What do Men’s Rights Activists want? Based on what they actually do, it’s seems pretty clear that many of them want little more than the right to pester women with endless cries of “what about the menz?” But from time to time MRAs will step forward with little bullet-pointed manifestos presenting their grievances — and their goals — to the world.
So today let’s look at one of these little manifestos, from an MRA calling himself TzeTze Anopheles. It’s pretty revealing. And stupid. But that goes without saying.
Tze Tze starts off by demanding:
A complete rollback of all misandric laws. … It is high time we assigned the systematically unjust, contradictory and oftentimes outright insane feminist laws to the dustbin of history.
So what does Tze Tze mean by this? Well, you guessed it: “Paper abortion.” That is, the right of men to abandon their children without penalty.
Reproductive rights must be bestowed on *both* men and women and the cruel farce that is the current family law regime ended. This entails granting men the right to unilaterally “abort” their responsibility for any child they might have sired for the *exact* same time period a woman has to abort her child.
Huh. If this man lives in Texas, should he have to drive to a clinic in another state in order to carry out this “abortion?”
Tze Tze continues:
I want nothing less than the complete removal of sex from the equation regarding laws. By this I mean, that women have to be punished to the same degree as men for the same offenses and the ‘Pussy Pass’ needs to be rescinded. Additionally, I demand that women no longer be excluded from having to register for selective services. Draft has to be unisex.
Given that there hasn’t been a draft for decades, and that it has been feminists, not MRAs, who have been pushing for women to have the same rights to serve as men, I’m not sure this is the gigantic CHECKMATE FEMINISTS issue you think it is.
Tze Tze’s next proposal is a doozy. Indeed, it’s positively Anthony Zarat-esque in its audacity:
A complete segregation in society with regards to schooling and work. By this I mean girl only and boy only schools combined with appropriate education methods tailored to the respective sex’s natural inclinations. With regards to work I mean creating – as best possible – companies that are male only or female only.
Wait, what?
If Feminism’s claim that women can do everything men can do holds water women shouldn’t have a problem with this since it gives them an excellent opportunity to demonstrate this claim by *deeds* not words. Likewise, I am convinced that men – undistracted by the actions of women and without the necessity to sugarcoat everything they say and abide to a totalitarian politically correct behavioural code – can achieve far better performance than we have at present.
Oh, but Tze Tze isn’t done yet. He also demands:
The creation of male only and female only healthcare, pension funds and other social benefit schemes. And here again I say to Feminists who might have a problem with this: put your money where your mouth is. If women are naturally superior at basically everything – as claimed by Feminism – they should be delighted to no longer have to “carry the burden of the inferior male”.
Yeah, I don’t know many feminists who actually think that women are “naturally superior at basically everything,” or who even think about the genders in these terms.
It just seems a little odd that Tze Tze’s grand political program is based largely on playing a weird game of GOTCHA with the straw feminists living in his head.
And men for their part will know that their labour will no longer be abused in order to pay for the entitlement of western “princesses”. I for my part am convinced this would strongly increase the incentive of men to work hard, seeing as they would be sure to actually be able to enjoy the fruits of their labour.
I’m pretty sure “men for their part” — and even a good number of MRAs — would see your plan as pretty much the dumbest thing they’ve ever heard.
Tze Tze then throws in some garden-variety libertarian nonsense about reducing the size of government and “return[ing] to the US constitution, the original constitution.”
But it turns out he’s got quite an odd definition of democracy, as he then moves on to demand:
A complete reworking of suffrage.
Oh dear. This doesn’t sound promising.
I believe universal suffrage is unbecoming to any republic. When the mob rules democracy degenerates into a corporate circus, a cesspit where corrupt individuals bribe criminals to pose as politicians and the plebs is fooled and hoodwinked on every level.
Yes, “the plebs is fooled.” What kind of elitist can’t master subject-verb agreement?
As such more democracy is actually *less* democracy, and certainly…less freedom.
Black is white! Up is down! Freedom is slavery!
Cats are dogs and dogs are cats!
What I envision is a mechanism by which merit can be determined effectively and suffrage bestowed accordingly.
Presumably this wouldn’t involve a writing test. (See “the plebs is fooled” above.)
Hence, any individual would have the potential to acquire voting rights but only if he or she manages to demonstrate outstanding merit by, for example, inventing a useful technology, creating a successful business, creating excellent works of art, literature or philosophy (and thus demonstrating above standard wisdom). Naturally, this mechanism would have to be balanced out and its details worked out in a holistic sense.
Yeah, that sounds great.
It was nice of Tze Tze to suggest that women might pass this little test of his, but he didn’t mean it. A mere five days after publishing his little manifesto, he published a post with the title “Why Women’s Suffrage Destroys Democracy,” arguing that
Any country that thus gives women the vote is *inevitably* doomed to devolve into tyranny ere long. There is no other possibility.
Too bad, ladies! I guess the vote is too important to be entrusted to you, what with your love of tyranny and all.
Tze Tze moves on from the question of suffrage to another critical question of our age:
A widespread and stringent inquiry into the feasibility of a male contraceptive pill as well as an artificial womb. These two innovations are of pivotal importance as they will finally create absolute equality between the sexes – something women and feminists claim to support. As such I cannot see and will not accept any rejection of this basic human right of man.
Well, get to work on it, dude! As a man with a superior man brain I’m sure you’ll be able to have both of those invented by dinnertime.
Tze Tze then regurgitates some notes he wrote down while reading Warren Farrell — or while listening to some other MRA regurgitate their Warren Farrell notes — demanding
The undisputed right of any man to opt out of traditional male gender roles in very much the same way women have done. If women reject their role as sex objects then men should equally have the right to break their shackles and no longer act as status objects, as disposable instruments for the advancement of the Feminine Imperative.
Go for it, dude. Be as unsuccessful as you damn well please.
Every man should have the right to live his life the way he choses and *nobody* should have the right to shame him for his individual decisions. If a man doesn’t want to marry or start a family with a western woman (or any woman) that is his *own* prerogative and nobody has the right to judge him for that.
Dude, do whatever the hell you want. I would actually prefer it if you didn’t marry or start a family; you’d clearly be a terrible husband and/or father. Just don’t delude yourself by pretending that the women of the world actually give a shit about what you do.
Tze Tze moves on to the most important issue of all: the right to tell rape jokes in a crowded theater.
Either the complete abolition of all P.C. suppression instruments with regards to women’s sensitivities and their concomitant mob hysteria every time a man makes a “sexist” joke *or* the expansion of these same strict standards to include men as well. Basically, if it is not acceptable to make sexist jokes about women or portray them in less than flattering fashion in movies etc. the same applies for men as well.
Do you actually think it’s against the law to “to make sexist jokes about women or portray them in less than flattering fashion in movies etc?” Have you ever seen a movie?
So either stop demonizing men or allow men to likewise demonize women. Anything else is gross hypocrisy.
Well, you’ve declared women to be intrinsically inimical to democracy already, so apparently you were allowed to demonize women all along.
NOTE: In case any of you were wondering about the reference to Anthony Zarat above, he was an MRA who used to hang around these parts, and who had a rather dramatic proposal to solve all our pesky man-woman problems. This little video will explain:
“…where people could treat me badly and then respond to my healthy protest with ‘You’re grouchy again, go take a pill.'”
And if the pills don’t have the desired effect? Hm, personality disorder?
Let’s just ignore that “the pills” are the first ones they’ve tried and nearly nobody gets the desired effects from their very first prescription.
Yeah I woke up in the wrong side of the bed, but at least the risk of stepping on a cactus in the process has been eliminated (took two days to repot them so silly me left them on the floor…by my bed…some close calls there!)
Karalora,
I’ve been in a similar situation. Isn’t it “normal” to be sad when something terrible happens to you? I resent being told I need to see a therapist or get on anti-depressants when I am just expressing a sadness that should be expected when bad shit happens.
Or just expressing offense when someone says something offensive.
RE: sarahlizhousespouse
We’re multiple. Unfortunately, this led to our mother feeling that nobody here was her child, just strangers she was being forced to interact with for reasons she didn’t understand. She was hoping that medication would make the ‘strangers’ like me disappear and her ‘real child’ come back. Sadly, meds don’t work that way.
RE: karalora
Oof, you have my sympathies. Depression is a nasty thing, and I find it way more frightening than other issues I’ve dealt with here.
@Alice
That’s the problem with having a mood disorder – people tend to forget that you have normal moods too. And when your disorder takes the form of having your normal responses magnified (as opposed to weird mood swings apparently out of nowhere), it gets even more muddled.
@LBT
Appreciated. I’m much better now than I was then, to the point where I don’t think I’m even diagnosable anymore. I occasionally have something I recognize as a depressive episode, but a) much more rarely than I used to, b) they last a day or less, and c) it doesn’t feel so horrible. Nowadays it tends to manifest as a sort of angry apathy – i.e., “I do NOT feel like dealing with this shit!!!” – rather than an overwhelming sadness. And I never did wind up going on meds. Instead, I managed to improve my life so I wasn’t being triggered so much, and I also confronted my friends and told them they were being part of the problem by treating me like a ticking time bomb instead of a person who just happened to have a mood disorder.
RE: Karalora
It’s funny. I’m actually on anti-depressants now, and have been for about a year. How much of it was situational, how much was malnutrition, and how much was proper capital-D Depression… well, that’s hard to say. I do hope to come off these someday, since I don’t see depression as my main problem, but I also know better than to try right now, when things are still so up in the air. It just feels really weird to be medicated for something that I still have trouble seeing myself as having!
I deplore segregation but how can paper abortion be labelled ‘right to abondon your child’ any more than physical abortion be considered ‘murder’ ?
A man that never wanted a child is not, in my definition, a father, and should not be treated as one.
Depression is funny that way. I’m pretty sure there is no clear bright line between a regular bad mood and a depressive episode, or between someone who is glum because of circumstances, someone who is just naturally kind of glum by default (the way some people are naturally optimistic), and someone with diagnosable clinical depression.
I deplore segregation but how can paper abortion be labelled ‘right to abondon your child’ any more than physical abortion be considered ‘murder’ ?
Because one is a child; and so a person, and the other isn’t.
They really do have trouble with that don’t they?
Seriously, the solution here is simple, but I’m a fucking commie sometimes — everybody pays into a fund for the care of everybody’s kids. A bit like public school but inclusive of more services.
Huh, public school is all red commie run away? No wonder my father is pissy about having his property taxes go towards the school he doesn’t have kids in [anymore] >.<
I always laugh at my friend whonworks for Walmart and swears by libertarianism, and less regulation on businesses. Dude, the only reason you can makes ends meet there is because of regulation. We’ve seen how they treat their employees in overseas factories, and even howthey skate by with doing the bare,minimum for employees here. You really think deregulation would makeyour life better?
Also, I only wish men shared the responsibility of birth control at the cost women do. Condoms are side-effect free short of your dick feeling slightly less awesome and it’s still like pulling teeth to get some men to wear them. Now imagine they couldbget a pill with even half he side effects that women get. Oh, not to mention the responsibility of having to take it at the exact same time evey day. I forsee quite a few men preferring to take the risk with a woman’s body than suffer some tummy aches from time to time.
I also doubt thesemen are aware of the human rights violations that brought the pill about in the first place. Though I’m sure with all the white supremecists in the bunch they’d be cool using non-white humans as guinnea pigs.
Sorry about typos. This tablet is tough to type on.
Oh and for our lovely, smart, teacher friend here, how kind of you to ignore nature vs nurture in your observations of how boys and girls behave and learn. I sure would want my kids in a class that teaches them based on their sex and not on the well documented, unisex learning styles that have been developed to understand how people learn as individuals. I love how gender essentialism has always left me out in the cold though. As a woman, supposedly predisposed to memorization, I have to work my ass off just to barely pass a history class. But put a math book in front of me and I can teach myself the entire thing. So which school should I attend? Or are girls like me doomed in your system despite our propensity for learning in the “boy’s style?”
Or maybe I’m just being too emotional, thinking about how unsimple teaching children actually is.
You know what I bet, Jessay? I bet if this chucklehead got his way and schools were entirely segregated, with girls being taught by having them sit down and do their work and boys being “taught” by letting them run around and act like gibbons, the girls would (generally) learn, the boys (generally) wouldn’t, and society would be female-dominated inside of a generation because women would be the only ones who actually received education instead of All-Day Playtime.
I also bet he thinks it would be exactly the other way around – that if boys weren’t being held back by the expectation to sit down and do their work, then we’d all see how smart they really are and how dumb girls are by comparison. And that if the business world was comprised of all-male companies and all-female companies, the all-male ones would be better at everything.
Three words: Brave New World.
Aldous Huxley (a man, MRA’s, so you know its truefax) figured out that this shit doesnt work a LONG time ago.
I guess he gets to vote…
/ sarcasm
Except the Brave New World part. But, they’d probably like it. All women woud have to wear a specific color, to display her HB rating. “I’m an HB6. All HB6’s wear green.”
Now I think I might throw up.
What the hell is an HB? Do I even want to know?
@Sarahlizhousespouse
IIRC, it’s “hot babe (and then the number follwing is how hot the rater thinks the ratee is in 1 – 10”. I always found it kind of yucky, but/because PUAs are very fond of it.
RE: Jessay
Condoms are side-effect free short of your dick feeling slightly less awesome and it’s still like pulling teeth to get some men to wear them.
*sigh* I wish this weren’t true. The sheer amount of WHINING I’ve encountered is maddening. Seriously, wrap it or forget it.
1. Why do misogynists complain about a lack of male contraception and then lie, coerce, or emotionally blackmail their way out of wearing a condom? So many girls I knew in high school got pregnant because their douchebag boyfriends refused to wear condoms and either lied about how effective the withdrawal method is (while also “accidentally” forgetting to pull out) or else pulling the “you’d do it if you loved me” line which is fucking effective on an intensely insecure 15 year old whose parents got them exempt from sex ed on religious grounds.
2. How about we flippin’ give these guys “abortion” rights; in exchange for escaping their obligations as a human being with morals they can have an absolutely irreversible vasectomy, but only after the two mandatory urethral probes (which they pay for out of pocket) while getting a condescending lecture from a doctor, followed by a mandatory counselling session, followed by a mandatory 72 hour waiting period (business days only).
Which will be difficult because we’ll also bring in legislation saying that the doctor needs admitting privileges at the nearest hospital (and we’ll strongly imply that any hospital that DOES give them those privileges will lose a lot of funding), insist on building codes that are nonsensical and designed to shut down many medical clinics offering vasectomies, as well as banning public money going towards vasectomies and making it totes legal for insurance companies to refuse to cover the procedure. That sounds about fucking fair.
Thing is, I actually want to make it as easy as possible for these assholes to get vasectomies. In fact I’d be happy to set up a fund for them to do so. Think about it – do we want them being parents?
Pecunium, this is still operating under the assumption that the man has a child to abandon, if a woman can turn her back on parenthood while a fetus is developing in the womb, so can a man. yes if man ‘aborts’ then the woman may produce a child, but she still has the option to abort on herself,so it’s asinine to insist she would be forced to take care of a child alone, she chose to.
Mysterics, I have this to say to that:
And that’s real.
Well, something’s asinine, anyway.
Mysterics: Pecunium, this is still operating under the assumption that the man has a child to abandon, if a woman can turn her back on parenthood while a fetus is developing in the womb, so can a man. yes if man ‘aborts’ then the woman may produce a child, but she still has the option to abort on herself,so it’s asinine to insist she would be forced to take care of a child alone, she chose to.
Nope. It’s not his to “abandon”. If he wants to get an abortion, he can get pregnant. If he want’s to never have kids he can get a vasectomy. If he might want kids, and so won’t get a vasectomy; he runs the risks that come with fucking.
Saying, “if he aborts she can too” is bullshit. That’s removing her agency; and absolving him of responsibility for his actions. It’s punishing the child because he’s an asshole.
What’s asinine is that you didn’t bring any new arguments to the discussion.
“If he wants to get an abortion, he can get pregnant.”
I’m not sure if you intended this, or were attempting to say that since (cis)men don’t get pregnant…except hey Mysterics? Some men can get pregnant, trans* men, and if he wants an abortion, he can get one. The pregnant person gets the final say in whether the
creaturepotential baby growing inside them gets to stay there.