While perusing the Internet’s seedier gutters, as I am sometimes forced to do in fulfilling my duties here at Men’s Rights Sydney, I happened upon this noxious little nugget from what appears to be a feminist flavoured eMag called “Bust” (no, I’d never heard of it before either).

Anyway, on this site was a trite little article titled “Men’s Rights Movement Misunderstands Feminism” that left me simultaneously laughing, face palming, & shaking my head in equal measures (try it, it’s harder than you think).

Now I can already hear the sharper readers amongst you groaning in anticipation & yes, you are correct, it is yet another treatise on how if only people understood what feminism really is then we’d all be Feminists and live forever in a magical utopia of rainbows and unicorn farts for the rest of time. The author then goes on, much to her own amusement, about how ignorant we hapless MHRAs are about modern feminism while simultaneously strawmanning furiously and demonstrating comprehensively that she doesn’t know the first thing about the MHRM in order to demonstrate her point.

“Knock. Knock.”

“Who’s There?”

“Irony”

“Irony Who?”

“Yeah you didn’t recognise me the first time either”

So anyway, with this sort of article being so commonly penned these days I thought that, rather than post rebuttals to the comment section of every feminist blog that rehashes the same tired old argument that nobody bought the first time, I figured a better idea would be to publish this article & just post a link… a real time-saver indeed.

Note: Article text appears in bold & my responses appear underneath…

“…this is the actual definition of feminism: “the belief in gender equality of the sexes.”

Yeah and this is the actual definition of communism (according to google.com):

“A theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.”

Sounds pretty sweet, huh? We should get ourselves some of that.

Do we see a problem with describing feminism by it’s dictionary definition rather than by it’s real-world actions yet?

“the MRM believes that male “oppression” is a result of radical feminism.”

“The MRM” believes no such thing. Unlike the zombiesque lockstep of feminist dogma, the MRM is not an ideology & so has no dogma to be adhered to. Unless you count facts as being dogma that is. It is therefore pointless to ascribe a single belief to the entire movement because individual MRAs believe a range of things. That said however, the vast majority of MRAs agree that it is gynocentrism, not feminism, that is the root cause of the discrimination against men & boys & that so-called “radical feminism” has simply amplified the damage gynocentrism has caused & has exploited it for it’s own ends.

And nobody is saying that men in the west are oppressed. In all but the most extreme marginal cases, if you have lived in a wealthy western democracy for your entire life, you have never even come close to being oppressed, and likely have no idea what true oppression even looks like, whether you are male OR female.

“I think maybe it’s time that these Men’s Rights Activists are brought up to speed about the two more waves of Feminism that have happened since the 1960s generation!”

Oh we are well aware of the various waves of feminism and what they claim to stand for in theory. The problem is that, in practice, there really isn’t much to separate them from earlier waves.

Rather than MRAs needing to be brought up to speed on modern feminism, it seems far more like it is you who needs to be brought up to speed on what MRAs actually think, rather than the feminist strawman version that you seem to believe.

“Considering that men (specifically cis, straight, white men) have pretty much all of the power in our society, how exactly does it make logical sense that a women are the source of all their problems?”

Begging the question much? You sure have a hide invoking logic while engaging in a blatant & egregious logical fallacy like that.

Not that MRAs even believe this (as I’ve covered above).

By the way, remind me to drag my arse out of bed in the freezing cold at 4:30 tomorrow morning & berate my garbage man for being such a powerful & privileged oppressor won’t you?

“These are stereotypes that, ultimately, emerged from the traditional concept that women are inferior to men.”

Says feminist ideology based on no solid evidentiary standard whatsoever. Begging the question once again. You sure do seem to be fond of that particular fallacy.

10/10 feminists agree that feminism is great? Well then, how can we argue with that?

“the MRM are doing themselves a great disservice by demonizing those who could potentially be their allies.”

Yes because it’s men’s rights activists that are travelling by the busload, sometimes hundreds of kilometres, to prevent feminist issues being discussed on university campuses, that are pulling fire alarms to disrupt acedemic lectures on issues facing women & girls, & are calling in death threats to hotels in order to disrupt feminist conferences.

Oh, wait…

I know that you probably think the MRM was invented last Thursday but it may interest you to know that the MRM has existed for over 100 years. We tried the polite, respectful, & deferential approach for decades and attempted to work with feminists for much of that time. You want to have a guess at how much interest feminists, or anyone else for that matter, had in working with us, or how much attention they paid to the issues we raised using that approach? Any attempt to address men’s issues outside of the myopic feminist ideological lens was shut down, disregarded, or ignored with monotonous regularity.

It wasn’t until the MRM realised, around 10 years ago, that nobody in our society cares about men’s pain or distress that some within the MRM made the intentional & calculated decision to get up into people’s faces about it, the rationale being if people won’t listen to men’s pain, they will hear their anger. It was only when these people forced society to actually look at the issues by expressing their anger, that we started to get public traction.

I know that you, and people like you, would rather that we just shut up and went away or, failing that, at least went back to acting like deferential servants, begging at your table for scraps of attention like “good” men ought, but tough luck, it’s not going to happen. It didn’t work for the first 50 years that we tried it & there is no reason to believe it will work now. Deal with it…or don’t, I honestly don’t care.

“It’s essential that we use and share the correct definition for “feminism”

And you, of course, use the term “correct” in much the same way that Orwell used it to refer to the thinking of loyal party members in Nineteen Eighty-Four. You do realise that that novel was a warning and not a guidebook, right?

Well I say 2 + 2 = 4, not 5, & the number of people who are deciding to reject your claim that it does equal 5 is growing, and growing exponentially, because not only are the facts & moral high ground on our side but all Feminism has to keep people parroting the party line & prevent them from hearing the truth is social inertia & censorship.

We do not require your approval to address & rectify these issues ourselves, without indulging in feminist intellectual gymnastics to blame the victims by invoking the big bad patriarchy. Your attempts at silencing & demonising us cannot withstand the communication power of the Internet and when people find out just how badly they have been lied to….well, let’s just say I’ll be glad not to be in your shoes.

There is a reason that Feminism has such an abysmal reputation & I’ll let you in on a little secret, it’s not because people don’t understand what it is, it’s because, increasingly, people are fed up with Feminism’s hatred & contempt for men, & are realising exactly what it is, a self-serving ideology of hate & bigotry.

Feminism’s days are numbered, even feminists can see the writing on the wall now, and they have nobody to blame for it but themselves.