General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: MRA's (Mens Rights Activists) are extremely critical of feminism. [View all]cali
(114,904 posts)and much, much more on this ugly movement. And, yes, it's largely ugly and frightening.
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The mens rights movement, also referred to as the fathers rights movement, is made up of a number of disparate, often overlapping, types of groups and individuals. Some most certainly do have legitimate grievances, having endured prison, impoverishment or heartrending separations from genuinely loved children.
Jocelyn Crowley, a Rutgers political scientist and the author of Defiant Dads: Fathers Rights Activists in America, says that most men who join real (as opposed to virtual) mens rights groups arent seeking to attack the family court system so much as they are simply struggling to navigate it. What they talk most about when they meet face to face, she says, are strategies to deal with their ex-partners and have better relationships with their children.
But Molly Dragiewicz, a criminologist at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and the author of Equality With a Vengeance: Mens Rights Groups, Battered Women, and Antifeminist Backlash, argues that cases in which fathers are badly treated by courts and other officials are not remotely the norm. The small percentage of divorces that end up in litigation are disproportionately those where abuse and other issues make joint custody a dubious proposition. Even when a woman can satisfactorily document her ex-husbands abuse, Dragiewicz says, she is no more likely to receive full custody of her children than if she couldnt.
The mens movement also includes mail-order-bride shoppers, unregenerate batterers, and wannabe pickup artists who are eager to learn the secrets of gamethe psychological tricks that supposedly make it easy to seduce women. George Sodini, who confided his seething rage at women to his blog before shooting 12 women, three of them fatally, was one of the latter. Before his 2009 murder spree at a Pittsburgh-area gym, he was a student though clearly not a very apt one of R. Don Steele, the author of How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne yet 30 million women rejected me over an 18 or 25-year period, Sodini wrote with the kind of pathos presumably typical of Steeles readers.
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http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/a-war-on-women
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/misogyny-the-sites
http://www.salon.com/2011/03/29/scott_adams_mens_rights_movement/
And take a look at one of the leading MRM outlets:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/