We saw it recently with the planned boycott of Christina Hoff Sommers at her recent speech at UCLA. A women’s campus law group thought she was going to tell some icky truths, so they launched a thoughtless campaign to libel Sommers and perhaps pressure her out of speaking.
When Sommers tweeted the totally fabricated claims they posted online, they quickly took them off the internet. It is as though they did not get the memo that this was easier said than done. And so now the Law Women of UCLA, the group that attacked Sommers with wild and unsubstantiated claims, has egg on their faces for trying to hide that which cannot be hidden. All for the purpose of attempting to erase their mistakes from the public record.
It looks bad enough on a bunch of entitled little college girls, but how about the National Organization for Women (NOW)? NOW is the certainly one of the oldest, most influential and prestigious feminist organizations in the United States. They are, in the absence of any real competition, the gold standard of women’s rights in the western world. They simply have no peers.
NOW has relied on many double standards and hypocrisies in its illustrious history in order to a) make sure they collect money in the name of promoting equality between the sexes and b) make sure their supporters knew they were not really all that serious about equality.
Case in point, NOW has long been on the frontlines of chastising society because men were not expected to take on their fair share of childcare in families. They have argued that gender roles place women at an unfair disadvantage because those roles assume that women are default babysitters. NOW’s core values demand that this change and that men be available to take on half of that responsibility so that women will be free to pursue professional opportunities with which pesky and inconvenient children tend to interfere.
At the same time, however, NOW has fought tooth and nail against shared parenting initiatives that would provide a path to accomplishing the very gender neutral goal they claim to pursue.
It’s easy to understand the angle here. NOW leadership understands that the only banner they can fly is the alleged pursuit of equality. At the same time, getting that equality in a family court is not something most of their base wants anything to do with. Shared parenting arguably implies less control and less cash for those who are used to calling the shots.
What NOW did was to parrot rhetoric about equality even as they lobbied with no insignificant amount of muscle to make sure that equality never happened in a family court. I won’t say I feel sympathy for them, but I do understand what got them between a rock and a hard place. The fact is that NOW’s supporters pay them to be hypocrites, and they won’t pay for anything else. NOW leadership is acutely aware of this.
Damned if you do…..
Whatever hope of anything redeemable in the NOW leadership was laid to rest late last week when AVFM contributor Prentice Reid wrote an article documenting NOW’s decades long jihad against the idea of shared parenting.
NOW responded by losing it and removing ALL of Reid’s sources from their website, and removed all other material from their website that opposes shared parenting.
You heard that right. The National Organization for Women are so panicked over an article at AVFM that they have attempted to erase the public record of actions by the organization going back decades. They have literally jumped the shark in the worst possible way, providing the world with proof positive that the entire organization is not only hypocritical, but also devoid completely of any kind of moral compass. They also proved they don’t really know jack about the internet.
Quelle surprise.
The temptation here from a personal standpoint is to gloat a little. And I am. It is with no small amount of awe that I consider the fact that a single article on AVFM caused the most widely recognized “women’s organization” in the United States to self-inflict the most ginormous Streisand Effect since the original in 2003. They went full McIntosh on it, conducting a search and destroy mission on the record of their own work within 24 hours of the Reid piece running.
I will put a lid on the unavoidable smugness that comes with making big dogs act like scared puppies. However, I won’t ignore the myriad of implications that this rather enjoyable moment implies.
Most readers here will be aware that just during the short month of February, the mainstream media launched four consecutive, malicious hit pieces on AVfM and the greater Men’s Human Rights Movement (MHRM). Between vox.com, Mother Jones, GQ and Buzzfeed, the attacks were as vicious as they were yellow and misleading.
We have heard from a lot of people who think we are reaping the rewards of what we have sown. They feel that our harsh rhetoric and gloves-off style has come back to haunt us; that more progress would be made with a softer touch and more conciliatory action.
Wrong.
What I ask you to consider is that the proof of what really lies behind all the attacks is now fully exposed to those looking for it. What lies behind all the attacks is a boatload of raw fear. NOW knows they have abandoned whatever their movement ever stood for in favor of collecting bucks from a bunch of entitlement whores who want to have their cake and eat it too. They know the irrefutable proof of it was all over their pages waiting to be pointed out. And when it was they clamored like desperate rats to get rid of all of it.
Too bad the internet is forever, and we have copies of everything they removed available for viewing in Reid’s article. What started as an embarrassing set of double standards has now become the final nail in NOW’s credibility coffin.
In fact, it is advisable that the organization consider a more appropriate acronym for what they actually do. I am thinking “They Hide Everything Notable” (THEN). And how much more appropriate for NOW to become THEN considering they have already accomplished that in spades. What was once arguably a women’s rights organization has now become little more than a latter day SPLC, dreaming up boogiemen and removing the evidence of their own malfeasance whenever circumstances dictate.
Sounds pretty THEN to me.
The larger lesson for the people who really matter is what is important here, then. The fear is the tell. The fear is the revelation that despite the money and the social blindness and the political clout, we are essentially up against a paper tiger. They fold like cheap suits at the first hint of pressure. And they do so because they know what cockroaches they really are.
In what is already a banner year for the MHRM, things just got a whole lot better. Anti-feminism is rising. More and more people, especially women, have started to publicly reject organizations like NOW because they understand those organizations have completely betrayed the pursuit of equality in favor of raising funds driven by fears, hatred and hypocrisy they encourage in their supporters. Pay close attention, because if you are watching you can see the end of gender feminism as we know it.
This is all courtesy of A Voice for Men — and the society we are informing about the toxic cesspool that modern feminism has become.
These folks are getting scared. That is good, but I personally want them past scared and into the realm of terrified. I want them to panic and scramble into even more monumental screw-ups. I want them to feel it as their moral and financial support erodes, and as the society around them stands up and calls them out on their lies and their corruption. And I am going to predict right now that I am going to get what I want. I want feminism dead, and I want AVfM to play the lead role in killing it.
I hate to go all Tony Robbins on you folks, but the fact is that the time for NOW to be THEN is at hand. There is plenty of fighting ahead, but the writing is on the wall. The only thing left is to have more people stand up and challenge these ideological hucksters to a public showdown.
And the sad truth of it for them is that at this point if AVFM were to pull the plug tomorrow, the death of feminism as anything but a banner of hate would still take place. It is too late for any other outcome.
You can see this in play all over the media, as the misandric and discriminatory tone of mainstream writing now consistently draws fire from readers who are tired of the victim narrative and tired of the lies. You can see it as critiques of feminism and feminist ideas find their way into the mainstream. And you can find it as AVfM pushes forward with a shaker of salt, poised to dispense it into whatever deep cuts we can inflict on their actions.
In a few short years we went from a one-man blog to a social force that has organizations like NOW hiding their own articles like they were part of a pornography collection.
This is what men’s rights looks like.
In just a few weeks we will announce that tickets are on sale for the International Conference on Men’s Issues in Houston this October. When we do, please buy your tickets and plan to attend. The theme of this conference is going to be tagged as “Building Bridges” (between men and women). The locus of this conference is the idea that the social contract between men and women needs to be rebuilt (at least for the percentage of men and women with the integrity and vision to do it). And the assertion will be that the way to get there is with equality as the guideline. Not just the equality that equates to the most choice selections on the sexual politics buffet, but the equality that includes responsibilities with rights; the equality that in many ways is a step down for women and a step up for men.
That wave is coming whether NOW likes it or not. And if they seriously don’t want to invest in rebranding themselves as THEN, they should think about that good and hard and start acting with intellectual and moral consistency. It is hard to imagine that, though, from an organization which just humiliated itself in front of the entire world because it was scared of the truth seeing a single strand of sunlight.
Take heart folks. I know the ride is bumpy, but the fact remains undeniable that their ideas are getting less popular, and our ideas are capturing the imagination of more and more people all the time. If we continue to grow, and continue to convince more people to grow a spine and stare these bastards down in the public arena, the day will come when these ideologues have nowhere left to go but down.
And make no mistake about it, this is all happening because we refused to take the advice of weak, ineffectual people and go back to what never worked to begin with; because we refused to play nice or care about the sensibilities of a bunch of ideological thugs. All this is happening because we understand that the only way to kill feminism is to bash it in the head over and over again with bricks of logic until it finally quits breathing.
Every single person reading this has the opportunity to join that noble pursuit. Every single person reading this has the opportunity to add themselves the dogpile on feminism till it is crushed beneath the weight of everyone who will ante up and go after it.
You can witness the collapse of feminism in your own lifetime. And after that collapse you can join us in taking on misandry and gynocentrism in all the other forms they take. Feminists are cheerleaders for female entitlement, male disposability and lying to achieve ends; like, for instance, plundering through their own website to remove any indication that the charges against them are true.
The time to kick them is now, folks, while so many of them are down.
[Ed. Note: The House of Leaves – Burning by LearningLark is licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.]
