Paul Elam, founder of Avoiceformen, joins me to discuss a subject that receives very little attention if any from the mainstream. We discuss the flip side of feminism and what it is doing to the men today.
00:00:30.000This is Radio 314 on the Red Ice Radio Network.
00:00:45.480Hello, everyone. This is Lana, and thanks for tuning in to another Radio 314 interview.
00:00:50.780Well, we're back talking about the messy, dirty laundry of the unhealthy relationships between women and men
00:00:55.880and how it's unfolding in politics, propaganda, and society.
00:00:59.200Last time, we spoke with Lisa Arbacheski about how feminism has been turned and used as a tool for psychological warfare against women.
00:01:07.280Now, we're going to hear the flip side of feminism and what it is doing to the men today.
00:01:12.260Paul Elam, the founder of avoiceformen.com, joins me to discuss the subject that receives very little attention, if any, from the mainstream.
00:01:19.800Welcome, Paul. Thanks for being here with me today.
00:01:22.180Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
00:01:23.900Well, I've been combing through your website, avoiceformen.com, which has a lot of powerful truths on it for people to read,
00:01:29.200points that are not addressed by mainstream, which has to make one wonder.
00:01:32.720But tell us how you came to creating the website and your general philosophy behind it.
00:01:37.000Well, I initially got interested in the issues surrounding gender politics in the mental health field.
00:01:43.540I was a substance abuse counselor, addictions counselor for 20 years here in Houston.
00:01:48.580And I noticed during the 80s that there was a change in mentality that seemed to be coming out of our academic institutions regarding the relationships between men and women.
00:02:01.660We went from, I think, some kind of spirit of cooperation, although men and women have always had their differences.
00:02:08.640But there was an attitude coming out of academia that was overtly hostile to men.
00:02:16.660And to be honest with you, I sort of rode that wave myself when it started happening.
00:02:22.060I became very involved in trying to understand women's issues and to the special circumstances they faced,
00:02:30.860perhaps particularly in treatment settings, things like that.
00:02:34.740And in establishing programs and special tracks for women and in educating my staffs of counselors on dealing with special populations, particularly women.
00:02:47.980And I still think that at the time that that happened, that was probably a very good thing.
00:02:52.440But what seemed to come with it in ever-increasing doses was an animosity toward men, not just an understanding of women's circumstances or looking for ways to address their unique concerns,
00:03:09.880but a demonization and vilification of men that came with that.
00:03:17.160And after a few years of that, my attitude started changing, and I started wondering where this was coming from.
00:03:25.220And in digging into that, that was my first sort of real exploration of the politics of gender.
00:03:32.420And it led me to the writings of people like Warren Farrell, Christina Hoff Summers, and others that had written in dissent of academic feminism
00:03:44.540and had opened my eyes, they opened my eyes up to a lot of ways of thinking about gender and gender politics that I had never considered.
00:04:47.220So I don't think we're far off the same page.
00:04:50.480I do think that there were discrepancies in this society that worked against both sexes for as long as we've been human.
00:04:59.340There are roles that men and women have assumed through biology, through socialization, that put certain limitations on women,
00:05:08.720put certain limitations on men, at least within the confines of our own minds.
00:05:13.840And it's certainly, there were things that I think for both sexes that we're, and still are things, that we do well to overcome.
00:05:23.080I just don't think government's the answer.
00:05:25.120And I think as we've seen with the absolute hegemony over the discussion of gender that the government has fostered through gender feminism,
00:05:36.280we find that people are not overcoming anything.
00:05:40.040As a matter of fact, things are becoming in some ways more regressive.
00:06:08.980And this is why we certainly, at A Voice for Men, we don't look for government to fix anything.
00:06:14.740We're not looking – I mean, we point out the fact that there is, for instance, very well-heeled, federally-funded offices on women's health in the federal government,
00:06:25.960despite the fact that they outlive men and that there's nothing for men.
00:06:29.880But we don't call for government to form offices for men's health.
00:06:58.160And we're laughing as I say that, but as I look at the evidence, as I look at the agendas of feminists in our branches of government,
00:07:09.060as I look at them in our academic institutions and our media, what I see very clearly is a domineering move for complete ownership of the discussion about sex and gender.
00:07:24.700I see absolute bullying of people, of dissenting views.
00:07:30.420One example I'll give you, Murray Strauss.
00:07:34.800Dr. Strauss is a very eminent researcher in the area of intimate partner violence.
00:07:41.020And he was bullied so much by feminist ideologues that he actually produced a paper outlining their techniques for silencing, for skewing research, for producing bad figures, and for punishing anybody that got in their way.
00:07:58.400And a very convincing paper, and it is in practice with the full blessing of our wonderful government to this very day.
00:08:08.580Yeah, I just, when I look around at some of these crazy feminists, it seems like they want a society where women are basically relieved of all responsibility.
00:08:17.300They can openly express man hate and shaming tactics.
00:08:20.440They're feminizing boys and demonizing men.
00:08:27.020Well, I think it is a pathology of a kind.
00:08:31.300It is a very strange one to watch because when you hear feminist rhetoric, you hear them talking about women's empowerment, yet everything that they seem to actually do looks more like the infantilization of women than it does their empowerment.
00:08:49.840It is all about them not taking responsibility for their actions, having somebody to blame, regardless of what they do.
00:08:58.240And it is this total contradictory message, which most ideological agendas are, if you actually study them.
00:09:10.720I think for many of them, they want their fathers.
00:09:16.160They want government to be their father.
00:09:19.800They want men, generally speaking, to be their father, not their partnership in life.
00:09:25.140But as a father figure to take care of their problems, to fix things for them.
00:09:30.160In other words, what they want is a restructuring of the very patriarchy that they have said has been responsible for women's oppression and limitations for ages.
00:09:41.580Yeah, there's a video that you posted.
00:10:49.060And unfortunately, one of the side effects of feminism, and this is a very difficult area to talk about, but I really believe it's true, is that we have cultivated a society.
00:11:03.700It isn't just feminism that is infantilizing women.
00:11:07.860We've cultivated a society that is infantilizing women and is giving them expectations that they are owed, that they're victims.
00:11:17.380A lot of this stems from feminism, but it also emanates from more traditional conservative elements in our culture.
00:11:25.540That women are to be patted on the head and told they're pretty and not to have expectations of agency and accountability.
00:11:33.160I find that feminists and traditionalists make often very strange bedfellows, but they are.
00:11:40.280Sure, there could be a guy who's an asshole out there, or you don't like your boss, or you don't like your boyfriend,
00:11:45.000but it's your fault for being there and for not leaving.
00:12:03.900If the boss is that much of an asshole, they go find a different job, or they go start their own business, even better.
00:12:09.240And they become the boss, and then they can be an asshole if they want to.
00:12:13.040But that's part of our individual liberties and our individual freedom.
00:12:16.860The idea that we need to reshape society like it's clay so that nobody of any particular class of people doesn't have to deal with assholes is outrageous.
00:12:31.720It's part of why we're here is to learn to settle our own conflicts, not run to the government and ask for them to do it for you all the time.
00:12:44.360It would take hours and books to explain, but can you tell us some of the major issues men face that you've been highlighting on your website?
00:12:50.640Well, let me take it to the basics for you, and then maybe we can expand on those issues that emanate from that.
00:13:00.500Looking at this really from a psychosocial approach, the biggest issues that men face in this culture revolve around their interpersonal relationships with women.
00:13:24.400But there was forever a needed, I think, set of standards on men and women for the survival of the species that required men to fulfill a role in life as a protector and a provider,
00:13:37.620just as women were expected to fulfill the role of nurturers of children and providing for them and taking care of them.
00:13:44.940I totally understand how those roles developed and why they developed and the fact that probably for a time they were essential to our survival as a species.
00:13:56.520I don't see that as being such a necessity now.
00:13:59.940And what we have is ostensibly a society of women that allegedly has moved out of that dependency role and into their own independence.
00:14:12.240But that move, that change, would have required and does require some sort of corresponding reaction from men.
00:14:21.060It doesn't mean that it requires the government or anybody handing men a set of instructions.
00:14:26.360But a lot of men do feel lost in this culture, wondering sort of how they're supposed to be with women, what they're supposed to do.
00:14:35.560And basically they're stuck with the same set of expectations of men that we had in 1930 in a world that has changed.
00:14:44.760So what we talk about a lot at A Voice for Men is the choice of men to gravitate away from that role,
00:14:54.340to see themselves as something other than a protector and a provider whose mission in life is to secure the happiness and comfort of a woman.
00:15:05.500And that is a very controversial position.
00:15:08.100We think it's a very necessary one in order for men to free their minds in a lot of ways.
00:15:55.400It is amazing the number of men that I've talked to that have been drug into a family court and severed from their children by an abusive family law system
00:16:05.500and that just stand there and take it and don't realize that what is happening to them happens to thousands and thousands of other men in those courts.
00:16:15.940And they are totally reticent to speak up or say anything about it.
00:16:20.020And when we dig into that with them, we find that many of them feel like they cannot put themselves in a position of being in combat with a woman
00:16:29.520or, in other words, of seeing her as an equal even in the adversarial sense.
00:16:34.440And so we work with a lot of men on understanding that that programming in them is not necessarily their best friend.
00:16:50.600Has it been from violence and from war?
00:16:53.040Have men been beaten down into submission?
00:16:55.800Well, I think all human beings in some way or another have been beaten down into submission.
00:17:00.600I really think this came from deficiency needs and survival needs.
00:17:06.880I think that the general, what you'll find in most human beings is that men tend to be larger and stronger
00:17:15.180and more aggressive and more capable of physical violence.
00:17:19.540And so they have been trained through three million years of human socialization to take on that role of protector and provider.
00:17:27.400And that if a male dies, I mean, let's face it, one of the things we talk about a lot in my culture, in the men's rights culture, is male disposability.
00:17:38.760And the fact of the matter is, biologically, that if a male dies or perishes, goes down with a ship while we put a woman on a lifeboat,
00:17:46.600we've lost a sperm supplier in that regard, but we've lost the incubator if the woman goes down.
00:20:24.040Of course, they should be allowed to be educated and hold jobs and have access to owning land or doing anything else that they want to do to pursue happiness.
00:20:32.860At the same time, it's men's gender role that often inhibits them psychologically from making those same pursuits on their own behalf without thinking of women first.
00:20:44.160And we work on changing that, which is just we have a very big job.
00:21:27.400My partner pays half the bills in our home.
00:21:30.380My partner and I both have expectations that we take responsibility for our mistakes and that we work on correcting things, that there isn't a set of rules.
00:21:42.140There's no princes and no princesses in this home.
00:21:47.760And we don't go in that direction at all.
00:21:51.020And, you know, I've got to hand it to my partner in a culture that encourages women to have the expectations of loyalty in many cases.
00:22:00.720And she's done an amazing job of being a self-sufficient person with agency and accountability.
00:22:11.060And I think that's the key right there.
00:22:13.640She doesn't, we don't have a rule here that says, well, you take out the trash because you're a man, because she's actually capable of taking out trash.
00:22:21.360And I know that these are real small things that I'm talking about.
00:22:25.880But I think in the mentality that we approach the relationship with, it's one of mutual respect and mutual expectation.
00:23:18.140Well, another issue I keep hearing feminists bring up is males are so violent and, you know, they're all wired to rape.
00:23:26.020But I was just reading that 40 percent of domestic cases in the U.S. are from women's violence against men.
00:23:32.980And those are just a lot of the cases.
00:23:35.820If you looked at the work, I mentioned Murray Strauss earlier, there's Martin Feiberk at Southern Cal who put together an exhaustive body of research that covered a group of over 337,000 people in surveys and empirical studies.
00:23:54.820There are many, many, many other studies, all that demonstrate what's called gender symmetry, that women are as likely, if not a little more likely than men in relationships to initiate violence physically.
00:24:14.760There is a lot of evidence to suggest that women are injured in those relationships more frequently, which would make sense given the relative body mass difference between men and women.
00:24:27.960But in terms of using violence itself, it's roughly an equal proposition.
00:24:34.760And I think in a very important note, and this is where feminism has not only gotten it wrong, they've gotten it wrong with the terrible result in damage to our culture.
00:24:45.920By painting men as the only perpetrators of domestic violence, which is not true, and women as the only victims, which is also not true, they have ignored not only male victims of female violence, they are also ignoring the children in the homes where the mother is the one that is violent.
00:25:07.120And, you know, children are traumatized by family violence, and they don't care whether it was dad hitting mom or mom hitting dad.
00:25:15.940They are messed up over their stuff regardless of who it was.
00:25:20.360And at the same time, and again, I'm not saying this to advocate that the government should find solutions for people, but we live in a culture that is government dependent.
00:25:29.720When men look for social services because they have an abusive spouse, they're laughed out.
00:25:37.220And they're screamed out and often told that they're the abuser.
00:25:42.460They released a study not too long ago from Great Britain that said that men that called police to intervene in domestic situations when they were the ones being physically attacked were more likely to be arrested than their wives.
00:25:57.400Because the police are trained with the Violence Against Women Act here in the United States, at least our police are trained with funding from that act, which is driven by gender ideologues, to believe that only men can be perpetrators, and they look for ways to arrest the man when they show up.
00:26:16.500So this gets translated into state functionaries actually showing up at people's doors and arresting victims because of their sex.
00:26:26.100That's what's happening across this country right now.
00:26:28.960It's absolutely insane, yet we live in a culture that's pretty much conditioned to ignore the issues of men.
00:26:36.180And so the mainstream media and most other people, as you've already alluded to, won't even touch it.
00:26:42.240So what do you think about some of these elite men that are in power, like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds?
00:27:14.220But women spend most of disposable income.
00:27:17.460It's why if you turn on a television, you're going to see plenty of TV advertising where men are being slapped or kicked in the groin or told that they're enough or stupid or made to look like cavemen or whatever.
00:27:31.400And where women are portrayed as the shining light of genius in the family that has all the answers.
00:27:38.440Yes, my wife told me to take two Tylenol and my headache is cured.
00:27:45.480I would have never known to take Tylenol had it not been for my intelligent wife and, you know, cut to the next program of desperate housewives.
00:27:57.660But consumer culture is driven by female consumerism.
00:28:02.120So it makes sense to me that corporations are certainly never going to do anything but be very, very friendly to feminist ideals or any ideals that they feel like are user-friendly for women.
00:28:16.460If we're going further up the chain to the Rothschilds, to the Rockefellers, I don't know.
00:28:22.840I've had mixed feelings on this for a long time.
00:28:25.760I tend to be more of an Occam's razor kind of guy that the simplest explanation is probably the most logical.
00:28:33.460But I think that anything is possible.
00:28:36.280It's certainly illogical to assume that families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds don't have an inordinate amount of control of what happens in our government.
00:28:47.580Actually, it's Abby Rockefeller, one of the daughters.
00:28:52.080She's a feminist, like hardcore lesbian feminist.
00:28:56.380And she started up, was it Cell 16 or something like that?
00:28:59.280And it's a very violent organization that's all about basically just eradicating men.
00:29:43.260They were having discussions in a supposedly secret forum online where they were talking about murdering as many men as possible, castrating as many men as possible, throwing young boys out of windows, calling all young boys rapists and waiting.
00:30:02.580This horrific, horrific conversation going on between people in very, very influential positions.
00:31:06.220Now, if he stands up and makes a claim for women, he gets applauded.
00:31:11.160And it doesn't matter which side of the political aisle that he's on.
00:31:14.940But this goes back to the human biology.
00:31:17.480We're wired to protect women, and we're wired to see men as disposable.
00:31:21.860So anybody that stands up and says, hey, you know, these guys in divorce courts, it's a really terrible what's going on.
00:31:30.240And the abuses in family courts are absolutely just unbelievable what's happening in there.
00:31:37.260Nobody will talk about it, because the first thing that's going to happen if they do is that the feminist lobby will start screaming woman, hater, and misogynist.
00:31:52.940If they get hung with the misogynist label, now, I think a voice from men is starting to play a role in maybe having some hope for a change in that,
00:32:01.540because we have been so assertive with our message and pounding it so hard and we've gotten so popular that we're starting to see more and more,
00:32:10.180even in the media, little bits, people standing up here and there saying enough is enough.
00:32:16.320We're going to start standing up to this kind of nonsense.
00:32:18.500We hope that trend continues, because until it changes, none of this will ever get addressed,
00:32:23.700because nobody will be able to survive politically unless they side with women.
00:32:28.300And it doesn't make any difference if they're really hurting women by doing so.
00:32:33.160They still need to appear like they're siding or they're toast.
00:32:37.600Yeah, the other thing I noticed, too, and you see it in TVs and movies all the time, it's just boys don't cry.
00:32:43.440They're sissies if they say that they're being abused and they don't really have feelings.
00:32:47.580Otherwise, you're not a man, you know, be a man, man up, right?
00:32:51.260Well, yeah, well, that's when I was talking about feminism and traditionalism being strange bedfellows.
00:32:56.360That's exactly what I'm talking about is that you have feminists who have claimed for at least 50 years that they're all about ending gender roles and that we all need to be freed from this.
00:33:06.960And the moment a guy stands up and says, you know what, you're right, I don't think I'm going to get married.
00:33:13.240I don't think I'm going to try to shoot for the corporate ladder.
00:33:15.820I think I'm going to go under the radar and sort of tell the whole world to screw off and go my own way.
00:33:22.800The feminists are the first one to start screaming, you need to man up.
00:33:25.940And we had Kay Heimowicz do that recently right on the heels of Bill Bennett doing it in separate pieces.
00:33:36.660One of them in the New York Times, and I forget which one, but Kay Heimowicz was telling men to man up.
00:34:05.200There's no two human beings that are equal to each other, less two entire classes of people.
00:34:12.400Now, I think striving for equal treatment under the law, like if you go down the road at five miles over the speed limit and somebody's going to write you a ticket,
00:34:21.500I don't think it should be any worse or better than my ticket for doing five miles over the speed limit.
00:34:29.320Well, men already pay more for car insurance, younger men.
00:35:30.840It's absolutely insane what's going on.
00:35:35.360And what's really insane is that this information, this data, is right in line with the idea that men commit all domestic violence, that men can't be raped, that all this information that gets put out, all of it goes unchallenged.
00:35:52.980You don't hear anybody in network news, mainstream news, standing up and saying, hey, where's the backup for this?
00:36:01.680They've been parroting a false wage gap in the media for 20 years.
00:36:06.720It has been put out in one form or another.
00:36:09.240The most recent was in 2007, the American Association of University Women released a study that in their executive summary said that for every dollar earned by men, women earned 80%.
00:36:22.980Buried in page 26 of that study, even the AAUW acknowledged that after you controlled for life choices, time on the job, education, and experience, that there wasn't a wage gap.
00:36:36.960So it was in the very study that they used to prove there was a wage gap was the proof there wasn't a wage gap, and even that wasn't challenged.
00:36:54.980These people make it easy to prove how disingenuous they are.
00:36:58.660The challenge is in whether or not anybody in the society cares, and whether or not that they have the courage, if they do care about it, to speak up.
00:37:29.280I'm a left-wing ideologue, I'm a right-wing nutcase, I'm a libertarian jerk-off.
00:37:35.480You name it, I've been accused of it from one side of the fence or the other.
00:37:39.160But the fact of the matter is, is that every one of those ad hom attacks represents somebody that can't sit down and argue the points of fact.
00:37:49.380And so that sort of stuff does not bother me.
00:37:54.720I sort of expect it, and I exploit it where it's necessary.
00:37:58.540We just had McLean's magazine, one of the largest magazines in Canada, do a piece on us and misquoted me all the way through it, just blatantly lie.
00:38:08.900And so I write an article about that, and it ends up drawing some of McLean's readers to a voice for men, and they start figuring out, hey, we're being lied to, I wonder why.
00:38:20.360I want to ask you, what do you think about babies in America, I think this is horrible, baby boys being circumcised?
00:38:26.440I think it is, I don't even use the C word.
00:38:35.180It is not a legitimate surgical procedure.
00:38:40.980It's not a legitimate religious practice.
00:38:44.760It is mutilating the sexual organs of most all male children born in this country.
00:38:51.060It's doing something that we would not dream of doing, but it gets worse than that.
00:38:55.820I don't know if you're familiar with it, but there's a campaign underway right now, and there's big pressure and money behind it, to circumcise 28 million African men of all ages by telling them that circumcision will prevent the transmission of HIV.
00:39:17.260But there's a lot of money behind it, and it turns out that one of the biggest proponents working through the UN, I don't have his name right now, but I could get it to you, who is pushing this, along with Bill Gates, along with Hillary Clinton, and a few other people, also owns the patent on one of the clamping devices they're going to use in these 28 million circumcisions.
00:39:41.260And they're going to use in these circumcisions.
00:39:43.840So the conflict of interest there is absolutely outrageous, but it's going ahead, and they are lining up political power in Africa.
00:39:53.880They are recruiting clergy there to push the circumcision message, and then most importantly, they're recruiting women to tell men that if they want to have sex, if they want to be a real man, they'll get circumcised.
00:40:08.140And they also tell women, oh, sex is better once they're circumcised, which is bullshit.
00:41:05.680Yeah, there was a Scandinavian study that showed that guys that were circumcised, they lost their sensitivity, and they were craving more violent sex.
00:41:13.460I did not see that, but I do know that there has just been a study released, finally, in empirical evidence that showed the exact number of nerve endings that were severed,
00:41:27.260and the fact that a male genital mutilation reduces male sensitivity by upwards of 75%.
00:41:35.460So the idea, now, I've not heard that that led to men desiring more vigorous or violent sex, but the idea, if they're desensitized,
00:41:48.660that it might lead to more extremes in order to get sensitized, makes a certain amount of sense to me.
00:48:27.920I mean, maybe it's just my age, and I'm too old school, but the idea of even imagining a culture of one gender seems a little bit too Robert Heinlein to me.
00:48:58.360Well, the academe is where they were produced to begin with.
00:49:01.540It was academic feminism, and we've seen this played out in a lot of our work.
00:49:06.100We've been involved with going to different university lectures where feminists are protesting and trying to shut down free speech at anybody trying to discuss men's issues.
00:49:25.500We are starting to become, I'm very proud to say, a player in this realm when there had never been any players in this realm that did not follow feminist narrative.
00:49:36.200And we feel very strongly that this battle ideologically is going to be waged in our institutions of higher education.
00:49:46.960We're working right now with the National Coalition for Men to establish men's centers in universities across the United States and Canada.
00:49:55.500The reason for that being to give men a place of retreat from white ribbon campaigns and walk a mile in her shoes and slut walks and only men can stop rape.
00:50:07.580And all this demonization because, you know, we, and it is funny in one way, but it's really not funny.
00:50:16.280Right now in Canada at Hamilton College, every young man that attends that school has to start his first day by going to an orientation class called She Fears You.
00:50:28.160And they marched in there and they are told every last one of you is a potential rapist.
00:51:25.380Things are getting so bad with this stuff that men are finally starting to wake up and say, wait a minute, maybe these men's rights guys aren't such, you know, bug crazy after all.
00:51:35.340Maybe what they're really talking about is really happening.
00:51:38.740And I think that's a lot of why we're growing right now, is that people are starting to wake up, that this stuff has been out of control for a long, long time.
00:51:49.600And now it's so out of control, you can't ignore it anymore.
00:52:36.820But at the same time, these are the, this is the same God that commanded all the men to go to war, that fosters gender roles, that harmed men as much as it did women.
00:53:09.460Yeah, that sort of vengeful idea of God.
00:53:12.920It's easier for me since I really don't have an idea of God.
00:53:16.420But if we're going to, and I don't mean this to be offensive to anybody of faith, because, you know, a voice of men has a lot of readers that are people of faith.
00:53:28.400We just don't have much religious discussion for this reason, and it's pretty well known that I'm non-religious.
00:53:34.920But if we're going to believe in deities, at least we ought to have the common sense as human beings to believe in deities with good values.
00:53:46.840And right now, we're quite a ways from that.
00:53:51.140Paul, thank you so much for your time and your hard work on your website, exposing what's lurking in the shadows.
00:53:56.260Anything else you'd like to mention before we close?