MRA are making many efforts to cooperate with feminism. Many MRAs are feminists shamed and kicked out for not being radical enough. So far we got only acknowledgement that "men has issues too", that is kind of success.
I will not comment on article itself. I could go on any feminist conference and cherry-pick many statements.
> Many MRAs are feminists shamed and kicked out for not being radical enough.
Is feminism an institution? I was not aware anyone could be "kicked out" of feminism for not being sufficiently radical. I would know, being a not-particularly-radical feminist myself.
At any rate, this is quite dubious. The only MRAs I know of are not even close to being merely "insufficiently radical feminists," except perhaps in the same sense in which Catholics are insufficiently radical atheists.
Note that by "MRAs" I mean people who self-identify as part of the MRA movement. There are, I'm sure, many people out there who are aware of and interested in men's issues who could also qualify as feminists. Such people, such as myself, choose not to be identified with the MRA movement because of all the misogyny that travels with it.
I suppose you might make the argument: "why not refuse to be identified with the feminist movement for the same reason"? There are (at least) two reasons. First, feminism is less associated with a small particular people and institutions than MRA. This may just be because feminism is bigger. But, whatever the cause, I don't feel that identifying myself as a feminists as closely associates me with objectionable activities at the fringes. More to the point, I simply don't think most feminists generally are as virulently anti-man as MRAs are anti-woman. Again, maybe this is attributable to the size of the movement. I know that there are feminists who are virulently anti-man, but I think they make up a small fringe of the overall feminist movement. Ultimately, though, this is just a question of what labels one is or is not comfortable taking on.
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&sl=auto&tl=en&u=h...
Feminism is not just 'bigger' it is multi-billion dollar industry. MRA is just a few web forums which barely managed to organize single conference.
If you disagree with some radical feminists, perhaps it is time to tell them, instead of bashing on MRAs.
Also, you'll need to do better than an article from, of all places, avoiceformen.com that merely assumes the existence of a feminist institution that you can be kicked out of and blames it for a man's suicide.
I'm certainly not aware of any such institution and I'm a feminist! Perhaps my membership card has just been lost in the mail? Or gasp! maybe it's because I'm a man and the mother ship is just not giving me the time of day? That explains a lot, actually...
Perhaps you have no membership card because you never applied anywhere. But some people are more involved.
This is more than a mere semantic distinction since any arbitrary feminist group can have whatever arbitrary rule or prejudices it likes without those views' being imputable to all feminists. I certainly don't accept that FEMEN Sweden speaks for all (or even many) feminists or that being kicked out of FEMEN means you can't be or aren't a feminist.
It is hard to take MRAs seriously because they include people who say things like this.
This sort of language discredits any actual argument that feminists might actually have by reducing them to contentless, stereotyped feminine shreiks. That's seriously sexist. And at the same time, it mocks women's legitimate fears of being, you know, actually raped.
And men have legitimate fears of being raped as well.
- Someone suggest that men could have more visitation rights to his children.
- Radfems answer that most men are rapists and they could rape their own children.
- Author answers that it is not true, and gets shamed as rape apologist etc.
Any more questions?
Men teachers or baby-sitters practically does not exist anymore, exactly for this reasons. So "screams rape" fits like a glove.
1) You're making some incredible generalizations; this happens "every time"?
2) You started out by claiming "feminists" do that and when pressed, you immediately retreat to "Radfems". So it turns out that even by your own admission, it's not feminists who scream rape every time; it's only the radical ones.
3) Since you're presenting this hypothetical anecdote and using it as evidence, I'll introduce my own and point out that I just checked the faculty list for my old school (5th grade to 12th) and the teacher faculty was maybe 40 percent male. Thinking back to when I was in middle and high school, the current ratio seems about the same as it was back in the early 2000s. So I'm not seeing your claim about the absence of male teachers or babysitters.
I will be very surprised if you can document for us a single time that this has ever happened.
It would be nice, though, to hear some specifics about what mainstream feminists you find objectionable so we can have a discussion based on something other than generalizations.
Realistically, I don't believe anyone can speak for everyone. Politics isn't about imposing an ideology on society, it's about different groups coming together and negotiating rules that they can all live with. Feminists speak solely for women; as a man, I don't expect feminists to speak for me. And that's fine.
I don't consider myself a feminist just because I want to advantage women. That would be pretty dumb, since I am a man. I consider myself a feminist precisely because I am interested in advancing justice and fairness, an endeavor that, given our history, requires particular focus on the situation of women. I would certainly not support a proposal that I knew to disadvantage men and advantage women unfairly. And I would hope that those who are more focused on men's rights would do the same. I frankly don't think that we will get very far if we take the adversarial approach that you describe, at least in part because women, for historical reasons, will inevitably be disadvantaged in that sort of process. In other words, the approach you describe -- if it is to be fair -- assumes that all parties arrive at the political barraging table with equal power. But that is very far from the case.
It may well be true that there are feminists out there (presumably women) who, like you, see themselves as engaged in a self-interested struggle against the opposite sex. But, speaking for my feminist friends, I don't think that is true of many, let along most of them.
I'm a pragmatist. Ideologies never work. Ideologues are either hypocrites or worse. People whose entire worldview is based on the idea that women are uniformly and universally oppressed by men are never going to achieve gender equality on their own. Even a reasonable and moderate feminist like yourself won't go out of their way to help men even when that's the just and equal thing to do--or at least not as much as they will women. I don't mean that as a slight, but it's just a manifestation of bias. The way to prevent bias isn't to just trust some ideology or movement to be free of it; it's to openly acknowledge biases and vested interests and work in the spirit of mutual benefit.
The irony is, though, that instead of fighting these traditional gender roles, some men's rights activists seem to embrace the roles and then confuse diminution of those gender roles with the diminution of men. If more of them could embrace the goal of the abolition of traditional gender roles, and stop speaking in stereotyped terms about the need to promote and respect "masculinity" as though it were synonymous with male-ness, I think they would find that feminists (good ones, at least) are their greatest allies.
(This applies only to the "men's-rights" activists who don't say things like "All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married a–holes" and "Doesn’t no mean yes?" Clearly some men characterize themselves as "man's-rights activists" because it provides, in their view, a framework for legitimizing their antecedent misogyny.)