The Education of Arthur Goldwag
Since my book writing hasn't made me rich or famous, maybe sex-bashing will. I hear that some "manginas" (as the Mens Rights people call feminist-friendly men) really rake it in.But geez.... everyone told me about the fifteen minutes of fame. I wasn't prepared for the two minutes of hate. But here I am at A Voice for Men, "the largest and highest-trafficked men’s rights site on the web," being outed as a money-grubbing fraud."Arthur Goldwag is still a liar, and still an unskilled one," John the Other writes in his somewhat prolix response to my response to the "manosphere's" response to my article in the SPLC's Intelligence Report magazine. He even calls me a one-man hate movement.
Who is a hate movement Arthur? Who? Have you looked in the mirror? Goldwag claims that AVfM’s founder and publisher, Paul Elam – and his colleagues (that would include me) read or represented [Vliet Tiptree's] eugenics advocacy as a well-developed plan, calling us “obtuse” for the misrepresentation. However, he doesn’t cite any actual claim of a “well developed plan” on our part, probably because we never made any such claim. Obtuse is the word he used. Okay Arthur, if you say so.
I don't have the patience to go through his post and debunk it point by point (and I doubt many readers would have the interest in following me even if I did), but Exhibit A can be found here, right at A Voice for Men.
Up on that site right now, by a writer calling herself Vliet Tiptree, is nothing less than a fledgling manifesto calling for extermination of half the human race; the male half, that is. Oh, and she has a plan. A real plan....In short, this is, while quite insane, laid out within a strategic plan. There is nothing satirical about it.
But here's what baffles me. Why does a misogynist website take such extravagant offense at being called misogynist? Why deny that it demonizes all women, and not just feminists, when it so often does? Just to the left of the article about me is a Mother's Day message from AVfM's Paul Elam. Dripping with irony as it is, it does appear to elide the distinction between feminists and females:
To all you mothers of the world...Place a bunch of daffodils at a dumpster near you, perhaps one in which one of you, or one of your kind, has tossed an unwanted baby, leaving it there to slowly die alone....Now perhaps some of you could place large, colorful arrangements at the abortion centers where women go to have children cut out...This is not a request for some mothers, or a percentage of them, but all of you. In fact, you don’t even have to be a mother. If you have a vagina, the blood of all those children, who are abused far more at the hands of women than men, has stained your skin and caked around the cuticles of your fingers....It doesn’t matter. This is the age of equal opportunity for collective guilt. If I were a male college freshman at Hamilton College, I would be marched into an auditorium on day 1 where I would attend an orientation lecture called “She Fears You,” a class that lets all men know they are potential rapists, and that they are being watched....Now, do I really mean all this? Yes. It is not that women deserve to be collectively regarded as child abusers and killers. Most aren’t. Most are actually very good to their children and can even be trusted with the children of others. But that truth is not what is important here.What is important is the children, or the principle, or whatever other bullshit we make up to convince ourselves it is not about demonizing women when that is exactly what we are doing.....The fact is that mothers are more dangerous than fathers where it concerns children. They always have been. It is only a few percentage points in that direction, but of course in a White Ribbon way, it is more than enough to justify pointing a finger at your entire sex and feeling superior as we watch you atone for the unspeakable acts of a minority.So, suck it up ladies....If in general you have remained silent or actively participated as the image of the male half of the population has been reduced to that of a depraved threat, then step up and get your flowers. You deserve every last petal, stem and thorn.
I get that he's making the point that men who wear the white ribbon symbolizing their opposition to violence against women are participating in the demonization of their whole sex, and that he's giving man-hating feminists a taste of their own medicine. I do. But it also sounds to me (and I suspect it might sound that way to pretty much any other reader) that what he's also saying in effect is, "if you're not with us, you're against us"--that if you don't fully endorse not just the Mens Rights Movement but the unerring rightness of its dear leader Paul Elam, then you are pretty much exactly the same as Lorena Bobbitt.For a person who has written as much about extremism, cultism, and conspiracy theory as I have, it's almost surreal to get sucked up into this world of hyperbolic identity politics. I have even found myself playing a tangential role in a conspiracy theory. From A Voice for Men and AntiMisandry.com, I learned that an MRA "mole" code-named Agent Orange has ferreted out the covert connections between RadFem and the SPLC.Since I began writing my books I have been outed as a Zionist, a hater of white people, a Communist, and a Rockefeller-funded shill for the New World Order. Now I find myself on the wrong side of the "fastest growing human rights movement in America." It's all too grotesque for words.If you enjoyed this post, please go to my Facebook page and "like" it (there is a button that will take you there on the top right hand side of this page). You can also follow me on Twitter. Itanimulli
