What is the “men’s rights” movement?

I suppose I should preface this entry by clarifying my own position: I am not a feminist, and I am not a “men’s rights” proponent. Anyone calling me a mangina or any other term intended as a slur will be swiftly censored. Also, if you do this, fuck you in advance, you woman-hating asshole.

The “men’s rights” movement (MRM) is an ideology based on the premise that women have more power than men in our society (??), mainly concentrating on things like alimony and custody disputes, false rape accusations, laws biased towards women, and so on. At least, that’s the theory (an incredibly sexist theory, but still a defensible theory if you are incredibly sexist).

In practice, when you read what these people write, when they defend their positions or discuss them with like-minded people, you find invariably one thing: they don’t do anything about “men’s rights” or care a whit about the hardships of men, but they despise, mock, infantilize, resent, and hate women. It’s not that they think women are favoured by our institutions or laws, although that’s always part of it; their main drive seems to be a seething, sometimes violent, hatred for women. To them, women marry men purely to abuse and use men. Women are vile creatures, and on the whole it’s better to have nothing to do with them if possible.

An interesting thing. Where have we heard that before?

But the further interesting thing is that not only do they hate women, but they also hate abortion, they hate homosexuals, they hate sexuality, they believe in gender segregation, objectify women. They also profusely use projection: they are “nice guy” who just happen to want to kill everyone who disagrees with them, they claim women only want to exploit men and then talk about their fantasies of exploiting women, they are paranoid that women berate men when they talk to each other while they come together as a bunch of men to berate women, they believe that women only want to exploit them in relationships while they constantly talk about exploiting women for sex, they talk about women being herd animals and emotional while violently opposing anyone who disagrees with them on any subject, and so on and so forth.

Again, where have we heard these traits before? That’s right.. the truth is, “men’s rights” activists (MRAs) are faggots!

MRAs say they support MRM because women have too much power in relationships and in society (except when they say it, there’s a lot of b-words and c-words). Others, more clinical, say that the MRM (“men’s rights” movement) comes from men feeling they are losing all their privileges. But the probably truth, at least the only hypothesis that fits the facts observed, is that they are all faggots.

Feeling someone is taking away your privileges, or that women have too much power, doesn’t fit at all with the other hatreds MRAs have. But the faggot hypothesis does, almost completely. The only part of faggotry which MRAs do not possess is the self-hatred and subsequent belief in salvation: they believe they are perfect “nice guys,” so they don’t hate themselves (although there is a bit of self-hatred in that they are still attracted to women, and resent that fact about themselves). This may be related to the fact that MRM is not a belief system, but purely a system to channel faggot energy and faggot hatred.

There is also the added fact that MRAs constantly harp on themselves being the victims of women’s needs, aggression and dominance. But at the same time, they describe their fantasies of raping women, beating women to a bloody pulp, or just outright killing them. This is very reminiscent, again, of the Christian faggots who scream their victimhood while they are in control of the government, said government furthermore ruthlessly murdering brown people for the crime of having a different religion.

There seems to be other movements or ideologies which emphasize some other hatred over the rest. People who emphasize hatred of homosexuals? Ex-gay ministries (and Fred Phelps). People who emphasize hatred of abortion? Pro-life movement. People who emphasize hatred of sexuality? I’m not sure about that one, although I suppose most religions and various cults fit the bill. MRM seems to inscribe itself within this framework as putting the emphasis on hatred of women.

At no other phase of history would such an absurd concept of “men’s rights” make any sense whatsoever. Generally speaking, men have always been in control of women and have never needed a reminder of that fact. The fact that feminism has risen to the ranks of respectable ideologies and is now within the margins of discourse, however, is new. Feminism is a threat to male domination, which is a hierarchy, and all hierarchies have their own self-serving defenders, even the most ignoble of all hierarchies. Plenty of smart people defended black slavery. Plenty of smart people defended Catholicism throughout the centuries. Plenty of smart people defended Jew-hatred throughout the centuries. And now, plenty of smart people defend male domination and women-hating, even though it’s on the way out, because they are scared shitless that they will no longer be able to dominate women and delegate suffering to them (such as the suffering of giving birth).

The fact is, any person who still holds on to these outdated beliefs at this point is a fanatic. They profusely use projection, stimulate violence against women (the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, for instance, was an MAM phenomenon), and violently react to anyone who is against them in any way whatsoever. Like all faggots, they are fanatics, they are aggressive, and they throw themselves fully into their favourite cause. Their propensity for violence is merely the outwards indication of a crumbling ideology.

The sad reality is that they are fucked up in the head, probably because they didn’t have a healthy mother figure to teach them to love and respect women. Their mother wasn’t there for them. So now they are rebelling against their own mother which they see reflected in all women, even when it’s obviously not true. Hating half of the population because of a childhood trauma is a sick way of living, if you can even call it that.

From an Anarchist perspective, MRAs are class traitors, pure and simple. Their constant attacks against working class women sap energy from the class struggle and further undermine class consciousness. Instead of talking about the real social problem of the exploitation of the working class and how we, of the working class, can regain the power that has been taken from us, we are stuck rehashing the age-old sexist nonsense of the “battle of the sexes.” Instead of trying to bring about egalitarianism, we have to look at endless dick-waving from retarded faggots who want to throw us back into the fifties.

These bozos are cheerleaders for the patriarchy. They persist in claiming that women are in control, even though 90% of the power elite is made of men (see Who Rules America? by G. William Domhoff), men’s wages are higher than women’s, women’s sexuality is not as respected as men’s sexuality and women are not as respected in the media as men, and far more women are raped and abused (three times more women are victim of conjugal violence) as men. They are batshit insane, and these dangerous imbeciles have to be stomped out of public discourse right away before they send us straight to their own Hell. They must be chemically castrated, or otherwise removed from the gene pool, so they may not create daughters to abuse.

The Male Privilege Checklist

1. My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.

2. I can be confident that my co-workers won’t think I got my job because of my sex – even though that might be true.

3. If I am never promoted, it’s not because of my sex.

4. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this won’t be seen as a black mark against my entire sex’s capabilities.

5. I am far less likely to face sexual harassment at work than my female co-workers are.

6. If I do the same task as a woman, and if the measurement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.

7. If I’m a teen or adult, and if I can stay out of prison, my odds of being raped are relatively low.

8. On average, I am taught to fear walking alone after dark in average public spaces much less than my female counterparts are.

9. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.

10. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be called into question.

11. If I have children and provide primary care for them, I’ll be praised for extraordinary parenting if I’m even marginally competent.

12. If I have children and a career, no one will think I’m selfish for not staying at home.

13. If I seek political office, my relationship with my children, or who I hire to take care of them, will probably not be scrutinized by the press.

14. My elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more this is true.

15. When I ask to see “the person in charge,” odds are I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person is, the surer I can be.

16. As a child, chances are I was encouraged to be more active and outgoing than my sisters.

17. As a child, I could choose from an almost infinite variety of children’s media featuring positive, active, non-stereotyped heroes of my own sex. I never had to look for it; male protagonists were (and are) the default.

18. As a child, chances are I got more teacher attention than girls who raised their hands just as often.

19. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether or not it has sexist overtones.

20. I can turn on the television or glance at the front page of the newspaper and see people of my own sex widely represented.

21. If I’m careless with my financial affairs it won’t be attributed to my sex.

22. If I’m careless with my driving it won’t be attributed to my sex.

23. I can speak in public to a large group without putting my sex on trial.

24. Even if I sleep with a lot of women, there is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a “slut,” nor is there any male counterpart to “slut-bashing.”

25. I do not have to worry about the message my wardrobe sends about my sexual availability.

26. My clothing is typically less expensive and better-constructed than women’s clothing for the same social status. While I have fewer options, my clothes will probably fit better than a woman’s without tailoring.

27. The grooming regimen expected of me is relatively cheap and consumes little time.

28. If I buy a new car, chances are I’ll be offered a better price than a woman buying the same car. (More).

29. If I’m not conventionally attractive, the disadvantages are relatively small and easy to ignore.

30. I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.

31. I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called “crime” and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usually called “domestic violence” or “acquaintance rape,” and is seen as a special interest issue.)

32. I can be confident that the ordinary language of day-to-day existence will always include my sex. “All men are created equal,” mailman, chairman, freshman, he.

33. My ability to make important decisions and my capability in general will never be questioned depending on what time of the month it is.

34. I will never be expected to change my name upon marriage or questioned if I don’t change my name.

35. The decision to hire me will not be based on assumptions about whether or not I might choose to have a family sometime soon.

36. Every major religion in the world is led primarily by people of my own sex. Even God, in most major religions, is pictured as male.

37. Most major religions argue that I should be the head of my household, while my wife and children should be subservient to me.

38. If I have a wife or live-in girlfriend, chances are we’ll divide up household chores so that she does most of the labor, and in particular the most repetitive and unrewarding tasks.

39. If I have children with my girlfriend or wife, I can expect her to do most of the basic childcare such as changing diapers and feeding.

40. If I have children with my wife or girlfriend, and it turns out that one of us needs to make career sacrifices to raise the kids, chances are we’ll both assume the career sacrificed should be hers.

41. Assuming I am heterosexual, magazines, billboards, television, movies, pornography, and virtually all of media is filled with images of scantily-clad women intended to appeal to me sexually. Such images of men exist, but are rarer.

42. In general, I am under much less pressure to be thin than my female counterparts are. If I am fat, I probably suffer fewer social and economic consequences for being fat than fat women do.

43. If I am heterosexual, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover.

44. Complete strangers generally do not walk up to me on the street and tell me to “smile.”

45. Sexual harassment on the street virtually never happens to me. I do not need to plot my movements through public space in order to avoid being sexually harassed, or to mitigate sexual harassment.

45. On average, I am not interrupted by women as often as women are interrupted by men.

46. I have the privilege of being unaware of my male privilege.

The Whitest Kids U’ Know – Pledge of Allegiance

Walter Block, again defending NAP in the worse way possible…

In the comments section of one of Db0′s entries, someone posted this delightful article. Witness another of Walter Block’s logical absurdities:

You are standing in the path on an onrushing boulder, completely unaware of your fate. In a second, this massive rock will hit you, and you will die. (Let us stipulate the truth of this supposition). Instead, however, I push you out of its path, and into safety. The only trouble is, as a result of it, although I have saved your life, I also broke your arm.

Now, if you are a reasonable sort of person, you will be grateful to me. Instead, you insist upon sticking to the literal letter of libertarian law, and sue me for damages for the injury you have sustained. After all, I did initiate a violent act upon your person, which resulted in an injury. If this is not assault and battery, you argue, then nothing is. How shall the libertarian judge rule?

One possibility is to hold me innocent of this charge. This could be done by adding up the two acts, the life saving and the arm breaking, and deciding that the former is far more important than the latter. So much so that the one ought to be in effect “subtracted” from the other, and since the result would be a “positive” (I contributed more to your life by saving it than I cost you through the injury you sustained), I would be let off scott free. The point here is that I committed not two acts, but only one: saving-your-life-and-injuring-you, and that this complex but single act is not one of initiatory aggression.

A difficulty with this line of reasoning is that you might have been standing in the way of the boulder as part of a suicide attempt. You regarded the situation where you are dead far more highly than the one where you are alive, but debilitated. We may assume you wanted to end your life because of bodily malfunctions like a broken arm, and now I have worsened your welfare, not improved it.

Another problem is that these really are two separate acts. It is certainly possible that I could have pushed you out of death’s way without breaking your arm. To call it two separate acts is really to fudge: this would only be done in order to achieve the common sense result we all presumably want: to find me innocent of bodily harm.

No, the only proper libertarian judgment is that I am indeed guilty of a battery upon your person.

Here’s my challenge to all Libertarians and “anarcho-capitalists”: prove that Block’s reasoning is invalid
(while you’re at it, also prove Block’s Corollary wrong too).

Akimbo Comics: “Everything happens for a reason”

Click on each cartoon to make it bigger.

Links: 1, 2, 3

“Ex-gay” camps are a huge scam…

According to an undercover report, “ex-gay” camps restimulate homosexual feelings and basically only exist to make you come back again and again. They are recovery addiction camps.

It was the first night of “Journey into Manhood,” or JiM, a 48-hour weekend retreat designed to help gay men become straight. In that room, about fifty men—some 30 “Journeyers” and 15 staff members—sat on the carpeted floor of a ranch lodge two hours outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Most of the men, except for a few of the staff members, struggled to overcome their attraction to other men.

Sometime during all that holding and touching and singing, while I was cradled in the Motorcycle position, I felt it: the unmistakable bulge pressing through his tight jeans. It was the first time in my life I had a felt another man’s erection.
…
What I saw and experienced at JiM both enraged and disturbed me. I had trouble staying in character as I watched one man, as part of his therapy, act out beating his father to death with a baseball bat—just one of several “Are you kidding?” moments. How anyone could believe that a JiM weekend could turn a man straight still baffles me.
…
Three staff members take a seat in the middle of the room. They demonstrate three different “healing touch” techniques.

First: Side-by-side, where two men sit shoulder-to-shoulder, facing the same direction, their legs outstretched in front of them. The man giving the Healing Touch puts one arm around the receiver.

Second: The Cohen Hold, named after “certified sexual re-orientation coach” and Healing Touch pioneer Richard Cohen. For this position, the receiver sits between the legs of the giver, their chests perpendicular, the receiver’s head resting on the giver’s shoulder. The giver encircles his arms around the receiver.

Third: The Motorcycle. The receiver again sits between the legs of the giver; this time, the receiver leans his back up against the chest of the giver. Again, the giver wraps his arms around the receiver.

The ice cream salesmen cometh…

If there is one inevitability when arguing about antinatalism, it is that the ice cream salesmen (or as Gary would call them, the trivialists) will inevitably show up and try to sell you their particular laundry list of ice creams as an argument for making children. The ice creams, of course, can be anything nice and fluffy that make people feel good.

The Ice Cream Argument goes something like this:

1. Ice cream is great.
2. It would be terrible to deprive potential children of ice cream, wouldn’t it?
3. Therefore it is good to have children.

To begin with, this is just not a logical argument. Potential human lives cannot be deprived of anything. There is no life-void floating somewhere in the universe going “I wish I could be born so I could eat ice cream.” The universe does not experience pain from the fact that millions of potential people whose potential existence is made impossible (say, when a man masturbates) will never get to eat ice cream. There is no deprivation here.

There is no reason to believe that the experience of the ice cream is necessary. We love ice cream because we crave calories. It’s nothing but DNA programming. There is no objective merit to ice cream or anything else we crave.

The ice cream salesmen try to sell long laundry lists of nice fluffy things that DNA makes people chase. It’s really all just a reiteration of DNA-worship with no critical examination of whether these ice creams compensate for the harm of coming into existence. They are not arguing with you, they are trying to sell you ice creams, which means hyping the ice creams at the expense of any alternative viewpoint.

Obviously antinatalists do not deny that there are plenty of nice, fluffy things in life. Ice cream is a nice thing. So are orgasms, having a good night’s sleep, kittens, baby hedgehogs, having good friends, love, righteous anger, a cool shower on a hot day, and so on and so forth. There are also more abstracts fluffy things, like a sound argument which pleases the mind, a sense of dignity or justice or honor, the feeling of being recognized, understanding something, and so on and so forth. No one’s denying that there is a long list here.

The bare fact is that these things are only good for people who already exist. Only existing people can enjoy these ice creams, and potential people are not deprived from not having them. Therefore they are of no relevance in determining whether we should bring a potential person into existence.

The underlying premise seems to be that, if we compare the harm we encounter during our life with all the pleasures we experience, we’ll come out on top. Consider that, as Benatar rightly points out in his book, we have powerful motivators to overestimate the amount of pleasure we experience and to underestimate the harm we experience (for one, this evaluation is done before one’s ultimate end, which usually involves a great deal of suffering), so there’s no way our evaluation will be fact-based. But beyond that, how would one even start making such a comparison? There is no way for anyone to compare experiences from their past and determine which was more or less intense. So the whole idea falls on its face.

But suppose that by some unknown magical method we are able to compare experiences objectively and to overcome these distorting motivators. What if we determine that a given human life ended up positive on the whole? Then such a person would be very lucky indeed compared with the average human being; it would still not justify the hard life that most human beings go through. It also would not justify the harm that we inflicted on that person by bringing them into existence. Remember that, as I’ve pointed out before, harm and pleasure do not cancel each other: we have a duty to not create harm, but we do not have a duty to create pleasure.

Another major problem with the Ice Cream Argument is that it logically leads to the quiverfull position. If potential persons are being deprived, being harmed, by not being brought into existence, then we have a duty of bringing into existence as many potential persons as we possibly can. The only logical outcome of this reasoning is a constant frenzied production of children. And yet no one who ever uses this argument has twelve children. Could it be that they don’t really believe there are ghosts of their potential children haunting the universe and lamenting their lack of ice cream?

Now consider the opposite argument, the Flesh-Eating Bacteria Argument:

1. Flesh-eating bacteria are terrible.
2. It would be terrible to risk unleashing flesh-eating bacteria on potential children, wouldn’t it?
3. Therefore it is evil to have children.

This argument makes no more sense than the Ice Cream Argument. Possible children cannot suffer, and therefore flesh-eating bacteria can have no effect on them. However, rephrase both arguments around the act of bringing persons into existence:

1. Experiencing ice cream is great.
2. It is desirable for people to experience ice cream.
3. Therefore we should bring potential people into existence so they can have ice cream as well.

1. Experiencing flesh-eating bacteria is terrible.
2. It is undesirable for people to experience flesh-eating bacteria.
3. Therefore we should not bring potential people into existence lest they suffer from flesh-eating bacteria as well.

Now we can easily see that the first argument is still nonsensical, while the second is perfectly reasonable. Potential people do not experience suffering, while existing people can; on the other hand, potential people are not deprived from the pleasure of eating ice cream, so there’s nothing lost by not forcing them to exist. Another way to phrase it would be “it is bad to keep from potential people the future possibility of existing and eating ice cream” and “it is good to keep from potential people the possibility of existing and suffering from flesh-eating bacteria.” This is, again, rephrasing the issue around procreation, with the same results.

A related complaint is that the human race can’t “give up,” that people who follow antinatalism have just “given up” and that the human race shouldn’t “give up.” What exactly is it that we would be “giving up” by ceasing to reproduce? A chance to continue the endless cycle of consumption, addiction, cannibalism and reproduction? A chance to raise new generations of beings that get addicted to new ice creams, always only temporarily satisfying their desires? What’s the harm in giving that up?

I am not “giving up” anything by not having children. I am preserving a lot of what I would otherwise lose: my money, my free time, my well-being, my peace of mind, and my integrity, just to name those. To have children is to more or less give up one’s freedom for the next eighteen years, that’s the real truth of the situation. That’s what’s being “given up.”

There may, however, be something deeper to this “given up” paradigm. I suspect that deep down they are falling prey to the fallacies about evolution which I have discussed before, that evolution is a game with winners and losers, that our DNA-given purpose (the rule of the game) is to reproduce, and that species “win” by surviving. By abandoning reproduction, we “give up” the game and become losers, like the dodos.

(modified from a Cat and Girl cartoon)

There is even a team element to it. The people on the “human team,” that is to say all humans, have to keep the human race surviving to “win.” Antinatalists, then, are nothing more than traitors. If the players start believing antinatalism and stop reproducing, the “human team” will lose. Therefore you’d have to be a chump to believe them, or so the reasoning goes. Other teams, other species, will thrive on our “loss.”

Life is not a game. There is no goal or purpose in evolution. We exist due to purely mechanistic, unguided, unintelligent processes which have no concern whatsoever with human life or life in general. As a mechanism, it’s more inefficient and murderous than anything humans have ever produced. There’s no shame in giving something like that up unless you think human beings are eventually going to create some Garden of Eden that will make life worth it. But we are not even starting to go in the direction of trying to make life better, and such optimism is not really worth the time it takes to consider it. The only rational position is to stop feeding the mechanism.