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The news of misogynistic marriage-hater Mark Minter’s upcoming nuptials has been ricocheting around the manosphere for about a week now. In my previous post on the subject, I looked at the manosphere’s initial reaction to this startling — and for many, disillusioning — development. Today, a followup, looking at how the manosphere has begun to adjust to the idea of a married Minty.
Mark Minter, a bitter, angry, divorced man in his late fifties, made a name for himself over the last year or so in the tiny world of the misogynist manosphere as that subculture’s most vociferous opponent of marriage.
In a series of little manifestos, deposited as comments on various manosphere blogs, Minter excoriated the institution he thought made a “slave” of men. “Get it through your head,” he wrote in one,
Men are from mars; women are FUCKING IDIOTS.
Never marry. … Duh. Game. Duh. Pump them, dump them, next them. Duh. THAT IS THE ONLY WAY TO WIN. Duh!!!!!
That was the old Mark Minter. Then, last week, word got out that Minty was getting married. To a single mother (oh no!) over the age of thirty (eek!) that he’s apparently never even met in person (well, actually that does sound a bit worrisome).
Dean Esmay: You can close your eyes, but it won’t go away.
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here. I have left the text of this piece as is.
Those who have been following the ongoing saga of man’s rights hate site A Voice for Men’s stumbling attempts to explain away the fraudulent claims — and the blatantly faked screenshot — that they used in order to cover up an embarrassing error in one of their stories may have been wondering how on earth they were going to respond after I confronted them directly with the evidence in the comments section of the blog of AVFM contributor Girl Writes What.
The answer is: with a whole new batch of lies. And they are even more dumbfounding than the last batch.
Thanks Obama! (And David Futrelle.) (For more, click image)
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
So the mighty Paul Elam has acknowledged — in the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, at least –that there might just be some sort of problem going on with regard to, you know, that whole fake screenshot thing. You know, the blatant fraud that A Voice for Men mangling — sorry, managing — editor Dean Esmay seems to have engaged in to cover up a mistake.
But, Paul being Paul, he somehow manages to turn his sort-of acknowledgement of the problem into an attack on me, bizarrely blaming me (the person who actually pointed out this fraud) for him not knowing about it before today:
As much as I hate to say it, Futrelle does have a valid point. I am looking in to it today, and unlike Futrelle, I will address the results of my inquiry in public no matter where they end up.
I don’t mind looking into problems, even when they are pointed out by such a bald faced liar. I would have actually been aware of this sooner if his blog were worth reading. I had to become aware of it in your comments to even know there was a problem.
Well, Paul, I would have happily brought my findings to the comments section of A Voice for Men, rather than the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, but you may recall I am banned there. And I wonder if anyone there would have had the courage to stand up and say that, gosh, this Futrelle guy has a point, given how quickly people are censored there for deviating from your site’s perverse “conventional wisdom.”
And gosh, Paul, how unfair it is to expect the publisher of a site to be aware of what’s, you know, published on it. Concerns about the story were brought up by your own commenters shortly after it first ran. Esmay referred in an article and an editorial note to my alleged “lies” about the story; it didn’t occur to you to even go look at what I had said? And even aside from the phony screenshot, or anything I’ve written, did you really think that Esmay’s bizarreexplanations for the original mistake made any kind of sense?
In other words, are you incompetent, or are you lying about being unaware of the problem until now?
In any case, I await the results of your “investigation.” I am especially eager to see how you will manage to spin things so it becomes someone else’s fault. Will it be some evil conspiracy that “set you up?”
And when exactly have I lied, Paul? Could you offer a citation? When I point out the lies on your site, I fucking back up each claim.
[EDIT: Added some stuff in the “gosh, Paul” paragraph and made a few other changes.]
GirlWritesWhat to TheWoollyBumblebee: This misogynistic hate blog ain’t big enough for the both of us.
Sometimes the subtext is much more interesting than the text. On the surface, blabby FeMRA videoblogger Girl Writes What’s recent 3,635 word blog post on the l’affaire TheWoolyBumblebee is a nasty, brutish, but not-at-all-short attack on her former FeMRA comrade at men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men, recently kicked out of the clubhouse for telling off libertarians and Men Going Their Own Way. (See here and here for more details on it all.)
But if you read a little more carefully you can see signs that Girl Writes What’s anger and frustration may really be directed at AVFM’s founder and grand pooh-bah Paul Elam.
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
So the other day I showed you all in detail how someone at men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men fabricated evidence — in the form of a faked screenshot — in order to cover up an embarrassing mistake on their part. The person responsible for the fabrication appeared to be AVFM’s so-called “managing editor” Dean Esmay.
Well, now it appears that they’re going to triple down on their dishonesty and concoct more screenshots. In a “news roundup” from Esmay today I found this remarkable passage:
I can’t wait to see what on earth they’ve come up with this time. I encourage readers to take screenshots of all this in case AVFM decides to do any retroactive ninja editing as part of its plan to pretend it was right all along.
Meanwhile,those of you who have been following this story may be wondering: who is this Joshua Thompson? Well, it appears that AVFM — or at least Dean Esmay — can’t even get the name of the post’s author right. That’s right, AVFM’s MANAGING EDITOR can’t get the name of one of AVFM’S OWN WRITERS RIGHT.
The author was first identified on AVFM as Jason Gregory — and if you look at the bio for Jason Gregory on any of the other articles he’s written for AVFM, like this one, it points to American Idiocracy, the blog where the problematic Facebook post originally ran. (It’s now been replaced, on his blog, anyway, by a completely rewritten version.)
At some point, apparently by accident, AVFM changed the byline of the author to Jason Thompson, who appears to be someone else who wrote something for AVFM a long time ago. And now Dean Esmay is calling him Joshua Thompson.
Or maybe Joshua Thompson is his real name, and Jason Gregory was his pen name, and Esmay has accidentally doxxed his own writer. Who knows?
I suspect we have not yet plumbed the depths of AVFM’s dishonesty –or incompetence.
More drama at A Voice for Men! Kristina Hansen — the excitable FeMRA videoblogger better known as TheWoolybumblebee — has been tossed off the good ship AVFM by Master and Commander Paul Elam for what he calls her “constant public conflicts with elements of our community.”
Tom Martin would be right at home in Second Life, apparently.
I realize that I may be the only one who’s really all that interested in sectarian infighting amongst the MRAs, but an old friend of ours has weighed in on the recent battles over the A Voice for Men satellite group MRA London, and I’ve learned some interesting things as a result.
This just in: Men’s Rights Activists are some of the most gullible nincompoops in the history of ever.
The latest evidence of this? The regulars on the Men’s Rights subreddit were fooled by an obviously fake “screenshot” of an article from Jezebel that had been altered to make it look like a Jezebel staff writer thinks that paternity fraud is justifiable as a way to fight patriarchy.
