We Hunted The Mammoth
So earlier in the week I received an email with the subject line “$1000 donation to Paul Elam thank to you David!”
The email was a copy of a note this generous fellow evidently sent to Elam along with a $100 donation and a promise to send more.
But the email wasn’t so much about Elam as it was about me, or at least about an imaginary version of me that the email-writer has cooked up in his own fevered imagination, and who for some reason he calls “David Futtreele.”
How did anyone ever come to think that the gaming world is hostile to women? This GameStop training video from 2009 shows just how welcoming the video game retailer has been to “one of the world’s most fascinating creatures.” Yes, we’re talking about the enigma that is the human female.
In the video, an expert in “womanly studies” attempts to explain to GameStop staffers how to understand “a segment of the species that remains a mystery to over fifty percent of the population today,” analyzing staged interactions between male staffers and some of these mysterious females.
In addition to the weird sexism of the video, which manages to be patronizing to women and men alike, the video features some amazing graphics (relying heavily on stock photos of these mysterious “women”), brilliant acting, and extras who are supposed to be standing frozen in the background but can’t help compulsively blinking.
The worst part of this video is that despite its cringeworthiness it probably did help some male GameStop staffers deal with women in a slightly less patronizing way.
H/T — Polygon
If you have something terrible to say, say it with a meme!
That, at least, seems to be the consensus of some of the worst people on the internet. So I’m starting a little occasional series called “memesplaining” in which I’ll highlight some of the most nonsensical and/or horrific memes I run across on the internet. Today’s is both.
I found the lovely meme above pasted into the comments on the blog of everyone’s favorite rapey, racist “pickup artist” Roosh Valizadeh. I don’t know where it originated, but a quick image search reveals that it’s been making the rounds on 4chan and Reddit.
Here’s the text at a more readable size . I highlighted the worst bits, but then again pretty much the entire thing could be classified as “the worst bits.”
So Parks and Recreation had its Men’s Rights episode last night.
Well, sort of: A gaggle of MRAs made a few appearances in the ep, as one of the obstacles that Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) has to contend with as the wife of a political candidate.
There were a few great moments:
Oh, people. I would really like to take a little vacation from all the A Voice for Men posts, but as it turns out I have found the most A-Voice-for-Menny AVFM thread ever, and I must share it with you.
Ok, so a couple of days ago, AVFM’s Dear Leader Paul Elam posted an uncharacteristically brief video titled “A 41 second lesson for Adam Serwer and the mainstream media.” It consisted of a 41-second snippet of Elam’s phone interview with Buzzfeed’s Adam Serwer, one of the authors of that scathing expose of Elam, in which Elam boasts to Serwer about how much traffic AVFM gets every time there is a news article reporting what an utterly terrible person he is. (I’m loosely paraphrasing here; as far as I can tell, Elam is not actually aware he is a terrible person.)
So this is an … interesting reaction to that Buzzfeed piece about Paul Elam. And by “interesting” I mean “WTF?”
Over on The Spearhead — remember The Spearhead, home to some of the crankiest misogynists on the Internet? — our old friend WF Price offers a rather unique analysis of Elam’s life story.
So last week I pointed out that several A Voice for Menners, as well as one of #GamerGate’s E-list celebrities, had managed to amass impressive armies of fake Twitter followers — more than 70,000 amongst the four of them. Generally speaking, one does not get that many fake followers unless one literally buy them from the sort of sleazy people who make a living selling fake Twitter followers in order to make oneself appear more popular.
The next day some generous soul bought me well over a thousand fake followers to call my own. When I wrote my post, I had a bit more than 5000 followers. Now I have more than 7000, with most of the new additions obviously fake accounts with Russian names, a tiny handful of spammy Tweets to their credit, and pretty much zero followers of their own. Here are a couple of them:
A Voice for Men’s embattled Grand Wizard Paul Elam and his followers have responded to Buzzfeed’s devastating profile of him in some predictable ways, and in a few less predictable ones.
If you’re read the Buzzfeed piece – and if you haven’t, you really, really should – you know that it devoted a lot of time to the sad and sordid history of Elam’s three marriages and the even more sad and sordid story of the daughter he abandoned.
In a long and rambling post on Buzzfeed’s piece, Elam – all too predictably – goes after “Susan,” his first wife and the only one of his three ex-wives who was willing to talk on the record, trying his best to destroy her credibility by portraying her, essentially, as a lying slut.
Elam miraculously, and probably with considerable effort, managed to avoid the s-word – a favorite of writers on his site. But his attempts to slut-shame her are as transparent as glass.
For those coming here from the excellent Buzzfeed article on Paul Elam, here are some posts of mine that will give you an even fuller picture of this not only sleazy but dangerous man and the little army of fanatical assholes he has assembled to pester and often outright harass (mostly) women online.
Start here:
Aside from some of the information Buzzfeed found out about him, nothing is more damning to Elam than his own words.
Here are some posts on Elam’s peculiar approach to “activism,” which generally involves harassing individual women.
Here’s a post on the phony “offenders registry” Elam and company put up in order to demonize feminists and other women they don’t like by posting unflattering profiles of them alongside actual female murderers and sex offenders.
And here are a couple of posts on AVFM’s attempt to co-opt the name and the reputation of the White Ribbon anti-domestic violence campaign:
Some posts that quote Elam’s perverse justifications for violence against women:
And then there was this:
And a few, er, lighter reads on the man:
(This last one is about a post he wrote attacking Skepchick founder Watson in which he used the word “whore” literally two dozen times.)
And there are more in the archives if you want to search for them.
I guess I kind of write about him a lot, huh?
Well, for better or worse, he’s the most prominent and influential Men’s Rights Activist out there. For now.
If you’re a regular, or semi-regular, or even just an occasional reader of this blog, you need to stop reading this post right now and read Buzzfeed’s astonishing expose of A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam instead.
SPOILER ALERT: He’s an even bigger hypocrite than you think he is.
Here’s the link. Right here. Click on it now. Click. Now. Click.
If you need a bit more convincing: Buzzfeed’s long and meticulous examination of alleged “men’s human rights” activist Elam, written by Adam Serwer and Katie Baker, delves deep into Paul’s often sordid personal history, including his drug use, his numerous failed marriages, and the alternately depressing and infuriating story of the daughter he abandoned, who forgave and reunited with him as an adult, and who is now estranged from him again.