By David Futrelle
So Cassie Jaye‘s execrable “Men’s Rights” documentary The Red Pill has been causing a bit of a stir in Australia. Yesterday, the Sydney Morning Herald published a lengthy puff piece on Jaye and her film.
By David Futrelle
So Cassie Jaye‘s execrable “Men’s Rights” documentary The Red Pill has been causing a bit of a stir in Australia. Yesterday, the Sydney Morning Herald published a lengthy puff piece on Jaye and her film.
At this point, after five plus years of observing his shenanigans from my roost in We Hunted the Mammoth Manor, there’s very little that Paul Elam could do that would really shock me.
But I have to admit that I was a bit shocked last night when I discovered a little bulletin on the internet garbage heap that is Elam’s A Voice for Men website with the title “Plagiarism discovered and removed from AVFM.” I was even more shocked to discover that Elam actually credited me with this discovery:
On this, the last day of 2015, let us take a few moments to reflect on some of the HUGE TRIUMPHS the Men’s Rights movement has had over the past year.
Is AVFM, the hate site we all love to hate, melting down before our eyes? Consider.
AVFM’s head cheese Paul Elam has long fantasized about becoming King of the MGTOWs, which would help him build up his Flying Monkey army and turn Men Going Their Own Way into Money Going Into Paul Elam’s Pockets. In doing so, he seems to have alienated virtually all of those who consider themselves MGTOWs.
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (The PayPal page will say you are donating to Man Boobz.) Thanks!
Congratulations, A Voice for Men! You’ve caused me to feel an actual twinge of sympathy for a woman who once declared, on AVFM no less, that “[w]omen are facing a very real and grave problem in our culture: They are obnoxious [plural form of vagina-related slur redacted.]”
The c-word-slinging woman in question is former AVFM contributor and YouTube micro-celebrity Diana Davison, a friend to and frequent collaborator with another former AVFMer, the infamous “JohnTheOther” Hembling. The two have been sniping at AVFM in videos for months, and getting sniped back at in return, and have both become entangled in the wider war between AVFM and what seems to be virtually the entirety of the Men Going Their Own Way movement.
As Davison’s video above makes clear, this war is getting pretty ugly, with some AVFMers apparently circulating nude photos of Davison in an attempt to shut her up with some good old-fashioned slut-shaming.
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.
Longtime observers of A Voice for Men have been wondering for some time why John “The Other” Hembling has vanished from that site. Hembling, once the site’s Editor in Chief and number two figure, was not at AVFM’s much ballyhooed conference this summer, and his name has mysteriously vanished from the masthead. AVFM has not, to the best of my knowledge, ever offered a public explanation for the falling-out with Hembling.
Now, after months of silence on the topic, Hembling is telling his side of the story.
Bill Frezza, the overgrown, overtan frat man who warned the frat boys of America about the gravest threat to their very existence — drunk chicks — may have lost his gig at Forbes, but he’s found a new fanbase amongst the MRAs of Reddit, who’ve hoisted him aloft as the latest martyr to femifascism. In a couple of highly upvoted threads in the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars celebrated his heroism and good sense.
Let’s just take a look at some of the wisdom they deposited in the threads.
We might as well start with the most-upvoted comment of all, from the legendary JohnTheOther himself, who is evidently well aware of the threat that drunk chicks pose to his very life:
Congratulations, A Voice for Men. You are having an impact upon the world.
Or at least upon one organization in India, a truly reprehensible group called Masculinist India, which has adopted the histrionic rhetorical style, and even some of the specific arguments, advanced by AVFM and other North American Men’s Rights groups for a series of graphically challenged “masculinist” memes posted on Facebook and on the group’s web page. Masculinist India has even adopted AVFM’s preferred nomenclature, describing its members as “Men’s Human Rights Activists.” They are of course the complete opposite of “human rights” activists, campaigning instead against basic rights for women.
The influence of AVFM and other Western Men’s Rightsers can been seen again and again in Masculinist India’s posts and memes, which have all the sophistication and subtlety of Chick Tracts.
The “feminists made me a misogynist” logic of the meme above, for example, echoes the argument made in “Hate Bounces,” an influential MRA screed by MRA/MGTOW elder “Zed,” and by countless other MRAs including former AVFM Number Two John Hembling.
Other memes borrow not only the arguments of Western MRAs but recycle the same tired stock photos, like the angry woman in this meme, a favorite amongst Western MRAs.
Welcome to the first episode of Misogyny Theater, our new animated series, bringing you the best of the worst of YouTube misogyny.
In today’s episode, we revisit an old video from John The Other, also known as John Hembling, a fellow most of you already know pretty well. The monologue in this video is an unedited excerpt from a YouTube rant of his, minus some of the distracting background music that was included in the original.
Content Note: The misogyny in this one is pretty bad, even by John the Other standards.
I will try to produce at least one of these a week. There’s plenty of misogyny on YouTube, so it’s doubtful I’ll run out of material any time soon. I will also be doing a series based on Creepy PMs. Big thanks to everyone who’s pointed me to interesting candidates for future videos, as well as to those who’ve volunteered to do voice work or who’ve sent in pictures of their pets. Thanks as well to the anonymous Friend of the Mammoths who put together the snazzy title sequences here.
In my post announcing my video plans last week, I offered some suggestions on how to help; I’m going to write up a most detailed FAQ on this shortly.
John’s original video is no longer up on YouTube, but you can see clips from it — including the portion I used in the video above — in this more recent video from him in which he tries to explain away the horrible things he said. Apparently it was just a big joke! All in good fun!
EDIT: Removed an embedded video that was no longer functioning because it’s been removed from YouTube.
EDIT 2: For a mashup of Hembling’s original video, along with another video of his in which he pointedly refuses to apologize for the original video, see here, courtesy of Mancheeze.