Why Do MRAs Hate Feminists So Much

The manginas at TheGoodMenProject have given MRAs a platform to speak out. The comments section of the article is interesting.

http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/whats-up-with-this-mens-movement/


Dan Moore of MenZ magazine gives his perspective on fundamental men’s rights issues, breaks down MRA sub-groups, and answers the question: Why do MRAs hate feminism?


My involvement with the Men’s Rights Movement began nearly two decades ago, before Reddit gave MRAs (men’s rights activists) a place to gather, and before I founded MenZ magazine. Back then, there was a thing we call the “Lace Curtain,” a reference to the media’s unwillingness to take a male-sympathetic view of anything, even to the point of suppressing any pro-male comments or letters to the editor. We used to send out an email alert whenever someone got a letter to the editor published in their local paper. It was so rare, we had to celebrate it.

We’ve made a lot of progress as a movement since then. But what kind of progress, exactly? It’s obvious we exist, and that we’re angry and loud—but what do we believe in and stand for today? Explaining the MRM involves exploding so many of the cultural myths we live with that it would take more than one article to cover them. But, if you’ll bear with me, I’m going to try.

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The Issues:

Men have no reproductive rights throughout what we would call the Political West. Men have no right to choose if they are ready for parenthood post-conception, even though women have that right (and staunchly defend it). While the morality of letting men abandon pregnant girlfriends is left in question, the base inequality of the current situation is not. We have a blatant legal double standard, based solely on the sex of the person involved. Either give men the same rights as women, or restrict women’s rights to equal those of men—I don’t care which. But to fail to do so is to promote sexism as official government policy.

As the Department of Health and Human Services concedes,”historically, unmarried fathers have had fewer rights with regard to their children than either unwed mothers or married parents.” For example, as an unintended consequence of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which required single mothers seeking public assistance to identify the father and put states in charge of collecting child support, millions of men across the U.S. were declared dads by “default judgement.” As Matt Welch wrote in a 2004 issue of Reason magazine:

[W]hen the government accuses you of fathering a child, no matter how flimsy the evidence, you are one month away from having your life wrecked. Federal law gives a man just 30 days to file a written challenge; if he doesn’t, he is presumed guilty. And once that steamroller of justice starts rolling, dozens of statutory lubricants help make it extremely difficult, and prohibitively expensive, to stop—even, in most cases, if there’s conclusive DNA proof that the man is not the child’s father.

Many states have since passed reform bills, but paternity fraud is still a problem.

While we’re talking about family court, how about those child support tables? They were based in part on hysteria created when sociologist Lenore Weitzman concluded, in a 1985 report, that after a divorce women’s standard of living went down 73 percent, and men’s went up 42 percent. “For several years after the publication of her book, she did not make her data available to other researchers,” according to the Associated Press. In 1996, she admitted that her calculations were faulty. A re-analysis of her numbers “found a 27 percent decline in women’s post-divorce standard of living and a 10 percent increase in men’s—still a serious gap, but not the catastrophic one that Weitzman saw.”

But by that time it was too late. According to the 1996 AP report, Weitzman’s bogus statistic had already been cited in 348 social-science articles, 250 law review articles, 24 appeals and Supreme Court cases, and in President Clinton’s 1996 budget. “This has been one of the most widely quoted statistics in recent history,” said Anne Colby, director of Radcliffe College’s Murray Research Center at the time.

All this is done under “no fault” divorce, which basically means there’s no reason needed to initiate divorce and no acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Even in cases where one spouse is decent and hardworking and upstanding, and the other cheats and drinks too much and is addicted to gambling and takes off with the kids, there can be no assignation of blame. Alone, this is no big deal until you factor in the misandric culture we live in, where accusations of wrongdoing are gendered in the media.

Speaking of the law, men have particular concerns when it comes to the justice system. There has been a massive spike in incarcerations in the U.S. over the last 30 years. Nearly all of those are men, and nearly all of those men are poor, and usually black. While some might see this as our society being tough on crime, I see a society locking their “undesirables” out of sight. And while black and white men are often treated differently, the differences in treatment between men and women are substantially greater.


Why Do MRAs Hate Feminists So Much?

In a nutshell, because nearly everything they say is a lie. Why do men get such a bad rap? Why are men afraid to help small children, for fear of an accusation? Who is promoting the idea of a “rape culture,” and that one sex is responsible for the safety of the other? Who has consistently painted all things masculine as evil, toxic, or in need of improvement?

MRAs reject the very notion that “men oppressed women.” It didn’t happen. Ever. Men worked with women, in the roles they were allowed, and men’s roles were no less restrictive than women’s. Indeed, most of the time the men’s roles were far more restrictive than women’s. Of course, Patriarchy Theory doesn’t address this interpretation.

But more than that, feminists don’t even live up to their own rhetoric. And the reason for this? They don’t have to.

Feminism is little more than government-sponsored and -enforced chivalry. Feminism isn’t about equality—they have steadily attacked men’s privileges without giving up one iota of their own (and fiercely oppose those, like MRAs who seek parity).

Feminists have, from the outset of the Men’s Rights Movement, ridiculed, dismissed, viciously attacked, mischaracterized, and misrepresented the MRM—pretty much in that order. Today, feminists are castigating us for not wanting to play nice, as men made no concessions in the last 60 years.

Men are angry. Very angry.

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What Men Are Doing to Cope: MRA Sub-Groups
Articles written these days about men and boys don’t talk much about the issues I outlined above. Many of these articles still don’t even bother to ask men what they think. Instead, many turn to female “experts.” In an age where even articles discussing the state of men refuse to talk about the male viewpoint, or even ask men what they think, what exactly can a man do to get by?

That depends on your goals and expectations. These are the major sub-groups:

MGTOWs

Men Going Their Own Way, or MGTOWs, are one major subgroup of the men’s movement. These men are, as the name suggests, essentially dropping out of society as we know it. A good portion of these men are the ones Kay Hymowitz and the like are complaining about a lot—the men playing video games, drinking beer, smoking weed, and not “manning up” as expected.

For the most part, these men are responding to the lack of reward in our current culture for those who do “man up,” coupled with the massive risk involved in playing the game by the rules in place. They’ve decided that women—and society itself—are literally more trouble than they’re worth.

This is the fastest growing segment of the Men’s Rights Movement, followed closely by PUAs.

MRAs

Men’s Rights Activists (or Advocates) is the generic term for those men concerned primarily with the political and legal aspects of the issues facing men—and a strong concern for the social forces enabling these injustices. The defining characteristic of an MRA has yet to be found, but it seems to be concern over enough legal political issues, as opposed to any kind of traditional political leaning.

There are devoutly religious MRAs and “devoutly” atheist MRAs. There are black, white, Asian, aboriginal, and Indian MRAs. There are straight MRAs and gay MRAs. And there are male and female MRAs.
There are devoutly religious MRAs and “devoutly” atheist MRAs. There are black, white, Asian, aboriginal, and Indian MRAs. There are straight MRAs and gay MRAs. And there are male and female MRAs. MRAs have no particular political stances on things like abortion, other than men should have the same rights as women. MRAs are simply men and women concerned about the legal and social state of men today.

In fact, MRAs don’t have a catchy name because they didn’t expect to have a movement on their own. They originally believed the feminist movement would help. And yes, their faces are red about that foolish mistake (myself included).

PUAs or Pick-up Artists

Contrary to popular belief, there is enormous benefit to knowing “Game,” whether it’s used or not. PUAs apply some very astute analysis of female sexual behavior. PUAs have the know-how and the advice that fathers used to give their sons back when fathers were allowed in the family.

It’s a well-known fact that men and women both enjoy sex. “Game Theory” states that women are far more ruled by their libido than men are; men have simply forgotten how to push the right buttons. The effectiveness of this approach, as compared to what your mom taught you—”just be yourself”—can be easily seen nearly anywhere men and women interact. At the very least, Game Theory provides some protection against the petty manipulations men are subjected to daily.

While many women have complained about the presentation and the tone of the facts, sites like Roissy’s Chateau routinely have sheepish women admitting they are exactly as described. And while your mileage may vary, some advice is far better than none, especially in an age saturated with messages that “empower” women and denigrate men.

When Will the Men’s Rights Movement Go Away?

Likely never. Feminism manipulated already existing social biases to be more favorable to women, while leaving their gender role intact as “fallback position.” Men are literally saying “screw you” to women as a sex, and society in general, and for the first time ever, are dismantling the Chivalric infrastructure.

Men are hardwired to love and idolize women. It’s why we want to protect them and support them. They give our lives purpose. They are the center of our families, and they are the comfort at days end. They are the makers of the home, the calm in the storm.

Well, rather, they were those things.

Now women are our competitors at work, our opponents in politics (women’s issues begat men’s issues), our critics in relationships. Women are told to fear us, to hold us in contempt, and to feel empowered when their success is greater than the men whose legs have been cut off to enable it. They are imbued with massive self-worth, and told their every accomplishment is worth celebration in this male-dominated world. And this leads them to believe all the men they meet—who they’ve been told their whole life have it even easier—are total losers. How else could they have failed to succeed?

Women feel entitled to take advantage of men. There is little social pressure on women who, say, capitalize on men’s loneliness by demanding free drinks as payment for her company, to stop this practice, since it’s seen as “normal.”

To the men who may not have much money, who simply want to meet a nice woman and don’t know any better, this seems like cruelty. And to that man, it is.

We live in a society that caters to female hypergamy (“the act or practice of seeking a spouse of higher socioeconomic status, or caste status than oneself”). We have structured our legal and social systems to accommodate the female desire to be able to “trade up” at whim with no consequences, and it has devastated marriage as an institution, and dating in general.

We live in a society that doesn’t care about men that are not “alpha,” You see it everywhere, the top slice of men doing as well as ever, with the bottom 80% falling off a cliff.

The men’s rights movement started because no one else was talking about this stuff. The MRM continues because even after hearing about this stuff, many people are too complacent or too convinced by opposing beliefs to do anything about it.

As long as men and boys are given the raw end of the deal (usually because society depends on the disposability of men to survive), the MRM will be in existence in some form or other. I suppose that if this is a concern, one could always take solace in one simple fact: Even after 20 years, and attacking all these major problems and more, and being the lone voice doing so for most of that time, there is yet to be established a single publicly-funded men’s rights advocacy agency anywhere. So at least the men’s movement won’t likely be surviving on your tax dollar, but will continue to thrive on the volunteer efforts of everyone involved.