As those of you who’ve been around AVfM for a while know, we don’t do partisan politics. We view all major political parties currently in office in the United States (and most of the rest of the English-speaking world) as either passively or actively endorsing male disposability and blindly accepting misandry without batting an eye. Therefore, it needs to be emphasized up front: we are mostly happy with the results of last night’s elections in the United States but not because we care who won. What we care about is the idea that lost.
Although not every race has been called yet, and at least one major race will not be settled until December, at this writing Republicans have picked up at least 7 Senate seats and 14 House of Representative seats. This gives them a solid majority in the Senate and a crushing majority in the House of Representatives. It appears likely that they will pick up a total of 8 or even 9 Senate seats before the counting is done, but two of those races at this writing are still being contested.
Are we at AVfM happy about this? I’d say most of us are. Is that because we’re Republicans? No. Republicans have failed for decades now to make any substantive improvements for men and boys in areas such as divorce law, education, arrest and imprisonment issues, suicide, homelessness, lies about rape and domestic violence, and a list of other things as long as your arm. A Republican douchebag who vetoed an end to lifetime alimony was re-elected. Not one politician we’re aware of won by talking about any issues negatively affecting men and boys (although feel free to let us know if there are any honorable exceptions that we missed).
We are nevertheless happy because one of America’s two main political parties—which happens to be its oldest political party, the Democratic Party, founded by Andrew Jackson—has for many years been actively tied to the virulently hateful strain of the feminist movement that spreads lies about domestic violence, sexual assault, and fatherhood itself. This noxious type of feminism, including the National Organization for Women and other hate groups, some years ago crafted a phony threat narrative for the Democratic Party that they called the “War on Women,” and Democrats have been using it ever since as a way to win elections.
Women are, after all, a majority of the American electorate, and if you tell them there’s a war on against them, you will have no trouble getting a certain percentage to believe it. You will also get pernicious white knight/purple poodle types who believe it too, happy to stand up and say, “I’ll save you!” to the “damsels in distress” who were never under any real threat to begin with.
The so-called War on Women threat narrative only ever amounted to this: some people thought women should have to pay for their own birth control, and some people are opposed to abortion. That’s it. There’s your “war on women.” Throw in the standard lies about the non-existent pay gap and the phony rape crisis on college campuses, the typical sexist hate-narrative about toxic masculinity causing mass shootings, and the perpetual lies about domestic violence (you can find out the truth about domestic violence at WhiteRibbon.org, by the way) and you have what appears to be a winning election strategy.
Well, it appeared to be a winning narrative at the polls. Funny thing is, those using it have been steadily doing worse and worse in opinion polls. Furthermore, polls on the War on Women trope have begun showing that a majority of women, let alone men, are getting sick of hearing about this phony “war on women” bullshit. It increasingly appears that the American electorate in general has had enough of this poisonous, hateful, bigoted false-threat narrative. Indeed, at least one major figure in the Senate chose to make the non-existent “War on Women” the centerpiece of his campaign, and lost spectacularly, as did almost everyone else who leaned on this sexist trope.
The War on Women trope has been soundly defeated. Or if we were trying to be clever, we’d say, “The War on Women is over—women and men both won it.”
But that would probably be speaking too soon; all that voters have really said is that the “women under attack!” narrative doesn’t work on them anymore. That doesn’t mean that toxic feminism, or the underlying gynocentrism that underpins so much of American politics, will be undone. But it does signal that a major underpinning of contemporary gender-feminist thought has been kicked out from under it.
Here at a A Voice for Men, we have some advice for Democrats: if you want to start winning again, feminism is not your savior, and you need to clean house. Just like Republicans did when they showed the John Birch Society and other loons the door decades ago, just like Democrats did when they let the “Dixiecrat” segregationists walk out the door, you need to look the National Organization for Women and other toxic hate organizations in the eye, point to the door, and say, “Get out.”
Many of my conservative pals scratch their heads at my own politics; they frequently accuse me of being a “leftist,” even though I’m not. My liberal pals often accuse me of being a right-winger, which I’m not. Some people will just never be able to handle someone who rejects the left-right spectrum (and also rejects the phony “You’re either a Marxist or you’re a Hayekian” dichotomy). If anyone cares how I voted in this election (I vote in every election): I voted entirely for a mix of wildly different third-party candidates to send an “anybody but you bums” message to the Big Two, helped vote a corrupt judge off the bench (judges are elected in non-partisan fashion in Michigan and we threw one bum out, yaya!), and voted on a couple of referendums on whether or not to allow wolf hunting (and how I voted on that is none of your business).
What do I want for American politics? Well, to be honest, I’d like to see a Constitutional convention to completely redesign our election system for mixed-member proportional representation and a whole bunch of other things. But since that won’t be happening any time soon, I want for Democrats to be the best and most principled Democrats they can be, and for Republicans to be the best and most principled Republicans they can be, and for the country to be better off because of it.
So here’s my suggestion to Democrats about how to come back from this really very embarrassing defeat: Toxic gender feminism is in your ranks, it’s hurting you, and it needs to be amputated and cauterized from your party. It’ll hurt like hell for a bit, but like excising a cancer, getting rid of it will leave you a healthier, more vibrant political party that does a better job not just for women but also for men and boys, whom you damn well ought to care just as much about.
And Republicans, we have a message for you: we’ll be watching you and ready to criticize you too. In fact, we’re halfway hoping you win the White House next election cycle so we can hold our Republican MRA friends’ feet to the fire and illustrate that Republicans are no friends to men and boys. You’re going to need to change your ways before we’ll trust you as a party either.
