[quote]Never trust anyone who puts an adjective in front of the word man. ~ Mike LaSalle, MND Publisher[/quote]

Recent events over at the Good Men Project have added a kind of Jerry Springer quality to the man-o-sphere of late. Tom Matlack had the audacity to offer some mild dissent from feminist hegemony – on the website that he founded – and all hell broke loose. Savage tweets were exchanged like bodily fluids during spring break and two psychotically feminist contributors took their toys and went back to playing where they make all the rules. Then our camp chimed in, giggling like school kids looming over an unfortunate garden slug with a shaker of salt. The people at GMP had to scramble to figure out what happened.

All the hoopla certainly involved some measure of the chickens coming home to roost. When you swim with sharks, you tend to get bit, and those that tried to tell you so might just have a snicker at your expense. But, I don’t think all of this is simply reduced to karma and schadenfreude.

The psychodrama we witnessed was fitting and edifying. It was driven, I think, by the core question essentially posed in the name of Tom Matlack’s website, and the modern struggle to own the answer. What is a good man?

That remains the question for which Tom, nor any of the other contributors to his website, have ever really produced an answer. Lest you think I am here to add to the beating Tom has taken over the past few weeks, I am not. In fact, as I review his handling of the matter, I am really quite impressed.

Tom stood up for what he believes in, going against the grain in his own environment. When it started to cost him, he did not back down. When MRA’s played a perhaps well-deserved round of “gotcha” he stood his ground with them as well (Hey, I don’t agree with him, but I respect his fortitude). Rather than reframe or misrepresent the criticism against him, he presented it unabridged and directly from the source via John the Other and Girl Writes What, two of the most articulate voices we have.

Tom has said that his mission was to include a full spectrum of ideas and opinions, and he has shown a lot more than token follow through on that. Isn’t this at least part of what makes a good man?

I think so. Well, except for one rather significant caveat. Most of what I have just said about Tom I could also say about Lisa Hickey, CEO of GMP. She has generally supported the diversity of voices there, and stood by Tom even as Schwyzer and Marcotte were trying to have him sent packing (assuming his luggage was under the bus). I also note in recent times that Ms. Hickey’s “voice” has begun to express a great deal of compassion for men; not for men that are being what women want them to be, but for men as they are outside of their utility; men demonized; men in trouble. Like Tom, Lisa Hickey has taken a dose or two of my less than friendly attention. I don’t regret doing it, as I was following my beliefs, but I have to respect the current actions of both of them.

Now, Is Lisa Hickey a good man?

That is the whole problem with this mess, and I want to offer it now as a challenge to Tom Matlack, Lisa Hickey or any other person affiliated with that site.

Please inform us of anything, one single quality, that you think constitutes a part of being a good man – that does not also apply to being a good woman.

I am not taking the feminist path here. I understand and accept that there are differences between men and women, physically, psychologically, emotionally and intellectually. I would disabuse anyone of the notion that any of those innate differences constitute a difference in innate value or should result in different expectations or different rights.

After extensive consideration, I can find no quality in human beings by which I don’t measure men and women equally. Tom, can you? If so, please email that to me because I am genuinely interested in hearing the answer.

I understand it may be tempting here to claim that I am sinking all of us in semantic quicksand. What’s the harm, after all, in striving to be a good man as opposed to being a good woman?

Well, for me there is harm because it is ultimately used to control people, and to abuse them.

Case in point. At least 11 people died after the Costa Concordia cruise ship ran aground on January 13. One of the first criticisms of the emergency procedures that came to light came from Edwin Gurd, a retired police chief who was on the scene and assisting with rescue efforts. He said, “We were keen for women and children to go first, and men if they had babies or families. A lot of men regardless of that were trying to save themselves.”

And this is where the rubber meets the road; for Tom Matlack; for Lisa Hickey; for all of us. And it is still the crossroads where GMP will more likely opt for a dating column than an honest exploration of the real issue. In the end each and every one of us knows what our culture sees in men who try to “save themelves.” Cowards. Not good men.

Is Edwin Gurd a “good man” because he wanted to help women and children ahead of other men and because he wanted to enforce that on everyone? How about the men who ignored the call to stay on a crippled ship while strangers were put ahead of them on life boats? Are they bad men? Should they have stayed, willing to die, in order to live by a code of disposability they were born into?

If, Tom, you are really struggling to get to the idea of what makes a man “good,” I submit you can’t get there without taking this bull by the horns and answering the questions. Romantic notions of masculinity are understandably appealing, but please tell me how romantic you would find it to see your son’s body floating face down next to a lifeboat that would not take him because he had a penis.

Some of the people defending the men who chose to ignore calls to wait behind women and children had an interesting rationale. Why would a man choose to die that way for strangers if it meant taking himself away from protecting and providing for his family?

My, what a telling defense! It is as though we cannot imagine that a man would think his life of equal value to anyone else’s, simply because he exists. The reason those people thought he was worth saving was because he was already sacrificing for those he knew. His life did not have value, but his utility did. Does this kind of thinking reflect what we should call good humanity?

Again, is this the sum of a man’s “goodness,” his worthiness to live? Is this why he cannot hope to have the value of someone with a vagina?

These are the real questions, and when you strip away all the internal politics; when the histrionic fits of your former associates have faded away, you are still left with a need to answer them.

My position on this is pretty clear. I don’t trust the thinking of anyone, no matter how good their intentions, who wants to define what a good man (or woman) is. That is the guy who wants me to die while someone else gets to live. It’s the woman who wants me to shut up and quit complaining because “good” men don’t whine; they either go out quickly, or slowly bleed to death without bothering anyone else with their troubles.

Good men line up to die in illicit wars for corporate interests, and leave their families to take solace in folded flags and cheap pieces of tin.

And worse, good men die the much slower and painful death, laboring daily just to stay out of jail, quietly dying in poverty, in the absence of home and children that were stripped from them – because speaking up gets them a “man up” or a “fuck off,” from most of the world.

Just ask Bill Bennett, Kay Hymowitz and Penny Nance. All of them have their ideas on what a good man is, and how we should all shut our fucking mouths and be one whether it kills us or ruins our lives.

Similarly, when many feminists speak of good men, they mean the ones who stand by them in trashing men and painting them as human contagions, in need of being reengineered so as not to contaminate the lives of their human betters. These are the same men working right now across the globe to foster a system of governance that reduces men to less value than livestock.

Yep, the whole world has ideas on what makes a good man, all of it hinging on how they can be used by thoughtless, shallow ingrates and ideologues.

As a man I know the price of being good. I see it in saltwater graves, flag draped coffins and a patch of charred pavement outside a family court in New Hampshire. I see it in the self-loathing of male feminists and sycophants, even in men like Hugo Schwyzer that fuck their students and try to kill people – then publicly display a psychopathic lack of remorse for all of it. By and large they will remain in good graces with many feminists, as long as they don’t make the mistake of imagining their own autonomy, like Tom Matlack did.

But most of all I see the price of being a good man across the pages of A Voice for Men every day, in the stories of men who have been battered, butchered and belittled for their goodness. These are men who have been strung up by the very things that most people would find worthy in men. And they stand, understandably, at arms-length from anyone who furthers the mentality that ultimately destroyed their lives.

Do I think Tom Matlack is a good person? Yes, I sincerely do, despite not agreeing with him on many things. I just don’t think he is a good man. I would not wish that on anyone.