The Right To Be Left Alone

People on the Internet spend a lot of time talking about rights. Reading some of the more active social media sites can set your head swimming with discussions about women's rights, gay rights, digital rights, privacy rights and whole other host of uses and abuses of the term "rights". Me, I'll settle for being left alone. I don't want to build some kind of masculine utopia. I don't want to see a white picket fence out the front of every house. I don't want to see women have their right to vote taken away or forced to cover their faces in public no matter how much feminists scream hysterically about what will become of them should masculinity begin to re-assert itself publicly. All I want, and I suspect, all most men want, is the right to be left alone.

The book "Men On Strike" by Dr. Helen Smith talks about how men are walking away from society - dropping out of college, leaving the workforce, and avoiding marriage - due to the lack of incentives to contribute. I believe it's more than that though. We've been hounded out of every place we used to gather. Young guys have retreated into video games and Internet porn, and even there it can be hard to find solace now.

It would be one thing if this departure were met with stony silence, yet still we find hordes of shrieking harpies chasing men down, eager to continue the flogging. For example, the disgusting "Don't Be That Guy" campaign in Edmonton, Canada which portrays all men as being somehow prone to accidentally-on-purpose slipping their penises into unconscious women is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. Not content that men are simply refusing to take on the risk of dating and marriage, Canada's "Battered Women Support Services" has to poster the entire town of Edmonton to remind men wherever they go that they are, in fact, to be considered sexual predators in waiting.

Women meanwhile, are aghast that their continual temper tantrums aren't having the desired effect of motivating men to pick their so-called "responsibilities". Women will happily moan and complain about men and their habits, and a media geared towards female consumers feeds their preconceptions voraciously. Then, they'll spend a good portion of their time trying to figure out how to get one of these awful creatures to go on a date with them. Yet it still doesn't stop. If a man does find himself in a relationship with a woman in America, he'll be constantly critiqued, tested and (looking at the divorce rate) ultimately tossed aside. If he opts not to engage in the dating scene, he'll be constantly harangued about his lack of ability to "commit". Possibly because he can't "handle a strong woman". Of course.

If the nascent Men's Rights Movement sets out to achieve only one thing, it should be the right for men, and indeed everyone, simply to be left alone. For them to remain unmolested by people with fancy-sounding titles and lots of government funding (like the instigators of the squalid "Don't Be That Guy" campaign) or by other people's notions of what their obligations to everyone else are. The absurdity of running somebody out of town only to demand they stand still just outside the town border so you can continue to scream at them however, makes me want to pick up a bottle of scotch and look for an explanation at the bottom.

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"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C. S. Lewis

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