The Rationalist: Why I'm A Men's Rights Activist

In the last edition of the Rationalist, I explained to you in detail what my problems were with feminist orthodoxy in the modern age. My fear in doing that, however, is that I may very well have ended up giving you only half of my political ideology. Here is the other half: I am a men’s rights supporter.

I know. Shock and awe and those very well may be the kind emotions right now, are coming from your computer. There are few things worse that you could declare yourself to be on the internet. I don’t even really know why this is.

Maybe it’s the idea that Elliot Rodger, the psychotic mass murderer, has long been believed to be part of the movement. Maybe it’s RooshV, the noted “pickup artist” who is supposed to be part of the movement as well,  and his frankly backwards understanding of sexual consent. But whatever it is, saying you’re a men’s rights activist appears to be the end of any discussion.  

So on this edition of the Rationalist, we’ll look how I got here and saw if I can’t help dispel, one myth and one step at a time, how it is that I repudiated feminism and became a men’s right activist.

Firstly, let’s make our terms. I am not condoning RooshV. I am not condoning pickup artist subculture. But, and I think this part gets missed either by accident or by design, there is no evidence whatsoever that RooshV is an MRA. In fact, a cursory Google searches with the words RooshV+MRA clearly shows he has serious beef with the men’s rights movement, and they with him. So if we could, please, stop implying that pickup artist culture somehow is part of the Men’s Rights Movement that would be great.

While we’re on the subject of people who never were MRA’s, hi there the disease and burning-in-hell corpse of Elliot Rodger. It is only the desire of this blog to be professional, and no other reason, that I even bothered to pronounce your name or even use it. Because, if I am honest, I hold no great joy in knowing you ever existed. Your actions were beyond deplorable, and I am frankly happy that you are gone.

But, and this point again needs to be made as clearly as is possible, Elliot Rodger was not an MRA either. There is no evidence he subscribed to any of the well-known MRA channels on youtube, or ever was on the Reddit Men’s Rights forum. What we do know, unequivocally, is that Elliot Rodger was a member of a group called PUAHate which is an anti-Pickup Artist community. And to continue to use Elliot Rodger as a cudgel to bash the entirety of the men’s movement is disgusting, a fact made even more clear by the realisation that every serious MRA has denounced what was done out of hand almost immediately.

But enough about terms. You, if you’re reading this, didn’t do so with the idea that you wanted to hear about a long negotiation. You wanted to hear how I got here.

The answer to that is simple. I’m proud of being a man, and of being manly. I live in a world, increasingly, where the former can be thought of as a cute mental tic, and the latter as being deeply toxic.

At this point, we need to address the idea of what masculinity means to people in 2016. The mere act of googling the word masculinity leads you first to a dictionary definition via Wikipedia and then several treatises, of varying degrees of stridency, about how masculinity, and increasingly white masculinity, has always been the problem. It further assumes that masculinity is toxic, with sexual over-aggressiveness and violence built into the thought process of every man. Right now, if you’re a man, it is safe to say the idea of masculinity is no longer just shifting under your feet. It is sprinting at full speed, and increasingly, not in a direction I wish it were going.

It is going in a direction where young men are being told they have to be taught “not to rape,” as though somehow, all young men are built with the gene to commit one of the most horrible crimes in creation already and they have to be broken from the habit. Men don’t need that level of hand-holding and shaming around their sexuality because it’s not necessary. Only the monsters rape, and we should realize that. Women, of course, are never taught anything about how not to rape because they would never need to. It is not like female-on-male rape ever happens. 

It is going in a direction where whenever the issue of consent is brought up; it’s never from a place of “both parties need to make sure their desires are clearly communicated”, but is instead active consent where it is the man’s responsibility to get proven consent every single goddamned step along the way. It again assumes that a man can’t read body language, or tell when someone doesn’t want something. It's a 1-way street, because of course, all men secretly want sex and would consent to any goddamned thing a naked woman in front of them wanted to do. 

Close your eyes, if you can, and think of the last positive thing you heard about manhood. I will wait while you come up with the answer.

Then, in the next breath, think of how many times you have heard someone mock “male tears”, or use “mansplaining” to describe a man explaining anything, or mocking someone’s real feelings and desire not to be insulted as “fragile masculinity.”

Which column feels bigger to you?

That is why I can say that to be a man, increasingly, is to be told the following truism:  manhood is dumb, oppressive, and not even real. However, do not be too much of a wuss.

And yet, in the world we now find ourselves living in, men are killing themselves at higher rates than women and are less educated. In the United Kingdom, as a point of fact, suicide is the #1 killer of men at FOUR TIMES the rate of women. Meanwhile, women are more likely to attend college on scholarship and receive degrees.

Let me be crystal-clear and blunt: If, at any point, data existed where women were less educated, and in the same breath, were more likely to kill themselves you would know about it. Panels would be created, and cultural force would be brought to bear. Educational and mental health policy would be pored over with a fine-toothed comb to make it more friendly to women and girls.

And yet, when we bring this up, there is an immediate attempt to diminish it, tell us it’s not happening, and to let feminism handle it.

This last point needs to be addressed. If it can be reasonably argued that more people are feminist nowadays than have been in the past, and I believe that it can be, it is then quite difficult to argue that there is no need for men’s rights activists as feminists are working to handle the problems inherently specific to men.

I struggle with this theory, if for no other reason, then for the following point.

If we are more feminist, or at least more familiar with feminist thought and theory, than we have been before it would stand to reason that the problems of the male suicide gap, the male education and crime sentencing gap, and all of the other problems men face that are unique to them and only them would at least earn some cursory mention.

The answer to that is two-fold.

The PG Answer: No.

The non-PG answer: Of Fucking Course Not.

And that’s why I’m a men’s rights activist. Because when someone tells you the battles you have to fight don’t matter, but theirs are a matter of life-and-death, you have to go to the people who are fighting with you.

Thank you for reading. And have a lovely day.