We Hunted The Mammoth
Men’s Rights, er, activists are waving their arms frantically in the air over what they see as a dire new threat to men and manhood: Facebook’s recent annoucement that it was going to try to do a better job of taking down violent images mocking victims of rape and domestic violence, and other kinds of misogynistic hate speech.
So, that tempest in a teacup involving MRA London, A Voice for Men’s British satellite group, that I wrote about last night? Well, it’s gotten even sillier.
The tl;dr is that MRA London has split up, with accusations and counter-accusations flying. AVFM staffer Andy Thomas has appointed himself CEO of the group after apparently tossing out most of its members. (Or “accepting their resignations,” or something; who knows?) As far as I can tell, this means that the group may now be down to literally two people.
Now AVFM’s Maximum Leader Paul Elam has posted a very long statement on the subject, saying very little indeed. The gist of it? He really doesn’t know what happened in the “very British coup” or who was right, but he’s sticking with Thomas because he knows the dude better than the dudes who are no longer part of the group. No, really, that’s his explanation.
Not only that, but Elam admits flatly that doesn’t really even care who was right, at least not enough to bother to try to figure out the basic facts of the case:
I am not in the least interested in trying to ascertain who was more or less at fault in MRA London’s internal conflicts. It is not that I am indifferent to right and wrong in this case, but simply as a pragmatic matter I cannot and won’t try to wade through several weeks/months of infighting, insinuation and accusations between people in conflict 8,000 miles from here and even pretend that I can come up with an informed judgment.
Really? Because most political organizations, when faced with issues like this, like to at least pretend to gather the facts before making their decisions.
Elam also alludes vaguely to
other factors, having to do with the best interests of AVFM and the MHRM, that lend more support to our decision to maintain the historical relationship we have had with Andy Thomas of MRA London. I am not at liberty to discuss them, but they are compelling.
Oh, so there were some SUPER SEEEKRET reasons too! Having to do with the “best interests” of the world historical force that is the Men’s Human Rights Human Movement of Men (But Not Those Dudes We Just Threw Under The Bus for Super SEEEKRET Reasons).
Come to think of it, no one has actually explained straightforwardly the non-super seekret reasons either. Ah well.
Elam also makes clear that any dissent to this decision will be confined to the comments of this one thread.
ALL HAIL ELAM AND HIS INFALLIBLE WISDOM OF MAKING DECISIONS BASED ON NOT KNOWING SHIT ABOUT WHAT HE’S MAKING DECISIONS ABOUT.
PS In my haste to write this post I neglected to include my regular reminder that AVFM, while claiming to be a “human rights” group, continues to post a literal call to firebomb courthouses and police stations in its activism section.
You may recall that post a couple of days back in which I talked about Dean Esmay of A Voice for Men — the alleged “Men’s Human Rights” site that hosts an open call to firebomb courthouses and police stations in its “activism” section — suggesting that unnamed Man Boobz “minions” might stoop to impersonating female MRAs in an attempt to make the Men’s Rights movement look bad.
I was a little saddened to read recently that A Voice for Men — the self-proclaimed “Men’s Human Rights” site that has posted an open call to firebomb government buildings in its “activism” section — will no longer be writing about little old me.
I apologize for returning so quickly to the cesspool that is The Spearhood, but I felt the need to note how head Spearheader WF Price celebrated Mothers’ Day this year: with an attack on trans* women that probably deserves a TRIGGER WARNING for its nastiness and ignorance.
Responding to an Op-Ed in the New York Times by author Jennifer Finley Boylan reflecting on her experience as a mother who also happens to be a trans* woman, Price lashes out at what he describes as
So someone on YouTube decided to put together what was intended as a heartwarming and inspirational video — assembled mostly from Russian dash-cam videos — showing an assortment of ordinary fellows taking a few moments from their day to help out their fellow human beings, and even a few animals. We get to see little old ladies walked across the street, cars pushed or pulled from snowbanks, and so on.
But when Paul Elam of A Voice for Men — the alleged Men’s “Human Rights” site that posts an open call to firebomb courthouses and police stations in its “activism” section — watched the video, all he saw was what wasn’t there — that is, helpful women.
Warren Farrell, as a sort of “elder statesman” of the Men’s Rights movement, may have gained a sort of weird respectability simply by being around as long as he has, and because he’s published books with major publishers. But the myth of Farrell’s intellectual respectability shatters pretty quickly once one takes a good, honest, and unbiased look at what he has actually written, in The Myth of Male Power and elsewhere.
We’ve already taken a look at some of the strange and troubling things he wrote about rape in that book. Farrell is also fond of rape as a metaphor, and regularly compares things that men endure to rape, as a way of bolstering his overall thesis that it is men, not women, who are the “disposable sex,” and who truly suffer.
Our dear friends over at A Voice for Men, the thought-leaders of the Glorious New Men’s Human Rights of The 21st Century Human Rights Movement With Girl Writes What (GNMHROT21CHRMWGWW) have been trying to introduce a new word into the vernacular, as part of their broad-based campaign for the betterment of human rights. That word? Rapetard.
While the portmanteau word has been floating around for some time, with assorted definitions, it took on its modern, human-rightsy definition in mid-April in a little-seen YouTube video by a fellow calling himself “Dick Magnum,” who defined it thusly:
An individual who, for reasons related to intellectual, emotional or moral deficits, cannot distinguish between questioning [the idea of] “rape culture” and supporting rape.
It was picked up in an AVFM post titled “Beware the Rapetard Society” about a week after that. Soon other AFVM writers seemed to forget Mr. Magnum’s careful definition, adopting it as their go-to epithet for feminists they don’t like. Which is pretty much all of them.
In a post having nothing to do with rape or rape culture, Paul Elam talked about “dumbing things down so that even a rapetard could understand.” In the comments to that post, AVFM contributor Dan Perrins joked about “rapetarded quote mining expedition[s].” And in a post yesterday, AVFM’s “Andy Bob” attacked Australian comedian Catherine Deveny for an assortment of alleged offenses against decency — including using the term “retard” – in a post that referred to her as a “rapetard” four times, including once in the title.
You might think that combining the word “rape” with an ableist slur –“tard” – and applying it liberally to feminist women would be a step backwards in the campaign for human rights, but apparently that’s old-fashioned twentieth century thinking on my part.
UPDATE: Elam has retracted his original story. See the end of this post for more details.
Men’s Rights Activists often insist that false accusations of rape are literally as bad as rape itself, and that false accusers of rape should spend as much time in prison as actual rapists.
Presumably they feel the same way about false accusers of other crimes, from murder to check kiting.
So in the wake of Paul Elam’s reckless false accusations against recent Georgetown graduate Arianna Pattek, one would expect other MRAs to rise up en masse to demand that Elam turn himself in.
Elam, you may recall, accused Pattek of serious violations of civil rights laws, claiming that she, as an employee of Georgetown’s admissions office, showed clear bias against white men. Indeed, Elam didn’t even qualify his accusations with an “alleged,” as journalists routinely do when writing about those accused but not convicted of crimes. Here’s what he wrote about her:
Just a quick update on the case of Arianna Pattek, the recent Georgetown graduate targeted for harassment by A Voice for Men and others, including the white supremacists at Stormfront. As I pointed out in an earlier piece, the “detective work” that led A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam and the other Pattek-bashers to target her was incredibly inept and sloppy, and it’s clear beyond any possible doubt that she has nothing whatsoever to do with the misandrist blog they accused her of writing, which increasingly obviously seems to be an utter hoax.
