"Ella the Squirrel" asks me, "What future do you predict for the manosphere?" Well, Ella, first let me say I am incredibly flattered (and bemused) that you would think I have any idea. If you have read much of this blog, you'll realize that I --- like most old fogies Baby Boomers --- am much more engaged in reminiscing about the past (specifically, my own past) than speculating about a future, especially a hypothetical future that I am, every day, less and less likely to be around for.
However, thanks for your question. Let me haul out my reading glasses crystal ball, and give your query an honest crack.
Hmm... I'm not seeing much here, Ella. The future looks cloudy, with a strong possibility of rain -- whoops, that's the local weather forecast! Never mind...
I'm still not seeing a damn thing, Ella. Perhaps that means that the MRM (Male Rights Movement) doesn't have a future. Maybe because it doesn't have a present? By that I mean it doesn't exist as a movement at all, but rather as a symptom -- a symptom of severe post-Reaganomics social / economic distress. As you no doubt know, the "manosphere" is a loose confederation of PUAs (pick up artists and gamers), MGTOW (men going their own way), and MRAs (male rights activists, or, as Paul Elam of "A Voice for Men" would have it, MHRAs). Feminists and other intelligent, thoughtful-type people (who may not identify themselves as feminists, but, frankly, who are) clump them together, recognizing that they are linked by a common thread of misogyny (= fear and loathing of women) w/ a big round dollop of racism.
What also unites the followers of the "manosphere" blogs is that they are really, really unhappy (frustrated) + really, really stupid. What unites the leaders of the "manosphere" (i.e., the writers of the blogs) is they are, for the most part, utter and abject social failures w/ outsized senses of entitlement, whose only experience of (or hope for) recognition is in being followed by... well, by a bunch of desperate morons. (And these days recognition (for whatever reason) = success, hence the phenomena of reality television "stars" and the fact that news media have become little more than celebrity gossip mills.)
The leaders of these manosphere blogs (Roosh, Roissy, Price, Elam, Forney, et al.) eke out slender livings by pandering to an audience of losers. And I call them "losers" not in anger, but in pity: young (or developmentally delayed) white guys who are being cast out by a global economy that no longer values them, or rather, that is no longer willing to accord them privilege simply by virtueof being white + male.
They perceive themselves as being "overtaken" by women and by brown people. The reality is that they are, for the first time in thousands of years, simply being forced to compete with those "minorities" on an increasingly level playing field. (Still, it has to be pretty scary. "Who stole my cheese?" I mean, I can only imagine...)
I am not without sympathy. But then, I've always been kind of a softy.
I was reprimanded over at manboobz for calling these guys "dinosaurs" who were heading for extinction (because I was being too hard on the dinosaurs, as I recall). But I will resurrect that poor analogy, nonetheless. The "manosphere" may survive, but the so-called "movements" it purports to be incubating will not. Oh, I'm sure there will always be a place for lonely guys to give each other dating advice, just as (for some inexplicable reason) girls keep buying Cosmopolitan magazine. Just cuz when we're young, we're horny and clueless... The Men's Rights Movement in its present incarnation will go the way of the KKK and the John Birch Society, increasingly marginalized and irrelevant. The legitimate grievances of the MRM (fathers' rights, acknowledgement of sexual and domestic abuse of men) will be subsumed under the broader liberal agenda (and I predict feminists doing a lot of the legwork in those regards). Men Going Their Own Way? There have always been a portion of involuntary celibates (of both genders) and "hermits" (of both genders), and nothing necessarily "wrong" with that: some people just aren't suited to "coupling", yet still enjoy rich and rewarding, albeit eccentric and somewhat lonesome, lives. Of course, to a great extent, the "manosphere" is a phenomenon of the internet. People are (I certainly am!) still thrilled to be able to "connect" to others with similarly "esoteric" interests. The internet has made it possible for people with relatively uncommon conditions or identities to find one another, to connect, to share, and to build on that. I'm not trans, but my Best Beloved is. How we envy the trans kids today, who have so much more information (and power) at their fingertips! How different would my SO's life have been, had she known she was so far-from-alone in the world? The internet has in this way fueled social justice movements, by bringing people together. Of course, the dark side to this is that the internet also brings together people who are marginalized (or feel themselves to be unfairly disadvantaged) in a very different way, and provides them with a refuge, an answer. In the case of the "manosphere" boys, that "answer" is scapegoating women (and minorities) for their troubles. Paradoxically, the internet also isolates, and draws already-isolated people into cults. And ultimately does them great disservice. But the "manosphere" is ultimately likely to remain primarily an internet phenomenon because it cannot stand up to public scrutiny. In the court of public discourse, the New Misogynists will lose. That explains why they are so ambivalent about straying outside of the "intertubes" into the "real world." And why, aside from their kamikaze-style leaders, most members scrupulously avoid having their real identities known: most people are not willing to commit social suicide.
To publicly identify oneself with this stuff (as Roosh has, in essence, admitted on more than one occasion) = to burn one's bridges forever. Elam and Price are old farts, so who cares? On the other hand, Roosh and Forney are relatively young -- yet they have tattooed their bigotries and hatred onto their identities more permanently and damnably than any white supremacist ever tattooed his face. There is as yet no laser surgery powerful enough to erase the evidence they have strewn upon servers across the world that they are, simply, terrible people...
Returning to the "patriarchy" is a lost cause. The followers of the manosphere, however much they may enjoy indulging in false nostalgia, know that the tide of the world is irrevocably turning against them, and the few of them willing to be swept out to sea for such a lost cause will be remembered with the approximate admixture of pity and contempt as we now accord the long-dead soldiers of the Confederacy: the poor, stupid, deluded bastards! Does this answer your question?
I'm a cemetery freak, and any trip to Europe will have to include visits to Highgate in London and Pere Lachaise in Paris.
Today I was watching the documentary "Forever," about people who visit Pere Lachaise, and was introduced to one of its residents, a singer I had never heard: Danielle Messia. Of course I immediately bought one of her CDs and have been listening to it all afternoon. Although my French is pretty bad, I do love me a good chanson, and this one is damn fine: sad and brave and heart-breakingly defiant.
One of the issues the MRM brings up a lot is child support, and how unfair it is that men have to pay it.
I am not unsympathetic to men who have to pay child support for children they never wanted. I think it is unethical for a woman to get pregnant on purpose (or accidentally on purpose) when she knows that the male partner is not on board. However unethical that is, it is not illegal, nor could it be. What they tend to overlook is that the support is to the child, not the woman, and no one reasonable can disagree that the child is the one utterly blameless party in these fiascos.
I am also sympathetic to parents who legitimately struggle to make their payments because, for example, they have lost their jobs. States need to respond in adequate and timely manners to adjust their responsibilities and help keep them out of arrears.
Notice that I have carefully used the term "parents" (not "fathers") above. That is because women pay child support, too, a fact that we often overlook, although it is increasing (as are the penalties against "deadbeat" moms). The custodial guardian is not always the man; it's not even necessarily either of the biological parents. It's sometimes the child's grandmother, or another relative.
I was reminded of that today when I overheard a female student, who appeared to be in her early twenties, tell a classmate how happy she was to have finally found a job that would enable her to start paying her child support regularly. She was $7000 in arrears, a significant sum for a girl working as a waitress while trying to graduate from college. What struck me was her positive and determined attitude about her responsibilities. She didn't think the system was unfair; she didn't seem to have an ounce of resentment. On the contrary, she was clearly looking forward to meeting her obligations.
Gosh, I get tired of hearing MRAs whine about the lack of shelters for male victims of domestic violence. Some years ago, a younger and more eager I spent a long dark winter in rural Colorado volunteering for victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault. Mainly this consisted of being called in the middle of the night to drive twenty or thirty miles to meet a strange woman at a desolate McDonalds or in the back room of a police station. It also involved accompanying women if their cases went to court. As an advocate, I held hands, explained legal procedures, made referrals to social services, and fetched coffee (in other words, provided moral support). The area in which I was living had an appalling rate of DV. Unemployment was high (end of a local shale oil boom), couples were stranded in their houses for weeks on end due to the frigid temperatures, and alcoholism and drug abuse were rampant. It didn't take long before I burned out. I probably imagined I was going to help pluck women like Tracey Thurman from the jaws of death, but my experience was that most of the victims were simply not very sympathetic characters, nor were they entirely "innocent" in terms of their roles in instigating violent squabbles. Many of them had mental illness or chemical dependency issues that no amount of well-intentioned feminist theory or police intervention could address. And most of them didn't want the kind of very limited help I could provide.
Once they had been stitched up and sobered up, most of them made beelines back to their SOs. There were so many things wrong with their lives (boiling down to poverty + an utter lack of imagination) that their relationships with their husbands or boyfriends were the only sources of stability and "love" that they knew, and even when that relationship was as dysfunctional as hell, it was what they could count on.
The area I was in didn't have a shelter at the time. Instead, we relied on a string of "safe houses" which were the modest abodes of volunteers like myself. The unsung heroines who opened their homes as havens were periodically exposed (often by the very women they harbored), so we were always scrambling for more. It was exhausting, unrewarding effort for little payoff, and although I admired the director and her valiant team -- all unpaid volunteers BTW -- I soon conceded that I was not the right person for this particular job.
I know from personal experience that men, too, are assaulted by women. A few years ago I dated a man who had a history of being struck by his female partners. He recounted one prolonged argument with a girlfriend which had culminated in her "cold cocking" him in the head with a telephone, knocking him senseless. He didn't press charges, and I was appalled to learn that this episode had hardly diminished his attraction to her -- although it was, in retrospect, a kind of red flag in terms of our own prospects. (In fact, although I was never remotely tempted to assault him myself, he was so maddeningly passive-aggressive that I broke up with him within a few tempestuous months.)
As these anecdotes suggest, I am no saint. I am impatient and easily frustrated by people who can't, or won't, take a strong stance for themselves. And I recognize the line between victim and perpetrator can get mighty blurry when it comes to domestic violence: in most cases I was involved with, the woman was just as likely to have "provoked" the violent altercations that resulted in her fleeing her partner. The problem was the size/strength differential that resulted in "him" with a scratch down the side of his face, and "her" with a broken jaw. Most of the male "perps" were not so much "evil" as really, really dumb -- too dumb to recognize how trapped they were in their own cycles of inchoate rage, dependency, helplessness, and lashing out -- despite repeated, predictable negative consequences... 200 pound toddlers, for the most part.
Of course, regardless of gender, or relative culpability, all people need refuges when they are at risk of injury in their homes. I just don't want to be the person to create and staff these shelters. So why are the MRAs who demand male DV shelters pissed off that feminists like me haven't made that happen yet?
Well, why haven't you done anything more than complain? Paul Elam and John Hembling are paying themselves salaries with the money some of you are donating! It's been years without any "activism" beyond harassing feminists and one very lackluster demonstration. Why aren't any of you challenging AVfM's handling of your contributions? Could it be that you don't really care as much about showing "compassion for men and boys" as you do "fucking up [women's] shit"? Listen, guys, I'll be the first to donate $20, canned food, and a big box of toiletries. You only need to get out from behind your computers, and start raising some funds. In my neck of the woods, there are a number of thrift stores that support shelters for women, so there's a suggestion for you. Put down your gym weights, pick up your tool boxes, and start renovating that safe house for teh menz that your community so desperately needs. You can do it! (And if you need advice or support, I'm sure you can find some nice feminists to help you -- you have only to ask.) Just for God's sake quit your bloody whiningbefore I [sarcasm alert] really give you something to whine about!
