I came home from lunch today to discover that I had made the pages of Houston’s top “culture” rag, Houston Press.
I knew before reading it that the coverage was not going to be good. I have been reading the unambiguously leftwing publication semi-regularly for about 30 years. They even published some of my letters to the editor, though not the ones that cut too close to home for the hive-minded staff that run the show there.
They have some fairly interesting content sandwiched between ads for call girls and “private masseuses.” Houston Press brings you the latest on wicked conservatives, cheap eats, music and “me love you long time.”
Oh, and lies. They print lots and lots of lies. I never bothered much with writing about them because they are pretty much the affirmative action program for yellow journalism. They will lie about most anything or anyone, acting as the National Inquirer for wannabe hipsters and the lifestyle victimized.
The paragraph Jef Rouner wrote on me is a pretty good example:
Paul Elam
The founder of A Voice for Men and the de-facto head of the Men’s Rights Movement, Paul Elam spends the majority of his time trying ineffectually to beat back gender equality and claiming that it is men, not women, who most often face sexism. Some of his more interesting and recent screeds include referring to the village-sized group of women accusing Bill Cosby of rape as “drug whoring star fuckers”, offering men counseling sessions via Skype for $90 because of “feminist bias against men in modern psychotherapy”, and starting a fake version of the White Ribbon Campaign as an attempt to subvert donations to the Canadian non-profit that addresses intimate partner violence. Elam makes no secret that his “movement” does not build shelters for male domestic violence victims, address underfunded men’s health concerns, seek federally mandated paternity leave, or basically any other cause that might actually better men. Yelling on the Internet is literally the point of the whole thing.”
Ok, so nothing new here. I will briefly debunk this short bit of pablum and get to my real beef with Jef. Well, after I stop to wonder if he dropped the second “f” to be edgy or maybe his parents were southern hippies and he has a sister named River Sky.
One, since Jef failed to cite a single source for my activities intended to “beat back gender equality,” he did little more than make a hollow accusation. I love the irony in this given that false accusations are one of the core items addressed on AVFM. Mind you, for the uninitiated, Jef provided no proof to his readers that I was invested in undermining women’s rights for a good reason. It doesn’t exist. He just made it up and ran with it like he was covering a gang rape story for Rolling Stone.
Next, concerning the words “drug whoring star fuckers,” in respect to Bill Cosby’s accusers, he omitted the fact that I wrote that in the form of a question. Sure enough, I am still wondering if Bill Cosby is a demon that slipped drugs to women and raped them, or if the cadre of women spanning decades who had simultaneous breakthroughs in memory, resolve and cash flow ills are really just a bunch of drug whoring star fuckers. It’s not as though drug whoring star fuckers are hard to find.
Unlike Jef’s apparent distaste for all things due process, I think it is better to ask questions than to make declarations before someone has their day in court.
Jef also states, as though he thinks it is some sort of “gotcha,” that:
Elam makes no secret that his “movement” does not build shelters for male domestic violence victims, address underfunded men’s health concerns, seek federally mandated paternity leave, or basically any other cause that might actually better men.”
Oh how I hang my head at the shameful truth in this. We don’t build shelters. We also don’t build safe rooms for men where they can have peanut butter and jelly and watch puppy videos when a feminist comes to speak on campus. We don’t have “Lothario Walks” to draw attention to cultural narrative that only exists in our heads.
We also don’t design Formula 1 racers, map genomes or debate on whether Pluto is a planet. There are a great many things we don’t do because, well, we do other things.
If Jef had done what people in journalism used to call “investigation,” and “fact checking,” he would have seen (and immediately forgotten) that we have been long involved in calling out the underfunding of men’s health issues, promoting awareness of prostate cancer and fundraising for male birth control.
We also have been instrumental in individual advocacy for men who have been falsely accused and falsely convicted. Our work has resulted in the only prosecutor in the history of the State of Maine to have her law license suspended for prosecutorial misconduct.
Oh, and not that it would matter to Jef, we have reunited children and fathers who have been capriciously taken from each other. You know, all the things that come with just screaming at people on the internet.
Sorry to belabor the points but we have also impacted the cultural narrative enough that corrupt ideologues find us sufficiently threatening to their dog and pony $how that they enlist the support of the mainstream media in trying to take us down. Thankfully, those in the mainstream media are so stupid that they live in denial of the fact that they are the main source of our growth.
Truth alert! Jef got one right. He says I am “offering men counseling sessions via Skype for $90 because of “feminist bias against men in modern psychotherapy.”
That I do, Jeffy. Or is it Jefy? Now, if you only knew anything about the very real bias to which I am referring. No bother, a little bird told me that within a few months the bias against men in the mental health community will be addressed in much more prominent places than The Press.
By people who know a hell of a lot more than Jef Rouner.
Now, to the White Ribbon matter. I know it was a completely honest oversight on Jef’s part, but he left out some key elements that might have actually informed his readers of a few things, even at the cost of his frail and fact barren narrative.
- I acquired the domain for whiteribbon.org with complete legality and legitimacy.
- I transferred the domain to Erin Pizzey, the woman who founded the domestic shelter movement for women in 1971.
- Neither myself nor Erin Pizzey have taken a single penny from anyone in donations to the site. There is not even a donation button to be found there.
- The White Ribbon has a long, long history of being adopted by several movements and organizations over the past 150 years. It is not owned by anyone as a trademark in Canada and is thus fully legitimate terrain for us to help educate people on the facts about domestic violence. White Ribbon Canada is no more or less legit than Whiteribbon.org and we have no hard feelings that they are using the same name we do.
- Whiteribbon.org was set up to present the latest science and research on the problem of domestic violence, not to raise money or to spread a false narrative about the problem.
- Not one single civil action or criminal investigation has been pursued against myself, AVFM or Erin Pizzey. Seems kind of funny considering Jef’s accusation would imply a clear cut case of fraud using the name of a legit Canadian organization. I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of Dudley Do-Right, not to mention the FBI.
And that is the end of my rebuttal to Jef’s feat of squeezing so much fail and so much dishonesty into a single paragraph. I do believe this boy is ready for prime time.
My real beef with him is on another matter. I have seen dozens of low rent hacks like Jef publish stuff like this for quite a few years now. I owe each of them thanks for sending people to AVFM where the ones who can think critically will understand they have been lied to.
What pisses me off though, and I mean really pisses me off, is that out of 10 people who Jef thinks are embarrassments to Houston, I got stuck in the number 10 slot?
WHAT. THE. FUCK?
The way I see it, I should have been in the top three, easily. Being targeted as a source of civic embarrassment by The Press, or any of the yellow clones who write for it, is precisely the badge of honor that I love to wear.
After all, The Press, all about dignity and civic pride, published a groundbreaking article on “The Ten Hottest Women on the Texas Sex Offenders List.”
The Press also ran a story many years ago about a gay man who was laughed out of getting services for being a victim of domestic abuse. The story, which I cannot now locate, was written as though the writer had no inkling that the discrimination in that case was based on sex, not sexuality. They must have lost track of the letter I sent them on that one. It never got printed.
Finally, back in 2000, Brian Wallstin managed to find a woman who was abused in a family court. It was not a particularly special story. Karen Shrader, M.D., the supposed victim, was treated no differently than men have been treated in family courts for the past 50 years. The piece, “Absent a Mother,” generated a lot of mail, including a letter from me which can be read here. Wallstin wrote this piece like he found a new source of discrimination against women. I feel pretty confident it got him a “good boy” and a pat on the head from the girls in the office. Still, using Dr. Shrader as the poster child for a very real problem with our courts was laughably foolish. All Wallstin did was inspire misguided chivalry – not awareness of the corruption in our family courts.
So there you have it. The publication that attacked me with lies is the same one that thinks the sex appeal of pedophiles is newsworthy, that gay men struggle for support in violent relationships because they are gay (like services for straight men are so abundant) and that the criminality of our family courts only matters when it happens to women.
That profile should have earned me a spot in the coveted top three. I hope you will let them know that in the comments before someone triggers their dissent meter and they lock them down. For pity sake, they put me several spots below Randy Freaking Quaid!
I am sending this article to The Press demanding that they change the order of annoying/embarrassing Houstonians and put me in near the top. After all, this is my subjective version of reality and when dealing with this particular publication, that is all that matters.
