One Man’s Meat is Another Man’s Hot Sauce

I honour Men’s Rights Activists, but i’m not really that kind of man myself. In different—especially, in more urban circumstances—i might be; but i think i’d still give my main time, attention and sweat to action that many activists wouldn’t see as their calling. I suppose that goes back to my grandfather, my Dad, my boyhood Scoutmaster, and the joy of gardening and building. I really like to produce results that can be seen and enjoyed by the locals.

Instead of calling myself “MRA”, i call myself “Men’s Interest Worker” (because “Advocate” would produce the same acronym as “Missing in Action”, which i ain’t.) I believe that the way up and out of the hole Feminism has dug for men, includes activism but is even more a matter of teamwork achieving practical tasks, mentoring boys and supporting wounded boys and men, designing and confirming by trial, social patterns that will define the post-Feminist world.* My guess is that thousands and perhaps millions of men would [like me] give more time to such action than to activism, just as we put more meat, salad and bread [or rice] on the plate than we do hot-sauce.

Let me honour a little specific activism: The “outing and shaming” that A Voice for Men has done with “Vliet Tiptree” and the Swedish SCUM organization, is, methinks, valuable work. If i were the sort of old man who sits home, plays classic-flick videos and Mozart CDs, and sends money for others to do the actual work [and lived in the US banking system], then i’d send check for a few hundred dollars to AVfM, a larger check to the Spearhead—and a few thousand to shovels-in-the-ground, hammer-and-nails, men-and-boys-around-the-campfire action efforts.

As it is, i intend to spend a few hundred hours each year writing and working with other men “on the ground” (and in rural life, that really means with my boots on the dirt, in the snow—and, come spring breakup, in the mud.) I plan to put most of the money i spend on men’s-interest work—and i plan to spend 10% of my after-tax income, maybe more—in support of my work and the work of men i know personally.

If enough local men get together to have a “Motherhood Is Serious Work—Not All Women Qualify” protest come Mother’s Day, i might well be there carrying a sign (and if the language is English, perhaps making a short speech.) Along with that day or two of work on activism, i expect to spend a week or two that same May, on practical action.  And because there are fewer than 10,000 Anglophone men within an hour’s drive of my home [and about the same number of Francophone men], the likelihood of such a protest isn’t what it would be if i lived in Halifax or Winnipeg—never mind Toronto, Houston, Seattle or WDC.

As a rural man, i’m not so much averse to activism, as located in the wrong place for it, and even more fond of practical action. You might say, if action is my meat, then activism is more like hot sauce with more jalapeño than tomato in it; and writing is the good stuff from the garden—Cardinal lettuce, Scotia tomatoes, homegrown arugula and chives, Honeycrisp apples, chocolate mint tisane, and dandelion wine.   (The apple trees are still too young to produce enough for cider.)

I’m glad there are activists; i’m glad there are Greek oregano and jalapeños and even [in very small amounts] habañero and cayenne and Scotch-Bonnet peppers. I wouldn’t fill my salad bowl with any of them, nor make them more than a wee fraction of the total volume of my next batch of salsa-picante.

* The sinking of the Titanic is a classic example of pre- or early-Feminist gender relations: At least 90% of the men passengers, 24% of the women passengers, and 51% of the children died. (Many men of the crew were saved because their work included “manning the lifeboats”. One lesson is, if you travel by ship, know how to sail; sadly, it doesn’t work for air travel.)

At that time, a century ago, men had their privileges and women had theirs—the privileges of the sheltered gender. Feminism has brought women out of the shelter of the home; but has not accepted the costs that “going where the hot action is” implies. The result: Where there was a balance in 1912, there is substantial overall female privilege and male disadvantage in 2011.