Paul Elam

Paul Elam founded the men’s rights website A Voice for Men (AVFM) in 2009 and organized the first International Conference on Men’s Issues in June 2014. He transferred control of the site to Robert Brockway in January 2022 and now works as a paid coach for men through his own company, Red Pill Solutions, LLC, while continuing to publish occasionally on AVFM.

Background

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Elam was born in 1957 and grew up in Houston, Texas. The SPLC reports that he worked as an alcohol and drug addiction counsellor, dates his stated turn toward men’s issues to reading Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power in 1993, and states that he left counselling in 1999. A Voice for Men’s own biography of him, published for its 2014 conference, describes him as “formerly a mental health professional” who “became concerned about the treatment of men and boys, both in mental health settings and the culture at large.”

A Voice for Men

Elam founded A Voice for Men in 2009. The SPLC describes it as “arguably the most influential men’s rights activist (MRA) website” and Elam as “probably the best-known men’s rights activist in the United States.” The site’s own stated objectives, in priority order, are to eliminate “gynocentrism and male disposability,” to resolve “certain issues facing men and boys,” to achieve “equality of opportunity for all,” and to oppose “enforcement of gender roles”; it states that it pursues these “by changing the cultural narrative through reasoned peaceful advocacy.” AVFM’s conference biography also credits Elam with founding “A Voice for Men radio, a network of internet based radio programs.”

In 2011 Elam launched Register-her.com, a site that published names and photographs of women, under the motto “Why are these women not in jail?” The SPLC reports that listings included women convicted of crimes, women it says Elam accused of false rape allegations, and women who had protested against him, and that the site produced coordinated harassment campaigns against several of those listed. Elam took the site down in early May 2014.

The SPLC’s profile catalogues a series of posts by Elam that it characterizes as promoting violence against women — among them a declaration of October as “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” and a 2011 post responding to the death of Thomas Ball. The SPLC states that Elam has subsequently described such posts as satire, while noting his own qualification that “just being satire does not mean there are not very serious implications underneath the hyperbole.” The SPLC also states that Elam has cited figures putting false rape allegations at 40% to 50%, and that scholarly estimates put the figure at roughly 2% to 8%. These are the SPLC’s characterizations and are reproduced here as such.

The International Conference on Men’s Issues, 2014

A Voice for Men held the first International Conference on Men’s Issues on 27 and 28 June 2014, preceded on 26 June by a private workshop given by Warren Farrell and a press conference. By AVFM’s own account the venue was changed at the last minute from the DoubleTree Hilton in downtown Detroit to St. Clair Shores, Michigan, after the hotel reported threats to Detroit Police. AVFM reports “over 250 in total attendance.” Announced speakers included Warren Farrell, Erin Pizzey, Barbara Kay, Karen Straughan, Canadian senator Anne Cools, Stefan Molyneux and Mike Buchanan.

The conference drew press attention in the weeks after the May 2014 Isla Vista killings, when the men’s rights movement became the subject of national coverage. The SPLC reports that Elam emailed the roughly 200 registrants beforehand warning that anyone “trash-talking women” or “making violent statements, even jokingly” would be removed, and told attendees his goal was to “build bridges between men and women instead of walls.” The SPLC, which sent reporters, judged the event “relatively subdued” and reports Elam’s claim that he spent $25,000 on security.

A Voice for Men has continued to run the conference series; its site lists editions labelled ICMI14, ICMI16, ICMI17, ICMI18, ICMI19, ICMI20, ICMI21, ICMI23 and ICMI24.

Departure from AVFM and Current Activity

In January 2022, according to the SPLC, Elam announced a new group called XY Crew for men “negatively impacted by gynocentric, anti-male policies and laws,” and handed control of A Voice for Men to Robert Brockway. AVFM’s own masthead confirms the outcome: it lists Brockway as Owner and Publisher and Peter Wright and Vernon Meigs as Editors, and thanks “the founder of A Voice for Men, Paul Elam, who has moved on to new projects.” Elam holds no listed role at the site, though he still appears as a bylined author there — most recently in an article dated 5 August 2026.

Elam’s own site, operated by Red Pill Solutions, LLC, offers paid one-to-one coaching sessions for men and links to the XY Crew project. He describes the work as “moving men toward lives of self-respect, self-determination and self-reliance.” His YouTube channel, @PaulElam, carried 31.6 thousand subscribers and 766 videos as of 1 September 2026.

Digital Political Impact

• A Voice for Men is the most-cited single node in journalistic and scholarly accounts of the online men’s rights movement, and is treated as an object of study in the peer-reviewed literature on the manosphere
• The 2014 International Conference on Men’s Issues marked the movement’s first sustained attempt to convert an online readership into an in-person, press-covered event, and has recurred most years since
• Register-her.com is an early and heavily documented case of a publishing site used to assemble a public list of named private individuals, and of the harassment that followed
• The January 2022 handover shows the site outlasting its founder, continuing to publish under different ownership four years later

What Is Not Established Here

Removed for want of a source that met this project’s standard: the claim that Elam began blogging about men’s issues in 2008 under the pseudonym “The Happy Misogynist”; that AVFM launched a broadcasting franchise on BlogTalkRadio in March 2011 with Elam hosting the inaugural broadcast; that the conference “received substantial media coverage from outlets including TIME” (no TIME article was retrieved and confirmed); the description of Elam as an “addiction counselor” stated flatly in the project’s voice, which is now attributed to the SPLC and to AVFM’s own “formerly a mental health professional”; the follower estimate “tens of thousands across social media and AVFM readership,” replaced with the YouTube figure actually retrieved; a primaryPlatforms entry for Twitter/X, for which no Elam account was confirmed; and a connections entry asserting that AVFM content was widely shared on Reddit, for which no evidence was found.

Corrected: the first International Conference on Men’s Issues was held in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, not in Detroit itself — the Detroit hotel booking was cancelled — and its main sessions ran on 27–28 June 2014.

Deliberately excluded: the SPLC profile relays a BuzzFeed interview with Elam’s first wife and daughter containing allegations about his marriages, arrests in the late 1970s, non-payment of child support and termination of parental rights. Those are second-hand accounts about a living person that this pass could not take back to a court record or other primary document, and they are not reproduced here. Likewise, the SPLC’s labels for Elam — “male supremacist,” “extremist” — appear on this page only as the SPLC’s own characterization, attributed, and are not adopted as the project’s description of him.