White Hot Rage (book review)

[ismnotwasm]

This book, "Angry White Men" which is pretty awesome-- and I'd recommend to anyone ( it was recommended to me) is taking to task by David Futrelle for not explaining and exposing enough about the MRA movement as the whiny, perpetually outraged assholes they really are. (My words)

Futrelle never takes any prisoners anyway, to coin a military phrase

The most surprising thing about Michael Kimmel’s new book Angry White Men is that the title was still available. We’ve been hit by wave after wave of angry white dudes for decades, from the so-called “silent majority” of the seventies incensed by “forced busing” and braless “women’s libbers,” to your Tea Partier brother-in-law who’s always forwarding terrible jokes about Obama being born in Kenya.

Let’s look first at what he gets right.

Why are so many white men so angry these days? Put simply, they’ve been knocked off their pedestal. While it’s a bit premature, to say the least, to talk about “the end of men” a la Hanna Rosin, who in a well-known Atlantic article declared that “the modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards,” it’s clear that things have changed dramatically since the days of Don Draper. Economically, we’re seeing the beginning of the end of what Kimmel calls “the single greatest affirmative action program in world history. It’s called 'world history.’” Women, while still paid less than men, have seen their salaries and job opportunities increase dramatically in recent decades—while men have seen their wages stagnate in real terms. With significantly more women than men graduating from college, this trend is not likely to reverse itself.

Men’s rights activists are harder to explain. They don’t fit as easily into Kimmel’s basic argument on the rise of male anger, heavily driven by the economic transformations and upheavals of recent decades. The men’s rights movement, for those who have yet to encounter it, has little in common with the so-called “mythopoetic” men’s movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which gathered in drum circles in the woods to reclaim their primal masculinity, poet Robert Bly at their helm. Its real roots lie in the anti-feminist backlash of the early ’90s, with ex-feminist Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power as its Bible. Deftly inverting the feminist narrative, Farrell declared that it was men, not women, who were the dispossessed, a “disposable sex” forced to fight the wars and take on the most dangerous jobs to protect and provide for women.

Men’s rights activists have latched onto the rhetoric of male victimhood, but designated feminists as the enemy.

Men’s rights activists have latched onto this rhetoric of male victimhood, but unlike Farrell, they have designated feminists as the enemy. The causes they take up—from false rape accusations to male abuse victims—often seem like little more than excuses to bash women in general, but especially feminists. Men’s rights activists don’t organize marches; they don’t build shelters or raise funds for abused men; they don’t organize prostate cancer-awareness events or campaign against prison rape. What they actually do, when they’re not simply carping in comments online, is target and harass women—from feminist writers and professors to activists—in an attempt to silence them. Paul Elam, the founder of the website A Voice for Men and probably the most influential men’s rights activist out there, once wrote to a critic: “Your only real hope is to keep your mouth shut ... We are coming for you, and we are coming for all the liars out there that have been ruining people’s lives with impunity.”

http://prospect.org/article/white-hot-rage

[Laelth]

1. Very interesting. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[smirkymonkey]

2. K&R!

:kick: