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 … .
Paul Elam, meet Tom Martin.
Speaking of stupid, lying whores, let’s discuss Rebecca Watson’s latest article … about how she and other women who trash and demonize men regularly are helpless victims, getting nasty emails and tweets from some people who don’t like it. … Once [sic] such comment came from an individual who penned, “Hope Dawkins will bestially rape you…in the elevator to hell.” …
I have a keeper file of death threats, but I never wrote an article about them. I have been hounded recently by half the media hacks in Canada … it does not even compare to John the Other facing a gang of 20-30 assholes on the street, some wielding box cutters … 2 plus 2 equals stupid, lying, whining whore. What John and other MRAs are starting to encounter every day, and the future of what is to come, makes getting bestially raped by Richard Dawkins sound kinda funny. We just don’t get the luxury of playing the damsel in distress, nor do we want it.
There are maybe 1200 more words to his post, but I think you probably get the gist of it.
Watson’s post, by contrast, is worth reading in full.
I’m reasonably sure you said something pretty similar about me though. Possibly while pointing out the being young and frustrated does not necessarily make one a shitlord.
My current problem’s one of isolation. Everyone I’ve met at uni is lovely lovely lovely, but I simply don’t have any way to see most of them again after semester ends or w/e – I’m awful at figuring out how to do that. I have a very small network of friends, only one of them going to the same uni, and I worry that I bother them too much (my ex had a big thing about me being clingy and jealous, which I was a bit, but he really played that one up and I can’t get that thought out of my head even over a year later). I don’t feel like I have the energy for a proper social life either up in Big City where I go to uni or down in Little City where I live and I feel reasonably isolated. I’ve looked around at clubs and such, but the left-wing groups, though largely awesome and doing great things against current proposed staff cuts at the uni, get pretty Trotskyite and are a little too comfortable with defending Julian Assange or calling the Palestinian situation “apartheid” and they’re all much older than me and ugh. Other groups require me to stick around until 6 for their little parties and end up back home at entirely reasonable times which still manage to knock me out because somehow catching trains is the most draining thing ever.
Speaking of “older than me”, I apparently read as being about 25 between my beard and confidence in tutes, but have less life experience than your average 16-year-old or so. I don’t drive, I’m almost entirely sexually inexperienced, I’ve lived with my parents in the same ultra-boring and unsophisticated suburb my entire life, I’ve not travelled overseas, which a lot of people up Big City way assumes means you can’t possibly be Cultured and Have Opinions on Foreign Issues because they’ve grown up real bourgeois. So older people can’t relate to me and younger people assume I can’t relate to them. I did meet my very very very cool and 25-year-old closest uni friend through this, so it’s not all bad.
Essentially, then: how do I social life? And will catching a train 4 hours a day plus walking and waiting for another hour or so ever seem doable?
Bonus question: is it weird/sexist to wish you had more friends of a particular gender? I dig female-dominated things and prefer one-on-one interaction, so my friendship group’s ended up around 65-35 ladies-men (not ladies’ men, that’s just the one guy), but it’s a small group of friends and the dudes have disappeared one by one and I feel I’m being deprived by only having women as friends even though they’re all great friends.
/whine
(Just typing that I get why Elam thinks he’s so great for not revealing the threats he didn’t get. The whole stoicism and self-deprecation’s a crappy little bit of male socialisation but I can’t bring myself not to do it.)
Hmm. First thought – is there any way to rent a room for part of the week, or to find a place to crash some nights so that you can stay in Big City and do stuff rather than having to catch the train home? Seems like that would open up a lot more possibilities. When I was in London friends who lived farther out/up north would come crash with me all the time since I was right in the middle of the city.
I wish this Mr Elam would realize that words actually have meanings. A sex worker (or *shudder* whore) is specifically someone who directly exchanges sex for money. That is really the only meaning of the word. It does not include women who exchange their labour for money. That’s just being employed. Or a woman who takes care of a house and/or children thus allowing her husband/partner to work without having to worry about domestic matters and is supported in return. Most people would consider that the husband/partner’s earnings were as much hers as his and she may well mannage those earnings with his blessing. There is one specific meaning for the term and it can’t be used to describe just any woman who exchanges something for money. If it’s extended out to include all these other random meanings then it ceases to have any meaning at all and becomes like white noise or static.
Basically he seems to be using the term to describe any woman he doesn’t like.
Gaaaah, I wrote a massive whine here but accidentally refreshed.
Essentially: I’ve looked into that, and finding somewhere to crash is vaguely possible but takes more social skills than I have (I have no idea how going out even works…) and my parents and I did look into shacking me up in a youth hostel semi-regularly but it didn’t work out to be very cost-effective. I’m at an odd point where my family’s too rich for me to get any government benefits and not rich enough to put me in student accommodation, but they are lovely so staying with them’s quite nice aside from the distance.
Only way around this is getting married and I’ve semi-seriously considered finding a spouse-in-name-only if only for the anecdote later and the fun of the journey but I’d have no clue where to start and would feel a welfare fraud.
@Seranvali
Wait, that word’s out of the filter now?
Cassandra – you win! Years on end of Country Does Christmas is way worse than several hours of Bing Crosby, even if it did make the funeral we were going to fun by comparison! 😀
Lowquacks – “Bonus question: is it weird/sexist to wish you had more friends of a particular gender?”
I don’t think so. I wouldn’t feel too comfortable if I only had male friends, however good they were. Mind you that’s a guess, since all my friends are women; the only blokes I’ve socialised with happen to be my friends’ partners or my workmates. I would absolutely feel like I was missing out if most of my friends were male, not because of them as individuals but because there’s shared experiences (or similar ones) between women that don’t exist between the sexes, and my women friends and I talk about that sort of thing a lot.
When we’re not talking about more important things like kitties, of course. 🙂
That is kind of a catch 22, isn’t it? You can’t find a place to crash until you get to know people, but you can’t get to know people because you don’t have a place to crash so you have to go home at night. And then there’s the issue of how to find people who might in the future be people to crash with, which I know how to do, but I don’t know how to explain how to do it. I can watch people interacting and go “OK, this is where your interactions are going wrong, try this instead”, but I have no idea how to take all the non-verbal stuff and make it verbal, which is part of why it’s so frustrating when Nice Guy types show up and demand a step by step guide to how to meet potential dates.
It’s catch-22’s all the way down, really. Infinite variations of “you can’t do Y in the city until you can do X in the city, and vice versa”.
Are you me?
Wait, am I kinda doing that?
Half the world’s population, in effect.
A ninety-year-old nun is probably a whore in his estimation.
Nah, not unless your next comment was going to be “And why won’t those bitches sleep with me? I have a job!”.
@CassandraSays, KittehHelp
Diss Country Goes Christmas and such all you want, but leave Willie Nelson out if you do. (Dicussion question: Willie Nelson is what would’ve happen if Lemmy were influenced by weed and Austin rather than speed and Stoke-on-Trent, yes or no?)
Wait, no, I just listened to him doing “Frosty the Snowman” again, diss him all you like. I do have a mix of bearable Christmas songs I made last year I was quite proud of but the only record of it I have these days is a Facebook wallpost for someone who has quietly deleted me, so I’m not going to open the can of worms that would be admitting I’ve noticed to ask her about it. Would’ve shown you two and other Men Boobzer reading otherwise.
@CassandraSays
Nah, I’m unemployed.
Willie Nelson singing Frosty the Snowman?
I can’t even imagine it … and I’m very grateful for that!
Doesn’t really matter who sings ’em, I’m not fond of Christmas songs in general. Only album of them I have is by Loreena McKennitt, bought back in the days when I was buying all her stuff – she was very popular with the Goth mob I was part of. And they were mostly medieval carols, not the modern stuff.
I just hope Mr Springsteen doesn’t do a Christmas album. I don’t think I’d be able to cope.
Go on, you know you want to hear it.
Same here. My mix was all original Christmassy bits with Can’s take on Silent Night at the end IIRC.
See, this is why I have issues with the goth community here, I think. There’s lots of folksy goth and pseudo-mythical goth and steampunk, and not so much industrial and (non-steam) punk or metal leaning goth, which is more my cup of tea. Now, if Al Jorgensen Does Christmas ever became a thing? That I’d buy.
Actually someone should totally suggest to Rob Zombie that he do a Christmas album. I bet he’d do it, he has the right kind of sense of humor.
Goth here is all Bauhaus-y post-punk and that works quite nicely. There’s a separate heavy-make-up-and-Nightwish thing with younger angstier people going on too, I’m fairly sure, but I don’t really see it.
@CassandraSays
Or Gensis P-Orridge, who’d be less likely to, but how interesting would a Throbbing Gristle Christmas album be?
I was really only into Goth for the frocks. And for laughing at the baby-Goths who took it all sooooo seriously. The mob I hung out with were all in our thirties and were having fun, whether we’re talking trooping off to sigh over Gary Oldman (and Winona Ryder’s dresses) or having alleged poetry readings that took about fifteen minutes to devolve into Monty Python quotation free-for-alls.
We were very silly.
My taste in music never got heavier than Stairway to Heaven (no, not the Rolf Harris version!) or a bit of Rick Wakeman or Mike Oldfield when I was in my teens. Only current music I listen to now, on occasion, is Bruce Springsteen; other than that most of my preferred music over the years has been medieval through to early baroque, with a dash of Glenn Miller now and then. Hence not really following the MRA ‘music’ thread, it’s all unknown territory! 😀
See, this is what I love about the Manboobz commentariat. Everyone who’s not at all into the heavy stuff has been so patient with all the meandering and in-jokes.
@ lowquacks
A Very Slipknot Christmas also sounds amusing to me. I still think dressing Jorgensen up as Scary Santa would be the best thing ever, though.
Did you ever own the pre-crap Triple J compilation with 20 different versions of that? Worth it for the Rolling Stone-lampooning liner notes alone.
For those who wonder WTF I’m on about, this is the dude who I want to dress up as Santa and make sing twisted Christmas carols.
I will never not love that spoken-word into, ever. Or that gonzo vocal in the main bit, actually.
I love Just One Fix even more, but yeah – much love for JBMH too.