I can’t really recommend this long article about MRAs. It’s not awful, but it seems determined to demonstrate something no one had questioned: “golly, not all MRAs are neckbearded trolls. They’re humans too!” OK, I know and agree; there are circumstances in which anyone could have a civilized conversation with them…which the author proceeds to do, talking to a random MRA named Max in Chicago, and also calling up Paul Elam and Roosh, and in every case doing his very best to put them in a good light, while not easing up on their awful opinions.
Which is fine. I don’t think we should ignore the ordinariness of the men’s rights weirdos. But I think a more honest approach would involve also confronting them with their more odious positions, not just their day-to-day commonplace conversations, and that’s missing. I was left wondering what the point of the whole thing was.
And while it’s also good to subvert wrong-headed stereotypes about MRAs, why did he have to reinforce this one?
There are some other things that Max is proud to be. He is an outspoken atheist and an active Libertarian. The contours are the same: a proactive anticlericalism and a distaste for regulatory apparatus couched in a vague sense that this distaste constitutes a moral stance.
Aargh. #NOTALLATHEISTS. Although sometimes it seems like it.
Here’s an article I do recommend reading: it’s all about Paul Elam’s history as a deadbeat dad, drug addict, and parasite on women. Instead of just calling up an MRA, letting them put on their most congenial voice, and emphasizing their ordinariness, this article digs deeper into Elam’s history by contact his ex-wives (I lost track of how many he had) and his daughter. His daughter is not happy with Elam.
It makes her angry that Elam has made himself into a martyr when his history speaks to the contrary. “Here you have men asking him for advice on how to get kids back, and he doesn’t say, ‘I was a really shit dad and a drug addict and I hate women and I’m not going to talk about my estranged kids or spanking my daughter’s son for opening up a fridge.’ He says women are awful, but I’m a woman. I raised two boys. I’ve been a victim of abuse but I didn’t let it affect me. He says women are needy, but I reached out to him in his time of need. The list goes on.”
One of his ex-wives:
“He sits there taking all these people’s money and all he’s doing is sucking them dry,” said Susan. “That’s what he’s done all his life — to say it’s the woman’s fault, and not make men look at their own mistakes.”
Yeah, that makes him pretty ordinary, I guess.
What struck me about that “Max” (explicitly a pseudonym) was how delusional he is about appearances: he interprets whole personalities into photos, and complex, specific intents (which revolve around him and people like him) into entirely unremarkable clothing choices.
I haven’t read much beyond that yet, because it takes so much time.
Haven’t read the Vox piece but Buzzfeed posted an in-depth article on Paul Elam’s lifetime of abusing, abandoning and living off of women while profiting from his website: http://www.buzzfeed.com/adamserwer/how-mens-rights-leader-paul-elam-turned-being-a-deadbeat-dad#.ctmkx8w54.
I hope Elam’s ex-wives and family members stay safe, as I’m sure the howler monkeys will be after them with a vengeance now.
One thing I’ve noticed lately in almost all areas of my interest is that there is an expectation that people who hold odious ideas will be totally friendless, unlikeable people. If we discover that in many things they are human and likeable, that means they can’t be odious. For instance, if you are a ruthless businessman, you need to be Ebenezer Scrooge. If you have friends and family, if people like you in a social setting, it erases the ruthlessness. You really aren’t doing bad things, because otherwise no one would like you.
This is a dangerous trend, because it disguises the fact that ordinary people are able to do some totally odious things. So we end up defending people who hold the most indefensible positions just because they are ordinary, nice people in other parts of their lives.
I’m reminded of the cliché regarding serial killers and the like, where shocked neighbours are trotted out to point out that ‘He seemed such a nice young man!’
Wait a minute: non-human neckbeard trolls exist!?
You learn new things every day.
a distaste for regulatory apparatus couched in a vague sense that this distaste constitutes a moral stance.
That’s a pretty good description, though.
Shorter form: me me me me me!
From drst‘s link:
I can’t stop laughing. I already thought of Elam as a complete tool, but I suspect that from now on, whenever I encounter his name, I’m just going to picture a 13-year-old boy angrily demanding the right to shit uncontrollably all over the place.
So… He metaphorically sublimated his childhood frustration into his adult life?
Yeah, I know Freud’s all discredited, but still!
laurentweppe: Maybe there are for example some gray langur MRAs (ones that live in all-male groups).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_langur
Not sure if any of them have internet access.
#& John Small Berries
6 February 2015 at 10:06 am
From drst‘s link:
I laughed my ass off at the thought of Paulie boy crying about not being allowed to shit all over the place and coupled with an image of Roosch saying, “That’s okay Paulie….you do not have to wipe your butt even if those stinking feminists try and make you do it.”
Is it just me, or is Roosh like every bad stereotype of a Persian man somehow brought to life? I half-expect to see a picture of him with a half unbuttoned shit wearing a gold medallion.
Yep. It is just you. Roosh is plenty terrible without the need for stereotypes.
On the article being too nice, I thought the same of the MJ one earlier this month (or late last month?). It seemed like they were bending over backwards to pain a sympathetic picture, and even in doing that, failed.
The Buzzfeed article drst links in comment #2 (and which I see PZ has now included in the OP) is pretty good, and it dose an excellent job of laying out Elam’s narcissism and misogyny. Still, as one of the commenters points out, even it does a fair amount of whitewashing, failing to note Elam’s many overt exhortations to stalking, assault, and terrorism, his constant use of misogynistic slurs, or the full extent of his rape apologism. In a world with many terrible people, it would be an exaggeration to call Elam one of the biggest pieces of shit on the planet, but he is thoroughly awful, and his deeply harmful actions completely overwhelm any sympathy that his abusive childhood might garner. I feel bad for the six-year-old Paul Elam, but the present-day Paul Elam really should stop interacting with other human beings entirely, with the possible exception of a skilled therapist who might be able to help him work through some of his trauma and come out the other side as a better person (though it would only work if he really wanted to change and was thus willing to do the hard work necessary to do so, which I doubt).
… as long as they don’t know you’re a woman.
I think it’s more likely that “there are circumstances in which any man could have a civilized conversation with them”
If they know you’re a woman, I don’t think it’s going to stay civilised for very long at all – how long before they start to belittle you, strawman you, subtly or unsubtly insult you?
Balance. Sweet, precious, baaaaalance.
opposablethumbs @15:
I doubt I’d be able to have a civil conversation with someone like Paul Elam for very long.
This “Max” guy also reinforces the stereotype of the hyperbolic MRA. Just from the opening of the Vox article:
No, they wouldn’t lynch him, much less go to the anti-Anita Sarkeesian lengths of threatening rape and/or bombing, just tell him to shut the fuck up (and probably get off the table).
So, what about the everyday harassment of women? Oh, that’s totally different:
Should we denounce such behavior? Condemn it? Call it out? No: “You just have to develop a thick skin and try to ignore it. The feminists. Me. All of us. You know? Just ignore the crazy shit.”
Point taken, Tony!, and you’re right – it wouldn’t be easy for any decent human being!
I just meant that as long as they think they’re talking to a man they could be ‘civil’ (talking about the weather, say) whereas they wouldn’t be capable of talking civilly to a woman for long – even about the weather.
@17, Tony — yeah, I think that’s what bugged me most about the piece. I know three alien abductees — one is a freakshow but the other two are very pleasant, normally socialized, well-liked members of the community. There’s a decent article to be written about a demographic such as that, demonstrating that they’re not all tinfoil-hat lunatics. But the Vox article seemed closer to saying: “Many racists and homophobes and anti-Semites are good family men, just look at Joe, he’s a cut-up at cocktail parties, and gives to charity! Then there’s Bill, who coaches the local Little League team, and explains ‘I was once mugged by a black guy, and a Jewish lawyer won a settlement against me, so I have plenty of reasons.'”
It’s perhaps worth noting that the handful of MRAs I hear mouthing off in the local doggie parks or at bars almost always sprinkle in a fair bit of racism and anti-Semitism and anti-Latino sentiments as well — it’s a culture of asshole-ism, and no there’s no need to be civil to them.
I couldn’t read that article. The attempt to wash their intense woman hatred away was enough for me. I’m sure if you looked at Hitler while he was playing with his dog he appeared decent too.
Elam certainly doesn’t like you, which is a good thing. Of course when I went to AVFM yesterday there wasn’t a single featured article about men’s issues. It was hatred at you, hatred at women. They love men so much!
iknklast@3,
Like the supposed rehabilitation of Mitt Romney just because that Netflix documentary showed him as a kind of dorky, doting grandfather. I’m not sure why it was supposed to come as a surprise to anyone that Romney (or anyone else) loves his grandchildren. The main objections to Romney weren’t that he was vile and hateful to everyone; it’s just that Romney’s America would be really really awesome for his grandkids (and the grandkids of others like him), and not so much for everyone else’s.
Regarding the vox.com story about MRAs, it’s worth reading this response from Melissa McEwan, Humanizing Abusers Abets Abuse:
iknklast
I dunno, I tend to just assume that their friends are odious bigots much like them.
HolyPinkUnicorn
He might get bodily ejected by the bouncer, although probably more because he was standing on the table yelling than because of the specific content.
Well, what did he expect? Horns? A tail?
(Credit Leonard Cohen.)
Enlarging: with due respect to the author, the lesson is, it seems to me, people who do appalling things do not necessarily twirl their moustaches and talk like Snidely Whiplash when you interview them.
But really, this lesson is redundant. It’s at once almost cliché to say now, and entirely true: history is full of decent family types who tuck their children in, kiss their wives goodbye, and go off to work in torture chambers. And socially-skilled psychopaths do exist. And otherwise dreadful people may indeed blend in well enough at dinner parties. While the moustache-twirling villain can make entertaining fiction, real-life horrors do not need these. On the contrary, apparently mild-mannered members of the library committee convinced they’ve been terribly wronged tend to figure prominently.
I _do_, by the way, have a limited sympathy for some of those who get drawn into these movements. Life and relationships being contact sports, people do get hurt, and what they do with that hurt will vary. For a lot of men, there are a lot of nasty traps waiting, as the culture shifts, unevenly as it tends to do. Raised with one set of norms, you will have later to adapt to others. So, notwithstanding the above observation there are such things as socially-skilled psychopaths, you hardly have to be one of those to wind up on Elam’s mailing list. A difficult divorce, an inability to accept your share of responsibility for the same, these may also be adequate. And it’s struck me a while now there’s something at least a little cult-like about at least the bits of the MRM I’ve encountered; I’ve seen at least one of their number shrieking ‘bigot’ at his critics just as insistently as the Scientologists do at Sweeney all through The Church of Fear…
But when I say limited, I do mean limited. Beside the caution above about humanizing abusers, it does seem to me there’s a certain obligation, here, to keep some self awareness live about just what your behaviour is doing to the world. And these guys, it also seems to me, are spectacularly derelict in this duty. This inability to ask, put simply, ‘Are we the baddies?’ is more than a minor failing, in the case of the more persistent trolls, those making threats, so on.
This said, I do wonder, given that parallel I think I do see with cults, if, as toxic as some of these guys are when those they harass encounter them, if it’s not also illuminating to see them as themselves prey to manipulators giving them easy answers, someone to blame for all their perceived troubles. Not getting the sex you think you deserve, thought you got a raw deal in family court? Blame women, and blame feminism, and how soothing…
But all this is a bit of a digression. Larger point is: people who do otherwise awful things may indeed prove to have decent table manners. We knew this already.
Maybe another thing worth saying here: I suspect it’s particularly likely you’ll find at least less-than obviously pathologically antisocial behaviour in some of those involved precisely because the MRAs don’t so much seek to create new injustices as revive or preserve older ones. So you don’t have to be some kind of alien mutant monster to go in for this stuff, so much as a sucker for the well-honed appeal of once widely respected, but increasingly discredited social norms. So, just as you could once (oh, never mind ‘once’, as you almost certainly still can) find apparently proper southern gentlemen speaking in a charming drawl about ‘miscegenation’, sure, you can probably find guys who’ll politely help seniors across the street, then insist a heartbeat later upon their God-given right to rape and beat their wives, and rave bitterly about a feminist takeover of the judicial system.
A Do-Not-Link to Elam’s response to the Buzzfeed “attack piece”: As the attack steps up, so will I.
Re: that Elam article.
I could go some way to understand his rage if he was a decent hardworking guy who’d worked hard for his family, worked hard at getting sober and then got screwed by the system anyway – y’know, if he was as he depicts himself to be. I could also have some understanding if he was running a non-profit and spending real time advocating for the interests of his community.
Obviously, that’s not the case here. He’s an unapologetic, abusive deadbeat who willingly abandoned his children, sponges off others for the privilege to do little more than post hateful, unhinged, dishonest op-eds and still has the gall to call out these mythical zillions of women who do nothing but leech off the men in their lives. Indeed, those women he loathes appear to be as much myth & legend as the hapless martyr whose mantle he wears.
Elam really just appears to epitomise today’s MRA: full of rage at non-existent crimes against his person and entitled to disproportionate revenge on the perceived perpetrators.
Worst supervillain origin ever.
@MJP #28:
Shitboy. His superpower? Never growing up.
There’s also the inverse conclusion: if people find out you have almost no meatspace friends, people will assume you’ve beaten them all away with a stick – even if hardly anyone in meatspace knows you exist in the first place because you’re introverted and don’t venture forth into meatspace all that often.
I wasn’t aware any stereotypes of Persian men existed… but it wouldn’t surprise me if Roosh likes those stereotypes and deliberately implements them on himself.
QFT.
So, he refused to take the poo pill?
I keep reading that the source of this kind of rage and misogyny is that these men were raised with one set of expectations and now the ground is shifting under their feet etc. But the “Max” in the story is in his 20s. I’m significantly older than him and I was raised by a single fulltime working mom. It’s not like this shit is new. And he says his mom is a feminist. So it just isn’t true that he was raised with a different set of expectations and is getting sandbagged now.
I got bored by that article halfway through.
But the part about the waitress’ uniform is truely bizarre:
I mean, she’s a waitress, there’s most likely a fucking dress code, maybe she even gets the clothing from her employer. There’s nothing deliberate about her choice. It does not send any message beyond “I’m not here for fun, I’m here for work”. And I’m not even getting started about what her “message” is when she goes out. How the fuck am I supposed to dress to communicate “leave me the fuck alone”?
Giliell @ 33
The poison dart frog has this covered. BRIGHT COLORS. POISON. STAY BACK.
(Sadly, it doesn’t appear to work on humans.)
TMM
Fuck…
Actually I know how I can communicate “leave me alone”. It’s a method I used many times: Have a legitimate male owner around.
*puke*
Quoting “Max”
Much like the Christian fundamentalists, there’s a deep martyr complex going on here. I think that it’s a desire for someone who knows that they’re insignificant to make themselves feel significant. At the same time, they can blame their insignificance on others — women, etc. Max is saying “If I do the right thing, everyone here will pay attention to me! They’ll pay even more special attention to me than to you! I’m special, special, special!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
There’s also a big dose of “You’re not the boss of meeeeee!” in all of this. Witness “Max”‘s attraction to libertarianism (probably Objectivism) and atheism. There are some people who are drawn to atheism not because of some rational process, but they just want to be “different” and “mavericks.” Ed Brayton just put up a post with a video from someone who fits that mold.
Which leads me to Elam’s “origin story.” I can’t say that I’m surprised. Amused, but not surprised. And it circles back to my original point about being insignificant and lacking power in the world. His assholishness is away for him to feel significant and powerful. (He is, in a way, but not in any way that does anyone but him any good.)
Giliell @33,
Jeezus. I didn’t read the article (I wasn’t really interested. I know MRAs are real human people. My brother is one. I really do get it), but that part you quoted…. So, this Max guy sits down with a journalist to talk about why he’s an MRA, what he believes, how it affects his life, and he decides to focus part of the conversation on women and how they dress??? Max, you just provided a lovely example of how MRAs are really about anti-feminism and hating women rather than doing anything to help men.