Do Men’s Rights Groups Have A Point?
Personally, I rate any attempt to encourage people – man, woman, black, white, rich, poor, whatever – to imagine what life could be like if the shoe were on the other foot. Empathy breeds understanding, and understanding breeds respect.
But I worry that, while some men’s rights activists might have the ability to empathise with, and ultimately respect, women, several at the top have proven time and again that they do not.
Take Paul Elam of A Voice For Men, for example. One of the men’s rights movement’s most prominent and divisive members, he has been ridiculed in GQ and treated with near reverence in The Red Pill, never missing an opportunity to fuel a media frenzy with shock tactics, or what he likes to call “satire”.
Anti-feminist counter protestors
In 2010, Elam published an article on his website in which he declared October annual “Bash a Violent Bitch Month”. Intended as a response to this Jezebel story, which admittedly rather irresponsibly makes light of male victims of domestic violence, in the article Elam encourages men who are the victims of female-perpetrated violence to: “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 till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.” When I ask Buchanan, a good friend and colleague of Elam’s, whether such language was warranted in response to the Jezebel article, he replied at once amused and surprised, that he found it “entirely reasonable”. Really? The Jezebel article, as ill-advised and utterly unfunny as it is, peaks in its violence with details of how one Jezebel staffer “punched a steady in the face and broke his glasses.” She breaks his glasses. Not his nose. Elam’s article on the other hand, calls for men to forcibly pummel women into the nearest wall until they bleed. This is the kind of language that fuels hate, not empathy. And were men and women equally at risk of being violently attacked by each other; if it really were a case of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, then maybe one could better understand the source of Elam’s vitriol. But the fact of the matter is it’s not. The fact of the matter is, satire or no, Elam’s is the kind of language that emboldens men to rape and kill women. Elam’s statements, such as “Women who drink and make out […] are freaking begging [to get raped]”, are part of a wider misogynist rhetoric that pervades the online “manosphere”, a network of forums, pick-up artist (PUA) communities and subreddits; some of which were frequented by Elliot Rodger – who in 2014 killed six people and injured 14 others before shooting himself dead, citing the “cruelness of women” as the reason for his crimes – and Alek Minassian, who murdered 10 people by driving a van through a crowd in Toronto earlier this year, and as we later learned was a self-proclaimed ‘incel’, or ‘involuntary celibate’, a man who hates women for denying him his perceived right to sex.