Thinking about Men’s Rights today …
Remember the Occupy Movement, from the summer of 2011? It started as a demonstration in a privately-owned park in New York City, with picketers and social-justice warriors pitching a “sleep-in” bivouac to protest the social inequity between Wall Street’s money-makers and “the 99%” struggling to make a living in the recession-bled economy. It went on to spawn more protests, more protesters’ campsites, more disagreement and faction-fighting in the Media, and (predictably) more hateful PR directed at “the 1%” who the protesters blamed for the whole situation.
They saw themselves as “victims” of Wall Street. But that wasn’t all … they sorted themselves out by their “victimhood,” when it came time for any discussions or pronouncements. I personally was fascinated to hear of their “progressive stack” discussion practice, sorting out who got a voice in discussions according to how “marginalized” they were, insisting that everyone “check their privilege” and demanding those of “privileged” groups – white, or male, or cis-gendered, or middle-class, or otherwise “born to privilege” – to “step back” and let the underprivileged others have their say.
In other words, let the “greater victims,” the “oppressed,” do the talking. Let them flaunt their “oppression,” display their scabs and their scars, and voice their victimhood and their demands – and the rest of you, the “privileged,” you just shut up. It spawns an underlying competition between different races, sexes, genders and classes, to prove who’s “more oppressed.” and deserves more of a voice.
The Oppression Olympics.
Now, I’m not denying that some people, some groups, get a rawer deal than others. I’ve seen it. I haven’t been “victimized” so much as others, but guess what? The markers used for “Check Your Privilege” don’t mean much when you’re a child of a poor-but-proud single mama, working hard to stay off welfare in the richest county of the United States. And the Oppression Olympics have become the States’ system for sorting out who needs more help, more benefits, more laws to favor them, more “empowerment.”
And that brings me back to Men’s Rights … and what might be the biggest obstacle faced by the Men’s Rights Movement: Men are poor ‘victims.’
Not “poor victims.” No, we are lousy as victims. We are so obviously at the Pinnacle of Privilege, that when men speak of their grievances – their very real grievances – they’re laughed off the stage.
Women, on the other hand, are “obvious victims.” They’ll show you. They’ll snow you with their evidence of “discrimination,” of “suppression,” of “second-class citizenship.” The Women’s Movement has been piling up this evidence for way more than a century, from Seneca Falls forward, and they have so well campaigned for a reversal of this “inequity” that now, the central purpose of the Laws and the Courts would seem to be the protection, the succoring, the empowering, and the benefit of those Poor Poor Victims, The Women Of Today.
And there just isn’t any room left for men at the table.
Men also tend to let go of their “victimhood,” given half a chance. Look at men who are the victims of divorce – and wouldn’t you say men are victimized by a system that routinely gives the complaining wife not only the benefit of the doubt, but the benefit of keeping the kids, the family home, and a sizable hunk of the man’s income, future earnings, and pension – with the threat of jail, of debtor’s prison, if he doesn’t keep up the payments? But the men struggle – they strive through – and the majority manage to carry the load as they get on with their lives. Their ex-wives? How many of them flaunt their “victimhood,” while they’re living on the ex-husband’s alimony and child-support payments? While they’re poisoning the minds of their children with hatred for the “Daddy” who loved them, tried to raise them well, and is still paying for their well-being?
The biggest issues of the Men’s Movement tend to crowd around divorce law and the practices of “Family Court.” Issues like shared parenting, and paternity fraud, and divorce fraud, and the ignored side of Domestic Violence (women’s violence toward their men, which is half of all domestic violence), are the raison d’être for the Movement.
But they fight in vain, because men are poor, poor “victims.”
Maybe men would do better without “being victims.” Maybe we’d do better by avoiding the problems of Family Court, paternity fraud, divorce fraud, and living with a potentially-violent partner.
Maybe the better solution is to Go Your Own Way. At any rate, I think so, and I practice what I preach.
Going Your Own Way – going Galt, taking part in the Marriage Strike – isn’t about fighting the Men’s Rights fight – or fighting against it; it’s about avoiding the issues altogether. That may not be “effective action” politically, but it is on a personal basis; and to misquote Ricky Nelson’s “Garden Party,” I can’t save everyone so I’ll have to save myself.
It’s a simple solution – don’t get married, don’t cohabitate, don’t procreate.
To quote YouTube vlogger Razor Blade Kandy:
I can’t fix the divorce problem within my culture. But I will never face divorce. I have removed divorce as a possibility by avoiding marriage; that’s MGTOW. I will not have my children taken away from me, nor will I be forced to pay child support, because I have no children; that’s MGTOW.
Yes, that’s what I advocate. That’s what I do.
I am NOT a victim.
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Community Organized Compassion and Kindness posted an illuminating article on “Empowering Women” a few weeks ago. It could have been subtitled “The Female Chameleon;” its theme is the way that women change their opinions, ideas and philosophy as readily as they change clothes. There’s nothing new in this observation; Giuseppe Verdi highlighted it in Rigoletto’s “La donna è mobile;” what struck me is the way the article laid responsibility for this on the men who enable it.
Victimization can be a matter of perspective.
If a woman stays home while the man goes out and works, he’s the head of the household (while she’s an oppressed housewife).
If a man stays home while the woman goes out and works, he’s a pimp (while she’s his whore).
How can a man ever be a victim? We can coerce women into having sex with us, with only the government or the woman’s father to fear. But if you do it right, you can convince her she wanted it, and then everything is fine.
I think men who see themselves as victims are failures at being men. Real men conquer the world.