Meet the women of the men’s rights movement: Why they see feminism as a “personality disorder”

[DonViejo]

A recent crop of profiles of female MRAs shows that bad ideas are truly gender neutral

KATIE MCDONOUGH

The women of the men’s rights movement are an interesting lot. Anne Cools, who delivered the opening remarks at A Voice for Men’s inaugural conference, is the founder of one of Canada’s first domestic violence shelters, the first black person elected to the Canadian Senate and the first black woman to serve as a senator in all of North America. But as Mariah Blake of Mother Jones pointed out in a piece on several of the movement’s most prominent women, Cools also believes that “behind every abusing husband is an abusing mother” and that feminism is a “personality disorder” that seeks to “dominate and terrorize.” Janet Bloomfield, the social media director for A Voice for Men, writes quite a lot about the respect she has for women and their many choices, but also thinks that single mothers are “bona fide idiots” who don’t “give a shit” about their children. (Bloomfield included these observations in a blog post on why men should never date single mothers. Most men, according to Bloomfield, prefer women in possession of a uterus with “no previous occupants.”)

And this is the thing with the men’s rights movement. Some of the goals articulated by these self-described activists — like the recognition that men are also victims of domestic and sexual violence and that women should be able to live their lives on their own terms — are actually important, which is why it’s such a tragedy that they go and contaminate them with everything else MRAs argue about how the world works. For a movement that seems to hold #NotAllMen as a founding principle, the women at the head of the men’s rights movement, like their male counterparts, deal heavily in generalizations about women and men. They wants us to understand men in all of their complexity, but also, it seems, want us to know that most women — particularly feminist women — are pathologically uniform. Conventional MRA wisdom holds that most feminists hate men. They also sneer at mothers who work in the home. They also inflate rape statistics. So egregious is this feminism thing that women needed to unite and stand against it.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/12/meet_the_women_of_the_mens_rights_movement_why_they_see_feminism_as_a_personality_disorder/

[Orsino]

1. If Cools were American, we could safely assume...

...that she was a wingnut welfare recipient expounding these views for pay.