We Hunted The Mammoth
Well, now you’ve gone and done it, you evil feminists: you’ve turned 0bvious_Atheist into a Nazi!
We first met the Men’s Rights subreddit regular the other day, when in a fit of ingenuity he blamed the Newtown school shootings on, er, Title IX. Well, his strange political journey has continued, and on his blog, on Boxing Day, the Canadian MRA officially announced his conversion to neo-Nazism. Literally. Let’s let him explain:
I am beginning to wonder – seriously wonder — if JohnTheOther of A Voice for Men has completely lost touch with reality.
Take a look at this angry, delusional tirade he posted on Reddit yesterday after a couple of his AVFM comrades were banned from Reddit, possibly for their promotion of “doxxing” – that is, their attempts to find and reveal the personal information of a Toronto feminist activist. In this embarrassing public meltdown, JtO turned on the regulars in the Men’s Rights subreddit for criticizing AVFM’s doxxing campaigns – and accused them, astonishingly, of being a gang of closet feminists.
UPDATE: In a new post on his blog, Marshall explains what (he says) actually happened. See below for details.
UPDATE 2: AVFM says “Oops!” (See end of post.)
I just hope none of you were planning on attending the Great Vancouver All-MRA Debate on whether or not feminism has “gone too far.” Because the already strange story of this debate has taken an even stranger turn, which seems to involve a large degree of blatant lying from someone, or a bunch of someones, connected to the debate. Which, by the way, isn’t going to be happening, at least not any time soon.
A Voice for Men yesterday announced that the much ballyhooed debate would be “delayed due to outside interference.” The announcement told a dramatic tale:
Chris Marshall, a father’s rights activist and the manager of a Vancouver business where a scheduled debate addressing the question, “Has feminism gone too far?” reported that he has just been fired from his job, and escorted from the premises by Vancouver Police after 30 months of employment. The timing of Mr Marshal’s ejection comes 48 hours prior to that scheduled event.
You remember Reddit Island, right? The utterly serious, unintentionally hilarious project in which a bunch of Redditors attempt to set up a Reddity miniature utopia on some remote island somewhere? They are still trying to find an island, and apparently that process is … not going so swimmingly.
As Adrian Chen of Gawker notes in a nice long piece on the project, a fortysomething IT guy from Virginia names Mark Wells has been telling prospective Reddit Islanders that he may have found the perfect place for them:
Wells, who uses the handle Citizenpolitician, explained in a series of increasingly breathless posts on Reddit Island that he’d been scoping out a tiny tropical splotch called Current Island. Just off the coast of Bahamian island of Eluthera, Current is sparsely inhabited, and could be a possible option for their settlement. He’d cold-called members of the local government about the possibility of having a few hundred internet nerds settle Current Island. And he had been met with a very promising response.
Here’s JohnTheOther on A Voice for Men, complaining that Australian journalist Tory Shepard has unfairly accused “men’s rights extremists” associated with AVFM of using the term “lying bitches.”
“[L]ying bitches” might have [been] pulled from from a reader’s comment on one of more than 1200 articles on AVfM. But that phrase forms no part of this human rights movement’s standard rhetoric, which if Shepherd were a journalist, she would know.
Huh. Yeah, it’s probably just some sort of incredible fluke. Just one reader’s comment on one of more than 1200 articles!
Oops, I guess it was used more than once.
But it’s not like this sort of language is encouraged by JtO or his boss Paul Elam.
To be fair, they don’t always refer to women as bitches. Sometimes they refer to women by the much more genteel “cunt.”
Like the time Elam described the CEO of the Good Men Project as “a disingenuous cunt that makes her living off trying to turn men into lap dogs.” And the time he referred to comedic actress Katherine Heigl as a “misandric cunt.” Oh, and that time he referred to a commenter on his site as “Ms. Cuntforbrains, or if you are male, Mr. Cuntforbrains.” And the time he referred to the feminist blogosphere as the “cunt-o-sphere.” Very witty!
I know, it’s unfair to cherry-pick comments from the guy who actually started and runs A Voice for Men. Clearly he isn’t representative of the site at all.
(Note: Yes, I did say yesterday that I wasn’t going to read that JtO post on general principle. And yes, I did read a little bit more of it. But I have not read the whole thing, and I never will!)
Manosphere doofuses have a wide assortment of excuses for dismissing this blog without actually having to deal with anything I’ve ever actually said. There’s the old “you’re a misandrist bigot so I don’t have to read anything of yours to know what you think” argument; no evidence of the alleged misandry is ever given. There’s the old “you call yourself Man Boobz and that’s a silly name so I can pretend that nothing you say counts” excuse; actually, I call you guys the “man boobz,” but never mind. Then there’s the old “he’s fat” chestnut. (See the next-to-last pic here.)
My favorite excuse, though, is a little logical fallacy you might call “argumentum ad kittypicturem.” That is, the claim that I can’t be taken seriously because sometimes I post pictures of adorable kitties. I’m not sure why these pictures confuse and infuriate misogynists to the extent that they do, but I’m sort of happy this is the case, because every time I run across it, it gives me an excuse to POST MORE KITTY PICTURES.
This time the kitty picture hater is the lying liar Dalrock, whom we’ve met several times before—most recently when he complained about women taking jobs from men by “playing career woman much the way that Marie Antoinette played peasant and Zoolander’s character played coal miner.”
In a post with the ponderous yet somehow also very silly title “We need worthy adversaries,” Dalrock dismisses my blog as one of the unworthy ones, the only example of said unworthiness being this post I made featuring pictures of several adorable kittens.
Here is my rebuttal:
Yes, that’s a hedgehog. Let’s see how they deal with THAT!
Many of those in the manosphere wear their misogyny like a badge of honor. Others like to present themselves as fierce opponents of bigotry, and angrily deny the charges of misogyny thrown their way. When the Southern Poverty Law Center ran an article noting the misogyny often found on A Voice for Men, for example, site founder Paul Elam responded with great indignation in an open letter to the group:
Yesterday I received the unfortunate news that your organization … listed my website, avoiceformen.com, among others, as misogynistic, or “woman-hating. … Contrary to what readers of your site may be led to believe, the goals of SPLC and AVfM are quite similar: We both work to identify groups who seek to oppress others, and inform the public of the inequities they would perpetuate.
This seems a strange argument for the man whose handle on YouTube is “The Happy Misogynist,” and who regularly writes posts filled with hair-curling hatred of women. It seems even stranger when you consider AVFM’s support of a site that frankly peddles hate – against women, “manginas,” gay men, lesbian, and trans folk.
I’m talking about the misleadingly named Artistry Against Misandry site. AAM and AVFM seem almost joined at the hip. AAM’s founder, musician Jade Michael, wrote and performed the theme song currently used on AVFM’s internet “radio show.” AVFM has returned the favor, promoting the site and helping raise money for it. Indeed, several days ago Elam himself proudly announced that he’d sent along $100 of his own money to help Michael fund an upcoming event.
The site describes itself as follows:
Welcome to the first pro-male artist activist network. Within these pages you will find music, poetry, prose, graphics, cartoons and additional links, all of which are here to bring attention to and counter misandry in Western society.
In practice, this means saying the worst shit about women you can possibly imagine. Oh, the “artists” also say terrible things about men who don’t hate women with fervor — you may recall the ridiculous caricature of me as a self-flagellating, woman-worshipping “mangina” at the end of this post from a couple of days ago.
But the “artists” whose work is featured on the site focus most of their venom on women. Let’s take a look at several graphics from Reality, one of the site’s most prolific contributors.
Yep, that’s right: “western women” are “the new tapeworm parasites.” Here are a couple more.
There are (literally) forty more where those came from, and they’re pretty much all as nasty and hateful as the ones I’ve featured here. I suggest you visit AAM’s graphic art page and scroll through the rest of Reality’s wares.
If you don’t have the patience for that, and since the app they use on AAM to display Reality’s artwork is a piece of crap, I’m just going to highlight some more of his clever anti-misandry slogans here in text form:
Women actually expect you to act like a traditional male. While they live like psychotic whores. Keep dreaming, bitch!
Guys, do you really want to know what she’s thinking? 100% pure shit.
[Picture of women pointing at the camera.] We get everything and do nothing for it. Now get back to work slave.. we can put you in jail or bankrupt you with just a pointed finger.
Remember, when a woman tells you she’s tired it’s the only time she’s actually telling you the truth because…being a raging petty psychotic bitch…while being virtually retarded…while having endless banal thoughts she considers “genius…” while making insane and constant ultimatums…IS absolutely EXHAUSTING!!
Meanwhile, an artist calling himself “Andy Man” declares in a graphic of his own:
This is the sort of “artistry” that A Voice for Men is actively supporting.
And they wonder why some might consider them part of a hate movement?
Artistry Against Misandry also features music, videos, and even poetry, all of it awful, in every sense of the word. I will take a look at some of this in future posts.
EDIT: I added one more Reality graphic and a bunch of his slogans in text form.
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.
Quiz: Who said the following?
I think that one of the greatest mistakes that America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote. We should’ve never turned this over to women. … And these women are voting in the wrong people. They’re voting in people who are evil who agrees with them who’re gonna take us down this pathway of destruction.
And this probably was the reason that they didn’t allow women to vote when men were men. Because men in the good old days understood the nature of the woman. They were not afraid to deal with it. And they understood that, you let them take over, this is what would happen. …
Wherever women are taking over, evil reigns.
Was it:
Some dude on The Spearhead?
A regular guest on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News?
Well, yeah, you guessed it: it’s door number three. Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a Tea Party activist and founder of the group Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny (BOND), said all of the above, and quite a lot of other outrageously misogynistic things, in a talk this March, and which is available on YouTube. Yet Hannity, who serves on the board of Peterson’s group, had him back on his show earlier this month, for an appearance during which Peterson described “liberal Democrat women” as “whores.” Raw Story, which discovered Peterson’s unlisted video on YouTube, offers many more delightful misogyny nuggets from Peterson.
Here’s the video of Peterson’s talk. The stuff about women and voting starts at about 8:30 in. But I suggest you watch the whole thing from the start; it’s a virtual smorgasbord of misogyny, seasoned with a bunch of stuff he simply made up about Sandra Fluke’s famous congressional testimony on birth control.
It would be nice if this sort of stuff was confined to the fringes of the manosphere, but alas, it’s everywhere.
More proof that Reddit will believe pretty much any story, so long as it makes a woman – sorry, “female” – look bad. Even if there is some tiny kernel of truth in this story from AskReddit , there is zero chance that it went down exactly (or even vaguely) as described by Mr. Kickass. Redditors are terrible writers of fiction, especially when their fictions masquerade as fact.
Oh, and there are plenty more comments castigating this probably-imaginary woman.
