Last month, I reported that Indian Men’s Rights Activist and marital rape apologist Amartya Talukdar — a regular contributor to leading Men’s Rights site A Voice for Men — was a Holocaust denier.
When I asked AVFM’s then-managing editor Dean Esmay about these troubling Tweets from someone he had published on his site only a few days earlier, he responded … by calling me a “stalker madman” and threatening to call the police if I ever emailed him again. (It was, as far as I recall, the only time I’ve ever emailed him.)
Well, ok, I thought, the folks at AVFM seem to be congenitally unable to ever admit to being wrong, even when the evidence is right before their eyes. But I didn’t think AVFM would be dumb enough to post anything by Talukdar ever again.
Uh oh! Dean Esmay of A Voice for Men is outraged by the latest terrible calumny besmirching the good name of the Men’s Rights movement. That Big Lie? That Men’s Rights Activists are boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road.
As Esmay puts it, in his characteristically overheated prose, the very notion that there is such a boycott
is a completely fabricated story by a handful of elitists abusing their power in the media–and betraying their fellow journalists while doing it.
Using his powerful internet detective skills, Esmay has managed to track down “the source of the lie,” which, as he sees it, “appears to have originated from a discredited hate-blogger named David Futrelle … .”
I’ve left off the rest of his sentence, as it is straight-up libel. Well, so is the bit about me being a “discredited hate-blogger,” and the part about the “lie” originating with me. I will give him credit for managing to spell my name correctly.
I’ll cop to the fact that my post on a would-be boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road set off an avalanche of articles on the subject. The Mary Sue, I believe, was the first to pick up the story, and was quickly followed by a few others. And then other writers piggybacked off of them. For better or worse, that’s how it works in online journalism these days.
But if Esmay is looking for the source of the incorrect notion that self-described Men’s Rights activists were behind the “boycott,” well, he’s not going to find it in my post, which contained no mention of Men’s Right Activists at all.
Yep, I reported the 100% true fact that a Youtube bloviater named Aaron Clarey had written a post on Return of Kings urging men, in his words, to “not only REFUSE to see the movie, but spread the word to as many men as possible.” I described his readers on Return of Kings as misogynists, not MRAs, though clearly there is a massive overlap between those two groups.
The idea that this was specifically a Men’s Rights crusade was, to be sure, a bit of sloppiness on the part of the journalists writing about it, who are not quite as familiar as some of us are with all the different varieties of woman-hating shitheads there are in the “manosphere” — especially since their belief systems overlap considerably. As I noted in a previous post on this subject, writing about Esmay’s accusations against a writer for the Huffington Post,
You can almost forgive journalists for getting a bit mixed up.
Meanwhile, it’s clear that some MRAs, including some associated with AVFM, have views on the movie that bear a striking similarity to those of Mr. Clarey and his comrades at ROK. It was an AVFM staffer, not Aaron Clarey, who posted this meme on AVFM’s Facebook page. (It’s since been removed, possibly because it contradicts the narrative that Esmay is now promoting.)
From AVFM’s Facebook page
And if you want many other example of MRAs saying they won’t go to see the film because feminism, you’ll find more than a few in this thread on the Men’s Rights subreddit. Oh, and in this thread (archived here) on … the official AVFM Forum.
Yes, that’s right: there are MRAs talking about boycotting Mad Max: Fury Road on AVFM’s own official forum. One declares himself “a (former) Mad Max fan,” another writes “going to skip this one. Mad Max is now dead to me.” “I’m out,” adds a third.
But Esmay seems to think that there is some vast conspiracy afoot, writing that
we are really serious with this question: was anyone paid to put this fake story in the press? If so, who was paid and who did the paying?
Don’t be silly. No money changes hands. At least no human money. We do it under direct orders from our feline overlordsladies.
Apparently, to Dean Esmay at least, posting that Mad Max: Fury Road is being boycotted by MRAs, when most of the boycotters are in fact merely MRA-adjacent, is a greater crime against truth than denying the Holocaust.
On Reddit’s Ask The Red Pill subeddit, a fellow called ThreeEyez comes to the group with a romantic conundrum:
I’ve known some guys to say that they just chill with a girl and just ask her for some head so they don’t have to kiss her. Usually I figured you have to escalate with a chick like make out with her, get her horny, etc. In my case, thats what I usually have to do. Has anybody else had success in just asking?
While one rude fellow tries to derail the conversation with some totally irrelevant comments (“You don’t enjoy kissing? Perhaps you suck at kissing”) others rally and give young ThreeEyez some highly useful advice.
The good folks at A Voice for Men, the most influential Men’s Rights site out there, like to talk a lot about how much they hate hatred. Specifically, the alleged hatred allegedly promoted by feminists. Here’s Dean Esmay, the site’s Managing Editor and Chief Operations Officer, offering some typically nuanced thoughts on the subject earlier today on Twitter.
So how have the powers that be at AVFM responded to the revelation that one of their contributors, Indian MRA Amartya Talukdar, is a Holocaust denier and Hitler fan who thinks Hillary Clinton is a “Jewess?” Did they denounce Talukdar for his embrace of perhaps the most hateful hater in history, and take down his posts on their site? Not so much.
Racist, woman-hating fantasy author Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) is upset that people are calling him racist. I mean, it’s not like he called all black people “savages,” he objects; he merely called one black woman — speculative fiction author NK Jemisin — a “half-savage” in a portion of a blog post that, he complains, has been taken out of context. Indeed, he sniffs,
the fact that the same ungrammatical excerpt chopped out of the middle of a sentence keeps being trotted out again and again should alert the dialectical mind to the probability that there simply isn’t very much, if any, there there.
Ah, context! A lot of shitheads who say terrible things complain, when others point out these terrible things, that their words have been taken out of context. So I thought I’d do Vox a little favor here and provide the context to his infamous quote so we can all see how much there is there.
You may recall a fellow name Albert Calabrese from Jeff Sharlet’s brilliant GQ article about A Voice for Men’s conference last summer. You may not remember the name, but you may recall one important fact about him: He thinks the age of consent should be lowered to twelve years. “I would rather err on the side of 12-year-olds having sex,” he told Sharlet, “than on the side of ruining men’s lives.”
Calabrese, a former substitute teacher, has made his own “errors,” having won himself a spot on the sex offender registry in Fayetteville, Arkansas for “Unlawful Sexual Conduct With A Minor.”
Today’s post requires an extra-large Don Draper “what” gif
The other day, you may recall, I wrote about a little slut-shaming campaign that a number of A Voice for Men staffers, including top banana Paul Elam, were waging against a former AVFMer who’s turned into a critic of the site. Her crime? She had put some topless photos of herself online — or, to be more precise, had sent them to someone who’d passed them along to others.
The horror.
Now Elam and his AVFM buddies have launched a campaign to frame feminists for allegedly getting topless photos of the pseudonymous AVFM “social media director” Janet Bloomfield taken down on Facebook.
I‘ve said it before, but the imaginary feminists that Men’s Rights Activists spend their lives fighting bear about as much resemblance to real feminists as the imaginary Elders of Zion do to actual Jewish people.
But even by typical MRA standards, the meme above (from A Voice for Men’s Facebook page) is a doozy. It’s hard to say which of these imaginary feminists demands is the most ridiculous. That idea that feminists demand “the entitlement to rape men and young boys” or “the right to take money from men under any pretense?” Or that they want “20 men in prison for each woman who commits a crime?”
As ludicrous as these are, I think the most insidious of the bunch is the complaint that feminists want women to have “the right to intoxication with no consequences.”
No, feminists aren’t campaigning for women to be able to drive drunk with no legal repercussions. The “consequences” being referred to here are, of course, rape and other forms of sexual assault. Yep, AVFM is angry that feminists don’t think that women should face the “consequence” of rape if they go out to a bar on Saturday night. AVFM is angry that feminists want the actual rapists to face the consequences of their actions.
The March of the Straw Feminists continues with more AVFM memes from their Facebook page, below.
If you’ve read Jeff Sharlet’s magnificent GQ account of his lost weekend amongst the “Men’s Human Rights Activists” at A Voice for Men’s conference last summer (or my take on it here), you know that some of the creepiest moments his account involved his friend Blair, a twentysomething writer who came along for the ride and ended up, by her account, being groped and propositioned by AVFM’s “director of collegiate activism” Sage Gerard.
