O)einions

The MRA: threats, violence, and fraud in
the name of human rights

Andrew Kenway
Team Member

hat do the MRA, MTGTOW, Red Pillers, and Counter-Feminists all

have in common? Well the last one might have given it away. Men's
Rights Activists, Men That Go Their Own Way, Red Pillers (a reference
to The Matrix that describes people who have woken up to reality), and
Counter-Feminists all feel that men are oppressed, that Feminism has
overstepped its bounds, and that women now have far more power in
society than men. The distinction between the MRA and MTGTOW, of
course, is probably that some thought the second name sounded cooler.
Looking up both on various blogs seemed to yield few results in telling
them apart. One commenter from the anti-feminist blog A Voice For Men
wrote that "Feminism uses the satin glove of equality to cover the iron fist
of eugenics." Yes, these people exist, and no, they're not joking.

They are a variety of groups that tend to have the same super-villainesque
rhetoric, the same intimidation tactics, and the same main goal: stop
Feminism. There are some men's issues floating around the top of the
movement's surface like a shield. Real, genuine issues, including the high
suicide rate among men, or the high rate of sexual assault in American
prisons, that are only used to distract from their real, often reprehensible
intentions. The one thing they all share is that they are angry, they have a
lot of problems with how society is supposedly giving women a definitive
position of power over men, and they think Feminism is to blame.

"The Sexodus", an article written by Milo Yiannopoulos for the Breitbart
News Network, examines the phenomenon of young heterosexual men
removing themselves from the dating scene and dedicating themselves
instead to pornography and prostitution. An intriguing topic, if it did not
immediately start blaming it all on women. The article is an awkwardly
but confidently written tirade about how men are wising up to women's
games. Yiannopoulos assures his readers that Feminism has rigged the
game of dating against men. A German youngster he interviewed said "It
wouldn't be so bad if we could dull the pain with girls, but we're treated
like paedophiles and potential rapists just for showing interest." The
fact that the German man sees girls as tools to dull the pain instead of
people might have something to do with his dating troubles.The article
goes on to blame Feminism for furries, liberated homosexuality, and
just about everything short of global climate change. MRA's believe
dating has been ruined, not by unhealthy patriarchal power structures
or attitudes, but by women. Yes, it is a sentiment not unlike that of The
Little Rascals, but presumably those characters grew out of their he-man
woman hater's club and found something better to do with their lives
than accost women to make themselves feel better. If a person's life
views are comparable to the philosophy of children from an ancient
cartoon, it is no surprise that their views are the only thing dated.

This brings us to a more recent website that seems to pride itself on
looking sophisticated and academic (which, for an MRA website, it sort
of does if you squint really hard)--A Voice For Men: Humanist Counter-
Theory (AVFM). The title might seem laughable, but the content is
anything but. The site's founder, Paul Elam, is a men's rights activist
who, while criticizing #GamerGate for being too late to hop on the
anti-feminism train, revealed that he's been fighting back against the
oppressive forces of female dominance for twenty-five years. Women
have apparently been in control of North America since 1990.

Paul Elam is a frequent contributor to his website and often
intermingles attempts at sounding academic and sophisticated with
insane violent tirades that contradict anything he's ever said that
may not have been offensive enough the first time. One example
being when he declared October “Bash a Violent Bitch Month" on
AVEM. For, you know, equality. The moderate in Elam made him
follow the violent fantasy by saying he does not endorse the violent
actions, despite everything else he had said, because jail time was
not worth it. Not because it is wrong, but because it is illegal.

David Futrelle of the anti-misogynist blog We Hunted The Mammoth
wrote an article on AVFM's most recent and possibly most newsworthy
offence. The title "The Men's Rights Activist behind a fraudulent White
Ribbon website accuses the real White Ribbon Australia of fraud" is self
explanatory. Paul Elam is the activist, and he claims seizing websites
with a similar name to the organization, setting up a website that
appeared to be the same cause and accepting donations was seizing an
opportunity, not fraud. In response to the crime being noticed, Elam
claims the actual White Ribbon campaign are the real perpetrators of
fraud. Elam writes that the original White Ribbon Campaign "paint[ed]
a false picture of the problem, identifying [domestic violence]’s soul
source as abusive men and its soul victims as helpless women." Despite
Elam's supposedly certain moral stance on the subject, the donate
button was removed from his phony site shortly after its discovery,
while David Futrelle guesses was because AVFM was "perhaps fearing
legal reprisal." Elam felt entirely justified in defrauding the charity.

There has been a backlash against the feminist movement and principles
long before it even got its current name. The one ray of sunshine in this

is that while this is symptomatic of an awful vein of culture that reminds
us why we need Feminism more than ever, these people just are not that
successful. When an inability to achieve your goals is the greatest gift your
community offers the world, you might want to rethink your life. However,
a thankful failure to produce results does not forgive their infamous
intent. The rancid little corner of the internet MRA extremists call

home is more disgusting, violent, and utterly insane than the imaginary
feminist illuminati supposedly pulling society's strings ever could be.

with

i shh
Lois Gatier Mary Na

LON CHANEY