Attention tiny ladies! Paul Elam wants you to know that if you attack him, he will totally punch you right back. And not in a satirical way, either. With his actual, non-satirical fists.
A Voice for Men’s maximum leader has long insisted that his notorious “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post was nothing more than misunderstood “satire.” That is, when he argued that men who are abused by women would be totally justified if they “beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall,” this was somehow a “Juvenalian” satire of some sort. There’s a famous quote from The Princess Bride that might be appropriate here.
Well, now Mr. Elam has announced to the world that every month is a potential “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” for him. Even if the “Violent Bitch” in question is less than half his size. In a post that he insists is super serious, he writes:
Thor, Captain America and other Norse gods prepare for battle.
Huh. So Thor — you know, that dude in the comic books based extremely loosely on Norse mythology — is going to be replaced by a woman. No, for reals. Marvel comics announced it on The View. No, that’s for real too.
I wonder what the alpha dogs over in the Red Pill subreddit might think of this?
I‘ve been so busy with all the shenanigans surrounding AVFM and their little conference that I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting the good old Men’s Rights subreddit. Don’t feel bad, Men’s Rights subreddit, for today I took a few moments out of my hard-core semi-vacationing to pay you a little visit!
While there, I noticed the regulars discussing a terrible quandary that faces all modern men: “As a man, would you help a child in distress?”
Well, the AVFM conference is over. I thought I’d post links to some of the media coverage today. I’m not sure Paul Elam and co have quite attained the level of respectability they were going for with the conference. It probably didn’t help that their PR gal, Janet Bloomfield, kept posting about “whores” and then, during the final panel discussion, delivered a passionate defense of “doxxing.”
I have a new theory that I think might help to explain why so many Men’s Rights Activists are so obsessed with false accusations of rape. It’s simple: They are so used to making false accusations themselves, about pretty much everything, that it’s hard for them to conceive of someone making an accusation that is actually true.
Naturally, as a critic of the Men’s Rights movement I’m a fairly reliable target for these false charges, and rarely does a day go by in which I don’t learn some new, terrible, and wholly imaginary thing I’m alleged to have said or done. Hell, these days I can barely make it through a Twitter conversation with A Voice for Men’s Dean Esmay without him spouting some grotesque falsehood about me.
The latest accusation from the A Voice for Men crowd – or at least from AVFM’s so-called Honey Badger Brigade – is that all the media talk about Elliot Rodger being an MRA was my fault. Or, as “Honey Badger” Alison Tieman put it in a tweet that she sent to an assortment of media outlets that had written about Rodger and the MRAs,
Unlike women, men have REAL issues to deal with. Like giant otters.
Anyone who reads the Men’s Rights subreddit on a regular basis knows that when you see the username DavidByron2 you are in for a treat. Well, a “treat” in the sense that discovering a flaming bag of dog poop on your doorstop is a “treat.” Like many Men’s Rightsers, he’s both smug and ignorant, a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
But somehow he manages to be more than just another insufferable mansplaining rage-baby who spends all of his spare time ranting about a subject — feminism — he knows less than nothing about. No, there’s a kind of daft genius to his comments; I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
And so I thought I’d wind up this week with a small collection of the best –that is, worst — comments he left in the Men’s Rights subreddit this week. In choosing the top 5, I have confined myself mostly to those that got more upvotes than downvotes, because, seriously, the thought that there are actual human beings out there upvoting this crap is almost as amazing as the fact that there’s an actual human being posting it. And thinking himself quite clever and righteous for doing so.
Oh, Reddit! Need another reminder that on Reddit, whiny lady-hating man-babies can be found outside the Men’s Rights and Red Pill subreddits? Take a look at this lovely comment from occasional Red Pill commenter purple4th in Change My Views, which (the last I checked) had garnered nearly 150 net upvotes from the crowd there. Here’s the money quote:
[S]ocietal laws are so filled with misandry that in 99% of societal contexts such as going to office, going to the supermarket, going to the movies, etc;, it is men who have to be continually afraid of women.
That’s right, fellas. Women who worry about men harming them are all a bunch of big sillies. It’s MEN who should be worried Oh, sure those gals may look innocent, but don’t let your guard down for a minute lest one of them misander you with a false accusation of being too much of a dude! con
Purple4th continues:
As my investment banks’ Sexual Harassment presentation says, “It is harassment if she says so”. Period.
Really? I decided to look online to see if I could find any Sexual Harassment literature making that argument. A search for “It is harassment if she says so” in quotes returns only one hit on Google: Purple4th’s comment on Reddit.
In fact, the legal standard for sexual harassment — in the US at least — is not “whatever the hell a random woman wants to call harassment.” It’s whether or not a “reasonable person” would see the behavior as harassment.
But that’s how it works in the real world. MRAs and the MRA-adjacent don’t live in the real world.
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks! And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the neverending struggle against imaginary feminists continues apace. Today, one brand-new Redditor, a self-described former feminist, won himself several dozen upvotes from the regulars by bringing them a literally unbelievable tale of his adventures with a coven of slap-happy feminists.
I stopped calling myself a feminist a few years ago when I went to a meeting and was told “men are inly allowed in this safe space if they participate in a slap circle.”
The idea was that it would be harder for me to intimidate with my six foot stature if all the women had a chance to slap me in the face. I left.
Another guy actually did it.
It’s all true. I WAS THAT GUY.
BUT WHO WAS PHONE?
Actually, no. If this dude’s story is true, I will literally eat my cats.
While most of the Men’s Rightsers commenting in the thread seem to have swallowed this story whole, “slap circles” aren’t actually a thing in feminism.
They are a thing, though, amongst bored and/or drunk young men (and sometimes women) around the world, as countless videos on YouTube can attest.
As as site called Hungry Teen explains, a “Slap Circle” is
A great way to bond with friends, release aggression and stimulate the face. The Slap Circle is a game made for the more hardcore, daring person and can be used as a test for finding the manliest of the group. Although adopting female fighting techniques, the slap circle appeals far more to men. Nothing is required for this game, other than a hand, a face and a set of balls.
All you do, is stand in a circle and slap the person to your right in the face, while waiting for a slap from the person on your left. If you’ve had enough, you step out of the circle and the last two standing fight it out for the winner.
I eagerly await stories in the Men’s Rights subreddit detailing Andrea Dworkin’s demand that all men and boys be forced to take the Cinnamon Challenge and all those insidious mandatory nut shot seminars being forced upon all college students unfortunate enough to be born with a pair of balls.
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks! And thanks again to all who’ve already donated.
If anyone was hoping – against their better judgement – that Men’s Rights activists would be inspired by the tragedy in Isla Vista to reconsider any of their beliefs, or even to reflect for a moment on the many striking similarities between passages in Elliot Rodger’s book-length manifesto and comments posted every day by MRAs and others in the manosphere, well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you should not keep that hope alive.
It’s not that they’re not talking about the tragedy. A look through the top 100 posts in the Men’s Rights subreddit, the largest Men’s Rights forum online, reveals that roughly a third of them, including the top stickied post, relate in some way to Elliot Rodger’s rampage and the discussions that have come up online and in the media in its aftermath.
But the message of virtually all of these posts is: “Nothing to see here! Move along!” There are numerous posts expressing outrage that anyone would see any connection between Rodger’s toxic misogyny to the Men’s Rights movement; there are others mocking and attacking the #YesAllWomen hashtag; there’s even one suggesting that Rodger, who wrote about how he longed to watch all the women of the world starve to death in concentration camps, wasn’t actually a misogynist at all.
Take a look. One post, with more than 500 upvotes, complains:
You know, maybe I’ve been unfair to these manosphere fellows. I’m always saying that they hate women. But what if they don’t really hate women? Like hate hate. What if they just don’t respect women, you know, for totally understandable non-hatey reasons that aren’t misogynistic at all?
I mean, there’s nothing misogynistic about refusing to show an entire gender any respect because of some reasons you came up with, right?
