Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by tapitsbo » Sat Dec 05, 2015 2:11 am
by slomo » Sat Dec 05, 2015 2:44 am
tapitsbo » 04 Dec 2015 22:11 wrote:Just of curiosity, how would you feel about the previous situation in my neck of the woods (some decades ago) where men were legal "persons" and women were not?
Not trying to make some sort of didactic point, just curious about whether you think this disqualifies as hierarchical domination.
by slomo » Sat Dec 05, 2015 3:04 am
by 82_28 » Sat Dec 05, 2015 3:20 am
by backtoiam » Sat Dec 05, 2015 3:27 am
by tapitsbo » Sat Dec 05, 2015 3:48 am
by slomo » Sat Dec 05, 2015 4:28 am
tapitsbo » 04 Dec 2015 23:48 wrote:So sharia is internally justified and tumblr feminism is internally justified... Well I guess MRA movements are too
Many MRA concerns interestingly enough are about situations where existing equality before the law is not observed or enforced, much like corresponding feminist areas of focus
by Heaven Swan » Sat Dec 05, 2015 4:34 am
by Elvis » Sat Dec 05, 2015 5:04 am
American Dream » Fri Dec 04, 2015 7:55 pm wrote:Go ahead and join up with the cause, if you think they're cool!
by slomo » Sat Dec 05, 2015 5:20 am
Heaven Swan » 05 Dec 2015 00:34 wrote:A woman's viewpoint on the MRA movement:
Mancheeze
Critiquing the Manosphere
https://mancheeze.wordpress.com
by backtoiam » Sat Dec 05, 2015 5:42 am
So I'm happy to get a more nuanced understanding of this whole question; it's bound to come up at a cocktail party.
by American Dream » Sat Dec 05, 2015 11:33 pm
What are Reactionary Ideas? What are Reactionary Tendencies and Movements?
Reactionary ideas, broadly defined, are political beliefs that develop in response to social change and which seek a reversal of said change – usually in the form of a return to some idealized past. Often, reactionary ideas take root among socially dominant demographics (such as white men) in response to the struggles of oppressed or otherwise marginalized groups. More often than not, this phenomenon is associated with conservative, or right-wing political currents. This is, however, not always the case. For example, Stalinism and primitivism are two reactionary ideologies with roots in the Left.
In this article we speak mostly of reactionary tendencies. By this, we mean a loose collection of reactionary ideas, public forums, small organized groups, and other elements that have not yet coalesced into a full-scale reactionary movement. In this article, we describe working-class anti-Native sentiment, MRAs, and Islamophobia as tendencies, because they have not yet given rise to mass social movements to the extent that, for example, the US Christian Right or the global Wahhabist movement have. The difference between a tendency and a movement can be understood as the degree of organization, influence, and unity of purpose and action among the different reactionary forces present.
Reactionary tendencies are mass phenomena, engaging and mobilizing significant numbers of the working class. It is this fact, above all others, that makes them so dangerous; they present anarchists with the challenge of taking on a mass movement. Mass reactionary movements can be, and often are, led or directed by the ruling class. But they can also be autonomous from, and in direct conflict with the ruling class, forcing anarchists into what is sometimes described as a “three-way fight.”
What is at Stake?
Reactionary tendencies present a clear danger to anarchists, and a significant challenge to our ability to build class power. In a worst-case scenario, these tendencies could rapidly take on a mass movement character, forcing us into a three-way fight for which we are currently ill prepared. To be clear, this would be a fight which would take place on our streets, workplaces, and campuses, and our enemies would be made up of neighbours, co-workers and classmates. This is what it means to be in a three-way fight with the ruling class and a mass reactionary movement. Even if this scenario doesn’t come to pass, and today’s reactionary tendencies fail to crystallise into a mass movement (something which cannot be assumed), they nonetheless spread and reinforce divisions within the class – divisions that must be contended with if we are to build up working-class power.
Reactionary tendencies are currently on the rise across the globe. Some – such as far-right nationalist parties in Europe, the global Wahhabist movement, and the constellation of forces grouped under the Tea Party and Christian Right in the United States – have already established themselves as full-blown reactionary movements. Within this international context, we believe that the potential exists for the current cesspool of reactionary tendencies in Canada to consolidate, or otherwise develop into one or more mass reactionary movements. We feel it’s important to try and understand the dynamics driving this development, in order to help determine what role anarchist communists can play in the building of an effective response. We may already be in a race against time.
Men’s Rights Activism
The examination of MRAs as a tendency which is actively organizing to perpetuate patriarchal social relations began in Mortar Volume Two (Taking Account of our Politics: An Anarchist Perspective on Contending with Sexual Violence). Here we take it up again, with an eye to the role that this tendency might play in the development of a mass reactionary movement.
What is it?
In the late 1960s, social and political advances attributed to the struggles of the Women’s Liberation Movement led to the creation of a parallel Men’s Movement. This vaguely progressive, yet inadequate movement saw men attempt to analyze their experiences with patriarchy using a feminist lens. Unfortunately, the effort yielded paltry results, as both progressive and revolutionary men found little incentive to participate in long-term anti-patriarchy organizing with feminists. This failure produced a void that was filled by the initial manifestation of a reactionary movement against feminism. Men whose personal comfort and success often rested on the unpaid domestic work of women began to characterize feminists as threatening and selfish, because they felt their own problems, real or imaged, had gone unaddressed. The reaction to this perceived affront was the creation of a Men’s Rights Movement.
The current manifestation of MRAs, and their much larger base of allies and sympathizers, take positions on a panoramic range of issues including health care, family law, fathers’ rights, war, education, gender roles, gender identity, sexual orientation, the workplace, domestic violence, criminal law, prisons, abortion, rape, dating, and sex.
Gender Peace and the Disposable Male
Warren Farrell’s 1993 best-selling book, The Myth of Male Power: Why Men are the Disposable Sex was seminal to the development of MRAs into their contemporary tendency, as it popularized the idea that it is men, not women, who are disadvantaged, oppressed and “disposable.” Farrell, a former board member for the National Organization of Women, took a sharp turn to the right in the late 1970s over the issue of child custody, where reforms had been made which sought to equalize the legal framework of divorce.
In The Myth of Male Power, Farrell makes the argument that as individuals, men are seen as less socially valuable than women. Relying heavily on cherry-picked statistics to highlight many areas of life in which men objectively experience more risk to their personal safety and restrictions to their freedoms, Farrell’s reasoning is appealing to some; it is undeniable, for instance, that men compose the majority of prisoners, soldiers, and victims of workplace injuries. Foreshadowing the popularization of the then-nascent (and still scientifically-controversial) field of evolutionary psychology, Farrell conjectured that this fact was an evolutionary imperative that had derived from women’s role as child-bearers, which made them more valuable, in an evolutionary sense. Because a man can inseminate multiple women in a short timespan, whereas women must complete a nine month long pregnancy and all the risks of childbirth before they can conceive another child, the evolutionary argument follows that an individual man’s body is a more rational sacrifice when faced with the prospect outside danger.
Karen Straughan, Contributing Editor at A Voice for Men, advances this theory in a video blog entitled Feminism and the Disposable Male. Straughan posits that a sort of informal social contract was formerly in place, whereby men would accept these necessary conditions in exchange for more social power. However, she claims that feminism has disrupted this purported gender peace by allowing women access to social power (in the form of jobs, money, celebrity, etc.), while doing nothing to ameliorate the enhanced exposure to danger faced by men. “[M]en don’t even get our admiration anymore,” she concludes. “All they get in return is to hear about what assholes they are. Is there any wonder why they’re starting to get pissed off?”
Straughan elaborates on this broken arrangement in order to mourn the death of what she sees as an imagined “golden age” of gender peace, and to call on MRAs to reverse this process of male emasculation and victimization. Yet there is little MRAs can do to stop this trend – particularly if they continue to misidentify the source of their own declining living standards and social standing. The “grand bargain” between capitalism and sexism, whereby working-class men, by virtue of their sacrifices as the family provider, received, along with domination over women, higher wages than women, is being eroded by more profitable economic arrangements. Capitalism commodifies all people, and under this economic order anyone can be made disposable.
Six of One
It is well documented that the Fascist regimes of twentieth century Europe gained their initial base by exploiting mass anxieties of economic and social decline, and redirecting socialist and syndicalist programs towards right-wing nationalist ends. Since WWII, the Left has been on a perpetual look-out for any reconstitution of neo-fascist movements. In a number of countries situated within the economic peripheries of the European Union, this has indeed come to pass. However we must contend that in English-speaking North America, the issues that might otherwise have led to working-class support of neo-fascism have instead been taken up by a variety of reactionary tendencies that are liberal at their heart.
Contributing editor for Harper’s and Rolling Stone, and observer of right-wing movements Jeff Sharlet notes that many of the grievances that MRAs complain about are consistent with those of “late stage American capitalism” but, because liberal rhetoric is so easily and readily available to them, there is no reason to reach this far in their analysis.
Irreproachable concepts like equality, human rights, tolerance, and nonviolence are mobilized as patronizing, easily-digested substitutes for liberation. MRAs express considerable concern for issues that are also of central importance to revolutionary leftists. Prisons, war and workplace conditions are common topics of conversation. But instead of questioning the social utility of prisons, MRAs demand to know why incarceration isn’t more equitable; likewise, little reflection is given to why the state requires such a steady stream of dead men’s bodies, both civilian and in uniform. MRAs must be facing an epidemic of repetitive strain injuries from all the blogs that they’ve written on the economic troubles facing men today. And these problems are certainly real, given the rampant and ongoing capitalist restructuring, which continues to leave fewer and fewer working-class men able to support themselves and their families. Growing levels of unemployment, as MRAs rightly point out, cast a massive blow to the feelings of self-worth of men conditioned under patriarchy to feel that earning a wage is their primary responsibility. Yet instead of questioning the actual source of their economic trouble, capitalism, or the idea that each family unit is responsible for themselves, these people, in a stunning “correlation indicates causation” error (which the many “skeptics” who are sympathetic towards this movement should be ashamed of) blame a social movement whose militant and revolutionary tendencies actually seek to address these problems.
Do not mistake this for us saying that MRAs are actually misguided, would-be revolutionaries. They are, for the most part, unrepentant misogynists and class traitors who deserve to be treated as such. However, their striking use of liberal vocabulary is appealing to individual men (and women) who observe problems in their lives, and are in search of answers in the form of analysis and solutions. And once drawn in, their patriarchal impulses are strengthened and honed. MRAs are significant, not so much for their ideas in and of themselves, but for the seamless way in which they adapt their rhetoric to liberal ideology.
Power is still conceived in terms of domination over others, rather than as the capacity to make changes that benefit everyone. Women are disproportionately employed in precarious jobs, and presently take home only sixty-nine cents for every dollar a man makes in Ontario. Sexism fuels consumerist exploitation, and vice versa. MRAs will never offer an honest answer for young working-class men worrying about how they are going to make it – just as liberal mainstream feminism will never offer a viable means for liberation to working-class women.
Half a Dozen of the Other
The MRA movement is, at its heart, a liberal tendency that willfully misunderstands collective aspects of feminism and the quest for liberation. “Women make less money than men,” says feminism, but “I am unemployed, and make no money” says the MRA—who probably wouldn’t take a minimum wage casual position as grocery store cashier or after-hours office cleaner if it were offered to him, preferring instead to wait for the cushy IT job he was trained for. The movement also assumes that there is not enough to go around: not enough economic resources, not enough children, not enough emotional well-being, and that advances made by women as a whole must somehow detract from men.
Men’s rights activism is reactionary to the core. It offers its followers simplistic answers and a clear target for all that ails them. Its goal is to undermine progress and recoup the dismantling of patriarchal structures. Its praxis, while dishonest and misogynist, is attractive to men unsure of themselves and their future in these precarious times. Deliberate or not, MRAs have a developing relationship of mutuality with the political and religious right, despite the liberal nature of their vocabulary and strategy.
What is at Stake?
So far in North America, the mainstream political involvement of MRAs has been just about non-existent. Some of the MRAs’ loudest voices, like A Voice for Men founder Paul Elam, insist that politicians will never have a voice in their movement. There are hints of a change, however. For example the Canadian Centre for Men and Families, which is located in Toronto and opened its doors in 2014, has moved men’s rights activism away from the university and the electronic sphere, and onto “Main Street,” so to speak.
In the US, MRAs know that they can count on traditional conservative political actors to keep a slightly more publicly presentable anti-feminist agenda moving. For example, the Utah state legislature is presently debating definitions of rape, and considering for the record if engaging in sex with an unconscious individual constitutes rape. Definitions of rape and debates over what constitutes consent are a central issue for MRAs. Many MRAs want marital rape laws overturned, as they claim these laws violate the marriage contract that gives men the right to sex on demand from their spouse. They have support in Virginia, where a legislator claims that spousal rape is impossible, and that laws criminalizing it would unfairly damage men’s reputations if their accusations made it to court. Regarding men’s rights to abortions, a few US states already have pending legislation that would require written, notarized consent from the “father of the unborn child” before an abortion could be performed or induced.
Related to the issue of fatherhood and masculinity, the recent attention raised by the Black Lives Matter movement to the racist praxis of the North American law enforcement and criminal justice systems has racism apologists on the defensive. MRAs have chimed in by claiming that racism is not the issue. Some point to feminized school environments and the lack of “father figures” in Black households as the issue. World renowned neurosurgeon and conservative US presidential hopeful Dr. Ben Carson specifically charges feminists with removing male mentors from the formation process of boys at home and at schools. He maintains that young Black men are not learning to be subservient to authority, and thus neither are they able to exercise proper male authority. This, says the doctor, leads to criminal behaviour and to trouble with the police and this has nothing to do with racism. It “has to do with the women’s lib movement.” So the doctor`s diagnosis promotes an agenda that the MRAs strongly support, but won`t ever advance themselves via their misogynist tirades.
While Canada lacks a mass movement similar in nature and scope to the US Christian Right, the arguments put forward by MRAs have found a strong echo-chamber on the Internet, and often overlap with those of other reactionary tendencies, such as “New Atheists” and other secular Islamophobes. Their effective and innovative use of widely-held liberal values to manipulate feelings of male victimization pose a significant threat. This threat, while already acute, would be particularly dire should MRAs ever merge with other reactionary tendencies, thereby helping to instill a mass reactionary movement with a vitriolic and dehumanizing hatred of women.
Towards a Response
For anarchists, MRAs certainly present a point of contention – whether this comes in the form of individual misogynist attitudes sabotaging a group’s mass organizing efforts, or, when the need arises for anarchists to help defend against orchestrated hate campaigns. There might indeed be times when direct, physical confrontations with MRAs are in order. Of course those organizing more confrontational actions should do so with an understanding that MRAs make political hay by playing the, “see how these feminists oppress us” card. Shutting down or interfering with an MRA event can be an occasion for them to build support on a university campus – but then, so can a forum held without opposition. The important thing is that direct confrontational tactics should encourage others opposed to MRAs to confront them as well.
In organizing alongside neighbours on issues such as tenancy, worker justice, and police violence, one can see signs of a feminism that is rooted in the best of what feminism means. When a woman leads her fellow tenants in organizing against a slumlord, and they mount a successful rent strike, one sees people equipped to take on other oppressive men and patriarchal institutions as well. These actions, and others like them build confidence and a sense of power for those who participate. They point towards a rejuvenated militant feminism that can stand up to capitalist and patriarchal exploitative practices. As we’ve shown, MRAs will never offer an honest answer for the anxieties of young working-class men. This leaves us with organizers, activists and scholars like bell hooks, who to paraphrase, suggests that the struggle to end sexist oppression will succeed only by organizing with a commitment to bringing about a new social order by means of a social revolution. All that gets in the way of this must be contended with.
by slomo » Sun Dec 06, 2015 12:58 am
by Elvis » Sun Dec 06, 2015 1:11 am
slomo » Sat Dec 05, 2015 9:58 pm wrote:Here we go again. Lots of opinion. No data.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 175 guests
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group
Site design by Likely Arts based on "Deluxe" by Artodia.
