However as ridiculous as these stereotypes are, it’s true that there are a tiny percentage of MHRAs who are truly misogynists. I’ve seen them from time to time making ridiculous comments on YouTube videos & blog posts all over the web & while a small percentage of these are obvious feminist agent provocateurs, there is no denying that there are some genuinely hateful people identifying as MHRAs out there & unfortunately they don’t mind making themselves heard. Loudly.

This is, of course, to be expected since every group of any size has it’s fair share of undesirables. In fact it’s such a ubiquitous phenomenon that, here at Men’s Rights Sydney, we have formulated a “law” of sorts that we call “The Nolan Effect”.

If you are unfamiliar with Peter Nolan (I envy you) the video linked below will shatter your fragile shell of blissful ignorance. You have been warned.

It’s easy to write off idiots like Nolan as moronic nobodies & just ignore them but we do ourselves a disservice if we let this sort of thing slide. Thankfully that rarely occurs.

MHRAs criticise the “Oh but that’s not my feminism” feminists for not calling out the offensive & hateful things said by prominent feminists all the time, and rightly so. However, one of the seemingly legitimate counters to this criticism is to point at the misogynistic or hateful stuff said by nutjob MHRAs & claim that it’s no different.

But it is different, VERY different, & this is why…

1. The MHRM is remarkably diligent when it comes to policing the outliers & hateful idiots within it’s ranks, especially when they are advocating violence. That shit is just NOT tolerated anywhere, AT ALL. Although I have occasionally seen truly hateful stuff written about women by people identifying as MHRAs, I cannot recall a single example where it has gone unchallenged by another MHRA, often entire groups of MHRAs, or organisations like AVFM, & on the very rare occasions where nobody has yet called them out, I have done so myself. In addition to this, in cases where an out of line post comes to the attention of an MHRA site administrator or owner, the person is almost always instabanned. Conversely, I cannot recall a single instance of any feminist, & certainly no groups of feminists, calling out the hateful stuff that feminists say about men (& far more often I might add). I’m sure that isolated examples of each exception must exist somewhere but in the vast majority of cases, MHRAs succeed in policing their own while feminists rarely, if ever, do.
2. The hateful radicals in the MHRM are anonymous nobodies that have no power within the MHRM & never will. How can I be sure of this I hear you ask? Easy, because no one will follow them & you need followers to be a leader. The only hateful nut job with any followers at all (& even then its a mere handful), is the infamous Peter Nolan himself & that is almost certainly due to his “World Citizen” pipe dream & not for his men’s rights activism (such that it is). Conversely, in feminism the hateful radicals ARE the leaders. Sure, some anonymous loser calling himself “Kingoftheuniverse2496” may leave a comment on YouTube saying all women are heartless gold digging bitches but that’s nothing compared to the truly disgusting stuff that has been said by prominent feminists like Catherine Comins, Andrea Dworkin or, even worse because it has a direct real world negative impact on the lives of millions of men, by feminist institutions like NOW. And, of course, you only have to take a peek at the Agent Orange files to see how unbelievably hateful some prominent feminists are when they think they are speaking to other feminists in private. Yet where is the feminist outrage about those people? MIA, presumed dead, it would seem.

The validity of this is easy to demonstrate. If we could somehow eliminate all the extremist haters from both the MHRM & feminism in one fell swoop, what would the two movements look like afterwards?

The MHRM would be essentially unchanged. Nobody would notice, or miss, the nutbars & our goals, methods, & even our membership numbers, would remain practically unaffected. Feminism, on the other hand, would completely collapse. The feminists saying this hateful stuff ARE the leaders, they ARE the people who are actively involved in making, or at least heavily influencing, public opinion & government policy. They run the big feminist advocacy groups & the DV & Rape Prevention organisations. They are politicians, authors, lecturers at prestigious universities. One of them, Hillary Clinton, is even likely to be the next U.S. President! In short they, unlike the “Kingoftheuniverse2496″s of the world, matter. Lose those people & feminism loses it’s stranglehold on government, the media, & the public discourse on gender issues. With those go it’s funding, the very support system that keeps it alive. Do away with the hateful feminists & feminism dies.

This is why pointing at nut jobs that call themselves MHRAs & saying “See! You do it too!” is not a valid argument. It’s a completely false equivalency.

Even so, it is critical that we keep on top of the undesirables in our ranks & continue to call them out whenever they rear their ugly heads. To this end, I urge you all to, not only challenge any hateful comments that you may come across, but to also commit the definition of The Nolan Effect to memory & to use it at every opportunity. Insert it into conversations, use it as an analogy, create memes about it, do whatever you can to spread it around, just get it out there. With any luck it will get back to Nolan himself & maybe, just maybe, he’ll decide to pull his head in & stop being a pain in our collective arses. At the very least it’ll ensure that everyone, everywhere knows that Nolan is not one of us, doesn’t speak for us, & that we oppose the stupid & hateful BS that he, & the anonymous nut jobs like him, spew.

In a world where we lack the power to control the actions of other human beings that’s all that anyone can reasonably expect from us. It is also the very least they can expect from us. Unfortunately for feminism, it is also the least we can expect of them but they have always, and still are, falling well short of that modest expectation.

If you’re an “equality” feminist that is sick and tired of being lumped in with all the hateful “radical” feminists then might I suggest that you do more to distance yourself from those people with whom you share a common label? Denouncing their hatred, loudly, publicly, & often, would be a good start. That’s what the MHRM does.