Dean Esmay: Considers himself qualified to judge your blackness
Dean Esmay — Men’s Rights Activist, AIDS “skeptic,” big old white dude — has added another skill to his resume: Arbiter of Blackness.
If you haven’t been following the activities of Mr. Esmay of late, the A Voice for Men “chief operations officer” has been having a rather extended Twitter meltdown, posting endless puzzling yet impassioned Tweets to his own #SpankAFeminist hashtag, addressing an assortment of imaginary feminist enemies.
Some of the more puzzling have involved race, like his repeated charge that feminists are a bunch of white racists because, well, let’s let Esmay explain:
Last month, I reported that Indian Men’s Rights Activist and marital rape apologist Amartya Talukdar — a regular contributor to leading Men’s Rights site A Voice for Men — was a Holocaust denier.
When I asked AVFM’s then-managing editor Dean Esmay about these troubling Tweets from someone he had published on his site only a few days earlier, he responded … by calling me a “stalker madman” and threatening to call the police if I ever emailed him again. (It was, as far as I recall, the only time I’ve ever emailed him.)
Well, ok, I thought, the folks at AVFM seem to be congenitally unable to ever admit to being wrong, even when the evidence is right before their eyes. But I didn’t think AVFM would be dumb enough to post anything by Talukdar ever again.
It’s yet another reminder that online hate has consequences. In a manifesto of sorts he posted before he shot and killed 9 black people in a Charleston church, Dylann Roof noted that he had learned his racism online. He even specified one of the hate sites that fuelled his hate: the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Now it appears he was also a regular commenter at The Daily Stormer, an especially vicious neo-Nazi “news” site.
I doubt you would be terribly shocked if I told you that fans of the misogynistic not-quite-Nazi pickup guru Roosh Valizadeh aren’t exactly celebrating Caitlyn Jenner’s appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair. And they’re not: on the Roosh V forum, the regulars have filled a five-page-and-still-growing thread with predictably transphobic outbursts –“Kill it with fire” gifs, references to Jenner not as a “she” or even a “he” but an “it,” emphatic announcements of “would not bang.”
You might be a little surprised, though — as I was — to discover that some of these lovely fellows are blaming the whole thing on … the Jews.
Once again, a look at some of the comments that people try to leave here, but which for assorted reasons don’t get past the rigorous We Hunted the Mammoth screening process.
I kid; the process is not rigorous at all. You just need to pass a minimal standard of basic human decency. Here’s an assortment of comments from people who, well, fell short. In each instance, I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to guess why.
Repugnant “game” guru Heartiste, who specializes in dating advice aimed at aspiring emotional abusers, seems to be trying to launch a second career as a kind of white supremacist Nostradamus. In a post this Tuesday, he predicted an imminent uprising by the white masses against the “cultural elites” and evil “leftoids” who’ve been, I dunno, oppressing them somehow with multiculturalism or something?
Well, whatever it is the leftoids have been doing, Heartiste thinks they’ll soon be facing their day of reckoning:
Uh oh! Dean Esmay of A Voice for Men is outraged by the latest terrible calumny besmirching the good name of the Men’s Rights movement. That Big Lie? That Men’s Rights Activists are boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road.
As Esmay puts it, in his characteristically overheated prose, the very notion that there is such a boycott
is a completely fabricated story by a handful of elitists abusing their power in the media–and betraying their fellow journalists while doing it.
Using his powerful internet detective skills, Esmay has managed to track down “the source of the lie,” which, as he sees it, “appears to have originated from a discredited hate-blogger named David Futrelle … .”
I’ve left off the rest of his sentence, as it is straight-up libel. Well, so is the bit about me being a “discredited hate-blogger,” and the part about the “lie” originating with me. I will give him credit for managing to spell my name correctly.
I’ll cop to the fact that my post on a would-be boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road set off an avalanche of articles on the subject. The Mary Sue, I believe, was the first to pick up the story, and was quickly followed by a few others. And then other writers piggybacked off of them. For better or worse, that’s how it works in online journalism these days.
But if Esmay is looking for the source of the incorrect notion that self-described Men’s Rights activists were behind the “boycott,” well, he’s not going to find it in my post, which contained no mention of Men’s Right Activists at all.
Yep, I reported the 100% true fact that a Youtube bloviater named Aaron Clarey had written a post on Return of Kings urging men, in his words, to “not only REFUSE to see the movie, but spread the word to as many men as possible.” I described his readers on Return of Kings as misogynists, not MRAs, though clearly there is a massive overlap between those two groups.
The idea that this was specifically a Men’s Rights crusade was, to be sure, a bit of sloppiness on the part of the journalists writing about it, who are not quite as familiar as some of us are with all the different varieties of woman-hating shitheads there are in the “manosphere” — especially since their belief systems overlap considerably. As I noted in a previous post on this subject, writing about Esmay’s accusations against a writer for the Huffington Post,
You can almost forgive journalists for getting a bit mixed up.
Meanwhile, it’s clear that some MRAs, including some associated with AVFM, have views on the movie that bear a striking similarity to those of Mr. Clarey and his comrades at ROK. It was an AVFM staffer, not Aaron Clarey, who posted this meme on AVFM’s Facebook page. (It’s since been removed, possibly because it contradicts the narrative that Esmay is now promoting.)
From AVFM’s Facebook page
And if you want many other example of MRAs saying they won’t go to see the film because feminism, you’ll find more than a few in this thread on the Men’s Rights subreddit. Oh, and in this thread (archived here) on … the official AVFM Forum.
Yes, that’s right: there are MRAs talking about boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road on AVFM’s own official forum. One declares himself “a (former) Mad Max fan,” another writes “going to skip this one. Mad Max is now dead to me.” “I’m out,” adds a third.
But Esmay seems to think that there is some vast conspiracy afoot, writing that
we are really serious with this question: was anyone paid to put this fake story in the press? If so, who was paid and who did the paying?
Don’t be silly. No money changes hands. At least no human money. We do it under direct orders from our feline overlordsladies.
Apparently, to Dean Esmay at least, posting that Mad Max: Fury Road is being boycotted by MRAs, when most of the boycotters are in fact merely MRA-adjacent, is a greater crime against truth than denying the Holocaust.
Hey, Dean Esmay — are these really the guys you want on your side?
The not-so-good folks at A Voice for Men are still so steamed about the Southern Poverty Law Center calling them out on their misogyny that they can’t think straight. Consider the unhinged anti-SPLC rant AVFM’s “chief operations officer” Dean Esmay posted on the site after the SPLC’s Mark Potok appeared on David Pakman’s internet show last week.
The good folks at A Voice for Men, the most influential Men’s Rights site out there, like to talk a lot about how much they hate hatred. Specifically, the alleged hatred allegedly promoted by feminists. Here’s Dean Esmay, the site’s Managing Editor and Chief Operations Officer, offering some typically nuanced thoughts on the subject earlier today on Twitter.
So how have the powers that be at AVFM responded to the revelation that one of their contributors, Indian MRA Amartya Talukdar, is a Holocaust denier and Hitler fan who thinks Hillary Clinton is a “Jewess?” Did they denounce Talukdar for his embrace of perhaps the most hateful hater in history, and take down his posts on their site? Not so much.
Rape survivor advocate Nayreen Daruwalla speaks to Indian women. Click on pic to see her on CNN
So I was wondering if any of A Voice for Men’s readers had spoken up in the comments there about a rather sensitive subject: the fact that the supposed “human rights” site recently published a post that was not only 1) an apologia for marital rape but also, 2) written by a Holocaust denier and Hitler fan.
When I took at look at the comments there this morning, the answer was (of course) no: there was no mention of AVFM contributor Amartya Talukdar’s numerous Tweets describing the Holocaust as a hoax, Hitler as a great man, and Hillary Clinton as a “Jewess.”
Instead, I found that those who challenged Talukdar’s post (archived here) — which defended the Indian government’s refusal to see marital rape as rape — got harsh rebukes from other AVFM commenters and the site’s moderators, who went so far as to actually ban two commenters unhappy with Talukdar’s rape apologia.
