The Daily Beast has made another foray into the Men’s Rights Movement, this one even more obnoxious and laughable than the last.
Nancy Kaffer penned “Men Need a Better Men’s Rights Movement,” subtitled “The world is changing, and men really could use a movement—just not the misogynistic, conspiracy-minded one they have now.”
The title work was either Kaffer or some editor, but either way the very idea that men need a movement—and thus the entire alleged premise of the article—was eviscerated by the author in the first few lines:
The first time I heard the phrase “men’s rights movement,” I think I rolled my eyes. And I probably rolled them pretty hard, because come on: Men have all of the rights. They control all of the things: The U.S. Congress, corporations, banks, Hollywood, governments, all of the money and power and launch codes in the world.
Men, particularly white, heterosexual men, are undeniably in charge.
Yeah, Nancy, we men control all of, uh, “the things.” Brilliant articulation, by the way. Still, one has to wonder how any of those cisgender, snowy-white brutes even consented to letting you voice an opinion in such a prominent venue as The Daily Beast. How did you get away with speaking such raw truth to the real power? Did you have to fetch coffee or maybe “retrieve” something from under your white male heterosexual boss’s desk?
It is hard to imagine that anything you think could be true, since it is you, in fact, doing the talking. Just wondering, is all.
Kaffer tries to clarify herself in the next sentence:
But take a few steps back from the echelons of power—and the elite corridors that lead to said echelons—and the picture isn’t so pretty.
Okay, Nancy, so you have now described the other 99.9% of the male population. And you are right, the picture there isn’t so pretty. In fact, for many it is downright ugly and treacherous. So pardon me if I question your impulsive need to cast a blanket of implied privilege and power over an intended miniscule percentage of men as though it is even remotely relevant to the issues faced by the rest of us.
While Kaffer seems to possess a limited inkling of awareness that the Men’s Rights Movement is here for a reason, she also demonstrates quickly that her insight will remain forever limited and useless.
The tactic of feminists for the past half-century is to view the upper crust of all men, a micro-fraction of the population, with the implication that it somehow defines all of us.
They do the same at the other end of the bell curve. We are all tainted by the extreme minority of men who are violent and dangerous, not to mention financially unviable.
It just depends on which part of the victim narrative they want to cash in on at the moment. If the alleged glass ceiling is the issue, then we men are all captains of industry. If raising money for the domestic and sexual assault industry, then we men are all thugs and deviants.
Standard, shopworn feminist skullduggery aside, those of us in between the extremes are the ones who need a men’s movement. Lo and behold, we are coincidentally the ones who are making it happen, with equal participation from women who don’t want you to define what they should be either.
Reality’s a bitch, innit?
Kaffer then goes on to do what any good propagandist does with sufficient brio to make Goebbels proud. She acknowledges some very superficial truths about men’s issues, then she pares it all down to men needing to do more for women, and ultimately concludes:
Men, it seems, do need a movement. Just not the one they have.
Or that they will ever have, Nancy. The men’s movement you want already has a name. It’s called feminism. But the movement for men you don’t like, the one that actually concerns itself with men’s very real problems, is on the way up while yours is on the way down.
That is precisely why you wrote your stupid hit piece, even if you are too obtuse to be aware of it or aware enough to know that the glaring ignorance of people like you has been increasing our ranks for a long time.
And so the saga continues, folks, and the narrative continues to shift. Now we actually do need a men’s movement, just one that this poor, oppressed woman who writes for The Daily Beast will find redeeming and, more importantly, useful to the movement to which she already belongs.
Is that too much to ask for? Uh, yeah. In fact, it ranks as one of the stupidest requests in modern history.
This is ultimately gratifying to me on a very personal level. I love watching feminists scramble pathetically. I can just imagine Nancy Kaffer storming around her office, wearing a monocle and wielding a swagger stick, barking about how we must do something about the “men’s rights threat.”
And I love watching them getting it so very, very wrong. I could have spent a good part of this writing explaining to Ms. Clueless about how the men’s movement predates modern feminism and that there is much more to our understanding of men’s issues than just a bunch of ideologues who hate us with their vaginas.
I could point to a ton of material by men’s rights activists (MRAs) that quickly demonstrates that our understanding of gender roles, sexual politics, and history is much more informed and nuanced than they teach in women’s studies.
But we are here to educate men and women who want answers more than they want dogma or compliance.
I do recommend reading Kaffer’s full piece on The Daily Beast, though. It is hysterical to watch her imagine that she is brilliant and cutting edge as she recycles the same garbage that most thinking people took out a decade ago.
