Category Archives: false accusations
A Voice for Men declares itself too important to bother to write about me, then writes about me
Man Boobz Minion disguised as female MRA
I was a little saddened to read recently that A Voice for Men — the self-proclaimed “Men’s Human Rights” site that has posted an open call to firebomb government buildings in its “activism” section — will no longer be writing about little old me.
Signal Boost: Official Georgetown statement on false accusations against Arianna Pattek
I‘ve written several times about the campaign of false accusations and harassment directed at Georgetown University alum Arianna Pattek by Men’s Rights activists, white supremacists, and assorted internet trolls. While some of Pattek’s false accusers have retracted their claims, others continue to peddle false information about her and still others, including some of those who’ve retracted their claims about Pattek, continue to make vague accusations against Georgetown.
And so I would like to draw attention to the following official statement from Georgetown University spokesperson Rachel Pugh.
In response to inquiries regarding Georgetown University alumna Arianna Pattek and the Admissions Office at Georgetown University:
Georgetown University confirms that Arianna Pattek graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service with a bachelor’s degree in 2012. On April 18, 2013 she was mistakenly identified as the author of an anonymous blog, and as a result became the target of threats on several Internet discussion boards. Out of concern for the safety and well-being of our alumna, the university removed information about Ms. Pattek from the university’s website. Georgetown University further confirms that Ms. Pattek is not now, nor has she ever been, employed by any of the admissions offices at Georgetown University. The unethical admissions practices described in the anonymous blog post do not reflect the careful and comprehensive admissions procedures at Georgetown University. Ms. Pattek has confirmed that she is not the author of the blog in question. Further, the blog in question does not reference Georgetown University.
You can find the statement online here, and can direct any questions about Georgetown’s handling of this whole surreal incident to them directly.
Though I really have to wonder at anyone who pretends to be shocked or surprised or mystified that university officials might remove information about a recent graduate after receiving word that this person is being harassed by white supremacists.
You can find more details about all this in my earlier posts on the subject.
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:
Drama! Men’s Rights Reddit threatened with shutdown after two of its mods are caught helping doxers
Earlier this week, as you may recall, Men’s Rights Redditors pretended they were shocked – shocked! – that anyone might think that MRAs had anything to do with the doxing and harassment of that red-haired Canadian activist we’ve been discussing. Couldn’t be them! Had to be … trolls!
Then on Wednesday the Men’s Rights Redditors found a blog post by a woman claiming to be a “conservative feminist” with a recently minted doctorate who was working in her alma mater’s admissions office — and, she claimed, rejecting out of hand all the applications that she thought were “dripping with white male privilege.”
Oh, Brother! Gun-toting MGTOWer rejected by Big Brother program
No, not THAT Big Brother
Life is tough for dudes in our evil misandryarchy. Even dudes who just want to help littler dudes find themselves blocked by evil women.
Take, for example, the sad tale of a public-spirited MGTOWer who calls himself TheDisgruntledGentleman, and his thwarted attempt to join the Big Brother/Big Sister program. No, not the TV show, or the creepy dystopian leader/voyeur from 1984 — the mentoring program that pairs adults with at-risk kids. Let’s let him explain:
Register-Her is a Fake “Offenders Registry” Run By Misogynists, Designed to Vilify and Intimidate Women
Register-Her accused Katherine Heigl of being a man-hating bigot who “endorse[s] male targeted sexual mutilation” because she appeared in a Funny or Die video.
Some of the women profiled on the site as “bigots” include:
Actress Katherine Heigl, who was put on the site after making a humorous public service announcement for the site Funny or Die promoting the spaying and neutering of pets. Register-Her charges her with “endors[ing] male targeted sexual mutilation.”
Feminist blogger Jessica Valenti, the author, most recently, of “Why Have Kids?: A New Mom Explores the Truth About Parenting and Happiness,” who was put on the site for several newspaper columns that the site misrepresents in an attempt to show that she is guilty of “an ongoing pattern of anti-male bigotry and advocacy for the eradication of constitutional rights based primarily on sex.” A Voice for Men has also labeled Valenti a “child abuser” for supporting feminist causes, and on one occasion posted candid photos it claimed were of her in an attempt to cause her embarrassment.
A number of young women who attended a protest against Men’s Rights icon Warren Farrell at the University of Toronto. Register-Her used Twitter Tweets from some of the women, clearly intended as jokes, as evidence of genocidal intentions towards men. In an article on A Voice for Men, an anonymous writer even attacked one of these women for Tweeting a picture of a poster which declared “it is important to have someone’s consent before sexual activity.”
Site founder Paul Elam and other writers on A Voice for Men make no bones about their desire to ruin the lives of their foes. Indeed, the site’s much-referenced slogan is “Fuck Their Shit Up.”
In one post, Elam warned one critic of Register-Her that:
I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection. …
[Y]ou fucking moron. Your only real hope is to keep your mouth shut and pretend AVfM and register-her.com does not exist for as long as you can. Because, as you can see right now, anything you say or do will be thrown back in your face like holy water on a vampire.
We are coming for you, and we are coming for all the liars out there that have been ruining people’s lives with impunity. …
You are SO fucked.
Register-Her is clearly a major part of Elam’s program to “Fuck Their Shit Up.” The “registry” is heavily promoted on A Voice for Men, which links to a number of “featured offenders” in its sidebar – all of them so-called “bigots,” none of them the criminals that Register-Her claims to really be about. A banner ad for Register-Her depicts a bloody knife. The tagline: “TRUTH is the real bitch.”
Elam’s idea of exposing the “truth” seems to involve publishing photographs and the personal information of his targets, whether these are alleged “false accusers” or simply feminists who have offended him. On the A Voice for Men internet radio show, Elam promised that:
If Mary Jane Rottencrotch out there wants to say that her husband beat her just for the sake of gaining leverage in a divorce he will now have a resource where he can come and post your name, your picture, your work telephone number, your address, perhaps even your route you take to get to work, if you bother to have a job.
While Elam has yet to make good on the threat of posting information on women’s routes to work, posts on A Voice for Men promoting the profiles of so-called “bigots” are filled with threatening language and vague intimations that further information will be revealed. In a post announcing the site’s campaign against the University of Toronto protestors, Elam wrote this about one of his targets:
We have her image and know her general location. We will identify her and profile her activity and name for public view.
We will not stop there, or just with her. And while we will not publish our complete intent, we are dogged in our efforts. …
We have no more sympathy for your agenda of hatred and exclusion than for a plantation owner’s rationale in the Antebellum South for justified ownership of another human being.
A Voice for Men’s posts about the targeted women are also filled with bizarre and hyperbolic accusations. In a post about a college student who had jokingly Tweeted that her “political position” was “kill all men hail satan,” and who in another tweet suggested she might get a tattoo reading “misandry,” one of A Voice for Men’s many pseudonynmous “agents” wrote:
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.
“Agent Mauve” makes clear that he hopes to ruin the life of the young woman by putting her on Register-Her:
[T]his will be the beginning of [name removed]’s real legacy; where she can revel in the full and permanent notice of her deeds, and the lesson she is providing to the world about the nature of feminism, and the etiology of hatred. And so that anyone who ever does an internet search on her name again will be aware of it.
So far, A Voice for Men’s campaign against the Toronto protesters seems to be having what one can only assume is the desired effect. On A Voice for Men’s Facebook page, a commenter refers to one of the protesters as an “evil twisted little piece of dogshit,” adding: “I hope she suffers a fatal injury before she can go out and ruin peoples’ lives like she seems determined to do.” This comment earned several “likes” from A Voice for Men’s readers.
In the Spring of 2012, Register-Her was profiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups, as part of a larger feature on the so-called “Men’s Rights” movement. Writing in the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, Arthur Goldwag described Register-Her’s modus operandus and its effect on one targeted woman:
Elam’s site can be frightening to its targets. In one case, he offered a cash reward to the first reader to ferret out a pseudonymous feminist blogger’s real name. In another, Elam singled out a part-time blogger at ChicagoNow who describes herself as a “vegetarian park activist with two baby girls.” The woman’s mistake was to write about her discomfort with male adults helping female toddlers in the bathroom at her daughter’s preschool. The blogger conceded that she was being sexist, but wrote that “I’d rather be wrong than find out if I’m right.”
After the woman was listed, she was widely attacked on men’s movement sites. “I don’t always use the word ‘cunt’ to describe a woman,” one poster raged, “but when I do it’s because of reasons like these.” Shocked, the “Mommy blogger” took down her original post and apologized for her “demonization of men.”
It wasn’t enough. “You targeted fathers, and just fathers,” Elam rebuked her. “It strikes me that you have never really been held to account for any of your actions in life. It is quite likely that the concept of complete, selfless accountability is just completely foreign to you.” Over at the Reddit Mens Rights forum, another poster fumed: “This entire episode should be a warning to all those male hating feminists out there who believe that they are safe screaming their hate messages on the web. Finally, they are held accountable for their hate messages and finally the rest of the world will find out exactly what type of depraved people they really are.”
That’s hate, and that’s precisely the sort of reaction Register-Her seems designed to provoke.
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I encourage readers to link to this piece on their websites, so as to make sure that people understand what Register-Her is really all about.
Man Boobz Ex-Troll Anthony Zarat Has Some Good News and Some Bad News
Dudes! Watch out! This pretty lady is falsely accusing you of something-or-other.
Feeling nostalgic for any of Man Boobz’ classic trolls? Here’s our old friend Anthony Zarat, now a regular Reddit Men’s Rightser, explaining some things about the ladies of today. Note: In order to understand what he’s saying, you need to know that when MRAs talk about “proxy violence,” they mean women calling the police on a dude, which women of course only do when men are completely innocent, because men are always innocent. (Also, in MRAland all police are men, and White Knights to boot.)
I like that he complains about women being “narcissistic,” then invents his own definition of “character” that applies to his own little obsession.
If you stand for Men’s Rights, you’ll fall for anything
Gullibility, thy name is Men’s Rights Subreddit.
So, a day or so ago, a troll graced r/mensrights with a tale of imaginary woe about a bad breakup and its aftermath that seemed was designed to push a whole bunch of Men’s Rights hotbuttons all at once.
Lo and behold, the locals bit, and in the process revealed not only their incredible gullibility but also what you might call a highly blinkered view of modern relationships and social etiquette.
Today the troll fessed up, but not before the r/mensrights crowd, taking his tale for the truth, offered him some truly terrible advice laced with lots of righteous indignation.
Here’s the not-exactly-believable story the troll told them:
A Man Going His Own Way explains his quite possibly imaginary life
Another good reason to avoid strange women.
Over on the A Voice for Men forums – yes, they have forums – one Man Going His Own Way spells out exactly what he means by His Own Way. Here’s misterbill:
For me, MGTOW has three major components:
1. Refusal to cohabitate with a woman
2. Avoidance of fatherhood like the plague
3. Avoidance of being alone in a room with a strange woman (for fear of false accusations)
These are the core elements, IMO.
I’m not celibate, I get sexual satisfaction from several call-girls that I’ve built good rapport with over a few years. I’ll visit one of these women whenever I feel like it, usually once a month or so.
I have what I would describe as a female companion who others would describe as my girlfriend. We don’t have sex, not because I’m not attracted to her, but because my fear of possibly getting her pregnant petrifies me beyond belief. So we hang out 2 days a week and have very nice times together, going on about 5 years. She understands my beliefs and that we will never live together and that I don’t believe in the myth of love.
So I’m MGHOW, but not without women.
I’m 41 and fairly wealthy. In my 20s and through to of my early 30s ( although I wasn’t a PUA) I studied game theory and in combination with other aspects of my life, I had no trouble getting laid. Then a woman made a false accusation against me (and was further slandered by another), and I began to wake up to the perils of having sex with (and interacting with) strange women. The risks outweighed the benefits, and I turned to going my own way.
I travel on business frequently and the one exception to my rule with being alone with strange women is the easy pickings while traveling. There is a rule amongst many women that if you’re 500 miles away from home, it’s not cheating. I see this a lot with many married women. Gents, her vows mean NOTHING once she gets on a plane without you. Although I wouldn’t allow any of these women into my home, I accept the risk when I’m traveling. And there is always a risk of running into a psycho who is ready to explode.
I don’t really have any jokes here. But I will note that his story doesn’t make a lick of sense; I find it literally unbelievable.
He’s so paranoid about women because of a “false accusation” leveled against him back when he pursued women using “game theory” that he literally refuses to be in the same room with “strange women” – or even interact with them. Yet when he’s traveling he suggests he routinely has sex with “strange” married women. Huh? These women could still get pregnant; these women could still make accusations, false or otherwise, against him. Does he feel safe because he can skip town in a hurry to avoid the possible consequences of his actions?
He’s (allegedly) been involved in a 2-day-a-week relationship, for five years, with a woman he’s sexually attracted to. But he refuses to have sex with her because he’s terrified of getting her pregnant. If he’s that worried about getting her pregnant, and generally wants to “avoid … fatherhood like the plague,” why doesn’t he get a vasectomy? If, after he sleeps with a married woman in a strange city, she gets pregnant with his child, does he simply assume she’ll never be able to track him down?
I’m going to assume that most if not all of what misterbill is saying here is bullshit. But if he does indeed live his life in way that even vaguely resembles how he says he does, it’s a rather sad and strange and paranoid way to live.
Posters getting torn down: A crime against humanity? (Includes video footage of JohnTheOther’s epic confrontation with alleged box-cutter wielding gang.)
Farting kittens: The real oppressors?
So I’ve been mostly avoiding writing about the whole Men’s Rights postering controversy in Vancouver, because it’s such a tempest in a teapot. The tl;dr: Some posters got torn down, and some of the people tearing them down yelled at the blabby MRA videoblogger and A Voice for Men second fiddle known as JohnTheOther.
MRAs: Given that virtually none of you have any experience as actual real world activists, you may not be aware of this, but POSTERS GET TORN DOWN. It’s annoying, and I don’t support it myself, but it happens all the time. Sometimes, you may actually run across people tearing down your posters, at which point there is usually some sort of awkward confrontation that may include yelling.
You know what you do when this happens? You put your posters up again. You know what you don’t do? Compare the experience to rape. Because, on the list of the grand injustices of the world, having posters torn down is pretty far down the list, somewhere around “stubbing your toe” and “kitten farts on you.”
