I was young, but I remember seeing America burn in the late 1960’s. I watched the television screen, wide-eyed and fearful as plumes of smoke rose from Detroit and Watts. It was much closer to home than that, too. In 1967 here in Houston a deadly riot broke out at Texas Southern University (TSU). After a story broke that a young black boy had been killed by a white Houston police officer the violence erupted quickly. The Houston Press described it as follows:
Angry students gathered, more police arrived. Rocks and bottles were thrown. A shot rang out, wounding an officer in the thigh, and within minutes, a full-blown riot erupted. Over the next hours, HPD shot 3,000 rounds of shotgun and carbine fire into the building, and received return fire. Five hundred officers eventually stormed Lanier Hall, the men’s dormitory, from which the first shot supposedly came. When the smoke cleared, one police officer was dead, one student and two officers were wounded, and 488 students were arrested.
Time reported one police officer as saying, “It looked like the Alamo.[1]””
Similar tragedies were erupting nationwide, all with one thing in common: damage to primarily black assets. TSU is a predominately black university. It was pretty much the same everywhere else. Whether at the hands of black rioters or police responders (often both), it was black businesses, homes, institutions and people that bore the brunt of the destruction.
The attempt to draw attention to a history of marginalization and discrimination, aggravated by “white flight” from inner city enclaves that were left to rot in the hands of corrupt and indifferent city governments, turned inward and the afflicted suffered more. It was a tragic but arguably necessary part of the civil rights movement.
Elam Compares Internet Flame Wars to 1960’s Race Riots
Of course, that subhead would be a gross overstatement. I had to say it though because it is part of my responsibility to assist the not-so-creative David Futrelle develop headlines for his blog.
And indeed, even if not nearly comparable in scope and gravity, there are some similarities. Certainly there is much more valid comparison of the American Civil Rights Movement to the Men’s Human Rights Movement than there ever was to Feminism.
The cakewalk of women’s liberation is best described as women telling men what they wanted and men pushing each other out of the way to be the one to give it to them. The necessary digression is to point out that overall it turned out to not be what a lot of women actually wanted, which is why women are less happy now than they were before they were “liberated.”[2] Even as some imbalances between men and women did warrant correction, a rights movement for those already privileged only proved to produce a step down.
Men on the other hand contend with a set of social and legal double standards that are arguably as bad (at this time) and even easier to ignore than those of racial minorities. Just watch what happens to a black man who stands up for his rights as a black man vs what happens to him if he stands up for his rights as a man. He won’t get any slack, and he is more likely than not to be crushed by his own community, even, no, especially by his fellow men. Perhaps even more than the white community it is the expectation that black men will serve black women with their heads down and their mouths shut.
Disposability means invisibility.
It is that invisibility; the invisibility of issues, of discriminations and especially the invisibility of pain that tends to pressurize to blowing points
And this is where the men’s movement is not similar to, but exactly like the Civil Rights Movement. Society is all too happy to see one guy driving down the street in a Maserati and ignore the countless homeless, suicidal and desperate men laying at its feet. Or even worse, kick those men in the teeth for obstructing the view of the Maserati.
That is indeed the fuel for explosive, inwardly directed anger. And it is what we see happening, even in the nascent population of men and women who are reacting consciously and actively to the current state of affairs for men and boys.
The recent round of sabre rattling and infighting on YouTube between camps that are 98% on the same page philosophically is indicative of that problem. I have been “guilty” of it as anyone, and make no promises that I won’t be a part of it in the future. It is, after all, the nature of the beast.
If anything I am grateful that the internet is not only a powerful tool to change the social narrative, it also provides a largely safe, virtual battleground for pressure to be released. And when it comes to pressure, we have our share and then some.
The challenge here isn’t to create a Utopian legion of SJW-like lock-steppers with “the” message on men’s rights. That is born of a herd mentality not suited to the world of most men. But rather the challenge is not to view the natural process of growth as a setback or a defeat. The world is already changing, not least proven by the fact that anti-gynocentrism is not only a thing, it is growing even as gynocentrism is being increasingly called to the social carpet.
And that is the entire point. After 100 years of an unknown Men’s Rights Movement — largely buried by media and historians — one is emerging that is on the path to success because the path to success is not in attempts to change law or governance, but to change culture. Laws change because culture does and for no other reason.
Finally, the insanity of gender feminism is providing society the undeniable proof that gynocentism unchecked results in evil; that it visits harm on all men, women and children. Finally society is just starting to lift itself out of the fog of denial that has led to toxic obsession with the problems of women, real or imagined, and callous indifference to the problems of men.
How do we know this? Because MGTOW exists and is leading more and more men to drop out of society’s expectations. We know it because anti-feminism is growing; because the Men’s Rights Movement is no longer unknown. Indeed it is causing panic and backlash from a culture still clinging to archaic dictates which no longer serve it and have in fact begun destroying it.
And soon enough the narrative will emerge that feminism is just an extreme example of the real problem: gynocentrism.
During this process we benefit from remaining circumspect. The story of the black youth slain by a white police officer in Houston turned out to be far from true. Actually, it was a white boy wounded by another white boy. That is what started that particular riot. Well, that and a few hundred years of slavery, Jim Crow and government sanctioned bigotry.
At AVFM we will continue to do what civil rights activists did after the late 1960’s in the United States. That is, we will push our message into the mainstream consciousness. Just as civil rights activists campaign against racism, we will campaign against gynocentrism. We will promote MGTOW and a marriage strike, and we will advocate for all men from all walks of life, even those who hate our guts for doing it.
We will shake people from their transfixed stares at the Maserati and refuse to allow them to ignore those suffering at their feet. And just as civil rights activists finally accomplished with racism, we will shine a light on the ignorance and bigotry of valuing one half the population more than the other based only on their sex.
A little venting on YouTube from time to time is not going to slow us down. In fact, it will likely make us stronger.
[1] http://blogs.houstonpress.com/news/2009/07/houston_101_tsu_shootings.php
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