To Man Up or Stand Down
Among the many emails I get that don’t support men’s rights or don’t support my take on them, a hefty number of them are from men who take issue with the idea of other men shedding traditional masculine expectations and going their own way.
The common theme among those emails is a short lecture on what men are supposed to do; replete with sonny-lemme-tell-ya-what-it-means-to-be-a-real-man instructions. Most of them are written with enough swagger and brio to make John Wayne sport a proud, if grossly posthumous smile.
And curiously, many of the concordant emails I get from women totally miss the point. I just read one from a woman who lauded my work against feminism because she lamented the loss of days when a man “knew how to treat a lady.”
Apparently she thought my objection to feminism was because it kept me off a white horse. She assumed I am engaged in a fight to protect my right to sacrifice, like a real man. A glaring misunderstanding, but she did provide an opportune segway for the correct question.
What if a man doesn’t want to?
(pause for effect)
When all is said and done, this is the question that speaks to the heart of a growing voice, not just in the world of Men‘s Rights Activists, but in the world of men collectively. And it is the first of many questions that are sure to form tempests of debate and ire in the coming years.
Should men break with tradition? And in that should they quit expecting themselves to be the financers and custodial protectors of women’s lives? Should they quit paying for dates? Should they refuse assignment to the role of breadwinner? Are men supposed to be congenital bodyguards, socially and biologically indentured in a world where women no longer need such protection? Indeed, we now live in a world where it is men that increasingly need protection- from women, as is clear in family courts, the workplace, universities -think Duke- and frequently their own homes.
The answers to these questions, which are, like it or not, relevant now, require some intellectual scrutiny that won’t be found in myopic edicts like “Be a real man.” In fact, I’d argue that anyone issuing such proclamations needs to take a more lucid look at the world in which they live.
And it would help to have a more cogent understanding than some of the emails I get would demonstrate.
First, I think it is critical to understand that feminism doesn't keep any man off a white horse. Quite the contrary, feminism seeks to keep you mounted and chained to the saddle of that utilitarian stallion whether you want to be there or not. Look, it is about time we start to understand that feminism isn't the enemy of masculinity. It is, rather, a twisted and corrupted exploitation of it.
Chivalry was a code that men lived by to protect and provide for women and children. Feminism is an ideology that has sought, with a great deal of success to bind you to that code with no commensurate benefit. And they use traditional masculine muscle to make sure you by God comply.
When a woman makes a false allegation of domestic abuse during a divorce, she gets an ex parte restraining order issued, without proof, and takes your property, children, assets and income without due process or just cause. It isn't Jessica Valenti and her sisters that she sends after you. It is gun toting state functionaries from an almost exclusively male justice system, represented by male cops that will take you to a jail with male keepers.
When your woman becomes violent, the police will mostly likely come and arrest you. They do this under the auspices of primary aggressor laws, which I will cover at another time. But suffice it to say for now that those laws quite simply translate into "arrest the man no matter what the circumstances."
And these guys slapping the cuffs on you will feel righteous and heroic for what they are doing. It is not because they are feminist, and this is most crucial to understand, but because they are being chivalrous; because they know how to treat a lady.
They are nothing more than useful idiots, genetically programmed puppets. It is the modern paradigm of chivalry on crack, and the men doing these things don't see themselves as anything less than good men playing the role that good men are supposed to play.
Women don’t have roles any more, except as they choose to take them on. Even then, they can change their role at will, depending on whether they are vying for a promotion or sitting with a man in a restaurant when the dinner check arrives; depending on whether they are playing the empowered unstoppable woman, or the pitiful, helpless victim that needs the state to destroy your life so she will feel safe, and so that she will feel solvent. Despite all its disingenuous claims, feminism and self sufficiency do not live under the same roof. Feminism is simply a distortion of human biology that uses femininity to plunder the lives of men without having to compete with them fairly or reciprocate for what they take.
It's Carte blanche opportunism that leeches off the mandate of men to act with honor.
It is the new, but no longer sparklingly new social doctrine of equality-plus. When we were kids we used to call it getting the bigger half of the candy bar, except they want the whole thing, save for barely enough to keep men laboring and providing more candy bars.
This isn’t to cast men as victims of women. As I have tried to make it clear, all this is enabled, lock, stock and barrel, by men rigidly maintaining their traditional roles, giving women whatever they ask for by rote.
In fact, were it not for men engaging in this mindless form of collective patricide, feminism would have been deservedly quashed at least thirty years ago. Real men would not have tolerated all this nonsense for a minute.
The catch-22 of this affair, however, is glaringly obvious. The traditional mindset, previously more tempered by reason, has served as the foundation of stable families and adjusted children for countless generations. It is indeed an area where expressions like the fabric of our society and backbone of our civilization are not just tired and overused metaphors, but spot on descriptions of reality.
That, in and of itself, might appear to be a sound reason for men to just shut up, shovel and sacrifice; to labor for what has worked in the past as though the last 40 years never happened. But that is the problem. The last 40 years actually did happen. That toothpaste is already out of the tube, and trying to squeeze it back in is a noble and pathetically stupid waste of time.
It is not that traditional roles can’t work. They can for a waning few; those willing to find their way to each other though the modern morass of traditions in a world that has been stripped of them. But it is a gamble with Las Vegas odds and therefore should be a choice, I honor men who have managed to make traditional relationships work, but I don't infer on them a license to point and me and say I have to do it, too.
And until enough men start to imagine a world in which they can choose what they want to be, rather than having others choose it for them, we will continue to see misandry and feminism stab them in the back, with more than likely their male brothers holding the knife.
The way out of this is simple and clear.
When enough men find themselves paying for dinner woman who earn more than them, and can use the government to come after even more, there will likely be a lot more men, at the very least, saying:
“Hey, wait a minute.”
It seems such a small thing, but in the realm of a new direction for men, it would be one giant step in the right direction.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Busting the Wage Gap Myth
Busting the Wage Gap Myth- The Wages of Spin
Pay equity is one of the last battles in a gender war that started with women’s suffrage in the 19th century, and raged through the 60s and 70s. Unfortunately, it is a battle that continues for naught.
All the fighting is predicated on the notion that women earn less than men for the same work. Depending on who you listen to, the actual numbers vary. Back in the 70s, feminists wore "59 cent" pins to protest the fact that a woman earned only 59 cents for every dollar earned by a man. They also protested the "glass ceiling," claiming that women were shut out of the highest rungs on the professional ladder.
The stats are right. Men do earn more than women. But that surface reality is clarified when you take a deeper look into the pond. The numbers are based on a raw average of men’s and women’s income. Thus a female receptionist who works forty hours per week has her income averaged in with the male CEO of the company she works for, who works seventy hours per week.
Different? Yes. Sex based discrimination? Hardly. But that is the implication people are given when the faulty methodology that the wage studies use to reach conclusions is intentionally hidden. That was what happened in the 60s and 70s, and that is what is happening now.
In April of 2007 The American Association of University Women (AAUW), released a study with the following conclusion in the executive summary:
“One year out of college, women working full time earn only 80 percent as much as their male colleagues earn. Ten years after graduation, women fall farther behind, earning only 69 percent as much as men earn.”
So according to the AAUW women have gone from a 59 cent wage gap to a 69 cent wage gap. But there remains one fundamental problem. The methodology hasn’t changed. Please note the very next line from the executive summary.
“Controlling for hours, occupation, parenthood, and other factors normally associated with pay, college-educated women still earn less than their male peers earn.”
Note that they did not say that after controlling for hours and other factors that women still earned only 69 cents for a dollar earned by men, but that they earned less.
In other words, they presented their statistical conclusions without the controls so that misleading statistics would be remembered and passed on to others. It was a clear act of deception; a distortion fabricated and marketed as science in order to pursue and invalid political agenda.
Naturally, the question arises, if the AAUW and other feminist studies are distorting the facts, then what is the truth?
June O’Neill, former director of the United States Congressional Budget Office, conducted a study of the wage gap allegations. She found, after controlling for experience, education and number of years on the job, that women earned 98% of what their male counterparts earned.
That is a wage gap of 98 cents to the dollar, or what most statisticians would say is statistically insignificant or within a suitable margin of error to call EQUAL.
That is what the AAUW should have concluded, and would have if they were interested in disseminating accurate information. But the truth about the wage gap myth undermines the feminist agenda to paint women as victims to the male dominated work place. Understand that the AAUW and other similar organizations use these results to raise funds and to put themselves in the media limelight. If there is no problem, and there isn’t, then there is no need to give them money or even to pay attention to them.
While feminists maintain that feminism is about empowering women, we all to often see that the agenda depends on making victims of them, even if those victims need to be fabricated.
We can and should dig into this some more. It is important to understand much more about why studies indicate a wage gap before the statistics are clarified by considering variables that affect the outcome.
Warren Farrell, Ph.D., the only man ever elected to the National Organization for Women’s national board of directors three times, was one of the early feminists incensed at the alleged pay gap. Dr. Farrell dedicated a great deal of his life to challenging the culture to address this injustice.
Then, one fateful day, he asked himself questions that would change the course of his life and, eventually, convince him to leave that organization, reportedly to the relief of his feminist peers.
He thought, “Wait a minute, if women actually earn only 59 cents for every dollar earned by a man for the same work, why wouldn’t companies only hire women? Wouldn’t they be able to produce products much cheaper than companies that employ men, and put the competition out of business?"
He spent the next several years in painstaking research of the subject, and came to a conclusion that has been verified as many times as it has been ignored.
Women make less money because of their choices, not because of discrimination.
When given the choice between more money or a better quality of life, women are much more likely than men to choose quality of life. Women work fewer hours per week than men on average, take more time off, and frequently choose to put family and personal life ahead of their jobs. This speaks to their intelligence much more that it does to their status as victim.
Men not only work longer and harder, they are much more likely to choose work that puts them in physical danger, exposes them to the elements, shortens their lifespan and increases the level of job related stress.
These jobs, as a rule, pay better. It is the increased wages of risk and hardship. And the fact that more men than women choose to do those jobs is not a matter of discrimination, except to the extent that we still socialize men much more than women to put themselves on a chopping block for a paycheck.
And this illustrates a concept of Farrell’s seldom mentioned when discussing matters of pay inequity and glass ceilings.
The glass cellar.
At the very bottom of the employment ladder are the death jobs. Police work, fire fighting, construction, truck driving, commercial fishing, manual labor and other jobs that form the backbone of our civilization. They are also the most dangerous and life diminishing professions imaginable. All of them are as male dominated as the halls of power.
And they point to something many may not want to hear. Pay equity for women is found not in board rooms and corner offices, but behind the wheel of a semi, driving forty tons of steel through an icy mountain pass in January. Inclusion and parity is in the blistered hands that hold shovels and hammers; in the Bering Sea, laboring like a dog in unthinkable cold and fifty foot swells; in facing down sociopaths with knives in the darkened back alleys of urban America.
These realities call on us to examine a truth that many don’t want to utter in today’s politically correct culture. But it is the truth nonetheless.
If you want to get paid like a man, you have to work like one.
Sometimes, real justice is a real surprise, and equality, though noble and just, a step down.
On Killing the Alpha Male
On Killing the Alpha Male
Not so long ago I stumbled on some videos by YouTube’s Factory, the MRA who also publishes Mrm!, an online magazine for the Men‘s Rights Movement. I was eventually led to his blog, Hunting for Archetypes.
That title on an MRA blog says a lot, and reflects an encompassing and precisely articulated understanding of the state of modern males in western culture.
Scores of men today are crowded together at a bewildering impasse in the path toward their own identity as men. Largely severed from the lore of their father’s fathers, they are left struggling to feed their souls as men in the arid wasteland of a misandric Zeitgeist.
We live in a realm where the classic male archetypes, models of inspiration and aspiration, have been gutted and replaced with a model designed not to battle for progress, power or the greater good, but to fall on its own sword in self loathing, imposed from outside by its feminist creators.
Our archetypal Samurai has been replaced by a Shogun of Shame, a Sampson sheared of his hair, and the world of men now suffers from it.
The result is the grievous spectacle of masculinity succumbing and descending into the dismal culture of shallowness and self indulgence that is the hallmark of third wave feminism; the land of options without obligations; of self gratification without self awareness or self discipline.
This aimless, narcissistic existence is even reflected in some modern advertising, most notably Levi Strauss and Co’s recent ad campaign that proclaims men have “been stranded on the road between boyhood and androgyny,” the implication being that without archetypal alpha characteristics, men are forced to take up residence in Vaginaville, sipping Chai Tea, eschewing any trace of facial hair, testosterone, self esteem or personal power.
They are relegated to lives lived as apologies for being male, making all efforts to deny their true nature, unless it serves the whims of others. And while serving others is and always has been entrenched in the nature of men, it is now just a trait to be exploited when convenient, and denied when not in use. Most men submit to this without even knowing it.
With the male image so vilified and demeaned in today’s world, and betrayed by the previous generation of men that let it happen, the newly reengineered man is all but defenseless against this downward spiral into insignificance.
It’s happening all around us.
And though they must be held to account, we must remember that they live in a world they inherited, not one of their own making. And without an available model of manhood that does not lead to their own destruction, they will be lost forever.
Underlying the platforms and politics of the Men’s Rights Movement is an unspoken mission to serve as a lifeline to this lost generation of our brothers. More than anything else, it is the job of men who understand, who have taken the red pill and seen through the Matrix, to push a meaningful archetype of manhood into the collective consciousness. To push it past the feminist censors and their obsequious male henchmen; to be willing, in fact, to roll over them in the process.
The only real question is what that manhood should look like.
And that, just as with the lost men of this generation, brings us to a crossroads as well.
I have written recently about what it means to be an MRA; how we must abandon reflexive chivalry and blind reverence for traditionalism; how we should dispense with party politics and move past internal divisions to further the cause of men and boys. That task, as important as it is, is just a preamble to this one. Because the real point of all of this is not what we do so much as activists, but that in doing so we define and exemplify what we aspire to as men.
The road to that enlightenment will not be an easy one. We remain divided along the many lines I have already mentioned. Underneath that, though, are the real divisions; divisions as old as mankind itself.
The world of men has always been a hierarchy. Alpha males residing at the top, the rest of us falling behind them, either as soldiers to their causes or as potential competitors for a spot at the top, and frequently both.
And in a world of defined gender roles this served us pretty well. Civilization progressed; advances were made and made again. And most of us shared, if not always equally, in the benefits.
The warrior, the athlete, the statesman and the like gave us models to emulate, traits of greatness to pursue and achieve in our own right. And honorable codes kept in check, as best can be, the corrupting influence of power. While evil existed and sometimes flourished, the system also produced widespread goodness, progress for all, and produced warriors, when needed, to combat the worlds evil and stop it in its tracks.
But in a world where one sex has moved past their role to assume political and legal dominance, and where the codes of honor have been replaced by the unbridled quest for control, the alpha male, the pinnacle of masculine archetypes, has gone from a needed figurehead to an agent of evil.
Ask yourself this. When feminism launched it’s attack on the core of masculinity some forty years ago and spread like cholera though every aspect of western existence, where were the alpha males?
They were doing what they have always done, consolidating and using power, often for the greater good, and admittedly sometimes not. Only, now, in our unanswered gender war, codes of honor and integrity were the first fatalities, killed off as enemies to the feminist agenda.
Faced with either retaliating against a population they had always served, or giving up power altogether, alpha males compromised, rather capitulated, with the surrender of their values.
Stripped of their guiding, corruption inhibiting principles, they became the muscle of the feminist Mafioso, maintaining rank and privilege through enforcing feminist will on the defenseless masses beneath them. They became cops hauling men to jail on the simple accusation of their wives. They became judges bludgeoning men with their gavels in corrupt courtrooms; politicians passing ever more misandric legislation; C.E.O.’s of pharmaceutical companies pushing drugs to sap the masculinity out of our boys, to make them more malleable to feminine control.
They became the enemy their codes had always compelled them to fight, and so colluded with evil to destroy the world of men. In an ultimate act of irony, the men who had been charged by feminists as evil, stooped to embrace them, and for the first time became the evil that had been alleged.
And since there will be no power for alpha males in heralding the cause of men and boys until the feminist hegemony is terminated, they are the primary enemy of the cause. It serves us well to consciously reject any notion that they are a relevant model to which men should aspire.
Another archetype is needed. And another archetype is available.
He is The Social Warrior.
He has many names. One of them is Tom Joad.
The protagonist in Steinbeck’s classic novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” Joad was an unlikely hero trapped in a Machiavellian landscape during the great depression that bears eerily similar features to the lives of men in more modern times.
Much like the growing phenomena of men in the west who increasingly either expatiate or seek to marry women from cultures other than their own, Joad abandons Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl for dreams of a better life in California. And just like the many men who find themselves duped by mail order brides more savvy to western law than they imagined, Joad lands himself squarely in the middle of troubles he intended to leave behind.
This leaves Tom faced only with more circumstances that seem beyond his control. He is pummeled by a shadow government, designed to use him as slave labor for the enrichment of a ruling class.
Joad tries first to keep his head down and work, surviving and ensuring the survival of his immediate circle. But he discovers, much like the men of today, that he is not going to be left alone to simply live his life.
As the prevailing powers seek more control and more utility from Tom and others, the ensuing friction finally ignites.
Tom witnesses the murder of Jim Casey, a disgraced former minister who has mentored Tom in the philosophy that divinity is not an ethereal ideal, but a tangible, supportive connection between fellow men.
And it is that ideal to which Casey martyrs himself, transforming Tom into a heroic archetype that avenges his mentors death and moves on as a fugitive to organize and fight on behalf of his exploited brothers.
In departing from what remains of his family, he becomes a Man Going His Own Way, but promising that his path is not of corrupt self indulgence. We will see him, he assures, not in the flesh, but in the spirit of men who fight back on behalf of their brothers against the forces of tyranny in whatever form they take.
It is easy, and I think in error, to infer that Joab’s rebirth is just an indictment of capitalism and a move toward collectivism, though it is an idea that seems plausible in a story that unfolds against the backdrop of depression era America.
But the real message here is transcendent, delivered by a spiritual, not political leader, and speaks to the fellowship of man in a universal context, a connection far removed from the polemics of human political struggles.
One might also observe that the enemy of Joad was also the alpha male. That would be partially correct. Mankind has always struggled with the ebbs and flows in character from the corrupting influence of power. But Tom was merely the manifestation of the positive force in that struggle; the human embodiment of the code that has always risen to put evil in check.
Tom Joad was among the men that stormed the beaches at Normandy. He was the American revolutionary that fired the shot heard round the world. It was his arm that gave the first mighty swing of the hammer that toppled the wall in Berlin.
And he is the unknown, unsung and unrealized hero of men who face a similar struggle today.
In this context, Steinbeck offers us an archetype to replace the old one; to replace the one that failed us when he failed his own honor. We can now reject this model of manhood, the one that first enabled, then rode on, feminisms wave of power. And we can call these men out as the enemy they are, armed with philosophy and the righteousness to take them on, and win.
Call it the rejection of the archetype, or rebuilding of it if you will, as long as you keep calling these men to task.
And while they still have power and can inspire fear, we will see more men, cornered and desperate in this feminized world order, rise against it to fight. Or, in the immortal words of Tom Joad himself:
“It don’t take no nerve to do sumptin’ when there ain’t nothing’ else you can do.”
Sinking Feminism
SINKING FEMINISM
It might appear that men‘s equality sits on a mountaintop too high to reach in our lifetime. Feminist hegemony seems to reign like the Catholic Church in the age of Copernicus. Academics, government, media and the judicial system look like little more than extensions of feminist dogma. The workplace and even the social strata appear to have become feminist property.
For a number of years, average men have been acting as though they lived in 1936 Berlin or 1970 Moscow, measuring their words carefully and casting a quick, vigilant glance over their shoulder before speaking. Others extol the virtues of feminism with sincerity that can only be properly expressed with help from a straw hat, a cane and some Vaudeville piano. And Some men are the real deal, born again believers in feminism, dancing though the socio-political morass like Hare Krishna’s in an airport, complete with dirty faces and donation baskets.
Meanwhile, many Men’s Rights Activists, genuinely passionate about the cause, work under assumed names because of the very real danger of personal and professional retaliation if they are “discovered.”
Vee know vaht you haff been dooink.
It’s a sad testament to the reality that the thought police are not just imagined characters in some novelists dystopian fantasies. Men who mix the truth with their identities can be hurt by it, and have been.
But there is trouble brewing for feminists. Not just annoyances from the cacophony of uppity MRA’s that plague their online comment threads, but real trouble of the catastrophic variety. In fact, feminism as we know it is going to unravel sooner than you might think. The First Great Wave of masculism is on its way. It isn’t a revolutionary tsunami, but it is happening fast, like flood waters rising with deceptive speed and force. And in the end, it will drown the feminist orthodoxy before they even notice the waterline is over their nostrils.
If you think this is wishful thinking, keep reading.
MRA’s are already influencing and shaping a new Zeitgeist. The evidence of that is clear and measurable and is already changing the collective consciousness of the western world. In little more than the past year we have witnessed events in the Men’s Rights Movement that range from relatively impressive to significant…to groundbreaking.
There were two major court decisions in California and West Virginia that were very real, judicial cuts at the corrupt, feminist controlled domestic violence industry. Very recently the European Court of Human Rights dealt a severe blow to anti-father laws in Germany. In the last year we witnessed fathers rights protests in the presumably unlikely country of Mexico and the emergence of the movement in India. Men in Missouri recently won the right to use paternity testing in child support cases.
And as just reported on Men’s News Daily, The On Step Institute issued a press release announcing a convention on creating male studies programs at the university level. This is not just more of what we have seen in the past in men’s studies, which amounted to nothing more than a women’s studies program dressed up with a fake beard and a pair of plastic, pin-on cajones. It’s an effort that will ultimately produce a tectonic shift in the academic landscape with lasting, positive effects for men in western culture.
All these things leave one wondering what precisely has happened in recent times to spark such a flurry of events, seemingly unrelated, yet all bound to the common theme of positive changes on behalf of men. Why, after decades of trying, are things finally starting to happen, and why so fast?
The answer isn’t complicated.
The idea of speaking up for men is finally gaining acceptance. And that acceptance is all the culture ever needed to effect positive changes, the first of which was unclenching the vitriolic stranglehold that feminism had taken on our common sense.
Feminists are no longer The Untouchables of western politics, and once that reality spreads some more, and it certainly will, the proverbial gig will be up.
For this it is easy to credit to people like Warren Farrell and Christina Hoff Sommers; Kathleen Parker and Stephen Baskerville. Or the handful of others published and well known within the men’s rights community. And no doubt they have done much good.
But there is something else afoot here; something even more powerful. It is rooted in the collective consciousness of the society we live in, and it is much more dynamic than any given handful of writers or activists.
Forty years ago feminists steamrolled their way into the limelight of our attentions. Riding on the coat tails of the civil rights movement, they forced, with a less than legitimate agenda, a pendulum swing of such momentum that it literally swung out of sight. It moved so far away so fast that it appeared primacy in the gender dialogue belonged to feminists, and always would.
That pendulum is swinging back.
Recently a fellow MRA pointed me to some very interesting statistics regarding the internet and gender activism. And what they reflect is that MRA’s are taking over the online world.
Fact is, we already have.
In 2007 if you did a google search on both men’s rights and women’s rights you would have gotten the following results.
Women’s rights: 4,270,000 hits
Men’s rights: 511,000 hits
Exactly two years later you can do the same search with these results:
Women’s rights: 48,300,000 hits
Men’s rights: 70,600,000 hits
In other words, we went from lagging by over 400% to a very substantial lead in two years flat.
You may wonder why the internet matters considering the feminist influence in the mainstream media.
It matters very much.
Some elements of the mainstream media, largely as a result of the internet, are on the decline. Print media is clamoring against ever narrowing profit margins, cutting costs as much as possible but still falling behind the curve.
Cable and network news outlets have been forced to integrate the internet into standard operations to reach the increasingly valued demographic of consumers who blend traditional and online sources for news.
Political discussion forums and online campaigning are growing astronomically. Even political fledglings are using social networking sites like Facebook to launch their ambitions.
It all points in the same direction. The internet is the mainstream media of the future, and it’s nature doesn’t allow the traditional gags to be placed on alternative ideas.
In other words, in the online world, when the media talks, we get to talk back. And that fact makes it impossible to ignore any group with sufficient numbers and the will to voice their ideas.
MRA’s have the drive and will, and the exponentially growing numbers. We are literally changing the way people think each and every day. And feminists are hardly in a place any more to stand in the way.
Their dominance in so many areas has been long taken for granted, standard operating procedure if you will. But it is highly vulnerable for a variety of reasons. After a generation of debunked assertions, bad science and overtly sexist propaganda, their legacy of lies is finally making it’s karmic return to the source.
Keeping a grip on power at some point hinges on having a grip on reality. Failing at this, modern feminism has become a paper tiger, caged in it’s own hypocrisy, subsisting on a diet of delusion and hubris. Which is another way of saying they are eating their own excrement.
A once almost unassailable socio-political fortress, the gynocracy is now gimcrack on it‘s way to rubble, and feminism’s no longer a sustainable movement, but just a profoundly neurotic hitch in social evolution that is in the early stages of being corrected.
Going though demographic information provided by sites like Alexa.com and others, you get a pretty clear picture of average people keeping abreast of gender issues. When you compare feminist websites like Feministing.com to sites like mensnewsdaily.com it paints a pretty embarrassing contrast for feminists, assuming they can be embarrassed. Their demographics, particularly in education, look to be drawn from a mosh pit in an urban hell hole.
Intelligent, informed people seldom stay with shaky logic and false premises. As feminism continues to exceed the average life expectancy of bad ideas, those that cling to it are often the only ones dumbed-down enough for the job, or those so hopelessly brainwashed that they no longer can tell reality apart from deified victimhood.
So while men’s rights activism is on a steamroll and will soon be barreling like a locomotive right at the feminist power structure, the gate keepers won’t mount much of defense. The worm has already turned; consciousness of the truth is already being instilled into the culture on a growing scale. And truth is the ultimately terminal blow at any bogus ideology.
We won’t know about this from picketing, shrill demonstrations or flaming effigies on the streets. There won’t be a trumpet call or a celebratory parade. We can simply see that the tide is turning each time a court inflicts justice on the tainted domestic violence industry. Our evidence will be the demise, one by one, of rape shield laws, the prosecution of paternity fraud and lying for the purpose of a restraining order. Or crying rape when sex was consensual to cover guilt, or simply to cover the “victims” reputation with the person to which they were supposedly committed, but betrayed.
We will witness it in the eventual end of Title IV-D funding to corrupt family courts and the enforcement of shared parenting. The groundwork, and more importantly, the consciousness, for all this is being laid out as we live and breathe.
This movement will find it’s way into social circles where statements like “Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them,” are met with stone cold glares and the righteous indignation they deserve.
And we will know how real it all is as we hear the increased wailing of feminists who claim MRA’s are about misogyny and denying equal rights, followed by the dull thud as it falls flat on ears that grow more and more weary of histrionics and crying wolf.
Feminism will die from a synergistic overdose of stupidity, smugness and sexism.
And the men’s rights agenda will prevail because it is one of justice and equality under the law. That agenda isn’t just carried by those in the limelight. It is a groundswell of outrage that has been corked up for nearly a half a century.
It is legions of men and women who are finally waking up and deciding that enough is enough.
We have reached the time that if you want to get on the train, you will have to get a move on for a good seat. But it will be worth the effort. Or, as I recently read from another MRA, “This train is the only one that knows where it’s going.”
All aboard.
It might appear that men‘s equality sits on a mountaintop too high to reach in our lifetime. Feminist hegemony seems to reign like the Catholic Church in the age of Copernicus. Academics, government, media and the judicial system look like little more than extensions of feminist dogma. The workplace and even the social strata appear to have become feminist property.
For a number of years, average men have been acting as though they lived in 1936 Berlin or 1970 Moscow, measuring their words carefully and casting a quick, vigilant glance over their shoulder before speaking. Others extol the virtues of feminism with sincerity that can only be properly expressed with help from a straw hat, a cane and some Vaudeville piano. And Some men are the real deal, born again believers in feminism, dancing though the socio-political morass like Hare Krishna’s in an airport, complete with dirty faces and donation baskets.
Meanwhile, many Men’s Rights Activists, genuinely passionate about the cause, work under assumed names because of the very real danger of personal and professional retaliation if they are “discovered.”
Vee know vaht you haff been dooink.
It’s a sad testament to the reality that the thought police are not just imagined characters in some novelists dystopian fantasies. Men who mix the truth with their identities can be hurt by it, and have been.
But there is trouble brewing for feminists. Not just annoyances from the cacophony of uppity MRA’s that plague their online comment threads, but real trouble of the catastrophic variety. In fact, feminism as we know it is going to unravel sooner than you might think. The First Great Wave of masculism is on its way. It isn’t a revolutionary tsunami, but it is happening fast, like flood waters rising with deceptive speed and force. And in the end, it will drown the feminist orthodoxy before they even notice the waterline is over their nostrils.
If you think this is wishful thinking, keep reading.
MRA’s are already influencing and shaping a new Zeitgeist. The evidence of that is clear and measurable and is already changing the collective consciousness of the western world. In little more than the past year we have witnessed events in the Men’s Rights Movement that range from relatively impressive to significant…to groundbreaking.
There were two major court decisions in California and West Virginia that were very real, judicial cuts at the corrupt, feminist controlled domestic violence industry. Very recently the European Court of Human Rights dealt a severe blow to anti-father laws in Germany. In the last year we witnessed fathers rights protests in the presumably unlikely country of Mexico and the emergence of the movement in India. Men in Missouri recently won the right to use paternity testing in child support cases.
And as just reported on Men’s News Daily, The On Step Institute issued a press release announcing a convention on creating male studies programs at the university level. This is not just more of what we have seen in the past in men’s studies, which amounted to nothing more than a women’s studies program dressed up with a fake beard and a pair of plastic, pin-on cajones. It’s an effort that will ultimately produce a tectonic shift in the academic landscape with lasting, positive effects for men in western culture.
All these things leave one wondering what precisely has happened in recent times to spark such a flurry of events, seemingly unrelated, yet all bound to the common theme of positive changes on behalf of men. Why, after decades of trying, are things finally starting to happen, and why so fast?
The answer isn’t complicated.
The idea of speaking up for men is finally gaining acceptance. And that acceptance is all the culture ever needed to effect positive changes, the first of which was unclenching the vitriolic stranglehold that feminism had taken on our common sense.
Feminists are no longer The Untouchables of western politics, and once that reality spreads some more, and it certainly will, the proverbial gig will be up.
For this it is easy to credit to people like Warren Farrell and Christina Hoff Sommers; Kathleen Parker and Stephen Baskerville. Or the handful of others published and well known within the men’s rights community. And no doubt they have done much good.
But there is something else afoot here; something even more powerful. It is rooted in the collective consciousness of the society we live in, and it is much more dynamic than any given handful of writers or activists.
Forty years ago feminists steamrolled their way into the limelight of our attentions. Riding on the coat tails of the civil rights movement, they forced, with a less than legitimate agenda, a pendulum swing of such momentum that it literally swung out of sight. It moved so far away so fast that it appeared primacy in the gender dialogue belonged to feminists, and always would.
That pendulum is swinging back.
Recently a fellow MRA pointed me to some very interesting statistics regarding the internet and gender activism. And what they reflect is that MRA’s are taking over the online world.
Fact is, we already have.
In 2007 if you did a google search on both men’s rights and women’s rights you would have gotten the following results.
Women’s rights: 4,270,000 hits
Men’s rights: 511,000 hits
Exactly two years later you can do the same search with these results:
Women’s rights: 48,300,000 hits
Men’s rights: 70,600,000 hits
In other words, we went from lagging by over 400% to a very substantial lead in two years flat.
You may wonder why the internet matters considering the feminist influence in the mainstream media.
It matters very much.
Some elements of the mainstream media, largely as a result of the internet, are on the decline. Print media is clamoring against ever narrowing profit margins, cutting costs as much as possible but still falling behind the curve.
Cable and network news outlets have been forced to integrate the internet into standard operations to reach the increasingly valued demographic of consumers who blend traditional and online sources for news.
Political discussion forums and online campaigning are growing astronomically. Even political fledglings are using social networking sites like Facebook to launch their ambitions.
It all points in the same direction. The internet is the mainstream media of the future, and it’s nature doesn’t allow the traditional gags to be placed on alternative ideas.
In other words, in the online world, when the media talks, we get to talk back. And that fact makes it impossible to ignore any group with sufficient numbers and the will to voice their ideas.
MRA’s have the drive and will, and the exponentially growing numbers. We are literally changing the way people think each and every day. And feminists are hardly in a place any more to stand in the way.
Their dominance in so many areas has been long taken for granted, standard operating procedure if you will. But it is highly vulnerable for a variety of reasons. After a generation of debunked assertions, bad science and overtly sexist propaganda, their legacy of lies is finally making it’s karmic return to the source.
Keeping a grip on power at some point hinges on having a grip on reality. Failing at this, modern feminism has become a paper tiger, caged in it’s own hypocrisy, subsisting on a diet of delusion and hubris. Which is another way of saying they are eating their own excrement.
A once almost unassailable socio-political fortress, the gynocracy is now gimcrack on it‘s way to rubble, and feminism’s no longer a sustainable movement, but just a profoundly neurotic hitch in social evolution that is in the early stages of being corrected.
Going though demographic information provided by sites like Alexa.com and others, you get a pretty clear picture of average people keeping abreast of gender issues. When you compare feminist websites like Feministing.com to sites like mensnewsdaily.com it paints a pretty embarrassing contrast for feminists, assuming they can be embarrassed. Their demographics, particularly in education, look to be drawn from a mosh pit in an urban hell hole.
Intelligent, informed people seldom stay with shaky logic and false premises. As feminism continues to exceed the average life expectancy of bad ideas, those that cling to it are often the only ones dumbed-down enough for the job, or those so hopelessly brainwashed that they no longer can tell reality apart from deified victimhood.
So while men’s rights activism is on a steamroll and will soon be barreling like a locomotive right at the feminist power structure, the gate keepers won’t mount much of defense. The worm has already turned; consciousness of the truth is already being instilled into the culture on a growing scale. And truth is the ultimately terminal blow at any bogus ideology.
We won’t know about this from picketing, shrill demonstrations or flaming effigies on the streets. There won’t be a trumpet call or a celebratory parade. We can simply see that the tide is turning each time a court inflicts justice on the tainted domestic violence industry. Our evidence will be the demise, one by one, of rape shield laws, the prosecution of paternity fraud and lying for the purpose of a restraining order. Or crying rape when sex was consensual to cover guilt, or simply to cover the “victims” reputation with the person to which they were supposedly committed, but betrayed.
We will witness it in the eventual end of Title IV-D funding to corrupt family courts and the enforcement of shared parenting. The groundwork, and more importantly, the consciousness, for all this is being laid out as we live and breathe.
This movement will find it’s way into social circles where statements like “Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them,” are met with stone cold glares and the righteous indignation they deserve.
And we will know how real it all is as we hear the increased wailing of feminists who claim MRA’s are about misogyny and denying equal rights, followed by the dull thud as it falls flat on ears that grow more and more weary of histrionics and crying wolf.
Feminism will die from a synergistic overdose of stupidity, smugness and sexism.
And the men’s rights agenda will prevail because it is one of justice and equality under the law. That agenda isn’t just carried by those in the limelight. It is a groundswell of outrage that has been corked up for nearly a half a century.
It is legions of men and women who are finally waking up and deciding that enough is enough.
We have reached the time that if you want to get on the train, you will have to get a move on for a good seat. But it will be worth the effort. Or, as I recently read from another MRA, “This train is the only one that knows where it’s going.”
All aboard.
Domestic Violence
Domestic Violence- Women are Half the Problem
"Domestic Violence."
Even the mention of the words conjures up the larger than life image of some battered, bruised woman on a highway billboard; a day glow orange hot-line number beneath her visage, and some catchy slogan like “love shouldn’t hurt.
And no, I am not insensitive to battered women. My heart goes out to any real victim. But the day I see the images of bruised men on those billboards, I’ll be less prone to being offended at seeing the images of beaten women being propped up like the starving children you see on your TV at two in the morning; the ones you can feed, clothe and send to Harvard for 12 dollars a month.
"Domestic Violence."
Even the mention of the words conjures up the larger than life image of some battered, bruised woman on a highway billboard; a day glow orange hot-line number beneath her visage, and some catchy slogan like “love shouldn’t hurt.
And no, I am not insensitive to battered women. My heart goes out to any real victim. But the day I see the images of bruised men on those billboards, I’ll be less prone to being offended at seeing the images of beaten women being propped up like the starving children you see on your TV at two in the morning; the ones you can feed, clothe and send to Harvard for 12 dollars a month.
The myth is simple and designed for the simple minded. Domestic violence is almost exclusively perpetrated by men against women. Even better, it means brutish thugs pounding the crap out of Mary Poppins for burning the toast.
And here and there, that is true. But if you think it defines the problem, or even comes close, you need to take Dr. Phil off your TIVO to do list and start picking up some real books.
This nonsense didn't spring out of thin air. It was and is the raison d'étre of feminists, in their claim of patriarchal domination and how that extended into the home and family. And on the surface it makes sense, especially if you don't think about it. And of course we didn't, so the idea spread like chlamydia in a cat house.
But let us scrutinize it now. You deserve a lot more depth than is offered in a sound bite.
I’ll start with some research that most would feel was from a reputable source. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, GA. This is the summary of their findings as published in the American Journal of Public Health, May 2007.
First, almost 24% of all relationships had some level of violence. Half of those relationships involved just one of the partners being violent. The other half were reciprocally violent.
Now, in relationships where violence was perpetrated by just one person, over 70% of that was committed by the woman.
Did you get that? In all relationships in that particular study, more than 7 out of 10 batterers were female.
Let’s look even closer at the data as it relates to relationships where both partners are violent. This half is even more interesting than the first half.
The study concluded that reciprocally violent relationships were most likely to result in injuries, particularly to women. They were also a solid predictor of future, repeated violence for women, but not men. In other words, women who engaged in mutual combat with men were much more likely to have a pattern of instigating repeated assaults. Men’s violence was much more likely to be isolated, and, contrary to the repeated assertions of feminists, not likely to be repeated.
Now let me sum up those conclusions in a clearer form of English. Relationships where both are violent are more likely to result in the woman getting hurt. Those relationships are also marked by women who are much more likely than men to initiate and maintain that violence in the first place.
We have common expression for much of the men’s violence in these situations.
It’s called hitting back.
I know, there is no excuse for violence. Ever, some would say. But there is legal, and in the belief of many, moral justification for self defense. Either way, it is a judgment call made after, and only after, an attack has been made.
In fairness, it has to be pointed out that this one study, for many reasons, including methodology, can't fairly be generalized to the entire population. And one study alone is easy enough to dispute, even from a sound source. So let's look at a hundred more.
Professor John Archer is a psychologist at The University of Central Lancashire and the esteemed head of the Aggression Research Group at the same university. In his analysis of 100 British and American studies he concludes that women are more likely than men to initiate violence in their relationships and are more likely to be aggressive more frequently. He also addresses the myth that women are only violent as a matter of self defense by reporting that 29% of female college students admitted to physically attacking their boyfriends when no threat was perceived.
I know feminists won‘t be convinced by this, nor will they by several hundred more studies, but let’s look at them anyway. Professor Martin S. Fiebert of the California State University Psychology Department conducted an analysis of 249 scholarly investigations, 194 empirical studies and 55 reviews regarding domestic violence. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies numbers over 241,700 people.
Fiebert's conclusion? Women are as physically aggressive or more physically aggressive in relationships than men.
And if you think that the incidence of female on male violence is mitigated by women suffering more injuries at the hands of men, think again.
There are widely conflicting studies on this. Some of them place women at greater risk, but many of them place men. If we examine Fiebert's annotated bibliography which covers an exhaustive amount of studies, there are many times more studies cited that show women more likely to inflict serious harm, including with the use of weapons, than are men.
There are widely conflicting studies on this. Some of them place women at greater risk, but many of them place men. If we examine Fiebert's annotated bibliography which covers an exhaustive amount of studies, there are many times more studies cited that show women more likely to inflict serious harm, including with the use of weapons, than are men.
Are there other studies that contradict this? Absolutely. But there is a significant enough body of evidence to make three things patently clear.
1. Domestic violence is not a product of gender. Attributing it to one gender over the other is not only misleading, it actually hinders efforts to address the problem.
2. Society is wildly misinformed about the nature, origins and realities of domestic violence.
3. Most of our legal and political handling of domestic violence is based on the myths and not the realities, leaving us to put all of our resources into half of the problem.
As in so many other ways, we demonstrate a cultural tendency to remake reality, even embrace lies, when the truth about the fairer sex doesn't make them look all that fair.
Now many people of sound mind might well say, "Fine, let's just focus our attention on dealing with abusers and the abused, regardless of the sex."
But to say things are not that simple is a monumental understatement.
Richard Gelles is currently a dean at the University of Pennsylvania and holds The Joanne and Raymond Welsh Chair of Child Welfare and Family Violence in the School of Social Policy & Practice.
He is an internationally known expert in domestic violence, and was influential in the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997.
Gelles wrote, regarding his work with Suzanne Steinmetz and Murray Strauss, "The response to our finding that the rate of female-to-male violence was equal to the rate of male-to-female violence not only produced heated scholarly criticism, but intense and long lasting personal attacks. All three of us received death threats. Bomb threats were phoned in to conference centers and buildings where we were scheduled to present."
Now is it me, or is making terroristic threats of bombing and murder a rather strange way to protest being called violent?
Returning to the evidence, though, it would be easy to make an argument that domestic violence is more a female than a male problem. There are, after all, numerous studies that support that conclusion. But that would be as pointless as the current paradigm, and might result in my car blowing up the next time I start it.
So for those of you screaming for me to quit picking on women and take gender out of the equation, that is precisely what I am doing.
And what I am asking you to do, once and for all.
If you really believe that all violence is bad and shouldn't be tolerated, then here is what you can do to prove it.
Write Vice President Biden and tell him to seek an end to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), the legislation he authored that allocates billions to women victims but leaves men totally out of the picture. Men are, after all, injured by domestic violence, too. 835,000 per year in America alone.
Start holding shelters and social services to account when they have no real programs designed for men. Their failure to do this is institutionalized sexism and needs to go.
Confront police and prosecutors for their actions. Men who call for police help when attacked by their partners are more likely than not to be the one arrested, regardless of the circumstances.
Victims should be helped, not arrested, incarcerated and stigmatized.
Be sure to express your objections to and boycott the media outlets and corporations like Pepsi and Fedex that use men getting abused as a sight gag in their advertising.
When you see or hear a public service announcement that says something like "A woman is abused in her home every 15 seconds," realize that is is a actually a public deception, a convoluted half-truth, based in blind bigotry and callous indifference to the victimization of men.
Those are a few good beginnings, but you can best start by simply and publicly acknowledging what so few seem to know. Domestic violence has nothing to do with what sex you are. It never has. Disinformation is a poor way to address social ills. In fact, it just breeds more of them.
And what I am asking you to do, once and for all.
If you really believe that all violence is bad and shouldn't be tolerated, then here is what you can do to prove it.
Write Vice President Biden and tell him to seek an end to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), the legislation he authored that allocates billions to women victims but leaves men totally out of the picture. Men are, after all, injured by domestic violence, too. 835,000 per year in America alone.
Start holding shelters and social services to account when they have no real programs designed for men. Their failure to do this is institutionalized sexism and needs to go.
Confront police and prosecutors for their actions. Men who call for police help when attacked by their partners are more likely than not to be the one arrested, regardless of the circumstances.
Victims should be helped, not arrested, incarcerated and stigmatized.
Be sure to express your objections to and boycott the media outlets and corporations like Pepsi and Fedex that use men getting abused as a sight gag in their advertising.
When you see or hear a public service announcement that says something like "A woman is abused in her home every 15 seconds," realize that is is a actually a public deception, a convoluted half-truth, based in blind bigotry and callous indifference to the victimization of men.
Those are a few good beginnings, but you can best start by simply and publicly acknowledging what so few seem to know. Domestic violence has nothing to do with what sex you are. It never has. Disinformation is a poor way to address social ills. In fact, it just breeds more of them.
RESEARCH SOURCES FOR THIS ARTICLE
CDC Report- American Journal of Public Health
Martin Fiebert's Annotated Bibliography
John Archer: Sex Differences in Aggression in Real-World Settings: A Meta-Analytic Review
NOTE: Access to Dr. Archers research is fee based!
Abstracts- If you want the complete studies, you have to pay.
Prevalence and Correlates of Physical Aggression During Courtship. ILEANA ARIAS, University of Georgia. MARY SAMIOS, State University of New York at Stony Brook. K. DANIEL O'LEARY, State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Basile, S. (2004). Comparison of abuse by same and opposite-gender litigants as cited in requests for abuse prevention orders
Women who perpetrate intimate partner violence: A review of the literature with recommendations for treatment.
Michelle Carney, School of Social Work, Tucker Hall, University of Georgia. Fred Buttell, Tulane University. and Don Dutton, University of British Columbia, Canada
Quote from abstract: Particular attention is paid to the cultural influences that shape our conceptualization of “domestic violence” and the fact that empirical research suggests that domestic violence has been falsely framed as exclusively male initiated violence.
Gay Marriage? How About NO Marriage!
Gay Marriage? How About NO Marriage!
It is hard to turn on cable news any more without having your senses assaulted by some ersatz conservative wailing like a bagpipe about the evils of gay marriage.
“We need to stop this from happening,” they say. “Marriage is one man and one woman. God-almighty Hisself said so.” And then there is the obligatory, nauseatingly redundant, “We need to protect the sanctity of the institution.”
Excuse me? The sanctity of the institution?
It makes me wonder if they have a rehab for this type of thinking.
Modern marriage, in case these Einsteins haven’t noticed, has all the sanctity of a ten dollar hooker. Matrimony has devolved into just another throwaway institution in a throwaway culture and it wasn‘t homosexuals that got us here. Nor will it be them that drives the final nail in the coffin.
As usual, we are not facilitating any real understanding with sound bites from talking heads. “One man and one woman,” no more illuminates the problems of modern marriage than nonsense like “my body, my choice,” illuminates the issue of abortion.
Worse yet, as any men’s rights advocate knows, marriage hasn’t been “one man and one woman” for a long time. The reality of the times is that men marry the state they live in. The woman just comes with the deal for a few years. When it’s fini with the woman, things really heat up with the state, shearing the man of his assets and adding a new, bizarre dimension to “till death do us part.”
And allowing gays into this fiasco is going to hurt the institution?
I wish I could corner a couple of these pundits and make them answer some questions. Maybe Hannity, or the anorexic looking chick with stringy bleached hair.
The questions would be simple. Where were you? And what are you doing about it now?
When the feminists pushed for and got no fault divorce, and the divorce rate consequently hit the stratosphere creating legions of dysfunctional, fatherless children, where were you? What are you doing about it now?
When feminist ideology spread like a malicious rumor though the media, academia, government and the culture, demonizing all things masculine and creating the fundamental rift between the sexes that plagues marriage to this day, where were you? What are you doing about it now?
When the family courts started taking Title IV-D money, turning benches into private fiefdoms, profit centers whose stock-in-trade became eviscerating the father-child bond, where were you? What are you doing about it now? And add to that another question. Do you even know what Title IV-D money is and how it makes it’s way from the federal government into family court coffers? Or would that take more information than you can squeeze in between Cialis commercials on Fox News?
Of course, the point is that we already know where these people were and where they are now. They’re in the place they have always been, crawling like roaches over every media news outlet that will call on them to say something profoundly meaningless about profoundly meaningless topics, in the name of plugging profoundly meaningless books.
These vultures want to protect the sanctity of marriage in the same way Courtney Love wants to protect chastity.
And those that caterwaul the loudest about the supposedly sinister prospect of gay marriage are the same ones that can’t stop wagging their tongues about the virtues of constitutional conservatism.
I’m fascinated by people that call themselves limited government conservatives, but sit by complacently like grinning, plastic bobble-heads, as long as the government is enforcing their religious and moral beliefs on the rest of the population.
News flash, that is not conservatism, it’s not even a cheap imitation. It’s theocracy. Ayatollah style. And it’s about as conducive to men’s rights as feminism.
I wouldn’t be bothered by this all that much if it were contained to media pinheads. I expect them to say a lot and understand little. It’s what they get rich doing.
But when I see MRA’s espousing this cause célèbre, it puts a spike in my “shoot-yourself-in-the-foot” detector.
Why, for the love of Pete, would men’s rights activists seek to protect the sanctity of an institution that is currently the most prolific source of oppressive discrimination against them?
But I see it all the time, from MRA’s, rather from patriarchs who think they are MRA’s.
Just as theocratic zealots shouldn’t confuse themselves with constitutional conservatives, patriarchs shouldn’t confuse themselves with MRA’s. In this writers opinion, our agendas are diametrically opposed.
Patriarchs want to return to the imagined days of chivalry and glory for men, when they were the heads of their homes and women did the dishes and pretty much anything else they were told. And I used the word imagined for a reason. The idea of days when men held all power and dominion over women never happened. It is just another in a long line of feminist delusions and revisionist history. It is a fantasy that modern patriarchs have swallowed, lending them to wax nostalgic about somebody else's pipe dream. I’m sure it would be a nice world for the control obsessive, but that toothpaste, inasmuch as it never existed, is already out of the tube and is not going to be squeezed back in. And chivalry, in that it hinges on putting women first at the expense of men, has much more in common with feminism than it does with men’s rights.
MRA’s just want to escape the sexism and bias and treachery involved in marriage and every other institution that affects men. And that puts us, again in this writers opinion, in the ironic place of finishing what feminists started; an all out assault on marriage itself.
The feminists won this one. Game over. A shutout. What remains of marriage is not salvageable. It’s water that can’t be decontaminated; a cripple that can’t be healed. And the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery and start the whole shebang over from scratch. Hopefully that would be sometime after the culture has recovered from the damage of feminist doctrine and placed some sanity back on the table.
So if gay marriage erodes the sanctity of the institution, I say fine, let’s print them licenses by the truckload. I’ll spring for some rice.
There are plenty of real issues, the ones the pundits ignore, that need plenty of real attention. I won’t be bothered to invest in anything else, especially something that ultimately undermines men even more.
It was no doubt feminists that put marriage on life support. We should mourn that and look to the future for renewed hope that some day men and women will share life again with love and dignity. But today, MRA’s should do the decent thing with marriage and pull the plug
It is hard to turn on cable news any more without having your senses assaulted by some ersatz conservative wailing like a bagpipe about the evils of gay marriage.
“We need to stop this from happening,” they say. “Marriage is one man and one woman. God-almighty Hisself said so.” And then there is the obligatory, nauseatingly redundant, “We need to protect the sanctity of the institution.”
Excuse me? The sanctity of the institution?
It makes me wonder if they have a rehab for this type of thinking.
Modern marriage, in case these Einsteins haven’t noticed, has all the sanctity of a ten dollar hooker. Matrimony has devolved into just another throwaway institution in a throwaway culture and it wasn‘t homosexuals that got us here. Nor will it be them that drives the final nail in the coffin.
As usual, we are not facilitating any real understanding with sound bites from talking heads. “One man and one woman,” no more illuminates the problems of modern marriage than nonsense like “my body, my choice,” illuminates the issue of abortion.
Worse yet, as any men’s rights advocate knows, marriage hasn’t been “one man and one woman” for a long time. The reality of the times is that men marry the state they live in. The woman just comes with the deal for a few years. When it’s fini with the woman, things really heat up with the state, shearing the man of his assets and adding a new, bizarre dimension to “till death do us part.”
And allowing gays into this fiasco is going to hurt the institution?
I wish I could corner a couple of these pundits and make them answer some questions. Maybe Hannity, or the anorexic looking chick with stringy bleached hair.
The questions would be simple. Where were you? And what are you doing about it now?
When the feminists pushed for and got no fault divorce, and the divorce rate consequently hit the stratosphere creating legions of dysfunctional, fatherless children, where were you? What are you doing about it now?
When feminist ideology spread like a malicious rumor though the media, academia, government and the culture, demonizing all things masculine and creating the fundamental rift between the sexes that plagues marriage to this day, where were you? What are you doing about it now?
When the family courts started taking Title IV-D money, turning benches into private fiefdoms, profit centers whose stock-in-trade became eviscerating the father-child bond, where were you? What are you doing about it now? And add to that another question. Do you even know what Title IV-D money is and how it makes it’s way from the federal government into family court coffers? Or would that take more information than you can squeeze in between Cialis commercials on Fox News?
Of course, the point is that we already know where these people were and where they are now. They’re in the place they have always been, crawling like roaches over every media news outlet that will call on them to say something profoundly meaningless about profoundly meaningless topics, in the name of plugging profoundly meaningless books.
These vultures want to protect the sanctity of marriage in the same way Courtney Love wants to protect chastity.
And those that caterwaul the loudest about the supposedly sinister prospect of gay marriage are the same ones that can’t stop wagging their tongues about the virtues of constitutional conservatism.
I’m fascinated by people that call themselves limited government conservatives, but sit by complacently like grinning, plastic bobble-heads, as long as the government is enforcing their religious and moral beliefs on the rest of the population.
News flash, that is not conservatism, it’s not even a cheap imitation. It’s theocracy. Ayatollah style. And it’s about as conducive to men’s rights as feminism.
I wouldn’t be bothered by this all that much if it were contained to media pinheads. I expect them to say a lot and understand little. It’s what they get rich doing.
But when I see MRA’s espousing this cause célèbre, it puts a spike in my “shoot-yourself-in-the-foot” detector.
Why, for the love of Pete, would men’s rights activists seek to protect the sanctity of an institution that is currently the most prolific source of oppressive discrimination against them?
But I see it all the time, from MRA’s, rather from patriarchs who think they are MRA’s.
Just as theocratic zealots shouldn’t confuse themselves with constitutional conservatives, patriarchs shouldn’t confuse themselves with MRA’s. In this writers opinion, our agendas are diametrically opposed.
Patriarchs want to return to the imagined days of chivalry and glory for men, when they were the heads of their homes and women did the dishes and pretty much anything else they were told. And I used the word imagined for a reason. The idea of days when men held all power and dominion over women never happened. It is just another in a long line of feminist delusions and revisionist history. It is a fantasy that modern patriarchs have swallowed, lending them to wax nostalgic about somebody else's pipe dream. I’m sure it would be a nice world for the control obsessive, but that toothpaste, inasmuch as it never existed, is already out of the tube and is not going to be squeezed back in. And chivalry, in that it hinges on putting women first at the expense of men, has much more in common with feminism than it does with men’s rights.
MRA’s just want to escape the sexism and bias and treachery involved in marriage and every other institution that affects men. And that puts us, again in this writers opinion, in the ironic place of finishing what feminists started; an all out assault on marriage itself.
The feminists won this one. Game over. A shutout. What remains of marriage is not salvageable. It’s water that can’t be decontaminated; a cripple that can’t be healed. And the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery and start the whole shebang over from scratch. Hopefully that would be sometime after the culture has recovered from the damage of feminist doctrine and placed some sanity back on the table.
So if gay marriage erodes the sanctity of the institution, I say fine, let’s print them licenses by the truckload. I’ll spring for some rice.
There are plenty of real issues, the ones the pundits ignore, that need plenty of real attention. I won’t be bothered to invest in anything else, especially something that ultimately undermines men even more.
It was no doubt feminists that put marriage on life support. We should mourn that and look to the future for renewed hope that some day men and women will share life again with love and dignity. But today, MRA’s should do the decent thing with marriage and pull the plug
The Psychology of Hate
The Psychology of Hate
Years back, in another life, I used to teach at seminars and conferences that provided continuing education units for professional re-certification.
In one particular module, I used a portable grease board in a room in front of my waiting audience. Without introducing myself or saying anything else, I used a grease pen to write the words “Men are…” at the top of the board, and then silently invited the audience to finish the sentence.
Almost invariably, “pigs” or “dogs” was the first offering, accompanied by a room full of good-natured chuckles. I would nod my head and write it down on the board and return to the audience, still silent, for more.
“Controlling,” says one. “Afraid of commitment,” says another. “Aggressive.” “Macho“ “Afraid of intimacy." “Violent.” “Sexist,” and “Power hungry.” More of the pejoratives, and almost only pejoratives, would come from the audience till the board was full.
I then flipped the board to the other side.
“Women are…” was the cue, and the answers were even more rapid fire than they were with men.
“Strong.” “Capable” “Empowered” “Sensitive.” “Nurturing,” and the like would fly from the audience to the grease board like a barrage of arrows, till that side too was full.
“What do you imagine,” I would ask, taking a strategic pause for a sip of water, “that these answers tell us about the real nature of sexism in the way we view men and women?”
Asking them a question with actual spoken words must of thrown them for a loop, because the stock response to that question was almost invariably a room full of nonplussed, cognitively dissonant faces. And that confusion usually gave way to irritation, clearly at me, though every answer on both sides of that board had come from them.
And by the way, the participants in the crowd? They weren’t accountants or nurses or teachers or financial advisors.
They were mental health professionals.
Counselors, psychotherapists, social workers and the lot. The very people we love to imagine possess the objectivity to rise above the mindset of bigotry and sexism. And the people, despite our want of faith in their work, least likely to actually do it.
I wanted a little more pressure so I asked more questions. “How could this affect our therapeutic alliance with clients?- Could it make our relationships with females enabling?- Punitive with men?” And always, the final question I asked was “Do we carry sexism, against men, unconscious or conscious, into our work with each and every client?”
With that question the anger usually intensified.
In one talk, a female participant, a social worker, jumped out of her chair and threw her papers everywhere. “You’re the sexist!” she hissed at me, and stormed out of the room. She later wrote letters of complaint both about my topic and the fact I would not sign off on her attendance.
Welcome to the wacky world of mental health.
It is a telling study in the psychology of hate. Indeed, as we peel back the layers of fantasy from the profession, we are forced into a most disturbing conclusion.
Psychology is hate. At least as it is practiced in western culture.
It’s most evident in the junk psychology market. Since the mid-eighties, get-rich-quick psychology gurus have often made their way to bestseller lists. Books like Robin Norwood’s Women Who Love Too Much, Susan Forwards, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them and others have been runaway hits, all predicated on rigid stereotypes of men who hate and women who love; all just more additions to the already crowded grease board.
Recently, MRA Mark Rudov appeared on Fox News in a brief debate with Karen Salmansohn on women executives. She was given a nice plug for her new book, Bounce Back. They could have, and probably should have in the interest of balance, given her credit for her previous publication, How to Make Your Man Behave in 21 Days or Less Using the Secrets of Professional Dog Trainers.
I don’t make this stuff up. Unfortunately, I don’t have to.
Currently, male bashing monarch Phil McGraw reigns in the ratings, and it won’t be long before another emerges, fighting to be top dog in dogging men. All you need is a warped worldview and a nod from Oprah.
And these are just the media hucksters. At least we can say that the men and women who embrace their misandry-for-profit schemes are just another dumbed-down group in a dumbed-down media culture.
The more culpable and dangerous are the ones with the air of legitimacy. These folks don’t write, or don’t just write. They teach, do research, and most dreadfully, hang out their shingles and help infect the world, one gullible client at a time.
The world of psychology in academics and practice has become a weapon in the realm of gender politics. Almost all pretense to objectivity and academic integrity has been forced aside by ideologues with an ax to grind against men and who are using the loathsome disguise of helping professionals to further their agenda.
If you think that is extreme, read on.
Allaboutcounseling.com is purportedly an information and referral resource for people seeking mental health services. What it is in reality is a portal, a conduit that induces women into the mentality that it is the vile scourge of manhood at the root of their problems.
And they offer feminism as the solution before the first session is booked.
Some tidbits from their site include some detailed hype about the fundamentals of feminism and some reassurances that not all feminists are lesbians.
I suppose they figure heterosexual women need such basics. And it’s good pre-sell to overcome objections before they are raised. Ask any used car salesman.
They even have a nifty section promoting a new masculinity. These Freudettes have the key to re-engineering men for the better, with the implication, of course, that the way men are now is defective and in need of an overhaul.
Part of that overhaul is a gag. This is just one of the standouts, as it appears word for word on the site.
Openness- To others (especially to women) criticism of our behaviors and attitudes, listen, listen some more, and only speak if the critic wants feedback.
This isn’t even speak when spoken to. It is shut up and take it. Speak with permission only, from whichever woman is attacking you at the moment.
Ah, the finer aspects of mental health.
They have much more there. Enough bogus stats on domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse for a N.O.W. convention, and staunch defenses of feminism tied in directly with the counseling message. Their ultimate point is clearly that sound mental health for women depends on embracing feminism, and with it the hatred for men.
Sound advice for those seeking love and intimacy if I ever saw it.
At this point, the grease board is showing more grease than board.
I wish I could say that this was the bottom of the pit; that the infection stopped there, but we are still dealing more with the symptoms than the actual disease.
Enter the American Psychological Association, and it’s Division 51 group The Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity. (SPSMM) You can pronounce the acronym spasm if you want to. I do. And it fits.
Here are two of the bullet points of from the Mission Statement on their home page, out there for the world to see.
Endeavors to erode constraining definitions of masculinity which have historically inhibited men’s development, their capacity to form meaningful relationships, and have contributed to the oppression of other people.
Acknowledges its historical debt to feminist-inspired scholarship, and commits itself to support groups such as women, gays, lesbians and people of color that have been uniquely oppressed by the gender/class/race system.
Aye, there‘s the rub, and with it goes the last remaining bit of room on the grease board. Men are defective, pernicious banes to civilized society. And feminism is the answer.
Even our most revered experts in human nature are saying as much.
And this is how it worked in the old Soviet Union. It is wise to consider that in the Solzhenitsyn era of gulags and iron fisted reaction to political dissent, that most of the dissidents were imprisoned in “mental health facilities,” the logic being that if you disagreed with the state, there must be something wrong with your mind.
It was also a strategy of, and yes, I will say it without reservation, the Hitler regime, to poison the minds of the populace with disinformation about Jews, prepping the people to look the other way while they were dispatched in the name of a master race.
The plans for men may be less extreme and of longer duration, but it is happening nonetheless. Men are being marginalized year after year. Their numbers in college graduating classes are waning. 42% at last count. They have lost over 80% of the jobs in the current recession. They are dying by suicide and all other manners of death at rates that make women’s lives look like vacations in Fiji.
It’s hell having all this power. It is a wonder how we find time to oppress the world with it, much less twirl our moustaches and snicker while we do it.
But the anti-male hate machine keeps grinding away. Spasm would no doubt classify the MRM as a mass shared psychosis, and MRA’s individually as antithetical to humanity.
I used to remember that social worker who threw the tantrum in my class with a smile. It was a funny image. But that was some years ago. At the time, I knew the sexism was there, but it was not entrenched as deeply as it is today. And I naively thought it would go away.
I am not smiling about it any more.
Years back, in another life, I used to teach at seminars and conferences that provided continuing education units for professional re-certification.
In one particular module, I used a portable grease board in a room in front of my waiting audience. Without introducing myself or saying anything else, I used a grease pen to write the words “Men are…” at the top of the board, and then silently invited the audience to finish the sentence.
Almost invariably, “pigs” or “dogs” was the first offering, accompanied by a room full of good-natured chuckles. I would nod my head and write it down on the board and return to the audience, still silent, for more.
“Controlling,” says one. “Afraid of commitment,” says another. “Aggressive.” “Macho“ “Afraid of intimacy." “Violent.” “Sexist,” and “Power hungry.” More of the pejoratives, and almost only pejoratives, would come from the audience till the board was full.
I then flipped the board to the other side.
“Women are…” was the cue, and the answers were even more rapid fire than they were with men.
“Strong.” “Capable” “Empowered” “Sensitive.” “Nurturing,” and the like would fly from the audience to the grease board like a barrage of arrows, till that side too was full.
“What do you imagine,” I would ask, taking a strategic pause for a sip of water, “that these answers tell us about the real nature of sexism in the way we view men and women?”
Asking them a question with actual spoken words must of thrown them for a loop, because the stock response to that question was almost invariably a room full of nonplussed, cognitively dissonant faces. And that confusion usually gave way to irritation, clearly at me, though every answer on both sides of that board had come from them.
And by the way, the participants in the crowd? They weren’t accountants or nurses or teachers or financial advisors.
They were mental health professionals.
Counselors, psychotherapists, social workers and the lot. The very people we love to imagine possess the objectivity to rise above the mindset of bigotry and sexism. And the people, despite our want of faith in their work, least likely to actually do it.
I wanted a little more pressure so I asked more questions. “How could this affect our therapeutic alliance with clients?- Could it make our relationships with females enabling?- Punitive with men?” And always, the final question I asked was “Do we carry sexism, against men, unconscious or conscious, into our work with each and every client?”
With that question the anger usually intensified.
In one talk, a female participant, a social worker, jumped out of her chair and threw her papers everywhere. “You’re the sexist!” she hissed at me, and stormed out of the room. She later wrote letters of complaint both about my topic and the fact I would not sign off on her attendance.
Welcome to the wacky world of mental health.
It is a telling study in the psychology of hate. Indeed, as we peel back the layers of fantasy from the profession, we are forced into a most disturbing conclusion.
Psychology is hate. At least as it is practiced in western culture.
It’s most evident in the junk psychology market. Since the mid-eighties, get-rich-quick psychology gurus have often made their way to bestseller lists. Books like Robin Norwood’s Women Who Love Too Much, Susan Forwards, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them and others have been runaway hits, all predicated on rigid stereotypes of men who hate and women who love; all just more additions to the already crowded grease board.
Recently, MRA Mark Rudov appeared on Fox News in a brief debate with Karen Salmansohn on women executives. She was given a nice plug for her new book, Bounce Back. They could have, and probably should have in the interest of balance, given her credit for her previous publication, How to Make Your Man Behave in 21 Days or Less Using the Secrets of Professional Dog Trainers.
I don’t make this stuff up. Unfortunately, I don’t have to.
Currently, male bashing monarch Phil McGraw reigns in the ratings, and it won’t be long before another emerges, fighting to be top dog in dogging men. All you need is a warped worldview and a nod from Oprah.
And these are just the media hucksters. At least we can say that the men and women who embrace their misandry-for-profit schemes are just another dumbed-down group in a dumbed-down media culture.
The more culpable and dangerous are the ones with the air of legitimacy. These folks don’t write, or don’t just write. They teach, do research, and most dreadfully, hang out their shingles and help infect the world, one gullible client at a time.
The world of psychology in academics and practice has become a weapon in the realm of gender politics. Almost all pretense to objectivity and academic integrity has been forced aside by ideologues with an ax to grind against men and who are using the loathsome disguise of helping professionals to further their agenda.
If you think that is extreme, read on.
Allaboutcounseling.com is purportedly an information and referral resource for people seeking mental health services. What it is in reality is a portal, a conduit that induces women into the mentality that it is the vile scourge of manhood at the root of their problems.
And they offer feminism as the solution before the first session is booked.
Some tidbits from their site include some detailed hype about the fundamentals of feminism and some reassurances that not all feminists are lesbians.
I suppose they figure heterosexual women need such basics. And it’s good pre-sell to overcome objections before they are raised. Ask any used car salesman.
They even have a nifty section promoting a new masculinity. These Freudettes have the key to re-engineering men for the better, with the implication, of course, that the way men are now is defective and in need of an overhaul.
Part of that overhaul is a gag. This is just one of the standouts, as it appears word for word on the site.
Openness- To others (especially to women) criticism of our behaviors and attitudes, listen, listen some more, and only speak if the critic wants feedback.
This isn’t even speak when spoken to. It is shut up and take it. Speak with permission only, from whichever woman is attacking you at the moment.
Ah, the finer aspects of mental health.
They have much more there. Enough bogus stats on domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse for a N.O.W. convention, and staunch defenses of feminism tied in directly with the counseling message. Their ultimate point is clearly that sound mental health for women depends on embracing feminism, and with it the hatred for men.
Sound advice for those seeking love and intimacy if I ever saw it.
At this point, the grease board is showing more grease than board.
I wish I could say that this was the bottom of the pit; that the infection stopped there, but we are still dealing more with the symptoms than the actual disease.
Enter the American Psychological Association, and it’s Division 51 group The Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity. (SPSMM) You can pronounce the acronym spasm if you want to. I do. And it fits.
Here are two of the bullet points of from the Mission Statement on their home page, out there for the world to see.
Endeavors to erode constraining definitions of masculinity which have historically inhibited men’s development, their capacity to form meaningful relationships, and have contributed to the oppression of other people.
Acknowledges its historical debt to feminist-inspired scholarship, and commits itself to support groups such as women, gays, lesbians and people of color that have been uniquely oppressed by the gender/class/race system.
Aye, there‘s the rub, and with it goes the last remaining bit of room on the grease board. Men are defective, pernicious banes to civilized society. And feminism is the answer.
Even our most revered experts in human nature are saying as much.
And this is how it worked in the old Soviet Union. It is wise to consider that in the Solzhenitsyn era of gulags and iron fisted reaction to political dissent, that most of the dissidents were imprisoned in “mental health facilities,” the logic being that if you disagreed with the state, there must be something wrong with your mind.
It was also a strategy of, and yes, I will say it without reservation, the Hitler regime, to poison the minds of the populace with disinformation about Jews, prepping the people to look the other way while they were dispatched in the name of a master race.
The plans for men may be less extreme and of longer duration, but it is happening nonetheless. Men are being marginalized year after year. Their numbers in college graduating classes are waning. 42% at last count. They have lost over 80% of the jobs in the current recession. They are dying by suicide and all other manners of death at rates that make women’s lives look like vacations in Fiji.
It’s hell having all this power. It is a wonder how we find time to oppress the world with it, much less twirl our moustaches and snicker while we do it.
But the anti-male hate machine keeps grinding away. Spasm would no doubt classify the MRM as a mass shared psychosis, and MRA’s individually as antithetical to humanity.
I used to remember that social worker who threw the tantrum in my class with a smile. It was a funny image. But that was some years ago. At the time, I knew the sexism was there, but it was not entrenched as deeply as it is today. And I naively thought it would go away.
I am not smiling about it any more.
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