We Hunted The Mammoth
So Parks and Recreation had its Men’s Rights episode last night.
Well, sort of: A gaggle of MRAs made a few appearances in the ep, as one of the obstacles that Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) has to contend with as the wife of a political candidate.
There were a few great moments:
Oh, people. I would really like to take a little vacation from all the A Voice for Men posts, but as it turns out I have found the most A-Voice-for-Menny AVFM thread ever, and I must share it with you.
Ok, so a couple of days ago, AVFM’s Dear Leader Paul Elam posted an uncharacteristically brief video titled “A 41 second lesson for Adam Serwer and the mainstream media.” It consisted of a 41-second snippet of Elam’s phone interview with Buzzfeed’s Adam Serwer, one of the authors of that scathing expose of Elam, in which Elam boasts to Serwer about how much traffic AVFM gets every time there is a news article reporting what an utterly terrible person he is. (I’m loosely paraphrasing here; as far as I can tell, Elam is not actually aware he is a terrible person.)
If you’re on Twitter, and have any number of followers at all, you’re going to end up getting followed by some bots — usually spambots looking for people to pester when certain keywords get used.
But when Twitter accounts have more than a relatively small percentage of fake followers, it’s almost certainly because they went out and bought them in order to make themselves look more influential than they really are.
Well, it looks like two of the most active members of A Voice for Men’s Twitter squad have done just that.
Twitter users @BlutalTheDog and @UnseenPerfidy recently ran “Twitter Audits” of a couple of AVFMers who are especially active on Twitter — AVFM “Managing Editor” @deanesmay and @Jackbarnesmra, co-host of AVFM’s Blue Collar Red Pill online radio show. The results weren’t pretty:
It seems like only yesterday that a Voice for Men’s Paul Elam and John “The Other” Hembling were the bestest of friends, laughing and joking together as they plotted to take over the world. Now, after an ugly falling out, the two are the worstest of enemies, and this whole MGTOW thing is making their ugly divorce even uglier.
You know that little war that Elam has going on with the MGTOWers, or more accurately, the MGTOWFAFPE (Men Going Their Own Way Far Away From Paul Elam)? Mr. Hembling and his girlfriend/comrade Diana Davison have allied themselves with Elam’s many enemies in the MGTOW world, and, well, Elam doesn’t seem to like this very much.
I present to you three recent skirmishes in their little war.
#GamerGate and Men’s Rights: two terrible tastes that taste terribler together.
Ok, maybe that slogan needs a bit of work. But it’s true that when you combine the poor-oppressed-me-we-hate-AnitaZoe-Sarquinneesian narrative of the #GamerGaters with the poor-oppressed-me-feminazis-rule-the-world narrative of the Men’s Righsters you get some amazing outbursts of indignant self-dramatizing self-pity.
Take, for example, this melodramatic email sent by A Voice for Men’s “operations manager” Dean Esmay to … a grocery chain that advertises on the game site Kotaku, a bete noire of the #GamerGate movement. I’ve highlighted some of the Esmay-ist bits:
On Monday, Anita Sarkeesian posted the latest installment of her Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games series on YouTube, a half-hour examination of the ways in which video game makers use sexualized violence against women as a cheap way to spice up their narratives and appeal to straight male gamers.
Her tone was measured, her analysis clear and logical and supported by dozens of clips from a wide assortment of games.
Late Tuesday night, this happened:
One last AVFM Conference update, with links to two more stories about that historic event.
The first, a gently skeptical Washington Post story by Monica Hesse titled, with a certain irony, “Men’s rights activists, gathering to discuss all the ways society has done them wrong.”
The whole thing is worth reading. My favorite bit:
One presenter, a military veteran speaking on the treatment of veterans returning from war, put up a PowerPoint slide alleging that 70 percent of men returning from war get divorced, and 90 percent do so within five years. When asked about the source of this statistic, he said, “That particular statistic is from my personal observations. I’m just speaking here as a dude.”
Ah, the prestigious Journal of Statistical Dudeness!
The second, well, it’s a bit more disturbing. DarkHorseSwore – a regular in the AgainstMensRights subreddit who raised money to go to Detroit to cover the convention only to be turned away at the door – managed to finally get an audience with some of the conference attendees and organizers – after the convention, as they celebrated at a bar and then in a hotel lobby. She got this access because none of them knew who she was. (Eventually Dean Esmay showed up and had her escorted off the premises.)
Now DarkHorseSwore has set up a website – DarkHorseSwore.com – and has started posting about the strange 5 ½ hours she spent amongst the AVFMers. She tells the tale of a strange encounter with one of the Honey Badgers and then an even stranger tale of an even stranger encounter with an old man and his camera. You’ll have to go read it. Be warned: It’s creepy as hell.
Oh, and she picked up some amazing conference swag as well. And by “amazing” I mean “possibly the worst conference swag I’ve ever seen, I mean, what the hell, and also why are they all beige?”
It’s Twitter Thursday here on We Hunted the Mammoth! Which is my way of saying that I spent last night poking around in the Twitterings of some of the A Voice for Men crowd. And I’ve decided that, as much as I enjoy Judgy B’s passive-aggressive evasiveness and schoolyard taunts, I think I like Dean Esmay’s tweets better.
Why? Because he tweets as if at any moment his head might literally explode.
Let’s take a look, shall we, at this selection of tweets from Mr. Esmay I gathered up last night. I have taken the liberty of highlighting some, well, let’s just call them recurring motifs.
A Voice for Men likes to present itself as a voice for gay men as well as straight ones. In a recent post, site founder and chief fulminator Paul Elam declared that
We regard men as human beings, regardless of their sexuality. And most of us feel that this is the salve that heals what has in recent history been inflicted on gay men.
No mention of lesbians, but of course they’re women, and Elam does not seem to like women very much.
AVFM managing editor Dean Esmay, meanwhile, likes to present himself as a champion not only of gay men but of lesbians as well, boasting in one recent tweet that “I have been lesbian-supporting since the ’80s.”
So why is AVFM giving a platform to one of Canada’s most influential opponents of same-sex marriage — and gay and lesbian rights in general?
Does anyone here understand string theory and dark matter and all that physics crap? Because I am seriously beginning to wonder if Men’s Rights Activists literally live in an alternate universe that only partially intersects with our own.
In the universe I live in, Canada is a lovely and somewhat uncannily polite country to the north, the home of Rush and Kate Beaton and, I’m pretty sure, a lot of bears. To MRAs it is a land under the bootheel of a radical feminist gynarchy in which men cower in elevators because they are deathly afraid of being accused of sexual harassment.
No, really.
I was skimming through an old interview with good old Erin Pizzey, A Voice for Men’s pet domestic violence expert, probably because she’s the only one who thinks jokes about eating “battered women” — you know, like batter fried chicken — are hilarious.
In the interview, she was telling Dean “Long Tie” Esmay about a speaking tour she’d made in Canada — a place she describes as “one of the worst countries in the world.” No, really. Here’s what she had to say about her harrowing ordeal:
I did a six week tour, with Senator Anne Cools, all across Canada. And there were some wonderful … uh, men’s groups, just struggling to keep going. And as we traveled and talked to men’s groups, we realized how terribly dangerous it is because it’s almost as though the entire government and the judiciary–the same people–had been infiltrated by very radical feminists out to get men. And I talked to people all the way across Canada. You know my mother was Canadian, and I’m half Canadian, and it hurt actually. See I was a child in Toronto, and my feeling as we went through is real fear. I remember I was working with Anne in the Senate and I walked in to the lift, and this man who was in the lift with me was cowering over in the corner. And I came out and I said to Anne, “What on earth was that about?” And she said, “Men are frightened. They just don’t know when they’re going to be told they’re sexually harassing somebody.”
I’ve highlighted several of the passages which I think may have entered our universe from the Bizarro Men’s Rights multidimensional wormhole of misandry.
But, seriously, what planet does this woman live on? Does she actually think something like this really happened? Was there really a man in an elevator with her who was literally cowering in the corner because he thought she would accuse him of some sort of sex crime? Was there a man there at all? Was there even an elevator? Is Canada a real country? THEN WHO WAS PHONE?
