Transcript of "Fempocalypse!!!"

Okay, someone commenting on my last video scoffed at my assertion that unless our attitudes change, society will, sooner or later, reach a...well, let's call it a "fempocalypse". That is, that feminism will eventually help bring about an economic and social collapse.

Many people are simply unable to wrap their heads around that idea, because we've all been told, ad nauseum, that feminism is a cause of prosperity, when in reality, it is largely--perhaps entirely--a consequence of it.

I mean, let's consider patriarchy, or to put it another way, the social contract of marriage and fatherhood. This system benefitted all parties in a world of largely manual labor (much of it, since the agricultural age, beyond the physical capabilities of women). Remember that we are also a species whose offspring have one of the longest periods of complete helplessness and immobility of any on earth, and whose maternal parent lactates to provide nourishment to offspring for up to four years.

Because men were not burdened with the gestation, lactation and care of children, as individuals they could subsist and survive while expending only a small percentage of their capacity to perform work. When male animals of any kind don't need to do more than survive, there's often a great deal of lying around going on--and this isn't necessarily laziness, but efficiency. Expending more energy on work than you need to, especially when that "work" is physically demanding, negatively impactful on your health, and dangerous, is just foolish.

Because women were burdened with the gestation, lactation and care of children, because those children have a prolonged period of helplessness, and because women had no real control over their fertility until just a few decades ago, women were unable to work at their full capacity for a large portion of their lives, and I would suggest that during the periods of extreme vulnerability shortly before and after birth, unable to reliably and consistently perform the necessary labor to even keep themselves alive, let alone their very helpless offspring. 

The mutual dilemma was that those individual men who only had to expend a small amount of energy to subsist probably wanted to pass on their genes as much as anyone else did. And those individual women needed help and support in order to successfully raise their children in a world with no daycare, social safety net, maternity leave, baby formula or safe, easy jobs offering flex time and health benefits.

A man could not have children without the cooperation of a woman, and a woman could not raise her children effectively and safely without the cooperation of...well, someone.

And I'm going to borrow a bit from another blogger, Rob of the blog No Ma'am, and read a portion of his description of patriarchy and lifelong monogamous marriage, because he explained it EXTREMELY effectively.

When one stands back and observes the whole lot, we see that both males and females have a surplus and a shortage: 

Males have a surplus of labour but a shortage of reproductive ability. 

Females have a surplus of reproductive ability but a shortage of labour. 

Now, perhaps, you can see why marriage is an economic contract.

The male “sells” his surplus labour to the female in exchange for her reproductive ability. 

The female “sells” her reproductive ability to the male in exchange for his surplus labour. 

In order to “sell” something, you first must “own it” yourself, and upon “selling it,” you are agreeing to transfer ownership of it to the buyer. This is the basis of economics, and as you can see, it is based on property rights. 

In the economic contract of marriage, the female agrees to transfer the ownership of her sexual reproductive ability to the male, and she takes ownership of his surplus labour as payment for it. 

So, yes, while the feminists harp on and on that women were once “owned” as chattel, there is truth to this because in a very real sense, a woman’s sexuality became the property of the husband. He very much was considered to “own” her sexuality and the products of her sexuality (children). The children of a marriage became his property, because he paid for them. 

(Note that while the children of a marriage are supposed to belong to the husband, children born out of wedlock are the property of the woman. A woman who is not married owns her own sexuality and the products/children of that sexuality are also her property). 

This is also why, in the past, women were so much more harshly condemned for adultery than men. The wife's sexuality was no longer hers to give away. 

This is why, in the past, when a woman was raped it was considered an act of theft against the husband. Someone “stole” the sexuality which was his property. 

This is why, in the past, it was considered impossible for a husband to be found guilty of spousal rape. How can you possibly steal your own property? 

So, feminists are somewhat truthful when they claim that women were “owned” as chattel. A wife’s sexuality (NOT her person), was very much “owned” by her husband and it was in fact used as a means of production: The production of the husband’s own children. 

But, as always, feminists are only capable of speaking in half-truths. The part of the “women were owned as chattel” song leaves out the second verse, which is “and men were owned as beasts of burden.” 

Now as an aside, one thing I find very interesting is that a recent experiment with capuchin monkeys found that once you taught them the concept of "money"--chips that fit in machines that dispense food and treats--it wasn't long before the male monkeys were trading their chips for sexual favors, and the female ones happily obliging them and spending away on things like grapes and jello. And at its most basic, money is representative of labor. So the idea that a woman's reproductive capacity is a valuable commodity men are willing to pay for (whether through marriage or prostitution) is not a purely human social construct designed by men to oppress and exploit women. If it is exploitation, both sides are culpable. I mean, sheesh, considering how quickly those monkeys took to prostitution, is it any wonder it's considered the world's oldest profession? 

It also bears mentioning that an expectation of chastity in women was socially enforced under patriarchy largely in the service of women's interests and wellbeing--that is, a woman who had no husband to assist her in raising a child was bringing that child into the world at an extreme disadvantage, and putting herself at a disadvantage as well. 

And it ALSO bears mentioning that, because of the gendered roles of patriarchy, men were penalized with a great deal of social censure for not living up to THEIR part of the marriage bargain--that is, just about the only thing that could earn a person as much scorn as being a slutty woman was being a deadbeat, shiftless, layabout husband/father.

And it ALSO ALSO bears mentioning that the *lifelong* component of the  marriage contract arguably protected and benefitted women living under difficult socioeconomic conditions MUCH more than it benefitted men. Men's value in the "economic contract of marriage" was likely to increase over time as he accumulated job experience, savings and property, while a woman's value (her reproductive capacity) peaks very early, and disappears long before she'll die of old age. Lifelong marriage protected women from husbands who might abandon them when their fertility (and all her options) were gone in favor of someone younger--from a man essentially using up the best, most valuable years of her life, and then trading her in for a newer model. In a sense, he owed her "pension benefits" long after her primary contribution to the economic contract was gone.

A few other details:

Men who are married and have children--especially if they have a sense of ownership, in the philosophical if not property-rights sense, of their children--are more motivated to labor at full capacity. Historically, within marriage, when a child is born, a man will often scale up his participation in paid work. And it's been shown that divorced men who have no access to their children are the most likely to default on child support, while as access and involvement increases, so does the likelihood of him paying that child support in full.

Women are also, for the most part, consciously or unconsciously hypergamous. Even women who would never dream of uttering the words "I want to marry for money," usually have standards of success before they will consider a man a long term prospect. The standard, even now, is usually "as successful as, or more successful than, I am", and from many of the articles I've read from even feminists, disillusioned and still single in their late thirties, the idea of "settling" for most women often has as much to do with income/career potential as personality, sense of humor, or how often a guy is willing to do the dishes.

So let's look at why this social construct of lifelong monogamous marriage (with all its attendant shunning of fallen women, enforcing of gender roles and placing authority over children in the hands of husbands and fathers) has always been considered so important to society.

Well, in order for society to function, you need two things: Strong backs (literally or figuratively) to perform the necessary labor to keep everything going--to build the roads and plough the fields and slaughter the cows and haul the bricks--and people whose job it is to replace the strong backs as the old ones wear out. 

Men are very good at being the strong backs that were much more necessary in the past than they are today, and women are...well, good or bad at hauling bricks, they're the only ones capable of generating more strong backs to replace the old ones. It was very much in society's interest to keep women at that work, because without modern medicine and other such luxuries, infant mortality rates and lower life expectancies required more babies born in order to keep things chugging along. And I think it's important to note that the VAST majority of both men and women through history had zero access to educations that might help them perform work that didn't require lifting, lugging and frequently...well, dying.

Patriarchy worked very well for society overall, because it provided women with the surplus labor they required in order to raise their children in the best possible circumstances AT NO COST to anyone but husbands and fathers. And men's ownership of their children motivated the vast majority of men to do more than just subsist--to essentially labor at more than minimum capacity. That meant that a lot of work got done, and the economic surplus men generated was handed directly to the women who needed it. Of course this arrangement benefitted some women more than others (the ones who married rich), and some men more than others (the ones whose wives didn't turn out to be barren), and could easily benefit one party in a particular marriage more than the other. But for the most part, in its function as the smallest building block of society, it worked like whoa and like damn. 

In fact, it's been suggested by anthropologists that the Neanderthalers died out because they employed an egalitarian division of labor in a world that did not lend itself to maintaining and growing populations through equal distribution of labor and equal distribution of risk to life and limb, and once the hapless neanderthalers met up with modern humans, who had a more gendered division of labor based on prioritizing women's safety, it was all over for them.

And this is generally what has happened to all societies based on arrangements other than patriarchy--the few matriarchies that existed through history tended to be small, poor, and disappear the moment they came into contact with patriarchal ones.

Now I've heard some people posit that there's no reason to believe a matriarchal society can't be just as successful as a patriarchal one, now that the world, technology and the nature of work has changed. 

I think there is plenty of evidence already to the contrary. 

For instance, the UK has essentially become a partial matriarchy wrt the base unit of society. Neither children, nor women's sexuality, is owned by men--on the contrary, even children born into marriages are essentially more the "property" of the mother. In addition, single motherhood is a growing norm over there, with about half of all babies born to unmarried women, and at least 20% of children currently living in single mother households.

However, even now that we have safe, easy indoor jobs that pay decently, women still seem to require the surplus labor that used to be provided by husbands and fathers--in the form of maternity benefits if nothing else. They get that surplus labor now from the state. Men contribute a disproportionate amount of tax revenue to government coffers, and women pull a disproportionate share of the benefits. Women also get that surplus labor in the form of forcible extractions  through alimony and child support from divorced fathers, or from single men who often did not consent to become fathers.

The UK government has also been rather...blase about the idea of fathers having access to their children, and as I mentioned above, when fathers do not have access to their children they are generally less productive and pay less child support. Fathers who never wanted children are pretty much in the same boat as those who are banished from the lives of children they did want--especially since they are penalized for their productivity. The more they earn, the more is taken in child support. So not only are they not motivated to be more productive through a sense of ownership of their children, THEY ARE INCENTIVIZED TO BE EVEN LESS PRODUCTIVE than they might have been, because any surplus they generate will be seized anyway.

And because this surplus of labor is not willingly handed directly from men to women--that is, because it has to be extracted in one way or another from men--that means a growing bureaucratic machine taking it from men and handing it to women, eating a share of it as it performs this service. 

I keep hearing the term "nanny state" used by political pundits, but really, in effect, we have a "daddy state". Men pay into the system in taxes and direct payments, and women withdraw from it in the form of alimony, child support, tax benefits, subsidized health care, day care and housing, government sponsored after school programs, income top-ups, welfare and food stamps. Not every woman with children is a drain on the system, but women as a group very much are. Not every man pays more into the system than he takes out, but men as a group very much do. This is why the system works...for now.

But let's look at some of the other costs of single motherhood--especially when fathers are completely absent--through the statistical disadvantages to their children These children face a 2 to 10 times greater risk of:

• substance abuse
• truancy
• health problems
• being abused
• behavioral problems and personality disorders
• criminal behavior
• gang activity
• suicide and running away
• dropping out at all levels of education
• incarceration as youths and adults
• sexually transmitted diseases
• having children outside of relationships
• becoming teenage parents

So we basically have a lot of direct and indirect costs attributable to the breakdown of marriage as the base unit of society, all of which will increase as those last two pesky items--single and teen parenthood--beget more and more single mothers generationally. 

But wait, there's more!

When a man defaults on child support, we incarcerate him, to the tune of about $60,000 per year. This not only directly costs us, but we've also removed his earning and taxpaying capacity while he's incarcerated and further, have handicapped his ability to return to a productive role once he's released with a criminal record. We are essentially paying for him to become less productive and more of a burden. It's lose-lose!

Consider, also, that when a family breaks up, you suddenly need two households and almost twice the money to support the same number of people--all of that money flows upward toward corporate coffers, rather than staying in people's savings accounts and helping them build futures. And since women control 80% of consumer spending in the west, the more money you put in women's sole control, the more of it gets spent on consumer goods and bonuses for CEOs.

And the really awesome thing is it all looks great on paper, because a divorce actually boosts the GDP--anything that causes money to change hands boosts the GDP. To the bean counters, the harmful, rotten beans are just as good as the nutritious, fresh ones. A multi-vehicle collision that kills several people may actually up the GDP more overall (through money shifting to and from insurance companies, doctors, nurses and other medical staff, funeral homes, EMTs, tow trucks drivers, accident investigators, law suits, prosecutions, etc) than if it hadn't happened and those people had lived to a ripe old age. So a divorce might boost the gross domestic product, even though there is little that's productive about it--even though it actually increases poverty. It's the lawyers and their yacht salesmen who are getting rich, as well as corporations, mortgage brokers,  bureaucracies, credit card companies, and banks, not families.

Once a family breaks up, then both parents usually need to work at full capacity to provide a quality of life for all of them that will still be less comfortable than it would be were they still together. And the really awesome thing is, the more people you have who MUST work at paid endeavors at full capacity, the more competition there will be for existing jobs, and the more power corporations have to negotiate compensation downward. It hardly seems surprising to me that between the flood of bored housewives glutting the workforce after the advent of the pill, and the rise in divorce and single parenthood, wages have failed to keep up with inflation. 

At the same time, our demand for the things corporations produce--jobs and merchandise--only ballooned as the nuclear family disintegrated and all those single-dwelling families turned into multiple-dwelling families with twice the consumption rate. The more family is eroded, the more us plebes need both jobs and goods, and the more power those corporations have to up the cost of living through inflating prices (and executive salaries), while lowering wages at the same time.

Again--lose lose.

And as all this is going on, the machine required to extract men's obligations from them, to provide their surplus labor to women and their children, gets bigger and fatter and less efficient and more hungry, and the gap between the super-rich and the rest of us gets wider and wider as we find ourselves having to work harder to provide a decent quality of life to our children.

But wait, there's still more!

Remember all those kids from all those single mother homes? You know, the ones who face all those increased risks of a host of social maladies that will lead them to become burdens on, rather than productive members of, society?

Well, here's how that goes. 20% of men under 25 in the UK are considered essentially unemployable. The London riots were blamed on fatherlessness. And that much is true--the false part is in blaming fatherlessness on fathers rather than on a system where fathers are considered superfluous to their children's lives, other than as ATMs, and encourages women to force fatherhood on unwilling men by not holding those women fully accountable for their unilateral reproductive decisions. This system has had the effect of discouraging the development of long term partnerships by skewing the power balance fully in favor of women the moment things get bumpy, while skewing the accountability balance even more toward men than it was during patriarchy.

Various feminist organizations have been fighting tooth and nail against a presumption of shared custody or equal access after divorce since it was first proposed, and they throw around super-scary (and super-flawed, super-one-sided) domestic violence stats to do it. The moment you mention an idea like legal paternal surrender--which would, essentially, shift full ownership of (and full responsibility for) single women's sexuality onto those women--feminists almost uniformly take up the cry, "What about the children??" 

Feminism scrapped tooth and nail to make no-fault divorce a reality--not to make divorce as available to women as it was to men, but to make a unilateral divorce without wrongdoing by either party a legal reality. And lo and behold, now we have 70% of all divorces initiated by women, and the leading cause given is "dissatisfaction." Not abuse. Not adultery. Not even irreconcilable differences. Just, "I'm not 100% content." And then they claim that men denied custody or access to their children is "sexism against women," and alimony is "benevolent sexism" though it's "sometimes necessary", and therefore "too soon to do away with it."

Feminists fought and still fight for women's reproductive freedom, but they don't seem to worry too much about the lack of responsibility demonstrated by women's growing penchant for getting pregnant and having children out of wedlock at rates of up to 60%, at a time when they have almost total control over their fertility. And despite women having 100% power of decision over reproduction (no matter what the man does or doesn't do), very few feminists believe those women should be held 100% financially responsible for those decisions. Not only should abortions be free, but child support automatic. Despite having no say in any of these decisions, men are still held partly responsible, and we ALL are as well, through the increased social spending required to make all reproductive choices on the part of women as burden-free as possible. 

Reproduction may be women's burden, but it's their power as well, and feminism seems happy to not only indulge any irresponsible exercising of that power, but has suggested and implemented measures designed to ensure every decision a woman might make wrt her reproductive capacity, whether wise or foolish, comes with as little cost to the woman making it as possible.

And let's look at some other feminist initiatives. The pendulum in both basic and post-secondary education was already swinging in women's favor in the 80s, yet during the 80s and 90s feminists insisted on measures like gender quotas, affirmative action and women-only funding, as well as changes in primary school teaching (such as the whole language method) that raised outcomes for girls relative to boys (insanely, the whole language method has been shown to handicap both boys and girls compared to oldschool phonics--it just handicaps boys MORE). The swinging pendulum was thereby given a firm and expensive push in the direction it was already going, and we're seeing the results now.

Men are now the minority of high school graduates, and the majority of drop-outs at all levels. They are the minority of university students. There are more women than men alive today with high school diplomas and bachelor's degrees. Women under 30 in US cities now earn an average of 8% more than their male peers. 

And while quotas, incentives, gender specific funding and scholarships and similar measures should no longer be required to assist a demographic that is already dominating at all levels of education (other than stem fields) and already out-earns their male peers, no feminist organizations seem to think it's time to do away with them, or to introduce gender specific measures to assist men. We have prioritized women's opportunities for career success, at the expense of the success of men, and at great cost to all of us in all the spending it requires.

Now let's look at how that plays out in the real world, by examining the very cut and dried profession of medicine. Spots in medical school are limited, because the cost of training doctors is so onerous that tuition doesn't even begin to cover it. Money is given directly from government (and private donors) to medical schools to cover those "invisible" costs. So let's put a dollar value on the cost to all of us to train a doctor--let's say it's a half million dollars. 

Now let's look at the return on investment between male and female doctors. A male doctor will almost always end up working 44 hours per week or more for about 35 years. During that time, he'll pay flipping great wodges of income tax, and provide 44 hours or more per week of necessary service to communities. He is also more likely than a female doctor to work unpleasant but essential shifts--such as overnighters in the OR. If he has children, in all likelihood, he will work more, not less. And with his ginormous income, he generates spending power that pays off in sales taxes, fuel taxes, property taxes, value added taxes and all that jazz. 

A female doctor usually has her first child within ten years of earning her MD. At this point, she'll take as much as a year off, and collect maternity benefits. When she returns to work, she will likely work 35 hours/week or less. If she has another child, she'll take another year off, perhaps more. And may opt to work even fewer hours if and when she returns. She may drop out of the workforce entirely at some point before official retirement age. A large minority of professional women have decreased to part time, or ceased altogether, their participation in their careers within ten years of getting their credentials. On average, male doctors work more hours per year and per lifetime than female ones. 

And when a huge percentage of your doctors are women, suddenly you find yourself waiting 3 weeks just to see your GP.

On average, we get a LOT more out of a male doctor in actual...you know, doctoring, than we do out of a female one, for our half a million dollar investment. And because that female doctor took one of a finite number of spots, well...we really are talking zero sum game--another qualified candidate was bumped so she could be trained. 

And that's not to say that motherhood is not important, or that she is not being productive. Just that she has not exploited her expensive training to its full economic potential, and she's given us a smaller ROI.

And while there are plenty of men out there who get university degrees we all help pay for and then do nothing with them, men are, over their lifetimes, more likely to pay that money back to us, and then some, simply because over lifetimes, men still earn more than women, pay more taxes, and take less out of the system. 

By prioritizing women in education at all levels, we have handicapped men's ability to be as productive as the system needs them to be to maintain itself. By encouraging single motherhood and allowing women to banish fathers from their children's lives, we're creating half a generation of boys who risk becoming unemployable and expensive burdens on the system as adults, and half a generation of girls who are more likely to perpetuate and exacerbate the problem by becoming single mothers themselves. 

By turning marriage into a risk for men that a compulsive gambler wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole if he had two brain cells to rub together, we've motivated men to be less productive than they otherwise would or could be. And by inserting a ravenous middle-man into the contract between men and women for men's surplus labor, we've only managed to increase the size of government, its mountains of expensive red tape, and the deficits it routinely operates on. 

The weaker fatherhood becomes as a concept, the weaker society becomes. Demoralized men in Japan have started a trend called "grass-eating", where 60% of men under 30 have no interest in marriage, children or getting a job that more than pays the bills. Japanese economists are freaking out over it, because women and children still need men's labor no matter how it changes hands, and Japan's economic dominance was built on the productivity that surplus labor generated.

So, to summarize:

Now that the transfer of surplus labor from men to women must go through a middle-man, who takes a slice of that pie only to get fatter and hungrier, you actually need more and more productivity on the ground to both provide for women and children, and feed the beast of government. In western countries, that beast has grown to 100x the size it was before women's suffrage, and has begun pulling out the visa card willy nilly--pledging the labor of our children to foreign governments to finance the largesse of today.

But what have we done? We've removed all the motivation men have to be economic generators by removing all the benefit to them of marriage and children, so more and more are refusing to do the 50 hour a week thing and are opting for part time jobs, beer and x-box instead. Others are simply so damaged and handicapped by the system we've created that they are incapable of being productive at all. So we actually have LESS productivity on the ground. And those children we're relying on to get us out of hock when foreign governments start calling in the debts, are only going to become less able to save our asses with every generation of them raised in single mother households.

Men paying a greater share of the taxes is what's been funding all of this. But because of our decision to prioritize women's educations over men's, this generation of men are now more likely to drop out at all levels of education, less likely to attend post-secondary, and already earn 8% less than women do under 30. We are actually handicapping the earning power of the people who fund the system women need, and prioritizing training and education for the people who are least likely to exploit it to its full economic potential. We are allowing women to banish fathers from their children's lives at no cost to themselves--in fact, the rewards to women for doing so are myriad and tangible--when we KNOW this disadvantages children and generates current and future costs to society. And we are disincentivizing men's productivity by offering them no realistic opportunity for children that are actually theirs, or marriages that will last longer than a few years, after which all benefit to them is gone, while all the costs and obligations remain.

And while economists in Japan are freaking out over Japanese men going their own way, men don't actually have to consciously go their own way to bring about a fempocalypse. They don't need to start rioting all over the place like in London, or begin waking up en masse to the fact that the "male privilege" they supposedly enjoy amounts to "shut up and get to the back of the line" the way it did at the Occupy protests. All that needs to happen is for us to keep right on giving women everything they want and keep right on marginalizing men, and eventually there won't be enough surplus productivity on the ground to hold up the increasingly bloated system women require, and it will fall. 

And no, not all of this is the fault of feminism. There are a lot of other factors paying into this fool's gamble. But feminism seems to be the one of the loudest lobbies out there demanding entitlements and freedoms that cost us all a crap-ton, and will only keep on costing, rather than paying off in return. 

Transcript of "How feminism conned society, and other not so tall tales..."

I wanted to talk today a little bit more about why society in general seems so reluctant to tolerate men standing up for themselves, their rights and their interests, and how our collective views of gender inform our responses to such things.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked by Harry Crouch--president of the NCFM--to travel to Montana and speak at a symposium and recruitment meeting for the Montana State U's new NCFM chapter. I took a week off work, drove down, and prepared a presentation touching on the new rules for adjudicating sexual misconduct cases on campuses across the US--rules that take a sledgehammer to the once sacred democratic concepts of due process and burden of proof. The chapter head, Chris Thompson had been putting up posters and giving presentations at some of the frat houses, explaining why these young men should join the chapter and why they needed to start looking out for their rights. He'd had a lot of positive feedback from these frat members, though in public they tended to talk in hushed voices about it.

We set up our conference room at the local library, got the power-point ready, and....well....no one showed up but the reporter for the local NBC affiliate. She was a trooper, and decided to do a story posing the question of WHY no one showed up, and to her credit, it was an unbiased story and she seemed largely sympathetic to all the issues we discussed--things like job deaths, rates of suicide and homelessness, underrepresentation in post-secondary, as well as the obstacles involved in advocacy for these issues.

For one, out of about a hundred posters that went up around campus to advertise the event, all but two were ripped down within a day. Businesses that were requested to post them in their windows refused, citing a need to "remain neutral", even though campus feminist organizations use those same windows to advertise their events. The few men who'd talked to Chris in public kept their voices hushed and obviously did not want to be seen to be interested in a men's organization, or their own rights.

I was quoted in the news story that there was a "strong, strong social condemnation of men standing up for themselves. They're supposed to stand up for other people, but not for themselves." I think the public resistance inherent in businesses refusing to post ads for a men's symposium, posters being torn down, and the feverish glee evinced in places like shitredditsays and manboobz over the MSU event only proves that that social condemnation exists in spades. Especially since both the srs crowd and manboobz have repeatedly stated the MRM is an impotent movement with no relevant issues comprised of losers who live in basements and can't get girlfriends--I mean, one would think that if the MRM had no relevant issues and consisted of ineffectual people, no one would waste their breath criticizing the MRM or socially sabotaging its events.

For whatever reason, I've become something of a target of criticism and hostility from these people. SRS has multiple dossier-style posts filled with quotes they've mined from my online conversations, going back months, and even went so far as to mine quotes from other websites to post on a subreddit devoted to "unacceptable" things said ON REDDIT. That's a lot of time and energy to devote to discredit people you believe have no issues to speak of, and who could never generate any kind of public support. And I constantly come across people who attribute things to me that I've never said, and when asked, it's revealed that they heard it from someone else.

So given all of this, the resistance of regular people to support men's rights causes even in uncontroversial ways, and the intensity of the feminist-spearheaded campaign to discredit, misrepresent and silence a group they profess to be impotent and irrelevant in the first place...all of this has really got me thinking about how it is that feminism managed to gain the steam it did despite it being "ostensibly" against all established social norms, and become the beneficiaries of so much public tolerance despite the hate speech that was common to academic and literary icons of the second wave like Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin, and writings like the SCUM manifesto.

Especially since men advocating to end circumcision can come up against some extreme hostility and accusations of being insensitive and even anti-woman if they don't preface every commentary with 1000 words describing how female genital mutilation is a much more harmful practice (even though it often isn't). One cannot advocate for accuracy in informing the public as to the true nature of intimate partner violence, how half its victims are men, and how the system leaves both them and their children twisting in the wind, without being called a misogynist. David Futrelle, manboobz himself, has characterized the MRM's efforts in this area as an agenda to dismantle existing protections for women--in his mind, we don't want to direct state funds toward battered men's shelters or provide equal access to existing ones, we want to tear down battered women's shelters.

How is it that advocating to end circumcision or to provide domestic violence services to male victims can be seen as anti-woman? Well, I'm coming to the conclusion that anyone who fights FOR is also perceived--whether it's accurate or not--to be fighting AGAINST.

And when there's a gender binary with men on one side and women on the other, fighting for women as a group is going to be perceived as fighting against men--and vice versa.

This didn't pose much of an obstacle for feminists. They had a lot of gendered perceptions working in their favor, all of which made their attacks on men and masculinity--which have frequently been much more vicious and overt than anything from the icons of the MRM--palatable to society's collective consciousness. Keep in mind these perceptions have existed pretty much forever--they existed long before feminism did.

*Female violence and hostility are nonexistent, essentially harmless, or excusable.

*Men are powerful, threatening, and potentially dangerous.

*Women are the appropriate beneficiaries of society's protection, help and support.

*Men are the appropriate objects for absorption of violence and harm.

*Women are objects that are acted upon.

*Men are agents who act upon others and the environment.

Those collective perceptions of men and women only facilitated every one of feminism's efforts, from their demands for suffrage, equal rights and protection under the law, to the extraordinary measures they've demanded to protect women from harm. All of those demands dovetailed beautifully with our perception that giving women what they need is beneficial and appropriate. They've also facilitated feminism's ability to demonize masculinity and are responsible for society's ability to tolerate the levels of hate and violent fantasy found in, say, the SCUM manifesto, since we perceive the hostility of women and their proxies to be harmless and excusable, and the group such writings target are, in our perceptions, not only powerful and potentially dangerous, but the appropriate objects for the absorption of violence and hostility.

These perceptions also allowed feminism to essentially rewrite history, to craft palatable and believable lies about the nature of society in the past. For example, their claim that domestic violence against women was traditionally socially acceptable. This claim ignores easily accessible facts such as historical laws AGAINST wife battering, which provided for punishments from chain gangs to public flogging, incidences of vigilante justice against battering husbands that included lynching, and newspaper reports of convictions and sentences going back to at least the early 1800s. At the same time, utter falsehoods appear not only on blogs and in media opinion pieces, but in Feminist textbooks written by scholars, such as Domestic Violence Law, 2nd edition--which, according to Berkeley law school is the premiere textbook on the subject. This book brazenly states that the rule of thumb (described as a law limiting a man's right to beat his wife to sticks no wider than his thumb) was attributed to an emperor of rome who never existed (Romulus, son of the god Mars), and was perpetuated in English Common law and throughout Europe, even though no such laws have ever been found to exist.

These are easy lies to believe. Men are powerful and potentially dangerous agents who act upon others, while women are seen as objects at the mercy of outside forces who require protection. They are easy lies to tell even by those who know they are false, because there is no socially or instinctively ingrained taboo against attacking men--in fact, the absorption of violence and hostility is a man's natural place in the scheme of things.

These perceptions are what lead people to justify a woman beating a man in public by assuming he must have done something to deserve it: men are dangerous, women are harmless, men are appropriate targets of violence, and men act while women are acted upon. In order to maintain the agent/object dichotomy and all our other perceptions of men and women, we will actually manufacture justifications for such a woman, to turn her action into a reaction to some hypothetical action on his part--"I bet he was cheating on her."--to force the situation comply with our internal gendered narrative.

So when feminism fights FOR women, even when it's representatives are actively and hostilely attacking men in order to do it, most people see those attacks as harmless and reactive rather than active, attacks aimed at a group whose natural role is to accept and absorb hostility. And the moment feminists constructed out of whole cloth their elaborate justification--namely Patriarchy Theory--everything they told us complied with what our instincts tell us, and all was right with the world.

It is that desperate desire that exists in most of us to recharacterize all female action--especially hostility and violence--as reactive, that left society wide open to the snake oil of patriarchy theory and feminist ideas of male privilege and the gendered oppression of women. Here were feminists, angry and hostile and hating on men, and the rest of us did what people do when they see a woman beating on a man--we think to ourselves, "well, he must have done something to deserve it. I bet it was horrible, too." And there was Patriarchy Theory to explain it all.

So many people have swallowed patriarchy theory because if men hadn't always been oppressive assholes, then feminists wouldn't have a reason to be so angry at men in the first place, and the first thing we all look for when women act is what, exactly, they are reacting to. If men hadn't been holding women down all this time, then feminists wouldn't even see a need to rectify the damage to women, so therefore it must be so.

Patriarchy Theory was simply the tasty, tasty rationalization most of society gobbled up to explain the overt hostility of second wave feminists toward males, and feminism's ever-increasing advancement of women's interests at the expense of everyone else. If those ladies are hating on men and pushing to spend ever more public dollars to protect and support women, productive or dysfunctional, well, they OBVIOUSLY have a damn good reason, right? They're obviously reacting to some injustice, and the most obvious place to look for that injustice is in the public sphere actors who occupy the other side of the gender binary.

Just like that man whose getting a beat-down from his girlfriend down the sidewalk, men as a group MUST have done something horrible to deserve all this.

And now let's flip the record and take a look at how our perceptions of men and women inform society's reaction to the MRM.

If men are fighting FOR men as a group, who are they fighting against? The most obvious answer is women, of course, the people on the other side of the gender binary, and this is first place our knee-jerks lead us. Even if MRAs confine their condemnation to feminism, feminism is "women by proxy", and the perceived stench of misogyny remains.

And women are not the appropriate objects for absorption of violence and hostility in our collective perceptions--they are, in fact, the appropriately protected class. To the majority of society, men fighting for themselves feels on a visceral level dangerously close to a man kicking the shit out of a woman--and because she is an object rather than an agent, she can't possibly have done anything to deserve it.

Because men are seen as agents who act upon the world, society is more interested in focusing on suppressing their acting out, rather than exploring any causes for it. Because we perceive men as appropriately placing the wellbeing of others before their own, they appear churlish and immature when they prioritize their own interests. Because they are perceived as strong, they are assumed to not be subject to any hardship they should not be able to just weather or overcome as men.

And Patriarchy Theory, which posits that men created society in such a way as to oppress women for the benefit of men, means you can blame all of men's problems on...well, on men. When women are oppressed, it is men's fault. When men are oppressed, it's their own fault. Men are in all the positions of power, so if there were any REAL problems for men, those guys would be on it. After all, these guys constructed patriarchy JUST to benefit men at the expense of women, right?

Except there is NO evidence to back this up. There is no evidence to back up the claim that when men are in power they will oppress women for the benefit of all men, or that they even act in men's interests at all. In fact, there is evidence that demonstrates the opposite is true:

A 2004 study of gender differences in automatic in-group bias found that men lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic own-group preference. Only women showed this bias in all four experiments, and in 3 of them, all subjects, male and female, showed a strong bias toward women.

Which is a horrifying thing, to me. Because it shows women in power will act strongly in the interests of women, while men in power exhibit no own-group preference, but will act more often than not in the interests of women instead.

Society has been well and truly conned by feminism's pathological lying, we've been duped by our own instinctive perceptions of men and women, and our own internal biases that serve women's interests over those of men--and we've managed to vilify, shortchange, disadvantage and marginalize half our population in doing so. In the UK alone, shifts in social and education policy along with the rise of single motherhood have rendered 20% of men under 25 officially unemployable, and no one seems to want to do anything but wonder what the hell is wrong with boys that they're dropping out of school.

If and when we ever snap out of this cognitive coma to see the damage we've done in our slavery to appease the ravenous female at the expense of men, families and social cohesion, we'd better hope men aren't so marginalized, damaged, uneducated, impoverished unemployable and apathetic to pick up the shovels and start helping us dig ourselves out.

Can we redefine the terms, please?

And I don't mean changing Patriarchy to Kyriarchy, and leaving the ladder of the rest of society relatively unchanged, with males enjoying privilege and women suffering "benevolent sexism".

I mean changing the words with which we examine the complex interaction of society and gender roles, the oligarchical structures depending on us plebes' subservience, etc etc.

Under the feminist treatment, we talk about rights, freedoms and oppression. When we look at gender relations in this way, we get a very "women on the bottom" picture:

• Men had the right to earn income and own property
• Women did not generally have a right to earn income or own property. This lack is defined as an oppression.
• Men had a right to be in authority over women (and children) and money in marriage
• Women were under men's authority, and were therefore oppressed
• Men were free to bang floozies all they wanted before (and often during) marriage without social outcry
• Women had to be virgins until marriage, and faithful within marriage, and were therefore oppressed sexually
• Men had a right to sex within marriage
• Women were sexually objectified, therefore oppressed
• Men had a right to a clean house and dinner on the table
• Women were seen as domestic slaves
• Men had freedom of movement
• Women did not have similar freedom of movement, and were therefore oppressed

But when you redefine the terms a little, and make them about obligations and entitlements rather than rights and oppression...well, when we look at the base unit of society, the family:

• A man had an obligation to earn income
• A woman had no such obligation
• A man had an obligation to provide for his wife and any children of the marriage
• A woman had an entitlement to a man's financial provision

Wow! Net gain for Team Woman! Let's delve a little deeper, shall we?

• A man had an obligation (social and legal) to be accountable for provision for his wife and children, and maintaining family finances (if all the money got spent on booze and fast women, he was the one working extra shifts to compensate)
• A man therefore had an entitlement to authority over his wife, children and marital finances, including property
• A woman had no such obligation of accountability (if all the money got spent on spa treatments and subscriptions to fashion magazines, her husband was stuck working extra shifts to compensate), therefore, she had no entitlement to authority over finances
• A woman was thus obligated to defer to her husband in financial and important matters

Huh. You mean when someone is responsible for the financial wellbeing of other people, they're the one who has the say in how the money is spent?

• A woman had an obligation to provide her husband with children if she could (sex)
• A man had an obligation to provide his wife with children if he could (sex) 
• A woman had the (biological) entitlement of knowing that her children were her genetic progeny
• A man was entitled to have all the sex he wanted before marriage, and to engage in extramarital sex without much social censure
• A man had no biological entitlement to know that the children of the marriage belonged to him, yet he had a legal obligation to provide for children born into the marriage (whosever they were)
• A woman therefore had an obligation to remain faithful, so her husband would know he wasn't paying to put the milkman's babies through private school

Um....this actually seems too close to call. Tie game!

• A man had an entitlement to freedom of movement
• A woman had an entitlement to the protection of her husband
• A man had no such entitlement from his wife, but was obligated to die to protect his wife, if necessary
• A woman had an obligation to abide by her husband's restrictions on her movement, so that his safety would not be needlessly put at risk
• A woman had an entitlement to share her husband's income
• A woman had an obligation to perform domestic labor in return for sharing her husband's income
• A man had an obligation to provide his wife with a living until her death, if he could

So, to recap, in a different way:

• A man had an entitlement to freedom of movement. He also had an obligation to keep himself safe
• A man had an entitlement to authority over his wife. He also had an obligation to keep HER safe
• A man had an entitlement to domestic comfort provided by his wife. He also had an obligation to provide her with food, shelter, clothing, and all other material necessities out of his own paycheck
• A man had an entitlement to virginity in a bride and fidelity in a wife. He also had an obligation to provide for all children born into the marriage, his or not
• A man had an entitlement to authority over his children. He also had an obligation to protect those children
• A man had an entitlement to earn income. He also had an obligation to earn income, whether he married or not
• A man had an entitlement to control any assets of his marriage, including those his wife brought into the marriage. He also had an obligation to keep the entire family afloat, increase their holdings (if any), and would be held solely socially accountable if he failed
• A man had an entitlement to be provided with children, if his wife could do so (sex). He also had the obligation to provide for and protect his wife until her death, even if said death occurred long after the children left home, or long after any sexual congress between them ceased, and even if there were no children

Now let's look at how it went for women:

• A woman had an entitlement to the protection of her husband. She also had an obligation to defer to his authority
• A woman had an entitlement to be provided for until her death or her husband's. She also had an obligation to provide him with domestic labor, and with children if she could (sex)
• A woman had an entitlement to share in the social and financial status of her husband. She also had an obligation to hand over any of her own assets into his control
• A woman had an entitlement to be provided with children (sex) and to provision for those children. She also had an obligation to ensure her children actually belonged to her husband
• A woman had an entitlement to protection for her children. She also had an obligation to cede authority over those children to her husband
• A woman was entitled to basic provision (from society or extended family) even if she never married. She had no obligation to earn income
• A woman was entitled to basic protection (from society or extended family) even if she never married. She had an obligation to abide by societal restrictions with respect to keeping herself from endangering others by endangering herself

Again...at this point, things aren't really looking that onerous for women, when you consider the entitlements they got in return for their obligations. While feminists have always argued that men "got more", they've never really looked at it in terms of different obligations (most importantly, personal accountability and accountability for others) that were expected of men and women, and different entitlements being derived from those obligations. Women "got less" because their obligations and accountability were less, their responsibility was less. Men "got more" because the buck stopped with them, whether that buck consisted of a sack of coins or his blood.

And this isn't even going into what men owed society. The obligation women owed society consisted of the obligation they owed their husbands--to be wives, mothers, housekeepers, etc, or to be as small a burden on society or family as they could manage. What men owed? Economic output. Military service. Often financial provision for extended family--unmarried or widowed sisters, aging parents, etc, before the days of national pensions, health insurance, 401Ks, income assistance, and unisex office jobs. 

Was it restrictive? For sure! Did history miss out on some serious contributions women might have made if they were not crammed into this very strict, very confined little box? Oh yes. Does this model remotely fit the world we live in now--a world of safe public transit, a social safety net, daycare subsidies, service industry jobs galore, birth control, formula, and a multitude of modern conveniences? Fuck no. Was any of it a cakewalk of privilege for men? I don't fucking think so.

But the impossibility of a different kind of bargain for the majority of women and their children until very recently made it very, very important to society to uphold this system of obligation/entitlement, and uphold it for everyone. The truth is, until the last 100 years or so, most women could not have lived a life of children and public sphere work, independent of a man (and not all can today, realistically). Because of this, men's obligation to provide for women and their children had to be ruthlessly enforced. And the only meaningful way to enforce those obligations in men was to not allow them to become entitlements for women.

And then the nature of work--both in the home and outside of it--changed, feminism descended, and where are we now?

Women have no real obligations--neither to society nor to men. They have no obligation to remain faithful in marriage, no obligation to remain married if they don't want to, no obligation to provide a man with sex or children within marriage, no obligation to bear any children conceived therein, no obligation to become fully self-supporting afterward. No obligation to maintain their children's relationship with their fathers if it becomes inconvenient or annoying.

Only entitlements. The entitlement to share in a husband's social and financial status, and to a share in his income--even after a marriage ends. The entitlement to not have to earn income if she chooses.

And there are NEW entitlements for women that never existed under patriarchy. The entitlement to not be expected to be a virgin on her wedding day. The entitlement to stray without penalty, the entitlement to divorce without penalty, the entitlement to abort a fetus without even informing her husband or partner, the entitlement to child support and alimony, and the entitlement to move with the kids out of state if that's where the new boyfriend wants to live. The entitlement of an unmarried woman to a man's financial support for an illegitimate child (back in the day, that entitlement came with a corresponding obligation of marriage or it didn't come at all). An entitlement to demand her husband help with domestic labor and child care, even if she doesn't work outside the home.

And men?

Still socially obligated to be the primary breadwinner, still socially obligated to share his social and financial status and any assets with his wife, still obligated to share those assets and provide for a woman even after she's no longer his wife, in many jurisdictions still obligated to provide for children DNA testing proves were conceived through his wife's infidelity, still obligated to earn income or be called a deadbeat, and apparently still obligated to provide sex to his wife or he's gonna pay out of pocket.

In the US, he is still obligated to serve in the military if his government sees fit, and still obligated to be self-sufficient or end up in the gutter. He still has a socially enforced obligation to generate more income and economic activity than he requires to meet his basic needs.

And what about what women owe society?

No obligation to serve in the military, no obligation to put more (or even as much) into the economy than she takes out. No obligation to the taxpayer who subsidizes her education as a doctor or lawyer by actually, you know, remaining in the workforce full time over the long haul to help pay back the cost of her training and serve society. No obligation to earn a self-supporting income if she's unable, or can find a man who'll do it for her.

Yet she is still entitled to society's provision (through a multitude of women-targeted income and social assistance programs), and still entitled to society's protection no matter how foolishly she behaves (VAWA, the new sexual assault rules on campus), or how badly she behaves (google any female offender and you'll find criminal accountability for women is at patriarchal levels and not going anywhere).

Women have a "right" to serve in the military (while for men in the US it remains an obligation that hangs over their heads the moment they turn 18), a right to earn income and spend it as they see fit (and then become burdens on the system in their old age), an entitlement to an education whether they're going to do anything with it or not, an entitlement to disproportionate government assistance with their health care needs.

Women now have no obligation to do anything that is not in their own interest. You do what's right for YOU, sister! And yet all of society--including any men they've been more than tangentially involved with--has an obligation to them. An obligation of protection, provision, acceptance and tolerance, no matter how poor women's choices might be, no matter how badly they fuck up, no matter how selfish they are, no matter how much they harm others. The good women and the bad, the productive and the burdensome, all enjoy these entitlements if they so choose. Feminism has done nothing more than free women from any obligation, while simultaneously expanding their tally of entitlements.

And yet feminism seems to have no interest in freeing men from their obligations, does it? Financial abortion for men is pooh-poohed the moment anyone mentions it, even though this option is fully open to women through unilateral abortion, adoption or abandonment. There are giant, free, government agencies whose only purpose is to extract men's (patriarchal) financial obligations to the mother/child unit, while no similar agencies exist to enforce any obligation on the part of women to maintain a father/child relationship. 

200 years ago, we could not grant women an entitlement to earn income without removing the income-earning role as a male obligation--and without that male obligation, perhaps 2% of wealthy, educated women would have found work in a barrister's office, while the other 98% would have been mining coal with babies strapped to their backs. But now? The world has changed just enough to free women from any obligation toward anyone but themselves, while keeping their entitlements virtually untouched and actually increasing them.

And who pays? I mean, entitlements aren't free, right? So who's paying for all this?

Well, all of us. And if these entitlements were equally available to anyone, regardless of their gender, this would be just peachy, wouldn't it? But they aren't. And those to whom none of these patriarchal and more modern entitlements apply are now paying for them through a disproportionate cost of obligation.

The more I look at it, the more I realize women have never had it as bad as feminists believe they did, and no one has EVER had it as good as women in the west do today. They receive left right and center, from society, from government, from men. And the only person they owe any obligation to is themselves. Pretty sweet deal.

Woman and Black are Not the Same Thing

The other day, I had someone who identified himself as a feminist man, tell me that he is certain that women are more disadvantaged than men in our society because men hold more positions of power and influence than women.

I told him that when examining patterns of oppression, advantage, disadvantage and privilege, one cannot look only at the top. One must look downward as well (to the needless deaths, the incarcerated, the homeless, the suicides, the impoverished, etc), and frankly, men dominate the numbers there, too. They always have, and their domination of these areas has become even more lopsided relative to women as women break through the glass ceiling without concurrently breaking through the glass basement.

He replied that looking to those in power has always been a good indicator of privilege and oppression, citing apartheid South Africa and Jim Crow America as examples. Whites at the top, therefore whites are privileged. When I asked him if he did indeed feel that the experience of women throughout history was remotely comparable to the experiences of blacks during slavery, he replied "Absolutely."

I was shocked. And a little sick to my stomach. And I began to realize one of the reasons why I've been seeing more and more women of color throw up their hands and disavow mainstream feminism.

Anyone who has read my piece on Patriarchy will know that in my view, patriarchy was not a system of oppression, but a collective strategy for dealing with a world that was very different from what the world looks like now. Differences in biology that go just a little deeper than the color of one's skin, and a history of public sphere labor that more closely resembled the work portrayed on "Dirty Jobs" (only without the machinery) than "The Office" made it essentially impossible throughout most of humanity's time on this planet for women to collectively put their hands to "men's work".

The most effective team strategy humans ever stumbled on for perpetuation of the species, one that has been seen in some form or other throughout most of human history, was the pairing of a resource-gathering unit with a child-caring unit. Given the fact that until very recently, any sexually active woman was, or could have been, pregnant at any given time, that she was the sole member of the team who had the necessary equipment to provide food to a child in its infancy, and that the vast majority of public sphere work was either beyond her physical capabilities or more ably performed by the larger, stronger, faster man, it should really come as no surprise that the vast majority of societies have always arranged themselves this way. It was, up until recently, virtually impossible for men and women to swap roles on the team.

Then the nature of public sphere work began to shift dramatically with the Industrial Revolution, assembly lines, and automation, allowing women entry into jobs outside the home and giving them the tools to be able to compete with men. But even so, it wasn't until women got control over their fertility (the pill) and were provided with realistic options that eliminated their children's physical dependence on them and only them (bottles, formula, disposable diapers, regulated daycare providers), AND the workplace became dominated by service jobs rather than resource ones, that women gained some serious equality in the working world and became 50% of the workforce.

To say that this means men and women are equal is...disingenuous. Women and men are not equal and can never be, because men are still larger and stronger than women, and women are still the ones who gestate and lactate. What it does mean is that both public and private sphere work have changed in such as way as to make the biological differences between the sexes largely irrelevant. A father cannot lactate, but he can bottle-feed a baby as well as any woman can, and so can a daycare provider. A woman could never have been reasonably be expected to cut down trees with a handsaw for a living or harvest grain with a scythe, but she *can* file documents, run an office, diagnose an illness, operate a forklift, drive a taxi, enter data on a computer or work a cash register as ably as any man.

The biological differences between men and women are not even remotely the same as the skin-deep differences between black people and white people. Women's unique gendered disadvantages throughout history can ALL be traced back to those very real and significant biological differences between the sexes. Women were forced into their roles not by men, but by reality. And men's options were, realistically, not much more varied than women's.

The disadvantages blacks faced under slavery, and the ones they still struggle to overcome even now? Those disadvantages owed to nothing more than the color of their skin, and what that signified with respect to their status as persons to those in power. How on earth can the two be considered even remotely comparable?

Moreover, when we examine oppression with respect to men and women and their relative places in society through history, we see men at the top and men at the bottom. If we looked only at the top, as feminists have been, and are still, wont to do, we could say men were the privileged class and women oppressed. But if we look only at the bottom, and the expectations and obligations required of men that were not required of women, we could just as accurately and justifiably say that women were the privileged class and men the oppressed.

While there were downsides to being a woman, there were upsides to being one as well.

• She might have less freedom of movement, but she had a greater expectation of safety and protection than a man did.
• She might not be able to own property, but she had an often legally codified entitlement to financial support from men.
• She might not be able to work outside the home, but at the same time, she wasn't expected to risk life, health and limb earning money.
• She may have been "stuck" at home with the kids, but she wasn't "stuck" for 12 hours a day in a coal mine, either.
• She may have been under her husband's authority, but if she committed a crime, she wouldn't be held fully accountable for her actions.
• The upper echelons of power and influence were mostly (not completely) barred to her, but she couldn't be ordered against her will to die for her country, either.

When we examine the pattern of oppression, disadvantage and privilege with respect to black people and white people during slavery, things are rather more...uh...black and white. You looked up, and you saw all whites. You looked down to the very bottom and you saw mostly blacks. And things still very much look that way even now--the higher up you go in the strata of society, the whiter things look. And blacks still disproportionately dominate the areas of greatest disenfranchisement--the poor, the incarcerated, the uneducated. All based on a difference that is no more relevant than eye color or the size of one's nose.

And what, pray tell, were the "upsides" to being black in America during slavery? Can anyone here name a single white slave owner who ever died to save the lives of his black slaves? Who ever gave up a space in a lifeboat to his black slave and chose himself to go down with a ship? Who ever stood with a rifle between his black slaves and an enemy to defend their lives, rather than his right to own them?

Can anyone even imagine a white slave owner working 16 hours in a field while his black slaves stayed inside and kept his house tidy, then coming home and sharing the fruits of his labors with his black slaves?

Did a black woman who was the sexual partner of a white man have any expectation of respect, lifelong provision or shelter, or of sharing the benefits of his quality of life and his social status? Or was she just an object of the moment, free to be used and cast aside at will? Did a black man who was obligated to obey his owner's wife have any legal right or recourse when she turned around and pointed a finger and claimed he raped her? Or was he swinging from a tree within hours?

Can anyone imagine a reality where a white slave owner would perform physically gruelling or dangerous work his black slave was incapable of? Or would he simply set more slaves to the task, or work his slave to his death, or discard his used-up slave and buy a better one? If women were truly oppressed by men, would they have been spared the most onerous and dangerous work because they were less physically capable of it, or would men have simply assigned more women to the task?

Can anyone here name a single black person, man or woman, who rose to a state-sanctioned position of serious political power during slavery? Off the top of my head, I can name a fuck-ton of women who have been heads of state, going as far back as Ancient Egypt. The greatest and most notable black leaders emerging from Jim Crow America and apartheid South Africa rose to influence by opposing the government, not being elected to it, because they had no avenue to power within a system that oppressed them.

Women have always been less likely to be punished than men for the crimes they commit, and less severely punished. When, under slavery or Jim Crow laws, did black people enjoy this advantage? While women historically had to defer to men, in return for this disadvantage they have always been held less accountable for their actions. Black slaves, on the other hand, were under the total authority of their owners, and could be (and often were) brutally punished or executed--without trial--for crimes not their own.

Even now in these "enlightened" times, blacks are not only more likely to be convicted of crimes than whites, but their sentences are disproportionately long compared to whites. At the same time, while women no longer have to defer to men in any aspect of life in the west, they are STILL not held as accountable for their crimes as men are.

While a woman had less freedom of movement than a man, she had a socially and legally enforced expectation of safety and protection from the harshness of the world. Black slaves, on the other hand, had NO freedom of movement, and no right to any expectation of protection from those in authority over them, or from greater society.

Women had no money of "their own" (once they were married, anyway), but the most difficult, dirty, nasty, smelly, dangerous, physically arduous jobs (other than childbirth) belonged to someone else. And slaves? Do I really need to outline how it was downside all around for them in this area too?

When one wishes to identify groups which oppress and those which are oppressed, one simply cannot look only at the top of society and draw all your conclusions from who occupies those positions. In order to be oppressors, a group doesn't just have to occupy positions of power, but they have to, you know, do some oppressing. And while the biological differences between men and women could be said to be oppressive to both parties with respect to the expectations, obligations, choices, freedoms and rights afforded to each group, the oppressor responsible for patriarchy was not men, but nature.

The nature of human sex differences and the nature of the world we lived in, wherein some choices were simply not realistically open to either gender. Roles were rigidly enforced because rigid enforcement was beneficial to the stability of society. Was a man "oppressed" by women because his inability to lactate forced him into the role of provider rather than a possibly preferred role of nurturer? How then can we characterize a woman as oppressed by men because her inability to control her fertility and the limitations of her physical size and strength kept her from earning her own money working in a foundery?

The only quantifiable, material, functional and practical difference between black people and white people? Skin color. That's it. And yet it is black people, who won the right to vote before women did, who are facing a more difficult and arduous struggle for equality with whites than the women who have breezed to equal, near equal, or better than equal status with men in the space of a century. It is black people--not women--who even now inhabit an average position of lower social, educational, legal and economic status than white people in America, who are still disproportionately represented among the incarcerated, the poor, and a dozen other areas of real disenfranchisement.

And that's because the oppression of black people in America was--and is--really-and-for-true, one-way, genuine oppression that looked NOTHING like the experience of women relative to men at any point in human history.

Patriarchy was a cost/benefit partnership where men and women each bore some of the costs and reaped some of the benefits. Slavery was a cost/benefit system of oppression where all the benefits were reaped by one party and all the costs borne by the other.

To compare the experience of women--a valued, protected and provided-for class--throughout history with that of black people under slavery and apartheid is a slap in the face to every single black man who died wrongfully imprisoned in South Africa, to every single black woman who was forced onto her back by her white owner, to every single black man who was ever executed by a mob without trial, to every single black person who lived and died in bondage or in a concentration camp, and every single black person who still struggles to overcome the lingering and devastating effects of the utterly baseless, unjustifiable and man-made oppression of slavery and segregation.

So I just wanted to repeat, so we're all clear on this:

Women and Black are NOT the same thing.

No Seriously, What About teh Man-Hatrz?

Okay, I just read something kind of encouraging on No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?

I mean, I do indeed believe it's time that the Sisterhood aimed some of its missiles at a few of the loonies who march(ed) in its ranks. It's long past time someone called out Mary Daly's misandry, transphobia and racism, her delusions of female supremacy and superiority, and her paranoid equation of Man = Oppressor.

But I'm sorry, ladies. It's too little, too late. I don't understand how you can't see this. You can't revoke anyone else's Feminism Card, and you certainly can't revoke it after their death. This is because, as I've been told time and again by feminists, Feminism is not a club with rules of membership, it's not a political party, it's not an ideological monolith with a rigid set of beliefs and ideals that are required of every member. Every single self-identifying feminist has a right to define "what feminism means to them". This is something I hear ALL THE TIME from, you guessed it, self-identified feminists.

Mary Daly was a feminist. She was a feminist because she said so. That is literally ALL it takes to be a feminist. And what's more, she had every right to label herself a feminist. And you, Doctormindbeam, have no right to take that label away from her. Neither by consensus, nor by fiat.

I mean, sure, it's a step in the right direction to try to distance a movement whose members--some of them, anyway--are in favor of gender equality, from those who are bigoted, hate-filled, intellectually dishonest and batshit fucking insane. But it's as ineffectual as the constant refrain I hear from other self-identified feminists that "not all feminists are like that!" or "no true feminist would advocate for such a thing."

The only thing that makes a feminist a feminist is an interest in women's issues and the self-applied label of feminist. A person advocating mass chemical castration of males for the protection of women is a feminist if he/she decides that's what to call him/herself. This is the way it works.

I mean, it's really nice of you gals to think about cleaning house, but, frankly, the place has turned into an episode of hoarders over the last several decades. What started out as a gorgeous mansion built on a foundation of equality, fairness and humanity, now looks more like Monster House. No matter how hard all of you work, and how many cans of Febreze you use, the place is still going to be filled with the lingering stench of the rotting corpses of dozens of bigoted, man-hating, self-labeled feminists and their cats. Mary Daly should have been evicted the first night everyone sat around the dinner table and heard her spouting her bullshit, not 40 years after she first started leaving her shit lying around and cluttering up the place with effigies of dead men. Certainly not a year after her body went cold.

Sometimes shit gets left to fall apart for so long, that the job of clean-up and repair is either impossible or not worth the investment. Sometimes the place has been left in disrepair for so long, the floorboards are rotted, the foundation is sinking, and there's nothing for it but to condemn the place and move.

And seriously, it's not as if you don't have your share of undesirable squatters sharing the house with you even now, stinking up the place with their more modern style of bigotry and misandry.

Some things feminists have been up to of late:

• Arguing to keep the gender-profiling and discrimination against male DV victims in VAWA unchanged.
• Lobbying--and succeeding--in mandating lighter sentences for female criminals in the UK.
• Lobbying for a shut-down of women's prisons in the UK.
• Asserting that Women as a group feel--and should feel--threatened by Men as a group.
• Arguing that despite women comprising 60% of university enrolment, that it's both "too soon" to do away with women-only scholarships, and sexist to consider men-only scholarships.
• Opposing the changing of retirement age for women in the UK to bring it in line with retirement age for men.
• Lobbying to lower the amount of child support arrearage that will result in jail time.
• Opposing a presumption of shared parenting after divorce, using language that demonizes men as abusers and portrays women as victims.
• Defending the practice of routine infant male genital mutilation, citing that it is NOTHING like female genital mutilation.
• Freaking right the fuck out because milk producers implied in their ads that men are the primary victims of PMS, because they have to live with PMSing women, while cheering Hillary Clinton's assertion that the wives, daughters and mothers of men who are dead, are the primary victims of war

These people can't be evicted, ladies. There's no feminist landlord to evict them, no condo association, no property management company, because feminism doesn't work like that. They get to live in Feminist House with you for as long as they choose to call themselves feminists.

When I talk about the problem of rape, I sometimes speak of the inherent value of what many perceive to be "victim-blaming".  That is, if there were decisions a woman made that led to her being easily victimized, it is not only appropriate to examine them, it's beneficial (arguably necessary) to the recovery process. And I've argued that expecting society to protect women while refusing to expect women to take some responsibility for their own safety, is a disempowerment of women. It is taking power from them as individuals, stripping them of agency. It is telling them they are objects that shit just happens to, rather than participants in their lives, and that this is the way the world should work.

I believe the way I do because if there's no other lesson life has taught me, it's that we cannot control the actions, behavior, thoughts, motivations, goals and emotions of other people--we can only control our own. And because of the nature of feminism as a self-applied, self-defined label, no individual feminist has any control over what other feminists will do in the name of feminism. You can't kick anyone else out of the club. The only membership you can revoke is your own.

I mean, how much time and energy are you people going to waste trying to sweep up after these people? How much time and energy are you willing to put into arguing amongst yourselves, trying to throw people out who won't go, tidying up their trash, running damage control, and picking their empties up from the yard so the neighbors won't think you're all a bunch of irresponsible jerks? Isn't there something more useful you could be doing?

And why the hell are you so attached to the word, anyway? Words mean things, people. And while the connotations and even denotations of words evolve over time, right now, in common parlance, feminism doesn't mean what you think it means. It has come to mean something else to a growing number of people who aren't feminists, even if they believe in equality.

By your stubborn and single-minded attachment to the label "feminism", you do more harm than you can possibly know. By refusing to abandon the house, you give every man-hating kook who lives there more legitimacy than they deserve.

Let me put it this way. Here's the Senate Judiciary Committee, listening to testimony regarding whether to change VAWA or leave its bigoted, anti-male legislation as it is. Many people are testifying as "experts" on domestic violence, and many of these people are in favor of leaving VAWA unchanged. Many of them are feminists. And they're saying, "Women must be protected. As a feminist, I implore you to keep VAWA as it is."

Then the head of the Committee looks out his metaphorical window and sees millions upon millions of other feminists crowded under a banner that says "WE ARE FEMINISTS". Unbeknownst to him, they are debating and arguing and nitpicking each other, and some of them may even be strenuously trying to convince the others that VAWA is wrongheaded and must be changed. But all he sees are millions of feminists, and some people in front of him who claim to be speaking as feminists, and all those millions of feminists on the street outside his window add weight to every single word those few feminists have said before the Committee. Even if he knows not every feminist is in agreement on every issue, their association with THESE feminists, in front of him today, add to the credibility of what they've said.

By calling yourselves the same thing that these misandric, sexist, intellectually dishonest assholes call themselves, you are giving a perception of unity of purpose with them, whether you like it or not. Every single self-identified feminist provided the ballast that a few feminist-identified nutbars needed to ram their mandatory lower sentencing for women through in the UK.

I hold a lot of beliefs that could be said to be feminist beliefs. I've written articles on women's issues that were lauded by feminists. But I see a lot of harm done in the name of feminism, too. I choose not to call myself feminist, because I don't want my presence under the banner to add any weight to the efforts of those who would do harm in feminism's name. If I call myself feminist, I throw my vote in with the defenders of VAWA, whether I want to or not.

I won't do that. Why are you?