This is a brief email discussion between two well seasoned Men’s Rights Movement activists. It describers some obstacles of our movement.

Subject: Out-numbered and out-organized

MRA 1: The ballot for candidates to the Steering Committee of the District of Columbia Bar Association Family law Section exemplifies how we are outgunned and out-organized.

It’s a nine-member volunteer committee that sponsors training, suggests legislation and gets to put the Bar Association name on its recommendations. The six incumbents include two men and four women. The six candidates for the three seats to be filled in the current election cycle are all women – – – THERE ARE ZERO MALE CANDIDATES

Of the six candidates, four brag about their DV credentials and a fifth one brags about being “President-Elect of the Women’s Bar Association.” (Of course, there is no Men’s Bar Association; just the regular Bar Association that is run by women while simultaneously being pilloried as part of the “Old Boys Network” and “Patriarchy”).

This is happening all over the country in all sorts of organizations.

You can be mad at certain individuals and groups for their gender bias but you can’t be mad at them for working, organizing, using the system and implementing their agenda through the organizations that they take over. Anybody can do that but, right now, only they are doing it.

That has to change or the bias will only deepen and become further institutionalized in formal law and in institutional policy. For anybody who cares about men and boys, that has to be a concern.

We all need to increase our civic participation and encourage as many others as possible to do so as well.

MRA 2 response: This is a real contribution for what we must do. Certainly if we get out gunned as you are describing we will not get a damm thing but a headache. Your call as I see it is this. Stop playing at politics and start doing the backbreaking work that produces results. Of course, the structural problem is that women team in a minute while men do not except in football and basketball and it is a struggle there.

I don’t at all despair and I think that men can effectively form teams in any endeavor. Recall that most of the groups that are being taken over by the women were first created by teams of men. The Bar Association is a perfect example of that.

MRA 1: One of the key things we need to do is to re-legitimize men and boys as worthy of attention, interest and effort.

In the current environment, it is considered natural to have a “Women’s Bar Association” but it is impossible to have a “Men’s Bar Association.” Maybe we should have both or maybe we should have neither but it is the height of sexism to say that one is good and the other is bad. Almost every university has a “Women’s Studies” program but almost none have a Men’s Studies” program and the few that do offer “Men’s Studies” courses are dominated by the blame and shame ideologues.

That is not to say that anything is impossible in our efforts; it just means that we have work to do and much of that work consists of just showing up to demand a seat at the table and speaking up on behalf of men and boys as human beings with wants, needs, strengths and weaknesses – – – just as much and just as worthy as women.

NCFM NOTE: Absent here is discussion of the $$$. MRA’s are out-funded too. The women’s movement, relatively speaking, has it all and they continuously clamor for more regardless of the cost; that is, as long as the cost is primarily paid for by transferring $$$’s from men to women. Did you know that the two primary ways women achieve wealth are inheritance and divorce? All branches of government pay a significant number of women advocates hefty salaries to do not much more than go to meetings to figure out how to get more money for women. They call it work.