Why did you become a Men's Rights Activist?

eletheros · 2014-11-09T15:00:09+00:00

Because my now-ex wife was arrested for child neglect and spent 30 days in jail. When she got out, divorce proceedings were already on the way and the judge gave her temporary custody.

It gets worse, but that's the proximate cause.

chocoboat · 2014-11-09T18:13:24+00:00

I've always been interested in advocating the idea of treating all people equally, and wiping out the almost-laughably-stupid discrimination out there (mostly racism, but some sexism).

I learned more about feminism and thought "This is a great movement. Women are being held back or treated as less valuable then men in certain areas of life (often career-related), men face the same problems in other areas (male disposability). Feminism is for gender equality, so it's going to fix all of that... what a great idea! Everyone should be treated as if their gender doesn't matter!

But then I was told that my comments aren't wanted, because I'm a man. I was told I'm part of the problem, and I'm not wanted. When I asked why no issues affecting men were ever being addressed, I was told to stop trying to make everything about men. Eventually it became outright aggressive, I was told that I hate women and I'm part of the problem, and that I stand in the way of equality.

In short, I had a group supposedly focused on gender equality telling me that I don't matter because I'm the wrong gender, and that they're only interested in fixing problems for one gender and not the other.

I just stopped caring about these issues for a while. Eventually after I discovered Reddit, I saw this sub mentioned and came to take a look, and I was glad to find that there are people out there who care about men's issues, while feminism caters to women's issues. I thought this sounds like a good system, separate the groups and address each gender's problems separately.

Then I was disappointed (but not really surprised) to find that feminism considers the MRM an anti-equality hate group. That's something I don't think I'll ever understand, and it seems as pointless and laughably-stupid as the idiotic racism that first led me to notice issues of inequality.

They recognize that men face problems... but if people come together to address those problems, suddenly that's supposed to be a hate group. Why? Because of the physical characteristics of the people doing it.

It's just sad that the primary group claiming to be for gender equality has so much hatred and intolerance for one of the genders.

2014-11-09T16:06:24+00:00

Because I was constantly abused by my ex wife. I would call the police (or the neighbors would) after she beat on me and I would go to jail, We have a mandatory male arrest law where I am from, and she knew it,. The worst was being cuffed to a gurney with a screwdriver through my forearm, pleading with the police as I had called them. We were divorced soon after where the judge used the domestic reports as a reason (because I must have driven her to it) as a reason to damn near award her everything she wanted. Which left me in poverty.

tprice1020 · 2014-11-09T16:00:32+00:00

[permanently deleted]

lordslag · 2014-11-09T15:46:08+00:00

I didn't so much become one as I found out I'd been one for quite some time. I saw the conviction/sentencing disparity, ALL my male friends getting reamed in the courts in divorces and over kids, lack 50% assumed custody, the double standards of DV and rape accusations, and on and on...and then I wandered in here. I was like...oh...I'm NOT the only one who's taken the blindfold off...Nice.

Emorio · 2014-11-09T16:28:05+00:00

Because I got cyberbullied by a feminist friend of mine and her army of white knights. This was after I pointed out the blatant misandry in the poisoned M&M's analogy back in May. I received a large volume of hate mail, kicked out of the RPG group I had been attending (she was a shitty GM anyway), and was referred to as "Soloman Bundy." I ended up getting fired over this event as well, as we both worked together. I knew I should have followed through with that sexual harassment claim after she leaked details about a drunken night of BDSM to my direct supervisor, who then made jokes about me ending up in a corsette and tutu. I think the most ironic and hypocritical thing about the whole situation is that by feminist definition she literally raped me.

EDIT: May not March.

ErlichBachman · 2014-11-09T19:08:15+00:00

Fairness is a concept that I value highly. I was supportive of feminism in the 80s. Then over time I realized that no matter how much they gained it was never enough. Today 60 out of every 100 college students are female but do you hear a pip about this growing problem from the feminists?

Nope.

I am also sickened by the man-hating cisSJW idioits who have been completely brainwashed by feminism into hating their own. Sadly these idiots are now starting to infest and dominate this group and Atheism as well.

rudelyinterrupts · 2014-11-09T14:12:28+00:00

I became one because I grew up in an area that didn't deal with feminists ideals and propaganda. Everybody finds their own place. Men still open doors and carry heavy things for women, but they'd do the same for a guy. Women are typically the cooks and cleaners at home while the man is typically the carpenter and handyman. But this is not a static role. Men understand that women are generally better at certain tasks due to simple biology. Women understand that men are generally better at certain tasks, again thanks to biology. So for eighteen years I grew up with this idea that the world just worked and that feminists who cried about inequality in first world countries were one in a million. Then I went to college and saw how looked down upon I was. It's been 6 years since that time and I'm still shocked at the problems that arise from my sex. So I go back home as often as possible top where the world makes sense and sexism, discrimination, and bigotry aren't woods to throw around lightly. They are real accusations and are only used sparingly. I guess I'm a MRA because other men get discriminated against, and because I see the feminists conspiracy theory and the false flags and facts they shove in our faces, and I'm sick of it. I want more places to be like where I grew up. Everybody is equal, but there is a very clear distinction between men and women. It's simple biology.

2014-11-09T21:59:28+00:00

Mainly reading about outrageous abuses and outcomes from the family kangaroo court system.

ThePigmanAgain · 2014-11-09T22:08:34+00:00

Because it needs to be done and it's the right thing to do. If i had been born at a time when women were the second sex i would probably have been a feminist. Weird but true.

ParanoidAgnostic · 2014-11-09T22:27:31+00:00

I spent most of my life as a serious misandrist. As a non-conforming male forced to live among males with, no female privileged to protect me or female safe spaces to retreat to, I was constantly bullied at school and grew to hate most other males.

In feminism I saw the same hatred for men as I felt. However it became increasingly clear that they group me with the other men and hold me in equal disdain. The feminist interpretation of the Eliot Rodger incident and the bullshit "poisoned M&Ms" rhetoric that came with it really rammed the point home.

This led me to reexamine my own attitudes. Just as feminists refused to recognise my individuality, I was refusing to recognise the individuality of other men. I was a hypocrite. I resented being generalised as the worst of masculinity while I was doing the same to others.

mikesteane · 2014-11-09T23:37:28+00:00

From kindergarten and primary school where girls were praised for doing girly things while boys were punished for being boyish.

2014-11-10T00:10:24+00:00

after reading so many cnn.com articles that I began to think there is something wrong with me just because I'm a dude.

2014-11-10T00:28:30+00:00

Because I cannot watch television without seeing a commercial where a man is assaulted, sexually violated, objectified, or depicted as a mindless idiot while the women are depicted as godlike beings.

Then I saw lots of double standards IRL regarding female-on-male sexual violation. And then I found MRAism.

topsecreteltee · 2014-11-10T06:03:37+00:00

Where to begin... I was in Afghanistan and one of my NCOs started having a lot of problems. Stopped doing meaningful physical training, making appalling dietary choices, not maintaining himself, and generally raising the concern of the leadership... He wasn't keen to talk about it and things were headed down hill. Then his wife posted to the Family Readiness Group's Facebook page and things started becoming public.

What resulted was the discovery that she had become clinically insane, and I'm not exaggerating or using the term loosely, she was informally evaluated by a mental health professional who was part of a team that reached out to help her before it was clear who was the bad guy and accusations were flying. He didn't know how to handle it, she was abusive before deployment and after four months of separation couldn't contain herself. She started threatening his property, his career, and herself as a tool to manipulate him. She ended up getting our group commander involved, the installation's Commanding General, and the state governor's office involved to try to strong arm him into all kinds of preposterous situations and have HIM arrested for being abusive. He ended up going to and spending MANY long nights talking with his entire NCO support channel to the BN CSM, myself, and our CO and BN Commanders trying to get help.

By the time all was said and done I discovered he was presumed guilty as an abuser and had to prove his innocence to everybody after a mere allegation and no investigation. That no domestic abuse resources around our home station would/will help men. The Army has plenty of structures in place to punish soldiers for committing domestic abuse, but not to help them recognize and get away from abuse. And that it took the active efforts of a Sergeant First Class, a First Sergeant, a Command Sergeant Major, a Lieutenant, a Captain, two Majors, three Lieutenant Colonels, and three Colonels, and a General, not including numerous counselors, chaplains, lawyers, and military police to keep a man safe from a clinically insane woman's unfounded allegations of abuse. The worst part is that we were all against him at the beginning.

Today he is divorced and doing excellent. I'm proud that myself and the other leaders close to him dug in and took a stand to help him when we realized what was really happening. But I don't think that we would have been as effective if his platoon sergeant wasn't a misogynistic feminist and our Commander a Lesbian who married her wife days before deployment. Having those two vocal women at his side defending him made a huge difference. And that is how I realized how vulnerable men are, and decided to be part of the solution.

CriticallyRed · 2014-11-09T21:15:23+00:00

I'll try to keep this short.

Used to, the idea of gender issues still existing today just wasn't even a thought to me. In my high school years, I dated a girl who cheated on me multiple times. Being the naive sophomore I was, I always forgave her because obviously she would stop eventually.

But when I decided I had enough I decided to end things with her. When this happened she immediately began freaking out making up these strange excuses about how she was "just confused", or how "she just didn't know what she wanted". After this, and all the bashing I got from her friends, I started to think about the scenario in which I would have wanted another chance. I mean from the other relationships I saw fall apart around me, a girl didn't have to have much reason at all to break up with her boyfriend - and the world around her justifies it. I would become a bit wiser from this.

Now I know this was just a high school relationship. I wasn't very wise at that age, so it wasn't anything to take seriously. However, this did make me sensitive to situations involving gender inequality. And no one had to sit down and convince me that men get the crappy end of the deal most of the time. I would try bringing this topic up, even among my male friends, but no one really took me seriously. I'm just an evil white male who can't stand to see my power (as if men were allowed to have power) stripped from me.

thereyouwent · 2014-11-09T22:34:52+00:00

the dangers of identity politics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac6zDnK4ov4

Apellosine · 2014-11-09T22:55:58+00:00

The issues that my father had with my mother, her friends and the police.

On the day that he was trying to move out and had hired a truck for the day she had the police come around and remove him from the property on bullshit dv charges. She had been drinking and had fallen due to being drunk all night and that morning.

Because of this he was forced to leave the property and not be able to return. This made it rather difficult to move his stuff out and no amount of reasoning with the police officers by either him or myself (who even told the police that it was bullshit) would help. I had already taken the day off work to give dad a hand but we also had to get onto my brother to help me as well while my father was forced to simply help unload at his new place.

The combination of the police officers' inability to be reasonable when it came to what was happening was just mind boggling to me and caused be do find out why this was the case.

nitzua · 2014-11-10T03:08:16+00:00

I'm a law-abiding, employed, and dedicated father who has his 6 year old daughter ~45 hours/month while her mother neglects her to the degree that she has had 16 cavities in her two visits to the dentist since she was born. I want a fair shot at being a part of my daughter's life and I believe her mother should be prosecuted for negligence as well as forced into therapy (at the very least) for her untreated borderline personality disorder.

2014-11-11T02:01:12+00:00

I became one because I had to watch one of my best friends repeatedly abused by his girlfriend.

She was the epitome of the hipster college girl meme. She would rant and rave about oppression and patriarchy from her couch while he worked offshore oil rigs to finance her women's studies degree. When someone called her on her bullshit she would exclaim "i'm just a girl". My favorite was when she would complain about sexual objectification the day before getting tarted up specifically to mess with the other MTG nerds libidos mid game.

This went on for years and I stayed in the thick of it to do what I could to reprogram him. When he finally got out and found a good woman I gravitated into this space via Girl Writes What and her eloquent explanation of all the phenomenon I couldnt wrap my head around regarding feminist hypocrisy. When I found out there were other men suffering the same fate and a world that never gave a shit I felt a need to come here and lend what small support I could to other men.

On a deep level I knew the gallows were coming and I'd be damned if I'd hang apart from my brothers.

Jaykaykaykay · 2014-11-09T23:15:50+00:00

I saw one of Karen Straughan's videos.

WMO · 2014-11-10T03:58:32+00:00

Because when I was a victim of some pretty violent DV I had nowhere to turn for help and when I did say something even the men in my family are so brainwashed that they would say things like "Any man that gets beat up by a woman is a pussy." and I have watched many of my friends and met many others who suffered the same indignation.

OfficerGibbles · 2014-11-10T17:07:39+00:00

because i miss my sister... College psychology professors took her away from me and my family

Title	Why did you become a Men's Rights Activist?
Author	TheThinMan34
Upvotes	24
Comments	39
Date	November 9, 2014 1:29 PM UTC (11 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/2lrd50/why_did_you_become_a_mens_rights_activist/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/why-did-you-become-a-mens-rights-activist.993667 https://theredarchive.com/post/993667

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