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I mean, that women have to be punished to the same degree as men for the same offenses and the ‘Pussy Pass’ needs to be rescinded.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:
@katz: Oh, I’m all over that for sure. Part of me wants to stick it out, just to see how one-dimensional those characters get.
I keep forgetting about the Red Pill read-through. Need to get there.
So one of the problems with male birth control has to do with medical ethics. Apparently, serious/potentially serious side effects are more ethically acceptable under traditional medical ethics when (a) there’s informed consent, and (b) the side effects are a cost of treating a particular person’s medical condition.
Once you’re talking about male birth control (for those men who can’t get pregnant), it gets more complicated. Obviously, another person’s pregnancy can have a profound effect on someone, but medical ethics hasn’t gotten around to considering that yet so they tend to treat serious effects from a male birth control pill as unacceptable — even when those same effects for a woman might be acceptable (with informed consent).
Awesome; if you’re in the fora (and everyone who isn’t should be; things are way too dead over there) then feel free to participate; everyone is welcome to contribute/comment without any commitment or requirement to read the book for real. (AKA I am not actually that funny and I totally rely on the rest of you.)
“What, you mean like Murasaki Shikibu, Cleopatra, Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston, that woman who invented the hair-straightener, and a bajillion other women who made shit?
Make up your fucking mind, dude. Can women do things or just invent tyranny?”
I wouldn’t make a distinction between sexes in this regard. In the (reworked) voting scheme I envision it would depend strictly on individual merit – as verifiably demonstrated – for individuals to be enfranchised regardless of sex.
I would invite you to actually read my article about female suffrage destroying democracy.
Because I don’t actually make the claim that *all* women would destroy democracy. I’m well aware that there are exceptions.
But the facts I presented in my article speak for themselves. Oh, and by the way, I would like to add that whereas Mr Futtrell’s polemic and emotional rant here provides virtually nothing besides distortions and quotes from my articles taken out of their context I actually provided scientific studies confirming my claims.
Again, please try to remove emotions and polemics from the equation for a moment and think *dispassionately* about these issues.
“(Also, really don’t understand people who always assume THEY will be part of the superior class. Part of what keeps me in line is the knowledge that I’m likely to end up hosed by whatever dystopic fantasy goes up.)”
Where did I say I was going to be part of the “superior class”? Again, if you had actually taken the time to read my article in detail you might have noticed that I didn’t make this claim at all.
@Fade:
“Okay, I am going to break my track record and comment on the post.
The people who think that abortion is *just* about not wanting responsibility of a kid tick me off.
For me, the issue is about BODILY AUTONOMY. I dont really give a fuck about “paper abortion” because no one’s being forced to be an organ donor for something they don’t want there.”
But men *are* forced to pay for children a woman decides to give birth to. Where’s the bodily autonomy there? A woman has the right to unilaterally abort a child – even against the father’s wishes – citing ‘my body my choice’. A woman also has the right to carry a child to term and then give it up for adoption, again even against the father’s wishes. If she does decide to carry the child to term and raise it herself the father is then *forced* to pay child support.
Anyway you twist this it is still an absolutely injust arrangement. The woman has all the rights, the man all the responsibilities. The way I see, a just system would be to either allow a man to have a say in the birth / abortion of his child or, alternately, allow a man to likewise “abort” his responsibility for this child….during the same period open to a woman to physically abort.
And if you say the mans hould have behaved more responsibly prior to sex then I agree with you but would say the same about the woman as well. So this is not an argument either, in my book.
“Still re: person quoted in the post. Anytime I hear people talking about how universal suffrage is bad I mentally replace it with “PEOPLE MIGHT VOTE AGAINST WHAT I WANT”
It’s more about the question of having a country that is able to function effectively and enjoying a society that is prospering. If you think the current society we live in is doing well then by all means continue to bury your head in the sand.
But if you are able to see the mounting pathologies, the increasing dysfunction then it might be time for you to reexamine your beliefs and worldviews.
@Shaenon:
“Can I break for a moment to say how much the phrase “status object” grates? The idea is that men being valued for their intelligence, talents, and accomplishments is as dehumanizing as women being valued for their looks. That’s not what objectification means, guys. Being valued for your actions is the opposite of being treated as an object. It’s being treated as a subject.
I would be thrilled to the bone to be a “status object.” It would be awesome if being talented in my field made me popular and attractive and tons of dudes wanted to bone me. Especially since I am super talented in my field.”
That’s because you have the wrong definition of status object. Men as status objects are not valued for their intelligence, talents etc. per se but rather for their ability to facilitate the female reality. This means that men as status objects – in the minds of many women – have no value of their own but rather only value as *tools and instruments* for the benefit of women.
If you think a dehumanised instrument has more value than a woman that is valued for her sex appeal I’d say you have a great deal of pondering ahead of you still.
@Pillow in Hell:
“Education tailored to the respective genders natural inclinations?
Sounds like a call to insure that girls don’t get more education than what’s required to clean up after men and gratify their boners. After all, bitches ain’t shite when it comes to thinking or hard work right?”
No that’s just your interpretation of my statement. Your emotions are getting in the way of your understanding, I’d say.
It has been my experience that boys and girls learn things in a different fashion and as such can benefit from different teaching methods tailored to their respective gender’s inclinations. For instance, I believe boys require a more ‘competitive, aggressive’ approach to teaching whereas girls tend to prefer cooperation and harmony.
And this is all fine by me. But if you agree with me that the current way schools are being run is not exactly good for boys – as has been written about exhaustively – then why not try something new?
And why exactly would girl only schools “insure that girls don’t get more education than what’s required to clean up after men and gratify their boners”?
On the contrary, it would seem to me that girls would do well without the interference of boys as well.
Finally, vis a vis teenagers in sex segregated schools you would also have less distraction because the sexual dynamic would be minimized (except for homosexuals of course).
So you’d have less distraction due to sexual urges and more actual learning *as well* as a more effective teaching approach tailored to the gender’s respective inclinations. I call that a win-win.
@Wordsp1nner:
“People with uteruses (who are mostly, but not all women) have health care needs in the healthiest years of their lives that people without uteruses (mostly men) will never have: pregnancy, childbirth, and the regulation of the equipment down there, which I think is further proof of my DD (drunk designer) hypothesis. This cost directly leads to the continuation of the human race, including the male half.
How is that fair to saddle all the cost of that–plus the hassle and the risk–on half the human race?”
It is absolutely fair in that these women – of their own, free volition – decide to have babies. How is it fair to force other people (oftentimes men) to pay for your own individual choices?
You have all kinds of contraceptive methods at your disposal. Hence, I for one believe you should also assume responsibility if and when you have a child.
And the “continuation of the human race” is not at risk at the moment, I would say. With almost 7 billion people on this world I don’t see how this of all arguments has any merit at this time.
Chapter one was painful though. I mean, those last pages!! (No seriously guys, heed the trigger warning, I stumbled into that blind and my mockery quickly went to shit)
I’d still hold out for kittens.
Argenti: I’m sorry, I didn’t preread that excerpt before posting it. I’ll be more careful with later chapters.
That said, I think we’re through the worst of it and the rest should be the fun old MRA nonsense you’ve come to expect.
LOL LOL so, do you pull your money out of your arse like you do your ideas? Because otherwise, dude, money =/= your body.
As it happens, I and my husband have been professional tutors for over a decade. (He’s also been school teaching for part of that time.) We keep up with all the literature on learning and learning difficulties and teaching strategies for maths, English, ESL and science. I’ve not yet seen anything on this. (I would probably have missed it if it was on art or history or languages other than English, so I can’t be sure I’m fully up on the whole area.)
In other words. [Citation needed.]
I think just changing the word “experience” to “assumption” in that quote would make dudebro’s comment much clearer.
With the emphasis on ASSumption.
“LOL LOL so, do you pull your money out of your arse like you do your ideas? Because otherwise, dude, money =/= your body.”
Money is an abstraction of work which is done with your body. So the fact that a man is compelled to pay money to a woman who unilaterally decides to have a child even against his wishes is clearly on infringement on his bodily autonomy.
So by the same standards women used to justify their right to abort a man should likewise have a right to “abort” his responsibility for a child he does not want *or* he should have a voice in the question of wheter or not a child is carried to term / aborted.
“As it happens, I and my husband have been professional tutors for over a decade. (He’s also been school teaching for part of that time.) We keep up with all the literature on learning and learning difficulties and teaching strategies for maths, English, ESL and science. I’ve not yet seen anything on this. (I would probably have missed it if it was on art or history or languages other than English, so I can’t be sure I’m fully up on the whole area.)”
Different learning styles between boys and girls have been widely documented by different studies in the past.
As an example I give you this study:
“Gender and learning styles
Since the Second World War, there has been recurrent interest in the issue of learning styles. Much of that interest has been on individual cognitive differences in perceiving and processing information. It is, for example, well known that girls start to speak fluently earlier than boys and that girls and boys like to play with different toys from early childhood onwards, with boys taking more to technology to mediate their learning (e.g. computers) and girls reading books more than boys, who are more likely to read manuals and comics. In summary, girls have been found to be more inductive and concrete in their thinking and to be better able to follow meandering and detailed arguments than boys – probably because they listen more closely than boys. On the other hand, boys have been found to be more deductive and abstract in their thinking and to more often ask for evidence to support arguments as well as getting bored more easily than girls. This boredom partly results from boys’ greater propensity to move around and to use more space than girls. Girls have been found to be more sensitive to group interactions than boys and to have less hierarchical social arrangements, which enable them to work more cooperatively in groups. Boys appear to prefer to use more symbols, graphs and diagrams in printed material, while girls, who are more linguistically fluent, tend to prefer written texts.”
http://www.atl.org.uk/Images/Gender%20in%20education%203-19.pdf
I myself am a teacher as well and I have personally witnessed countless of times the fundamentally different behaviour and learning style of boys and girls. For instance, boys tend to be a lot more physical, active, competitive and aggressive than girls in class. I have noticed this pattern for boys of all ages but especially from 7 to 13.
Suffice to say I find it rather astonishing that you have never evidenced these traits. Maybe your perception of this issue does not allow you to see things clearly?
Ah, rape jokes…..You can say them, but people aren’t obligated to laugh or listen.
Yay! Last weekend my friends and I went to a comedy thing. The first two were great, but the third guy came on a told a rape joke. So, all 8 of us got up and walked out. When he responded to us leaving my friend flipped him off. I don’t know if it made a difference, but I’m glad we left. I was feeling kinda crappy after that. So, ya I’m not obligated to sit and listen to a rape joke just cause you want to tell me one.
*ahem* Because women aren’t people? Only men are people. Women should have the burden placed on their shoulders because ALL they are is a….(okay even in pretend I refuse to use that word) c***. To bring more people (aka men) into the world. And to satisfy the needs of men. Right?
OMG he is ON THE THREAD WITH HIS AWFULNESS!!!
Yikes.
Yep, cuase once the child is born, the woman has no repsonsibility to for it at all. No need to feed, raise, clothe, teach, provide etc. All the costs and effort pass straight to the poor father. /sarcasm
And the very next paragraph in your reference reads as follows…
(My bold.)
I remember reading this not long after it came out but I haven’t revisited these 108 pages for a very long time. I suggest a more considered reading on your part. I’ll have a look to refresh my memory.
I’m confused about why the standard for voting should be someone who has made a successful business, a great work of literature or a usefull invention none of these things mean that you know anything about politics or (with the possible exception of the business owner) economomics or healthcare or human rights or any number of other things that are important for running a country.
Please tell me you don’t teach English.
Here’s hoping you don’t teach reading comprehension, either.
Or biology, come to that.
Taking all this “segregation” to its logical conclusion, government will have to be segregated, too. So how will that work?
*Imagines the male half of the USA declaring war on a country while the female half engages in strong diplomatic relations and forms trade treaties with that country.*
*imagines different tax for males & females. would have to have segregated tills at the supermarket to ensure the correct VAT is applied, depending on gender*
So what happens to anyone non-binary?