Men's rights activist explains why it's OK to not care about female rape victims

The leader of an online men’s right group defended comments made by his hand-picked successor, who said he lacked empathy for rape victims.

Paul Elam, founder of the website A Voice For Men, complained that feminists had conspired to underreport incidences of male rape and promote the victimhood of female rape victims.

“I don’t find it particularly hyperbolic for a man to say, ‘I’m not gonna give a damn about female rape victims anymore,’” Elam said in a video posted Sunday on YouTube. “They have tons of money, of law enforcement, of special programs funded by the government, of social consciousness – schools have Take Back The Night rallies, everything you can possibly think of.”

Elam was responding to a profile published Sunday by The Daily Beast about John “The Other” Hembling, who was quoted as saying in a video that he didn’t

The men’s rights activist noted that Hembling, the editor-in-chief for A Voice For Men who’s been tapped to succeed Elam as the group’s leader, had since taken down the video from his own YouTube channel, although it remains online elsewhere.

“’John The Other’ makes a video and says, because he’s angry at dealing with these clowns, at doing this, that, ‘I don’t give a damn about rape victims,’ and it’s something to terrorize his reputation with,” Elam says. “I stand behind John for making that video.”

Elam complains that feminists hold men’s rights activists accountable for their accurately quoted remarks, and he suggested that advocates for female rape victims had a hidden agenda against men.

“We better not ever forget that when it comes to really marginalizing rape victims, to proving you don’t give a sh*t about what happens to people, nobody has anything on feminists when it comes to the subject of rape, nobody, and I don’t want that to go without being said,” Elam said.

Hembling defended himself in another lengthy video posted Tuesday on A Voice For Men, saying he was intentionally playing up his "super-villain" tendencies as an attempt at humor.

"The fact that there's a crackling and booming Beethoven soundtrack in the background, as if to emphasize the hyperbole," Hembling said.

The site then directs readers to subscribe to Hembling's YouTube channel to gain a full understanding of his viewpoint.

[Image via YouTube]