Who are men’s rights activists, and what do they want?
The Men’s Rights Movement (MRM) is a growing and disproportionately vocal group that believes Western culture and its institutions are contemptuous of men. Men and boys, they argue, are systematically disenfranchised and discriminated against by feminists and their allies. Once dismissed as the looniest and fringiest of the lunatic fringe, men’s rights groups have “gone mainstream” (Salon) and become “frighteningly effective” (Slate), influencing family law and domestic violence legislation, and imposing their views on our national conversations around gender and a host of other social issues.
Today and over the next week, the Good Men Project Magazine will be taking an in-depth look at this controversial movement. Despite the attention they’ve drawn and their relentless effort to make their voices heard, their ideas have yet to receive a thorough and fair hearing by mainstream media. That is, until now.
We’ve invited leading voices in the movement, as well as its outspoken critics, to help us better understand what men’s rights activists believe, why they believe it, and whether we should take their claims seriously.
Men’s rights activists (MRAs) can be easy to dismiss as crackpot extremists. Perhaps best known for descending like outraged locusts on the comments section of your favorite online magazine, newspaper, or blog, bewildering readers with esoteric epithets like “mangina” and “white knight,” they tend not to make a favorable first impression. But if you have the curiosity and thick skin to engage these guys, you’ll find that beneath the hysterical, dogmatic rhetoric lie some valid complaints.
It’s impossible to have a complete discussion of masculinity in the 21st century without acknowledging the men’s rights point of view.
So strap in and leave your delicate sensibilities at the door—it’s time to meet the Men’s Rights Movement.
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Men’s rights and other men’s movements have been kicking around since the 1970s. Many sprung up in response—some sympathetic, some hostile—to second-wave feminism. Like feminists, these movements have taken various forms in the pursuit of various, often contradictory goals.
Broadly speaking, they fall into three categories:
- The weekend-warrior, drum-circle, pass-around-this-wooden-phallus-and-talk-about-your-dad movement, popularized by poet and author Robert Bly. Known as the mythopoetic men’s movement, these groups tend to focus inward, on interpersonal issues around their own manhood.
- The pro-feminist Men’s Studies guys, who like to question and re-imagine standards of masculinity and gender roles. Their conclusions have often led them to take political positions, but their focus is primarily intellectual and academic.
- And the men’s and fathers’ rights activists, who believe that men have been oppressed since, well, a really long time ago. They focus on political, legislative, and cultural reformation, from the unjust family court system to entrenched media bias. It’s these guys—the MRAs—who are making the most noise these days. (The “A” in MRA can also stand for “advocate,” depending on which MRA you talk to.)
According to movement leader Paul Elam, whose website, AVoiceforMen.com, is among the most popular online MRA hangouts, the MRM is largely comprised of “men who have been screwed over by a corrupt and oppressive family court system—and those [who] don’t want to be.” Thus anger and frustration—at the courts, at their ex-wives and women in general, at pervasive injustice—tend to be the animating emotions behind the MRM. The down economy, which by all accounts has hit men hardest, continues to boost MRA recruitment and sympathy.
Dan Moore, the publisher of Menz magazine, has been active in the movement for nearly 20 years. He’s “bullish” on the immediate prospects of social change. “I think it will be less than a decade before these issues are resolved. And yes, that’s largely because of this recession,” he said. “But honestly, I think we’re changing the world.”
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MRAs are well known for their tactical assaults on the comments sections of offending feminist and “misandric” (man-hating) blogs and websites. “If you write about them, it’s like feeding a stray cat tuna fish,” a feminist blogger warned me as I was soliciting stories for this package. “Except more like if you feed 100 cats tuna fish—they just show up and hang out and mewl and will completely swarm the place.”
That warning came too late. MRAs haven’t had many nice things to say about the Good Men Project Magazine since our launch last June. Here’s a representative appraisal:
I believe this site, and the viewpoints expressed within it, are toxic, and EXTREMELY harmful to boys and men. And I find the cynical attempt to paint yourselves as helpful in any way to be most disgusting of all. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Toxic, cynical, disgusting, and shameful. Actually, that’s one of the nicer ones. (A healthy percentage of the comments we get from MRAs aren’t fit to reprint here.) When we started getting comments and emails like this one, we were surprised. We were aware of the existence of men’s and fathers’ rights groups, but we had no idea how angry they were, and we certainly didn’t expect to be targeted as feminist “mangina” conspirators, bent on destroying the lives of men and boys everywhere.
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Initially, I wrote these people off as insane. It was difficult for me to imagine how anyone could believe they were systematically oppressed by women. Put off by second-wave feminism? OK, I get that. Fed up with political correctness? Though this strikes me as very 1994, I know and love men who still feel that way, so sure, I get that too. But under the thumb of the Great Feminist Oppressors? That’s just hard to take seriously.
But to understand MRAs, their fury, and their almost pathological certainty, you have to understand their definition of the word feminism. MRAs believe Western culture is feminist culture, and that culture, whatever you call it, is oppressive toward men. Thus a feminist is anyone they don’t agree with, regardless of gender. And that’s pretty much everyone.
Last week, when Paul Elam launched his A Voice for Men Radio podcast, he put it this way:
Let’s be clear—this show is not and never will be about the hateful bashing of women, and to be clearer, we’re going to often speak harshly of men … [But] our current gender zeitgeist is one that has promoted and enabled such a degree of female narcissism and entitlement that it has now produced two generations of women that are for the most part, shallow, self-serving wastes of human existence—parasites—semi-human black holes that suck resources and goodwill out of men and squander them on the mindless pursuit of vanity. Is this all women? No, of course not.
Not all women are semi-human, just most—and even if you don’t identify as female, you still may be complicit in maintaining the status quo.
MRAs commenting on this site and elsewhere around the Internet interpret the most radical feminists as speaking for women and governments the world over. No one, for example, takes Valerie Solanis, author of the satirical SCUM Manifesto, quite as seriously—with the possible exception of Andy Warhol, for a split second, in 1968—as men’s rights activists.
They see everything through the lens of a zero-sum gender war. Everywhere, men get a raw deal at the hands of women. Anywhere women have made advances, it’s at the expense of men. In their complaints, across gendered lines, about the draft, civil service, sentencing, and suicide disparities, they appear to ignore salient issues of class and race. To be sure, it’s more powerful men, not feminists, who are the ones sending men off to war and prison.
But for MRAs, everything comes back to their definition of feminists: anyone who supports or tolerates the oppressive culture we live in; thus, powerful men are covered by this definition. They’ve set up a tautological circle from which there is no exit—only progressively deeper certainty.
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It would be easy to write these guys off as nuts and not give them a second thought—if they weren’t so damned persistent. As hard as it is to imagine a Vast Feminist Conspiracy, it’s equally hard to see how anyone could be so invested, so irrepressible, if they didn’t have some skin in the game. Like that blogger told me, these guys hang around. There must be some basis for their tenacity.
There can be little doubt that at least some of these guys have been victims—of physically or psychologically abusive women, the family court system, or other painful circumstances. It’s therefore understandable why they don’t see the benefits of being in the “patriarchy.”
Removed from the hysterical rhetoric, MRAs have some valid complaints. Several movement-affiliated organizations—some more legitimate than others—fight for the rights of male victims of discrimination. Glenn Sacks’ Fathers & Families, a lobbying, PR, and advocacy group that has influenced family law policy around the country, is one. Another is RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting), a nonprofit group that argues that domestic violence is perpetrated equally by men and women.
Fathers & Families, like many men’s and fathers’ rights groups, want men to be recognized as good parents who are equally capable of raising children. They want the courts and society to acknowledge that men can be caring and nurturing dads, and that assuming traditionally female roles is not only not creepy, weird, and emasculating, but can be respectable and, yes, even desirable.
Society seems to resist this acknowledgment, if not by word then by deed.
Consider, for example, this post from The New York Times’ Motherlode blog from December, in which Nicole Sprinkle described how, in looking for childcare for her 3-year-old daughter, she found a friendly, well-spoken applicant from her neighborhood who was studying to be a paramedic. His mother owned a local daycare center. He had worked as a summer camp counselor at the preschool her daughter attended, and “got rave reviews from his supervisor there.”
But he was a man, and that was just too dangerous:
I told him frankly that I liked him best of all and yet still wasn’t sure I could make the leap of letting a man watch my daughter: one who might have to help her wipe, clean her up in case of an accident, who would be alone with her every day for several hours.
I also told him that I felt really awful about having to feel this way, and that it was such a shame that society forced us to discriminate against kind, competent men as caregivers for our kids.
Of course, society didn’t force her to discriminate—she made the choice to discriminate. But it illustrates the point: it’s not just that men are refusing to adjust to new roles, as Hanna Rosin argued in her now-famous “End of Men” article in The Atlantic. When it comes to survival, or the survival of their children, men and women will scramble to adapt. It’s society and its institutions that lag behind.
There are plenty of guys out there who would like to see gender roles not simply reversed—a prospect that has Hanna Rosin twirling with glee and MRAs blitzed on rage-ahol—but obliterated altogether.
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In a recent column for The Wall Street Journal, Lenore Skenazy detailed the very real “Eek! A Male!” phenomenon: “almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep,” she wrote. “Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant.”
In this culture, men who choose to work among (or even just near) kids are suspect. Among the handful anecdotes she presents as evidence: an Iowa daycare worker who isn’t allowed in the room when diapers are being changed and a guy who sent kids running and screaming when he rolled down his window to ask for directions.
Then there’s Timothy Murray, the Massachusetts Lt. Governor, who, while pulling two small children from a burning minivan, narrowly escaped the wrath of their grandmother. She thought he might be a kidnapper. “I was gonna smack him,” she told a local TV station. “I yelled, ‘Get away from my car!’”
MRAs rightly point to this as a troubling phenomenon. But is feminism, as many MRAs suggest, really the prime mover behind it? I suspect we’ll have the chance to debate this question in the comments section, below.
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For “The End of Men,” Rosin interviewed a divorced dad named Darrell—he’d lost his job laying sheet metal, fallen behind on his child-support payments, and was attending a fathering class in order to avoid jail time. Despite getting trucking and bar tending licenses, he couldn’t find work, and lost his house and car. He described sitting at a bus stop, watching his wife drive past. “‘[She] looked me right in the eye,’ he recalled, ‘and just drove on by.’”
Darrell, like so many other casualties of this recession, must feel blindsided by circumstance. And as Hanna Rosin will tell you, he’s representative of a growing number of American men.
We have to expect that there will lots more disaffected, disillusioned guys out there in the years to come, struggling to understand how they fit in to a changing world—which means we can expect interest in men’s issues to grow.
The Good Men Project Magazine is in a unique position to help guys grapple with their evolving roles and what many men see as conflicting and even impossible societal expectations. Our mission has always been to challenge men to think deeply about themselves and their place in the world, and that’s the goal this week.
Starting today, we’ll be featuring articles by leading MRAs about what they see as the central goals and concerns of the movement. MRA Blogger Zeta Male presents the results of a poll he conducted to determine the Top 10 Goals of the Men’s Rights Movement. Paul Elam from A Voice for Men breaks down the critical MRA notion of misandry.
We’ve invited some frequent MRA critics to offer measured criticism. Regular GMPM columnist Hugo Schwyzer—whom Menz magazine publisher Dan Moore calls “the Darth Vader of men’s issues”—argues that MRAs misdiagnose both the sources of, and the solutions to, common MRA complaints. Double X blogger Amanda Marcotte argues that what these guys need is more feminism.
Rounding out the list is our own Tom Matlack, who has endured stints as an MRA punching bag. He explores “Adultery’s Double Standard.”
Later in the week we’ll feature stories by Swedish MRA Pelle Billing, men’s rights lawyer and GMPM contributor David Pisarra, men’s studies professor Kaelin Alexander, and journalist and Man Boobz editor David Futrelle.
Dan Moore will fill you in on the State of the Movement, explaining, among other things, what MRAs have to say about feminists, and why they’re determined to “go their own way.”
We’re looking forward to some spirited, good-faith debate. We encourage everyone to comment, but please keep the discussion respectful and on topic. Please consult our commenting policy, here.
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Other stories in in this special package:
About Henry P. Belanger
Vocalyze
“Like that blogger told me, these guys hang around. There must be some basis for their tenacity.”
One of the greatest injustices of the western world, misandry, oh yes, I can be passionate about fighting THAT.
Righteous anger, baby. It’s contagious.
Okay, there’s a lot of ignorance in this article, so I’ll just lump the rest of my corrections in one reply.
“It’s therefore understandable why they don’t see the benefits of being in the ‘patriarchy.’”
I’m not in the patriarchy. I have never been privileged on account of my penis. I have had to earn my way through life. This is more than many woman can say. Is that their fault? Not directly. But policies that give special privileges and entitlements to women and girls at the expense of men and boys are inherently misandric.
Feminism, instituted by the government and corporations which promote women’s groups, does three key things to favor women over men: 1) focus only on issues affecting women, never men; 2) distort the statistics to make it appear that women are disadvantaged when they are not; 3) act as if giving special privileges to women is “equality” even though this necessary hurts men’s opportunities because they don’t receive any privileges. I know I never did.
“Removed from the hysterical rhetoric, MRAs have some valid complaints. Several movement-affiliated organizations—some more legitimate than others—fight for the rights of male victims of discrimination. Glenn Sacks’ Fathers & Families, a lobbying, PR, and advocacy group that has influenced family law policy around the country, is one. Another is RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting), a nonprofit group that argues that domestic violence is perpetrated equally by men and women.”
Merely an attempt to divide and conquer. It’s not going to work, chum. Catering to the center isn’t going to get you anywhere. http://www.avoiceformen.com/2011/01/29/everyone-in-the-mrm-should-watch-this-video/
In fact, that’s your whole problem. You’re catering to man-haters in an attempt to draw a crowd and get more money.
Guess what? Society is bored of misandry. It’s not going to net you a profit. That’s why feminist blogs are dying or dead. They are not new or interesting.
Don’t think we will forget, buddy. When TGMP fails, don’t think we’ll give you forgiveness for your blatant misandry.
You won’t receive a cent of my money.
My time and money goes to the men’s rights movement, and boy do I have a lot of it now that I’ve stopped listening to frauds like you.
By the way, fix your blog so it doesn’t randomly refresh and delete comments, silly. Remember, this is all about the money for you.
“There are plenty of guys out there who would like to see gender roles not simply reversed—a prospect that has Hanna Rosin twirling with glee and MRAs blitzed on rage-ahol—but obliterated altogether.”
Um, you think I wouldn’t love it if gender roles were reversed? I could stay at home and raise the kids while mommy goes off to war? Sounds like a pretty good deal, man.
“We have to expec that there will lots more of disaffected, disillusioned guys out there in the years to come, struggling to understand how they fit in to a changing world—which means we can expect interest in men’s issues to grow.”
Well, you blew your chance, bud. Just couldn’t help but take a piss on men’s rights, could you? Don’t think we will let you or any of your readers forget it in the future, pal. You’re done.
You are simply a tool, soon to be disposed of, for the MRM to gain attention.
Thanks for the help.
Henry’s original analysis of MRAs as crazy seems valid after their attacks on this blog. Its called The GOOD MEN Project and is run by a MAN. Doesn’t sound like misandry to me! They even acknowledge that men can be on the receiving end of sexism too. Following this logic Barak Obama is a Ku Klux icon and people campaigning for gay marriage are homophobic. Is the fact that British crime statistics show that men commit 80% of crime in the UK the result of some vast feminist conspiracy?
Nonsense.
The Good Men Project, whatever this might mean, is under the control of Ms. Magazine. Hardly a place considering men and their needs.
80 percent of all criminals might be men, but this is not a valid excuse that the remaining 20 percent (= women) are getting away with remarkable ridiculous sentences for their crimes because of their gender.
Oops I sent a number of your advertisers the following e-mail:
Subject: Advertiser defrauding you out of $ per impression
Hi,
I noticed the following advertiser is linking to one of your ads with a “cost per impression” link:
http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/meet-the-mens-rights-movement/
However, their blog refreshes every couple minutes, seemingly in an attempt to inflate the number of impressions.
I thought you should know.
Thank you,
Jay
Hysterical or just had one beer too many last night?
You decide.
He said “articles”, not “comments”.
The “Meet the Men’s Movement” articles linked on the front page are mostly devoid of content and anti-male, while the well-sourced and pro-male articles are hidden from view.
Was it necessary for the opening article by Henry to paint men’s rights activists as “hysterical” and spread misinformation? Feminist bullshit in the opening article?
If TGMP thinks continuing to cater to feminists, white knights, and many women, is going to get the big bucks in the long run, they’re quite mistaken.
Making the worst, most anti-male articles visible on the front page while hiding the best, most pro-male articles isn’t a good sign either.
Anyway, thanks for doing this series.
all anyone (this is especially true of feminists) need do to reveal the bias of this article is to replace every instance of the words men, boys, and MRM with the words women, girls, and feminists, respectively. a big part of the problem is that the “mainstream” writers of articles such as these cant even see their own ideological slant. i challenge any feminst to read that article with those substitutions, and tell me that they WOULDNT instantly think it was a “sexist woman bashing” read.
equality, fairness, and objectivity are easy to spot. this article has NONE of these qualities. if you can see how an article such as this would be dismissive and contemptable if its subject women and feminism, then ask yourself “why cant i see this when the same article is written about men and mens rights?”
Question: do men really buy this magazine?
Funded by and under the wing of feminists.
The women here sure are afraid of getting their privilege checked.
Men will not be silent any longer while you abuse us in person and via the State thugs.
We’re here, we drink beer, get used to it.
No justice, no peace.
Wendy, you’ve got a big surprise coming to you!
“no quotes policy” = No Facts Policy.
Time to give my little spiel about this whole thing. I have never read such hurtful comments against men and women in my life. Probably the most hurtful comment against women I have ever read is someone who claims he wouldn’t help a woman if she were getting hurt. This has nothing to do with chivalry. This has everything to do with respect for your fellow human being. Don’t even think of her as a woman. Think of her as a human being who needs your help. Don’t even think if she would do the same for you, because that’s selfishness at its finest. You don’t help a person expecting the same in return. You help a person because that person is helpless otherwise. It’s cold, callous, and full of assholery of you to not help a human being that needs it. And don’t even lump women in the same group by claiming all women wouldn’t help a man if he needed it. I’m sure there are women out there who do help, but if I, a skinny, 115 lb girl, came across a guy getting beat up by a guy three times my size, I wouldn’t jump in and stop it because I reasonably can’t. My efforts would be wasted. Not only would the guy get hurt, but I’d get hurt myself, and I’d be of no use to anyone. I’d call the police. That’s how I’d help. And don’t think there aren’t women out there who haven’t called the police to help someone, be it man or woman, because it’s unreasonable to think there aren’t. Helping a man in need doesn’t have to involve stepping in and preventing a fight. Helping a man in need is as simple as calling the police, and I’m pretty sure many women have done it, because I’ve done it before.
As for everything else, I am completely in favor of equal rights, and sometimes it enrages me about some of the things men are subjected to. I remember in my junior AP Literature class I brought up the problem of men being stereotyped as pedophiles and women on men rape. The class, reasonably, responded with rage to men being stereotyped as pedophiles, but they were in disbelief that a woman could rape a man. Even my touch-feely teacher who is usually so in tune with her emotions was in disbelief. She said this, “I don’t think a man could get raped unless he wanted it in some way. There is no way he couldn’t have fought her of.” My heart tore, and I just wanted to flick off the class right then and there and leave because I was so pissed she said that. The whole class collectively agreed, and while I was trying to point out that it happens, nobody would listen to me. Even today, I still burn with rage and want to strangle that teacher for her ignorant comment.
I think we need to stop looking at everyone as men and women and start looking at everyone as a human being. I agree men face crap, most certainly, just as women face crap, but not all men experience the same things as other men, just as not all women experience the same things as other women. As a female, I most certainly was not handed anything in my life because of my sex. I’ve had to work hard for things, and I was never handed anything. Granted, I have more privileges than my brother, but I had to work for these. My brother had to pay for car insurance in high school because he totaled his truck. I never had to because I never totaled my car. My brother had to get a job because of his poor grades. I never had to (though I volunteered every weekend for sixteen hours at a horse stables) because I maintained a GPA that let me graduate with honors. I was also writing for the teen section of my newspaper, which I also had to work to get. So to think that all women are handed things is ridiculous and insulting. This assumes that women are only where they are today because they were handed their positions and didn’t have to work for them. I personally don’t know any woman who didn’t have to work hard to get to where she is, yet I know people who were handed things because of connections. My fiance had a fantastic job that paid 20 bucks an hour only because his uncle was a plumber. My fiance didn’t have to to go school to assist his uncle simply because he was his nephew. He doesn’t have that job anymore because he lives with me in Georgia and not Maryland.
Discrimination sucks, but guess what? Not all men experience the discrimination written all over this site, just as not all women experience the discrimination written all over other site. Individual people experience individual things. Does that mean we shouldn’t do anything about it? Of course not! But to get your underwear in a knot and start hating on each other is not helping anything! Female privilege is hurtful to women just as male privilege is hurtful to men. Men are viewed as disposable when it comes to the draft because they are deemed stronger, but this slights women because it implies women are collectively weak, ignoring that there are capable women out there. Either we get rid of the draft, or we draft women, too. I propose we get rid of the draft, but that might be unrealistic, particularly if we are in a time of war where a need for soldiers is high. Men not being able to show emotions slights men because it means more mental health problems, but it also slights women because it implies that men showing anything deemed feminine is inferior, but if a woman shows masculine traits, that is somehow empowering. What is masculinity and femininity anyway? Certainly not anything biological. Of course, I do realize there are problems that only hurt men, just as there are problems that only hurt women, but to argue who has it worse is ridiculous because by doing this, neither movements are going to get anywhere.
I propose a humanist movement, because I’ve found it’s almost impossible to talk about men’s problems without also addressing women’s.
You can keep your proposal, as nothing you said in here is actually true, I would dissect it line by line, but its not worth it and would be too long.
“because it implies women are collectively weak, ignoring that there are capable women out there. ” stuff like this shows exactly how ideologically BLIND feminists and unfortunately most women are.
But here is a compromise.
Next time, I see a woman in a burning building, or bleeding to death after an accident or caught in flood waters, I will call the police. If I see a woman being raped, I will contact the faculty at the Gender studies department to get the latest definition of rape. Once they explain those to me, I will evaluate the situation, and if it is really a rape, I will call the police. I will never EVER voluntarily put myself in any danger, of even stubbing a toe, to save the life of a woman.
Is that humanist enough for you?
Also, I will always vote to acquit any man charged with any sexual crime or under any law created by feminist or chivalrist intentions – until all such laws are repealed.
Pankaj,
I agree that Emily did not make the most of her forum and reported counterproductive ideas, but your response is simply uncalled for. Masculinity should not be watching women suffer. Humanity should not be about watching people.
“Masculinity should not be watching women suffer”
LOL! you can define that word whichever way you want, Mr. White Knight.
It is their doing – they wanted equality and I am in a mood to give it to them.
i cant help but think back to an incident in the uk a month ago when a man stepped between a couple when they were fighting to try and stop the man hitting the woman, the good samaritin died when the woman he was trying to protect hit him with the heel of her shoe.
Yep i really should dive in and help anyone.
” You don’t help a person expecting the same in return. You help a person because that person is helpless otherwise. It’s cold, callous, and full of assholery of you to not help a human being that needs it. And don’t even lump women in the same group by claiming all women wouldn’t help a man if he needed it. I’m sure there are women out there who do help, but if I, a skinny, 115 lb girl, came across a guy getting beat up by a guy three times my size, I wouldn’t jump in and stop it because I reasonably can’t. My efforts would be wasted. Not only would the guy get hurt, but I’d get hurt myself, and I’d be of no use to anyone.”
Sounds like you need to check your privilege,hun. Your coming dangerously close to making the argument that women are ENTITLED to a man’s help.
If you want to know about the REAL men’s rights movement from one who has been in the movement since its modern beginning (in the 1960s), go to website mensdefense.org.
What do you mean by “REAL” men? Does that mean men that don’t adhere to the man-code?
Here are the real MRA’s who started the movement for equality, not traditionalism.
“Operating since 1977, NCFM is the oldest men’s group committed to ending sex discrimination”
http://ncfm.org/
Rich is a pioneer in the MRM and he knows what he is talking about.
I’m a bit surprised not to see these similarities being brought mentioned. To me, the Men’s Rights Movement is rather similar to the Counter-Reformation in European history, or the First Ku Klux Klan around the time of Reconstruction after the US Civil War, i.e. it is a reactionary movement attempting to redress what it feels is the loss of natural rights of a justly privileged group. Such groups typically identify themselves as persecuted, as being oppressed by a conspiracy, and as defending true, traditional values. There have even been specifically male movements of this kind before, although I don’t remember the details off-hand: some of the Catholic monastery orders, various groups in pre-revolutionary France, etc.
Anon.
You’ve completely missed the point. I, like most MRAs are not asking for privilege, rather, we are demanding equality. Men and women are different, so defining equality will always be difficult. Men and women have been oppressed for millennia, men got the vote in most countries 100 to 200 years ago, women about 50 to 100 years later, while many countries still have no democracy. The claim of privilege for males and oppression for females is special pleading. Men fought for freedom and later gave it to women. Women owe more to technology than to feminism.
The most disadvantaged group in the US today are African American men, shortest life span, lowest education, highest incarceration and the list goes on and on. Yet feminist programs disproportionately target them. African American boys are routinely deprived of their fathers and most positive role models. If you read To Kill a Mocking Bird, you will remember the victim was a black man. The MRM is NOT a group of straight white men.
When you talk about male privilege you are talking about a minority of men, while denying the majority. What has happened is the privileged male has been largely unaffected while the majority of men have had their rights and dignity diminished. Men’s rights is not about going back to anything, the past and traditional values hold little attraction to most MRAs.
Women weren’t given anything. We, too, had to fight to earn what we felt was rightfully ours ever since the constitution was written but the men of the upper class wouldn’t give. We may not have had to physically fight, but we had to fight in other ways that people constantly claim were given to us. The vote was not given to us. If we had not mentioned anything about the vote, if we had sat complacent like we did when the vote was first given, we wouldn’t have voting rights.
Amber,
I agree it is entirely possible that if women never asked for the vote, that they never would have got it. However, if men did not fight and die for the vote women certainly would not have got the vote.
What I resent about feminism is the way it writes history as being men oppressing women. If by men they mean more than one man and if by saying women they also do not exclude men, then they are in a sense correct. It is more correct to say that women and men have been oppressed for millennia by people who were mainly, but not exclusively men.
How many men died in the war of independence? How many in the Civil war? I WWI? WWII? How many men will die today in Libya? Further, how many more men were maimed and traumatised in these conflicts?
So why you may well say that women did ask and protest for the vote (along with supportive men), in comparison with the sacrifice that men made for democracy, the sacrifices women made to get the vote were at least an order of magnitude less and only possible due to the previous sacrifices of men.
the day that the american goverment says they are stopping men fighting in the military and will not accept men fighting until the 1,5 million women to balance the scales of wars over the last century to make certain that women have truly fought and can claim that they earned the rights they got with the aid of men then in a truly logical manner they cannot compare , during the gulf war men and women both were paid the same and recived the same bonuses yet women didnt have to ( and by that i mean they had a choice ) go into combat zones, yet men who did and who were killed or injured were given comparible pay for doing more…… is that equality , same with so many things. Feminist driven ideology when put under a microscope and when challenged doesnt hold water.
Nope, women gained the right to vote by protesting, whinging and whinning. How many people actually in the US do vote when they have the right to????
The laws of most western countries where governed by religion and it was the ‘Church’ that made the laws and no one voted… it was either do as they said or jail.
Too many women think that men had the right to vote since the begining of time rather than doing some research on the matter.
And no women had to ‘fight’ for of the things they have gotten… no instead they have nagged, used emotional blackmail etc etc to get what they have.. but even tho they have the ‘option’ to vote still a lot dont.
How do you figure men are privileged? Is being a member of the group that makes 80% of victims of violent crime or most of the imprisoned or homeless a pretty good indicator of privilege where you come from?
Are there any traditions where women have to get down on one knee and beg to be allowed to work themselves to death for a man in this alternate universe?
What exact privileges do men have over women ? Do you call being able to be forcibly removed by the state from your own home at a woman’s merest whim, no evidence required, no questions asked, a “privilege”? I’m really interested to see things from your perspective. When you look at China, and you see people being jailed for doing a painting of a butterfly that the government doesn’t like for some reason, do you see freedom of speech there or repression?
When you see people mocking men here for having the audacity to suggest that their concerns be valued on the same level as a woman’s, do you see a general societal attitude that “Boys rule,girls drool”, or do you see what I see, a bunch of clowns trying desperately to preserve female privileges?
When was the last time you saw a t-shirt that said “Women are stupid,beat and rape them!”? Surely if this attitude thoroughly saturated our society, as you feminists suggest, we’d see them all over the place. I don’t see any, instead I see t-shirts that say “Boys are stupid,throw rocks at them!”. Our society is saturated with anti-male sentiment, to the point that we needed to make websites of our own just to counter that message. Why do you think we do this,for fun? We do it because we have to. We do it because you have been screaming that all (not some,or most,but all) of us are rapists for 40 years. Privilege,my ass.
This comment pasted from WORD due to GMPM’s practice of auto refreshing to inflate the appearance of advertising impressions.
and there is one simple equation with regards to equality , in the 1920s women lived 1 year more than men , now they live 8 years more than men .
This in itself is simple enough evidence that shows womens lots have improved , beyond all reason while mens hasnt, and could easily be argued mens lot is worse, suicide rates are up, health is getting worse, inequality in the workplace, more homelessness, no help for male victims of DV, or rape victims.
Just read Elams attack on this site over on his Voice 4 Men page.
He is one hostile man. He gets into frequent fights with men’s rights advocates and usually ends up labelling them mentally ill. In fact he uses the “mentally ill” tag so often I cant help but wonder if he has suffered a humiliating use of that comment against him? Who knows.
He’s a brilliant writer and debator, but like the man walking up a snow covered hill he takes three steps forward and slides three steps backward due to his hostility. If he cut that stuff out he would be the champion of the men’s revolution.
Thats all.
He is not hostile at all… he is HONEST, and a lot of people dont like to hear nor read anything that is Honest, is back up by REAL facts.
He is well respected by all. Listen to his radio show and then see what you think.
Sorry I have to disagree with you. He often comes across as NEEDLESSLY hostile. I agree with homesty, which is why I’m pointing out his hostility. I’ve seen him do it many times when it wasnt warented. While I’m being honest I want to say you are full of bull by saying “he is respected by all”. Even he would tell you to F off over false comments like that.
That said, I’m still a big fan of his, much moreso that a fan of sites like this one. I guess if he didnt have that agro (which goes badly off track) he would also not be passionate. Its that passion that makes him Paul ElaM.
My message to Paul regarding his attacks on potential if somewhat misguided alies: ‘COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE’.
Barry
I agree with both of you here, Paul is certianly honest but i agree there have been occasions where he has been needlessly hostile (though in some ways its understandable)
Dear Henry,
I’m surprised to see a true reporter slacking off when it comes to reporting the true other side of the story:
Will you kindly allow readers see the real mens rights movement (true equality and justice) here:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/2011/03/13/good-men-project-magazine-ripping-of-readers-and-advertisers/
Hostile hit piece that is. Anything goes for feminist supremacy in sheep’s clothing?
No quotes policy or no facts policy??? Same thing?
Here’s a link you’ll find interesting:
http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/extended-discussion/abusive-fathers-win-custody-battles-more-often-than-mothers/t.70265549/ (This link includes a plethora of other links within the post.)
Apparently, father’s rights movements lie just as much as MRAs claim feminists lie. In fact, abusive fathers retain custody of their children in 70% of cases. The lesson I’m taking away from all of this is that neither MRA members nor feminists are to be trusted anymore.
Amber, here’s a link that doesn’t ultimately tie back to a 20-year old study based on data older than than from another geological era.
To the Editors of GMPM:
In another series of comments, James asked for evidence of adult women getting off light after drugging and then raping underage boys.
Here is a March, 2011 case from Astoria, OR. Adult woman plies kids, including a 14 year old boy with booze, gets him drunk, has her way with him, and then is sentenced to….. 30 days. Boy is too ashamed to come to the sentencing hearing.
Question to GMPM editors — are you outraged? will you speak up? will you run a piece?
Silence = Death.
http://www.koinlocal6.com/news/local/story/Astoria-woman-pleads-no-contest-to-raping-14-year/sp6cQmcuFESd8N8qpRgapw.cspx
Even women are now standing up against the hypocrisy of feminism as this video proves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plkeKMTDM9g
If this fem-apologetic screed had been written by a black man about whites, the term “Uncle Tom” would be appropriate. The fifth-columnists of the Spanish Revolutions, the Quislings of Norway, the Vichy collaborationists of France, could not have excused themselves more eloquently.
I hope “Uncle Hank” and the Good Boys Project are content licking the boots of their female masters.
I call it the LRM (Losers’ Rights Movement) and it’s run by LRAs (Losers’ Rights Activists). These are men who have failed in life, and they are looking for scapegoats because they can’t POSSIBLY be the cause of their own loserdom. Anyone born with a Y chromosome can never be blamed for anything they do, literally since the beginning of time with Adam and Eve (she FORCED him to bite the apple, remember?)
Do you think Bill Gates or Paul Allen sit around crying about how they don’t have rights as men? No, they don’t. BECAUSE THEY’RE TOO BUSY BEING SUCESSFUL.
Men have is SO good, in America and in every other country around the world. The ones who turn out to be failures and blame “feminism” do so because they don’t even know what feminism is. Treating women as equal human beings under the law doesn’t force men to be stupid, violent, terrible husbands, or unemployed. They are the reason for all of those things.
So, listen up, boys. I know it’s hard being a loser. But I want you to understand one thing very clearly–IT’S YOUR FAULT. Whether your problem is you just can’t get laid (which I’m sure is a main factor for many LRAs), you got divorced (you picked her, and you were in the marriage too), or you got fired (this is a male-caused recession).
But then again, Congress is only 83% male. In 1905, it was 100%. Men have lost so many rights because of feminism! LOOK IN THE MIRROR, FELLAS. That’s who you should blame for your life.
Men have it so good? That’s why men die earlier, have the privilege of making up 70-80% of the homeless, constituting over 90% of workplace fatalities… and so on? Question: Do you consider civil rights activists in the 50s to be loser-rights activists, whining about segregation?
This is precisely true of feminists. I know loads of secularly and personally successful, balanced, happy women – none of whom ID as feminists or agree with today’s feminist agenda.