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melb22 Archive

View 41 posts and 668 comments by melb22 on TheRedPill subreddit and various other subreddits related to The Red Pill community.
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Upvotes Title Category Author Subreddit Date (UTC)
115

melb22/r/MensRights15/11/13 08:48 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights16/04/12 12:50 PM
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melb22/r/MensRights18/05/09 12:42 PM
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melb22/r/MensRights23/05/09 07:47 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights26/11/09 08:54 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights05/11/09 11:40 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights24/06/09 12:52 PM
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melb22/r/MensRights04/06/11 01:28 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights14/09/09 09:35 PM
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melb22/r/MensRights14/01/11 10:07 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights13/02/10 09:03 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights31/03/10 04:06 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights31/07/10 10:31 PM
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melb22/r/MensRights25/11/13 09:29 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights15/08/09 11:26 PM
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melb22/r/MensRights18/07/11 09:53 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights19/01/12 04:25 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights08/11/10 11:34 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights18/04/10 04:03 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights08/01/11 09:22 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights08/07/10 05:51 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights24/03/10 11:29 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights09/08/13 11:19 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights20/03/11 12:04 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights08/03/10 01:56 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights24/09/10 10:14 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights08/10/11 02:04 AM
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melb22/r/MensRights08/11/08 09:49 PM
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melb22/r/MensRights27/02/10 06:21 AM
Upvotes Comment on Subreddit Date (UTC)
2

Yep, I was thinking "cluster b" maybe BPD after reading just half way through. The stuff about "you're trying to control me" is one tell. There's no stable sense of self, so there's this unusual sensitivity to "engulfment". My ex would break up with close female friends on the basis of some really vague sense that these women were somehow being controlling.
/r/MGTOW18/02/19 05:43 AM
3

Mostly good advice, but I'd take care suggesting that BPD can somehow be tamed. Those with BPD do not inhabit the same mental reality as others. This is one reason it is so unsettling to have experienced a BPD relationship - you no longer have a sense of the people you have dealings with having the same, underlying shared reality. Nor is it just "one thing" that is going wrong - there is a baffling array of thinking errors - a lack of object constancy, emotional amnesia, projection, black and wh…
/r/MarriedRedPill10/02/19 10:40 PM
5

Disagree strongly with you about women in their 50s. According to a large Australian study (based on the HILDA surveys) only 7% of single women aged 50 or over will ever again cohabit with a man. And a dating coach was quoted as saying that the women in their 50s on her books have about a 1 in 7 chance of ever being matched and that it takes a miracle for most of them to find anyone. Most women want a man around their own age to date, but a 50 year old man is not going to find a 50 year old woma…
/r/TheRedPill11/10/17 09:54 AM
2

I agree with everything but the last part of this. It's true that a woman's abundance mentality affects how she approaches relationships. You have to imagine how if 100 women were willing tomorrow to give you their love, that the gift of each one of these women would lose value in your eyes. It wouldn't seem so special. And if you did accept one of these women, you might have a picky and critical attitude along the lines of "you better not muck up, you better keep me happy etc." I disagree with …
/r/TheRedPill11/10/17 09:42 AM
3

Sylvia, I wrote the blog post and I agree in part with what you have written here. Men don't want or need a great deal of fuss made about what they do, nor is a well-adjusted man likely to go around feeling sorry for himself. Nonetheless, men do think they are making a sacrifice for their families and I'd like to try to explain why it's such an issue. When young men reach a certain age they realise that the entry price for having a family is committing to a stable, well-earning job. This is not …
/r/RedPillWives21/09/17 10:30 PM
2

I'm a school teacher. Was floored the other day when a female student told me that she and her mother read 50 Shades together as a shared enthusiasm.
/r/MensRights04/03/17 11:48 AM
2

Great advice. Yes, when you're 35 women who have hit the wall will start to take an interest. But these are often women who have wrecked their ability to pair bond. So many of them have "issues". The women who can pair bond will mostly have already done so by their early to mid 20s.
/r/MensRights04/03/17 11:47 AM
20

And after the divorce rape, the ex wife will hamster herself into the belief that "we are still a family, nothing has changed" whilst shacking up with a damaged/bad boy type on her ex-husband's dime. She still wants to think she can have both things.
/r/TheRedPill22/02/17 09:16 AM
8

That's an amazing video, thanks. The girl at 7.40 is just melting away.
/r/TheRedPill10/02/17 06:38 AM
20

Child support is often just hidden alimony. For instance, my ex wife and I both have 50% custody of our children. But because she chooses not to work it means that I am forced to pay 25% of my income to her (and to her new boyfriend) as the child support is calculated on relative income. This is despite the fact that she is also supported by a very wealthy mother and so has recently moved into a million dollar house and has bought a new car. In my view, if a woman chooses to divorce her husband,…
/r/MensRights07/02/17 11:53 PM
1

Exactly. When she starts laughing, I explain that she didn't need to throw herself down crying, that she could have just smiled nicely and asked openly for what she wanted. I'll keep at it, but it feels like I'm trying to override an instinct she has.
/r/TheRedPill01/02/17 12:17 PM
3

I've been observing my 6-year-old daughter practise this kind of thing. I have to give her credit - she's good at it! I've learnt to recognise when she's genuinely upset about something and when she's putting it on. When she's putting it on, I just laugh at her and tease her about it and she finally gives a "yeah, I've been caught out" laugh. From dramatic tears and upset to a laugh in half a second. It's cute but I do sometimes wonder about the games she will play in her future relationships.
/r/TheRedPill28/01/17 11:58 PM
2

In my experience this does influence some women not others. When I went through my divorce, the less flighty kind of women said of my ex-wife "how could she do that to the children?" but there were plenty of other women who just breezily said "well, if she's not feeling it anymore she should divorce". I'm not entirely sure how you pick out which women will react which way but having grown up in an intact family/good relationship with her father/some religion based moral beliefs/intelligence and …
/r/TheRedPill27/01/17 10:15 PM
2

Thanks for expanding on this.
/r/TheRedPill21/01/17 01:18 AM
6

she wants you to demonstrate you're leading everything in a direction that makes her feel good/safe/secure/attracted. I saw a video of a man who dealt with his wife wanting emotional comforting by lifting her onto a bench and enfolding her - it seemed to work well - that to me isn't being an emotional tampon - isn't this a way of making her feel safe/secure without buying into whatever she is verbalising? I have to confess I'm not sure about some of this, so I do take seriously what you suggest …
/r/TheRedPill20/01/17 11:37 PM
12

But don't try to solve her problems intellectually. The feedback I've gotten from women is that they are looking for a man who can make them feel better simply by putting a hand on their shoulder and saying something reassuring in a gravelly masculine voice, or maybe enfolding them physically and saying something reassuring.
/r/TheRedPill20/01/17 09:46 PM
8

The single biggest predictor of divorce is if a woman experienced parental divorce whilst still a child.
/r/TheRedPill20/01/17 09:37 PM
2

This is why crazy insecure and BPD women are a yo-yo between Alpha and Beta and are not stable relationships. Was true for me - BPD ex-wife wanted both absolute beta and absolute alpha at the same time - no way anyone could meet these psychological needs.
/r/TheRedPill20/01/17 09:35 PM
11

I'm in a similar situation. I have 50% of the care of two children but because my ex chooses not to work it means that I lose 25% of my income to subsidise her choice. It is really a form of alimony. In my opinion, if a father is willing to do 50% of the childcare there should be no long-term child support levied - the only possible reason for child support payments would be if the ex was a stay at home mum and needed a year or two to retrain for the workforce. It's a really odd and unjust situa…
/r/MensRights03/01/17 10:51 PM
3

Well, I sympathise. It's like that between myself and my radical feminist sister. I have to very studiously avoid talking about anything to do with politics/gender. I know from her social media feed that she is politically very hostile to white men - which is what I happen to be.
/r/MensRights29/12/16 12:25 AM
3

Yes and no. Most feminists I know manage to combine a hatred for men "as a class" with an ability to get along with individual men at a personal level. Similarly, most feminists I know don't hate their sons but they do manage to poison the relationship and they end up having oddly cold relationships with their teenage boys (my nephew, for instance, has taken up the strategy of sharply rebuking his feminist mother when she starts ranting about men, patriarchy, sexism etc.). Nor is Polly Dunning "…
/r/MensRights28/12/16 09:27 AM
8

Yes, this is what strikes me about all this. Even if you're Brad Pitt you can still end up divorced. Marriage seemed to work better when it had a grounding in belief. I'm not sure it's compatible with a society focused on the unfettered pursuit of individual happiness. There are many women who are led around by their emotions, so making the marriage tie depend on female emotion isn't likely to have stable outcomes. There has to be something "above" the day to day experience of emotion that a com…
/r/MensRights10/12/16 10:01 PM
28

High-functioning BPD can be difficult to spot. A lot of the giveaways are hidden in their past. They won't let you know, but if you were to look back you would find a lot of broken relationships with family, friends and colleagues with most of these people perplexed and wondering "what happened?" The thing is, they have learnt to keep part of their subjective reality to themselves, because they know it is likely to alienate the other person, so there is a front room to their mind (which they pre…
/r/TheRedPill30/11/16 08:26 PM
1

Instant connection & tingles? It sounds like you're talking about sexual frisson. Men experience this too, but I don't think we really take it that seriously as a basis for marriage, as it's so fleeting. Men are at least capable of a more spiritualised kind of love for women, one in which a woman is thought to embody, in part, a feminine principle in life that men want to believe is good. So if a woman is perceived by a man to be beautiful and good, he can love her with a constancy that you won'…
/r/TheRedPill27/11/16 12:14 PM
1

My female counterparts (uni educated types) took up this idea here in Australia from about the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s (that's a rough timeframe). In 2002 a prominent journalist, Virginia Hausseger, made waves for criticising "the sins of our feminist mothers." She was angry that older feminists had discouraged family formation in young women: here we are, supposedly “having it all” as we edge 40; excellent education; good qualifications; great jobs; fast-moving careers; good incomes ... It’s…
/r/TheRedPill27/11/16 11:57 AM
2

The takeaway from this is that being a beta-provider is like being friendzoned with benefits. He provides her with resources/emotional support and she occasionally gives him duty-sex in return. Oh Lord, sounds like my marriage to my ex-wife. Feeling embarrassed right now.
/r/TheRedPill27/11/16 12:16 AM
1

They are skilled at mirroring. The film Gone Girl portrays mirroring exceptionally well. They will be the woman who complements you, who mirrors you, so that you end up feeling strongly compatible. They are also emotionally outgoing (feminine charisma) and a little vulnerable (waif like) calling on your masculine strengths for rescue. It can seem appealing in comparison to the mannish women who don't bother sending feminine signals. But, really, they don't have a real sense of who they are, so i…
/r/TheRedPill27/11/16 12:09 AM
8

Yeah, but a lot of women hamster this stuff. They think "Sure if the right guy came around I'd get off the carousel for him" but they know that it's unlikely to happen as they have an unreal or unstable idea of who the right guy would be. And so they say to themselves "You have to kiss a lot of frogs to meet your prince" and stay on the carousel, usually sleeping with fun guys rather than family guys. By the time she gets to 30 and is ready to settle/settle down, there's a good chance she's ruin…
/r/TheRedPill26/11/16 11:33 PM
8

You are describing my life in your comment. Wish I had this level of insight 20 years ago. Glad you're putting it out there for the next generation.
/r/TheRedPill08/11/16 06:59 AM
2

You see, I agree with this but at the same time think it a privilege that it is given to men to love idealistically. It is something we get to have that women don't. It is a positive life experience. We just need to make sure that the rules are set up in a way that we don't get exploited/manipulated too readily by the female approach to relationships and that we work hard to keep the largest number of women possible worthy of love (i.e. that they display some traits of feminine loveliness in bot…
/r/TheRedPill01/11/16 08:51 PM
13

It's a variation of "You have to kiss many frogs to meet your prince".
/r/TheRedPill01/11/16 08:34 PM
9

Something to this. Men's minds are often directed at penetrating the reality around them, trying to get at the way things work. There is a real effort to understand, to get to the truth of things. The male mind can operate in a relatively detached and analytical way while doing this. Not sure this is equally true of women, at least in my experience. Women are more moved by the emotions they are currently experiencing in comparison to men.
/r/TheRedPill14/09/16 09:40 PM
4

Not exactly open-minded, are they?
/r/MensRights11/09/16 12:28 PM
12

Yeah, she explains this pretty well. Maybe that's why women used to be sorted into the marrying kind or else the promiscuous kind. I note too that she became jaded with the "sex for adventures" lifestyle, and is now looking for fulfillment via creativity. Like too many women, she seems to have expected too much from marriage, as if it could, by itself, fulfill her in every way.
/r/TheRedPill07/09/16 05:52 AM
4

But when the Italian Government prints a postcard with the slogan "Beauty has no age, but fertility does" the feminists in that country are in uproar, with one declaring it to be one of the most offensive things she has ever seen: http://ozconservative.blogspot.com.au/2016/09/feminists-hate-fertility-day.html
/r/MensRights04/09/16 09:49 AM
7

I've observed this too. A woman who has grown up in a close-knit family where dad is respected is often a lot more open to LTRs - they tend to go for the "greater beta" type - i.e. masculine, family-oriented men.
/r/TheRedPill03/09/16 02:13 AM
5

Which is why they weren't allowed to ride it in traditional societies. Look how messed up it makes them. Nor were they allowed to upgrade, so hypergamy remained off the table as well.
/r/TheRedPill03/09/16 02:05 AM
0

Thanks for saying this. Mine is the same thing. Nationalism for the west.
/r/TheRedPill13/08/16 11:54 AM
5

I had an odd moment like this with my (now) ex wife. She was complaining that I didn't do enough for her and I pointed out that I had just come back home from a long day at work to allow her to be home with the children. She gave me a quizzical look and said "But that's just what you're supposed to do". All that effort and clearly it counted for nothing in her mind.
/r/TheRedPill06/08/16 09:55 AM
1

Seems to me to be one reason why young women are so into virtue signalling. It is aimed, from the start of the interaction, at the closing of political discussion, not about demonstrating a curiosity about the world and its workings.
/r/TheRedPill30/07/16 10:07 PM
1

Now they are controlling the whole game Go back before the 1800s and women were not allowed to control the whole game - maybe what is happening now makes sense of the older rules.
/r/TheRedPill30/07/16 09:53 PM
0

Glad you wrote that because it bothers me too. I can accept that the kind of sporty, self-confident, fashionably dressed, muscular men that high quality women often go for are "alpha". But I have observed women also going for men who other men would consider weak (scrawny, drug issues, life out of control) - I just don't think these men also merit the term "alpha" even though they win female attraction.
/r/TheRedPill23/07/16 05:17 AM
10

"I watched my mom slowly become hateful" Chamaelleon, the whole point of marriage used to be that it "trapped" you - i.e. you committed to it for life. So when you entered it you were a) supposed to try to find someone you thought you could live with and b) you were then supposed to be actively oriented to pair bonding with someone. I find the idea odd that a man is now supposed to provide a future wife with a house of her own so that she can the more easily jump from a marriage if she wants to,…
/r/MensRights21/07/16 09:34 PM
14

It was true in my divorce. My ex-wife chose a professional mediator to sort out child care arrangements, she was a middle-aged female, to my complete surprise she was strongly supportive of me getting a fair share of custody, my ex-wife ended up lodging a complaint against her. One thing I noted was when my ex-wife did the whole crying thing, the mediator wasn't taken in at all, just said something along the lines of "that's part of the tragedy of divorce". So my personal experience does back up…
/r/TheRedPill20/07/16 11:58 AM
9

And if she does get it? She gets the high SMV man, the house, marriage, two kids. In ten years time she will be looking at him as a beta provider type. She won't like the idea of giving her body to him. She will want to go back to the free wheeling player types who will suddenly seem awfully attractive.
/r/TheRedPill18/07/16 08:59 AM
5

by the time you talk, it is just a formality. This happened to me in my marriage. I had always imagined there would be an open communication of any discontents - that you would try to work things out. Didn't happen. The process being described in this thread happened.
/r/TheRedPill09/07/16 02:00 AM
11

Or, if not on your career, then on other aims that require dedication and strength of character.
/r/TheRedPill07/07/16 11:03 AM
20

This is the elephant in the room. There are women who set themselves up for a life of never having to work again through the route of divorce/child support/alimony/welfare. The husband gets burned in the process. There are hundreds of thousands of such women in the West. In my view, if a husband is willing to have a roughly 50/50 split with the children, there should be neither alimony nor child support (except in a few cases where perhaps the wife needs time to upgrade work skills).
/r/MensRights05/07/16 06:47 AM
2

It's almost impossible to imagine, isn't it? He would be attacked and derided across the face of the planet.
/r/MensRights05/07/16 06:42 AM
-1

You can improve your odds. Most important thing is to choose the right woman to marry. It's not as easy as it seems because women are better than men at masking their "drivers" (even from themselves). A man might not spot these during the early years of a relationship. When women don't develop along the right lines, they are prone to certain types of emotional and psychological immaturity, including depersonalising men (seeing them unrealistically in terms of a power to have or to do things), vi…
/r/TheRedPill04/07/16 12:44 PM
7

But take care to also screen out women who want to follow up because you have flicked on their "you are a nice guy provider type" switch. Some of these women have the ability to delude themselves into thinking they are attracted to you (and maybe a part of them is for a while) but the relationship can come down to her wanting to leverage you for stuff and her repressing a desire to be with a different more uncaring kind of guy. So it's complicated, no?
/r/TheRedPill03/07/16 03:05 AM
1

I think there's something to this, thanks. And your last point is well taken. If you present yourself as the player type, the one who is there for a night of anonymous fun, then women seem to respond differently sexually, than if you present yourself as future hubby. It seems perverse from the male point of view (why give more of yourself to the man who is offering you nothing?) but your explanation does at least make sense.
/r/TheRedPill29/06/16 10:03 AM
6

Not wise to set out to make an unhappy woman happy. Fool's errand. In this case, the fact that her father was thought of as an "asshole", true or not, was alone a major red flag. One of the best predictors of a successful relationship is a normal, happy relationship between father and daughter.
/r/TheRedPill29/06/16 07:38 AM
1

Maybe. It's an interesting comment to think about. But consider this: most husbands are happy to have their wives slut it up in the bedroom, to try out different things, to be creative and so on. But the wives seem to flick on a switch with a provisioning man that says "sex with you is for leveraging things, so once I've got your commitment, then we start at a base level and see what you can do for me" - which given the difficulty of women's emotions will often mean she doesn't give much. Yes yo…
/r/TheRedPill28/06/16 02:33 AM
5

What gets me about the whole situation is that women once got married to be able to enjoy sex, now they get married when the desire for security and marital status and perhaps children starts to outweigh the desire for sex. So women have sex whilst single and then when ready to give it up (or downgrade to duty sex) they're ready to get married. And they seem to think this is a workable long-term arrangement.
/r/TheRedPill28/06/16 12:26 AM
2

It does get you used. My big life lesson.
/r/TheRedPill28/06/16 12:19 AM
3

For goodness' sake! I can't speak about what happened in the US as I'm from Australia, but here it was definitely the women who powered along the hook up culture. I can tell you with some certainty as I lived through the transition period. I was at university for quite a long time (did two degrees) in the 1980s and 90s. I was one of those men who was caught off guard by women suddenly changing their dating preferences to what you might call "inappropriate" men - i.e. men who they would never mar…
/r/MensRights27/06/16 11:46 PM
3

Just signed.
/r/MensRights27/06/16 02:21 PM
18

This seems to be the big picture timeline of this story: N.O.W.: sexual morality is a tool of the patriarchy to oppress women and keep them enslaved within the family. Women should break their shackles and become sexually empowered. College women start hook up culture. College men adapt and become players. Emma Sulkowicz hooks up with boyfriend 1 (bad boy type) but he won't commit to her, has her as part of a harem and allegedly gives her an STI. Emma Sulkowicz hooks up with boyfriend 2 (nice gu…
/r/MensRights27/06/16 06:45 AM
3

Chances are that even if she is not cheating she is psychologically withdrawing from the marriage. Absolutely correct that he should trust his gut instinct.
/r/TheRedPill26/06/16 06:05 AM
12

I agree, but women don't seem to be learning to offer more. If anything they seem to be becoming less psychologically stable and less cultivated.
/r/TheRedPill26/06/16 12:21 AM
7

Don't know about white knights and gamer nerds. But until the late 1700s, food scarcity meant that the children of women who did not have solid provider husbands were less likely to survive infancy. So in terms of reproductive success the "beta" (i.e provider) male did have some advantages.
/r/TheRedPill17/06/16 10:32 AM
2

As someone with a borderline ex-wife, this could possibly be a borderline symptom, though it's not enough by itself to really say. Borderlines find it difficult to connect the act of sex itself to emotional intimacy. They seem to have two modes. Either they will commit to having sex, and they can do the "sex to get off" thing quite well and be impressive at that level, but it never leads to a sense of two people connecting; or else they find the idea of sex with the person they are with repulsiv…
/r/TheRedPill14/06/16 11:50 AM
5

Yep, I stayed not because of her but because we had a child. Was not going to abandon child. She ended up dissolving the family anyway.
/r/TheRedPill12/06/16 10:56 PM
15

Can confirm. Things were bad when she would give a BJ but not have sex.
/r/TheRedPill12/06/16 10:54 PM
1

Do not agree to her giving up those 20 hours a week. Keep her in touch with the labour force.
/r/TheRedPill12/06/16 09:31 AM
3

Seconded. An intelligent attempt to lay out the situation. Unfortunately, no easy solutions.
/r/TheRedPill12/06/16 09:13 AM
53

I struggle to find a just principle for this decision. If you divorce someone, then you divorce them. You can't selectively still claim the goods of the marriage that you yourself have chosen to dissolve. If anything this kind of decision goes to show that marriage itself is held in contempt by the powers that be. Marriage no longer confers rights or obligations - the principle instead seems to be that once a man has been in a serious relationship with a woman he is obligated to her for life reg…
/r/MensRights12/06/16 08:40 AM
3

The small red flags at the start usually turn into major issues down the road. So if the flags are flaring this brightly early in, I wouldn't be hanging around. This doesn't sound like a normal "can you hold frame to assuage my insecurity" test.
/r/TheRedPill10/06/16 03:04 AM
2

They don't interpret social data accurately. For instance, they falsely perceive others as having deliberately acted against them or having slighted them. They have unrealistic expectations of others. They react out of proportion to real or perceived criticisms because of their black and white/all or nothing thinking. And part of the workings of their minds even seasoned psychologists don't fully understand - but the upshot is that they end up painting others they are in close relationships with…
/r/TheRedPill07/06/16 08:49 AM
7

Exactly. That is also one of my life lessons. Women who have warm, secure relationships with their fathers are much more likely to be securely family oriented.
/r/TheRedPill07/06/16 08:19 AM
6

The only red flag for BPD I noticed is when she writes that she doesn't know who she is ("Who am I?"). I don't think the letter is typically BPD (there are usually weird misinterpretations of other people's motivations).
/r/TheRedPill04/06/16 06:39 AM
4

There are high and low functioning versions of BPD. A low-functioning, inward acting BPD woman will self-harm and will have ended up in the hospital/psych system. A high functioning out acting BPD woman won't be so obvious. There are still occasions when I meet my BPD ex-wife and understand why I was attracted to her. She can seem normal and charming and in some aspects of life they are in fact normal. It's the processing of close relationships that they cannot manage. There is a part of the bra…
/r/TheRedPill02/06/16 11:58 PM
17

Yes, even the high functioning BPD women have trouble with long term relationships. They suffer from cognitive distortions which mean they mistranslate what others feel for them or think about them. There is a part of their mind that they mask, and that they themselves don't understand well, so it's especially difficult to apply reason or logic to their behaviour.
/r/TheRedPill02/06/16 11:54 AM
1

Isn't it true, though, that women can be influenced by men to act in a better way than if they are left to the worse parts of their own natures? As an example, even in today's society women generally hold it together better at work than in their private relationships, because there are still principles and consequences governing most workplace cultures that do not exist when it comes to personal relationships (imagine, for instance, if a boss gave a female employee some work, and she sniffled an…
/r/TheRedPill09/02/16 01:42 PM
3

Good advice. During my divorce I got endless demands from my ex-wife's solicitor and psychologist to leave the house - which I refused to do until settlement. I got endless verbal and physical provocations, but I kept my cool. I also recorded everything, including the times she slipped up and lost it with our children. End result - 50% custody, kept the house, no alimony.
/r/TheRedPill07/02/16 01:40 AM
2

Money is not only important for SMV. As you get older, work stress interferes more with your sense of well-being. It's good to have the option of at least scaling back work commitments by your 50s. Hard to think that far ahead, I know.
/r/TheRedPill07/02/16 01:02 AM
1

There are clearly both liberal and conservative women posting criticisms - which is a good thing, surely (feminists are being attacked on multiple fronts). Some of the more conservative women have good comments. They are not just about wanting things for themselves but are about not treating men as the enemy; recognising that they themselves are treated well by husbands and boyfriends; recognising that they aren't oppressed by the men around them and by their role in society; asserting that men …
/r/MensRights04/08/14 10:04 AM
3

Great ad, thanks for posting.
/r/MensRights22/07/14 09:42 PM
1

Thanks for posting the first link in particular.
/r/MensRights21/06/14 12:18 AM
0

My experience as a teacher has been a bit different. I would say that the most difficult group of students to teach are the 15-year-old girls, but not because they want to be queen bees, but because they go through a period of a year or two in which they are very damaged by whatever dysfunction exists in their background. They can be moody, weepy, prone to aggressive outbursts, uncooperative and unfocused on school. A lot of it is channelled into feuds with other girls. It all takes up a lot of …
/r/MensRights01/06/14 06:01 AM
1

TK-85, I'm not sure how you got that first dot point from my post. I'm someone who got put through the wringer of third wave feminism and who is very much aware of things going wrong in Western culture. The very last thing I'd ever assert is the idea that there have been no changes to the culture of relationships or marriage over the past 60 years.
/r/TheRedPill11/05/14 09:26 PM
0

Boston, I disagree with the way you've characterised myself and that particular post. If you read through my site you'll find that I'm not liberal at all in my politics, nor am I feminist. The main focus of my site is to criticise liberalism (both of the left and right varieties) as a political philosophy. I wrote that post some time ago, but I think it still holds. There are some different strands within the MRM, two of which are a liberal strand and an MGTOW strand. The liberals do tend to ass…
/r/MGTOW11/05/14 08:29 PM
0

There is a mistake in the first part of the video. The mainstream right-wing parties, such as the Republicans, do not represent traditionalism. They mostly represent a "right-liberal" philosophy that grew out of nineteenth century classical liberalism. The emphasis in this philosophy is on the idea that we best fulfil our human purposes through participation in the free market. The right-liberal parties have a contradictory view of the traditional family: on the one hand, they tend to prefer civ…
/r/MensRights04/05/14 10:20 AM
4

It's good for a boy to grow up to be manly. The way you as a mother can help to do this is by providing him with mother love; by holding together the relationship with the father; and by modelling a good relationship with the father. This will most likely lead the child to develop a positive self-identity as a boy as well as a good level of self-esteem. It's up to the father to act as a counterweight where necessary to some of your more feminine influences; he can't do this "cold" - he has to ma…
/r/MensRights27/03/14 08:31 PM
2

I disliked the article linked to. It set up a narrow concept of masculinity and then claimed at the end that "masculinity is overrated". I don't think that's a helpful way to look at things. If you are a man, then you cannot separate masculinity from who you are. Men get to embody something meaningful when it comes to masculinity and this meaning is to be drawn out whether our particular endeavours are sporting, scientific or artistic. It is the masculine questing spirit that matters, less so wh…
/r/MensRights01/03/14 10:25 PM
3

And the problem will go beyond teasing at school. It's not the case that men can do well in life without cultivating masculine strengths. Unless a man strikes it very lucky, he's going to need a lot of resilience to succeed at work and in family life. He will also need his masculine drives (e.g. the questing spirit) to find personal fulfilment as well. Therefore I don't think good parenting means "letting your child do whatever they want to". It means intelligently encouraging a positive, mascul…
/r/MensRights22/02/14 01:07 AM
11

Yeah, that's what I noticed too. According to the writer when Miley sexualises herself it's a positive thing that no-one had better criticise (evil men slut shamers!) but if women are sexualised in the culture then that's evil men's fault (bad men!) Is the idea to put men in a no win situation?
/r/MensRights22/12/13 10:56 PM
1

In my workplace all of the married women over the age of 35 work part-time, including the passionately feminist ones.
/r/MensRights22/12/13 09:34 PM
1

Ambitious, that's a very fair summary of things. In my marriage we've also ended up with a traditional division of labour for some of the reasons you give.
/r/MensRights22/12/13 09:31 PM
1

Yes and no. I think it's possible to reach a point at which marriage no longer makes sense. I can't advocate that right now, though, for two reasons. First, there are still women out there who make good wives and with whom a man can build a happy and fulfilling family life. Second, giving up on marriage also means giving up on your own tradition - I think it's still too early in the piece for that and that men should still be trying to keep things going whilst working to improve things for their…
/r/MensRights22/12/13 06:39 AM
1

I'm a teacher myself. I agree that teachers have a right not to have their private space invaded. The school I teach at discourages such interaction. Nonetheless, hugs happen. I'd see several a day at work (usually female student/female teacher). That's the context in which this punishment seems to be an overreaction. If the teacher really wanted to make it clear that she wanted no further invasion of her space, why not just have a conference involving the student, the teacher and someone in the…
/r/MensRights14/12/13 02:28 AM
58

Teenage girls are mostly bullied and harassed by...teenage girls.
/r/MensRights06/12/13 09:20 PM
0

A quibble. The traditional pattern was not "men do everything for women, women just do what they want". That's a modern pattern. I suspect that both traditionalist and liberal MRAs reject that modern pattern. Traditionalists like myself want to return to complementary roles between men and women; liberals MRAs want an equality which is not about maximising female autonomy at the expense of male autonomy.
/r/MensRights05/12/13 09:27 PM
1

Unfortunately she's guessing.
/r/MensRights04/12/13 07:53 AM
7

I believe it took place in a provincial city in Argentina.
/r/MensRights03/12/13 08:37 AM
2

Great find. Gives a good summary of the legal disadvantages faced by men in the late 1800s.
/r/MensRights29/11/13 10:44 PM
1

I agree that "man up" is often used the way you describe, as a shaming tactic to get men to act for the benefit of feminist aims and goals. But the problem is that it can be very helpful to men, in other contexts, to be asked to toughen up. Some of the boys I teach really do need to toughen up - they are going to be left a long way behind if they don't (nor will they connect well with their adult masculinity if they don't).
/r/MensRights28/11/13 08:32 PM
2

He repeats the rogue statistic "violence against women is the leading cause of death and disability in Australian women aged 15 to 44 (VicHealth 2010)." Anyone who believes this has lost all credibility to begin with.
/r/MensRights24/11/13 06:46 AM
3

I remember my father, grandfather and uncles working hard to support their families.
/r/MensRights24/11/13 06:45 AM
5

Wow! It's interesting, you get feminists claiming that there is no hostility toward men in feminism, and then you get a viciously man-hating article published in the mainstream press.
/r/MensRights23/11/13 04:49 AM
4

I don't think that's the best argument against Lily Allen. Lily Allen has made music herself which promotes a coarse view of sexual relationships. What she seems to object to is not so much coarseness in music videos, but coarseness coming from men. Female coarseness seems to be OK by her. It's that old feminist double standard, in which women are to be free to do anything they want, but men must do what feminists want. I'd prefer it if both sexes were held to a reasonable standard.
/r/MensRights17/11/13 07:06 AM
26

I'm a secondary school teacher and at my school all of the married women with kids are part-timers (usually working a .5 or .6 time fraction). They themselves admit that this is an easier option, given the workload, than having to be a full-timer (they will say things like "I don't know how you could do this job full-time, I need the days at home to catch up with the workload" etc.). But the married men, like myself, can't afford to take this option (mortgages etc.) so we just have to find a way…
/r/MensRights15/11/13 11:20 PM
15

And if the white men hadn't gone for her? Would that also be racism?
/r/MensRights15/11/13 07:41 AM
5

This unnecessarily splits the movement. This. At the moment the MRM has united men from across a range of political philosophies. In general, there is a positive, outward focus rather than destructive infighting. We seem to be getting along OK. So why try to impose one philosophy now?
/r/MensRights27/10/13 10:37 AM
4

I disagree. I think there's been some success in making the MRM open to both liberals and traditionalists. I haven't noticed the presence of both groups tearing apart the movement. Also, if there are any provocative voices in the movement it is probably some of the MGTOW figures. Although I'm politically opposed to MGTOW, I have to concede that these men have injected some energy and activism into the movement. There's no need to make big changes right now - we're being noticed, we've occasional…
/r/MensRights27/10/13 06:52 AM
1

Well done! You refused to be either intimidated or to lose your cool. If this starts to happen more, then we will win.
/r/MensRights27/10/13 06:27 AM
1

Yes.
/r/MensRights26/10/13 06:56 AM
1

The average woman cares about this stuff 0%.
/r/MensRights26/10/13 02:02 AM
3

I'm a school teacher, roughly 50% of English and history classes are about pushing a political agenda.
/r/MensRights26/10/13 02:02 AM
14

That's a really good refutation. I'm a teacher at a secondary school and at our school it's the Year 8 and 9 girls who give us headaches with the way they interact. There are complex patterns of friendship and animosity, often beginning with seemingly trivial matters. For the girls these are deeply wounding affairs, sometimes leading to school refusal. The boys can muck around, but their friendship groups are more stable.
/r/MensRights26/10/13 01:49 AM
2

I've never forgotten that one because I was reading a history book once and it recounted how in WWI a woman handed a white feather to a man at my local railway station (Balaclava in Melbourne); he subsequently enlisted and was killed in battle. I sometimes thought of what had happened when I was waiting for a train.
/r/MensRights26/10/13 01:43 AM
2

I wonder if there is going to be a realignment of politics anyway over the next ten years. I might be proved wrong, but I sense that there are men on both sides who are open-minded in looking for a way forward. We'll see.
/r/MensRights24/10/13 09:08 AM
3

I find the conservative side arguing that men should "man up" and just deal with whatever unfairness comes his way, and if he complains about it then something is wrong with him. There may be conservatives like this. But I'm a conservative and my concern is to get the social settings right, so that there's a workable framework. If I encourage men to be masculine it's not to put up with anything, but to be active in setting things right.
/r/MensRights24/10/13 08:53 AM
10

Interesting that when it suits them feminists will claim that men and women have no significant differences and that it is sexist to claim that such differences exist, but then you get articles like this which push the line that women are both different to and better than men to the point that female board members would have stopped the economic crisis, raised profits etc. (Principal Skinner grapples with this same issue about a minute into this clip)
/r/MensRights24/10/13 08:35 AM
1

This was always going to be a problem. If men are expected to do everything they did before and then to do half of the traditional female role as well, then there's no way that work-life balance is going to improve.
/r/MensRights10/10/13 09:01 PM
5

Laurie Penny might herself have contributed to the notion of feminists being angry and anti-male. Her commitment to anger: It's getting harder to stay angry. And that frightens me. My mental health has taken a turn for the worse. I'm struggling to care. I'm struggling to stay angry. That terrifies me more than anything ... So here's what you can do to help me... Send me your rage, your issues, things that make you mad... And here she is denying that fathers have rights when it comes to their chi…
/r/MensRights08/10/13 11:15 AM
4

Um, I wonder what my husband, father, nephews, cousins and brothers-in-law would think about me being deemed as “the enemy”. So unaware. Does she not understand that there are feminists who have deemed men to be the enemy for decades regardless of what the wives, mothers, nieces and cousins of those men would think. But this data, as well as the VicHealth data showing male intimate partner violence is found to be the leading contributor to death, disability and illness for women aged 15 to 44 ye…
/r/MensRights02/10/13 08:46 AM
7

There's more information on this issue here. I find it interesting that those in favour of female quotas would claim that profits rise by 42 per cent. It stretches the bounds of credibility to make such a claim. As it happens, a major survey of the research finds that those studies which take into account the possibility of reverse causation either conclude that there is no effect on profitability or else that there is a decline.
/r/MensRights01/10/13 08:57 AM
2

There's a bit of information here.
/r/MensRights29/09/13 04:27 AM
2

It seems to me that feminists support the idea of "sexual liberation" to the extent that it means a woman using sex and her sexual power however she wants to. But there is a major problem with defining sexual liberation this way. If men follow the same principle for themselves, then it is likely to take some of the power away from women to use sex for their own purposes. So feminists are, in a sense, forced into a double standard. They have to insist on "correct" behaviour from men, whilst pushi…
/r/MensRights26/09/13 10:03 AM
3

Spot on. I'm teaching a 13-year-old boy this year who has never had to relate to an male adult before and whose mother herself lacks social skills. There is a side to his personality that is missing. My advice to any single mums out there would be to at least ensure that their sons are put into a situation in which they relate to adult men in positions of authority, e.g. a sports team or scouts or something similar (or maybe request that the son be put into a primary school classroom with a male…
/r/MensRights26/09/13 02:29 AM
2

I pity her for having to go through life thinking this way.
/r/MensRights07/09/13 05:41 AM
3

Being a stay at home mom is controversial and virtually never economically necessary Better put: being a stay at home mom is controversial and difficult to achieve economically I know there are MRAs who want to do the "make sex distinctions not matter" thing. But I'm going to put an opposing view, namely that it's not a great thing to put the motherhood role culturally and economically out of the reach of women. For some women, such a role is an important part of fulfilling their womanhood and f…
/r/MensRights30/08/13 09:14 AM
-1

Nothing wrong with urging men to act like men. Where we have to be careful is in making sure that the "man up" refrain isn't used to shame men into committing themselves to unworthy causes.
/r/MensRights23/08/13 07:35 AM
5

I felt sorry for the daughter reading this article. I'm in my mid-40s and I've seen the same pattern over and over. The attractively feminine young women partner up early with decent guys. But the women raised like this daughter go through their 20s with an unattractive mean streak that repels men, then by their mid-30s the drive to have a family becomes so strong that they start to dress more softly and be less harsh in the way they interact with people - and usually they suddenly settle in a b…
/r/MensRights02/08/13 11:18 PM
1

The relevance to men's rights is that she has played a leading role in trying to persuade women that they should commit themselves to competition with men in the workforce rather than mutually satisfying relationships with men. It failed for her in her own life big time. It didn't lead to "women on top" but to a feminist stalking a much older married man.
/r/MensRights12/07/13 11:55 PM
2

I've read the EU report. The EU report wants to get women out of the less desirable parts of the fishing industry (e.g. processing) and into the more lucrative areas (administration, aquaculture). They don't want women on the boats because the work is dangerous and less lucrative. There are only a tiny number of women who work on the boats anyway (e.g. one in Belgium, none in Denmark or Finland.) The real thing to pick up on here is that the resources of the EU are to be used to bump up women's …
/r/MensRights23/06/13 11:41 AM
4

But this guy is in a strong position to make things better for himself. He is clearly value adding to the marriage in a big way. He is therefore in a strong position to impress upon his wife that she needs a change of heart. He should channel his anger into withdrawing all but the most basic of husband services. He might have to do this three of four times over the next couple of years before his wife starts to believe that she needs to takes his own basic needs into consideration within the mar…
/r/MensRights17/06/13 09:07 AM
2

It's a fast track to a self-destructive nihilism because it doesn't recognise anything meaninfgul to commit to outside of our own selves. So there is nothing meaningful to anchor or to orient the self. The difficulty with defining manhood is that it's not an ideological principle but something that exists in the world. It is a complex of qualities that are grounded in the male personality and that express a larger life principle that is complementary to the feminine one.
/r/MensRights22/05/13 09:45 PM
2

That's a very cynical view. Humans are also motivated to act for the benefit of what they love and to follow the good.
/r/MensRights22/05/13 09:40 PM
9

First, let me point out the implication of what you're arguing. If it's true that parental roles are undifferentiated, unisex ones, then men are not necessary within a family. Fatherhood can be dispensed with. Do we really believe that to be true? Does a father really look on his children and think "they don't really need me as a father"? Most men who are committed to family life do not think of themselves as dispensable. At the very least they will think of themselves as having particular insig…
/r/MensRights22/05/13 12:41 PM
3

You live for yourself? That's a terrible definition of manhood. And a fast track to a self-destructive nihilism.
/r/MensRights22/05/13 12:16 PM
5

I disagree. I've explained why in detail here. But, in brief, what does it mean to deny that there is such a thing as real manhood? What does that mean for the identity of men? For the significance of social roles such as that of husband and father? If you say "masculinity is something I define for myself" it starts to be thought of as something that is just made up instead of having a real existence. I don't think that's a step forward at all - it's a significant stepping down.
/r/MensRights22/05/13 12:09 PM
3

Reckon you've nailed it.
/r/MensRights11/04/13 03:04 AM
1

Here in Australia some companies are beginning to pay women more than men, on the basis that it's necessary to provide incentives to keep women at work. Examples? Here and here.
/r/MensRights11/04/13 02:17 AM
2

The article is trying to be sympathetic to men, which is something, but it does so by claiming that men are better off in a feminist system because the wife generates a second income. But there are problems with this view. First, men's wages have been suppressed in part by the inflow of female labour - the male wage was rising gradually in the 1950s and 60s but has stagnated since the early 70s. Second, one effect of the second income has been to push up house prices, not only requring a larger …
/r/MensRights08/04/13 03:17 AM
2

A good marriage is one of the best things there is. And even in a good marriage you have to be forgiving of your wife's moods at times. You learn to treat some of the things she says as expressions of moodiness and shrug it off (and she'll expect you to shrug it off). And you enjoy all the other stuff. If it gets to the point of bitchiness you chide her for it, and usually she'll accept she's done wrong. Having said that, the level of disrespect shown by the girlfriend in this particular case se…
/r/MensRights28/03/13 11:09 PM
1

Do women really want men to come across as entirely harmless? There's a line men have to walk here: don't deliberately make women feel uncomfortable, but don't turn off your own masculine presence either.
/r/MensRights28/03/13 11:03 PM
3

Tim Harford did a BBC show researching these claims back in 2009. He found that it was a case of a "rogue statistic". See here.
/r/MensRights21/03/13 09:36 AM
1

Did I land at a radfem site?
/r/MensRights19/03/13 09:39 AM
-4

Agreed that the sympathy was wrongly directed. But a belief in rape culture has nothing to do with such media reports. It comes from an ideological belief that men established a patriarchy to hold down women, including via the use of sexual violence. This claim is insulting to men and clearly ignores the stigma amongst men regarding committing acts of violence against women.
/r/MensRights18/03/13 08:05 AM
3

An odd argument. She's worried that women doing the whole independent woman thing in their younger years aren't marrying or having children so there's nobody to look after them when they're older and the solution is .... more feminism?
/r/MensRights13/03/13 08:38 AM
88

Well, this was in Australia's newspapers yesterday: Census data released by the ABS shows 61 per cent of women own their own home, compared to 58 per cent of men.
/r/MensRights09/03/13 02:09 AM
2

Good answer. Here in Australia women got the vote in the state of South Australia before men got it in the state of Tasmania.
/r/MensRights06/03/13 08:20 AM
3

It's not that I disagree with all of this, but I think it understates some of the problems that are built into feminism. For instance, a major strand of feminism, one that was there at the beginning, sees the maximising of individual autonomy as the ultimate goal. But if you pursue this aim thoroughly enough, then you are going to disrupt relationships and family formation (just one example of how this works is that a woman who wants to maximise her autonomy will want to delay family commitments…
/r/MensRights06/03/13 08:18 AM
3

divorce porn
/r/MensRights02/03/13 10:49 PM
1

I know there's a meme out there blaming "traditionalism" for feminism, but the traditional view was that men and women had complementary roles that were supposed to balance out. Each role was thought to represent something distinct and of value. The problem now is not traditionalism (which has been marginalised) but the idea that society is to be understood in terms of categories of privilege and oppression, with men being tagged as a privileged oppressor group and women as a victimised class, w…
/r/MensRights22/02/13 09:47 PM
5

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 88% of homicides are committed by men. See here. According to the Bureau "Both male and female offenders are more likely to target male victims than female victims." Note too that when it comes to IPV (intimate partner violence) the percentage of female perpetrators rises considerably to 34.5%.
/r/MensRights18/01/13 09:26 AM
1

Excellent observation.
/r/MensRights16/01/13 02:43 AM
1

bequeathed us a world where neither my father nor my husband has his foot on my neck I agree with much of your comment, but I think you're underselling Western history if you sum up gender relations prior to feminism in this way. Men were expected to treat women chivalrously; there were hopes of marital love within marriage; and the value of home life was highly respected. If you read the diaries of women written prior to the 1900s (admittedly these are mostly from middle or upper class women) t…
/r/MensRights16/01/13 02:35 AM
1

Great answer.
/r/MensRights16/01/13 02:07 AM
5

Exactly the same for me (except I've only been married for 10). Very flattering to be flirted with by attractive younger women. I enjoy it but like the commenter above am very happy in my marriage so have no problem staying faithful.
/r/MensRights16/01/13 02:00 AM
1

I still don't think you're defending womanhood.
/r/MensRights06/01/13 12:25 PM
-2

Life is the proof. People get brought up believing in social constructionism, but they continue to act upon gender essentialism, because that is the reality they live. As for your assertion: Plenty of heterosexual men like competent, strong, powerful women. I have watched the generation after me pair off and marry. The men with options continue to select for what men have always selected for - and that includes the left-wing men I know. They have chosen beautiful, graceful, feminine women. When …
/r/MensRights06/01/13 10:34 AM
-4

Oh boy, you're going to have big trouble accepting heterosexuality. A man likes the softness he sees in a woman's eyes. He likes the slenderness of her limbs. He likes the hint of emotional and physical vulnerability he perceives within her. And at an even higher level than this he perceives the woman as embodying, no matter how imperfectly, a feminine life principle that is different from his own. Far from looking down on it, he falls in love with it and wants in a way to possess it in her. Tha…
/r/MensRights06/01/13 08:17 AM
-13

Of course it's a feminist parable. It's feminists who think that sex distinctions are an oppressive social construct which ought to be abolished.
/r/MensRights06/01/13 07:08 AM
-2

So you don't think there's anything distinctively impressive about women then. They're just men with funny bits. Come alive.
/r/MensRights06/01/13 07:04 AM
-2

What makes a woman lovely?
/r/MensRights06/01/13 03:08 AM
-4

Men shouldn't have a facade of strength, they should be strong.
/r/MensRights06/01/13 02:39 AM
-1

I'm against paid parental leave for either men or women. The reason is this: if a man goes out to work to create something of economic value, then the credit for doing that should go to him and not to the state. In other words, at the moment a man goes out to work, the fruits of his labour are taxed and that taxation is then used to allow women to stay at home. The state gets the credit. It would be better if people were taxed less, or got some sort of tax relief, in order to fund parental leave…
/r/MensRights03/01/13 04:44 AM
1

I dislike these kinds of articles because they assume that committed or engaged fatherhood is exactly the same as committed or engaged motherhood, i.e. that there is only one unisex parental role and the only thing that role involves is the physical care of young children. It's especially problematic because, if true, it would mean that men are not necessary within the family. If there is only a motherhood role, then you could have one mother, or two mothers just as well as you could have a fath…
/r/MensRights31/12/12 10:46 PM
-1

This assumes that the MRM is a liberal movement. It's more accurate to state it's both liberal and conservative. The conservative part is not going to sign on to every aspect of gay rights, e.g. the idea of homosexual marriage. From the conservative point of view, accepting homosexual marriage hurts the position of the average man, as it implies that marriage is not a complementary relationship between man and woman and that men are therefore not a necessary part of a family.
/r/MensRights03/12/12 10:32 AM
3

The frame you have accepted isn't helpful. In the past people tried to work toward what they believed to be a common good. That meant that both men and women made sacrifices for larger entitites, whether that be family, community or nation. It's difficult to say which sex made the larger sacrifice. Many women died in childbirth, many men died in war or in the workplace. Women worked hard in the home and in home businesses (farms, workshops etc); men worked hard to support their families. Women g…
/r/MensRights01/12/12 08:43 AM
7

Disliked the article. A woman who hated her dad transitions to being male and then sets out to remake what it means to be a man. Also it's not true that a traditionally masculine ethos has supported violence against women.
/r/MensRights27/11/12 07:58 AM
1

Yeah, I'm sceptical of the claim too. Let's see some proper evidence before assuming it to be true.
/r/MensRights25/11/12 06:26 AM
11

The Ottomans get off so lightly. They had a system set up in which white boys were taken from their families to serve as Janissaries in the Ottoman army and white girls were taken from their families to serve as concubines and this persisted for hundreds of years.
/r/MensRights14/11/12 09:08 PM
13

There were leaving classes at boys schools here in Australia in 1913 in which not a single boy survived unwounded from WWI.
/r/MensRights14/11/12 09:02 PM
18

Yet when feminists are in a triumphant mood, they emphasise how much wealth women control: http://www.wlp.givingto.vt.edu/wealth/index.html
/r/MensRights31/10/12 09:07 AM
9

Known in the trade as a "rogue statistic".
/r/MensRights31/10/12 08:58 AM
9

He doesn't need feminism, he needs a dad.
/r/MensRights30/10/12 09:46 AM
3

I think it had to do, in part, with a weakness in the political philosophy of the West. This philosophy tended to emphasise that the defining human qualities were those of reason (rather than emotion) and autonomy (rather than dependence). That implied that women were not as fully human as men. There was therefore a push for the same kind of education for girls as boys (mid 1800s) followed by a push for women to enter the professions (later 1800s). Why the later 1800s in particular? I'm not sure…
/r/MensRights28/10/12 07:33 AM
2

Sorry, I misread your comment.
/r/MensRights28/10/12 07:18 AM
1

Women might be encouraged to define themselves however they like. But reality eventually kicks in. There are qualities of womanhood that people admire and if a woman departs too far from them she will rightly be thought of as unfeminine and sexually unappealing. What do we think of a harshly unemotional woman? Or even a woman who presents herself drably or mannishly? Do our hearts really light up in appreciation of her ability to self-define? Do we men think "Well she's the one for me?" (Even th…
/r/MensRights28/10/12 01:54 AM
0

I downvoted you because I disagree that being a man or a woman is just about what is between your legs. I disagree because reality tells me otherwise; because science tells me otherwise; and because my sexuality tells me otherwise. If being a man were just about having a penis or a chromosome then it would be a meaningless category. What's the point of having a men's movement if the central message is that being a man is insignificant? That's just copying the feminists who are rightly questioned…
/r/MensRights28/10/12 01:47 AM
1

I disagree. There is a masculine essence that flows through individual men differently but it's still there and if you depart from it too much you're not going to feel comfortable with yourself. I work in a large office with roughly equal numbers of men and women. Sure there is a spectrum of masculine and feminine behaviours, with some women for instance being less feminine than others. But if you were to take the "median female" and compare her to the "median male" you'd notice a very big diffe…
/r/MensRights28/10/12 01:42 AM
8

The crazy thing is that Kasey Edwards wrote a book in which she explained that in her 20s she got a series of highly paid jobs, that she was earning twice as much as her parents combined, that she was spending all the money on restaurants and clothes etc, but that she got bored with it and wanted to do something else. Then she has the cheek to present herself as being part of an underprivileged class and that it is men who have to change their behaviours.
/r/MensRights27/10/12 02:38 AM
6

Men aren’t attracted to her because she physically resembles a child, but because she emotionally represents the non-threatening nature of a young girl. We're supposed to be attracted to women who are threatening? The woman writing this piece wants to have her cake and eat it. She wants to be a male-challenging feminist and have this quality recognised as attractive to men. I'll speak for myself - it doesn't work for me. I'm not attracted to someone romantically who sets herself against me or ag…
/r/MensRights24/10/12 09:18 PM
1

The good news is that she's the one on the back foot.
/r/MensRights24/10/12 10:01 AM
3

But it boils down to this. A bad marriage is a curse, a good marriage is a blessing. So the question then becomes how you encourage good marriages rather than bad ones. I don't think the MRM is going to agree on this. Traditionalists like myself will think that you need complementary relationships with distinct masculine and feminine roles; liberals are likely to emphasise equally autonomous, individually chosen arrangements. What we can agree on is that current divorce laws are unjust and give …
/r/MensRights16/10/12 08:36 PM
1

what happened if she continued to misbehave Then she would continue to be judged as having a character flaw. Real Christianity doesn't infantilise women the way that the Catholic guy quoted above does. Women have a soul and a conscience and will be judged for their own sins. Christianity has never said to men "you will have to account for the sins of your wife" - it was the wife who would have to account for them.
/r/MensRights15/10/12 08:16 PM
1

Traditional values teach men that they are entirely responsible for the behaviour of their women. That is a perversion of traditional values. Traditionally men were supposed to take the lead within a family. But that didn't mean that if the wife behaved badly she was an innocent suffering from a lack of pandering by her husband. Look back at past societies. Women were criticised morally for their own character faults. Some people on this thread might have read a Jane Austen novel, for instance. …
/r/MensRights15/10/12 07:36 PM
0

The guy quoted will have had zero contact with the tradcon movement and will not think of himself as a tradcon. He no doubt thinks of himself, rightly or wrongly, as a serious Catholic. Some members of the tradcon movement are religious but we are a political movement not a religious one, and we advance political arguments and analysis. And we do not pander to the more destructive impulses of women.
/r/MensRights15/10/12 07:23 PM
3

It's a well written piece and I'd certainly agree that this older style of liberalism would be preferable to what we have now. However the fact remains that feminism grew out of classical liberalism in the mid 1800s. And the reason is this: If we, as a society, return to the ideals of a classically liberal society, in which each person is guaranteed the autonomy to pursue his/her own life without interference from the State beyond its purpose to ensure the negative rights of the citizenry If tha…
/r/MensRights13/10/12 10:12 PM
-1

I disagree with this. Feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. Liberalism says that the key good to aim at is individual autonomy, meaning an ability to be self-determining. Therefore, feminism seeks to make women as independent of men as possible. Feminists decades ago got the idea accepted within the political class that men were privileged when it came to autonomy. Therefore, it was thought that to be equal nobody needed to consider the position of men. The emphasis was all on bu…
/r/MensRights12/10/12 09:04 AM
3

experts now confirm that long-term committed relationships are good for mental and physical health and this benefit increases over time. In an editorial published by student BMJ, David and John Gallacher from Cardiff University say that on average married people live longer. They say that women in committed relationships have better mental health, while men in committed relationships have better physical health here Another interesting source here. Basically states that women's mental health imp…
/r/MensRights01/10/12 10:20 PM
0

I don't think we should make blanket statements like "don't get married". If you go into marriage on the right basis and with the right woman it can still be one of the best things you ever do. We need to focus on marriage reform. That's not impossible - our case is strong and as the movement grows it will be harder to ignore in the public arena.
/r/MensRights01/10/12 09:37 PM
1

I don't think this is going to fly. There are too many men like myself for whom masculinity is an integral aspect of being male and of a male identity.
/r/MensRights01/10/12 04:07 AM
1

I disagree. Identifying as male and developing along masculine lines go together.
/r/MensRights01/10/12 01:53 AM
8

Yeah, we're supposed to accept that it's only white men who have the negative quality under discussion. That's real convenient.
/r/MensRights29/09/12 10:46 PM
2

Well, if that's true it's a first. Usually the concept of privilege is based on the assumption that men and/or whites have some kind of unearned advantage compared to other groups. Reality gets filtered to fit the framework. For instance, if men have done well in an occupation it's thought to be because of sexism or an old boy's network (and the government needs to intervene to do something about it), but if women have done well it's because they are hard-working, flexible, better motivated and …
/r/MensRights29/09/12 09:03 AM
0

There was a similar research project done in 2007 in the U.S. It too found that women were happiest in traditional marriages. The researchers concluded that modern marriages were too much based on "account keeping" - in which everything had to be done 50/50, which then led to men doing less "emotion work" in the marriage - rather than on a more "enchanted logic" of "gift exchange". I blogged on the research at the time, see here and here.
/r/MensRights29/09/12 01:04 AM
11

Still, 72.3% of female high school graduates enrol compared to 64.6% of men. So even amongst the young, women are clearly enrolling in higher numbers than men. So Utah is being short-sighted in focusing on female enrolments - it's more important in the long run that they focus on keeping male enrolments at the same level as those of women.
/r/MensRights22/09/12 02:46 AM
0

Because for aeons it has been the role of men to defend the tribe. In more primitive societies that would have meant not only the military defence of the tribe but also basic forms of governance. In more sophisticated societies, the role of securing the perimeters of a community to give a protected space for women and children becomes more complex, but the same instincts and drives still exist.
/r/MensRights20/09/12 09:40 AM
2

Little Ms Cynical.
/r/MensRights20/09/12 09:34 AM
3

Excellent point. First, working to provide for your family is one aspect of men being involved in their family. It does show a commitment to family. Second, there are other distinct ways that men have traditionally been involved in their families. Men help to model relationships in the way they relate to their wife; they help to shape the character of their sons and daughters in the kinds of interests they cultivate, in disciplining their children and in the values they impart. Men have an insig…
/r/MensRights08/09/12 11:23 PM
3

Agree too. I've seen the TV ads. They show ordinary dads as important to their wives and children. Great ad campaign.
/r/MensRights06/09/12 11:05 AM
3

You know what WOULD be goundbreaking? Lt's have a show that takes the men away. Absolutely. We've had a few decades in which the focus has been on the state artificially propping up the independence of women. Let's take the artifice away. Let's see what would happen if women really did have to exist entirely independently of men (including the welfare revenues generated by men).
/r/MensRights15/08/12 09:20 AM
4

Agreed. She gets called names and is hit on several times. It's not like these are romantic overtures - it seems to be more aggressive, overt and persistent.
/r/MensRights14/08/12 12:32 PM
1

There is an underside to the use of the term "privileged". If you want something from another group of people, but can't justify it in normal terms, then you can use the concept of privilege to justify claiming it from them. And, yes, once the concept is applied then members of that group lose moral status and are therefore less able to challenge the way they are being treated.
/r/MensRights10/08/12 09:57 AM
2

Never have children is the wrong conclusion to draw. It's like agreeing to accept a choice between two poisons - one poison being the possibility of being excluded from your family, the other of never having children of your own. Neither option is acceptable. The only acceptable conclusion to draw is the need for better legal protection for fathers.
/r/MensRights07/08/12 10:04 AM
7

More to the point, it is the role of government to accommodate the unaccommodated, to protect the unprotected and to care for the uncared for! That is the point of society! You've defined government and society solely in terms of welfarism. That's way too reductionist and it's likely to lead to an unsustainable culture. It's true that every society needs to deal with welfare issues, but the life of a society is much more than this.
/r/MensRights05/08/12 08:37 PM
1

Children need parents who love them. It doesn't matter your gender or your sexuality. I really think MRAs need to be careful about making statements like this. As a matter of logic it means that men are no longer necessary within a family - they become optional. Shouldn't a men's movement at least pause before committing to a view that makes men optional within family life?
/r/MensRights05/08/12 09:52 AM
1

I think regardless where they fall, all MRAs agree that the legal system is stacked against men and should be changed. Agreed. The two wings do share common ground. Neither wing agrees with the "men are evil privileged oppressors" line and we all recognise that there are laws (particularly regarding divorce and domestic violence) that are unjustly biased against men. Nillerz is right, though, that the traditionalist wing doesn't want to abolish gender roles, but we want to return to a situation …
/r/MensRights05/08/12 09:43 AM
0

This is a difficult one for me. In my experience if a man is crying over something trivial it's a warning sign for him that he is overloaded in some way and that he needs to take stock of what's happening in his life. But I admit that men differ, and cultures differ, so perhaps there do exist men who cry "just because". But I haven't met any yet.
/r/MensRights05/08/12 09:24 AM
1

But is it a gender stereotype which harms men much if the average man isn't interested in crying anyway?
/r/MensRights05/08/12 04:30 AM
2

I'm curious. I'm a man and I never feel the need to cry. So this seems to be a non-issue to me. Is it the case that some men feel oppressed because they're not supposed to cry?
/r/MensRights05/08/12 04:03 AM
3

But evolution isn't selecting for intelligence. Well-educated women are two and half times more likely to remain childless. If you are an intelligent man trying to select amongst your female peers you're at a disadvantage, not because women don't like signs of intelligence, but because your female peers will believe that family formation is something to consider well into their 30s, that is, when female fertility is beginning to be compromised.
/r/MensRights04/08/12 09:26 AM
5

Good Lord. Do you really believe that women were just treated as objects and passed around as sex toys? Or that no one cared about them as human beings? Where do you get this from? It's monumental bad faith in your own ancestors. I thought we were starting to get over this kind of depressed, nihilistic, rancorous outlook.
/r/MensRights04/08/12 02:15 AM
5

And it's too unspecific an account of history. The evidence from the Tasmanian Aborigines is that in early hunter gatherer societies sexual relationships were marred by jealousy and violence and that men's greater physical power did give them leeway over women. When settled agricultural societies developed, societies went in different directions. Some chose not to regulate female sexuality and these developed into uncle societies: men couldn't know if a child was theirs, and so they lived in the…
/r/MensRights04/08/12 01:51 AM
1

That's exactly the point I was trying to make. And, yes, masculinity isn't reductive in the sense of leading to all men being alike and doing the same thing.
/r/MensRights29/07/12 06:45 AM
2

Men will always feel more at ease with themselves when they develop along masculine lines. It's like hitting something that you were born to be - your fully developed self. As for the "let's just all be the same" idea that strikes me as boring. I like it that women are different.
/r/MensRights28/07/12 11:01 AM
4

Feral girls.
/r/MensRights21/07/12 03:49 AM
1

Traditionalist conservative.
/r/MensRights19/07/12 10:09 AM
2

its success was due to women not fighting the bastards as hard as men do. Too right. I say this as a male teacher. Our female dominated union, as an industrial tactic, organises an occasional strike day which saves the government money (the government doesn't have to pay wages). When I suggest to my female colleagues more effective tactics I just get the usual "yes that would work but it would cause disruption so we can't do it".
/r/MensRights14/07/12 02:18 AM
2

It's not something that most men and women want to share.
/r/MensRights09/07/12 12:39 PM
17

An Australian feminist, Kate Gilmore, got caught out once claiming that 1 in 3 Australian women are victims of domestic violence. She defended concocting the statistic this way: Fact is an elusive notion ... feminists have no more distorted the truth than any other advocates of disadvantaged groups fighting for public support. What's going on here is trying to get something up on the public agenda that hasn't had any public attention. For all the excesses of which the field might be deemed to be…
/r/MensRights09/07/12 12:28 PM
8

Yeah, it used to always be 1 in 3 of whatever the issue was. Now they've bumped it up to 1 in 2.
/r/MensRights09/07/12 12:20 PM
2

Interesting information. Thanks.
/r/MensRights09/07/12 06:38 AM
13

In "sacrificing" a piece of the penis, in uncovering and revealing themselves in their most vulnerable part, in making themselves more like women, men can be made more whole. That part is indeed disturbing.
/r/MensRights09/07/12 06:33 AM
6

The reallly significant news is not even the fact that one Austrian medical school applies a lower standard to women, it's that American universities in general (according to Dr Henry Sondheimer) use a personal interview to "overcome" the problem of men's higher test scores.
/r/MensRights08/07/12 10:24 PM
0

Agreed. Even if they're his kids he doesn't get the woman when he most wants a partner and when she's at her most desirable. And it's insulting to the provider guy. The message is that he's going to stick it out waiting for her until after she's finished with the sex thing. A clever society finds ways to build up the provider guy - to make sure that the incentives are there for the provider guy to commit to work. It doesn't say to men "the provider guy thing is over, we're not sure what your rol…
/r/MensRights08/07/12 11:12 AM
2

Right. It worked well for society for men to attract women to their side through being good providers. It led to men being positively invested in their society and in a particular family. It also meant that most men had the chance to find a wife and have children. In the new sexual order a lot of men are going to lack such investment. You can see it already in the MGTOW strand of the MRM. It's unlikely to end happily.
/r/MensRights08/07/12 09:44 AM
0

But you're not making money for "other people" you're making money for your family. And, in my case, I'm making money so that my wife can be home with our young children. I do think that's an expression of a core masculine instinct - the one in which men set themselves the task of creating a protected space for both their community and their own families. It's a task that draws on the tougher qualities of men.
/r/MensRights08/07/12 03:33 AM
4

First, it's too early to claim that the male breadwinner role is over. Out here in the burbs it's alive and well. Nearly all women out here are either at home full-time or working part-time. Second, if the male breadwinner role is lost, there are going to be consequences. If men really have no sense of themselves as breadwinners then are they really going to be motivated to stick with study and career? Aren't more young men going to defer such commitments for as long as they can? Isn't that alre…
/r/MensRights08/07/12 02:38 AM
0

But that's what I assumed was meant. I don't support a men's movement that is a kind of mirror image of feminism, e.g. feminism pushed women into more traditionally male roles, therefore it is equal for the men's movement to push men into more traditionally female roles. Men are no more going to be liberated by a freedom to sweep the floor than women were by the freedom to become riveters.
/r/MensRights07/07/12 11:06 PM
-1

But here we get to underlying philosophical differences. Moderns tend to assert that there are no essences or, at best, only individual ones. Therefore, the aim in life is to throw off any external influences from outside the individual. Traditionalists like myself believe that there are "type" essences that are meaningful, so the task is to raise yourself to the best of the type that forms the core of your self and your identity. The moden approach stresses freedom from things, the traditional …
/r/MensRights07/07/12 11:00 PM
-1

In what way is the paternal role distinctive? i) A father's authority is received differently by his sons. I'm not sure I can explain why adequately, but I notice this already and my son is only 8 years old. He will often disregard his mother's instructions but complies once I step in. ii) A father stands in for the larger society more than the mother does. This has both positive and potentially negative consequences. The positive side is that a father has a particularly decisive role in certain…
/r/MensRights07/07/12 11:26 AM
2

If you think I missed the point, why not explain why?
/r/MensRights07/07/12 11:00 AM
-12

Of course men can carry around babies, sweep things etc. But that's not the core of either fatherhood or motherhood. Nor is it wise for the men's movement to assent to such an idea. If parenthood is just a set of gender neutral tasks, then men become optional rather than necessary within a family. The real question is whether that man can adequately fulfil a distinctively paternal role within his family.
/r/MensRights07/07/12 03:10 AM
3

In Australia some women even beat men to the vote. Universal suffrage for women was introduced in South Australia in 1894, whereas universal suffrage for men was introduced in Tasmania in 1896.
/r/MensRights07/07/12 02:44 AM
-1

I don't like either variant of feminism. I don't like the sex negative victimised variant which the author criticises. But she herself has this over the top "power feminism" which focuses on women seeking power and the freedom to autonomously choose to be or to do anything they want. That might sound nice, but it's death to relationships. "Sorry Joe but I met another guy I like and it's my right as a power feminist to do or to be anything". If everybody in society declares that their main aim is…
/r/MensRights07/07/12 02:40 AM
0

Women don't have to compete with men in the economy and society. They are pressed to do so, I agree. But they don't have to and even if they choose to do so they have a state apparatus making sure that they are not outcompeted.
/r/MensRights07/07/12 02:23 AM
0

I have to agree with this. I enjoy reading the reddit men's rights page, but it seems to me to be mostly liberal in orientation. As a conservative I'm used to not dominating political discussion and, to be honest, I'm glad that there are liberals who are breaking with aspects of feminism. And yet every so often there's a complaint about conservatives having too much sway in the MRM. I wonder if liberals aren't as used to sharing a platform.
/r/MensRights06/07/12 07:34 AM
-8

Your son is going to have to compete in life with other men. He's going to need a mature masculine personality to do this successfully. It's unlikely it's going to help him much to "try girl things". If I have a criticism of a previous generation of fathers it's that they left their sons to figure it out for themselves, which most men are able to do but with unnecessary delays. It's better if you can figure it out at age 20 with good guidance, rather than finally getting there at age 30 on your …
/r/MensRights06/07/12 07:27 AM
-5

Sorry to the future lesbians, but she's being raised to one day attract a good man.
/r/MensRights06/07/12 07:14 AM
-4

All the kick ass heroine stuff. The mercenary career stuff. Contact sports. Excessive work/study demands. All of the often unstated assumptions that the masculine in life is more meaningful than the feminine. Ladette culture (heavy drinking, tatts, casual promiscuity, fighting).
/r/MensRights06/07/12 07:13 AM
-11

I want my daughter to embody the feminine virtues and to grow to be a lovely young woman. I want her to be a good wife and to choose a decent man to be her husband. I want her to understand the complementarity of the masculine and feminine and to know the value of the feminine in the world. How does a father achieve these things? First, by raising her in a warm and loving home, which she might want to emulate and which gives her security. Second, by maintaining a good father/daughter bond. Third…
/r/MensRights06/07/12 01:36 AM
1

As if traditional marriage wasn't a tool for extortion and legal bondage of men as well. Overall it was a good thing. It gave all men the chance to have children. It gave men a good chance to have a sexual partner when young. It gave men the chance to live in a society with a generally rising standard of living. What it's being replaced with is worse. In the replacement, men are still expected to work just as hard in paid employment, to do more in terms of domestic work and to wait longer for th…
/r/MensRights28/06/12 12:22 PM
0

I've got a collection of short posts on the issue of the wage gap here.
/r/MensRights11/06/12 03:27 AM
0

How does it feel for me to be a "pocket of resistance"? Great!
/r/MensRights09/06/12 04:14 AM
2

It sounds a bit desperate. Probably shows that they're worried the current consensus is falling away.
/r/MensRights06/06/12 10:25 AM
-5

But why do people always talk about white privilege? Why not Asian privilege? Asians do much better than whites in education and employment. It seems odd, too, to talk about white privilege at a moment in history that whites are in such a serious demographic decline, not just in the U.S. but internationally. The truth, it seems to me, is that white people need help at this point in time. Talking about whites as privileged oppressors doesn't help.
/r/MensRights04/06/12 09:29 PM
5

Agreed. It's the same approach for both maleness and whiteness. Both are held to be socially constructed to create an unearned privilege for one group of people over another group. And in both cases if you as a male or as a white person accept the analysis then you lose moral status in society.
/r/MensRights04/06/12 01:17 PM
4

That cop was in a difficult situation. He was trying to arrest one woman, who was being very physically aggressive, when the second woman also went in to attack him. The boyfriend of the second woman tried to stop her, but she broke free and went for the cop. Not sure if the punch was the right strategy, but the women were acting crazy. Having said that I would only ever punch a woman as an absolute last resort (have never had to do it). My punch would do a lot more damage than hers and I try to…
/r/MensRights29/05/12 09:42 AM
2

You've clearly never been through the modern relationships grinder. Let's say you're a young man who wants a girlfriend. You've been brought up by your mom to be nice to girls; you've watched movies in which the nice guy proves to be nicer than the frat boy and gets the girl; and you hear girls complaining about their treatment by bad boys and that there are no nice guys left. So you think as a nice guy that you have an advantage. But then you find yourself not quite getting to the relationships…
/r/MensRights26/05/12 04:17 AM
5

It's not a small minority.
/r/MensRights26/05/12 04:06 AM
7

Scalzi is wrong even on his own terms. If what matters is income levels, education, family outcomes etc then whites do not have it best, Asians do. I've presented the evidence for that here and here. To give just one example, in 2010 the median income for whites in the U.S. was $54,620 and for Asians in the U.S. it was $64,308. When I present this information the response is often an outraged "But that's because Asians work hard, have strong families etc" - which is true. But the same logic isn'…
/r/MensRights24/05/12 10:14 PM
2

Do you feel that being legally married makes it easier for the relationship to handle hardships that a de facto relationship would have trouble with? Yes. Can you explain what you mean by "more stable"? De facto relationships are statistically more likely to break down. For instance, in Australia twelve percent of marriages end after five years compared to 40 percent of de facto relationships after the same period
/r/MensRights21/05/12 10:50 AM
1

8 years.
/r/MensRights21/05/12 10:40 AM
7

I'm happily married. I work as a teacher to bring in the money, my wife looks after our two young children at home. There was a bit of friction at the start, but we've grown well together and have a strong family unit. In terms of advantages, it depends on what you're comparing it to. If you're comparing it to a bachelor lifestyle, then the advantages include the opportunity to experience marital love and paternal love and to use your masculine strengths in your role as a husband and father. If …
/r/MensRights20/05/12 12:18 PM
1

It's good for women to be able to stay at home to care for their own children. But the best way to achieve that is for the husband to be able to afford to support a family. One option is for governments is to give tax cuts to men supporting a family.
/r/MensRights06/05/12 03:08 AM
-1

I wish to be home to raise my own kids some day. Then you are shooting yourself in the foot by supporting feminism. Feminists don't want you to do that - they believe that the male role is the privileged one that women should pursue. As someone wrote earlier, the motherhood role is barely tolerated by feminism.
/r/MensRights04/05/12 12:49 PM
3

Exactly. If there are kids then there is plenty to do at home and if the kids are young she'll be doing an equal amount of work. But in this case it seems like the girlfriend expected to be supported even before marriage/kids - that does seem entitled.
/r/MensRights04/05/12 12:44 PM
5

Agreed. My wife is a housewife and it works well for us because our values on this are aligned. This stuff has to be very clearly communicated before any big commitments are made.
/r/MensRights04/05/12 12:38 PM
1

OK, I agree that the "truckie" bit is irrelevant - it probably came to mind because I know a family where the 35-year-old happened to be one. Personally, I think it's normal that young men are a bit apprehensive about the father of the girl they're interested in. Not to the point of fearing shotguns etc - that's way over the top. But fathers have a job of trying to deliver their daughters into happy marriages. That means having a concern for who, and at what age, their daughters choose to date. …
/r/MensRights28/04/12 10:42 PM
7

If your daughter is sexually mature, seeking male company, your job is not to protect her from real world. I disagree. Fathers are supposed to be protective of their children. That doesn't stop when a daughter is sexually mature. Imagine if your 15-year-old daughter wanted to go out with a 35-year-old truckie. If you took the attitude "she's sexually mature, it's not my job to protect her from the real world" then you'd be a poor sort of father. Fathers are not the ones who smile benignly with u…
/r/MensRights28/04/12 01:07 PM
2

I'm a conservative but I welcome the fact that liberal men are turning against the idea that men are a privileged oppressor class which then justifies anti-male discrimination. The rejection of "men as a privileged oppressor class" is something that both conservatives and liberals can agree on - it could lead in the future to MRAs enjoying bipartisan support amongst younger male politicians. However, there is inevitably going to be differences in other areas. I don't read every post here, so I'm…
/r/MensRights18/04/12 09:29 PM
2

I have a collection of items on Scandinavian feminism here.
/r/MensRights18/04/12 10:16 AM
1

The other thing is that the trade unions and the Herald Sun paper were highly supportive of the idea of women being paid more than men - the principle of equal pay was quickly forgotten when it was a case of women being paid more.
/r/MensRights17/04/12 08:09 AM
6

You left out part of the paid leave. 2 x 14 weeks company paid leave = 28 weeks, 2 x 18 weeks government paid leave = 36 weeks, 2 x 6 double pay = 12 weeks. Total paid leave= 76 weeks. The opposition party, which is likely to win power in the next election, wants to significantly boost government funded paid leave. It would be 24 weeks per year of the full salary which would be capped at $150,000. That would bring total paid leave for the two children to 88 weeks.
/r/MensRights16/04/12 09:18 PM
4

Not quite right. The Swedes believe that traditional gender roles are social constructs created for the purposes of the oppression of women. Therefore, the aim is to overthrow them, or at least to make them not matter, rather than to expand them. To be more exact, the Swedes believe in two things: i) Masculinity is socially constructed to harm women, therefore men should not be masculine ii) Masculinity is the privileged position, therefore women should be masculine
/r/MensRights06/04/12 12:21 AM
2

But then what do you end up conserving? If you think the individual should be self-determining, then you commit yourself to liberating the individual from whatever is predetermined. And that includes some of the most important aspects of individual identity, such as sex & ethnicity (and if you push the logic far enough, even nationality). Furthermore, if you hold to autonomy as the overriding good, then justice will be defined as an equal distribution of autonomous life conditions. And the only …
/r/MensRights05/04/12 09:34 PM
8

Attitudes will change as you get older. Once women turn 30 and have kids, only a minority want to continue full-time paid work.
/r/MensRights10/02/12 09:17 AM
3

Yes, I agree. The problem here is not that she wants children and to be a SAHM. Those are normal aspirations for women. The problem is the mismatch in values and life aims between husband and wife. They are so great, I have to assume that the wife perhaps concealed what she really wanted in the hope that the husband would be won over. Lesson: it's important for both men and women to be honest and upfront about these matters during the courting phase and certainly during the premarital counsellin…
/r/MensRights29/01/12 10:03 PM
1

I don't see what the problem with the linked article is. It is complaining that men are portrayed in the media as weak and ineffectual and that masculine strength is vilified in society. It does ask for men to take on masculine responsibilities but it recognises the barriers placed in the way of this, for instance, via family law.
/r/MensRights25/01/12 11:12 PM
6

white men own this entire planet Is that meant to be a joke? First, women own more of the world's wealth than you imagine: Women will be the richer sex by 2025, owning 60 per cent of the UK’s personal wealth compared with 48 per cent today, research has revealed. The study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research also found that UK millionaires aged under 45 and over 65 are more likely to be women than men. There are 24 per cent more female millionaires aged between 18 and 44 - 47,355 c…
/r/MensRights23/01/12 05:23 AM
3

Sure. There's a recent example from the Herald Sun, Australia's largest circulation newspaper, below: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/nsw-aboriginal-job-programs-not-working/story-e6frf7kf-1226237176557
/r/MensRights20/01/12 12:56 AM
2

Clothesforrobots, Aborigines is still the most commonly used term in Australia. In some places you hear the term "Koorie" but that's not accepted everywhere. Indigenous Australians sounds clunky and is used mostly for official documents. The term Aborigine isn't used with derogotary connotations. You hear it in combinations like "Aboriginal art" and "Aboriginal culture".
/r/MensRights19/01/12 08:09 PM
0

Does she say that only men should be self-sacrificing? The way I read her post she says that a criterion for being grown-up is acting in a self-sacrificing way for others rather than always putting yourself first. I think she overstates it, but it should be said that this is a component of the classical virtue of being magnanimous or great-souled, which has a long history in Western culture. To her credit she believes that men and women should work together for the good of society and she believ…
/r/MensRights15/01/12 02:17 AM
0

It's the female way of saying that you're being too nice. Try to think of some of the more out there things you've done and drop them into the conversations you have with these women. And try to be a bit "cocky funny" with them - that's something that often comes fairly naturally to good-natured men.
/r/MensRights08/01/12 09:22 AM
3

That's a liberal version of men's rights. It has one great advantage: it rejects the current 'settlement' that most feminists are desperate to keep in which women get to be individualistic self-definers, whilst men are supposed to act dutifully to prop up society to allow women to do it. But it has a great disadvantage - any society that really attempts to live by such principles is doomed. It will just become a competition between individuals asserting rights to act according to their own will …
/r/MensRights27/11/11 02:23 AM
14

Exactly. Feminists believe that the highest good in society is individual autonomy, meaning a freedom to self-determine your life as you will. They also believe that males are privileged and have taken all the autonomy at the expense of women. Therefore, to put things right politics becomes aimed at "liberating" women to choose, with men being expected to dedicate themselves to to propping up these choices. The theory is flawed in many ways. Is it really true, for instance, that individual auton…
/r/MensRights09/11/11 08:56 PM
2

The state shouldn't undermine men's efforts to provide. A man who is able to successfull provide for his family has a better chance of creating a stable family unit. He will also be more motivated to contribute economically to society. What the South African feminist forgets is that South African men will end up handing over a lot more than 10% of their salaries to their wives - they will hand over something like 90% and do it voluntarily as part of their commitment to their family. But this sho…
/r/MensRights23/10/11 01:43 AM
2

I disagree with Paul that the traditional ideal of manhood involved men unthinkingly doing whatever women or society told them to do. At least in Australia strong manhood involved a certain independence of mind and leadership within the family.
/r/MensRights20/10/11 08:01 PM
10

Honest answer: because straight men don't see trannies as women.
/r/MensRights13/10/11 12:19 PM
2

On the positive side, at least Penny Nance did base some of her argument on the importance of fathers in the family. That's a lot more male friendly than those who argue that fathers are dispensable.
/r/MensRights10/10/11 08:41 AM
2

It sets out clearly the problems that arise if women leave family formation too late.
/r/MensRights08/10/11 02:06 AM
2

But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's one thing to oppose the "man up" slogan if it's being used in ways that harm men or society. But appeals to masculinity don't always have negative connotations. They can be a call to a man's strength to help him overcome obstacles and to achieve in life.
/r/MensRights05/10/11 09:39 PM
0

But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's one thing to oppose the "man up" slogan if it's being used in ways that harm men or society. But appeals to masculinity don't always have negative connotations. They can be a call to a man's strength to help him overcome obstacles and to achieve in life.
/r/MensRights05/10/11 09:39 PM
1

At least it's interesting. I think she's wrong though to equate modernism with masculinity. I suspect just as many men feel alienated from aspects of modernism as do women. Modernism is a product of ideology and technology rather than a genuine expression of masculine values.
/r/MensRights17/09/11 12:03 PM
3

In her 20s, she spent a lot of time with "bastards and arseholes" Modern girl. The thing is, she says, people are essentially selfish, so why pretend otherwise? "I think I am a selfish person." In what way? "In the way most people are. I think of what works for me first." Unsalvageable modern girl. Unlike her, she says, her man is a proper grown-up. Pathetic unsalvageable modern girl.
/r/MensRights12/09/11 11:05 AM
0

Alanna, Some of your arguments don't logically follow. For instance, to say that there is no absolute proof for something doesn't mean that there is no proof at all. If your standard is absolute proof then you won't be able to believe in the existence of anything at all - you'll become a radical sceptic. Second point. It was you who claimed that the problem with masculinity was that it might exclude gay men. I responded that 98% of men shouldn't be expected to give up something meaningful in ord…
/r/MensRights01/09/11 08:29 AM
0

I didn't say at all that the standard of manliness was arbitrary or irrational - quite the opposite - I believe that there is an objective masculine essence that men are connecting to in their lives. What I did concede is that there is no absolute test of proof for the kind of masculine values that an individual or society holds up as a masculine ideal. That there is no absolute test doesn't mean there is no test at all. What I find silly is the idea that the average man has to give up something…
/r/MensRights31/08/11 12:48 AM
0

Why does the test for something have to be absolute? If that were true it would be impossible to make a statement such as "That is a clean house, whereas that is a dirty one". After all, no house is absolutely clean. It's true to say that when we describe something as "manly" we are asserting a kind of value. We are saying that X characteristic is particularly associated with men and we find it to have moral excellence. There is no absolute proof that this assertion is true (no walking outside a…
/r/MensRights30/08/11 11:42 PM
1

ThePigman, your scientism doesn't work very well when it comes to this issue. After all, science has confirmed what all traditional societies believed - that there are hardwired differences between men and women. We are different in our hormones and even in the structures of our brains. Maybe you should justify to me why such scientific evidence should be ignored for the ideological purpose of making our sex not matter.
/r/MensRights30/08/11 10:04 PM
0

ThePigman, your scientism doesn't work very well when it comes to this issue. After all, science has confirmed what all traditional societies believed - that there are hardwired differences between men and women. We are different in our hormones and even in the structures of our brains. Maybe you should justify to me why such scientific evidence should be ignored for the ideological purpose of making our sex not matter.
/r/MensRights30/08/11 10:04 PM
0

No, concepts of manhood are remarkably similar across cultures and time. There will be differences when the work men do in society differs. For instance, men who live together in a military barracks tend to evolve concepts of masculine honour in a way that men who sell things in shops don't - and that's to be expected. But most traditional cultures managed to independently come to a sense of masculinity that they did not hold to be arbitrary at all, but something that expressed an inner core of …
/r/MensRights30/08/11 09:58 PM
-1

I disagree with you. There is a masculine essence that men succeed in cultivating to a greater or lesser degree. It is this that makes us spiritually men or not. The wimp might be male but he is not a man. Yes, an appeal to masculinity can be used to manipulate, but that doesn't mean that masculinity itself is false - just that we have to discriminate between worthy and unworthy appeals to manhood.
/r/MensRights30/08/11 12:22 PM
-2

if you are an adult homo sapiens with a body full of y chromosomes you are being manly. I'm curious as to why you would say that. Is there really no masculine ideal for men to strive for? What about courage, for instance? Is a man who stands up for himself not more manly than a man who timorously takes orders?
/r/MensRights30/08/11 10:47 AM
2

Men have emotions (as expressed in the art men have created) but we are not on average as emotional as women.
/r/MensRights22/08/11 01:27 PM
5

Exactly right. Most men of my generation in Australia were not circumcised. So it's a non-issue here. An intact penis is just regarded as normal.
/r/MensRights07/08/11 02:07 AM
0

popoi, The state of Victoria is in one of the world's worst bushfire zones. It's something that's taken very seriously here. The issue of how resources are used to fight the fire, how the different emergency services are coordinated, and how evacuations are planned can have tremendous real world consequences. She should not have been having her hair cut, going to the pub or spending time with a biographer. Even if she chose to delegate, she should still have been closely supervising the situatio…
/r/MensRights31/07/11 01:04 PM
1

Good comment, but one thing to mention here is that we're talking about men whose marriages are breaking up and who suspect deception. So the 37% probably wouldn't hold as an across the board figure. But, certainly, it seems that men who have been served with a child support notice, and who are in any way uncertain of paternity, ought to get the DNA test.
/r/MensRights31/07/11 05:18 AM
0

It's a bit ridiculous to post this now, I think. Disagree. It's big news here in Victoria right now. And you have to remember that when Christine Nixon was first appointed there was a lot of fanfare about how she as a woman was going to do a better job than her male predecessors. And no-one is claiming she had to take control. But you'd think she would take more interest in what was happening during what was arguably the worst disaster in the state's history. She had a haircut, went out to dinne…
/r/MensRights31/07/11 03:19 AM
2

Incredible. The attitude seems to be "better for men to be deceived and not know about it".
/r/MensRights31/07/11 03:05 AM
1

Glad you weren't ripped off by those women. But the problem with the vasectomy strategy is that you then don't get to have children. Most men, myself included, aren't going to go that way. Better for us, I think, to insist on the right to DNA tests and not to be held responsible if the test is negative.
/r/MensRights21/07/11 10:00 PM
15

It's about feminists trying to control the terms of female sexual liberation. Feminists want women to be "liberated" to pursue relationships for sex alone. But this then changes the culture of what men and women select for. If you're selecting for marriage you'll consider not just physical beauty but also intelligence, loyalty, compatibility etc. If you're selecting for romantic love you'll have an idealised image of the opposite sex you're looking for (men will seek "loveliness" in women). But …
/r/MensRights19/07/11 09:31 PM
8

If one believes the excuse feminists make "DNA does not make a father, diapers are more important", then permanent Baby switching is not a problem at all. Yes, that's the double standard here. There are feminists, including feminist men, who argue that the biological connection between father and child doesn't matter and that men shouldn't be concerned about paternity fraud. But then when a couple of mothers are given a child that is not biological theirs to breastfeed for just one day it's thou…
/r/MensRights18/07/11 01:39 PM
4

I would have thought that today the choice of women to do paid work is a far easier one to make than the choice to stay at home. In other words, your choice to work is a secure one, what's less secure is your real world ability to choose to be a stay-at-home mother. So why be so anxious if what you want to do is go out to work?
/r/MensRights17/07/11 09:23 AM
14

The title of your comment suggests that gender equality requires the abolition of gender roles. I don't agree with that. Even if you are someone who doesn't like gender roles, you should be able to admit that it's possible to have such roles "in balance". And what the two commenters you cited were complaining about is that the roles were/are not in balance.
/r/MensRights17/07/11 09:17 AM
1

Anything to open up choice for women, it seems.
/r/MensRights16/07/11 04:21 AM
3

It's amazing, isn't it? Feminists keep claiming to be for equality. Yet they keep writing artiles along the lines of "I'm a woman, I have morally superior status, you're a man, shut up, listen and don't interrupt". The feminists who write these articles don't come across as egalitarian in their personalities. They seem to need to express arrogance.
/r/MensRights14/07/11 11:28 PM
10

He is trying to sever the connection between fatherhood and biological paternity. Feminists are going to love this as it increases female choice over family arrangements - but at the expense of men. The men's movement is right to protest.
/r/MensRights14/07/11 12:07 AM
2

This is where she and her mates think MRAs are coming from: Sorry, can’t beat your kids, or your wife, and if you do you’re going to have to leave the home and still fulfill your support obligations. You can’t just act like a king and, if that fails, take your ball and go home. Right, so we're all wife beaters who used to get away with it but now have lost our privilege, have to leave home and still pay child support. Feminists like her have no idea - their minds are warped by the ideology they …
/r/MensRights11/07/11 11:14 PM
1

She needs to "look up" to the man That's a good way of putting it. Why would a woman put herself in the care of a man she felt superior to? It makes no sense. She needs to feel that he is someone worthy. You do not yield to inferiors. I know that goes against a lot of formal thinking when it comes to relationships. I don't think it's even something that the average man wants to hear - he just wants happy fun times with a woman. But nonetheless I think it is part of the relationships dynamic.
/r/MensRights10/07/11 06:57 AM
3

Is there an equivalent guide to men for women, or do men not operate under the hivemind that women apparently do? I'm not sure women need a guide as much as men do. You have to remember that many men have gone through the experience of hearing women say one thing and then watching them do something else altogether. For that reason, it can take a while for men to figure out how to be successful with women. Some of the insights of game can act like a sort of shortcut in this process. Remember too …
/r/MensRights10/07/11 06:44 AM
3

I thought at first it was an antifeminist parody. But then I noticed it was posted at a legitimate feminist website. So it seems to be for real. Again, I ask myself, who wants to relate to women like this?
/r/MensRights10/07/11 03:14 AM
7

I imagine that women who are treated that way develop hatred and contempt for men as a gender, because of how they are treated by those men. Some of these women seem to get to their mid-20s and start to feel confused. But remember that many of these girls are chasing unattainable alphas anyway. It's not like they're saving themselves for true love with a boy next door.
/r/MensRights10/07/11 01:56 AM
1

Problem is that there does exist an assumption in some powerful quarters that men and women are the same. The parliament of Sweden, for instance, has announced this to be the case. Therefore, when our sex is still seen to matter (e.g. a small pay gap) it is regarded as a consequence not of natural sex differences but of sexism, old boys networks etc - with the state then being brought in to get rid of the distinctions.
/r/MensRights10/07/11 01:02 AM
4

This whole incident has shown everyone just how divergent feminism has become Wasn't it just a couple of months ago that international feminism was off marching on slutwalks? Now we're being lectured to about how sexually scared and vulnerable women are and how men must modify their behaviour to fit into women's anxieties. It would be nice if feminists did, at least, acknowledge the mixed messages they have been sending.
/r/MensRights10/07/11 12:52 AM
12

Agree. I don't like the overall ethos of game either. But game resonated with many men because it explained certain aspects of female sexual attraction. I think the wise thing to do is just to take the useful insights without buying into the larger program.
/r/MensRights09/07/11 12:47 PM
3

I knew a guy once who was in a tempestuous relationship with a very unpredictable young woman. When they argued not only was he sent to sleep on the couch but the dog took his place in the bed. Even as a young, naive guy I used to think that was a bit of a slap in the face. BTW, I agree with the author that you're only likely to make things worse for yourself by letting a woman dictate such arrangements. It's not a good way to win respect from a woman.
/r/MensRights09/07/11 10:36 AM
2

That's the point I made in my blog post on this news item: http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2011/07/sex-disparity-ok-only-when-men-are.html
/r/MensRights09/07/11 04:00 AM
2

Just don't get into the mindset of trying to make yourself appear harmless to women. Do that and you go on the "friends" ladder rather than the "boyfriend" one.
/r/MensRights08/07/11 06:42 AM
3

V.good but you need a second stanza in which lift girl goes on a slut walk and a third stanza where she goes out clubbing and sucks face with a tough looking guy she's just met who turns her on.
/r/MensRights08/07/11 06:37 AM
13

How can anyone try to relate to women like this? Makes me glad I'm no longer in that kind of milieu.
/r/MensRights08/07/11 04:44 AM
1

that men must provide, rather than parent, and be sexually aggressive, while women are to be provided for, stay home with children, and be sexually submissive. Men's role as fathers was not traditionally only to provide, as fathers also had an important responsibility in socialising their children.
/r/MensRights07/07/11 11:32 AM
3

It's a mistake to think that the first wave was somehow pure compared to the others. One of the early critics of feminism was Eliza Linton. She described Lady Monson, a feminist of the 1850s, as an "uncompromising man-hater". In the 1860s she addressed feminists as "you of the emancipated who imitate while you profess to hate".
/r/MensRights07/07/11 11:28 AM
3

I lol'd when I read this: In my single days, I always offered to pay on the first date. It’s not because I’m old school or trying to impress. (Okay, maybe a little of the latter.) It certainly has nothing to do with trying to establish a quid pro quo. I think men should offer to pay on the first date for another reason: the enduring economic disparity between men and women. Is that not ridiculous? I'm a traditionalist guy myself, so I always paid. But the women I was with were also traditionalis…
/r/MensRights04/07/11 03:26 AM
2

This is how Kia Abdullah describes her relationship style: I am certainly guilty of this type of truculence. I react against all forms of dependence, stressing time and time again that I am independent and autonomous. During the course of my most recent relationship, I felt a constant need to prove that I was smart, secure, strong and self-sufficient. I was fiercely competitive and felt a relentless need to prove that I was right: a need that almost emasculated the man closest to me. In short, I…
/r/MensRights03/07/11 12:06 PM
0

Makes me glad not to be associated with that kind of politics.
/r/MensRights30/06/11 10:02 AM
3

It will just allow well-established and well-funded feminist groups to cherry pick areas in which men have a numerical advantage and bring legal challenges. It will also be used to override those areas of life in which natural sex distinctions are manifested in society.
/r/MensRights30/06/11 09:57 AM
1

Isn't this a gay rights rather than a men's rights news story?
/r/MensRights30/06/11 09:51 AM
1

As interesting as it may be - it's not directly related to MR.
/r/MensRights28/06/11 03:00 PM
2

Can't agree with you here. If you follow the orthodoxy and believe that autonomy is the highest good, then yes you will think of abortion as a litmus test of a good society. But for those of us who are less orthodox in our world view, it appears very differently. It appears more as an unnatural overturning of a woman's protective instinct toward the unborn life in her womb. In other words, for some of us our society has too casual a view of abortion.
/r/MensRights28/06/11 12:04 PM
11

This happens more than you might think in Sweden. In the Arstaberg preschool in Sweden they dress up the boys in princess costumes. And at the Freya school they have sex and relationships classes in which sperm are no longer described as active in the fertilisation process and in which male and female genitalia are not allowed to be described as complementary.
/r/MensRights26/06/11 09:21 PM
-5

You're not taking this in. People know that men can be good parents. That is not in dispute. Nobody is arguing, or is likely to argue, that men should not ever be allowed to be parents. But the position you are putting is this: "A man can be a good parent but his position in the family is a dispensable one". If men and women were really, truly, to believe this, then there is no way that you wouldn't have massive changes to family life. More men would walk. More women would go it alone. Men would…
/r/MensRights26/06/11 08:48 AM
2

It's not a question of whether men can be parents. Everybody acknowledges this. It's a question of whether men are needed as parents. This is what is in dispute. If the answer is no, then the consequences are radical. It is the fact that most men and women don't really believe that fathers are dispensable that keeps the whole show on the road.
/r/MensRights26/06/11 08:32 AM
0

Want people to take men's issues seriously while you party with these guys? In my experience, the most politically correct people will damn you for the slightest infractions anyway, e.g. "You think women occasionally fabricate rape accusations? Why, you must be a .... sexist!" It took guts for the early men's rightists to ignore the stigma and bring the arguments into the open. So, if you don't like the white nationalist stuff, then either argue against it or ignore it, but I wouldn't be too sen…
/r/MensRights26/06/11 08:26 AM
-5

DeboweCan, Maybe instead of cussing you should think things through. It's not women who are being pushed out of family life. The link between mother and child is not under threat. It's fathers who are being marginalised. And gay marriage, whilst not the first nor the only reason for the marginalisation, is yet another step toward fathers being treated as an optional element within the family.
/r/MensRights26/06/11 08:13 AM
-10

Sorry, I disagree. Gay marriage will further undermine the role of men in the family. Why? Because if two women can marry, then the role of men as fathers and husbands becomes, in an official sense, optional. The state is declaring: a family doesn't need a man in it to enact the role of husband and father. Furthermore, once you have gay marriage the definition of marriage changes in a way that won't be helpful to men. The traditional understanding of marriage was based on the idea of two distinc…
/r/MensRights26/06/11 06:43 AM
-3

The F Roger Devlin article is about women and relationships. Devlin has written a number of these essays. They're worth reading.
/r/MensRights26/06/11 02:18 AM
9

The odd thing is that since doing this, I seem to do better with women Well, that's predictable. No woman is going to put you on the "friends ladder" when you're a bit distant/hostile. You'll either be on the boyfriend ladder or none at all. Young men get raised with the idea that all women spend their lives terrified of violent men and so the young men try to learn to reassure women by presenting themselves as harmless or kind or easy going or non demanding. It's a big mistake. It's not that wo…
/r/MensRights26/06/11 01:22 AM
2

I think you reach a point at which you realise that if you are cultivating the masculine virtues it's not because it's going to be appreciated by women but because those are the right kinds of behaviours for a sense of your own integrity. In other words, there is not necessarily a correlation between what you need to do to uphold the best of being a man and what you need to do to attract women. They are, in part, different skill sets.
/r/MensRights26/06/11 01:12 AM
1

It's a big problem for single income families like my own. My wage has stagnated but costs have risen, particularly housing costs due to the ability of dual income families to bid up the price of housing. In other words, the idea of a living wage is disappearing.
/r/MensRights22/06/11 10:16 PM
9

Why can't we be equal and different? Good question. I think the reason why that statement isn't accepted (I think it should be) is that feminism has drawn a lot from the liberal intellectual tradition. In this tradition the key good in life is thought to be autonomy, by which is meant the right or freedom of the individual to self-determine. This sounds nice, but logically it means that whatever impedes us from self-determining is a limitation on our freedom that has to be overcome. We don't get…
/r/MensRights21/06/11 09:10 AM
1

one's "right" to not be offended by a boy in a dress shouldn't trump one's right to express themselves. There is no unlimited right to express yourself. If you were to try to express yourself by dancing naked on my front lawn, you'd face an angry me followed by a chat with a police constable and then a magistrate. It is the boy's "right" to wear a dress to a school dance which is minor. Is it really detrimental to his life outcomes if he, shock horror, might actually have to wear some pants?
/r/MensRights19/06/11 10:15 AM
2

A boy wearing a dress does not intrude upon others in a substantial way. Really? Isn't the whole point to intrude? Why else would he do it? I'm a teacher. I've attended a whole lot of school debs. It's taken very seriously by the young people involved. They look forward to it for years, spend a lot of money getting dressed up, have all their family there. It's a celebration of coming of age for young men and women. And it's very much in its nature a gendered event. The girls are trying to look a…
/r/MensRights19/06/11 01:04 AM
1

Yes, it's refreshing to read that fathers played a positive role in human development.
/r/MensRights18/06/11 11:13 PM
2

Nice to have the role of fatherhood in human civilisation recognised, but the comparison of hunter gatherer societies to feminist family life is a bit difficult to take. The Tasmanian Aborigines were hunter gatherers and their society was not only strongly patriarchal there was also a sex based division of labour within the family, with the men focusing on long range hunting. Parts of it read as junk science.
/r/MensRights18/06/11 10:41 PM
4

I'm still finding it difficult to get upset about not having the right to wear a dress to school.
/r/MensRights18/06/11 07:44 AM
0

They ain't no ladies.
/r/MensRights18/06/11 07:22 AM
-2

You'll have to count me out on this one. It's reasonable for a school to set a dress code which is distinct for boys and girls. If this boy really feels the need to wear a dress (why?) I'm sure there are alternative schools which would cater to his needs. Remember, too, that these kind of school proms are important rites of passage for young people; no need to intrude upon them by having either girls or boys dressing in drag.
/r/MensRights18/06/11 07:17 AM
-1

A man can think that a woman is nice and still find her romantically or sexually attractive. But for women, especially those in their late teens to mid-20s, nice men are sometimes put into the "friend" rather than the "boyfriend" category. It's not that such women don't like or don't want to spend time with the nice men in the friend category, they just don't see such men as potential sexual partners. So what can nice men do? I don't think such men can change their personality. But they can be a…
/r/MensRights17/06/11 09:50 AM
2

I liked this comment to the article: They're better than us at everything, but somehow, we manage to oppress them. We must have some hidden talent somewhere. We cop it from both sides. We earn more money which makes us oppressors. But we are worse at earning money and are therefore dufuses who can't do anything right. Truth is women are just as good at self-destructing. What about all the female teachers and prison guards who ruin their careers, their families and their reputations by following …
/r/MensRights14/06/11 09:19 PM
2

But then women get older and get upset that men don't check them out anymore ("Why have I suddenly become invisible?"). Probably what she wants is some sort of formal agreement with the political idea, whilst still wanting men to check her out (or the right sort of men anyway). Better not to be too sensitive about this kind of stuff.
/r/MensRights14/06/11 09:46 AM
1

Don't have that problem at all. I married an apolitical woman. She's just not interested enough in politics to get upset. I'm assuming your wife is either more political or has taken some women's studies courses.
/r/MensRights14/06/11 09:42 AM
7

Yes, progress is being made. Recently a female columnist here in Melbourne ran a column about the average man being a wife beater. You should have seen the comments. About 95% were from men citing statistics about domestic violence. Political debate isn't so one-sided anymore. Practical results will follow if the pressure is kept up.
/r/MensRights13/06/11 02:45 AM
3

The men's rights movement is having an impact. She wouldn't be ceding ground otherwise. Let's keep it going.
/r/MensRights11/06/11 01:41 AM
3

That's the key point. It was only during first wave feminism in the 1800s that women started to routinely get custody of the children when the parents separated. Note too that when men had this advantage they did not routinely abuse it and the rate of divorce was very low.
/r/MensRights08/06/11 02:55 PM
7

It was inevitable that as the movement grew that attempts would be made to coopt it. It's a question of whether the rank and file of the movement will go for the New Agey stuff or not. I suspect not. I don't think it fits the life experiences of most men. The idea that an age of male domination is passing into a glorious age of collaboration just won't resonate with men who've been through the modern relationships churner.
/r/MensRights06/06/11 12:37 PM
3

Favourite comment from I hate men. A woman there responds to complaints about men just wanting sex and being badasses: Oh dear - sounds familiar. I'm 40 now with 3 children - the dangerous/useless ones have always fascinated me and the stable/boring ones don't. I am absolutely convinced now that ALL MEN are bastards - the only ones that aren't are the less attractive ones and they don't behave like bastards because they don't get enough opportunity So she finds the good/stable men boring, will o…
/r/MensRights05/06/11 12:23 AM
2

Yeah, the same. I watched it again. It's tongue in cheek .... I think.
/r/MensRights02/06/11 01:18 PM
2

Please tell me this is a parody.
/r/MensRights02/06/11 12:57 PM
9

I don't agree that children aren't rewarding. In fact, my regret is not having had more. I spent some time as a bachelor before becoming a father. To me, being a father is the natural, comfortable, default setting.
/r/MensRights31/05/11 09:45 AM
3

I don't know at all if this is helpful or not. But the one guy I know who is divorced is doing OK. How? He remarried and sends his new wife out to work. Her income is used to pay the child support of his ex. They manage to get by on this arrangement. I think your situation is evidence that the no-fault divorce system can be very unjust. If a woman really wants to get out of a marriage when the husband has done no wrong, she should be willing to finance her own future life. It should be assumed t…
/r/MensRights29/05/11 06:24 AM
0

If no Western man has been accused of raping a woman in Oslo for five years (a city of 1.5 million) doesn't that mean that the feminist aim of changing the mainstream masculine culture there is misguided and unnecessary?
/r/MensRights28/05/11 11:20 PM
1

The assumption you make is that masculinity and femininity are not real qualities that men and women aspire to express in their lives. That is why parents do instinctively encourage their children toward masculine or feminine behaviours. It's true that parents might err by doing this too crudely or by trying to force a certain type of gender expression on a child who is not meant for it. But that doesn't mean that parents should reject a more sophisticated and tailored effort to encourage health…
/r/MensRights22/05/11 11:53 AM
3

a) It's not uncommon for women to have a temporary dip in libido after a baby - partly due to hormonal changes, partly due to tiredness. She shouldn't get too stressed about this. b) Women in a group are sometimes their own worst enemies. Your wife was given some very bad advice. c) My response would be to calmly but firmly spell out how important the sex was to remaining connected to her and to family life. d) Don't feel too defensive about needing sex. Men make a lot of sacrifices for their fa…
/r/MensRights22/05/11 05:39 AM
5

The title "She fears you" is going to miseducate young men. A man whose foremost thought in relating to women is to make himself appear harmless is not doing himself or the women he is with any favours. He needs instead to cultivate self-confidence, masculine charisma and boldness.
/r/MensRights17/05/11 09:44 PM
1

Take one of the more amusing-but-horrifying examples of unironic, unself-aware masculinity worship... So I'm only allowed to be masculine if I somehow make it ironic? I find this pitiable. The Marcottes can only play at being something rather than really being it.
/r/MensRights16/05/11 09:51 AM
3

The "zeta" male is presented as a social rebel. But what he is doing is following an established liberal orthodoxy. The liberal orthodoxy states that the overriding good is autonomy (i.e. self-determination). Our sex is not something self-determined but is predetermined. Therefore it has to be made not to matter in society. The zeta male is just following along this orthodox path of viewing masculinity negatively as an impediment to human "freedom" - just as feminists reject femininity for women…
/r/MensRights12/05/11 02:04 PM
4

This feminist has written a post in which she describes stopping intercourse with her boyfriend of 9 years because she wants to be independent of men and intercourse makes her emotionally dependent: i have written here before, mostly for the benefit of the young uns, that its extremely important that you never, ever, become dependant on a man, for any reason. mostly i meant financially, because thats a big one, HUGE in fact, and its so easily fallen into. but this one is new, and it surprised me…
/r/MensRights12/05/11 09:49 AM
2

Because their partner often holds a more domestic role they don't achieve as much status in the eyes of society Does that really matter? Most people don't have much status in society, nor is it something that confers a deep level of meaning in life. For most people, what matters more are the rewards of family and personal relationships.
/r/MensRights08/05/11 03:57 PM
1

I'm a traditionalist MRA who believes in traditional gender roles. But the problem I have with answering your question is that it's framed in a biased way. You seem to assume that equality means men and women doing the same thing so that if I reject men and women doing the same thing that I therefore believe in male superiority. That's not how I see it. I believe in something like a masculine and a feminine principle or essence which we as individual men and women aspire to connect with and expr…
/r/MensRights08/05/11 02:50 PM
1

Good response.
/r/MensRights05/05/11 09:57 PM
2

This is not defined by their sex Why mightn't it be? Isn't it possible that there are sex distinctions which are relevant to achievement in certain fields?
/r/MensRights05/05/11 09:49 AM
9

Cislum, I think it goes like this. We live in liberal societies in which the main aim of politics is to maximise individual autonomy. Feminism is the attempt to apply this principle, of maximising individual autonomy, to the lives of women. This leads to two types of objection to third wave feminism. The first comes from liberal men who accept the overall liberal project. Why would they oppose feminism? Because feminism claims that men deliberately organised to make themselves privileged at the …
/r/MensRights05/05/11 09:46 AM
1

It's supposed to be grimly humorous (and kind of is), but too nihilistic for me.
/r/MensRights04/05/11 12:49 PM
1

Gender is a product of both biology and society. It's not going away as it's partly hardwired. It makes sense then to have positive ideals of what is masculine and feminine rather than to try to overcome these altogether.
/r/MensRights03/05/11 09:04 AM
1

The dictionary definition doesn't tell you much. What do feminists mean by equality? Which sex do they think is unequal and why? What solutions do they propose? Why do some feminists end up hostile to men? Why do so many feminists exaggerate statistics regarding violence? Why do they filter statistics so that only men are perpetrators and only women victims? Why do some feminists think that it's wrong for women to be feminine? Why do some feminists oppose men having their own associations? Why d…
/r/MensRights22/04/11 11:39 PM
1

Bloody hell! That's the foulest feminist law yet. C'mon Mexican men - protest!
/r/MensRights21/04/11 05:11 AM
2

Batshit insane feminist Batshit insane man-hating feminist
/r/MensRights21/04/11 05:07 AM
1

I'm against women serving as combat troops and female conscription as a matter of principle. But I agree that some of the commenters in that thread are trying to have it both ways. They want women to have the right to be combat troops without the responsibility of being subject to conscription.
/r/MensRights20/04/11 11:53 AM
2

Feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. That means it's the attempt to apply rules of "equal autonomy" to the lives of women. But since it's assumed that women have been historically oppressed and therefore disadvantaged, this means that feminists are allowed to maximise autonomy for women without regard for that of men. So there are two problems with feminism. First, it has a skewered view of what equality means. It is assumed that autonomy is the good that has to be made equal. B…
/r/MensRights14/04/11 11:20 PM
7

Well, I'm a traditionalist man supporting a wife at home. A couple of points are worth making in response to this article. First, looking after young children is no easy task. In fact, for the first six months it's a job that ideally requires more than one person. So it's unfair to describe women at home as not doing anything. Second, the two income arrangement doesn't necessarily make life easier for men. It means that men are expected to do more of the domestic work after they get home from th…
/r/MensRights14/04/11 11:07 PM
1

They should watch the documentary that aired on Australian TV last night. Called "Every family's nightmare" it was about a rape accusation made against a 15-year-old Perth boy called Patrick Waring. Waring had chatted to a girl in a park and exchanged phone numbers. The girl later accused him of a violent, 20 minute long rape in the busy public park in the middle of the day. He spent a year in jail awaiting trial, whilst his parents bankrupted themselves hiring independent experts to test the ev…
/r/MensRights13/04/11 11:48 PM
2

As I understand it, DNA evidence constitutes corroborative evidence. If you take away the need for corroborative evidence, then you could be taken to court on a rape charge solely on the basis of what the woman alleges happened.
/r/MensRights13/04/11 11:29 PM
0

Not bad. The best bit is around 2:30 when he talks about feminists wanting to cherry pick the good bits of a man's life. A quibble - he gets the divorce rate wrong - it's more like 30% than 75%.
/r/MensRights12/04/11 08:18 AM
2

I find it strange that they think they can use the strong arm of the government to force men into a role that they themselves claim is oppressive Yes it's odd. We get told over and over that the traditionally female role is the "non-human" one forced on women by the patriarchy. And yet feminists then turn around and try to sell it to men. There doesn't seem to be much awareness amongst feminists of the mixed messages they are delivering.
/r/MensRights12/04/11 06:16 AM
3

We should be careful how she frames the issue. She wants to limit the debate to "men can be either providers or else they can be more actively involved by taking over more traditionally maternal practices." That might suit the feminist agenda, but there are other options. Men can also be actively involved by playing a role in socialising their children, by maintaining a distinctly paternal relationship with them, by imparting worldly knowledge and helping with their education, by providing physi…
/r/MensRights12/04/11 05:53 AM
5

It'd make more sense if the protagonist was a young bachelor Good point. Agree.
/r/MensRights11/04/11 05:52 AM
9

I dunno. It's hard to comment when only the bare outline of the plot is available. But this film seems better than the older style romcoms in which, to prove that love conquers all, the geeky but nice guy wins over the girl from the sporty, wealthy hunk. Those movies might be feelgood, but they mislead men. At least in this one there seems to be some better advice about how to present yourself well to the opposite sex.
/r/MensRights11/04/11 04:33 AM
2

If a girl points her finger at you you're fucking gone. Particularly if you don't have the support of your principal. If some ridiculous accusation is made (and they are), a principal who wants you on staff might well choose to support you. But if the principal isn't supportive, then yes a 15-year-old girl can end your career on the flimsiest of grounds.
/r/MensRights02/04/11 11:46 PM
6

She’ll go on about the importance of feminism even though you may actually know more about the history of the movement than she does. That's true. I've had experiences of debating with very passionate feminists who got basic facts wrong. You'd think they'd have in depth knowledge of a topic they were so committed to, but they were content with little sound bites they'd picked up from the mass media.
/r/MensRights28/03/11 09:12 PM
1

I don't know if I should even bother responding. But if there are some young men reading, they ought to know it doesn't usually happen in such an abstract way. It's a lot messier. If you're a man you might find a particular woman attractive, you'll get a bit flirty with her, see how she responds and if you think it's positive then you have to be a bit bold in closing the deal. A lot of men are not bold enough. Redditaly, why would you interpret this as being a "pervy wanker"? What did you think …
/r/MensRights22/03/11 04:54 AM
1

But how do you get to go on the dates? You have to make a judgement as to whether there's interest and then you have to make a move - and there are plenty of women who expect the man to make the move boldly. I do see the purpose of the law but I hope it doesn't further disadvantage the more conscientious/sensitive/intellectual type of men by making them more cautious.
/r/MensRights22/03/11 12:05 AM
0

Big deal? Whether there's a dad around or not doesn't seem like an issue to you?
/r/MensRights21/03/11 07:22 AM
1

It's newsworthy because it's part of a general trend for women not to reject family formation outright but to defer it to some vague time in their 30s whilst they pursue casual sexual relationships with unsuitable men instead. When they finally think it's time, they have fertility problems and/or they find that the available supply of men has declined because the more family oriented men have already married or have adapted and become players or have opted out. And the "solution" of using IVF to…
/r/MensRights20/03/11 08:17 PM
-2

Sorry, I'm strongly opposed. It's an anti-family measure and an anti-male measure. Instead of a man having a distinct and necessary role within the family of providing for his wife to enable her to have children, the state is taxing the man's earnings and taking over the role in order to foster women's independence from men. The man, instead, is to perform a more unisex maternal role, but one that is indistinct and therefore unnecessary/optional. Family life is to become undifferentiated and sub…
/r/MensRights20/03/11 08:09 PM
-1

I think it's extraordinary that it's the state which decides who looks after a child and for how long.
/r/MensRights20/03/11 09:40 AM
2

Problem is that men do need to be dominant, particularly when it comes to relationships. This needs to be made very clear to young men. Waiting for a woman to take the lead is a very poor option.
/r/MensRights20/03/11 09:26 AM
4

It all depends. If someone says "man up" as a way of discouraging men from tackling political problems, then I'm against it (e.g. if a man is trying to raise the issue of unfair custody laws but is told to man up and just accept it). But if it's more generally an encouragement to a man to be strong in dealing with life's problems then I think it's necessary as a way of preparing men to deal strongly with some of the burdens that adult men will inevitably carry in life.
/r/MensRights20/03/11 09:24 AM
3

Just let him be a little boy.
/r/MensRights20/03/11 02:55 AM
3

How about this bit: Objectification deprives women of their power to define what is beautiful, what is sexy, what is desirable, and places this power in the hands of the (male) viewer/judge. They seem to believe that it's up to women to define what men might find beautiful or attractive.
/r/MensRights17/03/11 07:05 AM
2

One reason it matters is that women have a tendency to bond sexually with the most alpha guy they've been with. So the more men that a woman has been with, the less likely it is that her current partner will fill the role of desired lover. There are also statistics showing that for each additional sexual partner a woman has had before marriage the more likely it is that the marriage will end in divorce.
/r/MensRights12/03/11 10:20 PM
1

Kollontai is interesting. She promoted a set of policies in Russia after the revolution which are not too different to what happens in Sweden today. She was a modern in the sense that she thought women should be made independent of men. Therefore, she wanted women to be careerists; she opposed romantic love; and she thought that women should be supported to raise children by the state rather than by a husband or family. She wanted the fact of being a man or woman to be made not to matter, to the…
/r/MensRights12/03/11 10:09 PM
1

My thoughts exactly. A couple of the points on the list were OK. But the opening ones were disasters.
/r/MensRights12/03/11 12:18 PM
2

I dislike the site and I think the idea of a schedule is misconceived, but... I thought her 6 point list was pretty good. It's similar to what I'd tell my son.
/r/MensRights12/03/11 02:46 AM
1

Couldn't agree more. I should have made it clearer that it's the feminist view, not my own, that evil masculine qualities led to the abuse of women. If that's the feminist view then they need to explain why they are sexually attracted to those selfsame qualities.
/r/MensRights09/03/11 08:02 PM
3

She's edging closer to an admission that she's romantically attracted to alpha qualities in men and doesn't respect the nice, shy guys. The problem is that this doesn't fit in well with aspects of feminism. If sex distinctions are just social constructs then why would women like herself go for socially dominant men? If the aim is equality then why go for socially dominant men? And if men are supposed to give up their evil masculine ways which have led to the abuse of women over the millennia etc…
/r/MensRights09/03/11 12:13 PM
29

Note the inconsistency when it comes to gender. If men do well at something the idea that it's because of a natural sex distinction is rejected. Instead, we get told that such distinctions are merely socially constructed and that men do better because of some sort of unfair advantage granted them by discrimination or sexism. But when it comes to something negative, like war, then suddenly sex distinctions are real and biological, so that the answer is to put women in charge. The much touted idea…
/r/MensRights07/03/11 08:46 AM
1

I have mixed feelings about this. I know that there are some phobias you can't do much about, but it doesn't look good if a guy is scared of a cockroach. Fair enough to point out the double standard, though. It's not right for women to deny the existence of sex differences when it suits them and accept them when it suits them. They should be held to a consistent standard.
/r/MensRights04/03/11 12:09 PM
2

Matrifocal societies are not even particulalry male-friendly. You have no role as a father in these societies, but at best a role as an uncle. You continue to live in your mother's house supporting your sisters' children. It's true that less is expected of you as you're not responsible for supporting a family of your own, but that makes such societies less dynamic than paternal societies. I've written a post of my own on the failings of matrifocal societies here
/r/MensRights26/02/11 11:54 AM
3

The author couldn't be more wrong about this. Western style patriarchy suppressed female hypergamy. In a truly hypergamous society, older men with resources would marry several much younger wives. This would leave numbers of younger men without the same motivation to live productively. The successful Western system of patriarchy was to have people pair off at a relatively young age in a system of monogamy. This meant that men could marry prior to building up resources and it meant that the highe…
/r/MensRights15/02/11 08:29 AM
1

I'm in a traditional marriage and find it very rewarding. My wife doesn't expect me to work a double shift. She stays home and looks after the kids and the house and I go out to work to earn the money. There's a clear division of labour. I don't think it's wise to work a 12 hour day and attempt to enjoy a traditional family life. Most women will want you to spend time with them and the family. Nor would I accept being the breadwinner and then having to do 50% of the household stuff. That's clear…
/r/MensRights14/02/11 10:51 AM
2

Didn't like it. It put femininity in a bad light and I like feminine women. I don't want an androgynous society, but rather one in which there's a healthy dynamic between the masculine and feminine.
/r/MensRights10/02/11 10:54 AM
1

You really have to be careful using these terms. They're loaded. For instance, many moderns take "equality" to mean that there are no group differences, therefore where group advantage/disadvantage exists it must be due to oppressive discrimination that must be rooted out by the state. Fraternity is taken to mean not a natural fellow feeling based on kinship or a shared communal identity, but a political commitment to state redistribution policies. Liberty is taken to mean not freedom as a man, …
/r/MensRights10/02/11 10:43 AM
8

They have a divorce section but not a marriage or family section?
/r/MensRights05/02/11 07:26 AM
1

She has a political agenda. She's worried that if people accept that there are natural differences that women might use that as a reason to stay at home rather than be careerists. See here for some quotes.
/r/MensRights03/02/11 08:43 AM
3

I have a baby daughter. My thoughts on this are: a) raise her in a warm, loving family that she'll want to emulate later in life. Women who have a good relationship with their fathers often seem to select more stable kinds of men to form a family with. b) when she's older point out the dangers that do exist but not to the point of scaring her - some women are naive about human nature and put themselves in unnecessarily dangerous situations. c) stress the inherent value of the feminine in life, s…
/r/MensRights02/02/11 07:00 AM
1

What I dislike about these articles is that they assume that there are hordes of men who would cry if only they were allowed to. I just don't think that's true. It's just not an issue for most men.
/r/MensRights25/01/11 08:56 AM
1

When the penis is erect you don't even see the foreskin. So what's the issue? Are they part of a nudist colony or something?
/r/MensRights22/01/11 11:14 PM
1

Excellent comment.
/r/MensRights21/01/11 10:28 AM
2

The Tony Porter site is absolutely disgusting. It uncritically accepts feminist patriarchy theory and blames all men for domestic violence. It even insists that men deny the statistical reality that there are particular stressors for domestic violence (mental ill-health, alcoholism etc). We are supposed to stop thinking and passively accept a feminist ideology that treats all men as responsible for domestic violence.
/r/MensRights16/01/11 10:11 PM
4

I'd go even further than this. What's needed is to understand how feminist politics leads to the idea that men are "horrible" and that female rage is justified. For this, I think you need to consider some of the assumptions of feminist patriarchy theory. This theory assumes that women have been treated as less than human by a gender system that men as a class established for their own benefit and privilege. If you buy into this theory, then Suzanne Moore's attitude is not only sane, it is logica…
/r/MensRights16/01/11 12:56 AM
2

Neither men nor women "chose" their role. But that wasn't the point. People didn't aim at a self-chosen life but at a good life. And the male role was thought to be the fulfilment of a man's life just as the female role was for a woman. If you think the aim is a self-chosen life, then you're up against it. We don't choose a lot of the things that are most important to us, including our sex, our ethnicity and our sexuality. So if you want a self-chosen life you have to seek to make these things n…
/r/MensRights15/01/11 04:54 AM
2

All being a feminist really boils down to is believing that women and men should be respected and treated equally. No it doesn't. Feminism is one expression of a larger modern movement which treats individual autonomy as the defining human good. So feminism is the attempt to apply this concept, of maximising individual autonomy, to the lives of women. That's problematic. If you want to self-define as an autonomous individual, then you cannot accept that something predefined like your sex has a s…
/r/MensRights15/01/11 02:11 AM
2

You have a very modern view of things. Most men and women until very recent times did none of the things you list. Very few men or women voted, or were elected to office, or spoke in church. Does that mean they were less human than you or I? Is the fact that I go to a polling booth every three years and tick a box what truly defines me as human? BTW, it's not true that women couldn't own or inherit property. Unmarried women and widows could certainly do both. It's true that married women could n…
/r/MensRights14/01/11 05:19 AM
3

I understand the school might have been worried about legal liability for any accidents. So maybe the school head might have had a quiet word to him about going through the process next time. But sacking him? Do you really sack someone for going out of his way to do something fun and engaging with his students? It's an extraordinary overreaction on the part of the school admin.
/r/MensRights14/01/11 03:36 AM
3

It's just feminist patriarchy theory presented to appeal more to men. But no matter how it's dressed up it's false. Patriarchy theory claims that the gender system is designed to privilege men by denying women full human status. Men as a class, it is claimed, use violence against women to enforce their privilege. Therefore, violence against women is held to be widespread and systemic, common amongst all men and embedded within masculine culture. The strategy to combat such violence is to deconst…
/r/MensRights13/01/11 07:54 AM
3

BTW, the feminist who wrote the piece linked to has apparently given up on politics altogether ("Politics and feminism grated on my nerves, and it didn’t pay at all."). She now writes female erotica under the pseudonym Elizabeth Black.
/r/MensRights09/01/11 01:59 AM
17

I did a google search on Trish Wilson. She's editor of a magazine called Feminista. She takes a feminist line on the traditional family, seeing it as a patriarchal, male supremacist institution. On the other hand, she wants to oppose data from father's groups showing that single mother families do worse on average. She's found out that single mother families don't do as badly when the father is still around contributing resources. So she wants an odd combination of things. She wants men to behav…
/r/MensRights09/01/11 01:32 AM
5

What she really wants is for men to prop up female individualism. If she cared about the well-being of children she'd be writing articles about how women might contribute to lowering the divorce rate.
/r/MensRights09/01/11 01:08 AM
2

A feminist is a person...etc You left out part of the quote. The bit which says that feminism is, certainly not about trading personal liberty--abortion, divorce, sexual self-expression--for social protection as wives and mothers So the feminism of Katha Pollitt prefers the "liberty" of divorce to the "social protection" of being a wife and mother. Pollitt is focused here on the feminist aim of maximising autonomy for women rather than on creating a stable culture of family life.
/r/MensRights08/01/11 10:55 PM
3

A feminist is a person who answers "yes" to the question, "Are women human?" So women can be non-human? How does that come about? Is there some particular quality that is held to make someone human or not? If so, what is that quality and what justifies it being the defining point of our humanity? Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. Katha Pollitt might like to admit at this point that most feminists see gender categories as being socially constru…
/r/MensRights08/01/11 10:22 PM
3

Hah! There's some progress at least. Feminists use to claim domestic abuse was the number one killer of women. Now they've dropped it down to number two. Still wildly inaccurate, of course, but maybe the ridiculing of feminist statistics is having some effect.
/r/MensRights06/01/11 12:02 AM
2

The extended quote is this: One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that one without the imminent possibility of the other is unthinkable and impossible. One can know everything and still, at bottom, refuse to accept that the annihilation of women is the source of meaning and identity for men.
/r/MensRights28/12/10 09:15 AM
0

Le sigh. C'mon. Patriarchy theory claims that men have enjoyed easy lives of privilege at the expense of women who were "othered" out of a human existence. It claims too that men as a class use rape and domestic violence to maintain their supremacy. If you don't think that provokes some male hatred amongst feminists, go and read some feminist blogs.
/r/MensRights28/12/10 06:57 AM
6

Problem is that cohabiting relationships have a higher rate of breakdown than married ones do. So it makes little sense to commit to cohabitation rather than marriage.
/r/MensRights28/12/10 06:53 AM
4

Here's something else that's odd about this writer. He is a nihilst of sorts, not believing in a concept of the truth: As a storycatcher I do my best to capture what is out there as the ways in which people perceive their own reality, without thinking that any of those is something weird like 'the truth'. But if there is no truth but only subjective perceptions of reality, then who is he to claim that masculinity is false and harmful? Isn't that a truth claim?
/r/MensRights23/12/10 12:20 PM
2

He writes about testosterone as if it's some kind of toxin and then advises men about the non-masculine place in the world he wants them to adopt. IMO, not friendly to men.
/r/MensRights23/12/10 12:13 PM
3

There are certainly some liberals who would support such a program. In 2005, the President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, raised the possibility that there were more male scientists than female ones because of hardwired differences rather than discrimination. This led to a huge controversy. Time magazine ran an eight page article on the issue. The magazine generally accepted the science of hardwired gender differences, but put forward the idea that scientists might one day be able to "…
/r/MensRights18/12/10 11:11 AM
5

Good question. My view is that the Western establishments are politically liberal. This means that they are committed to the idea that the aim of politics is to maximise individual autonomy, i.e. the degree to which the individual is able to self-define or self-create. But this leaves an important issue. How do you organise a society made up of millions of atomised self-seeking individuals? One wing of the establishment (the right-liberal one) believes that the hidden hand of the market regulate…
/r/MensRights18/12/10 09:04 AM
4

I've written a criticism of Peggy McIntosh's views on privilege: http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-does-privilege-mean-for-liberal.html McIntosh is following the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir. The basic starting point is the idea that the good in life is autonomy. How can we have more autonomy? There are three possible answers. a) We can have more autonomy as men or as whites. b) We can have more autonomy by escaping a predefined gendered or raced identity in favour of a human one. c…
/r/MensRights10/12/10 10:46 PM
1

The article didn't really give that much information. IMO, the "man up" meme is harmful mainly in the context of it being used to deny men the right to criticise the conditions we have been placed in. For instance, when a man tried to initiate a debate about divorce laws but there is an attempt to silence him by someone telling him to "man up". But "manning up" in the sense of building up strength and resilience of character is a good and necessary thing for men. It's difficult for men to succee…
/r/MensRights24/11/10 09:05 AM
1

Good point. I've often thought the same thing myself. A feminist will, in the same article, rage that child care is oppressive and at the same time urge men to devote themselves to it. They don't seem to be aware of the flaw in how they present their argument. BTW, not all women who stay at home to care for children are pill-popping depressives. My wife tells me that it's been a joy to look after our daughter and that she wouldn't have missed a moment of it. I suspect that some feminists would b…
/r/MensRights24/11/10 08:59 AM
10

To be honest, I think you have to distinguish "patriarchy" from "feminist patriarchy theory". Pretty much all societies have been patriarchal in the sense that men ruled the tribal councils. So it's not an insult to state that "society X is a patriarchy". The problem with feminist patriarchy theory (FTP) is the specific claims it makes about the position of men and women in society. The claim of FTP is that one group of people invented an artificial category for themselves ("men") in order to do…
/r/MensRights08/11/10 12:43 PM
2

There have been any number of attempts to create a "racy" kind of female magazine here in Australia. All of them have bombed. I've just had a look at "Who" magazine, which my wife reads each week. There are no pictures of shirtless men. In fact, there are no pictures of men showing any flesh at all. The number of pictures of women in underclothes? Six. Number of pictures of women in high cut dresses/low cut tops? Twenty-three. Number of pictures of men in suits and tie. Nine.
/r/MensRights07/11/10 06:34 AM
1

But infinitely thirsting, if the women don't register that they're turned on, then they're not turned on. Look, if women were as visual as men, then there would be industries out there to cater for this, just as there are for men. Again, how do you explain magazines? Women choose to buy magazines that are full of pictures of attractive women. If women really got turned on visually by the opposite sex to the same degree that men do, then female magazines would be very different - they would be fu…
/r/MensRights06/11/10 11:19 PM
2

He's a bit of a duffer. Men have appreciated the feminine for aeons. He should take a look at the history of painting, poetry and music. As for the "worship" stuff, that's just likely to put women off. When a man supplicates, it puts him beneath the level of the woman - which runs counter to female hypergamy.
/r/MensRights06/11/10 08:28 AM
1

ignoring the fact that women are also visual creatures Yes and no. I agree that there are women who appreciate the male form. But the average woman isn't as visual as the average man. Consider for instance what tempts men and women to buy magazines. Men's magazines lure men in with pictures of busty women. Women's magazines are more likely to have pictures of female celebrities on the cover.
/r/MensRights06/11/10 03:39 AM
2

I wrote a short piece on this when it first hit the news. Swedish social policy is based on the idea that our sex is a social construct and should be made not to matter. For that reason they also allow female topless bathing in some public pools because they believe that female breasts and male breasts should be treated the same. And so on. Personally, I think the attempt to repress or deny sex distinctions is both oppressive and unscientific. It's better to find the more positive aspects of a m…
/r/MensRights06/11/10 02:57 AM
1

You have to wonder what will keep the work ethic going in Sweden. Men there are no longer providers, the state is. It's the state that gives out the goodies and gets the credit. It's the state and the employer which grant women time and money to have children. If there is less in it for men to earn a wage, then over time men will be less determined to do so.
/r/MensRights05/11/10 11:17 AM
2

Well, in my experience it's still the case that men have to have some traditionally masculine qualities in order to succeed in life. I hope the mother isn't neglecting those qualities, otherwise she's not adequately preparing her son for the challenges he will face as a man both in his public and personal life.
/r/MensRights03/11/10 08:16 PM
0

It's just the usual feminist/liberal stuff about how masculinity and femininity are oppressive social constructs. Personally, I'm more inclined to believe that feminism/liberalism are oppressive social constructs.
/r/MensRights03/11/10 11:47 AM
1

The issue is that women were encouraged to think that they were simply entitled to get what they wanted. The question always asked was what men were supposed to do for women. There was no consideration of what women brought to the relationship. That included the idea that a woman could simply deny any sex to her husband and that the man should just accept the situation. That runs against all previous models of marriage in which part of the exchange between men and women in marriage included the …
/r/MensRights01/11/10 09:45 PM
1

It doesn't work well when family formation takes place after age 30 - particularly for women. I've known too many women who used their "sexual liberation" in their 20s to ignore family oriented men and go for the edgy bad boy types instead. Then sometime in their 30s, they realise it's last chance time for marriage/children and find their options limited. They either end up unmarried and childless or else they rush into marriage in a panic with men they don't think are great matches. BTW, when i…
/r/MensRights01/11/10 09:17 PM
1

I do not understand why social conservatives believe that the solution is to do away with the freedoms that women already have. But you have to define what you mean by freedom. Usually it's understood in the liberal sense to mean "autonomy", i.e. a freedom to self-determine or self-define. But that has caused many problems for men and for society. For instance, if a woman is told to aim for autonomy, what does that mean for relationships? First, she's likely to string out a single girl lifestyle…
/r/MensRights01/11/10 09:55 AM
-1

They see the relationship between the sexes as adversarial, not cooperative. Now I've heard everything. A feminist claiming that conservatives see the relationship between the sexes as adversarial, not cooperative. After 100 years of feminist inspired gender war. Good god. The feminists could have won things forever if they hadn't throttled men so hard in the late 80s and early 90s. You could hardly breathe back then without some feminist accusing you of being a rapist, or a wife beater, or a wo…
/r/MensRights01/11/10 09:32 AM
2

You won't get an argument from me about avoiding teen pregnancy. But I would point out that children don't necessarily make you poor. In Germany, for instance, researchers found recently that the group most likely to avoid poverty are intact families of father, mother and children. They had only a 7.7% risk of poverty. For childless couples the risk rose to 14%. And for singles the risk rose to 38%.
/r/MensRights31/10/10 10:05 AM
1

Bettina Arndt deserves top place on this list. She's an Australian writer who has copped heaps in the press for supporting men. Her heart really is in the right place. She has pointed out why feminists are wrong on the wage gap, why feminists are wrong on the work gap, and why feminists are wrong on women withholding sex from their husbands in marriage (this last one provoked shrieks of rage from the feministi).
/r/MensRights31/10/10 06:26 AM
2

Well, I can cite a survey showing that the happiest marriages are those of the non-feminist variety: "adherence to traditional beliefs and practices regarding gender seems to be tied not only to global marital happiness but also - suprisingly enough - to expressive patterns of marriage ..." http://ozconservative.blogspot.com/2007/04/what-kind-of-marriage-makes-women.html
/r/MensRights30/10/10 10:49 AM
2

MRAs are looking to kill off the old Traditional Gender Roles that made men slaves to women. My wife and I follow the traditional gender roles. Exactly who does more work varies over the course of the year and according to how old the children are. But it's a better deal for me than the new gender roles. According to the new roles I'm supposed to go out to work for eight hours and then come home and do another shift of traditionally female work. Whereas under the traditional roles, I go out to w…
/r/MensRights30/10/10 02:57 AM
1

The article is good but superficial. Good because it reaffirms masculinity and gender difference in a positive way. Superficial because it's written from the perspective of a woman who seemingly only relates to men as casual boyfriends and therefore doesn't require the more serious masculine qualities from men.
/r/MensRights29/10/10 10:19 PM
3

It's not women that the MRM has to attract but men. And I think more mistakes are being made there than in regard to women. The MRM would have more success with men if it asked the question "What can we do to defend the important role of men in society?" Instead, it's mostly assuming that the male role is inherently oppressive and so seeking, just like feminists, to abolish it. Since that aim fits in with the feminist and liberal agenda it might have some success in the political class. But amon…
/r/MensRights29/10/10 10:15 PM
1

I don't get your last point. What's sad is that we no longer defend the ideal of a living wage for men. That way neither of them would be overworked. Things have gone backward for both men and women over the past 40 years.
/r/MensRights29/10/10 07:07 AM
1

Now why would feminists be encouraging men to be stay-at-home dads? Isn't it because they view the male career role as being privileged? And therefore they think the female interest will be served best by men doing the family stuff whilst women go out to work? What is the MRA answer to this? Surely it's not to agree that the role of men is simply to prop up female individualism - which is how many feminists see the role of men. I think the answer has to be that the feminist valuation of things i…
/r/MensRights29/10/10 07:04 AM
1

There's a balancing act for dads here. You need to maintain the close relationship but also encourage traits of resilience and strength as your son gets older.
/r/MensRights26/10/10 09:58 AM
2

Personally, I think that's a hellish view of marriage - the idea that it's a temporary contract to be either torn up or renewed according to your convenience after X number of years. I don't think you're ever going to get to a successful culture of marriage that way.
/r/MensRights25/10/10 07:51 AM
2

Trollking, great summary of the article. You hit all the right points. The one that struck me the most was this one: By steering men toward a particular path, Sweden redefined the nature of choice. Oh yeah, they "redefined" the nature of choice alright. They redefined it to mean that you can choose whatever the feminist state wants you to choose.
/r/MensRights24/10/10 08:14 PM
7

A very silly article. The gist of it seems to be that women are prepared better for marriage because they invest more in the planning of the wedding itself. You're not going to get better husbands by convincing men to buy wedding magazines.
/r/MensRights24/10/10 10:34 AM
0

The reply was to flatteredbut.
/r/MensRights23/10/10 11:36 PM
5

Yes, I'm Australian, but the figures I quote are all from the US. There's a divorce calculator in the post I linked to which factors in a few of the variables relating to divorce. My own risk of divorce after 10 years of marriage was 10%.
/r/MensRights23/10/10 11:35 PM
7

Why don't you think about why a young Western man would see things this way? I remember thinking something similar when I was in my mid-20s. The pickings were pretty slim if you wanted something more than casual sex. Women didn't seem to know how to act or present themselves to men if they wanted to inspire love. And I don't think this is a random development. Women at that age are still strongly influenced by the feminism they've been brought up with. The message feminism gives young women is t…
/r/MensRights23/10/10 10:26 PM
7

Women are more concerned about being competitive with men, rather than complementing them. That's an excellent point the author of the article makes. He's also right that a high divorce rate is going to make men apprehensive about marriage. One quibble, though. The divorce rate in the US is not 60%, it's closer to 40%. And for many men, the real risk of divorce is considerably lower (e.g. it depends on your level of income, age, education). See here.
/r/MensRights23/10/10 09:56 PM
1

I was born a slave in the matriarchy. I'm just old enough to remember something different. In the 1970s in Australia there was still a pride in Australian manhood as part of the culture. It was a very encouraging climate for boys to grow up in. But by the 1980s the balance shifted toward denigration of men and masculinity.
/r/MensRights23/10/10 04:57 AM
2

I loved the following comment: "I give it three months."
/r/MensRights22/10/10 11:13 PM
4

It's wrong to call this racism. People generally want to perpetuate their genetic lineage. That's true of non-whites as well as whites. I know it's not considered good form to state this openly, but this is a particularly prominent issue for whites as our phenotype (the way we look) is mostly governed by recessive genes. Therefore, a white woman who has children with someone who has no recessive European genes will have children who will look nothing like her or her family. It's improperly coerc…
/r/MensRights21/10/10 09:33 AM
6

Once you accept feminist patriarchy theory, as so many feminists do, then it inevitably becomes an anti-male movement. Why? Patriarchy theory claims that gender has been constructed to maintain an unearned male privilege at the expense of women. From this follows the belief that: a) Men as a class have used domestic violence, rape and sexual assault against women to maintain their status in society. b) Men have not sacrificed for women throughout history but have had easy lives of privilege at t…
/r/MensRights20/10/10 08:30 PM
5

Excellent point. Women are still being assumed to be the victims in this scenario, even when it was a man who potentially had his life torn apart by a false accusation.
/r/MensRights20/10/10 11:34 AM
7

In this case, he's not being fair to the woman. She made it clear to him that she wants children. He has to make it very clear to her that he can't make that commitment. She's now 33 and needs to get on with things if she wants to have a family.
/r/MensRights20/10/10 09:15 AM
0

He needs to learn to give a woman some "pushback" every now and then. Women will push against their boyfriends/husbands to find the point at which he will push back. It's almost like a testing procedure. If you're temperamentally a laid back guy, that can be a problem, as the woman has to push very hard to get the response she's looking for. Why do women do this? I think it's got to do with hypergamy. Most women look for a socially dominant man, someone they can look up to. That then makes it ea…
/r/MensRights19/10/10 08:10 PM
2

Some MRAs might want to get rid of traditional gender roles. I'd prefer to defend them against the androgynising effects of feminism. Men and women are not blank slates to be slotted into interchangeable roles by the feminist state.
/r/MensRights19/10/10 08:00 PM
2

You don't think a positive defence of a man's role within the family is supporting men?
/r/MensRights19/10/10 08:24 AM
3

But that's a different issue. You're arguing that divorce laws give too much power to women over men. I agree. But the article linked to above is making a different point, namely that without a man in the family you are much more likely to have children living in poverty. You're also likely to have higher taxes and more poorly socialised children.
/r/MensRights19/10/10 08:22 AM
-1

Well, apparently she's a lesbian, so I'm not surprised she wants to break down gender distinctions.
/r/MensRights19/10/10 07:41 AM
2

He rehashes this claim: domestic violence was the single biggest risk factor associated with disease, disability and even death for Victorian women aged 15 to 44. It's amazing what some people will believe. Tim Harford, a BBC statistician, looked into this rather incredible claim last year and declared it to be a rogue statistic. The leading causes of death for Australian women in this age bracket, as you would expect, are car accidents, cancer and suicide. Far from being a "leading cause" of de…
/r/MensRights18/10/10 08:14 AM
2

A feminist, Connie Tolleson, commented on this article at Alternet as follows: As a 2nd wave feminist, I decided way back in the early 70's that for me, a woman, to define what "maleness" was would be as arrogant as it had been for men during the previous 4,000 years to define women (and God). I've been waiting for 40 years for men to re-define themselves and it turns out that men are apparently not capable of defining masculinity for themselves in socially appropriate ways. LOL. We get to "self…
/r/MensRights17/10/10 06:28 AM
3

I don't want to push this exchange further than it needs to go, so I'll make just one more specific point. You wrote above that posts urging men not to marry are in protest at the way that men are treated in marriage/divorce and therefore do concern rights. But that then means that those advocating a "marriage strike" will argue for their position, not just by attacking specific modern divorce laws, but by rejecting the worth of marriage itself and the value of men connecting themselves to women…
/r/MensRights15/10/10 02:34 PM
2

I am actually quite socialist economically and very liberal socially. Why should I not make comments that make that clear? I'm happy for you to make that clear. And it's reasonable too that you as a liberal should argue against the traditionalist/conservative approach to men's issues. But I think you go too far when you claim that traditionalists/conservatives can't be MRAs, that the two have to be separated. Truth is there wouldn't be an MRM if not for the conservative/traditionalist men, mysel…
/r/MensRights15/10/10 01:10 PM
0

Because they aren't about Men's Rights. They are about Men's Privilege. Talk about announcing yourself as a liberal. That's the kind of claim that feminists make. And, no, you cannot go from that statement to then assert that you are upholding some kind of neutral, free choice position. You cannot make alternative positions to your own morally illegitimate, and then claim that you are taking the non-coercive side of the debate. BTW, why do you call yourself ignatiusloyola? Does it have to do wit…
/r/MensRights15/10/10 12:11 PM
1

But why separate them? There is a traditionalist/conservative current within the MRM as well as a liberal one.
/r/MensRights15/10/10 11:27 AM
4

Keith Edwards, who runs these college sessions, believes in feminist patriarchy theory. He thinks that masculinity is an oppressive social construct leading on to violence against women. From his thesis: Fear of femininity is so central to the traditional definitions of masculinity that these rigid expectations of men are defined and reinforced primarily through misogyny and homophobia. Men socialized through this traditional version of manhood learn that misogyny and homophobia are two primary …
/r/MensRights13/10/10 10:03 AM
3

The West grew and prospered before feminist versions of gender equality became public policy. As for Iceland, didn't that country have a disastrous banking collapse recently?
/r/MensRights13/10/10 08:49 AM
1

I could have put that better. What I meant was that a woman can make a financial claim on her ex after a break up whether she is married or in a de facto relationship. So not getting married doesn't leave you better off financially should the relationshp break down.
/r/MensRights10/10/10 09:15 AM
4

How many husbands do you know whose shit is pushed out into the garage? most women i know wont allow a serious computer in the house My wife tried to make me give up computer work at home for years. She tried really hard, got really narky. But you just have to stand your ground. Give ground on things that don't matter to you, but hold firm when it does. She'll come round over time. I have a study full of my stuff. It's my room, my space where I do my own work. I work hard to support the family, …
/r/MensRights10/10/10 12:31 AM
2

A good marriage brings much happiness; a bad marriage is hell. That's the predicament. So how do you try to make yours a good marriage, unlike those of your mother? In part, it depends on you being a good judge of character. How has she behaved in previous relationships? How does she treat other people? Does she have a moral core, or is there a selfish ruthlessness? And what is her attitude to marriage and relationships? Does she have a feminist inspired chip on her shoulder? Has she spent years…
/r/MensRights10/10/10 12:17 AM
2

I know there will be an ever-diminishing place in that nest for me or my dreams. Not necessarily. Look, despite feminist propaganda, men are not optional in family life. A family doesn't usually function as well without the security and stability provided by a husband and father. You will be needed. Your children will instinctively look to you and reach for you. I'm not sure why you write that your dreams are at stake. Are your dreams set against some aspect of family life? It's true that there …
/r/MensRights09/10/10 11:37 PM
1

There was chivalry. Even as recently as the 1970s, men would have let the women go first. The feminists of that decade aggressively killed it off by attacking men who held open doors etc. The women in that office building should be attacking their feminist mothers not the young men.
/r/MensRights09/10/10 11:12 PM
1

That's a liberal approach to men's rights. The idea is that gender will be made not to matter in a more consistent way. If women are protected from some of the consequences of an androgynous society, it is thought that chivalry or cultural sexism is to blame. I'm not a liberal and it's not a vision of society that appeals to me. Nor do I think such a post-gender society has much of a future. If Western society still survives at all it's because large numbers of men don't follow the "I'll define …
/r/MensRights09/10/10 10:41 PM
0

The research surprises me. There are a lot of satisfactions in being a husband and father.
/r/MensRights09/10/10 08:04 AM
1

All societies have been patriarchal in the sense that the tribal councils were run by men. It's true, though, that some tribal societies in Africa and Asia have been matrifocal and matrilineal. That means that inheritance passed through the female line and that households were formed around the mother's place of residence rather than the father's. The reason for this is that in these societies female sexuality was not closely regulated. Therefore, men could not be sure of any children belonging …
/r/MensRights08/10/10 09:21 AM
1

Trolleyfan, come on. The editors and journalists are usually left-liberals (in the Murdoch press they are right-liberals). Therefore, what gets presented to the public generally has a left-liberal bias. From William McGowan (Colouring the News, 2002): By siding so openly with the cultural left ... the press has compounded the estrangement and anger of much of the electorate
/r/MensRights07/10/10 11:23 AM
1

Although I agree that the left doesn't offer men much, I wouldn't put too much faith in the mainstream "conservative" parties. The left and right agree on fundamentals. Both subscribe to the same underlying liberal philosophy. That's why feminist policies, once implemented, aren't challenged by either side of politics. Both sides identify an autonomous, self-defining life as the highest good. Unchosen, group characteristics such as our sex are supposed to not matter in the liberal universe; it i…
/r/MensRights07/10/10 11:15 AM
1

Lacuna, you keep trying to present feminism as neutral when it is no such thing. Here is Jens Orback speaking as a minister in the Swedish government: The government considers female and male as social constructions, that means gender patterns are created by upbringing, culture, economic conditions, power structures and political ideologies. Maybe your feminist friends do think that gender is a mixture of biology and construct, but the feminists in power disagree. They believe it is entirely a c…
/r/MensRights02/10/10 06:33 AM
2

Lacuna, what you forget is this. Liberalism states that the good in life is to be self-determined. However, our sex is something that is predetermined. Therefore it is seen by liberals as something limiting to the individual. Liberals therefore want to make the fact of being a man or a woman not matter. To do this they have to assume that men and women are "blank slates": that masculinity and femininity are just social constructs and that it is natural to think of men and women as being just the…
/r/MensRights02/10/10 05:18 AM
2

That's a cop out. Let's say that there was a fair dialogue between men and women. 20% of men wanted to stay home and 80% of women. Would feminists then be satisfied? Hell no. Why? Because these choices are perceived as limiting female autonomy. Measures would then be taken to try to alter the choices being made by men and women. This is exactly what is happening in Scandinavia. When parental leave came in there it was taken up more frequently by women than men. So the laws were changed to requir…
/r/MensRights02/10/10 04:12 AM
1

But this definition begs the question of what is meant by equality or justice, therefore it's meaningless. For instance, is it equal and just if a husband chooses to go out to work and a wife chooses to stay at home to care for her children? My answer is yes but a lot of feminists would answer no. That's because feminists and I have different concepts of what represents the good in life. If you have an orthodox liberal view (as most feminists do) that we should aim to be autonomous individuals, …
/r/MensRights02/10/10 03:39 AM
2

Feminism really is a society wide shit test. In some ways I think that's right. It's almost like a test of social skills. You're supposed to genuflect to feminist ideas in some contexts whilst completing ignoring them in others. Those who are overly conscientious or sensitive or who are intellectual enough to follow through principles consistently tend to lose out.
/r/MensRights02/10/10 03:18 AM
18

Feminism is the belief that individual autonomy is the key good in life (i.e. self-determination, independence); that we are autonomous when we have money, power, status; that men have organised to keep autonomy for themselves at the expense of women; and that human equality and social justice therefore requires that traditional gender roles be overthrown in favour of similar, non-gendered roles for men and women. There are a whole lot of problems with the theory. First, there's an assumption th…
/r/MensRights02/10/10 12:05 AM
3

That's the highest figure I've ever read. It's difficult to get accurate statistics, but one university study found that 17% of wives admitted to having cheated and 25% of husbands.
/r/MensRights01/10/10 05:40 AM
15

Notice, though, the contradictory messages men are getting in all this. We have feminists telling men that masculinity is either outmoded or oppressive to women, but then we have here a young woman who clearly finds masculine men the most sexually attractive (she praises them for being bold, aggressive, sporty, muscular etc).
/r/MensRights01/10/10 05:28 AM
1

Well put. Asking for specifics is the way to go.
/r/MensRights29/09/10 07:05 AM
1

Understood.
/r/MensRights29/09/10 07:03 AM
0

Be careful accepting this advice. Feminists gave women similar advice in the 1980s and 90s. Marriage was outmoded, they said, and women were better off being independent. Although few women rejected marriage outright, many were influenced to postpone it. Inevitably, when these women found out how important family is, many were bitterly angry with feminists. Family is important to men too. Having a wife who loves you and looks up to you and depends on you and having children of your own is a lot …
/r/MensRights29/09/10 04:25 AM
4

Women are more likely to perceive slights - often from other women. This is where it helps to accept sex distinctions. As a husband, when your wife has had a falling out with a female friend over something that appears trivial to you, it would be more maddening than it needs to be if you expected women to behave just like men.
/r/MensRights26/09/10 01:06 AM
2

Bingo.
/r/MensRights24/09/10 12:40 AM
-8

Women were never the property of men. Feminists claim that over and over but repitition doesn't make it true.
/r/MensRights23/09/10 10:43 PM
3

Hilarious. They want men to "man up" to accept an androgynous role in society. People who believe that sex is just a social construct are appealing to men's innate sense of masculinity in order to get them to accept a more genderless role in society.
/r/MensRights23/09/10 10:35 PM
-2

He made a case against marriage because he thought for religious reasons that men and women should be chaste and should focus only on personal salvation. It doesn't read well. Although it's interesting to read of complaints against women penned so long ago, he ignores the happiness and fulfilment many men find in being fathers and husbands, and the achievements of these men in successfully perpetuating a lineage and a tradition. Better for us to focus on how to restore a healthy and stable famil…
/r/MensRights23/09/10 08:36 AM
-4

Could be indicative of low self-worth, i.e. a form of self-sabotage. But I'm not sure I'd agree with you that it isn't normal. It's not normal by the standards of men. But then the tests that men apply to women are different. A man wants to be sure that his future wife will be faithful and that she's pretty enough so that he can be sexually fulfilled with her and that she'll be a good mother and so on. But a woman has different tests. The hidden truth is that a woman romantically and sexually "s…
/r/MensRights22/09/10 04:48 AM
0

it is not unheard of for women to behave slightly differently than what is true to themselves until after the marriage...to then let it all hang out. No doubt, that could be it. But there's another alternative. Men tend to think of themselves as being the same person before and after marrying. In fact, they assume/hope that there'll be the same "lover" relationship but within a marriage. But for women there's a wrenching change. Women see two different forms of being: the girlfriend and the wife…
/r/MensRights22/09/10 04:33 AM
0

I agree with the tactic of flipping things on her and saying "No. It's my way or the highway". That's good. But why pursue an annulment straight away? Maybe this guy is so laid back that the only effective way for her to bait and challenge him is to talk about taking his stuff. Personally, I'd stand up to her in a calm but very self-confident way and see what happens. She wants to know that the guy is committed to her and the marriage and is able to assert himself (so that she can look up to him…
/r/MensRights22/09/10 03:39 AM
-2

I wouldn't panic yet. I think you'll find a large percentage of men go through this early in a marriage. The newly married woman challenges her husband. She doesn't do this just to be mean or bitchy, but because she wants to test her husband's ability to be the dominant one. She can't do this without a challenge. Don't in response try to be placatory. Don't be chumpish. Don't bully or blow up in anger, either. Be firm and self-confident. If she bluffs about ending the marriage, call the bluff. D…
/r/MensRights22/09/10 03:01 AM
10

What does Newsweek want men to do? Transform ourselves to better fit the feminist future imagined for women. We are to fit ourselves into the space allowed us by the state and by certain business interests. They don't want us to be men, they want us to be serfs. A docile urban peasantry. I prefer the days when men insisted on a living wage and when the family was organised independently of the state and of business. There was more dignity for men in this. For the state to determine how much time…
/r/MensRights21/09/10 01:26 AM
3

Any medical benefits not easily obtained by washing yourself and not having unprotected sex with HIV positive women?
/r/MensRights20/09/10 08:25 AM
2

Interesting that female circumcision is considered a barbaric evil to be stamped out at all costs but male circumcision is being promoted as healthy.
/r/MensRights20/09/10 01:02 AM
2

Agreed. What's the rate of divorce for a man with a good job and a good education. If I remember correctly it's about 25%. It can go even lower if you choose a woman with a low number of previous sex partners and with a strong church commitment. So divorcing three times in quick succession isn't an expected outcome.
/r/MensRights16/09/10 08:55 AM
6

Notice how histrionic the journalist gets. He's trying to push non-reality onto us and knows that he has to push hard. The non-reality is that there is no sexual connotation to women wandering around a locker room filled with naked male athletes, even if the woman is as sexed up as Ines Sainz.
/r/MensRights15/09/10 10:15 AM
1

Mistyriver, I read your intro piece again and was disturbed by it. You are setting up a dichotomy between "good" boys who are brought up to be girlish and "bad" boys who are goons. I don't think this is deep thinking and I don't think it advances the conversation much. Boys don't need to imitate girls to be good. A man can be robustly masculine without being a goon.
/r/MensRights12/09/10 11:27 AM
3

My generation of men were brought up to be too nice. The ruling idea was that men were evil oppressors, so in order to redeem ourselves we had to be as inoffensive as possible. But this just meant that the more conscientious men became too bland and inexpressive to appeal much to women. I think you'll find that there is going to be a backlash against the inoffensive, nice guy ethos.
/r/MensRights11/09/10 07:05 AM
4

Motivations may change but reality stays the same. Women can't dictate that reality suit their purposes. We all know what a certain species of women want. They want to spend their 20s following an independent girl lifestyle, having casual affairs with unsuitable men, and then when they hit their 30s they want to find a Mr Right to marry and have children with. But you can't just demand that this happens as your birthright. The truth is that this pattern of life punishes the more family oriented …
/r/MensRights09/09/10 09:37 AM
1

I agree that marriage is being reconfigured, and society is being reconfigured, in ways that are likely to make marriage increasingly less relevant and appealing to men. Even so, I married eight years ago and am glad I did so. A good marriage is a great blessing in life, even though it does require sacrifices, work and commitment. I like being a husband and father. I like the fact that my family depends on me for its well-being. I like the fact that I'm raising some well-adjusted children to car…
/r/MensRights08/09/10 09:56 PM
3

In Scandinavian countries, men were found to work more hours than women. That's what I was trying to explain on another thread. Sweden isn't a men's rights paradise. The genderless parenting style there means that men do the traditional male work and then come home and are expected to do half of the traditional female role as well. It's a male double shift.
/r/MensRights06/09/10 08:21 AM
0

There's no doubt that marriage laws need to be reformed. But I don't agree that men are better off not marrying. First, married men end up on average wealthier in spite of the extra costs. They have more incentive to build up wealth. Second, if you marry a traditional woman (like I did) you get the house kept and healthy meals prepared for you. So there is less domestic work to do compared to a single man. Third, having kids is fulfilling. Having a little daughter who smiles joyfully when she se…
/r/MensRights05/09/10 08:33 AM
0

I'd be careful accepting the claims being made in this article. a) You don't need to take on a maternal role to bond with your child. You're likely to be a proud dad as soon as baby comes out. b) Nine months in the child care role is not a holiday from work. Infants are demanding. Sometimes the work is rewarding, sometimes it's tedious. The more masculine type of men are not likely to find it a better option than paid work. c) Let's say you do things the way the Swedish state wants you to and yo…
/r/MensRights04/09/10 07:39 AM
2

Ideally the boy should have realised how drunk she was and refused her offer. But as the young woman herself realises, it's not likely to turn out well if girls get very drunk, pretend to a level of sexual sophistication they don't really have and throw themselves at the very men who are least likely to show reserve in such matters. There's an issue of "culture gone wrong" here.
/r/MensRights03/09/10 12:11 PM
2

Great effort by Men's Health Australia to take the issue to the ombudsman.
/r/MensRights03/09/10 11:35 AM
1

It's unlikely feminism will last. It requires a very wealthy society to prop it up. The West isn't maintaining its economic dominance. State debt is rising to the point that some countries are nearing default levels. Eventually the state will be forced out of its "substitute husband" role.
/r/MensRights24/08/10 09:51 PM
2

Crapnovelist, you're showing bias toward women here. If women get paid more, you say it's because they are more motivated and men haven't got their act together. If men get paid more, you complain "we get paid more for the same job" and "Overall, women still make less than men". In other words, you're suggesting that if men get paid less it's their own individual fault, but if women get paid less it's because they are discriminated against. Let me answer your question about wage comparisons betw…
/r/MensRights24/08/10 09:46 PM
2

It's important to understand the logic of what happens in these ethnic minority societies you refer to. If there is no marriage which ties a woman in a faithful relationship to a man, then there is less certainty of paternity. Therefore, it makes sense for societies to be matrilocal and matrilineal. Why? Because a man knows for sure that his sister's children will be closely related to him, but he cannot know this about any children born to women he has been with. Therefore, "fatherhood" becomes…
/r/MensRights24/08/10 12:09 PM
2

The guy who wrote the article is not attacking marriage because it has become unfair to men. He's a believer in polyamory. He's happy for other men to have sex with his wife. He supports his view by pointing to the practices of a few remote third world tribes, such as the Masuo. What he doesn't point out is that men are more marginal in tribes like the Masuo. The older women give permission for sexual relations, men don't live with their wives but stay in their mother's house giving their earnin…
/r/MensRights24/08/10 11:46 AM
1

I read the original article from which the quote was drawn. Can't say I was impressed. It suggested that masculinity is such a problem that it has to be destroyed before something more useful can emerge - this advice coming from a self-confessed butch lesbian feminist. And theoretically it was based on a low-level orthodox autonomy theory in which sexual characteristics are portrayed negatively as limitations to the individual. If we're going to have discussions about masculinity it should be fr…
/r/MensRights17/08/10 11:21 AM
5

Most feminists believe in patriarchy theory. And once you believe in patriarchy theory you're going to end up hostile to men. Why? Patriarchy theory claims that sex distinctions are artificial social constructs created by one group of people ("men") in order to maintain an unearned privilege over the "other" ("women"). All aspects of society are thought to have been created for this purpose, including the use of violence, abuse and rape to control women. A feminist who seriously believes the the…
/r/MensRights14/08/10 11:37 PM
1

I see nothing wrong with the option to have kids while single Really? You don't think a father adds anything to family life? I have the opposite view to you. I think a father's role is critical. What our father does well in his role is of immense help. What he fails to do well makes success in our life so much more difficult. We should be discussing how to be good fathers, rather than asserting that fathers are merely optional within family life.
/r/MensRights12/08/10 01:16 PM
2

but proponents believe that such a policy could very well make a huge dent in the nation's scourge of absentee fathers, especially in the African-American community. But there's no evidence provided for this assertion. What does seem likely is that if you know as a young man that you have an "opt out" from financially supporting the children you father, that there is one less reason to be careful about fathering children. That wouldn't be so bad if the consequences were to fall on the young wome…
/r/MensRights01/08/10 09:27 AM
2

Telarmago, Talk about a posturing reply. If you think what I wrote was wrong then explain why. Don't just throw out little barbs without producing anything of substance of your own. C'mon, be realistic. If men were really allowed to choose not to financially support a child, then who do you think would end up paying? The girls in the ghetto or on the estates? What would they pay with? Wouldn't the taxpayer end up being hit for money?
/r/MensRights01/08/10 08:32 AM
8

Yes, imagine if it were the other way round and a man had stabbed his girlfriend and he and his brother left her for hours to bleed to death, refusing pleas to call an ambulance. It would be thought evidence of patriarchal violence against women, there would be calls for programmes to change the attitudes of all boys and there would be a cry for legal reform if the sentences were too light. At least the uncle spoke up for his murdered nephew.
/r/MensRights01/08/10 02:53 AM
1

Well, I'm going to be a dissenting voice here. I understand the double standard - that women get to choose whether or not to have a baby and men don't. But the solution of allowing men to choose not to be responsible for their children is no real solution if the state then picks up the tab. It'll just end up with me as a taxpaying man being burdened with the support of other men's children. How does that give me rights as a man? Also, we point out time and again how fatherless children are much …
/r/MensRights01/08/10 02:45 AM
1

The author makes a very good point. The Swedish ideal is to make gender not matter. But in relationships it matters a great deal. And so women in Sweden are left complaining that Swedish men are too effeminate and that southern European men are a better option. The lesson for men is not to give up their masculinity too easily, regardless of what the state ideology tells them to do.
/r/MensRights18/07/10 09:06 AM
2

Japanese men were certainly not effeminate pansies when I was there in the 1990s.
/r/MensRights18/07/10 12:58 AM
3

I lived in Japan for over a year. I can't say I ever saw any men hugging or holding hands. I don't know why this idea of men getting touchy-feely with other men gets pushed around. Most men don't want to do it, won't ever do it, and there's is no obvious benefit to men for doing it. So why go on about it? What's the point of it?
/r/MensRights17/07/10 11:32 PM
2

who do you think would be more prone to violence It's the boy who doesn't have a father in the house, no matter what variant of masculinity is shown by the father, who is more prone to violence - by a long way.
/r/MensRights17/07/10 11:28 PM
8

Shrine, that's an extraordinarily negative view of masculinity you're putting forward. You're associating it closely with criminality. You're putting an even worse spin on male qualities than even the most radical feminists would come up with.
/r/MensRights17/07/10 12:31 PM
2

It's wrong for a man to think that he is a good husband because he does most of the chores and earns the money. That's not how a wife is going to see it. The wife wants him to show some masculine traits of dominance. That's how she is going to respect him as a man and feel sexual attraction. This guy has two options. One is to recognise that his wife sees him as a friend rather than a lover and annul the marriage and start over. If he really wants to keep going, then he has to make very clear hi…
/r/MensRights11/07/10 01:50 AM
6

Most likely fake. I don't doubt there are golddigging women out there, but the discussion runs along just a little too neatly and there's no link to the forum from which it was supposedly copied.
/r/MensRights09/07/10 12:05 AM
2

Feminists want to apply the liberal orthodoxy to the lives of women. That's why feminists have so easily become part of the liberal establishment. What's the liberal orthodoxy? It's the idea that you can make radical individual autonomy the organising principle of society. This belief in autonomy is expressed in a number of different ways. Sometimes as "liberation" or "emancipation" (from impediments to autonomy), sometimes as "agency" or "choice" or "independence". But there are problems. First…
/r/MensRights05/07/10 11:16 AM
0

Just recognise your privilege? C'mon, you know full well what that means. It means being relegated in moral authority and political status. It means that acts of discrimination against you are considered legitimate. It means attacks on your position in society are considered justified. I think instead I'll do what men did historically which was to atttempt to act for the good.
/r/MensRights05/07/10 12:17 AM
6

"She'd just have been a burden". Atomicparrot dismisses all the sacrifices women made for men over the centuries. That's as bad as feminists who assume that men spent the past centuries having a good time at the expense of women.
/r/MensRights04/07/10 12:21 AM
-4

You cannot "safely argue" that at all. A chattel is an article of movable property. Women were obviously never considered this way. If there was no offense of rape within marriage in the past, it was because it was assumed that women, on marriage, consented to the conjugal relationship, not because women were considered to be articles of property. It's the same when it comes to property rights. In theory, men were supposed to be the providers, and so on marriage property was held by the husband.…
/r/MensRights04/07/10 12:16 AM
0

Zolty, don't give too much ground. Your white male ancestors worked hard, dedicated themselves to their families and communities and contributed much to human civilisation. You should have a positive regard for what they achieved and for the sacrifices they made. And they did not treat women like chattels. Chattel means moveable property, such as furniture, that can be bought and sold. Feminists say that women were treated as chattels to get an emotional response, it's best not to take these cla…
/r/MensRights03/07/10 07:46 AM
1

Why make autonomy the overriding good? Truth is that you'll never get balance or healthy relationships if you do so. Autonomy means getting to enact your will/choices/agency - and it helps if you have power over others to do so. Relationships formed betweeen people seeking to maximise their individual autonomy aren't likely to turn out too well. Are we really going to make life a competition between men and women for autonomy? Are we really going to assume that men and women have spent the last …
/r/MensRights03/07/10 04:15 AM
1

FingerOfDeath, Maybe I didn't make it clear - I'm not a Swede and I don't approve of what the Swedish Government is doing. I was writing critically. And it's the EU bodies, rather than all of the national members, who are pushing the ideas I briefly described above.
/r/MensRights02/07/10 11:13 PM
-1

I find that difficult to accept. I've raised a couple of kids and it amazed me how early on they showed typicallly distinct gender interests - well before I or anyone else had much of a chance of influencing them.
/r/MensRights02/07/10 11:11 PM
0

Tatertotty, you're obviously not aware of the situation in Europe. It's like this. The Scandinavian governments (and the EU) believe in a feminist "gender equality". What they mean is that women should be equally autonomous. But being a housewife isn't thought to grant women the power of autonomy - after all, housewives are financially dependent on their husbands and housewives do not have direct political power or financial influence. So the idea is to "unisex" things - to make patterns of pare…
/r/MensRights02/07/10 11:02 AM
1

This is from a Swedish feminist called Linnbe in a discussion here at reddit just a month ago: Feminism is very strong here [in Sweden], several male party leaders have claimed to be feminists ... And with this feminist power that I would call quite a bit stronger than the American ... Women [in Sweden] are expected to work and housewives are VERY rare. I don't know anyone that would call herself that, not even my grandparents and their friends. If feminism is just about choice then why are Swed…
/r/MensRights02/07/10 09:00 AM
3

Tatertotty, That's not an accurate account of feminism. Feminism is about autonomy. That means making women independent of men. That's why in a feminist culture women often defer a commitment to family life in favour of a single girl lifestyle. It's why careerism is pushed so hard, as this is thought to give women financial independence. It's why feminists push for paid maternity leave schemes so that women rely on the state rather than their husbands for material support. In feminist Sweden, th…
/r/MensRights02/07/10 07:39 AM
5

You've overstated your point. Most people aren't neutral when it comes to being masculine or feminine. You are not going to find that the sexes will be easily interchangeable when it comes to family roles.
/r/MensRights02/07/10 04:19 AM
7

Third-wave feminism basically boils down to the belief that women should have the right to make their own choices about life; you want to be a female CEO? Great! You want to be a homemaker? Have at it! Now I've heard everything. Third wave feminism assumes, just like all other feminisms, that if women aren't earning the same amounts as men, or aren't represented in equal numbers in the professions, that it's due to sexist discrimination which must then be overturned and corrected by coercive gov…
/r/MensRights02/07/10 04:13 AM
3

Not true. If that were the case then feminism would have limited itself to promoting equal opportunity. Feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. That means that the key good is thought to be radical individual autonomy. And that means that feminism aims to remove whatever impedes individual autonomy from the lives of women. What impedes individual autonomy? First, the influence of our sex, since that is something predetermined, not self-determined. Second, dependence on a husband. T…
/r/MensRights02/07/10 04:03 AM
1

But why call it gender conservatism? Cenk Uygur is part of liberal radio. From wikipedia: "Uygur created the talk show The Young Turks in the goal of starting a moderate liberal political and entertainment show." It's possible to believe, as conservatives do, that there are differences between the sexes that matter in human relationships, without then giving women a free pass when it comes to criminal matters. I think you need a better term than gender conservatism to describe what you're gettin…
/r/MensRights02/07/10 12:52 AM
26

I could accept paying more for car insurance if the principle were applied across the board and women paid more for health insurance. But at the moment the principle seems to be that discrimination is wrong if it benefits men and discrimination is good if it benefits women. And that is flat out unacceptable.
/r/MensRights29/06/10 05:42 AM
1

Cruel reality, There are some men who think it's manly to struggle through individually no matter how adverse the circumstances become. If affirmative action knocks out 90% of male applicants in a particular field, then the aim is to be part of the 10% who win through. If divorce hits 50% of men, then the aim is to be in the half who remain unaffected. If innocent men fall victim to biased sexual harrassment or assault laws, then the aim is to be one of the ones who get through unscathed. I agre…
/r/MensRights28/06/10 12:52 PM
2

anon781, fair enough, but the longitudinal study undertaken by Gartrell has been in progress since 1996 with three yearly updates and has been cited frequently in the literature. We do need to be aware of the presence of advocacy research in the claims that are being made about lesbian parenting.
/r/MensRights14/06/10 12:23 PM
35

The research on lesbian mothers was advocacy research. It was funded by LGBT organisations and undertaken by two lesbian feminist academics. The lesbian mothers were recruited at lesbian bookshops and other meeting places for politically committed lesbian women and asked to self-report their own family outcomes. To give you a sense of the type of academic who put together the research Nanette Gartrell was named one of the ten most powerful lesbian doctors in 2008. She teaches feminist theory on …
/r/MensRights13/06/10 11:25 PM
-2

But as I've stated over and over Sweden does not allow people to choose what to do with their lives. The state there is forcing people to accept one single undifferentiated family role. As for what women want, most young women in the West are brought up to be careerists, which they accept until they are married with kids. Then only a very small percentage want to carry on with full-time careerism. Of the 30 or so married women who have had kids in my workplace there is not a single one who is wo…
/r/MensRights13/06/10 03:38 AM
1

Atomic parrot, wrong on what? That men have been providers? I consider it silly in the extreme to deny that that has been the case in the Western tradition. Editor, I do have a wife who stays home to look after our children. So do the majority of men in the suburb I live in (though there are a minority of women who work part-time and it's not impossible that my wife will return to part-time paid work when our children are older.) What I don't understand is the benefit for men of losing a provide…
/r/MensRights13/06/10 03:13 AM
4

Atomicparrot, you need to be careful how you formulate your positions. You often exaggerate them, making them indefensible. For instance, you write that the "mythical time when men were exalted just for going to a job every day never really existed". That's clearly a false position. My great grandfathers, my grandfathers, my father, my uncles and myself have all lived a lifestyle which you claim is mythical and never existed. What am I supposed to do with this idea of yours? View myself as a myt…
/r/MensRights13/06/10 01:41 AM
-3

But you repeatedly miss the point atomicparrot. Men in Sweden still have to spend their lives working. They have to do this as much as men elsewhere. They just don't get as much credit for it. Nor is Sweden providing for individual tastes. Quite the opposite. In Sweden, they are setting up one undifferentiated role for everyone that is based fundamentally around career not family. Yes, women in preindustrial, agricultural societies did help to provide in various ways - though you overstate your …
/r/MensRights13/06/10 12:06 AM
-3

Men can have it all? Don't be taken in by the heading. Men get much less in Sweden than elsewhere. Men still have to spend their lives working but they get less credit in Sweden for being providers as the state takes much of what they earn as taxes and then the state gets the credit for paying the bills. Men don't get to have a distinctly masculine role in the family as a father; the paternal role has been effectively abolished and replaced with a unisex maternal one. Men in Sweden are still fac…
/r/MensRights12/06/10 11:33 PM
-4

If masculinity is just something we make up for ourselves it's meaningless. And you wrongly assume that I feel bitter. I feel lucky that I'm living a more traditional male lifestyle in Australia rather than the modern feminist one in Sweden. The Swedes are relying heavily on the habits of self-discipline and the work ethic inherited by Swedish men. Once these are gone, there's not much left to hold the Swedish system together.
/r/MensRights11/06/10 05:54 AM
-3

You're changing the argument. A race is not a society. The Aka may belong to an ancient race but that doesn't mean that a tribe identifying itself in a particular way as the Aka with a particular family structure has been around for any longer than recorded history says it has. There are only about 20,000 Aka. They might live a nice life for all I know, but they haven't developed their society either in numbers or culture or technology to any significant extent. They are hardly promising poster …
/r/MensRights11/06/10 05:38 AM
-4

I was the one who stated that it was women who carried their babies with them on their daily adventures. So I didn't feel the need to reply to your second example. I just doubted that men would have strapped babies on their back for long-range big game hunting expeditions or for warfare - two of the main occupations of men in many hunter gatherer societies. How do you know the Aka society has been around longer than any Western society? I doubt if anyone knows for sure how long the Aka have been…
/r/MensRights11/06/10 04:47 AM
-4

Maybe you would really enjoy it and realize what you have been missing all these years We have a newborn in the house. I've spent a lot of time in the past month walking around at night with the baby to help out my wife. There are some nice aspects to this, but it is not a masculine activity. It is not something that connects me to the better or stronger part of my masculine character. Again, in Sweden the role of mothers is not considered important. Career is what is considered important. Swedi…
/r/MensRights11/06/10 03:36 AM
-6

But again you have things entirely the wrong way around. Sweden is not giving people more leeway to act according to their inner nature. Sweden is enforcing one single undifferentiated life path on everyone. Everyone is to make career their first priority, take the same number of months off to perform the same unisex parental role, before returning to the same career path. The bureaucrats enforcing these rules rely on the passive conformity of the mass of the population.
/r/MensRights11/06/10 01:58 AM
-2

as long as divorces are reasonably civil I don't really care I don't think you can maintain a society with such a blase attitude. I hear from men all the time who are understandably spooked by the high level of divorce in Western societies and who are therefore unwilling to take the risk of committing themselves to marriage or fatherhood. Remember it's mostly women who are initiating these divorces. From the male point of view it doesn't look like such a great development.
/r/MensRights11/06/10 01:42 AM
-4

Mandano, you have that strange attitude which says we can make things just however we want to make them. We can reduce the male role but women will still want men just as much. We can have men do the maternal role but men will be just as masculine. We can order society around careers but family will still come first. We can have men do whatever they please but men will still choose to make sacrifices for their families. When do the unicorns start dancing with the mermaids?
/r/MensRights11/06/10 01:29 AM
-5

He gets to spend a few months with his sons when they are babies. That's it.
/r/MensRights11/06/10 01:16 AM
-4

I knew it. I knew you'd cite the Aka men, a small tribe of African pygmies who are best known for being the exception to the rule. The thing is, the Aka might be good at handing round babies, but the lack of specialisation makes them bad parents: "Aka society is very adult-centered in that parents seldom stop their activities to pay undivided attention to their children." Aka men do not perform the socialisation role that men in the West do with the result that children are known to run wild, at…
/r/MensRights11/06/10 01:13 AM
-5

But rates of divorce are high and rates of marriage are low. A majority of children now in Sweden are born to unmarried parents. In 2000, the divorce rate even managed to reach 55%, though it's stabilised now at a more typical Western level.
/r/MensRights11/06/10 12:59 AM
-4

Mandano, you have things exactly the wrong way around. It amazes me sometimes how the left ends up supporting the things they claim to be opposed to. You write "Men's identities are not their job". But in Sweden the basic idea is that the most important thing in life is a career. A career is thought to bring autonomy and therefore the Swedes believe that what matters is maximising and equalising the centrality of career for both men and women. That's why life is organised around career and not f…
/r/MensRights11/06/10 12:51 AM
-4

But I DO want to be valued for my efforts to earn a wage. That's what I spend most of my time and energy doing. There are ways to tackle the divorce problem without men making themselves redundant as providers. And we shouldn't undermine the paternal role either. Looking after the kids doesn't just mean doing the traditionally maternal things. There is also a paternal role of socialising the children for their future life outside the home. Consider why divorce is often lower in middle and upper …
/r/MensRights11/06/10 12:35 AM
-4

Anon781, apart from providing material and physical security, the father has to guide his sons to success in the world after they leave home. That means maintaining a close enough relationship with his sons, whilst at the same time having standards and expectations of his sons' behaviour and progress. It also means being a role model for his sons when it comes to relationships, work ethic, community involvement, moral behaviour and engagement with life. It's important that sons are able to posit…
/r/MensRights10/06/10 11:41 PM
-5

For thousands of years women have been carrying their babies with them through their daily adventures. They still do. They go the shops, visit relatives, drop older kids at school and so on. They have not very often gone trekking through the vast Scandinavian forests firing high powered weapons to bring down large game. That is not typical at all.
/r/MensRights10/06/10 11:24 PM
-4

But essohbee your comment shows what is wrong in Sweden. The state takes your money, the money you earned, and then gets all the glory for having provided security. Here in Australia I still get to keep a fair portion of my salary, so I can pay those medical and other bills and so my wife looks to me to provide security. I'm the one who gets the positive response from my wife, not the state. Yes, we do have problems in countries like Australia and the US with divorce laws etc - but those same pr…
/r/MensRights10/06/10 11:16 PM
-5

I've got nothing against hunting or men taking their sons hunting, but it sounds weird to me that a man would take a baby moose-hunting. Babies are softly natured things who want to be cuddled and played with. They usually need a fair bit of attention and looking after. Strapping one to your back, trekking through a forest and blasting away with a gun isn't really creating a babycare environment. Either this man is overcompensating for the loss of a masculine role in the family or else he's foun…
/r/MensRights10/06/10 10:44 PM
-1

test - not sure if comments system is working
/r/MensRights10/06/10 01:52 PM
-3

I don't see the appeal of the Swedish system for men. You still have to spend your whole life working but for much less reward. The state takes most of your salary in the form of taxes. There's less reason for your wife to appreciate your efforts at work as the state uses the money it took from you to pay for her family leave, her medical bills etc. There's no distinctive and respected paternal role in the family but a merely unisex one based on the motherhood role. Life is dominated by the stat…
/r/MensRights10/06/10 01:47 PM
1

I should have explained. There were quite a number of skeletons found at the site, all had died violently. The scientists believe that some members of a tribe had been killed in a raiding party and that other members of the tribe had then buried them according to family relationships. That's why it's of interest that the father, mother and biological children should have been buried together holding hands.
/r/MensRights09/06/10 10:07 PM
1

It's true that there has been variety over time and place in family structure. However, it's an exaggeration to say that the nuclear family has only been around for some 100 years. Historian Peter Laslett has studied the British records from the early 1500s and found that 90% of households from this time were of the modern nuclear variety, with the other 10% being extended families. And the earliest evidence for the nuclear family in Europe comes from the year 2600BC, when a father and mother we…
/r/MensRights09/06/10 10:04 AM
1

Isn't another possible factor the way that donor sperm is selected? If all a woman needs is a sperm donation, she can select on the basis of educational attainments. She doesn't have to select on the basis of who she is able to attract or who she is attracted to sexually or who will be a reliable partner etc. In other words, whereas some women will settle for men with low educational qualifications, those selecting sperm donors don't need to settle at all - they can choose the ad from the "tall,…
/r/MensRights08/06/10 09:58 PM
1

I haven't dismissed her research. I've tried to raise awareness that those funding and carrying out the research have a political agenda that has negative implications for men. Most mainstream publications twig to the negative implications straight away, as evidenced by the titles not only of the two interviews I cited above but also of the NY news article ("Are dads really necessary?")
/r/MensRights08/06/10 09:53 PM
1

As long as you understand the radical implications of what you're arguing. It means that men aren't as important in the family as we thought they were. The self-concept of men as fathers would have to change and would inevitably weaken. Nor would society need to be as concerned by the phenomenon of fatherless families.
/r/MensRights08/06/10 09:44 PM
0

But couldn't self reporting still be an issue? Mightn't lesbian parents think it politically important to put a positive spin on their family outcomes, whereas parents in more mainstream families wouldn't connect their family outcomes to any political aim?
/r/MensRights08/06/10 01:13 PM
0

But the report does imply that children do better without fathers. In the report it is claimed that children raised by lesbian parents: were rated significantly higher in social, school/academic, and total competence and significantly lower in social problems, rule-breaking, aggressive, and externalizing problem behavior than their age-matched counterparts And that's how the research has been publicised. For instance, the NY Daily News reported the research with this headline: Are dads really ne…
/r/MensRights08/06/10 12:43 PM
1

Here are the titles of two interviews with Henny Bos, the lesbian/feminist activist who co-authored the research: "De ideale vader is een moeder" ("The ideal father is a mother") "Een vader heb je eigenlijk niet nodig" ("You don't actually need a father") Someone is aware of what is at issue here.
/r/MensRights08/06/10 10:33 AM
2

What does this have to do with men's rights? Here we have a report which claims that children do better without fathers: that they do better at school, are better psychologically adjusted etc. That has terrible implications for men. But let me point this out. Nanette Gartrell who authored the research is not a neutral expert. She was named one of the ten most powerful lesbian doctors in 2008. She teaches feminist theory on campus and one of her recent books is titled "Everyday Mutinies: Funding …
/r/MensRights08/06/10 09:54 AM
1

Not if a biological predisposition or a particular personality trait is involved as well. I'm not trying to establish an iron rule of nature here. I'm observing that if a young boy doesn't identify positively with being male, that it then becomes difficult in later life to have a heterosexual orientation. There are various reasons why a boy might not identify with being male, one of them being a father who is unusually abusive or avoidant.
/r/MensRights06/06/10 07:13 PM
2

Elton John's father was reportedly uninterested and absent. But I agree with you that there are plenty of people with terrible parents who don't end up homosexual. That could be because there's also a biological predisposition at work. Or even a predisposition of personality (how people respond to difficult circumstances varies).
/r/MensRights06/06/10 10:25 AM
-4

Gareth, citations no. And I'm not suggesting that the poor parental relationship operates in every case. But anecdotally it seems to be very common. Take Gore Vidal for instance: "He connects his resistance to sexual and emotional ties to the horrendous example of his mother, who sounds, in his description, like the worst mother anyone has ever had." Boy George's father was extremely violent. Patricia Cornwell was abandoned by her father as an infant and then dumped by her mother when she was ni…
/r/MensRights06/06/10 07:48 AM
-2

I agree that sex is a pair-bonding act. I agree too that you find instances of homosexuality in nature, including in human societies. But the point remains that men are designed for sexual congress with women. That is where it makes sense for the pair bonding to occur. It's possible that in some animal species such as bonobos that some kind of sexual activity is used promiscuously for social purposes. But that's not what explains homosexuality in human societies. Men do not have an instinct to h…
/r/MensRights06/06/10 07:13 AM
-3

Atomicparrot, this is from Camille Paglia, one of the world's best known lesbians: "lesbian sex ... is lacking in many ways. Bodies fit together in heterosexuality. There's some frustration involved in the life of a lesbian." The core, defining sex act is one that involves a penis and a vagina. That is the sense in which "bodies fit together" in heterosexuality.
/r/MensRights06/06/10 07:03 AM
0

Responding directly to the topic under discussion isn't trolling.
/r/MensRights06/06/10 06:32 AM
-4

It's a question of sex itself, regardless of what the sex is for. The male reproductive organs are clearly designed for/complementary to the female ones.
/r/MensRights06/06/10 04:27 AM
-5

Gareth, I'm part of that half. I don't think you should be that surprised. Men and women are clearly complementary when it comes to our reproductive biology. Men are designed to have sex with women not other men. So there has to at least be a question mark when things don't work out as expected. Why wouldn't things work out? There could be a biological predisposition, that's true. But it seems too that homosexual men and women very often have a highly dysfunctional relationship with a parent in …
/r/MensRights06/06/10 03:40 AM
1

Again, you make it sound as if these traits will look after themselves. They won't. If a man looks on them as being part of his own masculine character, he is much more likely to follow through with them.
/r/MensRights22/05/10 11:00 PM
1

Believe me, being a teacher requires large amounts of patience and self-control. A lot of teachers seeing that video would have mixed feelings: there would be faces screwed up at the lack of professionalism, but also a feeling of "There but for the grace of God go I".
/r/MensRights22/05/10 01:45 AM
1

Just do whatever you want is not a philosophy that is going to prepare men for adulthood. If men are going to succeed at work and in family life they are going to have to be determined to see things through, to show forebearance, to take the longer view, to delay gratifications, to show constitutional strength, to persevere, and to act for a good larger than themselves.
/r/MensRights21/05/10 01:25 PM
0

Mandano, If what is important is female autonomy - self-direction, independence, self-support - then why would anyone marry in the first place? Marriage by definition impedes our autonomy, it places restrictions on what we can and can't do. That's one reason why women were influenced by third wave feminism to delay making a commitment to marriage until some vague time in their 30s. Their focus was on an independent single girl lifestyle. The disruption this caused to family formation was immense…
/r/MensRights20/05/10 09:02 AM
1

Infinitely Thirsting, The key argument Mrs Martin makes is that the male position within the family is not one guaranteed by nature but is created significantly out of need. When the woman is in need of male protection or provision, the man is going to have a more stable role within the family as a husband and father. This then leads to much higher levels of male investment in his family and in society. It seems clear to me that the efforts to make women independent of men, although only half ac…
/r/MensRights19/05/10 09:54 PM
0

OK, here goes. a) The poems I linked to praised women not only for their physical femininity but also for being kind, sweet, smiling and vivacious - qualities which many men today would also find attractively feminine. b) In the polygamous societies I'm aware of, it's usual for very young women to be married to much older men. Therefore, the explanation in these cases can't be that men are marrying widows to prevent solitude. c) The study I quoted was a large scale overview of existing research.…
/r/MensRights19/05/10 11:49 AM
-1

Red revival, I live in a middle-class suburb of a large city. The traditional family is still predominant - by a big margin. How then can it be, as you put it, "impossible". Women do yield to men. It's part of the psychology of sex. When a woman accepts a man, puts her trust in him, makes herself vulnerable to him, there is a moment of letting go of resistance and allowing the man "entry" - both physically and emotionally. Look at the covers of romance novels - novels that play up to female sexu…
/r/MensRights19/05/10 09:39 AM
0

Atomic parrot, a) I wasn't attempting to use the term "alpha" in a scientific sense, so your argument is beside the point. Alpha is a term commonly used in English to denote "a man with high standing". Although sex selection is often a messy and confused business, in general a man who is short, poor and of low social standing will struggle to attract the same interest from women than a man who is tall, wealthy, sporty and socially confident. b) The idea that there is little division of labour in…
/r/MensRights19/05/10 09:16 AM
-1

There's no reason why the traditional family has to become more and more impossible. Sure, where the state sets out to make it impossible that might happen, as in Scandinavia. But it's still what most men and women aim for. Feminism, like modern politics in general, is about autonomy. That makes family relationships problematic. Family is about interdependence and becoming important to the people around you. Autonomy is about indepedence and a self-determining lifestyle. That's why in a feminist…
/r/MensRights18/05/10 10:12 PM
-4

It's true that housing costs make it difficult for many women to choose to stay at home. However, it's still the case in most Western countries that most women either stay at home or work part-time when their children are small. Women of colour may have been in the workforce for a very long time. But that only proves my point. The black American family is not in good shape. It's not true that the traditional nuclear family is limited to the white West. North-east Asians do it even better than we…
/r/MensRights18/05/10 01:16 PM
-8

Ignatiusloyola, I can think of some reasons. Women are hypergamous. They have an instinct to feel sexually attracted to dominant men. It helps if women at least believe that their husband is alpha. It's not easy for this to happen if men are at home cuddling babies while the wife is carving out a competitive career in the corporate world. The fact is that there is a very close correlation between female earnings and rates of divorce. The higher the rate of female earnings relative to her husband…
/r/MensRights18/05/10 11:32 AM
1

Atomic parrot, Basing marriage on the idea of "we'll stay together for a while till we grow apart" is always going to be a much worse deal for men and children than for women. Women have serial monogamy built into them. Growing apart for women can mean "I've met a man with higher status at work" or "I've spent long enough with you not to respond sexually to you any more". You talk about civilisation. But civilisation did not develop on the basis of female sexual autonomy. Civilisation developed …
/r/MensRights18/05/10 09:01 AM
1

He really, really dropped the ball when he suggested that biologists might one day "fix" men so that men could breastfeed, thereby making men and women even more interchangeable as parents. Doesn't that at least dent his credibility on gender issues?
/r/MensRights02/05/10 12:28 PM
-1

A son doesn't learn to be a man by observing Mum's work ethic. Nor do most boys love and admire their mothers for their mother's masculine skills. It's true that we're not gendered as men in exactly the same way. Still, there is a distinct relationship that fathers have with their children that isn't likely to be reproduced by women.
/r/MensRights02/05/10 06:11 AM
0

You contribute unique value to your children by being you, not by being a particular gender. No, I disagree. I can't in a brief comment summarise all the differences between men and women in parenting styles. But here, as an example, is one: fathers are generally more attuned than mothers to building character traits in their sons that are required for future success in society. Mothers are more likely to focus on acting as a source of immediate comfort. The child gets the benefit of uncondition…
/r/MensRights01/05/10 11:31 AM
0

I was a bit surprised that Myers didn't understand the archbishop's argument about interchangeability. If the state says it's fine for two women or two men to parent a child, then that means that a child doesn't need parents of both sexes - a mother and a father. It means that the parental role is a unisex, interchangeable one. If men really believed this to be true, then family stability would take another blow. If a father really thought that he did not contribute anything of unique value to h…
/r/MensRights01/05/10 08:19 AM
2

Part of the problem might be the change to the law permitting single women and lesbians to access IVF. If a man donates sperm, he might well be creating a fatherless family. Yes, some men might be comfortable with this, but there must be plenty of family men aware of their own role in the family, who would hesitate to donate sperm and deprive a child of a father.
/r/MensRights28/04/10 09:52 PM
1

Why wouldn't feminists be loyal to the state? The leading feminists are mostly state functionaries of one sort or another. They rely on the state to enact their beliefs. So they'd feel threatened both personally and politically by an aggressive enemy. So it's not so much that feminists would rally around the flag, as that they'd rally around the preservation of the state. I don't think feminists would necessarily disintegrate as a political group, but I doubt you'd get the same level of male bas…
/r/MensRights21/04/10 09:25 AM
0

Exactly. We live in odd times. Politically, we're supposed to accept an equality of sameness. Sexually, women's preference for dominant bad boys has been unleashed as never before. My own take on this story is here
/r/MensRights19/04/10 11:40 AM
1

Alanna, Sometimes the point of chivalry was for men to do things for women that women couldn't easily do for themselves. It used to be the case, for instance, that the bolts on tyres were machined tight and were difficult to loosen when a car tyre needed changing. As a young man I used to stop and help women with this task. The women were always gracious in their thanks. Sometimes, though, it was just a gesture. Obviously women are capable of opening a door for themselves. But men used to do it,…
/r/MensRights19/04/10 09:06 AM
1

I think that if social goods (love, care of children, etc) cannot be achieved without sacrificing individual autonomy, then social goods can fuck off and die. Individual rights uber alles! Eddie VH, that's a pretty extreme view. Most people do willingly give up a measure of autonomy for other significant goods. Most people do place limits on their own sexual autonomy for the good of their marriage/LTR for instance. Or they accept that there will be limits placed on how they can choose to spend t…
/r/MensRights19/04/10 08:45 AM
1

it sees men as perpetrators and women as victims in the realm of DV That's because the preferred way of explaining domestic violence at the moment is via feminist patriarchy theory. According to this theory it is men as a class who perpetrate domestic violence as a way of maintaining their unearned privilege over women. If you hold to this theory then you'll believe that the problem is not with individual men but with men and male culture in general. The solution then becomes to deconstruct male…
/r/MensRights18/04/10 09:55 PM
-2

Pteridophyta, you've just supported my basic point. You are a feminist. You don't want preferential treatment via male chivalry. What you want is to "deconstruct gender" and to be "treated in a certain (equal) way". Now why would a heterosexual person want to deconstruct gender? That sounds odd, doesn't it? The answer is that feminism follows the liberal line of taking autonomy (self-determination) to be the key good. Our sex is not something that we get to self-determine. It is predetermined. T…
/r/MensRights18/04/10 09:37 AM
1

Thanks for welcoming some debate on the issue. I agree with one point you make, which is that chivalry probably does have its roots in a much older male instinct to provide and protect. However, I disagree with you that feminism is state enforced chivalry. Feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. By the mid-1800s the state was ruled on liberal principles, so it was then inevitable that feminism would be picked up with and run by the state. Here is one reason why feminism is not stat…
/r/MensRights18/04/10 07:24 AM
2

Catlebrity, you might be interested to know that most of those opposed to female suffrage at the time were women: "Anti-suffragism was a political movement composed mainly of women, begun in the late 19th century in order to campaign against women's suffrage in the United States and United Kingdom." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-suffragism
/r/MensRights17/04/10 06:36 AM
7

We sometimes forget that first wave feminism went for a very long time (1850s to 1940s) and resembled later waves in many respects. For instance, one of the early anti-feminists was Eliza Linton. As early as the 1850s she criticised Lady Monson, a lesbian feminist, as an "uncompromising man-hater". In the 1860s Eliza Linton addressed the feminists of that era as "you of the emancipated who imitate while you profess to hate".
/r/MensRights16/04/10 10:56 AM
3

The entire history of the world being dominated by men? Because religion claimed that women were inferior? You're setting women up here for permanent disillusion and disappointment. You are defining the traditionally feminine sex role as inferior to the male one. Therefore women either have to compete with men in traditionally masculine public roles or accept inferiority. Many women can successfully compete, but find that by the time they're in their 30s they no longer want to. It doesn't seem m…
/r/MensRights01/04/10 10:26 AM
0

You've got the suffrage thing wrong. The idea of extending suffrage to most men was resisted for a long time. It was thought of as a radical social experiment. Ever heard of the chartists? The fear was that there would be mob rule and that the propertied classes would lose out - as in fact the aristocratic classes did by the early 1900s. A short time after suffrage was granted to men, it was then granted to women. The issue had nothing to do with the idea that women were inferior in their human …
/r/MensRights31/03/10 10:59 AM
-1

Thanks for the response. In America the term "liberal" is sometimes used to refer to what is elsewhere called "left-liberalism". Free market liberalism is sometimes called classical or "right-liberalism". I use the term liberal as a descriptor for both. The liberal orthodoxy in the West is made up of both left and right liberalism.
/r/MensRights31/03/10 08:57 AM
2

No. Women in the West were never sold and were never subject to harsher judicial punishment than men. Western women were not subject to more violence than men, but to far less. Only a tiny fraction of men had the right to vote, most did not. Women in the West were able to travel freely and to participate in the economy. The average Western man worked in factories, fields and mines to scrape together a living for his wife and family to live in greater comfort, health and security. He achieved few…
/r/MensRights31/03/10 08:31 AM
-2

If you agree that liberal essentially means autonomy then why would it be "weird" to write about liberal elites bowing to the feminist demand for autonomy? Wouldn't it be predictable for the liberal elites to do so?
/r/MensRights31/03/10 05:55 AM
0

Liberalism leads to people thinking that individual autonomy is important in all spheres (rights are secondary). This seems to make women second-class. If our status as humans depends on our ability to self-determine who we are through our reason and will, then women seem to be more stuck than men in the single biologically predetermined role of mother, a role which involves emotion more than the application of reason. So feminists, from the time of Wollstonecraft in the late 1700s, complained t…
/r/MensRights31/03/10 05:40 AM
1

One thing the author gets right is that we can't look to the men in power today to reform things on our behalf. I don't think, though, that this has got much to do with the strengths or weaknesses of so-called alpha men. It has more to do with the set of beliefs or principles the dominant political class rule by, namely liberalism, with feminism being liberalism applied to the lives of women. For a long time the family was considered to be off limits to the rules that were applied to public life…
/r/MensRights30/03/10 03:00 AM
3

The argument the author presents is this: feminists have become the alpha controllers of society and the former male alphas have decided to become beta enforcers for the feminist alphas. He then argues that this means the feminists were right about masculinity being corrupt and outmoded and that the real fight is not with feminists but with the ex-alpha, now beta, male enforcers. It's an original argument, but with some weaknesses. Why, for instance, are feminists so blameless if they are now th…
/r/MensRights30/03/10 02:23 AM
1

How many men go for women who are so masculine that they resemble lesbians? A very small percentage I would have thought. The general rule is that men go for women who are attractively feminine. Nor is it unusual behaviour for women to cry more readily than men. I well remember my own wife suddenly bursting into tears when watching Breakfast at Tiffany's. Audrey Hepburn threw her cat out of a taxi into the rain. When I asked my crying wife why she was upset, she said that she felt sorry for the …
/r/MensRights25/03/10 01:31 PM
1

I'm describing self-determination the way it is understood by the political establishment. The ruling idea is that we are defined as humans by our capacity to be autonomous and to self-author. Therefore, the aim of politics is to remove impediments to self-authorship, to "liberate" individuals from what is unchosen, to make whatever is predetermined not matter. But, as I've mentioned already, there's much of significance in life that we do not and cannot self-determine, such as our sex and our e…
/r/MensRights24/03/10 09:07 PM
2

Mandano, where then is the meaning of heterosexuality? Are you suggesting that we are only attracted to the bodies of women and not to the whole feminine package? And haven't you ever wondered at the behaviour of the women you know? (I'm assuming you're a man) If a woman suddenly bursts into tears at some seemingly inconsequential point of a film, for instance. Hasn't it ever struck you that women are different in a way that men will never experience?
/r/MensRights24/03/10 08:31 PM
1

Atomic parrot, there's not a lot that's self-determined. Is your intelligence self-determined? How you were shaped by your parents' influence and the influence of your culture? The technology available to you? Your looks? Your sex? The truth is that we work within what has been bequeathed to us. And much that has been bequeathed is of great value and shouldn't be rejected because it hasn't been self-created. The alternative is to imagine that you begin as a blank slate atomised individual and th…
/r/MensRights24/03/10 08:24 PM
1

Come on, Mr Invisible. Cross dressing is just a fetish. I wouldn't bully a man who does it, but it's not a normal expression of masculinity. Nor is there a masculinity club that people can be excluded from, so I don't know why you're so hung up about this. I'm getting the impression that something else is going on here. I'm guessing, but I think that there are men who have let the sexually submissive side of them take over, then naturally feel alienated from their masculinity, and respond to the…
/r/MensRights28/02/10 06:21 AM
0

I read the post again. It's even worse than my first impression. He talks about men needing to be soft, weak and submissive and about his desire to be pretty and wear dresses. No wonder he feels alienated from normal masculinity. There's no way that the concept of masculinity can be extended to fit him in without rendering the concept meaningless.
/r/MensRights28/02/10 05:11 AM
1

"there are legions of assholes out there who support and try to enforce a very limited view of masculinity" Again, I'm sceptical. There are very few masculine dominated places left in the world. TV constantly shows fathers as being sweetly incompetent rather than as having masculine authority. Most schools have now gone coed and are dominated by female teaching staff. The ruling idea is a feminist one that masculinity is a destructive social construct that oppresses women. The churches too offer…
/r/MensRights27/02/10 09:30 PM
2

Mr Invisible, you've internalised a very limited view of masculinity. Who ever said you had to be into sports to be masculine? Schopenbecq, I'm with you on this. How can it be part of men's rights to run down masculinity and to argue that men should be more feminine?
/r/MensRights27/02/10 11:16 AM
-2

I'm sceptical. I've observed women who try to embody masculine qualities. It makes them boring. They're not impressive as men and they lose the chance to be impressive as women. So, I guess my answer is that the men you speak of would be better advised to develop their masculine qualities. This is where their true potential for development lies.
/r/MensRights27/02/10 11:11 AM
0

I couldn't disagree more with this article. Men will feel their best when they are at their most masculine, not when they are unsuccessfully attempting to reproduce feminine qualities. And masculinity will serve a man well in his efforts at work and at home.
/r/MensRights26/02/10 09:14 AM
5

Agreed. What's the point of having men's rights if you argue that female qualities are superior and that men should act like women? It's a bit like feminists who claim to represent women but who then argue that femininity is wrong and weak and oppressive etc.
/r/MensRights26/02/10 08:58 AM
1

Maybe feminism should have taken a woman's freedom to marry and have children more seriously.
/r/MensRights16/02/10 08:40 AM
2

Atomic parrot, that's a clearly set out reply. It's modernist philosophy in a nutshell. I disagree with it though. The fact of something being predetermined doesn't make it less of a good. I didn't choose my nationality and yet that's important for my self-identity. I didn't choose my sexuality, but that's important too. The things we get to self-determine are mostly limited in scope: career, consumer choices, travel destinations, hobbies. What we inherit is often of greater significance, even t…
/r/MensRights14/02/10 12:43 AM
11

Agreed. Not all western women are a lost cause. I had a tough time in the dating field myself, but I did still end up finding an attractive Western woman to marry. I wouldn't want my son to go through what I had to go through, so I'm still out there working for a better deal for men. But I do consider myself happy and well off in my own personal life.
/r/MensRights13/02/10 11:22 PM
2

Your gender is a more meaningful aspect of who you are than your job, your hobbies or your consumer choices. It's not some kind of negative restriction, it's something that can potentially make you feel more connected in your personal identity.
/r/MensRights13/02/10 11:14 PM
1

OK, so you think the law is being gender neutral because hypothetically it's possible to have a group of men knocking on hotel room doors, offering sex to single female occupants, being accepted by one female, attempting to fleece the female of her money, with the woman then being charged with attempting to buy sex while the men got off scot free. So you're offering a hypothetical gender equality. I'd prefer a real one.
/r/MensRights11/01/10 05:37 AM
1

But this single instance shows what the law will effectively permit or even encourage. Moral responsiblity and legal consequences have been removed from the side of women. So why won't more young women follow the lead of these three females?
/r/MensRights11/01/10 05:27 AM
3

What do you think would really happen if three men went knocking on hotel room doors offering sex to unknown single female occupants? My guess is that the police would be called on them very quickly, they would be removed quickly from the premises and threatened down at the local police station with being charged with sex offences.
/r/MensRights10/01/10 10:52 PM
6

But look at the details of the case. A group of three women on a night out ran out of money and went looking for a man to fleece by pretending to offer sex for money. And yet it's the man who gets charged with a crime. The women here have been given a green light to do the wrong thing; the man, who did not initiate any of what took place, ends up taking the blame.
/r/MensRights10/01/10 10:27 AM
1

"I'd equate it with saying only 1 in 25 men is a rapist or 1 in 25 people are murderers." Yes, put this way I do get your point.
/r/MensRights16/08/09 01:31 AM
4

I agree that for the men who are defrauded it's a disaster. It is a despicable act for a woman to deceive a man this way. However, my comment that "only" 2-3% of men who are confident of their paternity are defrauded (according to some studies anyway) was made in reply to someone who feared that it was something typical of female behaviour. Most women do still want to reward the men who support them with a child. If a man has doubt, though, I'd recommend exactly what you suggest: a paternity tes…
/r/MensRights16/08/09 12:53 AM
-6

It just goes to show how feminism taken seriously is poison to relationships. There are some reasonably good looking women in my workplace who are still single in their 30s, and part of the reason is that they react with arctic coldness to anything that isn't in line with their politically correct feminism. Which man wants to be on guard all the time in his personal life? Even if this woman were better looking, she'd still be someone to avoid.
/r/MensRights15/08/09 11:49 PM
2

Excellent. Well worth bookmarking.
/r/MensRights08/07/09 04:01 AM
2

If you're a woman who believes in patriarchy theory, then it's easy to feed your depression. According to the theory, a group of people got together and created a category for themselves (men) which then allowed them to take autonomy and agency for themselves at the expense of another falsely created category, women. This made "men" the human class and "women" the sub-human class. The whole of society is set up to perpetuate this, so only the most radical revolution of all time will change it - …
/r/MensRights27/05/09 04:50 PM
10

Tim Harford finally lays to rest the much quoted myth that men are the greatest threat to the health of young women.
/r/MensRights18/05/09 12:44 PM
1

When I submitted the article there was only space for a URL and a title. Could you explain the tags and the number?
/r/MensRights30/03/09 06:51 AM
1

A Melbourne feminist gets things seriously wrong
/r/MensRights29/03/09 08:55 PM
You can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea.

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