My address to the NY state libertarian party convention

Hi, everyone. Firstly, I want to thank Gary for inviting me to speak here, and thank all of you for being open to the different perspective I'm hoping to present to you.

Some of you--maybe all of you--might be asking yourselves, what on earth is an anti-feminist gender theorist doing speaking at a libertarian party convention. What the heck does gender, or feminism, have to do with libertarian politics and philosophies? The answer to that question is at once extremely complex, and very, very simple.

The simple answer is this: Gender influences everything. Including the size, scope and decisions of government.

And now, to complicate things a little.

On the microscale, gender affects the way men and women think, how they feel, how they process their interactions with the world, what motivates them, what influences them, what is important to them, what incentives are going to affect their behavior, and how. It affects how we perceive other people depending on whether they are male or female. It impacts on what we feel is appropriate, regarding both the behaviors, responsibilities and roles we expect of others, and the behaviors, responsibilities and roles we feel are appropriate for ourselves. It affects what roles and vocations, on average, a given person will find themselves suited to or interested in.

On the macroscale, gender affects the way society feels about people, depending on whether they're male or female, what expectations society has of them, what obligations society is prepared to place on them, how, and how much, society cares about them. It influences whose voices society is prepared to trust on what issues and in what situations. It affects society's willingness to punish or forgive, who society is interested in holding responsible and accountable for wrongs done, who society is prepared to devote resources to help or protect, and who society is prepared to cut loose.

So gender is kind of a shortcut societies and governments use when sorting priorities. Who is deserving of our help, support and protection--socially, legally and governmentally--and who is less deserving, or perhaps not deserving at all? How should that help be implemented, and how should it not, how much are we willing to spend, and how much institutional power and scope should government have to involve itself in the lives of citizens?

To demonstrate these effects of gender I'm talking about, I'm going to make a few statements, and I want you all to pay attention to how you feel when I say them. They're statements I've culled from published books, newspapers, or the speeches of politicians, though you'll notice I've flipped the genders for effect:

Men can do anything women can. And do it better. And do it with one hand tied behind their backs. --Barack Obama

When a woman strikes a man, she strikes all of society. --Hillary Clinton said exactly that about violence against women.

Women CAN stop false allegations of abuse and rape. --The "Men can stop rape" poster campaign is making an appearance on campuses across the US and Canada.

It cannot be assumed that women are bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of mothers in families is necessarily a means to social cohesion. --This gem, about how unnecessary fathers are, is from UK equalities minister Harriet Harman. She might be forgiven this sentiment if it wasn't grossly inaccurate.

A mall roof caved in yesterday, killing 23 people and injuring more than 100. Tragically 4 men and one child were among the dead. --all right, that's from any newspaper story about any tragedy. We hear about women and children because that makes a tragedy more tragic.

I want to see a woman beaten to a bloody pulp with a workboot shoved into her mouth like an apple in the mouth of a pig. --Change woman to man and workboot to high heel, and you've got second wave feminist Andrea Dworkin's attitude.

Or even this: "It is an amazing thing to see in our city the husband of a laundress, or a fishwife, or a housemaid dressed in velvet with chains of gold at the throat, with silver buckles and boots of good value....and then in contrast to see his wife washing the clothes, chapped and bedraggled from the day's labor, poorly dressed.... but whosoever considers this carefully will find it reasonable, because it is necessary that the gentleman, even if low born and humble, be arrayed in such fine form for his natural excellence and dignity, and the woman be less adorned as if a slave, or a little ass, born to his service." --And this is perhaps the most interesting of all, since a gender-flipped version of it was written by Lucrezia Marinella, and published in her book "The nobility and excellence of woman and the defects and vices of men" in the year 1600.

Feels kind of weird, doesn't it? These are statements you would NEVER hear or read in mainstream culture as I changed them--not even in the year 1600--some of them because they'd be repulsive to us, and others because it would just never occur to us to think or feel in those ways. All because of the way we as humans perceive, and have always perceived, men and women.

And while feminism claims to have worked very hard to dismantle all of these individual and society-wide assumptions about men and women, if you scratch the surface of their ideologies and their efforts, what you find is all of those assumptions human societies have always held, dialled up to 11. Not only has feminist activism manipulated and exploited all of these age-old perceptions about gender, for political, legal, economic and social gain, it has only amplified them in the cultural zeitgeist.

It is very much a case of, "Say hello to the new boss, even more sexist than the old boss."

I've been asked before to describe what exactly I'm doing with my blogging and video lectures and it's a difficult question to answer. I'm an advocate for the issues of men and boys, certainly, but first and foremost, I'm an anti-feminist. My task, as I see it, is to try to uncover the nature of things, and then deprogram as many people as I can. To encourage people to think from a different angle, to entertain thoughts that are forbidden in our politically correct culture, to educate as many as I can about the hidden nature of society, gender and ideological feminism.

Among those of us who talk about these issues, it's called "taking the red pill".

As for why I'm here, hoping to convince libertarians to think from that different angle? Well, there's a strong libertarian streak that runs right through the center of the men's movement, and there's definitely a reason for that.

Canadian libertarian philosopher Stefan Molyneux once described feminism as "socialism in panties."

As I'm sure any of the men here will attest to, anything, no matter how destructive or unprincipled, is probably going to look more appealing and less sinister if it has a female face and you put it in a pair of panties.

I'm not going to bore you with a detailed history of the marriage of feminism and marxism. For that, I'll refer any who are interested to a lengthy but fascinating lecture by Soviet ex-patriot Valdas Anelauskas, who describes a courtship between two ideologies that began in the mid-1800s and has now become the foundation of feminist thought. I will simply note that Karl Marx, in his communist manifesto, emphasized how very important women would be to any communist revolution, and that the best way to secure the support of women would be to convince them of the plural nature of their oppression--as workers, they were oppressed by the elites, and as women, they were oppressed by their husbands, fathers and even sons. In essence, he posited that if a system that respected the concept of property rights oppressed the male worker, this same system that placed economic authority in the hands of men doubly oppressed the wives and daughters of those male workers.

Though radical feminism has never severed its ties with communism, as early as the 1920s, feminism had essentially co-opted and repurposed Marxist theory to describe the structure of society relating to the interaction of the sexes. The intellectual backlash against feminism that began within the marxist community around the turn of the 20th century, with E Belfort Bax and Robert Briffault, was quashed through intimidation, censorship and skilful use of emotionally charged propaganda.

By the 1960s, when the western world's love affair with communism had begun to fizzle, communism's red-headed stepdaughter, feminism, was only growing in popularity. The sexier, less threatening, more benign-seeming Trojan Mare upon which marxists had relied to sneak their ideology past the gates of the western world had outgrown its helpmeet role, and taken on a life of its own.

By this era, a discrete and quintessentially Marxist theoretical model of gender had become entrenched in the intellectual sphere, a model based on class conflict theory and postmodern discourse. While communist thought was confined to a small pocket of what the mainstream mostly thought of as misguided weirdos, feminist thought, slapped together from the exact same bricks and mortar, became not only fashionable, but had spawned its own branch of academia, sponsored and enabled by unwitting democratic governments across the west.

While historical views on the sexes had maintained that men and women were distinctly different but complementary partners--role mates, as Dr Warren Farrell has described it--this new feminist model cast all aspects of society as oppressive and exploitive systems wherein men embodied the Bourgeoisie, and women the Proletariat.

Most of this model--The Patriarchy--and its sub-theories are little more than post hoc rationalizations based on emotional reasoning, easily swallowed by the well-meaning public because of the evidence that stands out most starkly to us given our natural, evolved views of gender. Humans have always been more emotionally reactive to the harms, injuries, injustices, complaints and perils affecting women, and more likely to see women as nurturing, benign, kind, well-meaning and deserving of protection. We have always been more likely to see men as strong, sturdy, capable of self-sufficiency, potent and potentially threatening, and these perceptions inform our reactions when men suffer harms, injuries, injustices and dangers, and when they dare to complain about them.

Because of these innate perceptions, when feminists pointed up toward the top of society and showed us mostly men, we didn't bother to direct our attention down to the bottom of society so we could see the mostly men there, as well. We all saw a glass ceiling, but not a glass cellar, and allowed feminists to convince us that all aspects of society, the formalized and the informal, were male-dominated and male-controlled, and that women, as a class, were utterly powerless and subjugated under this system.

Marriage was redefined under this model, from a partnership where both parties contributed and benefitted, to a form of sexual slavery and unpaid drudgery for women where wives were subjugated and exploited for their husbands' express benefit. Under second wave feminism, family was reinterpreted as an institution based on exploitation--instead of all members working together for the benefit and shared success of all members, women were recast as powerless subordinates, providing unreciprocated labor toward the raising of HIS children, and the keeping of HIS house, labor that freed husbands to pursue economic and social power outside the home.

It didn't matter that most men had little more access to economic and social power than most women, or that what power men achieved they were expected to share equitably with their families. Feminists were too busy pointing upward at the congressmen, bank managers and CEOs and crying injustice, to show us the taxi drivers, garbage men, plumbers, loggers, fishermen, miners, construction workers, factory laborers, field workers, roughnecks and janitors. They envied the power of generals and statesmen, but spared no thought for the thousands of young footsoldiers dead in the trenches. They were jealous of the self-determination that made an industrialist rich beyond dreaming, but when that self-determination produced a different outcome for the mostly male population of tramps, beggars and hobos it was invisible to them.

They focus solely on the men above and don't even notice the men below.

The 23 cent average, apples to oranges, annual wage gap is STILL, in their minds, the height of sexist injustice, but the greater than 90% workplace death gap is...well, who cares?

Traditional ways of providing for and protecting women that were necessary in the pre-industrial past, were reinterpreted by feminism as male oppressors keeping women down all through history, for men's benefit. Domestic violence--a social problem that has ALWAYS been gender-symmetrical--became synonymous with violence against women. A husband's historical right to conjugal relations was redefined as marital rape, while a wife's *identical right*--one that for centuries if denied was legal grounds for divorce and could even get a man excommunicated from his church--that part of history was essentially erased from modern scholarship, even as it is upheld and reinforced by feminist activism. In fact, according to current feminist theories on domestic violence, a man withholding sex or affection from his female partner, whatever the reason, is a form of domestic abuse, and a man in France was recently required by a judge to pay his ex-wife over $10,000 in punitive damages because he didn't give her enough sex during the marriage.

The traditional obligation of a woman to defer to her husband's authority was defined as "oppression", but her husband's obligation to die in a trench to protect his country and family...that became "male privilege" and when enough people protested the hubris of that assertion, it became "Patriarchy hurts men too."

Under The Patriarchy, all men are privileged by their maleness, and all women oppressed by their femaleness. And if men are, as a class, the privileged Bourgeoisie, if men hold collective power over society, then all men are culpable for the oppression and exploitation of all members of the female Proletariat, and any discrimination a man might face in society is just his own privilege backfiring on him.

According to radical feminists, the drastic technological and economic changes that occurred during the last century--medical advances that virtually eliminated deaths in childbirth and drastically decreased infant and child mortality rates, changes that rendered the workplace as comfortable and safe as your living room, safe and reliable birth control, industrialization, automation, prosperity, plenty and an unprecedented level of individual security--none of this has anything to do with anything. Even prior to those changes, during a history in which a woman might spend half her adult life pregnant or nursing children, where most labor was gruelling, dangerous and simply beyond the physical capabilities of women, where life was often brutal and brief, and where men bore a legally enforceable obligation to provide for the material needs of all family members, the fact that men bore the economic authority as well as all the economic burdens of a family was a system specifically designed to disempower women.

According to radical feminists, your grandfathers and great grandfathers were rapists and slave-masters who exploited, subjugated and violated the women who were nearest and dearest to them--their own mothers, sisters, wives and daughters. According to radical feminists, every atrocity ever committed throughout all of history can be laid at the door of normative masculinity, but every male-generated advance--calculus, alternating current, the telegraph, the transistor, radio, penicillin, the number system, hydro-electricity, microwaves, fiberglass, the theory of relativity, the periodic table, trigonometry, insulin, canned foods, vaccines, fire retardant, teflon, wireless communications, the microchip, the birth control pill and even tampons--is a result of men intentionally holding women back, keeping women down, refusing to allow women to achieve, and hogging all the power and glory.

You see how this all works? All the evils of history, admittedly committed mostly by men are evidence of men's oppressive natures. And all the advances of civilization, because they were generated almost exclusively by men, are equally evidence of men's oppressive natures. Even the exceptional and wonderful things men achieved that have benefitted all of us, are not evidence that men embody anything good. In fact, they demonstrate the opposite. They are evidence that the "old boys' club" modern feminists complain about today dates all the way back to the pleistocene, when women would have eagerly hunted mastodon with babies strapped to their breasts, and carved back a jungle filled with leopards and bears, if only men had not enslaved them and thereby deprived them of the opportunity to do so.

This is what they believe. This is what ideological feminism IS. It describes women's experience through all of history as identical to the experience of blacks under slavery. You know, actual oppression, subordination and exploitation without any compensatory benefit.

To clarify, what 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 slave stayed inside most of the day and kept his house tidy, then coming home and sharing the fruits of his labors with his black slave?
Did a black woman who was the sexual partner of a white slave owner 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 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 because his black slave was incapable of it? 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 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 rising within it, because they had no avenue to power within a system that oppressed them.

Slavery and oppression are defined as obligation and disadvantage without compensatory benefit. Does anyone here think women, who were a tiny minority, tenths of a percent, among the 10 million military personnel who died during WWI, derived no benefit from the traditional system? Heck, one of the few ways a man could duck conscription was to be married--a man could literally avoid mandatory military service if his wife would be inconvenienced by it. And yet this system existed to benefit men at the expense of women?A system of top-down oppression, according to feminists, that is no different from the experience of blacks under slavery?

If you perceive the history of gender relations as being remotely similar to the history of slavery in the US, it's no shock to hear feminist Robin Morgan, editor of Ms. Magazine, claim, "Man-hating is an honorable and viable political act. The oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them."

Yet as childish, simplistic and absurd as this model was, it wasn't long before it had become firmly entrenched in academia, in the humanities and the arts--in sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, women's studies and gender studies, the very faculties and programs associated with education, social work, journalism, the law and political science. The very branches of society most able to influence public perception. And because of all those things I was talking about at the beginning of this presentation, public perception was vulnerable to the half-truths presented to it, disguised as the whole picture.

And the really awesome thing about this model is that as long as enough people believe it, even just a little, as long as enough people can be convinced to see men as the Bourgeoisie who have always unjustly benefitted from their exploitation of women, and women as the Proletariat who have always been forced to toil and slave without benefit under the boot-heel of those privileged men, you can justify anything.

If men are believed to have always collectively held power and economic privilege through the enslavement of women, if all of men's authority since the dawn of time was ill-gotten through the unreciprocated exploitation and violation of women, then women are entirely justified in stealing it back, and the state is justified in assisting them. It becomes acceptable, justified and appropriate for women to expropriate men's undeserved and unearned power by any means necessary, including state coercion.

And this attitude is not confined to family law, domestic violence law and sexual assault law--the primary areas where men's interests conflict with women's interests, and where the state has been quietly at work, eroding due process protections and equal treatment under the law, and building bloated and ravenous mechanisms that suck up dollars and power while curtailing civil liberties. It's everywhere. It informs economic and employment policy, health spending, criminal law, everything.

According to Dr Warren Farrell, the government has passed more laws to protect women in the workplace from dirty jokes than it has to protect men from injury and death due to faulty rafters on construction sites. And nearly everyone in society, especially women, seems to feel this is an appropriate allocation of resources.

One need only watch the Life of Julia, Obama's most naked and blatant appeal to the natures of women--especially young, single women. Julia has no father, and no husband--she needs neither of those things. The state will take care of her needs from birth to death, and will support her when she decides to have a child of her own--a child that, in Obama's narrative, is also fatherless. The man in Julia's life, the one who will perform the roles--provision, protection, support--historically performed by husbands, brothers and fathers, is more powerful than any man she'll ever meet, more able to provide for her, and one she need make no compromises with.

Julia will never have to pick up this man's dirty socks, or put up with him snoring or farting in bed, or consider his needs, or provide him with respect, love or affection. He is the ultimate provider and the ultimate protector, and he will ask nothing of her in return but her vote.

And he'll give her all those benefits through a system that coerces net taxpayers and net tax-generators, of whom a disproportionate number are men, to surrender their productivity while offering them neither mutual benefit nor voluntary association. This feels right and just to feminists, because the state is merely assisting Julia in stealing back what was wrongfully taken from women, as a class, by men, as a class. This feels like a great deal to Julia, since all she has done is replace a man with whom she would be required to bargain freely, with a state that provides her all the same benefits without the messy business of having to trade anything valuable for them.

If women today in the west can be said to be married to the state, in a very real sense, men are married to it as well, and the obligations expected of them are the same as they always have been. In this marriage, men pay at least 75% of the tax revenue into the system, and reap a disproportionately tiny percentage of its protections and benefits. In this marriage, the state enforces the obligations of husbandhood after divorce, and the obligations of fatherhood even when men did not consent to become fathers, and even when they are allowed no meaningful role in the lives of their children.

In this marriage, the resources men put in are diverted toward the additional protection of women through the erosion of men's legal protections and civil rights. In this marriage, men are expected to pay for a system that not only does not serve them, that not only offers nothing back to them, that has not only made a mockery of due process protections for them, but one that even handicaps their ability to perform these obligations by favoring women in the prioritization of education and employment, and by facilitating the removal of fathers from the lives of children who need them.

The state is, essentially, forcing men to finance a system that disenfranchises them. And the state is, essentially, paying women to disenfranchise men, and handicap their own children. Social responsibility is enforced on men through penalty of imprisonment, while for women, social irresponsibility means a check in the mail every month.

A lot of people have wondered aloud why there aren't more female libertarians. If there's a reason, it might lie in a lack of incentive. Big government costs the vast majority of men--their wealth, their civil liberties, their autonomy, sometimes their freedom--but for most women, big government represents an insurance policy and a perpetual subsidy of their personal choices, good or bad. Men pay, women benefit.

If women sprinted down the aisle to offer their hands in marriage to the state, for men, it was a shotgun wedding, coercive by its very nature. And the influence of radical ideological feminism on government and legal policy has ensured that this marriage is as abusive as they come.

When Gary told me about his experiences with family court and its affiliated agencies, I told him, "If you weren't a libertarian before all of this, I can certainly see why you're one now." What used to be a voluntarily accepted obligation on the part of men, is now extracted from them at the point of a gun, and often there is no way for them, no matter how well they comply, to avoid being shot.

One example of what men's tax dollars disproportionately support, which lies in direct opposition to the interests and rights of men, would be the institutionalization of the Duluth Model of Domestic Violence.

This model is the feminist conceptual framework of family violence, and it is one that has been discredited by hundreds of studies across cultures--from the most modern western democracies to countries like Jordan and Namibia. According to Duluth, family violence is overwhelmingly male-perpetrated, and is motivated by men's and women's relative positions in society--by male social and political dominance and the expectation of female subordination. A man who batters his wife is not just asserting his dominance over her, he is expressing normalized masculinity. Abuse and coercive control of women, according to this model, is a not a pathology, but a natural function of male identity within a Patriarchal culture. Simply put, it's just what men do.

Every piece of legislation, every government policy and every publicly funded treatment program in the US regarding family violence, and the vast majority of them worldwide, employs this conceptual model.

Too bad it's bunk. As hundreds of studies demonstrate, in at least half of cases, partner violence is reciprocal. It involves men and women hitting each other, and what motivates men and women is pretty much the same: anger, poor conflict resolution skills, jealousy, a desire to control or discipline a partner, drug and alcohol problems, and external stress such as poverty. Women are as likely as men to report abusing their partners for all these reasons, and are more likely to engage in coercive control of a partner. More than that, they are more likely to be the one to initiate physical violence, and in cases of severe unilateral abuse against a non-violent partner, women are the perpetrators up to 70% of the time.

For every 8 women seriously injured by domestic violence, at least 5 men are also seriously injured. And perhaps most damningly, considering feminism's unwillingness to address women's perpetration of violence, the number one predictor of serious domestic violence injury in women is their own initiation of violence. It is when men are hitting them BACK that women are most likely to be hurt.

What all this means is that patriarchal terrorism--the Duluth model of intimate partner violence--is the most rare form of all--and yet the patriarchal terrorism paradigm informs all of our government funded mechanisms for intervention and treatment.

But it doesn't end there.

At least 35% of spousal murders are men murdered by their female partners. I say at least, because if a woman engages a hitman, boyfriend or relative to assist her in murdering her male partner, it is classified statistically not as spousal homicide, but as multiple-perpetrator homicide. Because of this, there is no way to know how many men are killed by their female partners each year.

More than this, women are the most likely demographic to perpetrate child abuse and neglect, even controlling for time spent with children, and the majority of young children murdered are murdered by their mothers. Biological fathers are, in contrast, the least likely demographic to abuse or kill young children, less likely than both biological mothers and stepfathers.

Statistically, the environment in which a woman is MOST safe from violence is in a stable marriage, and the environment in which children are the MOST safe from violence is one in which their parents are in a stable marriage.

Yet our entire system of family law, and our entire response to domestic violence, from the VAWA to local police department policies, is designed to encourage and facilitate divorce, to favor sole maternal custody arrangements, and to protect children from the very people least likely to abuse them.

Mandatory arrest policies coupled with predominant aggressor policies based on Duluth, ensure that 1) somebody gets arrested in any domestic violence incident, and 2) that regardless of who was assaulting whom, the person arrested will almost always be the larger, stronger, male partner.

A judge in Florida recently estimated that 80% of all temporary restraining orders granted in the context of divorce or child custody cases, requested almost entirely by women, are either fraudulent or unfounded. Divorce lawyers have called false allegations of domestic violence and sexual abuse of children, and the abuse of TROs merely part of the "gamesmanship" of divorce--a method by which a wife can secure automatic custody of both the children and the marital home, and leave an ex-partner scrambling to defend himself often without access to necessary documents or even a change of clothes. The average length of time it takes for a woman to obtain a TRO in an ex parte hearing is under 3 minutes. She need provide no evidence of prior abuse. All she has to tell the judge is that she feels afraid of her husband. The first any man might hear that such an order has been issued is when the police arrive to remove him from his home.

The advantages to a woman of abusing the system are many and myriad, and the disadvantages virtually nil. By the time a man has cleared his name, the children are often completely alienated from him. Family court judges will go so far as to admit that a mother has abused her own children through her abuse of process, but will hesitate to penalize her in any way. She will almost always retain custody because it would harm the children to place them in the care of a man they've been wrongly taught to hate and fear. Because she retains custody, if she's prosecuted, the children will suffer. If she's financially penalized in the divorce settlement, the children will suffer. If she's forced to pay him damages, the children will suffer. In some extreme cases, judges have completely, permanently stripped a man's rights and access to his children, explaining that the mother's persistent combativeness, false accusations and abuse of process had made it so that upholding that man's parental rights would only subject the children to more of their mother's abuse.

And while not every woman is going to take advantage of a system weaponized specifically for her use, the ex-wife of a friend of mine recently told him she was proud that she'd never availed herself of such measures during their divorce, despite three court-appointed officials encouraging her to make a false claim of domestic violence and thereby gain the upper hand in the process.

Feminist models of gender and domestic violence have institutionalized the assumption that all men are batterers or potential batterers, that dominating, controlling and abusing their female partners and their children is just part of what it means to be a man. They've institutionalized an assumption of non-culpability on the part of women even when they openly abuse their husbands, ex-husbands and children, and even when they use the court system to do it.

In 85% of divorce cases in the US, mothers receive primary physical custody. The remaining 15% represent sole paternal, and shared physical custody arrangements. The average cost to a man in a contested custody battle in the US is over $200, 000. It can take up to six years of expensive court battles for a man to secure even regular access or shared custody, let alone primary physical custody. He may be required to pay his ex-partner's legal bills in addition to his own, and pay for the court-ordered assessments and services required for his case. Through this battle, he will also be required to pay maintenance to his ex-partner in the form of alimony and/or child support, and in some cases, even pay the fees of the third party required for supervised visitation with his children.

Is it any wonder that in the year following a family break-up, men are 11 times more likely to commit suicide than women?

According to the Michigan chapter of NOW, fathers' rights groups are an "abuser's lobby", and the official stance of the chapter is to oppose reforms that would normalize equal or near-equal shared custody after divorce if neither parent is unfit. They oppose these measures in part because it would put women and children in danger from abusive and controlling former spouses, and in part because it would have an unintended negative impact on child support awards. This, despite the oft-stated feminist claim that cultural assumptions that women are automatically better caregivers are sexist against women, and despite the fact that the environment in which a child is at the highest risk of suffering abuse is in the care of a single mother.

This is the influence of politicized ideological feminism in the areas of domestic violence and family law. And while society has always placed a greater priority on protecting women than men from violence and abuse, feminists have managed to rewrite history and public perception of human interaction, in order to justify ever more intrusive government mechanisms that protect women from even their own criminal behavior, and curtail the rights and civil liberties of the men who find themselves at the mercy of the system after having done nothing wrong.

Over the last 40 years, a growing number of researchers have challenged feminism's theory of gender conflict and the conceptual framework of Duluth. These researchers have been subjected to blacklisting, career sabotage, intimidation, professional shunning and even death threats. Family violence researcher Suzanne Steinmetz had a bomb threat called into her daughter's wedding. Erin Pizzey, the woman who established the first battered women's refuge in the world, lived for years under police protection due to threats to herself, her children and grandchildren, and finally fled the UK after her family dog was killed. All for daring to say that women are as violent as men within relationships, and that partner abuse is not a natural function of masculine identity, but a gender neutral social problem primarily caused by experience of abuse during childhood.

To prove women are not violent, feminists have engaged in campaigns of violence and threats, and to prove society is male-dominated, feminists have engaged in a pattern of malfeasance that has silenced all other voices, allowing feminism to remain the dominant authority in all gendered issues. And they evidently see no irony in any of that.

The fiscal, social and human costs of these policies are staggering. We treat every domestic violence accusation, indeed even the hint that a woman is afraid of her partner, with a better safe than sorry strategy that engages multiple bureaucracies. Taxpayers and beleaguered men pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for investigations, assessments, psychiatric evaluations, lawyers, expensive legal proceedings, incarcerations and prosecutions, a growing number of which end with the discovery that a woman was lying for revenge or for personal gain. Children are mercilessly fragged by combative mothers, deprived, often permanently, of what may be their only stable parent. Fathers are ground into the dust.

Intervention programs, run by government funded agencies, apply a single, ideologically tainted treatment to a multifaceted problem, "curing" citizens of diseases they don't have, while allowing their actual problems to fester untreated. Cumbersome legal procedures, no-drop policies, predominant aggressor policies, institutional, legal and informal biases, all contribute to a bill that is increasingly impossible for taxpayers to afford, and that is handicapping the ability of children--those future taxpayers who will be stuck with the growing mass of red ink generated by this system--to shoulder the debt.

Fatherless children--an epidemic of whom we are creating with these policies--are more prone to a whole host of social maladies. They are at two to ten times the risk of being physically or sexually abused, becoming teenage parents, dropping out of school, being behaviorally disordered, becoming involved in gangs, being addicted to alcohol or drugs, being expelled from school, committing suicide, not going to college, committing crimes, being incarcerated, requiring welfare or food stamps, contracting sexually transmitted diseases, and being victims of violence. In fact, if you control for fatherlessness, the race disparity in the US prison system all but vanishes.

If we're expecting our children to bail us out of the fiscal and human mess we're creating, we're in for a nasty surprise.

This is a problem of snowballing costs that will only worsen with each generation, as government gets more bloated and top-heavy while simultaneously crippling the ability of future generations to support it. It is a system where we examine the reading scores of 8 year old boys not to determine how to help boys stop falling behind in education, but to determine how many new prisons we need to build. It is a system wherein a man who is laid off and temporarily unable to pay his child support is systematically stripped of his driver's license and professional licenses, thrown in debtors' prison and saddled with a criminal record, rendering him permanently unable to pay it. Where we will metaphorically chop a man's arms off, and then tell him he'd better still shovel for all he's worth or he'll be sorry.

And behind all of this, you will find radical feminist lobbyists pushing for further "reforms" for women to undo millennia of oppression of women that never existed as they believe it did, and regardless of the collateral damage to other members of society. They do this in the name of "liberating" women from the oppression of their historical dependence on men, by constructing enormous government bureaucracies, ever-growing in power and scope, funded disproportionately by men, and upon which women in general have become just as dependent a they ever were on any man. 

All for the purpose of "ending oppression", because, as we all know, no government anywhere has ever oppressed anyone.

Is Feminism Hate?

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Transcript of "Hi, Danielle, nice to make your acquaintance..."

Hi, everyone, and hello Danielle Paradis. I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for responding to Eric Duckman's challenge to debate him and myself as far as the question of whether feminism is hate. You seem like a really nice person, you seem really sincere and well-meaning, and I don't want you to think of this as a personal attack on you, because frankly, you just seem very nice.

But, there are a few things.

First, you open your video with the quote that everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts, and then you went on to say that you would, as a feminist, add "or her" to that quote. I agree. One of the reasons I do is that the primary architects of feminist theory--things like The Patriarchy, Rape Culture and the Patriarchal Terrorism Paradigm of family violence--those architects were primarily women, and they seemed to feel entitled to their own facts, or to something I'll call "selective facts". Given that, adding "or her"? That's a really good idea.

I would also agree with your assertion that a person would be hard-pressed to find any feminist who does not believe that women "have historically gotten the short end of the stick", that is, that women were historically uniformly oppressed by their gender, and men historically uniformly privileged relative to them.

So that's two things we can agree on, right off the bat. I don't think there's going to be a whole lot more that we're going to agree on, but at least there's that.

Now, I wasn't really surprised at how brief your video was. I mean, all it contained was typical feminist talking points framed as axiomatic, self-evident truths, the veracity of which you seem to feel no need to defend or substantiate. You just state them, and assume that any person would agree with both their accuracy, and the conclusions you believe they support.

Myself, on the other hand, well, I don't have 100 years of political activism and media representation of my position to fall back on, nor 50 years of the institutionalization of my viewpoints within schools from Kindergarten to university. So this response is going to be too long for one video. Because, you know, unlike feminists, I don't have the luxury of simply making a bald statement, and then moving on to the next one, without providing rational and empirical support for it. Without actually presenting an argument behind it. See, you can get away with saying, "X is X," without saying, "...because A, B, C."  I can't get away with that because my viewpoint isn't the one that's been swallowed hook, line and sinker by most of society.

So, in this video, I'm just going to address the first few points you made, and I'm going to have to leave the other points for other videos, because otherwise this is just going to run really long. What I'm going to try to do in this video is explain some of the reasons I believe feminism is wrong. Wrong about the power dynamics that underpin society (historically and today), and wrong about men's and women's relative positions in society (historically and today). Hopefully we will then be on our way to demonstrating why I believe feminism is based on hate.

Now, right off the bat, you launch into what is one of the most predictable feminist rebuttals to anything anti-feminism that exists: the question of voter rights. You claim initially that denying a person the vote places them in the position of a second class citizen, that not giving them a say over decisions that will affect them is subjugation, and because this was denied to women, it's subjugation based on gender. If this is the case, then ALL but a tiny percentage of men were in the exact same boat as all women were, through most of human history. In fact, the amount of time between universal male suffrage and female suffrage in the west amounted to a paltry one half of one percent or so of recorded human history.

So under your reasoning, all men but those in charge (under a monarchy) or the most wealthy (following democracy but before universal male suffrage) were also subjugated by their governments in the exact same way women were.

Now, if that government was headed by a woman, would those men have been subjugated based on their gender? I find it really problematic to assume that because a man is in charge or because a woman is in charge, that that person in charge is not going to care about the opposite sex. This is an absurd argument. It doesn't hold water.

On the other hand, even men with no say whatsoever, men who were subjugated by their governments by being denied the vote, bore a greater and more costly obligation and burden of responsibility to their communities and governments, and even to their families, than women did.

It's foolish to even entertain the question of "who had the shorter end of the stick?", during a period of history when men and women had very different sticks to carry, and when there was little to no option for anyone to choose a different stick. The end of the stick that men got may indeed have been longer than the ends of women's sticks, but the stick itself was heavier and more difficult to lift, by a long shot. And while I know feminism is largely anti-science, I can demonstrate that through a simple, biological argument.

When the conditions two animals are subjected to over an extended period of their evolution are very different, one of the easiest ways to determine who had things harder or more onerous is to look at what biology has to tell us. If we look at monogamous primates like marmosets, males and females live nearly identical lives. The only real difference between male and female roles in that species is that females gestate, give birth and lactate, and males don't. Males do, however, collect food, nurture and supervise the young, and are chosen as suitable mates by females based on how well they perform the exact same tasks performed by females. In fact, if you want to get right down to it, marmoset females choose males based on how good those males are at mothering.

And when you look at male and female marmosets, you can't really tell them apart--they're the same size and have the same muscle mass and density. Other than their reproductive organs, they're basically interchangeable, because they do all the same stuff, and they've done all the same stuff for a very long time. They are gender-egalitarians.

Now look at humans. Men have stronger skeletons, higher muscle mass, stronger muscles even controlling for mass, and more red corpuscles by blood volume, than women do. Would these differences exist if women's roles through history were remotely as strenuous, onerous or dangerous as men's? If natural selection pressures on women had been as severe and rigorous as those placed on men?

What our sexual dimorphism tells us is that men had to be capable of doing physically harder and more dangerous tasks than women did, consistently, all through our history as human beings, and that women were not subjected to this kind of pressure. If they had, they'd have evolved to be a lot more burly.

And what I find really interesting is that very little of that strenuous, dangerous work that men did was actually necessary to the survival of individual men.

I mean think about it for a minute--how much more work would it be to provide for a family than only oneself? I could tell you a thing or two about that--if the only person I had to take care of was me, I could live like a queen on a waitress's pay. I'd never have to put off buying something I wanted just because the people dependent on me would rather eat dinner tonight than see me in a new pair of shoes.

How much more work would it have been for a man way back when to provide for a wife less productive than he was, and several even less productive children, than to only provide for himself? How much less safe was he if he chose to protect a woman smaller and weaker than himself, who was often vulnerable due to pregnancy and childbed, and several vulnerable children, than if he was the only person he was responsible for keeping safe?

If men had not been prepared to willingly take on those burdens in order to spare women from them, guess what, Danielle? Women would have sturdier skeletons and bigger muscles than they do, because they'd have had to evolve those things in order to survive. I honestly don't know how it was that more men didn't do what the Buddha did, and just walk away from those burdens--I mean, that guy sure had more time to think about stuff and ponder the nature of the universe, sleep in and get himself fat as fuck once he didn't have a wife and kid to look after.

To further illustrate how men can enjoy higher status than women while simultaneously having more burdensome and difficult lives--you know, getting the shorter end of the stick, the worse deal, all that--let's look at an extreme case of a staunchly and severely patriarchal society--something relatively unheard of in hunter-gatherer cultures: The Inuit.

Now in most hunter-gatherer societies, gender roles are just as differentiated as in any traditional society. BUT, male and female roles usually commanded similar levels of social status, respect and admiration. This was not the case with the Inuit.

But one of the really striking ways in which Inuit societies differed from other hunter-gatherer societies was that in most hunter-gatherer societies, men and women brought in roughly the same amount of food--in fact, sometimes women brought in the larger share. Women may not have become dominant, or have higher status than men, because they weren't expected to risk their lives to bring in the food that they brought in, the way men were expected to in the act of hunting. But the Inuit were very different. Not only did men bring in more than 95% of all the food, they did so at extreme risk to their lives and health, under conditions more severe than the conditions almost anywhere else on earth.

Rates of injury and premature death by injury among Inuit men of the past were horrendous. I mean, here are a bunch of guys who were expected to go out in a damn kayak in -40 weather, and chuck spears at whales 200 times their size, or go out on treacherous ice that if you fell through it meant almost certain death to hunt seals, in order to bring home tons more meat than they could possibly eat by themselves, and share that meat with the women and children who got to stay home, safe and sound.

Now I'm wondering what you think would have happened if you'd convinced those men that their wives needed them like fish need bicycles. What would have been the result for women? What if you'd told those men that this woman and these children are not yours, they don't belong to you, therefore you don't have any right to dictate to them and neither do you have any responsibility to take care of them? Or if you'd said that women are every bit as capable as men, and they're men's equals in every way that mattered? What if you'd actually convinced those men of all that? Heck, what if you'd actually convinced Inuit men that women's work was just as important and prestigious as men's work? You think maybe a lot of men might have taken up sewing? 

You know, those men who could, if they wanted to, just go off on their own, club a baby seal every month or two, and do just fine, since chewing pelts into fur and stitching them into clothes isn't that hard, and they'd have plenty of free time to do it without all those extra mouths to feed? 

Do you think maybe those men would have chosen not to risk and sacrifice like Inuit men did, if all they got was the same rewards and status as Inuit women? Do you really think those men would have, or should be expected to, risk and sacrifice the way Inuit men did, for the same rewards and status as Inuit women? Do you think Or would they have said, "Hey, she's my equal, and she's her own person, and her kids don't belong to me either. Let her get her own food." Because you know what? That's exactly what I would have said, if someone had convinced me of all of that.

I mean, hasn't it ever occurred to you feminists that the most extreme patriarchies occur in the harshest living conditions?

Do you think those women would have been better off--you know, less oppressed--by being seen as equal to their men--equal and therefore in no need of men's provision or protection? You ever wonder what it might have been like to be a pregnant Inuit woman, out on the ice trying to find a seal to jab a stick in so she could eat? You ever think that maybe, just maybe, she might have been perfectly happy to trade something valuable in order to secure the cooperation and support that imposed such hideous costs and risks on him? That her survival in that environment was so dependent on him risking life and limb every time he went out, that she might have thought social status and personal autonomy were really small prices to pay in exchange for what it cost him to give her what she needed?

You ever wonder if marriage wasn't a way to force women to become slaves to men, and bear men's children and provide them with free domestic services, the way so many second-wave feminists portrayed it, but a way to force men to become slaves to women, to support women's children and provide provisioning and protection services to women? You ever wonder if just maybe it was BOTH?

OMG, I think I just blew my own mind...

You never stopped to wonder why the very idea of feminism only occurred to women when economic, political and technological development finally meant that trading places with men would mean trading UP instead of down? That idea probably goes a long way to explaining why feminism originated among the wealthiest and most privileged women first, dontcha think? I mean, even Mary Wollstonecraft was honest enough to call women's privilege exactly that in her claims that it should be eliminated. And I just don't get why she wasn't more popular among the working class women who depended on that privilege for their survival!

I don't know if you realize this, Danielle (being feminist and therefore anti-science as you are), but male provisioning and protection of females and young is a gift and a luxury that few females of any sexually dimorphic species have ever enjoyed. Just ask a female Bonobo, who gets to trade sex with every unrelated male in her community in return for foraging rights and male ambivalence toward her offspring--not for actual food or for assistance in caring for offspring, but for the right to do her own foraging in an area a male might actually prefer to have for himself, and the right to not have her offspring fall victim to competitive infanticide by a male who would rather she produce his kids than his brother's.

Because that's the way most of nature works, Danielle, and it isn't the way human society has worked for a very long time.

One of the reasons human women have been able to remain significantly weaker than men is because men were consistently subjected to more extreme and demanding conditions than women, all through history. And one of the reasons we don't have more in common with Bonobos--why we've become the most dominant and intelligent species on the planet, in fact--is because women and children benefitted from men doing that, from being subjected to those conditions. Because men, unlike Bonobo males, were actually willing to share the benefits and rewards of their harsher survival conditions with women and children, because women, unlike Bonobo females, were willing to individually trade something valuable in return for an individual man's investment.

And I know, the whole thing is so cold and uncivilized. Those Inuit men should have been willing to harpoon whales from a kayak and share the meat with women and children, and give their lives to protect women and children, without any expectation of any extra anything. They should have been willing to do it "Just because". For nothing. THAT would have been "fair" to everyone. It was "oppression" of women that Inuit men were granted higher social status, more respect and a few extra rights in exchange for doing a ton of really difficult shit they didn't need to do for themselves, but did anyway because women and children needed them to. And it was really "unfair" that women weren't given power in those societies, because hey, the one who doesn't have to risk anything, pay anything, or go out on the ice, should be given an EQUAL say in decisions that affect everyone in the community.

And you know, I think it's perhaps that feminist framing--the duty of a man to share his labor with women, to put himself between danger and women, to risk and pay for the benefit of women during a history where the risks and burdens of doing that were so very high (which is why women couldn't be expected to bear them)...that's oppression of women simply because men weren't willing to do it for nothing. I think that was the first red flag I had that feminism is based on sexism and hate. Because you kind of have to hate someone if you're going to tell him that his kind have oppressed women all through history by doing what was necessary--including dying--to keep women safe, sheltered and fed. You kind of have to hate someone to claim that the old system only existed to benefit men at the expense of women's enslavement, when that system is the only reason that women are still around, that women are not like the Bonobos. And it's definitely hate to say that women were not complicit in this system, that they have no responsibility for things working the way they did.But feminists do this all the time.

Like Hilary Clinton once said (and yeah, I'm paraphrasing), men have never been the primary victims of their own deaths in war. It's the women who are stuck still alive and raising the kids alone who are the primary victims of men's deaths.

If I claimed that a woman's husband was the primary victim of her death because he's left alive to look after the children alone, you'd call me a misogynist. And you'd be right.

And I know, it's not the same, because women have always had the short end of the stick, right? They've only gotten out of society what they were required to put into it, and that meant that they got less, and that's unfair. That verse in the Bible about women being obedient to their husbands if they wanted to stay on the right side of the man upstairs, that's unfair gender roles. But the several verses that admonished men that they were 100% responsible for the survival of their wives, their children, their widowed mothers, their unmarried sisters, and any other extended family members who could not be self-sufficient, if he wanted god to approve of him. NO! None of that was unfair. None of that was gender-biased. The Bible was only unfair to women. 

All men got was power. Just power. Cookies for having a penis, no other qualifications required.

You know, for three years I was the only thing keeping myself and three children alive and fed and with a roof over our heads and all of that. And you know what? It fucking sucks. Even now, even today, even in this easy world, it fucking sucks. And it would have sucked even more if this was still an era of manual labor and zero workplace standards, the way things were when men were expected to take on the burden of providing for women and children under The EEEVIL Patriarchy.

But anyway, let's get back to the vote, and how not having a say over decisions that affect you is subjugation.

As an aside, there's currently a campaign to lower the voting age in Canada to 16. Do you believe that Canadians between the ages of 16 and 18 are subjugated, Danielle? Do you support those efforts? If not, why not? How about Canadians *under* 16? Are they subjugated? Would you support efforts to expand the franchise to 14? Or 12? 

Do you assume that because children aren't allowed to vote, that the government has no interest in their wellbeing, you know, their safety, happiness and wellbeing? Do you even imagine that being true?

Regardless of that, the history of the expansion of suffrage is a lot more complex and nuanced than most feminists would lead you to believe. For instance, up until shortly before women's suffrage in the US, the system was not one of secret ballots. Because ballots were public in the early years of universal male suffrage, there had been numerous cases of employers coercing their male employees to vote the way they wanted, and there were real concerns about something similar occurring between husbands and wives, or fathers and daughters. There was a lot of worry that giving women the vote would be the equivalent of giving some unscrupulous men two votes.

On the other hand, if you look at a lot of political campaign propaganda from that time, you'll see a fair amount of "Ladies, tell your men to vote for soandso!" and a lot of stuff like that. I can't imagine with the comparatively minuscule campaign budgets they had back then, and the cost of paper and ink, that anyone would have wasted the resources to print posters like that unless women were seen as fully capable of influencing, or even controlling, their husbands' votes.

And I'm pretty sure you're not aware that some of the most famous suffragette leaders--such as Emmiline Pankhurst in the UK--weren't campaigning for universal female suffrage. What Pankhurst was after was "ten pound suffrage" for wealthy women, and the rest of the ladies of the UK could go fly a kite. How very noble.

It might also interest you to know that in 1917 at the height of WWI, when the US government began sentencing draft dodgers to death, a group of activists brought a constitutional challenge of military conscription. In the Supreme Court's ruling on that challenge, it stated:

“It may not be doubted that the very conception of a just government and its duty *to the citizen* includes the reciprocal obligation of the citizen to render military service in case of need, and the right to compel it.”

So, the draft was ruled constitutionally sound and allowed to continue, because it was considered to be the reciprocal obligation of citizens in return for the rights of citizenship granted by government. Indeed, it was largely because of the huge sacrifice of men during the American civil war (some of them draftees) that led to men being offered universal suffrage in the US in the first place--it was deemed unfair to order a man to die for a country in which he had no say. It was felt that if men have an obligation--social or legal--to go to their deaths to protect society, they should really be allowed a say in what kind of society they were expected to protect. I have a hard time arguing with that kind of logic.

So maybe you can tell me, what did women owe society, what kinds of burdens and sacrifices were they expected to take on if necessary, often by force? Was it anything remotely on the scale of putting on a uniform and charging into enemy bayonets? Was it? Really?

In fact, a LOT of women opposed women's suffrage in the late 1800s and early 1900s--so many and so vehemently that it was pretty much the same afternoon that their opposition was overwhelmed by a general consensus among women that they did want the vote, that women actually got it. Why would any woman oppose women's suffrage, you might be wondering. Well, because citizenship rights and citizenship obligations had always gone hand in hand for men, and many anti-suffragette women were worried that might apply to women, too.

Oh, anti-suffragette women, you so crazy. Didn't you realize? Women get all kinds of shit without having to pay for it, not only on ladies' night.

Needless to say, the vast majority of men who fought and died in the Civil war, whether draftees or volunteers, didn't have the vote. The American men who were still alive after that war were given the vote as payment for past sacrifices, and in anticipation of future ones.You might also be unaware that at the time when that constitutional challenge to the draft failed, the voting age for men in the US was 21, but the age at which they became eligible for the draft was 18 1/2. The same goes for every US war for which there has been a draft, up until public pressure was placed on the US government over wounded veterans returning from Viet Nam without the right to vote--how embarrassing for everyone! Only at that point was the voting age lowered to 18.

Now I wonder how subjugated a 19 year old boy might have felt, bleeding to death on a WWI battlefield without the right to vote? I also wonder what that boy might have thought about the women campaigning for female suffrage safe at home, at the very same moment he was dying at the behest of his government, without franchise? And I wonder if he would have felt more or less subjugated, had he been drafted, or had one of those suffrage-crazy ladies shamed him into enlisting by handing him a white feather?

In Canada, 125,000 men were conscripted in WWI, 25,000 of whom were sent to the front lines of a war that killed 10 million men on all sides. Talk about the short end of the stick--ten million short ends of ten million sticks, to be precise. Our government was a little more sensible than those in other countries, and alongside the conscription legislation it enacted in 1917, it passed a law giving voting rights to all those currently serving in the military or who had served, even if they were under 21.

Good job, Canada! And while you, Danielle, are technically correct that women were given the vote in 1917, that vote was only given to military women, or to women acting as proxies for male relatives fighting overseas.

So even in Canada, military service was tied to the expansion of voter rights. 2000 military nurses (none of them drafted, mind you, but all of them admirable in their voluntary service and the sacrifices required for it) became some of the first women with the right to vote in Canada. The rest of us had to wait a whole 'nother year.

By 1920 and 1918 respectively, the governments of the US and Canada had extended suffrage to all white female citizens of voting age, despite women being subject to neither conscription, nor the social expectation, to sacrifice their lives in the service of their countries' decisions.

A second draft occurred in Canada during WWII, and conscription became a norm in the US in 1948, with the Selective Service Act (which remains in force today). Between 1950 and 1953, 1.5 million American men were drafted. Any of them between 18 and 21 would not have had the vote, even though their government was able to coerce them to serve.

In several modern, democratic nations, such as Norway and South Korea, military service remains a mandatory obligation of the citizen. Well, if that citizen is a man.

And what price did women have to pay, in terms of a citizen's obligation to government, to purchase their right to vote? None, you say? Oh yeah, that's right, only men had to purchase their citizenship rights--women just had to finally agree with each other that they wanted them, and then ask.

And in light of that, you know what's really awesome? Men have, at times, though not always, been exempt during a draft if they were married or had children, because drafting a husband or father was considered an unfair hardship to women and children, and was to be avoided if possible. One of the few ways a man could avoid his obligation to society--to die--was if a woman or child would have to help him pay that price. Yep, society sure was interested in giving women the short end of the stick, all right.

I also find it kind of amusing that you mentioned female suffrage in Kuwait. I'm sure you did that because OMG, 2005, right? However, Kuwait's status as a democracy has been consistently inconsistent since 1920, heck, even since their independence in the early 1960s. Moreover, after a very quick and cursory look at the information on that country, I learned that only Kuwaiti citizens are allowed to vote, and the majority of residents of Kuwait--you know, those who'd be affected by the decisions of the Kuwaiti government--are not technically citizens. Even naturalized citizens have to wait for 30 years before being eligible to vote.

Wow. That's a LOT of subjugation, about half of which is going to be male, but you only seem concerned with women, so of course you didn't bother to read further.

Hey, I have an idea--I think I'll read further and see if Kuwait employs conscription....

Wow, what do you know? It does! Kuwaiti men who are citizens are inductable at age 18, and oh my goodness, wouldn't you know it? The voting age in Kuwait is 21. So Kuwaiti men and only Kuwaiti men, can be coerced into giving their lives for a government they have no say over. How very...well, I can't exactly say it's shocking, now can I?

Interesting as well, is that the vote in Kuwait is actively denied to men currently serving in the military. That's right, you heard me. The very people who are risking their lives (by choice or against their consent) based on their government's decisions are explicitly denied a say in those decisions. How's that for subjugation?

Also interestingly, Bedouin volunteers in the Kuwaiti military often enlist because of promises that military service may result in citizenship, and the right to vote. I think this is what's called "pay before you play," and it seems to be what men have had to do right from the get-go.

I suppose what I'm trying to say with all of this conscription/political franchise talk is that the franchise, in its earliest days, was connected to military service. Even the very first women allowed to vote in Canada were given the vote in return for their own military service, or on behalf of their male relatives who were serving.

No, if it's your position that a person is subjugated by having no say over decisions that affect them, then it was men who could be required by their governments to die who would have been more subjugated than any woman by being denied the vote. The draft is a particular decision of government that has NEVER affected women as directly as it has men, and it only stands to reason that in countries where a legal or social obligation to put one's life on the line for the benefit of government or fellow citizens exists, that decision was considered important enough for those directly affected by it to be the first to be given a say. Eventually. Once a whole bunch of them had already died.

I also wonder if you might have considered the inverse of this equation as it stands now--that women today have a say in the decisions of government-- a greater collective say than men in many countries, due to sheer numbers. In any country with universal suffrage and male-only conscription, the female electorate as a unified bloc could conceivably unilaterally make the decision to send unwilling men, and only unwilling men, to their deaths. That's quite the moral hazard, when you think about it.

I'm sure you and your feminist sisters are going to get right on rectifying that--either by actively and tirelessly demanding an end to conscription and selective service in countries where they exist, or by vigorously campaigning to include women.

I mean, you feminists want equality, right? And inclusivity! Or do you only want those things in areas of choice and rights, and not in areas of obligation, expectation, responsibility and government coercion?

So, to reiterate:

Yes, though I believe that all feminists (and most mainstreamers, for that matter) honestly feel that women were historically second class citizens, things are a lot more complicated than that. Women may have been considered different citizens than men, but it's dishonest to use a term like "second-class". That term doesn't address the exemptions from the burdens and obligations of male citizenship that women enjoyed historically, and still enjoy today, or any of the entitlements they received through the enforcement of male gender roles.

The bulk of the "extras and bonuses" that men received--in legal rights and social status--were a result of the greater obligations they had to society, the higher price they were expected to pay in terms of protecting and providing for people other than themselves--especially women and children--and the fact that they were held socially and even legally accountable for other people's survival and wellbeing. None of these burdens were ones women were ever expected to carry. They were burdens women were entitled to expect of others, and they still are, and they would have enjoyed no such entitlement in the much harsher past had they been seen as the equals of men.

So when feminists insist that women got the short end of the stick compared to men, they're only telling half the story. And half-truths are more dangerous by far than lies, because they're easier for people to swallow--so easy, very few people have ever asked you feminists to support your own conclusions by addressing all the facts in the entire context, and not just the facts you cherry-pick.

My next video will address your contention that feminism isn't as powerful as the men's movement thinks it is, and in anticipation of that I want you to ponder this quote from Warren Farrell: "Men's greatest weakness is their facade of strength, and women's greatest strength is their facade of weakness."

And, if you're still listening, Danielle, if I haven't made you slam your computer shut in a huff, I guess I'll see you again in a few days when I post my next video.