Once you’ve been around long enough, you can get a decent sense of social change. It’s kind of like watching a child grow. When you’re a parent minding a child day to day, you don’t notice the changes as they happen, but after some years you look at the kid and wonder how this could be the same little boy who needed to have his face wiped after every meal not so long ago.
Having been deeply involved in gender issues for some time now, I think I can say with some certainty that society’s views on the subject have changed markedly in a relatively short period — only ten years or so ago feminism was orthodoxy in both official and popular culture. While I’m sure that our efforts have been partly responsible for this, there’s the question of whether we were agents of change or products of it.
In my case it’s the latter. I had no desire to effect change in regards to family law and feminist political power until they punched me right in the face. I was an unwilling participant in a process over which I had very little control. It was that shock that led me to try to exert some influence over it, and whatever impact I or this site may have made was touched off by changes that had begun years ago and motivated not only me, but millions of other men and their families.
The “manosphere” is part of a much larger popular unease with a radical form of feminism that began to generate resistance as it picked up steam. As it grew, the resistance grew. Slowly during the first decades of modern feminism, but then faster as the feminist triumphs of the 1990s began to bear their rotten fruit. Today, we find radical feminism discredited in the eyes of most people, although it remains institutionally strong. Contemporary feminist family law is similar to Jim Crow in the early 1950s — morally defeated yet still holding its ground.
The manosphere happened for a reason; it didn’t appear out of nowhere. And it is only a small part of the general suspicion that now surrounds feminism. If all of the blogs of the manosphere were to disappear tomorrow, it wouldn’t take long for something similar to take their place. Enough people have had enough.
This isn’t to say that the manosphere is unnecessary or irrelevant, but rather that it’s part of an organic process. It is a crucial part that has carried a heavy burden, and will continue to do so for some time, but it’s important that we have a little perspective on what brought it about. I reject the idea that only a few people have taken the “red pill” — what we know of as the red pill is something that has been forced down many, many people’s throats by feminists themselves.
This is exactly why we have the moral upper hand. Modern feminism came about at least partly because women ended up in a disadvantageous position during the cultural and sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s, but since then it has been a movement of aggression. The manosphere and associated movements opposed to feminism are essentially defensive. Feminists act as though these increasingly effective acts of self-defense are the true aggression. It’s akin to when Soviets characterized Eastern European freedom movements as capitalist aggression, and it’s becoming every bit as transparent.
The importance of emphasizing who bears responsibility for resistance to feminism cannot be overstated. If, as the feminists say, it is an insidious plot orchestrated by a mysterious patriarchal cabal, then they may be able to justify the brutality they have employed in their war against men, just as the United States justified atomic strikes on Japanese cities a few years after Pearl Harbor. But if it is the combined anger and despair of millions of men, children, mothers, sisters – and even wives – over having lost their loved ones, their livelihoods, their sense of security and well-being and even their freedom, then it’s going to be a lot harder to explain it away.
If a feminist ever asked me what made me so strongly opposed to feminism – what caused me to take the red pill – I would look her in the eye and say “you did.”
As John Rambo would say: “They drew first blood…”
