In case you haven’t heard, there’s a war on women.
This rhetoric usually refers to a handful of bills in US states which propose limits on access to abortion. Contrary to popular opinion, some people believe abortion should not be as easily and casually used as pre-conception birth control. In a democratic system of government, legislative wrestling over how much or how little unimpeded access to surgical termination of a human embryo is both reasonable and expected.
In response to this, several female legislators, starting with Georgia State Representative Yasmin Neal have tabled legislation to deny men’s access to the pre-conception birth control of vasectomy. The reason stated for this is explicitly totalitarian. According to Neal:

It is patently unfair that men can avoid the rewards of unwanted fatherhood by presuming that their judgement over such matters is more valid than the judgement of the general assembly, while women’s ability to decide [over the life of an existing embryo] is constantly up for debate throughout the United States. Women, our bodies, and what we do with it[sic] are always up for debate. This bill has been drafted for all women. Who have the wherewithal to chose. The day has come when men should feel the same pressure and invasion of privacy that women have faced for years. I have introduced this legislation because it is the purpose of the general assembly to insert an invasive state interest of reproductive habits of men in this state, and substitute the will of the government over the will of adult men.

The false equivalence between birth control prior to fertilization and conception, and the treatment of the termination of a pregnancy – in which a viable human embryo is killed is likely not lost on Yasmin Neal or her supporters. If men were to “feel the same pressure and invasion of privacy that women have faced for years,” men would first have to have reproductive rights – which to date, they do not. What men do have is a legal onus to financially underwrite a woman’s reproductive rights, in which she legally compels a man to abide by whatever decision she makes over reproduction. Debate over male reproductive rights cannot actually occur until men have such rights, and representative Neal knows this.
In fact, it has been gender ideologues who unilaterally deny men access to basic birth control technology women have enjoyed for a half century. A male contraceptive pill has been feasible for at least a decade. According to Dr. Elsimar Coutinho, a Brazilian endocrinologist and a human reproduction scientist, the male pill is widely used in China. However, in an interview on Brazilian TV, Dr Coutinho explains how when seeking approval for a male contraceptive pill based on natural substances extracted from cotton seeds, he was denied permission at the Budapest World Population Congress.
During his interview Coutinho explains:

In Budapest, I went to try to get the support of women. I thought, if women support it. The American feminists were all there, including Betty Freidan. It was her, I started to speak and in some ten minutes, she interrupted. She said: Dr., do you think we’ve fought our whole lives to have in our hands the decision of having children or not? Do you think we’re abdicating that? Men say they’re on the pill, women believe them? Do you know what you are, what you all deserve? To have credibility, swear you’re using pills just to get laid and leave? Leave us with the responsibility and then ‘the pill failed’ ? I was dazzled, because the women stood up screaming NO MALE PILL!!
I was suprised that women wouldn’t support me.

One of the hosts on the Brazilian television show questioned Dr Coutinho, asking “It was the feminists who rejected the male pill?” and Coutinho replied, saying “[At] the international feminist movement in Budapest, World Population Congress, I was the only scientist to talk. The others were politicians. I went to tell our results which were great. We already had more than 1000 men who had taken the pill, no side effects, etc.”
The show’s female presenter interjected: “I don’t get it, she was demanding to her, or to us [women] the decision on procreation?” Dr Coutinho responds by stating the position of the feminist panel members at the Budapest Population Congress, “WE take the pill, when we want to get pregnant, we stop taking it”.
And that is why the in the “free world” there is no male birth control pill. Because, according to politically connected feminists,“WE take the pill, when we want to get pregnant, we stop taking it.”
This also explains the ideology behind denying men access to the pre-conception birth control of vasectomy. As long as women exercising their “rights” over reproduction can also use the power of the state to appropriate money to pay for their own choices from unwilling fathers, then any encumbrance to this totalitarian system will be painted in the hysterical colors of a “war against women.”
If such a war were real, and not the hyperbolic fear mongering of professional liars then State Representative Neal’s openly declared intention to escalate the inequality of rights between men and women would place herself as serious risk. The fact is that men face ongoing legal disenfranchisement, companied with continued state enforcement of the unilateral legal reproductive rights of women including the imprisonment of men unable to finance baby making they have no rights over.
Although debtors prisons were legally abolished more than a century ago, men are still locked up if they find themselves unable to finance a woman’s decision to reproduce. But if we listen to our media, this is a War Against Women.
The Violence Against Women Act is another area of push-back, after 20 years of a law which governs policing and prosecutions based on a totally discredited model of domestic violence. VAWA turned the real problem of violence within romantic relationships in which men and women abuse each other coequally, in a world of legal fiction in which women were universally innocent victims and men were universally guilty aggressors. While male-on-female abuse is real, it is only a small part of the larger problem domestic violence. However VAWA also incentivized frivolous prosecutions by allocating funds to prosecutors for indictments, regardless of convictions. Now, after 20 years of policing by profiling, where cops follow a script of arrest-the-man-no-matter-what rather than doing actual police work, the public is catching on to this scam, and VAWA faces open opposition in it’s re-authorization.
In addition, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, prior to the Easter weekend repealed that state’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, a law based on the persistent myth of the wage gap. In reality, women on average do earn less over their lifetimes than men. Gender ideologues who have enjoyed an increasing command of public narrative have always claimed that this meant women and men doing the same job were payed differentially based on sex, but this is now, and always has been a lie. The difference in lifetime income is actually just a byproduct of women’s preferences, on average, for employment which affords greater flexibility, greater access to friends and family than the career paths men generally pursue. The wage gap myth has been so thoroughly and so repeatedly debunked that continued public pretence to it is no longer politically viable. Of course, oppositional commentary characterizes Walker’s action as further evidence of the “war on women.”
Omitted from this “war on women” narrative is the department of education mandate for diminished standards of evidence in male-targeting accusations of sexual misconduct in american universities and colleges. Also omitted is the persistent female favouring affirmative action in access and in higher education, despite 20 years of escalating female favouring imbalance in educational outcomes. Even the feminists have noticed this, but rather than treating it as a problem to be solved, systematic male exclusion from higher education is celebrated by professional bigots like Hannah Rosin.
Also omitted from the war on women is the unofficial policy of the courts to fabricate excuses for female criminals – like Amanda Knox, whose bizarre acquittal reveals in human beings a wholly irrational ability to forgive any behavior from a sexually attractive female, including murder. A google search for “woman kills baby” revealed a lengthy list of women acquitted or given suspended sentences for the killings of their own children. When it comes to the behavior of females, there appears to be no limit on violence, murder, or outrageous conduct. However, we are constantly reminded that there is a war on women. How much repetition will it take to convince all of us?
The Obama health care package is another area in which, rather than being sensibly omitted from the constructed narrative of a “war on women” in the few places where women are expected to pay for coverage – the “war on women” screen rings out again. Strangely, in every area where free coverage is offered for women, no corresponding coverage is listed for men.
Breast cancer screening, yes, prostate cancer screening, no. According to reporting by AVfM contributor Anthony Zarat:

..there are also line items for three breast health treatments, with no matching prostate health coverage.  There is cervical cancer screening, but no provisions for male specific cancers.  There are several line items protecting women from STDs, but no matching money for men.
This is also where mandatory free birth control products and free tubal ligation services for women will be, once the Institute of Medicine’s recommendations are accepted by the president.  That approval process led to the fuss over a “war on birth control.” Nobody talks about the fact that birth control for men, including vasectomy, is not covered, not free, and not mentioned in either the IOM or the USPSTF. Feminists and the liberal left are crying foul because a small number of women will have a small number of their female-only services under Obamacare limited. A few women, some of the time, will be treated like all men are treated, all the time. Outrageous!”

So this is the war on women? That women sometimes are treated as men are treated all the time?
Although it would very likely have a salutary effect on the perception of people whose reality is filtered through the lens of mainstream media, I am not bloody-minded enough to wish for a reversal of the imbalance of legal rights between men and women. I lack the necessary cruelty.
In addition, whoever came up with that marketing for this apparent “war on women” wasn’t trying hard enough to get guys like me on board, but after examining what’s behind this war on women, and in spite of the poorly chosen name, count me in. After reading some of the recent, emotionally overblown and free-from-facts attempts at condemnation of the MRM, it’s evident that many commentators of the gender-ideologue stripe are convinced that the movement seeking equal legal rights and recognition of the humanity of men is rising. Our most vociferous detractors are clearly worried that we are winning. In that concern, they are correct.

I’ve just read another article variously excoriating men and “empowering” women on the topic of exposed female flesh. Cleavage specifically, and it’s power to draw male attention. As this is being written in early Spring, the seasonal spectacle of high cut skirts and low-cut tops will be putting a bit more bounce back in everybody’s step, and social commentators will write predictable criticism of males who just cant keep their eyes to themselves.
I’ll be the first to admit that every spring when horseflesh goes back on display, I enjoy the scenery. I’m biologically wired to not only enjoy it, but also be distracted every time a bit of pink goes jiggling through my peripheral vision. However, there is apparently a bit of a problem. Women who put themselves on display and enjoy the attention of high-income, high-status men are somewhat less than enthused with being ogled by men they regard as low-status, unattractive, or gods-forbid: beta males.
Those guys – men who don’t have what it takes to get a second glance from women – well, those losers are just as likely to leer at bouncy cleavage and short skirts, and sometimes even offer unwanted comment or commentary. In fact, average guys, when told to buzz off and that their attention is unwelcome, sometimes don’t even have the good sense to control themselves in these circumstances. Rude remarks are increasingly common from this sort of creep. It’s almost like low-status males imagine they have a right to look at what’s paraded in front of them, or even a right to speak. How stupid are these guys anyway? Don’t they know to shut their mouths and avert their fucking eyes?
Or maybe, just maybe – there’s another way to understand this problem. It might even be that provocative attire is described using the word “provocative” because such clothing is designed to provoke a response. It might be that male sexual attention, when it is deliberately stimulated by women showing off their secondary sexual characteristics is stimulated in men without regard to the size of their paychecks. It might even be that men whose income or attire doesn’t mark them as high-earning alpha males, that these fucking stupid losers think they’re human beings even if they don’t tick all the boxes on women’s reptile brain wiring and make them wet. It might be that these guys have a different view of themselves and their worth, wholly apart from the primitive hominid programming most women use to discard 90% of men as worthless before they’ve even registered there’s a person in their field of vision.
Holy fuck, these guys might even think they’re human beings worth saying hello to. Can you imagine anything so stupid? In fact, this is going to stretch credulity, but as I was writing this, another possibility crossed my mind. Because it made me laugh, I’ll share it – just for the entertainment value.
It might be that low status men, ones who are socially invisible to women seeking the attention of executives, lawyers and elite athletes – well, it could be that these guys know they are socially invisible – and that attractive women parading their sexual and social power as if it’s an unholstered gun, they know such women regard them as low grade peasant scum. These foolish males might even realize the contempt they’re held in, and it might mean they’re increasingly unwilling to defer to those privileged princesses whose sexual and social power is based not on accomplishment, but just on their sex.
It might even be that as average, low status males, these guys understand that their social value to the women who flaunt their sexual power and potency is based only on what use those women can make of them. It might be that understanding they are seen by females only as under-performing appliances for dispensing money and for female convenience; violence – they’re disinclined to respond to women’s open contempt with anything except unapologetic honesty.
In fact, according to Bettina Arndt, in her article “the Booby Trap” although some claim slutty attire is just to make themselves feel good, the main message sent is about flaunting women’s sexual power. It’s an “UP YOU” gesture of the most provocative kind. The message is unsubtle. look what i’ve got, what you want, and what I’m flaunting in front of you and that you are not even allowed to respond to.
And many men, increasingly aware of their second class status, and faced by undisguised contempt from a sexual class who recognize no limit on their own behavior, these men are uninterested in pretend deference.
So if you’ve got great tits, or a pert, round behind, and you’ve put them on display, of course men are going to stare, princess. You might even get a few comments. Also, the difference between creepy and appreciative in those comments exists almost entirely in your mind, and not in the content of the offered commentary. As a woman, your evaluation of the difference between appreciated compliment from an attractive gentlemen and unwanted creep-behaviour from a loser is based on your subconscious evaluation of social status and wealth. This is the reptile portion of your brain’s instinctive selection – evaluating men as utilities which dispense money, violence on your behalf, and sperm. This is also why low status males are socially invisible to you. Your subconscious has edited them out before you even consider them as individuals worth chatting up. And no, those men should not apologize to you for being attracted, or for saying so. Instead, perhaps you should apologize to them, for presenting for inspection what was not on offer.
Or maybe, and here I’m just making a wild-assed suggestion, when you’re picking your outfit, including that low-neck top that gives guys whiplash and the short skirt that shows off your cute round butt, you should not be so shocked when it results in male eyeballs vectoring in on your advertized cleavage. And when you get a whistle, or a clumsy comment, realize that attention is exactly what you asked for.

I have become accustomed to accusations of hatred of women by people, who are either intellectually lazy or dishonest or confused about what I say in my blogging and writing. I have always seen these accusations as a sort of surrender from people I’ll call my philosophical opponents.
In debate over ideas, accusations of bad character, bad hygiene or bad ju-ju are nothing new for debaters unable or unwilling to address what’s actually being argued. I have thought too that the difference between a rational argument and groundless insult of character was glaringly evident to observers. When certain self identified radical proponents of a view I find unethical have habitually heaped accusations on me, ranging from sexual impotence, personal unattractiveness and deviant behavior – I’ve dismissed those insults and accusations, confident that those actors only painted themselves into an increasingly narrow corner of implausibility.
However, as many people are already aware, a high profile organization with an established reputation as proponents of human rights and opponents of bigotry and prejudice has recently announced that a movement I am a part of – along with a collection of other movements and organizations, advocates or promotes hate. This was the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Thankfully, several respected publications and channels have publicly objected to the recent pronouncements of the SPLC – confirming, for me anyway, that I have not woken up the only sane human being on a bizarro planet of the demented. Included in the protest were the American Spectator[1] and Reason Magazine[2] who both called baloney on the SPLC’s new list; Reason-Magazine doing so in several articles including the perfectly titled Fearmongering at the SPLC.
However, the repeated justification for inclusion of writing within the men’s rights movement in a list of hate groups is that such writing frequently takes an openly oppositional position to an ideology calling itself, in various forms and flavors: feminism.
If you believe feminism represents a movement seeking equality of human rights between women and men, then a movement in opposition to it might indeed seem misogynistic. Misogyny is, of course, the most common argument against human rights advocates arguing that men  are mistreated by the nation’s family courts, sentenced unequally in criminal courts, characterized as either buffoons or villains by most media, and variously marginalized, shamed, silenced, and told to shut up, man up, and get back to protecting, providing, and dying when convenient.
Arguments for fair treatment in the courts, the workplace the education system and elsewhere are, by this logic, transmuted in oppositional commentary as hatred of women.
This is why in my own writing, my answer to accusations of misogyny (the hatred of women) is to explain, as to a child, that a group of people (women) and an ideology (feminism) are not actually the same thing, and that opposition to an ideology, particularly one based on hatred or violence – does not translate to hatred of women.
However, this all depends on a shared understanding of just what is encompassed by that most flexible of labels: feminism. If a reader equates feminism with women’s rights, then opposition to it is logically an argument against women’s rights. Clarity of understanding of just what anybody means when using the F-word (feminism) is hindered by the reality that widely different philosophical positions all use the word feminism to identify themselves. To any proponent of any of these ideologies – they likely appear so widely different that shared use of the feminist brand name presents no problem, however, to an outsider, and subscriber to none, the differences can appear superficial at best.
This is not simply a problem of which is the real feminism – as all these variations are arguably real, but also a question of who is at the politically potent centre, and who occupies the fringe of this thing we all rather sloppily call feminism. This can be answered in two ways. I know a number of men and women who self identify as feminists, and whose activist goals, although not identical to mine, point in the same direction. That is to say: the pursuit of equality of legal rights and opportunities in employment, education, representation, and protection from harm under the law. Their goals are largely the same as mine, and although they might not use my nomenclature – for clarity in this discussion I will call them humanist feminists. Another group, or set of groups, also calling themselves feminists have a decidedly different list of objectives and these goals are – from my point of view – monstrous.
The reduction of men to a tiny fraction of the population through eugenics. The eradication of human rights for “male animals”. The de-coupling of “human society” from “male society” to create a feminine utopia free from “male predation”. Male targeting infanticide, sexually selective abortion and so on.
These feminists call themselves radical, and it’s easy to take that word as a synonym for absurd. However, the usage intended is based on the classical Latin verb radicalis, which means “of roots”.
Radical feminism then can be better understood by calling it a feminism pursuing replacement of the fundamental root and branches of the basic tenets of human society. The proponents of this particular flavor of the ideology being similar in character to fundamentalist adherents of an Abrahamic religion, substituting the writings of Dworkin and Solanas for the holy writings of early desert dwelling religionists.
Because of the rabid and often overtly violent tone of radical feminist rhetoric, the public conception of radical feminists has been that they were fringe elements, barely functional, unemployable wing-nuts, living in cat-filled apartments, and subsisting on food stamps; or naive, but equally fanatical freshman women’s studies students who after graduation and contact with the real world – we all expect will grow up and stop being such idiots.
These radicals are obviously at the fringe, and “mainstream” feminism is the equality-seeking human rights movement which a number of my friends advocate.
That’s what I used to think too.
In November of 2011, the news aggregator web site Reddit.com published a link to a radical feminist blog posting, calling for male-targeted eugenics, infanticide, direct violence against male children, and male-targeted sexually selective abortion. This by itself wasn’t enough to draw community-wide attention and dismay; from lone-nut bloggers this type of violent rhetoric is not so unusual. However, rather than eliciting condemnation – the comment thread on this article took the author’s suggestions of eugenics and hatred and doubled down, amplifying the enthusiasm for violence, murder, infanticide and psychological and physical abuse of children.
The savagery and hatred demonstrated in the comments thread led some human rights activists to inquire just who was advocating such a violent and hateful direction for the movement claimed by some to be nothing except “the radical notion that women are people.”
When it turned out that the article’s author was Simon and Schuster published novelist and former lawyer Pam O’Shaughnessy – and that the commentators taking calls for eugenics and murder to the next level of violent-and-crazy were tenured professors, child care workers, teachers, civil rights activists and other professionals internationally pre-eminent in their respective fields – a re-evaluation of radical feminism’s apparent occupation of the fringe was necessary.
What came to light next was a collection of Swedish feminists producing and performing a stage adaptation of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto for Swedish school children, and advertising their performance with a realistic staging of the execution-style murder of a newspaper reading man, followed by celebratory dancing and the text message “do your part”.
The play, staged for school children, based on Solanas’ published rant which in the opening paragraph calls for the extermination of the male species.
The incandescent hate which characterized Solanas’ work was adapted for school children and advertized with the simulated murder of a man by 6 giggling women. Based on on-line Swedish language reporting, translated using Google – the play features on a Swedish national holiday called “Hetero Hate Day.” If I were properly multicultural, I might suggest the holiday be made more inclusive, extending it to a full weekend with the second day being Homosexual Hate Day. Unfortunately, I can’t really get behind hating people for their sexual preferences – or even for their arrangement of reproductive organs. I also can’t muster the energy to give much care for the levels of melanin in somebody’s skin, or whether they worship the appropriate diety. People with peanut allergies though, I really hate them. Passionately and with vigor.
After writing about Swedish murder cheerleaders and hetero-hate advocates, I, along with several other writers at AVfM wrote about a movement within the Australian civil service to craft legislation which appeared to have the purpose of stripping human rights from men, and propagandizing the factually false narrative used by the grievance industry that all domestic violence is male on female. This narrative is of course false, as the peer-reviewed research shows.[3][4][5][6][7] In domestic violence, “women are as violent or more violent than their male spouses or partners”.
Australia also hosted an international feminist conference called “the SCUM Conference” in late 2011, named in unambiguous reference to Solanas’ violent and furious anti-male hate literature.
But the radical feminists, the violent-and-crazy feminists driven by hatred, and arguably mental illness; we continue to think of them as the fringe, the ineffectual and the irrelevant. It is increasingly obvious that radical feminism is the potent, politically connected and central driver of change within feminism’s wider ambit. Humanist feminists, arguably far more numerous than their radical cousins – are sadly the ineffectual fringe.
Thus, opposition to feminism – without any prefix of “radical” or “violent” – is not an opposition to the human rights of women. However, due to ignorance of the power and tenacity of those we might instinctively relegate to the disregarded fringe, the general public still equates the label of feminism with a humanist, civil-rights movement.
The sloppy research identifying human rights activists as a hate movement and absence of due diligence by a formerly prestigious human rights organization whose principal active members are licensed legal professionals, on the other hand, is not excusable. The former prestige of the Southern Poverty Law Center is now shame. And it is deserved.
[1] http://spectator.org/blog/2010/03/02/the-great-hate-hype-are-libert
[2] http://reason.com/blog/2010/03/03/fearmongering-at-the-splc
[3] http://csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
[4] Headey, B., Scott, D., & de Vaus, D. (1999). Domestic violence in Australia: Are Women and Men Equally Violent? Australian Social Monitor 2:57-62
[5] Dutton D. G. (2007). Female Intimate Partner Violence and Developmental Trajectories of Abusive Families. International Journal of Men’s Health, 6, 54-71
[7] Archer J (2000). Sex Differences in Physically Aggressive Acts between Heterosexual Partners: A Meta-Analytic Review. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 651-680
[6] http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/facts/1-20/2006/3%20crime%20victimisation.aspx
[7] http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf