The Huffington Post has jumped on the SPLC bandwagon, and written an article targeting the men’s movement, this website, and the men’s rights subreddit at reddit.com.
The article is glaring with factual errors and direct falsehoods, including the incredible claim that “The Innocence Project” is a product of the Men’s Movement. There are equally off target claims on nearly every line of the piece. They couldn’t even manage to write the headline without trying to shame MRA’s by telling us to “grow some.” On a normal business day I would walk you through that generic Huffpo writer’s lines of broken logic and repeated falsehoods, for your entertainment if not for anything else.
Today, however, is not just another business day. Today I will just link you to the article. Read it at your leisure or don’t. You have heard it all before. They have us all figured out, only they don’t know even the most fundamental things about us. Same shit, different day.
It has become apparent that after keeping their heads in the sand for as long as possible that some elements in the mainstream are waking up to the fact that the MRM is here to stay, and growing.
They are freaking out.
The SPLC fiasco was an orchestrated warning shot (with Huffpo likely being a hapless, tagalong follow up). They clearly don’t understand the nature of this thing well enough to know that coming after us this way is like trying to stop a thunderstorm by going after one raindrop at a time. I am happy for them to do this. It gives us a bounce in publicity and does nothing to slow things down.
But there is another concern here which takes us back to why this is not just another day in the MRM.
Recently we went through a crisis that, unlike what SPLC and Huffpo can muster, was real. One of our more respected members became despondent and sent me an email in which he stated he was going to end his life. Luckily, with the help of MRA’s we were able to track him down and get some help to him before he took himself out. We still don’t know exactly how he is doing, except that today we are reasonably certain that he is still in the land of the living.
His breaking point was exactly what many of our adversaries want. Or, as one feminist troll on Reddit quipped hopefully, “1 down 35,000 to go.”
This is not just an isolated scumbag. There are others out there, sitting in corners and lurking, waiting for MRA’s to make posts expressing their feelings of hopelessness. And when that happens, they come out of the woodwork wherever people like David Futrelle hang out, like the SRS subreddit; the same place that assumed feminists were recently taunting suicidal men; goading them; hoping to push them toward ending their own lives.
This is, in the end, who we are dealing with. It is a population of people that want to target the many wounded men that find refuge in this movement and urge them toward the unspeakable.
I can hear the fembots screeching now some crap about how those aren’t real feminists and not to blame them for the actions of a few. Forget about it. As far as I am concerned, there is no difference between someone who will say, ‘1 down, 35,000 to go,” and other scumbags that will treat abused, disheartened men like they are hate-mongers, or better yet misogynistic whiners that are pettily grieving for some confabulated illusion of male privilege that they don’t and never did have. It is just as cruel and depraved.
It is hard for me to start in on these “people” and not write a book about it, but that is not why I am writing this article.
What I want to say today is that I know what these immoral bigots refuse to understand, and refuse to care about when they do. There are a lot of desperate and damaged men in this movement; men who have been taken to hell and back by a system that started throwing them overboard 50 years ago; men who have not seen their beloved children in years, men living in squalor, working in servitude to a system that owns them like chattel; men who have been destroyed by evil, outrageous lies – taken as gospel by authorities who just don’t give a damn about truth or justice.
We have men in this movement who have been stripped of everything; who have not even been allowed to hang on to their freedom or their dignity. And now, in this faltering, but still female-centric economic climate, we have legions of men who are destitute, homeless, and who see only bleakness in the days ahead. The cruel icing on that cake is that they still live in a world that tells them they are worthless if they are not financially successful.
In short, we have more than our share of men teetering on the edge.
Of course, we don’t have much of any services that are wired to deal with these men, and almost nothing in the way of social understanding. Increasing numbers of men are, for all most of the world cares, simply a bunch of broken appliances; outmoded, useless and taking up too much room. And the moment some reach out for compassion or help, there are more than a few that will shove the knife in deeper and twist.
It sounds terrible, and it is. But there is another side to this as well. When our friend Factory reached out, many, many in the MRM offered whatever they could to help. I had offers of help from the town in which he lives. I had emails of support from people who offered to do whatever was asked. I am still getting messages inquiring about how he is doing. There were people, men and women, from Texas to California to British Columbia to Saskatchewan, all taking action of some kind or another. All of this from MRA’s and MRA’s only.
And that is worth writing about. It is a much more important message than dwelling on the society of human garbage in which men and boys currently find themselves living.
I want to encourage those MRA’s who are not in the worst of times to please continue to watch out for those who are. And for the many of you who are just hanging on, hang on a little tighter. If you need help, please let someone know. We will work something out. Scratch and claw if you have to, but choose to live. We have a long way to go, and we need you. Not to mention the fact that despite what people who oppose our cause think, you are worth staying alive just for the sake of living.
Perhaps someday when our culture recognizes that men are human beings we can quit operating everything for them on tattered old shoe strings and the men’s movement can actually start funding some services to help men in crisis. Till then, please hang in there and help us get down that road.
