# Paul Elam Paul Elam (b. 1957) is the founder of **A Voice for Men** (AVFM, founded 2009) — the website that the SPLC has classified as a male-supremacy site and that effectively launched the **second wave of the men's rights movement** (MRM) by moving it from journal-and-newsletter circulation onto the public internet. Elam organized the **International Conference on Men's Issues** (ICMI) starting in 2014 in Detroit, which served as the public coming-out moment for the modern MRM. The SPLC maintains an extremist-file profile on him. ## Background Elam has been open about his pre-MRA career as a substance-use counselor in Texas. He has also acknowledged, including in his own writing, a period earlier in life as an absent / non-paying father — a fact that critics (Adam Serwer's [[BuzzFeed News]] profile and others) have used to frame his subsequent men's-rights advocacy. The personal-history-into-political-grievance pattern is structurally common in the broader [[Manosphere Ecosystem]]. ## A Voice for Men (2009–present) A Voice for Men is the central content and organizing platform for what Elam terms the "men's human rights movement" (MHRM). Its agenda includes: - **Family court reform** — opposition to perceived bias against fathers in custody and divorce proceedings - **Domestic-violence asymmetry claims** — the contention that male victimization is systematically underreported - **Selective Service / draft equality** — opposition to male-only draft registration - **Rejection of feminism** — framed by the site as a hate movement against men The SPLC classified AVFM as a male-supremacy site based on its rhetoric (Elam has authored posts with titles like "October is Bash a Violent Bitch Month" — which Elam later said was satirical), its harassment campaigns against feminist academics and journalists, and its function in coordinating the broader online MRA ecosystem. ## ICMI and the Detroit conference The first **International Conference on Men's Issues** in Detroit (2014) was the public arrival of the modern MRM as an organized movement. [[Warren Farrell]] — Elam's mentor and the intellectual godfather of the movement — was the keynote. The conference drew international press attention (most prominently Cathy Young's *Time* coverage) and attempted to establish the MRM as a legitimate civil-rights movement. The framing was largely rejected by mainstream media and academic critics, but the conference established AVFM as the organizing center of the second-wave MRM. ## Function in the ecosystem Elam's role in the [[Manosphere Ecosystem]] map is **the second-wave MRA founder** — the figure whose 2009 site launch and 2014 Detroit conference brought the men's rights movement onto the public internet and into the broader manosphere coalition. The MRM's political agenda (legal reform around custody, divorce, draft, and DV reporting) was largely *not* absorbed by the subsequent commercial-wave manosphere — [[Andrew Tate]] and [[Myron Gaines]] do not run policy-reform campaigns. But the *grievance frames* the MRM developed under Elam's organizing leadership were absorbed wholesale and now function as load-bearing premises across the manosphere even where the policy-reform orientation has been abandoned. ## See Also - [[Manosphere Ecosystem]] — ecosystem map (Ring 1b: Men's Rights Activism) - [[Warren Farrell]] — Elam's mentor; the intellectual godfather of the MRM - [[Antifeminism]] — the political ideology AVFM advances - [[A Voice for Men]] — Elam's flagship organization