It was, perhaps, inevitable, and now it has come to pass: obviously fed up with Men’s Rights Redditors questioning his wisdom (and his tactics, and his general narcissistic assholery) on a fairly regular basis, A Voice for Men Supreme Leader Paul Elam has started up his own Men’s Rights subreddit – r/mensrightsactivists –in which he can summarily ban all ”armchair activists” and “white knights” and “people who disagree with him.” Yep, that’s right: he’s made like a Trotskyist banana, and split.
Elam has long had a fairly strained relationship with Reddit MRAs. If you search through his comment history on Reddit, you can see evidence of numerous meltdowns on his part, which occur fairly regularly whenever anyone challenges him on pretty much anything, even when they are otherwise sympathetic to his views. On his own blog, he responds to such criticism by quickly banning the critics; on Reddit, he has tended to respond with schoolyard insults, digs at the masculinity of his critics, long recitations of his many fine accomplishments as a dedicated armchair activist, and the occasional rape joke.
Well,I got carried away there. It’s not literally the whole world. Only a teensy weensy portion of it.
The fellows at A Voice for Men, you see, evidently stung by criticism that they aren’t activists, have begun engaging in real, honest-to-goodness real-world activism, by which I mean that a handful of them, some in Canada and at least one in Australia, have been putting up posters advertising the AVFM website.
In other words, their activism consists of putting up posters for a website whose only activism thus far has consisted of putting up posters for itself.
Well, eventually they’ll get the hang of it, I guess.
It’s a proud day for the dudes over at A Voice for Men, which is celebrating the landing of the Curiousity rover on Mars by giving dudes everywhere serious dude credit for the event, which apparently involved no women at all. Well, maybe a few. But it certainly didn’t involve any of the women in the women’s studies department at Columbia University!
Actually it would be rather difficult for that to be the case. Impossible, really, as there is no women’s studies department at Columbia. Instead, Columbia has an Institute for Research on Women and Gender, an interdisciplinary center that works in cooperation with the Barnard College Women’s Studies department.
In any case, that once sentence is the entire text of the post, which linked to a live feed of the landing.
But to make sure everyone understands the MAN-significance of this MAN-vent, the AVFM dudes promoted it with this MAN-tastic blurb on the front page. (I mean the blurb on the right, of course, celebrating MEN and their UTTER MASTERYof technology. Just ignore that bit on the left about the technical glitches that AVFM has itself been having lately.)
The comments are more or less what we’ve come to expect from the AVFM crowd. I especially liked these two, from a manly fellow calling himself ActaNonVerba.
His followup is a bit Anthony Zarat-esque in its utopian grandeur:
In yet another discussion of Arthur Goldwag’s latest post on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog (looking at MRAs bad-mouthing the men who lost their lives protecting their girlfriends in the Aurora shootings), longtime Men’s Rights Redditor Liverotto offers this intriguing take on what he sees as Goldwag’s motivations for criticizing the Men’s Rights movement:
Yeah, a dude actually wrote that, and a couple of people actually upvoted it.
I’m trying to understand the logic: Goldwag is growing older and more homosexual (do men usually become gay as they age?). But gay men age badly, which makes them mad at their “suitors.” So therefore Goldwag has come to hate the (mostly straight) men of the Men’s Rights movement?
Another highlight of the discussion: The r/mensrights regular who thinks I’m Paul Elam. No, really.
In his latest post on A Voice for Men, Mr. Elam laments the evil way one Australian news site took AVFM’s rallying cry – “Fuck Their Shit Up” — and made it seem kind of mean. Also, they added an “ing” to “fuck.” Elam writes:
[Journalist Tory] Shepherd (or her editors) gave a subheading to her piece which read:
Hate site’s motto is ‘F***king their s**t up
Misuse of the transitive verb aside, and ignoring the fact that even when properly quoted it is not the sites motto (which is “Take the Red Pill”), the use of that phrase in the sub-header was calculated to make AVfM appear to be a hate site.
How unfair to tag a website with the slogan it uses constantly! And, really, how could anyone see “fuck their shit up” as anything but a spirited call for peacefulness, understanding, and love?
Sorry, guys. Berge may literally be the world’s worst MRA, and one that most MRAs have been content to ignore, but he’s still an MRA. He’s described himself as such many times (e.g., here); he has many of the same views and obsessions as “mainstream” MRAs; and he’s even got a few outspoken MRA fans. And while some Reddit Men’s Rightsers were distancing themselves from Berge in the wake of his arrest, others were respectfully discussing a blog post from Berge’s girlfriend Emma the Emo (who shares many of his views) taking aim at what she called “American pedophile hysteria.”
Over on the Spearhead, the more reactionary W.F. Price has a rather different spin on Berge, as encapsulated by the title of his blog post on the subject: “Eivind Berge Arrested for Provocative Rhetoric.”
Evidently, threatening to stab a police officer (and announcing the day on which you plan to do so) is merely a sort of rhetorical flourish.
It’s a strange and often incoherent post, in which Price seems to argue that Berge’s threats don’t count as real threats because … he made them publicly? Here, you make sense of it:
Eivind Berge has been posting some pretty provocative stuff for quite a while now, including his desire to kill police for enforcing misandric laws. I agree with his girlfriend that it was a bunch of hot air, but he got arrested for it anyway. Despite his support for Anders Breivik, who decimated the youth wing of the Marxist/Islamist Norwegian left in a solo Knights Templar crusade last year, I seriously doubt Eivind would have carried out any violent acts. Breivik, who really meant business, kept his plans to himself.
The truth is that people who manage to pull off spectacular terrorist attacks are almost always those who don’t say anything about them beforehand. Think Mohammed Atta vs. James Ujaama.
Yeah, it’s not like Osama bin Laden ever made threats about attacking the US. Or that abusers who threaten their exes ever actually harm them. Or any of a million other examples in which someone who issues a threat carries out said threat.
The lesson here is that if you want to be political, there’s a sort of tortoise/hare dynamic at work. The impetuous, fast hare tends to run out of steam (or run into trouble with the law) fairly quickly. The slow-and-steady tortoise, on the other hand, keeps trudging on and wins the race. …
[T]hreatening to kill people openly and loudly is essentially worthless.
Is Price really equating terrorists who plot their attacks secretly with the slow-and-steady tortoise who wins the race?
Who the hell knows. But he is clearly offering an apologia for making violent threats on the dubious grounds that those who threaten their enemies openly are somehow therefore not dangerous.
Later Price offers this completely clear cut and definitive repudiation of violence.*
We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that violent action will do us any good. Of course violence does work, but the power of the state is so overwhelming today that individual acts are almost certain to fail. Furthermore, those who are willing to unleash violence on others must be prepared to die themselves, and must lead by example. Somehow, I don’t think many of us have reached that point. It’s a long road to get there, and I hold out the hope that it will never go that far.
[T]he point is that anyone who condones violent action loudly and publicly, but doesn’t back it up, can’t be taken seriously.
In the comments, Eric complains that men who commit violence for putatively political reasons may suffer the indignity of being called bad names:
As we have all seen repeatedly, violence against men is socially and politically sanctioned violence. A man committing violence in defense of his rights is labelled a ‘terrorist’ or an ‘extremist’. The case of Thomas Ball is a perfect example. …
The feminist elites are bullies who are aware of their power and our inability to ‘push back’ in any way that will cause them deserved pain (at least for now). But like all bullies, they are also rabid egomaniacs and fear anyone who doesn’t bow slavishly to their power. The more men who are informed as to their true nature and who are taught to despise them, the weaker these bullies become because their fear of exposure and losing their power is a mania.
I guess Eric’s main beef is with the English language. I’m pretty sure that using violence to cause “deserved pain” in an attempt to intimidate your political enemies is basically the dictionary definition of “terrorism.”
Further down in the comments, Eric sets forth a curious little conspiracy theory involving, well, me. In one comment, he suggests that the attention I’ve given to the Berge arrest
illustrates that the anti-MRM forces are primed and ready for a ‘false flag’ or provocateur-instigated ‘incident’. … The feminist elites have noticably shifted from typical ridicule to painting the MRM as a dangerous extremist movement.”
I have the feeling that something ominous is in the wind.
This kind of language out of the Mangina League; the SPLC’s attention; the spate of troll and provocateur attacks and hacking on mens’ blogs; this crap going on in Scandanavia—there’s definately a pole-shift among our enemies and it stinks of orchestration.
So Mr. Paul Elam was apparently so offended by this video from Jay Smooth defending Anita Sarkeesian and her Tropes Vs Women video project against its many misogynistic detractors that he sat down and wrote out a carefully reasoned rebuttal of all of Mr. Smooth’s points.
Nah, I’m kidding. He wrote a snide couple of paragraphs calling Smooth a “leftist scumbucket,” and a “chickenshit feminist quisling,” and invited his readers to jump in with their own dopey insults. And they did. Some highlights (that is, lowlights):
I showed Paul’s comment to an MRA friend, and he said, “dude, you have to stop talking to me. I don’t exist! I’m no more real than Paul Elam’s ‘gay friend.'”
Andybob added this to the debate:
Yes, that’s right, he’s saying Smooth is being a “fag” in order to score with women. Clearly we have a brilliant mind at work here.
Several comments later, Iron John, a man apparently oblivious to irony, weighed in with this gem:
I’m pretty sure you don’t get to complain about “comment mining” for homophobia when 1) you’re the guy behind the site and 2) you’re one of the ones shouting “fag.”
Notice that Zorro’s original comment got an equal number of upvotes and downvotes. Then Elam jumped in to give the homophobia his seal of approval. After that, it was nothing but upvotes for those using or approving of the homophobic slur.
Calling a dude a “fag” on the internet: Men’s Rights Activism at its finest!
Don’t go to THIS doctor, though. He does not seem very dedicated to his work.
Is there anything in the world that Paul Elam can’t blame on feminism? Apparently not.
In his latest post on A Voice for Men, Elam reports on a number of health problems he’s been dealing with – or not dealing with – for years. You see, despite chronic troubles with his gall bladder and with his breathing – which led to many ER visits over many years – Elam refused to get his gall bladder removed, or to give up smoking. For a while, he confesses, he was alternating puffs of cigarettes with hits from his Albuterol inhaler. But after numerous health scares, he reports, he’s finally dealing with his underlying issues, getting his gall bladder removed and weaning himself off the cigarettes.
I’m not going to mock him for any of this. Lots of people – especially men – have trouble pushing themselves to get the medical help they need. I’m one of them: the last time I went to the dentist it was because one of my teeth had gotten so rotten that a chunk of it broke off. There are a lot of mostly not-very good reasons I procrastinate about getting proper treatment for my health reasons, from simple denial to lack of funds. (Though, as I have sadly learned, waiting to go to the dentist until your teeth start breaking apart in your mouth does not actually save you money in the long run.)
Lots of guys won’t go to doctors because, as guys, they’ve been raised to believe they should grin and bear whatever pain they face. That’s one of the reasons feminists tend to criticize traditional notions of masculinity.
But for Elam, the problem is … feminism:
We live in a misandric culture, and often times, when we are scared enough or motivated by some other powerful force, we find that the root of the hatred is in the mirror staring back at us and mocking.
We men are raised with a sense of shame for having any needs. We are told, in fact, that we already have everything, and largely don’t deserve even the most basic of our needs for dignity, respect and love. If you look around in medical literature long enough, you will even see them shaming us for not going to the doctor more. Feminists have even used our tendency to neglect ourselves as a good reason to go full steam ahead with the unabashedly pro-female Obamacare.
This last charge is based on an almost completely delusional misreading of Obama’s health care legislation by our dear friend Antony Zarat. Elam continues:
And you can watch many men nod their heads in agreement with this crap. Sure, some of it is just the typical effects of feminist ideology on the brains of obsequious men, but there is something else at play here.
What made men willing to stand on the decks of sinking ships where their betters were loaded onto lifeboats? What makes men OK with being singled out for selective service? When is the last time you heard an average man point out to a woman who is whining that her great grandmother could not vote, that even today, unless a man signs an agreement with the government to use his body as cannon fodder, that he still won’t be allowed to vote?
We often have to point out to morons that being anti-feminist is not the same thing as being anti-woman. I think we would do well to remember from time to time that misandry is often not something done to us, but something we do to ourselves.
It is a monster that can live in any one of us, and often does. I have been doing battle with my own for a while. 25 years of consideration, soul searching and bucking the system and I am just now figuring out to go see a doctor when I have a problem.
Elam, dude: Despite your overweening narcissism, I have no trouble believing that on some level you hate yourself. Narcissism is often driven by insecurity, and no one who responds to even mild criticism with the level of rage that you do could be anything other than deeply insecure. But what you feel isn’t “misandry,” and feminists aren’t to blame. All that rage isn’t healthy for you. You should really get it checked out. And I’m not even joking.
Here’s Sleater-Kinney with “Call the Doctor,” though really only the title of the song is appropriate to the situation here.
Over on A Voice for Men, noted human rights advocate Paul Elam has responded to criticism from a fellow antifeminist internet warrior in his typically logical, understated manner. Some highlights:
He’s whining, about jack shit, on behalf of a misandric cunt. …
Matt Forney just jerked off all over his bed sheets. And now it appears he is standing there like a virtual ‘tard, grinning about it and drooling.
At issue? Mr. Forney wrote a post some months back critical of the faux “offenders registry” called Register-Her, a pet project of A Voice for Men’s JohnTheOther in which female “bigots” – that is, feminists – are “registered” as “offenders” alongside female criminals. (Forney’s post originally appeared on the thankfully now-defunct blog In Mala Fide, but Elam only discovered it after Forney posted it on his own blog.)
In particular, Forney disagreed with Elam’s decision to “register” actress Katherine Heigl as a “bigot” after she made a Funny or Die PSA about spaying dogs and cats. The problem, for Elam and crew? That in the video she pretended to be a crazed testicle-hater obsessed with cutting off all balls, including those of human males. The AVFM crowd whipped themselves into a frenzy over this one, with Elam’s Number One Stooge JohnTheOther writing, in all seriousness:
Katherine Heigl’s supposedly humorous claim; that her advocacy of neutering pets is an outlet for her desire to chop human male’s balls off shouldn’t be taken out of context. The context being that she’s a creature of hollywood who lives in california – the same state which earlier this year saw Katherine Becker cut her husband’s penis off for the “offense” of wanting a divorce. …
We know it’s a joke. That’s the point. It’s both shocking, and plausibly deniable. It also wouldn’t be funny to most people if there was not an element of truth in it. Heigl’s “joke” included the word “yet”. This is an obvious nod to her awareness of increasing cultural acceptance of male-targeted violence and mutilation.
No, I have no fucking clue what on earth he means by that bit about the word “yet.” He goes on:
Male targeting violence persists and escalates because in the unconscious reptile corner of men’s minds, they think nodding along with whatever vile , violent, murderous shit the nearest vacuous barbie utters in her you-go-girl bubble of social enablement might get him approved for access to the magic vagina.
Like Elam, JohnTheOther apparently writes all his posts for AVFM with steam literally coming out of his ears.
Here’s the video in question. (Sorry, it won’t embed.) As you can see, the real butt of the joke is Heigl herself, and more generally narcissistic celebs who glom onto fashionable causes for all the wrong reasons. It’s not really a castration joke; it’s an actress making fun of her own reputation for narcissism. (And the video is also a serious attempt to raise awareness about the need to spay and neuter pets.)
Katherine Heigl, attempting to lull a dog into a false sense of security so she can remove its balls.
Forney, in the blog post that roused Elam’s incredibly easy-to-rouse fury, suggested that AVFM’s claimed outrage about Heigl’s video was both silly and a bit unconvincing:
Were you honestly offended? Did that video get you mad? It didn’t get me mad. I thought it was stupid and unfunny, but aside from that, I don’t care about it. After watching it, I just shrugged my shoulders and closed the tab.
Forney went on to suggest that any MRAs who were offended by the video were, well, basically a bunch of “phony pussies,” a virtual mirror-image of the Politically Correct:
In trying to gin up indignation over Heigl’s ball-cutting comments, Register-Her.com and the MRM are seeking to perpetuate our politically correct regime, not burn it to the ground and piss on its ashes. …
The men’s rights movement wants men to keep picking at their scabs, to wallow in self-pity for all eternity. That’s not a satisfying goal for me, or countless other men who want to rise out of the mud. Until MRAs address this issue, their movement will be stuck in neutral, regardless of their occasional victories.
Yes, that’s right. A dude posting on In Mala Fide — which was known for its blatant misogyny and its proud racism, among other terrible things — is the closest we’ve got to a “voice of reason” in this particular debate.
Elam, an MRA scab-picker extraordinaire, lashed out in barely coherent rage to Forney’s charges:
[T]his kind of chicken-shit nit picking by a supposed sympathizer is far more pathetic that the Heigl video could have ever hoped to be.
Why would the Heigl video hope to be pathetic? Also, how exactly can a video hope?
I write people like you off all the time. But then you have the gumption to parrot a bunch of keyboard courage about crushing your enemies? And you make fun of guys who get fucked over by the system? What a laugh. I don’t mean what you said, but you, personally.
You may be every bit as brave as your words. I doubt it, but I don’t know. What I do know is that your article is a misandric piece of shit. Based on your rhetoric, though, I would lay dollars to doughnuts you have never crushed so much as a Dixie Cup at a water cooler. Your kind of man never does.
You just shit on those out there taking the hits and doing the work, likely because you lack the conviction to stick your neck out for anything really important to anyone but yourself.
Personally, I would not talk to MRA’s about picking scabs until you quit being one.
I’m not sure if Elam is calling Forney a “scab” as a sort of random insult referring back to his mention of scabs, or if Elam thinks that Forney is a “scab” violating some imaginary MRA “sex strike” – or “cock blockade” – by not hating on the ladies every second of every day. I’m guessing it’s the latter, because Elam really is that delusional.
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EDITED TO ADD: Matt Forney has responded to Elam’s little tantrum here. At the end, he says this:
And since I can’t end this post without mentioning that David Futrelle has (reluctantly) defended me on this issue, mainly because Elam’s neckbeard fans are going to brandish Futrelle’s article as proof that I’m an evil crypto-feminist racist mangina, let me just say that Futrelle is an even more pathetic bitch than Elam, and I don’t want his support.
Don’t worry, lil dude. I don’t actually support you. I simply agree with you on a couple of points: that Elam is a total drama king, and that anyone who believes (or purports to believe) that Heigl’s video is something to get ENRAGED about is a twit.
Men’s Rights Activists regularly complain that it is mostly men who serve in the armed forces, and that it is mostly male soldiers who are killed and injured in service to their country in wartime. MRAs also complain that, in the United States, only men have to sign up for the draft – though this is more of a formality than anything else, as the draft has been dead for decades and there is virtually no chance of it being resurrected any time soon.
MRAs love to cite the dominance of men in the armed forces as a prime example of what they call “male disposability,” and somehow manage to blame feminists for it all.
But it’s not feminists who are trying to keep women from becoming soldiers, or serving in combat. While some MRAs support the idea of women serving in the army, and having to register for the draft the same as men do, many others scoff at the very notion of women as soldiers, mocking their alleged female “weakness” and in some cases denigrating the service of women now in the armed forces as being equivalent to attending “day care camp.” (Not exactly.) These MRAs may complain that men bear the brunt of the costs of war. But they don’t actually want women to serve.
Not that it makes much of a difference, because the MRAs who do supposedly want women to share the same responsibilities as men aren’t doing shit about it. You know who is? Feminists. The National Organization for Women, while opposing the draft, has long argued that if registration is required of men, it should also be required of women. NOW has also opposed the ban on female soliders serving in combat. (Not that it’s easy to draw a clear line between combat and non-combat positions on the contemporary battlefields.)
Do you want to know who is opposing them – aside from the Pentagon’s lawyers? Take a look at some of the comments posted in response to a Los Angeles Times article on the lawsuit. Note: The quotes below are pretty egregious; some deal with military rape in a really offensive way. (Thanks to Pecunium for pointing me to them.)
These aren’t “cherry-picked” from hundreds of comments; these are the bulk of the comments that were left on the article.
Are any of these commenters MRAs? Maybe, maybe not, but certainly their misogynistic “logic” is virtually identical to that I’ve seen from misogynist MRAs opposed to women serving in combat. One thing they are clearly not is feminist.
If MRAs, or at least some of them, truly want a world in which men and women share equally in the responsibilities of military service (and both have equal opportunties for military leadership), they need to challenge the misogynists — within their movement and without — who argue that women simply aren’t fit for the battlefield. And they need to support the feminists who are actually trying to make a difference — instead of standing on the sidelines crying foul.
I don’t hold out much hope that this will ever happen. MRAs are much too enamored with their fantasies of male martyrhood.
It was, perhaps, inevitable, and now it has come to pass: obviously fed up with Men’s Rights Redditors questioning his wisdom (and his tactics, and his general narcissistic assholery) on a fairly regular basis, A Voice for Men Supreme Leader Paul Elam has started up his own Men’s Rights subreddit – r/mensrightsactivists –in which he can summarily ban all ”armchair activists” and “white knights” and “people who disagree with him.” Yep, that’s right: he’s made like a Trotskyist banana, and split.
