The following was first published in July 2012. It is presented here with slight modifications, to reflect changes in the author's thinking.
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There is a school of thought in male-friendly cyberspace which says "keep it apolitical". What this means is, that pro-male partisans should either stay away from established categories of political discourse (such as right-versus left), or stay away from extraneous issues which do not clearly pertain to feminism, men's issues and the like.
There is also a school of thoughtlessness in male-friendly cyberspace, which flaps its gums about all manner of things only marginally related (if at all) to feminism, men's issues and the like. That is for starters. What compounds the original difficulty, is that these same thoughtless ones voice all manner of indiscreet opinions -- which is politically unwise.
Clearly, these schools of thought are at odds with each other.
And they are quite right. You see, the point at issue, for them is message discipline -- a department of rhetorical
discipline. Message discipline is vital if you would craft a so-called
"movement" (political or otherwise) that draws upon topical issues as a
rallying point. If you aim to gather followers
and gain traction, you must stick to a pertaining set of issues and
govern your tongue when you speak of those things.
That said, and speaking as an outsider, I would submit that the so-called men's "movement" is nothing of the kind. Rather, it is a group of people, largely male, who are talking loudly about a variety of things. But all of this loud talk is like an orchestra with no conductor, where the musicians are out of tune with each other and playing different tunes anyway.
The general public, walking outside the orchestra hall, hears only a frightful racket from within. The bigoted bassoonist, the anti-semitic saxophonist, the conservative clarinetist, the anti-feminist flugelhorn player, the PUA piccolo player, and so on. It all runs together into a dreadful audio slurry.
And so the general public draws its varied conclusions about that sum total of weird noise, and those conclusions are often unfavorable. The general public, you see, deals in generalities and doesn't generally know what the hell is going on. Some of them may enter the building, and walk around, and talk to the musicians separately, and begin to form a more educated understanding. Yes, many of them do this to varying degrees. But many others never investigate further than the sidewalk and what they can hear from there.
Very well. The "men's movement" is no movement at all, but simply a lot of random motion. And such words as "MRA" and "MRM" are only ad hoc terminology. Figures of speech. Convenience words. Yet people persist in using these words because they are, well . . convenient! They simplify discussion, and even render discussion possible in the first place.
But these words also falsify the state of reality, and our enemies, the feminists, capitalize on this. All they must do, is fan the flames of doubt and distaste in the public mind. This, precisely, has been the feminist strategy. A smear job. Moral ghettoization. Guilt by proximity.
Briefly then, whoever simply talks against feminism will be called an "MRA", or a member of the "MRM".
Now, there is nothing wrong with talking against feminism. In fact, talking against feminism is one of the finest things a person can do. It is a noble thing. Feminism is a social cancer, and talking against it is part of the necessary process that will conduct toward the eventual liquidation of this cancer. So by all means, yes, talk against feminism!
By the way, when you merely "criticize" feminism from within feminism, that is not talking against feminism. Talking against feminism means talking AGAINST it, from an alien standpoint completely outside of its perimeter.
All hail anti-feminism!
But the trouble is, that whoever simply talks against feminism gets shoved into the same box, willy-nilly, with. . . oh. . . PUAs, expatriate pussy-hunters, conspiracy theorists, racists, anti-government radicals, tea-partiers, bonafide misogynists, and a passel of other people. I mean, people whose philosophical venn diagrams might overlap yours by a narrow slice at most. Admittedly, the inherent goodness or badness of those things will vary -- it is not my point to discuss their inherent goodness or badness. My point is that, like it or not, the words "MRA" and "MRM" have been crammed into the same jar with the motley crew listed above, even if there is no inherent reason why they should be. So if you identify as an "MRA", or even just get identified as one, then you will go there too.
Once more, to get identified as an "MRA" or an "MRM person", all you must do is to talk against feminism. That's it. After that, public ignorance, combined with feminist propaganda, will do the rest. And presto-chango, you are now a PUA or a Tea Party member even if you never remotely signed up for the likes of those.
Again, let's be clear that talking against feminism is a good thing. The point is, that you can do this either well or poorly in terms of political strategies -- and some people do it very poorly indeed.
But enough for the bad stuff. Now let's talk about sunbeams and silver linings.
I mentioned that the "MRM" is not a movement. That is a silver lining.
So what, then, is the so-called men's rights "movement", if not a movement? Get ready.
It is a microcosm of the human race. In other words, it is THE WORLD.
And so, it is not accountable for itself, any more than the world is accountable for itself. The world is simply the ecumenical human condition, with all of its lights and shadows, in toto. And the ecumenical human condition simply is what it is. We are all part of that ecumenical human condition, but as individuals our liability is limited.
Feminism, on the other hand, may be usefully defined as a movement, and for that reason can be held accountable as a movement. It is a part of the world, but it is not the world -- even though it pretends to be.
But no, feminism is merely an interpretation of what the world is, forced upon the world in defiance of what the world in fact is. Alternately stated, feminism is a violation of the natural order and the laws which compose that order.
Therefore every natural law or principle which feminist theory violates becomes our enlisted ally against the feminist regime itself. And so the character of our revolution is not just demographic or political. It is radically primordial.
Yes, that is us. We are the world, nay, the universe! And we are radically primordial.
In retrospect, we can see that this had to happen. It was predictable. There was a point beyond which feminist innovation could not push without the universe pushing back. And let me tell you, pushback from the universe can be a bitch!
So the "MRM" is not a movement as that word is generally understood, but a primordial pushback against feminism. And this involves a chaotic array of forces that can never be reduced to conventional categories of understanding. New categories are necessary.
Rather than calling the "MRM" a "movement" -- singular -- we should call it a complex of movements -- plural! -- which are now in process of formation. But as a whole, it lacks the structural unity that would subject it to accountability. As I have stated, it is a microcosm of the world, and is no more accountable for itself than the world is accountable for itself.
Feminist smear tricks are not working because anti-feminist numbers, worldwide, continue to swell. Every feminist slander campaign only helps the cause by giving it publicity. People drop by for a closer look, and plenty of them stick around. And then they pass the word along to their friends.
So the microcosm is growing, and merging with the macrocosm. The so-called "MRM", you see, merely represents that portion of the non-feminist sector which has become politically aware of itself. And the size of the self-aware portion increases on a snowballing growth curve.
In light of all this, what does it mean -- and what could it mean -- to keep things "apolitical"? Well for starters, I would call that entire realm of conversation a misunderstanding. For in fact this thing of ours has never been truly apolitical, and never will be. Seriously, what do we understand by "political"? Does politics mean the struggle for power, influence, and self-determination? All right, then how has our project ever been anything other than political? It has been, I submit, political indeed, for it has always focused on power and the accumulation of it by one device or another. Yes, that is what I call politics.
When people talk about keeping the so-called MRM "apolitical", they're voicing a fear lest it be caught up in established categories of power struggle, eventually being co-opted and rendered worthless for its original purpose. This is more commonly expressed, as I myself have done, by saying that the movement will pick up counterproductive baggage and sink beneath the weight of it.
Well in a strange way the good news becomes the bad news, and then the bad news immediately becomes the good again. The original good news is, that our numbers keep growing. Then the bad news is, that in return for the numbers we are taking undisciplined people and their counterproductive baggage on board. Yet directly from this bad news the original good news springs to life once more, namely, that in spite of such inconveniences -- and indeed because of them -- our numbers continue to swell. So the good and bad news feed upon each other like yin and yang.
The lesson we draw from this, is that ALL SORTS OF PEOPLE WANT TO BE LIBERATED FROM FEMINISM. Some of these are good people, some of these are bad people, some of these are indifferent people. But they want to be liberated from feminism, and they are worthy of getting what they want.
Every god-damned blessed one of them.
They needn't do one single precious thing in all the world to earn this or deserve this.
ALL people deserve to be liberated from feminism. Even the worst misogynist or rapist who ever lived deserves to be liberated from feminism.
The whole wide world deserves to be liberated from feminism.
All people should, ideally, get the justice they deserve for their misdeeds. But they should NOT get that justice under color of feminism.
They should get the justice they deserve under color of something else -- some other system of law or morality.
But NOT under color of feminism.
One more time: the whole wide world deserves to be liberated from feminism.
And you know what? The whole wide world will wake up to this, and demand it.
Feminism is a worldview slated for extinction.
So it is silly to fuss about the ideological purity of any so-called "men's movement", because the whole wide world is coming on board and there is simply no way that the whole wide world can be ideologically pure. Therefore, if some feminist wants to slander the so-called men's movement, you have only to demand "WHICH men's movement??".
And then, demand to be left in peace.
Because in the end, there is no such thing as the "men's movement". In its own right, it does not exist. So it is up to you to create it for yourself. There are ten, twenty, forty, a hundred different "movements", and when you start your own, that will bring the total to a-hundred-and-one.
What's that, you don't like the baggage that certain people are lugging on board? Fine. Pack your own bags onto your own wagon, and go your own road. With the growth of our numbers, we need no longer cling for dear life to any possible travelling companion. "We" can afford to be choosy.
Understand that every philosophy or life-system which grows beyond a certain mass will fractionate into schisms, and those schisms into schisms. The reason is simple. It is because the system naturally pulls in more and more of the world's variety as it grows numerically. It cannot possibly do otherwise, because the world is never monolithic.
But this is a good thing. It is a source of strength and a cause for celebration. To us, it means that our enemy can no longer smear us, because you can't smear something which is spread all over the landscape in the first place, can you? With our growing numbers and our variety of schisms, we are out of the box and we are everywhere, like a wraparound environment. It is impossible to shake a stick at us any more because you can't shake a stick in all directions at once. So by reason of our ambient character we are, or soon will be, in a position to define the cultural ambience and even control the discourse.
The pro-male project as we have known it, is the germinating bud of something larger called the non-feminist revolution. Feminism's war against the world started with the war against men, but that war quickly spread because it was impossible to contain the social toxin it generated.
The recent growth of anti-feminist feeling on the political Left signals a tectonic change in the political landscape. It signals that feminism's intellectual reign of terror is weakening among that cohort -- and the implications of such a development are perilous for feminism's power base. But this development, like so much else, was a predictable thing that had to happen and, in the context of primordial pushback, couldn't possibly not have happened.
I would suggest that some may wish to discard the rhetoric of "men's rights" in favor of a strict anti-feminism message:
http://counterfem2.blogspot.com/p/saf-manifesto.html
Very well. Disciplined work lies ahead, but I can see that the field of opportunity is wide open.
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