Came across this essay. The way I see it, broadly, there are two different kinds of MRAs. There are non-traditionalists who want to see men given equal opportunity to be liberated from traditional role constraints (and it's this camp I definitely fall into since IMJ it represents the greatest chance for equal justice for men) and the traditionalists who want to see society return to a more traditional approach to gender roles. This essay is one in defense of traditionalism. So while I am not of this POV, and I feel the author injects prejudice and overgeneralization in several key areas of his arguments, I do see the practical issue relevance it raises in terms of certain specific gender roles, especially where the raising of children is concerned. It's hard to deny, for example, that boys raised without fathers have a much harder time of it than boys raised with fathers, and numerous studies bear this out. Excerpt:
'Without a stable family order, in which adult men civilize the young men, terror necessarily rules. No array of daycare centers, police powers, social welfare agencies, psychiatric or drug clinics, special schools and prisons can have any significant effect. William Tucker's fine new book Vigilante vividly shows the imbecile bathos into which our legal system has already fallen as a result of the decline of the stark mandate of justice into the weasels and waffles of social liberation.
At a time when millions of young men are slipping beyond the reach of democratic institutions - indeed, outside the social order itself - the drive to emasculate our politics threatens the foundations of democracy itself. Democracy is not so secure a system that in a serious crisis it can easily survive the loss of the instinctual appeal of male leadership. A state oin [sic] which the police and other governmental authorities are heavily in female hands would not last a week. The very emergence of such a state would itself signify either the massive estrangement of men from politics or the degeneration of democracy into some court-ruled system of quotas.
It is part of [Phyllis] Schlafly's genius to have persistently linked the concerns of family with the reform of education, the conservative revival of our politics, and the rehabilitation of our military. From her concern with the national defense to her defense of the nation's families, she espouses a fully coherent vision of the American predicament. A society of families both constrains male aggressions and channels them toward the protection and support of family and society.
...
Together with the tragic breakdown of the American black family, the Swedish example should disabuse Americans of the illusion that it couldn't happen here. Family breakdown and demoralization can occur with frightening suddenness when government policy destroys the role of the male provider in the family. The alternative to traditional family roles is not a unisex family; it is sexual suicide.'
