We Hunted The Mammoth
A couple of days ago, Men’s Rights rageoholic Paul Elam angrily denounced journalist Tory Shepherd as a liar for saying that his A Voice for Men website “regularly calls women ‘bitches and whores,’ which it does not.”
Now, anyone who has actually read his website for any length of time knows this is patently false. As if to underscore just how baldly Elam was lying in his post three days ago, the site today ran a post attacking her with this headline:
If you live in New York state, you may have seen the poster above plastered on a bus shelter; or you may have seen it posted somewhere on the internet. The message is pretty simple, and it’s sad that it has to be said: kids are pretty impressionable, so teach your sons to treat women with basic respect.
The purpose of the ad campaign, sponsored by the New York state Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, is pretty clear as well: teaching boys respect for women lessens the chances that they will abuse women as adults.
Numerous studies have found that men with sexist attitudes towards women are more likely to try to control their wives or girlfriends with physical abuse. Indeed, one recent study even found that brief exposure to sexist jokes made men more inclined to brush off violence against women, at least amongst men with sexist attitudes to begin with.
Speaking of which, the sexist jokes over at A Voice for Men have unveiled a hilarious new “meme,” which just happens to be inspired by the “awaiting instructions” PSAs we’ve been discussing. And here it is:
The logic here is airtight: because some women get drunk and urinate in public, women don’t deserve respect.
I guess men never get drunk and urinate in public, or ever do anything vaguely embarrassing that gets caught on camera?
Is it really asking too much to respect people as people, foibles and all?
So the nice gentlemen over on MGTOWforums are trying to get to the bottom of what they see as a very important question: Why Can’t They Ever Shut Up?
Unfortunately, they’re not asking this question about their fellow Men Going Their Own Way and their tendency to blather on and on about the manifold evils of women. No, they’re talking about women and their alleged inability to shut up. And they have some, well, interesting theories to share.
NonNegotiable offers these highly scientific thoughts:
Has the Men’s Rights subreddit found its Walter Mitty? Yesterday, a fellow by the name of Mrwhibbley won himself nearly 200 upvotes from the assembled Men’s Rightsers with a tale of terrible misandry at his local Panera Bread.
I am sitting at panera bread. I got here at 6am, when no one was here. After ordering, I took the only comfy chairs next to a nice fire place and started reading. Halfway through my meal two women came up and asked me to move because they wanted to sit where I was sitting.
Ok, but before you say that this didn’t happen, consider this: Only a few minutes ago a woman demanded my seat, and when I didn’t get up to give it to her she simply sat right on top of me. And by woman I mean cat.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars are discussing the case of a Japanese man who set himself and his nine-year-old son on fire on a playground in an attempted murder-suicide; the man died, but his son, while severely burned, managed to survive.
The discussion amongst the Men’s Rightsers is actually less awful than one might expect, with only a few commenters making excuses for the man, or blaming his ex-wife. Many of the regulars are actually condemning his actions straightforwardly.
And then there’s TyphonBlue, the highly inventive female Men’s Rights activist who is one of A Voice for Men’s self-proclaimed “Honey Badgers.” She thinks the fact that the man tried to kill himself along with his son is a point in his favor and, more than that, a sign that men are better than women.
Oh, Men’s Rightsers, can you just make up your minds? Only a couple of days after blaming trolls for the spamming of Occidental College’s rape reporting site with false accusations, rather than acknowledging it as the work of Men’s Rightsers in his own subreddit who were proudly encouraging and taking credit for it themselves, Men’s Rights subreddit mod sillymod is now defending the false rape reporting as “unpopular” but thought-provoking activism.
![sillymod 6 points 7 hours ago (13|7) First you have to believe that we did something wrong in order to want to get our reputation back. Sometimes people fighting for a cause are going to do something that is unpopular in order to make a statement. I don't think we do need to get our reputation back. I think the act stands for itself, and it will get people to stop and think. permalink source save give gold hide child comments [–]TheIdesOfLight [+20] 15 points 4 hours ago (22|7) So I guess that whole "We were trolled"/"It was SRS!" bullshit is off the table? You can't pass the buck and convince yourselves everyone else is guilty but you and now it's become an act of bravery? Wow. Yeah, watching you flip flop on this for the past three days has been both alarming and rewarding. You didn't make any kind of statement, Sillymod. The entire internet and media is sneering at you and you still can't just say WE DID A TERRIBLE THING. PERHAPS WE SHOULD REFLECT ON IT AS A WHOLE. permalink source save parent give gold [–]ninioquiroz 6 points 3 hours ago (12|6) No, because that would require a level of maturity and self-awareness that this "movement" clearly lacks. But, does anybody else think feminists are to blame for all the world's problems?](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/sillymod2.png?resize=493%2C520&ssl=1)
This whole exchange is worth reading — it continues on for a number of comments beyond this, with sillymod’s rationalizations becoming increasingly baroque. It’s extremely rare to see critical remarks like those from TheIdesOfLight actually get upvoted in the Men’s Rights subreddit. The Occidental College fiasco has divided the Men’s Rights subreddit like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Some are appalled by it; others are digging in their heels.
Speaking of which, here’s former subreddit mod Celda defending the false rape reports in much more straightforward terms than sillymod:
![Celda [-1] 5 points 18 hours ago (9|4) I agree that the subreddit deserves some responsibility for that. But - there was nothing wrong with those actions. I saw the news articles in which it says they were spammed with hundreds of reports, of being raped by fictional characters, accusing the staff of the Dean's Office (the form is run by the Dean's Office), etc. Those reports are non-harmful - and the goal of shutting down the online form is quite a laudable one. I am actually quite disgusted by the number of people who are defending the existence of an anonymous online form intended for reporting people as rapists.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/celda.png?resize=521%2C231&ssl=1)
Elsewhere, Celda has called the false reporting “quite moral and laudable.”
Thanks to the AgainstMensRights subreddit — which, again, is not actually against rights for men, but against the reactionary clusterfuck that is the Men’s Rights movement — for keeping close track on all this.
This has to be my favorite quote to come out of the whole Occidental College fiasco; it’s staggering in its moral blindness and fanaticism and its complete lack of self-awareness. It also captures well the peculiarly self-defeating quality of so much Men’s Rights rhetoric and, er, “activism.”
![johntheother [-37] -8 points 3 hours ago (11|19) "‘Men’s rights activists’ conspire to cripple college rape reporting system with false reports" GOOD! Go forward, brothers, and fuck their shit up. rape is a crime. If somebody has a report to file of being the victim of this crime - file that report with a POLICE ORGANIZATION, not with some jumped up kangaroo court or administrative star chamber. And when operating in an environment where the star-chamber rules - FTSU with the same fraudulent reports they've tuned their system to process against you. permalink source save give gold hide child comments [–]O-Fortuna 3 points 35 minutes ago (4|0) This came off so silly and juvenile I thought it was one of the troll comments the mods talked about, but you seem to be some kind of widely known mra. In favor of making false reports. Appalling.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/jtoonbrothers.png?resize=535%2C306&ssl=1)
The backstory here: the commenter in question is none other than John “The Other” Hembling, the Number Two (or Three? I can’t tell) boy at A Voice for Men. He’s responding to an article on Raw Story that’s indicative of the incredibly (and justifiably) bad press Reddit MRAs have gotten for spamming Occiental College’s anonymous rape reporting website with false reports of rape, some of which may have named real people at the school as the “perps.”
At this point in the story, even the normally obtuse Men’s Rights Redditors realize they have a disaster on their hands, and are trying to blame anyone else they can.
But Hembling thinks it’s the perfect time to cheer on the false accusers amongst the MRAs.
That’s right: apparently jealous of all the attention Reddit MRAs have gotten for their cloddish “activism,” he’s decided to jump aboard this train — after it’s left the station, derailed, and fallen into a ravine.
That response is classic, too
Last night, a regular commenter in the Men’s Rights subreddit — inspired by a thread on 4chan — posted a link to an online form on r/mensrights under the headline “Feminists at Occidental College created an online form to anonymously report rape/sexual assault. You just fill out a form and the person is called into the office on a rape charge. The “victim” never has to prove anything or reveal their identity.”
This headline is not only inflammatory but untrue: Yes, Occidental College has an online form that allows victims of or witnesses to sexual assault to report the incidents to the school. But, as a statement at the top of the form makes clear, the point is to collect data on how much sexual violence there is at the school, who the victims are, and so on.
If the person reporting the crime names the alleged perpetrator,
a member of the Dean of Students Office will meet with that person to share that the person was named in an anonymous report, review the Sexual Misconduct Policy, and inform the person that if the allegations are true, the behavior needs to cease immediately. Information shared in this form alone will not result in anyone going through the grievance process.
I’ve put the last bit in bold to emphasize a point: No one will be charged with anything based only on information gathered using this form. As would be clear to anyone who thought about the matter for more than a few seconds, it’s rather difficult to investigate, much less prove, a rape if you don’t actually know who the victim is.
Somehow this rather elementary fact eluded the OP, and virtually all of those who left the hundreds of comments on the popular post.
Indeed, a host of Men’s Rights Redditors were so convinced of the innate evil of the online form they all had the same bright idea: let’s flood the school with false reports of rape and break the form. Here are some of their comments. (There are more in the thread.) Note the number of upvotes each of these suggestions got. (Click the images to see the comments in context on Reddit.)
While a few commenters stood up to point out that in fact the school will not charge anyone with anything as a result of anonymous information gathered by the form, they were outnumbered by Men’s Rightsers gleefully reporting that they in fact had reported false information. Among them:
![froggymorning 46 points 15 hours ago (59|13) I've already filled one out. permalink source parent save give gold hide child comments [–]Muffinizer1 6 points 7 hours ago (9|4) Was kind of fun. I swear to god though, if they track us down it would be terribly ironic, however it's mildly likely.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/froggy.png?resize=546%2C171&ssl=1)
It’s one thing to criticize an anonymous reporting system because of its potential for abuse; this is something else entirely.
The post has been up for 17 hours at this point, with more than 700 net upvotes, and some of the calls for “breaking” the form have been up for nearly as long. The moderators of Men’s Rights have done nothing to stop their subreddit being used to interfere with a school’s attempt to assist rape survivors — including men.
“Breaking” a school’s rape reporting mechanism is apparently a form of Men’s Rights activism.
So one of the regulars on Reddit’s The Red Pill subreddit — the “TRP Endorsed” contributor who calls himself IllimitableMan — has worked himself into a lather about the coming Whitepocalypse. You know, the impending collapse of civilization that Mr. Man and assorted other racist asshats fear will come about as a result of white women refusing to pop out the required number of white babies to keep it alive. Sorry, due to white women refusing to “shit out” the required number of white babies. (Mr. Man is quite the defender of family values.)
It pretty much goes without saying that IllimitableMan blames feminism for it all. In fact, over the course of his rambling, repetitive, and rage-fuelled 2,000 word rant he manages to blame feminism for the impending death of the white race roughly half a dozen different times.
Here’s perhaps the most coherent statement of his thesis:
Welcome to the first installment of “what the hell is wrong with people, I mean really,what the hell Saturday.”
Today we’re going to look at a couple of recent controversies in the world of gaming. And by “controversies” I mean “women daring to get involved in the gaming industry and getting harassed by misogynistic assholes.”
First up, let’s look at the tale of a woman who’s now facing an angry internet mob because she drew a picture of the video game character Mega Man … as a woman.
