We Hunted The Mammoth
Most conspiracy theorists are surprisingly uncreative in their choice of villains, blaming all the ills in the world on one or more alleged evildoers in a fairly short list: the Jews, the government, the Illuminati, space aliens, and a handful of other familiar suspects.
One Men’s Rights activist wants to add a few more names to the list: the women’s magazines Glamour, Allure, Self, Vogue, and, most terrifyingly, Teen Vogue.
So Facebook has been making some tweaks to some of its graphics. The company recently changed its already unexciting logo to one that is … even less exciting, but apparently easier to read on mobile devices.
But it’s what Facebook has done to its “friends” icon that has one lady MRA up in arms.
Is MRA thinking simply beyond satire?
Cartoonist Rebecca Cohen (@GynoStar on Twitter) recently decided to offer a satirical take on the false rape accusation paranoia that’s endemic in Men’s Rights circles, producing the list of tips below, designed to mirror some of the terrible advice that’s regularly given to women on how to avoid rape.
Men’s Rights Activists love to “warn” women that they may soon face a day of reckoning if they don’t shape up and start acting the way MRAs think they should. Don’t make men angry, they say; you wouldn’t like us when we’re angry!
Still, most MRAs making these “predictions” at least make a token effort to pretend to be horrified at the notion of men rising up to wreak vengeance upon uppity women. This isn’t what we want, they assure women; it’s just what will happen if you continue to “provoke” men with your bad behavior.
Other MRAs find it impossible to contain their glee; like doomsday preppers with well-stocked bunkers and enough ammo to kill every living thing within a 500 mile radius, they can’t wait for the end of the world.
Peter Andrew Nolan is one of these other MRAs. And he’s started to celebrate a little bit early.
More signs of desperation over at A Voice for Men, the Men’s Rights/Lady Disparagement site that has apparently ceased to be the cash cow for its founder, the unlovely and untalented Paul Elam, that it once was:
Dean Esmay — Men’s Rights Activist, AIDS “skeptic,” big old white dude — has added another skill to his resume: Arbiter of Blackness.
If you haven’t been following the activities of Mr. Esmay of late, the A Voice for Men “chief operations officer” has been having a rather extended Twitter meltdown, posting endless puzzling yet impassioned Tweets to his own #SpankAFeminist hashtag, addressing an assortment of imaginary feminist enemies.
Some of the more puzzling have involved race, like his repeated charge that feminists are a bunch of white racists because, well, let’s let Esmay explain:
Pride parades are a bit more fabulous than usual this Pride Weekend, on the heels of the Supreme Court ruling making gay marriage legal across the United States.
A Voice for Men “CEO” Paul Elam is using the occasion as an opportunity to “warn” unwary gay marriers that they may be embarking on “a trip to the gallows.”
Elam, you see, considers himself a bit of an expert on marriages — possibly because he’s had so many of them himself — and wants gays to know that marriage is terrible and that their celebrations this weekend will ring hollow once they end up in divorce court.
On Fathers Day, somewhere on the internet, the following meme was posted:
The Men’s Rights subreddit reacted, as it so often does, with manly indignation: how dare these women take our Fathers Day from us! Even by normal Men’s Rights standards for empty outrage this seems a bit much. After all, it’s not exactly news that a lot of women raise their kids by themselves, when the fathers of their children, refuse to act as, well, fathers to their children. Indeed, “financial abortions” — that is, consequence-free child abandonment for men — is one of the central demands of the Men’s Rights movement.
Last month, I reported that Indian Men’s Rights Activist and marital rape apologist Amartya Talukdar — a regular contributor to leading Men’s Rights site A Voice for Men — was a Holocaust denier.
The evidence? A series of Tweets in which, among other things, he declared that the “Holocaust is a lie of gigantic proportion,” expressed a certain admiration for Hitler and, bizarrely, declared that Hillary Clinton was a “Jewess.”
When I asked AVFM’s then-managing editor Dean Esmay about these troubling Tweets from someone he had published on his site only a few days earlier, he responded … by calling me a “stalker madman” and threatening to call the police if I ever emailed him again. (It was, as far as I recall, the only time I’ve ever emailed him.)
Well, ok, I thought, the folks at AVFM seem to be congenitally unable to ever admit to being wrong, even when the evidence is right before their eyes. But I didn’t think AVFM would be dumb enough to post anything by Talukdar ever again.
Dean Esmay, the Chief Operations Officer (whatever that is) of A Voice for Men, has scored a major public relations coup for the Men’s Rights movement with his aggressive promotion of an exciting new Twitter hashtag, #SpankAFeminist.
In what I can only assume is an attempt to convince the world that MRAs do indeed spend a good portion of their days fantasizing about doing physical harm to feminists, Esmay explains in a post on AVFM that the hashtag is necessary “because it’s finally time to put abusive liars over the knee.”