Yesterday, we looked at 6 memes from A Voice for Men’s “meme team” and decoded what they really meant. Today, some memes from AVFM’s Pinterest page that are a bit harder to decode, because they really make no sense at all. I’ll do my best to try to sort them out.
1) TALK TO THE HAND
What might it mean? “Ha ha girls talk too much, well joke’s on you because I’m GOING MY OWN WAY and later I’ll go home and make a poster about how I imagined I might I totally really did put that bitch in her place.”
I mean, that is what this poster is saying, right? It’s illustrating the notion that men and women should listen to one another by depicting a dude just up and leaving because he’s tired of listening?
How exactly does this advance any “men’s rights” other than the right of men to act like petulant children?
Hey ladies! Dean Esmay reaches out to the young women of America
Not that long ago, an 18-year-old student named Carly, appalled by the rampant misogyny on display at A Voice for Men, sent a critical but thoughtful email to a number of the men associated with the site challenging them to rise above their hatred of women.
AVFM “Managing Editor” Dean Esmay decided to take her email as an opportunity to reach out to all the Carlys out there in the world in an attempt to win them over to AVFM’s peculiar brand of “human rights activism,” penning what he called an
open letter … not just to you, but to any young woman who has an open mind and is willing to be challenged on her prejudices.
Naturally, given that Men’s Rights Activists are some of the most verbose douchebags in history, it was long as hell — some 3000 words. But Esmay’s diplomatically worded attempt at outreach didn’t go quite as well as he might have hoped. Carly responded with a note saying that his open letter had merely
reinforced everything I believe. It seems we are at a stalemate, you will never agree with me, and I will never agree with you.
So where might poor Dean Esmay might have gone wrong in his attempt to win Carly’s heart and mind?
Let’s start here, with 5 Arguments Least Likely To Convince A Young Woman That A Voice for Men Isn’t a Woman-Hating Piece of Shit Hate Site, in the form of direct quotes from The Esmay himself. Since Esmay is so long-winded, I’ve highlighted some of my favorite bits in bold.
1)“[Y]ou’re 18, and so, not to put too fine a point on it, you are still a young skull full of mush.”
2) “[M]en have few to no voices speaking about issues that are specific to men, or defending men as a group, in this society. Until very recently in history men never have had such a voice. Because pretty much all civilizations for the last few thousand years have prioritized the needs and desires of women over those of men. For hundreds, even thousands, of years.
3)“If you believe men have silenced women for thousands of years … you believe something that just not true. … Furthermore, if you believe that, what you have to believe is that Asian men have been oppressing Asian women for thousands of years, black men have been oppressing black women for thousands of years, European men, Australasian men, and so on, have all been oppressing their women for thousands of years. And those weak women could do nothing about it. So what you believe here isn’t just wrong, it’s racist.”
4) “For most of history, being female was a privilege. It carried certain special rights that only applied to women, and special responsibilities that only applied to women, and through most of history, being male was a burden, a burden which carried certain rights that only applied to men, and those rights were there mostly so they could discharge their duties to women properly.”
5)“[Y]ou may occasionally see angry remarks or articles on this site. What I would hope you would do with that, when you do see it, is contemplate that there is a difference between righteous anger at real injustice, and what you seem to have misinterpreted as hate.”
The funniest thing about Esmay’s “open letter” is that this bizarre crackpottery, easily seen through by anyone with any knowledge of history or sociology or, hell, the real world, is his attempt to sound as reasonable as possible. He’s reined in the wild conspiratorial ranting he often indulges in when arguing with ideological foes; he’s avoided the misogynistic slurs (cunt, bitch, whore) favored by other AVFMers like Paul Elam and Diana Davison. And this is the best he can manage.
The Men’s “Human Rights” Movement isn’t ready for its close-up. And I suspect that it never will be.
EDITED TO ADD: A commenter has pointed out another quote I should have included as well. So here is BONUS EXTRA LEAST CONVINCING DEAN ESMAY ARGUMENT NUMBER SIX:
6) “The truth is, the most privileged class of people in the whole wide world are young women living in places like the US, UK, Canada, etc.–and if you want to be treated like an equal, you should not flinch or cry like a little girl if someone tells you that.“
How dare you accuse us of sexism, you spoiled little girl!
So over on MGTOWforums — the festering hive of misogyny that is the internet’s largest forum for so-called Men Going Their Own Way — one of the regulars was so impressed with the Evo-Psychy insights of a YouTube commenter by the name of Moe that he decided to share them with the gang there. And I have decided to share them with you.
Brace yourself, though, because Moe is bringing some hardcore SCIENCE to the topics of feminism being awful and why women are such terrible selfish child-murdering monsters.
Sorry, gals! You’ll never be as blabby as Men Going Their Own Way
So the nice gentlemen over on MGTOWforums are trying to get to the bottom of what they see as a very important question: Why Can’t They Ever Shut Up?
Unfortunately, they’re not asking this question about their fellow Men Going Their Own Way and their tendency to blather on and on about the manifold evils of women. No, they’re talking about women and their alleged inability to shut up. And they have some, well, interesting theories to share.
Attention pretty high school girls! If a nerdy looking dude in your school shows up one day loaded with guns and Molotov cocktails and starts shooting up the place, it’s actually your fault, for not sleeping with him.
Men in dresses: How A Voice for Men chose to promote its post about trans women
Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men has not exactly shown much of an interest in trans* issues in the past. Indeed, the only time I can recall founder Paul Elam ever even mentioning trans* people was in the context of a vicious attack on a Men’s Studies expert who happens to be a trans woman; he suggested she was a mentally ill man-hater whose “so hated the sex they were born with that it sparked a life long academic quest to deconstruct it into something that did not disgust them.”
So it’s a little surprising to see a post on AVFM now with the seemingly dispassionate, slightly turgid, title “Male/female discrepancies in transsexualism.” The post starts out as dry as its title, but it soon becomes clear that it is “scientific” in style only. It’s not an attempt to understand trans women or trans people in general; it’s an attempt to use the existence of trans women as a helpful prop in an old Men’s Rights argument.
The diabolical Not Me strikes the Men’s Rights subreddit yet again
Some updates on the Occidental College situation.
First, for those who didn’t see my post yesterday, a quick recap: Yesterday, Men’s Rights Redditors discovered that Occidental College has an online form that allows victims of and witnesses to sexual violence to report the incidents anonymously.
Although the information is being collected to track trends, and no one will be charged with anything as a result of such a report, a number of Men’s Rights subreddit regulars decided it would be a great idea to flood Occidental College with false reports to basically break the system, and they suggested this to much acclaim; others proudly reported that they’d sent in bogus reports.
So what has happened since then? The story has been picked up by a number of sites, including Gawker, Business Insider, RawStory, and LAist. In a followup post, Adam Weinsten of Gawker confirmed that Occidental College had indeed been hit with some 400 bogus rape reports in the past 36 hours — that is, after posts encouraging false reports appeared on 4chan and the Men’s Rights subreddit.
Meanwhile, on the Men’s Rights subreddit, after belatedly realizing that this whole thing makes them look kind of bad, the subreddit’s mods are trying their best to make the whole embarrassing thing go away — and not really doing a great job of it.
One of the strangest things about doing this blog is all the things I ‘ve learned about myself in the process. I don’t mean all the insights into my inner being I’ve gained, though there’s been a bit of that. I mean all the completely untrue things I’ve learned from people who hate me.
For some reason, many of the people who most hate this blog– many of whom have never read it — aren’t satistfied with criticizing me for what I do and who I am; they find it necessary to make up many new and horrible and not-actually-true things to criticize me for: That I plant the things I quote on this blog to make Men’s Rightsers look bad, that I write all the comments myself (all the hundreds of thousands of them) to make Man Boobz look more popular.
Is THIS your quotation from Marilyn French? No? Um …
Is there something about Men’s Rights Activists that renders them utterly incapable of admitting a mistake? The other day, I performed a bit of rudimentary factchecking on a collection of allegedly “misandrist” quotes assembled by Jonathan Taylor of A Voice for Male Students.
Among other things. I pointed out that the drastically truncated version of a Marilyn French quote he posted completely misrepresented the actual meaning of what she had said, making it appear that she was charging the majority of men with killing, or beating, or raping women and/or molesting their own daughters:
![ILoveHate 18 points 21 hours ago (25|7) Why is it that I always see the hambeasts worried about rape and not the cute girls on the volleyball team? permalink save source report give gold save reply hide child comments [–]Bartab 21 points 17 hours ago (27|9) Because the cute ones turn guys down all the time and nothing happens. Fatties never turn them down, so they have this huge fantasy that if they did it would end in violence.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2guys2.png?ssl=1)
