A Voice for Male Students

We are at an interesting point in men’s advocacy.

We are growing by leaps and bounds. It used to be that there were only a small handful of websites and blogs shouting into the wilderness. That is no longer the case. We are now an online community bustling with energy and traffic, and commanding an increasingly formidable presence. A Voice for Men, for example, now has ~5.5 million views to its name, the Men’s Rights subreddit has ~80,000 subscribers [1], and Karen Straughan, aka GirlWritesWhat, now has ~43,000 subs on YouTube [2].

We have more people starting up blogs about men’s issues than ever before. While many have become defunct, many more have taken their place. Most of them fall into two main categories. First are what I would call “generalist sites” which focus on a wide array of men’s issues. Next are what I call “specialist sites,” like Community of the Wrongly Accused, which dig deep into one particular area and provide substantial and easily-accessible resources for those interested in one particular topic.

I would like to encourage MHRAs to develop more professional “specialist sites.” Find a topic you like and research the hell out of it, or a topic you know a lot about. Learn a bit of Photoshop to develop some iconic symbols and branding for your site, learn a bit of web design, and you’re mostly there.

These specialist sites could link and feed back to generalist sites like AVFM, NCFM, and so forth. Perhaps they could even create end-of-month or quarterly reports of news or new developments in their specific area of advocacy and submit them to these generalist sites.

If you’ve followed some of my activism in the past, you may notice that I don’t usually like suggesting to other MHRAs how to conduct advocacy unless I have done it myself [3]. That’s why I’m announcing a new website which focuses on men and boys in education. Some of you have already seen it. It’s called A Voice for Male Students [4]. It is the product of a lot of labor and research.

If you’d like a good rundown of what the site is about, the first post features a rather thorough introduction to the site, its mission and values, focus, and so forth [5]. Perhaps the two most important pages are the Summary of Issues page [6], which contains a lot of resources, data, and references to education policies, and the Mission and Values page [7], which will give you an idea of how resolution of those issues will be advocated by the website.

I launched the website on the 20th of August, although – as seen on the AVFM forums – it was in the works as far back as November of last year [8], when I registered the domain. In the first half of 2013 the site served largely as a placeholder for future content and a launchpad and reference for activism I was still conducting at my alma mater A&M-Commerce [9]. While most of my online activism has been in the form of making YouTube videos on education issues (especially misandry in education), there is so much work to be done in academia that the time has come for me to move on to a full-fledged website.

This site is more than just a blog featuring (and critiquing) what goes on in academia. It also features activism tools such as a guide to recording devices and the state laws governing them [10], posters of my own design and others’ [11], links to videos concerning men and boys in academia [12], an overview of the men’s human rights movement [13] and its core issues [14] to provide a quick reference for up-coming campus men’s issues groups, a network of pro-male groups in academia [15], and more.

If you are currently a student or employed in academia, have a relative or friend who is, or are simply concerned about men and boys in our education system, I encourage you to take a look around the website, as well as subscribe to the AVFMS Facebook page [16] and YouTube channel [17].

This is not a fly-by-night project by any means. I’d like to thank the A Voice for Men staff for the support they have given me, and look forward to what will come in the future.

Thank you.

– Jonathan Taylor

avoiceformalestudents.com

Sources:

1. http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/

2. http://www.youtube.com/user/girlwriteswhat

3. http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/dear-alumni-time-to-go-back-to-school/

4. http://www.avoiceformalestudents.com/

5. http://www.avoiceformalestudents.com/welcome-to-avfms/

6. http://www.avoiceformalestudents.com/know-the-issues/issues/

7. http://www.avoiceformalestudents.com/about/mission-and-values/

8. http://forums.avoiceformen.com/showthread.php?tid=905