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Why the hell would you want to do that?

Just a short note - recently I've been seeing backlinks in my page views to google searches on the topic of whether it's alright to contact someone or visit someone after taking out a restraining order against him. (Yes, all of the searches I've seen have referred to a him.)   

For the record, no, it's not. 

You have no reason, and no right. When you took out a restraining order, that's a court order for him to have no contact with you, and remain a specific distance away from you. If you initiate contact of any kind, you're not only sending a mixed message (stay away from me! Except when I don't want you to, which could be at any time...) and inflicting the emotional pain associated with that mixed message, you're placing him at risk of arrest and prosecution for violating the order, even though he has made no move to do so, and even if you don't want him prosecuted. 
 
In short, if you have  restraining order against another person, and you initiate contact anyway, you are now the abuser.

In doing so, you demonstrate that you never needed the restraining order in the first place.

So for those searching to see if it's okay, no. You had your say, made your point, got your way, and it's been signed by a judge. Your court order saying he has to leave you alone goes both ways.

You've ordered him to get over you. You'd better be prepared to get over him, too.

"Nice" feminists: How a hate movement uses its grassroots against men

NAFALT – not all feminists are like that - is a frequently offered counter to discussion about the hatred and bigotry that permeates modern feminist activism. It’s used to hold up people who identify as feminist, subscribe to feminist ideology, and support mainstream feminist organizations, but don’t consider themselves misandrist, as a shield to protect the movement from scrutiny. “Nice” feminists are offered as evidence that activist attacks on men’s human rights are not characteristic of feminism itself, but instead the actions of radical extremists. That argument is in turn used to admonish against any criticism of feminist actions, no matter how legitimate or relevant the criticism may be.
To understand the role of the “nice” feminist, one has to first understand some things about the Men’s Human Rights Advocate (MHRA) / Feminist conflict within the area of gender issues as they relate to human rights activism.
  • Gender issues are not as cut and dried as feminist advocates make them out to be. Both sides of the gender conflict perceive and accuse issue causes within the other side’s influence on overall society. It is therefore vital for an individual to seek out the facts behind these claims before judging their validity.
Feminists blame the existing power structure, which they see as male-dominated, for issues related to both sexes. They accuse men’s human rights activists of undermining feminist efforts to “fight the patriarchy.”
However, history shows that certain aspects of discrimination faced by men in modern society are the result of feminist influence on the very power structure they’re trying to blame. Decades of feminist efforts have led to denial of assistance for male victims of female intimate partner and sexual violence. It was women’s activism which led to the use of the Tender Years Doctrine in family court to limit fathers’ custody rights over young children. Feminists have opposed the efforts of father’s rights groups to seek a more even-handed method of handling child custody following divorce. In fact, they used efforts to demonize fathers as abusers and deadbeats in order to make their arguments.
  • Gender issues between the sexes are intimately connected to (but not entirely caused by) the effects of entitlement politics on overall society. Feminist involvement has created a subset of entitlement politics specific to women.
One area where this can be seen is in Obamacare’s extensive coverage of elective drugs and procedures for women, while denying similar coverage to men. Another is the way rape laws have changed during the last century, going beyond the reasonable goal of preventing social attitudes and irrelevant factors from affecting rape cases, and becoming an attack on due process, so that an accused defendant is left with the burden of proving his innocence even in the absence of evidence of his guilt, yet may be denied the tools to do so. At the same time, the feminist effort to exclude male victims from the legal definition of rape has left men raped by women with less recourse than women raped by men had before society’s attitude toward rape was ever addressed. This is also an example of the next factor to understand:
This can be seen in every area of feminist advocacy, as they scramble to exclude men from any consideration, any benefit, any recognition of humanity which they demand that society offer women. One of the most disgusting examples of this is the way feminist debaters scramble to differentiate between infant genital mutilation committed against boys, and childhood genital mutilation committed against girls. First world feminists are so bent on their predatory exploitation of proxy victim status related to the issue of female genital mutilation that they’re willing to actively hold back the movement to protect baby boys from the same abuse, lest their pilfered spotlight be diminished when the focus is widened to include all of the victims.
  • There is a gaping chasm of disconnect between current and historical influential feminists (leadership, academics,) and the current grassroots of the movement, wherein the hands and feet of the body have little knowledge of what the head is doing.
Feminists in media and education spoon feed their young charges false statistics, unsupported theory, and political rhetoric. Students get the edited version of feminist history, with emphasis on male society as an oppressive force and female society as the helpless victim. They aren’t taught about the destructive and controlling behavior of early feminists, including suffragette violence, early female activist bigotry, and their involvement in the temperance movement. Resentment toward men is presented as a rational response to the way society evolved before women began changing their social roles.

The combination of these factors has caused the movement to become a living propaganda machine, where those influential few at the top push their agenda, and the response goes through the ranks to the grassroots, who react with little understanding and less concern for the effects of their actions.

The other effect of the disconnect, which supports the machine, is that at the grassroots level, loyalty outweighs logic. This is due to that tendency to want more to perceive oneself as right rather than to be right. It’s a loyalty you see in politics all the time, treating an ideology the same way one treats one’s favorite university’s athletic clubs. They’re not feminists – they’re supporters of team feminist, many of whom don’t have any real grasp on the mechanics or method of the game.

When exposed to information that contradicts their blind devotion to their movement, these loyalists start riding the Change Curve: Shock, Denial, Anger, with the insertion of Bargaining (that being the attempt to rationalize compatibility of the movements) as the 4th step. There, they stop, and instead of going through the rest of the ride (Depression, Acceptance, Integration) they return to an earlier stage, or get stuck in a Bargaining loop, because the desire to not have integrated into their lives a wrong ideology is stronger than the desire to progress intellectually and socially. They’re so loyal to ‘team feminist’ that they cannot accept reality, but must instead try to impose their perception where reality does not suit them.

This apparently willful ignorance is not an individual trait. It’s not a character flaw. It’s an experience common to the grassroots segment of the movement, and there’s a reason for it. It’s the same reason for the “willful” ignorance that led other hate based political movements throughout history to remain cohesive and determined in the face of contradictory evidence, and in the face of evidence that their overt behaviors were abusive toward their fellow humans.

The tendency occurs in response to dehumanization campaigns; efforts by a political movement’s influential members and leadership to reduce the perception (by the target audience) of the humanity of a target population segment, not based on exhibited behavior, but based on generalized flaws insinuated upon that segment defined by a common trait or common traits. At the same time, these movements make a concurrent effort to increase the perception of their own humanity and that of their similarly defined allied segment of the population using the exact opposite of the dehumanization effort – the application of positively viewed characteristics, often combined with an unsubstantiated or ideologically (but not factually) substantiated claim by the leadership that the promoted population has been or is being helplessly victimized by the supposedly malicious target population.

This isn’t simply the “these people do these things with which we disagree, and we oppose those behaviors because (reasons related to behavioral effects)” kind of rivalry seen in political disagreements. Describing this phenomenon of politics does not justify characterizing all forms of dissent as dehumanization efforts. Dissent is justified where the practical application of an ideological push causes damage to a group’s ability to freely exercise their human rights. Dehumanization efforts occur when the target group’s free exercise of their human rights interferes or would interfere with the perpetrator group’s ideological push for or hold on political or social power.

The method exercised in dehumanization efforts is more “members of this group are inherently (insert negative characteristic here) and (insert type of power here,) while we are inherently (insert positive characteristic here) and (insert related vulnerability here), and therefore we have the right and responsibility to treat them as lower life forms because our traits are nicer than theirs, and their traits have led them to victimize us.” This is a direct play on the human team-loyalty and self-loyalty tendencies – exploitation of an us-vs-them mentality, and natural human sympathy for anyone perceived as having been wronged.
That treatment begins with taking a bigoted attitude toward the group, then progresses into villainization, discrimination, degradation, subjugation, exploitation, and sometimes eventually targeted efforts at extermination. The pattern has repeated itself throughout human history.

Ethnicity has been the common characteristic of groups most famously targeted (using characterization of blacks as childlike and unable to take care of themselves to excuse the slavery system, characterization of American Natives as “dangerous savages” by white immigrants to justify their eviction from their lands, and the near extermination of their race… demonization of ethnic Jews and Gypsies prior to and during the Holocaust) but such targeting is not unique to ethnic populations. Other groups have suffered similarly (as in the targeting of homosexuals throughout modern history including the Holocaust, the use of the label “Witch” to justify all manner of human atrocities in Europe during what today’s neopagans refer to as “the burning times,” or the use of the label “Kulak” to facilitate Stalin’s murder of anyone he viewed as an enemy, or the treatment of “Christian” and “bigot” or “Muslim” and “terrorist” as synonymous by certain modern groups to justify hatred of and discrimination against either.) Each of these targeted groups were dehumanized using the insinuation of disapproved traits as character traits universal to the group.

This same technique can be seen in the anti-male campaign within feminism, in messages such as “men are inherently predatory,”  “men are inherently violent,” and “male society has dominated female society throughout history.”

These messages are fundamentally identical to the propaganda of ethnic and religious bigotry movements. They contain the population-wide application of characteristics, the nature of which provide a rationale for purportedly respondent discrimination against that population. If men are inherently predatory and violent, then it’s acceptable to compromise on men’s freedoms to protect women and children from being victimized by predatory male violence. Combining the three promoted factors (predation, violence, and dominance), feminist ideology and advocacy can rationalize claiming that women are at a disadvantage, and damseling for preferential treatment to make up for it.

Treating destructive traits as inherently male traits allows influential feminists and feminist leaders to level a perpetual, consistent and ever-escalating attack on male society. No matter what women achieve, because they’re claiming to have achieved it in the shadow of a predatory, violent, domineering segment of society, they can still also claim a disadvantage. This is how every political hate movement throughout history has justified the slow descent from animosity to atrocity. It’s also how feminism is able to survive its own successes. Even as feminist activists achieve victory after victory, as long as they can claim that men naturally oppress women just by being men, they can rationalize continuing to damsel and push no matter how much power and privilege they’ve won.

The influence of a dehumanization campaign on the target audience – those in whose view they want to dehumanize the target group -  molds both intellect and attitude. The target audience is slowly trained to view the target group only as a group and a set of characteristics, rather than as individuals with unique and broadly varied personal traits. This leads to a subtly and eventually overtly bigoted perception of and response to members of the target group. The result is a combination of ‘team’ loyalty, an unsupported us-vs-them mentality, and a distorted view and growing hatred and fear of the targeted group. That, in turn, leads to being disposed to accept legal, political, and social treatment of anyone perceived to be part of that group in ways the individual would otherwise consider unfair, unjust, immoral, unethical, and inhumane.
Once mistreatment of members of the target group becomes accepted, the grassroots of the perpetrator group becomes the vehicle of the group’s own dehumanization, using language, display of attitude, and discriminatory rules to attack the target group’s sense of equal status within society. The loyalty tendency lends itself to unquestioning rationalizing of dehumanizing and discriminatory treatment of the target group on the basis of the perpetrator group’s claims about them.

This is seen in various aspects of feminist discourse, advocacy, and activism. The language aspect manifests in labeling, such as calling men “male oppressors,” and “potential rapists.” The  attitude manifests in double standards, such as attributing gender specificity to genderless behaviors like objectification, partner-violence, and rape, in dismissal of value by treating men’s well being and welfare as less important, and men’s experiences as having less personal and social impact than those of women. The application of discriminatory rules manifests in agitation for legal and social privilege, including impositions of the aforementioned double standards, such as combining the inference of perversion on male sexuality and predation on men’s sexual behaviors, while celebrating female sexuality and encouraging women to exhibit the same behaviors condemned in men.

In law, this translates into gender-specific criminalization of some behaviors, and to gender-specific amplification of the criminalization of some behaviors. One example is the double standard applied to rape. It can also be seen in unequal treatment in the criminal court system, where male convicts are punished more severely and for longer periods than female convicts with the same case factors. It’s also seen in social responses to crimes  such as statutory rape, where there is outrage over male perpetration, but many people balk at the suggestion that female offenders should even be considered offenders, much less face the same level of penalty as male offenders.

One role played by the grassroots in this involves being the mouthpiece for the propaganda and mentality of the leadership by repeating terms, catchphrases, and other rhetoric, citing essay writing and published reports based on biased and otherwise flawed research, responding to leadership initiatives. Another is the use of shaming language to try to silence anyone who disagrees. It also includes providing false credibility to the movement’s leadership by virtue of numbers – the more people call themselves “feminist,” and assert feminist theory, ideology, and goals, the more people will think of established feminist leadership as a benevolent entity which guides and advocates for a good cause. This leads to people in authority positions treating feminist leaders as experts as well as activists. The result of this combined promotion of ideology and credibility is the increased ability of feminist lobbyists and other advocates to persuade individuals and groups in positions of authority to accept their counsel and enact their ideological perspective into practical application through law and policy.

Additionally, the grassroots of the movement acts as a social cushion between  the public’s view of the movement, and the activism of its leadership; a wide-eyed innocent mask to hide the movement’s malignant soul. By presenting a “nice” face attached to the label, grassroots feminists draw attention away from the practical application of the movement’s ideology, and create the false impression that they are representative of the movement, rather than the movement being about the real-world actions taken in its name. This is a reason for the leadership to use advocacy and propagandized “education” initiatives (like Women’s Studies courses, and the insertion of political rhetoric into other areas of study) to cultivate a grassroots movement well armed with rhetoric and resentment, but low on detailed knowledge of the issues presented to them in their training.

This creates a population of brainwashed twits whose attachment to the label “feminist” is based on fluff and feelings. Being in agreement with each other in the belief that feminism is about fighting for equality, they view themselves as the movement’s mainstream even though their overt participation in the movement is mostly limited to providing it with free marketing for its name. As long as activist groups make effective use of the grassroots without becoming so overzealous as to make obvious the exploitative nature of the leadership’s relationship to the them, feminists will be able to continue to use their grassroots to filter otherwise socially unacceptable dogma, rhetoric, and terms into public discourse. They’ll be able to continue to point to that as evidence of their credibility when lobbying for discriminatory law and policy. In this way, leadership influence over the grassroots may be one of feminism’s strongest weapons:

“Nice” feminists are feminism’s propaganda drones – mindless of purpose and careless of the carnage they cause.

Feminist encroachment and co-opting; men's rights activism isn't the only target

This Huffington Post article speaks to an issue I've been noticing among feminists, watching them from the perspective of the men's rights movement.

Yes, as feminists tell you, they divide into a lot of different groups, but there's an overall, underlying ideology that links them all - the belief in patriarchy theory. That theory boils down to the idea that society is male dominated. They support it with various claims, including the ridiculous claim that somehow the male to female ratio in leadership positions translates into regular guys having power over regular gals, an argument I've addressed here. One of the concepts feminists often express in debate is the idea that 'patriarchy' is responsible for gender stereotypes.

Both feminist groups and men's rights groups agree that traditional gender stereotypes aren't suitable for modern society - they don't work any more. They're not needed, not helpful, and often are detrimental to human interaction and societal progress. Feminists blame male control. Men's rights activists blame the conditions under which humans had to survive prior to and during the evolution of society due to technological and intellectual advances over time.

Though the article has some very raw and very important points about enforcement of traditional gender roles on gay men by gay men, the use of the word misogyny is a big fat red flag. Why would anyone use the word "misogyny" to describe the way one man treats another man? Misogyny is hatred of women. Misogyny is not homophobia. It's got nothing to do with male sexuality. It's a feminist concept, and that article shows how feminist ideology is invading the gay rights movement. At its heart, the misuse of the word misogyny in the article communicates something most people won't notice - the insinuation that gay men, having male partners, are usurping the place of a female partner in each others' lives, as if women just automatically own you, and you're doing something in violation of that.

Within the overall umbrella of the feminist movement, there is a move to demonize men, whether gay, bi, straight, trans, old, young, no matter what characteristics. They express concepts based on it, like 'all men are potential rapists' and 'all men are potential pedophiles'  and treating domestic violence as a male-perpetrated, female experienced issue. That's the underside of feminist ideology. It's leaking over into the mainstream press, with articles about how one man's violence represents the attitude of all men, how men should accept being treated as potential offenders, how it should be viewed as normal to treat all men as predators, and now, how the issues of the gay community - a community of men - are somehow about women.

No matter how nice they may sound about gay issues when they find it useful to associate with gay rights activism, that demonization is still underneath, and in the end, that's where their leadership and activism are coming from, even though the rank-and-file grassroots doesn't all consciously know it. No matter how you feel or what you think about feminist activism in and of itself, the feminist co-opting and politicization of gay experiences, rights issues, and social issues is not going to benefit the gay rights movement. It's going to overshadow you and slowly replace gay rights activism with the promotion of feminist ideological concepts.

If the men involved in the fight for gay rights don't take note of that and resist it, feminist groups will co-opt your movement, twist the politics of it to suit their own needs, and gay rights will take a back burner to feminist advocacy before you even know what's going on. Then, when being associated with the gay rights movement is no longer politically advantageous to feminist groups, they'll turn on the movement and the concepts involved, and without warning you'll be looking at the underside of the bus.

Interesting reply from Sharrod Brown (TBC)

Dear Mrs. XXXX:
 
Thank you for getting in touch with my office in the United States Senate. I appreciate hearing from my constituents.  
 
I have passed your concerns along to the legislative assistant in my office who monitors judicial issues. I will keep your thoughts in mind. If you require any other assistance, please call my office at 202-224-2315. Thank you again for being in touch with me.
 

This must be in reply to my reply to the standard letter I got back from Sen. Brown in response to my letter regarding VAWA, as I noted in my reply to that standard letter that it didn't address anything I'd written in my letter.

I think that in the future, a phone call will be in order, but not until I get an answer back on a Freedom Of Information Act Request I've made (details forthcoming when I have more of an idea whether it's just taking extra time due to the nature of my request, or whether I'm being given the runaround by the agency I've contacted.) The information I've requested is related to the discussion, and if I can get that prior to making the call it will be very helpful in making some of the points I need to make.

The bottom line: At this time, the saga of Gloria Sass and the Chamber of Senate stands at the status of To Be Continued.

Effeminition: Patriarchy Hurts Men, Too



It seems to be one of their favorite battle cries: "Patriarchy hurts men, too!" When feminists say this, they think they're distancing themselves from the damage done to male society by laws and policies which give preferential treatment to women.

They're really not.

It's almost funny how the same group that says they've made a lot of progress, but there's still a long way to go, the same group that says laws giving preferential treatment to women are necessary to correct previous discriminatory conditions, fails to recognize that in lobbying for that preferential treatment, they're also responsible for the damage it does, especially in the hands of women who choose to abuse it.

Child custody is a prime example of this. Feminists will tell you that the belief that women are better parents, especially for younger children, is a notion imposed by "Patriarchy." That assertion is on a list that is being circulated and repeated by younger feminists in debate, without ever questioning its validity.
In fact, the assertion is dead wrong.
The legal presumption that women are naturally better caregivers, used as a determining factor in the decision of child custody, is rooted in a single feminist's mid 19th century activism. When Caroline Norton wrote the bill which would become The Custody of Infants Act of 1839, followed by her "plain" letter to the Lord Chancellor regarding the bill, she probably had no idea that her writing would end up as the inspiration for a court doctrine which would cause for fathers in multiple nations to suffer exactly the indignities she was trying to eliminate in her own life and the lives of other women, but that is what occurred. The Custody of Infants Act was the start of what is now referred to as the Tender Years Doctrine, the basis upon which it became traditional to place custody of children in divorcing families with the mother. The argument that mothers are better caregivers is put forth in Mrs. Norton's "plain" letter, in which she stated that fathers have to hire nursemaids to replace their wives' involvement in the lives of children during their "tender years," and therefore it is natural that the child should be placed in the custody of the mother. Over the years, this doctrine, originally intended to prevent divorce from keeping women from their children, has been pushed and twisted into an every-case imperative, making maternal custody the default in divorce cases.

It is interesting to note that some of the objections to the bill, addressed in Mrs. Norton's letter, have in the end turned out to be true, at least in the United States. With no checks in place to prevent female adultery, abandonment of marriage, or unwed motherhood, divorce and never-married single motherhood here have skyrocketed. Not that these are reasons why women should never have custody of their children, but it's apparent that if everything is arranged to make single parenthood attractive, a significant number of women will choose to be single mothers. As it stands, courts are backing them.
And while child abduction by mothers is not standard behavior, parental alienation has been enough of an issue that it's becoming common to place language in the divorce decree stating that each parent agrees not to slander the other to or in front of the children. Custodial interference is a fairly common behavior among custodial and primary residential mothers, as well.

Today, while some protesters claim that feminist groups do not want fathers to lose custody of their children, mainstream feminist lobbying groups have actively fought to prevent custody from being handled evenly, with genuinely shared custody as the default from which a case would begin.

This is one example, in which by tracing back, then returning to current activism, we can see how the system's discrimination against men has been in response to feminist activism, how feminists have actively fought to keep it that way, and the dysfunction which has resulted from the distance overboard they've gone with their fight. If you look at other areas, you'll see the same thing.

For the last 40 years, feminist advocates have (successfully) fought to impose their gender ideology on the issue of domestic violence, managing to deny assistance to approximately half of the victims of abuse.
Feminist advocated law and policy in the U.S. has whittled away at the due process rights of accused men, provided incentives to make false allegations, and made restraining order abuse easy to commit, and hard to counter.

They've advocated for laws which remove the presumption of innocence from men accused of rape. The handicapping of an accused man's defense makes false conviction a significant risk for men in the U.S., keeping organizations like The Innocence Project busy undoing the damage done by a severely imbalanced, heavily biased legal system.
Feminists have advocated for federally required changes in disciplinary policy at colleges and universities which have led an environment that encourages and enables the leveling of false allegations of sexual violence against men on college and university campuses in the U.S.  

Feminists will tell you time and again that your issues are rooted in the dominant power of men whose station is above yours. The argument seems justified on the surface, when you look at the individuals who seem to be keeping you down - male legislators, male judges, police, and government bureaucrats. However, when you hear the term Patriarchy, and you know the individual shouting it at you is talking about the legal and political structure, remember that these groups act on outside motivators. Patriarchy as feminism defines it is nothing more than a puppet responding to the group it finds most persuasive. When feminist advocates, who have been actively lobbying against your rights and your freedom for over a century tell you that puppet is the one who is holding you down, remember who is pulling its strings, and who really benefits the most from keeping the power structure exactly the way it is right now.

Yes, All Feminists ARE Like That

Videos of feminist protests at Toronto University have apparently put on display some prime examples of a serious pest problem within the feminist community: an infestation of extremists who, according to other feminists, don't represent the movement.



We hear it after every action they take. As MRAs discuss the violence and vitriol, the attacks on free speech, the irrational statements and spewing of venom, feminist apologists trickle into these discussions to offer the same sorry, tired, worn-out old argument:



Really?

If not all feminists are like that, what are the other feminists like... and where the hell are they? Because all of the overt, effective action we've seen has involved feminists who are exactly like that.

We've seen feminists lobby for discriminatory law and policy.
We've seen how some of those laws and policies are abused, often up close and personally.
We've seen feminists advocate for discriminatory social standards.
We've seen feminists attack the due process rights of men.
We've seen feminists attack men's speech rights... and consistently, at that.
We've seen feminist violence, even attempted murder.
We've seen feminists attack and condemn discussion on ways to prevent boys from falling behind in education, and other men's issues.
We've seen feminists oppose the success of civil rights efforts unless they're allowed a free ride on another movement's coat tails, even at the understood risk of derailing the entire effort.
We've seen feminists fight to deny assistance to abused men.
We've seen that fight extend into an overt effort to deny facts and hide existing factors related to abused men.
We've seen feminists propagate a culture of tolerance for female sexual violence against men by denying its existence, denying its severity, and when all else fails, denying its significance in relation to its gender counterpart.
We've seen feminists actively, deliberately vilify the entire male gender, treating the dysfunctional behavior of some as if it were a gender characteristic.
We've even seen them use the slander of innocent men in their campaigns.

The one time feminists point to as an effort to promote equality, they didn't advocate to remove a discriminatory factor from impacting men, but instead moved to become equally abused: When presented with the opportunity to advocate for the abolition of the United States Selective Service's outdated and unnecessary mandate that men make themselves available to be drafted into the military, feminists instead fought to be included in it. It was more important to them to be included than it was for them to right a wrong. I have often seen this effort presented as an argument that see, feminists care about men's rights, too. In reality, it's an example of the solipsistic nature of feminism. Rather than realize how important it is to end this one remaining vestige of overt slavery in the U.S., their main concern was their own exclusion from it. This was not an effort at elevating the treatment of men, but instead an effort at removing an area where the discrimination was obvious.

On a side note: I bet most feminists who have argued for "joining" the "draft" haven't gone to the level of effort that this one did. I don't think MRAs should take any feminist assertions on women in the military seriously until feminists do this en masse. If they really, honestly are for this, then they should be expected to back it up with action. If they won't do that, then we're justified in assuming that their advocacy on this is completely hollow and meaningless.

Back to our regularly scheduled topic: As stated, we have seen various feminist group attacks on men, men's rights, masculinity, and the public's perspective thereof. We haven't seen feminists put any effort into curbing the rampant and blatant extremism in their movement.

Think about what feminists do when they have a cause to promote or a factor to oppose. They don't sit around and simply deny association with it.

They act.

They march en masse, in protest, with shouted slogans and carried signs.
Social media campaigns spread outward from the central effort like ripples in water disturbed by a dropped rock.
Their various activist groups organize media contact efforts to promote their position.
They execute email, phone call, and letter-writing campaigns to government officials.
Public influence efforts include blogging, vlogging, and extensive discussion in the comments under each.
If the issue is with an entity, such as a business, university, or other organization, there are social pressure campaigns targeting the entity, as well, using anything from stern criticism to threats of boycott and public shaming.
If legal action is an option, it is taken, as well.

So, if "nice" feminists are the mainstream... if "nice" feminists represent the majority opinion, the majority effort, and the majority of activists within the movement... why haven't we seen any action from the "nice" front?

Why has not one feminist from anywhere shown up to these events to stand up against this "extremist" position?
Why have none of the Feminists who are Not Like That raised a counter-protest against those embarrassments to their movement?
Why have none of the Feminists who Support Men's Rights shown up to escort men through these pickets, protect the human rights posters, shout down the vitriol, and assert their place as the mainstream of feminism?
Where are the feminist-written blogs condemning the acts of harassment, violence, and vandalism that these "extremists" have committed?
Where are the popular, widely viewed "mainstream feminist" blog and vlog posts arguing the right of men to address and discuss men's issues among themselves, and on their own terms?
Where is even the slightest public "mainstream feminist" criticism of this type of behavior?

Have any feminist groups created information campaigns to help correct this imbalance in their movement?

Where are the "Real feminists don't abuse men" graphics?
Where are the "Real feminists don't deny issues" messages?
Where are the "Feminists can stop male-bashing" campaigns?
Where are the anti-harassment posters with messages like "Hatred is not a feminist value?"
Where is the "mainstream feminist" statement to any major media outlet, condemning the choice of "extremists" to treat the MRM as an enemy force instead of a cooperative effort toward the achievement of social and legal equality?
In fact... where is the mainstream feminist end of that cooperative effort? Is denying association with the part of the feminist movement which effects change all these apologists are good for, or are they going to put their money where their keyboards are, and stand up to those they not-so-openly condemn?

We've seen feminist groups take dramatic action in response to causes they support, or issues they oppose. If "nice" feminists are doing nothing in response to "extremism" within their movement but denying association with it, that doesn't signify opposition. It doesn't even signify separation from it. It signifies tolerance, and acceptance. The lack of action is still a choice - the act of subtly condoning the behavior.

Dissociation of the self from that behavior is not a meaningful argument. It's not enthusiastic dissent. It's a way of letting someone else do the dirty work, so that one may reap the benefits when that work is successful, but have plausible deniability when the hateful nature of it is noticed by others. Denial of association doesn't make up for the continued tolerance by self-titled "mainstream" feminists for these displays of hatred, bigotry, vitriol, and abusive attitudes. It doesn't erase the willingness to continue using these so-called "extremists" as a means of attempting to silence or suppress resistance to the human rights abuses advocated for by feminist groups.

It only shows one's willingness to be unabashedly dishonest about it.


Relevant:  “Nice” feminists: grassroots of a hate movement
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