In a sign that someone at Jezebel must be reading The Spearhead, Gawker’s feminist publication has also chimed in to address the “Dear Prudence” advice column I wrote up the other day wherein a daughter asks for advice about her MRA dad.
Jezebel, being the balanced, unbiased publication it is, decides to ask Hugo Schwyzer and David Futrelle for advice. Schwyzer is actually half-reasonable, but the solutions he offers are missing the point.
In terms of advice, it’s not easy for a son to challenge his Dad. But drive the conversation towards individual women — not the “bitches” and “harpies” of his father’s imagination, but the women Dad has loved. A mother? A sister? An ex? There is inside every MRA I’ve ever met a stopped-up well of compassion and love for women. It’s getting to the good stories (and there are always GOOD stories) about women that is so vital. And from those stories about individual women Dad has loved, perhaps the son can talk about what those women went through and experienced.
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It’s also important for Dad to be able to talk about his own pain — not his rage, which is a response to pain, but the pain itself. Men’s Rights Activism is the public manifestation of an experience of betrayal (whether that betrayal is “real” or not, it’s perceived as real.) Getting to the source of that rage is vital.
While I’m sure there are some men out there who despise all the women in the world, I haven’t actually met one, so I think he has a point. However, it’s the wrong one. Getting over pain and loving women in one’s life are really irrelevant to the issue at hand, which is preventing the pain from happening in the first place. An analogy would be car accidents. We should help people who have suffered terrible injuries from car accidents, but we should also try to prevent them from occurring.
Unfortunately, the situation regarding marriage and parenthood today is akin to giving every new driver a bottle of vodka and faulty brakes and coating the roads with oil. As you might imagine, there are a lot of smoking wrecks littering the streets.
Feminists, for their part, still attempt to say that they support equality, and put the blame for the problems men face on the nonexistent “patriarchy” that reinforces men’s roles. That’s just smoke. I’ve never, ever seen a feminist support an equal parenting law in the real world, but I did see them support gender-specific laws like the Violence Against Women Act, which gives the lie to their equality claims.
Here’s a typical feminist comment from one “opifex umbratili”:
And actually I think the bulk of the problems listed are caused by patriarchy more than anything else (and before you get your britches in a bunch Mr. MRA, that does not mean individual men). The belief that women are basically soft, fluffy, nurture beasts (ergo better mothers, bad soldiers, not criminals etc.) is a a patriarchy thing. I think you would be very hard pressed to find a feminist who doesn’t think that men can be good fathers, or that women shouldn’t be viewed as equals to men in terms of capability (even if that is a capability for violence).
In real patriarchy, the children are always under the authority of the father (this was the norm throughout the West prior to industrialization). That is the definition of patriarchy — father rule. How could default maternal custody possibly reflect patriarchal values? It’s ridiculous on the face of it, but feminists really are a one-trick pony when it comes to the blame game.
As for what feminists say, that doesn’t matter at all. It’s what they do that counts, and anyone who knows the score can see that they consistently support laws and policies that favor women rather than promote equality. The feminists are directly responsible for much of the trouble that befalls men in divorce, but as usual they blame men in general or the individual victimized man. Finally, however, people are challenging their narrative, and as the article shows they are trying to think of ways to squelch the protest.
We should take the fact that feminists are starting to push back against MRA as a good sign. There is a real problem in the way the West, and the United States in particular, treats its men, and it’s going to have to be dealt with one way or another. With these kinds of social problems that involve one group of people profiting from the misery of another, there’s always a lot of reaction against an emergent protest movement (people hate losing privileges), especially when it begins to become somewhat coherent. Eventually, however, people take a harder look at the problem, and then a more reasonable dialogue can emerge in the middle. I think we’re just getting to the stage where feminists recognize that they aren’t the only ones in the room now where “gender issues” are concerned, and they’re beginning to react.
