Armchair Activism for Men's Rights Activists

By Rod Van Mechelen Thinking I've discovered an act of sabotage turns out to be wrong but leads to a simple idea for how members of the Men's Rights Movement can be active without stooping to devious means that could amplify our presence on the web. Sabotage Most Foul!

2013 Olympia, WA - While updating an old article on my site I Googled the author to see what was going on with her and one of the first links to come up was on a directory site. You know, one of those obnoxious sites that clutter the web with clones of directories that do little but pollute search results. What caught my eye was that it listed a woman who appeared to be a feminist professor as my employee. Rather, it listed her as an employee of my website. What's more, it lists my site as a company with revenue in the $10 million to $25 million range, employing 50 to 100 people, and headquartered in Washington, D.C. It gives a street address and a telephone number. After following a few leads I determined that the contact information was for a college professor who, on the surface, appeared to be every MRAs worst nightmare: a feminist. More about her, below. My first thought was that this was a deliberate act of sabotage. An attempt to misdirect anybody who wanted to contact me to call a feminist, instead. How many members of the media, wanting to learn about the MRM had called this feminist, who had filled their ears with lies, I wondered? Was this a common tactic employed by gleeful young feminists taking women's studies classes? How many other MRM sites have been likewise sabotaged? Help from the Redditors on the Men's Rights Reddit

I decided to take the question to the MensRights group on Reddit and ask for volunteers to dig into this and find out. Several responded, and they did a great job. Early results are that this was simply the result of shoddy research by people throwing together a directory for the sole purpose of generating traffic without regard for the quality of the information provided. What else they found was that the "feminist" listed as the contact person for my website--Dr. Rita J. Simon--is not what many of us would consider a "feminist" because feminism has become a hate movement and her work appears to have a libertarian slant. She is the cofounder of the Women's Freedom Network and has written many books, none of which appear to have anything to do with the hate ideology of the modern feminist movement. So my initial concerns were wrong and Dr. Simon looks like she's one of the good guys. But this raised some interesting thoughts about activism on the web, with possibilities for the MRM. The Feminist War Against Culture

When I first thought it was an intentional act of sabotage, I was outraged. After it became clear that it was not, I realized that doing something like this could be an effective means to sabotage an organization. But let me be very clear: I would not condone that. It would be dishonest. Yes, feminists are dishonest. Yes, they lie about men, fathers, rape, women, victimization, puppy dogs and kittens, statistics and the patriarchy, you name it if it will serve their cause they will and do lie about it. Want to know who they really are, what really motivates them, what they really want to do? They tell us loudly and in public if you know how to listen. What do they say about men? What do they say about what motivates men, what men want to do, what men want, and so on? Everything they attribute to men exposes them for what they are. If a feminist says men want to rape, they have just told us that they want to rape. Do they say men want to oppress? They have just told us that they want to oppress. Whenever a person talks about what another person wants and feels, unless they are quoting them--e.g., "so-and-so said they want"--you can be fairly certain that they are projecting their own feelings, thoughts and motivations onto the person they are talking about. So yes, feminists lie all the time. And yes, feminists are making war on men. (War on heterosexuality, the middle class, freedom and liberty, really.) We know this because they have said so. When feminists claim that men are making war on women, what they are really saying is that feminists are making war on men. And because this is a war, doesn't that justify treating this like a war and doing what men do in war? No. Real War Vs. the Feminist Concept of War

When feminists talk about war, in almost all cases they don't know what they're talking about. War is death and bone numbing cold and flesh searing heat and starvation, pain, unbearable anguish and blood and dead babies and except when they talk about those kinds of wars--the ones with bullets and missiles and dead bodies and doors broken in and men and boys shot and women and girls rounded up and raped and flies buzzing over stinking corpses--they're not talking about real war. It's all just a part of the feminists' make believe war so they can claim to be victims of the people on whom they are projecting their own evil motivations. The women and men of the MRM are better than the feminists. But that doesn't mean we can't sabotage them, and do it with honor and class. Instead of misdirecting people to contact us about feminist organizations, we can honestly direct people to contact us to counter their lies. Huh? Thousands of MRAs Using Comments to Promote MRA Sites

How much time would it take for a single MRA to jump onto a directory website or even better the comments section of a blog or newspaper or magazine article and post a comment directing readers to an MRM site? Five minutes? And what if thousands of us did that? How much extra effort would it take? Many of us already post comments on newspaper articles and letters to the editor pages. Typically we express an opinion and leave it at that. A few people read our comments, some respond, we feel like we've said our piece, like we've contributed something, and sometimes we have, but most of the time all our chatter is just so much digital dust in the electronic wind. But what if we concluded our comments--those on men's and fathers' rights issues--with the name and link for a relevant website? On articles about rape and false accusations, COTWA and SAVE Services would make good choices. On gender issues in general, Male Defender and National Center for Men would make great choices. And while many may find this controversial, on the subject of MGTOW and why men are refusing to get married, my first choice would be Tom Leykis . No, I'm not kidding. Tom is not some schmuck pickup artist. He's very smart and in some repsects represents the bleeding edge of the backlash against feminism. While I have never fully approved of his methods, in his own way he's been involved in this movement a lot longer than most and he has been extremely effective, so don't write him off. Note: I do not mean to suggest spamming. When you post a comment to an article, just remember to put in a plug for an appropriate MRA website in your comment. So, for example, if the article is about how horribly American men oppress American women, and you comment to explain how this is wrong, you might write, "This is nonsense. As is well-documented by the many articles at Community of the Wrongly Accused and by "GirlWritesWhat" on YouTube, feminism has become a hate movement that is intent on oppressing men." That's not spam but a legitimate comment that also serves the purpose of promoting the Men's Rights Movement. A Stunning Demographic Shift

One quick aside: some believe that we are getting close to the end of this conflict, and that feminism is on the ropes. They might be right, but people have been predicting the end of the feminist movement for decades and have been wrong every time. Years ago in an article titled Cycles of Bigotry, Cycles of Sexism I wrote that social attitudes have cycles. The old song that "everything old is new again" probably applies to every human activity. This includes the prevalence of misogynist and misandrous attitudes. (FYI, misandrous and misandric are both accepted spellings with slightly different connotations.) Under ordinary circumstances, we would be nearing the inflection point of the current cycle and the feminist hate movement would be nearing the end. But there is a huge demographic shift coming that will skew this cycle. In Asia and the subcontinent they are already beginning to experience a shortage of women of child-bearing age. By the year 2020 this shortage will start to become acute. An economic analysis of this would lead us to assume that the value of women relative to men would go up. It's the law of supply and demand. Every straight man wants a woman, the supply of women will drop relative to the demand from men, and so their value will go up. Will this lead to a matriarchy in which each woman has multiple husbands, as in Robert Heinlein's great novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress ? Will it lead to drafting women ages 18 to 20 into a two-year term of sexual service (literally state enforced prostitution), as in J. Neil Schulman's great novel, The Rainbow Cadenza ? Or will it be something else? There's no way to know until the time comes. What we can know is that we should not expect the imminent demise of the feminists and their hate movement. Wait for it. When it comes, celebrate, but not until then. Armchair Activism At Its Best

There are many great sites and I wouldn't mind if you chose mine, but we should focus on promoting the sites whose publishers, writers, bloggers and vloggers are active and prepared to talk to the media. While my site (here comes the shameless plug) has a lot of good information and links on it, I'm no longer among the elite representatives of the movement. So while I would be glad to accept an honorable mention, please pick somebody else. This is armchair activism at its best, a way to leverage the power of the web to sabotage the feminist hate mongers without stooping to deceit or inflicting harm. If a time comes when this turns into a real war, with feminists and other progressives on one side and all those who cherish freedom and liberty on the other, it will be bad. They will have the money, governments and armies, and to counter that we will need all the people we can get. Using article comments and directory postings may not seem like much, but if hundreds of thousands of us do it, we will make a difference. Regards, Rod Van Mechelen Rod Van Mechelen is the author of What Everyone Should Know about Feminist Issues: The Male-Positive Perspective (the page now includes several articles by other authors), and the publisher of The Backlash! @ Backlash.com and Cowlitz Country News . He is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and served for 9-1/2 years on the Cowlitz Indian Tribal Council.