A Voice for Men mocks the fears of one of its targets of harassment
The self-described “Men’s Human Rights” site A Voice for Men is a hate site trying — admittedly not very hard, or convincingly — to pose as a human rights organization. In reality, as I and various other writers have documented in considerable detail, it’s an organizer and amplifier of hatred, directed at feminists and women more generally.
Much of this hatred is directed at specific targets, mostly though not always feminist women who have offended A Voice for Men’s founder Paul Elam. The aim is generally to terrorize feminists into silence.
I’ve written at length about AVFM’s campaigns of vilification and intimidation in the past; for a recent example as well as numerous links to discussions of past examples, see here.
Today I will look at some of the specific tactics that AVFM uses against its targets – providing, in each case, a recent example.
This, in other words, is how AVFM’s Hate Machine functions. [TRIGGER WARNING for abusive language, discussion of abusive tactics]
Cartoon by Sage Gerard, AVFM’s golden boy of campus activism
Today I’d like to share with you two quotations. One is from Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader whose legacy we honor today. The other is from someone who considers himself the leader of a human rights movement that follows in the footsteps of King.
The first quote:
Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Oh dear. Fantasy author and garbage person Vox Day is having one of those (vox) days, and has decided to take it out on, you guessed it, feminism, pounding out an overwrought little rant on his Alpha Game blog.
Never give feminists an inch. Don’t agree with them, don’t tolerate them, show them no mercy whatsoever. Feminism is a Satanic, anti-Christian, anti-reason, anti-science ideology that destroys literally everything it touches and everyone who embraces it.
Wow. He’s so mad he’s practically plagiarizing Pat Robertson’s famous quote about feminism being “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” I’m not sure how Vox managed to forget the lesbian witchcraft angle.
This is the final day of the We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
Every time you think they can’t go any lower, they go lower. This morning game designer and #GamerGate target Zoe Quinn discovered that someone was selling, er, “erotic fiction” about her on Amazon. Which is to say: a Kindle eBook apparently filled with explicit descriptions of her being gang-raped by five “upset” gamers trying to “teach her a lesson.”
GamerGaters sometimes try to rebut charges of misogyny by pointing out that the targets of their wrath aren’t only women. And that’s true. They also target men … who stand up for women.
Mike Stuchbery, a writer and teacher in England, recently aroused the wrath of the Gaters by posting a brief essay titled “A Letter To The Gamerdudes In My Classes” on his blog. In the essay, he wrote “[d]on’t be part of the mob that attacks whichever target GamerGate is going after this week.”
So now he’s become “the target GamerGate is going after this week.” Or one of them, anyway.
Martin Luther King after being hit by a rock during a demonstration in Chicago, 1966
Today is Martin Luther King day here in the United States. In remembering Dr. King’s legacy, alas, his story is sometimes reduced to a few simplistic soundbites, and we forget how much of a struggle his famous struggle really was.
The one thing no one seems to want to remember is how much opposition there was to King and his message, and how ugly and violent and hateful this opposition was.
King and his family faced real threats and real harassment on a daily basis. He was subject to real violence, yet continued to preach a message of nonviolence.
As a reminder of the courage it took to be Martin Luther King, here’s an account of a march he led in Chicago in 1966, taken from Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland. (Content warning: Racist language, violence.)
August 5. Six hundred open-housing activists, ten thousand counterdemonstrators. Some wore Nazi helmets. Others waved Confederate battle flags, carried George Wallace banners, swastika placards that helpfully explained THE SYMBOL OF WHITE POWER.
Martin Luther King, Mahalia Jackson by his side, led his legions forth: “We are bound for the promised land!”
“Kill those niggers!”
“We want Martin Luther Coon!”
Police trying to keep the two sides apart were screamed at: “Nigger-loving cops!” “God, I hate niggers and nigger-lovers,” a reporter overheard an old lady say.
Martin Luther King walked past.
“Kill him! Kill him!”
“Roses are red, violets are black, King would look good with a knife in his back.”
Instead he got a baseball-size rock above his ear. He slumped to the ground—the Gandhian moment of truth. … King got up and kept on marching. We shall overcome.
Why did King put himself at such risk? “I have to do this–to expose myself–to bring this hate into the open,” he later explained.
He also, as a result of his activism in Chicago, got local real estate agents to agree to abide by the city’s fair housing ordinance. Not a dramatic concession, but a meaningful one, and one that illustrated the kind of everyday discrimination that blacks faced in America.
This is what a real civil rights hero looks like.
EDIT: Here’s some footage of one of King’s marches in Chicago, and a Chicago Tribune video about King’s Chicago activism. The footage here is supposedly of King’s march in Gage Park; the march described above took place in Marquette Park, where he got an even more hostile reception.
[TRIGGER WARNING: QUOTES CONTAIN TRANSPHOBIA, ADVOCACY OF VIOLENCE TOWARDS TRANS WOMEN]
Pickup guru and human stain Roosh V. continues his search for attention at any cost. His latest grab for page views takes the form of a nasty little post on Return of Kings ostensibly “warning” his readers how they can protect themselves from evil “[t]rannies [who] will try to trick a player to get some loving.”
The post, written by someone calling himself redpiller1985, is a transphobic rant in the form of a jokey list purporting to show guys “8 Ways To Spot A Transsexual.” Redpiller1985 starts off by declaring that
It’s not just betas and closet conning alphas trying to hold us back. It’s cross-dressing men who are so mentally ill that they think they’re women. They’re delusional omega men who think acting like a caricature of the women who don’t give them play is how they can finally get some sexual pleasure from unwitting men.
The “humor” of the post is so strained it’s doubtful it would even elicit a chuckle from even the most egregious transphobe. Redpiller1985 mocks “trannies” for allegedly having silly names “[l]ike the name Jessica but spelled as Jessika.” He think’s its hilarious that they don’t like being referred to as “he,” and that some “trannies” use words like “kyriarchy” and “cisgender.” He thinks it’s risible that “[t]ranssexuals have an incredibly high suicide and drug abuse rate..”
Indeed, a portion of the article is devoted to mocking the suicide attempt of a trans game designer; I’m not going to quote any of that.
Redpiller1985 ends by proclaiming, with mock sincerity, that all this nastiness is really an attempt to help poor “trannies” get their lives in order:
We as red pillers must even tell the most beta blue pillers in existence when the “hot girl” at the bar is really a lying mentally ill man in a dress. If we stand up to their mental illness and call them out instead of making their delusions worse. It will inspire these disfigured men to stop being omegas and start being true men again.
In the comments, someone calling himself Ben “Race War Now” Garrison declares that “Trannies will be the first to hang on the Day of the Rope.” Another commenter posts a photo of a murdered trans woman lying dead in the street, with the note “[h]ere’s a good example photo of what happens once trannies get found out.”
Not all the commenters are on board with the transbashing. One suggests that
[T]rannies (especially the Asian kind) are super friendly and outgoing. No girl is every as nice or friendly to the strange guys around her.
That bit of racial and sexual fetisihization is about as “trans-friendly” as it gets on Roosh’s hate site.
Paul Elam in a web-only clip from the 20/20 segment that never ran on television.
Paul Elam, the founder and primary animating force behind the website A Voice for Men, is probably, for better or worse, the most influential figure in the Men’s Rights movement (or, as he prefers to call it, the Men’s Human Rights Movement).
Elam is also a fierce misogynist with a penchant for angry, violent rhetoric full of only-slightly veiled threats. But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps the best way to get to know Mr. Elam is through his own words.
So here are some of Elam’s thoughts on a variety of issues, taken from postings on his own website. I have linked each quote back to its source on A Voice for Men.
This spring, the pseudonymous “Ferdinand Bardamu” of the defunct manosphere blog In Mala Fide self-published a book/ebook collecting together his, er, best posts from that terrible, terrible blog. I actually bought a copy of the ebook — for research — and it is awful. Somehow putting Bardamu’s posts in book form makes even more clear how puerile — and how badly written — they really are.
But there are evidently some people out there who disagree. Indeed, I recently ran across a review of the book that could not have been more glowing had it been written by the author himself:
Three Years of Hate is an invaluable, priceless book not merely because it’s well-written, entertaining and thought-provoking. It’s worth reading because it’s a piece of history. It’s a record of one of the most influential and important thinkers of our times. Decades from now, when the current dystopia is naught but a bad memory, Ferdinand Bardamu will be remembered as one of the architects of its fall.
If you’re relying on glowing reviews to sell your book, and your book is a piece of crap, you might as well write the glowing reviews yourself, huh?
I suppose Forney’s explanation would be that it was all a big joke, and that by then “everyone knew” that Forney and Bardamu were one and the same, but that’s not true, and he didn’t confirm that fact for more than another month in any case.
I can’t remember exactly where I ran across a reference to theis ingenious little bit of self-boosterism, but I think it was while reading back through some old posts on the always interesting blog Roosh & Me: An Old Feminist Looks at the New Misogynist, by Cinzia La Strega. who is an occasional commenter over here on Man Boobz.
Michelle Obama is not impressed with your argument.
Christian J., the blogger behind What Men Are Saying About Women and the inventor of the infamous MRA two-dot ellipsis, has always been an open racist as well as a misogynist, letting drop horrific comments from time to time on why he thinks black women are the worst kind of women in the world.
Christian lays out his thesis statement in his first sentence:
I have made no effort to hide my disgust about black females as they do really deserve every criticism they get.
What follows is a largely incoherent stream-of consciousness rant unencumbered by logic or the correct use of language.
Christian starts off by attacking “black “Lesbian” females” and “Oprah “Find the Victim” Winfrey,” whom he describes as a
selfish, self-serving, anti-male bigot and organiser of female only schools in Africa. A true racist bigot in every sense of the word.
Yes, the author of “Why Black Women are More Repulsive than any Other..” did just call Oprah a racist bigot.
Apparently immune to irony, Christian J continues:
The facts about black women is even more horrendous than one could even assume. They developed themselves as being so arrogant and self-serving, that even black men avoid them like the plague. …
The fact that they have constantly hit out against black men as being either gays or hoods or in jail, leaving them pregnant (that’s a favourite with women, always blame someone else for one’s own stupidity) and refusing to man up when required. They vilified black men at every opportunity. …
The black man’s response was huge. They enjoyed handing their oversized asses back to them in popular songs like rap and other genres.
You will no doubt have noticed by now that Christian J. does not seem to understand what words mean or how language works, exactly.
They reduced the black female down to the levels they could understand and they also stated in no uncertain terms, what black females could do with themselves while they went off and picked females from other races to replace those high and mighty, self-elevated edifices and phoenixes.
Edifices? Phoenixes? Is he just pulling random words out of the dictionary now?
Poetic justice and it was the appropriate feedback they required to put them back in the box where they originally came from and hopefully teach them some level of humility.
The … box … they came from? What the fuck is he even talking about here?
That did not work of course as their ego now had grown even bigger that they themselves could no longer control. …
