Inequality poster

October 30th, 2007 Egghead

inequity.jpg

Mens College Activist

October 26th, 2007 Egghead

I’ve just added their site to my blogroll. Check them out. Link.

The War on Sex Traffic

October 24th, 2007 Egghead

I found this item on the Male Matters blog:

Sexual trafficking in the U.S., another ideological feminist complaint, has not been proven to be a huge problem: “Congress passed a law, triggering a little-noticed worldwide war on human trafficking that began at the end of the Clinton administration and is now a top Bush administration priority. As part of the fight, President Bush has blanketed the nation with 42 Justice Department task forces and spent more than $150 million — all to find and help the estimated hundreds of thousands of victims of forced prostitution or labor in the United States. But the government couldn’t find them. Not in this country. ‘Many of the organizations that received grants didn’t really have to do anything,’ said Steven Wagner, former head of HHS’s anti-trafficking program. ‘They were available to help victims. There weren’t any victims.’”

‘Nuff said.

I hate October

October 17th, 2007 Egghead
i-hate-october


I used to love October. The cool weather, the autumn colors, Halloween, getting loot for my birthday. Now, I kind of hate October, what with getting older on my birthday, and putting up with all the pink crap.

Wha… wait. Pink Crap? Aren’t October’s colors orange and black? You know, Halloween?

No, no. October’s colors used to be orange and black. Now, they’re pink. That’s because October has “officially” been designated “Breast Cancer Awareness Month.” Never mind that I can’t seem to figure out who, exactly, was responsible for that designation. Did I vote for this official? Who was it?

And, in order to rub our noses in this fact, everything is now pink. Hell, even the plastic bags I get my groceries in are this hideously ugly shade of pink. It’s pretty impossible to miss, even if the reason is obscure. I mean, when you see them, you’re more likely to think, “How ugly,” than you are to be cognizant of breast cancer. I mean, unless you somehow miss the annoying commercials that are always on TV. Which I tend to do.

Now, so far, this is really just a minor assault on my aesthetic sensibilities. No big deal. If corporate America wants to (continue to) whore itself out to the women’s lobby and do stupid publicity stunts to remind them to get regular mammograms, well, that’s their right. Doesn’t really affect me. Makes me wish that they’d spend a few cents on “awareness raising” for prostate cancer, or testicular cancer, or something, but I respect their freedom.

However.

However, I do object to one ad campaign in particular. And this one is particularly designed to shame and manipulate (not to mention emasculate) men.

Real Men Wear Pink.

Uh, excuse me?

Yep. Real Men Wear Pink. Every Friday. So that they remind women to get an annual mammogram.

You know, I’m actually surprised women aren’t up in arms over this advertisement. I would have thought that they’d be insulted by the insinuation that they weren’t intelligent enough to remember on their own. As if they suffered some sort of feeble-mindedness. But, apparently not. I guess the fact that someone is trying to shame and manipulate men – just as women are wont to do – reinforces their sense that all is well with the world.

However, as a man, I’m insulted by this commercial. I don’t own any pink clothing. I don’t want to wear pink clothing. I don’t like the color, and it doesn’t do a thing for me. But be that as it may, I’m far more insulted by the phrase “Real Men.” I HATE that phrase. What? Am I not flesh and blood? When cut, do I not bleed? How, then, if I choose not to wear pink, am I a “Fake Man?” Or, are they somehow casting aspersions against my manhood, or my masculinity, or my virility? Perhaps that is it. Are they saying that if I don’t wear pink, I can’t be considered heterosexual? That’s an oddly inverted idea. It smacks of cognitive dissonance, even.

In fact, let’s turn it around. I’m a real man whether or not anyone else agrees. It is an objective fact that I am a man, and my reality, while contingent, is. Manhood and masculinity are concepts which are related to freedom and self-reliance. By exercising my own free choice to NOT conform to the wishes of the group (i.e. wearing pink) I exercise my masculinity over and against theirs. I am not found wanting in that area, yet they – insofar as they fail to respect my freedom – are. Ergo, I am a real man, whereas the perpetrators of the advertising campaign have demonstrated that they are not.

Instead, they’re a bunch of wankers.

On MRA’s

October 16th, 2007 Egghead
on-mras

KellyMac has taken on Jeff Fecke’s libel against MRA’s. Good. Now I won’t have to. Go read it.

For the record, I believe that human life begins at conception, not at birth. Ergo, abortion is morally indistinguishable from murder. I oppose ALL abortion. The typical abortion debate is usally framed as if there were only two people involved: mom and baby. Everyone forgets about dad. There are 3 people involved. And it’s usually a question of whether one person’s life creates an inconvenience for someone else. Well, a life is always more important than mere convenience.

Some are more equal than others

October 10th, 2007 Egghead

Stephen Baskerville wrote the following article, which I repost here:

The substitution of the re-titled “Women's Equality Amendment” (WEA) for the same old text of what was known in the 1970s as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is a real-life validation of George Orwell's fictional portrayal of the opportunism of extremist political movements and their tendency to turn high-minded ideals into the opposite of what they promise. In “Animal Farm,” Orwell's allegory of the Soviet revolution, the pigs proclaim that “All animals are equal.” Once they seize power, the pigs revise the principle: “But some animals are more equal than others.”

Promoters of the WEA claim that it will prohibit discrimination against both men and women. But if so, why the name change? The entire U.S. Constitution has always been gender neutral, and without the help of feminists. The aim of the new sexual militants is not to ensure the “equal protection of the laws,” but – precisely the opposite – to signal that only one sex is equal.

Whatever the situation 35 years ago, today's name change is a declaration not of weakness but of strength. Virtually all forms of “discrimination” against women have been proven to be false or eliminated. Warren Farrell has shown the fallacy of the “wage gap.” Christina Hoff Sommers demonstrated that, far from being privileged, it is boys who are now struggling under feminist changes in public education.

In fact, if any group faces systematic discrimination today, it is males. And it is not trivial. Men routinely lose their children, along with everything else they possess (including their freedom), in divorce courts, because child custody is virtually automatic to mothers, even when the mother is the one breaking up the family. Feminists not only defend but celebrate this “divorce revolution” and resist shared parenting provisions that would allow children to have their fathers as well as mothers after divorce.

Much more is at work here than just than the principle that, all else being equal, young children need their mothers. Men lose their children even when they have given neither consent nor grounds to divorce and are legally faultless. Further, the legal innovation that opened the door to mass fatherlessness was itself the creation of organized feminism. As author Judy Parejko has shown, the National Association of Women Lawyers designed the “no-fault” divorce system as long ago as the 1940s.

So perhaps we need a resurrected ERA to protect men. I would be very skeptical. It is precisely to head off that possibility that feminists have changed the name to permit only feminist-approved definitions of equality.

Feminists and their judicial allies are very adept at redefining words to suit their interests. For example, laws already provide for gender equality in child custody. Feminists circumvent them by invoking different male and female roles (”primary caretaker”) when it works to their advantage. These ensure that “the hand that rocks the cradle” is a feminist one.

Thus do feminists either ignore or invoke biological reality to suit their immediate interests and make up new rules as they go along. According to their most tortured definition of inequality, feminists argue that because only women have babies denying taxpayer funding for abortion is discrimination against women.

The opportunism is visible in existing feminist legislation. Promoters of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) claim it protects both men and women. Yet laws against violent assault already do that. VAWA, on the contrary, eliminates the gender-neutrality of criminal law by skewing it toward one group; as such, it is essentially a “hate crimes” law. And this clearly is the purpose, since otherwise why do feminists vehemently oppose changing the name of VAWA to one that is gender neutral? VAWA-funded programs specifically exclude male victims of domestic violence, though a virtually unanimous body of scholarly research demonstrates that men are equally likely to be assaulted.

Here too the consequences are far more serious than “discrimination.” Patently trumped-up domestic violence accusations are likewise used in custody cases to break up families by ensuring not only that divorcing mothers get monopoly custody of children, but that the children will be excluded from contact with the “patriarchy” represented by their fathers. Further, fathers are criminalized not for physical assault but for domestic “violence” that has no precise definition and may be no more than verbal insults. The Orwellian irony is when “human rights” groups like Amnesty International promote the violation of human rights by VAWA in the name of women's equality.

“Power is the alpha and the omega of contemporary Communism,” wrote Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas during the repression of the 1950s. “Ideas, philosophical principles, and moral considerations … all can be changed and sacrificed. But not power.” Something similar can be said about today's feminism, an ideology with no fixed principles. At times gender differences are “social constructions”; at other times women have special “needs.” Women are oppressed by gender roles, but those same roles make women more “compassionate” and “caring.” Women and men must compete on equal terms, except when men must be excluded from certain competitions in order that women can win. Fathers should share equally in rearing children, but sole custody must always go to mothers, regardless of fault.

Alison Jaggar, author of “Living With Contradictions,” proclaims openly that feminists should insist on “having it both ways”: “They should use the rhetoric of equality in situations where women's interests clearly are being damaged by being treated either differently from or identically with men.” Her words are revealing. This “rhetoric of equality” is just that: rhetoric. As with Humpty Dumpty, words like “equality” change meanings as convenient; “interests” alone endure. But the bottom line is always power: to increase the power not so much of women, as of those women who claim to speak on behalf of the rest.

Those who want to know where the feminist revolution is now going may wish to read Orwell's account of how the pigs' revolution turned out.