Search Results for paul elam
Paul Elam of A Voice for Men: In His Own Words
[UPDATE: THE 20/20 STORY HAS BEEN POSTPONED ONCE AGAIN.] The long-awaited 20/20 story on the Manosphere is scheduled to run tonight — that is Friday, October 18 — at 10 PM EST on ABC. (I’ll open a thread for live chatting during the show.) The story will include interviews with Paul Elam of A Voice for Men, who is rather well-known already to readers of this website, to put it mildly.
But for any of you who have arrived here after seeing the 20/20 piece, I would like to provide an introduction of sorts to Mr. Elam, who is probably, for better or worse, the most influential figure in the Men’s Rights movement (or, as he prefers to call it, the Men’s Human Rights Movement).
Elam is also a fierce misogynist with a penchant for angry, violent rhetoric full of only-slightly veiled threats. But don’t take my word for it. Perhaps the best way to get to know Mr. Elam is through his own words.
So here are some of Elam’s thoughts on a variety of issues, taken from postings on his website A Voice for Men. I have linked each quote back to its source on A Voice for Men.
Manosphere Catfight! WF Price of The Spearhead eviscerates Paul Elam for his impending 20/20 appearance
Aw, kitties!
[EDIT: The 20/20 story has been postponed] So the Men’s Rightsers are already up in arms about the upcoming 20/20 story on the Manosphere — which, to remind everyone, is showing today, that is, Friday, October 18 at 10 PM EST on ABC. So far I’ve run across angry posts about it on A Voice for Men (naturally), the Men’s Rights subreddit, Rex Patriarch, Stares at the World and Captain Capitalism. Heck, the good Captain even made a rambling 30-minute video on the subject; skip forward ten minutes to hear his misogynistic tirade against the two women who wrote the brief teaser piece now up on the ABC website, complete with “funny” voices. He even calls them “twats.”
But so far the most interesting response comes from W. F. Price of The Spearhead, who uses the occasion to launch an attack on … Paul Elam. Yep. It’s a Manosphere He-Man-Cat-Fight.
A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam blames rape chants at Canadian schools on feminism
Paul Elam: If he hears any more about rape culture, he might possibly lose it.
You might not think that student orientation events would be an appropriate venue for chants celebrating the rape of underage girls. But such chants have apparently been something of a tradition at not one but two Canadian schools — and possibly more? Last week, a scandal erupted at the University of British Columbia after word got out that an orientation event at its Saunder School of Business had included a chant on this particular theme, led by orientation leaders from the Commerce Undergraduate Society.
According to one woman who disgustedly live-tweeted the event, it went something like this:
Y-O-U-N-G at UBC, we like ‘em young, Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for go to jail.
Meanwhile, in Halifax, someone made a video — and posted it to YouTube — of student orientation leaders at Saint Mary’s University chanting a nearly identical chant.
Naturally, noted, er, human rights activist Paul Elam of A Voice for Men felt compelled to weigh in on the issue. He started off by expressing his deep disgust … with having to hear anything about the issue at all:
I swear if I read one more outraged “report” — aka feverish, paranoid rant — that twists something stupid into “evidence” of a “rape culture,” I am going to just lose it.
Yes, how outrageous that a chant joking about raping underage girls at an official school orientation event could possibly be construed as contributing in any way to rape culture! So sorry that your delicate sensitivities were offended, Paul.
After some more predictable histrionics on this “hyper-hipster-hysteria” from Mr. Elam, he got to his main point: blaming feminists for the rape chants.
No, really.
I am an older guy. I find it interesting, given that I came from a more “patriarchal” generation, that something like this when I was 18 would have been unthinkable. Why? Because other men, especially older ones, would have pulled those young people aside and said, “Hey, we don’t do that around here.” That would have been that, as they say, if it had even happened in the first place.
We can thank feminists for this. Through policy and governance they have eroded positive male role models, and male authority, right out of the culture. After feminist undermining of the family, removing fathers from the lives of children and demonizing male heroes, we have a population of young people, especially young men, growing more socially feral with each new generation.
And now what do we see? Feminists running around everywhere telling men they need to tell each other, “Don’t rape. Don’t abuse women. Don’t this. Don’t that.” …
You can’t assault the identity of half the human race, marginalize and disempower them, which is exactly what feminism has done, and expect anything in return but what you are getting.
In other words: You gals asked for it.
Paul Elam, you are rape culture.
MRA Paul Elam: “This world deserves a jerk on the collar and a slap across the face and the flying spittle of rage.”
A Voice for Men’s Flying Spittle Production Department
“Compassion for Boys and Men.” This, the slogan of Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men, has always struck me as a teensy bit ironic, given that site founder and head angry dude Paul Elam spends much of his time berating other men, and really only seems interested in showing “compassion,” if it can be called that, for those who not only agree with everything he says but also donate money to him.
Recently Mr. Elam ran across a four-year-old video that’s been posted to the Men’s Rights subreddit numerous times in recent days. It shows a young woman assaulting a campus preacher, and knocking him off a platform, after falsely accusing him of groping her. (The woman, a student at Middle Tennessee State University, was arrested and later pled guilty to assault charges, getting a year’s probation, some community service and a fine; the preacher suffered only minor injuries.)
But the fact that a few people in the crowd cheered for the attacker apparently convinced Elam that everyone in the world except him and a few of his pals are worthless pieces of crap.
Look at the crowd cheer this violent lunatic on. It isn’t just her that is the problem. We live in a psychotic world where women can do whatever they want to men, as long as they vomit up a lie, like “get your hand off my breast.” It is a world which praises sickness, as long as the person to suffer for it is male.
Well, actually, it looked like most of the people in the crowd were a bit shocked by her assault and the preacher’s fall, and several people came forward to help him. And I’m not quite sure how Elam managed to miss the fact that the woman in question was led off by police at the end of the video.
In this culture, most every woman is Sharon Osbourne. Most every man is Hugo Schwyzer.
By describing women as a bunch of “Sharon Osbournes,” Elam is not (I don’t think) suggesting that they are savvy, articulate women who’ve been able to not only survive but flourish in male-dominated industries; no, he’s making a reference to the one time that Osbourne made a horrible castration joke on national television, and suggesting that women are a bunch of evil harpies that love to fantasize about cutting men’s dicks off.
By referring to men as “Hugo Schwyzers” — Elam’s post was written before Schwyzer’s recent Twitter meltdown — he’s not (I don’t think) suggesting that men are all a bunch of manipulative predators who glom onto feminism as a way to exploit and manipulate women, but rather suggesting that they’re a bunch of obsequious manginas who let women walk all over them.
I feel confident in attributing these interpretations to Elam’s words because he’s made these arguments many times before. It’s pretty obvious that Elam hates women. It’s only a little less obvious that he hates most men as well.
But I don’t think it’s really this video that’s got Elam angry. It looks to me like he’s still stewing over a recent op-ed by libertarian anti-feminist Cathy Young — a writer in many ways deeply sympathetic to the Men’s Rights ideology — which took a passing shot at A Voice for Men and similar sites whose “steady diet of vulgar woman-bashing … discredits any valid points they may make.”
So far Elam’s site has run at least four other posts — possibly five? I’ve lost count - responding to the single sentence mentioning AVFM in her column, including one by him and another by a “brigade” of self-described “Honey Badgers” (female MRAs), but Elam can’t resist the opportunity to point out yet again that he’s going to remain as angry as he wants to be:
I do not give a rat’s fucking ass about offending or upsetting any of them.
This world does not deserve MHRAs that are decent or measured or considerate of the mainstreams sensibilities. This world deserves a jerk on the collar and a slap across the face and the flying spittle of rage that it earns with each man and boy that it denigrates and abuses.
“The Flying Spittle of Rage” makes a much better — and more accurate — slogan for AVFM than that boring old “Compassion for Boys and Men.”
Paul Elam blames me for his alleged ignorance of the blatant fraud on his own site [CORRECTED]
Thanks Obama! (And David Futrelle.) (For more, click image)
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
So the mighty Paul Elam has acknowledged — in the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, at least -that there might just be some sort of problem going on with regard to, you know, that whole fake screenshot thing. You know, the blatant fraud that A Voice for Men mangling — sorry, managing — editor Dean Esmay seems to have engaged in to cover up a mistake.
But, Paul being Paul, he somehow manages to turn his sort-of acknowledgement of the problem into an attack on me, bizarrely blaming me (the person who actually pointed out this fraud) for him not knowing about it before today:
As much as I hate to say it, Futrelle does have a valid point. I am looking in to it today, and unlike Futrelle, I will address the results of my inquiry in public no matter where they end up.
I don’t mind looking into problems, even when they are pointed out by such a bald faced liar. I would have actually been aware of this sooner if his blog were worth reading. I had to become aware of it in your comments to even know there was a problem.
Well, Paul, I would have happily brought my findings to the comments section of A Voice for Men, rather than the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, but you may recall I am banned there. And I wonder if anyone there would have had the courage to stand up and say that, gosh, this Futrelle guy has a point, given how quickly people are censored there for deviating from your site’s perverse “conventional wisdom.”
And gosh, Paul, how unfair it is to expect the publisher of a site to be aware of what’s, you know, published on it. Concerns about the story were brought up by your own commenters shortly after it first ran. Esmay referred in an article and an editorial note to my alleged “lies” about the story; it didn’t occur to you to even go look at what I had said? And even aside from the phony screenshot, or anything I’ve written, did you really think that Esmay’s bizarre explanations for the original mistake made any kind of sense?
In other words, are you incompetent, or are you lying about being unaware of the problem until now?
In any case, I await the results of your “investigation.” I am especially eager to see how you will manage to spin things so it becomes someone else’s fault. Will it be some evil conspiracy that “set you up?”
And when exactly have I lied, Paul? Could you offer a citation? When I point out the lies on your site, I fucking back up each claim.
[EDIT: Added some stuff in the "gosh, Paul" paragraph and made a few other changes.]
Scorned: How Pissed is GirlWritesWhat at A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam?
GirlWritesWhat to TheWoollyBumblebee: This misogynistic hate blog ain’t big enough for the both of us.
Sometimes the subtext is much more interesting than the text. On the surface, blabby FeMRA videoblogger Girl Writes What’s recent 3,635 word blog post on the l’affaire TheWoolyBumblebee is a nasty, brutish, but not-at-all-short attack on her former FeMRA comrade at men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men, recently kicked out of the clubhouse for telling off libertarians and Men Going Their Own Way. (See here and here for more details on it all.)
But if you read a little more carefully you can see signs that Girl Writes What’s anger and frustration may really be directed at AVFM’s founder and grand pooh-bah Paul Elam.
A Voice for Men/MRA London infighting gets even sillier: Paul Elam makes his uninformed stand
So, that tempest in a teacup involving MRA London, A Voice for Men’s British satellite group, that I wrote about last night? Well, it’s gotten even sillier.
The tl;dr is that MRA London has split up, with accusations and counter-accusations flying. AVFM staffer Andy Thomas has appointed himself CEO of the group after apparently tossing out most of its members. (Or “accepting their resignations,” or something; who knows?) As far as I can tell, this means that the group may now be down to literally two people.
Now AVFM’s Maximum Leader Paul Elam has posted a very long statement on the subject, saying very little indeed. The gist of it? He really doesn’t know what happened in the “very British coup” or who was right, but he’s sticking with Thomas because he knows the dude better than the dudes who are no longer part of the group. No, really, that’s his explanation.
Not only that, but Elam admits flatly that doesn’t really even care who was right, at least not enough to bother to try to figure out the basic facts of the case:
I am not in the least interested in trying to ascertain who was more or less at fault in MRA London’s internal conflicts. It is not that I am indifferent to right and wrong in this case, but simply as a pragmatic matter I cannot and won’t try to wade through several weeks/months of infighting, insinuation and accusations between people in conflict 8,000 miles from here and even pretend that I can come up with an informed judgment.
Really? Because most political organizations, when faced with issues like this, like to at least pretend to gather the facts before making their decisions.
Elam also alludes vaguely to
other factors, having to do with the best interests of AVFM and the MHRM, that lend more support to our decision to maintain the historical relationship we have had with Andy Thomas of MRA London. I am not at liberty to discuss them, but they are compelling.
Oh, so there were some SUPER SEEEKRET reasons too! Having to do with the “best interests” of the world historical force that is the Men’s Human Rights Human Movement of Men (But Not Those Dudes We Just Threw Under The Bus for Super SEEEKRET Reasons).
Come to think of it, no one has actually explained straightforwardly the non-super seekret reasons either. Ah well.
Elam also makes clear that any dissent to this decision will be confined to the comments of this one thread.
ALL HAIL ELAM AND HIS INFALLIBLE WISDOM OF MAKING DECISIONS BASED ON NOT KNOWING SHIT ABOUT WHAT HE’S MAKING DECISIONS ABOUT.
PS In my haste to write this post I neglected to include my regular reminder that AVFM, while claiming to be a “human rights” group, continues to post a literal call to firebomb courthouses and police stations in its activism section.
Why haven’t Men’s Rights Activists turned on Paul Elam for falsely accusing Arianna Pattek of civil rights violations? [UPDATE: Elam retraction]
Graphic from SAVE Services, whose press releases regularly run on A Voice for Men. Why doesn’t this policy apply to Paul Elam?
UPDATE: Elam has retracted his original story. See the end of this post for more details.
Men’s Rights Activists often insist that false accusations of rape are literally as bad as rape itself, and that false accusers of rape should spend as much time in prison as actual rapists.
Presumably they feel the same way about false accusers of other crimes, from murder to check kiting.
So in the wake of Paul Elam’s reckless false accusations against recent Georgetown graduate Arianna Pattek, one would expect other MRAs to rise up en masse to demand that Elam turn himself in.
Elam, you may recall, accused Pattek of serious violations of civil rights laws, claiming that she, as an employee of Georgetown’s admissions office, showed clear bias against white men. Indeed, Elam didn’t even qualify his accusations with an “alleged,” as journalists routinely do when writing about those accused but not convicted of crimes. Here’s what he wrote about her:
An Unsolicited Update from Paul Elam’s P*nis
Regular readers of this blog, for better or worse, know one thing that makes “Men’s Human Rights Activist” Paul Elam’s penis happy: The prospect of harassing feminists. He is, after all, the man who wrote of one feminist that “that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.”
Now Mr. Elam has given us a rather more complete account of what it is that pleases his penis. I’m not sure there was any great demand for this information, but he has chosen to release it, and so here we are.
In a post with the tasteful title “on tits, ass and fucktards,” Elam informs the world that he is in fact a fan of the first two items in this list – that is, tits and ass. He is also, he goes on to explain, a lover of
Sorry, I have to stop for a moment to remind you that you are about to read about things that give Paul Elam — yes THAT Paul Elam — a boner.
I will not think any less of you if you stop reading right here.
If you are ready and willing to continue, here we go:
I like well-formed thighs that lead up to the promise land, and smooth knees above shapely calves. Of course, all that combined with a woman’s pretty face is a crowning glory; full lips that promise supple kisses and great blow jobs, clear eyes and unblemished skin. All this combines to make a woman utterly fuckable, and visually that is what I like most of all. I like to look at women that are little fuckmuffins.
Yes, he actually wrote all that, attached his name to it, and posted it for other people to see.
But as much as Elam likes to look at “little fuckmuffins” he does not actually seem to like most of them very much.
After roughly 150 words devoted mostly to cataloguing his favorite female body parts, Elam evidently runs out of nice things to say about women, and so he returns again to his favorite pastime, devoting the bulk of the post to a rant explaining how much he hates “feminist fucktards,” traditionalist women, and women with Facebook accounts.
While happy enough with “fuckmuffins [who] are sexually liberated and adventurous” and who “like to please and be pleased,” Elam informs the world that he feels no such love for all those awful “fuckmuffins” who “liv[e] life with prudish sticks up their asses made from the same wood that forms the chips on their shoulders.”
He’s also mighty pissed at all those who aren’t interested in hearing him expound at length on what his penis likes.
Of the now almost endless list of things that have grown annoyingly stupid and sanctimonious about feminism is the Victorianesque shaming of my sexual programming as a man. Even with the so called “sex positive” feminists, the most hypocritical assholes of them all, the only positive sexuality they embrace is that of women. To them, male sexuality, in all its glory, is something to be buried, controlled and allowed to surface only when it serves the sexual needs of some narcissistic, horny, self-absorbed little “sex positive” princess.
Unfortunately, more traditional-minded women aren’t much interested in hearing about his penis either. And for some reason they, like feminists, think that there might be some sort of connection between men and rape.
Who are those traditionalists? You will know them by their obsequious silence while feminists shame men for committing the scurrilous act of looking at women sexually. Or better yet, as they join in with their “men can stop rape” bedfellows to twist and distort the natural inclinations of young men with Puritan sexual guilt that marches in lockstep with the feminist hatred of male sexuality.
Elam stops for a moment to reassure his readers that despite all that stuff about “well-formed thighs” and blow-job lips he prefers Good Women to mere “fuckmuffins.”
Now, all that being said, is woman-as-fuckmuffin all I care about? Hardly. As a matter of fact, I would throw fuckmuffin to the curb faster than you can say “patriarchy” to spend time with a woman of good character and intelligence. I have learned in life that my dick has a healthy agenda for humanity, but not necessarily for me. So as my values have matured, so has my taste in women.
Heck, it turns out he actually sort of hates “fuckmuffin.” After all, he tells us,
fuckmuffin … is prone to act indignant when she feels sexualized (by the wrong guy). She can become so angry at being “objectified” that you can see her tits shake right through that tight sweater with the neckline that plunges to the vicinity of her toes.
And then he compares her to a bug:
Time and experience will lead [men] to understand that fuckmuffin should be regarded with same respect as you would afford a stinging insect.
Basically, he explains, the only problem with lustful young men who ogle women is that they haven’t learned to hate women enough quite yet. And so women shouldn’t complain when young guys stare at them. Or when they don’t. As far as I can figure it, he thinks women shouldn’t ever complain about anything.
Leave [young men] the fuck alone. There is nothing wrong with them. Nothing needs to be fixed. If you want to help a young man like that, just start encouraging him to connect the dots between fuckmuffin’s propensity to take her own picture and post it to Facebook four times a day and her ultimate tendency to make him miserable. Eventually he will get the connection. And if he doesn’t, maybe that makes him happy. Either way, it is none of your fucking business.
And so ends what’s probably the strangest work of erotica I think I’ve ever read.
MRA Paul Elam Launches a Hate Campaign Against a College Student for Attending a Demonstration and Making Twitter Jokes
Paul Elam, Poster Boy for a Hate Campaign
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.
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.
