The mythic Neckbeard and Why Black Men need the Men’s Rights Movement
The crux of intersectional feminism is largely, the co-opting of other social justice movements and putting them under the ideological umbrella that they are in control of. Feminists, particularly armchair academics and web pundits, have cast themselves as the champions of gay rights, black/minority rights and most recently, transgender rights.
This monopoly over advocacy for civil equality is a great disservice to men of disadvantaged groups, particularly Black men.
Feminist-styled theories of privilege, oppression and all their related narratives and neologisms are neatly adapted and applied to other movements. In the prevalent feminist narrative, the ultimate adversary is the white, straight, cisgender male, and it follows that all things antithetical to feminism have this mythic image imposed on them.
This is a fallacy, very much perpetuated by the fact that MRAs are still a very distant and silent to the average person, leaving them ready to believe any description of MRAs, no matter how disingenuous because they have no real-life reference to compare them to. MRAs are seen as characteristically white, and therefore racist, characteristically heterosexual, and therefore anti-gay.
This mythic image of the Men’s Rights Movement, alongside the artificial monopoly over social justice movements created by feminist academia, has created a strange cultural perception, in which a woman’s movement carries more popular credibility on the topic of the struggles of gay males or black men than does the men’s movement.
Let’s talk numbers. Police shootings are a very hot topic right now in the social activism community, a community that thanks to its monopolization by feminism is largely influenced and commanded by feminists. 95% of victims of officer-involved shootings are males. In a social climate where we are so willing to speak out against police violence (and rightfully so) are we so unwilling to frame this as a Men’s Rights Issue?
Unarmed black male victims are the center of public discourse on the subject of abusive violence by American police, and rightfully so. While white men are not exempt from being the subjects of unjustified police shootings, such as 17-year-old Devin Guilford, who was white and unarmed when he was fatally shot by a Police Officer, Black men are more than twice as likely to be fatally shot by a police officer compared to the national average.
In fact, many Men’s Rights concerns are more starkly visible when applied to Black men; under-representation in colleges and Universities disproportionally affects black men compared to black women by a huge margin.
Social men’s issues, such as culturally prevalent ideas of being seen as inherently violent or dangerous, being seen as uncontrollably and animally sexual, being subject to challenging and burdensome masculine gender roles, and being depicted as inherently inadequate parents are four of the strongest examples of how men’s issues are particularly visible in Black America.
Rape is considered a feminist issue, and this is fairly reasonable considering that (outside of prisons) the majority of rape victims are female. Acid attacks in the Middle East are considered a feminist issue, this too is reasonable as the majority of acid attack victims are female.
However, when 95% of officer-involved shootings involve male victims, and nearly 100% of slave laborers in Qatar are men, we are not allowed to frame this as a men’s rights issue, instead we are expected to allow feminists, the proprietors of all social justice, to speak on their behalf, because the dominant feminist rhetoric that depicts privilege as a one-dimensional zero-sum game, and rationalizes all injustice as a creation of an institutional monolith (The Patriarchy), there is no room to discuss or describe any of these issues as being exactly what they are: MRA concerns.
It’s time for men to speak for themselves. The Men’s Rights Movement does not contain in its central dogma an adversarial narrative of a “Matriarchy.” There is no need for the MRM to erase women’s issues to support its beliefs. Feminism, however, mercilessly and consistently erases men’s issues.
Being built on a foundation of false dichotomies and a social narrative that is child-like in simplicity, with even undeniably true men’s rights issues being casually dismissed as “the patriarchy backfiring” and going unaddressed. Such a movement cannot be trusted to hold authority or credibility over Men’s issues of any kind, and that their pundits are at the forefront of issues that disproportionally affect men cannot be allowed to continue.
