Men's Rights Activism

"But... let's move on to sunken costs and belief perseverance. So, imagine you have a hypothesis and you turn that hypothesis into an entire career. During the course of that career you've managed to acquire a huge amount of status - people think you're brilliant! They admire you. They pay you to speak. (... not paying me [mumbles]) They see you as someone who should be listened to. It becomes your life's work and something that you're famous for - you invest your whole being into this. Now imagine somebody shows you just one piece of evidence that undermines the foundational premise of your hypothesis. What do you do? You've invested so much of your life, your time, your energy, your heart, your soul in this one set of ideas, all of them supported by something you always considered a given, and that's now fallen - that one foundational belief is falling under scrutiny and challenge."

 

Karen Straughan, from her "Ogres, Onions and Men's Issues" speech at the Canadian Association for Equality in Ottawa on 2016/09/17 (video no longer exists)

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"Attaching your name to a failed, racist coup isn't exactly a good look for a civil rights advocate..."

Endtown 2018/01/19

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It's been about three months apparently, but getting back to the topic of FEMale chauvINISM I thought it might be nice to (as is my wont) switch tracks and comment on the other camp. If you flip back through the respective tag, you may notice that regardless of my stance on various gender issues I've conspicuously avoided directly referencing men's rights activists - just as whatever my stance on environmentalism, I don't build shrines to Ralph Nader.

There's an interesting detail MRAs themselves will bitterly point out on occasion: nobody cared about their movement until women joined it in a visible fashion. All of a sudden in the early 2010s the press started running hit pieces on the supposed dire threat of these misogynistic? rapist? bomb-throwing? neo-nazis? something? you'd never heard about before, every feminist on every forum had a new boogeyman and even Saturday Night Live was all of a sudden slamming MRAs as if everyone had heard of them, to the audience's confusion. But Warren Farrell published The Myth of Male Power in 1993 and men's movements had apparently been around for two or three decades before that. In fact the first time I heard about men's issues (and automatically dismissed it as a mere curiousity) was driving to work in the early 2000s listening to NPR interviewing someone on father's rights in custody disputes. (Hey, NPR wasn't always quite the useless puddle of unraked muck it is today.)

 

Men speaking on their own behalf can be ignored without consequence. They'll never be listened to and the media know it, only moved en masse to delegitimize them when sympathetic female faces on YouTube began drawing more attention. That in itself most ironically demonstrates that the feminist narrative we've always been fed, of men having all the power, is utter bullshit.

As for how to delegitimize MRAs, the classic smear was calling them pick-up artists, even though they'll generally give advice on any topic except getting laid. That or accusing them of chaining women to stoves or whatever. The newer approach is immediately trawling any male criminal's browser history for even the slightest evidence that he's ever visited a men's forum regardless of his other pursuits. In contrast, the activism itself centers on cultural, interpersonal, political or legal system bias against men... but whether or not any of their rhetoric ever hits its mark is pretty much a coin flip. I actually haven't paid much attention in recent years. After hearing meninists' basic arguments, I could much more easily dissect the various gender issues on my own terms than by listening to their repetitively self-congratulatory plucky rebel chest-thumping. I'd say I got disenchanted with them about as quickly as with the atheist movement around 2010 poisoned by identity politics. The warning bells rang quickly, as soon as I heard one in a podcast say she's getting more and more of her income from her followers' donations (hellooo skewed motivations and pandering) but my biggest gripe in both cases can be summed up in that old "politics makes strange bedfellows" saying.

 

So desperate for legitimacy, American MRAs could have well snatched the opportunity in 2016 to demonstrate they're not just a bunch of trolls who'll back any man against any woman, not just knee-jerk reactionaries. Just publicly denounce Donald Trump. Give the media a chance to use you to bash him - not even these guys want him! Admit that an insult-spewing Tourette's candidate should not be a country's top diplomatic figure, tax dodging is not a qualifier for civil service, bankrupting businesses by the dozen does not make one business savvy, cronyism does not yield functional agencies, Putin's catamite will not restore American masculinity, this third-generation nepotist is not meritocratic, this compulsive liar does not have our trust, this autocrats' fanboy is not democratic, this delusional narcissist is not a sane alternative, this incoherently babbling mental defective does not speak for us, this sub-man does not represent men! Y'know, just for starters. And of course they failed that litmus test. Never mind that in a wider sense promoting Republicans, a political party which no longer has any interest in actually governing, but only in burning the country down to loot the ashes, will harm everyone including men. The same appears true across the pond where MRAs cozied up to Tory robber barons and nationalist Brexit idiocy.

For that matter I was continually put off by the clown car of opportunists and hangers-on they attracted in interviews, whether it's Carl Benjamin a.k.a. Sargon pivoting to full-on kinder/kuche/kirche reactionary or a cult leader like Stefan Molyneux or Milo Yannopolous who always struck me as more of a sociopath with no convictions than a homosexual, and has since indeed switched gears and is pushing gay conversion therapy, at least while that notion sells. I remember trawling through Honey Badger Radio or ICMI videos years ago and occasionally coming across some speaker or another who'd veer into tangents about "the rights of the unborn" or "religious freedom" but even more damage was caused by the heterogenous gaggle of random loons. Trying to run with their image as rebels against the system, against a gummint-backed feminist movement, the "manosphere" and its prominent voices were so desperate for attention they refused to kick aside all the even less legitimate fringe interests hitching a ride. Hell, why not, let's call in all the antivaxxers, UFOlogists, global warming deniers, Jesus freak antiabortionist flat-Earthers and anti-evolutionists, gold standard libertarians, Bigfoot chasers, every last Chad and C.H.U.D. with a nominally antiestablishment axe to grind, an' we'll have us a big ol' jamboree!

... What were we talking about again?

Oh right, men!

Which brings us to how we define those, because for all the movement should and claims to stand for men living their own lives, it consistently falls back on dewy-eyed nostalgia for traditional family life and cozily familiar sports-watching, beer-drinking, roughhousing "boys will be boys" masculinity - which is probably why, aside from Farrell, so many speakers or audience commenters on men's issues remind me of every macho idiot prep/jock from high school.

 

Much of men's activism has naturally focused on the most pervasive social movement attacking them, but for all the damage modern feminists have done, they weren't the ones who chained men to supporting women and threw men into the meat-grinder while women sat back to reap the potential spoils. Traditional institutions did that, especially via religious control of reproduction, and there is no bigger fan of shotgun weddings than a priest. But more than that, push back against feminism, imagine you'll even defeat the older social norms, you'll still be left with underlying instinctive favoritism as old as our species or older.

 

Straughan's speech quoted at the top was probably the best I've heard from them for concisely but multifacetedly acknowledging that our subservience to female demands and our willingness to fight each other for female approval is not just some newfangled dirty godless commie subversion that can be fixed by rolling back the clock to before 1960, but intrinsic to our nature. From a more recent interview it seems Paul Elam himself has been halfway coming around to the idea, but from its political affiliations I doubt the "manosphere" as a whole yet realizes how radical a change it's proposing, and how inherently incompatible with conservatism. Defeating instinct requires a clarity of thought incompatible with superstitious caveman gibberish about souls, life after death or omnipotent cosmic forces who have nothing better to do than peek under your sheets. The right-wing profiteers currently using you as useful idiots against the feminist voting block depend for much of their take on male workaholism induced by female material demands. Personal agency for both men and women requires restructuring child rearing itself, a societal cornerstone if there ever was one.

All in all, you have to wonder whether a species whose males do not subvert their own lives to female whims would even be recognizably human, much less the Norman Rockwell painting so many speakers or supporters seem to think they'll reinstitute. They do make good points, but the foundational premise on which they've built their public speaking careers (and in which they are now socially/financially vested) that the world has gone wrong, is as rickety as a matriarchal hippie commune. Our world was never right to begin with.