I have no words of my own I could possibly use to express myself more eloquently than the following few lines taken from the work of an unknown poet:
Men my age are all the same
They hate themselves & feel ashamed
For what they are & cannot changeLittle heads filled up with lies
Raised only to apologize
For thousand-year conspiracies
In gender-studies histories
These words, written by L. Byron [1], had a profound effect on me when I first read them. Although I chose to use them as the opening to my latest video production, I ultimately wanted to take a different approach to communicating the men’s rights issue than simply documenting yet more injustices to men and boys in society.
In the video, below, I am attempting to showcase—without compromise to the feminist narrative—the positive traits of men and those aptitudes which are typically male. I do hope you like it.
Although it was not my intention at the outset, I took inspiration from the words of Malcom X and used them to help define the message I wanted to convey. I make no apology for this. His legacy is a checkered one and, according to many, his philosophy was one of racism, black supremacy, and violence. I can’t justify many of the views he preached and don’t intend to try, but I would like to give you this quote [2], which were his words shortly before his death in 1965:
I realized racism isn’t just a black and white problem. It’s brought bloodbaths to about every nation on earth at one time or another.
Brother, remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurant—the one who wanted to help the [Black] Muslims and the whites get together—and I told her there wasn’t a ghost of a chance and she went away crying? Well, I’ve lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I’m sorry for now. I was a zombie then—like all [Black] Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man’s entitled to make a fool of himself if he’s ready to pay the cost. It cost me 12 years.
That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I’m glad to be free of them.
In fact, toward the end of his life, Malcolm X retracted and apologised for many of his preachings. I’ve learned for myself that many people are unable to do this; many would rather defend their delusion than face reality. In the end, Malcolm X was willing to own his mistakes and admit them. He paid for that with his life.
He was a radical, but I say he was also a humanitarian who lived in extreme times in history. And whatever you think of some of his earlier views, to a people used to accepting low human worth, his message was a hugely powerful one, as demonstrated by the following extract from a speech in Los Angeles in 1962:
Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin, to such extent that you bleach to get like the white man? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lip? Who taught you to hate yourself, from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to—so much so that you don’t want to be around each other? No… Before you come asking Mr. Muhammad does he teach hate, you should ask yourself who taught you to hate being what God made you.
Malcolm X helped to demolish the negative stereotyping of black people, ultimately equipping them with the tools with which to build their own perception of self-worth.
Is it possible that we could do this for ourselves? Is it possible that we can start to believe in ourselves once more?
This is so important and so worthwhile because the systematic negative stereotyping of males is no longer restricted to adult men, but is now common place in the classroom. Our feminised education system, and wider society, teaches young boys that all the good things in the world are about women, and all the bad things are about them. Many boys, especially those lacking fathers, have come to understand that this world has no place for them. Their natural path is to drop out and fall into drugs, gangs, isolation, alcoholism and suicide.
I knew a man recently, an alcoholic, who’s only ambition was to own a large screen TV. While visiting him at home, I commented on why he had a rag hanging from the letter box of his front door. He explained that it was flapping in the wind and he had stuffed a rag in there to try and silence it. A moment or two later, he added, “I’ve been calling the council for months and months to come out and fix it, but they never do.”
Naturally, I asked him why he didn’t just fix it himself, and the wounded and confused look he gave me in reply told me a great deal about his upbringing. I withdrew myself from his company, while he continued to spend his days in front of the TV, drinking cider from a plastic bottle, hoping that someone would come and save him.
Then one day, I saw social services clearing out his house. I don’t know what happened to him.
Likewise, many men who find themselves in desperate situations, often in connection with family courts, cling to the hope that if only people could see what was happening to them—if only everyone knew just how bad things were—somebody will be outraged and something will be done. What they fail to grasp, but we’ve come to understand, is that society does not care about men.
No one is coming to save them.
No one is coming to save us. The pendulum is not going to swing back unless we are prepared to swing it. It’s up to ourselves to do the saving.
In my own way, this is the message I’m trying to convey in the video. I wanted to produce something that tells us about ourselves—something that reminds us all, myself included, just what it is that we really are, and not what we have been told all our lives.
A man’s life has never been about privilege; it’s historically been about hard-work, responsibility and sacrifice. It’s also historically been about providing for and protecting women and children. We are not useless, stupid, brutish oafs and emotional reptiles.
Far from it…
It was the toil of men—that of our fathers and grandfathers—that built the industry, the railways, the water and sewage systems that lifted millions, if not billions, out of subsistence level poverty. It is typically the male sex that is willing to shoulder the risk and endure the suffering necessary to push back human boundaries for the benefit of others. It is typically the male left-brain psyche that is the inventive one, the one to gaze at the heavens and to have the inclination to go there.
Young boys deserve a better future than that of a sperm donor and a walking cash machine, only to be cast aside when of no more use. They are human beings, not the pack animals of the human race.
No schoolboy should ever have to sit in class while his teacher makes him feel responsible for all the wrongs perpetrated throughout history, or makes him feel worthless and inadequate, or tells him that his gender harms the other and that women will need protecting from him when he gets older. This should be seen for what it is, nothing other than an ideologue abusing her position as a teacher in order to deliver dehumanising classroom propaganda to children. That’s misandry, miss!
We need to drive a positive dialogue about males, not just one of injustice and suffering. We must teach men and boys the truth about themselves if they are ever build their own identity free of feminism’s stigmatising invective.
Reference
1. Feminists Killed Kurt Cobain, L. Byron. TriggerAlert.BlogSpot.com
2. Parks, Gordon, “Malcolm X: The Minutes of Our Last Meeting”, Clarke, p.122
