Editorial note: we find it fascinating that this article, written in 2010, is still frequently cited by the Mainstream Media and critics of the Men’s Human Rights Movement as “typical” of the views of the movement and/or this web site. The truth is, this was written in the very early days of A Voice for Men to be deliberately provocative, to get attention and challenge people to think. It was, to use a phrase feminist Camille Paglia once used, a “necessary savaging” of a once-taboo subject.
Today the culture at large is beginning to acknowledge that both men and women can and do engage in abusive behavior that can provoke violent, dangerous reactions in psychotic and irresponsible individuals, and now that the culture is beginning to recognize that men are at least as likely to be victims of sexual assault as women, and women far more likely to be perpetrators of sexual assault than we’d like to think, a more mature dialogue seems to be developing on the non-gendered nature of rape and sexual assault and abuse. Many such articles on that have appeared on AVfM in subsequent years, so it seems strange that this old article is still repeatedly gone back to by critics. Why, out of the countless thousands written on this site, pick this one and hold it up as “typical” when it is simply not?
From our point of view, we think its intentionally provocative style no longer serves its intended purpose and it’s being obsessed over by people who want to avoid thinking hard about complex issues. We think it mostly tends to be quoted out of context by dishonest ideologues as “typical” rather than the unusually provocative article that it was.
Therefore, with reluctance, we are removing it from our archives. –Editors
