We Hunted The Mammoth
Life is tough for dudes in our evil misandryarchy. Even dudes who just want to help littler dudes find themselves blocked by evil women.
Take, for example, the sad tale of a public-spirited MGTOWer who calls himself TheDisgruntledGentleman, and his thwarted attempt to join the Big Brother/Big Sister program. No, not the TV show, or the creepy dystopian leader/voyeur from 1984 — the mentoring program that pairs adults with at-risk kids. Let’s let him explain:
NOTE: As of April 4, 2014, the original site and its individual profiles have been taken down; a new site with an apparently similar purpose is evidently being built to replace it, but it’s not yet functional. You can see an archived version of the site’s main page, and its list of “bigots” using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, though you’ll need to manually edit the URLs of the “bigots” listed to see the archived profiles. (Replace each %20 in the URLs with an _ .)
Some of the women profiled on the site as “bigots” included:
Actress Katherine Heigl, who was put on the site after making a humorous public service announcement for the site Funny or Die promoting the spaying and neutering of pets. Register-Her charges her with “endors[ing] male targeted sexual mutilation.”
Feminist blogger Jessica Valenti, the author, most recently, of “Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness,” who was put on the site for several newspaper columns that the site misrepresents in an attempt to show that she is guilty of “an ongoing pattern of anti-male bigotry and advocacy for the eradication of constitutional rights based primarily on sex.” A Voice for Men has also labeled Valenti a “child abuser” for supporting feminist causes, and on one occasion posted candid photos it claimed were of her in an attempt to cause her embarrassment. If you look at the archived version of the site’s main page, you will see a picture of Valenti alongside photos of convicted rapists and murderers, all underneath the headline “Why Aren’t These Women In Prison?” Valenti has not, of course, committed any crimes.
A number of young women who attended a protest against Men’s Rights icon Warren Farrell at the University of Toronto. Register-Her used Twitter Tweets from some of the women, clearly intended as jokes, as evidence of genocidal intentions towards men. In an article on A Voice for Men, an anonymous writer even attacked one of these women for Tweeting a picture of a poster which declared “it is important to have someone’s consent before sexual activity.”
Site founder Paul Elam and other writers on A Voice for Men make no bones about their desire to ruin the lives of their foes. Indeed, the site’s much-referenced slogan is “Fuck Their Shit Up.”
In one post, Elam warned one critic of Register-Her that:
I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection. …
[Y]ou fucking moron. Your only real hope is to keep your mouth shut and pretend AVfM and register-her.com does not exist for as long as you can. Because, as you can see right now, anything you say or do will be thrown back in your face like holy water on a vampire.
We are coming for you, and we are coming for all the liars out there that have been ruining people’s lives with impunity. …
You are SO fucked.
Register-Her was clearly a major part of Elam’s program to “Fuck Their Shit Up.” The “registry” was heavily promoted on A Voice for Men, which linked to a number of “featured offenders” in its sidebar – all of them so-called “bigots,” none of them the criminals that Register-Her claims to really be about. A banner ad for Register-Her depicts a bloody knife. The tagline: “TRUTH is the real bitch.”
Elam’s idea of exposing the “truth” seems to involve publishing photographs and the personal information of his targets, whether these are alleged “false accusers” or simply feminists who have offended him. On the A Voice for Men internet radio show, Elam promised that:
If Mary Jane Rottencrotch out there wants to say that her husband beat her just for the sake of gaining leverage in a divorce he will now have a resource where he can come and post your name, your picture, your work telephone number, your address, perhaps even your route you take to get to work, if you bother to have a job.
While Elam has yet to make good on the threat of posting information on women’s routes to work, posts on A Voice for Men promoting the profiles of so-called “bigots” are filled with threatening language and vague intimations that further information will be revealed. In a post announcing the site’s campaign against the University of Toronto protestors, Elam wrote this about one of his targets:
We have her image and know her general location. We will identify her and profile her activity and name for public view.
We will not stop there, or just with her. And while we will not publish our complete intent, we are dogged in our efforts. …
We have no more sympathy for your agenda of hatred and exclusion than for a plantation owner’s rationale in the Antebellum South for justified ownership of another human being.
A Voice for Men’s posts about the targeted women are also filled with bizarre and hyperbolic accusations. In a post about a college student who had jokingly Tweeted that her “political position” was “kill all men hail satan,” and who in another tweet suggested she might get a tattoo reading “misandry,” one of A Voice for Men’s many pseudonynmous “agents” wrote:
She doesn’t just hate men; doesn’t just want them dead or silenced or marginalized or ignored. She at least entertains the idea of permanently marking her skin with that hatred, like a convict signaling gang affiliation.
“Agent Mauve” makes clear that he hopes to ruin the life of the young woman by putting her on Register-Her:
[T]his will be the beginning of [name removed]’s real legacy; where she can revel in the full and permanent notice of her deeds, and the lesson she is providing to the world about the nature of feminism, and the etiology of hatred. And so that anyone who ever does an internet search on her name again will be aware of it.
So far, A Voice for Men’s campaign against the Toronto protesters seems to be having what one can only assume is the desired effect. On A Voice for Men’s Facebook page, a commenter refers to one of the protesters as an “evil twisted little piece of dogshit,” adding: “I hope she suffers a fatal injury before she can go out and ruin peoples’ lives like she seems determined to do.” This comment earned several “likes” from A Voice for Men’s readers.
In the Spring of 2012, Register-Her was profiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups, as part of a larger feature on the so-called “Men’s Rights” movement. Writing in the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, Arthur Goldwag described Register-Her’s modus operandus and its effect on one targeted woman:
Elam’s site can be frightening to its targets. In one case, he offered a cash reward to the first reader to ferret out a pseudonymous feminist blogger’s real name. In another, Elam singled out a part-time blogger at ChicagoNow who describes herself as a “vegetarian park activist with two baby girls.” The woman’s mistake was to write about her discomfort with male adults helping female toddlers in the bathroom at her daughter’s preschool. The blogger conceded that she was being sexist, but wrote that “I’d rather be wrong than find out if I’m right.”
After the woman was listed, she was widely attacked on men’s movement sites. “I don’t always use the word ‘cunt’ to describe a woman,” one poster raged, “but when I do it’s because of reasons like these.” Shocked, the “Mommy blogger” took down her original post and apologized for her “demonization of men.”
It wasn’t enough. “You targeted fathers, and just fathers,” Elam rebuked her. “It strikes me that you have never really been held to account for any of your actions in life. It is quite likely that the concept of complete, selfless accountability is just completely foreign to you.” Over at the Reddit Mens Rights forum, another poster fumed: “This entire episode should be a warning to all those male hating feminists out there who believe that they are safe screaming their hate messages on the web. Finally, they are held accountable for their hate messages and finally the rest of the world will find out exactly what type of depraved people they really are.”
That’s hate, and that’s precisely the sort of reaction Register-Her seems designed to provoke.
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I encourage readers to link to this piece on their websites, so as to make sure that people understand what Register-Her was really all about.
Feeling nostalgic for any of Man Boobz’ classic trolls? Here’s our old friend Anthony Zarat, now a regular Reddit Men’s Rightser, explaining some things about the ladies of today. Note: In order to understand what he’s saying, you need to know that when MRAs talk about “proxy violence,” they mean women calling the police on a dude, which women of course only do when men are completely innocent, because men are always innocent. (Also, in MRAland all police are men, and White Knights to boot.)
I like that he complains about women being “narcissistic,” then invents his own definition of “character” that applies to his own little obsession.
Gullibility, thy name is Men’s Rights Subreddit.
So, a day or so ago, a troll graced r/mensrights with a tale of imaginary woe about a bad breakup and its aftermath that seemed was designed to push a whole bunch of Men’s Rights hotbuttons all at once.
Lo and behold, the locals bit, and in the process revealed not only their incredible gullibility but also what you might call a highly blinkered view of modern relationships and social etiquette.
Today the troll fessed up, but not before the r/mensrights crowd, taking his tale for the truth, offered him some truly terrible advice laced with lots of righteous indignation.
Here’s the not-exactly-believable story the troll told them:
Over on the A Voice for Men forums – yes, they have forums – one Man Going His Own Way spells out exactly what he means by His Own Way. Here’s misterbill:
For me, MGTOW has three major components:
1. Refusal to cohabitate with a woman
2. Avoidance of fatherhood like the plague
3. Avoidance of being alone in a room with a strange woman (for fear of false accusations)
These are the core elements, IMO.
I’m not celibate, I get sexual satisfaction from several call-girls that I’ve built good rapport with over a few years. I’ll visit one of these women whenever I feel like it, usually once a month or so.
I have what I would describe as a female companion who others would describe as my girlfriend. We don’t have sex, not because I’m not attracted to her, but because my fear of possibly getting her pregnant petrifies me beyond belief. So we hang out 2 days a week and have very nice times together, going on about 5 years. She understands my beliefs and that we will never live together and that I don’t believe in the myth of love.
So I’m MGHOW, but not without women.
I’m 41 and fairly wealthy. In my 20s and through to of my early 30s ( although I wasn’t a PUA) I studied game theory and in combination with other aspects of my life, I had no trouble getting laid. Then a woman made a false accusation against me (and was further slandered by another), and I began to wake up to the perils of having sex with (and interacting with) strange women. The risks outweighed the benefits, and I turned to going my own way.
I travel on business frequently and the one exception to my rule with being alone with strange women is the easy pickings while traveling. There is a rule amongst many women that if you’re 500 miles away from home, it’s not cheating. I see this a lot with many married women. Gents, her vows mean NOTHING once she gets on a plane without you. Although I wouldn’t allow any of these women into my home, I accept the risk when I’m traveling. And there is always a risk of running into a psycho who is ready to explode.
I don’t really have any jokes here. But I will note that his story doesn’t make a lick of sense; I find it literally unbelievable.
He’s so paranoid about women because of a “false accusation” leveled against him back when he pursued women using “game theory” that he literally refuses to be in the same room with “strange women” – or even interact with them. Yet when he’s traveling he suggests he routinely has sex with “strange” married women. Huh? These women could still get pregnant; these women could still make accusations, false or otherwise, against him. Does he feel safe because he can skip town in a hurry to avoid the possible consequences of his actions?
He’s (allegedly) been involved in a 2-day-a-week relationship, for five years, with a woman he’s sexually attracted to. But he refuses to have sex with her because he’s terrified of getting her pregnant. If he’s that worried about getting her pregnant, and generally wants to “avoid … fatherhood like the plague,” why doesn’t he get a vasectomy? If, after he sleeps with a married woman in a strange city, she gets pregnant with his child, does he simply assume she’ll never be able to track him down?
I’m going to assume that most if not all of what misterbill is saying here is bullshit. But if he does indeed live his life in way that even vaguely resembles how he says he does, it’s a rather sad and strange and paranoid way to live.
So I’ve been mostly avoiding writing about the whole Men’s Rights postering controversy in Vancouver, because it’s such a tempest in a teapot. The tl;dr: Some posters got torn down, and some of the people tearing them down yelled at the blabby MRA videoblogger and A Voice for Men second fiddle known as JohnTheOther.
MRAs: Given that virtually none of you have any experience as actual real world activists, you may not be aware of this, but POSTERS GET TORN DOWN. It’s annoying, and I don’t support it myself, but it happens all the time. Sometimes, you may actually run across people tearing down your posters, at which point there is usually some sort of awkward confrontation that may include yelling.
You know what you do when this happens? You put your posters up again. You know what you don’t do? Compare the experience to rape. Because, on the list of the grand injustices of the world, having posters torn down is pretty far down the list, somewhere around “stubbing your toe” and “kitten farts on you.”
This lovely poster, meant as a sarcastic response to this “10 Top Tips to End Rape” poster, has gotten 759 upvotes in the Men’s Rights subreddit. Well, 759 net upvotes. It’s actually gotten more than 1200 upvotes, and 450 downvotes. Because, clearly, trying to stop the small percentage of rape accusations that are false is totally so much more important than trying to stop rape itself. Mocking rape prevention programs and promoting a culture in which women (and men, and genderqueer people) are afraid to come forward with real stories of rape for fear of being harassed and ridiculed is really the only decent thing to do. Plus: Lulz!
Here one commenter explains the “logic” behind the poster:
The discussion is, well, what you’d expect from r/mensrights. But don’t worry: some people have stepped up to critique the poster.
That’s right, solidwhetstone, your rapey poster wasn’t rapey enough!
—
There is some
here.
To arms, Men’s Rights Redditors! Evil feminists are running riot on Wikipedia, deleting pages devoted to books by MRA hero Warren Farrell!
Oops. False alarm! Turns out WillToHave doesn’t quite understand how Wikipedia works. As one commenter pointed out several hours after the post went up, no pages about Farrell’s books have actually been deleted. The reason there are no pages about most of his books is … that no one has bothered to put any up yet.
D’oh! MRAs aren’t being oppressed by feminists; they’re being oppressed by their own laziness.
Of course, the only ones who know this are those who’ve bothered to actually read the comments. 15 hours after being totally debunked, the post, with its misleading headline, remains near the top of the Men’s Rights subreddit, with 142 net upvotes.
So I wasn’t planning on commenting on this mysterious little Men’s Rights protest that managed to draw a meager seven protestors, with only two signs amongst them, one of them impossible to read at a distance. I mean, despite the poor turnout, they’re actually making an effort to do something in the real world, right? And that’s something, even if the person posting this picture didn’t bother to tell us when this happened or who organized it or even what the protest was about. (Circumcision? Or Men’s Rights generally?) But, hey, baby steps, right?
But then I saw this little exchange in the Men’s Rights subreddit about it:
Feminists: Everything everywhere is always their fault.
Over on A Voice for Men, our dear friend Paul Elam has come up with an interesting new way to celebrate Mother’s Day – with what is essentially the longest, least funny, and most rage-filled “Yo Mama” joke ever. (Indeed, it’s so rage-filled I should probably put a Trigger Warning right about here.)
Elam starts off by addressing the mothers of the world, suggesting he’s got a “a socially conscious twist” on the traditional Mother’s Day celebrations. Mothers, he argues, should gather together the flowers they’ve been given by their loved ones and:
Place a bunch of daffodils at a dumpster near you, perhaps one in which one of you, or one of your kind, has tossed an unwanted baby, leaving it there to slowly die alone in a pile of trash.
Perhaps you could lay a single rose at the base of a bridge that has been used by a mother to throw her baby into an icy river. Perhaps you can lay it there with hands that have beaten or shaken a baby to death.
You probably didn’t see that coming, did you? He goes on.
Now perhaps some of you could place large, colorful arrangements at the abortion centers where women go to have children cut out and laid to rest in those colorful and attractive biohazard containers that are all the rage in the clinics. …
Maybe you can lay virtual flowers at your computers to honor all the children that you and your sisters have pimped out to pedophiles, or perhaps the blossoms could be placed in your child’s room, which also doubles as your preferred place to abuse your own.
Oh, but you say you haven’t done any of these things, and that abortion isn’t actually the same as infanticide? No matter. Elam has an answer for that:
This is not a request for some mothers, or a percentage of them, but all of you. In fact, you don’t even have to be a mother. If you have a vagina, the blood of all those children, who are abused far more at the hands of women than men, has stained your skin and caked around the cuticles of your fingers.
If you are a mother, particularly one of the many abusers, or just one that has remained silent as your sisters have beaten, choked, stabbed, burned, drowned, abused, neglected, dumped, tortured and otherwise done the unspeakable to the most defenseless among us, then I hope to see those flowers in your murderous hands, paying homage to those that have been unfortunate enough to be placed in your path. …
In Daffodils for Dumpsters the gash gets you in, and you don’t really have a choice.
You see, Elam has decided that we live in an era of “collective guilt,” and that the evil (straw) feminists who go around blaming all men for the actions of a few – through such dastardly things like rape awareness seminars – deserve to find themselves collectively blamed as well.
Except that Elam’s post goes well beyond an ill-conceived and ill-intentioned attempt at “turnabout is fair play.” This isn’t a piece of Swiftian satire. He actually believes all this hateful nonsense, and says as much:
Now, do I really mean all this? Yes. It is not that women deserve to be collectively regarded as child abusers and killers. Most aren’t. Most are actually very good to their children and can even be trusted with the children of others. But that truth is not what is important here.
What is important is the children, or the principle, or whatever other bullshit we make up to convince ourselves it is not about demonizing women when that is exactly what we are doing.
I have to confess I have no idea what he’s trying to say in the second paragraph here. Did he mean to say “men” instead of “women?” If so, this is an interesting little slip.
He continues:
The fact is that mothers are more dangerous than fathers where it concerns children. They always have been. It is only a few percentage points in that direction, but of course in a White Ribbon way, it is more than enough to justify pointing a finger at your entire sex and feeling superior as we watch you atone for the unspeakable acts of a minority.
So, suck it up ladies. If you knew about White Ribbon and said nothing to object to it; if in general you have remained silent or actively participated as the image of the male half of the population has been reduced to that of a depraved threat, the step up and get your flowers. You deserve every last petal, stem and thorn.
I imagine Elam chuckling a bit as he typed that final word.
And a happy Mother’s Day to you, too!
Oh, and if you found yourself wondering about that “White Ribbon” thing, Elam is evidently (as best I can figure it) referring either to the women who, during World War I, handed out white ribbons to men who didn’t enlist in the army. Or he’s referring to this contemporary campaign to fight violence against women. But I don’t live inside Elam’s head, so I’m not sure what he meant, or why he seems to think that all women would know about either campaign, much less have any responsibility for them.
NOTE: Elam is also celebrating Mother’s Day by suggesting I had something to do with creating Reddit’s appalling “beatingwomen” subreddit as part of a nefarious plot to make the Men’s Rights movement look even worse than it manages to do on its own.
You may notice that Elam presents no actual evidence to back up his claims. There is no such evidence, because Elam’s accusations are utterly and completely untrue.
I have nothing whatsoever to do with r/beatingwomen. Nothing. I don’t know anything about who created it, or what their aim was beyond laughing at pictures and videos of violence against women. As I’ve said before, it’s a vile place. I think Reddit should shut it down.
