Amanda Marcotte has a two-part essay about what she calls the anti-feminist/men's rights movement. In part 1 she gives an overview of the players she sees in the MRA, and in part 2 she discusses some of the MRA arguments that she's encountered. The posts are long, and I haven't yet had time to fully digest everything she's written.
My initial impression is that Miss Marcotte is largely responding to the lunatic fringe of those who think men should have the same rights as women. For instance, she quotes men who apparently argue that rape isn't a big deal and then she acts as if such a disgustingly absurd position actually requires refutation. She also ignores a lot of obvious social factors that would undermine her arguments, such as the fact that men who are injured by women who use weapons to commit domestic violence are very unlikely to admit the source of their injuries.
Anyway, her posts are certainly an interesting read, and I'll probably have more to say about them later. I'm sure Miss Marcotte could find plenty to disagree with on my site, but I'd like to find some way to convince her that not all conservative men line up with the stereotype she portrays. Isn't there a middle ground between feminism and idiots who claim that "rape is not tramatic [sic]"?
Update:
For instance, this is the kind of nonsense you get when you see the world through Miss Marcotte's eyes.
Pre-teen boys who went to the "Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day" at the University of California-San Francisco's Center for Gender Equity last week got to undergo gender sensitivity indoctrination while their female counterparts took part in all manner of hands-on activities, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.The 9- and 10-year-old daughters got to, for example, work with microscopes, slice up brains, play surgeon or dentist and visit the intensive care unit nursery. The boys, on the other hand, learned about "violence prevention and how to be allies to the girls and women in their lives" using media, role playing and group games.
(HT: Ace. Check out his commenters while you're there.)
Ms. Marcotte seems to be leaving out of her analysis a bunch of us women who don't take her assumptions as axiomatic. For example, she seems to think the "one in four" rape statistic is accurate. Even if you allow that it includes both rapes and attempted rapes, it is still a biased statistic because the way the question was phrased would mean that sexual encounters regretted the next morning could have been counted as "rapes".
Also, some of us women happen to agree that not all unwanted sexual encounters are rapes; it's not (as she seems to think) limited to straight white males. I happen to agree that a woman who says yes with her body and no with her mouth has not been raped because she sent a clear signal of consent with her body (although I also condemn the man for proceeding with the seduction when there is ambiguity about consent). And women who have sexual encounters while drunk are not entirely responsible for the encounter, but they should be held responsible for voluntarily putting themselves in a position where they did not know what they were doing. A woman who got drunk and had sex with a man who was also drunk is NOT the same thing morally as a woman who was slipped some roofies and raped.
I think there is a non-fringe side to Men's Rights, that has a lot of valid points. For one, parental rights are genuinely lopsided under our laws. Men are routinely cut out of decisions about their offspring because women have been taking up all the bandwidth, so to speak, with talk about their "choices" and "rights". Men's "right to choose" fatherhood is routinely cut off at the moment they pull up their pants, but Ms. Marcotte probably wouldn't dream of cutting off a woman's "right to choose" motherhood at that same point. Even asymmetries in the biological roles of mothers and fathers can't account for all the discrepancies. Child support laws in some places force men who have not even fathered a child to pay child support, just because they share the same name with the child's actual father-- even when paternity tests prove their story. These cases are few, but the fact that the men in question have absolutely no legal recourse says a lot about the female orientation of our laws.
Bottom line: there are some areas where men DO have fewer rights than women. I think there's plenty of room to work on these, and insofar as Men's Rights movements bring these things to light, I think they're doing a public service.
Please send to me information on pro mens rights
groups,anti-feminist group meetings of men etc.