A chart posted by Elliot Rodger, giving his chilling spin on a manosphere meme depicting supposed female “hypergamy”
When a white supremacist murders blacks or Jews, no one doubts that his murders are driven by his hateful, bigoted ideology. When homophobes attack a gay youth, we rightly label this a hate crime.
But when a man filled to overflowing with hatred of women acts upon this hatred and launches a killing spree targeting women, many people find it hard to accept that his violence has anything to do with his misogyny. They’re quick to blame it on practically anything else they can think of – guns, video games, mental illness – though none of these things in themselves would explain why a killer would target women.
In the case of Elliot Rodger, who set out on Friday night aiming, as he put it in a chilling video, to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut” in a popular sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, some Men’s Rights activists and other manospherians are doing their best to convince the world that misogyny had nothing to do with it.
Men being oppressed by domestic violence treatment
A Voice for Men founder Paul Elam is so full of it on virtually every subject he opines about – from domestic violence to women’s spendinghabits – that much of what he writes might be best classified as fiction. He would no doubt disagree, but then again he’s not big on self-awareness.
But in addition to writing much inadvertent or unadmitted fiction, Elam has also tried his hand at fiction of the more traditional sort. I ran across one of his short stories the other day, and I’d like to share it with you, because it is quite possibly the most revealing piece I’ve writing I’ve ever seen from him.
As fiction, it is, of course, terrible, written in a clunky, melodramatic style one can only describe, with a shudder, as highly Paul Elam-esque. Elam doesn’t exactly have the skills or the subtlety to create an even vaguely believable fictional world. The story is essentially a polemic in story form – an extended argument justifying domestic violence against women.
On April 2, Army Specialist Ivan Lopez shot and killed three people on the Fort Hood military base in Texas, before turning his gun on himself; 16 others were injured. It’s not clear what caused Lopez’ killing spree, though the incident seems to have been triggered by the difficulties he encountered trying to get a 24-hour pass to attend his mother’s funeral.
But a writer for A Voice for Men, Michael Conzachi, has a novel explanation for the tragedy: the military’s excessive niceness towards lesbians and gays.
In a post entitled “What role has feminism played in the shooting at Fort Hood and its aftermath?” Conzachi sets forth his thesis:
Numerous directives from the Pentagon and the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS), of which some in the military refer to the group as the “Super-Feminists” or jokingly, the “Lesbo Circle of Doom,” allow for and promote an immediate leave period of five days for same sex military couples to marry. …
How is it that a large contingent of feminist dominated military and Pentagon leadership enacts policies that favor, prioritize, and give expanded benefits for same sex couples; yet Specialist Lopez apparently was only allowed two days to bury his mother?
If that was you, and you could only get two days to attend to your mother’s death, and you see same sex military couples being allowed five days immediate leave to marry; wouldn’t that bother you a little, regardless of what your opinions are of gay and same sex couples? Where is the equality?
Yep. An unhinged man murders his fellow soldiers in cold blood. Let’s blame it on same-sex marriage and the “Lesbo Circle of Doom.”
At least Conzachi admits that his theory is only a theory, and that “whether or not we will ever learn [the shooter’s] true motives is unknown.”
Coznachi spends the rest of his post tearing down the female officer who confronted Lopez and brought an end to his killing spree.
He ends with this question — a question that he seems to have already answered to his own satisfaction:
Are the military’s priorities of same sex couple, gay, and women in combat issues harmful to males in general?
A number of those who are associated with A Voice for Men — most notably “managing editor ” Dean Esmay and “contributing editor” Karen Straughan — profess to be great Friends of the Gays; indeed Straughan describes herself as a “genderqueer, bisexual … woman”).
I can only wonder why they would want to associate themselves with a site that publishes articles suggesting that supporting the rights of same sex couples in the military to marry is “harmful to males in general.”
Men’s Rights Activists tend to be fairly blunt; when they express a noxious opinion – and oh so many of their opinions are noxious – they do it in the most obnoxious possible way. It isn’t enough for Paul Elam of A Voice for Men to blame victims of rape; he also has to call them “STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH[es]” wearing the equivalent of PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign[s] glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.”
Warren Farrell is different. He takes a softer approach. He would never call a woman a bitch or a whore or a cunt. When he speaks, he manages to sound gentle and caring. He talks about the importance of listening to others. He sometimes even manages to give the impression that he cares as much about women as he does about men.
And yet his ideas are as noxious as Elam’s. He is as much of a victim blamer as any slur-spouting MGTOWer complaining about “stuck-up cunts” on an internet message board.
It’s just that he does his victim blaming with such carefully evasive language that he’s able to hide the noxiousness of his ideas – and to avoid taking responsibility for them when he’s challenged on them.
If you’re a feminist holding an event, and you don’t want to have recordings of that event posted online without your permission by MRAs, it looks like your only option is to ban anyone and everyone associated with A Voice for Men from the premises. AVFM “activism director” Attila Vinczer has made that very clear.
Earlier this month, you see, Jaclyn Friedman – feminist writer, speaker, founder of Women, Action & The Media (WAM!) – gave a talk at Queens University in Kingston, Canada, followed by a panel discussion.
A number of Men’s Rights Activists associated with everyone’s favorite hate site A Voice for Men showed up with cameras and other recording devices, as they do.
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?
A Voice for Men seems to have gone a bit meme-crazy. The site’s official Pinterest page, which seems to be fairly new, is loaded up with 374 memes on such subjects as Sexual Politics, False Accusations, MGTOW, and of course Feminism.
It’s not clear how many of these memes were created by the AVFM “Meme Team” and how many were simply grabbed from the internet. But a number of the memes are emblazoned with the A Voice for Men name and/or logo, so I think it’s fair to say that these, at least, are “official” AVFM memes.
Going through these memes, one thing about them becomes clear very quickly: most of them seem to convey messages that are often considerably different than those their creators seem to have intended.
So here, without further ado, here are 6 AVFM memes and what they really mean.
Is there no end to the ways in which women oppress the men of the world? Over on A Voice for Men, Clint Carpentier reports – and I use that term loosely – on a heretofore overlooked form of anti-male oppression: the abuse of fathers in delivery rooms by women who are at that moment literally in the stirrups giving birth.
Yep, we’re talking about women who use 12 hours of labor as a convenient excuse to yell at, and sometimes scratch and bite, their husbands and boyfriends. Apparently, there’s an epidemic of women in labor cruelly attacking men from the comfort and safety of the delivery table.
Carpentier starts off his post by making clear that giving birth isn’t really the big freaking deal all the ladies think it is, anyway:
No long post today. Instead, I urge you to go over to the AgainstMensRights subreddit to read about how several long time Men’s Rights Redditors have doxxed and harassed a college student, with one of the regulars gleefully setting forth a plan to stalk her and ruin her life and another seeming to suggest he might want to pay her a visit to “debate” her.
Some screenshots from the original Men’s Rights subreddit discussion:
The thread (which remained up for many hours) has now been scrubbed by the Men’s Rights mods — I got these screenshots from u/Aceyjuan and u/TraceyMorganFreeman’s respective timelines — but as of right now none of the doxxers have been banned from the subreddit, or from Reddit itself.
The “crimes” of the woman in question? According to her main stalker — who has apparently been harassing her for months — she’s tweeted comments like “white men are like the gum on the bottom of my shoe” and “Jared Leto looks like the kind if guy that gives you herpes.”
Yep. Apparently the second-worst evil misandrist comment she made was … a joke about Jared Leto. For these comments, apparently she deserves to have her life ruined.
Here’s the thing: If you don’t like someone’s comments online, you are certainly well within your rights to quote them and point out why you don’t like what they said. That’s kind of the point of this blog. But it’s one thing to point out these comments, and another thing entirely to track down their identity and stalk them in real life. It’s another thing to whip up a virtual mob against them.
Doxxing by Men’s Rights Activists isn’t an accident; it’s the inevitable result of the peculiar style of Men’s Rights Activism.
MRAs, you see, seem utterly incapable of engaging in any kind of activism that might actually benefit men in the real world in any concrete manner. What they as a group specialize in is demonizing women, and in the case of too many MRAS, nothing gets their activist juices flowing faster than the opportunity to attack an individual woman.
That’s why A Voice for Men “activists” put up “wanted” style posters featuring their favorite feminist villains of the day; it’s why they started Register-Her.com. That’s why a certain red-haired Canadian activist who yelled at some MRAs once at a protest now finds her image splashed everywhere online as a visual representation of an evil feminist. That’s why MRAs show up at protests with cameras and threaten to expose the women they film — even if they’ve done nothing more than stand there with a sign.
And that’s why they doxx.
The Men’s Rights movement isn’t a civil rights movement. As it stands right now, it’s a union of abusers, and their enablers.
EDITED TO ADD: Lest anyone claim that the OP didn’t “really” dox the woman in question because he didn’t literally post all her personal details, he provided enough to allow anyone with even rudimentary Google skills to find out her real name and a great deal of other personal identifying information in less time than it would take to order a pizza online.
Yesterday, several days after the twentieth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, A Voice for Men took a moment to honor the brilliant musician who tragically ended his life at the age of only 27.
Well, not exactly. What they actually did was run a terrible poem using the anniversary of Cobain’s death as an excuse to launch an extended attack on the supposed evils of feminism.
Here’s the opening:
Feminists killed Kurt Cobain Men my age are all the same They hate themselves & feel ashamed For what they are & cannot change
It gets worse. The poem, written by a YouTube MRA calling himself Laudanum Byron, continues on for another 104 lines after this. Only 13 refer to Cobain, and five of these are simply repetitions of the opening accusation: “feminists killed Kurt Cobain.”
The rest of the poem consists of an assortment of Men’s Rights talking points sketched out in the most melodramatic manner possible.
Men chastised, demonized, Healthy males pathologized A man is just a dirty ape Longing, lust, desire: all rape Your body is a loaded gun And all that it has done is wrong
Like all too many MRAs, Mr. Byron lets his anger at women get the better of his logic. In the following lines, for example, he lashes out at women both for living off of the earnings of men — and for earning money of their own.
Now the girls get told get what you can After all, he’s just a man You’re right to think it’s right to take Yes you go girl, you make him pay The girls get taught they must get on Like work empowered anyone: To sell your life for dollar bills Taking calls & stacking shelves In offices & factories Fulfilment sought in drudgery
Mr. Byron – no relation, one presumes, to the actual Byron – seems to have only a rudimentary notion of what a poem actually is. While most, though not all, of his lines scan, he has persistent troubles with the concept of rhyme, with his aabb and aabbcc rhyme schemes dominated by half-rhymes and quarter-rhymes and, well, the words have some similar sounds in them.
“Bills” and “shelves” don’t rhyme, or half-rhyme, despite both ending in the letter “s.” “Take” and “pay” aren’t even remotely close.
Admittedly, “chivalry” is a tough one to rhyme. But surely one can do better than “steeds.”
White knights, on their hobbled steeds Still cling to laws of chivalry Passed over by the queens they save A joke to all the other slaves
When he pulls off an actual rhyme, it comes a surprise:
All of us the sons of Cain Feminists killed Kurt Cobain.
But while we’re on the topic, it’s worth pointing out that feminists and/or feminism did not actually kill Kurt Cobain. (Nor did anyone else; the conspiracy theories suggesting he was murdered don’t make a lot of sense.)
Byron’s only “evidence” linking feminism to the suicide?
He screamed onstage & pierced his flesh Put on make-up, wore a dress
Look, nobody knows for sure the reason or reasons Cobain took his own life, but he was a troubled man with a history of suicide attempts. He suffered from depression and from a painful, persistent stomach ailment. He was addicted to heroin. And as his suicide note made clear, he found the fame he had achieved to be something of an intolerable burden; he felt like a fake. Like a lot of suicides, Cobain’s could be seen as psychologically overdetermined; it could have been caused by any or all of these things.
Using his suicide to score cheap rhetorical points against feminism is not only dishonest but highly disrespectful to his memory.
To top off this gigantic platter of disrespect, whoever wrote the headline on AVFM didn’t even bother to spell Cobain’s first name correctly. It’s Kurt, with a K.
Below, “Byron’s” own reading of his poem. If you can’t bear listening to it — I only made it a couple of stanzas in before I had to shut it off — you can make your way to AVFM, or to YouTube, to read the rest. I feel safe in saying that Kurt, who considered himself a feminist, would have hated it, and A Voice for Men as well.
