We Hunted The Mammoth
More drama at A Voice for Men! Kristina Hansen — the excitable FeMRA videoblogger better known as TheWoolybumblebee — has been tossed off the good ship AVFM by Master and Commander Paul Elam for what he calls her “constant public conflicts with elements of our community.”
While we’re talking about this whole Facebook thing (see here and here if you don’t know what I’m referring to), I figured some of you might be wondering: What does the eminent Man-O-Philosopher and self-described “Counter-Feminist Agent of Change” Fidelbogen think of all this?
So if you’ve ever wondered what sort of activism that Men’s Rights, er, Activists do when they do do activism, take a look at this little ACTION ALERT from A Voice for Men.
You may recall Paul Elam getting all worked up the other day because Facebook, responding to a campaign launched by a coalition of feminist activists and groups, announced it was going to try to do a better job removing “gender-based” hate speech from its site. You know, like this [TRIGGER WARNING] sort of thing.
Naturally, Elam and other MRAs interpreted Facebook’s announcement as the first step in the End of Male Speech on the Internet, or something.
Anyway, now the MRAs are ACTIVATING! AVFM has announced that it’s going after the groups that signed onto the feminist Facebook protest. Because, well, I’m not sure I get why exactly.
Here’s their explanation:
It’s time for action. The AVFM community has scrambled to look beyond the fine print of WAM!’s ultimatum to Facebook and into the signatories. We are finding that some of them are tax-exempt, and even government funded. We now know that government funded institutions have endorsed a harmful double standard that results in the censorship of men.
But, if we discover that even one cent of government money touched WAM!’s campaign, we will be exposing a whole new dimension of hypocrisy.
Uh, ok. I’m just really having a hard time finding the hypocrisy here. If you look at the names of the groups that signed onto the open letter, you’ll find a number of general feminist groups, groups concerned with the representation of women/gender in the media, and groups organized against sexual assault and other forms of violence.
They didn’t sign a petition demanding that all men posting on the internet be banned or, I dunno, kicked in the balls. They signed onto an open letter demanding that Facebook remove
groups, pages and images that explicitly condone or encourage rape or domestic violence or suggest that they are something to laugh or boast about.
That doesn’t seem hypocritical to me. It seems rather in line with what these groups promote.
And the only men who will be censored will be men posting this sort of hateful shit. If women post this sort of shit, they’ll be banned too.
Apparently, AVFM and its “activist” fans are so divorced from reality that they think they’re going to be able to publicly embarrass rape survivor support groups … for standing up against crude, hateful rape jokes on Facebook featuring images of brutalized victims.
Still, at least this sort of surreal, self-defeating activism is better than firebombing courthouses and police stations, as that infamous manifesto posted in AVFM’s activism section so enthusiastically recommends.
EDIT: I forgot the link to the AVFM alert; added it inthe first graf.
In Slate, writer Andy Hinds has provided us all with one of the most cringe-inducing “unsolicited penis updates” since our old friend Paul Elam filled us in on which “fuckmuffin” body parts make his Little Elam happiest.
Hinds starts off by assuring us he’s one of the feminist Good Guys, a stay-at-home-dad who respects the heck out of the ladies:
Men’s Rights, er, activists are waving their arms frantically in the air over what they see as a dire new threat to men and manhood: Facebook’s recent annoucement that it was going to try to do a better job of taking down violent images mocking victims of rape and domestic violence, and other kinds of misogynistic hate speech.
Over on This is Why MGTOW, the blogger who calls himself Cerberus Alpha (dude, seriously?) attempts to answer the question: Why are men more violent?
Rather than attempting to engage with the extensive scholarly literature on the subject, or even making a token effort to do any research on the subject whatsoever, Mr. Alpha instead spins a few familiar manosphere fairy tales into “evidence” that it’s all the fault of those evil sexy ladies and their evil sexy and/or feminist ways.
The top post on the Men’s Rights subreddit at the moment, with more than 300 600 700 net upvotes, is a link to this screenshot, posted as an example of radical feminism gone wild:
So the manosphere blogger who calls himself The Red Pill Theorist has managed to work himself into a tizzy over a Wall Street Journal piece by a woman who — gasp! — froze some of her eggs in her 30s in order to give her more time in which to find the right guy with whom to have kids.
I realize that I may be the only one who’s really all that interested in sectarian infighting amongst the MRAs, but an old friend of ours has weighed in on the recent battles over the A Voice for Men satellite group MRA London, and I’ve learned some interesting things as a result.
After yesterday’s horribleness, here’s a bit of MRA pontificating that’s mostly just absurd. In the Men’s Rights subreddit, our dear old friend OuiCrudites spells out the Seven Step Plan that is destroying men today. He doesn’t explain 1) who exactly is taking these steps, or 2) why exactly they want to destroy men, but, you know, I think we can just assume 1) the evil feminist gynomatriarchy/women in general and 2) EEEEEEVIL.
Interesting that two whole steps out of the seven here involve complaints about “females” dating thuggy alpha bad boys instead of decent, hard-working nice guys like those you might find posting thoughtful comments on gender relations in helpful list form on Reddit.