





If you ask a ‘progressive’ they will probably say no. According to patriarchy theory us men are the oppressive class, the ones with all the power, hogging success due to the privilege that goes along with patriarchal power. But life is not so one-sided. There are men who live their whole lives as blue-collar workers, fixing pipes or wiring, or working as a chef in a restaurant. Even in this scenario there are those who would insist that a chef is still higher up the social ladder compared to the person who cleans dishes or waits on tables . Meanwhile the upper echelons of society are looked upon as the beneficiaries of the efforts of the many, like company executives. It’s often glossed over that these men work the longest hours of all





The division of social oppression doesn’t stop with men. There’s race, sexuality, and your standard social class, or whatever else can be added into the mix to suggest that a planned society is how we stop ‘regressives’ from harming the vulnerable.





The fact is that progressives are obsessed with hierarchy. They suggest that this is what they want to end, though in truth they are fixated by it. Without hierarchy there would be no way to preach the moral high ground so nanny state can come and make things better. This is the ride to bureaucracy and public funding they are after – a free meal on the coffers of taxable revenue.





There is no distinction for individual nature to a progressive. You are either a ‘have’, or a ‘have-not’ – ability doesn’t factor into the equation. If you’re the former you’re used to attain power, and if you’re the latter you’re used to maintain it. Men are at the bottom of this pile, and nothing demonstrates this more than the disregard for black men, who are the continuously shown to be the demographic with the lowest life expectancy, while black women even have a higher life expectancy than white men. There is no better indicator for quality of life than the amount of years that you live - so much for male privilege.





Close to my heart is the way that fathers are treated by feminist progressivism. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a happily married father with a wife and daughter I adore, but this is all the more reason to feel for those men disenfranchised by family courts. In the UK 93% of custody is awarded to the mother, while the courts are notoriously bad at upholding visitation rights. Progressives cannot help but intrude on the individual, and the case of a Canadian father deemed too obese to see raise his own children is a new low of late.





We fathers often get a bad rap. A regular social meme is the deadbeat dad . Even father’s day is considered an acceptable time to shame dads, as David Cameron’s article on father’s day demonstrates. Yet again, this is not the full picture . 57% of mothers in the US have been found to keep to their child support obligations, while 69% of fathers do. The fact is that the family court system is rigged in the favour of women, and while women have been allowed to shed their old role as default nurturer, we men have been given no such flexibility when it comes to our roles as providers.





That’s not to say that I, like other ideologues deny practical reality. There is of course a valid case to be made for the roles of men and women in history. Today though the case is pretty weak. As long as hunter/gatherer roles are less necessary then women should accommodate men as nurturers, just as men have accommodated them as providers. One thing’s for sure though, a world where men and women don’t raise children together is one that throws away stability in the process.





Otherwise it’s nanny state to the rescue once again, and with it some of that individual autonomy that should never be bargained with. Our children need their biological parents because they are the ones who will sacrifice the most for them. We have kin altruism to thank for that – the bond that makes blood far thicker than water.Otherwise it’s nanny state to the rescue once again, and with it some of that individual autonomy that should never be bargained with.





Above all we need a men’s movement to set the record straight. Men have been repeatedly slandered since the civil rights era. It seems that many can’t distinguish between the actions of one man, and all men. Apart from setting the record straight and challenging agnotological (a la cultural) lies, induced by feminist hyperbole, we men must stand up for our essential liberty. No one put this better than Benjamin Franklin when he said:

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

What the men’s movement should not become is another version of feminism. Feminism started out as a movement concerned with de facto rights, or those defined by fact. One such example would be the unalienable rights that we are born with. We are not born into slavery or servitude. Hence we are free individuals, and with this freedom comes rights and responsibilities. As free individuals we can live free of coercive elements and exercise our own labour, transferring our own freedom into the world around us, sowing the fruits of our own existence, much like animals in the wild. What this results in is natural property rights, which even animals and tribal cultures adopt by maintaining territories.





As human progress evolved people realised that territorial battles among parties was a zero sum game. Thus they created contract law and trading psrtnerships, so that exchanges between parties would become a universally preferable outcome of positive sum trade; why fight when you can trade? That way all those involved can walk away from the table with their lives, and something else in the bargain. Thanks to contract law our rights are now written down, meaning that we brandish a piece of paper instead of a gun when our sovereignty is challenged.





As long as we focus on a de facto definition of rights then there is little risk of going down a path of abstract and arbitrary laws that have no basis in reality. One such example is marriage. While marriage is a legal union, it is still based on the natural relationship that occurs between men and women when they pair-bond to reproduce and raise chidren. This consistently accompanies social prosperity and the success of children with two biological parents, driven by kin altruism.





This is especially prevalent when we look at the rise of western civilisation, which was founded on monogamous principles of Judeo-Christian values. When we examine the evolutionary advantages of monogamy it is apparent that Christianity became a cultural representation of the natural propensity for human pair-bonding to occur when population numbers begin to thrive and rise.





Then there’s de jure rights. When we start to revert to this rights do become abstract, arbitrary, and even spurious. De jure rights are based on law, but this alone is no basis for rights. After all one could make a whole array of dubious claims about what de jure rights they deserve, with no basis in de facto rights at all. Consider divine right. Monarchs are often believed to have the right to rule based on them being chosen by god. Is this based in fact? No, since there is the requirement to prove this is the case – a burden of proof. If a monarch enacts laws based on the false premise of being god’s representative, this leads to a legal system that throws de facto rights out the window.





By the 60’s second-wave feminism became the very definition of de jure rights. Rather than focussing on natural and unalienable rights, feminism concerned entirely itself with the abstract – affirmative action programs demanding certain numbers of women in positions within society, an obsession with increasing the duration that abortion is permissible, or the definition of rape, which is now defined by the FBI as:

“Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the co nsent of the victim.”

Obviously this is a highly subjective and problematic definition open to interpretation. This is what happens when we lose a grip on facts, reverting to de jure rights influenced by postmodernism.





This is not what men’s rights should lead to. The way to avoid this is by focussing entirely on de facto rights, and the unalienable autonomy that we are born with as free people. If we do not do this then men’s rights will become yet another social justice movement driven by radicals wishing to control society through the state, just like feminism. Only through strong philosophical principles, and an understanding that the state is the entity that imposes the abstract, while denying natural freedom, can we create a world where men are free to live in a voluntary society.