A Voice for Men has just wrapped up its third International Conference on Men’s Issues and by all reports it was once again a resounding success. My congratulations and sincere thanks go out to all the speakers, attendees and especially the AVFM staff who worked tirelessly to make it happen.
Aside from their more obvious purpose, each ICMI event is also a time of assessment and reflection. It’s an opportunity to think about our mission, how we are doing with our goals. And to be truthful, it didn’t take an ICMI to draw some very encouraging conclusions along those lines.
“Changing the Cultural Narrative” as a site tagline, and as a goal, has enjoyed profound success. AVFM and a small handful of others (mainly the Honey Badger Brigade) have spawned a legion of social commentators that are doing just that. Feminism has rightly become a dirty word. Feminist ideologues are back on their heels trying to defend their hateful ideology to a world that has grown weary of their corrupt message. We have been so successful, in fact, that antifeminism has become a cottage industry, with the new purveyors taking in huge audiences.
To paraphrase Alison Tieman from The Red Pill Movie Q & A, when the wisdom of “antifeminism as men’s activism” was challenged, she said ‘We don’t even have a choice about that. The antifeminist narrative has popularized and grown beyond our control. We could not stop it if we wanted to.’
None of this is to say that the battle is over. Feminist interests are deeply entrenched in the State, in our establishments of higher education, in the political realm, in the media and throughout the corporatocracy. The change in narrative, however, has become a freight train, and if this follows previous shifts in collective social consciousness, the eventual demise of feminist influence, and its permanent stigmatization as an evil, is inevitable.
If true, that leaves us with the question, where do we go from here?
The answer to that is twofold. First is the AVFM mission. Second is how we go about accomplishing that mission.
Current realities reduce “Changing the Cultural Narrative” to something akin to beating a dead horse. We are better served with more relevant objectives. With that in mind I have drafted a new mission statement addressing the needs of men regarding physical, emotional and financial health, with the latter being focused on protection of assets, from the state, and from interpersonal relationships.
A quick look above shows the new AVFM tagline. “Men’s Health – No Apologies.” It is simple, concise and will be doggedly pursued.
With AVFM’s thousands of internet backlinks in place, assuring a permanent, healthy flow of traffic to the site, we will leverage those assets to further a message addressing men’s overall health, sans the traditional gynocentrism, and sans the unhealthy paradigm of feminist ideologues who see masculinity itself as a problem in need of correction. Indeed, it is our position that blind traditional gynocentrism and feminist dogma (barely discernable from each other) are equally deleterious to the well-being of men and boys.
With some specific exceptions, all future content on the site will reflect the new mission. Men’s mental, physical and financial health will dominate the discourse here with an especially intense focus on mental health. I fully intend that the content will remain as engaging, entertaining and informative as it always has.
More importantly, the content will be designed to be of more utility to men and boys than just bashing ever-so-bash-worthy feminists. Over the past year at my An Ear for Men YouTube channel, I have focused a great deal on men’s interpersonal relationships. I’ve been exploring topics that are an integral part of the lives of everyday men. Relationships, marriage, divorce and children. Adjusting to red pill life, dealing with the red pill rage and red pill grief. Issues of self-respect and self-worth. Matters that reach to the core of men’s identity in modern life, delivered with the same blunt candor for which AVFM has become so well-known.
I have tried to create a message that not only resonates with men, as the material here always has, but that also proves useful. In short, the idea is to more to serve the needs of men, not just invite them to ruffle feathers by challenging the status quo. It’s a lesson from our counterparts in India, who have grown their movement based on being of service to men who need it.
And make no mistake, we are not shedding the antifeminist or antigynocentrist sentiments. You will see them quite plainly in the days ahead, all of it relating to the overall health of men and boys.
To inform you about the second objective, about how we go about accomplishing this, I need to give you some history. In the beginning, eight years ago next month, AVFM was established as a one-man blog. We quickly grew into hundreds of writers over the years and eventually took on a formal business structure in the form of AVfM Education, LLC.
We benefitted a great deal from this. It afforded us some measure of legal protection, gave us much better organization and helped us manage assets to cover the rather weighty financial burden of maintaining top level security and multiple servers.
All this was enormously helpful for the mission of the times, but it also came with a cost. The burdensome processes that come with any business structure bled away some of the spontaneity and creative elements that put us on the edge of things to begin with. At heart, we have always been an activist organization. A reality check informs us that hearts and businesses are not always comfortable under the same roof.
Today, we begin to recover the heart of AVFM.
In the very near future, AVfM Education, LLC will be dissolved. All operations here will be brought under the purview of Red Pill Solutions, LLC, a one-man show (yours truly) with highly informal operations. I will leave the beans to the bean counters, and basically run things at AVFM as I did back in 2009.
AVFM will return to a very select group of contributors, by invitation only, who will have permissions to enter articles into the WordPress editor, and with solid self-editing as a standard. No more passing articles through a series of people to get them on the site. And no more need to burden editors with the tedious (and quite thankless) job of correcting spelling and grammar. Those who can’t or won’t provide well-edited material simply won’t see their writing on these pages. All contributors must be able and willing to come into the WordPress editor at AVFM and completely prepare their articles for posting.
Commenting policies will change, too. The temptation for me is to go to a generally unmoderated style, with of course the ability to remove and ban idiotic trolls on sight: no strike system, no ombudsman. We will do this, mind you, with a revised attitude about our comment section. Our approach will be something akin to laissez faire moderation, allowing men to speak their minds up to the point it becomes apparent their only reason for commenting is to disrupt and antagonize.
This won’t be an easy transition and I welcome feedback from our readers before the new system is implemented.
There is one thing that won’t change. AVFM will never, ever be silenced. We will publish what we believe to be the truth, without mincing words, and without apology and without compromise.
I am sending a link to this post to many of AVFM’s past contributors, hoping that I don’t leave anyone out.
This will be a somewhat challenging phase as we downshift to crest another hill in the journey of A Voice for Men. With your support, we will make it happen. After all, making things happen has been our business for 8 years.
