[quote]He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth, partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home. ~ Kris Kristofferson[/quote]



Poor Tom Matlack. He just isn’t getting any love these days.

The embattled founder of the Good Men Project remains on the defensive, and appears to be willing to take a stand against all comers. Tom is having his Tiananmen Moment, standing alone in front of a tank with a handful of groceries from the mini-mart.

I like that in a man. But of course I like it a lot better when it looks like courage instead of stupidity; when the stand means something and when the tank is not the very same one you were driving six months ago.

But that is where Tom is; staring down a monster he created; hoisted with his own petard. If he can stop staring at that tank for a moment, and looks down, he will see two feet, both of them riddled with bullets from his own gun.

I am not saying Tom is not a good businessman. He has a record of success in areas where his opinion on sexual politics and his own bizarre personality were not products he was trying to peddle.

I suppose you can put any manner of drivel on a website (which Tom has done) and with a little luck recoup your half mil of seed money. Maybe even make a buck. Hey, look at Jezebel.com.

Look at the entire mainstream, for that matter.

However, during his time at GMP, Matlack has managed the seemingly impossible. He has, largely by dumping money and copious amounts of feminist bullshit into it, produced a high traffic website – purported to be a positive one about the lives of men – founded on approval from man-hating ideologues and the virulently anti-male content they produce.

Then, because Tom does not understand feminists any more than he does his own manhood, he manages to not just run off most of his mainstream feminist writers, but has them so angry that they are waging war on him and his website even as we speak. All across the grrl-o-sphere, Tom has recently been shat upon by the feminists that used to write for his website.

And now he is publicly staring them down, like he has grande cajones.

All this while still managing to have his name become synonymous with a joke (at best) in the men’s movement, the only place there is that is actually having a really substantive discussion about men.

His response to all this is to rely even more on the cartoonish version of manhood he has propped himself up with at GMP all along.

At least that is what is on the surface. That’s the best dog and pony show that Matlack could cook up for readers, because the real story of what is happening is just too much of a hit to Matlack’s 1950’s machismo.

What we are really witnessing here is Matlack extending a hand to his feminist masters and offering another dance, assuring them that he has taken lessons and won’t step on their feet again.

In the articles excoriating Matlack, written by mainstream feminists, the message, the demand, is clear. Quit allowing MRAs to have a voice. Don’t print their articles. Don’t allow their comments. Shut them the fuck up and get back to being what GMP started out to be, a feminist dominated, woman centered men’s website.

And if you are paying attention to what is happening, you can already see that Tom’s stand in front of that tank is actually on his knees.

I wrote a few articles for GMP when they made the foolish choice to actually talk about men’s issues for a while. They had some really catchy titles, but they have all since been renamed to “404 Error – Page not Found.”

Yeah, that is catchy, too, I guess, but a little redundant. Still, they appear to like it, as they have similarly renamed articles by Girl Writes What and Dr. Elly Tams.

Oh yeah, Tom, you sure know how to make a stand. Inspiring, brah.

In his latest effort to appear tough while minding well, Tom makes one very interesting proclamation.

He tells us that when he started GMP, “Men’s Rights didn’t have anything to do with the MRA.”

Um, Tom, first, that should be MRM. MRA = Men’s Rights Activist, as in a single person. MRM = Men’s Rights Movement, as in the collective actions and progress of MRAs.

Now that we have corrected his terminology, let’s take a look at the near unspeakable arrogance and ignorance of a statement concluding that men’s rights activists, those whose mission in life is to take action on issues of men’s rights, have nothing to do with, uh, men’s rights.

Yeah, I forgot, at GMP men’s rights are only handled by women’s advocates.

Of course, this is bullshit. You know it and I know it, and I am pretty sure that even Tom Matlack knows it, even though he had never heard of the MRA, uh, MRM, before in his life.

Here is what I am thinking at this point. Tom is a businessman, and typically a pretty good one. He also feels pretty strongly about being the Dudley Doright of modern manhood, in part driven by his failures to meet Dudley type standards.

Tom woke up one day and thought, “Hoowee! I could make that another bidness! Mo manhood is mo betta money!”

Also telling from his article is something he has alluded to in the past, namely that he, “…started the Good Men Project with the simple premise that [he] had a story to tell about [his] own failures (and successes) as a father, husband, worker and man.”

That says a lot about Tom’s real motivation.

And he did good for a while. He got all the feminist endorsements, from places like Ms. Magazine. He got the most popular man-hating writers and set about creating a psychodrama of his own perceived failures as a man, projecting them on the world of men at large, which the feminists were only too happy to help him do.

Mo money!

But Tom has a fatal flaw in that he earnestly believes that somewhere underneath our tendency to act out our entitlement grievance by wiping out schoolrooms full of children, beating and raping women whenever possible, destroying the planet, changing the climate, making wars and blending kittens, there is still a Dudley Doright longing to get out. He knows for sure that there is a Tom Matlack trapped in the worthless bodies of all men.

And that is the fundamental problem.

Feminists know damn well that Dudley does not exist. And it will keep coming back to bite Tom on his saddle worn ass because he is all but entirely unconscious of what is happening.

He got into all this never having even heard of the MRM, and is still so far behind the learning curve that he doesn’t know MRM from MRA.

It will be entertaining to watch in the coming days. As GMP wipes out all traces of MRA expression on the site, particularly the voices of women who support men’s rights, Tom will attempt to negotiate a deal with his masters to give him a small corner of his own website in which he is allowed to express his own manly opinion.

A quisling’s agreement if I ever saw one. With enough quiet groveling behind the scenes and storefront actions to further alienate men’s advocates, he may get a pat on the head and ceasefire, if not a full truce.

But it will not last on either side.

Tom is impulsive and will eventually say something stupid about men being good. The ideologues pulling his strings (and holding his balls) will not be able to help themselves, either. They will sense the mathematically possible threat of balance to the discussion and go ballistic again.

It will go back to gridlock and tension, all because the truth is that Tom Matlack created a feminist entity to correct his own broken sense of manhood. He is just too stubborn to allow them to do it, and too weak to send them packing.