This blog gets a lot of drive-by commenters, usually hostile, who drop one comment and then vanish, never to return. A lot of these comments are insults and one-liners, but a good number of these one-shot numbers, apparently seeking to maximize the impact of their one bit of input on this blog, deposit mini-manifestos setting forth their grand visions of what Men’s Rights stands for, why feminism is evil, or whatever it is that has them most riled up that day.
A couple of days ago, Men’s Rights rageoholic Paul Elam angrily denounced journalist Tory Shepherd as a liar for saying that his A Voice for Men website “regularly calls women ‘bitches and whores,’ which it does not.”
Now, anyone who has actually read his website for any length of time knows this is patently false. As if to underscore just how baldly Elam was lying in his post three days ago, the site today ran a post attacking her with this headline:
Many of you may have been worried, but I’m happy to report to you today that the future of the Men’s Rights movement is in good hands! My evidence? The following essay on the evil that is feminism, posted recently to the Men’s Rights subreddit by a 5-year-old boy.
At least I’m assuming it was posted by a 5-year-old boy. If it was posted by a teenager, or — heaven forbid! — an adult, well, all bets are off.
Antifeminist attorney, A Voice for Men contributor, and would-be Male Studies lecturer Roy Den Hollander bustin’ a move on the Colbert Report.
NOTE: See the end of the piece for an important clarification from the University.
So it seems the new “Male Studies” initiative at the University of South Australia is running into a few problems. Well, one big problem: members of the general public have discovered that some of the people involved with the initiative are raving misogynists, or have chosen to associate themselves with raving misogynists.
Yesterday, a story by journalist Tory Shepherd noted that two of the lecturers have written for a notoriously misogynistic website by the name of A Voice for Men. (You may have heard of it.) One of them, the crankish American attorney Roy Den Hollander, even suggested in a post on that site that men’s rights activists may have to take up arms against the evil Feminists who run the world.
Hardly a controversial message, you wouldn’t think.
If you live in New York state, you may have seen the poster above plastered on a bus shelter; or you may have seen it posted somewhere on the internet. The message is pretty simple, and it’s sad that it has to be said: kids are pretty impressionable, so teach your sons to treat women with basic respect.
Numerous studies have found that men with sexist attitudes towards women are more likely to try to control their wives or girlfriends with physical abuse. Indeed, one recent study even found that brief exposure to sexist jokes made men more inclined to brush off violence against women, at least amongst men with sexist attitudes to begin with.
Speaking of which, the sexist jokes over at A Voice for Men have unveiled a hilarious new “meme,” which just happens to be inspired by the “awaiting instructions” PSAs we’ve been discussing. And here it is:
From A Voice for Men. I’ve blurrred the women’s faces.
The logic here is airtight: because some women get drunk and urinate in public, women don’t deserve respect.
I guess men never get drunk and urinate in public, or ever do anything vaguely embarrassing that gets caught on camera?
Is it really asking too much to respect people as people, foibles and all?
I am sitting at panera bread. I got here at 6am, when no one was here. After ordering, I took the only comfy chairs next to a nice fire place and started reading. Halfway through my meal two women came up and asked me to move because they wanted to sit where I was sitting.
Ok, but before you say that this didn’t happen, consider this: Only a few minutes ago a woman demanded my seat, and when I didn’t get up to give it to her she simply sat right on top of me. And by woman I mean cat.
The evidence for the existence of such a plot is a bit on the skimpy side — the Telegraph writer leads off with a reference to a 2012 proposal from a County Council member in Sormland, Sweden that doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere legislatively but that’s been a favorite evil-feminist story on conservative websites ever since.
The very notion that some evil feminist might force them to sit while they spray has Men’s Rights Redditors in an unusually combative mood. Heck, it’s got some of the regulars thinking that it might well be time to start doing some good-old fashioned murdering. No, really.
Yep. In case you’ve been wondering, suggesting “a campaign to assassinate feminist figures” because some local council member in Sweden had a dumb idea will in fact win you upvotes on the Men’s Rights subreddit.
EDIT: The “let’s murder feminists” comment has been taken down by the subreddit mods, though the user hasn’t been banned for it; the “I want to tie a feminist down and pee on her” comment remains up, and still boasts upvotes.
Men’s Rightsers and Pickup Artists alike are obsessed with the dilemma of the so-called “Nice Guy” who can’t get laid. MRAs see his plight as a symptom of a gynocratic society in which fickle, asshole-loving women are the gatekeepers of sex; PUAs see it as a sign that beta males need to learn how to imitate the vaguely aloof swagger of the natural alpha male.
And both MRAs and PUAs completely miss the point.
To see just how badly they do, let’s take a look at a recent post from the sadly influential PUA shitbag Heartiste, who uses an alleged Facebook screencap of uncertain provenance as a springboard for a diatribe against the “desperate male,” that is, the “desperate, clingy ünterbeta male” who pursues a woman, often in a weirdly apologetic, even abject way, long after she’s made it clear she has no interest in him.
Your donation will help change the life of this suffering man-child!
Here are some of the things Paul Elam of A Voice for Mens has said in the past that the $80,000 plus in donations his site aims to take in every year go to:
Dedicated servers, image royalties, legal fees, internet radio premiums, various kinds of computer and media hardware — and now traveling to different locations, like Toronto, in order to do what has been in the plans all along.
Here are a few things Elam has not said the donations have been going to:
Buying him sandwiches. Paying for the down payment on a condo. Paying his cable bill. Paying for DVD rentals. Buying tasteful framed art for the walls and tchotchkes for the end tables. Buying him suits for his big important media interviews.
Well, now he’s fessed up — sort of.
After a bit of a kerfuffle about financial transparency in his site’s comments section, Elam has finally admitted what a lot of us have been assuming but that he’s been loath to admit: that he’s been living off of his supporters’ donations — and a generous girlfriend. As he explained in a post yesterday:
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.
