Male Menopause Coach Part 2: He responds

If you try to click through to the rest of the promotional materials right now, you just get this:

But two days ago, you could click through to a video that featured a large number of menopausal-and-older women milling about a seminar room getting ready to attend their “free” workshop (and I’m sure the workshop was free; that’s how these things work).

The workshop, I assume, would be Mr. Harvey’s pitch to these women about how he could coach them (for a fee) to coach other women (for more fees) about how to survive menopause.

This is a lot more nefarious than him just deciding to become a menopause coach. If he were simply doing that on his own, he’d have to learn something about menopause, but that’s not what he’s doing.

He makes WAY more money on women this way than he would if he were an individual menopause coach because “coaching the coaches” creates a compounding profit (for him).

So he’s not just exploiting and profiting from women’s suffering; he’s figured out a way to get women to not only perform all the labor but to fund their own exploitation while he monetizes their lived experience.

Anyway, last night I received this email (text pasted below for readability):

Subject: Sorry

Message: Hi Jennie, I’m Quynh, the Marketing Manager at Authentic Education and I work closely with Benjamin J Harvey.

I came across your article about our menopause coaching ad and wanted to reach out to you personally.

I’m genuinely sorry for how we handled this campaign and for the impression it gave. I can understand why the ad was upsetting and why it raised concerns about men speaking into an experience that they cannot personally understand.

We’ve since stopped the ad, and I’ve taken the feedback back to our team to review both the messaging and how we handle criticism going forward.

I simply wanted to personally acknowledge the concerns you raised, and let you know that we are taking the feedback seriously.

Thank you for taking the time to speak up about it.

Hi Quynh,

Thank you for the email, but why are you apologizing to me? I haven’t been harmed by this. I’m a humor writer—that ad was candy to me. I almost felt bad that Benjamin J. Harvey made my job so easy.

(I also don’t love that he’s having a woman do his apologizing, though I guess this tracks with his general M.O.)

In any case, there seems to be a major misunderstanding of the problem here:

The problem is not that “the ad was upsetting” and that it “raised concerns about men speaking into an experience they cannot personally understand.”

This is the actual problem:

Benjamin J. Harvey is recruiting women who have endured or are enduring a health condition that is uncomfortable, debilitating, and frequently financially destructive. He’s then co-opting that pain and suffering, “coaching” these women about how to package their own lived experience, and leveraging all of it to his own profit.

So that’s the problem, not that I was “upset by the messaging.” That’s an absurd way to contextualize what’s happening.

That’s like uncovering a Ponzi scheme that robs elderly people of their life savings and saying, “Wow, this is really bad, someone needs to do a better job on the messaging of this Ponzi scheme.”

No, the Ponzi scheme itself is the problem; someone needs to shut down the scam.

Which I assume Benjamin won’t do; I assume he’ll somehow find a way to make this, too, work to his favor because that’s what men like him do, and he’s obviously been very successful doing it. He’s getting me to “do the work” for him right now by explaining everything that’s wrong with this business plan, and I’m doing it for free on my actually-free platform (because I’m going to publish this email).

I’m happy to help, though (not Benjamin, but other women), since this is all giving me an opportunity to talk about how a savvy application of feminist rhetoric can render women more empowered to steer clear of conmen like your boss.

Benjamin directing you to send me this email in which he ostensibly empathizes with how “upset” I am is called a “red herring” in rhetoric. It’s a distraction from the actual problem, intentionally inserted to get everyone onto a different problem so that we won’t focus on the original problem, which is that Benjamin J. Harvey is profiting off female pain.

It’s also sometimes called a “thought-terminating cliche,” in this case meaning that if we can re-cast the problem as “a bunch of women having their feelings hurt by a Facebook ad,” then we’re all of a sudden talking about women’s hurt feelings and a man doing something to make us feel better rather than the actual problem, which is again that Benjamin J. Harvey is a swindler and his “Authentic Education” program is the very definition of “inauthentic” (what I’m doing right now is termed “amplification”; I’m repeating the truth in a way that amplifies it so as to prevent Benjamin J. Harvey from introducing yet another spin; “Amplification” is a rhetorical tactic that is highly effective in reclaiming the words of a narcissist and returning everyone to what’s actually happening in reality, which, again, is that your boss is a grifter).

Anyway, I appreciate the email apology, but I don’t think anyone who read my piece is really struggling with being upset (did you read the comments? Everyone seemed super entertained and cracked up by Benjamin J. Harvey’s nonsense).

Sincerely,

Jennie Young