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 … .
The manly men at A Voice for Men do love their manly music! You may recall the asskickingly asskicking asskickery of “Go My Own Way,” the A Voice for Men anthem, as performed by Jade Michael and the Fuck Their Shit Up Singers Crew. And the “red pill honesty” of Slumberwall’s emo-folk (but totally not wussy) meditation“The Hatred of Women.”
Now, in a post with the dopily macho title “The weekend’s here. Swagger, brothers. Swagger,” AVFM contributor Skeptic presents a new video from his band Dark Star Disco.
No, it doesn’t quite match the terrible grandeur of either of the earlier MRA anthems. The music is utterly unexceptional testosterone-heavy rock-tronica that sounds like it just escaped from the nineties. And it’s 15 minutes long. But Skeptic is quite proud of it, nonetheless. As he describes it, in phrases as clichéd as the song itself:
We are sonically in your face – wall of sound — chainsaw wailing guitar, piercing electro synth and pounding rock rhythms.
Skeptic contributes the guitar – sorry, the “chainsaw wailing guitar” – to the sound. He apparently prefers guitars to women, as they don’t talk back:
I strut on guitar and love it. Nowhere do I feel more alive. Swagger.
I’ve been playing guitar for many years – self-taught. Swagger.
My guitars have helped me cathart during times of feminist insanity more times than I can recall. I truly don’t know how I would have made it this far without playing guitar. For my guitar doesn’t make maddening “man up” BS demands and treat me with misandry as a disposable utility.
The video, even less original, consists of pilfered stock footage of an assortment of putatively manly things, starting with, yes, a missile. (Oh, hello, Dr. Freud1) Let’s let Skeptic describe his creation:
It’s chock full of images men can relate to – a guided missile, eagle and cheetah hunting, jet aircraft and a high powered motorcycle at full throttle, runway dance swagger, military teamwork and bravery, high tech playfulness, raw wilderness, cutting edge scientific research, urban spaces constructed and running at full tilt and moving at a blistering pace into a future city of lights. It’s what men do. It’s cram packed with stuff feminists shit their pants over – unapologetic swaggering masculinity.
I dig it. It’s ballsy.
Just so you know, the “runway dance swagger” in question refers not to a fashion model shaking his or her stuff in a runway show, but to some dude doing a little victory dance on an runway for, like , airplanes.
Of course, Skeptic is making some assumptions here. We don’t actually know the gender of all those flying the planes (or driving the cars, or riding the motorcycle like an asshole) in the video. For the sake of argument, let’s just assume they are all male.
But the cheetah? Either Skeptic thinks all cheetahs are boy cheetahs, or he thinks that girl cheetahs sit on their fat asses eating cheetah bon bons and living off of Cheetalimony. In fact, of course, both male and female cheetahs hunt for their food. That ballsy swaggering masculine cheetah in his video may well be a gal.
If there are any stray misogynists reading this post who are unwilling to accept that female cheetahs can hunt, skip ahead to 1:30 in the video below to see one cheetah mom chase down a gazelle just like the cheetah in Skeptic’s video.
Here, a female cheetah faces down three hyenas to protect her cubs.
In other words, female cheetahs are badasses. So are male cheetahs.
Skeptic is just a plain old jackass.
If any of you actually listened to Dark Star Disco’s little masterpiece, or any of the other songs I linked to above, and need to clear your ears of all that manly man stuff, might I suggest “Crochet,” by Kathleen Hanna’s side project Julie Ruin?
So there was a bit of ugliness over on the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day. No, scratch that; there was a giant explosion of ugliness.
A couple of days ago, you see, a Redditor with a nine-day-old account posted a story to r/menrights detailing the alleged ill-treatment he’d gotten at the hands of a vengeful ex-wife and an unsympathetic family court system. The story was filled with literally unbelievable details – among other things, he claimed to have been rendered homeless by the demands of the court, forced to pay $1000 a month in spousal support to his ex though she had a $60,000 a year job. Some commenters challenged the veracity of the tale – while the OP gave a case number in his post, no one has been able to find evidence that a case with that number actually exists. (The OP has not responded to the skeptics.)
But most of the respondents assumed the story was true. And why not? It seemed to reinforce every paranoid MRA fantasy of evil women and courts out of control. Despite its fishiness, the post got more than 700 net upvotes.
And that’s where the ugliness began. Not content to merely offer the man sympathy and advice, many commenters started talking murder, and some of the most violent comments got dozens of upvotes.
If you ever have the desire to get yourself downvoted on the Men’s Rights subreddit, here’s one sure-fire strategy: Write a sensible comment suggesting that birth control benefits people with penises as much as people with vaginas.
Here are the two top replies to this comment:
I was going to point out some of the ironies inherent in Men’s Rightsers getting mad about women getting “free” birth control, but I suspect you can figure those out on your own.
This is why the so-called Men’s Rights movement is not so much a rights movement as a take-away-other-people’s-rights movement.
Some misogynists seem to have a really difficult time telling the difference between consensual kinkiness and domestic violence. Over on the Happier Abroad forums, our old friend Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c) – who doesn’t really seem to be all that happy, honestly – tells the fellows about a woman he recently met. (Note: the faux ellipses in the quotes to follow are all from the original.)
I am now able to look a woman in the eyes, even from some distance, and know if she is a decent woman or not. I only developed this two years or so ago and have only had it happen 4 times. I am not saying that it is ONLY these women who are decent women….I am saying that the 4 this has happened to turned out to be pretty good women…
By a “pretty good woman” he seems to mean a woman who hates women nearly as much as he does:
Paul Elam has so far refrained from responding to the halfway-on-the-mark, halfway-completely-ridiculous criticism of the Men’s Rights movement leveled by rapey PUA douchenozzle Roosh that we discussed yesterday. Not even that bit comparing the very serious dudes reading A Voice for Men to silly ladies reading Cosmo was enough to provoke the oh-so-easily provoked Elam. Either he’s gotten very Zen about criticism from PUAs, or he’s spent the last several days punching pillows and muttering under his breath about evil “pussy beggars.”
But some of Elam’s acolytes took it upon themselves to respond for him. My favorite comment is this bait-and-switcher from MrStodern, which starts off with a vaguely reasonable observation before descending into misogynist nonsense.
Apparently feminists love pickup artists, and the only legitimate reason for dudes to have sex with women is to teach them a lesson. Who knew?
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.
Yeah, why would anyone want gamer dudes to modify their behavior in any way? From Fat, Ugly or Slutty. Click image for the original post.
So the top post in the Men’s Rights subreddit for a time yesterday, with hundreds of upvotes, was a post devoted to the question: “Why should male gamers change their behavior?” Yep, apparently the sacred right of men and boys to harass women and girls on Xbox live is one of the most important Men’s Rights issues of the day. Here’s how the OP, IsItRacistToAsk, framed the issue:
[G]amers themselves (until relatively recently) were a 90% male community. This goes back really far if you count non-video-game games (like Dungeons and Dragons and the like). Now all of a sudden they’re expected to just behave differently because some girls want to join?
I’m not saying girls shouldn’t be welcome in gaming communities, I’m just comparing them to someone who shows up, uninvited, to a house party and demands everyone go out and get blue plastic cups because red offends her.
