with women on top and men on the bottom.
Also: Joseph didn’t bone Mary, at least not before she gave birth to Jesus.
The birth of Christ is without sin because, quite simply, it did not involve a penis. The entire mythology around the birth of Christ implicitly indicts male sexuality as the vector of original sin from generation to generation.
Uh, I sort of thought that the notion of Original Sin had something or other to do with Eve and an apple in the Garden of Eden. But apparently not:
Forget Eve. Forget the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the Serpent. If all human women, tomorrow, conceived and gestated and gave birth without ever coming into contact with a penis, our race would be purged of original sin.
Pretty impressive theological revisionism from a couple of blabby video bloggers who apparently don’t know how to spell “canon.” (ProTip: “Cannon” refers to one of those tubey metal things you shoot “cannonballs” from.)
The two conclude:
Our culture’s war against masculine identity, male sexuality and fatherhood is an old one. That war arguably began as we adopted a faith which marginalizes the role of men in procreation, idolizing a story that removes them completely from the process. The exemplar of male virtue in this theology is a man who had no natural sexual expression, although his character is designated as male. And his primary purpose was to be flogged, literally tortured for the “crimes” of others, and then bound and nailed through his limbs, still alive to an erected cruciform scaffold, to die from shock and exposure on a hilltop. And we somehow manage to claim that this religion elevates men over women?
Well, yeah.
Rather than supremacy, Christianity provides to men the role of asexual stewards of women’s benefit, and sacrificial penitent, preaching the gospel of a female-deifying, male-demonizing faith. It is true that women have not historically been allowed to front this farce, but mostly because that would make the message too obvious.
What?
While some kinds of Christianity get rather worked up about the evils of premarital sex and/or birth control, I’m pretty sure married and/or procreative sex is a-ok with all Christians this side of the mother in the movie Carrie. Even — well, especially — if it involves dudes. (I’m pretty sure the church fathers were never big proponents of lesbianism.)
And if women really run the show, despite men “fronting” the church, could you perhaps spell out just who these all-powerful women are? Like, some names perhaps? Who’s the lady puppeteer behind the pope?
They of course don’t offer any real-world evidence for this secret supposed matriarchy. Instead, they ramp up for a sarcastic ending:
But we continue to ignore all of this, and we entertain the farce that our religious institutions constitute a male-elevating, female oppressing patriarchy.
Yeah, tell us another one.
No point in telling you guys anything any more. Clearly you can twist any and all facts about the world to fit your increasingly weird and baroque fictions about men always being the most oppressed, past, present and future.
A Voice for Men is slowly but surely disappearing up its own ass.
Don’t go to THIS doctor, though. He does not seem very dedicated to his work.
Is there anything in the world that Paul Elam can’t blame on feminism? Apparently not.
In his latest post on A Voice for Men, Elam reports on a number of health problems he’s been dealing with – or not dealing with – for years. You see, despite chronic troubles with his gall bladder and with his breathing – which led to many ER visits over many years – Elam refused to get his gall bladder removed, or to give up smoking. For a while, he confesses, he was alternating puffs of cigarettes with hits from his Albuterol inhaler. But after numerous health scares, he reports, he’s finally dealing with his underlying issues, getting his gall bladder removed and weaning himself off the cigarettes.
I’m not going to mock him for any of this. Lots of people – especially men – have trouble pushing themselves to get the medical help they need. I’m one of them: the last time I went to the dentist it was because one of my teeth had gotten so rotten that a chunk of it broke off. There are a lot of mostly not-very good reasons I procrastinate about getting proper treatment for my health reasons, from simple denial to lack of funds. (Though, as I have sadly learned, waiting to go to the dentist until your teeth start breaking apart in your mouth does not actually save you money in the long run.)
Lots of guys won’t go to doctors because, as guys, they’ve been raised to believe they should grin and bear whatever pain they face. That’s one of the reasons feminists tend to criticize traditional notions of masculinity.
But for Elam, the problem is … feminism:
We live in a misandric culture, and often times, when we are scared enough or motivated by some other powerful force, we find that the root of the hatred is in the mirror staring back at us and mocking.
We men are raised with a sense of shame for having any needs. We are told, in fact, that we already have everything, and largely don’t deserve even the most basic of our needs for dignity, respect and love. If you look around in medical literature long enough, you will even see them shaming us for not going to the doctor more. Feminists have even used our tendency to neglect ourselves as a good reason to go full steam ahead with the unabashedly pro-female Obamacare.
This last charge is based on an almost completely delusional misreading of Obama’s health care legislation by our dear friend Antony Zarat. Elam continues:
And you can watch many men nod their heads in agreement with this crap. Sure, some of it is just the typical effects of feminist ideology on the brains of obsequious men, but there is something else at play here.
What made men willing to stand on the decks of sinking ships where their betters were loaded onto lifeboats? What makes men OK with being singled out for selective service? When is the last time you heard an average man point out to a woman who is whining that her great grandmother could not vote, that even today, unless a man signs an agreement with the government to use his body as cannon fodder, that he still won’t be allowed to vote?
We often have to point out to morons that being anti-feminist is not the same thing as being anti-woman. I think we would do well to remember from time to time that misandry is often not something done to us, but something we do to ourselves.
It is a monster that can live in any one of us, and often does. I have been doing battle with my own for a while. 25 years of consideration, soul searching and bucking the system and I am just now figuring out to go see a doctor when I have a problem.
Elam, dude: Despite your overweening narcissism, I have no trouble believing that on some level you hate yourself. Narcissism is often driven by insecurity, and no one who responds to even mild criticism with the level of rage that you do could be anything other than deeply insecure. But what you feel isn’t “misandry,” and feminists aren’t to blame. All that rage isn’t healthy for you. You should really get it checked out. And I’m not even joking.
Here’s Sleater-Kinney with “Call the Doctor,” though really only the title of the song is appropriate to the situation here.
Over on A Voice for Men, noted human rights advocate Paul Elam has responded to criticism from a fellow antifeminist internet warrior in his typically logical, understated manner. Some highlights:
He’s whining, about jack shit, on behalf of a misandric cunt. …
Matt Forney just jerked off all over his bed sheets. And now it appears he is standing there like a virtual ‘tard, grinning about it and drooling.
At issue? Mr. Forney wrote a post some months back critical of the faux “offenders registry” called Register-Her, a pet project of A Voice for Men’s JohnTheOther in which female “bigots” – that is, feminists – are “registered” as “offenders” alongside female criminals. (Forney’s post originally appeared on the thankfully now-defunct blog In Mala Fide, but Elam only discovered it after Forney posted it on his own blog.)
In particular, Forney disagreed with Elam’s decision to “register” actress Katherine Heigl as a “bigot” after she made a Funny or Die PSA about spaying dogs and cats. The problem, for Elam and crew? That in the video she pretended to be a crazed testicle-hater obsessed with cutting off all balls, including those of human males. The AVFM crowd whipped themselves into a frenzy over this one, with Elam’s Number One Stooge JohnTheOther writing, in all seriousness:
Katherine Heigl’s supposedly humorous claim; that her advocacy of neutering pets is an outlet for her desire to chop human male’s balls off shouldn’t be taken out of context. The context being that she’s a creature of hollywood who lives in california – the same state which earlier this year saw Katherine Becker cut her husband’s penis off for the “offense” of wanting a divorce. …
We know it’s a joke. That’s the point. It’s both shocking, and plausibly deniable. It also wouldn’t be funny to most people if there was not an element of truth in it. Heigl’s “joke” included the word “yet”. This is an obvious nod to her awareness of increasing cultural acceptance of male-targeted violence and mutilation.
No, I have no fucking clue what on earth he means by that bit about the word “yet.” He goes on:
Male targeting violence persists and escalates because in the unconscious reptile corner of men’s minds, they think nodding along with whatever vile , violent, murderous shit the nearest vacuous barbie utters in her you-go-girl bubble of social enablement might get him approved for access to the magic vagina.
Like Elam, JohnTheOther apparently writes all his posts for AVFM with steam literally coming out of his ears.
Here’s the video in question. (Sorry, it won’t embed.) As you can see, the real butt of the joke is Heigl herself, and more generally narcissistic celebs who glom onto fashionable causes for all the wrong reasons. It’s not really a castration joke; it’s an actress making fun of her own reputation for narcissism. (And the video is also a serious attempt to raise awareness about the need to spay and neuter pets.)
Katherine Heigl, attempting to lull a dog into a false sense of security so she can remove its balls.
Forney, in the blog post that roused Elam’s incredibly easy-to-rouse fury, suggested that AVFM’s claimed outrage about Heigl’s video was both silly and a bit unconvincing:
Were you honestly offended? Did that video get you mad? It didn’t get me mad. I thought it was stupid and unfunny, but aside from that, I don’t care about it. After watching it, I just shrugged my shoulders and closed the tab.
Forney went on to suggest that any MRAs who were offended by the video were, well, basically a bunch of “phony pussies,” a virtual mirror-image of the Politically Correct:
In trying to gin up indignation over Heigl’s ball-cutting comments, Register-Her.com and the MRM are seeking to perpetuate our politically correct regime, not burn it to the ground and piss on its ashes. …
The men’s rights movement wants men to keep picking at their scabs, to wallow in self-pity for all eternity. That’s not a satisfying goal for me, or countless other men who want to rise out of the mud. Until MRAs address this issue, their movement will be stuck in neutral, regardless of their occasional victories.
Yes, that’s right. A dude posting on In Mala Fide — which was known for its blatant misogyny and its proud racism, among other terrible things — is the closest we’ve got to a “voice of reason” in this particular debate.
Elam, an MRA scab-picker extraordinaire, lashed out in barely coherent rage to Forney’s charges:
[T]his kind of chicken-shit nit picking by a supposed sympathizer is far more pathetic that the Heigl video could have ever hoped to be.
Why would the Heigl video hope to be pathetic? Also, how exactly can a video hope?
I write people like you off all the time. But then you have the gumption to parrot a bunch of keyboard courage about crushing your enemies? And you make fun of guys who get fucked over by the system? What a laugh. I don’t mean what you said, but you, personally.
You may be every bit as brave as your words. I doubt it, but I don’t know. What I do know is that your article is a misandric piece of shit. Based on your rhetoric, though, I would lay dollars to doughnuts you have never crushed so much as a Dixie Cup at a water cooler. Your kind of man never does.
You just shit on those out there taking the hits and doing the work, likely because you lack the conviction to stick your neck out for anything really important to anyone but yourself.
Personally, I would not talk to MRA’s about picking scabs until you quit being one.
I’m not sure if Elam is calling Forney a “scab” as a sort of random insult referring back to his mention of scabs, or if Elam thinks that Forney is a “scab” violating some imaginary MRA “sex strike” – or “cock blockade” – by not hating on the ladies every second of every day. I’m guessing it’s the latter, because Elam really is that delusional.
—
EDITED TO ADD: Matt Forney has responded to Elam’s little tantrum here. At the end, he says this:
And since I can’t end this post without mentioning that David Futrelle has (reluctantly) defended me on this issue, mainly because Elam’s neckbeard fans are going to brandish Futrelle’s article as proof that I’m an evil crypto-feminist racist mangina, let me just say that Futrelle is an even more pathetic bitch than Elam, and I don’t want his support.
Don’t worry, lil dude. I don’t actually support you. I simply agree with you on a couple of points: that Elam is a total drama king, and that anyone who believes (or purports to believe) that Heigl’s video is something to get ENRAGED about is a twit.
Even North Korea is better at propaganda than the Men’s Rights Movement. Text reads: “Come to North Korea! We’ve got, like, shitloads of fish.” (Note: I do not actually know Korean.)
It’s sort of reassuring how bad Men’s Rightsers are at communicating with those outside their tiny movement. I should amend that: how bad they are at communicating what they want to communicate — that is, that they are the 21st-century version of the heroic and in many ways successful civil rights movements of the late 20th century. What theytend to communicate instead is what they’d rather the world not see: how blinkered and reactionary and hateful so many of them really are.
Browsing through the Men’s Rights subreddit last night, I ran across a batch of graphics one MRA had prepared for other MRAs to freely use, whether as online graphics, dorm room decoration, or posters to wheatpaste on the nearest family courts building. While avoiding the hysterical misogyny of so many of the graphics up on the Artistry Against Misandry website we looked at recently, CAGeorge’s posters reveal a bit more about himself and the MRM than he perhaps intends them to. Take this poster, ostensibly a call to “resist feminist bullying.” How exactly do you resist such bullying? Apparently, with a giant fist.
Apparently not. Apparently that fist ISN’T GIGANTIC ENOUGH. Meet MEGA FIST:
So, yeah. Also, FYI, that particular version of the old clenched-fist graphic has been used by the far-left International Socialist Organization (ISO) for several decades. Take a look at the little ISO fist to the right here. Same fist. You may want to switch that out, dudes, lest you inadvertently convert potential MRAs to Trotskyism.
And while I have to give CAGeorge a few points for avoiding the crass misogyny of Artistry Against Misandry, he doesn’t do quite as well avoiding racism and homophobia. Hence this poster, apparently an attempt to scare potential false accusers by suggesting they could end up sharing a cell with a scary and probably dark-skinned dyke.
Naturally, CAGeorge’s artisty won mostly plaudits from the Men’s Rights redditors who stopped by to look and comment.
EDITED TO ADD: Woah. Strike that last sentence. Returning to r/menrights I see that a real, critical discussion of the flyers has erupted. Many of the regulars are unhappy with various aspects of CAGeorge’s choices. Numerous commenters are critical of the fist imagery, including ignatiusloyola, one of the subreddit’s mods, who objects in one highly upvoted comment. One person even mentions the ISO!
Our old pal Sigil1 (a.k.a. the legendary banned Man Boobz commenter Eoghan) is especially critical of the “roommate” poster, and for a good reason: that it essentially threatens prison rape for false accusers. (He doesn’t mention the racism or homophobia.) But he still can’t help but blame the posters on a conspiracy of evil “false flag” feminists trying to make the MRM look bad.
The bit about “nullification” is of course a reference to Elam’s infamous suggestion that MRAs should undermine the legal system by voting “not guilty” in trials involving men charged with rape, “even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.”
Still, this is a real discussion. If the Men’s Rights movement has any chance at all of transforming itself into something really resembling a real progressive movement, it’s going to need to have a lot more discussions like this — and those who really do want to improved the lives of men instead of simply demonizing women will need to make clear that Elam and his ideological comrades are no longer welcome in the movement.
EDITED TO ADD, PART 2: Now the legendarily cloddish MRA videoblogger Bernard Chapin has made a video attacking the posters and the dude who made them. He’s not worried about the violent imagery, or the racism, or the homophobia — as I pointed out recently, he is himself a bit of a homophobe. Nope. He’s mad about the use of evil leftist imagery, and accuses the maker of the posters of being a sneaky Marxist infiltrator trying to co-opt the MRM with evil Marxist symbolism.
Gosh. Paul Elam said he liked the graphics. Is he a secret Marxist infiltrator too?
Men’s Rights Activists regularly complain that it is mostly men who serve in the armed forces, and that it is mostly male soldiers who are killed and injured in service to their country in wartime. MRAs also complain that, in the United States, only men have to sign up for the draft – though this is more of a formality than anything else, as the draft has been dead for decades and there is virtually no chance of it being resurrected any time soon.
MRAs love to cite the dominance of men in the armed forces as a prime example of what they call “male disposability,” and somehow manage to blame feminists for it all.
But it’s not feminists who are trying to keep women from becoming soldiers, or serving in combat. While some MRAs support the idea of women serving in the army, and having to register for the draft the same as men do, many others scoff at the very notion of women as soldiers, mocking their alleged female “weakness” and in some cases denigrating the service of women now in the armed forces as being equivalent to attending “day care camp.” (Not exactly.) These MRAs may complain that men bear the brunt of the costs of war. But they don’t actually want women to serve.
Not that it makes much of a difference, because the MRAs who do supposedly want women to share the same responsibilities as men aren’t doing shit about it. You know who is? Feminists. The National Organization for Women, while opposing the draft, has long argued that if registration is required of men, it should also be required of women. NOW has also opposed the ban on female soliders serving in combat. (Not that it’s easy to draw a clear line between combat and non-combat positions on the contemporary battlefields.)
Do you want to know who is opposing them – aside from the Pentagon’s lawyers? Take a look at some of the comments posted in response to a Los Angeles Times article on the lawsuit. Note: The quotes below are pretty egregious; some deal with military rape in a really offensive way. (Thanks to Pecunium for pointing me to them.)
These aren’t “cherry-picked” from hundreds of comments; these are the bulk of the comments that were left on the article.
Are any of these commenters MRAs? Maybe, maybe not, but certainly their misogynistic “logic” is virtually identical to that I’ve seen from misogynist MRAs opposed to women serving in combat. One thing they are clearly not is feminist.
If MRAs, or at least some of them, truly want a world in which men and women share equally in the responsibilities of military service (and both have equal opportunties for military leadership), they need to challenge the misogynists — within their movement and without — who argue that women simply aren’t fit for the battlefield. And they need to support the feminists who are actually trying to make a difference — instead of standing on the sidelines crying foul.
I don’t hold out much hope that this will ever happen. MRAs are much too enamored with their fantasies of male martyrhood.
Well, this is … interesting. So JohnTheOther has plopped out another rambling diatribe about evil feminists. This time he accuses them not only of “attacking male sexuality” but also (if I’m reading him correctly) of being a bunch of evil homophobes jealous that some men don’t want to have sex with women. You read this and tell me what you think he’s implying here:
Male sexuality is of course both demonized and treated as a form of predation, but also strictly limited to a narrow set of acceptable expressions. Outside of sexual identities which place men in positions to benefit women as sexual gate-keepers, masculine sexuality is generally condemned.
JTO would love to compare these alleged gay-man-hating feminists to the proudly gay-male-affirming Men’s Rights Movement. There’s just one problem: As even JTO has to force himself to admit, there are more than a few homophobic dudes lurking around in the Men’s Rights movement. As JTO acknowledges:
[T]here is a thread of opinion with a growing currency among some MRAs which rejects the legitimacy of men whose self identity and sexuality is gay or bisexual, or I suppose, transsexual.
JTO doesn’t like this, and says so:
[There] are men (and women) whose sexuality, either chosen or not, doesn’t conform to an acceptable standard – and some within the MRM would demonize them. Gentlemen and ladies – this is nothing short of stupid.
At what point does who an individual finds sexually attractive diminish their value as a human? How is it that a man whose preference doesn’t include vagina becomes less of a man? Conversely, are we going to pretend the sexual preferences of our female colleagues matter in the context of partnership in the fight for the human rights of men and boys?
So: JohnTheOther has explicitly decided to speak up in favor of “the gay agenda.” (Yes, that’s the phrase he used.) And he’s even included lesbians in the deal – something allegedly pro-gay MRAs often have trouble doing – even though he sort of suggests at the end that he’s only willing to accept lesbians who are also MRAs.
But, hey, baby steps, right?
Well, John, if you really want to toss the homophobes out of the Men’s Rights movement, you’re going to have to start with A Voice for Men itself.
If you go to read JTO’s whole post over on AVFM, you’ll see a couple of “featured videos” in the sidebar from longtime AVFM friend and contributor Bernard Chapin. One of them bears the intriguing title “Feminist Professor Gloats Over Lesbian Chic.” The description, presumably written by AVFM head honcho Paul Elam, reads:
Bernard’s on a roll here with this one. And you will be rolling to [sic] as he delivers another thorough fisking, Inferno style.
Watch the video, here or there, or as much of it as you can stand. As you’ll see, it’s basically eight minutes of gratingly “humorous” lesbian bashing from good old Bern – whose preferred term for “lesbian,” incidentally, is “lesbobo.” (Evidently adding an extra “bo” to the old slur “lesbo” is hilarious.)
Chapin has produced more than 1200 videos; this is one of the two that AVFM has chosen to feature.
You want to stand up to homophobia, John? Take down that video. Apologize for hosting it. Apologize for featuring it. Demand that Chapin apologize for it — or kick him to the curb.
Meanwhile, AVFM is helping the guy behind the website Artistry Against Misandry publicize and raise money for an upcoming event; Elam himself says he’s already sent along a hundred dollars. Here are some examples of the sort of “artistry” that’s featured on the site:
This second graphic is not only homophobic but confused: Chaz Bono is a trans man, not a lesbian.
John, I suggest you ask your boss at AVFM to get his money back from Artistry Against Misandry. Because, here’s the thing: if you actively support hate like this, people might just get the impression you’re a hate site.
EDITED TO ADD: In the comments, Elam proudly announces his own support of the “gay agenda” as well. Well, with 0.1% of it.
I don’t like most gay activists very much, and I oppose 99.9% of what passes as gay activism, but I don’t think it is very smart to forget that part of the reason they were led astray is because most “normal” men never gave them the dignity of being regarded as a man.
Forget gay marriage, forget bullying, forget AIDS: apparently the only real issue for gay men is evil feminist ladies calling them “fags” for not wanting to have sex with them.
Gay men are bashed, when all is said and done, because they are not of utilitarian value to women, and because they are perceived as not having enough strength to be of utilitarian value to the elites.
Yeah, that’s probably it.
What about homophobia against lesbians? That’s easy: “lesbobos” are just naturally ugly and hilarious.
Many of those in the manosphere wear their misogyny like a badge of honor. Others like to present themselves as fierce opponents of bigotry, and angrily deny the charges of misogyny thrown their way. When the Southern Poverty Law Center ran an article noting the misogyny often found on A Voice for Men, for example, site founder Paul Elam responded with great indignation in an open letter to the group:
Yesterday I received the unfortunate news that your organization … listed my website, avoiceformen.com, among others, as misogynistic, or “woman-hating. … Contrary to what readers of your site may be led to believe, the goals of SPLC and AVfM are quite similar: We both work to identify groups who seek to oppress others, and inform the public of the inequities they would perpetuate.
This seems a strange argument for the man whose handle on YouTube is “The Happy Misogynist,” and who regularly writes posts filled with hair-curling hatred of women. It seems even stranger when you consider AVFM’s support of a site that frankly peddles hate – against women, “manginas,” gay men, lesbian, and trans folk.
I’m talking about the misleadingly named Artistry Against Misandry site. AAM and AVFM seem almost joined at the hip. AAM’s founder, musician Jade Michael, wrote and performed the theme song currently used on AVFM’s internet “radio show.” AVFM has returned the favor, promoting the site and helping raise money for it. Indeed, several days ago Elam himself proudly announced that he’d sent along $100 of his own money to help Michael fund an upcoming event.
The site describes itself as follows:
Welcome to the first pro-male artist activist network. Within these pages you will find music, poetry, prose, graphics, cartoons and additional links, all of which are here to bring attention to and counter misandry in Western society.
In practice, this means saying the worst shit about women you can possibly imagine. Oh, the “artists” also say terrible things about men who don’t hate women with fervor — you may recall the ridiculous caricature of me as a self-flagellating, woman-worshipping “mangina” at the end of this post from a couple of days ago.
But the “artists” whose work is featured on the site focus most of their venom on women. Let’s take a look at several graphics from Reality, one of the site’s most prolific contributors.
Yep, that’s right: “western women” are “the new tapeworm parasites.” Here are a couple more.
There are (literally) forty more where those came from, and they’re pretty much all as nasty and hateful as the ones I’ve featured here. I suggest you visit AAM’s graphic art page and scroll through the rest of Reality’s wares.
If you don’t have the patience for that, and since the app they use on AAM to display Reality’s artwork is a piece of crap, I’m just going to highlight some more of his clever anti-misandry slogans here in text form:
Women actually expect you to act like a traditional male. While they live like psychotic whores. Keep dreaming, bitch!
Guys, do you really want to know what she’s thinking? 100% pure shit.
[Picture of women pointing at the camera.] We get everything and do nothing for it. Now get back to work slave.. we can put you in jail or bankrupt you with just a pointed finger.
Remember, when a woman tells you she’s tired it’s the only time she’s actually telling you the truth because…being a raging petty psychotic bitch…while being virtually retarded…while having endless banal thoughts she considers “genius…” while making insane and constant ultimatums…IS absolutely EXHAUSTING!!
Meanwhile, an artist calling himself “Andy Man” declares in a graphic of his own:
This is the sort of “artistry” that A Voice for Men is actively supporting.
And they wonder why some might consider them part of a hate movement?
Artistry Against Misandry also features music, videos, and even poetry, all of it awful, in every sense of the word. I will take a look at some of this in future posts.
EDIT: I added one more Reality graphic and a bunch of his slogans in text form.
Oh, ShitRedditSays! Not only are SRSers fighting the good fight against bigotry and assyness and general shitlordery on Reddit, but they also manage to come up with some of the best and most hilarious faux-propaganda graphics you’re likely to run across online, many of which are gathered together on the SRS FArtistry tumblr blog.
SRS being a bit of a circlejerk, the graphics are mainly designed to amuse other SRSers, and are full of in-jokes and references to the ridiculous reputation SRS has amongst Redditors at large as being the home to humorless man-hating Dworkinite feminazis eager to oppress helpless Straight White Males. By pelting them with dildoes.
Here, for example, is a lovely drawing illustrating how many Redditors actually see the unending battle between SRS (represented here by surly angels armed with purple dildoes) and the upstanding free-speech defenders of Reddit.
Other SRS graphics play on old propaganda tropes:
Still others are just excuses to make in-jokes. (For some reason, SRSers like to refer to dogs as “dags.”)
It’s interesting to see the contrast between SRS FArt and the, er, art generated by MRAs online. Here, for example, is a graphic taken from the Artistry Against Misandry site, a collection of “art” and “music” and even “poetry” from angry, art-, music- and poetry-challenged MRAs. AAM is heavily promoted on A Voice for Men; heck, Paul Elam recently sent them $100 of his own (supporters’) money to fight the (allegedly) good fight.
This hilarious piece of WTFery, if you haven’t figured it out already, is evidently supposed to be a picture of me. Or possibly Michael Moore. Whoever it’s supposed to be, I cackled with glee when I first saw it yesterday. (For future reference, I don’t own either a baseball cap or that particular kind of flogger.)
I will be exploring the vast artistic richness (sarcasm) of Artistry Against Misandry in several upcoming posts.
And after that I will highlight some of the magnificent art (not sarcasm) produced by some of Man Boobz’ own.
In the meantime, enjoy this one last bit of SRS FArtistry, which might be suitable for desktop wallpaper:
Like your arse, men’s rights are massive right now. Of course, this has been “a thing” since the Fathers4Justice superheroes first scaled a public building, reiterating in one fell swoop that irresponsible, life-endangering behaviour and silly costumes are not only newspaper-friendly, but are also not qualities many women look for in a potential birthing partner. Then we had Tom Martin suing the London School of Economics’ gender studies programme for sexism, one of his complaints being that the chairs they sat on were too hard and not suitable for the comfortable positioning of his goolies. Poor Tom.
…
A Voice for Men is essentially the EDL [that is, the Islamophobic English Defence League –DF] of the mens’ rights movement, positing as it does such statements as “a single mother is a woman who in most cases chose to have, or to raise a child without a father. This demonstrates terrible, selfish values”, and “fake boobs are a sexual advertisement. If your wife or GF wants them that means she’s seeking to attract heightened male attention.” It’s extremist, bitter, and encourages men to “not get fucked” by taping every conversation that they have with a woman, like a troop of paranoid angry, ninja spies.
Naturally, MRAs are up in arms about this horribly unfair completely accurate (and if anything rather understated) description of their “movement.” I added some thoughts of my own to the discussion on Reddit here. Here’s one of the responses:
EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: On the Men’s Rights subreddit, the battle rages on, but alas I can contribute no more, having just been banned from there, apparently for mentioning The Spearhead too many times, or something. Separate post on that in a second. But in the meantime, here’s my favorite comment from the whole thread, from someone who apparently didn’t enjoy the New Statesman piece as much as I did:
If anyone knows of any sorority newsletter that reads like that New Statesman piece, please let me know, as I would like to subscribe to that newsletter and/or join that sorority, if my status as a mangina qualifies me for membership.
In the meantime, I have added The Vagenda, the online home of Rhiannon and Holly, the authors of the NS piece, to the “Antidotes to Boobery” sidebar.
