We all understand motivating other people’s behaviour through selective rewards and punishments. This is often expressed in the metaphor of a carrot and a stick. Entice with the carrot, beat with the stick. The image springing to mind is one of a draft animal, yoked to a cart.

If you’re a part of this human rights movement, or even if you’re simply male, then you also know the present culture believes that for those beasts of burden called “men,” a persistent climate of attack is just about perfect to keep those unruly animals in line.

I have not included examples, because anyone who claims to need examples to understand the point is either lying, or too willfully stupid to bother explaining to.

If you are a man, you are a bad person. You’re stupid, you’re unworthy, probably a creep, potentially a rapist, certainly violent, emotionally stunted, sexually inadequate and/or sexually predatory, you smell, you have no style, and you’re a controlling oppressive untermensch. Unless and until you conform exactly to what the women around you want you to do, to say and to be, then you’re maybe an okay dude. Provisionally on your continued good behavior, of course. Oh yeah, and most of all you’re utterly and totally disposable – never forget that, bub.

Obviously, the various lame-stream channels of public reinforcement of the blue kool-aid that we all swim in spins endless variations of this: “y’all no-good man-boys who should do what you’re told”.

And then, every once in a long while, somebody broadcasts or publishes a piece addressing the male subset of the human race in a positive light. Hey guys, you’re okay. Hell, we like you. You’re even human beings, by golly, with feelings and everything. Hug!

The stick, and then the carrot. The most recent example of occasional positive coverage being a HuffPo article presently being praised by some of the readers of the men’s rights subreddit. “Dear Men: You Are Already Good Enough” [1] is an article written by Kate Bartolotta.

Taken by itself, it’s not a bad article. In fact, it lists a number of the very same complaints about the public climate of male vilification that writers at AVFM (including me) have frequently discussed.

Some of the comments in the men’s rights reddit posting of this particular article include the following:

“I needed this, thank you.”

“Beautiful article – nice to have something positive here [smiley face]”

“Nice article. Now if only we can fix the biases men face in courts, I may actually want to risk getting involved with women. Too much to lose as it stands.”

Paul once famously said most MRAs were one blowjob away from back-flipping from the high-diving platform through three elevated flaming hoops back to 115% indoctrinated blue-pill slavery.

In the comments thread of the HuffPo article itself, as I wrote this, the top-most comment was something so craven I was about to call a “pathetic dog” until noticed the commenter’s own username. What he calls himself: thatdogguy.

“Kate, thank you, thank you, thank you! By the way, will you marry me?”

Am I being too harsh to call this character a pathetic, approval-seeking dog?

Anja Eriud, writing for this site pointed out only 2 days ago: “..that women feel they reserve the right to arbitrate and exercise approval of male actions, male behaviour, and in fact male autonomy.”[2]

The point, for self-defining men of loudly disdaining engagement with the public firehose-torrent of male shaming, male villification, male-marginalizing rhetoric and ideology is not to coax some sort of positive feedback from that ideological public who until now have used the stick to coerce compliance, rather than the carrot.

The point is not to win some slivers of sympathy or praise from those who have, until now, shoveled scorn and contempt onto you, your brothers, your fathers, your sons, or your male colleagues and friends.

The point is that, whether enticed by the carrot of praise and recognition, or driven by that practiced “stick” of pain, shame and degradation; you – a man – are not a motherfucking draft animal. Neither are you anybody’s dog to be petted or swatted with rolled-up newspaper. You are a human being.

At what point did any of us agree that who and what we are, what our public identities as humans should be, would be appropriately decided by the self-interest of narcissists, overgrown toddlers, and collectivist ideological solipsists? My choices are: I’m a decent human being, or, I’m a bad man based on the self-interested opinions of members of our society’s leisure class?

No.

Which is why, besides my open contempt for the populist male vilifying narrative so pervasive it becomes the air we all breath, I have an equal disdain for praise, sympathy or affirmation from any voice in that same public discourse.

Kate Bartolotta, the author of “Dear Men: You Are Already Good Enough” might even have meant it. On the other hand, the article was originally published at the “good men project” website, a feminist site created explicitly to undermine the men’s human rights movement, so maybe we’re right back to carrot and stick.

In case anybody reading this is a slow learner, the carrot and the stick are both metaphorical tools of coercion.

So somebody in a mainstream channel has something nice, or kind to say about you if you’re male? Watching the backflips of joy from affection-starved dogs demonstrates that those fools still haven’t realized their identities do not belong to the public to be conferred on them by consensus.

“I needed this, thankyou.”

I don’t know if Bartolotta’s motivation was benign or otherwise when she wrote: “ Dear Men: You Are Already Good Enough.” However, whatever her purpose was, I don’t care. The metaphorical carrot, no less than the stick, is a tool of manipulation. Bartolotta and every other commentator looking for a lever can take their stick and their carrot, and stick them both right up their own lower alimentary canals.

Dear Kate Bartolotta: it is not your prerogative to tell me, or any other man, he’s “good enough”. His identity is his own, and if you’re lucky, when he’s decided, he may tell you who and what he is. He also might not tell you, because that’s his prerogative too. And, don’t take this too personally, but fuck off, Kate. And of course, whatever your motivation was, thanks you for your kind attention.

But in all seriousness, you can still shove it.

And one more thing: responding to this missive by Ms. Bartolotta, the first 5 conformist dolts to repeat item 1 from the shaming tactics catalog can each donate 1000 dollars to

http://prostatecancer.ca/Donate/Ways-to-Donate#.UoFEeZQ6XR4

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kate-bartolotta/love-and-relationships_b_4241217.html?utm_hp_ref=women&ir=Women

[2] http://www.avoiceformen.com/sexual-politics/m-g-t-o-w/mgtow-and-female-disapproval-2/