Various Perspectives on the First International Conference on Men’s Issues

The last weekend in June, in Detroit (fittingly), the first ever International Conference on Men’s Issues was held. Monica Hesse, who covered the conference for the Washington Post, summed up the 150-200 (mostly white) men who attended: "the binding theme was that almost everyone here had experienced a version of a 'red pill moment'." For those unfamiliar with the jargon of the men's rights activists (MRAs), think back to The Matrix:


For MRAs, a red pill moment is the moment in which a man wakes up and realizes he has become a second class citizen in this country. It's the moment he realizes that feminism has taken away his rights, his freedoms, and his privilege. The red pill crowd has a very popular Reddit site.

Unfortunately, for the majority of MRAs, taking their red pill seems to lead not only to anti-feminism, but to a lot of anti-women rhetoric as well.

As you might guess, this conference was an easy target for pro-women and pro-feminist sites to make fun of and ridicule, and Jezebel took up that task with enthusiasm.

The conference was organized by Paul Elam, who hosts the MRA site, A Voice For Men. According to Jessica Roy's article for Time Magazine, Elam wanted speakers and attendees to take a more press-friendly tone:

At Elam’s request, the majority of the speakers were noticeably less anti-woman in person than many are in their writings or speeches elsewhere.

For what it's worth, Roy did the best job of trying to provide fair and balanced coverage, but apparently Elam took issue with a couple of tweets she posted during the conference, moments when she was dismayed by the commentary she was seeing.

We Hunted the Mammoth posted about Elam's response to the tweets:

Elam, evidently incensed about a handful of sarcastic remarks that Roy tweeted during the conference, denounced her as, among other things, a “hack,” “a liar and bigot” and a practitioner of “journalistic scumtardery,” whatever that is. Commenters on A Voice for Men happily joined in the hate, denouncing her as an “airhead,” a “disgrace and a liar,” “lil’ miss hair-o’or-her-eyes,” and a “little asshole [who] will look like a right nazi in five-to-ten years time.” Amazingly, no one pulled out the c-word. Evidently AVFMers are still on their best behavior.

So much for being on their good behavior.

It's unfortunate, as Tom Hawking notes at Flavorwire, that the MRAs are so caught up in hating feminism and feeling like victims - their anger and hatred do more harm to men than they do to help men.

There are many things to dislike about r/RedPill types. Many, many things. But here’s the issue: quite apart from their hatefulness, they do their “cause” — such as it is — absolutely no good at all. As with extremists in many other areas, they hijack and polarize a discussion that is worth having.

And it IS a discussion that needs to be held, with all sides open and curious, not convinced they are right and highly cynical of other perspectives.

The blog ANIMAL New York posted the conference as well, but they took the added step of including some of the key comments from the speakers. Interestingly, many of the most cogent points have nothing to do with feminism. The realms where feminism has probably done men the most harm is in family courts, education, and related areas.

Quotes from Warren Farrell:

• Millions of boys are getting their dopamine fixes from performing in video games, but not performing in real life.
• With the increased amount of video porn, boys who are failures to launch, who aren’t doing well in school, notice that not many girls are interested in them. But they have an easy escape: Video porn, 250 million options… free.
• Men questioning work full time is to this day extremely difficult especially if the man is successful.
• Why, when girls are doing much better than boys, do we have a White House council on women and girls, but no White House council on men and boys?

None of these points can be pinned on women or feminism. Farrell has been one of the loudest and most visible voices on the plight of boys in education and as young men. However, if one looks at the issues he is most known for (some of which Elam presents below), in The Myth of Male Power, these are social structures and products of power differential.

Even Paul Elam had some good points in this area:

• Men are 93% of all workplace fatalities. They’re currently 97% of combat deaths. They’re the majority of the homeless.
• Men are sentenced on average to 66% more time in prison than women for the same crime, and are twice as likely to be incarcerated in the first place, again, for the first time. It is a gap even wider than that between black and white.

It's the 1%, the wealthy elite, who are the owners of all the industries in which men are most likely to be killed (mining, oil fields, etc) and these owners fight every effort to regulate safety. Furthermore, the military that sends these men to die in battle is run almost exclusively by men. As Hawking pointed out on Flavorwire:

The prison industrial complex uses male bodies as free labor for the enrichment of a privileged elite… who are pretty much entirely white men.

When Elam gets deeper into his message, however, there is a more direct attack on the feminist assault on male rights:

• Men are subject to a family court system so corrupt and biased it represents the biggest rollback of civil right since Jim Crow. It is a system that destroys the lives of men and children by severing their bond with calculated indifference. Parental alienation is real and rampant. Sadly there is now a profit to be made in the destruction of our families.
• Under the false banner of the best interests of the child, fathers are forced to pay child support as though it were mafia protection money.
• Men are starting to abandon the idea of marriage in the first place. It’s a form of risk management for their lives.
• Despite a compelling body of evidence, that men and boys are victims of domestic and sexual assault at rates far exceeding what most would think, the current gender paradigm ignores this and dedicates to resources all but exclusively to women.

The issue of the family court system is one place where I have seen good men lose to the system, even when the mother originally abandoned the child to the father. Then she decides she wants custody and wins, three years after walking away from her child. I have seen other fathers get jerked around in court by the ex-wives, forced to pay more child support because the mother "won" more direct time with custody.

The family court system claims that equal custody is the preferred norm, but it seldom plays out that way in court, especially if there are lawyers involved.

On that issue, I am all-in with the MRAs, except that I blame a patriarchal society that sees women as the care-providers and men as the bread-winners. Until that model changes the family court system is unlikely to change.

I'm also all-in on the lack of support for men who are victims of domestic violence (and men tend to be more often the victims, while women tend to be more often injured). This is a topic that will continue to be an issue until the stigma disappears on a man who says his wife or girlfriend beat him up. Part of this problem is due to law enforcement - if they are called to a DV scene and the male is the victim, they are much less likely to take it seriously unless the female is holding a knife or something and he is bleeding.

Elam gets caught in a double standard in his comments above. On the one hand, it should be easier for men to have or get custody of their children, while on the other hand, if a man doesn't want to be a father he should not have to pay child support. Sorry, man, but if you're going to play in the rain, you need to wear a jacket. Failure to do so makes you responsible for anything that grows.

Diana Thompson, one of five women who spoke at the conference, made some good points about the family court system, and she did not blame feminism to make them:

• I’ve seen many of the grievances men and father’s face; blocked visitation and unenforced visitation orders, move-away moms who use geography to drive father’s out of their children’s lives, acceptance by the court of false accusations of domestic violence or child abuser, especially as a basis for denying custody or even contact between the father and child.
• Our current family court system is very adversarial. The only winner being the billion dollar divorce industry paid for by our children, even though study after study shows that children without fathers are at higher risk for social pathology such as: criminality, teen pregnancy, and drug use and there’s many more.

Again, these are very valid points. The system is broken and the people who are getting rich off of this system, who are invested in keeping it broken, are the divorce lawyers.

Another of the female speakers, Suzanne Venker, made some points I have often made on this blog - the television and film industry routinely portrays men and fathers as idiots.

• The lack of respect for men is palpable. The message coming from the media, Hollywood, and America’s universities, is that men are superfluous at best, dangerous at worst.
• America routinely paints a portrait of the idiot husband whose wife is smarter and more capable than he. That is a war!

But then, Dr. Helen Smith has to go and say something stupid:

• We’ve seen women with increased reproductive freedom, married men often require a note from their wives before a doctor will even perform a vasectomy.

I have never heard of this happening, and I know several men who have had this procedure. But what I have heard about, over and over, is how doctors (always male) will refuse to do a tubal ligation for a woman under 40, because she's "going to change her mind" and want kids. How disrespectful. If a woman says she does not want kids, or is through having kids, then the doctor needs to respect her wishes. She's an adult, she can make adult decisions.

One of the few speakers who genuinely seems to be an idiot was Mike Buchanan, who wants a "Men's Rights Party" in British politics. But he goes off the rails more than the rest of the speakers:

• We had for more than 30 years across much of the developed world, unholy alliances between states and radical feminism.
• Now radical feminism is without doubt a female supremacy ideology that’s driven by misandry; the hatred for men and boys.
• Legislation is routinely drafted to advantage women and disadvantage men.
• Boys are being relentlessly disadvantaged by an evermore feminized education system.
• Apparently, we need more female engineers. I’ve never quite worked out why.
• It’s time to end divorce as a route to financial enrichment.
• We’re calling for compulsory paternity testing at birth, so at long last we’ll find out just what the rate is.

The only point here that has any truth to it is that boys ARE being disadvantaged by a feminized educational system. Women greatly outnumber men as teachers in the earliest school grades, and this the age at which boys are being given ADHD meds are alarming rates. Even worse, a lot of schools have done away with recess - and if you want to make it hard for boys to learn, don't let them run around and burn off energy.

There are a lot of areas in which I am in agreement with the MRAs that there are problems and we need to fix them. But I refuse to associate with them because of their penchant for rage and vitriol. That is not how change gets done.

I have aligned myself with an "equal rights for all people" agenda, a belief in equality that sees gender as only one variable among many. And because I support equal rights for women (and men), mothers take me more seriously when I speak about the need for boys to burn off energy before sitting down to do homework, or that it's okay if your son learns how to express his emotions rather than act them out.

If we move away from the truly radical feminists on one side and the truly radical MRAs on the other side, the remaining 90% of us have much more in common than we do in difference. If we start from that place of common interest, we can affect some meaningful change. 

If you want to read more about the conference from a variety of sources, here are some links.

• What I Learned as a Woman at a Men’s-Rights Conference, Time, by Jessica Roy
• Men’s rights activists, gathering to discuss all the ways society has done them wrong, The Washington Post, by Monica Hesse
• The First "Men's Issues" Conference Makes a Good Point. And a Lot of Bad Ones, Salon, by Laura Smith
• The Most Inane Moments from Last Weekend's Men's Rights Conference, Jezebel, by Madeleine Davies
• MRAs Aren’t Just Terrorizing Women — They’re Hurting Men, Too, Flavorwire, by Tom Hawking
• Inside The First International Conference on Men’s Issues, ANIMAL New York, by Bucky Turco
• Defenders of A Voice for Men tell Time magazine reporter “we have to SCARE you into listening,” you “stinky … human monkey”, We Hunted the Mammoth, by David Futrelle 

And two from the Hatewatch blog at the Southern Poverty Law Center:

• The First International Conference on Men’s Issues: Day 1, by Arthur Goldwag
• First International Conference on Men’s Issues: Day 2, by Arthur Goldwag

This sounds a lot like the MRAs in the U.S., but his agenda for men is hard to argue with.

TEDxLSE - Glen Poole - A New Gender Agenda

Glen Poole is a radical voice in the world of gender equality campaigning on issues like fathers' rights, men's health inequalities, male suicide, boys' educational underachievement, male role models and men and boys' personal safety. He first came to prominence as PR Director of Fathers 4 Justice and was described by the group's founder as "the most impressive campaigner" he'd ever met.

Glen is now the UK co-ordinator of International Men's Day and Strategic Director of The Men's Network, a dynamic social project based in Brighton and Hove that hosted the UK's First National Conference for Men and Boys in 2011.

Mark Greene Wonders If We Priviledge Women's Issues Over Men's Concerns

In a column over at The Good Men Project, Mark Greene wonders if we privilege women's issues over men's concerns, which is certainly something the men's rights advocates have been claiming for years. There is a lot to think about in this piece, and I am not sure I am clear where I stand on it yet.

One thing I do know is that I do not want - in any way - to see myself or men in general as victims of feminism, of patriarchy, or of anything else. I do not believe there is any power or healing in claiming a victim stance.

However, I do believe there is power in telling our stories, in fighting for equal rights for fathers, or in claiming a space in academia to study what it means to be a man. These are all valid issues, as is the domestic violence double standard that Greene raises here - I have seen it, as well. 

Regarding the Suppression of Men’s Issues

May 9, 2012 By Mark Greene

Mark Greene believes our male cultural history, the steps we took to get here, make ignoring boys and men as victims a likely outcome.

Excerpt (from a much longer article):

I want to address the question of whether or not women’s issues have purposely been (and continue to be) highlighted in a way specifically intended to disempower men, because I believe this question lies at the heart of the high level of reactivity from some men’s rights advocates.

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First let me say this. It would be naive to deny that some of us have bought into the gender wars. There will be numerous examples of incidental smoking guns on all sides. Some people will focus on these kinds of “evidence” to somehow prove an orchestrated effort to suppress men’s issues. No matter what side you’re on, there will always be examples of the intention to mislead and take advantage of the larger dialogue. Especially when there are vast amounts of public money at stake. But I believe our stunted and contentious discourse about men’s issues is mostly the result of long standing male cultural norms.

Our male cultural history, the steps we took to get here, made ignoring boys and men as victims a likely outcome. Only now are we starting to talk about men as being equally in need of society’s focus and resources. Imagining such an idea even twenty years ago would have been impossible. In part, because men refused to think of themselves as needing help. Whatever we have had to endure, the over riding cultural message was, endure it in silence.

Our current living generation of men, born from the 1920s on, spent decades responding to the world in either the angry or confident-macho modes. These were the two acceptable modes of expression by men when confronted with life’s challenges.  I suppose you can also toss in blind stinking drunk. But the fact is, there was no space in which men could express fear, or weakness, or talk about the abuse in their lives. In my father’s generation there was absolutely no space to discuss men as powerless victims. If things were bad you were expected to just punch back harder. “If you are too weak or stupid to avoid being a victim then its your own fault” seemed to be the prevailing wisdom. Never mind that some of us were just little children when bad things happened. Being tough was the answer to everything. And not that much has changed.

“Shake it off, crybaby.” When I hear that today at my kid’s soccer field, I look to see if its being said to a boy or a girl. It’s pretty much always a boy.

♦◊♦

The fact is women were culturally granted permission to weep. To show weakness and display emotions. To be victims who needed protection. (Even as they were, in some cases, victimizing men.)

But this discourse of victimhood is new for men. This space we have created in which to share our stories and our pain has no long cultural or historical roots. For men, it goes back maybe one generation and it stops. This is not a discussion I would ever expect to have with my father. These are new ways of speaking for men. New ways of being. And the stories that come pouring out are painful and angry and grief-stricken. They create rage and they cause us to lash out. In part because we are still getting a backlash when we do share our pain. The cultural rules about showing weakness are embedding deep in us and deep in those we share our beds with. Sometimes the strictest silencers are those closest to us. They prefer the old model. They don’t like scary stories and fear. Men are supposed to protect them from that.

♦◊♦

Sharing the stories of our victimhood is a double edged sword.  A slippery slope. Focusing on a personal history of powerlessness or victimhood, although a necessary step to moving past it, can be the equivalent of drinking poison. You can get stuck there. Forever.

Victimhood is a toxic state and one has to move past it or risk being drained and weakened by the very forces you are in opposition to. And so, if we as men (or women) are now empowered to tell publicly how we have been victimized, we should also be wary of staying in that place of victimhood only. Or for too long.

Read the whole article.