The capacity crowd at the press conference at the AVFM conference; from Metrotimes.
If anyone feels compelled to discuss the AVFM conference, do it here.
I’ll post links to any articles and blog posts and interesting tweets and pretty much anything of note I see about it; if you run across any, feel free to post them in the comments and I can add them to the post.
Here’s the live audio stream for the conference, which is off the air. And the video stream, which isn’t working at the moment. Apparently they’ve packed up for the day. (Friday, that is.)
There was no protest, as the organizers of the earlier protest called for a boycott
The official twitter hashtag is #icmi14. For some wonderful Janet Bloomfield PR professionalism, see @JudgyBitch1 and @icmi14.
I have a new theory that I think might help to explain why so many Men’s Rights Activists are so obsessed with false accusations of rape. It’s simple: They are so used to making false accusations themselves, about pretty much everything, that it’s hard for them to conceive of someone making an accusation that is actually true.
Naturally, as a critic of the Men’s Rights movement I’m a fairly reliable target for these false charges, and rarely does a day go by in which I don’t learn some new, terrible, and wholly imaginary thing I’m alleged to have said or done. Hell, these days I can barely make it through a Twitter conversation with A Voice for Men’s Dean Esmay without him spouting some grotesque falsehood about me.
The latest accusation from the A Voice for Men crowd – or at least from AVFM’s so-called Honey Badger Brigade – is that all the media talk about Elliot Rodger being an MRA was my fault. Or, as “Honey Badger” Alison Tieman put it in a tweet that she sent to an assortment of media outlets that had written about Rodger and the MRAs,
You all got the memo about #EndFathersDay fiasco, right – the phony “feminist” hashtag, seeded and spread by 4chan trolls, that aroused so much consternation on Twitter the other day, and that took in so many who’re already given to thinking the worst about feminism?
It would be nice if we could just dismiss this whole thing as trolls being trolls – no harm, no foul. But there’s a bit more to it than that.
For one thing, the troll campaign worked. At least on some people: While feminist writers quickly rushed in to point out that the whole thing was an antifeminist hoax, more than a few in the right-wing media were taken in utterly.
MRAs seem to think that they can spin their way out of pretty much anything. And on the internet, particularly in their own little echo chamber, they can kind of get away with it. It’s when they venture out into the real world that they run into some trouble.
Take, for example, the mad spinning that accompanied the implosion of the Canadian Association for Equality’s “E Day” concert scheduled for last weekend. CAFE, you may recall, is a Canadian Men’s Rights group that’s probably most famous for organizing a series of talks by Men’s Rights-friendly folks on Canadian campuses that, well, caused a tiny bit of a stir.
Oh, sorry. The group says that even though its “focus is currently on men and boys … [W]e do not consider ourselves a Men’s Rights Group.”
Anyway, so this non-Men’s Rights group decided to hold a concert on Toronto Island celebrating “Equality Day,” a holiday they made up just for the occasion. They found a venue, got some sponsors and even managed to convince a bunch of bands to sign on.
So, hoping to find out any more information I could about those threats the A Voice for Men gang has apparently been getting lately, I forced myself to listen to 45 minutes worth of a regular AVFM YouTube show with the highly ironic name Intelligence Report. The topic of the show was ostensibly the “Death Threats in Detroit.” But somehow, AVFM’s Paul Elam, Dean Esmay and Tara Palmatier managed to reveal much less about this subject than they did about their own obsessions and insecurities.
At one point in their rambling conversation they began talking about how unfair it was that the Southern Poverty Law Center had profiled the AVFM gang as a bunch of woman-haters, when really the SPLC should be putting mean feminists on their Hatewatch list instead. And somehow this segued into a discussion of gendered slurs against women, and why it was just fine to use them, so long as you didn’t use them to refer to every single woman on planet earth.
And yes, I’ve saved a sound clip of this edifying discussion for you. You’re welcome!
Oh, just a little FYI, when Pauly says they never ever ever ever use the words “cunt” or “bitch” to describe women as a group — as if using those words is totally fine otherwise — he’s lying. At least when it comes to “cunt.”
feminism, consumer products, psychology, media, advertising, politics and social custom [have] all merged into one Great Big Bitch Machine; [and] the modern female psyche is nothing more than a product of that machine
But technically he’s not calling all women bitches there. Just saying that “modern female psyche” is the product of a “Great Big Bitch Machine.”
A chart posted by Elliot Rodger, giving his chilling spin on a manosphere meme depicting supposed female “hypergamy”
When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime.
But when a man filled to overflowing with hatred of women acts upon this hatred and launches a killing spree targeting women, many people find it hard to accept that his violence has anything to do with his misogyny. They’re quick to blame it on practically anything else they can think of – guns, video games, mental illness – though none of these things in themselves would explain why a killer would target women.
In the case of Elliot Rodger, who set out on Friday night aiming, as he put it in a chilling video, to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut” in a popular sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, some Men’s Rights activists and other manospherians are doing their best to convince the world that misogyny had nothing to do with it.
If you’re a feminist holding an event, and you don’t want to have recordings of that event posted online without your permission by MRAs, it looks like your only option is to ban anyone and everyone associated with A Voice for Men from the premises. AVFM “activism director” Attila Vinczer has made that very clear.
Earlier this month, you see, Jaclyn Friedman – feminist writer, speaker, founder of Women, Action & The Media (WAM!) – gave a talk at Queens University in Kingston, Canada, followed by a panel discussion.
A number of Men’s Rights Activists associated with everyone’s favorite hate site A Voice for Men showed up with cameras and other recording devices, as they do.
Ok, folks, brace yourself, because this story of anti-male oppression is tough to read. Not because it’s badly written and completely implausible — no, no, not that — but because it reveals the evil workings of the feminazi oppressors at their most vicious: when they are targeting high school juniors for no other reason than because they are walking down the hallway too close to FEMALES involved in the annual Eating of the Fetuses Women’s Mentor Day, during which the school’s FEMALES are given inspiring talks and free lunch and gift certificates for, I dunno, let’s just assume they’re for some of those “Boys are Stupid, Throw Rocks at Them” t-shirts.
Anyway, so it’s Women’s Mentor Day, and young Zorfsic is going about his business:
I was walking to my 4th hour class that just so happen to stray near the Women’s Mentor Meeting. Thinking to myself “That time of the mont… I mean year, again!”. When all of a sudden a woman who does not work at the school grabs me by the arm and throws me onto the stairs as if she wanted me to sit. “What are you doing here! This is for females only! That mean girls, if you aren’t smart enough to catch on!”. My friend and my girlfriend came to me and as he planned it for year my buddy yells “Back off! This young man has nothing to do with you Feminist Nazi camp! He was just walk to his class!”. She grabbed him and took him to the office. My girlfriend was trying to help me up but another woman told her to stop and said “Let him do it. He doesn’t deserve your help.” and at that moment the schools security came to take me to the office. After explaining what happened me and my friend got suspended for trying to “stop a school planned event” that we tried to stay away from.
I cannot believe how completely true this story is. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything more true than this. It’s true SO HARD I had to put the especially true parts in bold. Apparently a good number of Men’s Rights Redditors agreed, as the post got more than a dozen upvotes, and poor misandried Zorfsic got mostly supportive comments from the crowd.
Granted, one dude — who was quick to point out that he totally thought the story was true — did suggest that Zorfsic might possibly consider trying to improve his writing ability, given that his post was “written with some level of theatrics and could easily be posted on an anti-MRM website to discredit what MRA s work for.” But, you know, every true prophet has his naysayers.
Note: I found this story through a post in the AntiMensRights subreddit. Amazingly, some of the people there doubt its veracity. Or at least they’re pretending that they do.
Note 2: In case any MRAs come by and get mad, yes, I Googled it, there actually is such a thing as Women’s Mentor Day, which is an annual event at one Arizona High School, and, yes, girls do get free lunches and gift bags. It’s the rest of the story that seems a tad made-the-fuck-up.
The pickup artist scene is a haven for manipulative assholes — and manipulative asshole wannabes — so it was hardly a surprise to see a post on Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog last week defending some of the internet’s most ubiquitous manipulative assholes: trolls.
Embracing rather than challenging a recent study that found internet trolling “correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism,” RoK’s runsonmagic suggested that such “dark triad” traits can serve leaders well and that trolling, handled expertly, can be a form of “provocative art.”
“Trolling can actually contribute to our culture by revealing our societal triggers and emotional weaknesses,” he wrote.
Emotionally secure people are not harmed by others perspectives, genuine or trolling. … If you feel like you are being trolled or become angry at something you read online, see if there is a way you can learn from the experience and be grateful for it.
Well, Roosh’s fans have just undergone quite a learning experience, but they’re not feeling very grateful.
If Jason Gregory were this adorable kitty, it would be hard to stay mad at him
Hey, everybody!
So you remember that post a couple of days ago, that one in which I quoted Jason Gregory’s most peculiar dating advice for angry men? You know, the one in which he suggested that men rebuff women who are interested in them with a long and rather nasty assortment of misogynistic insults? You know, like these:
Tell her that she isn’t interesting, that her soul is dog-shit and that she has nothing to offer other than boobs and booty, that she is a piece of shit and a total failure as a human being, that you don’t find her attractive and that she isn’t even good enough to be a cum-bucket.
Well, it turns out I totally misinterpreted Jason Gregory’s post, according to an unbiased and neutral outside observer named Jason Gregory, no relation to the original Jason Gregory, who’s written a post about it on his blog.
Hold on, I’m being told that this second Jason Gregory is in fact also the first Jason Gregory.
