The Men’s Human Rights Movement (MHRM) has been subject to all manner of criticism over the years, much of it libellous mischaracterizations intended to demonize its adherents as rape apologists who are reacting to the loss of unearned male privileges by attempting to silence women and make the world less safe for them. These critics are completely unfazed by the fact that none of them can offer any valid examples of MHRAs doing any such thing. This is because feminists regard lying to protect their precious narratives as acts of ideological heroism – necessary and commendable – and when the lies begin to founder, shame, shame and shame again. Being honest never seems to occur to them.
However, a good deal of the criticism aimed at the MHRM comes from well-intentioned voices within the movement, as well as from sympathetic views close to it. This criticism is often concerned with the uncompromising positions of ‘A Voice for Men’ (AVfM) and how it may be misunderstood or misinterpreted by the public as a whole, particularly those popularly described as ‘fence-sitters’, as being too harsh, accusatory and confrontational.
This criticism is often accompanied by calls to keep in mind that most people outside the MHRM are blithely ignorant of many of our ideas and concepts and that uncompromising positions appear to hold such people accountable for their ignorance. This elicits resentful and defensive responses which undermine attempts to raise these people from ignorance to awareness. In other words, people are going to be angry enough about the nature of your message, so you had better deliver it as gently as possible.
To this, I would point out that maintaining an uncompromising position and delivering it in an uncompromising manner is usually what it takes to shake people’s misandric assumptions to their very core. By uncompromising, I don’t mean stubbornly refusing to budge on issues when credible contradictory evidence is presented – compromising one’s intellectual integrity is morally unacceptable. I mean allowing people to weasel out of acknowledging that their opinions are based on assumptions which denigrate men and promote the bigoted notion that their rights and welfare matter less than everyone else’s.
Being uncompromising is not allowing feminists to claim that their radical elements dwell exclusively, or even largely, on the fringes of their movement – and speaking up the moment someone follows, “men do have some valid issues” with the word, ‘but’. Being uncompromising is calling out misandry the moment you see it and not accepting ignorance as an excuse. It is refusing to allow anyone, man or woman, to define an individual man’s masculinity for him. It is rejecting the concerns of tone-policing hand-wringers worried that adopting uncompromising positions might upset people – and writing these hand-wringers off as obstacles to achieving the goals of the MHRM.
Mainstream media pundits like to label AVfM as radical. The idea that men are human beings with an intrinsic value whose rights and welfare should be addressed and respected may be a radical concept for some people. It isn’t to me, and it shouldn’t be for anyone who lays claim to egalitarian principles, which the overwhelming majority of online bloggers like to do. Reading through the comments sections of news websites reveals that most people’s egalitarian principles rarely extend to include men and boys, exposing these alleged principles as nothing more than shams. To the uncompromising MHRA, the question of whether someone’s gynocentric worldview is ideologically driven or borne of ignorance is ultimately irrelevant.
For example, the comments following a recently published article on ‘Daily Mail’s’ online site about Yazidi women joining a battalion known as the ‘Force of the Sun Ladies’ to fight ISIS is riddled with complacent acceptance of male disposability as well as the assumption of the moral superiority of women.
Here are but a few of the 1300+ comments:
The women do the fighting while the cowardly men run off to Europe.”
They only need to fight because their men folk are weak, useless cowards.”
And the husbands, fathers, brothers and neighbors ran off to the EU and left their wives, sisters and daughters to be kidnapped, raped and killed and to fight for their country. Round all the men up and ship them back to fight.”
Here come the girls!!……well-done ladies I applaud your bravery. Just wish the sad excuses for men currently lying around Europe were anywhere near as brave in fighting ISIS.”
Aren’t women wonderful? Fortunately, there was a lone voice amidst the ‘you go girl’ hysteria (yes, ‘you go girl’ was actually one of the comments) and the chorus of man-up shaming willing to enlighten these ignorant people about the reality of recent Yazidi history in which the men suffered at least as much as the women – a point which the ‘you go girl’ brigade was more than happy to overlook:
People are quite rightly applauding these women. But you do a disservice when criticizing the men. Most were massacred as the women were captured. These brave women soldiers are bearing both the trauma of enslavement by ISIS and the deaths of their beloved family members, most of whom were male – including brothers, fathers, husbands and sons.”
A few attempted to challenge this lone voice:
Where are the men [who are] supposed to be fighting for their country. Are they all hiding?!”
She responded:
Do you mean the Yazidi men? They were rounded up and massacred while their womenfolk were held captive.”
One tried the old ‘women as chattel’ routine:
As tragic as all this killing is, this may be the one chance women in this region will have to assert their proper place as equals not chattel.”
The lone voice wasn’t having any of it.
“In the main, the Kurdish men and women are equal (and the Yazidis are part of the Kurdish community). In fact, it’s the Kurdish culture for men and women to fight side by side in the military.”
A lone voice belonging to someone who refused to allow their intellectual integrity to be compromised smashed the narrative to dust, and all she (I know it was a ‘she’ because she happens to be a good friend of mine) had to do was stick to the truth, reject the women good/men bad paradigm and refuse to accept the idea that men are disposable utilities.
Another article on ‘Daily Mail’s’ online site tells of the ordeal of Mark Pearson, who was acquitted of a “sexual assault by penetration’ which CCTV footage proved did not occur – in fact, it could not possibly have ever happened.
AVfM’s Editor at large, Erin Pizzey, had no trouble identifying Mark Pearson as the real victim in this case, and knew exactly who to blame: The false accuser who is above the law and the feminist-run criminal system which put her there. This is Erin Pizzey’s comment:
The CPS have recently been wrongly targeting men and it has got to stop,’ she said. ‘The CPS had no business going after him [Mr Pearson] because there wasn’t a case there from the very beginning. At the moment, women seem above the law. They can do it in domestic violence cases – simply pick up the phone, no evidence required, and have a man removed from his family and his children – and they can do it with rape, too.”
Don’t expect much sympathy for Mark Pearson in the comments that follow. Someone called Cheryl blamed Pearson for speaking “to the police against the advice of his solicitor enabling the police to build a case against him. He paid a high price for his ignorance of the legal system and for ignoring professional legal advice.”
LondonGal suggested that “someone else touched her up, but she thought it was him because he made eye contact with her.” A White Knight rode in to defend the false accuser by suggesting that she “suffers from a mental illness and may well believe what she said.” He blamed “the police and doctors” because they “should have seen that.” Many cited the waste of public money as the main reason this case angered them.
Predictably, the majority of the commenters identify women as the ‘real victims’ in all this:
As a woman, this sort of thing really annoys me. She has done no favours to real victims of sexual assaults.”
It is vexatious and spurious claims like this make it harder for genuine victims to come forward.”
The fact that there are women out there who are willing to have a man prosecuted on false claims only makes it harder for women who have genuinely been assaulted to successfully win their cases.”
She is a disgrace to women, and creatures like her actually make it more difficult for women to go through with genuine cases of sexual assault, as they take away the credibility of real sufferers.”
Women may not be believed? Are they kidding? This woman came forward with an allegation of sexual assault which video footage proved beyond any doubt to be a total fabrication, and the police and the prosecutors still believed her. An uncompromising MHRA doesn’t dismiss the claim that publicly exposing false sexual assault allegations may result in future claimants not being believed because they are misogynists who don’t take rape seriously – they do it because it is so obviously and demonstrably untrue. They also admonish those who fail to recognize that the real victim of any false rape allegation is the man who is falsely accused. Those who fail to understand this as implicitly as Erin Pizzey does have no right to refer to themselves as egalitarian – they are misandric bigots.
Fortunately, there are some women who are waking up to the fact that what happened to Mark Pearson does not bode well for the men in their lives, and are not willing to compromise the rights and welfare of these loved ones for anyone or anything:
This is terrifying. As the mother of a 14-year-old, I worry so much for him – it seems women can claim pretty much anything, and even when it’s proved that she lied, it’s still the man that suffers. She needs to be named, and charged with false accusation!”
One of the topics that many would like some MHRAs to adopt a less uncompromising position towards is feminism. As one of those MHRAs who refuse to compromise either with feminists, or about feminism, allow me to use the following example to illustrate why I regard this ideology as nothing more than a totalitarian hate-movement full of rabid ideologues who pose a clear and present danger to men and boys – and those inconveniently independent-minded women of integrity who refuse to toe their line.
Recently, a disabled student veteran studying at the Texas Christian University was asked by a feminist professor, Dr. Melita Garza, to write a blog post about feminism.
In his blog post, he made the remark that women today were “the freest and most liberated in human history.” For this feminist heresy, Garza called the police and told them that the student’s comment was “dark, offensive and inappropriate” and accused him of “bullying.” She also reported him to the department chair stating that she was frightened by his references to women, which she found “degrading.” She went on to say that she “was concerned about the safety of other students in the course, most of whom were women.” As a direct result of her complaint, the student lost his military education benefits. It hardly needs to be added that she awarded him an F.
Just in case, anyone is in any doubt that radical feminists are running the show, the Dean issued a no-contact order to the student and barred him from the university community. This outrage occurred simply because a student dared to offer an opinion which dissented from a feminist narrative. It wouldn’t have helped that he was a man – especially a disabled war veteran. So much for TCU’s demonstration guidelines which state that “TCU firmly supports the rights of all members of the University community to express their views.” Feminist-approved views that is.
Suggest to me that radical extremists dwell on the fringes of the feminist movement at your peril, because I can cite countless examples of radical feminists with real power doing real damage to real people. These examples are everywhere, which is why there is no excuse for people to be ignorant about the true nature and purpose of feminism – least of all anyone who identifies as a feminist. They can save their hollow rhetoric about equality for the ‘Daily Mail’ commenters who are more concerned about future rape claimants and public money than they are about a man whose life has been forever changed as a direct result of radical feminists in his country tampering with the due process rights of men and boys.
Like my fellow uncompromising MHRA, Janet Bloomfield, I am confounded by feminists, especially the ‘why can’t we all just get along?’ variety, who don’t seem to know anything about their own ideology.
Like Ms Bloomfield, I am more than happy to fill these morons in on the theories of Vanguard feminists whose seminal works are required reading in Women’s Studies courses throughout the world because, like Ms Bloomfield, I’ve actually read them. They are nothing but the bilious bigotry of man-hating psychopaths masquerading as scholarship which anti-intellectual totalitarians, like Dr. Melita Garza, gobbled down like manna from heaven at some point in her formative years. Claiming ignorance of this is either an outright lie or evidence that a vast number of feminist students don’t bother doing their required course reading – shame on them, either way.
Contrary to popular belief, the MHRM consists of a variety of people with a variety of approaches to challenging the narratives. I offer those who prefer the softly, softly approach my best wishes, as I would any fellow traveller. There is a place for them – it’s just that, in my opinion, that place may as well be at the feet of feminists who may want to adopt them as a special project for proving to the world that they really do care about men. The narrative can never be effectively challenged at the heels of feminists. It can only be challenged by standing up to feminists and debunking their gynocentric narratives with intellectual integrity, pristine logic and a refusal to compromise. The rights and welfare of men and boys are non-negotiable, something which some of our opponents are slowly beginning to comprehend.
The day Suzanne McCarley first showed up in the comments at A Voice for Men was the only day I have ever jumped from my keyboard and punched the air – I’m usually above that sort of thing. ‘Driver Suz’ was here! I was already very familiar with this woman’s intellectual honesty, eloquence, authentic commitment to men’s rights and her profound ability to make bigots weep without getting a single hair out of place. Her presence here could only be a monumental asset to AVfM. I knew that it would take Paul Elam about two seconds to recognize this fact, and it did.
Like all of the MHRAs whom I respect the most, Suzanne McCarley refuses to compromise her intellectual integrity for anyone. This refusal to compromise is the key to her effectiveness, as well as to Paul Elam’s leadership strategy, Karen Straughan’s widespread appeal and Luigi Logan’s (Fidelbogen) razor-sharp rhetorical discipline which was so essential in guiding me through the ordeal of debating feminists. The MHRM owes a great deal to MHRAs, who refuse to compromise. I’m referring to people like Kimski, who shows up everywhere to poke holes in feminist narratives. If a feminist is somewhere talking rubbish, Kimski is on it in seconds, persuading countless onlookers that feminism can and should be debunked – this man must never sleep.
Only recently, AVfM was accused of failing to offer public support to the hapless Roosh, an anti-MHRA Pick Up Artist (PUA) who admits to raping women. MHRAs, Dean Esmay and Bryan Scandrett, posted articles clarifying why they were flatly refusing to compromise their principles on the issue of supporting Roosh. Predictably, PUAs didn’t get it, preferring to label these articles, and the supportive comments that followed, as betrayals of a fellow man by a bunch of ‘betas’ coerced into submission by the mean ban-hammer lady – which is how PUAs have always characterized Suzanne McCarley and her role at AVfM.
All of the MHRAs who matter the most pointed to the PUA response to AVfM’s position on Roosh as one of the reasons why it has always been a mistake to compromise with PUAs. They have never liked or supported the MHRM, which is why PUAs have never lost any sleep over the extent to which they undermine its goals.
As more and more cracks appear in the gynocentric narratives so ruthlessly exploited by feminists, there will be more urgent calls for sites like AVfM to switch to a more diplomatic approach to promoting its goals. This would be a mistake. No compromises should ever be considered until feminists, like Dr. Melita Garza, have absolutely no power whatsoever to inflict the slightest harm on disabled student veterans, or anyone else, for voicing dissenting opinions. That, I regret to say, is going to take a while – and an approach that refuses to compromise with either man-hating bigots or those too ignorant to notice them and the damage they cause.
