In the fast-paced, perpetually busy world of today, we don’t all have time to read every post on A Voice for Men. So here is an edited version of Paul Elam’s latest post, on Rebecca Watson of Skepchick. And whores. And how he personally doesn’t spend all his time claiming to be a victim, even though he totally is one, in case you forgot since the last time he reminded you of that.
Here’s Paul:
Whores … typical whore … Main Street walking, garden variety anybody’s whore … honest whore. … corporate whore … corporate whores … whorish sexual symmetry … stupid whore … stupid whore … whore … lying whore … whore … lying whore … whore … lying whore … corporate whore … a lying whore can also be a corporate whore … whoring for the cause … whore … PZ Myers … stupid, lying whore … not just a lying whore who also happens to be a stupid whore … a different subspecies of whore altogether … stupid, lying whore … whore that rigorously abandons intellect, rationale, evidence, decency and compassion, and also fosters much deserved hostility toward themselves … stupid, lying whore … stupid, lying whore … .
So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit – you know, the old one, not its newfangled would-be replacement – the fellas are complaining about how oppressive it is for a university to put up signs suggesting that consent is good and rape is bad.
Clearly, these signs are an insult to non-rapist men, in the same way that “don’t feed the animals” signs in zoos are an insult to those of us who aren’t planning to feed the animals.
Happily, the dude calling himself anti-everyone has come up with a way to fight back against this feminazi tyranny:
Is the Poster Revolution moving to its next stage?
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 pretty good show. Most of the discussion involves social media researcher and Fordham professor Alice Marwick and Helen Lewis of the New Statesman. Those of us in the Google+ Hangout pop in briefly with comments and questions.
FWIW, I appear only briefly in the show proper, but I have a somewhat longer (and a bit more coherent) comment in the ten minute “online only” portion that immediately follows the show (and which is also on this video).
It was a somewhat strange, if educational, experience, my first appearance on TV. (The next time I get webcammed into a show, I won’t reflexively look down at the laptop while talking.) It all went by really, really quickly. Weirdly frantic behind the scenes as the producer tried to slot us all in.
The comments on the video on YouTube nicely illustrate the problem we were discussing; that is, they are a rancid pile of misogynistic shitlordery.
My favorite comment is this one from Urhoboman5 about Rebecca Watson:
At 5;30 that chick has a youtube channel. Just type in rebecca feminist and you’ll find it. Interesting how most of her videos are voted down. Sometimes as much as 80% negative because the stuff she says is pure nonsense.
That’s right. He actually thinks that the fact that her videos are targeted by downvote squads proves that she’s wrong to talk about harassment. She’s harassed by dudes who don’t like her talking about harassment so therefore it’s “nonsense” for her to talk about harassment. Brilliant.
Just a little FYI. It’s probably not a good idea to take dating advice from a dude who writes shit like this:
Your fuck funnel is the series of steps you take from the approach all the way to sex. Most girls will drop out as they go through your funnel by losing interest, declaring they have a boyfriend, flaking out, throwing up, or a multitude of other reasons that prevent sex. This means that for ever one girl you fuck, you have to approach a lot of girls. This is the basic law of averages, where no man fucks every girl he interacts with (even serial rapists have a failure rate).
I could probably have raw dog sex with 95% of all white girls, regardless of socioeconomic background. I only have met one girl that was super serious about using condoms, but I eventually fucked her without a condom too, so actually I change that to 100%. I could bang every white girl who lives in the United States without a condom if I desired, within three dates. I’m not kidding. I could do most of them raw dog on the same night. Here’s how to do it. ….
At this point our intrepid dating guru explains his clever Assange-esque (allegedly) method for convincing women to have sex with him sans condom, which involves repeatedly sticking his condomless penis into his dates until they stop resisting.
Note: He followed this post with another one about how terrified he was that he might have contracted HIV.
Oh, Roosh, is it entirely by coincidence that your name rhymes with “douche?”
You always wonder what guys like this are thinking. With the dog lover at the end, it’s clear he was trying to rattle a woman who hadn’t replied to two earlier messages of increasing creepiness. With the others, I suppose they think there’s always a tiny chance that some woman out there is as desperate and horny and undiscerning as they are.
What’s stranger are those who lead not with sexual come ons but with blatant misogyny. Do men really think that women melt at the thought of dating a man who hates half the human race? Or are they just looking for yet another chance to mansplain their Men’s Rights bullshit to the world?
Here are a couple of examples of this strange and unsuccessful approach to winning over women which I found on the delightful and disturbing blog The Ladies of OkCupid, which documents the quests of three women searching for love online.
Sometimes the misogyny sneaks up on you, as in this OkCupid profile from a “laid-back” slut-shamer (who was clearly not an English major):
This fellow, by contrast, launches into the misogyny right from the start, suggesting that the woman he’s writing is exceptional, simply because she’s not stupid and illogical like the rest of her gender:
This “edgy” fellow tries to break the ice with some lovely rape jokes:
But the strangest one I’ve seen so far comes from this dude, who uses his OKCupid profile as an opportunity to mansplain why feminism is eeeeeevil:
Oh, and that list keeps going; it’s one hundred items long.
As Jasmine from The Ladies of OKCupid writes,
Delusional and repulsive takes on a whole new level with this one, because I really don’t think he’s kidding. He has every social media outlet known to man with all the same crap, and his profile is HUGE. So either he’s attempting to become the ultimate Canadian troll, or he really thinks there’s a woman out there who exists like this AND would be interested in him, of all people. Really? He offers little more than a receding hairline and an outrageous sense of entitlement in return.
To paraphrase Animal House, delusional and repulsive is no way to go through life.
Happily for The Ladies of OKCupid, and the rest of those ladies seeking love online, not all the messages are like this. For example, take this message about a basic but delicious foodstuff:
Also, the woman who got the message above about that thinking-outside-the-box use for her glasses? She stayed on OkCupid, and is now in a happy relationship with a dude she met there who is not a shitlord.
This lovely poster, meant as a sarcastic response to this “10 Top Tips to End Rape” poster, has gotten 759 upvotes in the Men’s Rights subreddit. Well, 759 net upvotes. It’s actually gotten more than 1200 upvotes, and 450 downvotes. Because, clearly, trying to stop the small percentage of rape accusations that are false is totally so much more important than trying to stop rape itself. Mocking rape prevention programs and promoting a culture in which women (and men, and genderqueer people) are afraid to come forward with real stories of rape for fear of being harassed and ridiculed is really the only decent thing to do. Plus: Lulz!
Always hilarious: painfully unfunny dudes explaining how women just aren’t funny. Over on Chateau Heartiste, the Heartiste formerly known as Roissy drops some (pseudo) SCIENCE on us all:
[C] hicks dig male status, dominance and personality as much as, or more than, they dig male looks. Men, on the other hand, dig beauty first and foremost, and a woman’s comedic timing, however it might make a man laugh, won’t stir his schnitzel if she’s a dog.
Since women don’t see a benefit from humor in the competition to attract men, their sex, on average when compared to men, has not evolved a strong cortical humor module. Women are better equipped to appreciate humor than they are to produce humor.
Apparently, if you use the same words that scientists use – like “cortical” and “module” – that makes it true!
But there is more to this Old Misogynist’s Tale. As Heartiste explains, it’s cruel humor that women appreciate most of all — in their lady regions. In other words, chicks like dicks:
[W]omen become sexually aroused by men who expertly wield the soulkilling shiv of sadism. …
Cruelty that is delivered with supreme confidence, bemused detachment, and eviscerating precision is catnip to women’s kitties.
Get it? Kitties = pussies = VAGINAS.
Ba-dump-tssh! Heartiste is on a roll.
So let’s see some examples of the sort of masterfully eviscerating humor that makes the ladies weak in their knees and gets their “kitties” excited. (Note: By kitties I am, like Heartiste, referring to vaginas. Exciting a woman’s actual kitties is better done with shiny objects and mouse-shaped toys.)
Anyway, here are some of Heartiste’s examples of cruel humor at its most exquisite, which he has helpfully rendered in dialogue form:
Me: Sweetcheeks, look. That bum just winked at you. He wants to take you back to his cardboard box. [waving at bum] Hi, bum!
Her: [struggling to conceal a grin] Shh, stop that. Stop waving. You’re horrible.
Truly, bum-mockery at its finest.
But he’s only getting started:
Me: You want to take a bus? Forget it. [nodding in direction of obese woman] She ate it.
Her: [looking heavenward] Oh my god, I can’t believe you just said that.
Aw yeah. Suggesting that a fat person has just eaten something comically large: comedy gold!
After some further jests on the topics of male boobs (hmm), the size of black men’s cocks, and raping the disabled (yes, really), our hero is in like Flynn, well on his way to all-caps “TRIUMPHAL SEX.”
The way it will usually go down is like this: You revel in your cruelty. She reacts with manufactured disapproval, often stifling laughter. Her vagina moistens. A wave of hidden shame releases a continuous flow of blood to her vaginal walls, maintaining her in a semi-aroused state all day long. Later that night, the floodgates open and you slip in like a lubed eel.
Yipes. That is about as erotic as Gilbert Gottfried reading from 50 Shades of Grey.
I’m pretty sure the only reason Heartiste can maintain his belief that women can’t do cruel humor themselves is that he’s never heard what they say about him once he leaves the room.
There is good news, and bad news, and completely predictable news in the fight against prison rape. The good news: the Justice Department last week announced a major new initiative designed to fight against prison rape. The bad news: it’s being opposed by right-wing ideologues. As Think Progress explains:
This week, the Department of Justice published new standards addressing the epidemic of rape and sexual abuse in our nation’s prisons. The guidelines, which apply immediately to federal prisons and give financial incentives for states to comply, are a laudable, widely praised, and long overdue step in combating rape in the United States.
The American Action Forum, a Wall Street-funded group whose C(4) runs millions of dollars in attack ads against Democrats, responded by lambasting the move as too “costly” and “complicated.” …
The Weekly Standard echoed AAF’s response, bemoaning the cost of preventing people from being raped in prison. The total expected cost is less than 1 percent of the overall cost of our prison system and ultimately “end up saving money — for example, by avoiding the medical costs of injuries suffered by rape victims,” according to the New York Times.
The completely predictable news? Men’s Rights Activists are completely oblivious to all this.
If the Men’s Rights movement were truly concerned with helping men, rather than playing “oppression Olympics” and complaining about feminists and women in general, they would be all over this issue. But I have seen nothing about this on any site in the manosphere, aside from one post on the Men’s Rights subreddit that drew all of six (mostly ignorant) comments. (Looking through one large thread on the subject of prison rape that was recently on r/mensrights’ front page, I found zero references to the Justice Department’s new initiative.)
What accounts for this obliviousness? It could be because MRAs tend to regard the Obama administration as a tool of our (imaginary) feminazi overlordsladies. Or because they would have to acknowledge that women are also raped in prison. But I think the real reason is that MRAs are so disconnected from real activists working in the real world to combat prison rape that they are completely unaware of any of this.
