A Voice for Men has doxxed another student who was at the Warren Farrell protest at the University of Toronto. Her “crimes,” aside from going to the protest? She posted jokey comments on Twitter and a picture suggesting that it’s a good idea for people to get consent before having sex with other people. The Men’s Rights hate site has pledged to reveal the information of as many (female) protesters as they can find, and place them on Register-Her.com, its phony “offenders registry” which features feminists targeted by AVFM alongside convicted murderers and child molesters.
Readers of Man Boobz, in Toronto and around the world, would like to offer whatever support they can — moral or practical — to the targets of AVFM’s hate campaign. If you are one of the victims, or know how to get in touch with one of them, please contact me at futrelle [[at]] well [[dot]] com and I will pass their messages along to you.
EDITED TO ADD: If anyone has any messages for Sophia, the latest victim, I have a way I can pass them along to her. Just email them to me, and let me know if you want me to pass your email address along to her as well. Anything you want confidential will be kept confidential.
This guy, who enjoys outing anonymous college students and making videos featuring his own endlessly talking head, wishes to remain anonymous.
Some months back, I made a post in which I referred to the mysterious JohnTheOther by his real name. I didn’t think this was a big deal, since John — whom regular readers know as the number two man at Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men – had previously used his real name, and linked it to his online pseudonym, in various writings of his and on YouTube. But he asked me to remove his name from Man Boobz because, he said, he was being harassed. So, out of courtesy to him, I did.
Now, frankly, JohnTheOther is making me feel like he played me for a sucker, and is making me wonder why I continue to pay him this courtesy.
Here at Man Boobz, I’ve set it so first-time commenters have their comments sent to moderation so I can decide if they’re sort of people I want to have commenting here on a regular basis. Given the obnoxiousness of some of the people I let through, I imagine some of you might wonder just what it takes to get censored around here. So here, as a public service of sorts, is one recent comment from a first-timer that I didn’t let through.
When you spend as much time as we do here at Man Boobz scrutinizing the Men’s Rights movement, it’s easy to forget what a fringe phenomenon it is. So here are some charts from Google Trends – charting the frequency of certain search terms from 2004 until today — that help to put it all in perspective. (Thanks to Katz, Cloudiah and Cthulhu’s Intern in the comments for inspiring this post.)
That “rapidly growing” Men’s Rights movement that MRAs like to talk about? It may actually be stagnant or even shrinking, if searches for “men’s rights” are any indication. Despite a recent comeback, they’re still less than half of what they were at their height in 2004.
No, there’s nothing wrong with that graph; it’s just that My Little Pony is so much more popular than Men’s Rights that the latter simply vanishes into the X axis.
Well, nothing will top that, but here’s a graph showing that people are a lot more concerned about misogyny than misandry — and, I would add, for good reason.
Let’s see what other trends we can find!
(Oh, and sorry about the low quality pics; WordPress won’t let me embed the charts.)
Jen Kirkman (Men Against Assholes and Misogyny Not Pictured)
With all the assholery that I’ve been writing about lately, I wanted to highlight something that wasn’t assholish. That is, in fact, anti-assholish. And that’s comedian Jen Kirkman’s new tumblr blog: “MA’AM” – MEN AGAINST ASSHOLES & MISOGYNY, which she describes as “a place for men – not afraid to call themselves feminists – to write from their heart to help educate men who may still hold some sexist attitudes towards women.”
Kirkman started it a bit over a week ago after going on a sort of Twitter strike, frustrated by all the misogynistic assholes that kept popping up on her timeline.
Sometimes I would get sad when I was batting away dozens of hate-filled things while in my timeline my male comedian friends were just joking along having fun – as we all should be. And I felt like I was alone on the playground and I wanted them to speak up for me. Not “beat up” the specific people attacking me … but I wanted my male comedian friends to write, in public, about things they have expressed to me in private about how much they feel for the women in their life who are still spoken to this way.
So far she’s gotten a lot of followers — she picked up a thousand in the first 48 hours — and a ton of submissions, some from fellow comedians (Greg Proops, Michael Ian Black), some from regular dudes, one from her dad.
The submissions are, I suppose I should say, a mixed bag. Some of the essays are great. Some are a bit mansplainy, or White Knighty, or otherwise a bit problematic.
But that’s kind of inherent to the project. Jen is challenging guys who don’t spend all day every day thinking about feminism, but whose hearts are basically in the right place, to stand up against the asshole misogynists of the world. And a lot of guys are responding to her challenge.
Oh, BTW, while we’re on the topic: Jen is also pretty fucking hilarious.
Here’s some of her standup:
And here she is narrating some Drunk History. (She really was drunk.)
Paul Elam is a 55-year-old man who once told a feminist foe that “the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.” Today he’s launched a campaign of defamation against a college student that’s clearly intended to intimidate her and other feminists into silence. The alleged crimes of this woman, whom Elam identifies by name? Possibly attending a demonstration against MRA author Warren Farrell at the University of Toronto, possibly tearing down posters for the event, and making a couple of jokes on Twitter. Oh, and she also once suggested that Farrell was a misogynist.
Elam has not yet revealed what effect this new campaign has had upon his penis.
While her (apparent) attendance at the anti-Farrell demonstration is what brought the young woman to Elam’s attention, he seems particularly puzzled and enraged by two jokey comments she made on Twitter. In one of them, she joked that her “political position” was “kill all men hail satan.” In the other, she said she was thinking about getting knuckle tattoos that spell out “misandry.”
These jokey comments have evidently convinced Elam that
She doesn’t just hate men; doesn’t just want them dead or silenced or marginalized or ignored. She at least entertains the idea of permanently marking her skin with that hatred, like a convict signaling gang affiliation.
Pretty harsh words from someone whose YouTube handle used to be TheHappyMisogynist. (Check the URL here.)
So what exactly is the point of publicizing her name, which will give the assholes now posting rape threats and other violent shit about the demonstrators at that Warren Farrell protest the real name of a real, live person to harass?
Elam, while carefully avoiding any direct incitement of harassment and/or violence, makes clear that his aim is to “stop her.”
[She] is not going to stop. And no one at the University of Toronto is going to stop her. We can figure that one out by the fact that they chartered clubs to enable that kind of conduct.
For that reason, we bring her to public attention here at AVfM.
Additionally, over the next two days, she will be listed on register-her.com as a known bigot, and her image and name will find a place on our display of featured offenders.
Elam promises to do the same, by name, to others who attended the protest as well.
The best way to strike back at Elam’s campaign to shut up critics of his hateful Men’s Rights ideology? Make more noise.
If anyone is interested in reaching out to the student and any others who may be targeted by Elam, please contact me or leave a comment below. And if anyone knows how to contact her, please send me an email.
(Also, at one point Elam describes Farrell as “an individual who has dedicated a lifetime to helping children in trouble.” Oh, is that what he was doing when he was working on a book that he said would highlight the alleged “positive” aspects of incest?)
EDITED TO ADD: Just to make clear, this woman is not the same woman that Elam and JohnTheOther were talking about in their previous posts; it’s a different woman, who appears only briefly in that video. It’s not clear if they have the other woman’s info, but if not they are certainly still looking for it.
The Men’s Rights movement has been described by some as “the abusers’ lobby.” I don’t think that’s fair, but there are certainly those within the movement that fit the bill – not necessarily because they themselves are abusers, but because, among other things, they lionize abusers and advocate on their behalf.
In the case of hate site A Voice for Men, there is another way in which the term applies: the “activism” of the site and its followers, insofar as it consists of anything more than self-promotion, often mirrors the actions of abusers – AVFM is known for harassing individuals, usually women, and exposing (or threatening to expose) personal information that could be used to stalk and harm them, in an attempt to intimidate them and other feminists and shut them up. Indeed, the site on several occasions has offered $1000 “bounties” on the personal information of its foes.
The kitties are not impressed with your argument, Mr. Anonymous
So our excitable old friend MarkyMark (not the actor-singer) just put up a not-very-original rant of the “women are worse than Hitler because of abortion” variety. More interesting than his post — which is frankly not very interesting — is this comment from an anonymous fellow that takes misogynistic self-righteousness to a whole new (low) level:
This is one of the reasons that I use women for my convenience. They can kill with impunity – nothing I do to them comes close to that level of evil. So they are for my pleasure, then I ditch them although I do come back sometimes. (They aren’t very bright which is what makes it workable.)
Yep: He’s not just a self-righteous prick; he’s self-righteous about being a prick.
I can only hope his own “evil” is mostly of the “slept with a woman and didn’t call her back” sort — or is just imaginary internet boasting — because his “logic” could pretty much justify anything short of violent murder.
If you stuff a bunch of angry, narcissistic, egotistical twits into a “movement” the size of a teapot, it is perhaps inevitable that there will be drama. So I’m pleased to report on a dramatic BREAKING STORY in the Men’s Rights “movement” – a split between A Voice for Men and the bald, blabby, bigoted far-right videoblogger Bernard Chapin.
Well, I’m not sure how much of a BREAKING STORY it is. It happened about three weeks ago, but I only just noticed it yesterday.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t how birth control actually works.
You might think that Pickup Artists, dudes obsessed with sexing up the young fertile lasses, would be huge fans of contraceptives – which, after all, are what makes their particular lifestyle possible. But some prominent PUAs are about as enthusiastic about contraception as a Pope.
In the case of the charming fellow who calls himself Heartiste, I mean this literally. In a recent posting, he quotes approvingly from Pope Paul VI’s 1968 Humanae Vitae dissing contraceptives for allegedly demeaning the women that use them. Paul suggested that contraception may cause men to
lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.
I’m no Pope, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.
