Writing a piece for a series on MRAs at The Good Men Project, Amanda Marcotte argues that the solutions to many Men’s Rights Activists’ problems is more feminism. Of course, to prove her point she adopts a friendly view of feminism (i.e. not the one that claims all men are rapists or that men are disposable) and the most negative prototype of MRA she can come up with – the ones that are “embittered” by their lack of sex. Marcotte wants to compare notes from the most idealistic and objective feminists with those of the most reactionary and subjective MRA. False equivalency if ever there was one.

People like Marcotte remind us every day that feminists are not monolithic. According to them, one cannot characterize a feminist’s philosophy or values based only on her feminist label. Unfortunately, Marcotte doesn’t extend the same flexibility to MRAs, and she even forgets her leniency for certain feminists. She focuses on four issues and constructs the most extreme MRA argument to support her disdain for the group and posits a soft brand of feminism while pretending that feminism was created for everyone rather than just for women.

1. Ladies Night

Of all MRA “problems” to dissect, Marcotte says that MRAs are “stupid” for worrying about Ladies Night where bars extend drink specials to women and not to men. She cites “one MRA” who sued over this issue (probably Roy Dean Hollander), but she ignores (or was unaware of) the complaints of a young feminist, Jaime Keiles, who was recently profiled in the Feministing Five. I covered Keiles’ recent blog post in which she claims that Ladies Nights are misogynistic, sexist, and stupid and come away with the same conclusion as Marcotte: Ladies Night is a business plan implemented by a bar or a club to maximize profit.

But Marcotte can’t just leave it there. She ridicules this so-called MRA beef because “men tend to benefit more, because women still have to pay the price of fending off unwanted advances just to go out and have fun with friends.” Of course, Marcotte ignores those empowered women who welcome those Looky Lou’s advances and hope to land a suitor. After all, if the burden is so bad it is just as expensive to sit at home and watch TV or to go to Starbucks with a group of girlfriends. MRAs are pro-choice on this one.

Marcotte says “ban Ladies Night or don’t, because who honestly gives a crap?” The answer is that the level of “give a crap” on each side of the gender warfront offsets the other which makes me wonder why Marcotte is grasping at these particular straws.

2. Men as Primary Breadwinners

A passage from a report produced by President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers puts this issue in perspective:

An increasing number of women are breadwinners for their families. In almost two-thirds of families led by single mothers or two parents, women are either the primary or co-breadwinner. In two-parent families, with the wage gap and the loss of jobs traditionally held by men in this economy, reliance on a woman’s income in their family budget is even greater…Since women are nearly 50 percent of the workforce, the recession’s economic impacts on women are even more consequential for the economy than they would have been in past recessions.

While most MRAs may not be aware that President Obama values breadwinning females far above breadwinning males, gynocentric government reforms have long angered anti-statist MRAs who wonder where government support was when male-headed households were struggling or why nuclear families have never been worthy of investment.

The common view is that if fathers are breadwinners it is likely that they are stepping on someone’s throat to maintain their position; if mothers are breadwinners, it is despite being stepped on. Being a part of the hegemonic patriarchy, male breadwinners are viewed as evil authoritarians who only care about their jobs without much thought to the reasons that job is being undertaken. Feminists assume that male breadwinners just love working 60 hours a week without seeing their families.

MRAs are also angered by women who claim they don’t get enough love and support from their work-worn husbands who then whip their rationalization hamsters into full throttle to drum up reasons to leave his ass and turn the children against him for being an absentee father. If there is any resentment by MRAs, it is informed by the knowledge that a man providing for his family is either devalued or demonized by the government, the media, his wife, and his children.

Marcotte says:

Women still make less than men in the workplace, but still do more free labor at home, even when they do work full time. Plus, many men feel scaling back or quitting their jobs is emasculating.

Only women consider housework and non-labor force work to be free. I know of no man who scoffs at the work his wife or girlfriend does around the house or in raising children. And when men earn more than women outside the home, his paycheck usually goes straight into a household kitty that is controlled by the woman who makes 80% of purchasing decisions. Feminists and the rank-and-file consider the name written in the Payee portion of a paycheck, but they don’t consider who signs the checks flowing out of the family’s bank account.

The entire purpose of Marcotte’s piece was to show how feminism could be the solution to these MRA beefs. But she abrogates some of the power that women and feminists would have in assuaging any fears of emasculation that work-displaced men would feel. If anything, convincing men that they can maintain their masculinity while scaling back their jobs requires the prior acceptance of women. But women would have to check their natural desires at the door.

3. Men Have to Do Work to Ask Women Out

Marcotte argues that men often harass women when asking them out. She also says that approaching men gets a woman labeled slutty, bitchy, or desperate.

But she leaves out the fact that men who approach women are called losers if they are rejected. Trick is, it is mostly members of each person’s sex who provide these labels. On top of that, a “slut” label doesn’t necessarily diminish a woman’s chances of finding a man whereas the same man’s “loser” label is a death sentence.

Marcotte also constructs the most heinous image of a PUA to support her view that men who can’t get laid turn to skeezy methods to shore up their sexual insufficiencies. She accepts the the monolithic PUA who adopts a negative attitude toward women, but she leaves out the whole subset of Game-practitioners who develop their seduction skills in tandem with their inner self-respect. If anything, this minimizes sexism as it dismantles the pedestal on which women are placed. One would figure that feminists would be happy about mens’ termination of their inner Nice Guy.

4. Men Killed at Work

Marcotte essentially argues that MRAs hope to maintain the “occupational death gap” because it provides an excuse for the gender pay gap. She then suggests that to bring gendered occupational deaths up to parity, discrimination should be eradicated and various programs should be initiated to inform girls of their options for these types of jobs.

I say that this is all well and good. If such policies were implemented, the gender gaps – pay and death – would decrease. But would women actually move towards combat roles in the military, fire fighting, and coal mining if there were no social barriers to entry? Those occupations have systematically developed with the strongest and most able-bodied people in mind. Those people happen to be men. People started cutting down gigantic trees because a certain type of person mixed with a certain type of equipment could get the job done. It would seem that only a few women could meet the threshold required to participate in these jobs which begs the question, what job-killing changes would be implemented if women did flock to these occupations to create parity? To cut down X log you’d have to have A, B, and C measures in place which would make the whole endeavor unprofitable.

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Marcotte started her post by laying out an argument that MRAs haven’t quite made:

When you believe that we live in a female-dominated world where straight men are the most oppressed class, it tends to make you wrong about pretty much everything.

If anything, MRAs seem angry that women have a monopoly on every issue. Everything that is wrong with society can be laid at the feet of Men, and each human with a (natural) penis between his legs shares equally in that burden. MRA’s represent the Everyman, and he is angry that he is being forced to carry water for the rapists and violent offenders at the left end and the Patriarchs at the far right. The truth is that there is a large swath of men residing in the middle of this spectrum who have never affronted anyone and whose particular problems have gone unnoticed. The men who are now MRAs once dealt with the extreme elements, but feminists started bunching men all together. It seems, then, that MRAs said “screw it” and turned their focus towards feminists for self-defense purposes. To make matters worse, feminists don’t deal with rank-and-file womens’ complicity in this whole “hegemonic” system. Surely a great deal of women benefited from the previous set-up, and they helped perpetuate it. But revisionism has painted them all as victims.