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Men’s Movement: Personal and Political (ICMI’18 Speech)

Paul Elam
January 9, 2020

Transcript:

Greetings everyone,

I wish I could have been there in person to deliver this message, but unfortunately that wasn’t to be this time. I’d like to thank Mike and the Justice for Men and Boys organization for inviting me to do this talk, and for all their hard work, for the conferences and all they do on behalf of men and boys and the women who love them.

And you know, that work is really a remarkable thing. It boggles the mind when you think about it. We’ve become part of a philosophy that opposes longstanding and intense social programming to ignore the issues in men’s lives in the name of forever putting women and all other groups first. The ideas we embrace are healthy, functional, and corrective to social problems, yet are viewed by the general population as pathological and dangerous.

Thanks in part to the Fake News media, we have been labeled as haters, even though our work demonstrates that we are, in fact, rejecting hatred and hateful ideology.

That’s life for MRAs, and more broadly red-pilled people, and its often marked by loneliness, isolation and varying degrees of frustration. Compounding that is the fact that our lives require us to assume the daunting task of rejecting the pathological, unhealthy obsession on the issues of women, known as gynocentrim, in a world that will punish you for shining a light on the problem.

Mind you, I am fully aware that you are hearing me talk about this right now in a country that at one time produced the likes of the great Winston Churchill, but now imprisons people for telling jokes and practicing journalism.

It’s hard to forge ahead under those conditions.

Or is it?

Among other things, that’s a question I want to explore today, and I’d like to offer some reflections on the modern men’s movement; which I see as actually two movements. One personal, the other political.

To do that we have to start with some bad news. Actually, I mean a lot of bad news.

If you’re looking for a clear cut, watershed victory for men and boys on any large scale, political or social, you can quit wasting your time. It’s never going to happen. There will never be a men’s rights victory parade, nor broad legislation that corrects problems faced by men and boys, nor a sweeping shift in public consciousness that overrides the destructive human impulse to regard women as entitled and privileged. An ever fragile, protected class without agency or accountability.  The reasons for that are simple and inescapable.

As they say, without men, civilization can only last till the next oil change. Society piles complete and total responsibility on men for its existence. Almost all the sacrifice, of blood and sweat and of life that is required to keep the world turning, to keep us living in relative comfort and safety, is male sacrifice. Women won’t do it. Women can’t do it.

I know, to say that is heresy, as is often the case with truth today. But truth, as any MRA can tell you, is a cruel master. It is brutal and unforgiving. It cares not for mainstream sensibilities. And it exists in complete indifference to our feelings.

And with the harshness of these uncomfortable truths comes some uncomfortable realities. Like the fact that in society men’s vulnerabilities will always be overshadowed by expectations for them to protect, provide and perform. Prioritizing the issues of men and boys, caring about them, will always be perceived as a threat to women, a threat to the state and a certain pathway to destabilizing society. Therefore, the organized correction of men’s issues will be treated as strictly verboten for as far as we can see into the future. Just ask the SPLC.

Society, that being men and women working together, forever strives to keep men uneducated and unaware of their own condition – to brainwash men into believing that taking care of themselves is a form of cowardice. Men who are conscious of all this are difficult to exploit, which is to say most men are like hardwood floors. You can walk on them forever.

The modern men’s movement is the one and only alternative to that line of dysfunctional thinking, but getting there is not without problems.

Strangely, in a world as polarized as it can be politically, religiously and in most other ways humans devise to square off from each other in camps, the deference to those who advocate for women and chastise men is one area of near unanimity.

The world agrees on what it knows about men. Men don’t have problems, men are the problem. Men have too much power and should be on a mission to yield that power to anyone who demands it. Men need to quit pretending they have problems that matter, man up and help others.  Hopefully, when men die, they do it in an act of bravery, making sure someone else gets to live. If you think I’m exaggerating, you’re not paying attention.

We are all familiar with the ubiquitous superabundance of male shortcomings. Men’s addiction to power; their incapacity for love and intimacy; their inability to articulate their feelings to the satisfaction of a feminist mental health industry; their innate and destructive aggression. The list of stereotypes is all but unending, sufficiently dehumanizing men so that they can be exploited without remorse or reconsideration.

Driven by pure social force, diseases, suicide, homelessness, educational failure, addictions, all predominately, overwhelmingly male problems are hidden behind the fabricated, false veneer of men’s supposed power and privilege.

Meanwhile, as the world ever sharpens its ability impugn men’s very existence, our war zones and blue-collar graveyards still run with the blood of men. The dirty, dangerous work required to maintain our society is written in the cut and calloused hands of men. Even in the sometimes deadly battlefield of the human psyche, where casualties are reflected in suicide statistics, we find that too is a man’s world.

And rather than have compassion for any of this, society is more prone to mock and ridicule men who are uppity enough to complain about it.

It’s almost enough to make you throw in the towel or raise a white flag. More frankly, all this explains why so many men never join the fight; why we have so few in a movement trying to do for men what most are too timid, too indoctrinated or too self-loathing to do for themselves.

Even then, because men are so awesome and capable on behalf of anyone but themselves; because they are willing to do whatever needs to be done so that everyone else gets a better deal, because we are so dependent on their sacrifices we will always blind ourselves to their suffering. We will always ignore their problems and will likely always shun them for daring to discuss these things. Decades of involvement with men’s issues and the lifelong study of human sexual behavior leave me convinced that this will never change across the board for human beings.

But, even in the midst of all this apparent pessimism, the conclusion I have that matters is not one of hopelessness at all. As a matter of fact, it is just the opposite.

The fact is that human males are indeed awesome creatures. Some are capable of casting off the shroud ignorance and hate in which modern society has wrapped masculinity, and rebelling in a healthy way. How many, we don’t know, but the very existence of this movement, its refusal to die, demonstrates that truth.

Many men can’t be reached, of course. Some are just too steeped in the self-destructive tradition of unconscious, servile masculinity. They are destined to go from cradle to grave as obedient zombies, unable to imagine life outside the toxic role prescribed for them by a parasitic society.

And let’s face it, that is the average man. In understanding that the average man, much like the average woman, is a lost cause, we can and should take solace in the fact that the men’s movement is a movement for exceptional people. It is a movement that serves as a life sustaining intellectual and emotional refuge for remarkable people in an unremarkable world.

I’d borrow from the social justice crowd and call it a safe space, but safe spaces are built on comfortable lies, embraced by weak people to shield them from the real world. The safety of the men’s movement resides in the fact that MRAs have the strength to deal with reality. Our safety is in our values and in our spines, which is why after years of mainstream media attacks and campaigns of disinformation, we are still here with ideas that cannot be killed or ignored by everyone.

If that sounds self-congratulatory, it certainly should. If you are sitting there, as a man or a woman, watching this, knowing that you are cut from a different, more conscious cloth; that you don’t fit in the blue pill world and don’t want to; knowing that you equally recognize the humanity of both men and women and that you possess a depth of compassion and caring that extends to places and people ignored by the rest of the world, then you are exceptional.

Your character IS the character of the men’s movement, the rest of this lying world be damned.

That brings us to the purely personal side of this movement. The fact that one of our most redeeming and valuable features is that we offer men a clear path away from personal destruction. We benefit from one simple truth. The greatest majority of men’s issues, including matters of their human rights, can be effectively addressed by men’s personal choices.

Matter of fact, that is so important I want to say it again. The greatest majority of men’s issues, including matters of their human rights, can be effectively addressed by men’s personal choices.

Likewise, the greatest threat men’s rights is their own choices, almost always driven by a lopsided and rigged social contract with women.

We understand the pitfalls of that contract very well, especially when codified in law by marriage. False allegations, suicide, parental alienation, ruinous divorces, restraining order abuses, male financial exploitation, destructive, personality disordered women whose evil acts are enabled by society, and the bias that invariably turns against men when they are engaged in conflict with a woman.

Understanding these problems and the readily available solutions isn’t complicated once you rise above the blue pill fog. The trick is in practicing the resolve and the courage to carry a message to men, in plain public view, with shameless abandon.

And that message, to its core, is anti-matrimonial. We need to teach men, reaching them at the youngest ages we possibly can, that marriage, as it stands, is cancer. It is painfully easy, and equally obvious to see how so many of men’s issues, including suicide, is connected to marriage and divorce. And I am asserting that marriage and divorce each stand alone as separate and distinct problems in the lives of men.

Divorce can wreck a man’s social, professional and financial life, marriage can destroy his soul. This isn’t a playful joke about the stresses of married life. It is a deadly serious statement about life in a world that socializes women to be opportunistic parasites in the lives of men.

A contract between a man and a woman that starts with the man on bended knee, making a demonstration of his ability and willingness to provide for the desires of the woman, including the frivolous, is the same contract that a leech has with your leg.

Think about that for a moment. Picture that iconic scene of a man kneeling, presenting a diamond in hopes of being loved. If you’ve any honesty at all, you know his rights are gone, right then and there. He doesn’t have to wait for a family court judge to smash down the gavel and make it more official. He is coming to the relationship on his knees, offering sacrifice and hoping for nothing but acceptance of that sacrifice.

It’s his mentality as a man, his sense of his place in the world that is the problem. Society teaches men, often savagely, that if momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Women frequently reinforce that aphorism as though it were a god given right.

This is not a shot at women, though. As with every other sociosexual malady in modern times, it is a product of women and men working cooperatively. The men’s movement offers an honest, if sometimes brutal critique of both sexes. But unlike feminism, our answers don’t come from demonizing half the population while we concoct outlandish theories about why we’re not responsible for our own shortcomings and our own decisions.

Most of us understand that true victims are rare. Most of our problems are of our own making. Most of our answers are in the mirror. And that is where this movement becomes highly personal.

One very direct solution we have is men checking out and going their own way, which they are currently doing in impressive numbers. And if you’re wondering if I am saying that MGTOW is the men’s movement, you bet I am. It’s the largest, most functional part of it. It is, in the truest sense, the movement of men, away from toxic expectations, away from rigged contracts and away from ways of thinking that create a belief they are beholden to women as a class.

Men going their own way don’t agree to produce children just to have them taken away. They don’t get their property stolen by the state and given to a woman. They don’t live, as many men do, watching their interests, their friendships and their dreams slowly erode till they disappear.

They don’t start contracts on their knees, so they don’t end up on their knees, or flat on their backs when its over.

By owning their lives and actions, MGTOW are reminding us every day that there are no victims, just volunteers.

In fact, MGTOW philosophy is so powerful it can also be very helpful to married men, who can still benefit greatly from red pill values, starting by learning to say no to their wives, and yes to their lives, rejecting any punishment for doing so for the abuse that it is. Learning to say, If momma ain’t happy, then momma needs to own her shit and live with the fact that the world does not revolve around her desires.

The men’s movement, MGTOW philosophy, red pill thinking, whatever you want to call it, is teaching men of all stripes to value themselves. It is showing us that one man at a time, all men can win the gender war, not by attacking women, but by taking responsibility for their decisions, by having healthy values and living by them even when there is a cost.

Now, I know that some people will be listening to this with disappointment. They will recognize, and rightly so, that the nuclear family has long been the backbone of a stable society. They know that the deterioration of the family unit is directly proportional to the deterioration of society.

They will also recognize, and just as rightly, that human beings are driven to pair bond; that generally speaking we do not do as well flying solo as we do when meaningfully connected. They will lament all the loss that this represents, and once again they will be mostly on the mark.

But what I think these people fail to see is that MGTOW isn’t an attack on marriage, it’s a response to the fact that marriage is now an attack on men. Marriage was broken, fatally, a long time before MGTOW started gaining its current popularity.

It was broken by feminists, with no fault divorce policies that enabled women to steal men’s children, and their property simply because they want to. It was broken by corrupt family courts where the legal profession lines its pockets on the destruction of families. It was broken by traditionalists and their archaic, romantic, and frankly stupid illusions about love, and the ridiculously lopsided and burdensome expectations that it places on men.

Men walking away is the solution, not the problem. If the world wants other solutions, solutions that bring men back into the fold, it should work on them. Not just on fixing family law, but on ending female privilege and correcting the social contract. And it needs to provide a payoff for men, starting with a return of demonstrated respect and thanks for thier contributions. Till that happens, which is a long way off, the only sane path for men is one that leads away from the insanity. Like I said. This is not going to be sweeping, pervasive change. The point that I am making, though, is that each and every man within earshot of this talk, married or single, religious or not, of any race or creed, can use this movement, this way of thinking, to make his life infinitely better. We needn’t wait for government, or women, or other men for that matter to do it for us. In fact, waiting for those kinds of external forces to come to the aid of men and boys reflects a lack of understanding of the problems.

And one last note on this very personal movement. Second wave feminists, like all feminists, were wrong about nearly everything that ever issued from their mouths. You know that or you would likely not be at this conference. Either that, or you’re possibly a member of the fake news media here covering it.

One thing though that they did get right. They were fond of the notion that The Personal is Political. A hat tip to the fact that especially in the realm of sex-based issues, the politics of it is deeply, penetratingly personal.

The difference is that for women it meant a war against men. And it means the same in reverse for many men new to the MRM, or to disaffected men who are stuck in irrational, unresolvable anger. For them, it is a war against women.

In reality, the men’s movement is a war with ourselves. It’s a war against our lack of values with women, against our gynocentric ways and against our addiction to group consensus; to the world’s abusive, dysfunctional notion of what makes a man. It is a war against our own weakness. And you bet, all of this is personal. And so are our answers, all staring at us right in the mirror when we dare to look.

All this might leave you thinking that any political solutions are pointless. That would certainly be the point of view of some men going their own way. They are simply exiting the system with no intention of looking back. And they tend to view political activism by MRAs as an effort to clean up the plantation so we can get men to willingly walk back onto it and into subservience.

Of course, that is a largely emotional and irrational perspective. I for one, have no intention of ever marrying. I still want to do all I can to diminish the power of feminism,  and would find nothing more gleeful than to gut its funding by pretty much any means necessary. That won’t end gynocentrism, or make modern marriage more palatable in the short run, but I do think we are at the point politically where we can do great damage to feminists. With the recent meteoric rise of populist movements across the globe, we have the real possibility to attack their funding, something that would serve humankind.

Left wing universities, which is to say nearly all of them, produce an unending stream of gender zombies; embittered, brainwashed women; victocrats of privilege, and malleable, indoctrinated young men whose identity hinges on supporting and enabling women who demonize them. Media pundits fret over imaginary wage gaps, fabricated epidemics of sexual assault and will forever try to top each other in virtue signaling over the latest #MeToo allegation. They will, some subtly, some not, all join in the outrage at men as the root cause of our social ills.

Politicians in the public eye generally follow suit or stand by like sheep as it happens. People who we used to call conservatives, now more accurately called quislings, mask their spinelessness behind a façade of religious dogma and so called traditional-conservative values.

As we look at today’s political climate, particularly on the left, we see politics gone feral. In America, we see thinly veiled calls for violence from political leaders, demands that we abolish border enforcement and borders themselves. We see congressmen getting shot while playing softball and the unvarnished harassment of administration officials while simply trying to go about their daily lives. And we see a large part of the culture apparently willing to accept all this as the new normal.

This is a direct result, in my opinion, of widespread father absence. Robbed of the discipline, humility and empathy that fathers engender in children, they grow up noticeably lacking in those crucial qualities. Society suffers from it. That fatherlessness is not just an artifact of the left, though. For fifty years, conservatives have utterly failed to fight back against the left’s anti-father, anti-family agenda. In fact, they have become complicit in those objectives.

Why? Because conservative men aren’t just weak with feminists. They’re weak with women. So weak, they won’t fight back as their sons and daughters, as well as their political objectives, are undermined and corrupted.

On that level, even so-called conservative antifeminists haven’t made much of a difference. They’ve been entertaining, but ineffective. They are still self-censoring when it might upset women, which prevents the utterance of a multitude of critical truths. And many are still ultimately gynocentric and weak on the issues. They have lost the battle within themselves. Most never even showed up to fight.

But that is undoubtedly changing. Populist movements are growing everywhere, fired up by people who are done with identity politics, including feminism. We’ve seen it in the UK with Brexit, even though the UK government now is working furiously to find a way to ignore the will of the people.

The election of Donald Trump in America was much more than a shot across the bow. It was a political thermonuclear detonation. Even an endless barrage of accusations that he is a misogynist, that continues to this day, normally death for an American politician, could not stop him. He gave them all the finger and won an electoral landslide.

Politicians in Australia are starting to fight back, with Senator David Leyonhjelm telling a rabid feminist senator to quote fuck off, in response to her demonization of men as rapists. When the Australian Prime minister played the white knight and demanded that Leyonhjelm, apologize to her, Leyonhjelm called him, among other things, a pussy.

Dorothy, we are not in Kansas anymore.

Therefore, anyone who tells you the men’s movement is politically irrelevant is out of touch with reality. Red Pill men and women are poised to play a huge role in swinging upcoming elections, in furthering the political populism that can actually make a difference in policy and law.

Right now, you are at a conference hosted by the founder of the first men’s political party in the English speaking world. Since the last conference he hosted in 2016, another has emerged in Scandinavia. If you look now at what is happening in Italy, India, Eastern Europe, Southern Germany and America, all of which will hopefully inspire the UK to regain its momentum back toward sanity, you can see political opportunities that matter.

And one of the greatest opportunities is the growing antifeminist sentiment.

And let us not mince words about this. The war against feminism is a war against the left. And the war against the left is a war against feminism. That is something I would not have dwelled on 10 years ago, given the hapless gynocentrism of the old right. But this is not 10 years ago. Or even 5. This is a new day and a new age of disruptive populism. If you care about men’s and boys issues, you can help antifeminists become more effective by educating them about men’s issues as well as expanding their knowledge of the mendacity of feminism.

Enlighten the antifeminists. Use them. But do not be fooled into confusing them with advocates for men and boys who fit into our movement.

There are already some who claim to support our ideas, but whose actual motive is to create men and boys who are once again useful to women. These are frequently, but not always women. They will mock third wave feminism, often delightfully. They are entertaining and sometimes enchanting. But at the core of their philosophy is the old, dysfunctional social contract, complete with men’s purpose being utility to women.

These people can make convenient allies and are often quite useful in the big political picture. But this movement, and the world at large, still needs what it is woefully short of. Advocates for men and boys. Not cheerleaders for white knights. Not champions for traditional values. Not women who pine for the days when men were men and women were idle.

Not proponents for a toxic social contract between men and women, but true advocates who focus on the needs, wants, problems, aspirations and dreams of men and boys. People who see men and boys as having intrinsic worth. People who will champion the cause of them seeing their own intrinsic worth. People who understand that for women, real equality is a step down from their current station in life. And we need to know, all of us, that a gynocentric core, no matter how innocent or well intentioned, is a disqualifier for that advocacy. Remember, not every antifeminist is Janice Fiamengo. In fact, most of them aren’t.

Finally, I’d like to end this talk as I started it, with some thanks for all the people who made this conference possible. To all of you for attending, but especially to those of you in the audience who are more than just antifeminists. All of you who know that trouncing feminists in the arena of idea is like winning a footrace against a paraplegic; those who move past the simplistic pastime of antifeminism to take a stand for the men and boys in this world, even when it makes antifeminists uncomfortable.

I ask you wonderful warriors to please keep making people uncomfortable; to keep reminding a world that does not want to hear it of the radical notion that men are human beings.

Thank you.

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Post Information
Title Men’s Movement: Personal and Political (ICMI’18 Speech)
Author Paul Elam
Date January 9, 2020 12:00 AM UTC (4 years ago)
Blog A Voice for Men
Archive Link https://theredarchive.com/blog/A-Voice-for-Men/mens-movement-personal-and-political-icmi18-speech.36116
https://theredarchive.com/blog/36116
Original Link https://avoiceformen.com/featured/mens-movement-personal-and-political-icmi18-speech/
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