We Hunted The Mammoth
Feeling nostalgic for some of the Man Boobz trolls of yore? Well, head over to the Men’s Rights subreddit, where two of the greats most terrible are having a battle of wits. It all started when Man Boobz Troll of the Year 2011 NWOslave offered his opinions in a thread discussing Swaziland’s recent banning of “rape-provoking” miniskirts.
Among those who celebrate Christmas, the holiday is often (for better or worse) a time to celebrate family, and to bring usually distant family members together – parents and their adult children, grandparents and their grandchildren, and so on.
A proposal from the guy behind the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog would mean a bit of a change in this tradition: it would eliminate grandchildren from the equation utterly. Not just by excluding them from the holiday celebrations, but by eliminating them altogether – at least until his demands are met.
There’s one kind of person you meet again and again in the manosphere: the man who hates women, but insists that he’s not a misogynist. Some of them will even tell you that you calling them a misogynist is equivalent to a white person calling a black person the n-word. And they seem to even believe this.
So the other day someone went to the Men’s Rights subreddit with some concerns about the movement’s inclusiveness – or, rather, its lack thereof. “I’d be a lot more inclined to follow this movement,” this person wrote,
if it was more inclusive of the issues of other men, such as those of colour, homosexuality and those who identify as males. But as it stands even when you quote prison statistics as a form of sexism, you flat out ignore the ethnic make up of those statistics and the last time I saw y’all chatting about queer rights? I can’t actually remember, it’s been even longer since something along those lines came on the front page.
Naturally, the fine folks of the subreddit responded with a big “nuh-uh!”
A quick one question quiz, which all regular readers of Man Boobz should be able to ace.
Question: Over on The Spearhead, commenters have been offering their opinions about the Newtown school shootings. All but one of the following quotes have been taken word for word from the Spearhead, and reflect who or what the quoted commenter blames for the shooting. Can you identify which statement is NOT from a Spearheader?
A) “Guns don’t kill, the culture kills. A culture of out of control children. A culture of child neglect and abuse brought about and driven largely by the feminist philosophy of the fulfillment of women comes before ALL else, including their children, born or unborn. It wasn’t a hard sell because women already have a dark and selfish nature.”
B) “[A] sick person who may have been turned into monster with the help of a selfish and thoughtless woman.”
C) “I wonder to what extent did the shooter’s mom and female teachers have in motivating his actions? what if the shooter is the victim? what if more and more evidence (or strong implications) of the women using their authority as mom and teachers to manipulate a mentally unstable young man keeps coming out? … Of course it’s not actually paranoia if ‘they’ really are out to get you, is it?. And ‘they’ being a feminist police state, well, they really are out to get me!”
D) “Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Actually, in many ways, feminism is Munchausen syndrome by proxy.”
E) “The problem is women running things. Even after all the massacres, the dearies continue to insist the solution is to disarm all the law abiding citizens.”
F) “A Feminized Culture.”
G) “Lifelong sworn conspirators, murder incorporated, organized feminism, the police and judges, the deadly sneak parroting puppet gangsters, using all the gangster deadly Frankenstein-feminist controls—these hand and rope sneak deadly feminazi-gangsters, the judges and the police, trick, trap, rob, wreck, butcher and murder the people to keep them terrorized in in gangster Frankenstein earphone radio slavery from the Communist-feminazi-gangster government and con artists parroting puppet gangster feminist scum.”
BONUS QUESTION: Did anyone on The Spearhead blame the actual killer? Y/N
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ANSWER: A through F are all from The Spearhead. G is the ringer, from a rant by famous paranoid ranter Francis E. Dec, Esq, with the words “feminism” and “feminazi” worked into it here and there to make it sound a little more Spearheadish.
BONUS ANSWER: Surprisingly, yes. This guy.
It’s always a little distressing to see manosphere-style dumbassery outside the manosphere. Today’s offender: Charlotte Allen at National Review Online, explaining how the deaths in Newtown are the result of the school’s “feminized setting.” Had the school been filled with manly men (and manly boys), Adam Lanza could have been stopped in his tracks!
No, really, that’s what she says. Except that what she wrote is somehow even more egregious than my sarcastic summary. Read for yourself:
I don’t want to make this blog the A Voice for Men Show, but that little hangout of angry dudes has really been outdoing itself in recent days. Take site founder and chief egomaniac Paul Elam’s post the other day reading the riot act to another Men’s Rights activist for being a homophobic asshole.
Specifically, an Australian bloke named Chris Key, whom Elam describes as “a true misogynist, homophobe and all around asshole who claims to be an MRA.”
NOTE: As of April 4, 2014, the original site and its individual profiles have been taken down; a new site with an apparently similar purpose is evidently being built to replace it, but it’s not yet functional. You can see an archived version of the site’s main page, and its list of “bigots” using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, though you’ll need to manually edit the URLs of the “bigots” listed to see the archived profiles. (Replace each %20 in the URLs with an _ .)
Some of the women profiled on the site as “bigots” included:
Actress Katherine Heigl, who was put on the site after making a humorous public service announcement for the site Funny or Die promoting the spaying and neutering of pets. Register-Her charges her with “endors[ing] male targeted sexual mutilation.”
Feminist blogger Jessica Valenti, the author, most recently, of “Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness,” who was put on the site for several newspaper columns that the site misrepresents in an attempt to show that she is guilty of “an ongoing pattern of anti-male bigotry and advocacy for the eradication of constitutional rights based primarily on sex.” A Voice for Men has also labeled Valenti a “child abuser” for supporting feminist causes, and on one occasion posted candid photos it claimed were of her in an attempt to cause her embarrassment. If you look at the archived version of the site’s main page, you will see a picture of Valenti alongside photos of convicted rapists and murderers, all underneath the headline “Why Aren’t These Women In Prison?” Valenti has not, of course, committed any crimes.
A number of young women who attended a protest against Men’s Rights icon Warren Farrell at the University of Toronto. Register-Her used Twitter Tweets from some of the women, clearly intended as jokes, as evidence of genocidal intentions towards men. In an article on A Voice for Men, an anonymous writer even attacked one of these women for Tweeting a picture of a poster which declared “it is important to have someone’s consent before sexual activity.”
Site founder Paul Elam and other writers on A Voice for Men make no bones about their desire to ruin the lives of their foes. Indeed, the site’s much-referenced slogan is “Fuck Their Shit Up.”
In one post, Elam warned one critic of Register-Her that:
I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection. …
[Y]ou fucking moron. Your only real hope is to keep your mouth shut and pretend AVfM and register-her.com does not exist for as long as you can. Because, as you can see right now, anything you say or do will be thrown back in your face like holy water on a vampire.
We are coming for you, and we are coming for all the liars out there that have been ruining people’s lives with impunity. …
You are SO fucked.
Register-Her was clearly a major part of Elam’s program to “Fuck Their Shit Up.” The “registry” was heavily promoted on A Voice for Men, which linked to a number of “featured offenders” in its sidebar – all of them so-called “bigots,” none of them the criminals that Register-Her claims to really be about. A banner ad for Register-Her depicts a bloody knife. The tagline: “TRUTH is the real bitch.”
Elam’s idea of exposing the “truth” seems to involve publishing photographs and the personal information of his targets, whether these are alleged “false accusers” or simply feminists who have offended him. On the A Voice for Men internet radio show, Elam promised that:
If Mary Jane Rottencrotch out there wants to say that her husband beat her just for the sake of gaining leverage in a divorce he will now have a resource where he can come and post your name, your picture, your work telephone number, your address, perhaps even your route you take to get to work, if you bother to have a job.
While Elam has yet to make good on the threat of posting information on women’s routes to work, posts on A Voice for Men promoting the profiles of so-called “bigots” are filled with threatening language and vague intimations that further information will be revealed. In a post announcing the site’s campaign against the University of Toronto protestors, Elam wrote this about one of his targets:
We have her image and know her general location. We will identify her and profile her activity and name for public view.
We will not stop there, or just with her. And while we will not publish our complete intent, we are dogged in our efforts. …
We have no more sympathy for your agenda of hatred and exclusion than for a plantation owner’s rationale in the Antebellum South for justified ownership of another human being.
A Voice for Men’s posts about the targeted women are also filled with bizarre and hyperbolic accusations. In a post about a college student who had jokingly Tweeted that her “political position” was “kill all men hail satan,” and who in another tweet suggested she might get a tattoo reading “misandry,” one of A Voice for Men’s many pseudonynmous “agents” wrote:
She doesn’t just hate men; doesn’t just want them dead or silenced or marginalized or ignored. She at least entertains the idea of permanently marking her skin with that hatred, like a convict signaling gang affiliation.
“Agent Mauve” makes clear that he hopes to ruin the life of the young woman by putting her on Register-Her:
[T]his will be the beginning of [name removed]’s real legacy; where she can revel in the full and permanent notice of her deeds, and the lesson she is providing to the world about the nature of feminism, and the etiology of hatred. And so that anyone who ever does an internet search on her name again will be aware of it.
So far, A Voice for Men’s campaign against the Toronto protesters seems to be having what one can only assume is the desired effect. On A Voice for Men’s Facebook page, a commenter refers to one of the protesters as an “evil twisted little piece of dogshit,” adding: “I hope she suffers a fatal injury before she can go out and ruin peoples’ lives like she seems determined to do.” This comment earned several “likes” from A Voice for Men’s readers.
In the Spring of 2012, Register-Her was profiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups, as part of a larger feature on the so-called “Men’s Rights” movement. Writing in the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, Arthur Goldwag described Register-Her’s modus operandus and its effect on one targeted woman:
Elam’s site can be frightening to its targets. In one case, he offered a cash reward to the first reader to ferret out a pseudonymous feminist blogger’s real name. In another, Elam singled out a part-time blogger at ChicagoNow who describes herself as a “vegetarian park activist with two baby girls.” The woman’s mistake was to write about her discomfort with male adults helping female toddlers in the bathroom at her daughter’s preschool. The blogger conceded that she was being sexist, but wrote that “I’d rather be wrong than find out if I’m right.”
After the woman was listed, she was widely attacked on men’s movement sites. “I don’t always use the word ‘cunt’ to describe a woman,” one poster raged, “but when I do it’s because of reasons like these.” Shocked, the “Mommy blogger” took down her original post and apologized for her “demonization of men.”
It wasn’t enough. “You targeted fathers, and just fathers,” Elam rebuked her. “It strikes me that you have never really been held to account for any of your actions in life. It is quite likely that the concept of complete, selfless accountability is just completely foreign to you.” Over at the Reddit Mens Rights forum, another poster fumed: “This entire episode should be a warning to all those male hating feminists out there who believe that they are safe screaming their hate messages on the web. Finally, they are held accountable for their hate messages and finally the rest of the world will find out exactly what type of depraved people they really are.”
That’s hate, and that’s precisely the sort of reaction Register-Her seems designed to provoke.
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I encourage readers to link to this piece on their websites, so as to make sure that people understand what Register-Her was really all about.
Over on Reddit, Men’s Rights subreddit regular 0bvious_Atheist has offered the most, well, inventive explanation for the Newtown school shootings I’ve seen thus far. Apparently channeling the old Man Boobz troll NWOslave, he argues that they were the result of … Title IX.
The only good news here is that this theory was too weird and opportunistic for even the Men’s Rights subreddit, and 0bvious_Atheist’s post got many more downvotes than upvotes.
Also, the 4Chan thing hasn’t been confirmed by any reputable media source. Here’s something from the not-exactly-100%-credible Daily Mail on it is definitely a fake.
Thanks to r/againstmensrights for pointing me to 0bvious_Atheist’s post.
Advocating violence is allegedly against the rules in the Men’s Rights subreddit. Just don’t tell it to these guys! (Or the people upvoting them.)
As I’ve noted before, Demonspawn is fairly regular violator of this particular rule — as evidenced here, here, and, oh yeah, here. (And check the archives for even more Demonspawn terribleness that stops short of advocacy of murder.)
When I asked the r/mensrights mods some months back why they didn’t just ban him for his repeated violations, you may recall, this happened:
Hey, Mens Rightsers, if you don’t want to be associated with violence, perhaps you should, you know, disassociate yourself from those who advocate violence — seriously, repeatedly, and definitely not as a joke.
