While perusing the Internet’s seedier gutters, as I am sometimes forced to do in fulfilling my duties here at Men’s Rights Sydney, I happened upon this noxious little nugget from what appears to be a feminist flavoured eMag called “Bust” (no, I’d never heard of it before either).

Anyway, on this site was a trite little article titled “Men’s Rights Movement Misunderstands Feminism” that left me simultaneously laughing, face palming, & shaking my head in equal measures (try it, it’s harder than you think).

Now I can already hear the sharper readers amongst you groaning in anticipation & yes, you are correct, it is yet another treatise on how if only people understood what feminism really is then we’d all be Feminists and live forever in a magical utopia of rainbows and unicorn farts for the rest of time. The author then goes on, much to her own amusement, about how ignorant we hapless MHRAs are about modern feminism while simultaneously strawmanning furiously and demonstrating comprehensively that she doesn’t know the first thing about the MHRM in order to demonstrate her point.

“Knock. Knock.”

“Who’s There?”

“Irony”

“Irony Who?”

“Yeah you didn’t recognise me the first time either”

So anyway, with this sort of article being so commonly penned these days I thought that, rather than post rebuttals to the comment section of every feminist blog that rehashes the same tired old argument that nobody bought the first time, I figured a better idea would be to publish this article & just post a link… a real time-saver indeed.

Note: Article text appears in bold & my responses appear underneath…

“…this is the actual definition of feminism: “the belief in gender equality of the sexes.”

Yeah and this is the actual definition of communism (according to google.com):

“A theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.”

Sounds pretty sweet, huh? We should get ourselves some of that.

Do we see a problem with describing feminism by it’s dictionary definition rather than by it’s real-world actions yet?

“the MRM believes that male “oppression” is a result of radical feminism.”

“The MRM” believes no such thing. Unlike the zombiesque lockstep of feminist dogma, the MRM is not an ideology & so has no dogma to be adhered to. Unless you count facts as being dogma that is. It is therefore pointless to ascribe a single belief to the entire movement because individual MRAs believe a range of things. That said however, the vast majority of MRAs agree that it is gynocentrism, not feminism, that is the root cause of the discrimination against men & boys & that so-called “radical feminism” has simply amplified the damage gynocentrism has caused & has exploited it for it’s own ends.

And nobody is saying that men in the west are oppressed. In all but the most extreme marginal cases, if you have lived in a wealthy western democracy for your entire life, you have never even come close to being oppressed, and likely have no idea what true oppression even looks like, whether you are male OR female.

“I think maybe it’s time that these Men’s Rights Activists are brought up to speed about the two more waves of Feminism that have happened since the 1960s generation!”

Oh we are well aware of the various waves of feminism and what they claim to stand for in theory. The problem is that, in practice, there really isn’t much to separate them from earlier waves.

Rather than MRAs needing to be brought up to speed on modern feminism, it seems far more like it is you who needs to be brought up to speed on what MRAs actually think, rather than the feminist strawman version that you seem to believe.

“Considering that men (specifically cis, straight, white men) have pretty much all of the power in our society, how exactly does it make logical sense that a women are the source of all their problems?”

Begging the question much? You sure have a hide invoking logic while engaging in a blatant & egregious logical fallacy like that.