An acquaintance of mine, who calls himself a 'feminist', rocks up at a 'womens' book group and starts making lots of noise on behalf of his transgendered friends (who are not there), starts 'debating' (or maybe that should read baiting?) issues with the assembled gang of bright-eyed predominately white, lower-middle class student feminists who've come to talk about this frikkin' work of fiction they all loved, and boom, no book club no more: the young women involved were too scared the TRA's would rock up and chaos would ensue and they didn't have the stones to deal with a gang of aggressive, older, white men threatening to bash them for being cis-terf-scum. And I don't blame them. It was a book group. For women. Derailed by an allegedly 'woke' 50 year old man who was supposedly an 'ally'.
Cheers, 'Bro'.
So, no. I don't want men in feminism. Let men do their own, manly thing. On their own. Far, far away from the women, and when they're really 'woke up' to what's going down, then they need to come back and have a cup of tea with the women and realise that the problems both groups suffer with and from and under are the result of long-standing structural and systemic inequalities created by a minority elite who have long since morphed into respectability but who intentionally seek to maintain those inequalities so they can maintain their own elevated statuses, and the wheel keeps spinning because the engine of commerce need it to.
If all men were created equal, so too would baked beans. There would be no need for fifteen brands of baked beans and six different price points. All baked beans would taste more or less the same, and cost more or less the same. But, Asda Smart-Price tinned baked beans and Marks and Spencer's 'luxury' 'fresh' baked beans in a plastic pot with a fancy label will never co-exist in the same pan, my friends. This is a truth. Both are haricot beans in a tomato based sauce, of course, but if your Mum had two pans of beans, and one was Smartprice and the other was M&S, you'd still feel cheated if your Mum gave your brother the M&S beans and you know it. You'd be giving him the side-eye as he scarfed those beans, and you know he'd be laughing at you as he watched you try to swallow those inferior beanios while luxury bean juice dripped down his own overly-entitled chin.
the average woman's enemy isn't the average man, and the average man's enemy isn't the average woman. Our shared enemy is inequality, is lack of opportunity, is discrimination based on social class and the name of the beast who devours our children is capitalism.
you had unions, lads. To organise within, to fight for your rights, to provide you with educational options, but nah, politics wasn't cool. Instead you faux-collectivized with your football scarves, pretending this gaggle of blind men was a 'team', that football meant something, but you've been priced out of the football, and now you watch it in the pub instead.
And then the lads start noticing that there's all these others, blacks, gays, women, and they all have more rights than you 'highly prized' white men. So you run off to the right, to make noise and reclaim your birth-right, as men, but gee, the people on the right are not your friends either, lads. You noticed, yeah? They'll just use you for scut-work too. It's your defined role in society, lads, but your land is shrinking under your feet.
Average guys are bummed now they realise they're not really needed. Now they feel like nobody wants them, that nobody respects their ability to shovel shit and die in a trench now we've got machines for all that low-brow stuff. Soon we won't need soldiers or white van man, we wont need 'blokes' to drop off the new washing machine. We won't need taxi drivers, or lorry drivers, or well, poor white men in general, really. No wonder the poor blighters feel like they've got no voice, no place beyond selling drugs to escape the shitty sink estate, the army, or slumming it in Povvo-land and they feel cheated.
And rightfully so, lads. You have been cheated. White working class lads are at the bottom of the pile when it comes to educational attainment, social mobility, but they come top of the class when it comes to suicide. These lads were bred to be cannon fodder and do the donkey work, and well, sorry, but we have no use for that kind of man now, so abortion for all! Finally! Hurrah!
Thankfully, the guys are waking up. They've finally realised they're being shafted too, by the same system that kept women 'in their place' for centuries, and these men have started asking for 'more'. More freedom, more choice, more equality and equity and that isn't a bad thing, however clumsy and misogynistic their collectivizing sometimes appears: they too, like women, need to find their feet in this brave new world we're all creating.
just like how feminism went through it's 'men are cunts, let's cut off their cocks' phase, maybe men's rights need to go through their 'let's rape them in the fanny' stage before their discourse becomes more politically nuanced?
Of course, NAMALT.
More guys are accepting their responsibilities, they want to be good dads, they want to be good husbands, they want to be decent colleagues and friends and lovers, but they too, like women, are still shackled to these 'notions' we have about what men and women are, how they differ, and what that looks like. Lads have been left in limbo as the lies they were encouraged to believe fall away, but feminism isn't where they'll find succour.
Men don't need feminism. Men need their own version, a masculism, where their rights and health and reproductive and employment and other issues are considered from a purely male vantage point. Oh, but we have that already: and we call it... the patriarchy. But the patriarchy doesn't look after you either lads, does it? Not if you're a white working class lad it doesn't. All they bred YOU for was factory work and the army, and you're no longer relevant in today's society.
But, shucks. Instead of giving these poor fellas a break, we malign them and their toxic masculinity. We talk about their 'white male privileges' and 'rape culture', but most of these pasty faced kids don't have privilege, they just get the blame...
time to start organizing, dudes. marching. waving banners. that sort of thing.