alt.mens-rights Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Part 1/6
Peter D. Zohrab
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USENET
ALT.MENS-RIGHTS NEWSGROUP
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
PART ONE OF SIX
(posted to Usenet around the FIRST day of each month).
by Peter D. Zohrab
As creator of the Usenet Newsgroup alt.mens-rights, I'm providing an
FAQ, divided up into 6 parts for practical reasons, containing:
1) A specimen, condensed Men's Rights manifesto;
and 2) A Men's Rights Resource-List (in 5 parts).
1) SPECIMEN MANIFESTO
(from the New Zealand Men's Rights Association)
MANIFESTO
of the New Zealand Men for Equal Rights Association
(formerly known as the New Zealand Men's Rights Association)
AS AMENDED ON FEBRUARY 6TH 1998
A. Information Issues
Information issues are basic to the success or failure of the Men's
Movement. We have to be able to get our point of view across in an
intellectual climate where women are generally considered to be the
victims of male oppression in an evil patriarchy.
1. Media Bias
Anti-male bias in the media must be monitored and records kept.
Complaints must be lodged where appropriate, and publicity given to
the complaints.
2. Teacher Bias
Teacher unions usually have separate female officers on their
executives and at branch
level. These often use member funds to circulate Feminist propaganda,
which then gets
passed on to students and parents. This propaganda sometimes gets
discredited later
(e.g. the theory about boys dominating coeducational classrooms).
3. Men's Studies
Women's Studies departments offer pseudo-academic courses in
man-hating. Women's Studies departments at universities act as centres
of Feminist propaganda-writing, and also as
headquarters for Feminist activism within the university community.
Some U.S. universities already have Men's Studies departments. Men's
Rights activists should push for equity.
This means that every university that has a Women's Studies Department
should either abolish it, or have a Men's Studies Department as well,
in order to counter Feminist propaganda.
4. Ministry of Men's Affairs
The Ministry of Women's Affairs is just a Feminist propaganda-house.
For the same reasons that men need Men's Studies departments in
universities, men also need a Ministry of Men's Affairs in
all countries (such as New Zealand) where a Ministry of Women's
Affairs exists. The alternative solution is for all Ministries of
Women's Affairs to be abolished.
B. Legal Issues
Feminism has captured the legal system to the detriment of men. Legal
issues are second in importance to Information issues in the Men's
Movement. In fact, one of the main reasons for pushing the information
issues is to achieve our goals as regards legal issues such as the
following.
5. Divorce Law
This should cease to discriminate against men in areas such as
child-custody and false child abuse and domestic violence accusations
in the Family Court. A mere accusation of child
abuse or domestic violence should not have any effect on the accused's
chances of obtaining custody. The charges should have to be proved in
court first.
6. False Accusations
People making false accusations (such as accusations of rape or child
sexual abuse) should be prosecuted as a matter of course and police
policy, and the penalties should be made equivalent to the penalties
involved in the type of crime that the false accusation related to.
This is necessary as a deterrent.
7. Sex Abuse and false memories
A balance needs to be achieved between the needs of society to protect
itself against sex abusers, and the need to protect innocent people
from manufactured memories of supposed abuse in childhood produced in
adult minds by Feminist councellors.
8. Domestic Violence
The anti-male hysteria surrounding this issue must be removed, by
publicising statistics showing that women batter men just as often as
men batter women, by encouraging battered men to come forward, and by
educating police and public to take a more balanced view of this
issue.
More research must be done and publicised into the causes of domestic
violence, since it is currently presented as if men beat their wives
for no reason at all.
Feminists must not be allowed to monopolise this issue, as they tend
to ask misleading questions. For example, Feminists stirred up some
hysteria some years ago by publishing the results of a survey in
Australia which showed that a majority of men thought that they might,
under certain circumstances, be justified in hitting their wives.
The issue looks a bit different if you ask questions like:
- Are men NEVER justified in hitting their wives, no matter what they
do or say ?
- Are women ever justified in hitting, or otherwise injuring their
husbands ?
The problem is that Feminists have been pushing the legal systems of
Western countries towards a situation where women can successfully
plead provocation in crimes against men, while men cannot successfully
plead provocation in crimes against women.
9. Sexist Laws
Sexist, anti-male offences such as "Assault on a Female" must be
removed from the statute-books.
10. Law of Evidence
The restrictions on defence lawyers in rape trials must be removed, in
order to safeguard the rights of innocent defendants. It is up to
judges and juries, not parliament, to decide what evidence is relevant
in a given case.
11. Syndromes and legal defences
Men must campaign against women-only defences and men-only crimes.
Feminists have been steadily working towards the goal of getting all
women treated as innocent victims, no matter what they have done --
and all men treated as criminals, no matter if they are innocent.
12. Rape
The definition of rape must be restricted, and all attempts to expand
the definition of rape to include anything a woman might afterwards
wish she hadn't done should be strenuously
resisted.
13. Police Bias
Instances of anti-male police bias must be recorded, filed, protested
about, and brought to the attention of the media and the public. The
Police must be made aware of the need to train recruits to avoid
anti-male bias in their dealings with the public.
14. Infanticide
Infanticide by women should be punished just as severely as
infanticide by men.
15. Conscription and Military Service
Men's sacrifices in war must be suitably recognised by Society. They
are not suitably recognised if officials and the media pretend that
women made equal sacrifices in wars when they actually did not do so.
The NZMRA considers that it would be impractical for men and women to
have identical roles in wartime.
16. Choice For Men (I)
Men are entitled to a reproductive "choice", and should be allowed to
terminate their parental rights and responsibilities, just as a woman
can unilaterally, at present. A woman can terminate her parental
rights and responsibilities unilaterally, by having an abortion. If
women did not have this unilateral reproductive "choice", on the other
hand (see "Choice for Men II" below), then men should not have one
either.
Unplanned parenthood can completely disrupt a man's life. It can
disrupt his education, it disrupts his mental health, and it often
disrupts his entire family life.... Paternity, or additional
offspring, may force upon the man a distressful life and future.
Psychological harm and heartbreak may result. Mental and physical
health may be taxed. There is also the distress, for all concerned,
associated with the unwanted child. The continuing stigma of unwed
fatherhood may be involved....
Men have been treated as an under class without reproductive
rights.... Denying men reproductive rights is humiliating, oppressive,
offensive to the basic principles of human dignity. The decision as to
whether or not a particular man will terminate his parental rights and
responsibilities is a decision that can be made by that man only.
Women or men who trick their partners into involuntary parenthood
should be prosecuted and punished by the law.
17. Choice for Men II (Abortion)
A father should legally have an equal say with the mother in any
decision relating to abortion. This is because the father's wishes
have equal status with the mother's wishes, and both parents tend to
have an equal financial, moral and legal responsibility for any child
that is born. In many countries, the father is forced to contribute to
the child's upkeep -- whether he actually lives with the mother, has
custody or access rights, or not. Any abortion consent form should
need to be signed by both natural parents. If this is not the case,
then the father has the right to "Choice for Men I" (see above).
18. Abortion
Notwithstanding the issue of Choice For Men, there is a natural
tendency for Men's Rights activists to see abortion as yet another way
that women can issue a contract to kill with impunity.
19. Tax Law
Tax law should not discriminate against the two-parent, one-income
family. Family income should be taxed as one unit. Feminism is hostile
to the traditional two-parent, one-income family, which is associated
with stable societies with low crime-levels. There is a mass of
evidence associating increased numbers of single-parent families with
increased crime. Women in the workforce drive down real wages by
increasing the pool of available labour. This in turn makes the
single-income family less viable.
C. Other Issues
20. Men's Health and Longevity
Equal funds should be allocated to research, prevention, information
and treatment relating to male-only diseases (such as prostate cancer
and testicular cancer) as to female-only diseases. As men have a
greater mortality than women from most diseases, and a shorter
life-expectancy than
women, Men's Health should be a priority spending area within Vote
Health.
21. Sports Apartheid
Since Feminists favour Equal Employment Opportunity and oppose
separate men's clubs, the sexual apartheid system in individual,
non-contact sports should be abolished, e.g. female tennis players
should play in the same competition as men players -- for the same
prizes. The alternative is to enshrine sexual segregation in some
areas of social and sporting life in legislation, with payments for
sportsmen being set substantially higher than those paid to
sportswomen -- to reflect the different objective standards involved.
22. Circumcision
Circumcision is genital mutilation, and should be campaigned against
by all those who are opposed to female circumcision. The fact that it
involves less mutilation than female
circumcision does is counterbalanced by the fact that male
circumcision is more widespread than its female counterpart.
Circumcision is particularly abhorrent when it is practised for purely
secular, non-medical reasons.
23. Affirmative Action and Quotas
These should either be abolished altogether, or applied
across-the-board, including areas where women are underrepresented and
Feminists have made no move to increase women's representation (e.g.
prison populations, suicide rates, wartime death-rates, mortality
rates from disease, etc.), and also areas where women are
overrepresented (e.g. primary teachers).
Any such across-the-board fairness would logically have to apply to
ethnic minorities as well -- some ethnic groups do better than the
majority on these statistics, and some do worse.
24. Sexist Language
The media and Government should be just as careful to avoid sexist
language that belittles men (e.g. "gunman" instead of "gunperson",
"hatchet-man" instead of "hatchet-person") as they are to avoid
language that belittles women.
25. Advertising
Advertising that denigrates and belittles men must be combatted
vigorously.
http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm The Truth on Domestic Violence http://nzmera.orcon.net.nz/altmrfaq.html alt.mens-rights FAQ http://www.landwave.com/family/ More Truth on DV http://nzmera.orcon.net.nz/menlinks.html 1000 Men's/Dads' Links http://www.calib.com/nccanch/pubs/factsheets/canstats.cfm Child Abuse Statistics An "indigenous" people is that which committed the last local genocide http://nzmera.orcon.net.nz/contents.html Sex, Lies & Feminism