Who's "The Good Men Project"?
Masculist
Tom
http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/meet-the-mens-rights-movement/
Who are men’s rights activists, and what do they want?
The Men’s Rights Movement (MRM) is a growing and disproportionately
vocal group that believes Western culture and its institutions are
contemptuous of men. Men and boys, they argue, are systematically
disenfranchised and discriminated against by feminists and their
allies. Once dismissed as the looniest and fringiest of the lunatic
fringe, men’s rights groups have “gone mainstream” (Salon) and become
“frighteningly effective” (Slate), influencing family law and domestic
violence legislation, and imposing their views on our national
conversations around gender and a host of other social issues.
Today and over the next week, the Good Men Project Magazine will be
taking an in-depth look at this controversial movement. Despite the
attention they’ve drawn and their relentless effort to make their
voices heard, their ideas have yet to receive a thorough and fair
hearing by mainstream media. That is, until now.
We’ve invited leading voices in the movement, as well as its outspoken
critics, to help us better understand what men’s rights activists
believe, why they believe it, and whether we should take their claims
seriously.
Men’s rights activists (MRAs) can be easy to dismiss as crackpot
extremists. Perhaps best known for descending like outraged locusts on
the comments section of your favorite online magazine, newspaper, or
blog, bewildering readers with esoteric epithets like “mangina” and
“white knight,” they tend not to make a favorable first impression.
But if you have the curiosity and thick skin to engage these guys,
you’ll find that beneath the hysterical, dogmatic rhetoric lie some
valid complaints.
It’s impossible to have a complete discussion of masculinity in the
21st century without acknowledging the men’s rights point of view.
So strap in and leave your delicate sensibilities at the door—it’s
time to meet the Men’s Rights Movement.
♦◊♦
Men’s rights and other men’s movements have been kicking around since
the 1970s. Many sprung up in response—some sympathetic, some hostile—
to second-wave feminism. Like feminists, these movements have taken
various forms in the pursuit of various, often contradictory goals.
Broadly speaking, they fall into three categories:
The weekend-warrior, drum-circle, pass-around-this-wooden-phallus-and-
talk-about-your-dad movement, popularized by poet and author Robert
Bly. Known as the mythopoetic men’s movement, these groups tend to
focus inward, on interpersonal issues around their own manhood.
The pro-feminist Men’s Studies guys, who like to question and re-
imagine standards of masculinity and gender roles. Their conclusions
have often led them to take political positions, but their focus is
primarily intellectual and academic.
And the men’s and fathers’ rights activists, who believe that men have
been oppressed since, well, a really long time ago. They focus on
political, legislative, and cultural reformation, from the unjust
family court system to entrenched media bias. It’s these guys—the MRAs—
who are making the most noise these days. (The “A” in MRA can also
stand for “advocate,” depending on which MRA you talk to.)
According to movement leader Paul Elam, whose website,
AVoiceforMen.com, is among the most popular online MRA hangouts, the
MRM is largely comprised of “men who have been screwed over by a
corrupt and oppressive family court system—and those [who] don’t want
to be.” Thus anger and frustration—at the courts, at their ex-wives
and women in general, at pervasive injustice—tend to be the animating
emotions behind the MRM. The down economy, which by all accounts has
hit men hardest, continues to boost MRA recruitment and sympathy.
Dan Moore, the publisher of Menz magazine, has been active in the
movement for nearly 20 years. He’s “bullish” on the immediate
prospects of social change. “I think it will be less than a decade
before these issues are resolved. And yes, that’s largely because of
this recession,” he said. “But honestly, I think we’re changing the
world.”
♦◊♦
MRAs are well known for their tactical assaults on the comments
sections of offending feminist and “misandric” (man-hating) blogs and
websites. “If you write about them, it’s like feeding a stray cat tuna
fish,” a feminist blogger warned me as I was soliciting stories for
this package. “Except more like if you feed 100 cats tuna fish—they
just show up and hang out and mewl and will completely swarm the
place.”
That warning came too late. MRAs haven’t had many nice things to say
about the Good Men Project Magazine since our launch last June. Here’s
a representative appraisal:
I believe this site, and the viewpoints expressed within it, are
toxic, and EXTREMELY harmful to boys and men. And I find the cynical
attempt to paint yourselves as helpful in any way to be most
disgusting of all. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Toxic, cynical, disgusting, and shameful. Actually, that’s one of the
nicer ones. (A healthy percentage of the comments we get from MRAs
aren’t fit to reprint here.) When we started getting comments and
emails like this one, we were surprised. We were aware of the
existence of men’s and fathers’ rights groups, but we had no idea how
angry they were, and we certainly didn’t expect to be targeted as
feminist “mangina” conspirators, bent on destroying the lives of men
and boys everywhere.
♦◊♦
Initially, I wrote these people off as insane. It was difficult for me
to imagine how anyone could believe they were systematically oppressed
by women. Put off by second-wave feminism? OK, I get that. Fed up with
political correctness? Though this strikes me as very 1994, I know and
love men who still feel that way, so sure, I get that too. But under
the thumb of the Great Feminist Oppressors? That’s just hard to take
seriously.
But to understand MRAs, their fury, and their almost pathological
certainty, you have to understand their definition of the word
feminism. MRAs believe Western culture is feminist culture, and that
culture, whatever you call it, is oppressive toward men. Thus a
feminist is anyone they don’t agree with, regardless of gender. And
that’s pretty much everyone.
Last week, when Paul Elam launched his A Voice for Men Radio podcast,
he put it this way:
Let’s be clear—this show is not and never will be about the hateful
bashing of women, and to be clearer, we’re going to often speak
harshly of men … [But] our current gender zeitgeist is one that has
promoted and enabled such a degree of female narcissism and
entitlement that it has now produced two generations of women that are
for the most part, shallow, self-serving wastes of human existence—
parasites—semi-human black holes that suck resources and goodwill out
of men and squander them on the mindless pursuit of vanity. Is this
all women? No, of course not.
Not all women are semi-human, just most—and even if you don’t identify
as female, you still may be complicit in maintaining the status quo.
MRAs commenting on this site and elsewhere around the Internet
interpret the most radical feminists as speaking for women and
governments the world over. No one, for example, takes Valerie
Solanis, author of the satirical SCUM Manifesto, quite as seriously—
with the possible exception of Andy Warhol, for a split second, in 1968
—as men’s rights activists.
They see everything through the lens of a zero-sum gender war.
Everywhere, men get a raw deal at the hands of women. Anywhere women
have made advances, it’s at the expense of men. In their complaints,
across gendered lines, about the draft, civil service, sentencing, and
suicide disparities, they appear to ignore salient issues of class and
race. To be sure, it’s more powerful men, not feminists, who are the
ones sending men off to war and prison.
But for MRAs, everything comes back to their definition of feminists:
anyone who supports or tolerates the oppressive culture we live in;
thus, powerful men are covered by this definition. They’ve set up a
tautological circle from which there is no exit—only progressively
deeper certainty.
♦◊♦
It would be easy to write these guys off as nuts and not give them a
second thought—if they weren’t so damned persistent. As hard as it is
to imagine a Vast Feminist Conspiracy, it’s equally hard to see how
anyone could be so invested, so irrepressible, if they didn’t have
some skin in the game. Like that blogger told me, these guys hang
around. There must be some basis for their tenacity.
There can be little doubt that at least some of these guys have been
victims—of physically or psychologically abusive women, the family
court system, or other painful circumstances. It’s therefore
understandable why they don’t see the benefits of being in the
“patriarchy.”
Removed from the hysterical rhetoric, MRAs have some valid complaints.
Several movement-affiliated organizations—some more legitimate than
others—fight for the rights of male victims of discrimination. Glenn
Sacks’ Fathers & Families, a lobbying, PR, and advocacy group that has
influenced family law policy around the country, is one. Another is
RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting), a nonprofit
group that argues that domestic violence is perpetrated equally by men
and women.
Fathers & Families, like many men’s and fathers’ rights groups, want
men to be recognized as good parents who are equally capable of
raising children. They want the courts and society to acknowledge that
men can be caring and nurturing dads, and that assuming traditionally
female roles is not only not creepy, weird, and emasculating, but can
be respectable and, yes, even desirable.
Society seems to resist this acknowledgment, if not by word then by
deed.
Consider, for example, this post from The New York Times’ Motherlode
blog from December, in which Nicole Sprinkle described how, in looking
for childcare for her 3-year-old daughter, she found a friendly, well-
spoken applicant from her neighborhood who was studying to be a
paramedic. His mother owned a local daycare center. He had worked as a
summer camp counselor at the preschool her daughter attended, and “got
rave reviews from his supervisor there.”
But he was a man, and that was just too dangerous:
I told him frankly that I liked him best of all and yet still wasn’t
sure I could make the leap of letting a man watch my daughter: one who
might have to help her wipe, clean her up in case of an accident, who
would be alone with her every day for several hours.
I also told him that I felt really awful about having to feel this
way, and that it was such a shame that society forced us to
discriminate against kind, competent men as caregivers for our kids.
Of course, society didn’t force her to discriminate—she made the
choice to discriminate. But it illustrates the point: it’s not just
that men are refusing to adjust to new roles, as Hanna Rosin argued in
her now-famous “End of Men” article in The Atlantic. When it comes to
survival, or the survival of their children, men and women will
scramble to adapt. It’s society and its institutions that lag behind.
There are plenty of guys out there who would like to see gender roles
not simply reversed—a prospect that has Hanna Rosin twirling with glee
and MRAs blitzed on rage-ahol—but obliterated altogether.
♦◊♦
In a recent column for The Wall Street Journal, Lenore Skenazy
detailed the very real “Eek! A Male!” phenomenon: “almost any man who
has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a
creep,” she wrote. “Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very
worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate
ourselves for being so vigilant.”
In this culture, men who choose to work among (or even just near) kids
are suspect. Among the handful anecdotes she presents as evidence: an
Iowa daycare worker who isn’t allowed in the room when diapers are
being changed and a guy who sent kids running and screaming when he
rolled down his window to ask for directions.
Then there’s Timothy Murray, the Massachusetts Lt. Governor, who,
while pulling two small children from a burning minivan, narrowly
escaped the wrath of their grandmother. She thought he might be a
kidnapper. “I was gonna smack him,” she told a local TV station. “I
yelled, ‘Get away from my car!’”
MRAs rightly point to this as a troubling phenomenon. But is feminism,
as many MRAs suggest, really the prime mover behind it? I suspect
we’ll have the chance to debate this question in the comments section,
below.
♦◊♦
For “The End of Men,” Rosin interviewed a divorced dad named Darrell—
he’d lost his job laying sheet metal, fallen behind on his child-
support payments, and was attending a fathering class in order to
avoid jail time. Despite getting trucking and bar tending licenses, he
couldn’t find work, and lost his house and car. He described sitting
at a bus stop, watching his wife drive past. “‘[She] looked me right
in the eye,’ he recalled, ‘and just drove on by.’”
Darrell, like so many other casualties of this recession, must feel
blindsided by circumstance. And as Hanna Rosin will tell you, he’s
representative of a growing number of American men.
We have to expect that there will lots more disaffected, disillusioned
guys out there in the years to come, struggling to understand how they
fit in to a changing world—which means we can expect interest in men’s
issues to grow.
The Good Men Project Magazine is in a unique position to help guys
grapple with their evolving roles and what many men see as conflicting
and even impossible societal expectations. Our mission has always been
to challenge men to think deeply about themselves and their place in
the world, and that’s the goal this week.
Starting today, we’ll be featuring articles by leading MRAs about what
they see as the central goals and concerns of the movement. MRA
Blogger Zeta Male presents the results of a poll he conducted to
determine the Top 10 Goals of the Men’s Rights Movement. Paul Elam
from A Voice for Men breaks down the critical MRA notion of misandry.
We’ve invited some frequent MRA critics to offer measured criticism.
Regular GMPM columnist Hugo Schwyzer—whom Menz magazine publisher Dan
Moore calls “the Darth Vader of men’s issues”—argues that MRAs
misdiagnose both the sources of, and the solutions to, common MRA
complaints. Double X blogger Amanda Marcotte argues that what these
guys need is more feminism.
Rounding out the list is our own Tom Matlack, who has endured stints
as an MRA punching bag. He explores “Adultery’s Double Standard.”
Later in the week we’ll feature stories by Swedish MRA Pelle Billing,
men’s rights lawyer and GMPM contributor David Pisarra, men’s studies
professor Kaelin Alexander, and journalist and Man Boobz editor David
Futrelle.
Dan Moore will fill you in on the State of the Movement, explaining,
among other things, what MRAs have to say about feminists, and why
they’re determined to “go their own way.”
We’re looking forward to some spirited, good-faith debate. We
encourage everyone to comment, but please keep the discussion
respectful and on topic. Please consult our commenting policy, here.
♦◊♦
Masculist
> They seem feminist to me. Anyone know about this Good Men group?
Here's what they say in the "About us" section. Yep, they are
endorsed by Ms Magazine...oh the horror the horror.
We went live on June 1, confident that the world needed a new kind of
men’s magazine. Fortunately for us, the world seems to agree.
What makes the Good Men Project Magazine different? A few things …
First, we’re trying to make the world a better place. Seriously. In
that pursuit, we give 25 percent of our profits to organizations that
help at-risk boys.
Second, we’re trying to redefine what a men’s magazine can be. Yes, we
write about sports. And yes, we write about sex (although we do it
without selling sex). But unlike so many other men’s magazines, we do
our best not to patronize or caricaturize our audience. We try to
bring out the best in men, and we do that by producing content that
challenges men to think deeply—and to talk about the things they don’t
usually talk about.
With a name like the Good Men Project, some folks assume that we’re
going to tell men how to be good. This assumption has led at least one
media critic to suggest that we might be a “conservative culty thing.”
Others have called us “feminists” because, we suspect, we celebrate,
publish, and appear to be very popular with women. (Ms. Magazine said
we are “what enlightened masculinity might look like in the 20th
century.”)
We suppose we are a difficult magazine to categorize, and that’s
exactly how we like it. We’re not interested in telling men how they
should go about living their lives, nor are we intent on promoting a
certain “image” of masculinity. We’re interested instead in creating a
community where men (and the women who love us) can talk openly and
honestly about their lives.
Do we agree with everything our writers and guest columnists have to
say? Absolutely not. But are those things worth saying? Absolutely. In
the end, the Good Men Project Magazine is a gathering place for
thoughtful men with a conscience. We may not always agree with each
other, but we’re all here because we’re trying—occasionally with some
success—to be good men, however we define that.
We’re also here to laugh, because men are inherently funny creatures.
Though we talk about some serious things, we try not to take ourselves
too seriously. We are men, after all.
We hope you’ll check out some of our most read stories of all time
(below), and we hope you’ll sign up for our email mailing list to stay
informed about our best new content.
♦♦♦
Since our launch, the Good Men Project Magazine has spawned two
companion sites that we hope you’ll check out.
The first, Good Feed, is a blog where we report hourly from the front
lines of modern manhood. Writers Ryan O’Hanlon and Lu Fong, along with
a roster of guest bloggers, keep you updated on everything you need to
know to get through another day informed and entertained.
(Occasionally, Good Feed will feature a sponsored post; these posts
will be clearly marked “Sponsored Post” in the tags section.)
The second, Dads Good, is, in our humble opinion, the best place in
the world for dads. DadsGood features this country’s leading daddy
bloggers writing from the front lines of modern fatherhood.
Tom
Masculist
http://blog.fathersforlife.org/2011/05/01/the-good-men-project-is-supreme-misandry/
The Good Man Project is Supreme Misandry
An organization that propagates anti-male propagandist misinformation
like that in the indicated article should not call itself “The Good
Men Project”. A better name would be “Supreme Misandry”.
Are Men Natural-Born Cheaters? — The Good Men Project Magazine
goodmenproject.com
Men are more promiscuous than women, but that doesn’t mean we should
buy the cultural fallacy that men are programmed to cheat. The vast
majority of men are happily, naturally monogamous.
The last few years brought several headline stories about the cheating
behavior of guys like John Edwards, (former) South Carolina governor
Mark Sanford, and Tiger Woods. The public—or at least the pundits’—
reaction included outrage but little surprise. After all, here in the
U.S., we expect guys to cheat on their partners. Research on male
sexual behavior confirms what we know—that men are more likely than
women to have an extramarital affair.
The information in the article presents a pile of findings from
feminist advocacy research served on unadulterated B.S. Adultery is
not abuse when women do it, but it is bad only when men do it? Women
do not lie?
If you believe that, you better have a look at this:
http://fathersforlife.org/divorce/women_do_not_lie.htm
Why do we need misandrist websites like that launched by The Good Men
Project? You better consider how much funding such a thing gets and
where that funding comes from.
Consider also why the hatred against men needs to be intensified. Do
men need it? Does it do them injustice? Thinks about this and play
around with comparable and comparative search terms at the following
links:
1.) Misandry (hatred of men) vs. Misogyny (hatred of women)
http://www.google.ca/trends?q=misandry%2C+misogyny&ctab=0&geo=gb&geor=all&date=all&sort=0
2.) Jack the Ripper (he killed five prostitutes) vs. Elizabeth Bathory
(she killed about or close to 650 girls and young women by torturing
them to death) vs. Jane Toppan (a nurse and contemporary of Jack the
Ripper who killed as many as or more than 90 patients for no other
reason than that she wanted to set a record)
Although you probably know all you want to know about Jack the Ripper
(unless you grew up on a different planet), you most likely know
nothing about Elizabeth Bathory or Jane Toppan. The following links
will help you to learn something about those two women (and there is a
large lot of more women like that, as the first of the following links
shows).
http://www.michaelnewton.homestead.com/BadGirls.html
http://fathersforlife.org/hist/elizabeth_bathory.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Toppan
No one in their right mind will think that men need something like The
Good Men Project to help out with promoting the good image of men. It
won’t come from that place and organization.
Men need something like The Good Men Project Magazine like they need
Ms Magazine or additional holes in their heads.
This entry was posted on May 1, 2011 at 7:36 pm and is filed under
Social-Destruction Enterprise, False Allegations, Men's Issues,
Feminism, Propaganda Exposed, Women's Violence. You can follow any
responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a
response or trackback from your own site.
Society
Tom as "Masculist" <masc...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:10d175dd-0e64-4e13...@34g2000pru.googlegroups.com...
>
> Tom as "Masculist" wrote:
> >
> > They seem feminist to me. Anyone know about this
> > Good Men group?
I don't know much about 'em but from the sample of
their whining you provided, they appear to be some
kind of throwback to the 1970's sensitive new age guy
(SNAG) type - very much like Warren Farrell was
when he wrote his (now embarrassing) 1974 book,
_The Liberated Man_.
> Here's what they say in the "About us" section. Yep, they are
> endorsed by Ms Magazine...oh the horror the horror.
>
> With a name like the Good Men Project, some folks assume
> that we’re going to tell men how to be good. This assumption
> has led at least one media critic to suggest that we might be
> a “conservative culty thing.”
Ha. As if scolding men isn't what the secular leftist culty thing
known as feminism is about. Man-bashing, alas, knows no
political boundaries.
> Others have called us “feminists” because, we suspect,
> we celebrate, publish, and appear to be very popular
> with women. (Ms. Magazine said we are “what enlightened
> masculinity might look like in the 20th century.”)
"20th century," eh? See, they are a throwback to the past -
about 4 decades back in the past by my reckoning. Oh, and
Hugh Hefner also celebrates, publishes, and appears to be
very popular with women - he also funded feminist groups
too. And man-bashing is also hugely popular with feminists.
> We suppose we are a difficult magazine to categorize,
> and that’s exactly how we like it.
Not difficult at all; they're SNAG wannabees.
--
To be a liberal [US style] you have to believe...
gender roles are artificial but being gay is natural.
Rush Limbaugh, _The Limbaugh Letter_, August 1999
Masculist
> Tom as "Masculist" <mascul...@gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:10d175dd-0e64-4e13...@34g2000pru.googlegroups.com...
Thanks Society!
Tom
PolishKnight
"Society" <Soc...@feminism.is.invalid> wrote:
>
> Tom as "Masculist" <masc...@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:10d175dd-0e64-4e13...@34g2000pru.googlegroups.com...
> >
> > Tom as "Masculist" wrote:
> > >
> > > They seem feminist to me. Anyone know about this
> > > Good Men group?
>
> I don't know much about 'em but from the sample of
> their whining you provided, they appear to be some
> kind of throwback to the 1970's sensitive new age guy
> (SNAG) type - very much like Warren Farrell was
> when he wrote his (now embarrassing) 1974 book,
> _The Liberated Man_.
>
> > Here's what they say in the "About us" section. Yep, they are
> > endorsed by Ms Magazine...oh the horror the horror.
> >
> > With a name like the Good Men Project, some folks assume
> > that we’re going to tell men how to be good. This assumption
> > has led at least one media critic to suggest that we might be
> > a “conservative culty thing.”
>
> Ha. As if scolding men isn't what the secular leftist culty thing
> known as feminism is about. Man-bashing, alas, knows no
> political boundaries.
Hello Society,
I'm know I'm going to enrage both sides of the political spectrum here
but it has to be noted that the left is more wedded to man-bashing than
the right is because they view (correctly) women to be more amiable
towards the welfare state and easily manipulated with emotional, smug,
self-serving dogma.
Having been around the block, I now can totally deflate a feminist with
the ease of swatting a fly. The true-believer male leftists, they're a
bit more work. They're smarter and much better at cognitive dissonance
while even smart women don't put the effort into constructing
sophisticated arguments.
In some ways, I've found it to be more useful to discuss (ok, trash)
feminism with true believer female feminists because they so quickly
cave in one way or the other.
> > Others have called us “feminists” because, we suspect,
> > we celebrate, publish, and appear to be very popular
> > with women. (Ms. Magazine said we are “what enlightened
> > masculinity might look like in the 20th century.”)
>
> "20th century," eh? See, they are a throwback to the past -
> about 4 decades back in the past by my reckoning. Oh, and
> Hugh Hefner also celebrates, publishes, and appears to be
> very popular with women - he also funded feminist groups
> too. And man-bashing is also hugely popular with feminists.
And Hillary Clinton was cooing over the builder of the Ground Zero
mosque or "community center" and couldn't get a veil on quick enough.
It's interesting how the "progressive" agenda of the last century became
so "reactionary", isn't it? :-)
Sigh, I wish Parg hadn't left. She used to compare right wings to the
"Taliban." Marg is still on USENET and I found an article by her making
fun of someone objecting to the Ground Zero mosque.
> > We suppose we are a difficult magazine to categorize,
> > and that’s exactly how we like it.
>
> Not difficult at all; they're SNAG wannabees.
>
> --
> To be a liberal [US style] you have to believe...
> gender roles are artificial but being gay is natural.
>
> Rush Limbaugh, _The Limbaugh Letter_, August 1999
What a delightfully astute observation! Did Rush come up with this on
his own?
regards,
PolishKnight