I’ve heard feminist apologists declare that feminism is a social movement dedicated to the promotion of equal rights between men and women. I’m sure you’ve heard this too, and if you weren’t paying close attention when you heard it, you might have believed it. You might think, if unfamiliar or unimpressed by men’s movement literature, that any statement to the contrary is nothing but reactionary, anti woman patriarchal atavism.
If that’s the case it puts you in common company.
The tenets of the feminist movement are, for the most part, accepted by most people living in the western world. Feminist ideology now holds a majority share of public perception of reality. Feminism informs the policies and decisions made in our law courts, it controls the climate of the workplace, it rules with absolute fiat in our family courts. It also informs the difference in the way police treat male and female citizens. If a man is assaulted by his female spouse – and calls the police, he will be arrested. If a man is assaulted by his female spouse and attempts to defend himself- without doing any violence to his attacker, he will be arrested.
The assumption informing this bizarre outcome is that he must have committed some offense against his assailant, thus justifying her attack on him, and his subsequent arrest. One problem with this is that even granting the assumption of prior offense by the male victim of an assault in such a case, western law does not operate on an eye for an eye dictum. Prior insult or injury is not legal justification for personal violence. A man who assaulted another man because in the past, he was assaulted by that man would find no sympathy at all from either the police, or the courts.
When a parallel situation involves a woman committing violence against a man, not only is she excused based on her being a victim of who she is now assaulting, the victimization is assumed by the police and courts regardless of whether any such prior event occurred, and with no inquiry. A narrative of victimization and justification is fabricated to support the ideology that women are good, and men are bad. Men are assumed to be aggressors and villains, and women are characterized as poor, cartoonish victims, regardless the actual behavior of either party.
Do gender feminists recognize that in promoting this social pattern, they are casting members of their own sex as perpetual children? An ostensibly adult woman for whom violence is excused based on a real or imagined prior injustice is not really an adult.
How far does this fantasy go? Apparently, a long way – as the female centrism dominating so much of modern life is incongruent with a concept of personal accountability for women in any dealings with men.
This pattern works for the reality divorced, which is to say that it works for the culture at large. The monopoly on force held by the government inflicts a standardized pro-female outcome – ignoring the perverse marginalization of men necessary to maintain the gender feminist narrative. That’s the narrative that claims women have always been oppressed, and men, through some sinister conspiracy are the ones oppressing them.
Debunking this fantasy is beyond the scope of this article, and would in any case be redundant. The question which does bear consideration is – what is the logical outcome of continued normalization of a fantasy which equates masculinity as crime, and femininity as innate superiority, while also needing steeply tilted playing field encompassing continued affirmative action, public funding of historical revision, thought police, differential treatment by law enforcement and so on.
Do gender feminists really want their fathers, brothers, sons and husbands to be caged, hobbled, and enslaved as bipedal beasts of burden? How long can the illusion be maintained that men laboring as legislated nonpersons in a tiered society are in fact the sinister oppressors of that society?
Alternately, are we all now ready to adopt a public ethic that the real or imagined crimes made by members of some antiquarian historical patriarchy should be revenged on half our population, based on their sex?
Are we to systematize hereditary imaginary guilt?
No. Even assuming actual guilt by past generations, culpability is non transferable. This is a basic foundation of ethics, both legal and moral, at least as I understand it.
Do Gender feminists want to enslave and scourge half the population based on their sex? It sometimes seems like it, when you listen to gender feminists. But I really don’t know the answer to that. What I do know is that a small segment of the male population are no longer willing to play this game according to the established rules. I count myself as a part of this small group.
What should be interesting to an alert observer is that the traditional concepts of reward and punishment that have, for thousands of years been used with great success to curb self actualization in males who would chafe in the class bondage of traditional society are increasingly ineffective as a means of social control today.
Paul Elam some time ago wrote an article in which he coined the term “Zeta male”. This is not an alpha male, and it’s not a beta male, and it isn’t anything which fits into the traditional social hierarchy. It is, in my own shaky grasp of the concept a wholly self determined and self defined man. Elam is one, I am one.
I am proud to be.
Detractors of masculinity, of the men’s rights movement, and apologists for gender feminists will be quick to define men forging this new role as losers, malcontents, failures – and so on. Some of the pejorative will sting, because “malcontent” is true, but it’s incomplete, and patently misleading. There is more to this than just some sour grapes redefinition of failure as success, and there is a fundamental difference between simply being an entitled malcontent, and the experience of anger at institutionalized and organized discrimination.
Out of that anger, many men’s rights advocates are redefining masculinity and success using a yardstick in defiance of the definitions gender feminists use to exert control.
Before the full catalog of shaming language can be unlimbered and brought to bear, let me mention a few things about my own motivation and aspiration. I will never be married. Is this because I’m a loser who can’t “get a woman?”
I get that in my YouTube channel email with regularity. The thing is I have a job, a pretty good one – doing something I enjoy and which challenges me. I happen to own the company I work for. We’re making a profit and expanding. In spite of this apparent material success, I am an invisible man, and I mean to remain one, at least to the forces that threaten me as a man.
That does not mean that we in the men’s rights movement hate you feminists. We certainly don’t hate you as women. We don’t even hate the male apologists for female supremacy who foolishly seek to ingratiate themselves with women through some form of public self flagellation and self loathing. We are simply finished with being vilified, criminalized, marginalized and stripped of our earnings, our homes and our children. The Zeta male is inventing a new path, and we are leaving you behind. You are, of course, welcome to join us, because as I said, we don’t hate you; but we won’t be following the rules as you understand them anymore.
John Hembling is a Canadian writer and social commentator. His videos can be seen on YouTube on the JohnTheOther Channel.
I'm a software developer in Vancouver BC.
