jet_lagg wrote:I've been watching a lot of Karen Straughan this week. Particularly interesting are her statements concerning A Voice For Men, as they don't seem to match at all with the sentiments I see around here. If it were someone I didn't respect, I'd be able to dismiss their opinion based solely off the the pit's testimony, such is my esteem for you fuckers ;)
But I do respect her, so I'd be interested in hearing everyone's opinion on the group, and how they arrived at it.
Compared to other MRA leaders I had followed, Warren Farrell, Glenn Sacks, etc., AVFM always seems
+ inflammatory
+ loose respect to the facts
+ high in vitriol to anyone who disagrees
+ loathe to correct itself
+ incredibly prone to creating "parodies" that regardless of their content would only be used against AVFM and against all MRAs, including
] Bash a violent bitch month
] At least two "satires" badly carried off railing against Jews to portray how close feminism is to nazism, the problem being the satires were so poorly done it would easily be misled by supporters and detractors as supporting anti-semitism.
+ going way over the top in response to their critics (search the site for Cathy Young, and see how she is treated as worse than Marcotte in their eyes because she dared criticize them in one sentence of one paragraph that mostly took feminism to task) -- AND yes, when I pointed out their nonsense in a comment and defended Young, they banned me for dissenting
They claim they need to act like assholes to get anyone to notice, and that might be true, but if so, they should be out loud and proud assholes, instead whenever their bullshit is pointed out, they deny it.
So they try to be both good cop and bad cop and their bad cop act is so much better and so much stronger that everyone knows them as bad cop. They should have helped sponsor a good cop site.
Elam is both stupid and incredibly stupid. They created a site called register-her which in many ways wasn't such a bad thing, they claimed they would only list women where the complainant had sources to back them up: court papers or newspaper accounts. But then Elam declared in a podcast that it would be used basically as a tool of harassment against anyone they disliked, thus kicking out the one leg they had to stand on. Oops.
They are incredibly inconsistent, saying they will stop using mangina one month, then the next months going back to it again and again.
They are on my RSS feed, but I can't tell you the last time I read an article there to the end, because for the past six months, the site is basically unreadable and of no value.
+ The articles are way overly long and in drastic need of editing
+ Many articles have this pseudo academic tenor to them that makes them uninteresting, and without citations makes them more cringe worthy than readable
+ Most articles add little to an MRA's life to make that life easier except a reason to hate on feminists and women
So they can fuck themselves.
They did run a conference, and when they announced it, I was one of the first at reddit to support it, because the schedule of speakers was outstanding and spoke mainly to father's issues.
But on day to day basis, they rarely speak about issues of father's rights.
Other MRA sites I have bookmarked as containing useful research: glennsacks.com and a voiceformalestudents. But there really are no useful resources at AVFM, everything is derivative and comes from some other source.
Basically Elam poisoned his own well. He did that he says to get attention, and it worked. Terrific, he's a nationally known buffoon.
I am curious how anyone finds hte time to listen to 30 minute or longer youtube videos. The thought of listening to one drives me to suicidal ideation.