The Happy Misogynist

2009-07-27T21:49:00.000-07:00

With Apologies

2009-06-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

I have been unable to give this blog the attention it needs as of late. First there was a problem that it took some time to resolve. I embedded my youtube channel on the sidebar and it caused problems for everyone who visited here. That has been resolved by removing the channel from the sidebar.

Also, as you might be able to tell from the updates, I have been very busy with making videos. Now that I have slowed down from that, I will be able to give the blog the attention I would like to.

Thanks to all of you who have come here to participate. I hope to make it worth your while to stay.

Paul

Family Kourt

2009-06-28T21:29:00.000-07:00

This video, as named, is about the family courts in America. I hope it provides some good fodder for conversation. Please enjoy.

Some Problems with Men

2009-06-28T21:19:00.000-07:00

As an MRA I have seldom held my tongue when it comes to feminists, women, or the insane gender rules we live by in this culture. There are problems with men, too. Most of them have been overstated, even fabricated over the last forty years. But there are some problems with men that are seldom discussed, in my opinion. I do this in this video. WARNING: This one is an all out rant with some really strong language. If strong language offends you, you might want to sit this one out.

Accused

2009-06-28T21:16:00.000-07:00

This is a video on false accusations and the incredible impact it has on the accused.

Dr. Phil's Shills

2009-06-17T21:04:00.000-07:00

This is my newest video. Hope you enjoy!

A Letter to Women

2009-06-09T15:07:00.000-07:00

Dear Ladies,

When I first started this website I had originally posted, as my first essay, “A Letter to Women.” It was intended to be an explanation of sorts, for what I do, and why I do it. As most of the site visitors happen to be women, it was read more than the others.

Recently the site was hacked and had to be rebuilt. It dawned on me while reposting all the essays that the original letter I wrote to you is not at all like what I would have to say now. So I trashed it and I am now writing you again. This time, hopefully, with more focus and substance.

There is a problem with the women in this culture.

Yes, I know, there are problems with men, too. Believe me, I have heard about them for the last forty years. Some of it true and fair, much of it neither. It was a necessary dialogue just the same. So is this.

To understand this we need a brief look at history. Women, in the past, were denied voting rights, couldn’t own land and didn’t have much access to employment that would give them the freedom to make it on their own.

This needed to change, and of course, did, as can be confirmed with a glance at the world around you. I laud those changes. But the problem was in how we got here.

The reality is that the gender roles of our history were traps for both men and women. Women were relegated to home and children; men to sacrificial roles as protectors and providers. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was just a matter of survival, and for many thousands of years it worked quite well to that end.

But once men made the environment safe enough for women to leave "The Cave," it was only natural and right that men change and allow that to happen.

And ladies, we did.

This is the simple but accurate truth of the matter. Men and women evolved into gender roles that facilitated the survival of the species. And once those roles were not necessary for survival, they did begin the sometimes complicated path to change.

The problem here is that your knowledge of these historical events is largely shaped, convoluted rather, by feminism. Feminists taught you that your history with men was of unremitting evil; that you were chattel, slaves to men who held all power and shut you out with extreme intent. They even gave it a name.

Patriarchy.

It is a word that has become synonymous with oppression. But feminists were loathe to remind you that “Women and children first,” was the patriarchal mantra, and that much of the social norms, even when misguided, were a product of a code adopted for the sole purpose of preserving your life. It wasn't always fair, but the unfairness wasn't always yours. Men died by that code, and trained their sons to do the same.

The fact that we still do is the subject for another essay.

So what happened? As feminist distortions were increasingly embraced, and intertwined with the legitimate need for change, men did what they usually do. They reacted to the message and not the messenger and unblocked the entrance to that cave.

Many of you spit on us on the way out. Many of you still do.

It has to stop.

This isn’t just about decency. And it is not just about the chasm of mistrust that separates us from each other, or the legions of the walking wounded from this godforsaken gender war. It is about our future. The vilification of men that you have accepted as appropriate now translates to catastrophe for our sons, for your sons.

The problem is that what we say, think and feel about people invariably translates into what we actually do to them. Nowhere is this more evident than with our sons, in the here and now.

If you take an honest look at the academic environment to which our boys are subjected, you will see that their masculinity itself is under attack with ideology that teaches them they are inherently flawed.

Christina Hoff Sommers documented this in her highly recommended book "The War Against Boys." She writes, "The pedagogy is designed to valorize females, such as teaching history in a woman-centered way. Boys are to be inspired to revere Anita Hill and to “enjoy” quilting. At the same time, schools discourage activities that are natural and traditional to boys, such as playing ball together."

She goes on to say, with sad accuracy, "Most parents have no idea what their children are facing in the gender-charged atmosphere of the public schools.”

And as girls and girls programs increasingly flourish, boys are falling to the sidelines in ever growing numbers.

The results of that are most telling.

Boys are more likely than ever to drop out of school and engage in delinquency and other problems. They are representing less college graduates every year. With this diminishing education and wholesale marginalization, they are on a fast track to being the “second sex,” that position that so many feminists touted as the greatest evil of human history when they claimed it applied to women.

This is the lasting legacy of spitting on men. Your sons will not be the exception.

Young men now grow up to be destroyed in corrupt family court systems where women are encouraged to and even praised for using children, their children, like pawns in order to drain the father of assets. And those same children also have their badly needed connection to their fathers severed in the process. When those exploited, abused children start quite naturally to act out and get in trouble, we blame the father who was removed against his will, for of all things, being absent.

And the "freedom" women gained on this frenzied path of vengeance and victimization? It doesn't appear to have settled well. Women are growing increasingly violent. They are matching men in domestic violence, blow for blow, and they are causing the lions share of injury and death to children in the home.

But we don’t speak of these things. We are not supposed to. In your position as the identified victim, and mine as the identified perpetrator, there is supposed to be an indelible silence on these matters. For the most part, there is.

That silence is destroying us.

And it is a silence that is maintained with the collusion of weak men and misguided women, which is to say most of the culture. The only answer I can think of is for men, and for women, to change.

Perhaps you will consider this before concluding that men's activists are whiners or woman haters or products of bad mothers. You might actually decide that most men's activists are men who above all else, seek justice. For their children, for themselves, and ultimately for you.

I hope that a few of you will read this and consider it the next time you hear someone say “men are pigs,” or when you hear a woman refer to her first born child as “the insurance policy,” or before you nod your head in unconsidered agreement with whatever negatives about men happen to be making the rounds. All of this will be visited on your sons, and their sons.

I hope too, that some of you look at your sons and think, and ask yourself what kind of world in which you really want them to live.

When your sons choose wives and marry, I hope you consider the agony they will go through when “taken to the cleaners” and robbed of their children. You will be forced to stand by powerlessly and watch them have their guts ripped out.

It will happen to more than half of them.

The best prevention for this last one is to teach our sons to choose carefully; to scrutinize a woman before committing his life and work to her; to evaluate her morals and values as a woman prior to putting a ring on her finger. or even whether it is wise to marry in the first place. But how can we do this if we keep teaching them that such evaluations are the stuff of misogyny? Indeed, how can we do this if scrutinizing women at all is such a taboo?

And therein lies the rub, ladies. It is indeed time, just as it was for men, for women to be held to scrutiny, and to account. More importantly, it is time for women to do this on their own.

I’ll do my best to provide a fair and compassionate mirror in my writings. It is always up to you whether you want to look in it.

Family Terrorism

2009-06-07T20:19:00.000-07:00

The latest video. I don't think this one is going to make Momma happy.

Accused

2009-06-05T21:53:00.000-07:00

David Evans. Collin Finnerty. Reade Seligmann. Don’t be surprised if the names sound only vaguely familiar, though not so long ago they were the subject of national headlines. Perhaps the mention of another name will jar your memory.

Mike Nifong.

Yes, Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann were the accused in the stridently publicized Duke Lacrosse rape case. A rape that never happened. A case that never should have been.

In a supersonic rush to judgment, these three young men were subjected to a virtual lynching at the hands of the media, the Duke administration, the prosecutors office, police and every other public institution that could help toss a rope over a tree branch. Dukes administration canceled its lacrosse season, fired coach Mike Pressler, and ignored death threats against Pressler and the team.

Indeed, the university administration fanned the flames of public outrage and hysterical student protests against the players by publishing a letter that addressed the accusations with the following:

“The students know that the disaster didn’t begin on March 13th and won’t end with what the police say or the court decides...To the students speaking individually and to the protestors making collective noise, thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.”

Duke reacted to the allegations without the least regard for the concept of assumed, or even actual innocence or for the rights of those three members of their student body. Instead, they lit torches and incited the mob.

All these actions were given inertia by the knee jerk outrage of a public that didn’t have the facts and appeared not to want them.

It may be too generous to say that the public didn’t have the facts. The public did have enough to question the cases integrity, but ignored it. It was understood from the beginning what this “woman” did for a living. I know, I know, in this all too enlightened world we live in, I am supposed to take great pain to point out that ones profession isn’t an excuse for rape.

Consider it pointed out.

But let me also point out that her life as a pathological liar, stripper and drug addled hooker didn’t diminish her credibility for a moment, and it didn’t take the railroading of those young men off the fast track. Such is the power of accusation when it comes to men and women.

It is a power that has unjustly ruined the lives of untold thousands; a power that goes unchecked and unchallenged, all because we live in a culture that cannot imagine women as anything but victims; men as anything but perpetrators.

The results of this cultural psychosis are written in statistics that should outrage anyone remotely interested in justice.

Charles McDowell, a researcher in the United States Air Force Special Studies Division studied 1,218 cases of rape that were reported between 1980 and 1984 on Air Force bases around the world. Initially, 27% of those cases were found to be fraudulent because the alleged victims admitted to lying when asked to take a polygraph or after just having failed one. Another 212 of the cases were exposed as frauds with no polygraph involved, as the alleged victim convincingly recanted the accusations early in the investigation.

In other words, 45% of all the rape charges were proven to be hoaxes. The great majority of those did not recant until they were caught in the lie.

A 1996 study published by the U.S. Department of Justice revealed 28 cases in which men were exonerated by DNA evidence of rapes for which they had been convicted and sent to prison. The men were released after having served an average of seven years behind bars.

Former Colorado prosecutor Craig Silverman is quoted as saying. “For 16 years, I was a kick-ass prosecutor who made the most of my reputation vigorously prosecuting rapists. I was amazed to see all the false rape allegations that were made to the Denver Police Department. A command officer in the Denver Police sex assault unit recently told me he placed the false rape numbers at approximately 45%.”

The Innocence Project, which seeks to secure the release from prison for those falsely convicted of crimes, reported that “Every year since 1989, in 25% of sexual assault cases referred to the FBI where results could be obtained, the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing.” And those men freed were just the ones lucky enough to have DNA evidence available. There are certainly more who remain incarcerated.

And by the way, the crime for which The Innocence Project has had the most success in freeing the wrongfully convicted?

Rape.

Men, scores of them, have been Nifonged, robbed of freedom and reputation, all on accusations that no one bothered to scrutinize. Or worse, as in the Duke case, their innocence was known and they were prosecuted anyway.

This problem has infested the criminal justice system, which marches on like a Nazi battalion while the masses throw ticker tape.

Unfortunately, it doesn‘t stop there.

False accusation has become the WMD for modern women who choose to use it, and by the frequency it happens, that is no small number.

I know, I know, in this all too enlightened world, I am supposed to take great pains to point out that not all women falsely accuse men of wrongful actions.

Consider it pointed out.

But let me also point out just how pervasive the problem is. It happens in family courts where allegations of spousal abuse, child abuse, sexual misconduct and the like are routinely fabricated to facilitate restraint orders that are dispensed with no corroboration. In those courts, the lie is just another tool for winning a case.

It also happens in the workplace, where accusation alone of sexual harassment or discrimination can snuff out a career and generate huge legal settlements that companies feel compelled to pay to keep the allegations out of the press, truth and justice be damned.

Allegation has become the fiat currency of social power over men, and it is working in spades. Corporations cave in, shrinking from the bad press of lawsuits that go to trial. Prosecutors that cannot politically afford to be seen as soft on sex crimes, or hard on women, run innocent people through with grinding wheels of injustice without compunction.

And John Q. looks the other way, unwilling to take an honest assessment of this behavior and the women who commit it.

Vindication is of little solace. This is not innocent till proven guilty. It isn’t even guilty until proven innocent. It is guilty until proven innocent, but still guilty in the eyes of the world, even if your only crime was to have a whore point a finger at you and cry rape.

Try a Google search on any one of the Duke three. Their connection to rape charges will be there for life.

What does a man released from prison for a rape he didn’t commit tell an employer?

“Yeah, I did seven years on a rape, but they cleared me.”

Sure.

What does he tell a woman in which he might be interested?

It isn’t the accusers that pay the price for their criminal deception, it is the accused, exonerated or not.

The reason that these travesties continue is obvious. It can be summed up in one word.

Impunity.

The reality is that there are no real consequences for destroying the life of a man if you ruin him with a fraudulent charge. There are indeed laws on the books against it, but they are not enforced. It is a crime without a criminal, mainly because the perpetrators are women, or men acting in their behalf, and we all know they don’t lie about such things.

Crystal Gayle Mangum, the street walker who ruined the lives of those three young men wasn’t prosecuted. She was referred to counseling, and eventually graduated college herself, with a degree in police psychology.

I wish I made that one up.

But the fact is that the world not only tolerates this stuff, it embraces it. Or as Catherine Comins, a former assistant dean at Vasser College said, "Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes benefit from the experience."

I wish I made that one up, too.

Mike Nifong, the rogue prosecutor who broke every canon of legal ethics and more than a few laws, to further himself by prosecuting young men he knew to be innocent, was fired, disbarred, and spent one day in jail.

I am sure all this strikes terror into the hearts of the Mangum’s and Nifong’s of the world.

The Wages of Spin

2009-06-04T08:12:00.000-07:00

This is my second of what I hope to be an ongoing series of youtube videos regarding men's issues. I hope you enjoy it, and if so, please pass it on. Thanks to Pegs for the tech assist.

HR 2115

2009-05-27T12:10:00.000-07:00

The government, it seems, has finally figured out that having an Office of Women's Health, but not one for men is a tad out of balance. This is especially true given women live six years longer than men on average and men are more prone to all top fatal illnesses than women.

HR 2115 proposes to address this with the creation of The Office for Men's Health.

Please take the time to write your politician of choice in support of this legislation.

You can send an easy and convenient form letter simply by clicking here.

The Voice of Men

2009-05-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

I have been asked a few times over the years "If men really are getting a raw deal, then why aren't they complaining? Where are the protests? How come I almost never hear about 'men's issues?'"

These are fair questions. After all, men don't have guns to their heads. They can say pretty much what they want, and usually don't when it comes to this subject.

Either I have totally overblown the problems of men in this culture, or they are the greatest masochists of all time. My money is on the latter, and for some very good reasons.

Let's first take a look at what men have been listening to about themselves over the last forty years.

From feminist ideologues, we get such gems of wisdom as “Men have all the power,” “If women were in charge, there would be no wars.” “A woman needs a man like a bicycle needs a fish,” just for starters. That none of these ideas withstand scrutiny seems to have generated little serious debate or dissent.

We were also treated to a plethora of entries into the cultural lexicon like “macho pinhead,” “male chauvinist pig,” “deadbeat dad,” “emotionally unavailable,” and “afraid of commitment.” It is the language of socially permissible stereotypes that quite naturally lends itself to the socially permissible conclusion that “men are pigs.”

"Men are scum," and "men are dogs," round out the short list.

I am sure you are no stranger to any of these expressions.

Perhaps all these sentiments are most succinctly summarized in “A Feminist Dictionary” ed. Kramerae and Treichler, Pandora Press. 1985

Man: An obsolete life form. An ordinary creature who needs to be watched. A contradictory baby-man.

In the onslaught of all this anti-male sentiment, the men of our culture have banded together and voiced a collective, powerfully masculine response:

“How ‘bout them cowboys?"

Unfazed (seemingly) by a generation of personal attacks, men turn their minds to matters of more gravity in the scheme of things. Such as whether you are better off purchasing an LCD or plasma screen TV. There is much heated debate on this in male circles.

As their friends and relatives are dismantled in a corrupt family court system, as the epidemic of male suicide continues unabated, as boys are doped by doctors for being male and as they fall further and further behind in our schools, men generally react by making sure the TIVO is going to get the next ball game.

On first glance it appears that Kramerae and Treichler had it right. Men are contradictory baby-men, with all the shallowness and adolescent fixations that implies.

I don’t say this to bash men, at least not in the traditional sense, but in an attempt to explore just why they seem to go through life so emotionally anesthetized and oblivious to the tsunami's of insults and degradations that have been crashing into them since childhood if they are under 50.

And on one level it does appear that it gets down to the male obsession with sex, sports and work.

It’s about getting laid and getting paid, and it leaves men more willing to cough up two grand for a TV set than to donate a few bucks to fathers rights organizations that are fighting an arduously uphill battle for their rights and the rights of their sons.

The question here is if men really do present as developmentally challenged 'boys with whiskers', then why does this happen? Why are men are this way to begin with?

I think it has nothing to do with character or maturity and everything to do with biology and social programming.

Early in our history, I don’t imagine it would have served the species well for men to be too concerned with themselves. We needed someone at the entrance to the cave willing to lay it all on the line, otherwise something with a foul disposition and large incisors would have just come in an eaten everyone, including the women and children. In that light, self interest in men might well have resulted in humanity being a rather short biological experiment.

Fast forward a few million years and we have the internet, routine space travel and not much of a need for numbed out stalwarts to secure the immediate environment. But true to our biological roots, “big boys don’t cry,” and “take it like a man,” are still the foundation of male socialization.

We do still need them, I suppose, to take the occasional trek to the battlefield, willing to get their brains blown out in the name of better commerce. But other than that, the way we socialize them, as selfless and self sacrificing, is precisely why they listen with deadened attention to the charges that they are selfish pigs, and cannot imagine or articulate a defense to such nonsense.

That process starts with "Big boys don't cry," but culminates with "Big boys don't cry, they die."

And die they do. Men represent 83% of all suicides. This shouldn't be so shocking. They make up 93% of all workplace deaths and 98% of all war dead. It seems when men have to go down for the advancement of others, or for any other reason, it is much less messy when they don't feel too much about it.

So we raise them to feel little or nothing.

I leaves me in awe to think what it was like on the Titanic, and so many other similar situations. Men stoically ushering as many women and children as they could onto life boats, and then standing there in the cold, waiting silently to drown.

Their reward was to be remembered as hero's. Well, until 1985, when we figured out they were obsolete life forms that needed to be watched.

It might not be too much of a stretch of reason to think that abusive conditioning might result in males that are dissociated from their own sense of self and sense of survival; that we create a void in them that they can only pathetically attempt to fill with electronics and entertainment, work and women; that we breed shallowness and eschew insight in men, then condemn them for those very things.

That men are largely mute on matters that diminish their lives is hardly a surprise.

I remember watching the poet Robert Bly tell a story about watching his young son play basketball. Unfortunately, a bad pass of the ball hit him squarely in the groin. The youngster bent over, hiding his face as the agony coursed though his body. He stayed that way for quite a while.

"He would not stand straight," Bly said, "Till he could show the world a face that bore no pain."

That is the code of men, as practiced by a ten year old.

And that leaves me and a handful of other men standing before you, as socio-genetic renegades, bucking against the things that kill us while most of our brothers shop for gadgets and live in the perfunctory role of disposable providers.

In a sense, the feminist dictionary is right to a fault. Men are obsolete. At least the way we socialize them. We train men to stand at the gate, ready to die, a long time after we drove out the animals and invented locks. We train them to dig ditches and die young while people berate them for having too much power. And in doing so, we reduce them to mere utility; appliances to be used and replaced when they quit working; or when they start making too much noise.

So where does that leave the voice of men? Well, when it comes to speaking on their own behalf, they largely don’t have one. Nor do many want them to.

Maybe men have guns to their heads after all. And maybe, just maybe, we should take our fingers off the trigger.

The Voice of Women

2009-05-22T07:09:00.001-07:00

Advocating for men and boys is a tricky, often frustrating business, especially when speaking in a man’s voice. The sad truth is that reactions from many are still more negative than positive; more condescension than comprehension.

I have heard them all over the years. You’re just whining. You just hate women. This must be because you had a bad mother or bad marriage.

I’ve even heard the occasional call to reexamine my sexuality and the implication that I am angry because I can’t get a girlfriend or get laid.

I don’t mind all this so much. I am old enough to remember days when people, usually men, would snicker at the idea of a female doctor or lawyer; when employment ads were divided by sex, and all the real jobs were to be filled by men. And I remember the reactions when women started challenging all this.

You must be a lesbian. You’re mad because you can’t get a man, etc..

It was not until a number of men of good intent started echoing the sentiments of those women that things really began to change. After all, even when it came to suffrage, it was necessary for men to include women in the vote as women could not wield the power to obtain that right on their own.

I suspect, as time goes by, that it will be women that similarly push a more equalitarian agenda forward for the betterment of both sexes. Consequently, it will be women, I think, that bring the ultimate balance to our shared existence and an end to the gender war.

I don’t try to hide the fact that the intent of all my work is meant to be an invitation to women to do that very thing.

I don’t mean to say that I am asking women to become activists, to write their elected leaders or to take on feminists in the arena of ideas. Far from it.

To illustrate this, let me give you a brief synopsis of a lengthy email I got some time ago.

A woman wrote to tell me that she recently attended a craft class and that all the participants were women. While they were waiting for the class to begin, the women were chatting and the conversation turned toward men. Before long, she told me, nearly every woman in there was trashing and ridiculing the men they were with. She said it started out lighthearted but quickly devolved into rancor and wholesale bashing.

When she had heard enough, she said, “If any of those men actually love you, I feel sorry for them. I would never talk about my man that way.”

She told me the room instantly fell silent.

Now, I could have said the same thing to that group of women and I doubt that the reaction would have been silence. I imagine it would have been just the opposite, and replete with all the reactions I have become accustomed to.

But the point here is that there is a magnificent power in the silence that woman created. It was the silence of retreat. And that retreat is the retreat that open love will always force upon open hatred; that truth will always force upon injustice and lies.

The power here is something that women, whether they asked for it or not, almost exclusively hold in their hands.

Imagine a world where people joke and snicker about Elena Bobbit cutting off her cheating husbands penis and a woman asks aloud how funny people would think it would be if she had cheated and he had taken a butcher knife and mutilated her vagina. What would happen if more women started pointing out that domestic violence is not just a boys club and that male bashing in the media and by mothers is harming the self esteem of our boys?

I think a lot would happen, all of it good. And I am happy to say that I am hearing this from more women as time goes by. I look forward to the day when it will be commonplace.

When the day comes that the hatred of either men or women has to take that silent retreat from the certainty of social scorn, when the status quo is to acknowledge that both sexes deserve the basics of respect and consideration, of justice, then the need for political activism will largely fall by the wayside.

Until then, I will continue to speak my mind on these matters, and will express my most sincere gratitude when women do the same.

Some Thoughts on Love and War

2009-05-19T23:13:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel, like a poet of my admiration once said, like I am
adrift in the sands of gender war.

There is this angst among us. A bitterness birthed in the waves of a supposed social justice that has swept us all into those sands in the last forty years. We are mired in an undercurrent of resentments. In the analysis of our collective history we emerge as enemies; victims and perpetrators, the oppressed and the oppressors. It is a treacherous place to be for creatures so designed to connect out of mutual need.

As a men’s rights activist, I have for years debated facts and figures with feminists. It was as though I believed that if I could make a convincing enough argument on behalf of men that somehow a white flag would be raised and the war would be over. I thought if they could just see the truth of how toxic they had become that somehow they would take pause and lay down their arms. If I ever had schemes that were any more grandiose or hypocritical, I don’t remember what they were.

Through all that time, I practiced a hefty amount of denial in not seeing that I was fighting the same battle, with the same ideals and delusions that they were. As I look back at it now, we were as children shrieking at each other over toys.

The more accurate way to put it was that we were like jaded lovers in the death throes of a failed relationship, scratching and clawing to make ourselves heard, acknowledged…valued.

As a former clinician, I would have admonished anyone in this trap to consider that if you want to be valued it is best to start by extending that to the other side. My own status as a member of the walking wounded prevented me from entertaining such ideas.

Do I think feminism is an evil agenda? Yes, I do think it has come to that. Ships built with pain ultimately use vengeance as a rudder.

But I see the same exact thing in the Men’s Rights Movement. As that movement grows, and it will for men are every bit as wounded as women, the result will only be an escalation of the conflict. The result will be more war.

I am not going to be a soldier in that war.

I used to imagine that I was, and had ambitions to be a high ranking officer. I wanted to use my pen as a mighty sword and slay the evil agenda that trashes our boys and lays the weight of history on the backs of men, already strained from simply providing for people they love.

It dawned on me, as I watched the gray hairs on my head multiply, that this war is a war on ourselves. It is nothing less than the ultimate, massive divorce, with all the hatred and destruction that is engendered in the bitter end of such things.

And the truth be told, I do not want a divorce. I want the marriage to last, and I want it to aspire to the greatness of love and acceptance.

So how, some will ask, can you have a movement with no enemy? How can you seek justice with no perpetrator to point to? How can you advocate for something without advocating against something else?

You can’t.

But there is plenty of blame to be found and an enemy as close as the nearest mirror.

So I call on myself today to hear the pain of both my sisters and brothers; to encourage them to do the same. Today, I strip off this uniform and put the gloves back on. Today, I pledge to seek justice but not punishment; to follow the truth, but not the path of revenge.

I am done, also, with the debate. The debate is over. We are all hurt in some way, large or small. Of that there is no dispute. And the healing for those wounds will not be found in the thick of battle. We will not resolve conflict while conflicted. And we will not find justice by any other means than the love of justice, and each other.

I invite anyone to join me, but I am not waiting for stragglers.

This is Not Your Fathers Misogyny

2009-05-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

To be or not to be. An MRA (Men‘s Rights Activist), that is.

Welcome to my blog. It is an extension of my website at
The Happy Misogynist

One might wonder why someone with a website that focuses primarily on writing about men's issues would also have a blog that does the same. I have asked myself the same question many times which probably explains why it has taken me so long to start one.

It finally occurred to me that I need a place to write about my writing. And a place to more directly address where I take a stand on things and why.

I have been an advocate for men’s issues (see my bio) for approaching three decades. I am aghast at the way men are socialized to make themselves disposable, at the travesties against them in family courts, at their bashing in the media and their vilification by feminists. I am angry at the way our boys are indiscriminately medicated with drugs like Ritalin for nothing more than normal behavior. And I am deeply concerned that boys are spiraling downward in education and employment.

These are indeed the causes of MRA’s, and they are the things I write about with all the energy I can muster. And in the course of those writings I am prone to point things out that may cause some women to find objection. It comes with the territory. But since most of my subscribers are women, it seems to be, in general, working out. There is a problem, though.

I don’t hate women.

And my experience in MRA circles is that misogyny, the real kind, flourishes there like roaches in a dirty kitchen. It is tolerated in the name of allowing angry, wounded men to vent, and in my own way I understand that. The last thing any male needs in this culture is someone telling them to shut up. Especially when men have so much to say that generally goes unheard.

But my personal aversion to the path of hatred has left me a bit on the outs. I don’t fit with mainstream MRA’s and I need feminists like a bicycle needs a fish. Actually, I think that is a great blessing. It is a blessing because it leaves me here with you, who I hope is just the average person looking for some entertainment or some answers. I’ll do my best to provide both.

It would be helpful if you went to my site and read a few of my essays. When you come here you will get the background on them, and perhaps some better understanding that what underlies the greater body of my work is nothing more or less than the desire for reconciliation; for a truce, and ultimately an end to the gender war.

Pretty lofty for a guy with a computer and a chippy attitude, eh?

But I like the goal nonetheless. Why? Because we used to dance, you know? Even if it was only in our dreams we used to dance. And we used to be aware that the music was in our connection. I hope anyone that shares those silly notions with me will pull up a seat and hang out for a bit. Make yourself a cup of tea and let’s just talk for a while.

And just maybe, some day, anyone of us can extend and hand, offer a smile from the heart, and say, “Shall we?”