AIFWA is a not-for-profit organization campaigning against the misuse of protections and privileges granted to women.

AIFWA stands for true gender equality, and demands that civil and criminal laws be made equally applicable to men and women.

Why TEN – India?

Proponents of the women’s cause routinely attribute traits of low esteem, self pity, vagrancy, vulnerability and helplessness to women and girls.

Champions of the women’s cause have pushed, arm-twisted and bullied the Government into passing many anti-male, anti-family provisions and policies in the name of women’s rights and empowerment.

Women’s rights activists have convinced the society that in order to compensate for all the real or perceived disadvantages and sufferings endured by women in the past, present day women should be accorded special treatment in all areas of life, even if it is at the expense of the human rights and welfare of their male counterparts.

Thoughtless emphasis on pampering women has not only been hurting men and children, but it is also doing much harm to women themselves, and preventing them from appreciating all the joys of womanhood, motherhood, family life, and harmonious coexistence with men.

AIFWA endeavours to:

• enable young women to discover the beauty of womanhood and the true meaning of empowerment.
• inculcate self-esteem among young women and encourage them to appreciate true gender equality.
• help young women understand “Equal Means Equal”.
• urge young women to reject preferential treatment over men in all areas of life.
• encourage young women to make use of their strengths and excel in their chosen fields of study or vocation.
• promote among young women, a healthy attitude towards themselves as well as towards men.
• promote balanced, self-respecting, hard working women as positive female role models.

TEN-India is based on the following principles:

• Equal does not mean same; Men and women are different but are equally entitled to constitutional rights and human rights.
• Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome; Men and women must maintain their self-esteem and earn respect and reward by proving their true individual worth.
• Equality under law is essential irrespective of gender; Men and women should be given equal protection from and equal punishment for any crime.
• Equal rights beget equal responsibilities; Men and women must not only enjoy equal rights but they must also shoulder equal responsibilities.

We would like to promote gender harmony through following The “TEN” Commandments:

1. Doing injustice to men is not equal to Doing justice to women.
2. Oppressing men is not equal to Uplifting women.
3. Harming men is not equal to Protecting women.
4. Disempowering men is not equal to Empowering women.
5. Denying opportunities to men is not equal to Providing opportunities for women.
6. Penalizing men is not equal to Rewarding women.
7. Degrading men is not equal to Honouring women.
8. Undermining men’s lives is not equal to Valuing women’s lives.
9. Neglecting men’s welfare is not equal to Promoting women’s welfare.
10. Violating men’s rights is not equal to Upholding women’s rights.

On the occasion of the launch of TEN-India, we are inaugurating a flyer campaign which will continue until 8^th March, International Women’s Day.

We will spread our message to as many young women as possible in Hyderabad, and encourage them to become members of TEN-India. We will expand our “movement for real empowerment” to the rest of India in the coming years.

*************************************

“To be a feminist is to acknowledge that one’s life has been regressed. The demand for granting preferential treatment to women is an admission on her part of her inferiority and there has been no need for such a thing in India as the women have always been by the side of men in Council and in the fields of battle…. We must have no mutual conflict in our homes or abroad. We must transcend differences. We must rise above nationalism, above religion, above sex.”

- Sarojini Naidu

(at the Fourth session of All India Women’s Conference, Bombay, 1930)

To be a feminist is to acknowledge that one’s life has been regressed. The demand for granting preferential treatment to women is an admission on her part of her inferiority and there has been no need for such a thing in India as the women have always been by the side of men in Council and in the fields of battle…. We must have no mutual conflict in our homes or abroad. We must transcend differences. We must rise above nationalism, above religion, above sex.”

• Equal does not mean same; Men and women are different but are equally entitled to constitutional rights and human rights.
• Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome; Men and women must maintain their self-esteem and earn respect and reward by proving their true individual worth.
• Equality under law is essential irrespective of gender; Men and women should be given equal protection from and equal punishment for any crime.
• Equal rights beget equal responsibilities; Men and women must not only enjoy equal rights but they must also shoulder equal responsibilities.

The “TEN” Commandments:

1. Doing injustice to men is not equal to Doing justice to women.
2. Oppressing men is not equal to Uplifting women.
3. Harming men is not equal to Protecting women.
4. Disempowering men is not equal to Empowering women.
5. Denying opportunities to men is not equal to Providing opportunities for women.
6. Penalizing men is not equal to Rewarding women.
7. Degrading men is not equal to Honouring women.
8. Undermining men’s lives is not equal to Valuing women’s lives.
9. Neglecting men’s welfare is not equal to Promoting women’s welfare.
10. Violating men’s rights is not equal to Upholding women’s rights.

ON WOMEN’S DAY, 8 MARCH 2010

JOIN THE MOVEMENT FOR REAL EMPOWERMENT!

Join “TEN-India” if you believe in equity and justice irrespective of gender!

Join “TEN-India” to oppose gender war!

—————————————————————————————————————————–

TEN-India is the youth wing of All India Forgotten Women’s Association (AIFWA)

_______________________________________________________

Click on the image below for printable version:

Click on the image below for printable version: “To be a feminist is to acknowledge that one’s life has been regressed. The demand for granting preferential treatment to women is an admission on her part of her inferiority and there has been no need for such a thing in India as the women have always been by the side of men in Council and in the fields of battle…. We must have no mutual conflict in our homes or abroad. We must transcend differences. We must rise above nationalism, above religion, above sex.” - Sarojini Naidu (at the Fourth session of All India Women’s Conference, Bombay, 1930) Equal does not mean same; Men and women are different but are equally entitled to constitutional rights and human rights. Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome; Men and women must maintain their self-esteem and earn respect and reward by proving their true individual worth. Equality under law is essential irrespective of gender; Men and women should be given equal protection from and equal punishment for any crime. Equal rights beget equal responsibilities; Men and women must not only enjoy equal rights but they must also shoulder equal responsibilities. The “TEN” Commandments: 1) Doing injustice to men is not equal to Doing justice to women. 2) Oppressing men is not equal to Uplifting women. 3) Harming men is not equal to Protecting women. 4) Disempowering men is not equal to Empowering women. 5) Denying opportunities to men is not equal to Providing opportunities for women. 6) Penalizing men is not equal to Rewarding women. 7) Degrading men is not equal to Honouring women. Undermining men’s lives is not equal to Valuing women’s lives. 9) Neglecting men’s welfare is not equal to Promoting women’s welfare. 10) Violating men’s rights is not equal to Upholding women’s rights. ON WOMEN’S DAY, 8 MARCH 2010 JOIN THE MOVEMENT FOR REAL EMPOWERMENT! Join “TEN-India” if you believe in equity and justice irrespective of gender! Join “TEN-India” to oppose gender war! —————————————————————————————————————————– TEN-India is the youth wing of All India Forgotten Women’s Association (AIFWA)

https://sites.google.com/site/tenindiaclub/

To: All Men

Re: Operation “Feminist Movement”

Men, our long twilight struggle with the opposite sex is over. Our victory is total.

Can you believe the way things used to be? Remember when our fathers and grandfathers would drag themselves to mind-numbing jobs every day, having the sole responsibility for the feeding, clothing, and housing of their entire family?

And things were no easier before marriage, when men’s quest for sexual satisfaction was all too often hampered by the widespread moral code which taught women not to give out the “milk” for “free.”

Well, that state of affairs just wouldn’t do. So we men came together and did what we do best — formulate and implement a plan. First step, design the perfect world, the perfect male world. We decided such a world would consist of two things: less responsibility and more — and no-strings — sex.

Brothers, have we succeeded.

The amazing thing, really, is how easy it was, how fast the old world of obligation and responsibility dissolved. The first, crucial step, of course, was convincing women that they had it bad, that our jobs were “intellectually stimulating” and not the soul-crushing monotony that they in fact were.

It worked, and soon women were clamoring to join us on the job. It seems never to have occurred to them that we could have so easily prevented them from doing so — and yet we didn’t. We sidestepped without much fuss, actually, which had to have constituted the largest voluntary abdication of power in history. This alone should have tipped them off that something was amiss.

Right away, women at work began to solve our problems. First, men and women interacting more frequently inevitably led to hanky-panky, which led to the breakup of families, which led to less responsibility for us.

But that was only a start. To really fix things, we had to root out that old bourgeoisie mentality that had in previous times kept girls frustratingly modest and chaste. And what better way to do that than to convince women that the most reckless elements of our sexuality — the promiscuity — were in fact the correct behaviors, which had to be imitated in order for them to be “liberated”?

Amazingly, they bought that, too.

Unfortunately, our sister selves are less suited to such behavior, which can cause painful and lasting tears in the feminine soul. But no matter — we were also able to convince them that there was no such thing as a “feminine” soul, any more than there is a “masculine” soul, and that both sexes are equally suited to all things.

(Many of you said that women would never buy this, that the accumulated history of our species speaks to the deep and abiding difference between the sexes, a difference which has benefited both sides from time immemorial. But I was sanguine about our ruse — have I not been vindicated?)

Men, “Operation Feminist Movement” has worked, and more swiftly and completely than many of you thought possible. Mere decades ago, we spent endless hours and countless dollars before marriage courting and wooing; after marriage, we shouldered the entire financial burden for our families.

Now, after marriage, women can be expected to pay for half of everything, which is to the good, because video games are expensive. But, as more and more of you are discovering, why bother with marriage at all anymore? You can stay up all night, hang with your buds all the time, secure in the knowledge that on any given night you can be sure to find a willing woman, a woman who has likely been taught, conditioned even (by other women!) to expect nothing from you in return — and that this is a good thing.

Is it any wonder that, according to recent research, women these days are “becoming less happy relative to men” across all age, income, and marital levels? No, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, although the unhappiness of the modern woman seems to be taking many of them by surprise. After all, don’t they “have it all”?

No — it is men who now have it all.

Congratulations, brothers. Our day is at last at hand, a day of no responsibility and easy mating access as far as the eye can see. Best of all, women are convinced that they have done this themselves, and for their own good.

Sure, there are downsides. Civilization has now entered into free fall; those masterpieces of art and science and literature, for which men have been almost exclusively responsible, have ceased to issue forth from our minds and hands — and is it any wonder? Such pyrotechnics are no longer necessary to impress women, which, really, was the only reason we bothered. High culture seems a small price to pay, though, for the loosening of morals and duties which has brought our present Sex and the City-fueled bounty.

So sit back, men, and enjoy the slide. It’s Miller time.

Matt Patterson is a National Review Institute Washington fellow and the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story”.  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.

Jack Kammer, author of two excellent previous volumes, Good Will Toward Men: Women Talk Candidly About the Balance of Power Between the Sexes and If Men Have All the Power, How Come Women Make the Rules? has written his third men’s rights book, Heroes of the Blue Sky Rebellion, and it’s a very, very good one. (Full disclosure: I provided the author with two rounds of detailed comments on earlier drafts of the book, for which I receive an acknowledgement for “essential suggestions” from the author.)

“Heroes” is both very similar to and very different from If Men Have All the Power. Very similar, in that it is another short, punchy, accessibly written, even aphoristic and at the same time gutsy primer addressing a need in men’s rights literature. Very different, in that this book (while it may be read with interest with anyone) is directed to boys and young men in the age range of thirteen to 23, and is primarily designed to initiate young males into basic principles regarding men’s rights (and in fact to propel them toward thinking about and working on transforming many of the very issues on which the National Coalition for Men works).

The book proper begins with a section titled, “You Deserve Better,” which very efficiently sums up the predicament faced by today’s boys. The section titled, “So Few Choices. So Much Time” sketches out the incomparably greater life options enjoyed by women, in an homage to Warren Farrell that incorporates Kammer’s own take on matters.

I am not sure endnotes belong in a book like this at all, requiring as they do that the reader flip between different sections of the volume, and I definitely don’t think it is appropriate for a book with this book’s intended audience to spend fully one-third of its length on the notes. In my view, they should have been trimmed, and the extra space that would thereby be gained used to flesh out some of the book’s less easily intelligible arguments.

I find the book quite scattershot, both in authorial voice and in subject.  That is, I find the tone often varies quite significantly between successive paragraphs, moving sometimes from a perfectly appropriate, down-to-earth mode to an approach more appropriate for someone like myself, an intellectual, almost-fifty father interested in men’s issues. The subject wanders in ways that will be hard for the uninitiated to follow. Topic transitions are not always as smooth as one might wish and occasionally are not present at all.  These shortcomings sometimes seem to require the reader to already have the tools the book is trying to provide.  In my view, a bit too much reliance is placed on the admittedly excellent 1999 Daniel Kindlon-Michael Thompson book Raising Cain.

Most fundamentally, I believe the Blue Sky Rebellion needs to be set up in more detail right up front, before other issues are explored or refinements and examples discussed. This is particularly true given the treacherous combination of unfamiliar terminology and concepts that will almost certainly be new to the reader.  What is the Blue Sky Rebellion? Why participate? A single page summarizes what the author means by the term and then he moves on to devote, for example, fourteen excellent pages to expected attacks on the Rebellion and proposed self-defense in response to these attacks.

I do not agree with Kammer that it is primarily men who have failed boys. The discussion of male suicide is very good but given its intellectual tone, it might fit in better in a book for adults.  Similarly, several other issues are treated excellently yet at a level incongruent with the stated audience: female attendance at law school, the discussion of fathers facing barriers as equal parents, advertising’s perpetuation of limitations on male roles, and adolescence as spring training.

Kammer deftly highlights the issue of choice as one of women’s main advantages. A boxed item explaining that while the engine may be considered “more important” than the car, life is much more pleasant for the stereo, is fantastic. Here we get what we too often miss: a potent and easily understandable metaphor, simple language, and a powerful message, all rolled into one short example. As a counterexample, the mention of three New Guinea tribes and their remarkable range of gender ideas typifies Kammer’s work in that there is lots that is fascinating and new and yet sadly it often does not quite fully cohere. Similarly, a metaphor of male role limitations as a race from New York to Los Angeles in which the male has a head start but may not want to go to LA fails to fully connect and comes across as a bit strained.

For all these concerns I have listed, “Heroes” truly is richly rewarding and page for page, simply can’t be beat as a primer on men’s issues. The paragraph analogizing present-day testosterone prejudice with past uterus prejudice is apposite. The discussions scattered throughout the book on making allies of male friends are great, as is the section on persuading boys who are “losers” to become allies. I really enjoyed the tips for reaching the heart of one’s father, mother, and teachers.

The author includes an illuminating and heart-warming story of former National Football League (NFL) player Joe Ehrmann, who habitual tells his high school team their top job is to love each other. The author also includes an excellent section addressing “What if You Are Just No Good at Sports? Remarkable is the word that comes to mind for the story of longtime activist Fred Hayward being abruptly tossed off the air by Oprah Winfrey after pointing out that men are discriminated against more than blacks are in terms of jail population.

The great range of ideas listed in the “Let the Rebellion Begin” chapter are often original. At times they are a bit much and seem unlikely to work for most young males (write poetry, start your own Internet radio station, give speeches to Lions and Rotary Clubs, tell your principal you would like to organize a Boys’ History event) but collectively are a powerful and inspiring read.

Jack Kammer’s Blue Sky Rebellion deserves our attention and support. The author provides many powerful ideas and his astute determination to enlist our young males offers the potential to transform the gender work paradigm to a much more fully inclusive model.

He had never been married to or even cohabiting with the boy’s mother. The two had a brief affair and when the mother had the baby in 1987, she told Hatley that the baby was his.

A couple of years later, the mother applied for and received public assistance. The state demanded reimbursement from Hatley who agreed to make those payments believing the boy was in fact his son. In 2000, DNA tests showed that Hatley was not the biological father. A court ordered that Hatley be relieved of any obligations for future support of the boy. However, this order did not relieve him of the back payments owed when it had been assumed he was the father so Hatley continued making those payments from the money he earned at his job of unloading charcoal grills from shipping containers.

In 2007, Hatley was laid off from his job. Unable to afford housing, he lived out of his car. Nevertheless, he continued to make child support payments to the state out of his unemployment benefits.

However, he fell behind in his payments, was found in contempt of court and jailed. He was recently released because he is indigent. Soon after his release, a judge relieved him from any obligation to pay the support on which he was in arrears – but which he never should have owed in the first place.

It is good that Hatley is free and relieved of any future financial obligations in the case. However, this does not rectify the injustice that he has suffered. It does not return the money he already paid out of his extremely limited funds nor does it make up for the thirteen months he spent in jail.

The Hatley case illustrates a crying need for an overhaul of the child support system. Firstly, there is the fact that poverty is not a defense against the failure to pay child support. Even if the child had been his, the facts are that Hatley was unable to adequately support himself and did not have the money to support the child. However, the law took a jobless, penniless man living out of his car to jail for not making child support payments. This is a modern day version of the old Victorian horror of debtor’s prison.

People should not go to jail in 21st Century America just for being poor – but Frank Hatley did and so have many others.

Of course, the case began because of a misidentification in paternity. Many observers would criticize the mother as a liar and see her as someone who should be prosecuted for what is often called “paternity fraud.” I do not. The mother was there at the time of the conception but it is unlikely that she was taking notes. Human memory is extremely fallible and this fallibility is exacerbated by the emotionality of questions involving sex and reproduction. Given these truths, a DNA test should be routinely taken before paternity is assigned. If the DNA test is negative, a man could still voluntarily agree to assume the role of the father – with the financial responsibilities incurred as a result – but it would be his free and informed choice.

That we need to fix this system is obvious when a man has been treated as a criminal and jailed for failing to provide money he does not have for a child who is not his.

The internet is awash in men’s rights movement sites. They are ‘organic’ rather than manufactured. They are growing rather than fabricated. Many have been around for a while, while some burst upon the scene and disappear in a year for want of nurture.  Each is built around one man, often working in the evening in a small room. These string & waxmen are paving the way, often with an idea to help society by gathering information and opinion and ‘friends’.  Creating the necessary elements of the MRM.

It is astonishing what a little technology and wit can produce. There are forums, mini-communities where discussion and ‘education’ goes on informally. There are more formal and directed efforts which focus attention on specific issues. There are sites which gain a reputation either as a small centre of critical opinion limited only by the verve of the owner or because of a striking personality or both (AH for example) or because of a strong and maintained focus. They become Nodes.

Most remain small and have little or just small effect. Some rise to prominence and lead aspects of the Movement. Repetition of content or view is rife and often the ‘next step’ is not taken, whatever that step might be. Unless one comes across them almost by accident, they remain unidentified by the public even when Joe does a ‘search’. We remain ‘obscure’. In the factory on the bench; in the greenhouse on the shelf.

Men’s Rights Organisations are on the ground too. You might be surprised to know just how many there are. In fact I doubt anyone actually knows how many there are or where they are or what they are doing.  And not just in America, the land of the Unknown Braves, but elsewhere in the world.

They are all tackling many aspects of MRM issues, Father’s issues, Children’s issues, social issues, educational and legislative influence issues, sometimes – I suspect – completely oblivious to the efforts of the others or what works and what doesn’t.

Now we can all name a few, our ‘favourites, local to us or far afield, but who is to be asked? And if I ask YOU, what ‘coverage’ can you give? What is the depth and breadth of your knowledge?

There are people, men and women, who have written books of essential interest to men. I have never been able to find a list anywhere of all the books that are relevant to the MRM. Where do I find such a list? I have had people react in surprise when I have mentioned a particular book with ‘I have never heard of that one’. I am not at all surprised. New people coming into the MRM could be directed to a wealth of material, but who is to do that?

I could name perhaps ten Journalists in five countries that I would consider MRM-friendly. How many more are there out there? Barbara Kay in Canada. Who has read any of Barbara’s work?  Who gets it regularly? Andrew Bolt in Australia. That woman, Wossername in the UK. Thingy in WosseState in America. Who do YOU know of and do you have a list of their articles relevant to MRM matters?

Several fine MRAs have taken it upon themselves to provide ‘Service’. Our own Leader here is Mike LaSalle. What a publication he has started. Our best so far.  There is John Dias with his Misandry Review. A great servive to your email in-box. There is Pierce Harlan with his False Rape reporting. Yep, a good Lawyer. Thare had to be one !  There is Glenn Sacks with his tireless efforts that have galvanised people to action around a variety of issues. There are already stellar organisations – again, born in and living in small rooms in the evenings – like RADAR, for example – reliant on just a few people.  Small stars but shining Light into darkness.

Such people have a vision and a drive to share themselves unselfishly. We need courageous men like this who answer the question – Who does the Grail Serve. It does not serve them as there is neither fame nor fortune in their sights. They serve us.

We need such men. We also need some more who can do the dogged work behind ‘service’. We need the chaps in their small rooms to do a variety of ‘Taxonomy work’.  Of vital need are men who can find out who is doing what. Men who can collect basic information; identify all, and I mean all, the Groups, the sites, the blogs, the forums, the Organisations, the men’s charities, the legal provisions for men, the health providers, the Journalists and the newspapers the TV stations and radio stations that are MRM-issue friendly, the Men’s academics, the men’s writers, etc etc. In every country. And we need a central organising effort that can direct this modest task and collate the information, the lists, the types etc and act as a repository.

So, some of you might comment here on this small offering, this small voice on a page. Please, append with your comment an identification of five or six MRM ‘elements’ that you know of.

Make a start. Someone, somewhere might take it up.

In fact, if the idea of doing six month’s work appeals, an hour here, an hour there, collecting and collating information, volunteer and get to it.

A good mechanic could bolt them all together in no time.

Ask, ‘Who does the Grail Serve’.

And answer with your service, even a small service.

By the way, do we have any Learjet pilots around?

Among the many emails I get that don’t support men’s rights or don’t support my take on them, a hefty number of them are from men who take issue with the idea of other men shedding traditional masculine expectations and going their own way.

The common theme among those emails is a short lecture on what men are supposed to do; replete with sonny-lemme-tell-ya-what-it-means-to-be-a-real-man instructions.  Most of them are written with enough swagger and brio to make John Wayne sport a proud, if grossly posthumous smile.

And curiously, many of the concordant emails I get from women totally miss the point.  I just read one from a woman who lauded my work against feminism because she lamented the loss of days when a man “knew how to treat a lady.”

Apparently she thought my objection to feminism was because it kept me off a white horse.  She assumed I am engaged in a fight to protect my right to sacrifice, like a real man.  A glaring misunderstanding, but she did provide an opportune segway for the correct question.

What if a man doesn’t want to?

(pause for effect)

When all is said and done, this is the question that speaks to the heart of a growing voice, not just in the world of Men‘s Rights Activists, but in the world of men collectively.  And it is the first of many questions that are sure to form tempests of debate and ire in the coming years.

Should men break with tradition? And in that should they quit expecting themselves to be the financers and custodial protectors of women’s lives?  Should they quit paying for dates?  Should they refuse assignment to the role of breadwinner?  Are men supposed to be congenital bodyguards, socially and biologically indentured in a world where women no longer need such protection?  Indeed, we now live in a world where it is men that increasingly need protection- from women, as is clear in family courts, the workplace, universities -think Duke- and frequently their own homes.

The answers to these questions, which are, like it or not, relevant now, require some intellectual scrutiny that won’t be found in myopic edicts like “Be a real man.” In fact, I’d argue that anyone issuing such proclamations needs to take a more lucid look at the world in which they live.

Women don’t have roles any more, except as they choose to take them on. Even then, they can change that role fluidly depending on whether they are vying for a promotion or sitting with a man in a restaurant when the dinner check arrives.  Feminists and flat tires are seldom in each others company, so women don’t really so much have roles as they have a choice as to which role benefits them at the moment.

Perhaps carte blanche for opportunism is a better way to put it.

It is the new, but no longer sparklingly new social doctrine of equality-plus.  Women now enjoy a range of options that men could not possibly dream of.  They have been granted equal and often preferential entrance into the realm of financial opportunity and independence while social mandates still leaves the door wide open for them to do what they have historically done, e.g., draw sustenance and enhanced lifestyle from the sweat and labor of men.

It’s the net result of feminist doctrine and men’s complicity in it; a paradigm not of parity, but of parasitism; a Kafkaesque realm for men where they are bludgeoned with messages of their uselessness to women, often while being bled dry by them.

This isn’t to cast men as victims of women.  All this is enabled, lock, stock and barrel, by men rigidly maintaining their traditional roles, giving women whatever they ask for by rote.  By practicing chivalry like a crack habit, and by excoriating other men for not doing same.

In fact, were it not for men engaging in this mindless form of collective patricide, feminism would have been deservedly quashed at least thirty years ago.  Real men would not have tolerated all this nonsense for a minute.

The catch-22 of this affair, however, is glaringly obvious.  The traditional mindset, previously more tempered by reason, has served as the foundation of stable families and adjusted children for countless generations.  It is indeed an area where expressions like the fabric of our society and backbone of our civilization are not just tired and overused metaphors, but spot on descriptions of reality.

That, in and of itself, might appear to be a sound reason for men to just shut up, shovel and sacrifice; to labor for what has worked in the past as though the last 40 years never happened.  But that is the problem. The last 40 years actually did happen.  That toothpaste is already out of the tube, and much more likely than not trying to squeeze it back in is a noble and pathetically fruitless task.

It is not that traditional roles can’t work.  They can for a waning few; those willing to find their way to each other though the modern morass of traditions in a world largely stripped of them.  But it is a gamble with Las Vegas odds and therefore should be a choice, and one that doesn’t include a license for risk takers to place a proscription on alternatives for those more survival minded.

As long as we deny men choices that women are allowed to take for granted, we will continue to see men marginalized and exploited.  As the New York Times just reported, it is possible that for the first time in history that in America women will surpass men in the workforce. And that right soon.

It is a picture consistent with men’s drastically decreasing presence in higher education and punctuated by their suffering the lions share of job losses in the bad economy.

And men are to continue to sacrifice for women and protect them? There are still plenty who say yes.  But then there are plenty who think Elvis is still alive.

When enough men find themselves paying for dinner with a gainfully employed woman with money from their unemployment checks, there will likely be a lot more men, at the very least, saying:

“Hey, wait a minute.”

That would be one giant step in the right direction.

Paul Elam is the Editor-in-Chief for Men’s News Daily and the Publisher of A Voice for Men.

With a sigh he lumbers to the garage and wedges the box in a corner, feeling the sides buckle a little as he forces it between his fishing gear and some power tools. Back inside, something starts to claw at him somewhere in the pit of his stomach, like talons sinking into a small animal. It was the trip to the garage. It was a little too…familiar.

There were two things that all his closets had in common. One, as you know, they were all full. Two, almost none of that stuff was Joe Bob’s. Between wife and kids his home was fully occupied. And it wasn’t just the closets. Everything from bathroom counters to bookshelves to basement was the terrain of others. What remained for him was trying to squeeze in what little he had around the property of those considered to actually live there.

Joe Bob’s heart sank with an intractable sense of the walls closing in around him. It was as though he had become the baseball cards, stuffed into a cardboard coffin and shoved in the corner with no room to breathe. It wasn’t just a shortage of square feet. It was something much more personal; more important.

He thought about the fishing gear. If he were to actually use it again he’d have to replace all the line. By now it was brittle with age and neglect. Somewhere along the way, exactly when long forgotten, the fishing trips just ended. They had been shelved with other childish things that interfered with his duties to provide for a family. His wife was instrumental in helping this along. Any mention he made of fishing, or any personal enjoyment, was met with cold disapproval and not so subtle questioning of his priorities. The few times he didn’t cave in to that he paid for with guilt being tied around his neck like a noose. Eventually he got the point. He might go fishing, but he wasn’t going to be allowed to enjoy it.

As time passed by, so did life in a way. Friends slipped away, personal interests and hobbies became memories. The lack of personal space became a lack of personal identity. Somewhere between the early days and where he stood now his life had morphed into something defined only by automated compliance with the needs, and frequently whims, of others. Eventually he reached a place where he could barely remember that he liked fishing to begin with. He wasn’t sure he could remember liking anything at all.

Not that there wasn’t an abundance of rewards from taking care of his family. He loved his family; would lay down in traffic for them. In the end, though, robotic care taking leaves a lot to be desired. Ask any woman. Rebelling from it is inviting a firestorm into your home. Ask any man.

As you probably know, Joe Bob is an imaginary friend. Rather he is a composite of a lot of men I have known. And while the character is fictional, his story is not. It’s a story not often told, much less in mixed company.

Contrary to popular worldview, men feel. They feel as deeply and profoundly as any woman. If you peel back a mans skin, you find flesh and blood, not gears and wires. Men have wants, needs, desires and dreams outside their role as protectors and providers. They are not whole without these things and yet they all too often surrender them without so much as a struggle. And in that, so many become machines; appliances for the use of others.

Many men are Joe Bob; working to provide, complaining little about their lot in life and sacrificing much for the sake of those they love. But sooner or later something gives. It always does.

Joe Bob is average as far as men go. Likely as not he can’t really identify and articulate why the world seems like it is closing in around him. It just is. He doesn’t know that standing up to his wife and insisting she support his taking time for his own interests might solve the problem, or at least lessen it. If he thinks of it at all, he knows such an effort would only result in heated conflict and fishing gear gathering more dust in the corner of his garage.

So he reaches for stuff. He does it without exactly knowing why. A bottle, drugs, violence, even another woman. Anything to feel alive again. He is reaching for the wrong things for the right reasons.

I am not excusing Joe Bob, or trying to say that this explains the worst to be found in some men. I am saying is that it might indeed explain some of it. And it surely needs explanation. For when all the things Joe Bob reaches for ultimately fail him, he sometimes reaches for a gun. This isn’t a blanket explanation of suicide. Nor would any one thing explain it so simply. But I do know this: People who take their own lives often feel like they are alone.

Joe Bob doesn’t feel like he is alone, he is unshakably certain of it.

Paul Elam is the Editor-in-Chief of MensNewsDaily.com and  publisher of A Voice for Men

In one particular module, I used a portable grease board in a room in front of my waiting audience. Without introducing myself or saying anything else, I used a grease pen to write the words “Men are…” at the top of the board, and then silently invited the audience to finish the sentence.

Almost invariably, “pigs” or “dogs” was the first offering, accompanied by a room full of good-natured chuckles. I would nod my head and write it down on the board and return to the audience, still silent, for more.

“Controlling,” says one. “Afraid of commitment,” says another. “Aggressive.” “Macho“ “Afraid of intimacy.” “Violent.” “Sexist,” and “Power hungry.” More of the pejoratives, and almost only pejoratives, would come from the audience till the board was full.

I then flipped the board to the other side.

“Women are…” was the cue, and the answers were even more rapid fire than they were with men.

“Strong.” “Capable” “Empowered” “Sensitive.” “Nurturing,” and the like would fly from the audience to the grease board like a barrage of arrows, till that side too was full.

“What do you imagine,” I would ask, taking a strategic pause for a sip of water, “that these answers tell us about the real nature of sexism in the way we view men and women?”

Asking them a question with actual spoken words must have thrown them for a loop, because the stock response to that question was almost invariably a room full of nonplussed, cognitively dissonant faces. And that confusion usually gave way to irritation, clearly at me, though every answer on both sides of that board had come from them.

And by the way, the participants in the crowd? They weren’t accountants or nurses or teachers or financial advisors.

They were mental health professionals.

Counselors, psychotherapists, social workers and the lot. The very people we love to imagine possess the objectivity to rise above the mindset of bigotry and sexism. And the people, despite our want of faith in their work, least likely to actually do it.

I wanted a little more pressure so I asked more questions. “How could this affect our therapeutic alliance with clients?- Could it make our relationships with females enabling?- Punitive with men?” And always, the final question I asked was “Do we carry sexism, against men, unconscious or conscious, into our work with each and every client?”

With that question the anger usually intensified.

In one talk, a female participant, a social worker, jumped out of her chair and threw her papers everywhere. “You’re the sexist!” she hissed at me, and stormed out of the room. She later wrote letters of complaint both about my topic and the fact I would not sign off on her attendance.

Welcome to the wacky world of mental health.

It is a telling study in the psychology of hate. Indeed, as we peel back the layers of fantasy from the profession, we are forced into a most disturbing conclusion.

Psychology is hate. At least as it is practiced in western culture.

It’s most evident in the junk psychology market. Since the mid-eighties, get-rich-quick psychology gurus have often made their way to bestseller lists. Books like Robin Norwood’s Women Who Love Too Much, Susan Forwards, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them and others have been runaway hits, all predicated on rigid stereotypes of men who hate and women who love; all just more additions to the already crowded grease board.

Recently, MRA Mark Rudov appeared on Fox News in a brief debate with Karen Salmansohn on women executives. She was given a nice plug for her new book, Bounce Back. They could have, and probably should have in the interest of balance, given her credit for her previous publication, How to Make Your Man Behave in 21 Days or Less Using the Secrets of Professional Dog Trainers.

I don’t make this stuff up. Unfortunately, I don’t have to.

Currently, male bashing monarch Phil McGraw reigns in the ratings, and it won’t be long before another emerges, fighting to be top dog in dogging men. All you need is a warped worldview and a nod from Oprah.

And these are just the media hucksters. At least we can say that the men and women who embrace their misandry-for-profit schemes are just another dumbed-down group in a dumbed-down media culture.

The more culpable and dangerous are the ones with the air of legitimacy. These folks don’t write, or don’t just write. They teach, do research, and most dreadfully, hang out their shingles and help infect the world, one gullible client at a time.

The world of psychology in academics and practice has become a weapon in the realm of gender politics. Almost all pretense to objectivity and academic integrity has been forced aside by ideologues with an ax to grind against men and who are using the loathsome disguise of helping professionals to further their agenda.

If you think that is extreme, read on.

Allaboutcounseling.com is purportedly an information and referral resource for people seeking mental health services. What it is in reality is a portal, a conduit that induces women into the mentality that it is the vile scourge of manhood at the root of their problems.

And they offer feminism as the solution before the first session is booked.

Some tidbits from their site include some detailed hype about the fundamentals of feminism and some reassurances that not all feminists are lesbians.

I suppose they figure heterosexual women need such basics. And it’s good pre-sell to overcome objections before they are raised. Ask any used car salesman.

They even have a nifty section promoting a new masculinity. These Freudettes have the key to re-engineering men for the better, with the implication, of course, that the way men are now is defective and in need of an overhaul.

Part of that overhaul is a gag. This is just one of the standouts, as it appears word for word on the site.

Openness- To others (especially to women) criticism of our behaviors and attitudes, listen, listen some more, and only speak if the critic wants feedback.

This isn’t even speak when spoken to. It is shut up and take it. Speak with permission only, from whichever woman is attacking you at the moment.

Ah, the finer aspects of mental health.

They have much more there. Enough bogus stats on domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse for a N.O.W. convention, and staunch defenses of feminism tied in directly with the counseling message. Their ultimate point is clearly that sound mental health for women depends on embracing feminism, and with it the hatred for men.

Sound advice for those seeking love and intimacy if I ever saw it.

At this point, the grease board is showing more grease than board.

I wish I could say that this was the bottom of the pit; that the infection stopped there, but we are still dealing more with the symptoms than the actual disease.

Enter the American Psychological Association, and it’s Division 51 group The Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity. (SPSMM) You can pronounce the acronym spasm if you want to. I do. And it fits.

Here are two of the bullet points from the Mission Statement on their home page, out there for the world to see.

Aye, there‘s the rub, and with it goes the last remaining bit of room on the grease board. Men are defective, pernicious banes to civilized society. And feminism is the answer.

Even our most revered experts in human nature are saying as much.

And this is how it worked in the old Soviet Union. It is wise to consider that in the Solzhenitsyn era of gulags and iron fisted reaction to political dissent, that most of the dissidents were imprisoned in “mental health facilities,” the logic being that if you disagreed with the state, there must be something wrong with your mind.

It was also a strategy of, and yes, I will say it without reservation, the Hitler regime, to poison the minds of the populace with disinformation about Jews, prepping the people to look the other way while they were dispatched in the name of a master race.

The plans for men may be less extreme and of longer duration, but it is happening nonetheless. Men are being marginalized year after year. Their numbers in college graduating classes are waning; 42% at last count. They have lost over 80% of the jobs in the current recession. They are dying by suicide and all other manners of death at rates that make women’s lives look like vacations in Fiji.

It’s hell having all this power. It is a wonder how we find time to oppress the world with it, much less twirl our moustaches and snicker while we do it.

But the anti-male hate machine keeps grinding away. Spasm would no doubt classify the MRM as a mass shared psychosis, and MRA’s individually as antithetical to humanity.

I used to remember that social worker who threw the tantrum in my class with a smile. It was a funny image. But that was some years ago. At the time, I knew the sexism was there, but it was not entrenched as deeply as it is today. And I naively thought it would go away.

I am not smiling about it any more.

Paul Elam is the publisher of A Voice for Men

The song begins by telling of a rather commonplace activity: a couple who meet in secret, in a hotel or motel room, to engage in sexual activity. Both of them are secretive because both are married to someone else.

The narrator speaks of himself and his lover as being “like thieves and beggars when we meet.” These stigmatized terms are appropriate. Each is stealing the comfort and pleasure that has been sworn to another and stealing from their own spouse’s. They feel like beggars because their relationship has the “low,” embarrassing quality attached to begging.

Despite their guilt and sense of shame, they continue the affair because their feelings together are so very “sweet.”

However, the narrator ends by singing, “If he should want your love tonight, don’t turn away, don’t hurt his pride. Close your eyes and think of me in some room above a street.”

What is striking in the above passage is the narrator’s concern and empathy for the man he is cuckolding. This might not be as strange as it seems. Both the narrator and his lover take care to keep their illicit activities secret and probably believe – or at least hope – that what his wife and her husband don’t know won’t hurt them.

The narrator knows that his lover may be tempted to turn away from her husband out of a feeling, however irrational, that she should be faithful to the man whom she really loves or at least really desires. But the man singing also knows that while the husband may not be hurt by an affair he doesn’t know about, he will inevitably be wounded by a wife’s rejection. The narrator does not want their affair to cause another man such a psychic injury. Our singer feels for the husband as a human being, since humans of both sexes are hurt by rejection, and specifically as a man since men are usually the ones making advances and therefore the ones disproportionately apt to be rejected.

Does the man’s lover no longer desire her husband because he has lost the physical characteristics that once attracted her? That is a possibility. Another is that the passage of time and the familiarity of a long marriage have caused her passion for her husband to dull. However, her lover urges her to do something that a person of either sex can do: use an illicit passion to rekindle the fires of a marital one. It neither condones nor excuses adultery but it is an odd irony of life that extra-marital erotic stimulation can be brought home to the marriage bed. In Some Room Above the Street is a song that displays a sense of wisdom and caring even as it tells of a situation that is fundamentally sordid.

“We need to stop this from happening,” they say. “Marriage is one man and one woman. God-almighty Hisself said so.” And then there is the obligatory, nauseatingly redundant, “We need to protect the sanctity of the institution.”

Excuse me? The sanctity of the institution?

It makes me wonder if they have a rehab for this type of thinking.

Modern marriage, in case these Einsteins haven’t noticed, has all the sanctity of a ten dollar hooker. Matrimony has devolved into just another throwaway institution in a throwaway culture and it wasn‘t homosexuals that got us here. Nor will it be them that drives the final nail in the coffin.

As usual, we are not facilitating any real understanding with sound bites from talking heads. “One man and one woman,” no more illuminates the problems of modern marriage than nonsense like “my body, my choice,” illuminates the issue of abortion.

Worse yet, as any men’s rights advocate knows, marriage hasn’t been “one man and one woman” for a long time. The reality of the times is that men marry the state they live in. The woman just comes with the deal for a few years. When it’s fini with the woman, things really heat up with the state, shearing the man of his assets and adding a new, bizarre dimension to “till death do us part.”

And allowing gays into this fiasco is going to hurt the institution?

I wish I could corner a couple of these pundits and make them answer some questions. Maybe Hannity, or the anorexic looking chick with stringy bleached hair.

The questions would be simple. Where were you? And what are you doing about it now?

When the feminists pushed for and got no fault divorce, and the divorce rate consequently hit the stratosphere creating legions of dysfunctional, fatherless children, where were you? What are you doing about it now?

When feminist ideology spread like a malicious rumor though the media, academia, government and the culture, demonizing all things masculine and creating the fundamental rift between the sexes that plagues marriage to this day, where were you? What are you doing about it now?

When the family courts started taking Title IV-D money, turning benches into private fiefdoms, profit centers whose stock-in-trade became eviscerating the father-child bond, where were you? What are you doing about it now? And add to that another question. Do you even know what Title IV-D money is and how it makes it’s way from the federal government into family court coffers? Or would that take more information than you can squeeze in between Cialis commercials on Fox News?

Of course, the point is that we already know where these people were and where they are now. They’re in the place they have always been, crawling like roaches over every media news outlet that will call on them to say something profoundly meaningless about profoundly meaningless topics, in the name of plugging profoundly meaningless books.

These vultures want to protect the sanctity of marriage in the same way Courtney Love wants to protect chastity.

And those that caterwaul the loudest about the supposedly sinister prospect of gay marriage are the same ones that can’t stop wagging their tongues about the virtues of constitutional conservatism.

I’m fascinated by people that call themselves limited government conservatives, but sit by complacently like grinning, plastic bobble-heads, as long as the government is enforcing their religious and moral beliefs on the rest of the population.

News flash, that is not conservatism, it’s not even a cheap imitation. It’s theocracy. Ayatollah style. And it’s about as conducive to men’s rights as feminism.

I wouldn’t be bothered by this all that much if it were contained to media pinheads. I expect them to say a lot and understand little. It’s what they get rich doing.

But when I see MRA’s espousing this cause célèbre, it puts a spike in my “shoot-yourself-in-the-foot” detector.

Why, for the love of Pete, would men’s rights activists seek to protect the sanctity of an institution that is currently the most prolific source of oppressive discrimination against them?

But I see it all the time, from MRA’s, rather from patriarchs who think they are MRA’s.

Just as theocratic zealots shouldn’t confuse themselves with constitutional conservatives, patriarchs shouldn’t confuse themselves with MRA’s. In this writers opinion, our agendas are diametrically opposed.

Patriarchs want to return to the imagined days of chivalry and glory for men, when they were the heads of their homes and women did the dishes and pretty much anything else they were told. I’m sure it was a nice world for the control obsessive, but that toothpaste is out of the tube and is not going to be squeezed back in. And chivalry, in that it hinges on putting women first, has much more in common with feminism than it does with men’s rights.

MRA’s just want to escape the sexism and bias and treachery involved in marriage and every other institution that affects men. And that puts us, again in this writers opinion, in the ironic place of finishing what feminists started; an all out assault on marriage itself.

The feminists won this one. Game over. A shutout. What remains of marriage is not salvageable. It’s water that can’t be decontaminated; a cripple that can’t be healed. And the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery and start the whole shebang over from scratch. Hopefully that would be sometime after the culture has recovered from the damage of feminist doctrine and placed some sanity back on the table.

So if gay marriage erodes the sanctity of the institution, I say fine, let’s print them licenses by the truckload. I’ll spring for some rice.

There are plenty of real issues, the ones the pundits ignore, that need plenty of real attention. I won’t be bothered to invest in anything else, especially something that ultimately undermines men even more.

It was no doubt feminists that put marriage on life support. We should mourn that and look to the future for renewed hope that some day men and women will share life again with love and dignity. But today, MRA’s should do the decent thing with marriage and pull the plug.

Paul Elam is the editor of A Voice for Men.

Conservative black American commentator has compared the injustice suffered by the Scottsboro Boys to the Duke Lacrosse players case. In the former instance, black men accused of raping white women were assumed guilty by much of the public despite scanty evidence of guilt and actual evidence to the contrary. In the second case, white men were assumed guilty by much of the public of raping a black despite a similar lack of evidence. Sowell sees both cases as reflecting racial perceptions of our different time periods.

As I researched the Scottsboro case, I became very emotionally wrenched by it, in part because of the sheer amount of suffering and waste of life that these false accusations – and the willingness of so many people to believe them – caused. The accused were mostly teenagers when the accusations were first hurled at them. These innocent men grew up in the purgatory of prison, their lives inevitably warped by the horrors they endured.

My story on this horror is up at http://www.crimemagazine.com/scottsboro_boys.htm
I would appreciate knowing what readers of this blog think of both the case itself and how I handled it.

We may disapprove of politicians getting into sex scandals, but we should not be shocked, regardless of the person’s moral beliefs. The simple truth is that monogamy is not a natural state for humans of either gender. Millions of years of natural selection mean that the human male is biologically programmed to spread seed, and the human female, biologically programmed to diversify it. We can rise above our biological tendencies, but we should not be too surprised when people act on them.

Some people took the above letter as promoting polygamy or at least the practice of having multiple sexual partners. It does no such thing. The truth is that monogamous marriage is a good ideal and should remain the ideal. For one thing, while monogamy is not a natural state for either men or women, jealousy comes naturally to both. If a person is in a committed relationship, respect and caring for the partner often means adopting the discipline of fidelity. Additionally, adherence to monogamy keeps down the rates of sexually transmitted diseases, problem pregnancies, and children raised in unstable situations.

What is natural is often not ideal and should not be what we strive to do.