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.
The last we heard from Men’s-Rights-adjacent eccentric Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c), he was falsely accusing an Ohio University student of being a false rape accuser and posting her personal information on the internet.
Now he’s back in the news again with an exciting new social media venture. While Paul Elam takes on the world of publishing with his Possibly Still Unnamed Publishing House for Men Who Don’t Write Good (not its real name), Nolan(c) is taking on an even bigger target: Facebook.
Nolan(c), who for complicated crackpot reasons now goes by the name Joschua-Brandon: Boehm(c), has just launched ManBook, his version of Facebook, but for men only. While ManBook might look to the world like a glorified blog, Nolan(c) Boehm sees it as a viable alternative to the alleged misandrist tyranny and “censorship” of “fascist book.”
Well, unless you’re a woman. If you’re a woman and try to post on ManBook, Nolan(c) Boehm(c) explains, he has the right to kill you.
Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield, lovely human being that she is, has resumed her harassment of feminist writer Jessica Valenti. Several months back, you may recall, the integrity-deficient Bloomfield tried to smear Valenti by Tweeting a series of made-up quotes she attributed to the writer.
The fact that the quotes were patently ridiculous, and utterly unlike anything Valenti has ever written, didn’t stop Bloomfield’s army of knucklehead followers from swallowing her lies whole – or, once informed that the quotes were fake, of declaring that they sounded like something someone like her would say.
What a surreal life Anita Sarkeesian must lead, in which virtually everything she says and does becomes grist for the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine, Sarkeesian Division.
Take the latest blowup, which followed a few comments Sarkeesian made in the wake of Friday’s school shooting in Marysville, which may have been triggered by the shooter’s angry response to a romantic breakup. On Friday, Sarkeesian posted a few thoughts on the matter on Twitter:
Emma Watson, U.N. Women Global Goodwill Ambassador
UPDATE 2: See here for my updated take on the hoax.
UPDATE: It appears the Emma You Are Next site is indeed a hoax, put online not by a 4chan hacker but by a sleazy internet “marketing” company known for similar hoaxes in the past. That said, it was a hoax designed to take advantage of two disturbing trends — not only the widespread public demand for leaked celebrity nudes but also the antifeminist backlash culture of the internet. Emma Watson was already being denounced and derided by internet misogynists even before the Emma You Are Next Site went online. I have made some changes in my original post below; strikeouts indicate the original text. I have also rewritten the conclusion, and taken down the video version of this post.
You already know the basic facts, I imagine: This past weekend, actress Emma Watson gave an eloquent speech at the United Nations about the necessity of feminism, and how the fight for gender equality can benefit both women and men.
Then some asshole or assholes apparently associated with 4chan a sleazy internet “marketing” firm decided to punish her for her opinions exploit the widespread desire for stolen nudes of female celebrities and the antifeminist backlash that was already developing in the wake of Watson’s speech by threatening to release stolen nude pictures of her, setting up a page entitled Emma You Are Next featuring a photo of Watson alongside an ominous countdown clock, presumably highlighting just when she can look forward to her privacy being egregiously violated.
There’s been a lot of debate over whether or not this threat is a real one or a “hoax.” [It appears that it is a hoax.] Business Insider declares that
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
A couple of days ago, embattled indie game designer Zoe Quinn embarrassed some of her biggest critics by posting screenshots she’d collected from a 4channer IRC channel, showing an assortment of hateful and duplicitous #GamerGaters literally conspiring to wreck her reputation and create the illusion of a vast grassroots uprising against alleged corruption in the gaming business.
Her critics, put on the defensive, tried their best to dismiss her screenshots as “cherry picked,” and a few even accused her of writing the very messages she screenshotted and posted. Oh, there might be a few bad apples in the bunch, some were willing to concede, but they were in the minority.
And then they pulled out what they thought was their trump card: the full chat log from the IRC channel #burgersandfries from when the Zoe Quinn “scandal” first erupted in mid-August up until September 6th. All anyone had to do, they suggested, was to read the log, and they would soon see that Quinn was presenting a distorted picture based on out-of-context, “cherry-picked” quotes.
Of course, reading this particular log is a bit easier said than done: it’s 3756 pages, in 10-point type, of chaotic overlapping IRC conversations.
This is a classic case of what’s come to be known as “doc dumping,” which Wikipedia helpfully defines as
Bloomfield, for her part, is suggesting that it might have to do with some cakes she was baking. No, really:
So it seems that my account on Twitter has been suspended. I find that odd since most of my most recent tweets have been about baking a wedding cake. Not exactly controversial. I suspect some sort of automatic response was triggered when a lot of people simultaneously reported me for abuse but I have no idea.
Naturally, Bloomfield’s comrades at A Voice for Men have spun this as “Judgy Bitch was censored for a cake!”
Attention tiny ladies! Paul Elam wants you to know that if you attack him, he will totally punch you right back. And not in a satirical way, either. With his actual, non-satirical fists.
A Voice for Men’s maximum leader has long insisted that his notorious “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post was nothing more than misunderstood “satire.” That is, when he argued that men who are abused by women would be totally justified if they “beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall,” this was somehow a “Juvenalian” satire of some sort. There’s a famous quote from The Princess Bride that might be appropriate here.
Well, now Mr. Elam has announced to the world that every month is a potential “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” for him. Even if the “Violent Bitch” in question is less than half his size. In a post that he insists is super serious, he writes:
Mr. Vinczer followed up this perplexing tweet with a bunch more insinuating that I’m a “hack,” a “pathological liar,” a “criminal,” and so on — as well as some links to what he apparently sees as “dirt” about me. (More on the latter in a moment.)
Apparently Vinczer — the “Activia Director” for men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men and the son of the genius who designed that AVFM commemorative coin — was stung by my gentle criticism of his father’s coin-designing skills.
So he has decided to dox me, apparently going as far as hiring a private detective to look into my allegedly sordid life.
PI will confirm, every living and non living fact about you. Enjoy your soon to be elevated infamous public status.
So far his doxing of me is not going very well, in that the “dirt” he has dug up about me is either wildly inaccurate, not particularly “infamous”– or not information about me, specifically, at all.
Jessica Roy, a reporter for Time magazine covering A Voice for Men’s recent :”Men’s Issues” conference in Detroit, found herself the target of a vitriolic tirade from AVFM maximum leader Paul Elam before she even sat down to write her account of her time amongst the MRAs.
Elam, evidently incensed about a handful of sarcastic remarks that Roy tweeted during the conference, denounced her as, among other things, a “hack,” “a liar and bigot” and a practitioner of “journalistic scumtardery,” whatever that is. Commenters on A Voice for Men happily joined in the hate, denouncing her as an “airhead,” a “disgrace and a liar,” “lil’ miss hair-o’or-her-eyes,” and a “little asshole [who] will look like a right nazi in five-to-ten years time.” Amazingly, no one pulled out the c-word. Evidently AVFMers are still on their best behavior.
Roy’s “What I Learned as a Woman at a Men’s Rights Conference” appeared on Time.com on Wednesday. Far from the hack job Elam and pals were predicting, her piece turned out to be a long, thoughtful and nuanced account that, while skeptical of AVFM and its brand of hateful nonsense, displayed considerable sympathy for some of the troubled men she met at the conference, men who could benefit from a movement that truly tried to offer solutions for men in difficulty instead of encouraging them to scapegoat feminists and women.
Reflecting on her discussions with several conference attendees, Roy wrote,
