Ally Fogg's cowardly men's activism

This Ally Fogg guy is a pseudo mra from UK (he doesn;t call himself so, but he writes on men's issues and even engages in some activism). He is a founder of Men and Boys Coalition, but he also writes for Guardian.... He can criticize feminism once every 5 years or so, but he also hates AVFM, Paul Elam, Mike Buchanan, and all current manifestations of MRM.

So, he has this article on his blog at FTB (PZ Myers' place....) that shows the limitations of current men's activism, especially when it doesn't want to upset the dominant narrative dictated by our dear sisterhood.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2017/12/13/masculinity-the-personal-the-political-and-the-economic/

As you will discover, he's not exactly a MensLib, he doesn't think that all problems will be solved by men being vulnerable and crying more, he goes a little bit further than that, but nonetheless he obeys too many sacred cows.... and the result is right before your eyes.

Here's the bits that stuck in my throat:

As I am here in a university, let me begin with a familiar problem. Boys and men in the 21st century are falling behind academically at a quite spectacular rate.

If current trends were to continue, a boy born in 2017 will be 75% less likely to attend university than his sister. As many experts have noted, this has calamitous implications for society, for our economy and for the individual men of the 21st century.

Given the extensive – and very welcome – efforts to get girls into STEM and other subjects where they are under-represented, we might ask how many initiatives, how many programmes the Department of Education has funded specifically aimed at addressing boys’ academic underperformance? The answer, is zero. None. Not one.

Girls are assumed to be in need of practical help, support, encouragement. Boys are left to fend for themselves or effectively told it’s their own fault for playing too many video games. That is not toxic masculinity. That is toxic patriarchy – the expectation that men should be self-reliant, powerful, independent at all times.

Could another thing be the cause of this? Perhaps a certain ideology that says that women were oppressed for so long and denied education for so long that we need to do everything possible to improve women's situation, and that men and boys don't need help because they were privileged for so long... This ideology has also profoundly influenced government policies on education.

At the heart of the movement to reform masculinity is the idea that men need to be more caring, more sensitive, more nurturing as fathers and friends.

As someone living in UK, Fogg should know about a certain report authored by former minister Harriet Harman that said "“It cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social cohesion." Harriet Harman is associated with which ideology?

There is no doubt that we need more male role models in those areas (caring professions), it would surely help if we had vastly more men working in childcare, nursing, primary teaching and other caring professions.

There can be little doubt that machismo and male gender norms make a huge barrier to that ambition. Here is an area where political decisions could make an enormous difference – this is precisely the other side of the coin to the numerous initiatives aimed at getting more girls into STEM.

Well, in the bad old macho patriarchal days, men made up majority of teachers.

And yet not only does the government do nothing to encourage men into those professions, when the topic was raised last year Andrea Leadsom – now Leader of the House of Commons – said it is not “sensible” to employ men as child carers because they might be paedophiles. That is not toxic masculinity. That is toxic politics.

What about a certain ideology that has engaged in criminalisation of male sexuality for the last few decades. Could it have something to do with pedophile hysteria? Coupled with conservative distrust of men, of course.

One of the more welcome developments in the field of gender politics in recent decades has been the belated acknowledgement of the unique issues faced by male survivors of sexual, domestic and intimate violence and abuse. The very existence of male survivors challenges the norms of hegemonic masculinity – men are supposed to be the perpetrators, not the victims.

And at a political level, when the government funds projects to support male survivors, when the government, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service collects statistics on sexual abuse of men and boys, they do so within a strategy that is called Preventing Violence Against Women and Girls.

As far as our authorities are concerned, male survivors of intimate and sexual violence are categorised as an awkward subset of Women and Girls. That is not toxic masculinity, that is toxic patriarchy woven into the very fabric of government.

Again, I seem to recall a certain ideology that has for the last few decades dictated how we think about domestic violence. And its invention called the Duluth model (which is accepted by UN).

And what bloody "hegemonic masculinity"? What on earth does that mean? Other than a diversion so that you don't mention that sacred cow of an ideology.

You can see what the strategy is. Mr Fogg recognizes that men have issues, but he will blame masculinity, patriarchy, gender roles, economy, politics.... everything except feminism. This is good enough to get a space in Guardian, but not good enough to actually get anything moving. The funniest thing is that Ally Fogg is actually the most extreme position that liberal/leftist/centrist media will allow! One step further and you're a misogynist.