Men’s rights activists not so scary after all

What exactly about the men’s rights movement excites such vitriolic opposition? Here you could cue obvious jokes like it forgot to shower, or predictable complaints about “patriarchy.” But both would just underline the curiously reflexive, intense, hostile stereotyping in our society toward … men.

For instance, I attended the inaugural meeting of the Ottawa branch of the Canadian Association For Equality (CAFE) last June, a small, underfunded gathering of mostly mild-mannered men and women concerned about the lack of domestic shelters for male abuse victims, the disproportionate tendency of men to drop out of school, commit suicide, go to jail and so forth. And it was disrupted by organized protesters.

This weekend I attended CAFE’s screening of The Red Pill, feminist filmmaker Cassie Jaye’s surprising documentary voyage of discovery into “MRAs” (Men’s Rights Activists). And intense pressure led Ottawa’s Mayfair Theatre to cancel the screening with just three days’ warning.

A private business has every right to show only those films they wish to. So I thank Ottawa City Hall for bravely making a venue available on short notice and regret the rude messages some CAFE supporters evidently sent the Mayfair. But why the panic, the disruptive tactics, the persistent attempt not to argue but to silence?

Partly it’s the radical left’s standard extralegal attack on any opinions they don’t share. But paradoxically, it arises in large part from the fact that these MRAs are not stereotypical burly macho throwbacks oozing testosterone. Instead, a surprising number are feminists. And much of the panic arises from what I might unkindly describe as their calling feminism’s bluff.

CAFE declares itself “committed to achieving equality for all Canadians, regardless of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, family status, race, ethnicity, creed, age or disability.” These are not men who want to restore the “patriarchy.” On the contrary, they frequently argue that men have been as much the victim of traditional gender stereotypes as women.

MRAs note that men account for 94 per cent of workplace fatalities in the U.S. and three quarters of the suicides, and comprise less than 40 per cent of university undergraduates but get 60 per cent more prison time for the same offences. And they blame harmful stereotypes of masculinity that also make men drown their pain in alcohol or work themselves into an early grave.

Such complaints provoke conspicuous unease, and a strong hint of “suck it up, buttercup,” because to admit distress and ask for help is not truly manly in precisely the old sense that feminists ostensibly despise. Especially regarding female violence against men. A man who cannot take it, without hitting back, is a sissy. Hence men who instead seek help when battered endure the scorn not just of the “patriarchy” but of the feminarchy as well.

MRAs generally want to change such attitudes. They want men to become more like women. They do stress the unique contributions of involved and nurturing fathers. But there is far more Alan Alda than Jesse Ventura about them.

So what if men did take the feminists’ ostensible cue and chuck the whole manliness thing? What if we started to cry, refused to do dangerous or disgusting jobs, repudiated the notion of “women and children first” into the lifeboats, and did not feel like failures if we did not earn money? What if we stopped being “men”?

In the Red Pill, one MRA agreed that women had too often been made sexual objects. But, he complained, men had been made “productive objects.” And indeed, while “second-wave” feminists denied the inherent differences between men and women, Third Wave feminists angrily insist that when families break down courts should assign women the nurturing and men the providing.

Actress Cybill Shepherd, a feminist activist, famously said in 1994 “Marriage isn’t my thing ... I don’t mind having a husband so much as I mind being a wife.” Exactly. Too many feminists insist that women can be anything but men still have to be men, and lose it in a hurry when challenged on such hypocrisy, including their weird Victorian stereotype of women as embodiments of frail virtue, too helpless to harm anyone.

The Men’s Rights Movement argues that the gender “power imbalance” is far more complicated and less one-sided than feminists claim. Yes, men have held physical power over women for most of human history and some have made appallingly beastly use of it. But women have a mighty power to shame men, and withhold sex, and have often misused it. Feminism itself has included a half-century outburst of shaming that is causing many men enormous and damaging pain and humiliation.

Including that CAFE can’t hold a single event without being shamed, harassed and brutally stereotyped.