He’s kino escalating, but she’s not giving him any Indicators of Interest.

So you all remember The Red Pill subreddit, that wretched hive of scum and misogyny I wrote about the other day, and the other other day, and the other other other day before that. Well, now something even more horrible has sprouted up on Reddit, like genital warts after a night “raw dogging it” with a PUA douchebag.

It’s a new subreddit from the Red Pill masterminds called Red Pill Women.

But wait, you say, isn’t The Red Pill subreddit all about manipulating and exploiting women sexually and generally just being misogynistic douchebags generally? What on earth might a Red Pill subreddit have to offer women?

In a 1400-word “welcome” statement, RedPillSchool, the subreddit’s top mod, tries to explain why the ladies might want to join up.

He starts by laying down some biotruths, by which I mean that he repeats the standard-issue manosphere fairy tale about men and women and the cock carousel:

A man’s biological imperative is to procreate. Some men (the few– less than 20%) are very attractive to women and may take on as many partners as he can. There’s no telling if he’ll stick around to help with the young, but rest assured he’ll make the rounds. Other men aren’t as attractive are happy being providers. This is a majority of men. They want to settle down, have a family. Their biological impulses, believe it or not, is to make a woman happy. It’s both a feature, and as we’ve discovered on /r/theredpill, one of man’s biggest weaknesses.

A woman’s biological imperative is to procreate. (We’re not so different!) Her strategy is slightly different. She wants provisions, but she also wants the highest quality DNA to procreate with. Unfortunately for guys, this sometimes ends up with women having sex with one of the attractive but noncommittal men, and then finding another man to do the provisioning. Her strategy is two-fold: have sex with the highest value males as possible, and get commitment from the highest value males possible. If possible: get both in one man. If not, get both from separate men.

As for those accusastions of misogyny, RedPillSchool responds with a big “nuh-uh!”

It isn’t. The red pill is about accepting reality for what it is. As you’ve seen above, men and women’s mating strategies are at odds with each other, and a lot of men on /r/theredpill are a bit angry. But they’re not angry because this is reality. They’re angry because they spent a majority of their lives being told that this isn’t reality, and putting them at a severe disadvantage.

Oh, so they don’t hate women. They’re just jusifiably angry at them.

Once we embrace what reality is, we find our relationships to be more successful, more fulfilling, and a better deal for ourselves and for the women we’ve dated. We’ve concentrated on what women like, and by doing so have been able to make ourselves into mates that women would want.

Yeah, women love dudes who spend all their time online talking about how awful women are.

So what do Red Pill men want women to do for them?

Sorry, I meant, what can the Red Pill Women subreddit help women to do that will be just fantastic for them, the women?

Well, the past half a century was the march of feminism telling women that they don’t need to do anything for men, that they are perfect and don’t need to change, that change or compromise is oppression, and that you can have it all. A career, kids, family, education- it’s all yours.

The problem is that our culture ended up self indulgent with no long-term goals, and thusly- no long term happiness (at least where family is concerned).

With divorce rates skyrocketing, single motherhood increasing, never-marrieds piling up, and hook-up culture and one night stands at an all time high, people are reaching 35 going.. where’s my family?

Huh. Taking the Red Pill must really do something to your eyesight, because the divorce rate has been heading downwards for the last thirty years.

Click on the pic for source.

But let’s just ignore the false premise here and continue on:

Women, you have the ability to find happiness when you embrace the reality of your biological urges and impulses. You have the ability and the requirement to become the optimal mate for your optimal mate. Do not believe the hype that you are good enough how you are, and realize that in life, the only things worth having take work.

Oh dear. So what sort of “self-improvement” advice will the subreddit contain? Apparently, a lot of misogynistic insults. Oh, sorry, harsh truths.

This forum will embarce truth first and foremost, sensitivity be damned. While I encourage people to remain positive towards each other, plain insults are discouraged, I understand that sometimes the truth will seem like an insult.

Ok, so who exactly is qualified to give advice on RedPill women?

RedPillWomen is not the place for men to show up and spout nonsense.

Ok, but you’re a man, and you’re spouting nonsense.

We have an unofficial rule on  /r/theredpill that basically amounts to: don’t listen to women about sexual strategy. It’s not that we don’t like women, it’s that women really have a hard time seeing past what they like to understand men have a different palate.

Um, what? Why would this mean that you shouldn’t listen to women?

The same goes for men, perhaps even worse so. Men, being the less discriminating gender, are more-or-less programmed to find women sexy.. no matter what. And when a woman says, “I like to eat pie with my fingers” you’ll have sex-thirsty guys line up out the door willing to say anything for female validation. “I love women who eat with their fingers.”

Wait, did I wander into the wrong subreddit? Why are we talking about pie?

Men will say anything for female validation. Men are utterly and completely blind when it comes to what attracts them. They are clueless. They are conditioned by society to tell you that things we’re supposed to find attractive are attractive. And why not? In our minds, if I find you attractive, and you exhibit certain qualities, it’s hard to isolate which qualities were the ones we found attractive.

Huh?

But you’re not looking for low-hanging-fruit.

Now we’re on to fruit? Was RedPillSchool just really hungry when he wrote this?

You could just walk into a bar with no clothes if you want to make men drool. But instead, you want to make yourself into the woman who will snag the highest value mate. You want to redefine high value to mean longest-term happiness. And you don’t want just any old schmo to drool over you. So don’t take schmo’s advice. It’s terrible.

RedPillSchool, I served with Joe Schmo. I knew Joe Schmo. Joe Schmo was a friend of mine. RedPillSchool, you’re no Joe Schmo.

Welcome! I hope this will be a productive place to discuss sexual strategy for women.

I can’t wait to see what sort of “sexual strategy” these guys advocate. Maybe we can assemble a list of some of the best suggestions.

Meanwhile, that white supremacist dude who thinks that women who hate the Red Pill dudes are all secretly into them — that guy I wrote about the other day — is already excited to see a subreddit of Red Pill “cheerleaders.”

It looks like TheRedPill Mannerbund, which at first only attracted TheBluePill hecklers, has now attracted some cheerleaders.

Perhaps a sorority forming next to the fraternity.

Notice TheRedPill kept the women out (at least female centric opinion, since this is virtual space) and now we see the reaction: submit and service.

My opponents of course could only interpret “service” as sexual, which is was partly but not completely. The women are no longer heckling the mannerbund, but have adopted the mannerbund’s agenda – they have become cheerleaders.

What he doesn’t know is that one of those cheerleaders is me — I just subscribed. Let’s see if they notice and ban me.

The Blue Pill squad is on the case as well, with a bunch of posts devoted to this exciting new development.

Thanks Obama! (And David Futrelle.) (For more, click image)

So the mighty Paul Elam has acknowledged — in the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, at least –that there might just be some sort of problem going on with regard to, you know, that whole fake screenshot thing. You know, the blatant fraud that A Voice for Men mangling — sorry, managing — editor Dean Esmay seems to have engaged in to cover up a mistake.

But, Paul being Paul, he somehow manages to turn his sort-of acknowledgement of the problem into an attack on me, bizarrely blaming me (the person who actually pointed out this fraud) for him not knowing about it before today:

As much as I hate to say it, Futrelle does have a valid point. I am looking in to it today, and unlike Futrelle, I will address the results of my inquiry in public no matter where they end up.

I don’t mind looking into problems, even when they are pointed out by such a bald faced liar. I would have actually been aware of this sooner if his blog were worth reading. I had to become aware of it in your comments to even know there was a problem.

Well, Paul, I would have happily brought my findings to the comments section of A Voice for Men, rather than the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, but you may recall I am banned there. And I wonder if anyone there would have had the courage to stand up and say that, gosh, this Futrelle guy has a point, given how quickly people are censored there for deviating from your site’s perverse “conventional wisdom.”

And gosh, Paul, how unfair it is to expect the publisher of a site to be aware of what’s, you know, published on it. Concerns about the story were brought up by your own commenters shortly after it first ran. Esmay referred in an article and an editorial note to my alleged “lies” about the story; it didn’t occur to you to even go look at what I had said? And even aside from the phony screenshot, or anything I’ve written, did you really think that Esmay’s bizarre explanations for the original mistake made any kind of sense?

In other words, are you incompetent, or are you lying about being unaware of the problem until now?

In any case, I await the results of your “investigation.” I am especially eager to see how you will manage to spin things so it becomes someone else’s fault. Will it be some evil conspiracy that “set you up?”

And when exactly have I lied, Paul? Could you offer a citation? When I point out the lies on your site, I fucking back up each claim.

[EDIT: Added some stuff in the "gosh, Paul" paragraph and made a few other changes.]

GirlWritesWhat to TheWoollyBumblebee: This misogynistic hate blog ain’t big enough for the both of us.

Sometimes the subtext is much more interesting than the text. On the surface, blabby FeMRA videoblogger Girl Writes What’s recent 3,635 word blog post on the l’affaire TheWoolyBumblebee is a nasty, brutish, but not-at-all-short attack on her former FeMRA comrade at men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men, recently kicked out of the clubhouse for telling off libertarians and Men Going Their Own Way. (See here and here for more details on it all.)

But if you read a little more carefully you can see signs that Girl Writes What’s anger and frustration may really be directed at AVFM’s founder and grand pooh-bah Paul Elam.

Oh, GWW — real name Karen Straughan — is plenty angry at TheWoolybumblebee — real name Kristina Hansen. Here’s one relatively restrained passage from Straughan’s rambling diatribe, which ironically, with only a few changes in details, could also describe AVFM’s Elam to a T:

WBB seems to thrive on attention (both negative and positive), has very sloppy impulse control, is emotionally unstable …. She takes up causes she thinks will get her admiration (such as the A Voice for Boys site, which she started and quickly abandoned–the URL now redirects to her personal website), and it’s probably at least as much about external validation as anything else. I have watched her repeatedly engage in several of the tactics of abusive women–DARVO (deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender), especially–when people take issue with her attitudes or behavior. Witness the quote-mining she engages in, while simultaneously castigating her opponents for their “intellectual dishonesty” and “lies”.

Oh, but it gets worse, much worse.

[D]espite 10 years of state-subsidized education and four degrees, Kristina Hansen’s accomplishments include 1) following her hind-brain into the weeds to her own self-destruction, 2) being a rabid joiner with little follow-through, as evidenced by A Voice for Boys, 3) whining about people who she claims “do nothing” a month after they handed her $5000, 4) alienating three quarters of the people she claimed she was serving, 5) squeezing out babies, 6) collecting child support and social welfare despite having milked the system for god knows how many degrees between her and her husband, and 7) throwing public temper tantrums because no one appreciates her.

Money well spent, by all measures. Let’s pay people to get educated so we can pay them to sit on their asses and generate more burdens on society. Again, I’m so glad to know I helped pay for those four degrees she’s using to sit in a lawn chair and gestate a fifth fetus with. A fifth child who makes me weep for the future of humanity, because regardless of whether you’re a biological determinist/reductionist or whether you think it’s all environment, you have to admit those are five fucked up kids about to be unleashed on the world.

Yeah, that’s right. She attacked the woman’s children. Classy.

And then Straughan gets all Mean Girls (pretentious antifeminist version) on her:

And whatever your actual motivations, I can tell you what it looks like to outsiders and disinterested parties: it looks like you’re the misfit attacking the popular girl for getting more attention than you. It looks like you’re grinding a man (AVFM) into the dirt because you were scorned by him. You’re living up to every single goddamn negative stereotype of women out there, which is all the more ironic considering your constant NAFALTing to MGTOWs.

You are the female nature that drives feminism, even if you’re not a feminist … .

So what was this I was saying about Straughan’s real rage being directed at Elam? Well, it’s clear from a number of remarks she makes throughout the piece that she’s livid with him for having put Hansen on the masthead in the first place. Not only that, but she feels a certain contempt at him for being so easily won over by the younger woman.

Elam put Hansen on the masthead, she writes,

despite several glaring red flags in videos she’d uploaded to her previous YT channel (TruthandOblivion, which got flagged down), where she used terms like, “you’re the man, you have to be the adult” to a male DV victim, etc. ….

Apparently Paul wasn’t aware of the red flags (he doesn’t even have time to watch all MY videos, pfft ), or ignored any tingling of his spider senses (or perhaps intentionally ignored the flags because he is constantly juggling multiple priorities). He promoted her (way too early for ANYONE, really, who was so new to the MRM) to senior news director for Canada.

So Elam promoted this fresh new face to Senior News Director for Canada — and somehow can’t  find the time to even watch Girl Writes What’s videos. And Straughan just stewed quietly about it for months, as she makes clear in a part of her post that is ostensibly addressed directly to Hansen, even though it’s clear the real target is Elam:

Kristina, I just want to say, I avoided raising my concerns with Paul primarily because it might have been construed as me being catty–me being one of those women only concerned with monopolizing male attention and being top dogette. Given how quickly he promoted you, I figured he was smitten and would be even more prone to draw that conclusion if a shopworn old bird like me raised concerns. And I wasn’t interested in turning anything into a cat-fight over market share over this movement’s mostly male cheerleaders.

And however much power you seem to think I have over AVFM (given your statements to that effect), and how much practical power I might actually have (given my reach), I choose not to involve myself in the inner workings of AVFM, and always have. Paul has actually made more decisions based on your counsel than on mine, because I would never think to tell someone how to run their own goddamn website. Even when they hire sociopathic, toxic, abusive people like you.

Wow. If she thinks so poorly of Paul Elam’s judgement, why on earth does she stick around?

Will Girl Writes What be the next out the door?

Not the bees!

The WoolyBumbleBattle continues.

A couple of weeks back, you may recall, the excitable antifeminist videoblogger who goes by the name of TheWoolyBumblebee got herself kicked out of the A Voice for Men clubhouse after annoying Paul Elam with her incessant (but actually pretty much justified) attacks on libertarians and Men Going Their Own Way.

Naturally, there has been much drama since then.

Elam, doing his best to affect a certain world-weariness about it all, put forth a video offering his take on the subject with the understated title “On Ideologues, Isms and Evangelical Atheists.”

TheWoolyBumblebee — real name Kristina Hansen — has made no attempts to hide her feelings. She’s started a new blog called Menticulture that seems to be devoted entirely to bashing A Voice for Men. And with her husband, she’s produced not one but seven videos lambasting AVFM, ranging in length from 38 seconds to an hour and twenty minutes. The long video, by the way, is a point-by-point response to Elam’s video; a number of the more recent videos are attacks on regular AVFM contributor Karen Straughan, aka Girl Writes What. Hansen’s husband has also done a couple of videos by himself as well.

I’ve actually listened to them all, for better or worse. They’re angry and rambling, and for the most part not worth the effort –  unless you just really love schadenfreude. While some of their criticisms of AVFM are on the mark, the two go off on weird pedantic tangents and seem rather too obsessed with Girl Writes What’s lack of academic credentials. (She was evidently a two-time college dropout.) Hansen’s husband also likes calling people faggots. Lovely.

I had at least hoped for some good inside dirt on AVFM’s main characters, but the Hansens have got very little to tell that isn’t obvious from the outside: John “The Other” Hembling is a liar? Tell me something I don’t know. Elam is a tin-pot tyrant who likes to get his way? Gosh, who could have possibly guessed that?

But I suppose it’s to be expected: these two agree with the irrational antifeminism that’s at the heart of AVFM, so it’s hardly surprising that their critiques don’t go far enough, and that they get bogged down in lots of irrelevant issues.

Still, in a recent post on her blog, Hansen makes her arguments against AVFM a bit more cogently than she does in any of the videos.

After assuring readers that her attacks on A Voice for Men aren’t driven by “vengeance, hurt feelings, or a desire to one-up anyone” — not sure I’m buying all this — she charges the principals at AVFM of letting their ideological predilections get in the way of providing real practical help to men.

I suggested several things we could have done to help men, such as applying for funding for men’s services through VAWA and other Gov’t agencies, and was told that they would never touch government money because … it is against their libertarian principles, and because that is ‘what feminists do’….

I admit feminists have done a lot of harm to men and boys, but they have also done a lot of good for women and it is THAT part which we need to look at and study in order to be able to adequately assist men in any real way. It is called working the system. If you want change, that is where you go to do it, and not by sitting on the sidelines waiting for the government to collapse.

But AVFM, she notes, seems much less interested in making things better for men than in keeping men in a permanent state of rage:

[Elam] keeps men in a state of anger, and hopelessness. He perpetuates the victim narrative and tries to keep you stuck in victim mode. And he is not the only one. The inflammatory rhetoric used by those at AVFM, like John, are carefully written to get you emotionally worked up. I know this to be the case because I was on several SKYPE calls with John when he wrote many of his articles. I know how he does it and why. It’s to keep you in a state of anger and despair. …

Anyone working in the helping professions worth their salt will tell you that the goal of their work is to help their clients free themselves of the need for their help. …  But what Paul, John, Karen, and others at AVFM do, is keep you in a state of constant anger, helplessness, and need. They do not want you to get better. And why would they? … The more you rely on them the more they profit.

I don’t agree with TheWoolyBumbleebee about much, but this is spot on.

She also has some very pointed things to say about AVFM’s attempts to blame the suicide of Earl Silverman, a Canadian activist for male victims of domestic violence, on feminism.

There are men out there at this very moment that are truly hurting and suffering. Let’s start showing them we really care by doing things that make a real difference in their lives. Enough of the useless sitting on the sidelines bitching about how evil women are, how the government needs to collapse, or how the only way to solve things is to opt out. This is why Earl Silverman died. John wants to blame feminism, but the fact is that the men that were close to Earl at the end knew that his despair was borne of the failure of the MRM to actually DO anything.

Again, she has a point. By its own accounts, A Voice for Men raises literally tens of thousands of dollars a year — a considerable portion of which, I imagine, must end up in the pockets of Elam, who seems to have no other visible means of financial support, and/or in the pockets of Hembling, who has recently been promoted to a paid staff position. After Silverman’s death, AVFM raised money to help start an Earl Silverman center — a project now ironically in the hands of Hansen herself. Why couldn’t AVFM have used some of its fundraising ability to help Silverman fund his domestic violence shelter back when he was alive?

In my next post I’ll look at Girl Writes What’s response to all this.

So the other day I showed you all in detail how someone at men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men fabricated evidence — in the form of a faked screenshot — in order to cover up an embarrassing mistake on their part. The person responsible for the fabrication appeared to be AVFM’s so-called “managing editor” Dean Esmay.

Well, now it appears that they’re going to triple down on their dishonesty and concoct more screenshots. In a “news roundup” from Esmay today I found this remarkable passage:

And going back to the story with the error I found a new “editorial note” from Esmay:

I can’t wait to see what on earth they’ve come up with this time. I encourage readers to take screenshots of all this in case AVFM decides to do any retroactive ninja editing as part of its plan to pretend it was right all along.

Meanwhile,those of you who have been following this story may be wondering: who is this Joshua Thompson? Well, it appears that AVFM — or at least Dean Esmay — can’t even get the name of the post’s author right.  That’s right, AVFM’s MANAGING EDITOR can’t get the name of one of AVFM’S OWN WRITERS RIGHT.

The author was first identified on AVFM as Jason Gregory — and if you look at the bio for Jason Gregory on any of the other articles he’s written for AVFM, like this one, it points to American Idiocracy, the blog where the problematic Facebook post originally ran. (It’s now been replaced, on his blog, anyway, by a completely rewritten version.)

At some point, apparently by accident, AVFM changed the byline of the author to Jason Thompson, who appears to be someone else who wrote something for AVFM a long time ago. And now Dean Esmay is calling him Joshua Thompson.

Or maybe Joshua Thompson is his real name, and Jason Gregory was his pen name, and Esmay has accidentally doxxed his own writer. Who knows?

I suspect we have not yet plumbed the depths of AVFM’s dishonesty –or incompetence.

Gold digger, 1933 model

This won’t be news to a lot of you — I’m a little late getting to it — but our old pal Tom Martin, the repulsive British MRA celebrity, is actually going ahead with the somewhat baffling video “women and comedy” project he was babbling about in the comments here many months ago, when he was still allowed to comment here. Well, “actually going ahead with it” this August if he can get anyone else to agree to work for him for free minimum wage.

The documentary project is called “Laughing with Women” and, Martin explains, it will “investigat[e] if gold-digging impairs women’s joke-making ability, and if, when women reject gold-digging in all its forms, they can become instantly funnier.”

In case that didn’t make sense to you — don’t worry, that’s a completely natural reaction — Tom explains his, er, “logic” a bit further in a jobs listing he’s posted in hopes of finding a crew, which has already gotten a good deal of ridicule over at PZ Myers’ and on at least one comedy website.

Why are women, on average, slightly less funny than men? Does gold-digging in particular impede women’s joke-making ability? When women publicly reject gold-digging, do they become as funny, or even funnier than men?

In his numerous visits to Man Boobz, Martin expounded at length on the topic of gold-digging women, generally referring to them by his preferred term, the shorter and blunter “whores.” Martin has previously estimated that roughly 97% of women fit this description, and has  suggested that female penguins are also whores. Frankly, once he gets going on the topic, it’s hard to shut him up, which is partly why he’s no longer welcome in the comments here.

In any case, this odd hypothesis will be tested, Martin says, with a “radical, and revealing street-based social experiment.”

Still puzzled? Mike Booth, the British video comedian behind SomeGreyBloke and Dan Cardamon, has managed to tease out a few more details from Martin (posting here as sexismBusters):

Martin is confident that his proposed video will blow the lid off this whole “women and gold-digging and comedy, no really, they’re connected” thing:

If the radical, and revealing street-based social experiment at the centre of our documentary proves gold-digging does make women less funny (as pre-production research suggests) then our findings will make headlines around the world, our film’s two minute teaser trailer attached to all those news and blog articles (Update: this advert alone has already been blogged and tweeted about by outraged PC types).

The full documentary will be shot to a broadcast-quality standard and format, giving mainstream television companies worldwide the opportunity to purchase broadcasting rights (if they’re feeling brave enough) whilst we maintain a virtually guaranteed revenue stream from our already established hardcore of supporters and fans within the non PC gender equality field around the world, who, along with everyone else, will be able to enjoy Laughing with Women on newly launched pay-per-view channel, Vimeo on Demand (VoD) – where VoD itself takes a very modest 10% cut. The documentary has the potential to be translated into several languages – gold-digging a familiar if hidden story in every country, until now.

In other words, it sounds like some sort of video gold mine.

So I’d recommend that all gold-digging women out there try to get in on the ground floor of this Tom Martin dude.

Oh, and speaking of Dan Cardamon, here’s the faux MRA’s take on the project:

CORRECTION: This post originally stated that Martin wouldnt’ be paying his crew, but he says he will be paying them minimum wage, so I’ve corrected the relevant passage above.

EDITED TO ADD: Tom has shown up in the comments, and I’m letting his comments through (for now at least), so if you have any questions for him, feel free to head to the comments to address him directly.

When reputable publications, online or off, make a mistake, the editors grit their teeth, swallow their embarrassment, and run a correction. [EDIT: I've even got a little one at the end of this post!]

Men’s Rights hate hub A Voice for Men has somewhat more lax standards than reputable publications, or even not-so-reputable publications, and generally prefers to deal with its errors by pretending they never happened. But sometimes the errors are so obvious, even to their own somewhat credulous readers, that they have to acknowledge them in some form.

In the case of one egregious recent error AVFM has tried something a bit more audacious: resorting to a phony screenshot and outright lies in an attempt to prove that they were right all along.

Sorry, dudes, but you’re not going to get away with it. You guys are so grossly incompetent you can’t even lie convincingly.

You may recall the post I ran the other day about A Voice for Men’s bizarre claim that search engines were somehow hiding articles and resources related to violence against men from intrepid web searchers? Indeed, the post in question on AVFM asked readers to

try typing into a search engine the phrase “violence against men.” You will get scores of pages linking to articles and information regarding violence against women.

As I pointed out, and as everyone else who tried this experiment noticed as well, this is not actually true: typing in the phrase “violence against men” into Google or Bing gets you lots of links related to …. violence against men. A few intrepid Googlers even pointed this out in the comments on AVFM.

So what has AVFM done? Well, here’s how Dean Esmay, AVFM’s so-called “managing editor” Dean Esmay responded in the comments to one reader suggesting that a correction might be in order.

Did you follow any of that? I had to read it several times, but Esmay seems to be suggesting that someone at Google read the post on AVFM and adjusted Google’s search algorothim so that searches for information on “violence against men” would in fact return information on “violence against men.”

In other words, AVFM didn’t make a mistake. It made the world a better place!

You should also note that Esmay’s confession that he had no screenshots to back up his claims.

By the time he got around to writing a little “Editorial Update,” however, he was a bit less tentative about tooting AVFM’s horn — and he also managed to somehow conjure up a screenshot that conveniently seemed to prove his point.

There’s just one problem. The screenshot is an obvious fake. Here’s the link to it on AVFM’s server.

But I’m pasting it here as well.

Now, at first glance, this seems to prove his point. The searcher here seems to have searched for “violence against men” and gotten results dealing with “violence against women.”

But look again at the additional results listed at the bottom of the screenshot: “News for violence against,” and “Searches related to violence against.”

That was the actual search term used. “Violence against,” not “Violence against men.”

Had he really searched for “violence against men” the additional results at the bottom would be listed under the headings “News for violence against men,” and “Searches related to violence against men.” Test this for yourself if you want.

In other words, someone involved with AVFM — Esmay himself? — did a Google search for “violence against,” got the results, and then typed in the word “men” in the search box before taking a screenshot to make it look like the original search was for “violence against men.”

I just did my own search for “violence against” (without the word men, and without quotes) and these are the top results. Look familiar?

Yeah, so familiar THAT EVEN THE TOP TWO NEWS STORIES THAT COME UP ARE THE SAME.

Here’s the top news story linked to in AVFM’s faked screenshot — and in the one I just made.

You’ll notice that it was posted on June 13th. That is, the day AFTER the AVFM story went up, not “before press,” as Esmay claims.

In other words, Dean Esmay (or whoever concocted this forgery and gave it to Esmay) didn’t make this screenshot before the AVFM story went up.

The AVFM forger did a search yesterday, using the search term “violence against,” then typed in the word “men” after getting the search results but before taking the screenshot, to make it look like he was searching for the term “violence against men.”

All so AVFM wouldn’t have to admit it had made a mistake, and acknowledge that Esmay, as “managing editor,” had fucked up royally by letting a story be published without doing even the most rudimentary bit of fact-checking of the story’s central premise.

Put a fork in it, A Voice for Men. Your credibility is done. Burned to a crisp.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, you can use the AVFM Google forgery technique here to make it look like searching for, say, “violence against marmosets who enjoy soup” returns a bunch of results about violence against women — just so long as you don’t pay attention to the highlighted words in the search results.

I mean, once you start blatantly forging evidence, you can pretty much “prove” anything your audience is gullible enough to believe.

Too bad for A Voice for Men that the rest of us aren’t quite so gullible.

EDITED TO ADD: This story just gets stranger and stranger. I’ve just checked the blog where the AVFM post originally ran. The author of that post — who calls himself funkymunkyluvn, and who has been identified on AVFM as both Jason Gregory and Jason Thompson –  has now completely rewritten his original post and changed his central claim to this one:

try typing into a search engine the phrase “violence against.” You will get scores of pages linking to articles and information regarding violence against women.

This claim, unlike his original one, is true. And this time he provides screenshots to prove it. Here’s one of them — click for a larger version. Look at the top ten results on the left. Do they look familiar to you?

Yep, right on down to that Guardian article.

Unfortunately, while correcting his original article — and happily not resorting to AVFM style screenshot fraud — Mr. MunkyLuvn/Gregory/Thompson/? has not acknowledged his original error. He’s essentially pretending that he never made his original mistake. Which isn’t going to work any better than AVFM’s forgery, as his original article is still available on AVFM, and (at least for now) in Google cache.

You’ve gotta fess up, dude. That’s how it’s done.

But at least I now have a reasonably convincing — to me — theory as to how the original mistake got made, and here it is: Mr. MunkyLuvn/Gregory/Thompson/? did a search for “violence against” and got results similar to what he got in the screenshot above. But perhaps he didn’t get around to writing his blog post right away, and by the time he wrote it, he unthinkingly and incorrectly added the word “men” when describing what he’d searched for. He never bothered to recheck, and no one at AVFM did either.

Now he’s trying to pretend he never made this mistake. That’s deceptive — but not as deceptive as actually forging evidence in an attempt to pretend you were never wrong.

EDIT AGAIN: Ok, this is just getting weirder. I assumed that AVFM was no longer referring to the author of the original post as Jason Gregory and was now referring to him as Jason Thompson. But that’s not true. They actually seem to be different people.  Jason Gregory’s profile links to his blog, and to AVFM’s Jason Gregory’s page, but it DOESN’T link to his “violence against men” post. Jason Thompson’s profile doesn’t link to that blog, but to this non-existent page instead, but the Jason Thompson author page DOES link to Jason Gregory’s “violence against men” post, now bylined “Jason Thompson.”

I actually think this is some sort of glitch and not anything devious, but jeez, guys, get your act together.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article, and its headline, referred to AVFM’s phony “screenshots,” plural. There was just the one.

See, corrections aren’t so hard!

Ladies love men in groups.

What do women want? Dudes. In groups. Especially dudes who hate them.

That, in any case, seems to be the conclusion drawn by a blogger who calls himself Hipster Racist, and who seems to be a white supremacist of some kind. Anyway, he’s written a little post about the rise of Reddit’s  Red and Blue Pill Subreddits and how they illustrate the Mannerbund Effect, a theory that helps to explain just why it is that the ladies allegedly like getting up in men’s business so much.

Here’s how HR tells the story of the two subreddits:

Someone created a section of reddit called TheRedPill which is devoted to “game,” seduction and anti-feminism. Essentially, a group of young men comparing notes on their various romantic successes and failures, which for obvious reasons, include a lot of frustration and what some might call misogyny. … Some of these men talk about “gaming” women in the same sense you might talk about training a dog. Gaming bitches, they might even say.

Yeah, some might call that misogyny.

The men’s romantic advice to each other essentially boils down to: women are selfish and incapable of love, so never fall in love, just improve yourself, lift weights, make money, dress better, and the women will come running.

Yeah, some might call that misogyny too.

As if on cue, the women show up and create TheBluePill a section of reddit exclusively focused on mocking, shaming, and attacking TheRedPill with anti-male rhetoric just as critical and harsh and the anti-female rhetoric of TheRedPill.

Now, pretty much none of that is true. TheBluePill is populated by a lot of dudes as well as women and the subreddit is basically an elaborate parody of the Red Pill subreddit, punctuated by occasional serious posts when people there are too astonished by the misogyny to make jokes about it. Take a look. If you can find any sincere anti-male rhetoric within it, posted by a regular commenter and with net upvotes, I’ll literally mail you a dollar.

But what is so fascinating about the dynamic is this: the men exclusively discuss how to improve themselves, while the women exclusively discuss … how the men can improve themselves. Obviously, they have very different views of what “improvement” looks like, the men essentially say “be more macho” while they women essentially say “be less macho.”

Well, not exactly. The advice in The Blue Pill subreddit is really only implicit advice, and it isn’t so much “be less macho” as it is “don’t be a misogynistic, manipulative, rapey asshole who gets validation from a bunch of other misogynistic, manipulative, rapey assholes like those Red Pill dudes on Reddit.”

Anyway, so Mr. Hipster Racist thinks that what all this means is that the Blue Pill ladies want the Red Pill men, and want them bad.

The dynamic plays itself out, over and over again, constantly. A group of men get together – the Mannerbund is formed – and do something. The women then show up, watch the men, and either cheer them, or heckle them.

But when the boys get together, the one thing the girls cannot do is ignore them.

Mr. Racist refers us to the manosphere-famous video of the protests of the Warren Farrell talk at the University of Toronto from last year. He points us to one female protester who became notorious in the manosphere for shouting at one of Farrell’s male fans, declaring him to be a “fucking rape apologist, incest supporting, woman hating, fucking scum.”

To Mr. Racist, only one thing could be driving this much apparent hate: pure animal lust.

Look at the man, look at the woman, and look at how the woman is looking at the man. Look at her eyes.

You could cut that sexual tension with a knife.

No. Just no. Sometimes a “you fucking rape apologist” is just a “you fucking rape apologist.”

So, anyway, someone took the opportunity to post Mr. Racist’s reflections on the Mannerbund Effect to the Red Pill subreddit — well, ok, that “someone” was Mr. Racist himself — where it met with many huzzahs.

My favorite comment of the bunch comes– surprise! –  from Mr. Racist, posting as jack50s; it’s almost Penthouse Lettersesque in its sophomoric eroticism:

Later, Mr. Racist wandered into the Blue Pill subreddit, and quickly convinced himself that everyone there, including me, had the hots for him. (To be fair, I did kind of lead him on a little.)

Huh. Apparently I’ve been awarded some sort of honorary Women’s Studies Degree from the Dean of Pompous Nazi Blogger University. That will help to ease the sting of rejection a little. A little. At least I have my cats.

Evil womens voting for starvations.

So over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars are engaging in a bit of self-reflection. Well, that may be a bit of a generous description on my part. They’re discussing the question “Are we fanatics?” Not surprisingly, they conclude that they aren’t.

Yet this is the most upvoted comment in the thread:

Those of you who have studied twentieth century history may have remembered Lady Hitler’s war on the Jews, the Romani people, and homosexuals; the Great Feminist Purges of Lady Stalin; the Cultural Revolution of Lady Mao. (Oh, wait, there actually was a Madame Mao, and she was a pretty evil gal, though she owed her power largely to her husband and was ousted shortly after his death.)

Moving on from all that war and starvation stuff, let’s return to that first sentence, since MRAs are so fond of blaming eeevil feminists for the draft.

The link in that sentence goes to a discussion of an organization called The Order of the White Feather. Take it away, Wikipedia:

In August 1914, at the start of the First World War, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald founded the Order of the White Feather with support from the prominent author Mrs Humphrey Ward. The organization aimed to shame men into enlisting in the British Army by persuading women to present them with a white feather if they were not wearing a uniform.

It’s worth pointing out that at the start of WWI, people of all political stripes and in all the countries involved were pretty gung-ho for the war. Even the big socialist parties of the day quickly forgot their pledges of international solidarity in favor of supporting their national war efforts.

So where do the evil feminists come in? Well, a couple of the most famous British suffragettes signed onto the White Feather crusade:  Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. And yes, they supported compulsory national service — though they supported it for both men and women: men would go to war, while women would be required to work in factories.

Of course, the Order of the White Feather didn’t represent all feminists at the time. Indeed, it didn’t even represent all the Pankhursts: Christabel’s sisters Sylvia and Adela were pacifists.

Even aside from all that blather about feminists being responsible for wars and concentration camps, it’s highly misleading to present the story of the Order of the White Feather as “proof” that feminists are warmongering all-male-draft-lovers. As a quick visit to Google will demonstrate, feminism has a long history of antiwar activism, dating back to the 19th century — when feminists first organized Mother’s Day as a protest of war.

But, hey, MRAs, if you want to invent your own mythological version of history, knock yourself out. You only make yourselves look like the fanatics you are.

Thanks to this thread in the AgainstMensRights Subreddit for pointing me to this most edifying discussion.

A Voice for Men has a little Google Challenge for its readers, and I’m going to invite you to take part in it as well. In the midst of yet another post trying to gin up outrage over Facebook’s banning of violent rape memes and other such repugnant shit, new AVFM contributor and “former feminist” Jason Gregory sets forth this challenge, which he originally posted on his blog several weeks ago:

As we walk the grounds of moral turpitude for a moment, try typing into a search engine the phrase “violence against men.” You will get scores of pages linking to articles and information regarding violence against women. That’s right. Searching for violence against men leads to information about violence against women. Try it.

I did. We’ll get to the results in a second, but let’s just let Mr. Gregory explain what he sees as the enormous significance of his little experiment:

Even though the overwhelming amount of violence in this world is violence against men, feminists have monopolized the narrative of violence as violence against women. The normalization of violence against men permeates society. We don’t even notice it. However, violence against women receives special status and notice. So much so, that search engines don’t even link to violence against men.

That would be quite a damning charge, except for one little thing: it’s not true.

When I typed  “violence against men” into Google– both in quotes and without –  I got page after page of links to articles about and other resources related to, well, violence against men, most of them dealing specifically with domestic violence.

There were a few links referring to violence against women mixed into the results, but the vast, overwhelming majority of the results were in fact directly relevant to the topic of violence against men. As you might expect.

I did this while logged into Google, and while logged out. Similar if not identical results. I tried the same thing with Bing, with similar results.

I know that search engine results are personalized — I’m not sure if this is true for those who, say, sign out of Google first, as I did — but it looks like everyone else who’s tried the experiment has come to a similar conclusion, including various commenters in the Men’s Rights subreddit, and even a couple of commenters on AVFM.

On AVFM, one of the Googlers suggested gingerly that

The result I got was a bit different from yours though. The top results seem to be pages actually about domestic violence perpetrated against men. …

I know the point you’re trying to make. Just want to make sure your statement is actually accurate, and not an exaggeration.

In a comment responding to this, Mr. Gregory seemed to attribute his error to a combination of 1) the passage of time and 2) feminists.

So we’re expected to believe that several weeks ago, when Mr. Gregory tried the same query, there were literally no results about violence against men — that does seem to be what he was claiming when he wrote that “search engines don’t even link to violence against men.” We’re supposed to think that somehow Google wouldn’t even link to, say, the Wikipedia entry on Domestic violence against men — which was the very first link when I Googled the phrase.

And that then, somehow, over the past few weeks — presto chango! — all these dozens or hundreds of links to sites about violence against women magically transformed into links to sites about violence against men?

Somehow I suspect the real culprit here is what you might call MRA Bombast Syndrome, a disease that runs rampant at AVFM, where gross exaggerations seem to become “facts” in the minds of writers and readers both — like the way in which a small group of feminists John Hembling once had an argument with became a mob of twenty to thirty brandishing knives.

Perhaps a handful of “violence against women” links in the search results metastasized in Mr. Gregory’s mind into all the results. It’s hard to know, because he provides no evidence — say, a screenshot — to back his claims up, and no one else has been able to replicate his alleged results. (None of the commenters on his blog bothered to try his challenge when he first posted it several weeks ago.)

Even if Mr. Gregory’s unbelievable claims were true, that doesn’t let him or AVFM off the hook. I’m not sure what sort of citizen journalism AVFM practices, but it is generally considered a journalistic “best practice” for writers and editors to check if things in articles are true before they are published. If there is a delay in publishing something, they are expected to check if these things are still true.

In addition to “founder and publisher” Paul Elam, AVFM  has both an “editor in chief” and a “managing editor” listed on its masthead, along with five other people listed as editors of some sort. Apparently none of the editors charged with seeing Mr. Gregory’s article through to publication thought to take a few seconds to take his little Google challenge before presenting it to the world.

I have yet to see evidence that even a single person on AVFM’s “staff” has any understanding whatsoever as to how journalism — or, really, anything — is supposed to work.